On Green Dolphin Street (11 page)

After lunch they took a taxi uptown to the Met, and at about four
o’clock Mary was overcome by a desire to sleep. Frank took her back to the hotel.

“Well, thank you,” said Mary, as he went round the cab and opened her door. “I enjoyed the tour.”

There was a moment of unease.

“Good,” said Frank.

“Thanks.”

“You know, we could do the second part of the tour tomorrow.”

“It has two parts?”

“It has a number of parts.”

“I’d better see what Charlie’s doing.”

“Sure.”

“Are you certain it wouldn’t be a nuisance for you?”

Frank’s answer was lost beneath the driver’s shouted question: “You coming, pal?”

“I’ll call you,” said Frank, walking round the back of the car.

Mary went through the swing doors. It was pleasant to have some company when sightseeing, she thought; you could go into bars and cafés without being stared at as a lone woman; it was good to have this fallback for the next day if nothing else was required of her.

Up in the room, she took off her shoes and skirt and curled up on the bed. She began to read her book, then found herself drifting off: the traffic noise from the street became part of an almost-dream, a pleasing sound track to the static images of no particular significance that were for her always the gateway to sleep: a tree, a gate, the corner of a house. The half-slip she was wearing could not prevent a draft reaching her legs and she pulled a cover over her, as, with her dark hair loose over the hotel pillow, she fell asleep.

She awoke when Charlie came back into the room. He leaned over to kiss her and lost his footing, so that he collapsed beside her on the bed, leaking fumes of alcohol. Mary sat up and stroked the hair back from his forehead.

“Are you all right, darling?”

“Boring bloody day. Christ, it’s so bloody boring.”

It was an art, knowing whether Charlie should be indulged, rebuked or put to bed, but it was one in which Mary was practiced. It was a failure to her if he could not be made to have dinner, but would only curl up with a bottle, rebuffing her attempts at friendliness. She decided to leave him where he was while she took a bath; sometimes a short sleep could pull him back onto the main line of the day, especially if followed by a shower and a large scotch on the rocks.

Mary sat in the deep tub, moving the hot water up between her legs and round her sides. She felt reinvigorated by her rest and wanted to go out to Chinatown, or Little Italy, or the Village: she didn’t mind what they ate provided she could experience some more of the city. After twenty minutes she climbed out and wrapped herself in a towel. Charlie was where she had left him, snoring softly; Mary put on a robe she found in the bathroom and took him by the shoulder.

“Get off, leave me alone.”

“No, darling, you’re coming out. Come on.”

She gauged that if she could withstand some abuse, Charlie was not so drunk that he could not be persuaded to cooperate.

“You have a shower and I’ll ring for some ice. When you’ve finished I’ll have clean clothes and a nice drink ready for you.”

Half an hour later, they were ready to go out, Charlie with hair still damp, but his mood somewhat restored by two large drinks and a cigarette. On Lexington Avenue he hailed a taxi.

“Where to, bud?” The driver craned round in his seat.

“Ask the lady.”

“I don’t know. Greenwich Village. Anywhere down there.”

They pulled out into the middle lane, where they hit a run of green lights as the cab went loudly downtown, bouncing on the potholes, sounding its horn as it swung from lane to lane to avoid the dithering schmucks, jerks and assholes identified by the driver.

“This good enough for you?” he said, as they pulled up in Washington Square.

“Just let me out,” said Charlie.

“Thank you,” said Mary. “This is fine.”

As they walked through the square, they noticed a group of young men lined up with their arms entwined through the double-barred iron railing, smoking, watching the people pass by. Although the night had turned cool, they wore only T-shirts, some of them rolled up over biceps; they hung forward from the rail as though captive, yet with a hungry impatience.

“What are those men doing?” said Mary.

“Not something that concerns a woman. Where are we going?”

Mary led him down Sullivan Street for a couple of blocks, then turned left, where the sidewalks glowed under the light of neon signs. There were bakeries and greengrocers still open, bookstores and a low brick building with a circular sign announcing it as the Circle in the Square Theatre. Colored awnings led into various restaurants and bars, and they eventually settled on a corner building with scrubbed wooden floorboards and tables set in candlelit booths.

As Mary ate her appetizer and looked across the table at his glazed but no longer hostile expression, she found her eyes sting with sorrow. She seldom allowed herself to remember Charlie as he had been when they first met: ebullient, clear-eyed, certain that he could reinvent the world or at least convert it to the invigorating plan he had for it. Nothing in her sorrow affected the love she felt for him or her devotion to their joint cause, the children, their domestic life together on their Washington street—the things he referred to as “1064 and All That.” She felt only an anguished sympathy for what he seemed to suffer and, periodically, a fear that it might have some awful outcome. When she had once confided her anxiety to Katy Renshaw, however, Katy had told her that there was nothing to worry about. Charlie drank only a little more than most men they knew. So what if he went to see a psychoanalyst? Everyone did, particularly in New York. Katy made it sound as though the sky over midtown was a jam of uninterpreted dreams, the drains below the fuming manhole covers a network of suppressed desires. Anyway, Katy said, men like Charlie and Edward were creative, unusually clever guys who needed to be
allowed their foibles and their games, like when they tried to catch each other out with lines of poetry they pretended to have read but might instead have made up. Had Mary seen the pleasure in Charlie’s eyes when he had passed off a line of his to Edward as one of Wallace Stevens’s? It was a game; it was all just a game.

Such was Mary’s temperament that she was inclined to believe her. All would be well, because all usually was well, more or less; and anyway, they were locked together in a common endeavor: dealing with Charlie was part of her life and she would have it no other way.

“I have to go to Chicago,” said Charlie, pushing a piece of chicken round his plate. “Tomorrow. I have to take a plane from La Guardia at ten o’clock.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ask. It’s this bloody election. Trouble is, I don’t think I can manage it. The flying.”

“You’ll be all right, darling. You’ll be fine. Have you got some of your pills with you?”

“Yes, I have. But I have to take so many that then I can’t perform at the other end.”

Mary put her hand on his. “Would you like me to come with you?”

“No, I’d hate that. You stay here.”

“All right. How long will you be gone?”

“Two nights. I’ll be back on Thursday. Will you be all right? You can go back to Washington if you like.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”

Charlie lit a cigarette and pushed his plate away. He held his head in his hands. For a moment Mary thought he was crying. Then he wrenched his hands away and pushed back the chair noisily, losing his balance for a moment as he stood up.

The next morning, in the taxi on the way to La Guardia, Charlie looked pale, and there was a tremor in his hand; but he was also quiet and resigned.
Mary suspected that he owed his mood to one of the pills Weissman had prescribed, but knew he would be irritated if she asked. She stood with him on the ramp outside the departure building, checking that he had everything he needed. As she kissed him, she did up the middle button of his jacket, and patted his ribs, as though he were a child. She felt the little death of departure.

He licked his dry lips, turned, bag in hand, and made off through the revolving door.

Mary climbed back into the waiting taxi and told the driver to return to the hotel. She wondered how Charlie would manage the flight; she hoped he would not be so doped by the time they landed that he would be incapable of getting off the plane.

Back inside the hotel, she went to the front desk to collect the key.

“Mrs. van der Linden?”

“Yes.”

“Message for you. A Mr. Renzo called.”

“Oh. I see. Did he leave a number?”

“Sure did, ma’am.” The desk clerk held out a piece of paper along with the key.

Up in the room Mary paused before telephoning. She could perfectly easily spend the day alone, doing what she wanted to do. This would entail some of the things for which New York was more obviously well known: going to the Frick Collection and looking in some of the shops on Madison Avenue behind it; a light lunch overlooking the park and then, one of her particular pleasures, a film in the afternoon, emerging while it was still light for a cocktail at the top of a midtown skyscraper, and the self-indulgence of a room-service dinner alone with her book.

Did she really want to be taken on another random and exhausting trek through low-rent neighborhoods, plague areas, secondhand bookstores, streets with “interesting” ethnic history, fish and garment markets, pausing infrequently to be presented with a glassful of stupefying iced liquor and a lecture on recent American politics?

It would be company, at least. She lifted the receiver and dialed. It was
arranged that he would stop by the hotel at midday; Mary calculated that this would give them only an hour before lunch, and this time she would have some say over the venue. As a precaution, she invented a call from Charlie which she would expect at five o’clock; in fact, he seldom rang when he was away, but she wanted to have an escape route.

Frank called up from the front desk at ten to twelve.

“I’m a little early. I took the subway. I can wait if you like.”

“No, no. I’m ready.”

The elevator sank eighteen floors and the uniformed attendant hauled open the rolling accordion doors. Frank was standing by the desk, turning his hat slowly round in his hands. Mary moved swiftly across the lobby.

“Hi.” Frank took her by the arm and moved her toward the door.

Mary paused at the curb, expecting him to hail a cab, but he set off on foot, down 45th Street, then right onto Third Avenue.

“How’s Charlie?” Frank said loudly above the traffic noise, as they waited to cross the street.

“He’s fine. He’s had to go to Chicago. Where’s the tour taking us today?”

“I haven’t decided. I like it down here, though. Toward Murray Hill. It’s kind of blank.”

“You like that?”

“I like the fact that it’s impersonal. No one troubles you. That’s what cities are for. Frankfurters, cabs, you know. Loud noises. Come on.”

Frank walked more slowly than the previous day so that they could continue their conversation. He guided her over to Madison, past the J. P. Morgan home, back onto clamorous Lexington with its long blocks of furniture stores, then over again onto Third, where they walked down past the old gin mills. Despite the proximity of many skyscrapers, the city was less overpowering than in the seething boxes farther west; there was a sense of the island sloping downhill to the East River and of the tight grid beginning to shake loose.

“When I first came to New York I had a room in a railroad flat way uptown on 95th, and I used to take the train down Third every morning.”

“Is that when you got the habit of looking into people’s windows?”

“I guess so. They took it down a few years ago. I never imagined how pretty Third Avenue would be beneath the tracks.”

“Pretty?” It seemed to Mary a strange word for the blur of commerce, the undistinguished tenements, where a police siren had begun to shriek in front of a clothing store.

At lunchtime they took a cab back uptown to a chophouse on Lexington of which Frank spoke warmly. Most of the clients seemed to be businessmen in suits, sitting at a long mahogany bar or gathered at tables with blue checked cloths, speaking with low urgency over their powerful drinks.

“So what’s Charlie doing in Chicago?”

“I don’t know. I’ve learned not to ask over the years.”

“Why? Is it confidential?”

“No, not really. Charlie’s job really is to follow the election. We’d been in London for a bit and we were expecting to go to Paris. Charlie was Assistant Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary at a very young age. They made him a counselor when he was only thirty-six.”

“So he’s what they call a high flyer?”

“It’s an awful expression, but I suppose that’s it. With the election coming up the Embassy political staff in Washington needed someone extra, and Charlie’d done a doctorate on American politics, so he was asked to come for a couple of years. He’d met Senator Kennedy when his father was Ambassador in London and it was thought he had some kind of special line to him.”

“And does he?” said Frank.

“I think so. He claims he remembers nothing about their meeting at all. He says he was drunk at the time. In fact he does have some kind of access. I don’t quite know how it works, but I’ve seen the results. It’s all a bit of a gamble, because at the moment it doesn’t look as though Kennedy’ll even get the nomination. But Charlie does other things as well. When someone’s on leave or off sick, he’ll cover for them, then you have to take over their speciality, which might be the Soviet Union or Indochina or something. And he’s supposed to liaise with the American press as well. They all are, to some extent.”

“So why don’t you ask what he’s doing?”

“Because he gets so cross with me.” Mary pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bag and offered one to Frank. “Charlie’s not a very happy man. He doesn’t like the work. Or maybe he doesn’t mind the work, he just doesn’t like being alive. It’s a kind of illness.” She paused. “I shouldn’t tell you these things.”

“We’re still off the record, aren’t we? Does he see a doctor?”