Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Externally too Brian and Erica have a reputation to uphold. For many years they have been generally regarded; and have regarded themselves, as democratic peace and freedom-loving persons, devoted to decent and humanitarian goals. So great was their need to preserve this reputation that they had never declared war officially, but continued to speak of the conflict as a peace-keeping effort and to insist that they were acting in an advisory capacity. Nevertheless, the true facts are widely known, and have earned them the bad opinion of the rest of their world—including, that of other parents who are currently engaged in their own undeclared wars. Jeffrey and Matilda, on the other hand, do not have to worry about public opinion. They know they are right. They know that any belligerent action they might undertake will be applauded by their contemporaries, some of whom have already gone even further in terms of overt hostility. The magazines they read, the songs they hear, their whole culture supports them. Even on the enemy side there are many who dare to take their part, repudiating natural adult allegiances in the cause of revolution and truth.

As yet, Brian has won most of the pitched battles; but the effort of winning is exhausting his resources, and he knows it. He knows that time is against him, and he cannot win the war. Even now his victories are all negative ones: he has, once more, beaten off an attack on some stronghold, or contained the enemy within the existing combat zone. He can, for example, wearily congratulate himself on the fact that his children do not—as far as he knows—steal cars or bomb buildings or inject themselves with drugs; that they have not got themselves arrested by the police yet, or pregnant. Sometimes Brian wishes they had done so; then at least they would be somewhere else—in jail or an unwed-mothers’ home—and someone else would be responsible for them.

What makes the war most exhausting for Brian now is that his ally, Erica, has deserted him. She has declared, not so much verbally as by her recent actions, that she cannot fight any more, that she is giving up the effort. This defection seems to him profoundly unjust; even dishonorable. For years the Tates’ domestic life has been governed according to the principle of separation of powers: Erica functioning as the executive branch, and Brian as the legislative and judicial. He has always left it to her to supervise the children in everyday matters. Now when—possibly as a consequence of her management—the children have grown into selfish, rude, rebellious adolescents, she resigns and declares that it is his turn. Which is as if the President and his Cabinet should abdicate and turn over the task of suppressing a colonial revolt to Congress and the Supreme Court.

Under normal circumstances Brian would not have permitted this. But circumstances are not normal; Erica is not normal. For the last six weeks especially she has been behaving in a very abnormal way. She is alternately watchful and abstracted; curious about his work and openly bored by it; overtalkative and silent. In bed she feels peculiar: half stiff, half limp; she comes late with a wrench and an angry cry, or does not come at all. She appears on campus at odd times of day with no explanation, and serves supper up to half an hour late with no excuse. It has not occurred to Brian that his wife suspects him of having an affair, since he cannot imagine she would keep silent about that. What he fears is that she is coming down with a mental illness; and since yesterday, Wednesday, he has feared it more.

On Tuesdays and Fridays, Brian has lunch with Wendy in her Collegetown apartment; on Mondays and Thursdays with his colleagues at the Faculty Club. On Wednesdays, however, he has a class until one-fifteen followed by a committee meeting at two. He therefore buys coffee from the machine in the basement, and Erica packs his lunch (sandwich, fruit, and cake or cookies) in a brown paper bag. At the same time she also packs lunch boxes for the children, washes the breakfast dishes, sweeps the kitchen, and takes out the trash—the bottles and papers and cans to one container, the garbage, in a paper bag, to another.

This Wednesday after his class, Brian returned to the office accompanied by a radical graduate student named Davidoff who had proposed a dubious project for his seminar paper. While outlining his objections to this project Brian sat down at his desk, uncovered his container of coffee, and upended his paper bag. Instead of lunch, what fell out onto the blotter was a heap of coffee grounds, crushed eggshells, orange rinds, crusts of toast stained with jelly, and soggy Frosted Flakes.

“Hey, wow!” Davidoff exclaimed, laughing good-naturedly. “Is that your lunch?”

Equally annoying, and perhaps more disturbing, was Erica’s reaction that evening. She seemed to be aware only of the humor of the incident and not of what it implied about her own state of mind. “It was a mistake, that’s all,” she kept saying, obviously suppressing an impulse to laugh as Davidoff had done, but more ill-naturedly.

“You already said that,” he told her. “What I was asking you is why you should make that sort of mistake. What it means.”

“What could it mean?” Erica stopped smiling and looked at Brian in what seemed to him a disturbed way.”

“Well, that you were disturbed, or unconsciously angry at me.”

“Why should I be angry at you?” Erica’s tone was ambiguous; for a moment he imagined she knew everything. Fortunately, he was not startled enough to lose the offensive.

“I couldn’t say. What concerns me is—” and he went on to list other failings of Erica’s which concerned him. But her question has remained hanging in the air ever since, half visible, like a cobweb. It is hanging there now. Suppose she does know, Brian thinks, only she doesn’t know he thinks she knows. But then, why doesn’t she tell him she knows? If she doesn’t know, then her behavior is crazy. Unless of course she is still angry about what she does know, about last spring. Should he admit that he knows this? Brian blinks; he feels as if spiders were at work in his head, spinning sticky gray webs of conjecture from point to point. Or are they in Erica’s head?

But these spiders are not the most serious of Brian’s troubles this morning. His doubts about his wife’s mental condition, the dislike he feels for his children, and his professional irritations and disappointments, all are as nothing today to the problem of Wendy Gahaghan.

To put it briefly, Wendy has recently become preoccupied with the idea of bearing a child—preferably Brian’s child. She mentioned this interest at first casually, some weeks ago, in reply to a compliment from him: “Yeah, they’re all light—only I sort of wish they were bigger.” She smiled confidingly. “When I have a baby, I’m going to breast-feed it for six months at least—that makes your boobs grow, you know.” A week later the theme recurred: “Gail says if it wasn’t for the population problem she and Danny would have five or six kids. I can groove on that, you know? I mean if you love somebody you naturally want to have as many kids with them as you can; like I’d like to have kids with you.”

This remark made Brian uneasy; apprehensive. As a form of insurance, he told Wendy that he sincerely hoped her friends weren’t planning to become parents at once; he elaborated upon the harm which was so often done to society, to their children and to themselves by people who reproduced irresponsibly, before they were economically or emotionally mature. Ecologically speaking, it was just littering—in every sense.

And then finally on Friday, when they last met—and at a very intimate moment: “You know, it’s funny how things work out, with heredity. I mean I was thinking just the other day, if you and I had a baby, what would it look like.” Brian refused to speculate on the appearance of this hypothetical infant. “I don’t know, and I don’t ever want to know,” he said. Drawing back, he looked at Wendy’s smooth, slightly convex belly uneasily, imagining it inflate before his eyes like a pale balloon. “That’d be the end of everything. Anyhow, you don’t want to think about babies now; your job is to think about finishing graduate school,” he added, smiling uselessly, for Wendy had turned her face away. “Okay?”