Family Happiness (7 page)

“Your cousin Janet is not fit to kiss the hem of your slip,” Lincoln said. “She isn't pretty or nice or any fun, and she thinks she's perfectly wonderful.”

“She treads the straight and narrow,” said Polly.

“Any jerk can do that. Besides, how do you know? Maybe she's sleeping with two painters,” Lincoln said. “I know that when you cry out into the darkness you cry: Oh, why can't my life be as perfect and effortless as the rest of my family's?”

This was so true that it caused Polly to smile.

“I love you the way you are,” Lincoln said. “I think you're a good, brave soul. I think you are as straight as they come. You are a loyal, true-blue person. You think such awful things about yourself.”

“I can't help it,” Polly said. “I used to read those women's magazines at the beauty parlor when I went to get my hair cut, about discovering new things about yourself, and expanding yourself. I used to think: Isn't it fortunate that my life is so orderly and nice? I didn't think there would be much to discover. I
hate
discovering new things about myself. They didn't say in the magazines that it hurt this much. No one in my family has had to do it. Why do I?”

“Be quiet, Dot,” Lincoln said fiercely. “I really can't stand for you to compare yourself with those people.”

“They're not having affairs!” Polly was now in tears.

“Maybe they are,” Lincoln said, “maybe they're not. Who would want them?”

“You don't know what it's like for me to be in love with you,” said Polly. “It's easier for you. You don't have to live a double life. You don't have to feel wrong all the time. Every day I think about giving you up.”

Lincoln put her hand on his chest, right over his heart.

“Are you going to?” he asked.

“I can't. I just can't. It would break my spirit,” Polly said. “It's just so full of confusion and pain. Maybe that's what love affairs are like. I know you love me, and I can also tell exactly at what point you really need for me not to be here. I lie in bed at home and wonder how you would feel here in this studio with Pete and Dee-Dee running around. I imagine us all around your table. When I'm down here at the end of the day, the same thing happens to me: I need to be home. I need to see the children. I go home and think about you, and you pace around here and think about me.”

She looked at Lincoln, and there were tears in her eyes. Her face was soft and serious at the same time. Lincoln rarely saw anyone with her sort of refined, clear, serious beauty except the other members of her family, and none of them were quite so pretty as she. Every once in a while he saw someone who had some trace of those features. His adjective to describe this look was Polly's maiden name, as in “What a very Solo-Miller–looking person.”

“We need each other,” Lincoln said. “You saved my life, Dottie. I was a low, lonely, miserable soul until you came around. And as for you …”

“What was I?” Polly asked.

“You were so sweet and innocent and out of your mind,” Lincoln said. “You should have seen yourself, Dot. You were quite a sight. I said to myself: This woman is either frantic, or cuckoo, or she is actually falling in love with me. Each time after you left I would drink whatever wine was left in your glass and say to myself: Am I ever going to get to kiss her?”

“Well, you did,” said Polly. “And then some.”

“I was so nervous,” Lincoln said. “I used to get up early in the morning and go to the bakery, and I would stop at that Japanese flower stand and tell myself that I was only buying flowers to make the studio look nice, but they were for you.”

“I wanted to bring you things,” Polly said. “On the days we had lunch I used to take a bath in the morning, when I always take a bath at night. I used to think for days ahead what I was going to wear. I wanted to bring you flowers and I wanted to bake you some madeleines but I was afraid to. Oh, Lincoln! Is this what lovers do? Do they lie in bed talking about how they came to feel what they feel?”

“It's one of the best parts,” Lincoln said.

“I wish my life were simpler,” said Polly. “If only I could say to myself: It's heavenly to lie around like this, and it's perfectly fine, too. But it isn't, for me. I can't help thinking what my family would say if they knew.”

By this time Lincoln knew whether “family” meant Henry or Polly's parents and brothers.

“You always hate it when I say this,” Polly said, “but I feel unworthy. Don't be cross. My family puts a lot of stock by the straight and narrow. They believe in what's upright and true.”

“If you don't mind my saying,” Lincoln said, “they believe in it; you
are
it. It makes me mad that they don't know a thing about you. You let them crowd you.”

“They don't crowd me so much that I don't get to you,” Polly said. “Here I am in your bed, right up next to you. I'm a fallen woman in your behalf.”

Lincoln sat up and pulled Polly up with him. He put his arms around her and held her very tight.

“I want to go away with you,” he said. “There's a chance that a gallery in Paris may give me a one-man show. I'd have to be there. It would be this spring. Would you come with me?”

Polly wriggled from his embrace. The idea of going off to Paris with Lincoln had the effect on her that a roller coaster has on a stomach. Wanting rushed from her head to her toes in a gush, making her dizzy. Instantly she realized that she had never wanted anything so much in her life. Instantly she realized how impossible it was. She burst into tears. Her big, creamy shoulders heaved. All the Solo-Millers, even the lean Henry, Jr., were broad in the shoulders and long in the flanks. Polly had the body of a swimmer, but more lush. Her flesh was peachy and smooth. She had fine, strong hands. When she was upset her eyes darkened. Her thick hair was mussed and she looked wild with emotion.

“Come with me,” said Lincoln.

“I can't. I can't. I can't,” she wept. Then she collected herself a little. “I'm sorry, Lincoln. This really rips me up. I can't leave the country—it's too drastic.”

“You didn't go to Vermont either,” Lincoln said.

A month after their love affair had begun, Lincoln had asked Polly to go to Vermont with him, just overnight, to an inn. Henry was away, and it would have been easy enough for Polly to invent a reading conference, Lincoln said. Polly had balked. Her parents could have taken the children for the weekend, but what would she have told them? Suppose something had happened to Henry or the children and they had called the inn to find her? It had been too guilt-inducing, too complicated, and too overt for Polly to bear. And by not doing it she had condemned herself constantly to thinking about it: of herself and Lincoln walking through a stand of birches, of waking up together in the same bed, of going to sleep together.

“How wonderful it would be,” said Polly, wiping her tears away with her arm. “I would love to go to Paris more than I can say, but when I got there it would be awful.”

“Awful?” said Lincoln. He put his arms around her. His darling, tactful Polly almost never slipped. It was very clear to him how miserable she must be.

“You know what I mean,” Polly said. “It would be heavenly—absolutely heavenly—but I can't do it. I know I can't.”

“Well, it may happen, and it may not,” said Lincoln. “You know how these things are. A woman from the Galerie Georges Deliel cornered me at the opening, but it may be just talk. Even if they have the show I might not have to be present. I'd miss you an awful lot if I did go, you know. Some day, Dolly, when we're both fifty-five and the grubs are in graduate school, we can astound everyone by running off together. We'll go to India on a sketching tour.”

“What will I do while you sketch?”

“You'll sketch, too. I'll buy you a sketch book and some number-three pencils. You'll have to wear one of those English garden-party hats. We'll go into the countryside and sleep in hunting lodges under mosquito netting. Then we can investigate the local school system and find out how little Indian children are taught to read, and you can write an award-winning study. I'll illustrate it. We'll run away, that's what we'll do.”

He kissed her on the cheek and she turned to him. Her eyes were blazing. “Oh, Lincoln,” she said. “I love you so very much.”

At five o'clock Polly called to say she was on her way home. Lincoln watched her as she got dressed. He loved seeing those thick, expensive garments transform her back into a respectable matron. He made her the farewell cup of coffee she loved and they arranged their weekly schedule.

“What do you have on this week?” he said.

“Partners' dinner tomorrow. Home Tuesday. Henry's in Boston on Wednesday. Thursday we have Paul, the Peck-hams, and the Sterns for dinner. Friday we're going to the theater with Mum, Daddy, Aunt Lilly, Uncle Francis, and Henry and Andreya.”

“I thought they hated art,” Lincoln said. “Or don't they consider theater art?”

“Well, they do, actually,” said Polly.

“That's how dumb they are.”

“They like to go to the theater so they can misbehave,” Polly said. “You know, the thing about them is that they can get away with murder. They sit in the theater and fidget, and they eat those awful Milk Duds and Henry rattles the box. And they talk and giggle and the people in back of them have to ask them to shut up, but they don't. I tell you, she and Henry look like those little plush brother and sister mice we used to get in our Christmas stockings and they're so adorable that no one ever gets annoyed.”

“Except the people in back of them.”

“Except for them,” Polly said. “We always think that if the people in the back saw them from the front they would be enchanted, too.”

Lincoln gave her a bleak look. “Is that what you all think?” he said. “Milk Duds, for God's sake, why don't they grow up?”

“They're engineers,” said Polly. “Maybe that explains it.”

Lincoln shot her another baleful look. At this point on a Sunday afternoon, both were edgy.

These days the light faded early and fast. There was only one lamp on in the studio—one by Lincoln's bed that had a dark yellow paper shade. It threw long, bleak shadows everywhere. Lincoln's neatness, in that mournful, dusky light, looked singular and austere. This was a place you visited, the home of a hermit who had occasional guests. There were moments when that solitude looked delicious to Polly and when the thought of the Demarest household uptown sounded rich and happy to Lincoln. This was their worst time: when she was set to go home, and he was set to have her leave, and both were so ardent that they could not bear to part.

Polly sat down next to him at the table and nudged his arm with her forehead. He put his arm around her.

“What do you have on?” she said.

“Nothing Monday. An opening Tuesday. You Wednesday. Dinner with my old painting teacher Thursday, and Friday I may go to the architects' for the weekend.” Gus and Violet were restoring a house in the Berkshires and Lincoln did not mind helping out. “I'd come back Sunday morning. Can you invent another seminar?”

“Probably,” said Polly. “But sometimes I just want to put my elbows on the table and say: Here's the deal. I'm having a love affair and I must go to it. This love affair doesn't mean I don't love all of you, but there you are. This sandwich is for my sweetie-pie, not for a bunch of reading technicians. He's a very lovely fellow from a good family and so you have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

“That would cause something of a commotion,” Lincoln said.

“No, it wouldn't,” said Polly. “They'd all smile and say: Polly! Our Polly! Having a love affair? How ridiculous!” The lamp caught her face just right. She looked as innocent and sweet as honey, and lonesome. It cut Lincoln up to see her. It seemed awful to him to be surrounded by so much family and be so lonely: surely it was better to be really all alone. He gathered her into his arms. She had a wonderful heft, his Polly, and a sort of spring to her flesh. She came back at you, instead of melting away, although she sometimes melted, too.

“All right,” she said, standing up. “If I don't go now, I'll never go, and think how affrighted you'd be. Give me my coat and get me out of here.”

They walked arm in arm down Lincoln's street, hailed a taxi, and kissed good-bye. Although they knew they could easily see each other on Monday, their Sunday farewell was always painful. Polly always turned to watch Lincoln walking away as the taxi drove off.

On the way home Polly imagined Lincoln savoring his solitude. He often told Polly that she had rescued him, that she was his sign of spring. She had seen his white paintings—layer upon layer of despairing white. These pictures would never be shown, but he kept them as a reminder of what the other side of his solitude was all about. During the year that Lincoln had spent almost entirely alone, his brother thought he was having a nervous breakdown. He saw almost no one, and almost never went out except to shop for groceries and art supplies. When he discovered he could not paint in color, he painted in white. He was amazed, he had told Polly, at its variety and texture. He had done landscapes, still lifes, and a self-portrait, all in white. These paintings were extraordinary, Polly thought, bleak, intense, and full of power. She felt they ought to be seen, but they were too potent a reminder to Lincoln of what he felt Polly had saved him from. Her warm hand had pulled him back into life. These small doses, these blissful visits, were nourishing.

Polly knew that when she left the studio Lincoln smoothed the bed, washed the dishes, lit more lamps, and sat down at his drawing table. After she was gone, he told her, he sketched her from memory, although he often sketched her while she was there, too. He had a large folder in which he kept his pictures of her. He worked in colored pencil and when she was not around he did cartoons for an oil portrait. When Polly saw these drawings she was stunned. In drawing after drawing she stood in a doorway wearing her gray skirt and sweater. The room before her was full of life: a bowl of poppies, a pot of lilies, a lamb, a fox, a house cat, a cage of doves. In another the room was full of babies in baskets. The tribute they paid to her made her feel shy and fraudulent.