you? she said, with petulance.
—Yourself.
She stared across the dark room, frowning.
—That’s easily mastered, she said.
This was disingenuous. She didn’t believe it.
—I don’t believe that either, I said quietly.
Tears welled, of course. She nearly surrendered right then and there. But she rallied her resources, I saw it happening. She tried to remember who she thought she was.
—All the same, she said at last, I’m not going to marry you.
She held me off for as long as she knew how but in the end she acquiesced. She didn’t know what to do and had no friend she trusted well enough to discuss it with other than Ellen Taussig, a senior editor at Cooper Wilder. Ellen was an austere woman of fifty who’d taken Constance under her wing when she’d first arrived in the city two years before. But Ellen had never marriedand was a fierce believer in the idea that Woman must work, Woman must rise, Woman must challenge Man. We both knew what she’d say:
Don’t do it.
But I’d arrived at an understanding of Constance by then. For in the long still reaches of the night she’d allowed me a glimpse of her various terrors, childish fears of abandonment mostly, and I had a good idea where they came from. It was the usual tedious story, a failure of approval from the parent. I’d soon put that right, I thought. I’d give her all the approval she wanted.
So it wasn’t difficult once she started to waver even a fraction, and I reeled her in with comparative ease. I was patient. I was careful. She came to depend on me. Time spent with me was nourishing, and it was the kind of nourishment she required; this was clear from the first night when we’d sat up talking in that empty restaurant. I offered water, in effect, to a child dying of thirst, although she didn’t see it that way at the time. For how do you identify the sickness in yourself, she asked me much later, when we were deep in crisis, and the joking was over, if you’ve never known a state of health?
I wasn’t blind to the responsibility I was assuming. I’d recognized this so-called sickness in her from the start, the impression she gave of an inner fragility, of there being no foundation, or if there was, whether or not it could hold up under pressure. And this was what aroused my love, or my need to protect her, and nourish her, and if this isn’t all of love then it’s a large part of it, for this was how I’d failed both with Barb and with my first wife, a Frenchwoman I’d met in Oxford when I was a young man and about whom I’d said nothing to Constance. So yes, we decided to get married. She wanted it simple and so did I. We’d do it at City Hall. I think the license cost ten bucks.
We invited only immediate family, which meant my mother, who lived on eastern Long Island, having emigrated with her second husband, an American, soon after my father died, and Constance’s father, the doctor, and also her sister, Iris, who both came down from Rhinecliff on the train. Constance said she wished Harriet could have been there, to see her.
I was curious to meet the father. Constance hated him, this was abundantly clear. She felt he’d both neglected and punished her and she was obsessed with him. I asked her once about his reaction to his wife’s death, this heartless monster, this
doctor
. Did he grieve? He was distraught for months, she said. He’d arrive home late in the evening and sit up drinking. The first she knew of it was one night when she was awakened by a noise and thought a raccoon was in the house. So she went downstairs and tiptoed along the corridor to the kitchen.
She saw him sitting in deep shadow, his long legs stretched out crossed at the ankles and his head on his arms on the table. He was sobbing. That was what she’d heard, her father sobbing. It was pathetic, she said. Not until they were older did she tell her sister about it. Iris was upset by the incident.
—What did you do? she said.
—I went back
—Yourself.
She stared across the dark room, frowning.
—That’s easily mastered, she said.
This was disingenuous. She didn’t believe it.
—I don’t believe that either, I said quietly.
Tears welled, of course. She nearly surrendered right then and there. But she rallied her resources, I saw it happening. She tried to remember who she thought she was.
—All the same, she said at last, I’m not going to marry you.
She held me off for as long as she knew how but in the end she acquiesced. She didn’t know what to do and had no friend she trusted well enough to discuss it with other than Ellen Taussig, a senior editor at Cooper Wilder. Ellen was an austere woman of fifty who’d taken Constance under her wing when she’d first arrived in the city two years before. But Ellen had never marriedand was a fierce believer in the idea that Woman must work, Woman must rise, Woman must challenge Man. We both knew what she’d say:
Don’t do it.
But I’d arrived at an understanding of Constance by then. For in the long still reaches of the night she’d allowed me a glimpse of her various terrors, childish fears of abandonment mostly, and I had a good idea where they came from. It was the usual tedious story, a failure of approval from the parent. I’d soon put that right, I thought. I’d give her all the approval she wanted.
So it wasn’t difficult once she started to waver even a fraction, and I reeled her in with comparative ease. I was patient. I was careful. She came to depend on me. Time spent with me was nourishing, and it was the kind of nourishment she required; this was clear from the first night when we’d sat up talking in that empty restaurant. I offered water, in effect, to a child dying of thirst, although she didn’t see it that way at the time. For how do you identify the sickness in yourself, she asked me much later, when we were deep in crisis, and the joking was over, if you’ve never known a state of health?
I wasn’t blind to the responsibility I was assuming. I’d recognized this so-called sickness in her from the start, the impression she gave of an inner fragility, of there being no foundation, or if there was, whether or not it could hold up under pressure. And this was what aroused my love, or my need to protect her, and nourish her, and if this isn’t all of love then it’s a large part of it, for this was how I’d failed both with Barb and with my first wife, a Frenchwoman I’d met in Oxford when I was a young man and about whom I’d said nothing to Constance. So yes, we decided to get married. She wanted it simple and so did I. We’d do it at City Hall. I think the license cost ten bucks.
We invited only immediate family, which meant my mother, who lived on eastern Long Island, having emigrated with her second husband, an American, soon after my father died, and Constance’s father, the doctor, and also her sister, Iris, who both came down from Rhinecliff on the train. Constance said she wished Harriet could have been there, to see her.
I was curious to meet the father. Constance hated him, this was abundantly clear. She felt he’d both neglected and punished her and she was obsessed with him. I asked her once about his reaction to his wife’s death, this heartless monster, this
doctor
. Did he grieve? He was distraught for months, she said. He’d arrive home late in the evening and sit up drinking. The first she knew of it was one night when she was awakened by a noise and thought a raccoon was in the house. So she went downstairs and tiptoed along the corridor to the kitchen.
She saw him sitting in deep shadow, his long legs stretched out crossed at the ankles and his head on his arms on the table. He was sobbing. That was what she’d heard, her father sobbing. It was pathetic, she said. Not until they were older did she tell her sister about it. Iris was upset by the incident.
—What did you do? she said.
—I went back
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