The Vagabonds (16 page)

Things improved. Aaron believed in Franklin Roosevelt and when the bank did open again he returned to his office and was promoted to the Department of Trusts and Bequests. When the Gideon Putnam opened its doors he took her there to celebrate and, in the ballroom, to an orchestra, they danced. For her thirty-fifth birthday he bought his wife an automobile and taught her how to drive it, and they motored up and down the lanes of Saratoga County—feeling prosperous and fortunate, with Alice bundled between them in her bonnet and red scarf.

And now she was forty and Alice was eight and Elizabeth was weary unto death. The wolf was at the door. It was not the wolf of want or need but the beast of desolation she tried to keep at bay. It was a pack of jackals snarling at her there beyond the window and keeping her from sleep. All day she had attempted sleep; all day she had failed to achieve it and dreamed of not having her wolf-haunted dreams. When the birthday meal was finished, and while they were doing the dishes—she with a towel for drying and her husband with his sleeves rolled up, the soapsuds on his forearms where the dark hair clustered—Alice telephoned to wish her happy birthday. She and Janey were going to sleep. “I’ll see you in the morning, Mummy,” Alice said, and Elizabeth promised to bake a sponge cake, and wished her daughter sweet dreams. They had opened a bottle of wine, and she was unused to it, yet Aaron insisted they finish the wine and drank it off by himself. He was distracted, she could tell, and there was something troubling him, but he would not answer when she asked and said, “Later. After dinner. After we wash up.”

“Let
me
do the dishes.”

“We’ll do them together,” he said.

She dropped a wineglass. It shattered. There were glass splinters at her feet, a clustering glitter of small shards of crystal, and Elizabeth retrieved the broom and dustpan and wet a rag for fragments the broom would fail to find. “You’ll never guess,” Aaron was saying, “what I uncovered at the bank today.” She made no answer, and he said, “Well, aren’t you curious, don’t you want to know what I found in the listing of Trusts and Bequests?” Wordlessly she shook her head and he said, “A trust fund, Elizabeth Dancey. And not one endowed by your parents, but in your maiden name.”

“Oh?”

“Oh.”

Aaron was no fool, she knew, and knew she had to answer him, but there was nothing to say. It’s very curious, he continued, the donors dictated the terms of the gift, and all this time I thought you had a soldier boy for husband and we were poor and I needed to work and you were laughing every day while I went to work at the bank. You had
protectors,
didn’t you, you had Mr. Thomas Edison and Mr. Henry Ford and Mr. Harvey Firestone who were paying for that child of yours;
hush money
is the word! And all this time I thought I knew my wife but you were keeping secrets, keeping a trust fund of stock market shares; why,
why?

A splinter of glass lodged in her palm, and she felt it prick her and a drop of blood emerged. She dropped the dustpan, then the rag, and fell to her knees on the floor. When she began to cry he said, “Don’t give me that, don’t play your dainty tricks on me, I know I’ve been stupid and turned a blind eye. But not any longer, missy.”

“Blind eye?”

“These fingers”—Aaron held them out—“I worked them to the bone. I worked and
slaved
for you, the two of you, and all the while you’d been somebody’s mistress and at the bank they were laughing . . .”

“What tricks,” she asked, “what dainty tricks?” but knew he could not hear her and knew she could not tell him that she had to see a doctor. “Get up from there,” he said. “Get up off the floor, bitch, goddamn it to hell”—this from a man who never once in her presence before had sworn, or spoken in anger, and now was calling her a bitch, a slut, a whore. He had a terrible temper, but never before had he turned it on her, and so she gathered herself to her feet and he slapped her twice. When she stared at him through the storm in her eye the face she saw was Barclay’s, redly, and behind him their son Harold, whom she reached for to embrace, could not, and when she fell again she heard herself saying, “Don’t, darling, please. Please don’t die.”

IX

1952

A
lice was twenty and going to Skidmore and finishing school by the skin of her teeth. It was boring, boring, boring, and she
hated
her professor and how he was making them study
The Origin of Species
and how dull it was, dull, dull. The better word was
blame.
He was to blame for making them read it, for what he called the tangled bank of Darwin and Frazer and Karl Marx and Freud. Her professor, Mr. Atkinson, was small and bald and nervous; he fingered his watch chain all during the lecture, and when he sat at his desk he jiggled his leg and polished his glasses and sneezed. He was famously in love with Darwin, Frazer, Marx and Freud and taught the same class every year. She herself wanted to sleep. Charles Darwin should have stayed at home or drowned in a storm off the
Beagle
or killed himself like Captain Fitzroy instead of producing her reading assignment and making her write about the Galápagos Islands and the yellow finch and turtle, five pages due for Monday’s class and make sure you footnote, please. It was boring, it was dumb and dull, and what she really wanted was a cigarette outside.

Outside the sun was shining and there was spring growth on the trees; she could see the wind in Congress Park and how it lifted the leaves. Today was her roommate’s turn to take notes, and she watched Alison bending and writing—
Alice and Alison, Alison, Alice
was the joke they made of it—so Alice could pay less attention in class; she stared out the window instead. Clouds scudded through the sky. Last Friday night at a mixer she’d met a boy called George from Williams, and they did the lindy and Charleston together, and the boy could dance. At the end of the evening, which was a fox-trot, he asked if he could call her, maybe drive over this next weekend, and Alice told him yes. He was tall and gray-eyed, with a straight nose and a gap-toothed grin, and she thought she might like him a lot.

“Charles Darwin,” Mr. Atkinson was saying, “struggled all his life with headaches—migraines, probably, or something he picked up in the tropics that the doctors couldn’t cure. Against tremendous odds, ladies—overwhelming odds, in fact—he completed his life’s work and transformed our understanding of the species. Which is to say, you and me. He worked out how we got here and what we’re doing on this earth and what our ancestry consists of in the evolutionary chain. So it isn’t too much to ask that you should complete a five-page assignment—even if you have spring fever or are suffering from senioritis. Questions?” He sat, jiggled, sneezed.

Mr. Atkinson was forty and lived on East Street with his mother, in a brown-shingled house with red trim. His mother knew Alice’s father and they played bridge together on Thursdays, and it embarrassed Alice that their parents should be the same age. Her father had retired and was always getting casseroles from widows like Harriet Atkinson, but he had grown forgetful and sat all day in his pajamas, reading the paper, drinking cold tea, so she never could drop by with friends or come home unannounced. “I’d like to, Daddy,” she told him, “but it’s really really hard to introduce you to a person when you’re wearing pajamas and still haven’t shaved.”

“I’ll shave,” said Aaron. “You tell me you’re coming, I’ll shave.”

On the streets of Saratoga Springs she was always meeting someone who had grown up with her mother and who remarked how much she looked like Elizabeth; it was too small a town for her to pass the post office or drugstore or even to walk past the entrance to the Adelphi Hotel without meeting someone she knew. This was a comfort, mostly, a way of feeling recognized, but it didn’t help that Mr. Atkinson was saying, “Alice, are you with us? Are you suffering from senioritis?”

The bell rang in the hall. He was smiling at her, not unkindly, and so she waved
The Origin of Species
at him and dropped it in her bag of books and gathered her notebook and stood.

“What was that about?” asked Alison, and Alice said, “Oh, nothing. He just wants to show us he’s cool.”

“Cool?”

“Right. Really a hepcat,” she said.

She could remember her mother, of course, but who she remembered was somebody else, not a woman she resembled or was the spitting image of, the way Mrs. Hildebrand said. This had happened yesterday, downtown. She had been riding her bicycle home to get a record she wanted, and her yellow full-length skirt, and on the sidewalk in front of the Adelphi a woman stopped her, saying, “Alice? Aren’t you Alice?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dorothy Hildebrand, dear. And I could recognize you in a heartbeat; you look just like your mother, just exactly how she used to, you’re her spitting image, dear.”

“What’s a spitting image?” she asked her father afterward, and Aaron said, “It’s spit
and
image, you spit on the mirror and shine it and then you get to see.”

“Do I look like her?” she dared to ask, and Aaron said, “A bit.”

“Am I
like
her, Daddy?” she asked him, and he turned away.

The high clouds were cumulus clouds. There were cirrus and nimbus clouds also, and she could tell them apart. What matters is the difference in similar things, said Mr. Franks in art history class; that morning he had lectured on
resemblance, imitation,
and he showed slides of examples and she had copied them down. Mr. Franks said we have to distinguish between paintings—apprentice copies, tip-of-the-cap compositions—that at first glance seem the same. What George from Williams saw in her was not the way her mother looked, or how much they resembled each other; he liked it that she knew the lindy and could sing and dance. He told her she looked like Elizabeth Taylor, the girl in
National Velvet,
and she said flattery will get you nowhere, and he said he was telling the truth.

George came from New York City and was a senior too. He wanted, he told Alice, to be an architect or airplane pilot or accountant; she said those seemed a strange choice of careers, and he explained he hadn’t even gotten to the
B
s—
banker, bandleader, baseball manager,
you name it, I’ll try it,
comedian, count, clown.
Then she understood he was joking, unserious, and when he pressed her to him in the fox-trot she could feel the power in his arms and legs. “I’m coming back on Saturday,” he said. “I’m taking you out for a spin.”

“A spin?”

“Let’s call it a spin,” he said. “A picnic. The movies. Whatever you want.” His smile was knowing and playful and she couldn’t wait for Saturday and whatever it was she would want. In the meantime there was art history class and a spot quiz on Frans Hals and Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt and how they represented a different way of portraying the world than did Van Dyck or Vermeer; there were five pages due for Mr. Atkinson on the turtle and the yellow finch and how they both were crucial to
The Origin of Species.
So Alice tried to concentrate except it wasn’t easy and she’d wear her yellow skirt.

When he arrived that Saturday she was in fact dressed for an outing, with her skirt and wide tin-studded cinch belt and scoop-necked light blue blouse. He himself wore white flannel trousers and a straw boater with a crimson ribbon, and white bucks. The rest of his clothing was a surprise. Over an old flannel shirt, George wore a rumpled seersucker jacket, and his tie was string. “I couldn’t decide,” he told her, “if you were a Tom Dewey or Harry Truman kind of girl. So I thought I’d take no chances and be a bit of both.”

“Which one is which?” Alice asked.

“You guess.”

“The President’s a haberdasher . . .”

“Right. Except that he’s a Democrat, and this is my Democrat shirt.”

They were flirting; she was flirting with him. “Which one did you vote for?”

“I couldn’t, I’m not twenty-one. I don’t get to vote in elections.”

“Which one
would
you have voted for?”

“Truman, of course.”

“Oh, good. That’s a relief.”

“What, you never date Republicans?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“So what’s your idea of a good time today? Where would you like us to go?”

Sigmund Freud, said Mr. Atkinson, had a friend who was a princess, a woman called Marie Bonaparte, and he had asked her famously, “
Marie, was willst die Weib?
” This is German for, “Marie, what do women want?” and Freud—who also suffered constant pain, although the doctors understood what
he
was suffering from, inoperable cancer—completed his life’s work in agony and is an example for us all. If Charles Darwin transformed our understanding of the species then Sigmund Freud continued the work, as did, of course, in their separate ways, both James Frazer and Karl Marx. In Freud’s case, however, the exploration was inward, ladies, focusing on the unconscious, the subconscious, and he was particularly interested in what the poet Goethe called
ewige Weibliche,
eternal womanhood. His question was quite serious; the issue of
volition
is a question for us all.

George had packed a picnic bag with a blanket and two towels and, for some reason, radishes; he had pretzels and a chocolate bar and what she later learned was a flask of brandy and several bottles of beer. His car was a midnight blue Oldsmobile, a 76 with black seats; she signed herself out at eleven o’clock on the parietal sheet. Alice had written “Lake George” as destination, and “Family Visit” as reason; they were used to her departures, since she went home so often, and the woman tending the switchboard smiled and said, “Have fun.”

It was a beautiful morning—bright, warm—and when he turned on the car radio the first song was “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from
Oklahoma.
This seemed like an omen, a sign. She knew the words and knew the tune and the two of them joined in the chorus, and then there was “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and Alice asked him what isinglass curtains might be, the ones that you could roll right down, and he said, “Haven’t the foggiest, my dear,” and they laughed and laughed. She was twenty and giddy and daring and happy to be out with him; Alison called him a “dreamboat” and that morning had made their old joke. “Be careful, OK? And if you can’t be careful then name it after me!”