“In heaven’s name, why? The obvious inference is that there’s a young man.”
She shook her head. “There was a man, not so young. Thirty-five or so.”
“The usual charming Frenchman?”
“The usual charming American, but married and with no intention of marrying me. All the usual objections to the charming foreigner except he happened to be an American.”
“Did you fall in love with him?”
“Yes.”
“But he didn’t fall in love with you?”
“No. Or even pretend to. Love wasn’t mentioned very often in that crowd. If you talked about love it was the next thing to talking in legal terms, and they were all trying to avoid that. Some of the people were in love, but they were very old-fashioned about the word. They were afraid to say it because of the implications. In that respect they were the most old-fashioned people I ever met. Do I make any sense to you?”
“Yes, I think so,” said George.
“College boys will tell you they’re in love with you the first time you go out with them, but those people wouldn’t even say it when they meant it. Of course most of them were married.”
“What sort of crowd was it?”
“Mostly Americans, most of them had money. The women had husbands in London or Paris. The men had wives back in the States or working somewhere. Actresses’ husbands. One opera singer, whose husband was plastered most of the time. Two of the men were writers. Oh, they weren’t like the Lantenengo Country Club crowd, but they weren’t the Left Bank, either. They weren’t literary or artistic as a crowd. Mostly they seemed to have gotten together after the war, formed their own group, and when one dropped out, someone new came along to take his or her place. Money. They all had money, but nobody was very rich.”
“Your man, what did he do?”
“Something to do with the electrification of the railroads. Not as an engineer, but the financial part. He worked for a Wall Street firm, actually. I never quite knew exactly what he did. He called himself a trackwalker, but isn’t that one of those men that go around with hammers and repair the tracks? Obviously he wasn’t that.”
“What was his name?”
She shook her head. “It no longer makes the slightest difference, to him or to me. It’s a dead issue.”
“Not to you it isn’t,” said her father.
“That’s how little you know me, Father. When it’s over, it’s over.”
“No bitterness?” he said.
“Some bitterness, sourness, yes, but I’ll get over that, too.”
“You had an actual affair with him, of course?” he said.
“Do you think I’d make so much of it if I hadn’t? I’m past the hugging and kissing stage.” She had acquired a new mannerism: she would gaze at the floor as though she were on the top of a mountain and looking down into the activity in the valley. It was a disconcerting mannerism that excluded her listener from participation in her thoughts, and was intended to do so. “What do you want, Father?” she said, turning and facing him.
“I doubt if I’d get anything I want, from you. In your present state of mind,” he said.
“But you got me back here, so you might as well tell me what it is,” she said.
“Well, I’ve found out that you’re miserably unhappy.”
“Yes, I won’t deny that.”
“And I’d like to do something to rectify that, if I can.”
“Thanks, but how can you if you don’t know why I’m unhappy—”
“And you’re not going to tell me,” he said.
“No. Because I don’t know. A few years ago I would have worried about having halitosis. But I’m quite sure it isn’t that. I’m just not getting very much out of life, and this is when I ought to be getting the most.”
“Who said so? Just because you’re young? Youth isn’t everybody’s time for happiness. For some people it is, but by no means for everybody.”
“What was your best time?”
He nodded. “Yes, I knew you’d ask me that.”
“Well, when were you happiest?”
“I have to give you the answer you gave me. I don’t know.”
“You must know that,” she said. “Was it when you were in college? When you were first married to Mother? Now?”
He pondered her questions. “Now. This minute,” he said.
“You don’t seem particularly happy,” she said.
“I’m sure I don’t,” he said. “But at this moment, sitting here with you, I’m closer to happiness than I’ve ever been in my entire life.”
“Happier than when I was born? Happier than when Bing was born?”
He nodded. “Yes. Those were times for celebration, but I’m closer to happiness with you now than I ever was before. I’ve never stopped to consider happiness before. And now that you’ve made me consider it, I don’t believe I ever have been happy. No, I haven’t. I’ve had some good times, of one kind or another, but happiness—no.”
“Why are you happy now? Or close to it?”
“Will this embarrass you? Yes, it will. But I’ll say it anyhow. This is the first time I’ve ever loved anyone.”
“Me? Now?”
“Yes.”
“You never loved any of those women?”
He hesitated. “Yes, I loved one.”
“Not Mother, I know that.”
“No, not your mother.”
“And obviously not Geraldine,” she said.
“No, not Geraldine. It was a girl who had no brains at all, no particular distinction of any kind. But I loved her in a way that I never loved anyone else or even wanted to love anyone else. A passionate dumb-Dutch girl that was the only woman ever to take me outside myself.”
“It was sex, then?”
“Oh, my, yes. It was sex.”
“Is there sex in what you feel for me?”
“Well, your generation believes that there’s sex in everything. No, what you’ve done, that she did, was to take me outside myself. Why? How? Because in her case, she loved me, passionately. In your case, I feel needed. You are miserably unhappy, and you’ve turned to me. Maybe that’s why you came home against your will. We can’t know that. We may never know. Too many subtle things we don’t know about ourselves, Tina. Subtleties we can’t be truthful about. Hundreds of tiny changes that occur before we grasp a recognizable thought. And it has to be a recognizable thought or we don’t grasp it. And now I’m back inside myself again, trying to rationalize, to analyze, to think—and doing the thing that everybody hates me for. I don’t know why I sent for you. How can I go back through a million half-thoughts I had before I recognized one, which turned out to be the thought that I wanted you to come home? The reasons are somewhere in the half thoughts, and they remain half thoughts because we don’t like the reasons.”
“Father?”
“Yes?”
“I think you’ve cut yourself,” she said. “Isn’t that blood on your hand?”
He looked at the palm of his left hand. “Why, yes, it seems to be,” he said. “I seem to have scratched myself. On what, I wonder? There must be a nail loose on this chair. But there aren’t any nails on this chair.”
“I’ll get some iodine,” she said.
“No,” he said. “You know what I’ve done, don’t you?”
“No,” she said.
“I scratched myself with my own fingernail.”
“That’s an odd thing to do,” she said.
“It’s worse than that,” he said. “I got so intense in that last speech of mine that I cut myself open with my own fingernail. I’ve never known that to happen before.”