Alison Lurie: The War Between the Tates: A Novel

“And what did he say?” Erica is smiling now, almost laughing with relief and anticipation.

“He agreed to everything. He said it sounded like a good deal; after all, he’s been doing all his own cooking and cleaning for two years. He said he was afraid I was going to ask for separate bedrooms.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I guess I’ll have to marry him.” Danielle shrugs, then suddenly smiles brilliantly. “It won’t be so bad. He’s a real help around the house, he can fix anything. Yesterday he put up that triangular screen in the attic that Leonard never could figure out, you know?”

Erica acknowledges that she knows.

“And he’s great for my ego,” Danielle continues. “He thinks everything I do is fantastic, and everything I say is brilliant. Well, you know, I’m sort of keen on him too. I guess I really love him.” Unexpectedly, she flushes and looks down.

Below on the floor of the hall the crowd is beginning to thin; the other Women for Human Equality Now are getting to their feet. Danielle raises her sign and follows them and Erica follows Danielle. She knows she ought to congratulate her friend, but cannot arrange the words in her mouth. “But why do you love him?” she wants to ask. “Nobody else loves him—none of all these hundreds of people here. I don’t love him; I don’t even like him.”

“I can’t figure out why I didn’t say yes sooner,” Danielle continues, descending the grandstand. “I think probably it was a kind of mind set. You get into the habit of being angry and hurt by life, and then when something good happens you can’t accept it because it doesn’t fit the pattern. You really have to make a big effort to stop brooding over the past and all your injustices.”

“Mm.” Erica thinks that this is what she had said to Danielle herself, a long time ago. But now—

“Another thing that probably stopped me was Lennie. Not my parents so much. Mama will cry because Bernie’s not Jewish, and thank God that Grandpère didn’t live to see it, but they’ll come around eventually. But Lennie will make some lousy crack, and then he’ll sneer at us for the rest of his life.” Danielle’s voice is harsh.

“But what the hell right has he to think he’s so superior?” she adds, turning to Erica as they reach the floor of the hall. “Bernie makes a better salary than he does, and his work is a lot more use to the world than picking apart other people’s books. Anyhow, he should be overjoyed. Now he can sell the house, like he’s always wanted to, and buy himself a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard or in Sag Harbor, or wherever all the fashionable intellectuals are going now.”

“Mm.” Danielle is going to leave town, Erica thinks as, jostled by feminists, she is propelled through the doors of Norton Hall into the cloudy spring noon outside. She’s going to move to Brookdale, and I probably won’t see her very often. Everyone is going away: Danielle and her children, and my boss, and Wendy; Sandy has already gone. He wouldn’t even stay a few more days for the march.

“Leaving May fourth!” she had exclaimed as they sat having tea in the Krishna Bookshop for what turned out to be the last time. “But that’s the day after tomorrow.”

Sandy nodded slowly.

“But you’ll miss the big peace demonstration. You must stay for that, at least.”

“There’s no point. I wouldn’t go on it anyhow.”

“You wouldn’t go?” She lowered her mug of tea. “But aren’t you against this war?”

“I’m against every war.” He smiled in the faint, irritating way Erica associated with his religious fixation. Under further questioning it came out that he had never been in a peace march, or any political demonstration; had never written to his congressman, or signed a petition; and had not even voted since 1954. “I’ve been trying to detach myself from all that,” he explained, resting his face in his bony hands and looking out at her from between them. “It doesn’t matter, you know. It doesn’t do any good.”

“That’s a defeatist attitude,” Erica said, thinking that she had been right all along; Sandy was like an ostrich, hiding his head from the world in the sands of mysticism—just like the hero of her books, who had his own bucket marked SAND for use in emergencies. “If everyone thought like you—” She broke off, recalling that this was their last meeting. She didn’t want to quarrel with Sandy; she was grateful to him, Not only for keeping her company all these months, but for something more important.

The trip he had taken her on had, as she hoped, been good for her work. It had inspired her—but not by supplying her with new and exotic images and patterns. The revelation instead had been that the most ordinary things are rare and strange; glorious, full of meaning. This unexpected vision had survived her trip. It was, whenever Erica chose, with her still; so that now, here on the bookshop counter, the thick white crockery cup with its dull-green stripe and chipped rim, the hexagonal wooden pencil, the piles of stacked change, the dagger-shaped brass letter opener—all were touched with this glory. All of them could, if she had time, be added to the collection of drawings of simple important objects she is now making.

The Peace March did matter, she told Sandy; it was part of what she had been trying to tell him all along, she said: that the real world and what you did in it mattered.

“You haven’t had much luck with that effort, have you?” he remarked. “Just about as much as I’ve had trying to teach my students to detach themselves from the world.” Sandy filled their mugs again. “They think they’re free because they’ve quit school or got away from their parents. But usually it’s right out of one bag into another: laws, duties, obligations. Did I show you the list of rules for membership in the bookshop that Tim and Danny have drawn up?” He sighed. “Well, it’s one of the principles of astrology: you can’t learn anyone else’s lesson. What you have to do is keep learning your own, over and over again.”

“But you worry about other people,” Erica said. “You can’t help that.” She hesitated, remembering how chilly and silent Sandy had grown last week when she told him she was concerned about his future.

“For instance, Wendy,” she said instead, “Of course she hasn’t behaved very well. But now she’s going off, pregnant, with someone who has no intention of marrying her. She doesn’t know how they’re going to get to that commune place, or even where it is, or what they’re going to live on. Brian tried to give her some money, but she wouldn’t take it—she said it had bad karma. It’s all so vague and uncertain. It worries me awfully.”

“A real Virgo. You’ve got to have everything neat.”

“It’s true.” Erica laughed. “I keep wishing I knew somebody in California, so I could give her a few names and addresses. I really want to do something for her. I wondered if you—”

“Haven’t you done enough?”

“I—what do you mean?” Something ambiguous and cold in his tone struck Erica. “I tried to help last fall. But you know that didn’t work out.”

“No.” Sandy grinned. “God is good to us. He doesn’t always grant our wishes.”

“I suppose you’re right. It would have been a mistake for her to marry Brian.”

“It would have been a disaster. But maybe that’s what you wanted.”

“No, I didn’t,” Erica says, wounded. “I wanted them both to be happy. It was very hard for me, but I thought I ought—That’s a mean thing to say.”

Sandy, provokingly, continued smiling. “You know, Erica, that’s how you always manage it. When you want to do something, you convince yourself that it’s a duty which demands great self-sacrifice. Like when you dropped Greek ... Or in my case,” he added, almost under his breath.