Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Brian walks back through the rooms toward the West Gallery, where the most important works of art hang. It will be a relief when this day is over, he thinks; when this month is over. Reason has fought a hard battle; Wendy’s mind, under the veneer of education, is illogical and stubborn. She may look like a graduate student, a liberated woman, but basically she is no different from the girls in the Fragonard Room: feminine, emotional, driven by instinctive forces beyond her own control. Though exasperated and exhausted by the struggle, he knows he cannot really blame her—that is what women are born for, as the numerous simpering Madonnas on these walls testify, from Byzantine icons to Renoir. He recognizes the strength and inevitability of Wendy’s wish to have a child; but he is determined not to become personally involved in this process.

The logical conclusions of his argument—have not escaped Brian. Fond as he is of Wendy, he knows that their relationship cannot be permanent. Eventually she will need to have children; she will marry someone nearer her own age. Eventually he will return to Erica and his family—probably when Jeffrey and Matilda are somewhat older. But not now; not yet.

He walks down the long gallery inspecting the paintings. Wendy’s attention should be called to the Rembrandts and the Goya; the rest can be passed over more rapidly, since they will not have much time now. But as he dismisses them Brian notices one picture which appears to his heightened and impatient perception almost symbolic: Veronese’s “Allegory of Vice and Virtue.” It seems to him that the features of the handsome youth who is rising from his seat beside Vice into the embrace of laurel-crowned Virtue (but looking back over his shoulder) might be his own at an earlier age. Virtue, who is somewhat taller than the young man, wears an expression of calm and loving Solicitude. Though he has evidently sinned with plump, blond Vice, she intends to take him back; she wraps her blue mantle around him forgivingly and protectively.

Erica should see this painting; there is a lesson there for her. But she would not heed it; she has not forgiven him yet and may never forgive him now. Most wives would be relieved and grateful for what is about to take place, but he knows Erica will be furious. She will pretend regret for the baby, but Brian suspects that all along the baby was just an excuse to get rid of him. Otherwise, why should she have been so eagerly self-sacrificing, so willing to dispose of him “for his own good” and the good of another woman’s unborn brat? Tall, cool, unforgiving, this modern Virtue spurns the hero; she turns away and wraps her satin cloak around herself.

Brian checks his watch again and realizes that Wendy is now almost fifteen minutes late. He walks rapidly back through the rooms. In the front hall he pushes through the turnstile and goes to the door, but Wendy is not coming along the street in either direction. Something has delayed her: her mother? the bus? It is annoying, because they are due on Park Avenue at Eighty-seventh in three quarters of an hour.

Perhaps he should call, just to be sure. He goes back into the museum, receiving a sour look from the guard at the turnstile, and finds the public telephone, which is not well located for seeing Wendy if she should come in. His dime produces no dial tone, and after losing twenty cents he notices a discreet Out of Order sign in italic penmanship. Swearing, he makes another even more rapid tour of the galleries, and again returns to the front door, squinting through the cold drizzle along Seventieth Street for a phone booth. There seems to be one at the far end of the block and across Madison Avenue; but if he goes to it he may miss Wendy. And since this is New York, it is also likely to be broken.

Feeling more and more irritable, Brian turns back into the building for the third time. As he clicks through the turnstile the guard, a tall cavernous figure in the style of El Greco, addresses him. “You going in or out, mister?” he asks sarcastically. “This ain’t the subway,”

Ignoring the remark as it deserves, Brian continues with an air of purpose to a room called in his guidebook the Living Hall, which is strategically located so that anyone visiting the Frick must pass through it to reach the major galleries; it also commands a view of the courtyard in case Wendy should choose that route. This room is dominated by an imposing fireplace, over which looms El Greco’s “St. Jerome as a Cardinal”—the guard at the entrance transfigured. He points sternly to an illuminated page of his Vulgate. The text is indecipherable, but from its location in the volume and his expression, it must be one of the more hysterical prophets. “This place is damned, and all its inhabitants,” he seems to inform Brian.

On either side, Holbein’s Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell face each other across the empty marble hearth: the scholar, saint and gentleman’s son from Oxford; and the son of the Putney brewer, the shrewd, hard politician who in a few years will destroy him.

Neither More nor Cromwell are looking at Brian, but as he stands there he feels their attention—even, before long, their disapproval. The expression of More, who had been one of his early heroes, combines sorrow and resolution: it is that of a ‘Harvard professor who finds himself forced to fail a once-promising student. Both as a fond husband and father and as a loyal Catholic, he cannot sanction Brian’s recent behavior. His grief at seeing him there on the carpet, with a wad of twenty-dollar bills where his heart should be, is restrained but profound. In a moment he will repeat sadly, almost to himself, the words from his Utopia which he knows Brian once copied onto the flyleaf of a Coop notebook with secret high resolve:

For it is not possible for al thinges to be well, onles al men were good. Whych I thinke wil not be yet thies good many yeares.

As for Thomas Cromwell, he has little interest in past promises, or in moral questions. This hard-headed administrator, with his heavy ringed hand and his narrow moneylender’s eyes, has no time for such nonsense. He measures value in terms of accomplishment: deals made, problems solved, opponents eliminated, cash coming in. At certain moments in his career, for instance at long-winded departmental meetings, Brian has silently called upon this man, who in an incredibly short time and almost single-handed brought the English church under submission to the state. Sometimes the ghost has responded; has given him the energy to interrupt tedious arguments and propose cutting through petty scruples and red tape. But Cromwell’s attitude toward Brian today is one of cold scorn. He condemns him as a clumsy and impolitic small fool who has allowed mere women to get the better of him; who has failed to make it either as a good man or a bad one, “You still think’ that little whore is coming, do you?” he asks suddenly, hardly moving his tight lips.

Disconcerted, and not only that he should imagine a picture to speak, Brian turns his back on the three portraits and looks at his watch. It is twenty minutes to two; unless Wendy arrives almost at once she will be late for her appointment. For the first time it occurs to him that something has gone seriously wrong. Wendy has come down with the intestinal flu since he spoke to her yesterday, or she has been mugged by a mugger on her way from Queens to Manhattan.

He starts back through the galleries, forcing himself not to hurry, even pausing at moments in front of some painting. The Fragonard girl is still dreaming of her lover below the sundial; but this time she has a different look. Her abandoned pose, the swelling of her breasts (now too large to be properly contained by her silk bodice), and a fullness in the face which he has lately noticed in Wendy, all suggest the same thing: that she is already, as she would put it, enceinte. And is not the naked cupid above, whose shadow falls toward the number XII, unmistakably demonstrating that it is too late?