Portraits of a Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page A

guesswork. I can’t name the disease: I can only tell you the symptoms.
    You asked me if he loved me? … Well, yes, he loved me. But I think he only truly loved his father and his son.
    He cared for his father and was full of respect for him. He visited him every week. My mother-in-law dined with us each week. “Mother-in-law”: there’s something nasty about the word. But this woman, my husband’s mother, was one of the most refined creatures I had ever met. When father-in-law died and when this wealthy, highly elegant woman was left alone in the big house, I feared she would get too used to us. People are so prejudiced. But she was all sensitivity, all consideration. She moved into a small apartment, was a burden on no one, and managed all the difficult, fiddly bits of her life by herself with considerable care and foresight. She asked for neither pity nor kindness. Of course she knew things about her son that I couldn’t know. Only mothers know the truth. She knew her son was tender, respectful, and attentive; it was just that she didn’t love him. Such a terrible thing! But we should consider it calmly, because that is what I got used to with my husband—it was something we both learned from Lázár: that the truth had a certain creative, cleansing power. There was never any argument or disagreement between those two, between mother and child. “Mother dear,” said he, and “Yes, dear son,” she answered. There was always that ritual of kissing hands, a certain formal courtesy, if you like. But there was never any intimacy. The two never spent any time alone in a room together; one was always standing up and finding something else to do elsewhere, or inviting someone in to join them. They feared being left alone together, as if there were some urgent matter that they’d immediatelyhave to discuss and there would be trouble, real trouble, if their secret was revealed, some secret that they, mother and son, could never talk about. That’s what I felt, anyway. Was it really like that? I sometimes wondered. But yes, that’s how it was.
    I would like to have made peace between them. But that could only be when they were not cross with each other! I tried to probe the nature of the relationship, proceeding very carefully, the way you’d probe a wound. But the first touch frightened them and they immediately started talking about something else. What could I have said? … Neither accusation nor complaint had any clearly visible, tangible object. Might I have suggested that mother and son had injured each other some time in the past? I couldn’t, because both were, perfectly properly, “fulfilling their obligations.” It was as if they had been constructing alibis their whole lives. Our name days, birthdays, Christmas, those lesser and greater tribal rituals common to all families, were properly conducted, down to the minutest detail. Mama received a present; Mama gave a present. My husband kissed her hand; she kissed his forehead. At dinner or supper Mama took her place at the head of the family table and everyone conducted respectful conversations with her, on the subjects of family and the world at large, never arguing, listening to Mama’s precise, courteous, quietly stated views—and then they ate and talked of something else. Oh, these family dinners! Those silences between conversations! It was this talking-about-something-else, this polite silence, forever and ever! This wasn’t something I could talk about with them between soup and main course, between birthday and Christmas, between youth and aging. I couldn’t say to them, “You are always talking about something else.” I couldn’t say anything because even with me, my husband was always talking about something else, and I suffered the same silences, the same shutting out as my mother-in-law, and sometimes I even thought that we were both to blame, his mother and I, because we didn’t know how to go about it: we had not succeeded in