The Ice Storm Read online

  —I’m not interested in your smart-ass remarks right now, lady. Let’s go. Right now. You and I can discuss it on the walk home.

  At the mention of the walk home, at the mention of pedestrian conveyance, Wendy began to crack. The regret began to creep in like the bad colors in a bad sunset. She started to feel ashamed. She had curled her hands around Mikey’s almost concave stomach as she rode up on the back of his bike and it had been a cool ride. Something about the fact that her father was here without a car, that they were gonna have to walk back to their house, walk along the roads of New Canaan, in the heaviest weather, like people who couldn’t manage car payments, it embarrassed her. And she would have to defend her virginity to him. It was a burn, as they said at Saxe Junior High School. This was a burn. It was going to be an awful weekend. It was going to be a holiday weekend. There were going to be lectures and long, cruel silences. It would never end. She curled her tresses around an index finger—as she stood silently next to Mikey—and squelched tears.

  —Well, her father said.

  She joined him, didn’t say anything, looked back one last time at Mikey. In his haste, Mike had zipped his shirt-tail up in his fly. She thought of his beautiful red and brown pubic hair, the color and consistency of a baby’s first tangles, and her worries diminished. Love was bittersweet. Then, on the way by, she thrust a hand into one of the packing boxes and came up with a half-dozen loose pieces of Bazooka.

  —Services rendered, she called back to Mike.

  Her father sighed.

  They closed the Williamses’ front door behind them. Evidence of night was everywhere. The freezing rain fell horizontally. It was ten or fifteen degrees cooler than when Wendy had waited down at Silver Meadow. Sleet and freezing rain. The mixture fell threateningly on her and her father as they made their way, skidding and cursing, down the walk and into the driveway. She began to shout a feeble and grateful apology to her father, but it was hard to manage with the wind and the rain. You couldn’t hear.

  On Valley Road, an emergency snow truck lumbered past them, hissing and spitting sand on the accumulating slush. Its yellow strobe lamp swiveled on top.

  Wendy’s father took her arm roughly at the shoulder.

  —Baby doll, he called, and his voice seemed to come from some beyond.

  —Baby doll, don’t worry about it. I really don’t care. I’m just not sure he’s good enough, that’s all. We can keep this between us.

  She didn’t get where he was coming from. She could hear the apology.

  —Huh?

  —I mean, he’s a joker. He’s not serious. He’ll end up living off Janey and Jim, you watch. He’s just not worth it. And that’s not a family you want to be part of.

  —Dad.

  They walked in cinnamon slush. They sank deeply into it. The precipitation fell with a relentless uniformity. On nearby communities with less affluent tax bases—Stamford and Norwalk—as well as on New Canaan’s wealthy. The sleet ruined Wendy’s toe socks and her father’s cordovan loafers and at the same time, across town, it ruined the orthopedic shoes of Dan Holmes’s sister, Sarah Joe, one of the special-education kids at Saxe Junior High. Sarah Joe’s heart was all battered and worn, and she seemed to know it. But she managed to trudge along. The kids said that she would sleep with anyone. Wendy wondered if Sarah Joe had any instincts about positions and sex, if she knew about the myth of the vaginal orgasm, or if she felt somehow intuitively that her sexual fumblings were more gratifying with someone she loved. Sarah Joe, laboring up Brushy Ridge Road herself, through the slush, walking up that hill that all the boys careened down in tenth gear.

  Somewhere the popular girls were trapped indoors with their ephemeral crushes, the infatuations they shared with no one. And elsewhere the half-dozen poor boys of New Canaan High, whose fathers would have to go out into the snow and run the plows, watched TV from couches covered in flame-retardant vinyl. The sleet and snow turned the last light a sullen yellow. The sky looked awful, nauseating.

  Wendy wanted to know why conversations failed and how to teach compassion and why people fell out of love and she wanted to know it all by the time she got back to the house. She wanted her father to crusade for less peer pressure in the high school and to oppose the bombing of faraway neutral countries and to support limits on presidential power and to devise a plan whereby each kid under eighteen in New Canaan had to spend one afternoon a week with Dan Holmes’s sister, Sarah Joe, or with that other kid, Will Fuller, whom everybody called faggot. Wendy wanted her father to make restitution for his own confusion and estrangement and drunkenness.

  So when he asked how cold her feet were and then hoisted her into his arms for the last quarter mile, past Silver Meadow, down the embankment, through the thicket of barren trees, across the circle in the driveway, the driveway covered with frosted maple leaves, maple leaves, maple leaves, where a single lonely soccer ball lay buried in a crater of slush, the soccer ball Paul had been kicking around despondently before going into the city—when her father carried her close to his chest in silence, she thought it was fine. She would put off her journey to the Himalayan kingdom of the Inhumans. She would stay with her family for now.

  More of same—or worse. That was the weather report. The mercury would retreat into its little bulb. The heavens would open. Elena foresaw glazed and treacherous roads. Ski jackets with fur fringe. Hats with pom-poms. And this wasn’t all bad. Any excuse to avoid the Halfords’ party was a blessing.

  She was in the library. Cross-legged on the sofa. Her home was silent as a library. Reading was a brave spiritual journey for Elena Hood, and little piles of books were for her like the stacks of rubble—the Tibetan prayer walls—that marked the progress of pilgrims. There was a warm force field, an invincibility, around her in the midst of this reading journey, no matter how conventional it was by 1973, no matter how trammeled, shopworn. She cherished the I Ching and the tarot deck, though she told no one in the suburbs; she believed her decisions were mapped by unseen cartographers. She purchased books from the occult and religious studies sections according to their spines, or if she overheard talk about a title, or if it was advertised in Psychology Today.

  In her library, in firelight, she read, in silence. Her hair was frosted blond. Her glasses were thick, but she wore them only for reading. The rest of the time she squinted. She wore amber wool slacks and a wool sweater she had knitted for herself and Hush Puppies. Elena was always cold. Her college textbooks were relegated to a low, dusty corner of the shelves, below the Book-of-the-Month Club selections—glossy, hardcover editions of current fiction that she ordered for her husband, who neglected them.

  She was reading about impotence in older men. She had opened Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response, to the very page. According to the experts, the chief cause for the diminishment of intercourse in middle-aged couples was a single incident of impotence. This initial crisis, whether caused by the traditional drinking—provokes desire but affects performance—or by anxiety or other mental factors, so frightened men that thereafter they frequently inclined toward celibacy. In their indignity and remorse, they claimed to be uninterested.

  The very page she turned to. She enjoyed Masters and Johnson. Much better than Havelock Ellis, the grandfather of sexual studies, who was big on examples from country life—hairpins removed from teenaged girls’ vaginas, accounts of couples unable to uncouple afterward—but short on the pathos of unhappy marriages. Much better than Kinsey, that precursor, with his quaint, polite view of sexuality—mouth-genital contact may not be, after all, a strictly homosexual practice—or Krafft-Ebing’s monumental Psychopathia Sexualis: the hallucinatory and dangerous cousin to Reich’s Function of the Orgasm.

  There were some sensational pictures in here. Like the diagram of the penis, scrotum, anus, and prostate. All neatly inked in. The prostate intrigued her—that little walnut the urologist was always wringing out. Men sheltered it away. So much, in the end, was done in deference to the prostate. When it s
trangled off the urethra in older men, it struck the famous and unknown with the equanimity of a plague. They all stood shaking out meager drops at the urinal.

  And there were graphs, too, graphs that rendered, in seconds, the likelihood of nipple-stiffening and muscle-shuddering and labia-moistening. This was up-to-the-minute stuff. For example: in New Canaan, suddenly, women were familiar with the term labia. They had strong opinions on the vaginal orgasm. She could recall any number of recent afternoons when she had overheard Dot Halford and Denise Blackmun—or somebody—trading theories over a glass of carrot juice: Dot, I’m aware of how the clitoris functions when I climax, but I’m just not sure, when he’s wombing me, that my vagina has a role in it. I’m just not sure. Anxiety etched in their faces.

  Elena and her husband were not truly middle-aged. They hadn’t sagged that far yet, but they had experienced the initial trauma of impotence. They had felt its clean incision. Both of them. Yes, she had felt it, too: “The inhibitions of the upper-level female,” as the experts had it, “are more extreme than those of the average male.” It was something like eighteen months. Eighteen months since then.

  Whether Ben’s drinking had brought on his impotence, which had in turn brought on the drought in their connubial relations, she couldn’t say. But when she saw his penis now, as he showered or dressed for work, she felt no more for it than she felt for any plucked and headless game bird. It was a quaint reminder of another time, an antique, a curio. A reminder of Ike’s stroke or the Berlin crisis. And the worst thing about it was she felt the same way about herself. The fertile spot in her, the mandala in her belly was shut down, stored away.

  The way she saw it, the drought led straight to Benjamin’s unfaithfulness. Masters and Johnson had no good advice here. The plain facts hadn’t dawned on Elena suddenly. There had been no painful encounter with evidence—stained shorts or lipsticked collars or perfumed envelopes. It just struck her at a party one night—a party was the natural place to learn these things—that this was the logical next step for him. This was the narrow channel at which they had arrived.

  So there they were, Janey Williams and Benjamin, at this party, sunken into a couch without any kind of back support. Buried in throw pillows. Janey Williams, miserable, desperate Janey, whose husband no longer comforted her. There they were, Benjie and Janey. Getting sloppier as they moved toward one another. Their expressions were mournful, their drinks were frequently empty. They inched around each other like porcupines, closing in for warmth, then stabbing one another and moving off.

  The idea of betrayal was in the air. The Summer of Love had migrated, in its drug-resistant strain, to the Connecticut suburbs about five years after its initial introduction. About the time America learned about the White House taping system. It was laced with some bad stuff. The commodity being traded was wives, the Janey Williamses of New Canaan. The payoff was supposed to be joy, but it was the cheapest approximation of exalted feeling. It was just a demonstration of options, nothing more. From her meditative position on the couch, in her unflattering slacks and Hush Puppies, Elena felt she could judge the motives of New Canaan, Connecticut. Because she had permitted her own options to dwindle. Time sputtered and flickered and consumed the comedy of her efforts.

  Elena read. She roused herself now and then. For dinner: Green Giant frozen peas in butter sauce, leftover stuffing, and leftover turkey. This parsimonious and homely table awaited her husband and daughter.

  It was monks who first taught the art of reading in silence. During the Dark Ages. Augustine, perhaps, was first. And silence was a tongue Elena understood. Silence was her idiom for support and caring. Silence was permissive and contemplative and nonconfrontational and there was melody to it. It was both earth and ether. When Paul hinted that he had been experimenting with drugs, Elena said nothing. When Wendy boasted of her first period, Elena said nothing. Later she placed on her daughter’s pillow the box of Kotex, with the instruction circular removed and placed carefully beside it. Silence suited the complexities of these passages—the initiation in yajé, and in the lunar calendar. If you were an American Indian, you went off into the bush and hallucinated on your own. And if you were a Druid girl, a marriage would be prepared for you, and this very effluent would be a condiment at your feast. We would drink your menstrual blood, and later, eat your placenta.

  Elena said nothing about this or other matters, and not just because she had found in this village of Republicans—Republicans all the way back to Garfield—that she couldn’t articulate her own opinions without appearing foolish, but because she came by this silence through experience.

  Her Irish forebears went from the kind of trash you eighty-sixed from a riverside saloon to the sorts of people who repealed the Volstead Act. They folded rags-to-riches fabrications so deeply into their recollections that they believed their own public relations. Or that at least was her father’s way. Her father had been a newspaperman, a publisher of cheap tabloid philosophies. He had worked his way through a Midwestern journalism school moonlighting as a soda jerk. He had hopped a freight train east. Started in the mail room. He had married his high-school sweetheart.

  The strain of bearing up under this tabloid myth led to the mute intolerance of her father’s household. You could take the Irish out of the saloons, but not the saloons out of the Irish. Their hearts were caves of doubt. Edwin O’Malley was a two-fisted drinker, a collector of fine wines, but his wife, Margaret, Elena’s mother, slipped behind the curtain of alcoholism before Elena even graduated from elementary school. Margaret couldn’t communicate in the palaces and mansions that the O’Malleys frequented during the Depression. Her tongue was tied. Chat failed her. She was like the rat balking at the maze.

  Her father didn’t mince words: You look like hell. Jesus Christ, you look like hell. Why bother to come down here? You can’t even walk—how are you going to feed yourself. You’re drunk and you can’t even walk. You’re a disgrace. Damned disgrace.

  It seemed to Elena that she was always waiting for her mother to come downstairs. Her parents had separate rooms, of course; they never slept together. When her mother limped downstairs for dinner, it was often the first they had seen of her that day. Elena hid behind servants and furniture and she listened. She stored away the results. She repeated phrases of affection and hatred alike, until she couldn’t tell one from the other, couldn’t tell derision from respect, a beating from a fond hug. Once, a friend of her father’s visited: Oh, Margaret, lovely to see you, you look marvelous. To which her father had replied, Jesus, Karl, don’t you have eyes?

  That was her mother. Her mother fell down the staircase and they left her there, at her father’s instructions. Her mother disrobed on the front lawn. Her mother locked herself into a shed, looking for stashed treasure. She might have stayed there for days, if it hadn’t been for the gardener.

  Margaret O’Malley lost a little bit of herself every evening. She turned to climb the stairs again, after each episode of humiliation, until there was no dignity left, no character to assassinate, until she no longer had to climb because it was too dangerous. A primitive home escalator was installed, at great expense.

  Her father made sure Elena knew about her mother’s condition. He called her down from her room to witness each infraction against him, against his success. So when she was a child and her mother tried to take her own life with sleeping pills, he induced vomiting, called for an ambulance, and then brought Elena into the bedroom. Margaret O’Malley was soiled and unconscious. Shit and piss and bile puddled around her, in her linen, spattered on the rug. This is your mother. Go ahead. Look.

  It was the holidays that always brought her back to this past.

  She had left home with the mixed feelings anyone might have. By the early sixties, her mother often threatened to take her own life. Elena calmly woke Benjamin and, as the sun rose, she caught the first train to New Haven, to the airport there. The threats had always evaporated by the time she arrived. Her mother was asleep, or
on her bed, placidly doing a crossword puzzle, drinking gin and smiling.

  They dried out Margaret and then released her to the world. Dried her out and released her again. It was like any annual occurrence, like a harvest or saint’s day. They dried her out, and all were hopeful for a couple of weeks, even her father would seem to be of good cheer, and then her mother would drink again—sometimes she would even toast returning to the house—and soon it was back to the weekly delivery of cases. Elena’s father paid for her detoxifications and for her wardrobe and the tabs at each and every liquor store and for the long-distance telephone calls, and he paid extra to have her bathed and cared for at home. All the bills were paid.

  Had it been just the three of them, there would have been cause enough to leave Weston, Mass. But she had a brother, too. A carbon copy of his father—as stable as some inflammable gas—full of impatience and hate. And he drank like his mother. He was the most difficult man Elena had ever met. He actually argued about the weather. His sense of rectitude was so finely tuned that he lay awake nights ordering and enumerating worldly infractions according to a code he could never observe himself. Billy O’Malley was ten years older than Elena and he had taken her education entirely into his own hands. He claimed even to have named her himself, according to rules of prosody. Two bacchic feet. Elena O’Malley. No middle name. She’d just get rid of it later. He’d named her for Bacchus. Her parents were mostly busy anyway.

  Instructing her in water safety, he had pushed her, as an infant, into the swimming pool. She sank. Instructing her in etiquette, he had removed her elbows from the supper table with the sharp side of a steak knife. She took a number of stitches. Instructing her in respect for her elders, he’d dangled her by the ankles from a third story window. Instructing her in the management of local mass transit, he’d abandoned her blindfolded in downtown Boston.

  Elena had been a good student.