Dying Unfinished Read online

  “The woman you were with?”

  “I was at the meeting.”

  “Yes, I know. Is she the one having problems with her fiancé?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  He said nothing, silently admitting guilt. She did not protest as his hands moved over her, but her consciousness drifted. Barely awake, she thought of Heinrich, her secret nourishment. If she and Aaron were to deprive each other of their lovers, she feared they would consume each other, and all passion between them would die. Yet why did tears so often flood her eyes? Why did she rage over trifles?

  In the morning the alarm rang as usual at six forty-five. Aaron quickly got up, dressed, and went downstairs to make breakfast. But Eleanor lingered another half-hour, hating to leave the soft, warm confines of their bed.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE PAST

  Her sense of alienation had begun many years ago when they moved to Westbury. They bought the house in 1945, immediately after the War ended, with help from Aaron’s parents. It was a large old structure with creaking stairs, a huge yard, and a ramshackle building in back which had once been a stable.

  Aaron chose it within two weeks of his release from the Merchant Marines, while she and the children stayed on in his parents’ house in Saint Louis where they had been living while he was off at sea. Housing in Westbury was less expensive than in more fashionable suburbs.

  The former owners had been eccentric, English, and given to drink. Most of the walls were a hideous beefy red, shades of a country manor in the Midlands. Aaron painted them over with paler colors before they moved in.

  Just before they were to sign the final papers, Eleanor flew out from Saint Louis to inspect the house. That morning she took a walk by herself through the small town, and she felt disturbed by people’s faces in shops and along the sidewalks. They had pinched faces and pinched sensibilities, she thought, as well as dreadful Long Island accents. With his Communist leanings, perhaps it pleased Aaron to think he was a simple artisan like these Italian and Irish working people. But how would she and the children fare?

  In the realtor’s office she wanted to cry out, “Wait!” when they handed her a pen. But it seemed so stupid to object at this late moment. Words stuck in her throat. Half-paralyzed, she signed. Her objections seemed nebulous and without tangible foundation. After all, the house—a white elephant among its more modern neighbors—was a bargain at $9,000. And it was within reasonable commuting distance of Manhattan where Aaron planned to set up his studio.

  Aaron always did things too hastily, including the act of love, or more accurately sexual release, she thought. His touch was brusque, impatient. And yet at times he would kiss her with a terrible intensity in which tenderness was buried. He came too quickly, before she was fully aroused. Later she might dream of flying, of orgasm. Then the sound of the toilet flushing or a creaking floorboard might awaken her and she would lie quietly, hands at her sides as she had been told long ago to hold them. While he sprang out of bed in the morning, refreshed by the sound sleep that follows orgasm, she would awaken with a deep fatigue that stemmed from years of insufficient sleep.

  After the move, she felt as if her soul had been wrenched like a bone from its socket. How isolated she felt in this small town. Before the War they had lived in Manhattan, and she missed the city. She became very ill. If her mother had not provided funds for a housekeeper that first year, Eleanor could not have managed at all. She was bedridden, racked with pain in her lower back and pelvic area. Her body had not recovered from giving birth to Jesse, the youngest, six months earlier. It seemed ironic to have a servant when their finances were so precarious that she and Aaron barely had enough for food.

  When the pain grew unbearable, the doctor made an emergency visit, saying that she needed surgery right away. After he left, the old Irish housekeeper had peeked through the bedroom door and said in a quavering voice, “You will die for your sins!” Although delirious with pain, Eleanor could not help smiling at this malicious old woman with her bosomy, gnarled flesh, clothed in starched gray cotton.

  Eleanor’s tubes were tied. She would not be able to have any more children. That plunged her into depression, although the truth was they could not afford another child.

  Before her marriage, she had never given much thought to money. It was simply there. As a young girl, she assumed there would always be funds from a vague source such as a trust. When Aaron proposed, she imagined that being married to an artist would be romantic. She pictured herself lying on a red velvet sofa, a shawl gracefully draped over her naked body while he sculpted or painted her. Then he would remove the drape, offer her a bowl filled with grapes, and they would make love. She had not imagined crying babies, a suburban house with its isolation, and masses of bills.

  But during those first years after the War there was never enough money, despite help from their parents. Aaron occasionally won commissions for architectural sculpture, but his earnings were not nearly enough to cover their expenses. The children were too little for her to work outside the home, and she needed to help at the Cooperative Nursery School. Even after Aaron began teaching part-time at a local college, she felt a continual sense of poverty.

  During that time, she thought with some regret of whom she might have married. Among several other suitors, there had been Fritz, whom she met when she was living with her family in Switzerland. He would have been a gentlemanly husband who knew how to handle dogs and horses. On long winter evenings, after they returned from skiing, they would have read by the fire. Their children, rosy-cheeked and smiling, would be brought in by their governess to say goodnight.

  Before marriage, she had fantasized what it would be like to be Aaron’s wife. She had imagined an existence filled with wildness, laughter, and love. She would meet fascinating people and go to artists’ parties where the rooms hummed with intoxication and good music. Her world would glitter. She would vibrate on a higher frequency. Perhaps in the late afternoon before cocktails she would write poems or short stories, carried along by the creative current of the milieu.

  There had, indeed, been parties. But these were remote from her daily life in Westbury. As for the writing, only a few jottings had materialized, distracted as she was by the multitude of daily tasks.

  What were Aaron’s dreams? Perhaps he wished he had married one of the young women artists in blue jeans who used to flock around him. Together they might have studied Marx, lived in a Lower East Side loft, raised children among a mess of paints, clay, and dust. Perhaps he would have preferred a more forthright, earthy woman. Perhaps he dreamed of someone with a luscious body and breasts that overflowed, or perhaps one of those cool women with perfect features and straight blonde hair who attended Vassar, whose camel coats were never out of style, and who—like Eleanor’s dream mate—had unlimited trust funds.

  Aaron and she first met at a country club to which friends brought them one Sunday. He had recently completed his studies at the Art Students’ League and returned from a year’s traveling fellowship in Europe. She had just finished her first year at Radcliffe. It was early June. Everything was fresh and green. He had been so handsome with his dark hair and eyes, his slender but muscular build. His intensity had charmed her. She felt chic with her newly bobbed hair, her yellow silk beach pajamas, which were fashionable that season, and a lovely pair of silver earrings.

  They went for a walk in the woods. When she took off her sandals to wade in a stream Aaron said, “I like your sturdy feet.” He drew her close and kissed her. His body throbbed against hers. She could feel him growing hard against her, and when his touch became too urgent, making a great effort of will, she pulled away.

  They were each somewhat surprised at the passion they felt.

  Later when they joined their friends on the terrace, he spilled a glass of grenadine punch on his shirt. He looked so awkward that she laughed to cover up his embarrassment. She dabbed at the spot on his white shirt with a napkin she’d hastily drenched in a glass
of water. “It will come out in the wash. Oh, what a lovely design! Oh dear, I’ve only made it worse.” The others laughed, while Aaron squeezed her hand.

  They began discussing Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Eleanor began to drowse off. Half-consciously, she felt that politics did not take into account a deeper level of reality, and it seemed as if her friends were engaged in posturing.

  Their voices grew louder. “Capitalism is social suicide,” Aaron cried.

  “An ironic sentiment,” said Eleanor, rousing herself. “We’re all supported by families who have done quite well under the system. But then again, how would we feel if we were migrant workers?”

  The others were silent.

  She told them about children she’d once seen in the back of a pickup truck. They were being driven somewhere after a hard day’s work in the fields. Their little faces expressed utter exhaustion. When she waved and smiled, they were too tired and worn out to respond.

  Afterwards, when she and Aaron were alone, he confided that he might have made a girl pregnant at a recent house party. Eleanor listened quietly, absorbing his fears. “What should I do?” Aaron asked, his voice bristling with tension. “I don’t want to marry her.”

  “Perhaps she’s not pregnant after all. Wait and see.” (Three weeks later, he would indeed learn that the pregnancy was a false alarm.)

  Aaron and Eleanor were sitting apart from the others. An expanse of lawn in front of them gently rolled towards a barrier of pine trees. The calmness in her manner soothed Aaron. As she gazed off into the distance, he was struck by her high cheekbones and a stoic, masculine quality in her face. He had enjoyed her delight in wading barefoot, her gaiety with others, and the way her body yielded when they embraced. But beyond that, he sensed Eleanor had the power to sustain his spirit.

  “That young man intends to marry you,” said her father privately to her in his book-lined study, after he first met Aaron. Eleanor thought her father spoke as if she were clay to be shaped. She remembered that evening clearly. Aaron had taken the midnight bus up from New York to Cambridge, where her family was then living, and arrived on their doorstep early that morning in worn tweeds, carrying a shabby leather suitcase, strikingly handsome with his thick, unruly black hair. Despite his rather startling Communist beliefs, he charmed Eleanor’s parents. He seemed to be a man with high ideals, and he exuded energy. Upon inquiry, they learned he came from a well-established family and that his father had prospered in business.

  That weekend she and Aaron tramped through the streets of Cambridge, while he pointed out architectural features of old houses from which occasional strains of violin and chamber music sounded. He had a magnetic energy her other suitors lacked. Something in her wanted to be taken, seized as cave women were, relieved of the responsibility of choice. In an unsteady world where other men’s desires wavered, she found Aaron’s desire for her deeply reassuring.

  He wanted her to live with him. Of course, she could not do so openly. However, overcoming her parents’ surprisingly mild objections, she left college, moved to Manhattan to be near Aaron, rented a tiny apartment, found work as a secretary, and began to savor her new life.

  They married on a raw November day in 1936 before a Justice of the Peace. She would have liked a traditional wedding, a reception, an ivory satin gown. But Aaron wanted none of these trappings. Instead they went to dinner afterwards at a Spanish restaurant in the Village with one of Aaron’s Marxist friends, and Margaret, Eleanor’s closest friend from boarding school. They sent telegrams to their families.

  The couple moved into a one-bedroom apartment on East 23rd Street, not too far from his studio, where he had formerly lived and where he spent most of his waking hours. She continued at her secretarial job.

  When she met Aaron, she had been naively romantic. Marriage disillusioned her. Often he did not come home until ten or eleven at night. What was he doing all this time? Was he simply working? Were there other women? Certainly he knew many women artists. Although he often used Eleanor as a model, he still had a great deal of opportunity to philander. In retaliation, Eleanor began going out evenings to dinner, concerts, theater with friends and former suitors.

  She succeeded in arousing Aaron’s possessiveness, but he never did pose her on a velvet divan. His studio was dirty, dusty, barren. The sagging Goodwill couch was covered with a torn sheet. The floor was concrete. Bare light bulbs dangled precariously on wires strung along the ceiling. The windows looked out onto the street. When he got hungry, he would go out for a greasy hamburger, a slice of apple pie, and a cup of coffee.

  While she took refuge in the poetic sensibilities of Virgina Woolf, he read treatises on Marxism and novels of social realism. When Aaron’s parents sent the couple much-needed financial gifts, Aaron wanted to hand them over to the Party—a fitting end for the decadent fruits of capitalism. However, Eleanor would quickly deposit the checks in the bank, pay their bills, and write his parents graceful thank-you notes.

  “Your life is so interesting,” said Margaret, who now worked as a publisher’s assistant.

  She would listen to Eleanor’s accounts with admiration.

  “How wonderful of your parents to accept Aaron,” she said late one afternoon over tea in Eleanor’s small kitchen. She nibbled at one of the watercress hors d’oeuvres, which Eleanor had carefully prepared on thin slices of rye bread.

  “Mine would die if I married an artist. Such a risky life.”

  Eleanor, too, found it strange that her parents should have championed Aaron as a suitor. Perhaps it was because he shared to a certain extent in their idealistic beliefs, which they could freely indulge in, protected as they were with a lifetime of ample income.

  A few months after they married, despite their precautions, she became pregnant. When she told Aaron, a look of anguish came over his face that she had never seen before. He strode back and forth in their bedroom, barely containing his emotion.

  “You can’t have the baby!”

  “Aaron!”

  “If you don’t have an abortion, I’ll divorce you!”

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  Divorce! It loomed as a pit of blackness.

  He stood over her as she lay in bed, his muscles radiating tension, his anger searing through her.

  “I’m just getting started as a sculptor!”

  “If you’re going to be an artist, don’t do it half-way.” His mother’s voice rang in his ears. In his parents’ world, especially as he had refused to go into the family business, there was no room for failure. They expected him to win awards and recognition. He walked a tightrope high above the ground. To have a child just now would destroy all his plans.

  She tried to speak, but sobs choked her.

  He sat down on the bed and put his arm around her, caressing her beneath her blue silk nightgown. “Remember Don Costello?” Eleanor thought of the dark-bearded man she’d met at a party along with his very pregnant wife. “He worked with me on a WPA project. A terrific sculptor. Now he’s given up his studio. He’s working fulltime in a machine shop to support his wife and baby—with another on the way.”

  Again she burst into a fit of sobbing. “We will have children,” he said, stroking her hair. “Someday we will.”

  That night Eleanor lay sleepless while Aaron slept on the far side of the bed. Can you hear me, she pleaded silently to the creature inside her. I don’t want to kill you. But I must. You were conceived too soon. I thought it would break the romantic spell to put in a diaphragm! How foolish I was.

  She wanted to hit Aaron, choke him, yell to the rooftops that he could not force her to kill their child. Yet at the same time she wanted to hold him tightly and find comfort in his warm, muscular flesh. She lay very still, arms at her sides, scarcely breathing. Don’t touch yourself or the bogeyman will get you. Don’t reach out. Don’t touch anyone. Be Spartan.

  She could have refused.

  But she was afraid of losing him if she did.

  And so in early F
ebruary she had the abortion. She and Aaron took a taxi to the abortionist’s office in the Bronx, a rather dirty place with dull green draperies. During the procedure the pain was so intense that Eleanor could hardly bear it. Perhaps she would die along with the fetus. Maybe that would be for the best, she thought bitterly, her body overwhelmed with pain. The doctor used no anesthetic except brandy. Aaron held her hand, as she clenched his tightly and bit her lips.

  Afterwards Eleanor bled for days and had to go to the hospital for help. The abortionist had dislocated her uterus, and she had backaches which would plague her for the rest of her life. She and Aaron realized they had made a great mistake. However, Aaron seemed to get over his sorrow quickly, submerged as always in his work. Eleanor’s grief lingered. Beneath it surged an undertow of rage she did not want to acknowledge.

  The child seemed to speak to Eleanor from a realm beyond. Rosa, who believed in reincarnation, might have said that she herself was an incarnation of the aborted child and that this explained her distrust, even before birth.

  “Sculpting is the most important thing in my life,” Aaron said during the early days of their marriage. He was so earnest, so passionate. He embodied qualities that she lacked. He was fire, she thought, while she was earth, mist, and intuition.

  He was rash, often rather foolish, with a touching awkwardness. At parties he might hiss loudly to Eleanor “What’s her name?” with the peculiar sense that no one heard him. Gently she schooled him in social graces, but he never lost his boyish air. Self-centered, intense, he worked with a fierce drive. She had not known the toll this would take on her—a toll that was invisible, inaudible, and that manifested itself over time.

  During their first years in Westbury, he continued to work in Manhattan at a studio on the Lower East Side, a huge, drafty place filled with his clay and metal creations. At night he would whistle as he walked home from the train station, filled with joy that came from doing what he loved.