Honorable Men (25 page)

“Oh, Chip!” She hurried over to put her arms around him. “Oh, Chip, my poor darling. I'm so sorry!”

But even in the frenzy of his need of her sympathy, he was able to push her off. “I don't think even you will want to stay in Benedict now!” he cried in anguish.

N
INETEEN SIXTY-ONE,
the first year of Jack Kennedy's presidency, found us settled in Manhattan in a large apartment on Park Avenue that we had rented furnished, as I had not the heart to dismantle our house in Benedict or the energy to decorate a new one. Our city abode was as expensively conventional as an elegant department store's sample rooms; it was full of bright chintz and handsome imitations of Colonial furniture, and Chip had a library with mahogany paneling and English hunting prints. But it was comfortable, and Chip at least seemed content. He went downtown every day to his law firm, but much of his time was devoted to public trusteeships. Of course, he was just what every charitable institution dreamed of: a board member who was willing to work as well as give, who could speak eloquently at meetings and read between the lines of a financial statement. Before our first year in town was up, he had been elected to the boards of the Public Library, the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Gardens. He was on his way to becoming “Mr. New York.”

With me it was just the opposite. The bottom had simply dropped out of my life, and there was nothing that I wanted to do. Eleanor was at Yale Law School, immersed in her studies, which was perhaps just as well, for she and I continued not to get on. I think I tried, but her dry refusal to accord the slightest importance to anything that I cared about was certainly daunting. Dana, my darling, was in his last year at Saint Luke's, but Chip refused to let me visit the school more than once a term, for fear of my “mollycoddling” him. My literary agent (pretentious term, considering the exiguity of my output) had submitted without success to several publishers a short romantic novel. My publishing record at the age of forty-two was three short stories in magazines and a slender volume of sonnets.

I knew plenty of people in New York, but too many of them revived unpleasant memories of my debutante year. My parents were beginning to dote: Daddy's memory was largely gone, and Mummie's storytelling about society folk had become compulsive. Chip and I dined out a certain amount—he was always in demand—and we sometimes entertained, but I found myself allowing these parties to be done by caterers. It seemed that I had left my soul in Benedict.

I didn't know how to assess my resentment of Chip. There were times when he seemed to me a veritable monster of egotism and selfishness. That he should have so calmly accepted the rape of a business that had been the basis of our lives and of his parents'—with such fatal results to the latter—and now have embarked so cheerfully on a totally new career seemed to indicate more than a prodigious capability of accepting the inevitable; it seemed to suggest an actual spirit of cooperation with fate. Had Chip wanted Benedict to fall to the enemy? Had his ethical concern been mere quibbling? But even his poor dead father had not gone this far, and I tried to repress the suspicion. At worst his scruples must have been quixotic, not malicious. But what a price we had to pay for his quixoticism! And there he was, so to speak, his hands in his pockets, whistling.

He and I were more remote from each other than at any point of our marriage. Chip seemed to sense the existence of my doubts and difficulties, but he also appeared to have decided that only I could solve them for myself, that any interference on his part would be officious. He would tell me in the evening about the events of his eventful day, and his failure to question me about my own I could attribute only to his tact. The contrast between our days would have been too sad. We went to the Piping Rock Club on weekends, where Chip played golf or squash and I took long solitary walks in the woods. On Saturday nights he still made conscientious love to me. I suspected that he might have private arrangements for additional satisfaction in that area (God knows he had experience!), but I did not much care. It was like his new interest in being a public citizen—something that did not really seem to have much to do with me.

My problem was how to get through the days. During the war, when Chip was away, I had had a minor problem with alcohol. It had not been bad enough to be spotted by anyone but my all-seeing mother-in-law, and she had been kindness itself in her gentle warnings. What had appalled me then, and what appalled me now, was the prospect of appearing drunk to others. In my periods of greatest temptation I had managed to overindulge only in afternoons and evenings when I was quite alone. And even then the quantity that I consumed was not great, as I have never had a strong head. I used to recall Granny Struthers's dictum: “It's not a compliment to a lady to say she holds her liquor well.” She might have revised this had she lived into our time!

I tried to arrange my day into zones that would offer the least ennui and the least temptation. I lingered over breakfast in bed with the newspapers. An early lunch at the Colony Club made for a short morning. I could usually find someone to eat with there, and company kept me down to a single cocktail. Few women at the club took more than one in midday. In the afternoon there was the blessed narcotic of bridge, at the Colony or at the homes of friends, and the evening was apt to provide a social engagement where I would be safe under Chip's observant eye. But if he was out of town, I would watch television alone and go to bed early after several (too many) libations. Fortunately he was not often out of town.

The cards were what really saved me. I had always played a respectable game of bridge, but now I conceived the ambition (never spurn an ambition!) of becoming expert. I found a teacher who would take me in the morning, which took care of that part of the day, and I soon discovered that I needed something better than the casual afternoon foursome that I had been able to put together, sometimes with difficulty, at the club. What I really needed was three regular players who were as good as I, or preferably a little better. And these I found through Suzanne Bogart, whom I had not seen since she and Chessy had left Charlottesville after the terrible episode of the cribbed Law Review note.

Suzy had changed a lot from the timid, pretty creature whom Chessy had brought to our midst at law school; she was now a fine, full, marble-skinned, rather stocky woman who seemed to be perfectly content with female society and had developed considerable self-assurance. She brushed aside the hostility between our spouses as if we had been two mothers discussing a spat of fisticuffs between their young sons.

“I don't see that what happened between Chip and Chessy need be any concern of ours. Wouldn't you like to join a bridge foursome that meets two afternoons a week? We just lost Anne Stone, who's had to move to Florida, poor dear. The other two are old pals of yours from deb days: Amanda Bayne and Dolly Jones.”

Indeed, they had been two of my “disciples” in my foolish debutante career! Amanda Bayne had not married; she had survived her parents and lived rather elegantly alone in an apartment hotel. She was still pretty, though she had to work to be. She was one of those lacquered creatures, perfectly dressed, polite, amiable, with mildly artificial good manners, who seem oddly content with an existence of unvaried routine from which all the challenges that are supposed to make life worth living have been carefully pruned. It seemed characteristic that her perfect teeth had never known a cavity. Dolly, who had been born Dolly Hotchkiss and was now divorced, had been more ravaged by life. Childless and rudderless, she spent her evenings alone without a Chip to stand between her and the whiskey bottle. Daytime was her discipline; she managed to pull herself together for the card table.

We rotated our afternoons between Suzy's bleakly modern apartment, hung with Chessy's small but fine collection of abstract impressionists, Amanda's elegant, bibelot-crowded, high-ceilinged chamber at the Lamballe and my own Park Avenue abode. We never met at Dolly's, probably because she associÂ
ated her own domicile with intemperance. Anyway, we never served anything but soft drinks or tea. Suzanne would produce the ice and bottles herself, I had a maid for the purpose, and Amanda would ring down to the hotel restaurant for what she needed, producing the necessary tip from a desk drawer that I noticed was filled to the brim with quarters.

As I look back on our sessions, my three women companions, pale figures all, seem to merge with the walls around them. We never gossiped or quarreled over bids or criticized each other's play. Rudeness, I have found, is more a characteristic of male than of female players. Some men must always act the strutting cock, even at the card table. But in our muted sessions I heard little but the click of a played card, the swish of a shuffle, the quiet enumeration of a bid, the subdued, almost apologetic “double,” the faint, disappointed “oh” at the appearance of an unexpected trump, the permissible sigh of relief at the making of a slam. And behind us, around us, I see Suzy's white walls and the jagged lines and exquisite spirals of a Picasso drawing, or the gleaming glass cupboard of Amanda's China trade tureens and platters, or the fashionable, mauve decade portrait of her grandmother by Boldini.

The real people were in my hand or on the board: the royal families of the four suits, the imperial aces, the loyal soldiers of the guard. We rarely used a pack more than half a dozen times; we relished those easily sliding surfaces and the smart tick of a stiff back as it was placed on the card previously played. Time and anguish were suspended as I concentrated on my contract, assessing the hands of my opponents, counting my possible tricks, plotting ruffs and the establishment of a long suit. I was in a world of consoling finiteness, where there was nothing beyond the fifty-two cards and their infinite perÂ
mutations. I was pitted against the terrible deity of chance with the only weapon a human being could rationally expect: his capacity to make each card play for its greatest value. Call it peace, euphoria, a drugged existence—I was at least at ease as I played. Only when we put the cards away was life again empty and bare.

It was not long before Chessy Bogart made his appearance at one of our sessions at Suzy's. He looked very much as he had in Charlottesville, dark-complexioned, neatly groomed, but stouter, and with a voice that was almost a bark. His attitude towards me was familiar, almost aggressive.

“I suppose in your world, Alida, no husband dares show himself north of Canal Street before six. Chip will suppose I have gone quite to the dogs when he hears that I'm sometimes home in the middle of the day. Except, of course, that the dogs are just where he probably assumes I am.”

Chessy, I learned, practiced law without any of the usual overhead. He had a few regular clients whom he advised about tax shelters, using any spare desk in their offices, and he took an occasional gamble with one of his own projects. Apparently he made enough to keep him and Suzy comfortable in their apartment, with a balance over for the purchase of an occasional picture. In the summer they visited friends or went to a seaside hotel. They had one son, who was twenty and who had gone to live in San Francisco. They did not speak of him.

If Chessy came in before we had finished, Suzy would let him take her hand. He was an expert player, much better than any of us, but his manners were vile.

“What
should
I have led?” I asked once, when he exploded over my opening.

“Any of the other twelve cards in your silly little hand!”

However, we took his abuse in good part. I think we liked having a man at our meetings, and his playing was bold and exciting. He tended to address most of his side remarks to me. Obviously he still hated Chip, and it gave him some satisfaction to be on friendly, sassy terms with me and to subject me to abuse about “self-righteous, small-town tycoons.” I could not make out what sort of marriage he and Suzy had, but Dolly told me once in the taxi going home that they had twice been separated and on the brink of divorce.

It was in this period, during a winter visit to Saint Luke's School, that I learned something more definite about my own spouse's extramarital life.

Dana and I had always been close, perhaps too close. In the natural family balance it had obviously been Chip's role to make up to Eleanor for the growing distance between mother and daughter; the four of us should then have constituted two couples with greater possibilities of mutual understanding. But Chip had elected instead to compete with me for Dana, with the result that Eleanor got too little, and Dana too much, of both parents' attention. For all the boy's congeniality with me, for all our shared love of theater and art, for all our common appetite for laughter and gossip, Dana had a rather cringing admiration for his father, punctured by almost hysterical fits of shrill defiance. To tell the truth, I preferred the latter, for there was something of the spaniel waiting coyly to be stroked and patted in Dana's way of looking at his father when he wanted to be praised. Something effeminate.

By which I do not mean homosexual, though Dana sometimes seemed to invite this inference. His blond, willowy good looks, his damp gray eyes, his emphatic stresses of speech, plus the presence of a strong father and a possessive mother, unÂ
doubtedly led many of our friends to suppose the boy a classic case of inversion. But he was, and still is, much attracted to girls. I have even suspected that he uses the feminine aspect of his personality as a way of creeping close to them before they realize his true intent. Not that I object! One child is quite enough to have contributed to that other world. I mention the doubts that Dana aroused only because I believe he aroused them in Chip, which may have been why the latter so forcefully opposed Dana's going to college in England. The three of us had a rather violent dinner at the Parents' House.

“If I'm going to specialize in English Romantic poetry, Dad,” Dana argued, “wouldn't I do better to go where it was written? Can you think of anything more appropriate than to spend a vacation hiking in the lake country or visiting the British Museum to view a Grecian urn?”