Lit Page 8

  That ivy-scribbled house has a fairy-tale quality, with gardens sprawled around it and long, vaulted windows you could drive a Buick through. Plus a door bigger than my daddy’s bass boat, with a bronze knocker, even. The uniformed Irish maid waits outside to help us with our bags, which Warren refuses, partly because she’s at least seventy and no taller than five feet.

  They call her Kelley, though it’s her last name, and I’ll later find out she was deputized to take Warren trick-or-treating when he was a kid, with a sheet over her head and a bag for her own candy. Odd, I thought, my parents hadn’t taken me around, either. (Though the Whitbreads’ offhand parenting style was light-years from my family’s, both Warren and I grew up yearning for a warmer home than where we’d started.)

  I don’t have the sense not to hug whoever greets us, so I try to throw my arms around Kelley, and she flinches away, straightening her apron. Facing the big house, I’d like to say I’m neither wowed nor panicky, but I feel like a field hand called out of the cotton.

  Would you like some tea? Kelley asks.

  Yes, please, Warren says, closing the door.

  The foyer, a crystal chandelier like a sparkly jungle gym hangs from the two-story ceiling. Two dogs waggle around us, which Warren pats and baby-talks to while I stare. Cloudily mirrored alcoves hold Chinese vases. The staircase curves grandly enough for his older sister to have descended for her debut into New York society on it. At some point, Warren gently uses his hand to close my jaw.

  For something to say, I ask the dogs’ names.

  The mutt is Sammy, Kelley says, and this grand old man—she ruffles the ears of the golden retriever—is Tiger.

  Tiger Three, Warren says. He explains that the death of Tiger One so traumatized the family twenty years back that his father kept buying new pups and stapling the old name on.

  Tea comes in the formal library, Kelley lurching in under the weight of a silver tray. A dozen cookies circle a linen napkin, and following Warren’s lead, I take a single measly cookie the size of a half dollar, eyeing the rest with the same appetite that keeps Tiger panting openmouthed nearby. In that house, you have to practice not wanting.

  The living room has about fourteen chintz couches and a fireplace big enough to roast a pig, plus polo trophies and embossed silver cigarette cases. Also a baby grand nobody’s used since Warren left for prep school.

  I ask where the TV goes in that vast space, and he drags aside the drapes to reveal the portable set his dad infrequently rolls out for viewing golf. Warren tells me if his father poked his head in the living room and found Warren and his sister before the TV, he’d never fail to say, Hello, idiots.

  Which shocks me. In my house, personal freedom is all, amusement so hard won in that town that the right to scrabble for it is inalienable. Also in my house, cruelty was rarely so deliberate, more often the haphazard side effect of being shitfaced.

  I plop down at the keyboard to play the only chord I know, but Warren mentions his mother naps after lunch. He sits next to me with a wry smile. In the car he’d told me how he’d chosen poetry over his family’s penchant for law, partly to escape that preordered hamster wheel he was bred for. He’s opting for a game only history can measure his success in. (He didn’t mention how his father came home from Wall Street and read Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin.) How clear Warren’s green eyes are as he restates those to me noble convictions, and then he bends to kiss me with a mouth tasting of anise seed. Poetry will deliver him from his stultifying fate as it will me from my turbulent one. We’re sealed in that unlikely covenant already, with the vast house spread out around us as the dogs circle, tags clanking.

  Afterward, Warren leads me meandering through the scented rose garden and alongside the neat rows of vegetables. I think of Daddy’s pride at tomatoes staked in paint buckets on the porch under the clothesline sagging with dishrags.

  The tennis courts were razed for a huge pool. At the old stable—empty of horses—we feed carrots to the gray-muzzled donkeys. Once bought to keep the thoroughbreds calm, they’re fat court jesters who’ve taken over the place now the royal family’s died off. The family’s history is linked to horses. In my hometown, they’re used to cut cattle. As a kid, Warren and his sisters rode with their father before breakfast in the mornings. You had to make the high jump to get an extra serving of roast beef at dinner.

  Crossing the wide pantry, I spy the saucer of cookies and ask, Your mother still upstairs?

  Why are you whispering, sweetie? he asks, adding, Take another one if you like.

  How can you only eat one cookie? I say, biting down on one, then thumbing the fallen crumbs off my lip.

  My father’s always on some diet he can’t adhere to. It must’ve affected the rest of us, he says.

  Evening finds us seated at the long glossy table, half the length of a bowling alley, where his parents sit at opposite ends—his father portly in a tweed jacket with patched elbows; his mother blond and thin as a greyhound, smiling.

  Thank Mary for the Burgundy, Mrs. Whitbread says.

  You brought this? Mr. Whitbread holds his glass up. (In fact, I’d called the old bar I used to tend to find out what to bring.) It’s excellent. He takes a sip, adding, My own children think I’m rich enough to buy my own wine.

  I could never find one you liked, Warren says.

  Which prompts the first of many silences I’ll sit through at that table. Silence rolls across us like a gray sea fog. Ice crystals form around our faces. Forks freeze in place. The salad plates are cleared. Warren sits straight enough to be lashed to a stake.

  Kelley comes in hauling a massive tray where two capons lie prissily on curlicues of kale. Mr. Whitbread rises to carve. I study the stiff painting over the massive sideboard—Mr. Whitbread in full riding gear atop a horse. I feel a stab of tribal pride that in the cracker-box house I grew up in, Mother’s blazing nudes assembled with swashbuckling brushstrokes show way more sensibility.

  So, Warren, his father finally says, will you row this year?

  Warren says, I’m not in college anymore.

  I shoot my eyes to him, but he fails to meet my gaze. How, I wonder, if you pay tuition, is it possible not to know whether the kid’s still in school?

  Mr. Whitbread forks poultry slices onto a plate, and no one says anything till after Kelley settles it before me. He says, That’s right. Nancy’s at Harvard.

  Nancy’s getting ready for law school, Mrs. Whitbread says.

  I’m working in the library, Warren says.

  Right, his father says.

  The Harvard library, his mother adds, wreathed in a smile I can’t decipher. That stamp on Warren’s job invokes the family’s appetite for excellence, how expected it is, demanded, devoured. It strikes me then how a house so large might feel like cramped quarters.

  To their credit, they all read so much they seem to accept Warren’s poem-making—he’s just starting to publish in journals—as a worthy enterprise despite its fiscal impracticality. Still, they say little about it (and it’s the not saying, I later learn, that matters).

  Widener Library? his father asks.

  Lamont, Warren says. There’s a recorded poetry archive there.

  He’s remastering these great lost recordings, I say. He found one of Tennyson. And these amazing Nabokov lectures.

  The arctic wind blows over us again, for my bragging has breached some protocol too delicate for me to understand yet. One does not brag; one does not need to. Mr. Whitbread pours me more wine, a sympathetic gesture that feels—no doubt unintentionally—like a pat on a dog’s head.

  Kelley comes in with a vat of asparagus she goes around dishing out.

  Mr. Whitbread keeps looking for one of the standard social connection points—to explain who the hell I am, I guess—till Mrs. Whitbread mentions that I’m friends with the writer Geoffrey Wolff, whose memoir of his con-man father had made a splash the year before. One of the few writers of any stature I know, Geoffrey happens to be married to Warren’s
first cousin.

  It’s a frail link, and Geoffrey’s being Jewish maybe undoes most of its value, but I try to capitalize on it, saying that he and his brother, Toby, taught at my grad school.

  Mrs. Whitbread perks up. You went to Princeton? Our son-in-law went there.

  Warren explains I hadn’t gone to Princeton but to a hippie school that just went belly-up.

  With that in the open, we fall to sawing our food. The cutlery weighs about a pound—a heft that sends some ineffable message.

  And what are two young poets reading? Mr. Whitbread asks.

  I babble on about the memoirs of Chilean poet Neruda, for ballast throwing in some pretentious French philosophy I’ve never so much as held in my hands.

  Mr. Whitbread asks for more asparagus, and Kelley vanishes with the bowl.

  How about you, Warren?

  Warren—having barely touched his food—dabs his mouth before saying, A biography of Samuel Johnson.

  Boswell? Mr. Whitbread says. I loved Boswell. How he described spying on Mr. and Mrs. Johnson through the bedroom keyhole in flagrante delicto like two walruses.

  Mrs. Whitbread ducks her head, and I try not to snicker, for any talk of sex in those environs seems particularly wanton.

  This is by Walter Jackson Bate, Warren says.

  Bate’s a campus luminary you can see sashaying through the library stacks wearing a little porkpie hat like Art Carney in The Honeymooners.

  Kelley returns to say there isn’t any more asparagus, and the cook bellows from the kitchen, Tell him if he ate like a normal man, there would’ve been enough asparagus. Which holler blows invisibly through the room. Again Mrs. Whitbread covers her mouth with her napkin, and Warren’s eyes aren’t beaming over at mine. The Whitbread talent for ignoring the ugly obvious is a quality I covet.

  Before we leave the table, we’re supposed to give our breakfast requests to the cook via Kelley. Mrs. Whitbread finds it odd that I won’t have at least a poached egg. But in the tract houses I visited as a kid, you declined food, presuming a spare larder made any offering a polite show.

  You’ll starve into a little chicken, Mrs. Whitbread says, standing and placing her napkin on the table.

  Over port in the library, I manage to sip daintily—having swilled enough wine at dinner to keep pace with Warren’s father—while I flip through portraits. In the small solitary time I’d had with Warren after tea, I’d tried to drag out some explanation of the house, the family’s history, but he’d dozed by the pool instead.

  Sitting in their library, the Whitbreads are only slightly more forthcoming. So I pore over the photo albums like a scholar trying to decipher the rules of the realm. With each flip of the page, I tune in more keenly to what the sloppy shoe box of photos in my homestead holds: Mother’s cousin Henry drunk in Mexico, dressed as a matador; Daddy and his brothers with alligators they’d killed for the hides strung from a tree.

  How would the society page editor chronicle my lineage for this historic visit to Fairweather Hall? At that time my family is broke out in the kind of misery common to sharecroppers in Faulkner novels. Just that month Daddy had suffered a stroke. While drinking at the VFW bar, he’d toppled off a bar stool. He’s still alive but paralyzed and speechless, barely aware that Mother’s popping valium like pop-tarts.

  But the Whitbreads’ photo album bulges with enough presidents to fill a high school history book. Both Roosevelts practiced in the family firm. Here’s Great-grandfather in the old touring car with McKinley right before he was shot.

  Warren gets quiet during the stories. He was bred in quiet and carries quiet in him but elegance also. Even picking burrs out of Tiger’s tail he can pull off with gravitas. But he can also drift far from me into himself. Sitting across from him, I can’t meet his eyes. Maybe he’s patiently irritated with how awed I am by the posh household he’s fleeing. Or maybe I’m breaking rules of comportment subtle enough to resemble the minuscule gaffes you get demerits for in precision diving contests.

  Warren’s grandfather—in riding gear circa 1930-something, holding a polo mallet—is Warren’s exact double. Here’s the cover of The New York Times that falsely reported his death after a fall. Mr. Whitbread stares into some decades’-old distance, saying, The old man was on a horse again the next morning. Infuriated my mother. People in New York were sending wreaths to the house, and he was galloping across a field.

  Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you’re born to, which opposes what little I’ve garnered about comportment. I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A’s you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they’ll try—without letup—to break you. Where I come from, house guests have to know you’ve sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown. At the Whitbreads’, preparations are both slapdash and immaculate. You toss some melba toast on a plate next to a fragrant St. André triple-crème cheese, or on Christmas Eve, half a pound of caviar casually flipped into a silver urn.

  It’s taken me so much effort just to do as medium-shitty as I’ve heretofore done. Just to drop out of college, stay alive, and have my teeth taken care of.

  I take another sip of port, which slides down as if greased. Warren seems thousands of miles away, and why has he kept all this from me?

  Here’s Mrs. Whitbread in her dress for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Some polo connection? They’ve stopped explaining why they were various places. Here’s Mr. Whitbread flanked by briefcase-carrying aides, striding confidently up the steps of the Supreme Court.

  Warren says, I remember sitting behind you, and you pulled out some notecards.

  You were there? Mr. Whitbread asks.

  Mrs. Whitbread looks exasperated. Of course, darling. I thought they should experience it.

  Warren goes on, And your client said, What are you doing?

  Mr. Whitbread tosses some nuts into his mouth, saying, I suppose I told him I was preparing my argument. And he said, Now?

  (Working for The Washington Post at the time, Geoffrey Wolff—that frailest of bridges between Warren’s parents and me—later claimed Mr. Whitbread was the only man he ever saw talk down to the Supreme Court.)

  At dinner, I’d seen my lover’s fine jaw flex as he studied his plate, and I’d felt the liquid warmth of our time together evaporate as he braced himself for his father’s scrutiny. Now I long for some definitive gesture to free him, to throw my port glass into the fireplace and stalk out with a poor kid’s piety, riding off with him in his Mazda into a life with nary a polo divet to stomp. But the house’s disabling comfort saps resolve.

  And by the time we’re in the library, I’ve begun to breathe in the parents’ gentility. The conversation is so adroit—the nonchalance so juicy—I lap it up as Tiger did our fatty scraps, steel bowls rattling on the kitchen tiles. I want to believe I’m at home with these composed individuals. They’re liberal in their politics, after all. From where I sit on the low settee wedged among needlepoint pillows, I can see a whole shelf devoted to the egalitarian writings of Thomas Jefferson. Surely they recognize my native intellect. At some point Mrs. Whitbread says casually, What religion does your family practice, Mary?

  Which I take as interest in my strangely compelling history. I think of my mother, who studied every faith and—with her husbands—committed to none.

  We’re not anything, really, I say. But I find myself dredging up a few childhood visits to the Presbyterian church, for I know a joke punch line about Episcopalians being Presbyterians with trust funds.

  But I catch Mrs. Whitbread’s unmet glance toward Warren, and it dawns on me that had he brought home his classmate Caroline Kennedy, her being a Catholic might have been a mark against her.

  In a mind shift, I’m a schoolgirl again in summer, and my half-Indian daddy has just come in the back door at dawn with grime under his nails from a double shift. How carefully he draws five one-dollar bills f
rom his weathered billfold to give Mother for two pairs of school shoes—one for me, one for Lecia. While I wait for her to bring the car around, he slips off his shirt, showing a chest pale as paper where his worker’s tan runs out. He steps out of his khakis, and jutting through his baggy boxers, his legs are knobby and thin. One thigh’s pronounced hunk of shrapnel is royal blue. The long scar up his right shinbone where a horse he was breaking threw and dragged him looks freshly scabby. He sits down on the bed’s edge, staring at his brown forearms. Daddy, I whisper, and that greedy call for him snaps the connection to the past. The voltage drops, and he’s gone, reabsorbed into the shriveled form in my mother’s house, tended days by a male nurse we can’t afford, nights by Mother, who resents it.

  In an instant I’m back in the Whitbreads’ library, and Daddy lies uninsured, half paralyzed.

  On the mantle, sits a recent Christmas snapshot with all the siblings before the fireplace, glossy-haired and tidy. They actually match like the gorgeous silverware. Not resemblance but precise replication. I think, Tiger One, Tiger Two…(I’ll come to believe that the WASP genetic code imperially squashes the other parent’s contributing DNA in offspring. My own son, blond and blue-eyed, will bear so little of me that ladies in the park will think I’ve been hired to push his stroller.)

  Just as we’re saying good night, Mr. Whitbread inquires whether, as a Texan, my father’s in oil, and I tell him he was, adding—wittily, I think—up to his elbows twelve hours a day. Which fact they take with a preoccupied air. I could speculate on what they thought, but they’re unreadable as granite.

  That night, lying in Warren’s narrow bed, where I’ve sneaked from his sister’s flowery boudoir to make love, I ask him, How’d I do?

  He cups my face. I love you, he says. Leafy shadows move over us. (How young we were.)

  Do you think they heard us just now?

  Don’t be silly, he says. I doubt they’d care.

  Their room is in another wing, which includes—among other mysteries—Mr. Whitbread’s own dressing room, padlocked from the outside. Not even the maid is allowed to clean in there.