“But not on parsonages,” Vernon told her. “Not even Presbyterian ones.”
Oddly enough, Imogen reproached him for mocking his mother. His principal method was to tune her out, which he’d decided long ago was merely respecting her wishes, since she interlarded her fanciful voyages to the continent of Catastrophia with statements like, “But I’m just a foolish old woman,” or even (the key to the kingdom), “Just ignore me.” Imogen seemed to think that was unfilial, so she allowed herself to be drawn in (“We’re not even in the flight path to the airport, Mother”), then complained to Vernon when they were alone together that he left it all up to her.
“She’ll talk you into the ground,” he said.
“She’s just lonely.”
“She’s been impossible all her life. She’s like that woman in Flannery O’Connor. ‘She’d be all right if somebody just shot her in the head once a day.’”
Imogen laughed. They’d discovered long ago that they shared a sense of humor.
• • •
After Vernon’s mother went home their expenses ballooned, because they had to pay the minister’s wife to watch Susan during the day. They ate less meat and stopped going to the movies. During this time, Imogen felt overburdened with her job and the baby, just when Vernon was deep in his dissertation research on neutron transport in breeder reactors. “Eighteen more months,” he promised her, when she complained.
“Only a year now.”
“Almost there.”
It didn’t help that Susan was one of those caterwauling babies you read about in stories of tenement life. He and Imogen had about half an hour of peace and quiet after she’d woken up before she would start fussing. Nights were a torment. But they survived. Didn’t they? He earned his PhD and they moved to California. Imogen no longer needed to work. They settled into the routine both of them had planned all along. Another year of happiness ensued.
That’s his memory, anyway. Imogen said years later that maybe he was happy, but not her. Had he missed something? “Of course you didn’t notice it, you were too wrapped up in yourself.” Was that true? Or was she reinterpreting the past, to make it all black and white, the way she likes to look at things? He doesn’t want her to take away that year, or the later years in Lexington, when she was raising the kids and he was working at Hanscom Field, and he came straight home every day, stayed home every weekend, fixed everything that needed fixing, paid the bills, always on time, not a late payment his entire life, and never a debt except the mortgage. He took care of them, as his father had done, only better—money for a second car, for summer camps, for college. He was what, he thought, every husband and father should be: a stable provider. He held up his end, she held up hers, and they still shared a bed, and of course they argued sometimes, but all couples did that.
“Tell me what I did wrong.”
“There’s no point.”
“Why won’t you just tell me?”
“You don’t really want to know, you just want to win another argument.”
Dark thoughts. (Sick, sitting in his study alone, Mark living in another state, Susan long gone.)
He and Imogen once shared a sense of humor, they shared a worldview. Sure, as far as the worldview went, it was a matter of him coming over to where she was already standing, but he felt at the time, and he’s never thought differently, that she was standing in the place he wanted to be anyway: her dim view of religion, her distrust of authority, her leftist politics. She saw everything in black and white, and it often made her wrong about little things, but on the big things she was usually right. She took that small-town Baptist bumpkin and slapped him a few times. Maybe there was nothing wrong with him that getting slapped once a day wouldn’t cure.
• • •
In his second year at RAND he modeled atmospheric forces for the final designs of the Atlas missile. Looking back, he wonders if it was perhaps significant that he had already taken one step away from work on the bomb itself.
Looking back, he wonders a lot of things.
It is hard to untangle, this many years later, what he began to suspect then and what he became more sure of later. What he noticed, or would eventually have noticed, on his own, and what Imogen slapped him into seeing. And to what extent her own unhappiness with him (she would have him believe now) strengthened her jaundiced view of the RAND culture, which she then passed on to him, and which he misread as criticism of them and support for him, and so more readily adopted.
Stuck in the fucking house all day with Susan while he was off enjoying himself at work (it is not inconceivable that she uttered those words to him at some point), Imogen found a babysitter for
