Family Happiness (14 page)

There was no break between pieces, which Polly took as a sign of Klaro's self-confidence. It robbed everyone of a chance to shake his hand and congratulate him, while giving the audience the briefest moment in which to read the program as instruments were retuned.

According to the notes, the Brahms Piano Quartet had been written during one of the unhappiest periods of Brahms's life. Composition had been an agonizing struggle for him, he was unknown in his home town, whose recognition he badly craved, and he had fallen hopelessly in love with Clara Schumann, who was older than he, and whose husband, Robert, was his dearest friend.

These days Polly had a working interest in what unhappiness might produce. She was reminded of Lincoln's white pictures, those intense products of what he called his “reign of terror.” Color had hurt his eyes. His bones had ached and he had had both insomnia and bad dreams. His brother, Gus, had encouraged him to see another psychiatrist, but still he had suffered for months and months. Those white pictures were more evocative of suffering than any representational picture Polly had ever seen. Eventually he had met Polly and fallen in love. He said, “Unhappiness isn't the worst thing in the world. It doesn't last forever and it usually teaches you something about yourself.”

When the Brahms Piano Quartet was published, Brahms had suggested illustrating the title page with a picture of a man pointing a pistol at his head, since that was the spirit in which the piece had been written. Polly put the program down, and listened. She was waiting for the third movement, which the program informed her was something of a love song, a testament to Brahms's devotion to and love for Clara Schumann.

This movement began with a theme so grave, so ravishing, and so touching that Polly was afraid she might cry out. Penned in on either side by family but secure in the darkness, Polly lowered her head so that no one could see the tears that slid down her cheeks.

It was childish to be listening to the most beautiful music in the world and have the reactions of an overwrought teenager, but no one noticed, and by the time the lights came on, Polly was herself again.

Eight

The weather became more severe: it sleeted, it snowed again, and then everything froze over. The torrent of family parties ebbed. Everyone had taken a look at Beate, acknowledged Paul's new standing in the family, and gotten used to the idea of Paul and Beate as a married couple. They had now been absorbed and would never again, except briefly when the baby was born, be subjected to such intense scrutiny. They would establish their own rituals. This would draw the family into their orbit, but would not conflict at all with those occasions specific to Wendy or Polly. Andreya had no rituals; she and Henry were the family guests.

Beate's festivals were Twelfth Night, New Year's Day, and Holy Thursday—the von Waldau family holidays. On Twelfth Night she would make a Twelfth Night cake, on New Year's Day she would have pancakes, and on Holy Thursday—Gründonnerstag—she would follow the von Waldau tradition of putting branches over the door and serving spinach soup and fried walnuts. Years of Twelfth Night, New Year's Day, and Gründonnerstag had unraveled before Polly's eyes as Beate, at a family dinner, explained the festivals by which she would enrich the Solo-Millers. This, of course, sat well with Henry and Wendy, who were medieval in their outlook and liked to build a network of fortified castles close to one another.

Lincoln said that Polly was set into her family the way a sapphire was set into a bracelet. He brooded mightily on Polly. Those family obligations forced him to see somewhat less of her, and when he saw her she was very low.

When the family went back to normal Polly did not. She had stood next to Henry through all those family parties, in her heavy silk dress. She wore the diamond earrings Henry had given her as an engagement present, her plain wedding ring, and her grandmother's watch. She knew what she looked like: a happy and successful matron. Her younger cousins looked up to her and Henry. This gave her an overwhelming sense of being a fraud. Only she knew the truth: that she felt as if she had a stone in her heart. That she often found it difficult to breathe. That she felt thousands of miles away from her own husband. That she had a lover. That Henry's abstraction upset her wildly. That his distance made her almost crazy for his affection. If she threw her arms around his neck, he patted her absently and then unhooked her hands and put them at her sides. She looked at Henry and she knew she loved him, but she could not get near him. Had it always felt like that to her? Had she been so intent upon having life proceed in a certain way that she had never noticed what it felt like to be lonely, rejected, and unsure? Even their most elemental connection left her lonely: she was sleeping with two men.

Her own discomfort was so neatly hidden that she wondered what Henry might be hiding from her—the charges, accusations, and hostilities he might be harboring. Perhaps he was in love with someone else. She could hear herself saying in a frightened, modest voice, “Oh, Henry, I'm so worried about us. I feel so far away from you.” And she imagined him telling her gravely that he loved and respected her, but that he was not happy; that he had turned to his work, that he had never been in love with her, but in the
idea
of them.

Polly was sophisticated enough to know about projection. Was this what
she
felt? She and Henry might dovetail, they might fit as married people ought, but did they actually have a taste for each other? Had she stopped noticing Henry? Did he surprise her? A husband, like a wife or a daughter, is part of a household and can be taken for granted as easily as a chair or lamp. Polly wanted things to be right, but now she did not know in what way she meant this. Would everything be right if Henry paid more attention to her? Or was it more complicated? If it was, she did not yet know in what way, and there were many times when Polly felt that her life might explode before her eyes and shatter into pieces before she found out.

Henry was as low as she was, and neither could turn to the other for comfort. The prettiness of her household, the sturdiness of her children, the very handsomeness of her husband shamed her—she did not deserve these things if she did not relish them. She felt that she and Henry were prisoners. A lovely meal, a weekend at the seashore, a long talk were not going to make things better. She did not know how these things were made better. She only knew that she felt condemned to undergo her sense of panic, confusion, and eventual loss the only way she knew how: by putting the best possible face on things, keeping going, smiling, making conversation, and trying to keep everything firmly in its normal place.

She was quieter than Lincoln had seen her and he was afraid to ask what was on her mind. If it was Henry it was none of his business; if it
was
his business he was afraid to hear it. Perhaps what was on Polly's mind was giving Lincoln up, and this alarmed him horribly. Life was not going to put another Polly in his path, someone good and kind and dear whom he might see enough of to make life sweet, but not enough of to threaten him.

As for Polly, she looked at Lincoln with longing, and knew that he would never rescue her, but that she needed someone to love her without complication or encumbrance, and he loved her in exactly that way.

One icy afternoon, Lincoln told Polly that the Galerie Georges Deliel in Paris had definitely offered him a one-man show in April. They were sitting at the table having coffee.

“Oh, linky! How wonderful,” said Polly.

“I've got to be there for about a month,” said Lincoln. “Maybe longer. I want you to come with me, for a week.”

“I can't, Lincoln,” said Polly. “You know that.”

“You can so, Dot. Tell Henry you need a week to yourself. Tell him you're overtired and overworked, just like him. Tell him the society of reading project analyzers is meeting in Paris. Get Concita or Concita's cousin to take the grubs, or send them to your mother's. You
can
do it.”

“I can't, Lincoln,” Polly said. “You don't know how it is.” She got up and began to pace around the kitchen, coffee cup in hand.

“I do know how it is,” said Lincoln. “You have a million more moving parts than I do. All right, if you won't go to Paris with me, give me one night with you. Just one. If I've got to be away from you for such a long time, let me wake up one morning with you next to me.” He grabbed her by the hand.

Polly's features closed up, a sight Lincoln knew her well enough to observe with tenderness. Henry, Jr., knew how to look like a closed door, too. Lincoln and he had been kite-flying friends for years before Lincoln had known Polly. He knew a variety of Solo-Miller looks, which most Solo-Millers wore a great deal of the time but which lasted only a moment in Polly. This one was replaced by a complicated expression that included longing, desire, perplexity, struggle. Polly's essence overcame her family every time, Lincoln thought. Her eyes changed color when emotion overtook her. It was not possible to see her looking like this and not take her into his arms.

“Oh, Lincoln,” she sighed. “You really are as free as a bird. I wish I were, but I'm not. It isn't loving you that makes me sad, but what I have to do to get to you.”

There was nothing Lincoln could say to this. His life was light and clean as a palette knife and he had no one to answer to, no one to look after, and nowhere he was expected to be.

“Maybe we can have a sleep-over date. That's what we used to call them in fifth grade,” Polly said. “Right before you go, if Henry is away. I'll make dinner for you. We can go to the zoo in the afternoon and stroll around and then come home, have dinner, take a bath, and sleep in the same bed, like normal people.”

When she left to go home, she was as sad as Lincoln had ever seen her.

Henry was due home late that evening, but when Polly got home, there was a message that he would be back tomorrow. On the sideboard in the kitchen was the tray Polly had set in the morning—a tray that would have contained a pot of tea, a plate of sandwiches, a peeled orange, and some shortbread for Henry's late snack. She always made up these trays for Henry, as she had made them up for her father when he came home late from a trip. Now she dismantled it, feeling the combination of anger, disappointment, and relief she was all too familiar with.

In the kitchen Pete and Dee-Dee were ready for dinner. One night a week, Concita cooked
arroz con pollo
. It had begun to sleet and it lifted Polly's heart to note that she was glad to be in the kitchen with her children, who ate happily, mashing everything together, Pete liked to entertain Dee-Dee by describing the natural life of whatever it was they were having for dinner. For this reason the idea of vegetable dinners did not appeal to Pete. He tried very hard to get Dee-Dee to cry, but Dee-Dee was a born hardhead, and the idea that a real bird with feathers had died for her dinner plate had no sentiment attached to it at all. Chickens were very nice to look at in the country but in no way resembled her
arroz con polio
.

“They flap and scratch, and make little noises like this, Dee-Dee,” said Pete. He then uttered a series of very lifelike chicken clucks.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Polly asked.

“From those chickens Mrs. Dunaway has in Maine. She let me sit on the fence and watch them.”

“I did, too,” said Dee-Dee.

“Yes, but you were too little to learn how to make their noises,” Pete said. “See that leg you were going to eat? Maybe one of Mrs. Dunaway's chickens used to have that leg and now you're eating it.”

“You're eating some part of a chicken, too,” said Dee-Dee.

“I don't have a leg,” said Pete. “I have these other parts that aren't as sad as a leg.” He lapsed again into chicken sounds.

“These aren't Mrs. Dunaway's chickens, anyway,” Dee-Dee said. “The chickens we get don't come from Maine, unless we're in Maine. They come from New Jersey, and from the
DEL*MAR*VA
Peninsula.”

Polly was appropriately awed. One of her children could imitate domestic poultry, and the other knew where it came from.

“Dee-Dee,” Polly said, “did you learn that at school?”

“Yes, Mommy,” said Dee-Dee with becoming modesty. “It's Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.”

Most nights Polly could have listened endlessly to her children, whom she admired a great deal. They constantly surprised her. They were just as inventive and imaginative as the books say children are meant to be, and they had very sweet temperaments. Pete had never expected that his depictions of animal life at the dinner table would faze Dee-Dee. A few years before, the thought of one of Mrs. Dunaway's chickens would have caused
him
to burst into tears. The fact was that he liked to scare himself and make himself cry. At the most frightening horror movies, when Pete, who always insisted on going to these movies, burrowed his head into his mother's coat, Dee-Dee sat placidly eating popcorn by the handful.

But Polly was tired, and she ached. It hurt her that her attention was wandering, that a lump rose in her throat, that she wanted her darling children to go right to sleep so that she could be alone to think.

But Pete and Dee-Dee demanded a story. Polly sat with them after dinner while they did their homework, and during the half hour of their baths. The story was the most important nightly ritual, unless Polly and Henry were going out, and then Pete and Dee-Dee read to each other.

Once they were in their pajamas and robes, with their bunny slippers on their feet, they snuggled up next to Polly on their parents' bed. Polly read them a Grimms' fairy tale. They were crazy about Grimms' fairy tales—the more gruesome the better. She read them “Fundevogel.”

“There was once a Forester who went into the woods to hunt, and he heard a cry like that of a little child,” Polly read. The woodsman finds a little boy way up in a tree, where a bird had carried him. He takes the child home with him to be the companion of his little daughter, Lina. He calls the child Fundevogel because he had been found by a bird.