Other Men's Daughters Read online

  More than sex, more than drink, it might be company that human beings needed. Conferences, faculty meetings, towns, churches, sex itself might be ways of satisfying it. The most hermetic hermit had the company of those he feared or hated, the company of the absent. At Walden, Thoreau walked into Concord every few days, his chairs were set for visitors. Company was the true human climate. Socrates returned to the cave prematurely from loneliness, not compassion. “Why hast Thou deserted me?” means “Why have you left me alone?”

  Or so thought Merriwether, home, in the bathtub, soaping his right foot, knee to chin, the fleshed antebrachium rubbing his genitals. Then, into mind, came the faceless body of the boy for whom Miss Ryder was preparing herself. Why? One kiss? Lips together amidst the old symbolic perfume. Plus one view of a tanned, mesomorphic body, a few hundred words, a sense of fifty traits and ten or twelve accomplishments (junior doubles champ, student, Macbeth-reader, ice-cream eater, hat-wearer).

  Two days later, he looked across Mass Avenue and, seeing no Miss Ryder, felt sick. “So,” he thought, “disappointment.”

  But its roots were shallow, there was oblivion in the walk home. “I should do the lawn.” Davison couldn’t play today, maybe Fischer was in town, maybe they could have supper.

  He walked toward nothing, so walked slowly, vacating himself to heat, looks in windows, the customers in ZumZum’s, the pleasant half-image of breakfast—bacon rolls, the small, fruity tear-segments of the orange juice, the first inroad on the Times, the sweet shock of the obituaries—round the bend, the grocer, the wine shop, the Brattle Theater—a Marx Brothers Festival, neither camp, amusement nor nostalgia for him—the grilled fretwork of the Loeb Theater.

  And there she was.

  Ahead of him, walking slowly, golden head bent, long, dark, bare legs out of scarlet mini-skirt, an odd slowness in the spreadfoot, springy, unusual gait; awkward and athletic both. Dr. Merriwether doubled his pace, came abreast and touched her elbow. “Miss Ryder.”

  “You.”

  “Hi.” And into her deep, unsmiling relief—his happiness—another “Hi.”

  “I’m so glad to see you. I was trying to find your house. I couldn’t remember how to get to it.”

  “You were doing pretty well.”

  They walked by the Graduate Center, down Ash, past Acacia, into Acorn Street, up to his house across from the Japanese urns and the gingkos of his millionaire neighbors, around his little oval lawn, up the squeaky, red steps and in through the door where Miss Ryder said, “I like you so much. I feel so foolish, but I like you so much.”

  Not looking at her. “I like you too, Miss Ryder. And I am ten times as foolish, without the license you have.” Meaning neither young—though inexperienced—nor free—though freed by intellect, will, abandonment.

  Miss Ryder twirled from sun parlor to dusk parlor, dining room, kitchen, stairwell, touching chairs, old mirrors, oil lamps (feebly bulbed, pathetic conversion). Ill at ease, he remembered the modern innocent’s “thing to do,” went into the kitchen and made drinks, Dubonnet, lemon juice, soda, ice; new combination—awful—for new combination.

  Miss Ryder was glad to hold a cold glass. Her hand was very soft—he did not then know the hours and hours of care that went into every inch of her body—touching it was sharp delight.

  He sipped, sat in the least menacing of the chairs, and said that much as he would like it, no relationship was possible for them, every relationship between heterosexual man and woman could only progress and what progress was possible for them? None at all. Their feelings were of course natural. As far as biologic and even psychic structures went, the feelings made perfect sense, but against even the reordered social structures of this affluent, long-living west—people living a life doubled over the social structures which supported the old half-lives—the young girl and middle-aged man being one of the most familiar bond-pairs of the new age, even so, even so …

  “Dear … Doctor, whatever. I love to hear you speak. But it is, isn’t it, just you and me here. Isn’t it?”

  “I hope so.”

  “I mean, I know we represent male and female, young and less-young and all, but it’s just you and me. Now. Here.”

  “Yes, Miss Ryder. But to understand something helps overcome it. There really should be no chance for us.”

  “Chance? For what?”

  Headshake.

  “Let me stay.”

  “Stay?” He could feel Davison in his voice. Was dull interrogation the easiest form of evasion?

  “Yes.”

  “Ok. We’ll play the radio, maybe have supper, I’ll wish I were twenty-one and you can wish what you want to wish. And we can kiss goodby.”

  “We didn’t kiss hello,” said Cynthia, who bent over, and this time was kissed as much as kisser.

  Weeks later, she said, “I was so surprised.” Which surprised him, for people think the curve of their feeling is apparent to all whom they don’t wish to deceive. Still, he was kissing in part for her sake (for therapy, for common humanity). So he could still feel himself Man of Principle, Man of Years, Doctor to Confused Patient, Professor to Easily Enchanted Student.

  In short, the Decorticate Dipsologist. Courting.

  two

  In the parlor, he’d managed with talk. “I’m too old for such love. You know I like you enormously, you’re a terrific pull on me.” Any twentieth-century western parent, doctor, teacher, knew the importance of self-confidence. “But a man gets on, he relies more on what he’s done himself. Whatever love is, it’s not an accomplishment.”

  “There are plenty of people incapable of it.”

  “Not the same. I don’t think the love system functions usefully after thirty. Real love comes at your age. I mean the early, parent-child structure of love is matched in the late teens or early twenties by the great transference. By the time you’re my age, it’s but a combination of lust and nostalgia. There’s no real room for new roots.”

  “Bertrand Russell says he only found true passion when he was ninety.”

  “Was he honest?”

  “If you can even lie like that at ninety, it might mean it was true at seventy.”

  “Russell remained adolescent. Didn’t he lose his mother very early? He had the schizoid’s passion for abstraction. His late amorousness was neurotic. He was a schizoid adolescent for seventy-five years.”

  She’d wanted him to hear a record and went off to buy it. He went off too, to buy wine, and then, in the Square, a bouquet of yellow jonquils, and, for her remembrance, a large book of Vermeers which, at home again, waiting for her, he inscribed “To my most charmingly impatient patient, in this loony summer.”

  The minutes of separation deepened his sense of the uniqueness of what was happening. This primary human illusion. As if human beings were as empty-headed as goldfish, swimming round the commonplace, astonished at perpetual novelty. Columbuses of the Bathtub. In a way, it really was that way. The neural complex was so staggering, a statistical case could be made for the absolute uniqueness of every human feeling and event. It was not true—as the Harvard poet Eliot said—that humans were most alike in their moments of passion. Everything was more or less like something else; but just considering the fantastic number of synapses involved, passionate moments corresponded to the greatest acts of intellection. Words might be displaced by grunts, but this did not mean the simplification of sensitivity. How much of his own system right now was alerted to Cynthia’s absence. Her absence was a tremendous presence in him. She was off somewhere in his town. The dakkadakka of the MTA escalator, the beaded chests, the saris, the billboards, the witch hat of Christ’s (where he and Sarah were married about the time Cynthia looked more fish than woman), fifty thousand small gleams, noises. There, now, but here, part of his milieu interieur.

  Home, the Graves in the freezer, the flowers in a blue Wedgewood vase he’d bought in London for Sarah’s thirtieth birthday, the Vermeer on the arm of his chair. Absence soaked the room. Weight. Waiting. Ha
d something happened to her? Lovesick, dizzy, maybe she hadn’t seen an open manhole, a car. No one would notify him. Or, seeing him in his house, had she come to (out of?) her senses? Something said or not said, a gesture flicking the illusion, so that she suddenly saw the grotesqueness of their relationship and was now working up the phone call which would get her out of it.

  Dr. Merriwether suffered in classic fashion; self-consciousness was no relief. He suffered, he knew the foolishness of suffering, he suffered more. “This is the fault of indolence. Acedia. Moping around, waiting for something to happen to me.”

  He changed into a Harvard sportshirt, did knee-bends, strummed the bookshelves, took down and put back tiny-print Victorian editions of Romantic poets, a medical school text (The Etiology of Rheumatic Fever), Aunt Agatha’s Greek lexicon. Cynthia. Kyneo, to kiss. Kynegetis, a huntress. Kynedon, doggily, greedily. Kynthos, mountain in Delos, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. Kyniske, bitch puppy. Kynopes, dog-eyed or shameless one. He picked up the Vermeer, sat on the sofa’s barest fang, and studied the interiors within which bemused women read letters, poured milk, weighed gold, adjusted bobbins, stared into golden window light. The radiance of their absorption absorbed him. Then, clip-clopping on the porch, a buzzer, and, dress changed, face charged with prospect, browned and golden, Cynthia.

  “I had to go back and change. I was so sticky.” A whirl inside, showing her dress, autumn leaves on a red base, high on her athlete’s legs—slightly knock-kneed—long, child-soft feet in wooden sandals.

  She had the record, could she play it for him, could she dance for him, would he think it silly?

  No, surely not. He’d find it charming. But where?

  “Where’s the record player?”

  He had to think. His own music came from the FM stations. “In Priscilla’s room.” He led her upstairs.

  Into the family innards. Which was less easy for him. But he could not refuse what was so patently harmless. If slightly goofy. He looked away from the master bedroom, led her down the cluttered hall to Priscilla’s room. Cynthia gawked, assessed, admired cabinets of Merriwether trinkets, marine prints, old beds, Stonesifer’s abandoned communications board, Priscilla’s wooden-pegged armoire. “It’s so quaint. So sweet, so historic-hysteric.”

  He found the record player.

  Cynthia took over, adjusted the bar, the tone arm, the speed.

  To his surprise, the music was lovely, quiet, full of clear, steely plucks over which singers half-sighed a lyric about riding the wind. Cynthia spun, bent, shifted stiffly, intensely arid then in large sweeps. Subtle and serious. Too large for this small room, too much. Yet oddly beautiful, touching, personal. A dance of love.

  Too much for him. He was of a time that thought of the beautiful in a frame. Performance. A spectator had to be one of a crowd. Only Hitler sat alone in auditoriums. (Or did the television generation accept personal performance for personal declaration?)

  Then too, there was his own body. Not flabby, but stiff with gravity; he felt sluggish, slow. God knows he couldn’t dance like this. Had anyone ever danced like this here? Priscilla danced, so did Albie and Esmé, but theirs was home-dancing. Priscilla was lively, but she had more strength and beauty than grace; she was no dancer. Perhaps—and this brought the smile Cynthia wanted—Aunt Agatha had twirled here for Louden Stonesifer.

  “Am I silly?” Stopping.

  “It’s beautiful. Thank you. Who are the artists?” after weighing “singers” and “musicians.”

  “The Youngbloods. Aren’t they good?”

  “I hope they don’t feel out of place.”

  She’d stepped out of her sandals for the dance. Now she stepped not into them but into a pair of Priscilla’s moccasins. “Are these your daughter’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her feet are fatter than mine.” Cynthia’s reading in women’s magazines had given her a physiologist’s index of proportions, the relation of feet to hands, of joint-space to body weight. Fat foot with thick waist, long fingers, long toes, long legs. Merriwether saw this forensic physiologist working out Priscilla’s appearance. He felt a surge of loyalty to his daughter’s feet. “Priscilla is a beauty.” The belle of Acorn Street. A fine figure, a little squat, a strong, sweet face lit by his own blue-green eyes. He assumed a lovely body, he had not seen her nude for ten years, had no desire to, remained New England where it counted, in distance, privacy, the sacred space of one’s own body, every person’s zone of repose.

  “I know. I’m jealous. Here’s a picture in her yearbook.”

  This golden beauty, this sugared child from the Carolina beaches was doing what he’d never thought of doing, going through his daughter’s things. A moral homunculus leapt in his chest. “Do you think?”

  “Oh please forgive me.” The long face tightened—in fear, not shame. Too much reaction. “I’m so awful. It’s just—I want to know everything about you. Please forgive me.”

  “Nothing to forgive.”

  Though his discomfort would disappear more in forgetting than forgiving, and he just kept from saying “I think it’s gone as far as it will go.”

  She could feel the need to get her out of this place. “All right.”

  “Do you know Boston?”

  She did but said, “Hardly at all. I’d love to see it with you.”

  He drove the old burgundy Dodge down Boylston to the Drive and then along the river filled with kayaks, rowing shells, sailboats. In Boston, they parked near the wharves behind the Statehouse, worked their way through shoppers down Freedom Trail, the cemetery, the churches, the Georgian meeting houses tucked like Monopoly pieces into the cement bloat of the new city. Walking with Cynthia stirred Merriwether, not to ancestor-worship—for, moralist, as well as physiologist, he knew neither physiology nor morality had altered in the human centuries. Give or take a few gestures, a few resolves, heroic times differed little from others, and heroes hardly at all. (This was Merriwether’s counter to his father’s ancestral inflation. The old insurance man had spent his last years writing The Memoirs of a Harvard Man on unused ledger books.) Still, the black bumps in the Granary Burial Ground covered Merriwether dust. He showed Cynthia the grave of the first American Merriwether, Andrew. She read out the only readable date, 1674, and two lines of verse.

  No season’s harshnesse was his Wether

  The godlie Andrew Merriwether.

  Odd to hear them in the soft speech, the beautiful girl kneeling, the rear’s interrogating curve pointed his way, while index finger moved in the black grooves of the seventeenth-century letters. Ah well. “We Merriwethers weren’t any great shakes. Artisans, farmers, tradesmen. A few legislative types.” The two best-known had been a Samuel who’d argued the Dartmouth College Case against Webster and an Albert who’d made a speech against American interference in Yucatan. (Albie had disinterred it from a diplomatic history and submitted it to the Boston Herald with a commentary on the restraint America had once shown in “Vietnam-type” situations.) Cynthia said, “To think you’re part of this.” Stones, old brick, steeples.

  “I suppose so.” With or against the grain, he was part of what lay under the automotive stink of this Black-Irish-Italian city.

  In a tourist’s bar, he ate steak, she oysters. (Full of health bulletins, she ate no red meat but veal.) They drank red wine and drove back in the dusk along the river.

  “May I come home with you?”

  They were by Dunster, headed up Boylston.

  “I don’t think you should.”

  “Please.”

  “For a bit, then. A drink.”

  “All right.”

  Downstairs, she sipped apple cider, sat beside him, touched him, then went upstairs and waited till he followed. She was in Priscilla’s room; her clothes were off. “Please,” she said.

  “Almost everything I know keeps me from this.”

  “Just lie down with me.”

  He did, talking. “There’s a déjà vu, a déjà lu about this. It’s so �
� typical: the good old innocent prof who’s never even called an undergraduate by his Christian name. And the undergraduate taking him by the hand, leading him where she thinks she knows he wants to go.”

  “Does there have to be an echo in everything? Is it so shameful?”

  “I don’t like living other people’s lives.”

  “People eat, sleep, love. You can’t get away from that.”

  Silence. She lay still, pretended sleep, then fell asleep. He got up and went into his own bed. Where in the morning, he woke to find her naked, drawing his pajama pants off around the matutinal erection. “Oh Jesus.”

  And they became, biologically and legally, lovers.

  Dr. Merriwether thought about aging. Not much was known about it. Buffon thought longevity had to do with growth. Flourens held that life duration was five times the period of growth. Bunge related mammal duration to ratios of weight increase in the new-born. Metchnikoff thought putrefaction the agent of degeneration. (The hindgut was crucial; he advocated a diet of culture-soured milk for lactic acid.) Weismann related duration to fertility: birds of prey produced breeds of one or two and lived longer than flies and rabbits.

  These days, the talk was of platelets and “genetic noise,” DNA errors caused by overheating, background radiation, chemical agents. The new jargon said that one source of aging was improper handling of input: the most efficient intelligence eventually succumbed to the silt of data.

  The physiological chatter covered Dr. Merriwether’s confusion. He took up his rowing on the Charles, ate “correctly”—no whiskey, no butter, no steaks, and yoghurt, in case Metchnikoff had something. It was for Cynthia. At night, he walked with her along the river, arm around her waist, happy at the sight of other lovers a quarter of a century younger, lying on the banks, “making”—as the chilling expression had it—“out.” In another foul label of the day, he was “a dirty old man,” the usurper of a trusting young beauty who should, in classic propriety, be the partner of a hairless-chested, sex-tormented, draft-eligible poet-in-the-egg. Instead, here he was, the well—happy, if nervous, quarry of this southern beauty.