Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“How do you deal with the guilt?” Edgar asked. His heart was pumping it out all through his system. Fern , his heart seemed to say, Fern, Fern .

“Eh. I make it worth his while.”

John came home later and slept on the couch without bothering to knock on the bedroom door first.

Edgar drove back to his summer family in the dawn, the twin highs of sex and grass wearing off together. A doe leapt out of the blackberry brush and stood in the middle of the road, looking at Edgar. Still as a photograph. She watched him, her eyes reflecting the headlights. It was too late for Edgar to go unseen, to slide back in without a mark.

He told his drowsing wife he loved her and it was true. Things were blooming outside that had not been blooming a week ago and other things died on the branch that had been luscious. Edgar grabbed Fern hard around her waist. She was his wife; their pleasures, their troubles, belonged to both of them. Edgar wanted to implicate her.

Fern lost her nightgown easily. Edgar was a hot wind and everything loose was swept up. Fern bent. She felt as if she was just meeting this man, that she was in bed with a foreigner. She pulled her head up like a person coming out of the water. “Edgar?” she asked, looking for magnetic north.

“It’s me,” he said. “Who else?” He glanced around the bed, because he’d felt it too, a new presence.

“No,” she told him. “No one else. I got confused. Where were you all night?” she asked.

“Just a party.”

“What party? I’m sorry that I called your mother. I’m sorry we need money to survive.” But her eyes were not sorry. Her eyes said, Time to grow up now. Time to earn and support.

Edgar suddenly felt hungry, very hungry. “Do we have any blueberries? I could make pancakes.” Edgar was putting on his pants. He did not have time for a shirt. “Let’s squeeze orange juice,” he said. “I’m in the mood for fresh.” The sun came over the hill and sent a razor of light into the room.

“I don’t think we have oranges.”

“We don’t?” As if this made no sense.

“It’s not one of the things I buy.”

“The only thing you don’t buy,” he scoffed. All around them was the evidence of her material desire: the fat headboard of the bed, holding her up; the rug from a faraway, sandy nation carried by camel and freighter; the pale butter-colored sofa with thin, modern arms that Fern had had made for this particular spot, to fit the dimensions of the stained glass above it; the stained glass itself, three deer in tall green grass, their long necks bent towards sleep. The modern house, all glass and view, and outside, grass and water.

“Don’t pretend you don’t care about any of this,” she said.

Edgar ignored her and went into the kitchen and assembled the ingredients, began to measure and pour, a mess accumulating quickly around him.

The children woke up to the sound, stood in the doorframe, their father in a sunlit stream filled with flour dust and their mother watching him with narrow eyes, as if he had arrived without invitation. Edgar said, “Pancakes!” and the twins were gleeful, but Cricket saw how angry her parents were, felt the treacherous space between their two poles and refused to enter the room or eat the breakfast. She sensed that something big had been upset.

—

They packed up a day early and the children cried all the way home, flat furious to be taken away. The ferry ride back to the mainland was pain itself, their beings and their bodies pulled in opposite directions. “Promise that someday we’ll stay on the Vineyard all year,” the twins pleaded to their parents. “We’ll go to the one-room schoolhouse and we’ll swim even when it’s too cold to swim.” Why didn’t they? Fern wondered. There was no good reason not to, except that their house was made of wood and glass and they would have frozen by December. Edgar thought of the house, the sea, the island and the fact that he only got to love the place because he could afford to. If he became Keating Steel, they could come every summer of their lives and their children’s children would grow up with the same saltsmell in their rooms as they fell asleep, the same blackberry stains on their fingers, the same memorized feeling of utter peace after having jumped into the cove and stayed under as long as their lungs would allow. And if he did not become Keating Steel? Edgar could not imagine selling the house, not only because it would have been devastating (to think of telling the children made his throat cinch) but because it seemed impossible — the place was not real estate but body part, heart part, something beyond ownership.

“Someday,” Edgar said. How long before the magic of a quiet winter island in an uninsulated house wore off? The first snow? What absurd indulgence, he suddenly realized, to build a beautiful house that was only habitable half the year. If they walked away from the money, sold their Cambridge colonial and all their things and retreated to the island, this house would make them immensely happy from May to October and then spend six months trying to kill them. Love, Edgar thought, good old love.

“Someday,” Fern repeated. The same seagulls the children had fed from the ferry happily in June now seemed predatory. The children closed their cracker boxes tight. “Shoo!” they said, flinging their arms.

EDGAR’S FATHER, Hugh Keating, had always stood in his office in front of big windows high above the fog-sketched city of Chicago, knowing that in every building were rods of steel with his name etched on the side, the skeleton tattooed with the name of its maker. From that vantage point, from that height, he told the story — to board members, visiting businessmen, friends — of his family’s humble immigrant beginnings, of the new metal city rising out of the ashes of the old wooden one. He thought again: thank goodness for poverty. It’s much easier to be rich when your people were once poor. Sleep too comes easier, the mind peaceful with all that balance: a pile of gold and the counterweight of past hunger. This comfort was earned.

The missus, Mary, had made an intricate study of how to belong. There were such things as lower-class flowers (geraniums, chrysanthemums, poinsettias) and upper-class flowers (rhododendrons, tiger lilies, amaryllis, columbine, clematis and roses, though never red ones). She learned that the slower one drove, the higher his class. Cocktail wise, sweet was always low. Scotch and water (not even soda) was the highest. When they went to parties, she ordered two and then slipped into the ladies’ room to sweeten them with packets of sugar she kept in her handbag. She made sure her husband’s shirts did not gap at the neck — a sure sign of misbelonging. She practiced, with index cards, renaming everything in her home: formalwear, footwear, leisurewear, stormwear, beachwear, neckwear, tableware, flatware, stemware, barware, glassware. Edgar’s mother’s nightmares did not involve being chased or drowned but of someone catching her trying to eat an artichoke with fork and knife, of wearing floor-length to an afternoon affair, of everyone knowing that class for this family was not bred-in but a choice, or worse, a purchase.

—

Mary bore a boy, as hoped, and she gave her husband, seated in a wooden chair at the side of her hospital bed, a short list of names: Edgar, John, Henry. “What about Hugh?” he asked, liking the idea of a tribute to himself.

“Hugh was never King of England.”

“Neither is our son.” The boy squalled like a brief, violent summer storm, then fell asleep.

“There can’t be anything bad about having the name of a monarch,” she said.

“I seem to recall an Alfred,” Hugh said, joking,