Matters of Honor (23 page)

I knew that she had started at Riggs, but I hadn’t heard that she had quit. And I didn’t know until she told me, when I came down to the kitchen after dropping my bag in my old room, that she had found a boyfriend, in the person of Greg Richardson, a former Riggs patient. She meant former in the sense that he was no longer living in the Center; he was renting the apartment over the Jacksons’ barn and seeing one of the Riggs analysts as an outpatient. For the holidays, however, he was staying with my mother, which was the reason it mattered so much that I had come home. My presence made it more like a real Christmas.

It’s hard for him, she said. He has two daughters, eleven and nine, living with their mother in Darien. She’s an unspeakable woman. He misses those girls terribly. You’ve heard of the Richardsons. It’s old Connecticut money.

Has it trickled down to him? I asked.

Not yet, replied my mother. His father controls all the trusts. He keeps Greg and his younger brother on a very tight leash.

Then she added that Greg had had those girls late. He’s a couple of years younger, but I’m not robbing any cradles.

She was clearly expecting me to say something, so I said it was too bad about the girls and the money. She nodded and told me that drinks would be at the usual time and dinner would be at seven-thirty. While my father was alive, that meant as soon as he came home from the office and had taken a leak. Dinner, so far as he was concerned, could always wait. I told her I’d be there. A beautiful afternoon was ending. I got into the Hertz car and drove over to Stockbridge. I first deposited my presents for the Standishes and Edie, who was spending the holidays with George. That accomplished, I made a tour of the village, which I had always liked better than Lenox. On Main Street, Riggs was lit up and festooned with wreaths and pine-branch garlands. Through the windows I could see that a large crowd was milling around in the rooms downstairs, presumably munching on sugar cookies, drinking eggnog (laced with bourbon for those who were allowed and plain for those who weren’t), and singing carols. For all I knew, my mother and this Greg character were there getting into the Christmas spirit. There was no risk of my going to look for them. I turned up toward Snake Hill, parked when I got to property belonging to people I knew who were living in Europe, and walked to the terraced garden in the back from which there was a view in all directions. During the few minutes I remained, night fell and the snow that covered the valley turned from a delicate shade of violet to a color that was darker and menacing. It was time to go home.

I found a note for me on the table in the front hall. My mother and Greg were washing up and would be right down. I was as washed as I cared to be, so I went into the kitchen, put water on to boil, and checked the oven. Roast beef surrounded in the pan by potatoes—one of my mother’s standbys. Having made myself a cup of tea, I sat down in the library and waited. It was a while before Greg and my mother came down, my mother’s face flushed from the hot bath or contentment or perhaps both. She was wearing a long black skirt I had never seen before and a cheap white cardigan with red buttons in the form of hearts that I had given her for her birthday four or five years ago. Greg was in festive dark red corduroys, a yellow turtleneck, and a green blazer with some club’s silver-stitched insignia over the breast pocket. Perhaps to show that he felt at home, he had donned black velvet slippers. He was easily as tall as my father but more solidly built. We shook hands pleasantly and I sat down with my mother while Greg went to the kitchen to get ice and then to the pantry to assemble the martini components. I wondered whether his would be as good as my father’s and what troubles or vices had brought this fine carefree-looking fellow to Riggs, away from those daughters he loved and their unspeakable mother.

Isn’t he nice? my mother whispered. It’s such a help that he’s of good family. Just before you came in, May Standish telephoned. She asked me to bring him to the party they’re giving for you, and she invited us both to their New Year’s Day lunch. Can you imagine? She has never once invited me with your father.

I
REMEMBER THE DAY
and time of Henry’s call with the precision usually reserved for nightmares: St. Valentine’s Day, seven in the evening. I had gotten a late start that morning, having returned only the previous evening from San Francisco, where I had been for two weeks, leading a seminar at Berkeley. The florist’s delivery boy awakened me, bringing my mother’s present, a large white azalea. I called to thank her, did the usual morning chores, and went to the Forty-second Street library, where I spent the rest of the day, with one interruption for a hamburger at the Harvard Club. The key was still in the front door of my apartment when I heard the phone ring. I realized at once that something was horribly wrong: it was Henry, and his voice was cracking as if he were out of saliva and breath. Between gasps, he kept repeating, Please come right away, for God’s sake, come over. I asked where he was. At home, he said, please hurry. Within minutes I was in a taxi on my way to Dorchester Road. He was waiting for me on the front stoop. This time she’s done it, he told me, she’s really gone. He led me upstairs to his parents’ bedroom. Mr. White was there, crying.

She’s in here, said Henry and opened the door to the bathroom.

Mrs. White, dressed in a nightgown, lay in a shallow pool of blood. Her head was twisted to the side as though in an immense final effort to see something over her shoulder.

She slit her wrists, Henry said. An open straight razor lay in the fold of the nightgown between her legs.

How long has she been like this? I asked. Have you called the police?

No, we haven’t, he said. He wouldn’t let me get near a telephone. I had to beg him to let me call you. He’s out of his mind. Will you talk to him?

Mr. White, I called out, I am terribly sorry. We have to get the police. Please understand.

He made no reply and didn’t move. I turned to Henry and said, Do it. Please make the call. You must do it.

As I pieced it together in conversations that night with Henry first at the morgue, then over the meal Henry and I had alone toward the early morning—Mr. White was unable to hold down any food—at the same restaurant at Flatbush and Church to which Mr. White had taken me, and later at the funeral parlor where Henry and I had gone to make arrangements for the burial, the story was a jumble of the old family misery and specific new horrors. Father and son meanwhile seemed unable to take any action beyond insisting that Mrs. White had to be buried; they wouldn’t allow her to be cremated. Otherwise, all I could get out of them were gestures I interpreted to mean I can’t answer, you do it. In the end I did the things I imagined had to be done, although I had no experience with death or the care of the dead other than the burial of my father, every detail of which had been arranged by my mother. Thus I found myself going through the Whites’ address book and calling people who seemed initially suspicious of my unaccented American speech and then became unnaturally polite when I explained my business, addressing me in careful stilted phrases about conventions I didn’t understand.

Henry had come home on five days’ hardship leave. As soon as he arrived he telephoned me, and had tried my number many times in the days that followed, getting no answer. I had no service that could have told him I was away and how I could be reached. The reason for the leave was a series of frantic appeals from his father, begging him to do whatever it took to spend a few days with his mother. She had taken sleeping pills again, although in a smaller quantity this time. The same doctor who had pronounced her dead the last time had come to examine her. In his opinion, it wasn’t necessary to empty her stomach. Let her sleep it off, he said. And get her some help, I mean real help, in a clinic with a psychiatrist who knows what he’s doing.

Did they? I asked.

She wouldn’t hear of it, Henry told me. To tell you the truth, my father didn’t want it either. It was too humiliating, he said; he didn’t want to treat her like a crazy woman; she didn’t deserve it. I knew, Henry said, what my father meant: if one of their friends found out that she had to be in a mental hospital he would die of shame. Instead, he bought her a Persian lamb coat and booked passage on a cruise ship going to Bermuda in April. At first this seemed to cheer her up; she had been after him to get her this fur coat and to go on a nice spring vacation but, some two or three weeks ago, everything turned black again; she told Mr. White and Henry as well on the telephone that this was the end. Conversations with her from a phone booth in Fontainebleau had become unbearable and more surreal than ever. Either she got angry and hung up on him, or she berated and insulted him to the point where he’d hang up on her even though he remembered vividly where that could lead. Finally, he applied for leave and, when he got it, caught a flight to New York and showed up in Brooklyn. It didn’t take more than one meal at which he did something or didn’t do something quite right before she put on what Henry called her “Why are you here?” act. She wanted to know where he had learned to exaggerate everything and throw money out the window, wasn’t the army in Fontainebleau going to think that he was taking advantage, shouldn’t he go back and make up the work he had missed, and so on. There hadn’t been one pleasant moment. She killed herself on his last day in New York; he was scheduled to fly to Paris that evening. They were meant to have a farewell dinner the evening before at a restaurant his parents particularly liked in Sheepshead Bay, which served good broiled lobsters and steamed clams. However, when his father came home from work—Henry had in the meantime gone to the Brooklyn Museum but had already returned—his mother said she didn’t feel like going out. There was nothing to celebrate: Henry had better go to bed and get a good night’s sleep since he was spending the following night on a plane. There was a scene after that. He wasn’t sure how it started, but she ran up to the bedroom and slammed the door, and his father went into his office and wouldn’t talk to him although Henry pleaded with him, saying that it would be a long time before they saw each other again. Mr. White kept saying, You want everything your way, you make trouble and then leave the trouble to me. In the end, Henry decided he was in an absurd situation and saw no point in staying home. He hadn’t told Margot he would be in New York. On the off chance that she was at her apartment, he called and found her free. They had dinner and he spent the night at her place. That had not been his plan; he had fully intended to come home but didn’t; nor did he call to say that he’d be out until the morning. To call would have only led to one more scene on the telephone.

You spent the night with Margot? I asked.

Yes, he said, she’s working at the Metropolitan Museum. Never mind all that now.

He came home at about ten in the morning. His father was there; he hadn’t gone to the factory. Both he and his mother had these blank and stony faces, and, when he addressed them, they didn’t simply remain silent: they made a show of looking past him. That form of punishment wasn’t new to him. His mother reserved it for major transgressions. But his father’s joining in represented a novelty. After a while, he gave up and went upstairs to take a bath and change his clothes. When he came down, his father was gone, and his mother sat at the window, staring out at nothing. He spoke to her; in fact he implored her. He wanted to be forgiven. Nothing. He went for a walk, saw about half of a movie matinee, and was home by two-thirty. His father had come home by then and greeted him with, Where have you been, your mother had to call me at the factory because you’d disappeared. What was I supposed to do? Henry answered, You wouldn’t speak to me, Mother wouldn’t speak to me, so I went out. Now I’m back. That was followed by some shouting, but by then he was on automatic pilot preparing himself to go to the airport. He went upstairs, threw the stuff he was taking to France into his duffel bag, got into uniform, and went downstairs carrying the bag. They were right there, waiting. I’m leaving, he said in their direction. Thanks for a great visit.

His father barred the door and told him, You can’t go away like that. You have to apologize to your mother. All right, he answered, I apologize, I am sorry, I regret everything, and now goodbye. With that he tried to kiss her. She pushed him away and said, If you leave now, this is the last time you will see me alive. No it isn’t, he replied, and said goodbye again and kissed his father, who let him. Meanwhile his mother was screaming, You can’t let him leave, you can’t let him leave, I know I am going to die. At this point, Henry said, he was so confused he didn’t know anymore whether he was speaking English or Polish and when he did try to speak Polish he found he couldn’t. The words weren’t there. He faced them and very self-consciously told them in English that there was no use arguing, he had to go to the airport at once and get on the plane or he would be AWOL. It was a while before a taxi passed by the corner of Flatbush Avenue where he was waiting. He got in and slept all the way to the airport. When his turn came to check in, the man behind the counter told him there was an emergency message for him to call home at once. Although he was convinced that this was another one of his mother’s stunts, he went to the telephone and found out what had happened.

The rest he got from his father. His mother said that she was exhausted and needed a sleeping pill. All right, he said, I’ll get you one. After the first suicide, he had put their store of barbiturates in a drawer in a bedroom desk to which only he had the key. He went upstairs without realizing that she was right behind him. The thick carpet had muffled her steps. When he opened the drawer, he saw her hand suddenly appear to swoop up the vial of Nembutal. She dashed into the bathroom. He opened the door before she could lock it, forced her fist open, and flushed the pills down the toilet. She became hysterical, screaming, Get out of my bathroom, leave me alone, and trying to scratch his face. He backed out of the bathroom keeping her at arm’s length. The moment he was through the door, she slammed it shut. Assuming that the door was locked, he wondered whether he should call a locksmith to force it, but he didn’t want to break the door or aggravate the situation. In the end he lay down on the bed planning to wait for her to calm down. Of course, he fell asleep. When he awakened, he saw that more than an hour had passed. The house was absolutely silent. He tried the bathroom door. It opened at once.