Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

It had not always been like that, of course. For the first ten years of Erica’s life everything was peaceful and ordinary. Like Dick and Jane in the reader, she lived with her Daddy and Mommy and her baby sister and her dog Brownie in a nice house on a nice street in Larchmont. Things began to change in 1940 when Daddy, motivated perhaps as much by restlessness as by political sympathy, enlisted in the Canadian Army. He revisited Larchmont in the following years, but less and less often. Presently he did not revisit at all. He had not been killed in the war, reported missing, or even injured—although Lena Parker later sometimes allowed these things to be supposed. Actually he had married a Canadian lady and gone to live with her in Ontario, though it was some time before Lena admitted this even to her own daughters. She never admitted to anyone, possibly including herself, that she had been unilaterally deserted, but took equal or greater responsibility for the separation (“Harold agreed with me that it would be best ...). Even now Erica is not absolutely sure that it had not been Lena’s idea, or at least her secret intention.

In any case, her adjustment was rapid. Within a month of her divorce she had a job at Manon’s, a local dress shop; in two years she was assistant manager, in five manager. She developed a special effusive manner—half ingratiating, half domineering—which was successful in flattering or bullying well-to-do women into buying clothes. She learned to suggest that the imported blouses and scarves and “frocks” in which Manon’s specialized were at once more fashionable and more timeless, more delicate and more durable than American-made goods. She learned to believe this, and also all that, in the largest sense, it implied.

As time passed, Lena Parker’s preference for the foreign increased and spread, like an exotic imported plant which at first merely survives, then flourishes, crowds out the native flowers, and at length jumps the garden wall to become a pestilential weed. As they wore out, Lena replaced first heir own and her children’s clothes, then her books and furnishings, and finally her friends with those of alien origin. She began to sprinkle her professional conversation with French phrases (“Magnifique!” “Mais non!”) and ended by speaking English, even at home, with a foreign intonation.

To Erica, entering junior high school in a mood of “Ballad-for-Americans” patriotism and in the wrong sort of clothes, it was all false, disgusting and hateful. Her mother made Erica wear shopworn rejects, but she hoarded sugar and canned goods in a cupboard in the basement. She collected extra gas coupons; she cheated her customers in small ways, cutting off labels and passing part rayon as pure silk—Erica had heard her boast of it. Worst of all, she justified herself for doing all these things. If she only hadn’t justified herself, it wouldn’t have been so bad.

Erica did not excuse Lena because of her financial difficulties. She would rather have had one plain ordinary American sweater and skirt than all her elaborate dowdy hand-hemmed and silk-lined foreign dresses, and she said so. But Lena could not bear to waste money on “shoddy factory stuff”—besides, it was against her principles. Determined to go on living in her nice house on the nice street, but on half the income, she had made the discovery that foreign things do not so easily proclaim their price. The Mexican equivalent of wicker chairs and dime-store china, the Indian equivalent of badly printed bedspreads and thin frayed rugs, can be seen as bohemian and chic rather than cheap. A French name and some squares of dry toast will disguise vegetable soup as a meal, and costs even less than hot dogs.

Visitors praised Lena to her daughters for the marvelous way she managed, and called her a remarkable woman—meaning among other things one about whom remarks are made. Erica hated these remarks, and the men who made them. They were mostly foreign too, often from obscure stamp-album countries like Guatemala and Estonia, refugees from what her mother called The Fascist Persecution. They ate the vegetable soup and sat on the wicker furniture. Some borrowed the clothes Erica’s father had left behind and did not bring them back, and one from Albania who smelled of onions tried to hug her in the corner behind the piano.

Erica was also embarrassed by the fact that her father had left home and her mother worked in a store. The hours after school which she and her sister Marian spent in the cluttered back room at Manon’s, because Lena did not trust them alone at home and could not afford a sitter, were among the worst she had ever passed. She hated everything about it: the backside of the beige velvet curtains, like the belly of a scruffy old cat; the stained and scratched plywood of the cutting table, on one end of which she did her homework; the racks of dresses which crowded against her like pushy women (it was the sort of shop where most of the clothes are kept hidden, to be brought out a few at a time with dramas of appreciation).

Marian, being some years younger and of a more docile temperament, did not mind Manon’s. She played on the floor among the cartons of painted wooden hangers, the piles of bags printed with beige and pink roses, and the stacks of cardboard glazed” beige and pink on one side, ready to be folded into dress boxes; she dressed her dolls in the scraps left from alterations. Marian did not mind going into the showroom to be displayed like a dress to some favorite customer, being introduced to them as “Marianne.” But for Erica it was shameful, hideous, to have her name called out in Lena’s penetrating phony-foreign voice; to try to pretend not to hear; finally to be dragged, or pushed from behind by Lena’s assistant, through the scruffy cat-fur curtains—lanky, awkward, silent, in her traditional junior-high saddle shoes and knee socks and one of those wrong, awful, tucked and scalloped dresses. “ Voyez, this great overgrown child, si jolie, but I can do nothing with her!” Lena would cry—mock despairing, false—while Erica glanced rapidly around the room to see if the worst thing of all had occurred and some girl she knew was there watching the scene.

During those hours in the back room Erica resolved to become as much unlike her mother as possible. Whatever happened to her in life, she would be honest and straightforward about it. She would avoid and suspect everything and everyone foreign.

This prejudice persisted for years, and had far-reaching effects. It was partly responsible for her initial coolness to Danielle, who was legitimately half-French. And it was certainly not the least of Brian’s original attractions’ that his family had been in this country for generations and that he was studying American government. Moreover, he had not (like so many of Erica’s other friends) been charmed by Lena or found her remarkable. It was even in his favor that Lena was not charmed by him. She pretended to be, of course: she smiled and flattered and posed and deferred to his opinion, as she did with all men; and after Erica announced her engagement she did so even more. But Erica knew that her mother disliked in Brian exactly the qualities she liked: she thought him humorless, solemn, unsympathetic, overcritical.

Her true opinion came out the morning of the wedding day. It suddenly started to pour, so that they could not have the ceremony under a striped awning in the garden, but would all have to crowd inside among the shabby wicker furniture and burlap curtains. Erica, standing in her long white satin slip looking out the window into the heavy rain, just as she is doing now, began to weep with nerves and vexation. And Lena, who was already dressed for the occasion (apricot pleated silk and real lace), put her hand on her daughter’s bare shoulder and said, “Don’t cry. Suppose it doesn’t work out, you can always get a divorce.”