Families and Survivors (6 page)

Then, a few weeks later, quite by accident and God knows unwelcomely, Barbara overhears a conversation—or, rather, a confrontation—between Michael Wasserman and his mother. Barbara is in the poetry corner of the Harvard Co-op; they are behind her, looking at fiction.

“With no rubbers!” says Mrs. Wasserman, evidently by way of greeting to her son.

“It wasn’t raining when I went out this morning.” But Michael coughs, as though to agree that she was right, after all; he did need rubbers.

“Michael, I’m telling you, from now on if you don’t take care of yourself no one else will.”

This heavy innuendo could be a description of Louisa; the “no one,” at least for Barbara, conjures up that sad pale presence. Unwilling to hear more of what seems to her extremely low comedy, she turns around.

She is recognized with enthusiasm, perhaps relief, by Michael—with reluctance by his mother.

“You look terrific!” Michael enthuses.

“It’s nice to see you again,” sniffs Mrs. Wasserman,
and then, to her son, “Don’t you think this new edition of James Henry stories would be a handsome gift for Martin’s birthday?”

“Mother, it’s Henry James.”

“James Henry, Henry James—” She makes it clear that she prefers the former combination. Then, “Handsome,” she repeats, fingering the leather binding.

She is wearing a black seal coat that Barbara recognizes as being very expensive. But her hair is barely pulled together with big ugly gray pins, her fingernails are dirty and cracked, and there is no powder on her nose. Her unmitigated ugliness is felt as a hostile assault (by Barbara). If she had made the slightest effort—combed her hair, for example—her terrible face might have elicited some compassion.

Boldly Barbara congratulates Michael on his marriage.

“Thanks!” he says vehemently. “And we have a great new apartment. You’ve got to come up and see it. Say, how about now? Some coffee?”

He is urgent, and uncharacteristically Barbara is carried along, perhaps partly out of a feeling that she is needed as a buffer.

Mrs. Wasserman refuses to come. “No, I have to be getting on home. Nellie needs me,” she says, achieving another loaded innuendo: Nellie needs her even if no one else does.

“Oh, Mother, come on. You haven’t been up since Louisa put up the curtains.”

“I’ll come another time. Maybe when Louisa invites me.” She laughs with no humor whatsoever.

“Oh, Mother.”

“Sunday dinner. You’ll remember to come?”

And she is gone, leaving most of the weight of her presence behind her, leaving Barbara and Michael to plod along gray crowded rainy Brattle Street together.

Separated from his mother, Michael can be quite articulate about her deficiencies of character. “She’s really been appalling about Louisa,” he confides. “Do you know what she said? She said to Louisa, ‘We’ve tried to love you,’ ” and he perfectly imitates his mother’s self-pitying tone, her massive ensuing sigh. “
Tried
to love her,” he repeats. “Can you imagine anything worse? To try to love?”

Barbara senses that he is talking to himself, which is an impression that Michael often gives, but she agrees with him anyway. After all, he is right.

“This way,” Michael says.

He leads her to the rear of a large white picket-fenced house, and up a double flight of outside stairs. He opens a door, to the dirtiest, messiest room that Barbara has ever seen. The windows cut into the slanted ceiling are small, and on that rainy day the light is dim, but as Barbara gets used to the dimness, the mess looks worse. Books and papers are loosely piled in small stacks, like the droppings of an animal. Against one wall is a tangle of sheets, presumably a bed. In another corner a sink and stove and a small table are piled with dirty pots and dishes. Dead center in the room is a small pair of crystal candlesticks, evidently just unpacked—paper and excelsior are scattered about the dark stained carpet. Distaste chills Barbara; it looks like a room whose inhabitants are mad.

“Louisa must be in the bathroom,” Michael tells her; quite unnecessarily he adds, “I guess she didn’t feel like cleaning up today.”

Sounds of water flushing from an adjoining room confirm his supposition. Then Louisa emerges.

“Honey, we’ve been wanting to see Barbara again, and here she is!” Michael goes over to nuzzle and then kiss his wife’s thin neck; Barbara looks away.

Surprisingly, Louisa is enthusiastic about Barbara’s visit. “Oh,
yes
, we haven’t seen you since that ghastly dinner, when she said all those awful things. God, wasn’t it terrible?” And before Barbara can answer she has turned back to her husband. “Did you see these horrible little candlesticks? God, I couldn’t believe them. Our wedding present from your parents.” But she sounds more triumphant than outraged.

Michael picks up a candlestick and begins a speech. “You don’t understand,” he tells Louisa and Barbara. “The gift is determined by the economic status of the recipient. I can just hear my mother, ‘A silver service would look out of place in their home.’ She buys
dreck
in Filene’s basement—she’s got trunks full—and every time she says it will make a lovely gift, she means it could have no other possible use. But you should have seen the actual silver service they sent to Cousin Albert when he married a New York Strauss. From Tiffany’s, yet.”

Unmoved by the astuteness of her husband’s analysis, which she has heard before, Louisa continues to hold and regard the other candlestick. “Pure
dreck
,” she repeats, with her odd mixture of triumph and wonder and despair.

Barbara does not know that word, but she understands that Louisa is trying to sound Jewish, and she wonders why.

Michael offers to make coffee, which Barbara declines. She would not have dared eat or drink anything that was served in that room.

“My parents have been worse than you could believe,”
Louisa tells Barbara. “My father. He’s been writing horrible letters about never wanting to see Jewish grandchildren, and couldn’t I make Michael change his name.”

Michael laughs. “Like Martin wants to, and maybe they’d rather I was screwing cabdrivers instead of you.”

To this laboriously unfunny remark Barbara reacts directly; at that moment she loves her friend Martin and she loathes his brother. She is not sufficiently sensitive (or kindly) to sense the panic behind Michael’s laboriousness, his doomed eagerness to please. (And neither is Louisa.)

Barbara gets up. “I have to go.”

“I hope I didn’t shock you,” says Michael, convincing Barbara that he hoped the contrary.

“I just remembered an appointment,” Barbara says, seizing on the most transparent in her repertoire of social untruths.

Louisa grimaces and hurries toward the bathroom.

Partly because she regards it as a gentile holiday, Mrs. Wasserman does not dress for Sunday dinner. She wears a housedress, one of her collection of drab shapeless cotton shifts from what she calls The Basement—Filene’s. Sighing, she serves the dry roast chicken.

Louisa cannot eat. Her illness has made her despise all food; she would have chosen to get rid of, rather than to nourish, her body.

“Louisa, you’re not eating,” says Mrs. Wasserman.

“I’m sorry, I’m not very hungry.”

“I suppose you’re used to a different kind of food,” insinuates her hostess, who correctly regards rejection of her food as a rejection of herself, but who has further (incorrectly) concluded that Louisa is pregnant.

Louisa blushes and excuses herself to go to the bathroom.
By this time there is no ambivalence; she is disgusting, she loathes herself.

On Louisa’s return, Mrs. Wasserman remarks, in her “earthy” manner, “I should have known there was only one reason for hasty weddings.”

Puzzled, almost stupefied, Louisa stares at her, then says, “I think I have colitis.”

That changes everything. Mrs. Wasserman is consumingly fond of diseases. Enthusiastically she cries out, “But you poor thing, why didn’t you tell me? You must be miserable. You know,” she goes on, addressing her whole family, in which Louisa is now for the first time included, “that’s interesting. I was just reading about some experiments on colitis patients with ACTH. Cortizone.” She turns to Louisa. “How many times a day do you have to go?”

The following spring, after having served in the occupation army, Eliot Spaulding comes home to Boston. To Barbara. And eventually to his father’s law firm. Barbara and Eliot are very happy together. For the next few years or so there are a lot of parties, reunions, and weddings all over Boston and up on the North Shore, down in New Haven and New York. They are not as splendid as the parties that now are referred to as “prewar,” but they are fun. Barbara and Eliot are very much caught up in all that postwar fun. Busy and quite content, Barbara has no further need or even time for Martin, who would not have fitted in. Although almost.

But she is, or has been, very fond of Martin, and one day on a nostalgic impulse she calls and asks him over for lunch. He accepts eagerly, and arrives with a small bunch of spring flowers. But he looks so badly that Barbara is almost sorry she called him. His face is terribly dark and sallow and drawn, and there are what look like bruises on his neck.
Uneasily they settle with sherry in Barbara’s pretty living room, simultaneously aware that neither of them has personal news that can be presented to the other as conversation.

As always, Martin tries very hard. He compliments her on the room, in the new Chestnut Street apartment, skillfully selecting touches which are surely hers: the small Victorian chair in toile, the good framed Klee that he remembers from her old apartment. “It’s wonderful to be in a place where there are
no
Lautrec posters,” he tells her, laughing as though they were still close friends.

“There do seem to be a lot around,” she agrees.

“Droves. As bad as last year’s ‘Sunflowers’ or that Picasso mother.”

Finding no other response, or available topic, Barbara asks, “How is your mother?”

“Oh, fine. She’s eternal,” Martin has forgotten for the moment that Barbara has met his mother, as well as Michael and Louisa. “A rather upsetting thing has happened with my brother, though,” he says. “His wife has some awful disease and they tried to treat it with cortisone and the drug made her go crazy. They called it a toxic psychosis. We all think Michael should do something about a divorce.”

Actually only Martin thinks Michael should do something about a divorce. Mr. Wasserman is against all divorce; he finds the idea terrifying. What would he do if
he
were free? And Mrs. Wasserman argues that it would be unfair to poor sick Louisa, thus insuring herself against more daughters-in-law.

Barbara notices now that she is feeling worse and worse—both more impatient and more paralyzed, and she has no idea why. The truth is that Martin’s depression and his anxiety—he is at the far limits of both—are affecting her, as cold germs or even a bout of yawning might have done.

Sensitive Martin understands what he is doing to her. He is sorry he has come, and he thinks of leaving suddenly, on any pretext at all. He doesn’t know what to do, and so he does the worst thing he could have done. He says, “Dear old Barbara, I’m sorry to have come to you in such bad shape. The truth is that I’m in the middle of an absolutely disastrous love affair. Last night he tried to strangle me.” Martin smiles and fingers his neck as his large dark eyes fill with tears.

Barbara is horrified. She has of course known that Martin is “queer,” but she has not extended this knowledge to include his having love affairs with men, and certainly not men who would try to strangle him. Rather stiffly she says, “I’m terribly sorry, Martin.” And then, “Excuse me, I have to see about lunch.”

By the time she comes back to say that lunch is ready, Martin has pulled himself together, and though it takes all of his exhausted strength, he talks with most of his old animation, his desperate charm, all during lunch. He has read or somehow heard about various phases of Barbara’s new life, a life that is fully as attractive to him as his is repellent to her. He amuses her with gossip, managing to make it “Jamesian” in its subtlety and its discretion, and managing at the same time to suggest that they both know that she is superior to the apparent frivolity of her life. Thus he quiets various doubts that sometimes, if weakly, nag at Barbara’s generally cheerful mind. He almost succeeds in making her forget what he earlier said.

But that unfortunate day is, for the moment, the end of their friendship, Barbara’s and Martin’s. He wisely does not call her to thank her for lunch. And soon afterward he reads that Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Spaulding have moved to San Francisco. (Like many Navy men, Eliot fell in love with that city, and had dreamed of living there.)

And soon after that Martin recovers from his love affair.

Barbara and her husband flourish in San Francisco. In common with most of their class, they survive and pass as very nice people, partly by blocking out or not seeing what is unpleasant: burned Asians, the American poor. Even the mildly “intellectual” phase of Barbara’s life has come to an end; she finds that she has less and less time to read. Besides, no one is reading Henry James any more.

And occasionally, when Barbara grows older and makes her remark to the effect that the first Jews she ever met were horrible (“unfortunately”), it is pointed out to her by more thoughtful friends that the awfulness of the Wassermans has little if anything to do with their being Jewish. She will, of course, agree. She is even heard to remark of recently met “quite attractive” Jews that they do not seem Jewish—meaning that they do not remind her of the Wassermans. For there in Barbara’s mind is always the image of Mrs. Wasserman at the head of her table, her eyes wild and unfocused in that dreadful face, as she absorbs all the combined energies of her husband and her sons.

By the time Barbara and Martin see each other again, much has changed: terrible Mrs. Wasserman is dead, and Martin (as Martin Walters) has moved to San Francisco, and with his inheritance has bought a small and very smart antique store, and (what no one could conceivably have predicted) he is on the verge of a happy (if somewhat eccentric) marriage.