The Peacock Feast, page 24
“I have been very lucky. One cannot have everything. I’ve had so much richness in my life here with Anna. Our work together. The work I’ve been able to help her with.”
Dorothy drinks the remainder of her tea and places the empty cup on her bedside stand. “There are people who think I’ve been too submissive to Anna. But submission to another’s needs is a component of healthy love. With my husband, given his illness…” Dorothy lowers her voice. “The times when he became violent … Submission to his wishes would have been so destructive to the children, and to me.”
She studies Prudence, as though assessing the degree to which she understands. “With Anna, it is different. She has given me my life. There have been things I’ve had to forgo. Not having a home of my own where I could host guests when Anna insists on solitude, that has been a loss, but ultimately a trivial one. Living across an ocean from my children and grandchildren—that has not been trivial.”
Prudence follows Dorothy’s gaze to the garden. Once, CCB had told Prudence that Dorothy and Anna had become serious gardeners at their cottage on the North Sea.
“I cannot deny that I have had my regrets,” Dorothy continues. “Very deep ones. But I have come to understand that there is grandiosity beneath regret: a fantasy about our own omnipotence. As though we could have made all the right choices.”
Dorothy turns back to Prudence. “I think that is what your father was trying to tell me.”
“My father?”
“Yes, that summer, when I clung to him because my own father was gone. I still remember how he said it. ‘Miss Dorothy’—that’s what he called me—‘we must accept about our lives who we are.’ Perhaps he even said ‘what is our station.’ I felt upset that he seemed to view himself in his very core as a servant. Later, when I saw him working inside, at my father’s Madison Avenue house—which seemed so wrong, he should have been working outside—I was angry that he appeared to have accepted this: that my father had moved him and your family like pieces of his furniture from Oyster Bay to New York.”
Prudence feels a pit in her stomach. Like pieces of his furniture. They’d been moved like chairs and armoires and settees from one of Louis C. Tiffany’s houses to another.
“What saddens me most is that I replicated for my children what I experienced with my father. There was such enormity to his genius, he eclipsed everything around him. I knew since I was very young that I would always be in his shadow. It’s a huge blow for a child.”
Dorothy places the flat of her hand on her chest. “I achieved a fraction of what my father did, but for my children, my life too looked like it took place on a scale larger than theirs ever would. They saw themselves as satellites of Anna and me…”
Dorothy narrows her eyes. “In some ways, I’m envious of you. Your father knew his children could have more than he did. That was what he was striving for.”
Prudence feels flooded with remorse. Always, when she thinks of her parents, it is with regard to how she escaped their lives. Never has she placed much stock in what they gave her. The moments of joy she can still recall from when they lived at Laurelton Hall: the afternoons with Mr. T and his family away when her father would carry her into the sea, dunking her in and out of the gentle waves, her father seated on the wet sand, laughing while Prudence chased the advancing and receding seam of water. Her mother sucking the pit from an orchard plum and with a sticky stain on her thumb and forefinger giving Prudence the purple flesh with its burst of tart and sweet. After Prudence’s father died, her mother (the only girl brave enough to ride a bike with Clara Driscoll around Grant’s Tomb) so valiantly putting one foot in front of the other to keep the two of them afloat: frying oatcakes doused with cream and sugar, cheerfully setting off mornings to her job at Wanamaker’s, sharing the spot of tea Sunday afternoons with Mr. Feeney. Never holding Prudence back: not when she wanted to enter the drawing contest, not when she enrolled at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, not when she left to study in Paris even though, as her aunt later confided, it had plunged her mother into months of crying herself to sleep.
“Only now that I am so old,” Dorothy says, “do I see that choice played such a small a role in my father’s life. I don’t mean to imply that he didn’t have free will. But he was as enslaved by his perfectionism and talent as we were by its obsessive expression. After growing up with him, I was left feeling that it was a blessing not to have inherited his artistry.”
Dorothy points at a watercolor on the wall behind Prudence. “Anna insisted on hanging that. It is something I did the year I was remanded to bed with the threat that if I didn’t take my recuperation seriously, I would be a lifelong invalid. At one point, I was so tired of reading and knitting, I begged to be brought watercolors.”
Prudence twists around to look at the picture. It is of the garden outside.
“You were drawing better than that when I met you as a child in my father’s studio. My pathetic little piece is no more than inept copying. Like a cheap Polaroid.”
Prudence turns back to Dorothy. “But my paintings were essentially the same. I spent so many years creating rooms for clients that were copies of what they’d seen in a magazine, I was never able to develop my own vision.”
“Vision can be overrated. For my father, there was his vision and only his vision. When Theodore Roosevelt came to the White House, he’s reported to have said about the glass screen my father had installed for President Arthur, ‘Smash it to bits!’ My father railed that it was because Roosevelt hated his politics, but I always thought that it was because Roosevelt knew that what my father had created had not been for Chester Arthur, but for my father himself.”
Prudence wonders if she should tell Dorothy that she’d heard this “Smash it to bits!” story from Harriet, who claimed the screen had been secreted away to a Washington warehouse, but it seems beside the point that Dorothy is marching toward.
“Thank goodness he switched to the glass business and left his interior design to his own homes. Who else would have wanted to live in rooms modeled after the Topkapi Palace? Or with collections of Native American artifacts?”
Dorothy sighs. “And then there were my father’s parties. My daughter Tinky tells me people today would call them performance art. It boggles my mind to think about what he put into creating his Peacock Feast. He’d been disappointed by the outcome of the Egyptian Fete he’d thrown the year before. Some of the young socialites had abandoned his theme at the end of the evening and begun dancing, not as slaves entertaining Cleopatra and Mark Antony, but as themselves, and there were tradesmen there who drank too much and became raucous.”
Dorothy pulls the coverlet up to her shoulders. “With his Peacock Feast, he was determined to have complete control. No female guests, only men of genius. The transport, the pergolas and flower beds, the organ music, the menu, the costumes, were all designed to create a unified effect. At precisely eleven, before anyone could break rank, the men were escorted back to the limousines. The evening ended with floodlights of different colors sweeping over the gardens and fountains as the limousines descended the drive.
“Once, when I showed Anna some photographs from that night, she said, ‘What are peacocks if not symbols of phallic destructiveness?’ I objected that they are also beautiful creatures. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your father produced a tableau of the cruelty veined in all beauty.’”
Dorothy laughs. “At the time, I chided Anna that even her father said a cigar is sometimes a cigar, but she’s right. Behind every genius is a tyrant. And my father was that unapologetically. My sisters and I called him the Pasha of Perfection. Sometimes, I wonder how many generations it will take for us all to metabolize what he created and did. We are still living in his wake.”
When Dorothy begins to cough, Prudence fears that Anna Freud will march in and demand that Dorothy now rest.
Still coughing, Dorothy points at her water carafe. Prudence fills the glass on the bedside stand and Dorothy drinks.
“I’ve overstayed my visit.”
“No, please don’t go. I know the coughing sounds awful, but I am fine. As fine as I ever am these days. There are so few people now who understand what I mean when I talk about my father. Not even Anna, really. Her father was a genius of an even greater magnitude than mine, but he intimidated Anna in a different way than my father did me.”
Dorothy holds up her hand as she resumes coughing. After the coughing ceases, she drinks again, then continues: “Once, when Mabbie was very angry with me for having nixed a plan she and her siblings had devised of my buying a retreat in the States where we could all spend summers together, nixed it because I wouldn’t be able to leave Anna long enough to make it worthwhile, she told me that it was the failure of my own analysis that kept me here. At the time, I dismissed it as something said in anger, but looking back, I would have to say that Mabbie was right. There is no one I have been closer to, felt more myself with, than Anna. But I have been as afraid to battle with her about certain things, including that retreat, as I was with my father.”
Dorothy pauses and Prudence thinks, Surely, now it is over. Surely, now Dorothy will succumb to fatigue. But after a moment, Dorothy goes on. “That summer, when my father was away, your father just listened while I blathered about how mean and unjust it was. He must have known I would never be able to say this directly to my own father. And, in the end, it was the same with Anna. I was unable to tell her that my wish to be near my children and grandchildren had the weight of hers to remain in the house where her father died.”
Dorothy smiles. “You must think I am becoming a demented old lady. Talking about things that happened so long ago. Seeing you has shaken the dandelion so bits of my youth are floating around us. It’s as if the repression has lifted. But now I’ve gone on too long. You must tell me about yourself, what brings you here.”
Why is she here? Why?
All she can think of is how Dorothy had been unable to stand up to Anna, unable to assert that she wanted to be with her children.
“I did the same,” Prudence says quietly. “Everyone assumed Carlton and I never had a baby because we were unable. But we were very much able. Carlton insisted he did not want children, and I never really stood up to him about it.”
Prudence’s eyes well. “It felt like a cruel joke that he died as my childbearing years were waning so even had I remarried, I would not have been able to undo that decision.”
Dorothy looks intently at Prudence, but she does not say anything comforting. And this, Dorothy’s knowing Prudence’s wound and holding that knowledge without making light of its depth, is the most comforting response: the acceptance that there is no balm itself a balm.
* * *
Not until after she has left Hampstead does Prudence realize Dorothy mentioned Robert only once, when she said that submitting to his illness would have been harmful to her children. She wishes she had said to Dorothy, You were so brave, you protected your children from their father. I was at CCB’s house once when he had one of his episodes. I remember how frightening it was.
Is it possible that Dorothy doesn’t know that Prudence witnessed Robert’s jump from the window? That CCB had told Anna and she’d never told Dorothy? Does Dorothy know that Robert was wearing blue-and-white-striped pajamas? That his body hitting the pavement made a sound Prudence heard from across the street?
After Robert opened the window in CCB’s library, he’d disappeared for a moment. Prudence wonders now what he did during that short interlude. Had he prayed? Looked into his own eyes in the bureau mirror? Kissed the photograph of Dorothy and their children he kept on his bedside stand?
* * *
In the morning, Prudence takes the train to Dover, and from there, the ferry to Calais and a second train on to Paris. She spends her first day in Paris in bed, battling a fatigue that feels like a flu but she knows is the aftermath of her visit with Dorothy: a battle inside herself to put the fathers Dorothy talked about—her own and Prudence’s—side by side with the Mr. T her mother claimed had called her a dirty Irish pig, and the Eddie who’d swung at Randall and then vomited on himself.
Two days later, she takes a train to L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. She checks into the same hotel where she’d stayed with Claire and Claire’s maid, where Jean-Christophe came in the middle of the night to give an emetic to Claire after she’d taken a bottle of Miltown. She thinks about Dorothy’s daughter Mabbie having done the same with her sleeping pills. It had been shocking when Claire’s maid banged on Prudence’s door, but never had Prudence believed that Claire really wanted to die. Rather, the pills had seemed like Morse code sent to Claire’s cheating husband: a telegram informing him that no number of Louis Quinze chairs and Provençal armoires would compensate for his nightclub singer. Had Mabbie been more serious than Claire or only less lucky?
Prudence brings a sheet of the hotel stationery and one of the envelopes to the café where she dines. It’s a warm evening, and she sits at a table by windows that open like doors. She orders a soup and a paillard, then writes Jean-Christophe. She will be in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue for a few days. Might they meet for a coffee?
On her way back to the hotel, she takes a detour to the glove factory Jean-Christophe’s father had converted to a clinic. The clinic is still there, now with Jean-Christophe’s name and a second one below: Docteur Nicole de Grange. She slips the envelope under the door.
She cannot sleep. Jean-Christophe had asked that she not write to him. Perhaps he will be angered by her note. But that had been so long ago. Would not twenty-two years constitute having respected his wishes? Or perhaps he is away, at a conference or on holiday.
At nine, the phone in her room rings. Jean-Christophe’s voice is deeper, muddier than she recalls. He is pleased she contacted him, he says. He still keeps a traditional schedule: seeing patients until one thirty, and then resuming at four thirty for evening hours. He suggests that they meet for lunch at two at a restaurant overlooking the river. He will reserve them a table.
After they hang up, she studies her face in the bathroom mirror. She is sixty-three. He is sixty. It seems foolish to be concerned about her appearance, but she is. She colors her hair so it is still red, though a bit lighter, more honeyed, than when he last saw her. She has her mother’s fragile Irish skin, but she’s taken better care of it than her mother had her own. And she is still slender, her body having never gone through childbirth, and menopause having slid over her without adding pounds. In New York, a taxi driver will still on occasion call her Miss.
When she arrives at two, Jean-Christophe is not at the restaurant. For a moment, she fears that he has sent her here as a vengeful trick. But the proprietress leads Prudence to a table she says Docteur Lemier has reserved for them on the terrace overlooking the canal.
A few minutes later, Prudence spots Jean-Christophe hurrying down the street. He is shorter than she remembers and considerably stouter, and when he leans down to kiss her cheeks, first left, then right, she sees that he has lost most of the hair on the top of his head.
“Forgive me. Right as we were closing, a mother rushed in with her young son, who had stepped on a nail in the garden. I had to clean the wound and give him a tetanus shot and three stitches too…”
He folds his hands on the table, and she sees the wedding band. How had this not occurred to her? That he would be married. Or might this be the wedding band from his marriage to Anne? She can no longer remember if he had worn it so many years ago.
“But of course. An injured child has to come first.”
“We doctors have always this same conflict. Our patients versus our own lives.”
The waiter arrives, and Jean-Christophe asks her if they should have an aperitif first, before they order, and she says, if he has time. If he would like.
He orders pastis with a carafe of water and ice.
“My wife”—he pauses, acknowledging that this will be news to Prudence—“has never fully adjusted to having a husband with divided loyalties: family and patients. For my daughters, it is natural, all they have ever known, but not my wife. I don’t mean to imply that she criticizes my work, only it still hurts her.”
“You remarried.”
He looks meaningfully at her. “The year after you were here. I believe you met her. Suzette, the music teacher from the school who was in my quartet.”
Prudence vaguely recalls a woman with a round face who played the viola.
“She adopted Nicole and Simone, and we had a daughter together too. Renée.”
“Three daughters?”
“Yes, but all grown now. Nicole is thirty-one with two sons of her own. She is a doctor too, in practice with me. She sees all of our female patients, gynecologist and general practitioner wrapped into one.”
“I saw her name on your sign, but I didn’t make the connection with your Nicole. And Simone?”
“She is an architect. She lives in Paris, but she has opened an office here as well, specializing in homes for holidayers. The area has become popular with the British who cherish their fantasies about our rural Provençal life. Renée, our youngest daughter, is a student in Avignon. She lives in the dormitories there, but we see her every Sunday. She’s the godmother for Nicole’s two sons and is very devoted to them.”
Prudence does not ask about Suzette; she wonders, though, if she still teaches music, if she still plays in Jean-Christophe’s quartet. If she has become the matriarch that Jean-Christophe’s mother once was, caring for Nicole’s two little boys, cooking midday meals with the help of a bonne. What reason Jean-Christophe gave her for not being at home today.
The pastis arrives. “May I?” Jean-Christophe asks. She nods and he pours the liqueur into their glasses, adds water, uses a long spoon to gently stir the cloudy liquid.
“Salut,” he says, clinking his glass to hers.
“Salut.”
He takes her hand between his two. From the way his thumbs and fingers trace her bones, she thinks he is content but not happy. He loves his wife but he is not in love with her.
