Letting Go (65 page)

“How will you?” she said.

“I’ll marry you either way.”

“Don’t say that, will you?”

“Then I don’t know what to say.”

“Say I’m not immoral, all right?”

“You’re not. You’re not, sweetheart.”

“Everything gets telescoped,” she said, touching my face. “I haven’t even known you two months, baby.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You don’t have to marry me is the difference. Why does everybody have to step up and marry me? I’m a drag on men. A strain on everybody. Oh Gabe, do you think making love would help matters? Hold me tighter, okay? Is that my whole damn downfall—hot pants? Oh let’s just do it, with the doors open and all the grunts and groans and nobody tiptoeing by and nobody’s neuroses blooming down the hall—nobody, nothing but our two selves.”

Very early in the morning I awoke to find that Martha was no longer beside me in Markie’s bed. I supposed she had gone back to her own room, but I found her barefooted in the hallway, bending over the large cedar chest in which the kids’ old toys were stored. The toys, however, had been taken out and were strewn around in the hall; in their place Martha was packing away my belongings—shirts, suits, coats, underwear, ties—and hiding them out of sight.

The next morning Mrs. Baker ushered us into her kitchen (hers until her daughter came out of Billings’ psycho ward) and in a cheery, we’ve-all-been-up-here-for-hours voice heralded our arrival. “Look who’s come! It’s Markie and Cindy’s mommy, and Mr. Wallach.”

The three Parrino offspring, sullen children with downy faces, took our appearance in their stride; hardly a face rose out of its cereal bowl despite their grandmother’s exuberance. Cynthia, however, never without resources for drama, jumped up from the table and leaped half the length of the kitchen. She threw her arms around Martha. “Daddy’s here!” she cried.

“How do you know, baby?”

“Isn’t he?” she demanded. “Did he go, already?”

“No, no—he’s here. I just didn’t know you knew.”

“He called me,” she said. “Ask Mrs. Baker. Didn’t my daddy call me here?”

A white-haired woman with pale hands and active fingers, who always moved around the house in full dress—weighty oxfords, fur jacket, and pink pillbox hat, veil up—Mrs. Baker gave a small birdlike reply, as though she were cracking a seed in her teeth. “That’s right, dear. Last night at eleven-thirty.”

“Well, I didn’t know that, sweetie.” Martha managed to maintain her composure in the face of Dick Regenhart’s surprises and energies. “I’ll bet you were excited. Does Mark know?”

“He gets confused, Mother.”

Martha went to the table and smoothed back the boy’s cowlick. “How are you, young man? Did you have fun sleeping over? Did you talk to Daddy?”

He looked confused all right. “I was sleeping,” he said.

“You finish your breakfast now,” Martha said. “Then you’re going to visit with Daddy.”

“Oh terrific,” Cynthia said. Mark and the Parrino children said nothing.

“Hello, Stephanie,” I said. “How are you?”

Mrs. Baker said, “Stephanie’s daddy and Tony’s daddy and Stevie’s daddy is going to visit with them next month, isn’t that right, honey?” She had made it sound like three people.

Stephanie nodded, and Cynthia, on the edge of her seat, said, “Do we go now?”

“Don’t be impolite. You finish your breakfast,” Martha said, “and we’ll wait in the other room.”

Mrs. Baker followed us, and when Martha and I had settled onto the sofa, she said, “Mr. Reganhart wanted to come over last night”—she had been looking only at Martha, but I now got a significant glance as well—“and I thought it over and weighed all sides and then I thought, well, it’s just going to overexcite those two children. Now I hope I didn’t do wrong, honey. I didn’t know how you felt about it. I didn’t want to call you and wake you up too. I know when Billy comes, I just think it overexcites the children.” She had a very excited, anticipatory air about herself, as though there was always the possibility that she might be strung up for her last statement. She seemed to sense some acute division between herself and the general drift of life.

“Thank you,” Martha said. “I think you were right.”

“You don’t want to disrupt their sleep,” the older woman said, this time only to me. “I don’t know how you folks feel, but personally eleven-thirty doesn’t seem to me an hour for telephoning all around town.”

“I suppose he was anxious to talk to them,” Martha said.

“You’re perfectly right, Martha,” said Mrs. Baker. “I didn’t mean that, you know. Billy certainly loves his children one hundred percent too. I didn’t mean they didn’t love their little ones. What kind of men would they be then?” Again the question was for me. “Billy’s certainly been very good while Bev’s been recuperating, I don’t mean that. It’s just that they’re not women and you can’t expect
that they’re going to understand a child the way a woman can. You men are our wage-earners and our husbands,” Mrs. Baker told me, “but there’s nobody like a mother.”

I agreed. She squared the edge of a pile of magazines on top of the TV set. “These are mine, you know—for Bev.” She held up a magazine before her, as a child will hold up something for the entire class to see, facing each of us in turn. “These are my genealogical journals of Illinois, Mr. Wallach. My daughter has gotten very interested in her family history, and we think that’s a very hopeful sign. You know, Martha, Beverly never much cared about DAR matters. But I suppose now she’s had all that time to think and so forth, and to appreciate, and well, we think it’s a good sign. I had to go all the way out to Highland Park the other day to bring in all my books and magazines, but I’d make a hundred trips back and forth a week if we can have our girl back the way she was. She even asked about you, Martha Lee.”

“Did she?” Martha said. “That’s very sweet.”

“Oh she talks about her daddy and her brothers, and her old old friends—little children all grown up by now—and about you, Martha Lee, and about Richard too—that’s Mr. Reganhart,” Mrs. Baker informed me. “In fact, she’s suggested—and it was all her suggestion, mind you—that I try to get hold of a genealogy from Oregon. She wants to work out your family for you, Martha Lee. Now isn’t that something? I’ve already written off to see what we can do. Wouldn’t you call that reason to be cheered up?”

“She sounds like she’s coming along,” Martha said.

“Well, the doctors are encouraged, and the children are managing beautifully, and I don’t mean to say that Billy hasn’t been a help. We have nothing against Billy,” she said, “per se. If a marriage doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, I suppose. Perhaps we’ll find out later that this was all for the best.”

Neither Martha nor I responded.

“Mr. Wallach,” Mrs. Baker said, “I was myself married to two of the finest men who ever drew breath. And I lost them both, that was God’s will.” She filled up instantly with tears. “But I went right ahead, and Beverly is going to go right on, and Martha Lee has gone right on, and that’s the nature of a woman. To go right on, and raise her children to be strong and good, and not to be ashamed, and to respect their elders and love their country. I had two fine husbands, both of them Masons, not strong lodge men, I’ll admit that,
but men’s men, who had the respect of their neighbors and knew their duty to their wife. After all, the husband chooses the wife, he gets down on bended knee—at least he used to—and then he’s got the duty to stand by her. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know what’s happened to the world, Mr. Wallach. If you’ll pardon me, I don’t mean this personally, but I don’t know what’s happened to our American men. I don’t understand this discontentment business and I can’t say that I ever have. I don’t know what men want any more. If this embarrasses Martha Lee, I’m just sorry, but heaven knows they don’t make them any smarter or any prettier than you, honey. And my own Bev, they didn’t make them any sweeter, you can attest to that, Martha Lee. The sweetest, kindest girl, loved animals, loved the seasons and her schoolwork, Queen of the Prom, I remember that, and a pretty girl too—and it’s just not imaginable what this world has turned around and given them. Now I don’t know Mr. Richard Reganhart except by name, and Billy has been very courteous through this whole ordeal, but I don’t think they either of them would know a good thing if they tripped over it. If they fell over it and broke their neck, as Mr. Baker used to say.”

Cynthia’s voice came lancelike down the hall from the kitchen: Markie and Stevie were throwing Farina.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Baker, and she flustered and fidgeted until Martha rose and went off to the kitchen to put down the riot. Still standing by her genealogical journals, Mrs. Baker leaned in the direction of the disturbance; when the situation seemed under control, she came over and sat down next to me, where Martha had been.

“They’re two fine children,” she said. “That Cindy is smart as a whip.”

“She’s very good at looking after Markie,” I said.

“They could make a man a very nice little family,” Mrs. Baker said, “believe me.”

Again I nodded my head, agreeing.

“I don’t know if you’re a Mason or not, Mr. Wallach, and I don’t want to pry.”

“I’m not.”

“Well,” she said, “I would certainly give it some thought. I’m not going to say much more, because if a man wants to become a
Mason that’s up to him. You know you won’t even be invited, you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, you won’t, so don’t sit around waiting. They don’t believe in that. If a man decides he wants to be a Mason, then he’s got to step forward. Now I wouldn’t try to convince you of anything, Mr. Wallach. I’m only saying I think you might give it some thought. You know what they say: ‘Once a Mason, always a Mason.’ I was married to two men, both Masons, and both fine men, Mr. Wallach, respected in the community and in the home as well. They were stern men, and maybe they didn’t wipe the dishes like some husbands do, but they knew right from wrong. You just ask over at the University—you teach, isn’t that it, over at the University?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you just ask around there. You talk to the top professors and you see if they’re not Masons—the top professors, and deans, and so on.”

“I will,” I said.

At the door later, with Cynthia and Mark in their coats and the three Parrino children—hot cereal having cut through their gloom—running up and down the hallway, Mrs. Baker took my hand and whispered to me, “They’d make a man a nice fine little family, don’t think they wouldn’t.”

In the back seat Martha sat beside her daughter; Mark and the little suitcase full of pajamas and comic books that the children had taken with them to the Parrinos were in front with me. After a momentary crisis on the street—Mrs. Baker all the while waving at us from upstairs—we had all submitted to Markie’s seating arrangement.

“He’s traveled all the way from New York to see you,” Martha was saying now, “and he wants to have a good time with you, okay?”

Uncooperatively, Cynthia mumbled that she would cooperate.

Martha leaned forward, so that her hand was on my coat. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Markie answered.

On Fifty-seventh Street we had to stop for the light. Martha said, “To help him have a good time, babies, I don’t think he wants to hear about some things. I think he wants to hear about school,
and the playground, and about your Christmas presents, and about Markie’s cold that he had, and Cynthia’s ballet lessons—”

“What doesn’t he want to hear about?” Cynthia asked.

“I don’t think, for instance, he wants to hear about Sid Jaffe, you know—or about Gabe,” she said. “I don’t think that’s important to Daddy on such a short visit.”

No one asked a question, not Mark, Cynthia, or me.

“Do you understand, Markie?”

“Okay,” he said, shrugging.

“I don’t think Daddy’s interested that Gabe stays with us overnight. You see? If Daddy asks about Gabe you say he visits with Mother. Okay, honey?”

Mark leaned over my way. “A secret from Daddy,” he whispered.

“Oh but just a small secret, that’s all,” Martha said. “You’ll have plenty to talk about without worrying about such a little secret. Agreed, Cyn?”