Commonwealth(65)

Eric was trying to turn the evening back into a dinner party. It occurred to Franny then that of course he wouldn’t know who Albie was, he wouldn’t know who she was either, other than Leo’s girlfriend. Because when Leo called her his inspiration, and he always did, no one thought he meant it literally. The story of two couples moving in next door to each other, their awful children, that was nothing more than the plot of a novel as far as Eric was concerned. Franny wanted to go to Leo, to reassure him, but Marisol had opened the door from the kitchen. Everyone could hear the voices coming in from the front hallway, so many voices! Hello! Hello! the sound of car doors, of laughter, the sound of Ariel’s voice calling out for her father.

*

If Beverly or Bert were to tell the story now, they would say they divorced after Cal died. And of course that was true, they had, but in this instance the word “after” would be misleading. It linked together the death and the divorce as if they were cause and effect, as if Beverly and Bert were one of those couples who, upon a child’s death, are led down such separate paths of grief that they can no longer find their way back to one another. This was not the case.

Bert blamed Beverly for leaving the six children alone on the farm with Ernestine and his parents, for not telling anyone she was taking his mother’s car into Charlottesville to sit through two back-to-back showings of Harry & Tonto. (She hadn’t planned to see it twice, but the theater was so empty and quiet and cool. She had cried at the end of the picture and all through the credits, and rather than walk into the lobby with her mascara running she just decided to stay where she was.) Did he really think she supervised the children every minute? Did he think that had she stayed home that afternoon, after reading another book up in their room, another magazine, taking one more nap, after she had officially died of boredom she might have gone with them to the barn and curried the horses? The truth was she left the children alone in Arlington too, she left them in order to preserve her sanity. At least at the farm there was adult supervision. Did his parents bear no responsibility for what happened on their property? And what about Ernestine? Beverly had left the children in Ernestine’s care even if she hadn’t told Ernestine that’s what she was doing. Ernestine had more parental sense than Beverly and Bert and Bert’s parents all combined, and Ernestine thought it was fine for them to walk the half a mile to the barn.

Bert should not have insisted that Beverly and the children stay at his parents’ house in the country for the week while he took the station wagon back to Arlington for work. If he thought that the children needed an escort to the barn then he should have stuck around and escorted them himself. Beverly didn’t want to be a guest in his parents’ house. They were forever asking the children about their wonderful mother—How’s Teresa? What’s Teresa doing now? I hope your mother knows she’s always welcome to come and stay with us.

The children didn’t want to stay with Bert’s parents either. They had been much happier at the Pinecone, where they had stayed in summers past. At Bert’s parents’ house they had to take their shoes off at the back door and wipe their feet with a towel. Because they weren’t allowed in the living room under any circumstances, they had inevitably made a game out of dashing through at top speed on dares whenever they heard someone coming down the hall. A porcelain figurine of an English gentleman and his wolfhound was knocked from an end table and smashed.

Bert’s parents didn’t want them there. They had made the offer of this extended and highly unusual visit in hopes of seeing their son, not his children or his second wife or her children. But then Bert left.

Ernestine didn’t want them there. She couldn’t have. It meant eight extra mouths to feed (seven after Bert decamped), piles of laundry, games to invent, fights to break up, employers to soothe. The load fell heaviest on Ernestine’s shoulders and yet she alone carried her burden without complaint.

Bert went back to Arlington because under the circumstances of a normal work week it was expensive, impractical, and stimulatingly dangerous to find a place to continue his affair with his paralegal. Linda Dale (two first names; she did not answer to Linda) said for once she would like to have dinner together in a restaurant like regular people, go to bed in a real bed, wake up in the middle of the night and make love while they were still half asleep, and then do it again in the shower the next morning. Bert was not crazy about Linda Dale, she was petulant and demanding and very young, but she talked like this on the phone when he called the office, so what was he supposed to do? Stay at the farm?

He was in the office when his mother called to tell him about Cal. He jumped in his car and broke every speed limit, making the two-hour drive to the hospital in Charlottesville in just under one and a half like any parent would do. There wasn’t time to go home and straighten up the house. He never thought of it.

Sometimes it was hard for Beverly and Bert to remember what had destroyed them. When Beverly wept over the affair, the unfamiliar red panties surfacing in her unmade bed, Bert was aghast. The death of a child trumped infidelity. The death of a child trumped everything. It was a logic Beverly could nearly embrace. If pain and loss could be ranked then surely Bert had won and this was the time for them to pull together, for the sake of their marriage, or their remaining children. But accepting the circumstances didn’t turn out to be the same as forgiveness. They bound themselves together with a little tape and soldiered on, and even though their marriage held for nearly six years after Cal’s death, neither of them would remember it that way. They would say that their separate griefs had broken them apart much earlier.