The Puzzled Heart (18 page)

Kate’s younger brother was a guest that weekend, together with his wife and young children and their nanny. Kate had agreed to attend this gathering at the insistence of her middle brother, whose engagement was being celebrated. Since he was the only brother Kate talked to in any terms other than perfunctory and coolly polite, she had agreed to his pleas to help see him through this ordeal: the family was destined to approve of his fiancée and he needed Kate’s support. The family’s approval, Kate understood, was even more daunting than their disapproval would have been.

Kate had, most unusually, for she avoided her family as much as possible, come for the entire weekend, but she had brought with her her lover—her first lover, in fact. They had met in college, lost each other for a while, and remet in graduate school. His name was Moon Mandelbaum. He was not only Jewish but certainly what her family thought of as dreadfully, horribly, “Sixties.” He played the guitar, his hair was long, he defended the student revolts, was firmly counterculture, and, unlike her family, did not defend Mayor Daley for his behavior at the Democratic convention. Quite the contrary: he had been there, and had seen the police force demonstrators backward through plate glass windows; he was not happily accepted as a witness.

Moon did not own a dinner jacket, and he refused,
with Kate’s encouragement, to don so much as a tie for the major event of the weekend, the announcement of her brother William’s engagement to the woman both she and Moon had met for the first time on their arrival. Moon was pleasant, laid-back, as the phrase went, and likely to persuade anyone annoyed with him to mellow out, take it easy, not to get excited—phrases perfectly designed to arouse all available Fanslers to fury. He and Kate swam in the ocean, played desultory tennis, and disappeared for long periods to engage in what no one in the family could for a minute either doubt or comment on.

The atmosphere was, at the outset, seething, but then, as Kate told Moon, it always was at family get-togethers, at least since the death of the Fansler parents. At this weekend, however, she had Moon to cheer her on, and her favorite brother, the only brother she liked at all, to support. It neither began nor ended as a promising weekend for anyone but Kate and Moon.

The Fansler family, comprising aunts, uncles, and an amazing assortment of cousins, was impressive, as was the house—large enough for most of them; the others were at nearby inns. Moon was astonished at the numbers. His family consisted of his mother, father, grandfather, and himself. They were all that remained of a much larger number of Austrian kin. Moon, however, watching regret and the horror of memories filter through his grandfather and parents, emerged willing to be American, looking forward.
He had been given a violin early in life, but had in his early teens transferred his musical ability, which was considerable, to the guitar. That was about all Kate knew of his background, except that he prized literature and was determined to teach it, as she did herself.

The first Kate heard of a problem was from her hostess sister-in-law, who cornered Kate during cocktails and ordered her, in no uncertain terms, not only to befriend William’s fiancée but to make her welcome. “Don’t let William fill you with any of his nonsense,” she had added. “Everyone gets cold feet at the thought of marriage, but no one pays the least attention to such things. I’m counting on you, Kate.”

This was not very clever of Kate’s sister-in-law since Kate, up to that moment, had had not the slightest idea that William was anything but happy. Now, of course, she felt called upon to seek him out and discover if there was real trouble, or only last minute qualms.

Kate was quite prepared to believe in the force of last minute qualms: she never intended to marry herself, and didn’t altogether see why anyone else bothered either, unless they were overcome with the desire for little ones. (The first doubt Kate began to have about Moon was when he showed himself delighted to sport with her nieces and nephews; when Kate objected to his loving uncle act, he only laughed and deserted the smallest Fanslers to lead her off for a swim. Kate loved the ocean.)

William, when finally cornered in the billiard room
where he was playing by himself and looking anything but bridegroom-eager, agreed to a walk along the shore. It was evening, and the beach would be largely deserted. Kate removed her evening shoes and walked barefoot through the sand. William followed suit. They left their shoes on a rock and walked close to the incoming tide, wetting their feet and their clothes. Something in this brought back to William—or so Kate surmised to Moon—their old companionship. At any rate, he began to talk.

“Do you believe in the Oedipus complex?” he asked, to get himself going. “You know, the idea that one marries someone like one’s mother.”

“ ‘I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Dad,’ ” Kate sang. “Is that what you mean?”

“That’s what I’m worried about. Dear old Dad was a bastard, no doubt about that, but he might have been a bit better if he hadn’t married Mother. I mean, alternate shrieking and sulking are hardly likely to turn a sourpuss sweet.”

“Am I to gather that you suspect Muriel”—such was his fiancée’s name—“of being like Mother, and if so, why did you ever agree to marry her?”

“That’s just it, Puss.” Without thinking, he reverted to what he had called her when they were children, since at Kate’s birth it had been explained to him that he had been given a kitten and his mother had been given Kate. “I feel like a child all over again, watching a loved and loving mother turn into a horror. Well, you remember what she came to be like, when
she wasn’t being the perfect lady. It wasn’t many years after you were born that the transformation took place, now that I think of it.”

“I daresay she hadn’t been happy to find herself pregnant again. After all, her youngest boy was six, and you were eight. I should think it would be enough to turn anyone into a crank. Not, I should add, that I ever found any reason to excuse her or to like her. I guess she left me more alone than she did you boys, at least when you were young.”

“You always seemed to slip out from under her pall. I envied you, in fact. Life was hell till we went away to boarding school.”

A wave rose against them, and Kate pulled her skirts up belatedly. She wrung them out with a laugh, and pulled William farther inshore. “What are you trying to do?” she asked him. “If Muriel is like Mother, surely you must have noticed that before now.”

“That’s what’s so odd; I didn’t. I’m not in love with her, but I didn’t expect to be. You remember the row over Deborah; I couldn’t face anything like that again. Muriel is fun; she likes to ski and the rest of it; the family took to her; she’s good-looking and she likes sex. She wanted to marry me, so why not? I know this all sounds a little cold-blooded, but I hadn’t started to think of it in this way until recently. The last few weeks, in fact.”

“Tell.”

“Our engagement was a settled thing. This weekend
was arranged. It wasn’t to be announced until next week, but everyone who had the slightest interest in the matter knew. I thought she and I would be able to relax and enjoy this time, but suddenly she began being different. Altogether different—like Mother. What’s the fancy word I’m looking for?”

“Transmogrified?”

“That’s it—turned into a monster. It began over where we would live. I’d made up my mind that it wasn’t going to be the East Side. I like the West Side. I like the people there, I like the feeling. I like Moon, by the way,” he added, clarifying his feelings about the West Side. “New Yorkers are either East Side or West Side and I’m West Side. I thought she’d agreed. But dear older brother offered to get us an apartment in his exclusive building, and I said no. She had a fit. She sulked, she screamed, she walked out on me, she hung up on me, she behaved like a bitch.”

“And?”

“I was clearly burned up when we got together, and she apologized and said it was some drugs she’d been taking for anxiety or cramps or something, and that she wasn’t really like that. We let the matter of the apartment drop, but of course it came up again and I could see she wasn’t going to give way. She wanted to live on the East Side. She wanted to live in an exclusive building.”

“The sort Jackie Kennedy lives in. No Jews.”

“Exactly. She was alternately sweet and angry. And damn it, Kate, I don’t know how to get out of it now,
after this bloody weekend and all. We got into a fight last night over something to do with the wedding—never mind what, it doesn’t matter—but suddenly I was back in the house where we grew up and Mother was screaming at me that I had to go join the Knicker-bocker Grays, or whatever the hell they were called. I learned pretty quickly that life would be hell if I didn’t do what she wanted. Can you believe it, I’ve got myself attached to a woman exactly like her? Can Freud have been right all along? Am I going crazy, Kate?”

“I’ve heard it said—don’t ask me with what veracity—that we tend to marry people like our parents, because we’ve learned to deal with that. Maybe you got caught up in that syndrome. Maybe you were just misled. Anyone can put on an act for a while, until something jolts the person into his or her ordinary behavior. Hell, Will, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do think that whatever the row, you can’t marry someone you don’t want to marry because everyone who’s anyone knows you said you would.”

“Do you think I could be wrong about her?”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

“Would you mind talking with her, sounding her out, seeing what you think?”

“I’ll talk to her if you want. I’ll ask her to play tennis. Does she play tennis?”

William nodded. “She plays everything, very well.”

“Okay, well play, we’ll talk. But don’t expect me to
see through her if she decides to beguile me. I’m not the Delphic oracle. I’m not even a Fansler, except in name. I’ve always suspected Mother of getting it on with the tutor or someone.”

“We didn’t have a tutor.”

“I know. I’m thinking of the rumors about Edith Wharton’s parentage—all nonsense, really. I’m just trying to convey the possibility that I may not be much help in figuring out what she’s like. But if you want out, William, I’ll be with you when the band begins to play.”

He hugged her for a moment, and then they walked on in silence, Kate racking her brain as to what to talk about to Muriel.

As it turned out, while they volleyed the ball back and forth warming up for a game, Muriel did most of the talking. She exclaimed about the beauty of this house, the hospitality of the Fanslers, the fun of knowing such a family.

“Fun?” Kate had asked before she could stop herself.

“Oh, yes. They’re all such warm, friendly people and have made me feel so welcome. Shall we toss for serve? Rough or smooth?”

“Rough,” Kate said, she hoped not prophetically. It was smooth. Muriel chose to serve.

Kate was a fairly good tennis player, and the two found themselves evenly matched. The first set was three-three when Kate admitted to thirst, and they
sat down together in a small pavilion beside the court and helped themselves to drinks from a refrigerator there. After all, Kate reminded herself, the point was not tennis, which she couldn’t seem to keep her mind on anyway, but was rather to get to know Muriel.

“You find the Fanslers more comfortable to be with than I do, it seems,” Kate said in what she hoped was a provocative manner.

“But they’re all wonderful,” Muriel said. “I know William has had his problems with them too, but I think it’s always hard to get one’s family into perspective, and I’ve offered to help him to get a better sense of proportion.”

“Do you have your own family in perspective?” Kate asked. “If so, I envy you.”

“It’s an altogether different matter,” Muriel said with some asperity. “My family was a mess. Not a bit like yours. Altogether unlike yours.”

Kate stared at her.

“My father drank, heavily,” Muriel said, staring at her polished fingernails. “We all got away as soon as possible. My mother couldn’t deal with him and was so afraid of offending him that we were on our own. An awful family, really, not at all like yours.”

Kate could not think of a sensible answer to this, and offered none. They could hardly get into a slanging match about whose family was the worse mess. All that was clear was that Kate’s family had had money and Muriel’s had not. Kate tried to think generously:
if she had never had enough money, would she not also find the Fanslers wonderfully agreeable? The question was, however, Kate reminded herself, whether Muriel was in love with William or with the Fansler family’s social standing.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Muriel said, twirling her tennis racquet. “You’re thinking I only want William for his money. Well, I admit, his money’s a part of it. But I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love just because he had money.”

“But would you marry someone you did love who had no money?” Kate idly asked.

“Of course,” Muriel said. “William’s being lovable came first. Shall we go on with the game, or was it only an excuse to talk to me?”

“I did want to talk to you,” Kate said. “But let’s finish the game, by all means.”

William came to Kate’s room while she was changing for dinner. She had spent the remainder of the afternoon in her tennis clothes, wandering around and thinking. She had, in the course of this, been intercepted by Moon, and she had confided her problem to him. In the end she told him everything, including her instinctive dislike and distrust of Muriel, and William’s fears.

“What’s worrying me,” she said to Moon, “is not that she’s interested in his money. Why shouldn’t she be? It’s that I can’t get over the feeling that’s all she’s interested in. Also, she isn’t very smart. If she were,
she would have spoken to me differently—do you know what I mean, Moon?—she would have figured out the sort of person I was. It’s clear she hasn’t really listened to William, and can’t believe that anyone lucky enough to be a Fansler wouldn’t understand someone else’s longing to be one too. I don’t think she’ll make William happy, but I hate making decisions for other people. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know what to do.”