Ezra ordered her to have the floors waxed. The children will slip, she protested. They should stay quietly in their rooms and walk carefully on waxed floors, Ezra bellowed. But it was pointless when they were moving in a few months, and besides, it was expensive, she tried to reason with him. We can’t afford it, she pleaded, citing unpaid grocery and doctors’ bills. So the children will have fewer toys, said Ezra, stomping into the bathroom with a stack of foreign journals.
Sophie was happy with the children; they went on making things even if it messed up the house. Ezra was mostly away and when he came, always unexpectedly, there would be a row, and that was part of family life. Only somehow, as the years passed and the children grew, the fighting became worse and Sophie saw herself losing and him winning in a way she could no longer accept because now he was keeping count of all of them, her and the children, keeping score of what each lost and did wrong and, having persistently failed and done badly, would continue doing. He was not only recalling past wrongs, but prophesying all the wrongs they would commit. By the time they became men and women he had them on gallows and in the gutter. Sophie Blind, who had never come around to defend herself, now had to begin to defend two and three and more against words and sometimes blows, the words especially, because they were more lasting. Also, now with more children Ezra had a longer inventory of his own favors and kindnesses and exertions in their behalf from the day they were born, which he recited at unrelenting length, till some turned faint and others screamed and stamped and Sophie didn’t know at all what she was doing, let alone what she should be doing, except that obviously this could not be resolved or survived in the way it had been, and that however great and pressing her inclination, she must neither scream nor faint, but do everything else. So many things had to be done: to shield or argue or sometimes just stand stock still like a statue, or get them out of the room and tell them to do as their father said, or try to get him out and try afterward to comfort and cheer. Years afterward when she tried to remember what she actually had done, or what she could or should have done, it was as muddled as then. She didn’t know what she was or should be doing and yet she went on from day to day. And from one country to another, packing and unpacking and traveling more on her own, till she was tired of living in remote, backward places, islands to which the ferry went once a week, mountains without roads, accessible only by foot or mule. She was tired of traveling or just tired and wanted a bit of city life. Both she and the children began to miss and want their things—books, toys, clothes, all the nice things they had bought and used in different places, and left in boxes and suitcases, stored here and there, lost perhaps (the suitcase sent to Ezra’s sister which had all her notes from Italy, and the fine glasses from Venice). She was tired of being shabby and of other people’s bad taste and wanted a place where she could have all their things together once and for all, and not have to move and pack and worry, but be settled in her own home to raise her children, and have peace and quiet to write one of the books she had always thought of writing someday.
All she really needed was money and a happy love affair, Sophie was told by a retired Englishman in Ibiza.
Sophie remembered she still had the money her father put in the bank when she got married, “in case—” She never let him finish his sentence; it was the day before her wedding and Sophie was afraid her father would say something that would spoil everything, so she refused to listen. In her life there was not going to be any “in case”; everything was going to be right, and none of his cynicism and doubt the day before her wedding.
Sophie made plans to settle in Paris. Ezra protested, then approved. Ezra’s delight in her choice of Paris and his ironic comments were to be expected. To their friends, Ezra boasted he was granting his wife what every woman dreamed: to live in Paris. To his father-in-law, he wrote reproaching him bitterly for aiding his daughter to run away from her husband with the children. Ezra mocked Sophie, but he was pleased at the prospect of visiting her in Paris and spending some weeks or months of every year in his favorite city. At last she had come to a sensible decision.
Ezra urged that the children stay with his sister Renata in Bern so that Sophie might arrange things in peace.
“But I’m leaving you, Ezra,” Sophie said.
“I only want to make it easier for you,” Ezra protested. “You are still the woman I married and the mother of my children,” he added with emotion. “Facts cannot be changed. The children will have the best care in Bern and your hands will be free. Renata will keep them for as long as you need to get organized.”
In the spring of that year Sophie went to New York to pack and ship things she had left there and to straighten out her finances. Was this the right time to have a happy love affair?
It was done.
Sophie returned to Europe to spend some weeks by the seashore with the children till their apartment in Paris was ready. On the plane flying from New York to join her children, her thoughts circled in sweet confusion. She would have many more happy love affairs. Or
