Matters of Honor (24 page)

XXIII

I
T WAS A RACE
to the grave. It had taken less than a year for Mrs. White to follow my father, the clear winner. Then it was Mr. White’s turn. He died, as he had feared, of a stroke, in the first days of January 1957. The funeral was held later than Jewish custom prescribed in order to give Henry time to get back from Fontainebleau. Meanwhile, Mr. White’s executor and business lawyer took charge of all the arrangements. George later told me that this was fortunate, because Henry seemed completely disoriented. I received the cable notification a week after the funeral. No one seemed to have my correct address in Rome, where I was living in a pensione near the Piazza del Popolo, busy revising my second novel.

The revisions done and reworked, I dispatched the manuscript to my agent, toured Tuscany and Umbria with Tom Peabody, who was on sabbatical in Florence, and finally made my way alone to Athens, Istanbul, and Vienna. I had submitted to a magazine a proposal for a very personal account of my first visits to these capitals of fallen empires. It was accepted; a photographer met me at each location. I was able to travel in style without worries about paying rent on my New York apartment, which I hadn’t been efficient enough to sublet. Away all summer, I sailed home from Southampton. By the time I landed in New York, Henry had already gone up to Cambridge to start his life as a law student, and I didn’t see him or George until one Saturday in October, at the engagement party Edie’s parents gave for her and George. When I moved to New York I resolved not to be impressed by the glamorous ways of the rich. As May Standish was fond of saying, there were too many of them in New York. The Bowditches’ double brownstone on East Eighty-first Street, and the walls of its two drawing rooms, dining room, and library covered with Renoirs, Manets, and Monets, put my resolution to a severe test. It would be hard hereafter to treat Edie as just another nice Radcliffe girl without reflecting on her robber baron ancestors or the extraordinary collector of impressionist art and benefactress of the Metropolitan Museum, who I now realized, having put two and two together, must be her grandmother.

My newborn small celebrity, pleasant enough in itself, was useful in certain practical ways: for example, I couldn’t believe that Dr. Kalman would have otherwise acquiesced without fuss in my long absence, and without the payment of some sort of retainer fee, or found for me a slot in the early morning when I returned. At large parties such as the Bowditches’, even if I knew only the host and hostess and a handful of their guests, I could make my way through the crowd confident that when I introduced myself my name would elicit a response along the lines of You must be the novelist, I am so glad to meet you, I haven’t read your book, but I’ve read the reviews, and what are you working on now. I would answer such questions more or less pleasantly, depending on the degree of inanity and the attractiveness of the person putting them, and then move on. That is how, after a few words exchanged with Edie and her parents and George’s, I slowly reached Henry. He had just come in from the garden, and asked whether I would be having dinner with George and Edie and the two sets of parents, in my role of cousin, friend, and bodyguard. I laughed and said that I hadn’t been invited; in fact, I hoped to spend the evening with him if he was free. There was someone he needed to see first, but we agreed to meet at nine at a restaurant in Irving Place that served late.

This gave me time to talk briefly to George. He had spent the past summer—crucial for law school students because firms decide during that summer between the second and third year of law school on the students they want to hire upon graduation, and students look firms over—working at Wiggins & O’Reilly, a firm that, in spite of the Irish name of one of the founding partners and the world of small-time courthouse politics it evoked, was at the summit of New York’s legal establishment. He had been offered a position as a regular associate, and, having had a fine experience during the summer, he was going to accept it.

It didn’t hurt, he told me, that Lee Sears & Bowditch sends most of its work to Wiggins, which makes it the most important client of the firm. One of the most important, he corrected himself; they keep that kind of specific information very secret. It shouldn’t hurt in the future either, when they decide who is going to make partner.

Lee Sears, I knew, was the investment bank of which Edie’s father was the senior partner and essentially the owner. The Wiggins hiring partner must have rubbed his hands in glee when he roped in the future Bowditch son-in-law.

I asked George whether he had lived at the Bowditches’ over the summer. He laughed and said that had been the idea, since Edie had decided she’d be in the city as well, but the parents on both sides nixed it. They’re dead set against making the course of young love run too smooth. He was forced to share a sublet with one of his Yalie roommates from law school. On weekends, however, either he went out to the Bowditches’ place in Syosset or else Edie and he drove up to Stockbridge. He’d brought his car to the city just for that purpose.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said, I trust that as my younger brother you’ll be my best man. Of course, you’ll have to make sure you’re around next June. I’m giving you so much notice so you don’t fly the coop and so you can get your tailor started on building that cutaway you’ve always wanted.

At a loss for words, I embraced him. He had gotten to know me as well as anyone, in his way as well as Henry or better, and our friendship, which for so many years had seemed impossible, now astonished me by its solidity. It was a great reassurance, for though I was as devoted to him and to Henry as ever, I knew that I was drifting away from them and would have to count on their forbearance and willingness to accept me on my new terms. Inevitably, the characters I was inventing laid the strongest claim to my attention; I gave them more thought, certainly more intensive thought, than I did to any real person.

Realizing how I was moved and the need to change the subject, George asked about my mother. I said that he probably knew more than I did. I had been in New York only for a week and had no plan yet to go up to Lenox.

I saw something of her during the summer, he said, at the club. She and this fellow Richardson played doubles a lot. He’s got an amazing serve. They’ve given him a summer membership so he could be in the Labor Day tournament with your mother. They came in first, and were the Lelands pissed! The word is that your mother and Richardson are going to get married. Isn’t that a bit of good luck?

I told him that if true it surely was for her. My own feelings were another matter; I would have to sort them out.

H
ENRY WAS ALREADY
at the restaurant when I got there, brooding over a bottle of Chianti. He perked up when he saw me. When I said that he seemed terrifically absorbed in his thoughts, he said it was nothing. Then he said, No, it is something important. He had been worrying about his study group at the law school. There were five first-year students in it, including him, and while the others were intelligent, and were certainly up on all the business vocabulary that he was only beginning to learn, speaking frankly they were creeps. In general, he said, law school students were a terrible lot, real turkeys, if you compared them with undergraduates at the college, but this group was as bad as they get. Their redeeming quality was their brains—which he didn’t think were any better than his. He wondered whether people would assume that since he’d chosen to be with these characters he must be like them. I asked why he had, in fact, hooked up with them.

He said, All five of us were always volunteering to answer questions in civil procedure and property, or else we were called on by the professor, and we didn’t make asses of ourselves. These two professors are really tough. After a class one of them came up with the idea that we be a study group and everybody agreed.

I said that sounded reasonable, although I would have supposed that he would be in a study group with his roommates.

I have no roommates, he answered, I live alone at Harkness. I didn’t know if anyone from our class was going to law school like me, after the army. Now I see that there are a few but none I know well. Anyway, there is no one to whom I could have suggested rooming together. All the people I knew and liked at college are in their last year—like George. He, by the way, is going out of his way introducing me to people. He’s a great guy.

Harkness was a dreary modernist dormitory for law school and graduate students designed by Walter Gropius, who had founded the Bauhaus and really should have done better. Its only advantage was being right next to the Langdell Library. No one socially desirable lived there, only the dreariest graduate students condemned to be snubbed by faculty members in their departments. Poor Henry had started off on the wrong foot.

Then the food came, and when we spoke again it was about his parents. Henry’s head was full of practical problems connected to his father’s business. There were apartment buildings his father had owned with mortgage payments to be made, repairs for which the landlord was responsible, ordinary upkeep, and rents to be collected to pay for it all. Vacancies were rare enough that he was spared at least the headache of replacing tenants. The manager looking after the buildings was doing a good job, according to Mr. Berger, his father’s lawyer, but Henry remembered his father’s saying that you had to keep after that manager, and this was something Henry hadn’t the time or inclination to do. Everything relating to the factory was even more complicated. Fortunately, his father had taken in his best salesman as a fifteen percent partner. Again according to Mr. Berger, this man was competent and honest enough to run the business until it was sold.

I can’t let the factory go belly up, said Henry. It’s not only the money; there are about forty employees. Either the business continues or I have to close it down very carefully so that everybody gets well taken care of, at least those employees who were already there when my father took over.

He hadn’t even tried to go through the house on Dorchester Road to empty it of stuff he didn’t want—ninety-five percent of the contents, he estimated—or to decide what to do with his parents’ personal papers. Mr. Berger had organized the business papers; there would be money from his father’s life insurance to pay estate taxes. For the time being, Dorchester Road would remain as it was, with the cleaning lady continuing to come in twice a week until his summer vacation. Then he would move in for however many weeks it took and to clear out the house for sale. How he was going to keep his sanity while he camped out there he hadn’t been able to figure out. One ray of hope was Mr. Berger’s belief that the factory might be sold before the summer. He advised Henry to keep the apartment buildings; according to him they were a great investment and Henry could afford to hold on to them.

I’ll take his advice, he said, because I trust him, but only if he is the one to keep after the manager and whoever we get to replace him.

He fell silent, though clearly struggling to say something. I waited and in the end he spoke first.

I can’t get away, he told me, from the double vision—that bathroom, of course, and also my father, his face clean shaved and green with just a little foam in the corners of the mouth. He had shaved, as always, a second time in the evening to please my mother, never mind that she was gone. In the morning two lathers and two passes with the razor, in the evening only one. That was his rule. I know that is how it had to be, I could tell just from the way he looked when I saw him wrapped in a shroud at the funeral parlor. You’ll tell me that I’m making this up, since he died alone, with his son overseas. Indeed, at the hour when the coroner said he probably died, a bunch of us who had gone to Paris for the evening were sitting down to a late meal at the Coupole. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to touch choucroute again. You want to know something else? They’d refrigerated him while they waited for me to arrive. He was like a block of ice when I kissed him.

There is something you don’t know, he continued. When my mother died, the army would have given me a compassionate reassignment to some place like Governor’s Island so I could be near my father. All I had to do was ask. But I didn’t ask. I think that if the company commander had offered to send me home I would have said thank you sir, but no sir; I believe my duty is to remain right here, in Headquarters Company. Why? I didn’t want my father to glom on to me. I didn’t want to be there with his grief, his fear of dying, his stubborn incompetence in everything that wasn’t running his business. If I let him, he would have swallowed me alive, like a python. That’s what I thought. So instead I helped kill him.

I pointed out that ever since I met him I had heard about his father’s weak heart and the threat of a heart attack or a stroke.

Yes, Henry answered, I know, that’s why I said I only helped to kill him. He would have died of his heart anyway sooner or later, but I almost surely made it happen sooner and I certainly made it sadder and harder. What happened was exactly what he feared: dying alone, found by a stranger. The cleaning woman, when she came in the morning. You’ll tell me that even if I had stayed I wouldn’t have been with him twenty-four hours a day—not while I was pushing papers on Governor’s Island or anytime later, and that is the pragmatic truth. The symbolic truth is different: it says that I willfully and unequivocally abandoned my father. I didn’t want to be around Daddy any more than I had wanted to be around Mommy!

He paused while the waiter cleared for dessert.

A napoleon, he exclaimed. That’s what I’ll have.

When the pastry was brought he examined it with great care and said, It was my mother’s favorite pastry. A Krakow specialty that she missed here. Quite honestly, can you believe that anyone else could have made such a hash out of his one and only visit—emergency leave, no less—to see his mother who was clearly bonkers? Show me another monster like that, if you can. He’s my missing brother. A fellow mother killer: I wonder why that isn’t the all-purpose GI epithet. It says it all so much more clearly than the one we use. I arrive and she tells me, Why are you here, go back to your barracks. What do I do? I get on my high horse. I can’t help it. I do it every time she says something that wounds me, and I make a point of being wounded. I do it like a fool, as though I didn’t understand the mechanism of what we do to each other so thoroughly that I could take it apart and put it together blindfolded. She was faint with the happiness of having me near, but for her to acknowledge happiness was to invite the thunderbolt that would destroy it. Far better to end it herself, design the set and direct the drama. Add to this her pride and her fear that I would rebuff her, and her craving for tension and excitement and risk—how long can she goad me before I turn on her?—isn’t that a better game than baccarat and roulette, which she never played? After four years in Pani Maria’s room behind a locked door, waiting for the evening so she can emerge for an hour or two, in each hand a chamber pot covered up so very carefully to contain the stench—what better games can you suggest for her to play? Why couldn’t I, why wouldn’t I, since this was certainly within my power, why wouldn’t I say, It’s all right, Mommy, I’m here because I love you and Daddy, and I’ll be back as soon as the wicked, wicked army lets me. Wasn’t that my ordinary and simple duty? Why did I have to be such a prick?