Families and Survivors (7 page)

And so, at that time, once more he and Barbara fill spaces in each other’s lives.

A cold red February dusk, in the early fifties. On a suburban railway platform, south of San Francisco, two young women hurry toward each other. They are so unlike that their rush together seems improbable; one, Louisa, is very pregnant, stoop-shouldered, and rather shabby; the other girl, Kate, with dark red hair, is erect and stylish. But it is true; they are old friends who have not seen each other for five years, and not been truly in touch for longer than that.

“Oh, Louisa, you’re beautiful pregnant!” Kate cries out.

Unused to kissing, and not quite used to shaking hands, they stand there grasping each other’s arms.

“ ‘Built-for-birth’—remember?” Ironically Louisa quotes the epithet from her early adolescence, “B.B.,” which the standardized “popular” kids had repeated, tittering not quite out of her hearing, before she was discovered by Kate and became herself a popular Sub-Deb.

Even now Kate flushes. She was always popular (very), but she loved (and loves) her friend.

“And you’re so chic!” Louisa says. (Is that a compliment?)

“Oh, well, I have to, with my silly job,” says Kate, who works in the advertising department of a fashionable store. She is wearing a trim gray flannel coat, neat white gloves, high black patent shoes. She wears her hair long; she has long exotic dark eyes and an eager vulnerable mouth. A strong voluptuous body and an impetuous mind. She has been married for less than a year and her husband, a doctor, has been in Korea for the past five months. David: she often tries not to think of him at all, but this does not work.

The area around the small station has been fanatically landscaped: oleander bushes forced into smooth rounded shapes beside gently rising paths, and the parking lot is surrounded with smooth round stones that are gray in the dying light. The girls walk toward a large and muddy car, an old Hudson, with swollen sides—conspicuous among the bright new (postwar) station wagons and sparkling convertibles. “This is ours,” says Louisa, and then, mysteriously, “Michael doesn’t really
believe
in cars.”

Kate has been told that Michael Wasserman is a graduate student, in psychology. She is a little afraid of this meeting; some of the intellectual awe in which she has always held Louisa has carried over to Michael—and it is worse since he is a man. (She really believes this.) Men usually like Kate, she bolsteringly reminds herself, but at the same time, she wishes that she had worn something else; she will feel overdressed in the pink silk that her coat now hides. (She is right—she will.) “Louisa,” she says, “it’s so marvelous to see you. I can’t quite believe it. When does the baby come?”

“April. That’s what I can’t believe.” Louisa laughs jerkily as, finally, the car starts up and they back vigorously out of the parking lot.

“I hope you’ll have an absolutely beautiful girl who looks just like you.”

This remark, although she knows it to be sincere (she knows Kate) makes Louisa stiffen; for one thing, she has never believed herself to be beautiful (though many people in her life have told and will tell her so); for another, she is passionately anxious that her child be a boy, so anxious that she has admitted this wish to no one. She mutters, “Christ, I’d drown her at birth,” and she hunches down over the clutch, shifting violently.

“Oh, Louisa,” chides Kate as she often did in the forties, ten years back, when Louisa’s classically lovely face went unnoticed because her body was the wrong size: she was very tall, broad-hipped, with minuscule breasts. Shame made her gawky, and for a time the only boys who liked her were shrimps. (Were they trying to make her look worse, out there on the dance floor?)

“Well, at least I’ll get to quit work next month,” Louisa says. “I tell you—this job—in the Purchasing Department. Of course, I don’t see how we’ll manage. Even working Saturday mornings. Michael’s parents—” she vaguely says.

None of this, besides a generalized sense of discontent (or fear?), makes much sense to Kate, but she decides to wait. She is looking forward to a drink. A martini, she hopes.

Between blocks of anonymous one-story California architecture, the old car heads toward a reddened sunset sky—heads west. The shade of the sky against the sharp black of the hills pierces Kate with nostalgia for those Virginia years of her late childhood, and she wants to say something to Louisa about what she still thinks of as home, but (out of character—she usually speaks her mind) she does not say this; she senses that Louisa is completely involved
with her present life. Also, Louisa can be snappish; you have to be sure of her mood.

And so it is Louisa herself who asks, “Well, what do you hear from home?”

“Not much. You know Mother and Dad moved up to New Jersey a few years ago.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And I’m so terrible about writing. Only to David.”

Quickly sympathetic (after all, it is her old friend Kate, not just a dangerous chic guest), Louisa asks, “David—how much longer will he be there, do you think?”

“Eighteen months, a year and a half.”

“God, poor Kate.”

“Well, yes. For one thing, he’s so much fun to live with.”

(She will not know how this sentence is to haunt her friend, or how Louisa is startled by it. Fun?)

“And he’s so ambitious,” Kate goes on heedlessly. “He really wants more surgical training. He’s interested in hearts. And lungs.”

“Oh” is what Louisa says, and then, “Some friends of ours are coming by after dinner, I think.”

“You were so good to ask me down to dinner.”

“Oh, it won’t be much. Michael and I don’t—” She lets whatever she meant to say trail off, and Kate suddenly understands that it is not so much that she is afraid of meeting Michael as she is afraid that he will be awful: a monstrous wasting of Louisa.

As he first appears, coming out to the car from the lamplit doorway of a small and literally vine-covered cottage, Michael is not terrible at all. He is short (well, of course; Kate was prepared for that), a little plump, blond, soft-fleshed, and very smiling. Jolly, he seems, in nice
Brooks Brothers clothes. (But why is he so much better dressed than Louisa is?)

He says, “I’m really glad you could come. Louisa’s Southern Gothic childhood—of course she’s mentioned you a lot.”

He seems ebulliently eager to please—a quality that Kate finds sympathetic. She smiles, glad to like her old friend’s husband.

The house is sparsely furnished with cheap-looking things that Kate supposes (rightly) to have come with the rental; a long dark lumpy sofa, some large and shapeless armchairs, a maple table and dining chairs. It is not very clean, tidy Kate discerns. (But she thinks: Who cares? What’s really so important about cleaning a house?) It seems hastily pulled together, books and records stacked in corners—things shoved aside, or hidden.

Kate says, “God, what a marvelous smell! I never get enough garlic.”

Louisa laughs with affection. “Kate, you sound so exactly like your
self
,” she says.

Michael brings in a bottle of bourbon. “I’m afraid this is all we have,” he beams.

“Marvelous—I’m dying for a drink.” Kate doesn’t like bourbon, but she thinks that perhaps this is just as well; she will drink less.

“You came down by
train
?” Michael asks, making it sound interesting. “How was it? We always drive, when we go. The Bayshore is my idea of what hell must look like—actualized.”

“Of course we almost never hear from my parents,” Louisa, who must have been thinking about this in the kitchen, comes in with glasses and ice and water.

Knowing Jack Calloway, Kate can well imagine: a handsome, charming, ultra-Southern man (though not from
a very “good” family), who daily rides one of his mares, who talks well, telling stories with a flourish, and who loves parties and pretty ladies and strong drink. He is occasionally hospitalized for what are called nervous breakdowns, and is given electric shock, which calms him down. It has never been clear how he feels about his daughter, but Kate can too easily imagine how he would feel about Louisa’s marriage. (Can that be partly why—Kate represses this half-formed question.)

“Even when I was so sick in Boston—I had colitis,” Louisa says.

“They gave her cortisone, which precipitated a psychotic break. It happens fairly often,” Michael gently explains.

“Jack never wrote. Caroline did, but such cold guilty letters—rather literary letters, actually. But at least I got the money for an analysis out of them. Not that it’s doing any good.”

“Now, honey—”

“And I hate those drives to the city.”

Wholly confused, Kate merely notes that Louisa has taken to referring to her parents by their first names—to remove herself from them?

Michael laughs, but without much mirth. “It’s hard to tell what’s worse, the smothering attentions of my parents or the coldness of Louisa’s. But of course smothering is exactly what they would like to do to Louisa. I think they had a great deal to do with her breakdown.”

“Well, what are David’s parents like?” Louisa asks, smiling but rather challenging.

“Uh, actually they’re quite nice. They’re divorced, but they’ve both remarried and the new marriages seem to be working out.”

“Maybe that’s the answer.” Michael laughs again.

Louisa looks at him, stricken, so that he says, “Honey, of course I didn’t mean us,” and coming to stand behind her, pulling her back he kisses her.

Louisa’s stomach is enormous. Kate tries (and fails) to imagine how that would be. A living child inside one? Instead she is struck with a pang of missing David, a pang that is vivid and sexual. “Louisa,” she says quickly, “what about your work—do you still write poems and draw? Louisa is the most talented person I’ve ever known,” Kate says, smiling to Michael.

“It’s called ‘too many minor talents.’ ” Louisa laughs, wry and self-deprecating. “No, I got tired of all that. Besides, I have so little time.”

“But that’s terrible—you did marvelous things.”

“Marvelous for a thirteen-year-old, maybe. I’m afraid ‘precocious’ is the word.” She frowns. “When I was crazy, I wrote a lot of poems. Poetry is Caroline, Caroline crying. I won’t do that again.”

Confused Kate tells her, “I still have the drawing you did of John.”

“Really, you do?”

“Of course; it’s a treasure. Every time I move, I’m careful to take it with me.”

“I’ll make more drinks,” says Michael, and he does.

“I wonder where John is,” Louisa says. “I think Caroline wrote that he married some fabulous New York beauty, an heiress or a model or something. John would marry someone mythic.”

The two girls laugh, almost easily.

“The boy who broke my heart,” Kate says. “God, how serious I was. But you know, that was a very bad thing for me. I did suffer.”

“Really?” Louisa looks at her curiously. It is hard for her to believe that her attractive friend has been scarred—or
perhaps she is too concentrated on her own scarring. Looking at Michael, she says that she had better see about dinner.

The quality of their connection, Michael’s with Louisa, is still quite obscure to Kate. She sees only that it is very unlike hers with David, and she thinks: David and I are noisier and more open, but then Louisa has always been more complicated than I am. She has a dim sense that Michael is controlling Louisa in some subtle way, although on the surface he is agreeable, somewhat passive.

They have dinner on the square maple table. Michael eats ravenously, breaking and buttering his bread while Louisa serves the coq au vin, and rice.

“Louisa, how marvelous this is,” Kate says. “And the rice!”

“I have some sort of atavistic thing with rice,” Louisa says.

“My mother is an appalling cook,” says Michael, “but she’s somehow perpetrated a myth that she’s terrific. God, the years of dry roast chicken and overdone beef, and everyone sitting around saying how great it is.”

This speech makes Kate uncomfortable; she is not sure why. She says, “I like to cook,” hoping for a change of subject. And she adds, “I’m not terribly good—yet.”

But Michael goes on. “And she sends me clothes, embarrassing big packages from Brooks. God! My brother still lives at home—of course he’s gay.”

This is an unfamiliar word to Kate, but she senses what he must mean, and does not want to hear about it. She turns to Louisa, and speaks in her old forthright way. “But I think you should go on doing those things you used to do. You were good—everyone thought so, and I know you were.”

“Louisa is very ambivalent about what might be intellectual competition.” Michael explains. “She’s afraid I might
slap her down, the way her father always did. Isn’t that true, honey?”

Louisa sounds tired. “I suppose so,” she says. “Or afraid I wouldn’t do anything really good. I think it’s more that.”

A terrible sense of strangeness suddenly overwhelms Kate; what is she doing there with those two people? She feels lonely, lost, with her old friend who has become a mumbling stranger. (Louisa is still in some way very sick. Miserable. Her eyes are desperate.) Why are she and Louisa here at all, thousands of miles from home? Why this husband, this Michael, whose heavy presence dominates the room?

But then the doorbell rings, and Michael gets up to let other people in.

A couple, young and good-looking, obviously “Eastern” in their style. Kate is at least momentarily reassured; she sees these people as landmarks. Sally and Andrew Chapin. Sally is hugely pregnant with their third child. Andrew is a graduate student in English; he has just got a new book by Lionel Trilling, which has several essays on Freud, on psychoanalysis, and he wonders what Michael thinks about it.

Michael hasn’t seen the Trilling book, but he says what he imagines it will be like; he uses words like “eclectic” and “neo-”(attached to a variety of names). Andrew and Louisa both listen to this as though it were extraordinary stuff, and for all Kate knows it is.

But then, as she listens (or half listens) to the two men, a sort of bell sounds in Kate’s mind, and she repeats the name: “Andrew Chapin?”

Interrupted, they both turn to her—both with (dissimilar) slight frowns.