Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Houses?” Edgar asked.

“I know you don’t care about these things, Edgar, so Ferny and I will take care of it.”

Over the next weeks, Edgar took Cricket to watch the Red Sox lose three games, to the museum where they stayed all morning in the ancient art collection and discussed philosophy with the sculpted heads of Roman noblemen. Another day he took her to the harbor so she could learn the names of different sailboats. “Gaff-rig, cat-boat, Herreshoff,” she said in her little voice.

Mary and Fern spent every day with a real estate agent who wore pink from head to toe every time they saw her. She drove them all over Cambridge in her big bronze sedan, which sighed over every bump. They drove along the edge of the Charles, sparkling blue and dotted with boats, the Boston skyline on the other side. They went to neighborhoods made of brick and neighborhoods filled with Victorians, neighborhoods around Harvard Square where they stopped for lunch in a sandwich shop filled with students with round glasses and long hair and jeans and leather jackets. They did not go to the neighborhoods where Irish people lived, where black people lived. The agent offered an edited version of the city.

Mary fell for a huge brick colonial with white trim and columns holding up the porch. It had six bedrooms, four baths, inlaid floors, three fireplaces and a garden thick with roses. “You can’t fake an old lawn,” the agent said, tapping her pink pump on the grass. “The younger stuff simply isn’t as dense.”

Edgar would hate it, Fern knew, but she liked it. It was beautiful — the big brass knocker, the long path to the door, the porch-swing. Mary was buying and Fern could let her mother-in-law take the fall for the choice. She had spent the last years in a box of a house on a base in the South where she was too unlike anyone else to have even one friend — a little comfort did not seem unearned.

To Fern, Mary explained that she would need at least four sofas and eight armchairs. All-new appliances. Fifteen good Persian carpets minimum, six chandeliers. “Teak is best for outdoors,” she said. “Inside I would recommend something warm.”

Fern said, “Edgar is going to hate this house. You know that, right?”

“The poor baby,” Mary said, frowning an exaggerated frown. “I wonder how he’ll ever survive such a sacrifice.”

—

Edgar did hate the house and he also didn’t care. He was thinking about his book and about sailing and about starting over.

The first night in the house, Fern sat up in bed in the blue hours and tore the blanket off. Her heart was racing. She jumped up, looked on the floor, under the bed, in the closet. “Where is he?” she yelled. “Edgar, where is he?” Edgar woke up and ran to his wife. “Where is Ben?” she said. “Where the hell is Ben?”

Edgar pinched her earlobe to wake her up. “Ferny, Fern. Ben isn’t here. We’re in Cambridge in our new house. It’s 1970.” He did not say the word dead .

Fern sat down on the floor of their big empty house and shook hard enough that Edgar felt it in the floorboards. He held on to her hands but said nothing. He had learned this from her brother: sometimes the only comfort is the fact of another person. Not a dam, but a surface to wash across.

Fern did not know that her father also woke sometimes and went looking for Ben. She did not know that her mother dreamed about him three nights a week, that in each dream, Evelyn and Ben were running side by side and they were lost and tired and it was on the brink of twilight and they had to keep going until they found the path home. Fern did not know that in her mother’s dream Evelyn held Ben’s hand, coaxed him gently forward, spoke to him the whole, hopeless way.

In the morning, the family went to the pet store and Cricket picked out a sloppy Lab that she named Flower. The dog and the girl followed each other around, each revering the other more. Before bed Fern went to pull Cricket’s blankets up and found them curled together like they were part of the same litter, legs and tail, fur and skin. She could almost feel her brother’s warm kid-back against her belly, the way they had folded together at bedtime after their daylong separation.

—

Summer’s torch fizzled down quickly. Fern suffered over clothes for an hour in the morning of her first classes. Everything she put on made her look too old to be a college student but too young to be a mother. She settled on a pleated skirt and blouse and oxfords not because she felt good in the outfit but because it was time to go. She dropped Cricket off with a sitter around the corner and drove to campus. Her first two classes were Modernism and Introduction to Sociology. Both professors were ancient men in ancient suits who could hardly hear and Fern was years older than the other girls, all in minis or bell-bottom jeans, their hair long and pooling behind them in the chairs. Fern’s hand hurt from taking notes and she felt incomplete away from Cricket, but also good, she noted. It also felt good. Since high school, Fern had been oriented towards another person. This was the first time in her adult life that her efforts were her own. She did not have to drag a child to the bathroom every hour. She did not have to carry snacks. To sit still in a chair and listen for a full hour and a half was luxury. She almost cried, to think that she might actually belong there.

—

Edgar rented a studio near campus in which to work on his book. It was small and run down and he loved it. He leaned out the window onto the fire escape and watched the students with their big hair and big glasses and he smoked cigarettes and read Tolstoy and worked to get the specter of a novel to emerge out of him.

At night Edgar knelt on the floor and put his ear to Cricket’s chest. Fern could not hear what he heard, but she knew what it sounded like because she did this too.

“How was writing?” she asked.

“Hard,” he said. “Today was hard. I think I figured something out about the structure though. How was school?”

“It was good. Everyone is so young,” she said.

Edgar was twenty-six years old. He still did not want to run a steel company. He still did not want his only contribution to the world to be suffering on one side and profit on the other with a thin column of vacations between. Edgar still did not want to turn into his father. Everyone would have to continue to wait for him to grow out of his own mind.

Edgar brought his lips down to Fern’s and held them there while a spark passed between them.

—

Fern recognized the symptoms immediately: she was so tired that her legs felt leaded; she was starving yet no food seemed edible. She called her doctor but already knew what the test would say: for the second time, she was not alone in her body.

The leaves changed to red by mid-September and it snowed a week later. It was as if the earth had been wobbled off her axis, as if the memory of however many tens of thousands of years of summer, fall, winter, spring had been undone. Fern fell asleep in class and woke up to the professor saying to her, “Missy? I’m terribly sorry to bore you.” She bent her head, stared hard at her notebook, which was blank except for the time and date of Cricket’s next dentist appointment. She could feel the snickers and the glances of the other students like pinpricks. They were scholars; Fern was a mother.

She stood in the line of girls waiting to talk to him after class. The other girls all had questions about selfhood and the public sphere. She heard a tall black girl with big eyes say the words the off-modern condition , and suddenly Fern, pregnant and tired and nauseated Fern, understood clearly that she had been mistaken: there was no place for her here.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to the professor, whose nose hair quivered with each breath he let out. “It’s not an excuse, but I’m pregnant.”