Daddy, Daddy!” came into his dreams without waking him, and what did wake him was the heaving of the other bed as Iris got up and hurried toward the bedroom door.
“It was Cindy,” she said when she came back.
“Dream?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I heard her but went on dreaming myself.”
“She doesn’t usually cry out like that.”
“Laurie used to.”
Why all these dreams, he wondered, and drifted gently back to sleep, as if he already knew the answer. She turned and turned, and finally, after three-quarters of an hour, got up and filled the hot-water bottle. What for days had been merely a half-formed thought in the back of her mind was now suddenly, in the middle of the night, making her rigid with anxiety. She needed to talk, and couldn’t bring herself to wake him. What she wanted to say was they were making a mistake in bringing the children up in New York City. Or even in America. There was too much that there was no way to protect them from, and the only sensible thing would be to pull up stakes now, before Laurie reached adolescence. They could sublet the apartment until the lease ran out, and take a house somewhere in the South of France, near Aix perhaps, and the children could go to a French school, and they could all go skiing in Switzerland in the winter, and Cindy could have her own horse, and they both would acquire a good French accent, and be allowed to grow up slowly, in the ordinary way, and not be jaded by one premature experience after another, before they were old enough to understand any of it.
With the warmth at her back, and the comforting feeling that she had found the hole in the net, gradually she fell asleep too.
But when she brought the matter up two days later he looked at her blankly. He did not oppose her idea but neither did he accept it, and so her hands were tied.
A S usual, the fathers’ part in the Christmas program had to be rehearsed beforehand. In the small practice room on the sixth floor of the school, their masculinity — their grey flannel or dark-blue pin-striped suits, their size 9, 10, 11, 11½, and 12 shoes, their gold cufflinks, the odor that emanated from their bodies and from their freshly shaved cheeks, their simple assurance, based on, among other things, the
Social Register
and the size of their income — was incongruous. They were handed sheets of music as they came in, and the room was crammed with folding chairs, all facing the ancient grand piano. With the two tall windows at their backs they were missing the snow, which was a pity. It went up, down,diagonally, and in centrifugal motion — all at once. The fact that no two of the star-shaped crystals were the same was a miracle, of course, but it was a miracle that everybody has long since grown accustomed to. The light outside the windows was cold and grey.
“Since there aren’t very many of you,” the music teacher said, “you’ll have to make up for it by singing enthusiastically.” She was young, in her late twenties, and had difficulty keeping discipline in the classroom; the girls took advantage of her good nature, and never stopped talking and gave her their complete attention. She sat down at the piano now and played the opening bars of “O come, O come, Emmanuel / And ransom captive I-i-i-zrah-el …”
Somebody in the second row exclaimed, “Oh God!” under his breath. The music was set too high for men’s voices.
“The girls will sing the first stanza, you fathers the second —”
The door opened and two more fathers came in.
“— and all will sing the third.”
With help from the piano (which they would not have downstairs in the school auditorium) they achieved an approximation of the tune, and the emphasis sometimes fell in the right place. They did their best, but the nineteenth-century words and the ninth-century plainsong did not go well together. Also, one of the fathers had a good strong clear voice, which only made the others more self-conscious and
“It was Cindy,” she said when she came back.
“Dream?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I heard her but went on dreaming myself.”
“She doesn’t usually cry out like that.”
“Laurie used to.”
Why all these dreams, he wondered, and drifted gently back to sleep, as if he already knew the answer. She turned and turned, and finally, after three-quarters of an hour, got up and filled the hot-water bottle. What for days had been merely a half-formed thought in the back of her mind was now suddenly, in the middle of the night, making her rigid with anxiety. She needed to talk, and couldn’t bring herself to wake him. What she wanted to say was they were making a mistake in bringing the children up in New York City. Or even in America. There was too much that there was no way to protect them from, and the only sensible thing would be to pull up stakes now, before Laurie reached adolescence. They could sublet the apartment until the lease ran out, and take a house somewhere in the South of France, near Aix perhaps, and the children could go to a French school, and they could all go skiing in Switzerland in the winter, and Cindy could have her own horse, and they both would acquire a good French accent, and be allowed to grow up slowly, in the ordinary way, and not be jaded by one premature experience after another, before they were old enough to understand any of it.
With the warmth at her back, and the comforting feeling that she had found the hole in the net, gradually she fell asleep too.
But when she brought the matter up two days later he looked at her blankly. He did not oppose her idea but neither did he accept it, and so her hands were tied.
A S usual, the fathers’ part in the Christmas program had to be rehearsed beforehand. In the small practice room on the sixth floor of the school, their masculinity — their grey flannel or dark-blue pin-striped suits, their size 9, 10, 11, 11½, and 12 shoes, their gold cufflinks, the odor that emanated from their bodies and from their freshly shaved cheeks, their simple assurance, based on, among other things, the
Social Register
and the size of their income — was incongruous. They were handed sheets of music as they came in, and the room was crammed with folding chairs, all facing the ancient grand piano. With the two tall windows at their backs they were missing the snow, which was a pity. It went up, down,diagonally, and in centrifugal motion — all at once. The fact that no two of the star-shaped crystals were the same was a miracle, of course, but it was a miracle that everybody has long since grown accustomed to. The light outside the windows was cold and grey.
“Since there aren’t very many of you,” the music teacher said, “you’ll have to make up for it by singing enthusiastically.” She was young, in her late twenties, and had difficulty keeping discipline in the classroom; the girls took advantage of her good nature, and never stopped talking and gave her their complete attention. She sat down at the piano now and played the opening bars of “O come, O come, Emmanuel / And ransom captive I-i-i-zrah-el …”
Somebody in the second row exclaimed, “Oh God!” under his breath. The music was set too high for men’s voices.
“The girls will sing the first stanza, you fathers the second —”
The door opened and two more fathers came in.
“— and all will sing the third.”
With help from the piano (which they would not have downstairs in the school auditorium) they achieved an approximation of the tune, and the emphasis sometimes fell in the right place. They did their best, but the nineteenth-century words and the ninth-century plainsong did not go well together. Also, one of the fathers had a good strong clear voice, which only made the others more self-conscious and
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