Collected Stories Page 21

  “… whom he sometimes tapes when they’re being interviewed on CBS or the MacNeil/Lehrer programs. Teddy Regler always the foremost.”

  Yes, there was the name. Mike Spontini mattered greatly, but you had to see him still in the husband category. Ithiel Regler stood much higher with Clara than any of the husbands. “On a scale often,” she liked to say to Laura, “he was_ ten.”

  “Is ten?” Laura had suggested.

  “I’d not only be irrational but psycho to keep Teddy in the active present tense,” Clara had said. This was a clouded denial. Wilder Velde continued to be judged by a standard from which Ithiel Regler could never be removed. It did not make, it never could make, good sense to speak of irrationality and recklessness. Clara never would be safe or prudent, and she wouldn’t have dreamed of expelling Ithiel’s influence—not even if God’s angel had offered her the option. She might have answered: You might as well try to replace my own sense of touch with somebody else’s. And the matter would have had to stop there.

  So Velde, by taping Ithiel’s programs for her, proved how unassailable he was in his position as the final husband, the one who couldn’t in the scheme of things be bettered. “And I’m glad the man thinks that,” said Clara. “It’s best for all of us. He wouldn’t believe that I might be unfaithful. You’ve got to admire that._ So here’s a double-mystery couple. Which is the more mysterious one? Wilder actually enjoys watching Ithiel being so expert and smart from Washington. And meantime, Laura, I have no sinful ideas of being unfaithful. I don’t even think about such things, they don’t figure in my conscious mind. Wilder and I have a sex life no marriage counselor in the world could fault. We have three children, and I’m a loving mother, I bring them up conscientiously. But when Ithiel comes to town and I see him at lunch, I start to flow for him. He used to make me come by stroking my cheek. It can happen when he talks to me. Or even when I see him on TV or just hear his voice. He_ doesn’t know it—I think not—and anyway Ithiel wouldn’t want to do harm, interfere, dominate or exploit—that’s not the way he is. We have this total, delicious connection, which is also a disaster. But even to a woman raised on the Bible, which in the city of New York in this day and age is a pretty remote influence, you couldn’t call my attachment an evil that rates punishment after death. It’s not the sex offenses that will trip you up, because by now nobody can draw the line between natural and unnatural in sex. Anyway, it couldn’t be a woman’s hysteria that would send her to hell. It would be something else….”

  What else?” Laura asked. But Clara was silent, and Laura wondered whether it wasn’t Teddy Regler who should be asked what Clara considered a mortal sin. He had known Clara so well, over so many years, that perhaps he could explain what she meant.

  This Austrian au pair girl, Miss Wegman—Clara gave herself the pleasure of sizing her up. She checked off the points: dressed appropriately for an interview, hair freshly washed, no long nails, no conspicuous polish. Clara herself was gotten up as a tailored matron, in a tortoiseshell-motif suit and a white blouse with a ruff under the chin. From her teaching days she commanded a taskmistress’s way of putting questions (“Now, Willie, pick up the Catiline_ and give me the tense of abutere_ in Cicero’s opening sentence”): it was the disciplinarian’s armor worn by a softy. This Austrian chick made a pleasing impression. The father was a Viennese bank official and the kid was correct, civil and sweet. You had to put it out of your head that Vienna was a hatchery of psychopaths and Hitlerites. Think instead of that dear beauty in the double suicide with the crown prince. This child, who had an Italian mother, was called Gina. She spoke English fluently and probably wasn’t faking when she said she could assume responsibility for three little girls. Not laying secret plans to con everybody, not actually full of dislike for defiant, obstinate, mutely resistant kids like Clara’s eldest, Lucy, a stout little girl needing help. A secretly vicious young woman could do terrible damage to a kid like Lucy, give her wounds that would never heal. The two little skinny girls laughed at their sister. They scooped up their snickers in their hands while Lucy held herself like a Roman soldier. Her face was heated with boredom and grievances.

  The foreign young lady made all the right moves, came up with the correct answers—why not? since the questions made them obvious. Clara realized how remote from present-day “facts of life” and current history her “responsible” assumptions were—those were based on her small-town Republican churchgoing upbringing, the nickel-and-dime discipline of her mother, who clicked out your allowance from the bus conductor’s changemaker hanging from her neck. Life in that Indiana town was already as out of date as ancient Egypt. The “decent people” there were the natives from whom television evangelists raised big money to pay for their stretch limos and Miami-style vices. Those were Claras preposterous dear folks, by whom she had felt stifled in childhood and for whom she now felt a boundless love. In Lucy she saw her own people, rawboned, stubborn, silent—she saw herself. Much could be made of such beginnings. But how did you coach a kid like this, what could you do for her in New York City?

  “Now—is it all right to call you Gina?—what was your purpose, Gina, in coming to New York?”

  “To perfect my English. I’m registered in a music course at Columbia. And to learn about the U. S. A.”

  A well-brought-up and vulnerable European girl would have done better to go to Bemidji, Minnesota. Any idea of the explosive dangers girls faced here? They could be blown up from within. When she was young (and not only then), Clara had made reckless experiments—all those chancy relationships; anything might have happened; much did; and all for the honor of running risks. This led her to resurvey Miss Wegman, to estimate what might be done to a face like hers, its hair, her figure, the bust—to the Arabian Nights treasure that nubile girls (innocent up to a point) were sitting on. So many dangerous attractions—and such ignorance! Naturally Clara felt that she herself would do everything (up to a point) to protect a young woman in her household, and everything possible meant using all the resources of an experienced person. At the same time it was a fixed belief with Clara that no /лexperienced woman of mature years could be taken seriously. So could it be a serious Mrs. Wegman back in Vienna, the mother, who had given this Gina permission to spend a year in Gogmagogsville? In the alternative, a rebellious Gina was chancing it on her own. Again, for the honor of running risks.

  Clara, playing matron, lady of the house, nodded to agree with her own thoughts, and this nod may have been interpreted by the girl to mean that it was okay, she was as good as hired. She’d have her own decent room in this vast Park Avenue co-op apartment, a fair wage, house privileges, two free evenings, two afternoons for the music-history classes, parts of the morning while the children were at school. Austrian acquaintances, eligible young people, were encouraged to visit, and American friends vetted by Clara. By special arrangement, Gina could even give a small party. You can be democratic and still have discipline.

  The first months, Clara watched her new au pair girl closely, and then she was able to tell friends at lunch, people in the office, and even her psychiatrist, Dr. Gladstone, how lucky she had been to find this Viennese Miss Wegman with darling manners. What a desirable role model she was, and also such a calming influence on the hyperexcitable tots. “As you have said, Doctor, they set off hysterical tendencies in one another.”

  You didn’t expect replies from these doctors. You paid them to lend you their ears. Clara said as much to Ithiel Regler, with whom she remained very much in touch—frequent phone calls, occasional letters, and when Ithiel came up from Washington they had drinks, even dinner from time to time.

  “If you think this Gladstone is really helping… I suppose some of those guys can_ be okay,” said Ithiel, neutral in tone. With him there was no trivial meddling. He never tried to tell you what to do, never advised on family matters.

  “It’s mostly to relieve my heart,” said Clara. “If you and I had become husband and wife that wouldn’t have been necessa
ry. I might not be so overcharged. But even so, we have open lines of communication to this day. In fact, you went through a shrink period yourself.”

  “I sure did. But my doctor had even more frailties than me.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “I guess not. But it occurred to me one day that he couldn’t tell me how to be Teddy Regler. And nothing would go well unless I was_ Teddy Regler. Not that I make cosmic claims for precious Teddy, but there never was anybody else for me to be.”

  Because he thought things out he spoke confidently, and because of his confidence he sounded full of himself. But there was less conceit about Ithiel than people imputed to him. In company, Clara, speaking as one who knew, really knew_ him—and she made no secret of that—would say, when his name was mentioned, when he was put down by some restless spirit or other, that Ithiel Regler was more plainspoken about his own faults than anybody who felt it necessary to show him up.

  At this turn in their psychiatry conversation, Clara made a move utterly familiar to Ithiel. Seated, she inclined her upper body toward him. ” Tell_ me!” she said. When she did that, he once more saw the country girl in all the dryness of her ignorance, appealing for instruction. Her mouth would be slightly open as he made his answer. She would watch and listen with critical concentration. “Tell!” was one of her code words.

  Ithiel said, “The other night I watched a child-abuse program on TV, and after a while I began to think how much they were putting under that heading short of sexual molestation or deadly_ abuse—mutilation and murder. Most of what they showed was normal punishment in my time. So today I could be a child-abuse case and my father might have been arrested as a child-beater. When he was in a rage he was transformed—he was like moonshine from the hills compared to store-bought booze. The kids, all of us, were slammed two-handed, from both sides simultaneously, and without mercy. So? Forty years later I have to watch a TV show to see that I, too, was abused. Only, I loved my late father. Beating was only an incident, a single item between us. I still love him. Now, to tell you what this signifies: I can’t apply the going terms to my case without damage to reality. My father beat me passionately. When he did it, I hated him like poison and murder. I also loved him with a passion, and I’ll never_ think myself an abused child. I suspect that your psychiatrist would egg me on to hate, not turn hate into passivity. So he’d be telling me from the height of his theoretical assumptions how Teddy Regler should be Teddy Regler. The real Teddy, however, rejects this grudge against a dead man, whom he more than half expects to see in the land of the dead. If that were to happen, it would be because we loved each other and wished for it. Besides, after the age of forty a moratorium has to be declared—earlier, if possible. You can’t afford to be a damaged child forever. That’s my argument with psychiatry: it encourages you to build on abuses and keeps you infantile. Now the heart of this whole country aches for itself. There may be occult political causes for this as well. Foreshadowings of the fate of this huge superpower…”

  Clara said, “Tell!” and_ then she listened like a country girl. That side of her would never go away, thank God, Ithiel thought; while Claras secret observation was, How well we’ve come to understand each other. If only we’d been like this twenty years back.

  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been able to follow him in the early years. She always had understood what Ithiel was saying. If she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to speak—why waste words? But she also recognized the comic appeal of being the openmouthed rube. Gee! Yeah! Of course! And I could kick myself in the head for not having thought of this myself! But all the while the big-city Clara had been in the making, stockpiling ideas for survival in Gogmagogsville.

  “But let me tell you,” she said, “what I was too astonished to mention when we were first acquainted… when we lay in bed naked in Chelsea, and you sent thoughts going around the world, but then they always came back to us,_ in bed. In bed,_ which in my mind was for rest, or sex, or reading a novel. And back to me,_ whom you never overlooked, wherever your ideas may have gone.”

  This Ithiel, completely black-haired then, and now grizzled, had put some weight on. His face had filled, rounded out at the bottom. It had more of an urn shape. Otherwise his looks were remarkably unchanged. He said, “I really didn’t have such a lot of good news about the world. I think you were hunting among the obscure things I talked about for openings to lead back to your one and only subject: love and happiness. I often feel as much curiosity about love and happiness now as you did then listening to my brainstorms.”

  Between jobs, Ithiel had been able to find time to spend long months with Clara—in Washington, his main base, in New York, on Nantucket, and in Montauk. After three years together, she had actually pressured him into buying an engagement ring. She was at that time, as she herself would tell you, terribly driven and demanding (as if she wasn’t now). “I needed a symbolic declaration at least,” she would say, “and I put such heat on him, saying that he had dragged me around so long as his girl, his lay, that at last I got this capitulation from him.” He took Clara to Madison Hamilton’s shop in the diamond district and bought her an emerald ring—the real thing, conspicuously clear, color perfect, top of its class, as appraisers later told Clara. Twelve hundred dollars he paid for it, a big price in the sixties, when he was especially strapped. He was like that, though: hard to convince, but once decided, he dismissed the cheaper items. “Take away all this other shit,” he muttered. Proper Mr. Hamilton probably had heard this. Madison Hamilton was a gentleman, and reputable and dignified in a decade when some of those qualities were still around: “Before our fellow Americans had lied themselves into a state of hallucination—bullshitted themselves into inanity,” said Ithiel. He said also, still speaking of Hamilton, who sold antique jewelry, “I think the weird moniker my parents gave me predisposed me favorably toward vanishing types like Hamilton—Wasps with good manners…. For all I know, he might have been an Armenian, passing.”

  Clara held out her engagement finger, and Ithiel put on the ring. When the check was written and Mr. Hamilton asked for identification, Ithiel was able to show not only a driver’s license but a Pentagon pass. It made a great impression. At that time Ithiel was flying high as a Wunderkind in nuclear strategy, and he might have gone all the way to the top, to the negotiating table in Geneva, facing the Russians, if he had been less quirky. People of great power set a high value on his smarts. Well, you only had to look at the size and the evenness of his dark eyes—“The eyes of Hera in my Homeric grammar,” said Clara. “Except that he was anything but effeminate. No way!” All she meant was that he had a classic level look.

  “At Hamilton’s that afternoon, I wore a miniskirt suit that showed my knees touching. I haven’t got knock-knees, just this minor peculiarity about the inside of my legs…. If this is a deformity, it did me good. Ithiel was crazy about it.”

  At a later time, she mentioned this as “the unforeseen usefulness of anomalies.” She wrote that on a piece of paper and let it drift about the house with other pieces of paper, so that if asked what it meant, she could say she had forgotten.

  Although Ithiel now and again might mention “game theory” or “MAD,” he wouldn’t give out information that might be classified, and she didn’t even try to understand what he did in Washington. Now and then his name turned up in the Times_ as a consultant on international security, and for a couple of years he was an adviser to the chairman of a Senate committee. She let politics alone, asking no questions. The more hidden his activities, the better she felt about him. Power, danger, secrecy made him even sexier. No loose talk. A woman could feel safe with a man like Ithiel.

  It was marvelous luck that the little apartment in Chelsea should be so near Penn Station. When he blew into town he telephoned, and in fifteen minutes he was there, holding his briefcase. It was his habit when he arrived to remove his necktie and stuff it in among his documents. It was her habit when she hung up the phone to take the r
ing from its locked drawer, admire it on her finger, and kiss it when the doorbell rang.

  No, Ithiel didn’t make a big public career, he wasn’t a team player, he had no talent for administration; he was too special in his thinking, and there was no chance that he would reach cabinet level. Anyway, it was too easy for him to do well as a free agent; he wouldn’t latch on to politicians with presidential ambitions: the smart ones never would make it. “And besides,” he said, “I like to stay mobile.” A change of continent when he wanted fresh air. He took on such assignments as pleased the operator in him, the behind-the-scenes Teddy Regler: in the Persian Gulf, with a Japanese whiskey firm looking for a South American market, with the Italian police tracking terrorists. None of these activities compromised his Washington reputation for dependability. He testified before congressional investigative committees as an expert witness.

  In their days of intimacy, Clara more than once helped him to make a deadline. Then they were Teddy and Clara, a superteam working around the clock. He knew how dependable she was, a dervish for work, how quickly she grasped unfamiliar ideas, how tactful she could be. From her side, she was aware how analytically deep he could go, what a range of information he had, how good his reports were. He outclassed everybody, it seemed to her. Once, at the Hotel Cristallo in Cortina d’Ampezzo, they did a document together, to the puncturing rhythm of the tennis court below. He had to read the pages she was typing for him over the transatlantic telephone. While he spoke, he let her run ahead on the machine. He could trust her to organize his notes and write them up in a style resembling his own (not that style mattered in Washington). All but the restricted material. She’d do any amount of labor—long dizzy days at the tinny lightweight Olivetti—to link herself with him.