First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories (7 page)

“Yes,” I said. “Where’s Mother?”

“Downstairs,” my sister said, coming into the room. “Sending telegrams. Do you want to see my ring?” She took her gloves off.

I turned the bedside-table lamp on, and she held her hand out. The ring was gold, and there was an emerald and four diamonds around it.

“It was his grandmother’s,” my sister said. I nodded. “It’s not what I—” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and forgot to finish her sentence. “Tell me,” she said, “do you think he’s really rich?” Then she turned a sad gaze on me, through her lashes. “Do you want to know something awful? I don’t like my ring….”

“Are you unhappy?” I asked.

“No, just upset. It’s scary getting married. You have no idea. I kept getting chills all evening. I may get pneumonia. Do you have a cigarette?”

I said I’d get her one downstairs.

“No, there’s some in my room,” she said. “I’ll get them. You know, Sonny and I talked about you. We’re going to send you to college and everything. We planned it all out tonight.” She played with her gloves for a while, and then she said, looking at the toes of her shoes, “I’m scared. What if Sonny’s not good at business?” She turned to me. “You know what I mean? He’s so young….”

“You don’t have to marry him,” I said. “After all, you’re—”

“You don’t understand,” my sister said hurriedly, warding off advice she didn’t want. “You’re too young yet.” She laughed. “You know what he said to me?”

Just then, my mother called out from the bottom of the stairs, “Listen, how does this sound to you? ‘Dear Greta—’ It’s a night letter, and we get a lot of words, and I thought Greta would like it better if I started that way. Greta’s so touchy, you know. Can you hear me?”

“I have to go,” my sister whispered. She looked at me, and then suddenly she leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Have nice dreams.” She got up and went out into the hall.

“‘—Dodie got engaged tonight,’” my mother read. “Is ‘got engaged’ the right way to say it?”

“Became engaged,” my sister said, in a distant voice.

I put on my bathrobe and slippers and went out into the hall. My sister was leaning over the banister, talking to my mother at the bottom of the stairs about the night letter. I slipped past her and down the back stairs and into the kitchen. I found a cold chicken in the icebox, put the platter on the kitchen table, and tore off a leg and began to eat.

The door to the back stairs swung open, and my sister appeared. “I’m hungry, too,” she said. “I don’t know why.” She drifted over to the table, and bent over the chicken. “I guess emotion makes people hungry.”

My mother pushed open the swinging door, from the dining-room side. “There you are,” she said. She looked flustered. “I’ll have to think some more, and then I’ll write the whole thing over,” she said to my sister. To me she said, “Are you
eating
at this time of night?”

My sister said that she was hungry, too.

“There’s some soup,” my mother said. “Why don’t I heat it up.” And suddenly her eyes filled with tears, and all at once we fell to kissing one another—to embracing and smiling and making cheerful predictions about one another—there in the white, brightly lighted kitchen. We had known each other for so long, and there were so many things that we all three remembered…. Our smiles, our approving glances, wandered from face to face. There was a feeling of politeness in the air. We were behaving the way we would in railway stations, at my sister’s wedding, at the birth of her first child, at my graduation from college. This was the first of our reunions.

I
CAME TO HARVARD
from St. Louis in the fall of 1948. I had a scholarship and a widowed mother and a reputation for being a good, hardworking boy. What my scholarship didn’t cover, I earned working Wednesday nights and Saturdays, and I strenuously avoided using any of my mother’s small but adequate income. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, my grandmother died and willed me five thousand dollars. I quit my part-time job and bought a gray flannel suit and a pair of white buck shoes, and I got on the editorial board of the college literary magazine. I met Duncan Leggert at the first editorial meeting I attended. He had been an editor for a full year, and this particular night he was infuriated by a story, which everyone wanted to print, about an unhappy, sensitive child. “Why shouldn’t that child be unhappy?” Duncan shouted. “He’s a bore.” The story was accepted, and Duncan stalked out of the meeting.

Two nights later, as I was walking along Massachusetts Avenue in the early dusk, I saw Duncan peering into the window of a record store at a display of opera albums. He was whistling “Piangi, piangi,” from “La Traviata,” and he looked, as usual, wan, handsome, and unapproachable. I stood beside him until he looked up, and then I told him I thought he’d been right about the story.

“Of course I was right,” he said, looking down at me from his patient, expectant eyes. “Those people confuse being sordid with being talented.”

We went to a tavern and sat in a booth that was illuminated by one of those glowing juke-box things in which you deposit a nickel and push a button, and the Wurlitzer, a mile away, plays the tune. At first, I was nearly asphyxiated with shyness, but I asked Duncan what he was planning to be when he graduated (substituting “graduated” for “grown up” at the last minute), and he said “Nothing.” I looked blank, and he took his cigarette and stared at the glowing coal for a moment and then said quietly, with a good deal of sadness in his voice, “I’m rich.” Then he raised his head, looked me in the eye—he was half smiling—and added, “Filthy rich.” I was utterly charmed. I asked him how rich. He said, airily, “Oh, a couple million if the market holds.” The idea of talking to someone that rich pleased me so much I burst into idiotic laughter. He asked me why I was laughing, but I didn’t tell him.

We talked warily at first, as men—or, rather, as boys imitating men—will; but then, impelled by the momentum of some deep and inexplicable sympathy, we went on talking until one o’clock. Duncan said the college literary magazine was a mere journal of self-pity, and those parts of it that weren’t amateurish were grubby. He firmly believed, he said, that most unhappiness was a pose. “It’s a way of getting out of being interesting.”

Even at his most arrogant, Duncan always had a note of despair in his voice. “People get what they deserve,” he said. “Why should I believe in tragedy? I’ve never seen any. Stories ought to have happy endings; people ought to be more interesting; everyone ought to have better taste.

“The important thing,” he said as he slouched in his corner of the booth and sketched faces in the sugar he had poured on the table, “is to have quality. No one cares if your mother loved you or not if you’re dull. And most people are dull,” he added sadly.

“This is a democracy,” he said later. “I’m supposed to consider everyone my equal. Well, I don’t. Dull people give me a pain. I think Whitman is a lousy poet and Willa Cather is feeble-minded, and old Huckleberry Twain gives me the creeps. What’s more, if there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a lot of pointless good nature.” I quenched my smile.

It seemed to me he was saying everything I had always thought and never expressed.

From that first night, we were friends. I suppose any friendship must have a core of mutual need. I was tired of what I had been. I was full of Midwestern optimism about my ability to change. From that very first night, I fully intended to live my life in line with the doctrine Duncan was expounding. But it wasn’t his ideas that I admired and wanted. What I wanted was his Eastern Shore of Maryland manner, and his honesty, and his faith that what he thought was important. And I wanted to look like him. He was very tall. He had a wan, smooth face, elongated and arrogant. He walked with a slouch and often sat for hours among people without saying a word, sometimes without an expression crossing his handsome countenance. But then he might suddenly begin to talk, especially if there was a discussion going on, and he would talk overexcitedly, gesticulate, occasionally not even making sense, and then later he would be inconsolable because he thought he had made a fool of himself. I thought he was charming at those moments. What did dismay me was the way he had of being rendered speechless by a color, or a pretty woman’s gesture of welcome, or an automobile, or the way a girl’s hair blew. He would stand, quite tense and excited, held by a kind of surprised rapture. When he had these quiet transports, I was embarrassed—for myself, because I was unable to share a friend’s emotion. But as I knew Duncan longer, the beauty that seemed to electrify him touched me, too. Duncan was always showing me shapes in the clouds.

Everything he said explained me to myself or else put a weapon in my hand, and his bitterness struck me like a surge of sunlight, bringing crisp-ness and definition, drenched as I was in the foggy optimism of my home. I was discarding my traditions as fast as I could, but it was difficult work; I had first to locate the roots and then to get them up. And Duncan’s disillusion—any disillusion, in fact—was infinitely helpful. I did my best to speak as Duncan did, with frequent, entrancing pauses, and with small curlicues of contempt.

Yet if Duncan felt it was a moment for kindness, his entire soul and bank account, his car, his wardrobe, his time were yours. I used to worry about people taking advantage of him; but although he had a terrible memory for telephone numbers and people’s names, he never forgot how much he spent, where, and with whom.

Girls fell in love with him often. They seemed to find his mixture of melancholy and arrogance irresistible. At first, Duncan would be overwhelmingly chivalrous to them, light their cigarettes, take them out when they asked him. But sooner or later he would begin to feel cornered; he’d cease lighting cigarettes; he’d stop answering the telephone.

The number of people we saw that year steadily dwindled as we decided they were doomed to be ordinary or as they disagreed with us; and they were struck from our list of acquaintances. He and I both believed that if we were careful and did the right thing, we could escape turning out as our elders had. “They give you advice,” Duncan pointed out, “and never stop to think of what you think of what they turned out to be.” We thought if you travelled far enough and long enough, you would come to a place where everyone liked the things you liked and talked the way you talked, where everyone knew your value without your having to get undignified and nervous in proving it. In this place that we were looking for, you would never have to boast or to make conversation out of pity for an ugly girl or to feel sorry for your parents. One January night when Duncan and I were walking along the Charles—it was cold and foggy—we swore never to hide the truth from each other, always to admit our faults, to admire each other’s virtues, to become men of stature, true stature, and to go to Europe together that summer for a year, leaving college, no matter what our parents said or did about it. We would take bicycles and be frugal and healthy, and we would deepen our culture and our refinement.

My mother objected violently when I told her I was going to Europe with Duncan. She said I was wasting my inheritance and going to the bad out of sheer obstinacy, and that it was all Duncan’s bad example. Duncan said that, of course, she was right. I got drunk and told Duncan that my mother could go to hell, and he watched me, as I recall, with eyes glassy with admiration. How could my mother compete with Duncan? All I wanted, that year, was to be like him.

We sailed from Halifax in June, on the Aquitania, for Southampton. Almost as soon as the green hills around Halifax receded and the ship was in open water, Duncan said to me, “I think you ought to write your mother a good letter. You were quite unpleasant to her over the phone. That’s one of your faults,” he added, and he grimaced to show that he didn’t like to talk this way but that he had to, in accordance with our vow. “You have so little tact. On the other hand, you’re much more dynamic than I am. I wish I were more like you.”

“But you’re not,” I said, candid at any cost. “You mustn’t worry about it,” I went on quickly, “because I like you very much the way you are now…”

We were free from college and observation; we were molding each other, protecting each other from being ordinary. Duncan put his hand on my shoulder briefly and smiled, and then we paced each other around the deck of the ship to get our exercise in before dinner. The statured figure had to be physically attractive, too.

We stayed in England just long enough to see the Tower of London, the National Gallery, and Scott’s, and to decide the food was inedible, and then we took the channel steamer from Newhaven. Standing at the rail, we saw the shores of France rise from the waves, green and promising.

When we landed in Dieppe, my delight—let me say that my delight rose like a flock of startled birds. Everything I saw or heard—the whole pastel city, the buildings as serene and placid as the green water of the harbor—touched off another flutter of the white wings. At one wharf, a group of fishing boats huddled in a confusion of masts, the hulls green and black and purple, arched like slices of melon. Along the waterfront was a row of buildings, with here and there a gap and a pile of rubble or a portion of a wall. But these were the colors of the buildings: pale green and mauve, light yellow like wispy sunlight, faded pink, gentle bluish gray. And then, perched on a hillside, the immemorial hulk of a castle.

Duncan’s gaze moved lovingly around the scene. “Every town should have a castle,” he said.

Our hotel room was old, with a sloping floor and a single, huge brass bed. There were no rugs on the wooden floor and no curtains on the high French windows, which wouldn’t quite close, because of their crooked frames. Outside our window, three streets converged and formed a triangular island, planted with plane trees and patterned beds of yellow flowers. Workmen in gray clothes and thick boots were sitting on stone benches and drinking wine. The fronts of the houses along the street were decorated with heavy lintels and occasionally with stringy caryatids, at once frivolous and orderly. In the distance an elegant spire rose, and the sound of bells floated down to us. We washed our faces and brushed our teeth and changed our clothes, singing the entire time—and then, since we were in France, we set out to find some women.