Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [15]
“The cards!” said Mr. Donegal. “We have forgotten the cards!” Whereupon he retreated to the nearly impassable sun room (filled with newspapers, cartons, never-unpacked appliances, and clothes) to obtain a series of envelopes of assorted sizes and two waxy boxes from the florist’s shop.
“Oh, Ven! How sweet of you,” Mrs. Donegal said.
“One for you! And one for you!” Mr. Donegal said, giving each of the ladies a florists’ box.
I opened mine with trepidation, for not only do I hate corsages, but I was wearing a very thin chamois dress, which would be ruined by a pin. In the box was a corsage of somewhat wilted Tropicana roses, festooned with orange and gold ribbons.
“Oh, thank you,” I lied. Mrs. Donegal had an identical corsage, which seemed to delight her. She put it on immediately, pointing the tail crookedly at her jiggling bosom.
“Oh, goody!” she said. “Now let’s see the cards.”
I fiddled with my corsage, hoping no one would notice I wasn’t wearing it. No such luck. Mr. Donegal came over and pinned it on my bosom, ruining my suede dress and copping a quick but unmistakable feel.
“‘Happy Thanksgiving to my beloved wife,’” Mrs. Donegal read aloud. “ ‘At this most special time of year, / My dearest wife, I bring you cheer. / For you make every holiday a cause for being bright and gay. / Without you life would be no fun, / so I salute you, dearest one. Happy Thanksgiving from your adoring Ven.’ ”
At his cue, Mr. Donegal bent down and kissed his immobilized wife.
“Oh, Ven,” she said. “How sweet.”
“Not as sweet as you, m’dear,” said Ven, as if by rote.
“What a loving family we are!” said Mrs. Donegal.
You could tell from the expressions of the two men that this charade had been played many a time.
Mrs. Donegal proceeded to read out the other cards from her husband, all of them equally saccharine and self-serving. She seemed genuinely delighted with the sentiments expressed. Never before having met people who took greeting cards seriously, I was astonished. I had grown up in a world where such sentiments were occasions for wild hilarity. At my family dinner table—such as it was—wicked humor and satirical kvetching were the rule. I had always wondered who bought such greeting cards—and now I knew.
At some point before dinner, Dart disappeared into the upper reaches of the town house and was gone for some time.
I was left struggling for conversation with Muffie and Ven.
What was oddest about them both was that all their conversation seemed to be about things that had happened before 1947. She loved to talk about Miss Porter’s School, her coming out party, and her honeymoon—a two-year spending spree in Europe—and he loved to talk about Princeton days, his eating club, and his classmates’ merry pranks, and how he almost made Review at Harvard Law. This was the house where time stood still. Miss Havisham could have moved right in, not to mention Mr. Micawber. No wonder their only son had disappeared to the bathroom, seemingly never to return.
My heart went out to Dart, who had had to make a life out of such unpromising parental material. Really, he was an orphan, for nobody was home to raise him. Both his parents were trapped in the past.
“We have many artists in our family,” Mr. Donegal said. “I’m not at all surprised that you and Trick get on so well. Besides Trick, there was Uncle Wesley—wasn’t there, Muffie?—who was a noted landscape painter in Vermont.” Ven pointed to a tortured little study of a covered bridge that hung above the fireplace. “And then there was Aunt Millicent, who did nudes.”
“And that’s not all,” said Muffie, in eyeball-rolling disapproval. “She also did other things.”
“Mrs. Donegal is referring to her lesbianic period, I presume, in which she depicted ladies in various, shall we say, compromising positions,” Mr. Donegal informed me.
“I’ll say,” said Mrs. Donegal.
“Mrs. Donegal believes