Jailbird (15 page)

I asked her what had become of the McCone mansion in Bar Harbor. My mentor had never mentioned it to me.

“Mr. and Mrs. McCone vanished from Bar Harbor the next day,” she said, “with their two young sons, I believe.”

“Yes,” I said. One son became my mentor. The other son became chairman of the board and president of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron.

“A month later,” she said, “around Labor Day, although there was no Labor Day then—when summer was about to end—a special train arrived. There were perhaps eight freight cars and three cars of workmen, who had come all the way from Cleveland. They must have been from Mr. McCone’s factory. How pale they looked! They were almost all foreigners, I remember—Germans, Poles, Italians, Hungarians. Who could tell? There had never been such people in Bar Harbor before. They slept on the train. They ate on the train. They allowed themselves to be herded like
to her. They, too, had been the brainstorm of Alexander Hamilton McCone.

“You are so beautiful!” I said, rising raptly from my folding chair. It was true, surely, for she was tall and slender and golden-haired—and blue-eyed. Her skin was like satin. Her teeth were like pearls. But she radiated about as much sexuality as her grandmother’s card table.

This would continue to be the case for the next seven years. Sarah Wyatt believed that sex was a sort of pratfall that was easily avoided. To avoid it, she had only to remind a would-be lover of the ridiculousness of what he proposed to do to her. The first time I kissed her, which was in Wellesley the week before, I suddenly found myself being played like a tuba, to speak. Sarah was convulsed by laughter, with her lips still pressed to mine. She tickled me. She pulled out my shirttails, leaving me in humiliating disarray. It was terrible. Nor was her laughter about sexuality girlish and nervous, something a man might be expected to modulate with tenderness and anatomical skill. It was the unbridled hee-hawing of somebody at a Marx Brothers film.

A phrase keeps asking to be used at this point: “nobody home.”

It was in fact a phrase used by a Harvard classmate who also took Sarah out, but only twice, as I recall. I asked him what he thought of her, and he replied with some bitterness: “nobody home!” He was Kyle Denny, a football player from Philadelphia. Somebody told me recently that Kyle died in a fall in his bathtub on the day the Japanese
bombed Pearl Harbor. He cracked his head open on a faucet.

So I can fix the date of Kyle Denny’s death with pinpoint accuracy: December the seventh, Nineteen-hundred and Forty-one.

“You do look nice, my dear,” said Mrs. Sutton to Sarah. She was pitifully ancient—about five years younger than I am now. I thought she might cry about Sarah’s beauty, and how that beauty was sure to fade in just a few years, and on and on. She was very wise.

“I feel so silly,” said Sarah.

“You don’t believe you’re beautiful?” said her grandmother.

“I know I’m beautiful,” said Sarah. “I look in a mirror, and I think, ‘I’m beautiful.’”

“What’s wrong, then?” said her grandmother.

“Beautiful is such a funny thing to be,” said Sarah. “Somebody else is ugly, but I’m beautiful. Walter says I’m beautiful. You say I’m beautiful. I say I’m beautiful. Everybody says, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,’ and you start wondering what it is, and what’s so wonderful about it.”

“You make people
happy
with your beauty,” said her grandmother.

“You certainly make
me
happy with it,” I said.

Sarah laughed. “It’s so silly,” she said. “It’s so dumb,” she said.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t think about it so much,” said her grandmother.

“That’s like telling a midget to stop thinking about being a midget,” said Sarah, and she laughed again.

“You should stop saying everything is silly and dumb,” said her grandmother.

“Everything
is
silly and dumb,” said Sarah.

“You will learn differently as you grow older,” her grandmother promised.

“I think everybody older just pretends to know what’s going on, and it’s all so serious and wonderful,” said Sarah. “Older people haven’t really found out anything new that I don’t know. Maybe if people didn’t get so serious when they got older, we wouldn’t have a depression now.”

“There’s nothing constructive in laughing all the time,” said her grandmother.

“I can cry, too,” said Sarah. “You want me to cry?”

“No,” said her grandmother. “I don’t want to hear any more about it. You just go out with this nice young man and have a lovely time.”

“I can’t laugh about those poor women who painted the clocks,” said Sarah. “That’s one thing I can’t laugh about.”

“Nobody wants you to,” said her grandmother. “You run along now.”

Sarah was referring to an industrial tragedy that was notorious at the time. Sarah’s family was in the middle of it, and sick about it. Sarah had already told me that she was sick about it, and so had her brother, my roommate, and so had their father and mother. The tragedy was a slow one that could not be stopped once it had begun, and it began in the
family’s clock company, the Wyatt Clock Company, one of the oldest companies in the United States, in Brockton, Massachusetts. It was an avoidable tragedy. The Wyatts never tried to justify it, and would not hire lawyers to justify it. It could not be justified.

It went like this: In the nineteen twenties the United States Navy awarded Wyatt Clock a contract to produce several thousand standardized ships’ clocks that could be easily read in the dark. The dials were to be black. The hands and the numerals were to be hand-painted with white paint containing the radioactive element radium. About half a hundred Brockton women, most of them relatives of regular Wyatt Clock Company employees, were hired to paint the hands and numerals. It was a way to make pin money. Several of the women who had young children to look after were allowed to do the work at home.

Now all those women had died or were about to die most horribly with their bones crumbling, with their heads rotting off. The cause was radium poisoning. Every one of them had been told by a foreman, it had since come out in court, that she should keep a fine point on her brush by moistening it and shaping it with her lips from time to time.

And, as luck would have it, the daughter of one of those unfortunate women would become one of the four women I have ever loved in this Vale of Tears—along with my mother, my wife, and Sarah Wyatt. Mary Kathleen O’Looney was her name.

I
SPEAK ONLY OF
R
UTH
as “my wife.” It would not surprise me, though, if on Judgment Day Sarah Wyatt and Mary Kathleen O’Looney were also certified as having been wives of mine. I surely paired off with both of them—with Mary Kathleen for about eleven months, and with Sarah, off and on, to be sure, for about seven years.

I can hear Saint Peter saying to me: “It would appear, Mr. Starbuck, that you were something of a Don Juan.”

So there I was in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, sashaying into the wedding-cake lobby of the Hotel Arapahoe with beautiful Sarah Wyatt, the Yankee clock heiress, on my arm. Her family was nearly as broke as mine by then. What little they had salvaged would soon be dispersed among the survivors of the women who painted all those clocks for the Navy. This dispersal would be compelled in about a year by a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court as to the personal responsibility of employers for deaths in their places of work caused by criminal negligence.

Eighteen-year-old Sarah now said of the Arapahoe
lobby, “It’s so dirty—and there’s nobody here.” She laughed. “I
love
it,” she said.

At that point in time, in the filthy lobby of the Arapahoe, Sarah Wyatt did not know that I was acting with all possible humorlessness on orders from Alexander Hamilton McCone. She would tell me later that she thought I was being witty when I said we should get all dressed up. She thought we were costumed like millionaires in the spirit of Halloween. We would laugh and laugh, she hoped. We would be people in a movie.

Not at all: I was a robot programmed to behave like a genuine aristocrat.

Oh, to be young again!

The dirt in the Arapahoe lobby might not have been so obvious, if somebody had not started to do something about it and then stopped. There was a tall stepladder set against one wall. There was a bucket at the base of it, filled with dirty water and with a brush floating on top. Someone had clearly scaled the ladder with the bucket. He had scrubbed as much of the wall as he could reach from the top. He had created a circle of cleanliness, dribbling filth at its bottom, to be sure, but as bright as a harvest moon.

I do not know who made the harvest moon. There was no one to ask. There had been no doorman to invite us in. There were no bellboys and no guests inside. There wasn’t a soul behind the reception desk in the distance. The newsstand and the theater-ticket kiosk were shuttered. The doors of the unmanned elevators were propped open by chairs.

“I don’t think they’re in business anymore,” said Sarah.

“Somebody accepted my reservation on the telephone,” I said. “He called me
‘monsieur.’”

“Anybody can call anybody
‘monsieur’
on the telephone,” said Sarah.

But then we heard a Gypsy violin crying somewhere—sobbing as though its heart would break. And when I hear that violin’s lamenting in my memory now, I am able to add this information: Hitler, not yet in power, would soon cause to be killed every Gypsy his soldiers and policemen could catch.

The music was coming from behind a folding screen in the lobby. Sarah and I dared to move the screen from the wall. We were confronted by a pair of French doors, which were held shut with a padlock and hasp. The panes in the doors were mirrors, showing us yet again how childish and rich we were. But Sarah discovered one pane that had a flaw in its silvering. She peeped through the flaw, then invited me to take a turn. I was flabbergasted. I might have been peering into the twinkling prisms of a time machine. On the other side of the French doors was the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe in pristine condition, complete with a Gypsy fiddler—almost atom for atom as it must have been in the time of Diamond Jim Brady. A thousand candles in the chandeliers and on the tables became billions of tiny stars because of all the silver and crystal and china and mirrors in there.

The story was this: The hotel and the restaurant, while
sharing the same building, one minute from Times Square, were under separate ownerships. The hotel had given up—was no longer taking guests. The restaurant, on the other hand, had just been completely refurbished, its owner believing that the collapse of the economy would be brief, and was caused by nothing more substantial than a temporary loss of nerve by businessmen.

Sarah and I had come in through the wrong door. I told Sarah as much, and she replied, “That is the story of my life. I always go in the wrong door first.”

So Sarah and I went out into the night again and then in through the door to the place where food and drink awaited us. Mr. McCone had told me to order the meal in advance. That I had done. The owner himself received us. He was French. On the lapel of his tuxedo was a decoration that meant nothing to me, but which was familiar to Sarah, since her father had one, too. It meant, she would explain to me, that he was a
chevalier
in the Légion d’honneur.

Sarah had spent many summers in Europe. I had never been there. She was fluent in French, and she and the owner performed a madrigal in that most melodious of all languages. How would I ever have got through life without women to act as my interpreters? Of the four women I ever loved, only Mary Kathleen O’Looney spoke no language but English. But even Mary Kathleen was my interpreter when I was a Harvard communist, trying to communicate with members of the American working class.

The restaurant owner told Sarah in French, and then
she told me, about the Great Depression’s being nothing but a loss of nerve. He said that alcoholic beverages would be legal again as soon as a Democrat was elected President, and that life would become fun again.

He led us to our table. The room could seat at least one hundred, I would guess, but there were only a dozen other patrons there. Somehow, they still had cash. And when I try to remember them now, and to guess what they were, I keep seeing the pictures by George Grosz of corrupt plutocrats amidst the misery of Germany after World War One. I had not seen those pictures in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. I had not seen anything.

There was a puffy old woman, I remember, eating alone and wearing a diamond necklace. She had a Pekingese dog in her lap. The dog had a diamond necklace, too.

There was a withered old man, I remember, hunched over his food, hiding it with his arms. Sarah whispered that he ate as though his meal were a royal flush. We would later learn that he was eating caviar.

“This must be a very expensive place,” said Sarah.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“Money is so strange,” she said. “Does it make any sense to you?”

“No,” I said.

“The people who’ve got it, and the people who don’t—” she mused. “I don’t think anybody understands what’s really going on.”

“Some people must,” I said. I no longer believe that.

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international
conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders what is really going on.

We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

“Does Mr. McCone know how much longer the Depression will last?” she said.

“He doesn’t know anything about business,” I said.

“How can he still be so rich, if he doesn’t know anything about business?” she said.

“His brother runs everything,” I said.

“I wish my father had somebody to run everything for him,” she said.

I knew that things were going so badly for her father that her brother, my roommate, had decided to drop out of school at the end of the semester. He would never go back to school, either. He would take a job as an orderly in a tuberculosis sanitarium, and himself contract tuberculosis. That would keep him out of the armed forces in the Second World War. He would work as a welder in a Boston shipyard, instead. I would lose touch with him. Sarah, whom I see regularly again, told me that he died of a heart attack in Nineteen-hundred and Sixty-five—in a cluttered little welding shop he ran singlehanded in the village of Sandwich, on Cape Cod.