Family Happiness (26 page)

Polly imagined going downtown and meeting her father at his law office, and setting out her problem before him. His noble, elevated features would turn rather dark. Daddy's Horizontal Flicker of Disapproval would dart across his face. He would be astonished, simply astonished, that a daughter of his, his reliable Polly, would be so childish, would put whim above responsibility, would jeopardize her household, was in fact capable of such action.

There was no one who would stand up for her. Her family would line up against her in shock, afraid that she was neglecting her children, that she might bring some sort of scandal to their door. No one would care that her feelings were real, or that she might be suffering. She was a producer of goods and services and image. None of these must be threatened, as all good tribe members know.

I should be doing some useful project, Polly said, but there was no useful project left to do. The only thing that was undone was an unanswered letter to Henry's sister, Eva, in London. Polly picked up the letter. It was opened, but unread, and it was now three weeks old. This was unlike Polly, who always answered a letter within two days of getting it.

Eva had been her best friend at college and would have continued to be her closest friend except that now they were sisters-in-law. It was no longer possible to talk with your best friend about boys and love when the boy you loved was your best friend's brother. It would hardly have done to complain about Henry to Eva: in that instance they were the blood and Polly was the water.

Eva had married an Englishman—a banker named Roger Forbes. They lived in London with their two daughters, Rosie and Theodora. In this letter, Eva recounted her recent happiness: she had done the illustrations for a children's book that would be published within the year. They had had the house redecorated. Rosie was still studying the violin and Theodora had started ballet lessons. Each year the family went to their country cottage for an American Thanksgiving, and Eva gathered every exiled American she knew. Before dinner everyone stood and sang “America the Beautiful”—her children sang this with English accents—and then they sat down to turkey, Indian pudding, and baked Brussels sprouts. A lavish description of this meal and its participants followed.

“It was very perfect,” the letter read, “but it would have been even more perfect if you and Henry and the children had been with us. Still, life looks very sweet these days. I think one gets happier as one gets older—there is more to be happy about.”

“Oh, go to hell,” said Polly to the letter. She thought about the sort of letter she might write in reply: Dear Eva: The last six months have been the darkest of my life. Maybe someday you will feel this way. You will wake up one morning and stop chirping. This may not be possible for you, but it was for me. Everything is very difficult, it turns out. Your darling brother has not changed a whit. I just got defeated by the way he is—working too hard, away a lot, and absent often when present. So I on the other hand am having an adulterous love affair. I am in love, and for this reason I forgot to make proper arrangements for the children's school holiday. Next week I shall be brought before the family tribunal, where quite justifiably I will be tortured and then probably shot. Every day I cry at least once. I think one gets more unhappy as one gets older—there is more to be unhappy about.

She sat at her orderly desk. Being alone when you are at war with yourself is horrible. What was more useless than a childless mother, a husbandless wife, a lover without her beloved, a person with no friends? Henry was due back late in the afternoon. Why did this prospect fill her with dread?

It seemed to Polly that there were two Henrys, or maybe three. There was the Henry she loved, who was full of qualities, kind and tender, an ardent lover, good with children, a strong family presence, an unyielding intelligence, a man of character. There was the Henry she was frightened of. The other side of his good nature was very severe. Polly was just fine by him, but he was critical of almost everyone else. How lucky he had been to find such an excellent person to marry! Polly knew he felt this way, and it made her constantly terrified that she might slip and be found wanting. Henry liked things to go right. He believed that things should be done well. Polly often felt like an over-achieving child dragging the little red wagon of her struggle along with her. Why had she never realized that until now?

Henry had been brought up under the old order. It was not so much that his work came first as that it was pervasive. Polly was a perfect lawyer's wife. She came from a lawyer's family and Henry's work was familiar to her. Furthermore, it interested her; but even if it had not, she had been trained to be interested. Henry's work had been such an effective restraint that for years Polly had not noticed how repressive it was. If she was blue, or tired, or upset, and Henry was working, there was not much chance of getting to him. He made gestures. He brought her a cup of tea, or made the children scrambled eggs for their supper if she was sick, or he held her in his arms and comforted her if she was sad, but it was very clear that these gestures took him away from what was really on his mind. Henry could be short-tempered, moody, and snappish. This was not personal: it was the result of being pressed. His children did not take it personally, since their daddy instantly turned to them and hugged them to make up for any snappishness he dealt out. But Polly took it personally. How personally she had taken it she had not known until she had fallen in love with Lincoln.

But Henry embodied every quality Polly admired. He was fair; he stuck by his high standards; he did not pay lip service to anything he did not believe; he never toadied; and there was not one drop of artifice in him.

At home, Henry was most himself. He liked to wear very old clothes: a pair of blue jeans as soft as flannel and patched like a quilt, and an old cashmere sweater of his late uncle Alfred's that was peppered with tiny moth holes. Under this he wore a shirt that had no collar: the collar had frayed off. He had a battered hat, once white, now gray, that he had found floating in a lagoon in Maine. In this getup he liked to take the children out on a Saturday and come home with strange edibles—pig's feet, cheese that looked like braided string, boxes and jars of things with labels in foreign languages. Along with these were the ingredients for Henry's favorite drink, the root-beer float. This was made with coffee ice cream and root beer, a drink Polly found disgusting and her children adored.

In Maine he took the children fishing, or blueberry-picking, or bird-walking. He took pie-crust-making lessons from Polly and learned to make blueberry pie. At night he made up for Pete and Dee-Dee the silliest stories he could think of. When Henry was happy, and his work was going well, the household hummed along very happily. Suddenly it filled Polly with rage that when he was not happy the household was not happy. Who the hell did he think he was?

Who was he to have neglected her for so long? To call when he was away either so late at night that she was asleep or so early in the morning that she was barely awake? Who was he not to struggle under the same burden to be cheerful and kind and generous when things were not going well? Had he ever been really aware of anything that happened at Polly's office? He was interested in a mild way but Polly had never made him aware. This was not all Henry's fault. She had let him be the way he was. She had expected it.

Polly looked at the clock. She had been sitting at her desk for three hours without moving. She had not gone out to get the Sunday paper. Would Henry, who was methodical about these things, have bought the paper for his plane trip home, or would he expect it at home waiting for him? There was nothing to eat in the house. Henry had said they could go out to dinner, but a good wife—the Polly that used to be—would have had a chicken to be roasted, the makings of a green salad, and an orange cake to welcome a husband back from a week-long business trip.

She struggled up from her chair and changed her sweater. She had not washed her face or combed her hair. This was what happened when you slipped into your own misery: everything went to hell.

Polly had never been in a supermarket on a Sunday. She had her mother's prejudices about supermarkets. Wendy considered them a good place for harried people to buy paper items and cleaning products but not the proper place to buy food. Wendy dealt, and had dealt for more than thirty years, with a small, expensive grocery that delivered. She shopped by telephone, which seemed to her the way to do things. If you were an excellent customer, you got the best of everything. This eliminated the need for shopping, an activity Wendy found trying.

Polly had a friendly relationship with her butcher, and with the family of Koreans who ran the local vegetable stand. She liked to shop, and she was good at it. She never ran out, was never caught short at the last minute. She usually had the makings of a good meal in the house, and it frightened her not to. She and Henry could easily go around the corner for dinner when he got home, but the lack of the gesture—the idea of
not
making dinner—frightened her, too. One lapse could easily lead to another until there were no more gestures. To think that she might not care whether or not Henry was given a nice meal also scared her. What if she didn't care?

She grabbed a coat from the front hall closet and opened the door. There stood Henry Demarest, getting out of the elevator, looking tired.

The sight of him disoriented her. Then it made her furious. He was home early. He was never home early. Why couldn't he come home when he said he was coming home? Her anger confused her. She stood in the hallway gaping at him.

“Oh,” she finally said. “I didn't expect you so early.”

“Where are you off to?” Henry asked. He did not kiss her, or take her arm. The jig was up. The fact that she was angry and troubled was written all over her face. Henry, who counted on her good spirits, now saw that she was not of much use. It is one thing to be unhappy. It is another when the people you live with acknowledge it.

“I'm off to the supermarket,” Polly said. “There's nothing in the house to eat. I'm going to get us something.”

“We can go out, Polly,” said Henry.

“No, no,” said Polly. “You've been out all week. I'll just be a second. Don't you want to take a bath and stretch out?”

Polly had never greeted him thus. There was no waiting tray, no drink, no kiss hello, no Polly perched on the side of the bed waiting for Henry to tell her how things had gone. There was just Polly, rattled, overwrought, and dying to get out of the house.

“I'll just be a second,” she said. “I'll just dash down to the supermarket and I'll see you in two seconds.”

It was of course horrible to be horrified by the sight of your own husband. The idea of sitting down to dinner with him, of trying to make conversation, was frightful. What was she supposed to say?

In the supermarket, Polly harangued herself. People who shopped on Sunday were people who had let things get out of hand, who paid no attention to detail, who let themselves get lost. There were people who actually bought their
vegetables
at the supermarket—Polly did not believe that anything in a supermarket could be really fresh. These were people who did not calculate what meals would be served or who would eat them, who were not generous, thrifty, or composed enough to shop for contingencies. Shopping in a supermarket was a sign of bad housekeeping. How could these people bring themselves to admit their flaws publicly?

Only something very dire, like death or a love affair, ought to keep a person from doing things right. Polly looked around her. Were all these people with full shopping carts having love affairs?

But of course it
was
something dire that had preoccupied Polly, while other people simply lived. They ran out of milk, missed trains, did not have dinner waiting for their husbands, and even forgot to make plans for their children's school holiday, and some of these people were probably very nice, having a good time, and happily married.

Every anchor had slipped away from her. The fact was, she could not bear to go home. She did not want to be alone with Henry. She wanted her children to come back and protect her, to make the interfering noises children make that get in the way of their parents' dialogue for better and for worse. Henry was clearly not very happy either, and neither of them had discussed it. They were like figures on an old-fashioned clock, bowing formally, ill at ease and far away from each other. And the truth was, or so Polly felt, that if they discussed anything at all, Henry would turn from her. Or did she mean that she would turn from him? In either case, she was perched right on the edge of failure. It was both their faults, but Polly should have been more aware of things. They had let each other down, and in the bleak, glaring light of the supermarket, their marriage looked to Polly hopeless and doomed.

She wandered down aisles full of soap, crackers, and canned vegetables. She had never bought a canned vegetable in her life. She thought of Lincoln, of the set of his shoulders. She thought of the times they had left his studio and meandered around the neighborhood. They always strolled arm in arm, but Polly often liked to hang back and watch Lincoln walk ahead. He had the ambling gait of a boy out of Mark Twain or Winslow Homer.

The image of Lincoln caused a physical sensation—a low blow. Longing, in its most concentrated form, was just like having the breath knocked out of you. Polly doubled over slightly.

She had never longed for Henry in that way because Henry was right in front of her. He had been hers to have. In the Solo-Miller family, love was intelligent and deep, and never unrequited. It was the basis of all good things and there was nothing secretive or covert about it. Love flourished in the sunshine, in public, in ceremony and ritual. It did not have to hide. It was the binding of life, the glue of families. The kind of love Polly felt for Lincoln was not the kind of which the Solo-Millers ever could have approved. It was feckless, led to nothing, was productive of nothing, and didn't do anyone a bit of good. Love stood for ties and binds, for the things that made life work. The Solo-Millers were not against romantic feelings, but against romantic feelings improperly placed.