Family Happiness (12 page)

Beate was talking about her parents. “Our father was a professor of theology and ethics, and the institution administered by our mother was run on the most modern lines. We are a family that believes in service toward society. Klaro is our only artist.”

“There was Great-Uncle Clemens,” said Klaro from the piano.

“A contemporary of Christian Morgenstern and, like him, a writer of serious nonsense poetry,” Beate said. “Klaro has made a song cycle based on Uncle Clemens's and Christian Morgenstern's sillier verses.”

“Has your great-uncle been translated into English?” Polly asked.

“I believe so,” said Beate. “But you must go to the library to find it.”

“The library system in this country is quite poor,” Wendy began.

“It's actually extremely good,” said Paul.

“I was thinking of the Bibliothèque Nationale,” Wendy said. “Or the British Museum.”

“Perhaps Klaro will sing from his song cycle,” Andreya said. Wendy looked fretful at this possibility.

“No,” said Klaro. “But Andreya and I will sing ‘Heidenröslein.' Since we know the same childhood music, she must know this as well.” He turned to her. “You know it, do you not?”

“I cannot sing by myself in front of people,” Andreya said.

“Oh, please,” said Polly. “Please sing. Klaro will sing it with you.”

Andreya got up and, looking like a chastened infant, went to the piano.

“This is not Schubert's ‘Heidenröslein,'” Klaro said, “but the version one is taught to sing in childhood. It is a simple, sweet tune like a folk song. Do you know this poem? The boy goes to pick the heath rose and the rose warns him that if he picks her, she will hurt him with her thorns and he will never get over it. But he does anyway, and that is the end of that.”

Andreya and Klaro harmonized the chorus:
“Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.”
During this performance, Henry, Jr., ate the entire silver-bowlful of salted almonds. He then ate half a dish of the hard chocolate pastilles Wendy considered proper for after dinner. Henry, Jr., liked chocolates with filled centers—the kind he could squeeze to discover the contents—but Wendy did not approve of them.

Polly looked around the room. Here was her family, the people she was most connected to of any in the world. She was surrounded by the fragrance of wood smoke and the smoke from Henry, Sr.'s and Henry Demarest's cigars, but she felt very far away. At the sound of Andreya's voice she was suddenly filled with longing, longing for Lincoln. She imagined herself and him in his studio in the evening. The studio would be filled with yellow light from the oilpaper lampshades Lincoln liked. What am I doing here? she asked herself. Longing struck her like a shooting pain. She wanted to stick her head out the window and call his name, but she sat quietly on the loveseat next to Henry. As Klaro and Andreya sang, he held her hand. She sat in the crook of his arm. How well they fit! How handsome they looked! When Henry turned his tenderness toward Polly, her heart usually melted. But now she felt like a visitor from another planet, alone in the middle of her family.

It was time to go home. Everyone stood up. Wendy still looked fretful: This was not the family she had bargained for. One of her sons had married secretly, and the other, who had eloped, shared his clothes with his wife. Henry, Jr., and Andreya were both wearing suits—Andreya was wearing a silk edition of a suit, and Henry, Jr.'s one formal shirt (a shirt he had inherited from his father, which was how Wendy recognized it) with a silk scarf instead of a tie. Wendy's eye rested easily only on Polly. Polly made perfect sense to her.

If Polly had told her mother that the family Wendy had gotten was more interesting than the family she had bargained for, Wendy would have told her that an interesting family did not strike her as an attractive idea. Families were not meant to be interesting. Wendy believed that life should be predictable. The unpredictable she considered rather vulgar.

Henry, Sr., was always the model of perfect rectitude. The small emotional arrangements made by mortals ran over him like water over an enormous rock: it made a little difference but only in the long, long run. His acceptance of his children was total. How could it not have been? They were his, and therefore they were above criticism.

It was not his style to say much. He either lectured, addressed himself to a question, or was silent. He cropped his hair short and favored clothes that were sober and manly. When he was not wearing a suit, he wore navy-blue Viyella shirts and twill trousers that were thirty years old. He was truly not much attached to things of the world. He had always had them: he had inherited them. There was almost nothing in his life that he had had to go out and get.

He wore on his face a look Polly knew well. It was The Look of the Higher Mind. In this case it meant that he was tired and had had quite enough dinner party, and his mind was now addressing some Important Issue. He had another look, a look that as a child Polly had dreaded to see. It was called Daddy's Horizontal Flicker of Disapproval—a look that darted across his eyes the way fish dart past you in the water. The wrong dress, a bad grade in Latin, a friend of whom he did not approve, a rebellious attitude or inappropriate hair style occasioned that look. It lasted but an instant, but had a devastating effect. Nowadays this look came over him out in public when he surveyed the eating, reading, or public behavior of others.

Henry, Jr., and Andreya were tired. When tired, they threatened to become cranky. Kirby was at home waiting to be taken for a walk. A little snow had stuck, and it was cold. There was every chance that their unreliable car wouldn't start. They felt it was unfair that Kirby was allowed to come to breakfast but not to dinner, and they had had enough of Paul and Beate.

“Hey, Andro,” said Henry, Jr., at the door. “How come I never hear you sing?”

“I sing to Kirby in a language you cannot hear,” Andreya said. She and Henry had their jackets on and were pawing at the door like colts dying to be let out of the stall.

Had all things been equal, Henry Demarest would have enjoyed himself entirely. He loved displays of personality, and the family he had married into always gave him an eyeful. If he had not had so much on his mind he would have enjoyed contemplating Paul and Beate. But all things were not equal. This dinner party had taken away a chunk of his time and now he would have to stay up for several hours after he got home. He was not in an optimistic frame of mind. Work was suspended before him, unremunerative, unending. Polly seemed tense and distressed. He felt pressured on every side.

Polly was exhausted and relieved: the evening had been a success. Now she wanted to get Henry home. She felt she could read his mind, and she knew he was thinking about how much work he had ahead of him. She had accepted this schedule of Henry's before, and she had catered to his preoccupation, too. Now she took it personally and was glad when she was too tired to care. She wanted to go home and go directly to sleep.

The family stood in the foyer saying good night with their coats on. The sight of Paul in his cashmere overcoat and Beate in her mink filled Polly with happiness. She had a rather simple heart after all and her wants were plain. She wanted Beate to like her, and Paul not to disapprove of her. When their baby was born she wanted to be able to go and play with it. As far as Paul was concerned, Polly always did the wrong thing. He did not like emotional gestures very much, and Polly had often been made to feel like an untrained puppy. Standing next to him now, she did not so much fling her arms around his shoulders as hug him.

“I'm so happy for you,” she said, on the verge of tears, and Paul patted her as if she were a distraught child.

Seven

Now that the weather had turned icy and wet, it was natural for Polly and Lincoln to spend their afternoons together under the covers in Lincoln's underheated studio.

Polly gravitated toward a bed. She liked breakfast in bed, reading or work in bed, and she liked to talk lying down. The Demarest family often shared horizontal evenings, in which Polly and Henry read or worked, and the children did their homework or some quiet project other than watercoloring, all spread out on Polly and Henry's big bed. The sight of her family lying around her gave Polly a deep sense of pleasure. The sight of Lincoln lying next to her gave her pleasure as well, but in their situation Polly knew it was impossible to be simply happy. Still, no matter how many times she told herself that lying next to Lincoln was certainly sinful, she could not help giving herself over to the pleasure of his company.

It was three weeks after the dinner party and very cold. Polly and Lincoln were fully dressed and huddled under a quilt. Polly had been talking about work.

“Last year,” she said, “I dove right into the spring report. I had it pulled together, edited, and at the printer's in two months. This year I feel as if my head were full of gelatin. I can't seem to get started. Linky, can't you get a space heater in here?”

“I have you,” Lincoln said.

“I mean for when you don't have me.”

“Then I don't care,” Lincoln said. “Don't scream, but I'm going to put my very cold hand under your sweater and right against your nice warm back. What you need, Dot, is a little vacation, in some tropical place.”

“Yum,” said Polly.

“You could lie in the sun like a lizard and I'd rub suntan lotion all over you. You could bring a briefcase with you and work on the spring report while turning a beautiful color.”

“It's nice to think about,” said Polly sleepily.

“Why can't you do it, Dottie? If not with me, then by yourself.”

“I can't do it either way,” Polly said.

“You can,” said Lincoln. “You just think you can't.”

“It's the same difference,” said Polly. “Besides, if we went away together you'd feel cramped in eight hours and start looking for an escape hatch.”

“I don't think I would,” said Lincoln.

“Lincoln,” said Polly. “I can feel you getting edgy about half an hour before I'm due to leave you. Being with you in a hotel would be like living with a trapped ferret.”

“If we went away it would be different,” Lincoln said. “Would you press yourself a little closer to me? Thanks awfully. My feet are freezing.”

“Put them back under the quilt,” said Polly. “Now I get to put my very cold hands under
your
sweater. You feel so nice, Linky. You have such lovely velvety baby skin on your back.”

“Scratch me right under my left shoulder blade,” Lincoln said. “That's perfect. Now enough about you. Tell me about the enchanting Beate. Did you find out what sort of psychoanalyst she is?”

“Well, she
is
one,” Polly said, “but not as we know them. Mum says she's a disciple of someone called Fitch-Grabner, or Horsefield-Finch. She believes in something called meta-ethics—it's all about character. It's about the great idea that motivates small behavior.”

“She picked a perfect family to marry into,” Lincoln said. “They're all bursting with meta-ethics.”

At this Polly was silent. The recent torrent of family events overwhelmed her. Of course Paul and Beate deserved this attention. It was right that they should receive it. Their having a baby made them exempt from everything, although Polly remembered that being pregnant had not made her especially exempt. She had carried on as always. She had gone to fuss over her mother when Wendy was enjoying one of her little declines and needed to stay in bed for a few days. She gave her father dinner every night for the week that Wendy went off to her college reunion. Henry was away or working late, as usual. She went shopping with her mother and gave dinner parties. But Paul and Beate were somehow different.

When Polly withdrew she did not turn away from Lincoln but toward him, as if she needed to be warmed up. Sleet clattered against the window. She burrowed against Lincoln the way kittens press up against their owners. Lincoln worried about Polly—about the pressure she put herself under, about her secret unhappiness, about the standards her family had set, which she tried to live up to when no one else in her family bothered.

Polly sat up in bed.

“I know it's the lowest part of the year,” she said. “But I feel so low. On Saturday, when we had the big party, I noticed how much my uncle Billy Solo-Miller drinks. He's my favorite uncle—the one from Philadelphia. He's the one who sent all his kids to Quaker schools and said, ‘Some of our best Jews are Friends.' I found myself saying to myself: Lucky Uncle Billy to be able to be drunk so often.” She turned to Lincoln, who was lying on his side watching her. “This is awfully boring, Linky. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be silly, Dot,” Lincoln said. “I've made you spend hours listening to me complain about a million things.”

“You don't complain about
your
family,” Polly said.

“My family is not my trouble,” Lincoln said. “I have other troubles, as you have often pointed out, but family is not one of them. What I'd like to do is to go to one of your family dinner parties and give them all what-for.” He pulled her down next to him. Their cold noses touched.

“You help me by just being here,” Polly said. “Now I have to go back to the office.”

“Sometimes I don't want to let you go,” said Lincoln.

“Sometimes I don't want to go,” said Polly.

She was glad to be back in her office with the door closed. It was not one of Martha's days on the job, and Polly was grateful that she didn't have to talk to anyone. This piece of time was her decompression chamber between Lincoln and home.

It was a quiet afternoon—no meetings, no telephone calls. The sky was dark gray. Polly thought about Martha with a jolt of guilt: only a very tired, sloppy, and needy person would have paraded a love affair past an office friend. She should never have let Lincoln come and have lunch with her. It was terrible to admit that you wanted to see someone that badly. Now Martha knew. That Martha might not care—that Martha might be sympathetic—did not occur to Polly. She had violated her own sense of propriety, and that was wrong.