Daphne thought that friendship carried with it an enormous responsibility. She had not always thought that, she had learned that. As a girl she had wanted a lot of “friends,” but as she grew older she became more careful—not unfriendly, and many people in Westhampton would call her a friend—but more cautious about becoming intimate. It seemed to Daphne that true friendship involved a form of intimacy, in some cases an intimacy different from but more naked than that of marriage, for there were things you would tell a friend that you would never tell your husband. Things about former lovers, or jealousies or fears or fantasies or even just foolish feminine thoughts about your thighs. Or the time when you, married, were at the grocery store during another routine day and a young man in line looked at you and then smiled at you and then offered to carry your groceries for you and tried to talk to you, so that for one moment in the middle of a day during which you only thought: Dry cleaning, get the tires checked, go to the bank, groceries, you suddenly thought: Oh, I am still an attractive woman! how nice, how nice, if I were free and single I would be able to get to know that handsome man who is now getting into his Porsche; if that happened, and of course it did happen, you could not tell your husband. It would seem as though you had somehow been unfaithful, flirtatious—cheap; he would be angry, or, worse, he would look scornful (Christ, my wife’s thrilled because some creep in a grocery store talked to her; where’s her sense of dignity?). When all the time you had been looking at your grocery list and at the items piled in your cart and wondering whether or not to buy a candy bar and had looked up to see that man studying you, with interest in his eyes. When this happened, you could not tell your husband, but you could tell a friend, and you needed a friend who would understand this appropriately, who could understand because it had happened to her too, so she would not think that you derived pleasure from it because you didn’t love your husband. It was so nice to have a friend who was your equal in experience and who shared your values; and it was so rare.
And it was such a responsibility. When you met a person, and the chance to become a real friend arose, there were decisions to make immediately: Do I want to know this person’s secrets? All of them? Do I want to tell her mine? Do I want her to help me—and then will I be obligated? Do I want to help her?
But of course finding a true friend was in many ways like finding a lover, or rather, not just a lover, but a true love. Chemistry was involved: it often happened at once, out of your conscious control, your body went ahead and did it for you, you liked the person at once, that was it. You met your friend and could tell her everything, hear everything, help and be helped.
That was the way, strangely enough, that Daphne felt now about Jack Hamilton. She had never felt that way about a man before. Her friends had always been women. And she could not pretend to herself that she wasn’t also sexually attracted to him—very much so. But there would never be any question of an affair; he was so much in love with his wife, and Carey Ann was so flawlessly beautiful, a walking centerfold of a girl, and Daphne was so much older, she was fifteen years older than Jack, and twenty-two years older than Carey Ann—she was old enough to be Carey Ann’s mother! Oh, how embarrassing even to have sexual thoughts about Jack Hamilton. But there was no doubt that the instinct was there, the surge, the joyous, even gleeful sense of discovery every time she saw Jack Hamilton, and it was true that when she came home from work every day she felt buoyed up and cheerful rather than tired, anticipating the moment when Jack would come jogging through the tunnel of trees up to her front door for a quick drink and a friendly chat.
Her friendship with Pauline White had not come hot and quick, in an explosion; it had been more of an accretion, like a tree growing its rings of years. The last time she had felt this sort of triumphant fireworks sort of friendship had been when she had met Laura.
That had been in 1966. Almost twenty years ago! Daphne was twenty-seven and Joe was twenty-nine, and had finished his doctorate in English literature and had been hired to teach at Westhampton, in the very department where Jack Hamilton now taught, where Hudson Jennings still taught and was now chairman. Daphne and Joe had just moved to Westhampton from Amherst and had bought their first house and were stunned with what seemed to be the beginning of their real grown-up life. They weren’t wealthy, but they could eat something more now than tuna-fish casseroles and they could unpack their wedding presents. They hadn’t even seen a lot of the loot for four years; it had been packed away in storage while they lived in tiny rented apartments. They hadn’t realized they had so much.
They were barely able to buy a little old “colonial” in a good neighborhood; they were able to afford it because it had been owned by an impossibly old brother and sister and the sister finally died, leaving the brother to sell the house and move to a rest home. The outside of the house, which was red brick with blue shutters, was fine, but the inside hadn’t been painted or redecorated for thousands of years.
That first semester in Westhampton had been a frazzling time for Joe, who was trying so hard to do everything perfectly so he could get tenure; Daphne wanted to be there when he got home from work or for lunch or dinner to listen to all he had to tell her. Daphne didn’t know what she wanted to do—she didn’t think she wanted to start commuting for her Ph.D. work now, not when Joe needed support and peace and quiet at home so he could concentrate on his work. She didn’t want to go to work either, in some secretarial job; she had just done that for four years. She enjoyed being able to stay in her robe, finishing her coffee in the mornings; she enjoyed watching the old house spring to new life under her hands. Now when Daphne tried to remember that first semester … when she had no women friends … what came into her mind first and most vividly was the pattern of wallpaper she had finally chosen for the kitchen, a luscious melon-colored print of basketed fruit—apricots, plums, pears, apples, grapes, all shades of orange and lavender and ruby. She had papered the walls with that, then trimmed the woodwork in melon-colored paint, and washed and painted the inside of the cupboards, even the insides of the top cupboards that no one could see. She ordered quilted fabric that matched the wallpaper and made cushions for the captain’s chairs as well as place mats and napkins. She made crisp heavy white cotton curtains for the windows. She played classical music on her stereo while she worked, and let her head fill with daydreams. She began to think that being a “homemaker” might be very pleasant.
Yet she knew she was lonely for women friends. She had had good friends at U. Mass. and still phoned them occasionally, but her life was now centered in this town, in this house. Joe wanted the inviolable security of the tenured faculty members, the complacency with which they moved through the world, the respect. Joe and Daphne yearned to be like those tenured faculty, all of whom, it seemed, had an old Jag or Rolls or MG or at least a Cadillac that had belonged to their parents, all of whom had summer places on the Vineyard or the Maine coast. The couple the Millers admired and envied the most, like everyone else at the college and, for that matter, in the town, was Hudson and Claire Jennings.
The Jenningses were just a few years older than the Millers, but they had tenure, the house on the Vineyard, the antique auto in the garage. Hudson was handsome, in a giraffish way, with long legs and limbs and long-eyelashed huge gentle brown eyes. He had thick dark hair that fell over his forehead, and he was kind. He was also brilliant and well-liked, and it puzzled Daphne that Hudson was married to Claire, who was rather large and awkward and mannish in an English, Virginia Woolf–intellectual sort of way. Claire was very pale. She had blond hair that she wore in a twist at the back of her head, and a long face from which her lower front teeth protruded somewhat. Her eyes were a piercing blue, with heavy lids, and she radiated intelligence and “breeding.”
The younger faculty, all Anglophiles, said only Claire, of all the people they’d ever met, was “the real thing.” She knew all about birds and flowers and dogs. Claire and Hudson had no children, but somehow that seemed right to those who knew them. Claire and Hudson seemed to have sprung full-blown from the womb, married, aristocratic, educated, elite, and terribly self-possessed. Claire had a long thin mouth that seldom moved, and a remarkable smile, during which her lips did not move sideways as others’ did, but simply turned up slightly at the corners while her eyelids drooped down correspondingly over her great long oblong blue eyes. So one never knew if one was amusing Claire or boring her into a state of agony. But this all gave her tremendous power and everyone wanted to please her, and Hudson was erudite and full of clever tales, so the Jenningses were invited everywhere.
When Joe and Daphne received the invitation to the Jenningses’ for New Year’s Eve, they were wild with delight. They felt like the Chosen, and wouldn’t have traded places with anyone in the world. The Jenningses lived on one of the most prestigious streets in this prestigious town. They had a great tidy French Provincial set in three acres of lawn and garden. Joe and Daphne nearly swooned with pleasure when they were shown into the library—the library! And it was paneled in mahogany, with shelves and shelves of books and hunting or seascape oils hung around the fireplace and an old but not shabby Persian rug on the slate floor. This was how all college professors should live, the Millers thought: this is how they would live one day.
At one end of the room, on an elaborately carved table, stood oversize art books and small brass or porcelain sculptures set out very formally on its surface. At the other end, by the window, was a walnut drinks cart with a silver ice bucket and some ornate crystal glasses and a bottle of Dry Sack. Daphne and Joe were just settling into a deep sofa before the fire when Hudson came into the room, bringing another couple from the college with him, the Krafts.
Otto taught German; he and Laura, whose real name was Hannelore, were both from Germany. Otto was stocky and bald even though he was only in his early thirties, with ice-cold blue eyes and amazing white teeth. He would have been thrillingly handsome except that he looked and sounded and carried himself like a Nazi. He was stiff and his speech was ponderous. In contrast, Laura seemed warm and bright and vivid, with her long dark hair held back with a paisley silk scarf and perfume wafting from her. When she crossed her legs her black evening skirt made slithery sounds as it exposed her legs almost to the hip. She was wearing patterned black hose and her thighs were long and slender; all during their friendship Daphne would envy Laura her thighs. During that long evening when Daphne and Laura first met, Daphne didn’t know whom she wanted to look at the most: dark-haired, vibrant Laura, or cool, blue-blooded Claire, or gorgeous, gentle Hudson. She tried not to stare. She tried not to feel tongue-tied. Everyone else seemed so cosmopolitan and self-assured.
They discussed college matters and college gossip. They talked about the major events of that year, and their hopes for what was to come. Claire held forth at length on the tradition of celebrating the new year, which was a celebration of the victory of order over chaos. Cultures had always celebrated the new year, she told them, as a time of purging and mortification in order to have renewal and revitalization. William the Conqueror had decreed in the eleventh century that January first was the start of the new year, but in medieval times the new year had started, more appropriately, in the spring, when the earth was coming back to life. The noisemaking, Claire thought, was probably originally from the Chinese, who exploded firecrackers and lit torches to frighten off the evil spirits.
She is so learned, Daphne thought, looking at her hostess, who sat at ease in her wing chair, her dogs at her feet. But could she be friends with Claire? She didn’t think so. Claire seemed so … humorless. Perhaps, though, Daphne was being unfair, perhaps Claire was in pain. It was Hudson who served them their drinks and brought in the tray of cheese and crackers, and Claire had said, with a wave of her hand, “Hudson has to do these things, you see; I have a bad back.” Perhaps that accounted for Claire’s stiffness. I wonder if she can enjoy sex, Daphne thought, and looked over at Hudson, who to her horror was just at that moment looking at her as if he were reading her mind. She felt her face blush and immediately looked back at Claire, freshening her face with an expression of interest.
“… the Scots have their own tradition of serving haggis on New Year’s Eve,” Claire was saying. “Have you ever eaten haggis?” Without pausing for a response, she went on. “It’s made from a pudding of sheep’s innards and oatmeal and other such things, stuffed into a sheep’s stomach, and slit open at the table.”
Daphne looked away again, this time at Laura, and to her surprise, Laura smiled and made a funny face, rolling her eyes. Daphne grinned and looked away. She didn’t want to be disrespectful, not here. But she was glad to see that smile of Laura’s; it reminded her that this was New Year’s Eve, and the tradition in the twentieth-century United States, she wanted to say to Claire, was to drink too much and dance and party and eat, not to attend lectures. Daphne shifted in her chair. How old was Claire anyway? She and Hudson both seemed to be in their early thirties, but Claire acted as if she was and always had been some petrified grande dame. How could she make Hudson happy? For he was not as deadly as she. Daphne looked at Hudson as he sat in his wing chair across from Claire. Did Claire ever walk in front of this elaborate fireplace and kneel on this gorgeous Persian rug and unzip her handsome husband’s expensive gray flannel trousers and lean down to put her mouth—Hudson looked at Daphne then, and again she found herself blushing, terrified that he could read her thoughts. She looked down at her hands. Well, Claire probably didn’t do that, she thought, because of her bad back.
The night seemed to go on forever. Now and then the others managed to say a few words, but mostly Claire held forth, while Hudson sat smiling benevolently at her. At midnight, Hudson opened a bottle of champagne and they all solemnly toasted the new year and each pair of spouses exchanged chaste kisses. I’ve got to get out of here, Daphne thought, before I turn to stone.
A few minutes after midnight, Laura surprised them all (even, if one could judge by the look on his face, Otto) by standing up and saying with a smile, “I’m so sorry, but we have to go now. We promised the baby-sitter we’d be home as soon after midnight as possible.”
When Hudson and Claire didn’t seem dismayed by this announcement, Daphne said, “I’m afraid we must be going along too,” and rose.
Claire didn’t get up—her back—but Hudson saw them to the door and handed out their coats and accepted their thanks for a lovely evening, and finally all four were out in the invigorating black cold of January 1, 1967. Daphne felt almost electrified by the change—movement, walking in the open air to the car, after sitting for so long without moving—cold air after the heat of the stuffy room; she felt vividly awake, and yearned for something more now, like someone who has awakened from a long sleep and is hungry, or wants to throw off the covers and rush eagerly into the day.
Daphne felt warm pressure on her arm, and there, wrapped in her black Persian-lamb coat (a present, Daphne would learn later, from Laura’s wealthy German mother-in-law—and so soft), her dark hair falling around her face, her smile like a candle in the dark, was Laura, suddenly hugging Daphne to her. “Do you believe her? Good God. Listen, you and Joe come to our house now,” she whispered, and told Daphne the address.
In the car on the way to the Krafts’, Joe and Daphne exploded with laughter about the horrible evening at the Jenningses’, but as they pulled into the Krafts’ driveway, Joe cautioned Daphne not to say too much; he wouldn’t want any of his criticisms to get back to Hudson. And Hudson, he said again, was not like that at the college. He was enjoyable and took a great deal of interest in his colleagues and the younger faculty. He had heard that Claire had a reputation for being formal—and now they knew she deserved it.
It was late, though, and Daphne was tired, and the Krafts’ house, at first glance, from the outside, disappointed Daphne, who had been expecting something—what?—luscious, after meeting Laura. The porch light illuminated a traditional commonplace split-level ranch house, the kind of house Daphne liked least in all the world. She thought they were so mediocre, and this house was in a little cul-de-sac of similar split-levels. It just didn’t seem right to Daphne that an originally European college professor with a beautiful wife should live in a ranch house. Now the exhaustion of the whole late night came over her and for a moment she didn’t think she could find the energy to get out of the car to go up to the brick-and-stucco building.
But the inside of the Krafts’ house was a wonderful surprise. It was like a museum of modern art, except that it was comfortable. Everything was black, red, or white, except for the furniture, which was teak. The back wall of the living room was entirely glass, looking out over a forest, and hanging against the glass were prisms and multicolored sun disks and an amazing leaded-glass gargoyle that Laura said had come from the window of a ruined fifteenth-century German church. There were plenty of comfortable seats in the living room near the fire that Otto lit, and Daphne and Joe sank down into the plush receptive warmth of the long, deep black leather sofa.
While Otto walked the baby-sitter home, Laura brought out champagne and beautifully shaped pottery plates laden with Brie and Camembert and Edam cheese and salamis and sausages and small sweet pickles and olives and a liver pâté and a fish pâté and salty chips and sweet dark pumpernickel bread and speckled mustard. There were clever little plates and small knives and forks and spoons, and finally there was a large silver platter with eleven different kinds of elaborate cookies.
“My God,” Daphne said, “were you planning a party?”
“Oh”—Laura laughed—“no, not at all. Otto just enjoys eating and I love to cook. This is just stuff we have around. But of course for Christmas I always make lots of different cookies and breads.”
It was a feast, and it was a delight to relax at last in this bright room, to laugh and drink a little too much champagne and talk and eat. Daphne and Joe stayed until four in the morning. Joe and Otto started talking college politics, college policies, and Laura moved close to Daphne, who sat with her shoes kicked off and her feet tucked under her. That night Daphne came under Laura’s spell. Laura that night became her inspiration and teacher. She had never met anyone like Laura, who was so beautiful, and who touched people when she spoke to them, and was always touching herself while she talked, stroking her long hair or twirling a curl around her finger or slipping her hand just inside the neckline of her black silk blouse and gently, absentmindedly stroking her collarbone or turning the rings on her slender fingers. Daphne was envious of Laura’s confidence about what was important in the world.
“Do you have any children?” she asked Daphne as she leaned up against the sofa. Strong traces of her German accent ornamented her speech, and this made her seem mysterious and cosmopolitan and exotic. Whenever she said “were,” she pronounced it “wear”: “We wear happy.” Laughter always seemed to be underlying Laura’s words, laughter or song, for her voice was lilting. Her husband’s words plopped from his mouth, heavy pellets, each piece separate and weighty, but Laura’s speech was music; it flowed and dipped and thrilled; it was sexual.
“No,” Daphne said. She was going to say that she wasn’t certain she even wanted children, but before she could speak, Laura leaned close to her and put her hand on Daphne’s arm, imploring, almost caressing. Laura’s hand was so soft and smooth and warm and her perfume was enchanting.
“Oh, but you must have children,” Laura said. “Daphne, it is the most wonderful thing, you can’t imagine! You must come up and see our little Hanno while he is sleeping. You will see what I mean—we must have children, in order to believe in heaven and innocence and trust and love and all the good things, all the real things, to offset all the grisly dribble our husbands deal with, with all their ghastly never-ending words.” Laura rose and took Daphne’s hand and pulled her up. “Come up with me, come, you’ll see what I mean.”
Daphne had her tall sliver of a champagne glass in one hand, and Laura had her glass in one hand, and, still holding hands, Laura pulled Daphne along through the house and up the stairs. The hallway was so marvelous with all its lithographs and black-and-white photos of the Kraft family at various places—Daphne glimpsed one as she passed in which all three seemed to be sitting on a beach completely naked—that only one fraction of her mind was able to point out that it had been years and years and years since she had held hands for so long a time with a woman. But Laura was both like a child, a childish best friend, and like some kind of fairy or witch or sorceress who was leading Daphne into sacred regions.
And it was a sacred region, for as Daphne stood over little Hanno’s bed with Laura, still holding hands, she saw that what Laura had said was right. Here was what life was all about—the goodness of life, in any case. Here, on a small yellow wooden bed with a yellow cover that Laura called a “puffy-puff,” was an angelic-looking little child, a yellow-haired child with rosy cheeks, sleeping a pure and peaceful sleep. He was three years old. His room was gently illuminated by a glowing night-light of a little shepherd boy and two lambs. A brightly painted dappled rocking horse stood in one corner, and wooden soldiers, wooden trucks, fat furry teddy bears, lined the walls. A small yellow bookcase was filled with children’s books and wooden puzzles. It was a lovely nursery, warm on this January night with the thick white carpet and the curtains pulled shut against the cold and dark. And the little boy lay there sleeping, no angles or sharpness, all softness and curves and peace.
Daphne realized that she was still holding hands with Laura, but it seemed appropriate somehow, for this was a moving moment for Daphne and it seemed to her that some kind of power and significance flowed like a warm current from her new friend into her own being. The little dark nursery was like a primeval cave, and Laura, standing so close to her that Daphne was embraced by her perfume, was the goddess of fertility and life and peace and domestic contentment. Here was the heart of the world, and Daphne came to know that profoundly, as any parent does when looking down on her sleeping child: here is the heart of the world.
After that night Daphne didn’t let a day go by without at least talking to her friend on the phone. That night, after the two women tiptoed from Hanno’s room, they went into the kitchen, ostensibly to brew coffee but really to talk about gynecological things: Laura’s pregnancy, Daphne’s kind of birth control, and when Laura began to describe in detail Hanno’s birth (she had had natural childbirth and had nursed Hanno immediately), Daphne thought she hadn’t come across anything as violently, passionately bloody and frighteningly allegorical since she had read Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Something sprang up inside Daphne that night: an appetite for blood and gore and physicality that was related to sex but that was selfish and self-centered. Suddenly she could not get enough of hearing about being pregnant and having babies. Suddenly she understood that being a woman was a deliciously juicy and complicated and slightly underhanded thing.
They shared so much, so effortlessly. It was as if they were sisters. By Thanksgiving of that first year, Laura had become the dearest friend Daphne had ever had. Laura was just a few years older than Daphne, and a few years ahead of her—she had decorated her house, she had gotten to know people in the town, she had had a child. But it wasn’t just that that made it seem natural for Laura to sweep Daphne off into real life; it was that Laura made ordinary life seem delicious, and Daphne wanted to learn to do that too.
Laura knew of the fabric mills near Greenfield where materials for draperies or pillows or clothes could be bought at amazingly low prices. And she knew which materials would last and which would fade or tear or stretch out of shape. Even though her taste in furnishings was modern, she seemed to know exactly the sort of thing that would go best in Daphne and Joe’s house, which Daphne was slowly furnishing in pine antiques. Laura would put Hanno in his car seat in the back of their Mercedes (another gift from the wealthy mother-in-law) and stick a banana in his hand and drive Daphne up into Vermont, where they would spend the day looking in antiques shops and secondhand stores. “Look,” she would say to Daphne, pulling her over to a chest or dry sink that was layered and clotted and scarred with various coats of paint, “this is pine under here.”
“Yes, but all the paint—” Daphne would begin, confused.
“Well, we strip the paint off!” Laura told her. “Silly. Haven’t you ever stripped anything before? It’s a terrible stinky job, but you find treasures underneath. And it’s so much fun to stain it just the color you want, to polish it up.”
Laura loved to sew; she helped Daphne choose materials, and helped her find patterns that were most becoming to her. It seemed to Daphne that Laura was brutally honest: “No,” she would say in a dress store, “you don’t look good in that. You have to be careful—big and white and freckled like you are—or you look like a peasant woman.” Once, early that first summer, when they were in the dressing room of an enormous cutrate clothing store in eastern New York State, trying on swimsuits, Laura put her arm around Daphne and pulled her so that they stood side by side staring at themselves in the wall-length mirror. “My!” Laura said. “Just think! If we had your breasts and my thighs, what a perfect woman we would be!” And she threw back her head and laughed.
Laura loved to cook. Nothing seemed formidable to her. The first night that the Krafts had the Millers—and the Jenningses and two other couples from the college—to dinner, Laura served, among other things, a succulent Beef Wellington. Daphne had never eaten Beef Wellington before, and thought it was the most fabulous thing she’d ever tasted. She asked Laura for the recipe, and the next day Laura brought it over—six typewritten pages of exacting notes.
“I can’t do this!” Daphne wailed as Laura sat across from her in the kitchen, bouncing Hanno on her knee. “I can’t stand around twisting mushrooms in a towel—six cups of mushrooms! That would take forever!”
“Oh, you are so American,” Laura said. “Everything must be quick and easy.”
“How do you do it?” Daphne asked. “How could you have made this and taken care of Hanno too? It must have taken you all day.”
“Oh, it took longer than that, of course,” Laura said, smiling smugly. “These things do take time. But I make Hanno some play dough so he is happy doing what Mommy is doing, and I put some Viennese waltzes on the stereo, and the house is full of music, and then it is a pleasant way to spend the afternoon.”
Nothing seemed too much for Laura, nothing daunted her. She seemed capable of giving artistic attention to every dimension of everyday life. She dressed little Hanno, who was already a storybook child, in gray leather “lederhosen” with suspenders, and a thick pale blue sweater and exquisitely patterned socks she had knit herself. She crocheted an elaborate, dramatic black fringed shawl that, when wrapped around her shoulders, hung almost to the ground and made her look like a Gypsy, so sexual and exotic. Daphne admired it so much that one week later—just one week!—Laura presented Daphne with a shawl just like it, except in red, which Laura said would be better than black for Daphne’s coloring. Daphne in her shawl looked mythologically beautiful, a princess, a queen, a sorceress. There was something so ancient and eternal about the way she and Laura looked, wrapped in those shawls, which swayed gently when they moved and enclosed their bodies in color as if in a cocoon from which they might emerge as changelings. Daphne had never had any piece of clothing she looked better in or loved more than that shawl—even now.
Laura made being a wife and mother seem luxurious. Over the weeks and months that Laura and Daphne talked, Daphne began to see why it was that Laura loved her daily life so much. Laura had been born in 1936. She had been a child during the war, not a baby, too young to appreciate what was happening, and not a teenager, when she would have been somehow involved, but a child of five and six and seven and eight, old enough to have some inkling of what was going on but no sense of control. She had lived in Hamburg, with her mother and father and sister Nikki. Her father was killed on the battlefield. Her sister was killed when a bomb fell on the city and Laura (then Hannelore) and her mother and Nikki were huddled in the basement of their house and the house from next door exploded into their basement, a section of wood falling onto Nikki’s head. (Nikki was three years old.) Laura could remember walking down the streets of Hamburg, holding her mother’s hand, saying, “Mother, I am hungry,” and her mother saying, “There is no food, we have no food,” and she could remember her mother quietly crying as she said that. She could remember chewing pages from books to still the pangs in her stomach. She was sent into the countryside to get away from the bombings, and also because country children were supposed to be better-fed since they lived on farms. But the farm was primitive and the outhouse smelled so foul that Laura secretly relieved herself in the bushes, and when the farmer discovered this, she was severely beaten. These were not atrocities she had lived through, but they were painful times, and the most heartbreaking, it seemed to her, was not that her father was sent to war and then was killed, for she had not known her father well, and not that her sister, whom she loved so much, had died, but that her mother would silently cry, standing outside a bakery window, because she could not buy bread for her one living daughter. Her mother had had everything taken from her.
“Now I have a child, and I know that if I can manage to keep my child’s belly full every day, then my life is good,” Laura told Daphne. Daphne listened, feeling guilty, for her own memories of childhood and the war years were so different. Her father had been an officer in the army, but he had never left the United States. Daphne and her mother had lived with Daphne’s mother’s parents in their huge Victorian house in upstate New York, and her grandfather had been adoring and talkative and they had had a wonderful time.
Now, from such different backgrounds, Daphne and Laura had met, and they had so much in common. They laughed at the same things, they enjoyed the same things, and most of all they found pleasure in each other’s company. Finally it came about that Daphne realized she had entered into a conspiracy against her husband—a delicious, wicked, thrilling conspiracy—and her life was radiant with dimensions she hadn’t thought of before.
It wasn’t very far into their friendship before Daphne realized that Laura had been absolutely right: she should have a family, she did want children. But when she approached Joe about having a baby (they were still using birth control, or, rather, Daphne was—she was on the pill), he shocked her by saying adamantly, “No. Not yet.”
When Daphne talked with Laura—the next day—she confided this to her friend, because she was very upset, she was hurt. But Laura surprised her by laughing. “Oh, of course he said no! Don’t you know that men are terrified of making babies? They don’t think of a baby, a child, they only think of years and years of endless bills. And your husband and mine, these college professors, they think they can control everything, they think they can do everything in some kind of sensible order. They will wait until they are certain they will be able to pay for everything, the child’s hospital bills all the way through the child’s braces and to the college education, then they’ll say, okay, let’s have a baby, except that by then you are fifty-nine years old. No, you can’t ask your husband for a baby, you have to sneak it out of him, which any woman can do. You just go off the pill sometime, and tell him that the doctor said you have to—and really, you know, it’s not good to be on the pill for a long time, it messes up your ovaries. So sometime, not when you are in bed or making love, but when you are eating dinner and then he must rush off to a college function, when you know that he will be preoccupied, you tell him the doctor says you must stop taking the pill. But that you will use other kinds of birth control—foam is good for getting pregnant with. Or get a diaphragm and poke a little hole in it. But listen, you shouldn’t do it just yet. He hasn’t been teaching yet a year here. Give him a little more time to get settled, to feel secure.”
Daphne listened with boundless admiration and, at first, a sense of guilt. To be plotting about something so serious as a child, which would, after all, not affect Laura but would completely change Joe’s life! Even to be discussing something so private with someone other than Joe!
Sometimes Daphne feared she and Joe were really growing apart. Had been growing apart for four years—at the same time, of course, as they were also growing together. But when they met, they had both been submerged in English literature—reading it, teaching it, studying it, living in it. Then, for four years, Joe kept at it, gradually sinking deeper and deeper into his work, while Daphne bobbed up to the surface and looked around and got a glimpse of the rest of the world. They loved each other, but she had stopped being his compatriot; his country was English literature, while hers was, well, the entire rest of the world.
Before she met Laura, every time the phone rang in the evening it was for Joe, and whenever someone was late coming in, it was Joe, who had been asked for a beer by his students, for a drink by his colleagues. And in conversations at dinner parties she felt left out if she tried to join in a discussion about some fragment of the vast field of literature.
“I’ve always thought Dickinson was too heavy-handed with her symbolism,” she might say, and before she could complete her thought or her sentence, the person listening (some poor professor who had gotten stuck next to her at a formal dinner table) would impatiently nod and look away and start a conversation elsewhere. What Daphne had to say now might be interesting—it might even be right—but it just didn’t matter, because she was officially “just a wife,” not an intellectual.
With Laura she suddenly felt she had joined, or formed, her own little private and very exclusive club. She needed a friend, a colleague of her own. Besides, Laura was such fun, and Daphne had forgotten how much fun she could have with a woman friend. The Millers and the Krafts grew accustomed to getting together for dinner once a week, usually at the Krafts’ house so that Laura wouldn’t have to get a baby-sitter for Hanno. Daphne would surreptitiously study Otto. Really, she knew so much about him, and such intimate things!—how his father, a wealthy industrialist, had never embraced his son even when Otto was small. Otto and his brothers and sisters had been raised by a nanny, and the closest his father ever came to really touching his son was during his monthly inspections, when the nanny had the children bathed and shampooed and dressed in their finest, standing in a line in the nursery. Then Otto’s father would walk along, examining and evaluating his children. He would always pinch the lower flesh of their upper arms. “This one needs more food,” he would say to the nanny. Later, when the children were older, their father gave them brief mental inspections: “What is the capital of Greenland?” he would bark, and if they did not give the answer immediately, they were to be punished with a whipping in proportion to their flaw.
No wonder Otto was such a rigid man. Sometimes Daphne would think about and compare Otto’s rigidity and Hudson’s. It seemed to her that Hudson’s carefulness always had the virtue of grace and elegance and lightness, like Hudson himself, a leanness about it, a slenderness, so that if he was rigid, it was like the string on a violin or an archer’s bow—taut, but one could touch it, pluck it, one could make it sing or send an arrow soaring. Otto, in comparison, was heavy and earthbound. His rigidity was like a boulder, or like a cannonball that had already been fired and now lay, immobile, yet remained a kind of weaponry, still capable of violence. No wonder he did not laugh easily, and when he did laugh, he sounded like a dog barking. He was handsome in a way, with his blazing blue eyes and that bald naked head. The baldness was aggressive; it seemed a kind of display. But he was not unkind. He was always pleasant to Daphne, and he did not intimidate Joe. Joe and Otto enjoyed getting together for dinner—there were always the college affairs to discuss, and then they both liked football. But Otto did love to follow rules to the letter, and according to Laura, even his lovemaking was scheduled. Daphne would never ever feel really comfortable with her best friend’s husband.
Everything about Laura and her life and her husband, in the end, finally only made Daphne love Joe more. Joe was so romantic, such a wonderful lover, and he did feel as Daphne did, that what their lives were about was their love. No matter how busy he became, or how far from her he seemed to go during his days at the college, there were always a few nights a month when he came back to Daphne, came into Daphne, and went with Daphne back down under, into their submerged and secret deep liquid world. They curled around each other, pulled each other deeper with their legs and embracing arms, they took each other’s breath, they made each other soaking wet. Joe and Daphne loved each other so passionately that one night of love could suffice them—even, still, exhaust them—for weeks.
She had had that with Joe. And she had had her friendship with Laura. Soon she had had her daughter. In those days, Daphne had had so much.