too many Daves

Immediately after finishing Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence earlier this month, I wrote that the novel “kind of wrecked me.” Setting aside whether a person can be wrecked in a “kind of” kind of way, I’m glad to say that I’ve found a way to be much less wrecked.

Let’s pause. If you haven’t read The Age of Innocence, go read it. I hope it won’t seem defeatist so early in the writing of this post for me to predict — with total certainty — that you will like Wharton’s novel better than whatever I end up writing here.

Here, in as basic a form as I can manage, is why I’m feeling less wrecked: I’m a dad.

Newland Archer, the man at the center of The Age of Innocence, is a dad. Because of an unplanned pregnancy, he stays in a marriage he wants to flee. Meanwhile, he lets himself become marooned and remote,  stranded in the imagined life he wished for with Ellen, his wife’s cousin:

… (He) built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

Yet, by the end of the novel, that unplanned pregnancy has become a grownup son named Dallas. Of Dallas and Newland, Wharton writes “the two were born comrades.” So Dallas — now engaged to marry Fanny Beaufort — wants Newland to join him for a father-son trip to France, and Newland — now a widower — decides to “seize this last chance of being alone with his boy.”

They go.

In Paris, Wharton shows readers that Dallas possesses precisely the sort of bluntness that Newland would have needed to change his own life. Here’s the exchange when Dallas tells a frazzled Newland that he’s arranged for them to call on Ellen, the (ostensibly secret) love of Newland’s life:

“You told her I was here?”

“Of course—why not?” Dallas’s eye brows went up whimsically. Then, getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father’s with a confidential pressure.

“I say, father: what was she like?”

Archer felt his colour rise under his son’s unabashed gaze. “Come, own up: you and she were great pals, weren’t you? Wasn’t she most awfully lovely?”

“Lovely? I don’t know. She was different.”

“Ah—there you have it! That’s what it always comes to, doesn’t it? When she comes, SHE’S DIFFERENT—and one doesn’t know why. It’s exactly what I feel about Fanny.”

His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. “About Fanny? But, my dear fellow—I should hope so! Only I don’t see—”

“Dash it, Dad, don’t be prehistoric! Wasn’t she—once—your Fanny?”

Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation. He was the first-born of Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve. “What’s the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ‘em out,” he always objected when enjoined to discretion. But Archer, meeting his eyes, saw the filial light under their banter.

“My Fanny?”

“Well, the woman you’d have chucked everything for: only you didn’t,” continued his surprising son.

“I didn’t,” echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

“No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said—”

“Your mother?”

“Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone—you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.”

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: “She never asked me.”

“No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other’s private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.—I say, Dad,” Dallas broke off, “you’re not angry with me? If you are, let’s make it up and go and lunch at Henri’s. I’ve got to rush out to Versailles afterward.”

Dallas, then, is Newland’s escape from that “deaf-and-dumb asylum.” Newland — no matter how the book ends and how that ending wrecked me — is lucky to have Dallas. I mean, lucky doesn’t even cover it. Here’s a man who’s spent his whole life being untrue to himself and inauthentic with the people around him, and he gets to have a child who cares enough to be real with him. Yes, Dallas is about to get married. But “Fanny Beaufort, whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely to interfere with their intimacy. On the contrary, from what he had seen of her, he thought she would be naturally included in it.”

Lucky. Lucky lucky lucky. Lucky!

Whatever tragedy there may be in Newland not ending up with Ellen, it’s clear to me that the greatest tragedy would be him not ending up with Dallas.

I felt an echo of all this tonight in a couple of sentences from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad:

Lou put his arm around Rolph. If he were an introspective man, he would have understood years ago that his son is the one person in the world with the power to soothe him.