To See You Again (21 page)

Most of the people in the Jewish DP camp made it to Israel; only a few, very old and already sick, died on the way. There in Israel they were generally happy, although some of the youngest were killed in later wars. The classics professor
from Munich lived on to have numerous grandchildren. The physicist, having enjoyed a distinguished career at the Hebrew University, was honored at several international conferences.

Stanley Morris did not have quite the career that anyone would have imagined for him. He married as planned, but instead of Harvard, as he had dreamed, he ended up in a large Southern university. A good school, but not Harvard. He was unfaithful to his wife with a succession of younger and younger girls, most of whom strongly resembled her; they were all dark and rich and graceful and intelligent, as she was. Stanley wrote one book—interestingly, on the theme of ambition in American literature—which did not do well. He was flabbergasted when, in early middle age, his wife left him for a much younger man.

Vittorio Garibaldi, who had taken a train to Rome, via Innsbruck, early on the morning after the dance, thus not seeing Diana again, enrolled that fall in law school in his native Padua. A few years after that he married a beautiful girl from Ferrara. He remained a Socialist, despite strong pressures from almost all other directions, and he had, increasingly, a reputation for kindness, intelligence and utter probity. He was at last appointed to a judgeship, a position in which he continued to be admired, sought after, loved. His wife and children loved him very much. He was truly a remarkable man; in his way, a hero of his times.

For a while Diana McBride did follow the wives-of-graduate-students pattern, rather than the grander plan of law school that she had announced to Vittorio, and sometimes she felt that as a broken pledge. She went to work in a law firm, thus helping to support the education of Braxton McBride; she was underpaid and condescended to, and she
even had a miserable, punishing affair with one of the junior partners. But what she managed to learn of the law was extremely interesting to her, even exhilarating; she found the judicial system fascinating.

Sometimes she thought of Vittorio, and longingly she would imagine that she had run off with him and shared whatever life he made; remembering that he had not asked her to was painful. In fact, those hours with Vittorio, recalled, were bruising to her during her own worst years. What she had experienced as beautiful rebuked her; she had turned out to be unworthy after all. At other times she could barely believe that it had happened.

Braxton got his degree, and then he got a job, in another, smaller Midwestern university. At that point, to everyone’s surprise (including her own, although she was sustained in part by a sense of having fulfilled a contract), Diana said no, she did not want to move to the smaller town with Braxton. She wanted to go to law school, and she wanted, almost incidentally, a divorce.

By this time William McBride had died and Braxton was rich. Diana asked for enough money to put herself through law school. She applied to and was accepted by Yale, her undergraduate record having been exceptional—a fact that over the years she had tended to forget.

Braxton eventually became the head of his department in his very small college. But he was a very big frog, and he liked it there.

Initially terrified, Diana worked her head off at Yale, and she did extremely well. And gradually she was able to calm down and to enjoy it, this first experience of competence, of gratifying work. She learned how to keep up superior grades with a somewhat more relaxed work schedule. And she was crazy about New England, exploring the countryside. During one gaudy fall she became involved with a
fellow student, another older overachiever named Jerry Stein, from Worcester, Massachusetts. Jerry was a strong, dark man, sturdily built. He was more easygoing, much more relaxed than Diana was, warm and friendly, whereas she tended to be diffident; they were good complements to each other.

“I used to know a professor named Stein. He was famous, very distinguished. Howard Stein,” Diana said one morning to Jerry—an idle remark as from his bed she watched him making breakfast; thin Diana, huddled in blankets. It was early November, after one of their first nights of staying together.

“
Well
. Howard Stein was my cousin, distantly. The Boston branch.”

They smiled at each other, delighted at this new coincidence (the first had been of feeling), this new proof of the logic of their love.

Then Jerry said, “He never liked me much. He thought I was one more unnecessary little brat running around.”

“Oh, really? He didn’t like me either, not at all.” And slowly, but eagerly, over breakfast, the good coffee and warm rolls and cheese, Diana told about the seminar that summer: Howard Stein’s opening speech, in the clearing, among the statuary, and the dumb thing she said to him on the truck ride home, about the look of the countryside.

“Well, that wasn’t really so dumb. He must have heard worse.” Jerry laughed.

“I know, but he looked so mad. I felt awful. I hated that summer.” Saying this, Diana thought suddenly, sharply of Vittorio, and to herself she added: I hated everything about it but Vittorio—and even at that moment, newly in love with Jerry, she had the most vivid sense of Vittorio. She could hear his voice.

She never tried to tell Jerry about Vittorio, as much out
of a sense of impossibility as from delicacy: how to describe such a collision, and its long reverberations?

The involvement with Jerry, which Diana never thought of as an affair, and certainly not as a “relationship,” continued over the winter and into an extraordinary New England spring. Diana felt herself to be another person; she hardly recognized this new, confident, loved woman—a thin woman, with gold-brown eyes. She and Jerry got married over a long weekend late in August, almost ten years after the seminar, after Vittorio and after Diana’s time with him.

Out of law school, both Diana and Jerry managed to get federal jobs in Washington, and during the Sixties they were actively involved in civil rights, and then in the peace movement.

Toward the end of the Sixties, discouraged at the political scene in Washington, they moved back up to New England, to a small town in western Massachusetts, near the Berkshires, and also not far from Worcester, where Jerry had grown up, and where he had sometimes met his distinguished cousin Howard Stein at some family gathering. Jerry and Diana were very busy, both practicing law, and they remained, for the most part, quite happy with each other.

In the early Seventies, perhaps as an outcome of the growing women’s movement, Diana was elected a district judge. She was tremendously proud of that office, and she worked extremely hard. And she, like Vittorio some five or six thousand miles away, acquired a reputation for fairness, for honesty and kindness—a coincidence all around, which neither of them could possibly have known about, and which, assuredly, no one could account for.

In a fairly new Porsche, on a Friday night early in June, two people—a young woman and an almost middle-aged man, Cynthia and Roger—are driving up from San Francisco, toward an exceptionally beautiful house in the mountains, near Lake Tahoe. A house that was broken into the night before. They have been talking, unhappily and disjointedly, about knowing versus not knowing about the break-in in advance of their arrival—as though there had been a choice. They have agreed that it is on the whole better to know, despite this present miserable anticipation.

The house belongs to Roger, but since they plan to marry in the fall it soon will be partly Cynthia’s, and sometimes she sighs at the thought of such responsibility; she is unused to owning things, her instincts being somewhat nomadic. And the news of this break-in has deeply upset her; she feels an unaccustomed rage and an ugly desire for vengeance: whoever broke in should be punished, and this sentiment is out of character too, for Cynthia.

Once a couple of years ago, Roger, probably with another girl, arrived to find the house flooded, dirty water
everywhere, stained upholstery. Another time he came up to find it severely burglarized, all the pewter and copper things tastefully selected and removed. He says that it is better to know.

Cynthia, who is in her late twenties, works as a reader for a local publishers’ representative. In fact, just before meeting Roger, she had a rather silly affair with her employer, an erratic and on the whole irresponsible young man. Roger’s stability as well as his age have seemed reassuring. She has never married, just had a lot of affairs, most of which in retrospect also look silly, if great fun at the time. Roger has been married three times, each ending in divorce; no children. But he is ready to try again; he really wants to marry Cynthia. They both think that it is time she married. They look well together: small, red-haired, brown-eyed and lively Cynthia, and large, just-graying Roger, who does not look ten years older than she, not really. He likes the commitment of marriage, an attitude new to Cynthia, who is used to more feckless younger men.

Cynthia means to marry Roger, but he has one habit that bothers her: he sometimes calls her by the names of his former wives: Charlotte, Caroline, Christine. “You see? I’m faithful to the letter C,” he teases. But none of those names sound like Cynthia; can’t he tell the difference?

Lately, before the rip-off, Cynthia has begun to wonder if the house doesn’t figure, perhaps, too prominently in her marriage dreams: does she think of marrying Roger, and like the thought, partly because he has such an exceptional house? Roger inherited the house from his mother, a famous beauty in her day, and sometimes Cynthia thinks he cares too much about it, but by now so does she, and this break-in has sorely afflicted her spirits.

The phone call came that morning from an aging and lonely mountain neighbor, Mary Drake. She had no phone,
and was calling from a gas station, in her oddly childish voice, among the other voices and sounds of cars and trucks and dogs. On her way to the Safeway that morning she had noticed that the draperies in Roger’s house were drawn and a light was still on. Going bravely to look in a window, she saw, she told Roger, “all this broken glass and food spilled all over. Liquor bottles.” From the Safeway she had called the sheriff, who, by the time she finished shopping, was at the house, and with him she went in. “I think someone got sick,” she indistinctly, and horrifyingly, told Roger.

Still, Cynthia and Roger were glad to be forewarned, although they were powerless to do anything but race toward the house, both their minds full of appalling images.

“Free-floating” anxiety (Why free? she has wondered) is sometimes a problem for Cynthia; she dislikes vague problems like when to end a love affair, when to marry. She functions better when, as now, there is something concrete to deal with. She stares out the window at the speeding scenery, the lovely slopes of ground, live oaks, cows, and she tells herself that it is only a house. This works, and she achieves some degree of calm.

Roger, to whom it is not only a house; it is
his
house—Roger is less generally anxious than she is; he is more direct. In extreme situations, like this one, he copes by outstripping the stimulus, so to speak. He shouts and swears, he makes things even worse than they are; he keeps the small car racing up the highway.

“Let’s face it,” he says grimly. “This is a lot worse than those frozen pipes, and rusty muddy water all over the house.” And Cynthia has to agree that yes, it is probably much worse. Food and waste are intimately revolting, totally so (not to mention the horror of “sick”). They are worse than rust, than any impersonal dirt.

And much worse than theft.

Twice in the past few years Cynthia has had minor but unpleasant surgery, for cysts that turned out to be benign, and she thinks of these operations now; she is reminded of their scheduled unpleasantness. Of feeling well, but knowing that at 7 a.m. she would be rolled onto a gurney and wheeled into a green operating room, from which she would later emerge and wake up feeling terrible. She now feels well, really, but knows that at about five-thirty they will arrive at the house, where they will open a familiar door, and see—something horrible.

She looks across at Roger, whose face is tense, and she decides not to tell him about this analogy. He feels bad enough already. Besides, he has never had an operation.

They have so often driven this exact route that it is possible to be blind to the racing views: the elaborate motel-restaurant clusters, the curious isolated bars that now advertise
TOPLESS AND BOTTOMLESS
. It is possible to ignore the strong homey smell of onions as they pass the packing plant at Vacaville.

Cynthia is, in fact, thinking about her first visit to that house, when the now familiar door first opened, and she saw that most beautiful room, that house.

It was nine months ago, a warm September day, air that held the barest hint of fall. Cynthia and Roger had only met in June, had been lovers (“in love”) for almost that long, an enchanted summer of discovery. They moved back and forth between Cynthia’s rambling, ferny Mission District flat, and Roger’s trim Telegraph Hill apartment, which held no traces of former wives, or, indeed, little sense of Roger himself. He apologized for its austereness, saying that it wasn’t really
where he lived, and he showed her pictures of his true house: long, low-lying, shingled, with a slate roof and stone chimney, on the river. In some pictures there were banks of snow up to the level of the row of windows. Cynthia said yes, it was really beautiful. And still she was unprepared.

They drove across the narrow black bridge; they turned onto a white dirt road, through a meadow of tall grasses, between tall strict dark pines, toward the house. It looked like its pictures, only more beautiful. The shingles just turning silver, the leaves of a wild rosebush beside the steps just yellowing. Cynthia felt her face smile automatically, and at the same time she felt a queasy excitement, in some unspecified place.

They got out of the car, in the clean pine-smelling air, in the sounds of the rushing river, and walked up flagstone steps, across a stone porch, to a massive brassbound door. Which, first putting down their suitcases, Roger with difficulty unlocked. “It always sticks,” he affectionately said; he might have been speaking of an unruly pet.