upstairs.
—You didn’t try to comfort him?
—It didn’t occur to me.
—Oh, poor Daddy.
They were at another kitchen table when they had this conversation, in New York, and I was present. Something had got them on to Daddy, it never took much. There were times Irisseemed the older of the two, particularly when I saw these sporadic flashes of compassion. I remember she was gazing at Constance with what seemed a kind of compound sympathy both for Daddy’s plight, his misery after Harriet’s death, and Constance’s own, her not knowing how to comfort him. In fact she was never able to. She couldn’t reach him, she told me, he was too remote. He rebuffed all attempts she made to get close to him.
She understood this much at least, she said, that he needed to discharge some anger she’d provoked in him. But she hadn’t yet learned what she’d done, or what she
was
, what she represented to him, other than a stray girl who happened to live under his roof: a foundling.
—Constance, honey, Iris had said, you’re not a foundling. Just trust me, will you? You’ve had problems with Daddy, god knows we all understand that. So have I. But you’re not a foundling.
I was glad she said it: she spared me having to. For some time I’d been aware of a sort of passivity in Constance, a persisting silent claim for sympathy in the face of what she saw as her father’s cruelty. It troubled me. I detected no resistance, no defiance, none of the refractory qualities I associate with a healthy spirit. I asked myself if I was unreasonable to think this. I decided I wasn’t. The Romantics still have this to teach us, that it’s imperative to act and not be acted upon. Constance remained a kind of work in progress. She was unformed and indistinct as yet, and I saw it most clearly when her sister was around. She was still shackled to the conviction that her father had wrecked her life.
Chapter 3
Soon after she agreed to marry me I gave Constance a small river view by the nineteenth-century landscape painter Jerome Brook Franklin. It was my first serious gift to her. I wanted her to hang it in her bedroom in New York so she’d see it in the morning when she awoke and be reminded of the view from her bedroom in Ravenswood. It was supposed to arouse happy memories of her childhood. I still believed she must have
some
happy memories.
We were in the sitting room a few nights later, she and I, and the apartment was almost dark. I was lying on the chesterfield, Constance was stretched out on the carpet. She liked to lie on the floor with a cushion under her head. She’d been talking about the painting. Then she was telling me about a flat un-moving expanse of black water that opened off a creek a mile downstream from Ravenswood called Hard Luck Charlie’s. This gloomy pond was surrounded by marshland for half a mile, and according to Constance it was haunted by the ghost of an old man who’d had a cabin in the woods nearby. On a hot summer afternoon you could drift for hours in a skiff with only the splash of a fish or the cry of a bird to break the stillness of theplace, or a heron wading through the rushes. Daddy had apparently forbidden the girls to take the skiff out on their own but often they disobeyed him. This was around the time Harriet first got sick, she said.
I could all too easily picture it, this pleasant stagnant backwater, the two dreamy girls drifting in a skiff, a drowsy summer afternoon, insects buzzing and the water rank with rotting plant matter. But one day, Constance said, they discovered they’d been observed, and not just observed, reported. It was very bad. Daddy confronted them at breakfast the next morning and asked them if they’d forgotten the rule. Iris had asked him what rule.
—You know what rule, he’d said.
Constance was silent for a few moments. Her mood was somber now. Here it comes, I thought. When they next went down to the boathouse, she said, the skiff wasn’t there. Then Iris was
—You didn’t try to comfort him?
—It didn’t occur to me.
—Oh, poor Daddy.
They were at another kitchen table when they had this conversation, in New York, and I was present. Something had got them on to Daddy, it never took much. There were times Irisseemed the older of the two, particularly when I saw these sporadic flashes of compassion. I remember she was gazing at Constance with what seemed a kind of compound sympathy both for Daddy’s plight, his misery after Harriet’s death, and Constance’s own, her not knowing how to comfort him. In fact she was never able to. She couldn’t reach him, she told me, he was too remote. He rebuffed all attempts she made to get close to him.
She understood this much at least, she said, that he needed to discharge some anger she’d provoked in him. But she hadn’t yet learned what she’d done, or what she
was
, what she represented to him, other than a stray girl who happened to live under his roof: a foundling.
—Constance, honey, Iris had said, you’re not a foundling. Just trust me, will you? You’ve had problems with Daddy, god knows we all understand that. So have I. But you’re not a foundling.
I was glad she said it: she spared me having to. For some time I’d been aware of a sort of passivity in Constance, a persisting silent claim for sympathy in the face of what she saw as her father’s cruelty. It troubled me. I detected no resistance, no defiance, none of the refractory qualities I associate with a healthy spirit. I asked myself if I was unreasonable to think this. I decided I wasn’t. The Romantics still have this to teach us, that it’s imperative to act and not be acted upon. Constance remained a kind of work in progress. She was unformed and indistinct as yet, and I saw it most clearly when her sister was around. She was still shackled to the conviction that her father had wrecked her life.
Chapter 3
Soon after she agreed to marry me I gave Constance a small river view by the nineteenth-century landscape painter Jerome Brook Franklin. It was my first serious gift to her. I wanted her to hang it in her bedroom in New York so she’d see it in the morning when she awoke and be reminded of the view from her bedroom in Ravenswood. It was supposed to arouse happy memories of her childhood. I still believed she must have
some
happy memories.
We were in the sitting room a few nights later, she and I, and the apartment was almost dark. I was lying on the chesterfield, Constance was stretched out on the carpet. She liked to lie on the floor with a cushion under her head. She’d been talking about the painting. Then she was telling me about a flat un-moving expanse of black water that opened off a creek a mile downstream from Ravenswood called Hard Luck Charlie’s. This gloomy pond was surrounded by marshland for half a mile, and according to Constance it was haunted by the ghost of an old man who’d had a cabin in the woods nearby. On a hot summer afternoon you could drift for hours in a skiff with only the splash of a fish or the cry of a bird to break the stillness of theplace, or a heron wading through the rushes. Daddy had apparently forbidden the girls to take the skiff out on their own but often they disobeyed him. This was around the time Harriet first got sick, she said.
I could all too easily picture it, this pleasant stagnant backwater, the two dreamy girls drifting in a skiff, a drowsy summer afternoon, insects buzzing and the water rank with rotting plant matter. But one day, Constance said, they discovered they’d been observed, and not just observed, reported. It was very bad. Daddy confronted them at breakfast the next morning and asked them if they’d forgotten the rule. Iris had asked him what rule.
—You know what rule, he’d said.
Constance was silent for a few moments. Her mood was somber now. Here it comes, I thought. When they next went down to the boathouse, she said, the skiff wasn’t there. Then Iris was
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