An Unfinished Season (11 page)

So that year we all grew apart, secessionist provinces of an unstable nation. The house was reorganized, the den and the terrace brought up to date, the pond and the sycamores soon to go; it was as if my mother was determined to erase history itself, airbrush the photographs as the commissars regularly did. Later that year, my father sold his business as he promised he would do, and at that moment some essential vitality left him. He gave away his skates and resigned as rules chairman of the club. He no longer arrived home with wildly improbable stories, like the one about the Persian and the basket of trembling silkworms. He lost touch with Sheriff Felsen. He lost interest in the Communists and I am convinced he felt defeated by them. He had loved his business but now the business was gone, sold like a stick of furniture, and now it lived in someone else's house. He looked to the stock market to occupy his time. My father no longer manufactured a product you could hold in your hand but gathered pieces of paper instead, shares in an automobile company, a bank, a pharmaceutical concern, a clothing business, and oil, blue chips all.

 

In August I saw them off on the train for New Orleans, where they were to board the boat for Havana. My father was smart in a white suit and carrying a malacca cane, my mother chic in a shantung suit and a wide-brimmed straw hat drawn down over one eye, sunglasses. They looked like a pair of middle-aged movie stars, the more so since my father had recently grown a mustache, neatly trimmed, Gable-sized. It was hard not to feel envious of them, embarking on such a glamorous journey, promising to buy me a bright red Cuban shirt, promising also to share their winnings in the casinos. My mother had been studying the rules of baccarat. We drank a glass of champagne in their compartment, toasting the success of the trip, hoping for good weather, hoping for agreeable shipboard companions, hoping that I would behave myself back home. The house is in your care. Don't stay out too late. Eat properly. No parties while we're gone.

I listened to their instructions while I looked out the window, passengers streaming by, everyone in a festive mood. A traveler in a dark suit was standing on the platform looking at my father. His expression was unpleasant, and then he turned to the woman he was with and said (I could read his lips), That's that son of a bitch Tom Dewey, and continued to stare. I looked at my father, scarcely believing that anyone could mistake him for an indoor politician like Dewey, altogether too slight a figure, not broad across the shoulders as my father was, not
solid.
My father raised his glass of champagne and turned to look at the platform and he and the stranger locked eyes. The other flung his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his heel, gave a final sneer, and stalked off.

My father said, What was that about?

I said, He thought you were Tom Dewey.

Why the hell would he think I was Tom Dewey?

The mustache, I said.

My father's forefinger went to his upper lip and he colored slightly. He said, I'll shave it off. Jesus, Tom Dewey. That bastard wrecked the Republican Party.

Don't be silly, my mother said. I love the mustache.

The mustache and the glass of champagne, I said. It all adds up.

Tom Dewey led us down to defeat, my father said.

The mustache didn't have anything to do with it, my mother said.

The hell it didn't, my father said. He looked like a headwaiter.

Well, you don't look like a headwaiter. You look like my Teddy, only more distinguished. My mother raised her head and kissed him on the cheek.

It's the champagne, I said. Wasn't that his nickname? Champagne Tom Dewey? And that was why he lost to the Kansas City haberdasher, swilling champagne in Wall Street instead of campaigning in Pekin. Haberdashers trump headwaiters.

My father smiled at that. Even my mother gave a grin of sorts.

Hell of a way to begin a trip, my father grumbled. Mistaken for Tom Dewey.

When the conductor's whistle announced the departure of the train, there was a sudden commotion on the platform, passengers beginning to hurry. I kissed my mother and shook hands with my father, wishing them both a bon voyage and reminding them about the red shirt, maybe a pair of castanets to go with it. They gave me a last warning about the house, always lock the door at night and turn off the lights, no parties, drive safely. Then I rushed from the train, pausing long enough to wave at them from the platform. My mother had taken off her hat and they were toasting each other and were still toasting when the train edged away from the platform in an acrid cloud of steam. I watched the cars recede, then went on my way to the newspaper office downtown, filled with plans for that evening and the next and all the evenings until Labor Day, when college began and I could move into one of the university dormitories on the South Side, temporary quarters until I could find a private apartment with a bed in the living room; but I would be a Chicagoan at last, on my own in a city larger than anyone's ambition. Meanwhile, I had plans for the empty house, the terrace, and the other special places where my girl and I would not be disturbed.

The glass of champagne in the crowded compartment of the City of New Orleans was the end of our life as a family, though I did not know it then. I did not notice because I had acquired this new life of my own, the one I liked to call the wider world, in some clear sense the modern world, and one I was disinclined to share, no doubt because its utter secrecy and privacy was part of its appeal. I had an idea that this new life gained in excitement because it was lived in the shadows of the North Shore, far from Quarterday.

 

 

 

 

I
N JUNE AND JULY
there were debutante parties nearly every other night, two hundred of us dancing under high-topped tents with girls in armored evening dresses, pearls swinging against their throats, the orchestra playing on and on until midnight, when breakfast was served, shirred eggs, scrambled eggs, eggs benedict, eggs daffodil, in copper chafing dishes arrayed on a long buffet table while white-coated waiters opened fresh bottles of Piper-Heidsieck. That summer the Charleston made an unexpected comeback, along with a jazz band from somewhere in Mississippi, its members very old black men. The jazz band played during orchestra intermissions and was the surprise hit of the season. They were tremendously sympathetic, the oldest well over ninety years old. He was rumored to have been born a slave, and you could believe it. He stood in a crouch and his fingers were gnarled as tree roots, as black as the clarinet he played. The jazz band played all the old standards, “Basin Street Blues” and “South Rampart Street Parade,” and hymns like “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” He seemed to float above the others, his eyes neither here nor there. If you spoke to him he always nodded politely but declined to speak back. My God, you thought, he was born at the time of the Civil War.

The dances had a timeless quality, as if things had not advanced for a quarter century—Coolidge in the White House, Capone in the Loop,
Gatsby
in the bookstores. Some nights you could believe that the entire North Shore was dancing to “Mountain Greenery,” the musical phrases handed off from one country club to another up the debutante's archipelago from Chicago to Lake Bluff, two thousand dancers whirling in a blur of cream and black, black and pink, aqua and white, the sound of saxophones rising and settling over the vast monotonous lake like a nervous mist; and the mist vanished at midnight, when the orchestra played its finale and the sweating musicians gathered up their instruments and left the bandstand, disappearing into the night. Then there was a sudden crush around the buffet table. The eggs had arrived.

Everyone knew each other, old and young brought together through acquaintance of the debutante or her parents or school connections or if you were on the List. The origins of the List were obscure, but it was updated every year by a committee, the object being to ensure an adequate supply of presentable young men. I remember reading somewhere, probably in Sassoon, that the great objective of Britain in World War One was to ensure an adequate supply of heroes for the Somme and the Marne; this was a weak-kneed version of that. At first I knew only about a dozen people, but by the end of the first week I had met most everyone, including the houseguests, school friends or cousins from the East and one from England. We roamed in a pack, circling the dance floor, commenting on the action. Each debutante party had a narrative and we knew in the first hour whether the narrative would be successful; that is, if we were still around for the eggs. Now and then I would dance with a popular girl, and when I was cut in on, return happily to the bar and continue to prowl the perimeter, observing the social rituals of the young marrieds. The hierarchies of these gatherings bore a resemblance to life aboard ship. We had set sail aboard a hilarious
Pequod,
young Ishmaels fascinated by the obsessions of the black-tied Ahabs and their women. The young marrieds seemed to us always in search of some fantastic grail, eternal youth or the ring of the Nibelungen, the presidency of the bank, the perfect crime, or the ultimate revenge. Their lives seemed to us unimaginably exotic, as if they were a tribe of the Caucasus or South Sea Islanders or French voluptuaries. The married life was storm-tossed and momentous and until you entered into it you were still an adolescent, becalmed.

They were rowdy, drinking heavily and dancing with abandon, as if their settled state entitled them to a valedictory spree—tomorrow they would be a day older, and the day after that the children would begin to arrive along with gray hair and arthritis and nighttime fatigue owing to various responsibilities at home and at work, too, the bank or the brokerage house where someone was always looking over your shoulder, and if you made a mistake the word would spread at once and your father would be on the telephone with a friendly word of warning and your wife would indicate disapproval in the usual ways. Naturally your father-in-law would also be informed, so there would be the obligatory lunch with him, offering sober assurances that the mistake, whatever it was, would never happen again. The excuses were well honed from years of use with headmasters and university deans and highway patrolmen. The married men never failed to dance with the debutante, if she was pretty or if her father was influential, and the deb was usually delighted because married men were so at ease and amusing, experienced as they were, not left-foot clumsy and looking down the front of your dress like the boys your own age. The married men treated you with courtesy even as they flirted a little, reminiscing about their college years, driving five hours from New Haven to Vassar or Bennett, arriving at dawn for a breakfast of doughnuts and scotch, weekends in New York and meeting under the clock at the Biltmore and going on to Jimmy Ryan's and ending up at someone's apartment and talking seriously about the state of the world, the war in Korea and how the Reds were trying to take over, the toll taken by the Yale class of '51 when so many boys joined the Marines, a life-altering experience. Like whales, they knew the secrets of the deep.

The other reason the young marrieds drank heavily and danced with abandon was because next year there would be fewer party invitations and the debs would be even younger, a Rebuke
to husband and wife alike. My friends and I were not welcome in their company, in the way that sergeants were not welcome at the Officers Club. The married men—they were only a few years older than we were but seemed middle-aged—were sarcastic, spoiling for an argument, and their wives were condescending, as if they knew something that we didn't, that something being, of course, married life, its ardor, its pleasures and miseries, its intimacies, its compromises and boundaries and burdens, its envied seriousness. They knew the score and we didn't. During intermissions they would press close to the jazz band, nodding to the beat, listening with perfect nonchalance, managing to imply that they and the old black men shared a certain knowledge of the wider world of hard knocks and disappointment, casual slander and crimination for imaginary offenses and the simple struggle to stay on top—and although they could not aspire to the natural rhythm of Negroes, they could certainly appreciate the melancholy soul of the blues, an American birthright. The blues were part of every life, even a privileged life on the North Shore; and while it was unnecessary—pointless, really—for one of them to imagine a sharecropper's life in Mississippi (everyone was dealt a particular hand, and how you played the hand was the acid test of character), it was no less pointless for one of the Negroes to imagine their life—the expectations that went with kinship in a good family and matriculation at a fine prep school and an Ivy League degree and the right sort of marriage and all the rest of it, a lifetime of measuring up, with the temptation all the while to say the hell with it, and that decision came with a price also. Not that the price wasn't sometimes paid, and with unpredictable, often hilarious results. Point was, even the North Shore wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Whatever hand you were dealt, someone at the table always had higher cards; and the stakes were not small. You went through the mill the same as everyone else, including the Negroes, though it would be a stretch for them to understand that. In any case, the blues crossed racial lines, even the divisions among the classes; each group would have its own special affinity. Behind the finger-snapping façade of the blues was a glum house of betrayal, thwarted ambition, sexual totalitarianism, lies, and misprision.
The idea was to stay at the table to get what was coming to you; that was the lesson of the blues, especially the stoic example of the clarinet player, born a slave at the time of the Civil War.

 

There was a man I wanted to meet, a silent presence at all the parties, always standing in the shadows off the dance floor, a gin and tonic in his hand and a cigarette burning in his fingers. He was gaunt with gray hair, crewcut, and I estimated his age at somewhere in the vicinity of fifty, ten years either side. It was impossible to be more precise. He seemed to have a prematurely aged head on an athlete's sinewy body, as if his head had lived an entirely different life. He was evidently unmarried. Now and then during the evening a woman would join him for a few moments of one-sided conversation, her attitude solicitous, looking up at him with something like awe. And then she would touch his elbow and drift off, leaving him alone and watchful in the shadows. I had learned his name, Jason Brule, and I knew he was a doctor, a psychiatrist with offices off Lincoln Park on the North Side, downtown. I knew nothing of psychiatry, except for my father's view that it was a shabby discipline one step removed from voodoo. Jason Brule did not seem to enjoy himself. He was often lost in thought, staring at his shoes or off into the distance. He rarely danced and usually left before the eggs. But he was present at most every party, and I came to think of him as a sentry on night watch. I wanted to meet him because he looked and behaved so out of the ordinary, but no one I knew was acquainted with him and it was not done to walk up to a stranger and introduce yourself, not at these parties, and certainly not if the stranger was an older man. His distant manner discouraged familiarity anyhow.