part one
one
The Merriwether Houseâas it was known in the neighborhood for most of its ninety yearsâis a three-minute walk from Harvard Square. The second house from the southwest corner of Acorn Streetâa hundred yards between Ash and Hawthorneâit is wooden, gabled, bellied with bay windows. âAutumn-colored,â said a Merriwether child. It rises three stories behind a large acacia tree set in a tiny oval lawn whose few feet of renewable earth stuff supplied a large proportion of ordinary Merriwether exchanges: âThe treeâs leafing out.â âTime to mow again.â (Mowing took sixty seconds.) âYour bicycleâs on the lawn.â
A resident of Manhattan might think of Cambridge as âcountry,â but it is urban in marrow, which is to say that whatever grows there bears the mark of human toleration or display.
Until the day of Merriwetherâs departure from the houseâa month after his divorceâthe Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one. Parents and children frequently gathered in the parlor reading in their favorite roosts, Priscilla, by firelight, the others by the light of old lamps whose bulbs were shielded by pies of rose and amber glass. Years of fire-heat have bulged the roomâs striped wallpaper and, with other pressures, lumped the armchairs and velveteen sofas.
Merriwether had complained for years that his wife Sarah hadnât rejuvenated Aunt Aggieâs house. The reason, he believed, was a form of Cambridge indolence disguised as ascetic contempt for body comfort. For years such Cambridge platonism brought the rear ends of Merriwethers against the coils of what should ease them.
âDarn it all, Sarah. I wish there were chairs we could sit in.â
âOf course, Bobbie.â
âI guess Iâll have to go out and buy some myself.â
âThat would be practical.â
âPractical all right, but where do you find them?â
âIâll inquire.â
A bit of charade: Sarah, âthe earnest, bright-eyed, agreeably useless antiquarian,â Merriwether, âthe helpless man of thought.â Two decades before, they had fornicated on one side of a double bed while Sarahâs roommate pretended sleep on the other. Even then much more of the world was in their heads than in talk with each other.
In the warm, crannied, silvery parlor, parents and children formed an irregular crescent around the fire. Albie, the eldest, home from Williams, stretched on a sofa reading Machiavelliâs Discourses. He is stocky, shaggy, sharp-faced, with soft, near-sighted, deep brown eyes. A political conservativeâhe runs quietly against all discernible tidesâhis preferred manner is oblique irony. Priscilla tells him he looks hip but smells medieval. Priscilla lies a yard from the soft mesh firescreen. She wears a green buckskin vest and scarlet bell-bottoms, wide bells at bare feet. The flames raise gold welts in her long brown hair, gold chips in her green eyes. She reads pamphlets on Metal Fatigue sent her by NASA. For years, she has corresponded with them about becoming an astronaut, has done the exercises, mathematics and engineering prescribed by their education specialists, and though, recently, it is poetry which takes up more of her time, she keeps her hat in the spatial ring.
Beneath Grandpa Tiptonâs portrait sits EsmĂ©. On the edge of greater beauty than Priscilla, she is a flat length terminated by ringmaster boots. A little bra shows through the unbuttoned upper half of a blue work shirt. Blonder, clearerfeatured than Priscilla, a dreamier girl, she reads the magazine Glamour.
The youngest child, George, has bangs to his eyebrows, his fatherâs blue eyes and his motherâs stocky build. Pencil in hand, he corrects the typescript of a childrenâs book written by a Merriwether neighbor who has already dedicated one book âTo my punctilious critic, G. M.â
Dr. Merriwether feels an antique safety here. He drinks a New York State Chablis and reads Cymbeline, a play he hasnât read since an undergraduate course in Shakespeare twenty-five years ago. The difficult, magic language and the mild wine enrich the calm. The parlor, the fire clicks, the tiny clinks and rattles of supper-making from the kitchen, the beauty and momentary seriousness of his children dissolve the anxiety which has gripped him for months. The play is such a mixture of strangeness, precision, extremity and restraint. It sits on the old rock of ethic: âSelf-fulfillment is self-denial.â He reads, âThe breach of custom is breach of all.â âBut is it true?â wonders Merriwether. This parlor, thicker with custom than life, holds like a microscope specimen his own breaching.
âThe parlor is for dusk,â said Aunt Aggie Tipton. Aunt Aggie, too, was a breacher. For thirty years she lived unmarried with Mr. Louden Stonesifer. The house is still laced with the debris of wires, speakers, buzzers and colored lights installed so that he and Aggie could communicate wordlessly with each other. (One never knew when a stroke would disable speech.)
âThe Merriwethers never felt the need to add to the Gross National Product. Or to coddle provincial morality,â said Aunt Aggie. Such boastful maxims supported her breach of Cambridge burgher life; though it seemed to her nephew that she gauged to a turn the bounds of Permitted Eccentricity.
âPray you trust me hereâIâll rob none but myself,â he reads in Cymbeline. If he could make his children understand that. If it were true. Even as he thinks, âIâm peaceful, happy, this is a beautiful moment,â he is aware that in four or five hours he will walk out of their earshot, down the backstairs and telephone the source of his breach, Cynthia Ryder, a young girl for whom he is almost ready to give up the thousand formulas which compose this beautiful human hour.
âLove,â Dr. Merriwether thinks. Famous, frozen word concealing how many thousand feelings, the origin of so much story and disorder.
When he teaches the Introductory Physiology course, he begins one lecture, âToday, ladies and gentlemen, we will talk about love. That is to say, the distension of the venous sinuses under signals passed through the third and fourth sacral segments of the spinal cord along the internal pudendal nerve to the ischiocavernosus, and, as well, the propulsive waves of contraction in the smooth muscle layers of the vas deferens, in seminal vesicles, the prostate and the striated muscles of the perineum which lead to the ejection of the semen.â
His seriousness does not invite the concessionary laugh to pedagogical wit. If he wants laughter, he will say, âThat, gentlemen, and perhaps ladies, is what is making you toss in your beds. One way or another.â Usually, though, he explores mind-body problems, peripheral sense filters, spinal lesions, the swelling and beading of myelin sheaths, the fragmentation and disappearance of axis cylinders. A careful lecturer, he does not forget love. (For non-majors, it is important to relieve the technical complex with more manageable views.) He cites a definition of John Locke, ââAny one reflecting upon the thought he has of the delight which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him has the idea we call love.â Philosophers among you may note the distinctions between âdelighting,â âthinking of delight,â and âreflecting upon the thought of delight.â I believe later analysts simplified this scheme. Freud, for instance, speaks of love as a mild psychosis.â Or Dr. Merriwether will vary his decorative allusions and speak of âsuch amateur physiologists of love as Balzac, Maine de Biran, RĂ©my de Gourmont and Stendhal. I suspect French analytic power is revealed in their literature more than in their science.â In the same lecture, he draws on Sarahâs masterâs thesis on Courtly Love. Those rough maps of feeling had precious little congruence with physiological ones; yet without the internal pudendal nerve, the invention of love would not have tamed the ferocity of medieval western life. Sarah had argued that the Rebirth of Women began in that old deflection from war to love. (Now, her direction was reversed.)
In those days, heâd been enchanted by her work. As she finished the chapters of her M.A. thesis, she read them to him. How had that stocky little dynamo with the cameo head learned so much? Provençal, Old French, Spanish. Those beautiful bird sounds spun out of her husky little voice. A Dietrich voice without the parodic sexuality; enchanting out of that sweet stump of girl.
He explained his work to her. The black pearl eyes lit with excitement: how she wished sheâd studied science so she could really follow. How long was it before they both realized she not only didnât follow but was bored stiff pretending? Dr. Merriwether retreated. Then, five or six years ago, Sarah stopped pretending. She opened a door inside her to a very tough little lady. The lady said, âThis is it. I am no doormat. You are no Einstein.â Venus in armor. A new Sarah who corrected everyone, who lectured everyone. When Priscilla got interested in French poetry, Sarah fetched down her old text and began passing out the Radcliffe word. âThe Spirit of Romance is NOT an authoritative book, sweetheart. Pound was enthusiastic, he was gifted, but he knew NOTHING. He bought a copy of the Chrestomathy and he thought that made him a scholar.â In Provençal, Sarah scored high; at least there was no one around to grade her. She moved on to politics: no âmushy liberal squashâ for her; Cambridge was a swamp of soft-headed muckers, what did they know about running the world? She stood with Bill Buckley (whoâd dated her cousin when he was at Yale): sheâd rather have the country run by the first thirty people in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. Albie got out the directory: âTriple A Cleaners, Aamco Transmitters, Felicia R. Aabse. Looks pretty good, Mom. Who do you want for Defense, Felicia or the Cleaners?â
For months now, Sarah specialized in her husbandâs moves. She classified his gestures, checked his bills, noted his new suit, his brighter ties, the extra shag in his hair. He has spent more time in the lab than he has for fifteen years. There is new ease in his speech and dress, yet he has long since stopped asking her what she had even longer refused him.
She used Albie as weapon and fortress. Albie, indolent and charming, accepted his motherâs flirtation along with her checks. In his cruder moments, his father is a conversational ploy, a backdrop for truancy. âDad gets everything through the test-tube. Thereâs more to life.â What there is mostly is sleep, touch football, reading Burke and The National Review. Sarah took the temperature of Merriwetherâs silent distaste. âIt does no good at all to get after Albie.â
âGet after?â
âHe sees your face harden when he sleeps late.â
âHe canât see it if heâs sleeping.â
âDo you want a debate or the truth?â
âItâs you who have the truth, Sarah. But it is true that Albie is happier horizontal than vertical.â
âYou may stay vertical, but he sees through that.â
âI stay vertical, because you donât want me any other way.â
The black eyes burned in her pale face. Angry, she is less puffy, almost the white cameo heâd thought so beautiful. âI am no legal whore.â
When he came back from the summer in France, he told her. âOf course thereâs someone, Sarah. Iâm not a cactus. I couldnât endure without intimacy. Iâve been driven to the wall.â Heâd kept from saying, âYouâve driven me to the wall.â Part of his fear and guilt had been converted into pity. Even to him, Sarah often seemed his victim. Despite the harshness of their life together, pity enabled him to care for her. Sheâd been so decent. She was basicallyâwhatever that meantâand he was to learn there were endless âbasesâ of Sarah and himselfâdecent. But this woman who had almost never lied or cheated or done much more than hold back the truth went into his files, read his mail, listened in on his phone talk.
âYou think I donât know,â she said. Cambridge neighbors were as hungry for gossip as their notion of Iowans. (Hungrier: fluent passivity was an appetizer.) Sarah herself gossiped little. But for years now she had kept an inner catalogue of his weaknesses; each year added to them, every book she read gave her new material. Double Helix, Jim Watsonâs charming boyâs book of genetics and tourism, was a treasure trove for her. âYou never had Jimâs free spirit. Youâre a grub, you go to the lab like a bookkeeper to his accounts. Without verve, without creative spark.â And he lacked Jimâs tenacity. âI canât see you rushing off a train to a bookstore and swotting up a subject the way he swotted up Paulingâs Chemical Bonds in Hefferâs.â
âBlackwellâs.â
âYes, a pedantic grub. Youâd remember you had to play tennis, or have lunch or take one of your girls to the movies.â He didnât have any girls then. And was this what a grub did? She described him the way Jim described himself. Yet it worked, as did anything in his dark moods, to sap his self-confidence. Her latest find was LĂ©vi-Strauss. âYouâre a bricoleur,â she said over the Corn Flakes she âinsistedâ on buying against his lectures about protein breakfasts. âA mental garbage collector. Your life is made of left-overs. You donât plan, you donât have long views of your own. Youâve got the mind of a primitive.â He vaguely thought LĂ©vi-Strauss had wiped out the notion of the human primitive, but he knew the joys of lecturing, he waited her out. âItâs clear why youâre not an important scientist.â
Women, thought Dr. Merriwether, did have difficult times, particularly women who grew up between the Twenties and Sixties; they smelled new freedom in the air, they saw young women who enjoyed it, yet felt they themselves hadnât been prepared for it. Even scholarly, New England girls such as Sarah had been raised as charmers, dreamers. If they were almost content, they sensed they shouldnât be. Like the new blacks of the SixtiesâMerriwetherâs experience was mostly second-handâthey assigned every pain to one conspicuous wound, they were this way or that because they were women, being a woman was a misery, an inflicted misery, and who were the inflictors but men, and what man in particular but the husband, or, at least, the husband one no longer loved, that is, the man who no longer loved them. So the progression went, and women of intelligence and education were the prime sufferers or complainers, activists, gossips, haters and corrupter/liberators of others. Merriwether feared for his children. Sarah did not hear hatred in her voice, but the vitriol leaked into the childrenâs heads. Poor Sarah, yes, but also, yes, curse her, curse her blind egoism, her self-righteousness and curse her hatred.
A strange, released summer for Dr. Merriwether. Most of the day he was alone. Sarah had taken the children to her parentsâ summer place on Duck Isle, Maine. He stayed behind in Cambridge and moped about the laboratory. Most of his friends were away. Three afternoons a week, he dusted off his M.D. and did the doctoring chore for the Summer School at Holyoke Center.
For a month, he ate most meals by himself, breakfast on a stool at Zum-Zumâsâtoasted bacon rolls with strawberry jam, fresh orange juice, a terrific tonic after the winter of frozen cylinders out of the Minute Maid cans, two cups of coffee and the New York Timesâlunch at the Faculty Club, sometimes with a colleague, and dinner at the Wirthaus where he had the same table every evening, just behind a little Korean gourmand who ate nine-course dinners. (âWhere do they go?â he wondered.) The first week, he hit on an excellent golden Graves; he drank most of the bottle every night. The waitress pointed him to the eveningâs deli...