Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters

“Have a steady girl?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Living together, I bet. Young people today …” His voice was pleasant, conversational. He took a sip of his vodka. “The old people are getting like the young people. New morality. The old widows at the club, always chasing me. Come over to say hello, how are you. I suppose they want me to take them out, go to bed with them. Not that I can’t still do it, you understand. But I don’t want to get involved. You go to bed with a woman, next thing she wants you to move in, marry her. Am I right, Cat?”

“I don’t know,” Robbie’s mother said. She gestured wearily at Robbie to take the cheese to his father.

“Is she drunk?” his father asked.

“Not very.”

His father looked at his watch and grunted.

“Grandpa’s talking’ about sex,” Robbie said. “He’s funny.”

“Jesus,” his father said.

He sat down and watched the game with his father for a while, and then he went back to the kitchen. His mother’s mood had changed. Now she was getting angry. He knew the phases so well he could anticipate them. The level of vodka in the bottle had gone down considerably.

“I wouldn’t do it now,” she said. “I wouldn’t marry the first man I fell in love with. Or the second, either. I’d go out and live first. Find out who I was. Did you ever try to live with a man who doesn’t talk?”

“You ought to have a cook,” his grandfather said.

“I don’t mind.”

“You should have people waiting on you. He’s successful. I don’t like to see you dragging heavy bags of groceries from the market.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing my whole life?”

“It isn’t right,” he said.

“I’d rather he talked to me,” she said.

“You talk to each other a lot,” Robbie said.

“Fighting isn’t the same as talking,” she said. “Maybe it is. But just once I’d like to have a conversation where I didn’t end up hoarse.”

“Can I help with anything?” Robbie asked.

“We should have eaten at the club,” she said.

Dinner was late. His mother put Christmas carols on the stereo and lit candles on the dining room table. She had covered the table with the white linen cloth she used for parties, and was using the dishes with Christmas trees painted on them.

“Turn that down, Cat,” his father said, annoyed. “How can I hear this?”

“It’s Christmas and we’re going to have music and conversation,” she said. She was very drunk now. “Turn that thing off. We’re going to act like a goddamn family.”

“You’re drunk,” he said.

“I have plenty of reasons.”

“When the hell are you going to have dinner ready?” He was none too sober himself. “Everybody’s starving except you.”

“It’s ready now,” she snapped, and turned off his beloved new TV.

The turkey was overcooked. Robbie could tell the moment he saw the dark, leathery skin. His father was carving it angrily. “I need an ax for this damn thing,” he said. “You get drunk and you burn the Christmas dinner, as usual. I should have eaten at the club.”

“Oh, you should?” she said. “Alone with all the families?”

“I wouldn’t take you in that condition.”

“This is my home and I can be in any condition I like,” she said, her cheeks flushed with rage. “I am a talented, well-educated woman, and I could have been someone, I could have had a life. You made me drink. I drink so I can get through the day. All my life, it was always duty. What you wanted. What everybody else wanted. Not what I wanted. Nobody ever asked me that.”

“I hate when you drink,” he said. “You act like a hostile bitch.”

“And I hate oyster stuffing,” she said. “Those disgusting little fishy gray things.”

Robbie closed his mind to their fight and ate quietly. He knew they were not fighting about dry turkey or oyster stuffing, or about how much liquor had been consumed that day, or even a wasted life ending in a lonely house with no guests and no laughter — they were fighting about something so deep they could not speak of it. He knew what it was, and it frightened him, because there would never be any end unless Hall came back. Even now, drunk as she was, she did not say: You called the police. And he did not say: He would have left anyway. Your fault, they were both shouting; your fault, yours … Robbie wondered if he would ever be old enough so these arguments did not make him cringe and want to leave.

His grandfather sat quietly, chewing his food, used to this chaos. Like Robbie, he had no other choice. But unlike Robbie, he had no guilt to share either …

After dinner Robbie drove his grandfather home. As he came back to his parents’ house he could see the lighted tree through the living room window, the fire in the fireplace burning merrily, and his mother in her dark red party dress sitting in front of the flames drinking, all alone. A party should never end with someone all alone, and yet they all were: his grandfather with his dreams of old widows, his father in bed, his mother by the fire, and himself. He wondered if each of them felt as lonely as he did.

At least his sentence was not indeterminate. He would be going back to school soon.

No one remembered who had first nicknamed Catherine Forsythe “Cat.” Her father said it was he because she was so agile and quick. Her mother claimed it was she, because Catherine was so quiet, sneaking up on you, watching with round green eyes. Nobody ever thought to call her “Mouse.” She was much too big.

She was one of the tallest girls in her class at school, but slender and graceful; athletic, aesthetic, and bright, and always with that cool aristocratic beauty that made boys write poems to her. Hers was an old, eastern family, and she was brought up to be what her father called “a gentlewoman.” A gentlewoman, she thought, had more character than a lady — a lady languished in a hammock, but a gentlewoman could handle anything. She went to boarding school, and then she went to Vassar, because her mother and grandmother had gone there. Her great love was music — she dreamed of becoming a professional pianist — but her parents would not hear of sending her to Juilliard. It was necessary for a gentlewoman to have a well-rounded college education, preferably at the school which had smoothed the edges of her forebears. Cat’s music was an excellent choice: she could play the piano at home while taking care of her husband and children. It would bring pleasure to her family and herself. Her becoming a professional was only discussed once, and dismissed immediately. Professional musicians had to practice eight hours a day, and then they had to travel. They could not have a normal life.

Cat met Hall Wheeling at a party. She was a Senior in college. He was different from the other men who wanted her; his ambition burned so brightly it was like sexuality. He radiated sparks. When he spoke to her of what he would become, the great things he would do, she felt her throat close as if she were going to cry — his life would be a wonder. He was working in New York, so they had weekend dates. She married him gratefully a week after she graduated. She was a virgin. Eleven months later she was a mother.

Marriage to an ambitious, successful man was not what she had expected. All of that energy he had was for other things, other people. When she went to parties with him she saw the Hall Wheeling she had fallen in love with; but now he was enchanting people from his business world. At home he was tired, quiet, busy with work he had brought home from the office. He wanted “to unwind.” She realized that without either of them ever knowing it he had won her the way he would win a contract. She had been the challenge, the project. Now she and their baby, Hall junior, were like a building he had designed: completed, strong, perfect, built to last forever, and he was off to the next assignment. She looked at the other wives, busy in their own little worlds of home and children, and she realized this was what marriage was. She was doing just what a woman was supposed to do. But she felt betrayed.