No, yes, yes, no, no, yes … on to infinity. Had I remained in the cab, would she not have wanted me to accompany her into her little room? And once in the room, would that have been enough? Would that have been anything? If I was not to tease, or to make false promises, or to dangle before her the hope of a better or a different future, what else could I do about Theresa Haug’s suffering except turn my back on it?
At the Herzes we all went upstairs and watched as Libby gently laid Rachel in her crib, which had been set up in the room that had been Paul’s study. Watching Libby bend across the brand new crib, Paul was near tears. Finally he went off to the bathroom, so that I did not get a chance to say goodbye to him. When we left, his tear-filled wife kissed both Sid and me.
Jaffe drove me back to Martha’s. After some three or four minutes of silence, he glanced over, and without much of an attempt at hiding his opinion of me, said, “I thought you were going to stay with her.”
When I answered him, I tried to find some comfort in the fact that I had learned something; I tried to engage Jaffe’s eye and let him know that I believed I meant what I was saying, but he was only waiting for me to get out of the car. “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t see that it made much sense.”
3
It was easier than it should have been for Dr. Wallach to imagine an old age other than this one. He set an elbow onto the sand, leaned back, and little by little he was able to bring his breathing under control. He felt encouraged by the sun’s ability to dry the water on his skin, and soon his chest was moving up and down at its normal speed. He slapped his belly where it was still flat and hard; he made a fist, one hand, then the other. He had taken care of this small body of his, he had exercised it daily and fed it upon foods rich in protein and vitamins; he may have been the victim of a fad or two, but at least he had gotten through life on a minimum of fried foods. Looking down at himself in a bathing suit, he did not experience the repugnance or shame that another man sixty years of age might have felt. He looked as he had always hoped and expected he would; it was not the appearance that he could imagine to be different, it was the circumstances.
Fifty feet out from the beach, his only child continued to swim back and forth through the surf. Now and then a wave rolled in to cover the moving form, but then an arm glistened, that shock of brown hair broke the surface, and he could follow again the progress of his son, cutting effortlessly through the water. Yes, he could imagine it all to have turned out another way. He could imagine that when Gabe had returned from the Army, he had moved back into his old room in the Central Park West apartment; he could imagine that the two of them had taken up a calm and amiable life together. Gabe could have done graduate work at Columbia, and then there would have been someone with whom Dr. Wallach could have eaten his dinner in the evening and discussed the Times in the morning, someone with whom he could have played tennis at the club and with whom he might have gone for pleasant walks in the park when the weather was right. Someone he loved.
He had not for a moment expected that his son would live with him forever. A year, two, three, and Gabe would have found the right girl in New York — well-bred, intelligent, kind — whom Dr. Wallach would have accepted without question as a daughter, and subsequently loved like his own child. The young couple would have been married and would have settled down in the city, Gabe teaching at Columbia, or NYU, or Hunter, or any of a dozen places. Dr. Wallach could imagine his son and his son’s young wife — he could even see her, a slender girl with brown hair and a soft voice — living just across the way from him on the East Side. On Sunday afternoons he would bundle up and take an invigorating walk through the park to visit them, to stay for a light supper, and then take a taxi home. And in the summers there would have been morning swims just like this one — the son and the father (perhaps even a grandchild) coming down to the beach before breakfast and diving together into the cold blue sea, while back in the sunny white house they had all rented for the season, his daughter-in-law, a pink pegnoir over her nightgown, was pouring orange juice into sparkling cut-glass goblets.
Of course at that very moment Fay was at her house preparing a nice breakfast for the three of them; and since one could by no means expect life to conform to one’s fantasies — even to one’s plans — he told himself that what had happened was not just to be endured, but to be accepted and valued. There was no reason for him not to consider himself a very lucky man for having met Fay Silberman. Without her, his last year would have been the most morbid of all. There had been Gruber in Europe with him, of course, and though the fellow was a satisfactory enough companion if one was oneself in a giddy mood, if one was not, then Gruber with his smiling and joking was worse than no one at all. In Europe Dr. Wallach had seen numerous widows and widowers traveling with friends they did not particularly care for, people to whom they had connected themselves only because they had lost those to whom they had always been connected before. He had seen them sitting opposite one another at the restaurant Tre Scalini in Rome, amidst all the old beauty of that piazza, picking at their food; he had seen them reading separate sections of the Herald Tribune in the lobbies of the Lotti in Paris and the Grand in Florence, waiting for the sightseeing buses to pick them up and take them away; and he did not really know who was more miserable, those who traveled with acquaintances they couldn’t stand, or those who traveled, literally, by themselves. On the Queen Mary, sailing home, there had been a bosomy, bejeweled woman from Virginia, a widow of fifty-five or so, who had told him that she had gone to bed at eight o’clock every night she had been in Paris. She had pretty blue eyes behind her glasses, and powder in the creases of her neck, and she brought tears to his eyes; under the table — they were all in the lounge waiting for the horse racing to begin — he had taken Fay’s hand.
Oh yes it was luck, it was good fortune indeed that had thrown him together with Fay only two days out of New York. With Fay along, so many funny little things had happened; and one warm night in Venice he had taken her for a ride in a gondola and she had lifted his hands and held them against her breasts. Imagine if he had had to go out with Gruber in a gondola! Yes, Fay had given him pleasure, and that despite all the drinking she had done — all the champagne, all the red wines and white wines and rosé wines, all the Scotch and Irish whiskies, whose consumption had added to the festive spirit, but had also helped to blur for her the image of her husband being driven, dead, around his lawn on a power mower. It had helped to erase the memory of the eight-room house in New Jersey, and of that same husband whose heart had failed him, and who — said Fay to whomever she happened to be speaking — had been very very good to her.
So Fay drank, and Dr. Wallach drank, and Gruber drank too, but then one morning they were back in America. They took a taxi from the pier to his apartment, and when he came out of the bedroom where he had changed his shoes, there she was standing in front of the fireplace with a glass in her hand. On native ground it apparently took even more alcohol than it had abroad to blur the past; at last it seemed he would have to say something before some accident, some tragedy, occurred. On Thanksgiving Day particularly he had been conscious of how much her drinking had prejudiced his son, whose approval he had been counting on (knowing all the while that he would not get it — that Fay in no way resembled the boy’s mother). Eventually he had cautioned Fay, had asked her to make him a promise, and the miracle that had happened was that she had stopped. At first cut down, then actually stopped.