Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Brian looks out the window again, but this time to make sure his wife is not coming home. Hastily, before she can do so, he retrieves his briefcase, raincoat and overnight bag, and leaves the house. Jeffrey is in the side yard, raking up apples with the wrong, or garden, rake, which is very bad for the lawn; but Brian does not stop to correct him. He gets into his car, starts the engine, and drives off into the damp, cold, darkening afternoon.

10

IT IS THE DAY after Thanksgiving. Erica is up in the storeroom sorting clothes: putting summer dresses away in cloudy plastic bags and taking winter skirts and coats out. She is alone in the house, for Jeffrey and Matilda are in Connecticut with Brian’s mother and aunt; but she is not lonely. She has not been lonely, or depressed or unhappy, for nearly a month.

At first she had hardly believed her feelings; she kept waiting for the reaction. Instead, day after day, there was only the euphoria of freedom—joy and relief at having Brian out of the house for good—in every sense “for good .” Cleaning out his chest of drawers, she felt no nostalgia—only a faint distaste for all those identical rolled dark-brown Orlon socks clustered together like horse droppings, for the pale shirts (14½-32) pressed bone-stiff in their cellophane bags. She took everything out and packed it into cardboard cartons; then she scrubbed the drawers with detergent and hot water, and relined them with fresh shiny blue-flowered contact paper. She dusted and waxed the empty bookshelves in the study.

Suddenly there was so much space in the house! She could walk through it, from room to room, and make everything right everywhere. She could take down the ugly yellow-varnished antique maps Brian had hung in the hall; she could move the best reading lamp, which he had somehow appropriated, back into the sitting room where it belongs She could trade in the ugly, clumsy Jar of Peanut Butter for a nice little blue VW station wagon that can park anywhere.

She can do what she likes now in her house; she can wear what she likes and cook what she likes. Brian will not come home at five-thirty tonight or any night to criticize the salad dressing or blame her for Jeffrey’s table manners or the fact that the plumber hasn’t come yet to fix the drip in the downstairs bathroom. She needn’t ask his permission to buy new curtains or have Danielle to dinner. And she doesn’t have to plead and reason with him if she wants to take a part-time job: all she need do is call the placement office as she did last week and say she can start on Monday. It vexes her that the job she has started is not as good as the one Brian forced her to decline: November is the wrong time to seek employment, and the best they could offer her was fifteen hours a week of typing and proofreading for a science journal. Still, it is a start.

More important, she has begun to draw seriously again. There is gradually taking shape in her mind a new children’s book, about a hare who lives in the northern forest, and turns white when the snow comes. She is not sure of the plot yet, but she has already completed some of the illustrations: large, delicately detailed ink-and-wash drawings.

Thinking of her book, Erica turns to the attic window. This is the one room which still has a view uninterrupted by ranch homes; it looks away from the city of Corinth over rising fields and woods bleached and stripped for the coming winter. As a local painter once remarked, nature is an instinctive psychologist of color: in summer she soothes the eye with cool greens and blues, but when the weather turns cold she puts on warmer hues. The late autumn landscape is all done in beautiful pale reds and browns, freckled with white from the first light snow. She must draw her next scene like this, from a height, with an oak tree there, the road there, the long field sloping up—

Erica rests her elbows on the sill, looking out over the lovely empty world, contemplating with wonder her own state of mind. She had expected to feel some moments of painful satisfaction at having made the right decision about Wendy, but not this continuing joy. Is it true, after all, that virtue is rewarded?

Of course there have been some difficult moments. But she would not have had it otherwise; without them, her happiness might have seemed too dreamlike; almost unreal.

Many of these moments have come about because she is still outwardly living a lie, though not one of her own choosing. As yet the real story behind the separation is known only to Danielle and to Wendy’s roommate. Everyone else in Corinth believes that the Tates have parted because of mutual dislike. It is Brian, of course, who has invented this fiction. He has made her promise to conceal the truth until after their divorce—in order to protect Wendy, he claims. But it is really himself he wishes to protect, for Wendy has no social shame, and would be proud to announce her condition from the steps of the college library through a microphone. Erica acceded to her husband’s demand very reluctantly. In her view it was not only dishonest but foolish. It would not prevent scandal, but merely postpone it—and very likely accentuate it. For now, when the real facts are uncovered, one of them will be that Brian and Erica have been lying to all their acquaintances for several months.

Already many of these acquaintances are not satisfied with the report of mutual incompatibility; they want to know the details. Was it sex? money? relatives? drink? They have invited Erica to lunch and to parties in order to pursue the investigation. Usually, she has gone, and smilingly endured their covert or overt scrutiny, their pitying and prying remarks; she has met their tactful or tactless inquiries with calm self-possession. This restraint was painful at first, but she kept silent by reminding herself that her inquisitors would learn the truth soon enough. Then they would remember how she had said with a fine smile that this separation was the best thing for everyone. By now she no longer regrets her promise to Brian; she feels as if she were walking through the world carrying within her a wonderful secret, which like Wendy’s child grows larger every day.

Concealing the facts from her own children has been harder. She and Brian had given out the official version together at a special family council; they had decided beforehand, not without acrimony, what to say. Brian had wanted to break the news gradually, and speak now only of a temporary separation. But she had insisted that even if they didn’t tell the whole truth, they must not tell any lies which the children would remember later. They mustn’t promise that the separation would be temporary; Brian mustn’t say that he had to be alone because of his work. She had spent wearisome hours convincing him of this, and more hours devising honest but evasive answers to every question she imagined the children might ask.

When the council finally took place it was anticlimactic. Brian and Erica made the short, neutral statement they had agreed upon; Jeffrey and Matilda received it stolidly, without apparent curiosity. Pressed for an opinion, they became even blanker. Their father was going to be away from home for a while—but he had been away before, lecturing and at conferences; and this time he would still be in town and would see them regularly. So what was the big deal? It was okay by them. No, they had no questions.

During the next few days, however, both Jeffrey and Matilda approached their mother separately. Erica had anticipated and even hoped for this. When Matilda asked how long Dad was going to be gone, she had her answer ready (“I can’t say now. It depends on a lot of things ...). As she spoke she looked at her daughter and felt, for the first time in months, a deep rush of natural sympathy—not so much maternal as simply female. As a child, Muffy had been strikingly pretty, like her mother: slim, graceful, elfin. Now, at thirteen-and-a-half, she was pudgy and shapeless. Her beautiful pale brown silk hair had been split and roughened and streaked orange by cheap dyes; her mouth was full of orthodontic hardware. But beneath this appearance, beneath the badly patched jeans and the baggy sweatshirt with ZOWIE! printed on it in comic-book lettering, was—or one day would be—a woman like Erica herself. Like Erica—or Danielle, or Wendy—Matilda would grow up, fall in love, have children, and be disillusioned by some man. And this man already existed, somewhere in the world. At that moment, wherever he was—standing in line for a Thanksgiving film matinée in some small town or big city, walking in the country, playing football in a vacant lot, or in some college stadium—he was slowly moving, walking, running toward this house, toward Matilda. It might take him a long time, but eventually he would get there, and get at her, and it would all begin over again.