Asked to mediate, Susan tried to keep a third side out of the case. It’s up to you, she would say, like a heroine in Henry James. Sometimes he would explode. He was not made to be celibate, it was not his nature. Did Selena realize that? Do they realize it? Who’s they? Susan asked. You, he said. He compared her case to his: You happily married with your comfortable husband and love and sex and your sane mind and his sane mind and sane conversation full of love love love, and nothing to worry about. She refused to deny it.
One secret leads to another. Because they couldn’t meet where they lived, they used her office phone for messages, trusting a friend of Arnold’s who had a room or else meeting dangerously in secluded corners of the park or in deserted offices after classes, and Edward took her late arrivals for granted. The old saga recreates Susan’s dilemma, caused by not knowing what kind of narrative she was in. A wife resumes an affair with her married lover. Though the husband knows of the earlier affair, he does not know about this one. And though the lover wants to be free of his institutionalized wife, he hasn’t done anything about it, nor has he decided what his obligations are. Susan is therefore once again an unfaithful wife. What is the future if you are an unfaithful wife? Is this transitional to a new life, a step in the dismantling of Edward? Or is it a permanent concession to weakness, one infidelity after another? The issue is hard because she is a person loyal and true. If she is to remain Edward’s wife, even though unfaithful, she ought to defend the Edward castle, protect its icons. If this is transitional, she should dismantle the castle without delay, tell Edward the truth and cut the ties. Love, love. Arnold talked of love. But he seemed happy with things as they were, and Susan did not know what to do. No doubt she was full of strong feelings, though the narrative remembers only the dilemma.
According to the chronicle, the renewal of her affair caused her to divorce Edward so as to marry Arnold. But when Susan looks now, she sees herself unable to make up her mind, never making it up until others made up theirs. She can’t remember how many discussions she and Edward had, how many turns and vague decisions quickly canceled, before it was settled. She remembers his silence, which she thought was for the failure of his writing, and she feared he was thinking of suicide. When she came home from her adventure full of exotic guilt, she felt ashamed of her joy while he was so miserable. There was an evening when Edward thought she was checking research papers in the library. And a night during which she heard him sighing and groaning as if he wanted her to notice. In the morning they got up, took turns in the bathroom, got their breakfast, ate together without speaking. They sat silent over coffee, Edward staring out over the enclosed yard to the back of the bookstore in the rain. The first words he spoke were sudden: I finally understand what’s wrong. I expect too much from you.
She said something conciliatory, but he was going another way. Shut up, he said, I’m giving you advice. You should get a divorce, the sooner the better. No one has the right to expect what I expect of you.
The talks that followed were full of confusion. They made decisions and changed their minds often during the next few weeks, which were full of rhetoric and paradox. No one knew where anyone stood. Things went around. Gradually, though, as they kept returning to the point, it simplified. The official cause was her failure to appreciate his writing, which he kept insisting was serious, really serious. You don’t esteem me, he would say. You don’t see me. But since Susan in her heart had always thought Edward’s commitment to writing was temporary, she did not take such complaints seriously. She assumed the real cause was her affair with Arnold, shown in Edward’s reluctance to mention it, as if jealousy were beneath him.
So they divorced, Edward-Susan, Arnold-Selena, to remarry as Arnold-Susan, and, later, Edward-Stephanie, while Selena stayed in the mental hospital. Officially, the divorce was amicable. They were polite and did not dispute the ownership of things, but there was a moody cloud. Speech was hard, especially after she moved out. When they met in the divorce court, though there had been no quarrel, she felt as if it had been all quarrel.
In its place, a new romantic idyll, the second in Susan’s saga and the last. New embodiments of the old forms reduced the triteness. Indiana Dunes. Brookfield Zoo. Museum of Science and Industry. The freedom to be seen in public. Gifts, jewelry and clothes. It was a relief not to judge his work and to look forward to his prosperity. The only drawback was his philosophy of sex and again, possibly, an insufficient consideration of what he expected from a wife. She asked him to revise the sex philosophy. No problem, he said, replacing it with a doctrine of fidelity and truth. As for his marital expectations, she learned these through trial and error.
Although it was a time of joy, Susan cried a lot. The narrative always has difficulty recovering feelings because they have no outer effects, but crying is an event which the narrative can describe. She cried for the honest Susan she would have to rebuild. She cried for her mother and father, for Edward at fifteen, the hours in the rowboat, the myth of childhood sweethearts, and the struggling artist life. She cried when her mother came to Chicago to persuade her to give Edward a second chance and said he would always continue to be her foster son.
She cried lest Arnold not divorce Selena and cried for Selena when he proved her wrong. She cried for Selena’s crying, and for the doctor who said Selena would never get out and the lawyer who obligated Arnold to support her the rest of her life.
Susan did not usually cry much, but this was an emotional time. The old crying Susan was still a child. The maturing Susan who married Arnold was wiser, but not much, as she entered her second marriage expecting to rectify the mistakes of the first. The contemporary Susan admits rectification occurred, not because Arnold was better than Edward, but through the force of time. It came about. Arnold was different, but much the same, and Susan would never know if the same rectification might not have occurred if she had stayed with Edward—just as she assumed a comparable rectification for him with loyal Stephanie.
But that makes no difference. What the matured Susan knows is this: however it began, in what shady manner or under what clouds, with whatever deceptions and betrayals in good or bad faith, what they have created is a world. That world is hers and must be protected. Sometimes still she can remember imagining a different world. She went to graduate school thinking she would earn a doctorate. She might have been a professor, taught graduate students, written books, chaired a department, gone on lecture tours. Instead she teaches when there’s a slot for her, part-time, auxiliary, not for the money, not for the career, but for the exercise. She might have been, but it annoys her when people like Lou Anne in the English Office speak of her sacrifices, feel sorry for her and blame Arnold like a tyrant or slaver. For though she never knew for sure whether it was by choice or default (it happened so gradually), this is what she has become: the mother of the family. The family is Dorothy, Henry, Rosie, and it’s Arnold and herself, and she is the mother. It’s the one thing in her life she knows is important, no doubt about that. Like it or not, it’s who I am, she says. She knows it, Arnold knows it. It’s what they know together.