A Hundred Summers (31 page)

He’d be so surprised to see me. He’d be delighted. He would pick me up and whirl me around, the way Nick once had.

My hands were shaking. I found the keys in my pocketbook and opened the door as quietly as I could. “Graham?” I said, but my throat had constricted, and the word was too soft to be heard.

I could hear him in the living room. He was making a stifled groaning noise, as if he was doing the exercises for his shoulder. I set down the satchel in the foyer, laid my pocketbook on the demi-lune table, and walked through the archway into the living room.

Graham sat in the exact center of the sofa, with his head thrown back and his hair flopping downward in streaks of sun-lightened brown. One arm in shirtsleeves lay across the sofa’s back, the other rested presumably in his lap. His eyes were closed, and I thought for an instant that he was asleep, except that his lips were moving, and from those lips came the groaning sounds I had heard from the foyer.

I stepped closer, and the rest of him came into view. His left hand was not in his lap, as I had thought, but speared through a ball of curling light-brown hair. The hair belonged to a kneeling female form, a girl, her lemon-yellow sweater and her generous brassiere discarded on the floor next to Graham’s black shoes, and her head bent attentively over Graham’s exposed penis, which emerged and disappeared in perfect rhythm through the plump red circle of her mouth.

As I watched, transfixed, Graham’s groans coalesced into a few incoherent words, and his hand moved with authority against the brown curls of his supplicant, guiding the girl’s activity. His hips bucked, but the girl held on tenaciously, her fingers secured around the base like a stack of pink rings. Her delicate shoulders gleamed ivory between the navy blue legs of Graham’s flannel trousers.

“Jesus, I’m going to come,” shouted Graham.

I must have made a sound of some kind, because the girl looked up with horrified eyes, and my mind was in a state of such incomprehension that it took me a few suspended seconds to recognize her.

“Maisie?” I said.

AFTER MAISIE LAIDLAW
had stopped weeping and apologizing, after I had dispatched her, fully clothed in her snug lemon-yellow sweater, back to her parents’ apartment, I told Graham to gather his things and leave. I wanted him gone by the time I returned. He said he wanted to stay, to talk and explain, but I said there could be no possible explanation, apart from the obvious.

He said we would talk later, when I was calmer. I said I was perfectly calm.

He said he’d made a terrible mistake, he’d been so lonely and unmoored without me, if only I’d visited him earlier. He said the girl had been after him since he arrived, throwing herself at him, literally taking off her sweater in the elevator just now, and what man born could resist
those
? He said at least they hadn’t gone to bed, he hadn’t actually fucked her, he would never betray me like that. I said it amounted to the same thing, as far as I was concerned.

He dropped to his knees on my parents’ rug and said he’d never do it again, never even look at another woman.

I said I wasn’t an idiot.

I said Maisie Laidlaw was hardly a woman.

He wouldn’t take back his mother’s ring, so I left it on the demi-lune table in the foyer, glittering in the lamplight beneath the two Audubon prints, and went to visit my father.

DADDY LIVED NOW
in a special hospital on Sixty-third Street, more like an apartment building, really, except it was filled with nurses and doctors and the corridor walls were painted white. His room had a brief view of the park, and he usually sat watching that sliver of green with his flat blue eyes and his immobile face.

“He’s having a good day,” said the orderly, leading me through. “Ate his lunch all right. I read him the newspaper. Looks like they’re braced for another hurricane in Florida.”

“Another one?”

“That’s right.” The orderly nodded. “The Atlantic coast this time. A big one, they’re saying. Look, Mr. Dane. Your daughter’s here.”

My father’s head moved, shifting slightly in the light. I came around the front of his chair and knelt before him and took his hands. “Daddy, it’s me. It’s Lily.”

He looked at me, and the right side of his face lifted into a tiny smile. I touched his cheek, running my finger over a small patch of stubble that the razor had missed. “How are you? It’s been a hot summer, hasn’t it? I’ve missed you so much.”

“I can bring a chair,” said the orderly.

“No, that’s all right.” I lowered myself next to my father’s legs and curled into him. A weight settled on my head: his hand. The window dipped low, and I could just see over the ledge, where the tiny green sliver of Central Park beckoned through the rain. Once a day, they took him out in his chair for a walk along the paths, unless the weather forbade it. I doubted he’d gone out today.

“Just ring the bell if you need anything,” said the orderly.

I sat there for a long time, looking out the window, hugging Daddy’s legs, feeling the weight of his unmoving hand on my hair. A faint smell of antiseptic hung in the air, tangling with the smell of Daddy’s shaving soap. “Do you remember Nick, Daddy?” I asked softly. He didn’t move. “Probably not. He was the boy from Dartmouth, the one I was in love with. I suppose I still am. He married Budgie, Daddy. Budgie Byrne. They spent the summer up in Seaview, in Budgie’s old house, except Budgie fixed it all up. It looks very modern now.”

Daddy made a little noise in his throat.

“It’s not that bad. It was very run-down; they had to do something.” I stroked his leg, narrow as a matchstick beneath the thin flannel trousers. Still summer clothes, in this heat. The fan rotated in a whisper above us, shifting the somnolent air. “Anyway, there they were, and he was just as he always was, so grave and clever and handsome, so full of warmth beneath it all. It was torture, Daddy, watching them together. And Budgie . . . well, you know Budgie. She’s so beautiful, such a match for him. And she loves him. You wouldn’t believe it, I wouldn’t have believed it, but she does. She really does.”

Central Park swam in my eyes. I lifted my sleeve and wiped them. “So I started flirting with Graham Pendleton, Daddy. I don’t know if you ever met him. He’s terribly handsome. He plays for the Yankees. I was jealous of Nick, and miserable, and I . . . I guess Graham made me feel better. Made me feel lovely and loved. And then Budgie said she and Nick were having a baby, and I couldn’t bear it, so I told Graham I would marry him.”

Daddy’s hand made a movement in my hair, the fingers just nudging my scalp.

“He said he needed me, Daddy. You know I can’t resist that, people needing me. I thought I could do something right. Give Kiki a man to look up to, to play with, the way I had you. Give Graham the loyal wife he needed, the family he needed. But I was wrong.” The tears choked up in my throat and ran out my eyes. I doubled over, clutching his leg. “I was so
wrong
, Daddy. I have been so
stupid
, haven’t I?”

I sobbed into Daddy’s trousers, until the flannel stuck to my cheeks and my nose was brimming. I sobbed for ages, until I was emptied out, hollow, a thin-skinned vessel of Lily balanced precariously on the eighteenth floor of a building almost overlooking Central Park.

Daddy’s hand remained in my hair, though it didn’t move anymore. The rain sheeted against the window, an immense amount of rain, tumbling down the gutters and into the streets. When I got up to leave, I couldn’t have said whether I had been there two minutes or two hours. My bones were stiff and aching, my face tight. I kissed Daddy on the cheek and told him I’d come by to visit him tomorrow.

On my way out, I stopped at the telephone booth in the hall and flipped through the pages of the directory until I found the listing for Greenwald and Company, 99 Broadway.

ACCORDING TO THE RAISED BRASS
letters in the lobby directory, Greenwald and Company received its visitors on the eleventh floor. The rain had lightened to a drizzle by the time I emerged from the subway, but my dress was still damp, my stockings still fused to my legs, my hair still a mess of strawberry-blond frizz. It was four in the afternoon, and the marble-clad lobby was nearly empty, in a state of hushed expectancy for the five-o’clock rush. I shook out my umbrella and pressed the call button on the elevator. I tried not to look at my reflection in the burnished stainless-steel surfaces around me.

I told myself that I was doing nothing wrong, that I was only going to see an old friend, to put things straight, to perhaps commiserate. I told myself that I had no designs on Nick, no intention of disturbing his marriage and his impending fatherhood. But my fingers were trembling as I pressed the number eleven on the elevator panel; my heart was smashing violently against my ribs with the consciousness of reckless guilt. Or rather, the consciousness of an absence of guilt: that I didn’t care, didn’t give a damn. That it was my turn to break things, to hurt someone irreparably.

I didn’t know what to expect from Nick’s offices. I knew he had managed the Paris branch of Greenwald and Company after college, that he had pulled it back from the abyss after the firm had nearly collapsed in the spring of 1932. I knew that he had returned to New York to take over the headquarters when his father died last year, and that he had proposed to Budgie shortly thereafter. Had he renovated, or kept the place as his father had built it? Would it be sleek and modern, like the apartment in Gramercy Park?

There was marble, plenty of it, cool and white. There were rich rugs on the floor, and comfortable armchairs, and bold modern art anchoring each wall in a shock of primary colors. At the end of the lobby, beneath a sign that read
GREENWALD AND COMPANY
in black sans serif, a pretty dark-haired secretary sat behind an ashwood desk. She cast me a look of haughty astonishment as I drew near, holding my dripping umbrella.

“Greenwald and Company,” she drawled. “May I help you?”

“Lily Dane to see Mr. Greenwald.”

“Mr. Greenwald is in a meeting,” she said promptly, with a touch of satisfaction. “Do you have an appointment?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

She glanced at the clock on the wall. “Perhaps you’d like to come back tomorrow.”

“No, thank you. I’ll wait.”

“The meeting is expected to last quite some time.”

“Nevertheless, I’ll wait. Perhaps you could give him my name, in the meantime.”

A superior smile. “I couldn’t possibly disturb him, unless it was an emergency.”

“Miss . . .” I searched for a name, either on her nipped gray suit jacket or a placard on the desk, but could find nothing. “Miss, I’m a personal friend of Mr. Greenwald’s. I’m sure he’d wish to be informed of my arrival.”

The barest flicker of doubt crossed her eyes and winked out. “I’m sorry. He left strict instructions. You’re welcome to wait in the chair, or else return tomorrow morning.”

I stood poised, staring at the door behind her, which was open to reveal a glimpse of the office interior. A hallway, lined with more marble. A man walked past, and another. One of them, quite young, came through the door and bent to whisper in the receptionist’s ear.