“You were quoting nonstop.”
A hand fluttered to her curls. “Oh, was I?”
“These beans are awful,” Frieda said.
United for once, her hosts glared at her.
“I was just making conversation,” Frieda protested. “Listen, tomorrow night I’ll do the cooking.”
Soon she was making their breakfasts as well as their dinners, running up early in the morning to start coffee. Amanda and Ben enjoyed sleeping late. Frieda cleaned up too. Ben liked coming home to a well-kept apartment. Each afternoon he sat down at his dusted typewriter with a vigorous feeling. Worthy pages began to pile up on the table beside the machine. He felt more and more benevolent toward Hawthorne’s first novel. The great author himself had repudiated Fanshawe—had even cast all available copies into the flames — but he, Dr. B. Stewart, would rescue the work, would reveal it as the precursor, however flawed, of the later masterpieces. It was a help on these afternoons to know that there was a bowl of strawberries in the refrigerator, and a pound cake on the counter. Frieda herself was never in the way.
“All daughters should be like you,” Ben said one night.
Frieda flushed. Amanda frowned at him.
“All younger sisters, I mean,” he said, getting the same response. “Silent partners? What do you consider yourself, toots?”
“A helpmeet,” Frieda said.
“Like Phoebe in Seven Gables?”
“Yes.” She had been doing her homework.
Every Friday the three of them went out for pizza and a movie. Every Tuesday Frieda went off with her aunt to visit another aunt, and Amanda and Ben were left to amuse themselves. They took the girl’s absences with the same good nature as they took her presence. Sometimes they talked about her devotion to them.
“She adores you,” Amanda said.
“She adores you,” Ben returned politely.
“She adores us both. My exuberance. Your scholarly wit. It’s wonderful, being adored. But whatever will Frieda do back on West End Avenue with those two aesthetes her parents?”
“I’ll call her every so often,” Ben said. “I’ll come up from the Village and treat her to a concert. I’ll buy her tea afterward, like an uncle.”
“Where?” Amanda asked.
“At the Palm Court,” said the expansive Ben.
“Will you really do that for Frieda?” Amanda asked unjealously.
It was midnight. They had just made love. Mandy in a long nightshirt sat on the porch glider looking at the moonlit streetscape of three-decker houses, each with its maple tree. Ben kissed her, then stood up with his back to the scene and leaned against the railing. “I don’t know if I’ll really do anything for Frieda.” He yawned. “I can’t look past this moment.”
But that was untrue. He was looking past this moment at this moment. Gazing at the tumbled young woman before him, he could see clearly another version of that young woman, wearing a cap and blazer as befitted a college girl. The maples were yellowing. Amanda waved good-bye. He saw himself, also purposefully clad, headed back to New York and the intense, exophthalmic psychiatric social worker whom destiny no doubt had in store for him. He groaned.
“We’ll always be friends,” Amanda soulfully promised.
It became Ben’s turn to do the dinner-table lectures.
“Hawthorne had a surprisingly gloomy view of life, considering how conventionally domiciled he was. That supportive wife, those devoted children. Yet his point of view remains tragic. Especially in The Marble Faun, with its plot of murder and paganism, its theme of sin and suffering, does he—”
“Supportive wife?” Amanda sniffed. “Sophia Hawthorne was a milksop, if you ask me. Letting him wallow in free love at Brook Farm while she waited celibately in Salem.”
“There is no indication of sexual irregularity in the Brook Farm documents.”
“I can read between the lines.”
“Nathaniel considered himself saved by his marriage.”
“Sophia knew herself ruined.”
“They went off to Italy, didn’t they?” Frieda said. “What a pair of nitwits. Please have some more bouillabaisse.”
Ben considered arguing further but chose the bouillabaisse instead. Mandy’s sassy comments did serve to illuminate the novels, in which placid arrangements within the house were threatened by the turbulence without. Only away from the hearth could the moral order be upset. This seemed particularly true of Fanshawe, which was now revealed to him as a morality tale: domestic continuity triumphing over unregulated passion. Afternoons, sitting in the Cunninghams’ dining room, Ben felt the rightness of his position. In their comfortable place it was possible for him to gaze long and hard at Hawthorne’s devils. Frieda’s lemonade helped too.
The summer was drawing to a close. Late one hot August night, Ben and Amanda sat on the porch drinking wine and watching the stars over the three-deckers. Amanda was on the glider, Ben on a canvas chair.
For a while they were silent. Then: “We’ve been happy here,” Amanda began.
“Of late we have not been miserable,” Ben allowed.
“So happy,” she said again.
He refrained from further comment.
“But would you mind terribly if I left a bit earlier than we’d planned? Say, just before Labor Day weekend? Because I have an invitation.”
He examined his heart. Certainly there was a twinge. “An invitation? From that self-centered jackass you see at school, I suppose. He’s back from abroad?”
“His family has the loveliest house at the Vineyard. Would you mind, Ben?”
Well, would he? Her eyes glittered at him. Oh, the darling. “I’ll mind a little,” Ben said truthfully. “But I myself have an invitation to Fire Island,” he lied. “So go, sweetheart.”
“Come sit beside me,” came her soft voice.
He found his way to the glider. He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “‘What we did had a consecration of its own,’” he whispered.
“Poor Hester.”
“We have been happy here,” he said.
“Like an old married couple,” she said.
“Or a brother and sister.”
“It’s the same thing. The best marriages have a strong incestuous component.”
“Is that so?” he murmured into the side of her neck.
“That’s so. The best marriages have complementarity rather than similarity. The best marriages have a sense of the past as well as a sense of the future. The best marriages—”
“The best marriages,” said Ben, suddenly enlightened, “have a maid.”
Frieda hated to cry. Instead she was baking a Queen of Sheba cake. “I thought you’d get married,” she loudly complained, “and here you are splitting. You’ve ruined my summer.”
“Shh,” Amanda said. “Ben is trying to work.”
Ben, in the living room, sent up a corroborating clatter on the keys. Then he resumed his eavesdropping.
“…madwomen in the family, and certain inherited disorders in Ben’s,” Amanda was explaining. “Gingivitis, that sort of thing. No, no, it would have been impossible. Not to mention illegal, Ben being already married to my aunt.”
“Shove it,” Frieda said.
“The place looks wonderful,” Amanda went on. “I hope the Cunninghams are grateful. We certainly are. We’ll miss you.”
“Won’t you miss each other?”
“Oh, excessively!” said Amanda, forcing Ben the didact to shout, “Exceedingly!” after which he rushed into the kitchen and with promiscuous joy embraced both girls.
Hat Trick
Boys are such boys,” Marcie moaned. “Adolescent, locked into latency, infantile.”
“Neonatal?” said Sallyann.