No interpretation, though, protects me from the anguish of Tess’s destiny. I suffer as I turn the pages, appalled yet mesmerized by Tess’s pure victimization. I jump ahead to the end to fortify myself with the few pages of respite—Tess’s time with Angel—between her killing Alec and her death.
I don’t remember such feelings when I first read the novel. Despite the incursion of Bow Wow, I was hardly yet schooled in a tragic vision of experience. Death, disappointment, loss, waste, and even sexuality were largely abstractions in my sheltered and still innocent child’s existence. Sometime in the previous year, I had been told about sex, but its power and its consequences remained vague to me. My mother and I had lain next to one another on the floor in her bedroom—she used to stretch out like this to rest—and she had described the sexual act to me, stressing throughout how natural it was, even beautiful. I can see myself next to her, listening, aware of her speaking, pleased to be with her in this almost conspiratorial way. Afterward, back alone in my own room, I marveled at the fact that the man and the woman took off their clothes. That’s what I found incredible—that they actually took off their clothes. But as I tried to imagine a naked man and naked woman together in a bed, it certainly wasn’t my own self I slipped into this picture. I was ill at ease with my own burgeoning sexuality and, I think, with sex in general, hoping to keep it at bay. In my Beverly Hills public school, the boys in the previous sixth-grade year had started roughhousing with the girls, and I had attended one party where in a game of Spin the Bottle I had to walk across the circle we sat in and bend down to kiss a boy. This moment bewildered and frightened me. But Tess’s highly sexualized body, her vulnerability, her impassioned cry to her mother, “Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in menfolk?” the terrible price she pays for her initial misstep—I should say mishap—were just parts of a sad and mesmerizing story—the way a child can blithely recount terrible things without express sense of their horror. “And then he ravished her. And then she had a baby and it died. And then she murdered him.” That’s the story.
In truth, I don’t remember much of the experience of reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles late that summer when I was back from Europe and waiting to begin seventh grade. I do recollect, far more vividly, rereading Little Women in the Illustrated Classics edition, a text I knew almost by heart, and suddenly feeling I wanted to switch from public to private school. I closed the book’s pages and went downstairs to try to convince my mother to make this change for me. She proved immediately receptive, and, ever a woman of action, got me admitted to a small private school in Bel Air, where we wore blue and white checked cotton jumper uniforms designed by Lanz. My aspiration was to more refined culture and gentility. It had been stirred in me by the trip to Europe, my disgust with the roughhousing on the playground, and the inspirational story of the March girls, whose fictional lives, except perhaps for that of Beth, who dies, seemed so enviable. Even Beth in a way was enviable—she plays the piano and dies sweetly. Tess, on the other hand, doesn’t play the piano, or speak Italian, or paint or write. She is beautiful and truthful, and she suffers. Hardy calls her a “pure woman,” defying the social conventions that would brand her otherwise. I hardly knew at eleven what being a pure woman might mean since I didn’t understand what it meant to be impure.
Looking back, I think Tess of the d’Urbervilles may have been the first book I ever read in which things turn out really badly. The heroine does not find happiness; she is pummeled by men and by the universe, then executed, a sacrifice to society, a “sport,” Hardy tells us, for the “President of the Immortals”—his ironic stand-in for God. But I did not, as I have said, possess the frame of reference for registering the impact of such bad fortune—either a personal frame of reference or a literary one. I had not yet even read my first Shakespeare tragedy—that would be Julius Caesar in seventh grade. What, in retrospect, I remember best is the book itself—object and fetish—the only present ever picked out for me by my father, except for the silver porringer that I discovered in 1989 he had sent after my birth in 1942. I found it mentioned in my mother’s papers after she died in a list she’d kept of presents received for her new baby. The porringer, coming to light so belatedly, hardly counts the way the book does. I fix on that one particular book, even though other books enter into our story. Books, in fact, surrounded our slender history, setting it off almost like bookends.
I knew Freddie Ayer for thirty-five years; of those I knew him as my father for only the last six months. When he died in June 1989, six weeks after I had gone to visit him in London as his acknowledged daughter, I said to my sixteen-year-old son, who was with me when I got the news, that truly I was now an orphan. “No, you’re not,” he replied. “An orphan is someone who needs parents to take care of her. You’ve been taking care of yourself and others
