Constance Read online

  —Sure, she said.

  So we flew Pan Am to the UK. I was doing research for the book and I needed to look at some papers in the Bodleian. I planned to stay in the small hotel in Pimlico I always used and make side trips to Oxford. Constance had been to London once, in her junior year, but on a tight budget. I won’t say I wasn’t anxious about the trip. Despite growing up over there I still found it difficult at times to penetrate the bland curtain of conformity behind which my countrymen like to conceal their true selves.

  But I didn’t want to sour Constance on the place. She claimed to love London, or she loved the idea of London, and I feared I’d have to pretend to be the same, and admire everything as though I’d just got in from Pittsburgh.

  It didn’t work out that way. For once it wasn’t raining. It was springtime, there was color in the streets, daffodils in Hyde Park, love in the air. London seemed a different city from the one I’d known. This was due to Constance. From the moment we arrived at our hotel she was sharply alert to the absurdities of English life. The fact that a grown man in a uniform addressed her as “madam”–as in, “Would madam care for some tea?”–this amused her. She said primly that madam would care more for some gin and tonic. When the man bowed, she bowed back. I was sitting nearby in the small comfortable lounge. She turned to me and I saw a schoolgirl who’d been mistaken for a lady and had no intention of correcting the error. From then on she conducted herself not as a lady but as an heiress from Texas seriously considering the purchase of anything her delighted eye fell upon. At those times she might seize me by the arm and gasp.

  —But Sidney darling, it’s too lovely, we must have it at once!

  She was peering at an oil painting black with smoke and age that hung over the fireplace in the dining room.

  —Honey, I don’t think it’s for sale.

  —Everything’s for sale. Daddy told me.

  The hotel staff humored her. They behaved with ludicrous formality solely to elicit more of what Constance considered her masterful imitation of a rich American girl. It was hard to say who took greater pleasure in the charade. It helped seal the deal. On our last night, in a restaurant in Piccadilly, after the theater–we’d seen a play by Harold Pinter, an unpleasant, immoral thing, Constance loved it–I made a proposal.

  —Do you know what’d be the smart thing for you to do? I said.

  She was fond of me that day. She cleared aside the silverware, placed her hands flat on the table, and rested her chin there, gazing up at me.

  —What’d be the smart thing for me to do?

  I reached over and took her hands in mine.

  —The smart thing for you would be to marry me.

  She pulled back at once and sat with her arms folded tight across her chest, staring at me, her eyes wide with shock. At times I forgot how young she was. She told me she barely knew me.

  —That’s not the case. You’ve just spent five days with me. I don’t slap you around, do I? I’m not a lush. I’m a fascinating thinker and I love you. What’s not to love back?

  She was utterly taken aback. She was deeply embarrassed. She couldn’t look at me. It was extraordinary. She’d have laughed if she hadn’t known I was serious. But no, she was bewildered. Her father had as good as assured her she’d die a desiccated virgin but apparently not. I didn’t tell her I’d brought her to London with this idea already in formation in my mind but I did tell her again that I loved her. But she couldn’t even discuss it then and only much later that night did she tell me that five days in a smart London hotel wasn’t enough, as a prelude to marriage, and that the idea terrified her, and anyway to make rapid intellectual strides was one thing but this was a direct threat to her autonomy, and anyway she didn’t like me. Then she repeated that she barely knew me.

  —You know me intimately.

  It was true. We’d achieved an impressive degree of intimacy in those few days. I believe I awakened her, or aroused her, at least, from a persisting distaste for any kind of sexual contact with a man. But she had such a tricky psyche, all turned in on itself like a convoluted seashell, like a nautilus, and at times I caught her talking to herself as though in response to what she heard in that seashell. When I asked her who she was talking to she’d all at once startle and wouldn’t tell me.

  —But what’ll happen when we get back to New York?

  —Like what?

  —I don’t know! How can I know until I know you better? You’ll get bored with me. I’m not a real intellectual! I’m a cretin. You teach me stuff now, but there’s nothing I can teach you.

  —That’s not true.

  I sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. I gazed down at my cretin. She was more lovely at that moment than I ever remembered her, this pale and troubled child. She struggled up and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  —What do I teach you? she said, with petulance.

  —Yourself.

  She stared across the dark room, frowning.

  —That’s easily mastered, she said.

  This was disingenuous. She didn’t believe it.

  —I don’t believe that either, I said quietly.

  Tears welled, of course. She nearly surrendered right then and there. But she rallied her resources, I saw it happening. She tried to remember who she thought she was.

  —All the same, she said at last, I’m not going to marry you.

  She held me off for as long as she knew how but in the end she acquiesced. She didn’t know what to do and had no friend she trusted well enough to discuss it with other than Ellen Taussig, a senior editor at Cooper Wilder. Ellen was an austere woman of fifty who’d taken Constance under her wing when she’d first arrived in the city two years before. But Ellen had never married and was a fierce believer in the idea that Woman must work, Woman must rise, Woman must challenge Man. We both knew what she’d say: Don’t do it.

  But I’d arrived at an understanding of Constance by then. For in the long still reaches of the night she’d allowed me a glimpse of her various terrors, childish fears of abandonment mostly, and I had a good idea where they came from. It was the usual tedious story, a failure of approval from the parent. I’d soon put that right, I thought. I’d give her all the approval she wanted.

  So it wasn’t difficult once she started to waver even a fraction, and I reeled her in with comparative ease. I was patient. I was careful. She came to depend on me. Time spent with me was nourishing, and it was the kind of nourishment she required; this was clear from the first night when we’d sat up talking in that empty restaurant. I offered water, in effect, to a child dying of thirst, although she didn’t see it that way at the time. For how do you identify the sickness in yourself, she asked me much later, when we were deep in crisis, and the joking was over, if you’ve never known a state of health?

  I wasn’t blind to the responsibility I was assuming. I’d recognized this so-called sickness in her from the start, the impression she gave of an inner fragility, of there being no foundation, or if there was, whether or not it could hold up under pressure. And this was what aroused my love, or my need to protect her, and nourish her, and if this isn’t all of love then it’s a large part of it, for this was how I’d failed both with Barb and with my first wife, a Frenchwoman I’d met in Oxford when I was a young man and about whom I’d said nothing to Constance. So yes, we decided to get married. She wanted it simple and so did I. We’d do it at City Hall. I think the license cost ten bucks.

  We invited only immediate family, which meant my mother, who lived on eastern Long Island, having emigrated with her second husband, an American, soon after my father died, and Constance’s father, the doctor, and also her sister, Iris, who both came down from Rhinecliff on the train. Constance said she wished Harriet could have been there, to see her.

  I was curious to meet the father. Constance hated him, this was abundantly clear. She felt he’d both neglected and punished her and she was obsessed with him. I asked her once about his reaction to his wife’s death, this hea
rtless monster, this doctor. Did he grieve? He was distraught for months, she said. He’d arrive home late in the evening and sit up drinking. The first she knew of it was one night when she was awakened by a noise and thought a raccoon was in the house. So she went downstairs and tiptoed along the corridor to the kitchen.

  She saw him sitting in deep shadow, his long legs stretched out crossed at the ankles and his head on his arms on the table. He was sobbing. That was what she’d heard, her father sobbing. It was pathetic, she said. Not until they were older did she tell her sister about it. Iris was upset by the incident.

  —What did you do? she said.

  —I went back upstairs.

  —You didn’t try to comfort him?

  —It didn’t occur to me.

  —Oh, poor Daddy.

  They were at another kitchen table when they had this conversation, in New York, and I was present. Something had got them on to Daddy, it never took much. There were times Iris seemed the older of the two, particularly when I saw these sporadic flashes of compassion. I remember she was gazing at Constance with what seemed a kind of compound sympathy both for Daddy’s plight, his misery after Harriet’s death, and Constance’s own, her not knowing how to comfort him. In fact she was never able to. She couldn’t reach him, she told me, he was too remote. He rebuffed all attempts she made to get close to him.

  She understood this much at least, she said, that he needed to discharge some anger she’d provoked in him. But she hadn’t yet learned what she’d done, or what she was, what she represented to him, other than a stray girl who happened to live under his roof: a foundling.

  —Constance, honey, Iris had said, you’re not a foundling. Just trust me, will you? You’ve had problems with Daddy, god knows we all understand that. So have I. But you’re not a foundling.

  I was glad she said it: she spared me having to. For some time I’d been aware of a sort of passivity in Constance, a persisting silent claim for sympathy in the face of what she saw as her father’s cruelty. It troubled me. I detected no resistance, no defiance, none of the refractory qualities I associate with a healthy spirit. I asked myself if I was unreasonable to think this. I decided I wasn’t. The Romantics still have this to teach us, that it’s imperative to act and not be acted upon. Constance remained a kind of work in progress. She was unformed and indistinct as yet, and I saw it most clearly when her sister was around. She was still shackled to the conviction that her father had wrecked her life.

  Chapter 3

  Soon after she agreed to marry me I gave Constance a small river view by the nineteenth-century landscape painter Jerome Brook Franklin. It was my first serious gift to her. I wanted her to hang it in her bedroom in New York so she’d see it in the morning when she awoke and be reminded of the view from her bedroom in Ravenswood. It was supposed to arouse happy memories of her childhood. I still believed she must have some happy memories.

  We were in the sitting room a few nights later, she and I, and the apartment was almost dark. I was lying on the chesterfield, Constance was stretched out on the carpet. She liked to lie on the floor with a cushion under her head. She’d been talking about the painting. Then she was telling me about a flat un-moving expanse of black water that opened off a creek a mile downstream from Ravenswood called Hard Luck Charlie’s. This gloomy pond was surrounded by marshland for half a mile, and according to Constance it was haunted by the ghost of an old man who’d had a cabin in the woods nearby. On a hot summer afternoon you could drift for hours in a skiff with only the splash of a fish or the cry of a bird to break the stillness of the place, or a heron wading through the rushes. Daddy had apparently forbidden the girls to take the skiff out on their own but often they disobeyed him. This was around the time Harriet first got sick, she said.

  I could all too easily picture it, this pleasant stagnant backwater, the two dreamy girls drifting in a skiff, a drowsy summer afternoon, insects buzzing and the water rank with rotting plant matter. But one day, Constance said, they discovered they’d been observed, and not just observed, reported. It was very bad. Daddy confronted them at breakfast the next morning and asked them if they’d forgotten the rule. Iris had asked him what rule.

  —You know what rule, he’d said.

  Constance was silent for a few moments. Her mood was somber now. Here it comes, I thought. When they next went down to the boathouse, she said, the skiff wasn’t there. Then Iris was kneeling at the end of the dock, gripping the planks and peering down into the water. Constance joined her and she saw what Daddy had done. The skiff was on the bottom of the river. Through the shifting sunlight on the moving water they saw it there, lying on its side in the weeds, rocking slightly in the current. He hadn’t told them, he’d let them discover it for themselves. It was an evil act, said Constance, so aggrieved you’d have thought it happened yesterday.

  —Hardly evil, I said mildly. You’d been told not to take it out.

  —For that you scuttle a boat? He took out the bung plug and just let it sink!

  —He was concerned for your safety.

  This made her more angry still.

  —No, Sidney, he wasn’t, all he wanted was to deprive us of a pleasure. Whose side are you on?

  I told her I was always on her side. Then why was I supporting Daddy? I said it’s not supporting—

  —Oh yes it is!

  She then told me what it meant. When Daddy scuttled the skiff he was really drowning her. Why? Because that’s what he’d wanted to do with her ever since she was born, just drown her like an unwanted kitten. Like a needy dependent, she said, some kind of a stray creature who required the shelter of his house but was entitled to none of its warmth, and for damn sure none of its love.

  —Oh for god’s sake, I said.

  I found it hard to take her seriously. The story of the scuttled skiff told me more about Constance than it did about him. It was obvious that she didn’t understand him. She didn’t realize he was only concerned for her welfare. Any father would do the same.

  —Sweetheart, I said, he didn’t want to drown you.

  She sat up and stared at me.

  —Oh yes he fucking did, she said.

  When she started to swear at me there was no point continuing the conversation. It was very discouraging. And an earlier conversation hadn’t helped, when she’d told me I was too old for her. I couldn’t seem just to shrug it off. I found it all too easy to imagine her meeting a younger man and, yes, being tempted to stray. This was probably foolish thinking on my part but entirely predictable. It’s an ancient simian anxiety, no man is exempt. I’d become not suspicious, exactly, but alert. In those days I liked to bring my graduate students home and the apartment would often be full of vigorous young men conducting boisterous arguments about Byron or Goethe or the divine afflatus of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here life was noisily lived, and although Constance was usually too tired to take part in my informal seminars, when she did join us I’d take notice of which of my students she responded to more warmly than was strictly necessary.

  This would provoke another argument. Once again I was accused of various crimes of the heart and had to defend myself. There were tears and screams and even the breaking of glassware and crockery. It was exhausting but it ended, as before, in bed, where all was forgiven and a tentative peace accord established. I soon abandoned the informal seminars. So yes, she kept me vigilant. She also kept me at a pitch of anxious exhilaration that I hadn’t known since the early days with Barb. Ed Kaplan saw the difference in me. He told me I looked ten years younger.

  —I was right about you, he said.

  —What do you mean by that?

  —You need a wife.

  We were crossing an uptown campus, I remember, on our way to lunch. I asked him to explain himself.

  —Sidney, where else besides marriage can you find yourself in a moral predicament on a daily basis? You’re one of those men who’s got to be forever choosing to do the right thing so as to silence the voices in your head. />
  —What voices?

  —Guilty voices.

  —What am I supposed to be so guilty about?

  —Your controlling personality. Your inability to tolerate criticism—

  —Okay, Ed, that’s enough.

  He’d missed the point. As for voices in the head, that wasn’t my problem. We walked on in silence. We crossed Broadway. We were too slow with the light and a taxi driver screamed insults at us out the window of his cab. The death of urban civility was one of my preoccupations at the time. I saw it as another symptom of the city’s deepening malaise.

  —Ed, that may all be true but it doesn’t change the fact that sometimes I feel like I’m dealing with a—

  I couldn’t finish the sentence. I was going to say paranoid hysteric.

  —Relax. It’s good for you.

  But at times I was starting to wonder if I hadn’t made a mistake, and once or twice I even thought of the quiet years with Barb with nostalgia. And regarding Barb, there was a new development, not a happy one, and it did nothing to improve my state of mind. The last time I’d seen her she’d told me there was something wrong with her. She had to go into the hospital for a few tests.

  We’d been sitting in the kitchen of her small rented house in Atlantic City, not far from the beach. I was alarmed. She was lethargic. There was puffiness around her eyes. Her skin was sickly looking. She’d lost weight. Wearily she pushed a hand through her hair.