My Dearest Friend (15 page)

Before she met Laura, every time the phone rang in the evening it was for Joe, and whenever someone was late coming in, it was Joe, who had been asked for a beer by his students, for a drink by his colleagues. And in conversations at dinner parties she felt left out if she tried to join in a discussion about some fragment of the vast field of literature.

“I’ve always thought Dickinson was too heavy-handed with her symbolism,” she might say, and before she could complete her thought or her sentence, the person listening (some poor professor who had gotten stuck next to her at a formal dinner table) would impatiently nod and look away and start a conversation elsewhere. What Daphne had to say now might be interesting—it might even be right—but it just didn’t matter, because she was officially “just a wife,” not an intellectual.

With Laura she suddenly felt she had joined, or formed, her own little private and very exclusive club. She needed a friend, a colleague of her own. Besides, Laura was such fun, and Daphne had forgotten how much fun she could have with a woman friend. The Millers and the Krafts grew accustomed to getting together for dinner once a week, usually at the Krafts’ house so that Laura wouldn’t have to get a baby-sitter for Hanno. Daphne would surreptitiously study Otto. Really, she knew so much about him, and such intimate things!—how his father, a wealthy industrialist, had never embraced his son even when Otto was small. Otto and his brothers and sisters had been raised by a nanny, and the closest his father ever came to really touching his son was during his monthly inspections, when the nanny had the children bathed and shampooed and dressed in their
finest, standing in a line in the nursery. Then Otto’s father would walk along, examining and evaluating his children. He would always pinch the lower flesh of their upper arms. “This one needs more food,” he would say to the nanny. Later, when the children were older, their father gave them brief mental inspections: “What is the capital of Greenland?” he would bark, and if they did not give the answer immediately, they were to be punished with a whipping in proportion to their flaw.

No wonder Otto was such a rigid man. Sometimes Daphne would think about and compare Otto’s rigidity and Hudson’s. It seemed to her that Hudson’s carefulness always had the virtue of grace and elegance and lightness, like Hudson himself, a leanness about it, a slenderness, so that if he was rigid, it was like the string on a violin or an archer’s bow—taut, but one could touch it, pluck it, one could make it sing or send an arrow soaring. Otto, in comparison, was heavy and earthbound. His rigidity was like a boulder, or like a cannonball that had already been fired and now lay, immobile, yet remained a kind of weaponry, still capable of violence. No wonder he did not laugh easily, and when he did laugh, he sounded like a dog barking. He was handsome in a way, with his blazing blue eyes and that bald naked head. The baldness was aggressive; it seemed a kind of display. But he was not unkind. He was always pleasant to Daphne, and he did not intimidate Joe. Joe and Otto enjoyed getting together for dinner—there were always the college affairs to discuss, and then they both liked football. But Otto did love to follow rules to the letter, and according to Laura, even his lovemaking was scheduled. Daphne would never ever feel really comfortable with her best friend’s husband.

Everything about Laura and her life and her husband, in the end, finally only made Daphne love Joe more. Joe was so romantic, such a wonderful lover, and he did feel as Daphne did, that what their lives were about was their love. No matter how busy he became, or how far from her he seemed to go during his days at the college, there were always a few nights a month when he came back to Daphne, came into Daphne, and went with Daphne back down under, into their submerged and secret deep liquid world. They curled around each other, pulled each other deeper with their legs and embracing arms, they took each other’s breath, they made each other soaking wet. Joe and Daphne loved each other so passionately that one night of love could suffice them—even, still, exhaust them—for weeks.

She had had that with Joe. And she had had her friendship with Laura. Soon she had had her daughter. In those days, Daphne had had so much.

Jack was pleased with himself. He had had a good morning. After three weeks into the semester, he had just had three more students sign up for his class, which meant that the word was getting around that he was good. He had started off this Introduction to Neoclassic Literature course by having the students read Pope’s self-satisfied mincing
An Essay on Man
(“One truth is clear,
Whatever is, is right
”) while lecturing to them about the general conditions in the British Isles at that time: the lack of sanitation, the plagues and diseases, the absurdly unfair penal code, the contrast between the few very rich and the many chronically poor, the squalor, the illiteracy, and, for the women in his class, the complacent sexism—even Jonathan Swift had said, “A very little wit is valued in a woman, as we are pleased with a few words spoken plain by a parrot.” If he had to teach this stuff, he wanted to get his students interested in it, even fascinated by it, and he had decided to do that by means of irony and rebellion—understanding one’s tyrants.

This morning, before he had introduced Swift’s
A Modest Proposal,
he had played on his cassette deck the rock group U2’s song “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” It was easy to lead from there into a discussion of conditions in Ireland then and now; the music hooked the students and they
felt
the similarities of this age and the eighteenth century; so they would give this literature, this course, a chance. Hudson Jennings might not approve of his methods, but he couldn’t object to the consequences; the students were reading the stuff,
all the way through,
and discussing it.

It was almost noon. Jack sat in his office trying to decide whether to eat there, while making notes on an essay he wanted to start work on, or whether to enjoy himself by going down to the cafeteria and getting a decent lunch and having some friendly conversation. Either way, he’d have a long walk. His office was located on the top floor of Peabody Hall, and the concession machines with their expensive cold sodas and stale sandwiches were in the basement, four flights down. Peabody Hall was a strange building, a building like Dorian Gray’s face: the old awful part was hidden in the attic, while the first floor, which everyone saw, stayed beautiful. That was where the gracious faculty lounge was with its long windows and thick Oriental rugs and leather chairs and
huge mahogany tables covered with current periodicals. Receptions were held there, in the Peabody Room, and it was also used as a refuge for the faculty during the day. Running the length and half the width of the building, it was so spacious that clusters of chairs and sofas were scattered around, with fresh coffee and hot tea kept in silver urns at one end of the room. It was a graceful room, and Jack went there often. The other half of the first floor was broken into two large lecture rooms and a grand foyer with brass plaques and oil paintings of former presidents of the college on the high walls. The second floor was given over to small classrooms. The third floor, which one always reached in a state of exhaustion, because the ceilings of the first two floors were so high, contained faculty offices. Hudson Jennings had an office with large windows and thick carpet near the top of the stairs. Jack’s office was at the back of a warren of halls and offices; it had one high tiny window and no carpet. But it was
his
office, and he loved it.

He decided that because he deserved a reward for the way his class had gone this morning, he would go down all those stairs and out of the building and across to the cafeteria. He’d find a friendly face and clever conversation there—but suddenly he heard a commotion in the hallway. It sounded like Alexandra, screaming
“Bottle,”
but that couldn’t be it.

Jack looked around the door and saw, to his amazement, Hudson Jennings leading Carey Ann, with Alexandra screaming in her arms. Carey Ann was extremely pale and her eyes were glazed so that she looked both blind and powerful.

“Here you are, my dear,” Hudson said, ushering Carey Ann into Jack’s office.

“Daddy!” Alexandra cried with delight, and reached out her arms to be taken and hugged. Jack was pleased by this, because it was flattering that his daughter was so thrilled to see him—and also because she had stopped screaming for her bottle.

“Your wife was having trouble finding your office,” Hudson said.

Carey Ann turned her beautiful wide blue glassy gaze on Hudson and said, “Thank you so much.”

“What a nice surprise,” Jack said. He hadn’t shown Carey Ann his office before—she hadn’t wanted to take the time to come in and see it until she got more organized at home.

Hudson went off down the hall.

Carey Ann shut the door behind her so that the three Hamiltons were enclosed in Jack’s tiny space.

“Oh, Jack,” Carey Ann wailed, and tears began to shoot from her eyes. “Alexandra’s been kicked out of playgroup!”

“What?” Jack asked.

Alexandra, knowing she was the subject of conversation, and possibly even aware that she was the source of her mother’s tears, reached up a plump dimpled hand and gently stroked her father’s cheek. “Prickles,” she said.

“I want to die! I want to just die! I want to go home!” Carey Ann said. “I want to go back to Kansas.”

“Oh, Carey Ann, oh, honey,” Jack said, and tried to put his arm around her, consoling, but as he got close to her, his daughter leaned forward with both her little hands (her legs were anchored between Jack’s arm and chest, her little bottom seated on his arm) and pushed her mother gently but firmly away.

“Go way,” Alexandra said.

Carey Ann was crying so hard she didn’t notice anything. Jack managed to pat her shoulder. “I hate everybody here,” she was saying.

“Prickles,” Alexandra said. She climbed up Jack’s body so that her face was directly in front of his, blocking his view of Carey Ann. With both little fat hands she gently rubbed his face. “Daddy prickles.”

How could anybody so cute be kicked out of a play group, for heaven’s sake?, Jack thought as he nibbled on his daughter’s fingers, making her giggle.

Carey Ann, ignored, began to talk loudly. She was actually kind of screaming: “…  uptight New England
bitches
!”

Oh, God, Jack thought, for some of the other English and history teachers were in their offices on this floor now.

“Here,” he said, pulling a heavy wooden office chair up to her. “Sit down, honey.”

He sat down in his squeaky typing chair and found some felt-tip pens and blank white paper. “Here,” he said to Alexandra, drawing a face on the paper, “Lexi draw picture!” He gave his daughter the pen. She looked at him suspiciously, knowing she was being bribed, but, kneeling on his lap, leaned across his desk and began to scribble.

“Now, Carey Ann,” Jack said. “Start from the beginning. I want to hear exactly what happened.”

Carey Ann was digging in her purse for some tissues. She blew her nose, then
said, “Well, you know how Madeline Spencer called and asked if I wanted to join their play group. She’s got little Zack, who is just Alexandra’s age, and she had these four other friends who all had kids, and they said if I wanted to I could join their group and it seemed like such a good idea. Madeline seemed all right, in spite of her hair, once I got talking with her. We were going to meet three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and leave all six kids together with two mommies to take care of them, and four mommies could be off, so each mommy could have two days off and one day on, and there’d always be two mommies together so we could talk and things. I really thought it was a neat idea.” Carey Ann succumbed to another moment of sobbing.

“See, Daddy?” Alexandra said, taking her hands and pulling Jack’s face toward her “picture,” which was squiggles and swirls.

“That’s
pretty,
” Jack told his daughter. “Lexi draw another picture for Daddy.” He gave her another sheet of white paper.

“So today was the first day, and we decided I would be one of the mommies to stay because Alexandra has never been left alone with a group of kids before and we thought she might feel more secure if I was there, and Madeline was the other mommy. And it started off just fine, we were at Madeline’s house, she has this neat huge rec room just off the kitchen. And everything was okay for a while, but then Lexi wanted to go into the other rooms, you know how she likes to explore, and Madeline’s rule was that the kids had to stay in the rec room or maybe go into the kitchen, but not into the rest of the house. Her rec room really is big and all, I don’t know why Lexi didn’t want to stay there and play with the other kids, but she kept trying to go into the dining room off the kitchen, and Madeline asked me not to let her go because she didn’t want the other kids going off, her house would get messy, so I had to stop Alexandra, and she had one of her little temper tantrums.”

Jack shuddered. He knew Alexandra’s “little temper tantrums” well; they would have brought Attila the Hun to a screeching halt. He looked down at his daughter, who was drawing happily, intently, on white paper. He adjusted the pen in her plump hand and brought the pen in to the middle of the paper. “Stay on the paper, Lexi,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.

“Then I got her settled down,” Carey Ann was saying, “and it was sort of difficult, for if I paid any attention to the other kids, she got kind of jealous and sort of … I don’t know, I mean she’d come tug on me or hit my legs or something. And I don’t know why,
but every time little Zack picked up a toy, Lexi wanted that toy, and she’d go grab it from him and say, ‘Mine,’ and I got embarrassed and tried to stop her, so she had another little tantrum. Madeline told me to just let her cry, and we tried to talk about it, but then Shelby Currier’s baby had to have her diaper changed while Madeline was in the kitchen heating up Kathy Kelly’s baby’s bottle, and I had the little baby on the floor on a towel, and I was trying to change her diaper, and Alexandra came over and started pulling on me, saying, ‘No!
My
mommy!’ and I
tried
to explain it to her, that I had to change the baby’s diaper, but Lexi started shoving the baby, trying to get her away from me, and then she picked up a play hammer and hit the baby in the face. She did it so fast I didn’t even see it coming. Oh, God, Jack, that baby screamed, you never heard any baby scream like that, I thought she was killed. And her nose started bleeding, and Madeline was standing in the door with the warm bottle and she rushed over and grabbed the baby up and went off into the kitchen with it and put cold wet towels on its face, and when she came back she said, ‘Alexandra ought to be spanked for that,’ and I said, ‘I’ve never spanked my little girl in my life and I never will,’ so she said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to do
something
to punish her?’ and I said, ‘She didn’t know what she was doing,’ and Madeline said, ‘She knew
exactly
what she was doing and if you aren’t going to do something to teach her she was wrong, I don’t believe you and she should stay in this play group.’ So I stood up and took Alexandra in my arms and said, ‘Well, all right, if that’s how you feel about it,’ and
she
said—oh, this is the worst part, because she stopped being angry and got all friendly and sympathetic, like she was sorry for me or something—‘Carey Ann, I really like you but you’re harming your daughter. You don’t discipline her at all. You’re raising her to be so spoiled she’s absolutely antisocial.’ ” Carey Ann broke off into another fit of sobbing.