The 158-Pound Marriage Read online

  'Look at that leg!' he cried. 'Look at the width of that ankle, the spread of that foot!' He said something to Utch in German which made her laugh; she wasn't angry or embarrassed at all. 'Look at that calf. This is peasant stuff,' Winter said. 'This is the foot of the fields! This is the leg that outran the armies!' He spoke more German; he clearly approved of Utch's sturdy body. She was shorter than he - only five feet six inches. She was rounded, full-hipped, full-breasted, with a curve at her belly and muscular legs. Utch had a rump a child could sit on when she was standing up, but she had no fat on her; she was hard. She had that broad face of Central Europe: high cheekbones, a heavy jaw and a wide mouth with thin lips.

  Utch spoke some German to Severin; it was pleasant listening to their singsong Viennese dialect, though I wished I could understand them. When he let go of her leg, she left it on the table.

  I picked up the candle and lit Edith's cigarette, then my own. Neither Utch nor Severin smoked. 'I understand that you write,' I said to Edith.

  She smiled at me. Of course I knew, then, where her smile was from and where we all were going. I had seen only one smile as confident as Edith's before, and Edith's smile was even more heedless and alluring than the one on the postcard of the angel called 'The Smile of Reims'.

  2

  Scouting Reports: Edith [126-pound class]

  EDITH FULLER LEFT PREP school in her senior year to go with her parents to Paris. They were the New York Fullers and there was no strife connected with the move; Edith was happy to leave, and her father said that she should not waste her time on education when she could live in Paris. She went to a good school there, and when her parents returned to New York, she chose to travel in Europe. When she returned to the States to go to college, her mother registered disappointment that Edith was 'suppressing her natural beauty in an unnatural way, just to look like a writer'. For two years at Sarah Lawrence, Edith looked like a writer - causing the only friction with her parents that ever existed. Actually, she really looked as if she was still traveling in Europe; being a writer had nothing to do with it. When her father died suddenly she left Sarah Lawrence and joined her mother in New York. Seeing no reason to upset her mother further, she took up the cause of caring for her 'natural beauty' again, and found that she could still write.

  Edith was instrumental in finding her mother a job - not that any of the New York Fullers ever needed a job, but her mother needed to have something to do. One of Edith's boyfriends directed the New Acquisitions Department at the Museum of Modern Art, and since both Edith and her mother had been would-be art history majors (neither of them ever finished college) and there was interesting volunteer work in the New Acquisitions Department, the matter was easily arranged.

  All of Edith's boyfriends had interesting jobs of one kind or another. She had never dated a college boy when she was in college; she enjoyed and appealed to older men. The boyfriend at the Modern was thirty-four at the time; Edith was twenty-one.

  She spent six months in New York keeping her mother company. One night she asked her to come see a movie with her, but her mother said, 'Oh, I really couldn't, Edith. I have much too much to do.' So Edith felt free to go back to Europe.

  'Please don't feel you have to look like a writer, dear,' her mother told her, but Edith was over that. There were friends in Paris from the Fullers' year there; she could have a room in someone's nice house; she could write; and there would be interesting things to do at night. She was a serious young girl who had never worried anybody, she was leaving behind no serious boyfriend in America, and she wasn't rushing to Europe to meet one. She had never had a serious boyfriend, and though, as she later told me, she did think - in the back of her mind as she left New York - that this might be the time to 'have the experience of really falling in love with someone,' she wanted to finish a good piece of writing first. She admitted that she'd had no idea what that piece of writing was going to be, any more than she'd 'bothered very hard to imagine what that first real lover would be like.' She had slept with only two men before, one of them the man who was at the Modern. 'I didn't do it to get Mommy the job,' Edith told me. 'She would have gotten the job all by herself.' He was married, he had two children, and he told Edith he wanted to leave his wife for her. Edith stopped sleeping with him; she didn't want him to leave his wife.

  It took her one day in Paris to be invited to use the sumptuous guest room and studio in the house of one of her parents' Paris friends for as long as she'd like to stay. Her first day out shopping she bought a fancy typewriter with a French-English keyboard. She didn't look like a writer, but at twenty-one that's how serious she was.

  In the beginning she spent a lot of time answering her mother's letters. Her mother was excited about all the research projects she was given to do. She was in charge of 'rounding out' what was called the Modern Movement Series. The Museum of Modern Art had most of the major representatives of every major and minor movement in the twentieth century, but they were still missing some minor painters, and Edith's mother was seeking available paintings by minor artists of more or less major schools. Edith had never heard of any of the painters her mother was so absorbed in. 'But my own writing felt so minor,' she told me, 'that I had a pathetic sort of sympathy for all these unknowns.'

  We must have had similar parents. My mother began developing a keen interest in minor fiction simultaneously with the publication of my first historical novel. Most historical novels are pretty bad, of course, but my mother felt compelled to 'keep up' with my field. I'd never read any historical novels before, but she began her habit of sending me her rare discoveries; it goes on to this day.

  When I went home to see my parents shortly after my first book was published, my mother met me at the door in what was to become a ritual for all my publications. She had just finished my book, she told me, wringing my hands; she was surprised at how much it moved her, and (as we tiptoed through the hall) my father was just this minute finishing it. She thought he had liked what he'd read 'so far'. And we would creep through the old house, approaching my father in his den as one might sneak up on an unpredictable beast who was said to be 'just finishing' his raw meat. It wouldn't do to arrive while he was still eating.

  We would surround my father's sunken reading chair. Standing behind him, I could tell that he was asleep. He had a way of pinching his Scotch between his thighs when he fell asleep; somehow, he never relaxed his muscles and the drink never spilled. And all around him books would be splayed open, books he was 'just finishing'. There were usually at least two in his lap. One of them would be mine, but it was impossible to tell which book had put him to sleep. I never saw a finished book in his house. He told me once that the endings of all books left him overwhelmingly sad.

  He was a historian; he had taught at Harvard for thirty-six years. When I was a student there I made the mistake of taking one of his courses. It was one of those Intellectual Problems courses, of which Harvard was very proud. The problem in this one was deciding whether or not Lenin was necessary to the Russian Revolution. Would it have happened anyway? Would it have happened when it happened? Was Lenin really important? Like most of the Intellectual Problems courses, you weren't really supposed to come up with the answer. About fifteen of us speculated on the question. My father speculated in his lectures, too. In the last class (I called him 'sir'), I asked him if he would just state his own opinion, since he must have one: Was Lenin necessary?

  'Of course not,' he said, but he was angry that I had asked; he gave me a C. It was the only C I ever got anywhere. And when I asked him how he felt about my writing - I said I assumed that he thought the historical novel was bad for both history and literature, but in my particular case ... 'Quite,' he said.

  My first historical novel was about one year of the great plague as it was decimating France. I focused on one small village, and the book was a terrifyingly accurate, if clinical, account of how all the seventy-six inhabitants of the village eventually died of the Black Death. There were a
lot of gibbet images. 'I like it so far,' my father said. 'I haven't finished it yet, but I think you were wise to select a small village.'

  My mother was the fan. She sent me one bad historical novel after another, with a trail of notes saying, 'I think your books are so much better!' And after each of my publications, the ritual would repeat itself. There I would be at the door on Brown Street, Cambridge, the only house I ever grew up in or went back to. At first I was alone, and then with Utch, and then with our children, and my mother would whisper us all inside, saying, 'I just loved it so much, and your father's liking it a great deal. Better than the last, he says. In fact, I think he's just finishing it now ...' And we would creep down the hall, approach the den, see my father sleeping with his Scotch held tight between his thighs. My book, along with all the others, lay culprit around him, possibly responsible for his stupor.

  I never saw him finish a Scotch, either. It was my mother, like Edith's mother, who took her work - however minor - seriously.

  I think that, as a rule, mothers are more serious than fathers. Once I sat down to dinner, patted Utch on her thigh and topped up my son's half-empty milk glass with wine. 'Have you even looked at your children today?' Utch asked me. 'Shut your eyes and tell me what they're wearing.' But my theory breaks down with Severin Winter. He was the mother in their family.

  Not more than a week after Utch had caught me mixing milk with wine, we were in Winter's active kitchen; everyone's children were everywhere, and Severin was making his bouillabaisse for us all. Edith and I were talking at the kitchen table; Utch was tying someone's shoe; and the younger Winter daughter was staring fixedly at her mother's earring. I hadn't heard the child say anything, either, but suddenly Severin turned at the stove and hollered, 'Edith!' She jumped. 'Edith,' he said, 'your daughter, who looks at you all day as if you were a mirror, has asked you the same question four times. Why don't you answer her?' Edith looked at her daughter, surprised to see her sitting there. But Utch knew; she, too, heard everything the children ever said.

  Utch said, 'No, Dorabella, it doesn't hurt very much.' Edith still stared at her daughter as if she'd just learned that she'd had a part in the child's lovely flesh.

  'Does it hurt to have your ears pierced, Mommy?' Severin boomed from the stove.

  And Edith said, 'Yes, a little, Fiordiligi.' Right name, wrong daughter; we all knew; we waited for Edith to catch her own slip, but she didn't.

  'That's Dorabella, Edith,' Severin said; Dorabella laughed, and Edith stared at her. And Severin, as if to explain to Utch and me, said, 'It's understandable. About four years ago Fiordiligi asked Edith the same question.'

  But suddenly it was very quiet in that energetic kitchen; only the bouillabaisse was speaking. Perhaps to break the tension we always felt when we recognized the peculiar alliances we felt toward each other, Severin said (but what a queer thing to say!), 'Does it hurt to have your tongue nailed to a breadboard?'

  We all laughed. Why? I thought about the four of us, but what I remembered was my father's reply to an interviewer from the Times who had asked him to say a few words about some new gesture in American foreign policy, 'with some emphasis on the subtleties we laymen may have missed'.

  'It's about as subtle as the Russian revolution,' my father said. No one knew what he meant.

  My father's creepy wide-angle lens. I never agreed with him about Lenin. Lenin was necessary. People are necessary. ('How nice for you,' Severin said to me once. 'Edith's a romantic too.') And my mother's terrible books, I sometimes think, were closer to the truth than my father ever came close enough to see. Edith and I were brought up unsure of ourselves as snobs - in love with our mothers' innocence.

  In Paris, Edith went out and read everything she could find about all the minor painters mentioned in her mother's letters. There wasn't much to find out about some of them, but she tried. She didn't get much writing done, and just when she mastered enough research to respond knowledgeably to her mother's interests, she was proposed to by the father of the household in which she was a pampered guest. He was always very polite and fatherly to her, and she'd never suspected. One morning he struck his soft-boiled egg too hard; it catapulted out of its eggcup and landed on the Persian rug in the breakfast room. His wife ran to the kitchen to get a sponge. Edith stooped next to his chair and dabbed her napkin into the yolky mess on the rug. He put his hand into her hair and tilted her surprised face up to him. 'I love you, Edith,' he croaked. Then he burst into tears and left the table.

  His wife returned with the sponge. 'Oh, did he rush off?' she asked Edith. 'He gets so upset when he makes a mess.'

  Edith went to her room and packed. She wondered if she should write her mother and try to explain. She was still wondering what to do when the maid brought the mail to her room. There was a new letter from her mother about minor painters. Could Edith tear herself away from her work in Paris just long enough for a business trip to Vienna? Her mother's boss was interested in rounding out one of the Modern Movement Series. Of course, they had something from the Vienna Secession; they had Gustav Klimt, who (Edith's mother said) did not really belong to Vienna's Late Art Nouveau, since he was really a forerunner to the Expressionists. For Viennese Expressionists, they had Egon Schiele and Kokoschka, and even a Richard Gerstl (a who? Edith thought). 'We do have a dreadful Fritz Wotruba,' Edith's mother wrote, 'but what we want is someone from the thirties whose work is random and imitative and transitional enough to represent it all.'

  The painter on whom this dubious distinction was about to fall had been a student of Herbert Boeckl's at the Academy. He had appeared to be 'peaking' at about the time the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938. He was twenty-eight at the time he disappeared. 'All his paintings are still in Vienna,' wrote Edith's mother. 'There are four on loan to the Belvedere, but most of them are in private homes. They are all owned by his only son, who apparently wants to sell as many of them as he can. We only want one - two, at the most. You'll have to get slides made, and you're not to promise anything in the way of a price.'

  'Leaving today for Vienna,' Edith wired her mother. 'Delighted to take a break. Perfect timing.'

  She flew from Orly to Schwechart. She'd been in Vienna in December three years ago; she'd hated it. It was the most Central European city she'd ever seen, and the cold slush in the streets seemed to belong with the city's squat Baroque heaviness. The buildings, like the men, had seemed to her to have an unhealthy color and ill-cut, elaborate clothes. It was not as friendly as a village, but it had none of the elegance she associated with a city. She felt that the war was just barely over. Throughout the city she kept seeing signs indicating the few kilometers to Budapest; she had not realized she was almost in Hungary. She spent only three days and saw only one opera, Der Rosenkavalier; it bored her, though she thought it shouldn't have, and at the intermission a man made a vulgar pass at her.

  But now when her Paris flight landed in Vienna, it was a different season: early spring weather, wet-smelling with a sunny wind and a hard-blue Bellini sky. The buildings, which had all seemed so gray before, now shone in such rich and subtle shades; the fat putti and the statuary everywhere seemed like a stone welcoming party hanging off the buildings. People were out walking; the population seemed to have doubled. Something in the atmosphere was changed, felt chiefly by the sight of baby carriages; the Viennese were feeling fit to reproduce again.

  The taxi driver was a woman who knew the English word 'dear'. 'Say to me where you want to be gone, dear,' she said. Edith showed her the addresses in her mother's letter. She wanted a hotel which was near the Belvedere; more important, she wanted to know where the painter's son lived. The son had graduated from an American university a few years ago and had gone back to Vienna because his mother was dying; afterwards he inherited all the father's paintings. He was staying in Vienna just long enough to complete a degree at the university, and he wanted to sell as many of the paintings as he could. He had written a very literate and witty letter to the Museum of Mode
rn Art. He had begun by saying that the people at the Modern had probably never heard of his father, which was forgivable because he wasn't a very important painter and they shouldn't feel they had missed anything. The son was twenty-seven, five years older than Edith. She found out that his address was a two-block walk from the Belvedere.

  Her driver took her to a hotel on the Schwarzenberg Platz. Outside the hotel waiters were setting up big red-white-and-blue Cinzano umbrellas for the cafe. It was still too brisk to sit outside for long; the sun was weak, but Edith had the feeling that she was arriving early to a party still in the preparation phase. She thanked the cabdriver, who said, 'OK, dear.'

  Edith had one more thing to ask; she didn't know how to pronounce the son's first name. 'How do you say this?' she asked the driver, holding out her mother's letter. She had the name underlined: Severin Winter.

  'Say-vah-rin,' the cabdriver crooned.

  Edith was surprised how she liked to say that name. 'Say-vah-rin,' she sang in her hotel room as she took a bath and changed her clothes. There was still sunlight on the west faces of the buildings on the Schwarzenberg Platz. Behind the spuming fountain was the Russian War Memorial. It no longer felt like the afternoon of the same day a man had put his hand in her hair, said, 'I love you' and then burst into tears. She would send them both one of those Dresden pieces of great delicacy; she caught herself smiling at the idea that it might arrive smashed.

  She put on a sleek, black, clingy blouse and a soft, gun-gray cashmere suit. She wrapped a bright-green scarf twice around one wrist and knotted it; she did things like that and got away with it. 'Say-vah-rin Vin-ter?' she said to the mirror, holding out her hand, the bright scarf like a favor.