“It doesn’t answer my question,” the General said. “Why am I the only one who’s required to dress?”
“You aren’t,” Aurora said. “I intend to dress splendidly, pretty soon. You are the host, Hector—a position I’d think you’d appreciate. Also you look quite attractive in your suits and rather ridiculous in sports clothes. In our new life you will be the one that dresses, if you don’t mind.”
“So far I don’t like a goddamn thing about our new life,” the General said. “You seem to think it’s going to be pleasant to have three men around.”
“Four when Trevor’s in town,” Aurora said. “Not to mention anyone entertaining I may meet.”
“I know my days are numbered,” the General said grimly, getting into his coat. Instead of feeling angrily gloomy he had started feeling resigned and nobly gloomy.
“I know you’re getting rid of me,” he said. “I can tell when I’m being phased out. You don’t have to pretend. Old soldiers never die, you know … they just fade away. I guess that’s my duty now, just to fade away down the street.”
“Jesus,” Aurora said. “I certainly never thought I’d hear a speech like that in my own bedroom.”
“Well, it’s true,” the General said stoically.
“On the contrary, it’s bullshit, if I may make use of a vulgar phrase,” Aurora said. “You know perfectly well how reluctant I am to alter my basic arrangements.”
“Oh,” the General said.
“It won’t hurt you to have some friends, Hector, even if they are my other suitors,” Aurora said. “You’ve seen no one but your chauffeur and those dogs for far too long.”
“All right, I’ll try it,” the General said, standing at attention and looking in the mirror. “I just don’t know what you’re doing, Aurora. I never know what you’re doing—I’ll never know what you want. It’s all a mystery to me.”
“Some gaiety,” Aurora said, smiling at him. “That, principally—and perhaps another Scotch, after a while.”
The General looked at her silently, still at attention.
“Admirable bearing,” Aurora said. “Why don’t you go down and get out some ice? Our guests will be arriving soon, and I shall be awhile.”
Later she looked out her window and saw two cars arriving at once, the old Lincoln and the new. She raised her window a bit higher so she could watch the arrivals and hear whatever was said. Alberto, she could see, had his arms full of flowers. When he saw Vernon beside him and the General at the door, he looked puzzled. His instinct was to bristle, and yet he was not quite certain that he should bristle just then. Vernon had put on a Stetson hat for the occasion. Aurora waited, smiling, and then by peeking over saw the General step out on her porch and extend his hand.
“Come in, gentlemen,” he said in his scratchy voice. Vernon took off his Stetson and the gentlemen went in.
Aurora watched the evening for a bit, and then stood up and pitched her dressing gown at the bed. She went to her closet and selected a dress for the evening, and when she had selected it and put it on and found the right necklace to go with it she took her hairbrush and stood for a while in front of her Renoir, brushing and looking at the two gay young women in their yellow hats. It occurred to her, as it often had, that their gaiety seemed a good deal quieter than her own had ever been. Then the young women blurred and the painting became like an open window, the window of memory, and Aurora looked through it and saw her own happiness—with her mother in Paris, with Trevor on his boat, with Rudyard beneath the mosses of Charleston. It seemed to her that it had mostly been all happiness then, before quite so much had been said and done.
After a bit her eyes ceased to swim and the two simple young women smiled once again from their pinks and yellows. Aurora felt quite peaceable. She dried her cheeks, finished dressing, and descended gaily to her fellows, all of whom, all evening, found her to be a high, indeed an inestimable, delight.
BOOK II
Mrs. Greenway’s Daughter
1971-1976
EMMA’S FIRST lover was her banker, a large, lugubrious Iowan named Sam Burns. He had something of the melancholy of a basset, and had been married twenty-six years when the affair started.
“That means you have at least twice the excuse I have,” Emma told him. “I’ve only been married eleven years.”
She always talked to Sam while they were undressing, for fear that if she didn’t he would change his mind and lumber out of the room. The mention of his marriage was a mistake, however. Any mention of it, ever, only made Sam the more melancholy. The notion that marriage led inevitably to affairs was deeply offensive to him. He was first vice-president of a small but prosperous suburban bank in Des Moines, and he loved his wife, children, and grandchildren very much. He didn’t know why he was spending his lunch hours in bed with a client’s wife. “I guess the Lord made us all sinners,” he said one day; but then it occurred to him that his wife, Dottie, would certainly never sin, or at least not in the manner in which he himself had just finished sinning, and his large brow wrinkled.
“Stop thinking about it, Sam,” Emma said. “It’s not as bad as you’ve been told.”
“I’ve been a banker all my life,” Sam said wistfully.
“You’re still a banker,” Emma said. “What are you talking about?”
Sam clutched her silently. What he meant was that in his own thoughts he no longer felt grounded in his profession; what he felt himself to be, all day long sometimes, was an adulterer. He had spent his whole dutiful life maintaining a state of respectability, only to lose it utterly in his fifty-second year—in order to sleep with a client’s wife. At least his parents were dead; they would never have to know about it if he were caught and disgraced. His wife and children would have to know about it, though. Sometimes when Jessie and Jinny, his two little granddaughters, were crawling around in his lap the thought of how unworthy his lap really was struck him, and appalled him so that he was close to tears. At such times he laughed too loud, annoying everyone in the house.
“Hush, Grandpa, too loud!” Jessie said, putting her fingers in her ears.
Sam thought of Emma as a client’s wife, although for all practical purposes she herself was his client. Flap Horton had long since taken refuge in a pose of academic impracticality; all bills and financial arrangements, such as the loan they needed on a house they wanted to buy, he left to Emma; though the pose didn’t prevent him from complaining constantly about her inability to balance a household budget.
Their fights about money were violent and bitter—terrible fights in which all their disappointment with one another came out. Whenever one started, Tommy and Teddy grabbed the nearest basketball or the nearest skateboard and fled the house. Years later, when she and Flap no longer argued, even about money, Emma’s strongest memory of Des Moines was of sitting at the kitchen table trying to calm down, and feeling guilty about the boys, whom she could see out the back window: Tommy often lying down on the grass by the driveway, refusing to play, waiting tensely for it to be over so he could come back to his science fiction magazines and his mineralogy set; Teddy, even more forlorn, a little boy so thirsty for love that he gulped it like water, dribbling miserably, shooting his ineffective push shots that usually fell two feet short of the rim of the basket, or else circling in endless lonely circles on his skateboard—all of it under a cold Iowa sky.
Tommy, tense himself, could live with tension. He could climb up on his bunk bed and read, answering no questions and responding to no demands; but not Teddy. Teddy needed arms around him, ears to listen; he needed everyone in the house to be warmly, constantly in love with one another. Emma knew it; her youngest son’s yearning for a household filled with love haunted her, as her marriage died. Tommy wanted no illusions; Teddy wanted them all, and his mother was his only hope.
Fortunately for them all, she and Flap had made one another happy for five or six years, when the boys were very young. They had that credit at least. For a time their marriage had s
ome energy, and it got them from Houston to Des Moines and six years into teaching. In the sixth year Flap got tenure, even though he had never quite finished his book on Shelley. They bought a house and had been living in it two years before Emma realized that she wanted to seduce Sam Burns, the man who had got her their mortgage. In the two years, something had slipped. Flap had quietly started to be a failure. He had always expected to fail, and slid into failure easily. In the context of academic life it was as common and as comfortable as his pipe and his slippers, but he hated Emma for letting it happen. It had been up to her to demand success of him; she was supposed to push, nag, bite if necessary. Instead, she left it to him, knowing that he would rather sit and read, or drink coffee and talk literature—or, as it later developed, fuck students.
Emma too knew that it was up to her, but the task of making Flap succeed was more than she could manage while raising two boys. It was a pity, but it was not her nature anyway. Flap had misread her to begin with. She too liked to sit and read; she also liked to sing songs with her boys and discuss life with them, to drink wine, eat chocolate, grow flowers, cook the five or six dishes she could really cook, see movies, watch TV, and get laid now and then—all that in no particular order. Success demanded a particular order. Besides, she found successful academics universally obnoxious; failed academics were at least sometimes a little sweet. She knew how obnoxious Flap would become if he succeeded; what she hoped for was a middle ground that would leave him friendly and relaxed and incline him to stay home a little, spend some time with the boys, and maybe even a little with her.
The Shelley book would have been enough, she thought later. One book would have done it. In his own view he would have been established forever. Yet he finicked too long, kept reading, polished what he had excessively, and never wrote the last two chapters. He published three articles, enough for his tenure, but that was that. Emma was too proud to nag—she was not about to nag. Flap hated her pride and paid her back by attacking her handling of money. Soon what energy was left between them all centered on money; arguments about it constituted their only real form of communication. Everything else, sex included, became perfunctory, impersonal, and mute. Flap went away to the library, the faculty club, his office, saw students and colleagues. He relocated his emotional life. Emma ignored the fact for six or eight months, until she began to ache for love too badly to be proud.
“You’ve abandoned me!” she cried one day in the midst of a fight about an air conditioner. “It’s summer. Why do you stay over there all day?”
“That’s where I work,” Flap said.
“What work? What work?” Emma said. “It’s summer. You could read here.”
“Did you realize how anti-intellectual you are?” Flap said. “You really hate colleges. Did you know that?”
“Yes, I know it,” Emma said. “Faculties, at least. I hate them because they’re all depressed.”
“That’s arrogant,” Flap said, stung. “Who’s depressed?”
“Every teacher on that fucking campus,” Emma said. “They just don’t acknowledge it, that’s all. I hate unacknowledged depression. At least I show it when I’m depressed.”
“Which is always,” he said.
“Not always.”
“You might be more attractive if you pretended to a little cheer,” he said.
“Who do I have to pretend for?” she said.
“The boys.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “You don’t see the boys six minutes a week. I’m not depressed with them. They cheer me up. So could you if you cared to.”
“Mine and my colleagues’ depression is more civilized than your cheer,” Flap said.
“Then keep it, you shitheel,” Emma said. “I don’t have to be civilized in my own bedroom.”
Flap kept it, and left. He retreated into his profession and had fewer fights with his wife. Tommy, with the precociousness of a well-read eleven-year-old, noticed and blamed his mother for his father’s remoteness.
“You have a lot of hostility,” he told her one morning. “I think you’ve driven Daddy away.”
Emma stopped and looked at him. “How’d you like this pancake in the kisser?” she said.
Tommy held his ground, for the moment at least. “My brother and I live here too,” he said. “We have a right to our opinion.”
“I’m glad you admit that he’s your brother,” Emma said. “You don’t usually. The way you treat Teddy doesn’t leave you a lot of room to talk about hostility—would you agree?”
“Well, there’s a difference,” Tommy said. Argument fascinated him.
“What?”
“Teddy’s too young to leave,” he said. “He has to put up with it. Daddy doesn’t.”
Emma smiled. “You’re your grandmother’s grandson,” she said. “That’s a good point. Perhaps we could reach an agreement. You try to be kinder to Teddy, and I’ll try to be kinder to your father.”
Tommy shook his head. “It won’t work,” he said. “That kid irritates me too much.”
“Then eat your breakfast and don’t pick on me,” Emma said.
FROM THE first Sam’s size and his lugubriousness fascinated her. His large face always brightened when she came into the bank. It had been so long since she had had an active sense of wanting someone that she was a long time in recognizing her own feelings for what they were, and then it was another eight months before she worked up to doing anything about it. She had met his wife, a dumpy, yappy, extremely self-occupied little woman named Dottie who ran half the civic and charitable organizations in Des Moines. She seemed to have little time to spare for Sam, and she was so pleased with herself generally that Emma never felt the least remorse about seducing him. Dottie was obviously not going to miss a few hours of Sam.
During the eight months, Emma flirted with him. She was not so fine a flirt as her mother, but she had nothing else of an emotional or romantic nature to do and she managed to find a great many reasons for going to the bank. Sam Burns had no idea he was being flirted with, but he certainly felt perked up whenever young Mrs. Horton stopped to say hello to him for a minute. His secretary, Angela, was slightly more aware; but she would never have suspected Emma of truly dark designs. “You’re the only one makes Mr. Burns blush, honey,” she told Emma. “I’m always glad to see you coming. He gets the blues easier than any man I ever saw. I’ve seen that man so blue he could hardly dictate.”
Emma befriended Angela; she was most discreet. Indeed, for a time she didn’t expect to succeed in her little flirtation. There seemed no way to lure such a large, sad, respectable man out of his bank office and into an illicit bed. Even if she succeeded in getting him out of the bank, what illicit bed would they use? Emma told herself she wasn’t serious, that all she needed was a little attention, someone to perk up when she came into the room. In fact, it wasn’t true. Her sex life at home had sunk to what she would have once considered an unbelievable low. Flap had made a happy discovery: that the student generation he was teaching attached no more moral significance to sex than they might attach to a warm bath. Better still—since he was lazy by nature—he discovered that it was not even necessary to seek out students; drably dressed but nubile twenty-year-olds were pleased to seek him out. Often it was only necessary to tag along to their apartments and perhaps listen to a few records and smoke a little grass in order to accomplish a seduction. He quickly formed a student habit and approached his wife less and less often, and then only when drunk or prompted by guilt.
Emma knew Flap had more of a sex drive than he was getting home with, but she didn’t inquire. She felt secondary in her own bed, which was humiliating enough; she was not about to make matters worse by acting jealous. In regard to Flap she felt more contemptuous than jealous anyway, but somehow that didn’t make her feel the less secondary. A year passed; she knew that inside she felt desperate, half the time, but she covered the desperation with such thick wads of activity that she thought perhaps no one would suspect it. Sh
e told herself to be matter-of-fact; she needed a lover. But she was living in a middle-class neighborhood, in a middle-class city, with two boys to raise and a house to take care of. Where was the time for a lover, and how could one be found in such a place? Sam Burns was an absurd fantasy, she realized. There was no way to get him out of his bank, and even if there was she would probably be too scared to do anything. Certainly he would be too scared—no man ever looked less adulterously inclined.
She gave up on her fantasy, then upon all fantasies. Resignation crept in; she told herself she might as well forget the whole business. Then one day in November she was at the bank chatting with Sam and Angela, and Sam Burns shrugged into his overcoat and told her he had to run to inspect a house the bank owned and needed to sell. Emma moved. On the spot she invented a friend who might be moving to Des Moines and who might be needing just such a house. Sam Burns was delighted to take her with him; he had wanted to anyway, but would never have been able to think of an excuse for asking her.
It was very cold and they were both very nervous. The house was empty of furniture. Emma knew from his eyes that he wanted her. She also knew it was up to her. They were walking around the empty house silently, their breaths condensing, now and then bumping into one another awkwardly. She didn’t know what to do; Sam was too tall to reach. Then he knelt down to examine a broken baseboard and Emma went over and put her cold hands on his face. His large neck was like a stove. They squatted awkwardly for several minutes, kissing; Emma was afraid to let him stand up, for fear he would flee. They made love in a cold corner, on their overcoats. As Emma had hoped and suspected, it was like being embraced by a large hesitant bear–very satisfying. Driving back to the bank, Sam was in terror, sure that everybody would know; Emma was quiet and at ease and when they got there discussed the house and her imaginary friend with Angela, quite persuasively, until she saw that Sam was over his panic and settled into an afternoon of making loans.