The Emperor's Children Page 14

  From which stemmed two divergent but near simultaneous threads of thought, the one concerning Frederick, the other (more or less) Marina. His nephew, only son of Murray’s only sister. It occurred to him that he ought to telephone his sibling. Although they weren’t close there was a familial bond between them, and he hadn’t spoken her to since—since when? Some conversation about the endless snowstorms, about the impressive inches fallen upon Watertown, a dull but necessary exchange of familial pleasantries at some point well past the new year, perhaps around Easter, and, he feared, at her instigation. Now, at least, they’d have something to discuss: the boy and his plans, what it was Murray might do for him, how long he might stay.

  The second thought alighted, via Marina, upon her friend, the small girl who had come to supper back in March, with the dark curls, soulful eyes, and fine breasts: Danielle. He didn’t have to hunt for her name; he merely pretended to himself to have to do so, aware, rather, that she was all too readily in his thoughts. Not improperly at all; but theirs was now an almost lively e-mail correspondence, in which he played a professorial role, recommending books, offering advice, reminiscing wisely about when he was her age. He hadn’t mentioned these exchanges to Marina, and sensed, clearly, that Danielle hadn’t either; and from this shared secret he derived some erotic charge.

  But what struck him this evening, even as he felt, or imagined he did, Marina, breathing down his neck (an expression too nearly literal to please him), was the possibility, even inevitability, of enlisting Danielle in a further betrayal—no, that wasn’t the right word: a collusion. Much better. He wanted her to collude with him for Marina’s benefit. Murray Thwaite found before him the excuse he’d hoped for since March, to arrange to see Danielle again, and this time, to see her alone. In all their e-mails, neither he nor Danielle had mentioned Marina more than in passing (this, too, titillated, smacked of the illicit), but now the time had come, he realized, to place her firmly between them, as a topic of discussion.

  “Dear Danielle,” he began, tapping at his keyboard with his two thick but swift forefingers. “I hope you won’t mind if I confide in you that I’m quite worried about our dear Marina. This may seem to come out of the blue, but as you will understand, Annabel’s and my concern [good to mention Annabel here? He debated, decided that it was] dates back to last fall, when Marina came home to us. We’d been hoping that a rest and the support of the family might be enough to help her get back on her feet, but as the months pass”—he paused, sipped his scotch—“and as the year anniversary of her return is not so far away [a slight exaggeration, but warranted, he thought], I find myself increasingly troubled.” He read what he had so far. Did it seem alarmist? Not unduly. He wanted Danielle to know that he had things to talk about; that this wasn’t (wasn’t it?) a trumped-up excuse. He tapped on, erasing half of what he wrote, wanting to be sure that he found the right tone, and with it the right inferences, connotations, shades of possible meaning. Because he wanted her to read the message several times, to worry—as he expected she would—about its propriety, only to be reassured, in every phrase, that there was nothing untoward to be found, that it was a message Annabel might as easily have written. And yet beneath this superficial smoothness, he wanted her to sense—he wanted her not to be able not to sense—that he needed her presence more than her advice; that he wanted above all to communicate with her, Danielle; and that Marina was, here, mere pretext (pretext not being a role, he realized, that his daughter was accustomed to playing).

  He tinkered with and tweaked his message—a mere two paragraphs—until his glass of scotch was gone; then debated storing his effort in the “send later” file. At which the very thought of Marina—did he not hear her again? Had she crept up upon him like the bloody cat? Surely not—directed his finger to the transmission key, and the message was sent. Simple enough: Lunch, next week? Or would a drink be better? That was the gist of it. Simple enough.

  He poured a little more scotch from the bottle in his drawer. He’d forgo the ice, this time, on account of the human risks involved in venturing to the kitchen. He checked his watch: not quite eleven. Surely not too late for Judy? He himself planned to work at least until one. He had to look up the number in his address book; and mused, in passing, on the strangeness of knowing Danielle’s e-mail address by heart, and not his sister’s phone number.

  Her voice was thick, as if with cold.

  “Did I waken you, Judes? I’m sorry—”

  “No, I mean, I guess I drifted off. In front of the TV. But I’m not in bed or anything.”

  Murray made conversation, coaxing his sister fully into wakefulness. It was a type of chat in which he did not readily indulge, these days, a provincial small talk familiar from his childhood—not just about the weather, but about its consequences (Judy’s son-in-law was already getting good business up in Alexandria Bay; if the summer went on like this, it’d be a boomer for him, even with the economy faltering), and about the minutiae with which Judy filled her time: only a month to the end of school, the municipal pool opening Memorial Day, the cost of gasoline, her old friend Susan—sure, he remembered Susan, the redhead—was coming down from Kingston, Ontario, for a couple of weeks; her husband? He owned Burger King franchises, two of them, and very successful, too: they’d built an indoor pool up at their house, with a retractable roof, no less. Eventually, because she didn’t mention him of her own accord, Murray brought up Frederick: “So, we’re going to get a look at your boy at last,” he said.

  “How do you mean?” Judy sniffed. Perhaps she did have a cold. “Are you up in Massachusetts?”

  “No, no—we don’t go up there for another couple of weeks. No, the boy’s coming here, of course. Didn’t you know?”

  “Frederick, you mean? My Bootie? He’s in Massachusetts.”

  “What’s he doing there, for pete’s sake?” Murray felt as though they were both yelling down an ancient trunk line, trapped in an echoing cave of miscommunication. He wished he hadn’t called. “Listen, Judy, I didn’t speak to him myself; it was Annabel, this afternoon. So maybe he’s in Massachusetts, but he’s coming here this week, for a visit.”

  “A visit?”

  “Can you hear me all right? I thought he was home with you.”

  “He left about a month ago. To see about summer school in Massachusetts. At U Mass. Where is it—Amherst?”

  “Right, right.”

  “But he can’t be doing that if he’s coming to you. The courses start in a couple of weeks. I mean—”

  “Maybe he just needs a break before he settles down to study.”

  “I don’t get it. I only spoke to him just two days ago.” Judy sounded—what?—thick, still, and now full of blame, as if this misunderstanding were somehow Murray’s fault. She always played the victim. “Just two days ago, and he didn’t say anything about New York.”

  “I didn’t speak to him, Judes. Annabel spoke to him. I thought he was home with you.”

  “Not for a month.”

  “I understand: he left a month ago for Massachusetts. I’m just saying that I didn’t know.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Quite.”

  There was a silence on the line, as if, Murray thought, both were attempting to martial their mutual irritation; or else, perhaps, as if there were nothing more to say.

  “So we’ll give you a call once he’s arrived,” Murray offered at last. “He can fill us in on all his plans. Probably he’s run out of clean laundry up in Massachusetts, needs a place to wash his socks.”

  “Maybe,” said Judy, quieter now, with another sniff. “I’ll tell you, though, Murray, it’s awful quiet since he left. More than when he went to Oswego. I guess because I worry about him. I don’t know what he’s thinking, you know? He really needs to get back to school.”

  “Mhmm. Although you know, Judes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  “You’re saying he doesn’t need to get back to school?”

  Murray pause
d again. “No—it’s just that sometimes … no, nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. You’re right, I’m sure. He should get back to school. And you’ll see, he will.”

  “You’ll talk to him, then?”

  “Talk?”

  “About school? Please, Murray.”

  “Sure. Sure, I’ll talk to him.”

  “He really looks up to you, you know. And of course his own father isn’t around anymore, so—”

  “No, of course not.”

  When he hung up, Murray felt as though he had been twisted in a trap, like some stupid raccoon. Here he was, as ever, punished for his big-brotherly impulses: there existed no circumstances under which he would ever ask anything of his sister, not a thing; and yet each time they spoke—at Easter, he remembered now, it had been a small sum of money, something about the maintenance of their parents’ graves—she contrived to gouge him for something. He shouldn’t make it so easy for her; he shouldn’t call her is what he shouldn’t do. No wonder her son hadn’t told her where he was going—who would? By which one had to infer, however hopefully, that the son was not like the mother. Those were not things he would say to anyone, not even to Annabel. He was a loyal brother, above all.

  Murray was revisited, in his desk chair, with the subsiding roar of the late night traffic at his ear, by a vision of his childhood home, the paneled vestibule and dining room, the cramped darkness of it, and the meanness, everything spare and bleached and doubly worn, and only their mother, their beautiful mother, with her patrician profile and wavy dark hair, like Ingrid Bergman, his mother the fantasist, who in spite of her ability to peel and prune and scour and press, in spite of her eternal apron and hospital corners, read novels and magazines and dreamed for herself and her son: of wider vistas, of glittering cocktail parties on Park Avenue, of fancy hotel rooms and travel to Europe. Most important, of Harvard: she dreamed of Harvard—or Princeton, or Yale, but ideally Harvard—for her son, and told him so from the earliest years, so that he grew up with, in his mind’s eye, not whistling fire trucks or the policeman’s shiny hardware, but the hushed reading rooms of the Widener Library and the dappled walkways of Harvard Yard, places he wouldn’t see in life until he was sixteen and a student, but that floated as magically as Atlantis in his darkened childhood bedroom. And all the while, his father and sister were mired in the there-and-then, in Watertown, where of course Judy had stayed, proving something (what?) to someone (whom?), or perhaps proving only that she was not like her brother. Crap about the Protestant work ethic, early to rise, Christian humility—garbage, all of it, which had served to turn Judy into a blousy, bland matron napping at night in front of the set.

  And yet, his mother: even in the last days, still the apron, the hands gnarled with arthritis, the ironed lace antimacassar on the chintz armchair. For all her dreams she’d been no different, in the end, and all she’d succeeded in doing was turning her boy into someone, something, she couldn’t understand, a fact made literal by her Alzheimer’s, so that in the mid-eighties when he’d gone up alone to visit, he’d sat beside her at the table, in his “old” place, and when she asked for Murray, he’d taken her wasted hand, and Judy had said, “There he is, Mom, right next to you,” and she’d fixed her sunken eyes on him, aglow with fear, and cried out, “That’s not my Murray, that’s not my boy! Where is he? You promised he was coming!”

  And so, to guard against that life, to guard against that ever being his life, from earliest days and with—although she didn’t ever know what it meant, what it might permit—his mother’s blessing, the resolutions: not only for Harvard, but never an office, never a timetable, never an alarm clock, always a new day, a new city, a new person, a new drink, another discovery, always more life, more.

  Had he said this clearly enough in his manuscript? It seemed childishly simple, as a philosophy to live by, and clearly he was not a simple man. Nor was he the direct, rebellious product of that narrow vestibule of his childhood, in which you could barely open the front door on account of the stairwell ahead, and the bald square yard in front (he remembered the smell, grown hideous to him even as it was tender, of the leafy clippings, on a summer Saturday morning, when his father stood upon the stepladder on the sidewalk and inched his way around, barbering the front hedge to an even shorn perfection, grimly matched by his own monk’s tonsure, a thin and mousy gray). Such memories were part of Murray, and escape an inescapable part of them; but it was not in this mode, this running away, that he had lived, nor that he would encourage others to live. Perhaps if the thought of his life then, of his sister’s life now, still had the power to tighten his throat and sour the air (another cigarette lit might clear it), then it was disingenuous not to say so? Wasn’t irrelevance, smallness, the dutiful petty life what everyone ultimately wanted to shed? And wasn’t shedding as important as embracing, in the formation of an adult self?

  And then he thought of Marina, raised as he’d wished to have been raised, and stymied, now, by the very lack of smallness, by the absence of any limitations against which to rebel. Should she then be shedding a life of privilege, moving to some Watertown of the heart, to begin again, her lot, on account of her birthright, to be a Judy figure, in whom merit would accrue merely because she’d given up all she’d been given? Nonsense. But he’d told her himself to get a job, advice he would neither have given himself, nor taken. And he’d meant it. Was he in some way acknowledging that his path was for the extraordinary only, and that his daughter, for all she was beautiful and deeply loved, was not—how to accept this?—entirely out of the ordinary? He couldn’t ask that question, couldn’t answer it.

  He remembered his father’s telling him—his father, small as he was himself tall, with sloping shoulders off which Murray feared, as a child, the braces might slip, a bow-tied little man with an almost Hitlerian mustache, softened from menace by its grayness, and by the softness, insidious softness, of his quiet voice, a softness that belied his rigidity and tireless industry, his humorless and ultimately charmless “goodness” (why had she married him? She’d been so beautiful, and such fun)—telling him, as he deliberated upon his path at Harvard, to choose statistics, or accounting, or economics, saying, with that dreaded certainty, “You see, Murray, I know you want to go out and write books, or something like that. But only geniuses can be writers, Murray, and frankly, son …” And Murray had slain his father, no question about it, so that the memory of him was slightly pathetic, almost endearing; laughable, above all. And who was Murray, who would he be, but a little man, to stand similarly in judgment upon his daughter, and declare her incapable of the greatness she so longed for? Better to say nothing; more than that, to venture nothing; to wait and see. She might yet, as he himself had done, take them by surprise.

  And what, then, would this boy be like? Had his mother called him Bootie? What form of unkindness was that? Frederick was his given name. And if he admired Murray, there might be hope for him.

  Murray decided to look once more at his e-mail before logging off, just in case. And yes, she had answered. So swiftly. His neck felt warm, his hands, too—the old, familiar thrill. Although this was no chase, surely? But he listened for his daughter’s tread, just in case, before he opened the message. It was brief, and fairly formal: lunches were difficult, given her schedule; but of course she’d like to talk about helping her friend, and if a drink weren’t out of the question, then Wednesday might work. She never knew places, and was certain he would, so perhaps he might suggest something? All of which, in its very propriety, thrilled him, the way the thought of her slender, white neck, her tidy waist against the fullness of her curves, thrilled him, or the neck’s pallor against the dark curls, the eyes for which the cliché “smoldering” came to mind—things he ought never to have remarked, in a friend of his daughter’s, in so very close a friend of his daughter’s—but there it was: more life, more. And as he reflected upon which bar to suggest, which atmosphere in which to bottle this minor fanta
sy, he heard his daughter scream across the hall, a choked, guttural emanation, so alarmingly close that he jerked in his chair, and almost neglected to close off the screen before rushing to her aid.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Pope’s End

  Marina had been trying all evening to make progress with her book. She had sat with her laptop on her knees on her bed, with copious notes and photographs and several library books, all pertaining to Chapter Five, on which she was ostensibly working, spread in disarray about her, a sea of print that engulfed her bed and made it look tiny. She felt tiny, in the face of it: surely if so much had already been said, she had nothing here to add? She was writing, in this chapter, about the long-standing Western habit of dressing a child like someone else: like an older child, or like a parent, or like someone else entirely; and she was comparing this to those ventriloquists whose dummies were attired to match them, among other things, and making, or attempting to, a broader point about how children have been seen as emanations of their parents, and she needed to fit in there somehow the inverse argument, based around, say, the Laura Ashley ensembles of the seventies, in which mother and daughter both were swathed in frilly floral smocks in a reenactment—or curiously ironic restatement, perhaps, in the era of women’s sexual liberation—of Victorian girlhood, in which case the question was, were they all, mothers and daughters, celebrating the repression of their sexuality, or its untrammeling? Those pervy lace-up black boots, the flash of calf, the loose layers of muslin and chintz, the tumbling curls above: they made every one from five to fifty into the same, slightly disturbing, erotic prospect—whereupon she wanted to draw comparisons to the girls in the windows of the brothels of Amsterdam, although she hadn’t personally seen them, but she’d heard they were dressed to satisfy all manner of fantasies: the schoolgirl, the nurse, the vixen, the headmistress. But maybe this didn’t fit in at all? Like a puzzle piece, there in her scribbled notes, albeit with a question mark beside it, this analogy had to have been intended for Chapter Five. But the notes were several years old, and didn’t readily serve their madeleine-like purpose of conjuring intellectual arguments entire, a few words opening a rich sack of thought. No, largely the scribbled phrases stood only for themselves, chicken scratches on paper, meager and disturbingly free of import. Marina felt, as she struggled to pull up not merely sentences but voluminous paragraphs from the records she had retained around her, that she was engaged in the archaeological excavation of a lost culture—the lost culture being, of course, her own earlier thoughts—and there seemed no certainty that her interpretation of the present artifacts would have any genuine logic at all. Should she go back to the sources? Back to the tomes in the public library, back to the archives at FIT and the Metropolitan, back through the past five years of her life, as if she’d never been there, and try again to compile the arguments that, in the early days, had seemed headily full of moment? She couldn’t face it. The notes were what she had, and all she would have, and whatever reconstitution she could manage—was this analepsis? Was it catachresis? From some mist of memory emerged Greek words of a literary theory course at Brown and she wondered whether they pertained to this crisis—would have to do. But it would be no good. She felt this every time she sat to write, that her reconstituted ideas bore as little resemblance to the originals as did the vegetables in instant soup to their former, unshriveled selves. Analepsis, catachresis, no: the word she was after was “floundering.” She could already write the review of her unwritten book: “Marina Thwaite flounders about in her subject, with little direction and still less progress.” The entire enterprise had become—already long ago; she couldn’t remember when it hadn’t been so—like the anxiety dreams of her adolescence, in which she had to stand up naked before the class, or deliver lines in a play she didn’t know, or offer an impromptu analysis of a book she hadn’t read.