Free Constance by Patrick McGrath Page A

the doctor, in his dark suit, himself a reserved and formal man, loom over my equally reserved and formal mother and bend to shake her tiny hand. At the restaurant Iris succeeded in doing what she’d been prevented from doing the previous night, she made a fool of herself, not being accustomed to champagne. I had to take her outside and help her throw up in a parking lot.
    Later that evening Constance was depressed. She said Daddy had once told her she shouldn’t have any illusions about New York. He said she’d last a few months in the city, a year at most, and then come home to Ravenswood and look after him. But she’d made her way in publishing and found a husband. She was now Mrs. Klein. But she couldn’t help comparing herself to the other Mrs. Klein, the diminutive black-veiled widow, my mother. She said she felt like a variation on a theme: my motherat an early stage of development, like a chrysalis, a little black widow in the making.
    —For god’s sake, I said, it’s our wedding night.
    —I’m sorry. It’s how I feel.

Chapter 4
    Constance was unfamiliar with the old prewar apartments of the Upper West Side. Mine, though dark, was large. After we were married I watched her drift through my rooms, nervous and hesitant, glancing into shadowy corners as though they concealed malevolent intruders. She told me she was easily spooked. She also felt that at any moment she’d be unmasked as a trespasser and evicted. She said that after her mother died she hadn’t felt at home in her father’s house either. I did what I could to make her feel welcome. I told her that the apartment was her home now. I wanted her to get used to her new surroundings in her own time, as you would a cat. Eventually I realized that her reluctance to settle masked a persisting unease not with the apartment but with me. Of course the only man she’d lived with before me was her father. One day she told me she was still mystified as to why I’d chosen her. I remember I gazed at her fondly. I told her she’d looked so helpless at that book party I knew I had to do something about it.
    —Do you know how many predators there are in this town? I said.
    She was faintly displeased.
    —You make me feel like a gazelle.
    —You
are
a gazelle.
    There was more than a grain of truth in this, and when I’d convinced her I was joking it briefly became a game we played in the bedroom. She was the graceful leaping antelope, I was the greedy lion. She couldn’t escape me, and our tussles were vigorous. Then one night, as we lay panting in tangled bed sheets, she sat up and told me that because I was the one she woke up with in the morning, and the one she went to bed with at night, it was true, she couldn’t escape me,
ever.
    —Not ever, Sidney! she cried.
    Then she delivered the bad news.
    —I don’t think it’s working.
    —What isn’t working?
    —The marriage.
    I stayed calm. I’d anticipated this. It was taking longer than it should have to get her established in my home but I believed it would all come good given enough
time.
    —Sweetheart, why not?
    —I think I’ve made a mistake.
    I asked her quietly what the mistake was. We’d moved to the kitchen for this conversation. She’d made herself a pot of tea. Her answer was unsatisfactory. She spoke slowly, as though reciting a lesson learned in class. I remembered her once claiming to have read Freud. Now she told me she understood why she’d agreed to marry me. Her father never gave her what she needed, she said, and she’d always felt it was her fault.
    I understood the argument. She’d lost her mother at a time when a girl most needs a mother, and was then given charge of her younger sister. Daddy hadn’t been supportive. He was moreoften absent than present. He’d actively discouraged her from moving to New York. When he saw that he couldn’t stop her he told her she wouldn’t succeed. He was overly critical and he made her feel worthless. But unlike most of the