Black Diamond (3 page)

She ran to the Sumner house, to the urn on the terrace. She left her note and hurried away with the letter she’d found addressed to her in an excellent facsimile of William’s handwriting.

His mother saw her come and go. And she picked up the letter meant for William. If she or her husband had stopped to think, they might have said to themselves that many boys and young men will sleep with the wrong kind of girl because there’s nobody else around, but that this affair wasn’t like that: the two were in love. Traditionally, that was supposed to make all irregularities acceptable. Therefore, if the parents disapproved so violently, it might be because they actually wished to
discourage
the young from loving.

William’s mother realized that she could keep up the letter game for only so long. It would be stupid to assume that one of them wouldn’t catch her at her substitution; or, they might come across her while trying – in spite of their promises, and against their parents’ wishes – to meet each other. Nor did she look forward to having her husband discover the exact extent of her interference. She could justify her actions if she had to: a mother has excuses not available to other people. But she’d rather not have to. All she had said in the beginning was that she was going to read the letters, in order to figure out the right way to approach William: as long as she was free to act on her own, everything would be fine. Of course, if her husband wanted to read their letters himself … No, he’d said; he didn’t think it was necessary to read anyone’s letters, but he’d leave the matter to her.

She was excited, frightened, and should have been worried about her rapid heartbeat. The thrill of participating in William’s drama, of saving her son from making a mess of his life, kept her at fever-pitch. She was happy. She’d never had a real romance herself: the secret, stealthy, illicit going back and back again to temptation. She was having her romance now, fired by the heroic part she was playing – a woman rescuing her innocent son from ruin. She didn’t blame the girl especially; it was just that a girl like Jean wasn’t good enough. Girls like that wanted to get married. It didn’t usually matter who was picked out to marry them. Jean would have to release her hold on William and find someone else.

Jean took her letter home and read it. She cried over it. Everything was going wrong: he was changing. If she could see him and try to talk to him, she wouldn’t know what to say. His letter almost sounded as if he didn’t love her any more. But that couldn’t be true.

Her mother made an excuse to the school, to keep Jean at home for a while. She thought her daughter needed time to think. Besides, Jean was looking so unhappy that her classmates might start to ask her questions; or, she might just decide, out of a need to feel comforted, to talk to someone herself. Then, later, if she
had to be sent away, everyone would know why. That wouldn’t do. And William was there at school, too. Although he wouldn’t be able to see Jean without cutting classes, he was there. He might wait around for her in the morning, or later in the afternoon.

At the same time, William’s mother asked her husband to arrange for their son to take a break from school. She wanted to make sure that William and Jean didn’t get a chance to plan anything on their own. She made the first suggestion herself: that William might like a change of scene for a short while, to get things clear in his mind; how about a trip somewhere nice for a couple of weeks? Nassau, perhaps; with his Uncle Bertram. William said no. He couldn’t leave now. As soon as the time-limit was up, he’d get together with Jean. He already wished he hadn’t given his word.

He couldn’t bear the thought that Jean had lost faith in him. He broke his promise to his parents and went over to her house at night. He stood under her window, where the light was out. He threw small stones up at the panes. If he’d had a long, black cloak, he’d have felt safely disguised: covered by darkness, the lover’s friend. On the other hand, it would have made throwing the stones even more difficult. It was impossible to hit anything in the dark. He might break the glass if he wasn’t careful. He began to get mad enough to risk it. Her light went on. Then other lights came on too, one near her window and another
downstairs
; her parents had heard. He retreated. Maybe she hadn’t even realized he’d been there.

He looked for her at school. He asked one of the girls in her class: where was she? ‘She’s sick,’ the girl told him. But it wasn’t anything serious, she said. Just a bad cold.

He stopped playing his records so often. He couldn’t
concentrate
on them. The most beautiful parts upset him; and
everything
in between made him impatient. He wrote a letter to Jean, though he knew she wouldn’t be able to go get it till she was better. He worried about her. She shouldn’t be sick if she was carrying a child. He put his letter in the urn and took out the one that was waiting there for him.

His father had a long talk with him about money and compensation, college and law school. William was so distracted he could barely understand what was being said to him. The letter he had just read, and which he believed to be from Jean, told him in plain terms how little she thought of his conduct, said there were others who wouldn’t have treated her so badly, talked about his petty-mindedness on the subject of money, sneered at his mother’s fur coat, claimed she could sue him, and
complained
that he’d talked her into keeping the baby: now she was stuck with it while he was as free as a bird.

His mother was just in time to intercept his desperate answer. In its place she put a letter containing a key to a box at the post office. The letter said that William was afraid he might be followed or sent away, so it was safer to use the post office.

From then on, it was easy to deceive the young couple without danger. William protested when he was sent to the Caribbean, but he gave in; the fight was going out of him. He too had been given a key, to a post office box with a different number. His mother was therefore able to make her exchanges without fear that a letter would slip through. She could also use William’s stamped and cancelled envelopes sent genuinely from the West Indies; a single numeral altered the box number. And she brought the affair to an end quickly. She sent Jean a letter that described William going to a party given by friends of his parents. These friends had a daughter he’d met years ago when they were children. He couldn’t believe now, the letter said, how much they had in common. Although he’d always be fond of Jean, he thought they’d better both admit everything between them had been a big mistake. He felt pretty upset, but he had to be honest and say he wanted to do lots of things in life – starting with college and law school – that wouldn’t be possible with a wife and child. He’d come to believe, from hearing some interesting theories on the subject recently, that it was better in every way not to start having children till you were about twenty-eight. He did realize, naturally, that in a certain sense he was to blame. But she couldn’t deny that she’d said yes in the first place, and nice girls didn’t – he knew that now: they just had
strong principles about the right way to behave in life. You had to have those high standards in order to become a mature human being. Of course he still liked her, but he thought she’d better take her parents’ advice, except not about trying to get money out of his father, because that could land them in a lot of trouble, she’d better believe that.

The letter ended,
So
I
guess
this
is
goodbye.

Jean wrote back. She pleaded with him. She thought that he couldn’t have meant to send her a letter like that. She asked him to read it over, and to think about what he felt, and to try to remember the way he’d known her. She enclosed his letter. She said she loved him; she’d wait for an answer.

He didn’t answer. He hadn’t seen her letter. She wrote again, almost immediately, telling him that her parents were taking her out of school for the rest of the year and sending her to live with her maiden aunt in the next state. She was going to have the baby there. She gave him the address and begged him to help her: if he didn’t help, they could take the baby away from her as soon as it was born. That was what they wanted – for the baby to be adopted by somebody, so then nobody would know she’d had an illegitimate child.

William still knew nothing. His mother had written him a masterpiece of a letter, filled with accusation, silliness and platitudes. It also compared parents, saying that her father had worked all his life, which was more than you could say for his father, who spent all his time swindling people and called it big business: she didn’t know why he was so stingy, either: William was going to be just the same when he grew up, which would probably be never. And she was taking her parents’ advice, by the way, and having an operation because she didn’t want to have anything more to do with him: she was hoping to get a steady job some day and meet a real man: and she was staying away from home for good, so he didn’t need to write any more dumb letters to her.

A key was enclosed. His mother had had duplicates made. She hadn’t worked out the details of her scheme at the beginning, but everything had seemed to go very well. She stopped writing any
letters herself. She merely collected and read theirs. At any moment she expected to find that William had written to Jean’s parents – that would have spoiled everything: but he’d lost his trust in them. He stopped sending letters. He’d come to the conclusion, suddenly, that it was over between him and Jean. He hadn’t done anything, or been able to do anything, to make a difference. She had changed; she was sorry about what had happened. She hadn’t loved him, after all.

His Uncle Bertram said over the phone that William was desolate: he swam, and he went out in the boat with the rest of the gang, but he was so unhappy it was pitiful to see. And he’d gotten drunk one night and passed out cold. ‘He’s getting over it,’ his father said.

When William returned to town and to school, Jean had gone. He finished his school year. His mother continued to collect the letters Jean was sending to the post office. At last a letter arrived that was much shorter than the others: it said simply that she loved him but she couldn’t go on – she knew they were going to take the baby away, and she was tired of everything anyway. She’d decided to kill herself.

His mother didn’t believe it. Girls tried that kind of threat all the time. She put the letter with the rest of them. She kept a regular check on the mailbox. Week after week there was nothing. Nothing for months. If Jean had killed herself, if she’d died – what could anyone do? It would be too late to go back. Long ago it was too late. But there was no question of suicide; that couldn’t be. Obviously the girl had just given up, finally. There was no reason to wait for more letters. The keys could be turned in at the post office.

William did well at school. He drank at parties, but he stayed away from drugs like Benzedrine and Dexedrine, which had begun to make an impression on the college campuses of nearby states. He started to go around with a girl from his own graduating class, and then went out with her friend. He slept with both of them. He had fun. He didn’t intend to get serious again. He began to feel better and to think of Jean with a sense of disappointment and revulsion. She had let him down. It seemed
to him that all women would act the same way in the end. They didn’t want love. Their sights were fixed on other things: safety, pride, interior decorating. He saw Jean’s mother in town one day. They both turned away at the same time, instantly, as soon as they recognized each other.

He went away to college, where he also did well. And to law school. He came back briefly for his father’s funeral and then, after he’d started work with a law firm, to visit his mother. She’d had a heart attack. She was only fifty-seven. William was horrified by the injustice of her illness. Because his father had been so much older, that death had seemed to come at a reasonable age. She was too young. He knew she still had hopes that he’d marry one of the girls she’d introduced him to. He hadn’t come home so often as she’d have liked, either. He had been thoughtless. He’d neglected her.

She had a series of slight attacks and then the massive failure that carried her off. William phoned every relative he could think of. He asked them all to come to the funeral: stay at the house, be with him. He had nobody now. When the funeral was over, he sat downstairs with Uncle Bertram and his cousins from
Kentucky
. He told them he felt like the last of the dodos; for the first time in his life he thought it might be nice to have some brothers and sisters. ‘Even though all of you turned up trumps,’ he said. He thanked them for coming. They spent a long and raucous night reminiscing, but they were gone the next day.

Later there were the clothes to give away, the accounts to put in order, the question of what to do with the house when he was away – whether to sell it, or rent it, or leave it standing empty. There was a lot of junk to sort through. And his mother hadn’t thrown out any of his father’s clothes; she’d just left everything of his the way it had been.

William took a bottle of whiskey upstairs with him. He plugged in his father’s portable phonograph and turned it on in the empty house. He put the volume way up. He played Verdi. He started with his father’s study, moved to the attic and then to his mother’s room. He was glad he was alone. He could cry without restraint.

He stuffed his parents’ clothes into suitcases, laundry bags and cardboard boxes. He threw combs and brushes and shoes after them. He opened drawers containing half-used lipsticks and unopened perfume bottles. He discovered all his old school reports back to when he was six years old. And he found the box that held the pink, flowered notepaper, the sheets covered with repeated phrases scribbled as practice for the final draft. He saw the originals in his mother’s handwriting, the bundle of letters he’d written himself, and the ones from Jean: all of them. He went out of his mind.

He smashed the empty whiskey bottle, the mirrors, the windows, the phonograph. His hands were cut and bleeding. He threw the unbreakable records out of the windows and snapped the others over his knee: all his precious collection of 78s. He picked up chairs and banged them down on the tables, threw vases against the walls. He screamed unceasingly, like a monkey in the forest. He slashed all the paintings in the house, even the ones he had known from his childhood and had loved most – the portrait of his grandparents as children, the view of the
summer-house
from the bay. He tore up all the photographs of himself and his parents, set fire to the Anatolian rug and walked out of the room while it was still smouldering. He took his father’s bird guns from their cases, loaded them up and began to shoot into the walls, sideboards, ceilings, stairs. After a while people out in the street called the police, who came and broke down the back door. They got a doctor to give William an injection. He spent a couple of days asleep.