Phyllis would think of her often during the coming years. And understand.
Steven came; Andrew was ecstatic. Pamela arrived, and Andrew was the clichéd, bumbling father filled with love and awkwardness.
When he had the time.
For Andrew was also consumed with impatience; Pace-Trevayne was growing rapidly—too rapidly, she felt. There were suddenly awesome responsibilities accompanied by astronomical financing. She wasn’t convinced her young husband could handle it all. And she was wrong. He was not only capable, but adaptable to the changing pressures, the widening pressures. When he was unsure or frightened—and he was often both—he simply stopped and made everyone else stop with him. He told her that his fear and uncertainty were the results of not understanding, not knowing. It was better to lose a contract—painful as it might be—than to regret the acceptance later.
Andrew never forgot the courtroom in Boston. That wouldn’t happen to him.
Her husband was growing; his product filled a void that desperately needed filling, and he instinctively parried in point-counterpoint until he was assured of the advantage. A fair advantage; that was important to Andy. Not necessarily moral, just important, thought Phyllis.
But she wasn’t growing; the children were. They talked, they walked, they filled uncountable pails of diapers and spewed out unmeasurable amounts of cereal and bananas and milk. She loved them with enormous joy and faced their beginning years with the happiness of the new experience.
And then it all began to slip away. Slowly at first, as with so many others. She understood that, too.
The schoolday was the initial shock. Pleasant to begin with—the abrupt cessation of the high-pitched, demanding voices. The silence, the peace; the wonderful first aloneness. Alone except for the maid, the laundry man, an occasional repairman. Essentially alone, however.
The few really close friends she’d known had moved away—with husbands or with dreams of their own having little to do with the New Haven-Hartford environs. The neighbors in their upper-middle-class suburb were pleasant enough for an hour or two, but no more. They had their own drives—company drives; East Haven was the territory for them. And there was something else about the East Haven wives. They resented Phyllis Trevayne’s lack of need and appreciation for their corporate strivings. That resentment—as resentment so often does—led to a form of quiet, progressive isolation. She wasn’t one of them. And she couldn’t help them.
Phyllis realized that she’d been thrust into a strange, uncomfortable limbo. The thousands of hours, hundreds of weeks, scores of months that she’d devoted to Andrew, Doug, and the company had been replaced by the all-day, everyday needs of her children. Her husband was more often away than at home; it was necessary, she understood that, too. But the combination of all things left her without a functioning world of her own.
So there was the first, free-of-cares, purposeful venturing out on a regular, daily basis; unencumbered by infant concerns. No patient explanations to impatient maids, no elaborate preparations for noontime, snacktime, playtime, friendtime. The children were in private schools. They were picked up at eight-thirty in the morning and returned conveniently at four-thirty, just prior to the rush-hour traffic.
The «eight-hour parole» was the term used by the other young, white, rich mothers of the white, rich youngsters attending the old, white, rich private schools.
She tried relating to their world and joined the proper clubs, including the Golf and Country; Andrew enthusiastically endorsed them but rarely set foot on the premises. They palled on her as rapidly as the members did, but she refused to admit the disenchantment. She began to believe the fault was hers, the inadequacy hers. Was there guilt? Then that was hers also.
What in God’s name did she want? She asked that question of herself and found no answer.
She tried returning to the company—no longer a warehouse, now a sprawling complex of modern buildings, one of several branches. Pace-Trevayne was running at high speed on a very fast track in an extraordinarily complicated race. It wasn’t comfortable for the wife of the energetic young president to be seated at a desk doing uncomplicated chores. She left, and she thought Andrew breathed easier.
Whatever it was she sought eluded her, but there was relief to be found, starting at lunch. In the beginning it was a delicate glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Then graduation to the single Manhattan, which swiftly became a double. In several years her degree was awarded by the switch to vodka—the no-telltale, very viable substitute.
Oh, God! She understood Ellen Madison! Poor, bewildered, rich, soft, pampered Ellen—hushed-up Ellen Madison. Never, never phone her after six p.m.!
She recalled with painful clarity the late rainy afternoon Andy found her. She’d been in an accident, not serious, but frightening; her car had skidded on the wet pavement into a tree about a hundred yards from the driveway. She’d been hurrying home from a very long lunch. She’d been incoherent.
In her panic she’d raced from the smashed car to the house, locked the front door, and run to her room, locking that also.
A hysterical neighbor ran over, and Phyllis’ maid called the office.
Andrew convinced her to unlock their bedroom door, and with five words her life was changed, the awful years terminated.
«For God’s sake, help me!»
«Mother!» Her daughter’s voice intruded on the stillness of the new bedroom that opened on the impractical balcony. Phyllis Trevayne had nearly finished unpacking; it had been an early photograph of her children that had triggered her silent reminiscing. «There’s a special delivery letter from the University of Bridgeport for you. Are you lecturing this fall?»
Pam’s transistor radio filled the downstairs. Phyllis and Andy had laughed when they met their daughter at Dulles Airport the night before; Pam’s radio was turned on before she reached the passenger gate. «Only biweekly seminars, dear. Bring it up, will you, please?»
The University of Bridgeport.
The coincidence of the letter and her thoughts was appropriate, she considered. For the letter from such a place as Bridgeport was a net result of her «solution,» as she called it.
Andy had realized that her drinking had become more than a social habit but had refused to accept it as a problem. He had more problems than he needed; he attributed her excess to the temporary condition of household pressures and too little outside activity. It wasn’t uncommon; he’d heard other men speak of it. «Cooped up» was the phrase usually accompanying their rationalizations. It would pass. Further, he’d proved it to himself. For whenever they took vacations or were traveling with each other, there was no problem at all.
But that rainy afternoon they both knew there was a problem and they had to face it together.
The solution had been Andy’s, although he let her think it was hers. It was to immerse herself completely in some project with a specific objective in view. A project in which she found a great deal of pleasure; an objective ambitious enough to make the time and energy worthwhile.
It didn’t take her long to find the project; the fascination had been there since she was first introduced to medieval and Renaissance history. It was the chronicles: Daniel, Holinshed, Froissart, Villani. An incredible, mystical, marvelous world of legend and reality, fact and fantasy.
Once she began—cautiously at first, auditing graduate courses at Yale—she found herself as impatient as Andrew was with the expanding concerns of Pace-Trevayne. She was appalled by the dry academic approach to these vivid, full-bodied histories. She was infuriated with the musty, cobwebbed, overly cautious literateness given these—her—poetic novelist-historians of the ages. She vowed to open the rust-caked doors and let the fresh air of new appreciation circulate among the ancient archives. She thought in terms of contemporary parallels—but with the splendor of past pageantry.