Union Atlantic Page 0,43
at the back, and the two of them bringing in the firewood Eric had found somewhere the day he moved in with her, his father's old car parked in the rain, the two of them running logs down the steps and into the house, piling them on a blue tarpaulin spread on the living-room floor, the wood dust and strands of bark matted to their coats.
Most of Charlotte's college friends had met their husbands before graduation or secured them soon after. Boys from Amherst and Williams arriving four or five to a car for the dances at Smith, long evenings of the smallest talk imaginable, the young gentlemen speaking like bad pantomimes of their fathers, all summer holidays and the names of banks, little lords of the financial manor. She'd watched women she'd heard speak eloquently in class of Shakespeare or Rome nod their heads and smile, listening patiently to one blandishment after the next, while the boys glanced about to see what else was available, and it made her feel ashamed for her classmates and for herself. It may have been that the boys didn't approach her because she didn't catch their eye, being a bit too tall, neither blond nor pretty in a conventional way, but the defiant expression she wore couldn't have encouraged them either. If one did strike up conversation, she thought it best to compensate for her classmates' hiding of their education; she usually started in on an analysis of whatever she was reading that week. A battlement her pride had been, high and safe.
As a single woman out in the world, it had only seemed the more necessary. At her seat at work behind the reference desk of the New York Public Library, middle-aged men would wink at her. On the subway they'd try worse.
"A bit lonesome, isn't it?" she remembered her mother asking at the table at Thanksgiving the fall she started graduate school at Columbia. "All those hours cooped up studying?"
"As opposed to the ones you spend cooped up in this house?" she replied, which brought silence and a withering stare.
Her father understood; he'd encouraged her from the beginning.
"I'm just being practical," her mother suggested, defending her worries for Charlotte's future. Henry, five years younger, had already graduated from law school, started with a firm, and, to perfect the narrative, married Betsy, whom he'd met one summer on a trip to the Cape. The wedding had been given by Betsy's parents in Hyannis, all white tents and high Episcopal good form, from the Bloody Marys to the starched collars to the understated, almost humble self-satisfaction of the father's toast and the look in Charlotte's mother's eye as Henry took his bride by the arm and led her onto the parquet for the first dance. Or the last dance, as Charlotte thought of it. After all the cotillions and proms and coming-out balls, the dance that fixed you in place. For Henry, it was a dress-up lark dreamed by women into existence for which he was happy to play his role for the day, because what would it ever cost him, and it made his mother so happy (decades later, imitations of the clothes they'd worn on weekends like that would show up in all those catalogues, Ralph Lauren and the others, the smugness of that faded time resurrected as commercial fantasy). At the reception, Charlotte had been seated next to the bride's brother, a Cadillac dealer who'd clearly never read Appointment in Samarra. Henry, to his credit, didn't join in the cloying asides about her being next.
She'd spent three years studying: taking seminars, attending extra lectures, working in the library, and reading in the evenings. Her friends were other people in the history department along with the two or three women from college who hadn't moved out of the city. In school, being single didn't register the way it did at home with her parents. Time had purpose without a companion. Still, the solitude got to her now and again. Despite her best effort, she couldn't rid herself of the tug of "Saturday Night" and the need to have something to do. On the weeks she failed to plan ahead and found herself alone, the doubt which concentration otherwise kept at bay entered her, and she heard her mother's voice. The words in the books and journals spread on her kitchen table seemed lifeless then, dead as the time they described. But the feeling always passed; a paper would demand more reading,