Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Throwing his coat on the Danish-anonymous couch, Brian makes himself a strong Scotch and water. He takes one gulp, sighs loudly, and carries the drink with him into his bedroom, switching on the light and tossing his suitcase onto the bed, where it falls heavily against a big heap of blankets which was not there when he left, for Brian always makes up his bed tightly every morning as he was taught in the Navy.

“Uhhh.”

“Hey! Wendy?”

The blankets churn and shift; she raises her face, which is puffy and streaked with dirty tears.

“Well?” he says in an exhausted, exasperated Navy voice.

“I’m sorry.” Wendy struggles to a sitting position. “I didn’t think you’d be back this soon, and Linda’s having a blast.”

“I see,” he remarks, in the tone of one who does not see.

“I blew it, Brian.”

“So I gather.” He comes further into the room, causing Wendy to draw back across the bed with a frightened expression.

“I couldn’t hack it, that’s all,” she mews. “I couldn’t.”

“You.could.have.let.me.know.” Brian is aware of controlling his anger, ejecting his words slowly like separate cold lumps of metal.”

“I was scared to.” Wendy smiles rapidly and nervously; she is up on her knees now, and he can observe that she is wearing only an oversize faded white sweatshirt printed with pink peace symbols.

“You.ran.away.because.you.were.afraid.of.a.minor.operation.” He fires another round.

“It wasn’t just that. The whole thing freaked me out. Like you know how I was all last week. And yesterday was worse. I mean you know, Ma and Pa and Brendan and Jakie. And then my sister and her husband drove in from New Jersey with the baby for Thanksgiving dinner, and we had the whole family-of-origin scene. All of them smiling and passing me the gravy and asking how I enjoyed my courses on account of they didn’t know that I was about to commit a murder. Because that’s what they’d think it was. I realize it’s just my same old parochial-school hangup, the return of the repressed. I know that. Only it really racked me up.

“But I was still convinced to do it. Then last night Linda came over, and I was rapping to her about it, and she said, why didn’t we consult the I Ching ? So we found the book up in my old room; and the first time I threw the coins I got hexagram number forty-two: Increase. I mean, wow.”

She looks up at Brian expectantly, but he makes no response. “The thing is, you know,” she continues, “with the I Ching, lots of times you get an answer that’s really hard to connect to your personal situation: it’s, all about the emperor and the great stream. But this was so right on. Increase! I mean, that’s what I’m doing, right? And the Judgement said, get this: ‘The satisfaction of the people in consequence of this increase is without limit.’ You understand? That means it’s going to work out really fine for everybody.”

“I understand, yes,” Brian says, holding his tone steady. “You’re telling me that you decided to change all your plans, and screw up your life, and mine, because of the way three pennies fell on the floor of a bedroom in Queens.”

“I didn’t decide—” Wendy’s voice trembles.

“No, I don’t think you did. You don’t really believe that kind of superstitious crap. Linda might, her head’s so fucked up, but not you. The truth is you just hadn’t got the courage, or the integrity, to stand by your decision.” Wendy edges away from the machine-gun fire along the bed, her back against the wall. She has begun to sob intermittently, but Brian has seen too much of her tears over the past month to be impressed. “You hadn’t even got the decency to let me know. Instead you had to sneak out of town.” Wendy has reached the end of the bed; she stands up against the far wall, looking damaged.

“But if,” she whimpers. “If it’s, you know, God’s will.”

“God’s will!” he repeats grindingly. He feels rage burn up inside him, as if a match has been put to powder, fusing all the anger he has tamped down over the past twenty-four hours, anger at his mother, his aunts, Jeffrey, Martha, the guard at the Frick, Mrs. Gahaghan, Dr. Friendly, the parking-garage attendant, the clerks at the hotel and theater box office, Sara, and Stanley. He rounds the bed toward Wendy, who is weeping steadily now.

“Stop that stupid noise.” He raises his hand; Wendy, anticipating the blow, crumples with it to the floor. Though he has barely touched her, she does not get up or move, but lies there in a heap, sobbing monotonously.

The fire blazes on; Brian prepares to strike again, more effectively, then pauses. It is partly the inhibition of which Sara spoke, a moral and social block against hitting a woman, especially a pregnant woman, a mother. But even more, it is a sense of futility. He sees himself and Wendy again as the sculpture in the Frick: Reason conquering Error. To an observer there would be no doubt which of them was victor, which vanquished. Brian stands upright, fully dressed, his arm raised, his square jaw set, and a righteous frown on his brow; while Error, half clothed, huddles under his feet, abject and trembling.

But appearances can lie; art does lie habitually. Brian knows from twenty-five years of teaching that Reason often fights a losing battle, and it is proved again here. All his arguments, his month-long logical analysis of the situation, were not worth three cents to Wendy once his back was turned. She lies there now looking weak and disheveled and defeated; he can curse her, strike her again, throw her out of his apartment, and she will not resist. But such tactics will not save him. He is joined to Error through his own flesh, as the figures in the Frick are cast of the same bronze. To separate them will take craft, skilled force, patience.

“Come on, get up,” he says therefore, nudging Wendy’s bare flank gently with his foot. “Don’t lie there crying. I’m not angry at you, everything’s going to be all right.”

12

THE ONE UGLY PART of the Tates’ pretty old farmhouse is the cellar. It is almost entirely below ground level, dark and usually damp, with mottled walls of a sour gray cement which will not hold paint, and a web of rusty pipes and hot-air ducts and wires hanging from the low ceiling. In the least damp corner, raised off the gritty cement floor on soggy two-by-fours, are the Maytag washer and dryer.

Erica is in this cellar on a Monday afternoon in December doing the laundry, which should have been done days ago, when she was in no condition to do it. For a week she has given in to her own bad feelings; she is almost literally washed out, as if she had climbed into the Maytag and let hot rage and soapy self-pity slosh over her, swishing her back and forth in the dark, draining her finally with a hard sucking noise and leaving her as she is now: limp, wrinkled and wrung out.

She still feels wrung out, but the chore cannot be put-off any longer, for the weather has suddenly turned worse, as everything’ has turned worse. Erica cannot feel the wind down here, but she can hear it beating around the walls with a noise like hostile laughter. The basement air is at once chilly and stuffy, as if it had been left too long in a refrigerator.

It is Brian’s fault that she is here, because when he came last Sunday to take the children out to dinner he asked if she could find his old Navy shirts—which she later discovered, dirty, in Jeffrey’s closet. “It’s getting pretty fucking cold for this time of year,” he explained in the new youth-culture manner he has recently grown to go with his new sideburns and way of life. She should have screamed at him. Find your own old shirts! But she was-too stunned; she merely smiled tightly and agreed to look. She went on behaving as she had been behaving for weeks: as if theirs was the most civilized, high-minded, mutually agreeable separation ever seen in Hopkins County. And this although Brian had just given her news that made the separation, and all her plans and efforts and sacrifices, meaningless. Laughable, even. For over a month she had been a romantic and moral heroine; now, with one stroke, he had turned her into a character in a cheap farce.