Free The Four Temperaments by Yona Zeldis McDonough Page A

to do with herself. While a student at Barnard, she changed her major three times: first it was art history, then classics and then, in an abrupt turn away from the Occident, Asian studies. Eventually, she gave up everything, failing to get her degree at all, and was content to orbit around the quiet, steady star of Gabriel's ascension. For ascend he did.
    Though he was neither talkative nor charismatic like his father, he nevertheless excelled in his chosen field, impressing first his teachers and later his clients, with the finely trained beam of his vision. He was not radical or iconoclastic in this; rather there was something conservative and even classical about his approach to buildings and the spaces within them. But he seemed to have a way of digesting and reinterpreting the past that was, as a senior architect in the firm where he first went to work put it, harmonious. “Gabriel designs a suite of rooms like he's composing a concerto,” the man said of him, “everything is rhythmic.” Oscar would have liked to hear that, Gabriel thought; then his father could imagine that Gabriel was the musician he had always dreamed of his being, a composer of space and light, dimension and form.
    During those years, Penelope moved in with Gabriel, and spent her time cleaning and organizing the apartment. He had always been neat, but Penelope was obsessively, compulsively neat, from the very smallest aspect of household management—spices and foods must be arranged alphabetically in the cupboards, socks lined up evenly in the drawers—to the largest, like the ritual cleaning of windows, walls, rugs and even ceilings. He probably should have realized then that there was something slightly amiss in her focus, that her desire for external order sprang from a deep dread of the chaos that lived inside her. But, at the time, he was dazzled by her loveliness, and her apparent devotion to him. And it was nice to live in a place where the floors were always mopped and waxed, the bedsheets pressed, the windows, for what little light they admitted, sparkling. She placed fresh flowers in the rooms twice a week—never mind that they were always white, this thing about color was starting even then—arranging the blossoms, the petals, the stems, just so. She made their life hers, and it seemed to satisfy her. She accompanied him to the firm's Christmas party, a slim-fitting, scoop-necked velour dress accentuating the impossible whiteness of her neck, the swell of her breasts, and he knew the other men in the firm were envious of the beautiful, attentive woman at his side.
    â€œYou'd better marry her,” one of the firm's partners said jokingly. “Or I may beat you to it.” Gabriel just smiled, but something inside him clicked. He and Penelope had lived together for three years; it was time to make a more formal arrangement.
    His parents were, of course, delighted. Oscar kissed Penelope on both cheeks, grabbing her hands tightly in his. Ruth wept openly. “I'm so happy for both of you,” she said, wiping her wet eyes with her fingers. “So very happy.” They had little to do with planning the wedding; Penelope's mother, Caroline, handled everything and they were married in the backyard of her big house in Greenwich, Connecticut. Penelope wore a long Victorian dress of a fine, fine cotton she told him was called “lawn” and a crown of gardenias in her upswept hair. Their heavy, sweet scent, as he leaned to kiss her before the rabbi and the minister who jointly officiated, actually made him feel a little light-headed, even nauseated, but he chalked that up to natural wedding-day jitters. The bride was radiant, the families and friends enthralled; the weather spectacular. Everything was perfect; wasn't it?
    And for a time after the wedding, he continued to think so. Penelope returned to her cleaning and organizing with a new vigor. She scraped, plastered, sanded and painted—by