Private Life (47 page)

to see who it is. And when we have a knitting circle, the first thing he asks afterward is

whether anyone said anything about him."

"You daren't tell him that they didn't say a word?"

Margaret smiled. "I don't know what I dare tell him, other than 'They all asked

after you.' But I don't know what to do with him. He doesn't know what to do with

himself!"

"He's a grown man," said Dora. "He'll think of something."

Dora was being sent back to Europe over her own protestations. It was not, she

told Margaret, that she was too old, it was that the events in Europe were too large, and as

large as they looked from her perch on Sutter Street, they would be that much larger once

she got to New York, and overwhelming once she got to London. But in fact she was too

old, Margaret thought. She said, "Your usual snooping?"

"I don't snoop. I interview. People want to answer my questions, and I write down

what they say."

"But you describe them. You say, 'He looks directly at me, but his left eye tracks

toward the donkeys on the hillside.'"

Dora laughed. "That's not snooping. Snooping is reading their mail and listening

to gossip about them."

"You've done a little of that."

"Well, I did, during my high-society period, but when someone looks at you

surreptitiously while she's telling a juicy story about someone else, or just happens to

leave her diary open at a certain page when she knows you might be alone in the room,

you do what is expected of you. I haven't gone into high society in ten years."

"So why go back to Europe?"

"Believe me, I don't want to go. In 1916, I couldn't imagine anything more

exciting than to have your ship attacked by a U-boat and write your last dispatch and stuff

it in a bottle while you were drowning, knowing that an editor from the
New York Herald

would inevitably find it and put it on the front page."

"And

now?"

"Now I know that it will be hard to find hot water for a nice bath, and there will

be a constant stream of people in every city who will deserve to eat more than I deserve a

new hat, and that friends from long ago who were once truly simpatico will now be

disgorging the most impossible sentiments about Anglo-Saxon purity or the rights of

Italians to a
'mare italiano'
or whatever they call it." It seemed to Margaret that Dora

must be thinking of a particular person, but she didn't say anything. Dora leaned back and

said, "My mother would say at last I am receiving my just deserts. You know, she used to

say, 'Now, Margaret saw a hanging as a child and promptly forgot everything about it, as

she should have. Dora never saw that hanging, and so she has always gone looking for

one.'"

"I never heard that." Then Margaret said, "The truth is, I've never seen anything! I

didn't even see that hanging, as far as memory serves. I should have just gone to Europe,

and now it's too late."

"I should have taken you with me years ago, but now is not the time." Dora's tone

was sympathetic, but idle, as careless of what she had enjoyed as of what Margaret had

not enjoyed.

"Andrew wouldn't have stood for that, as there was typing to do. I have been such

a fool!"

Dora's eyebrows lifted at this flash of anger, but she didn't respond other than to

say, "He would have gotten used to it."

"I wish you'd said that fifteen years ago."

That night, in her bed, Margaret lay awake thinking of her conversation with

Dora, how she had strayed into indiscretions that she had resisted for years, and how it

had felt. There was the surprise that nothing she had said surprised Dora, and then there

was the other surprise, that what she had said was still so emphatic, in spite of the

equanimity she thought she had attained. No, she was almost sixty and she had not been

to London or Paris or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced,

as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. But, she saw, she was

balanced on a very narrow perch.

POSSIBLY, over the years, she had hosted some ladies' circle or another two or

three thousand times. Sewing, knitting, collecting toys and clothing for poor children,

raising funds for soldiers, planning Christmas programs and Thanksgiving dinners and

Easter-egg hunts. In every case, if Andrew was in the house, he would come to the

doorway, bow to the ladies, greet the ones he knew by name, and then excuse himself to

go off to other business more worthy of his attention. On this particular day, he came into

the dining room with his hat already on and his jacket over his arm. He nodded to Mrs.

Hermann and Mrs. Roberts. He greeted Mrs. Tillotson and Mrs. Jones, and Miss Jones,

who was Mrs. Jones's unmarried sister-in-law. Margaret said goodbye to him with a wave

and dealt out the cards, one down, one up. She heard him open the front door, and then

she heard the front door close. As she was dealing the next round of cards to those who

wanted them, though, he appeared again in the doorway. The ladies placed their bets. She

dealt out a card to Mrs. Jones and one to Mrs. Roberts. Mrs. Roberts said, "I'm busted,"

and Mrs. Jones took the pot. Andrew said, "I thought you ladies were knitting, my dear."

Mrs. Jones said, "We've knitted enough mufflers to stock I. Magnin."

"You're playing blackjack?"

"Yes,

Andrew."

To everyone in general he said, rather proudly, "My mother played blackjack all

through my childhood. She called it 'vingt-et-un.'"

"Did you play with her?" said Miss Jones, evidently surprised that such a huge,

gruff, gray-mustached man as Andrew had had a childhood.

"For a while there, we played every day. My father made a sketch of us one night.

We were so intent upon the game that we didn't realize he was even in the room."

"How old were you, Captain Early?" said Mrs. Roberts.

"Oh, about seven, I guess. She started playing cooncan with me when I was five

to keep me occupied, because I was a terribly restless child. I liked blackjack better."

Margaret shifted in her chair, ready for him to leave.

"What was cooncan?" asked Miss Jones.

"A type of rummy," said Andrew.

"You should play with us," said Miss Jones, and, lo and behold, he sat down with

a thump in a chair and pulled it up to the table. Margaret felt disappointment set in, like a

flu.

Miss Jones continued, "You should write your memoirs, Captain Early. I'm sure

they're very interesting."

"Do you think so, Miss Jones? I don't need to do that. A young man once wrote

my biography." He smiled in a dignified manner, and spread himself a bit.

Margaret was relieved that, before he could offer the girl a copy, Mrs. Roberts, on

the other side of Andrew, gave a squeak that drew his attention. Mrs. Roberts was a

retiring soul who played without any strategy at all, and her stack of chips was already

noticeably smaller than everyone else's. Andrew glanced at her, and must have seen her

hole card, because when she took a hit and was busted, he leaned over and whispered in

her ear. She turned and said, "I don't know a thing about that, but you may show me, if

you would like."

He sat with them then for about two hours, whispering first to one lady and then

to another and another, until they stopped for tea, when he put on his hat and went out.

That night, over supper, he said, "Your lady friends have a deplorable feel for

strategy. I wonder if Mrs. Roberts even knows that there are fifty-two cards in the deck."

"Possibly not. She only comes for the gossip."

"She is being robbed blind."

"Andrew, if she loses two dollars, it's a bad day. The stakes are low. Think of it as

the price she has to pay for an afternoon's sociability."

"When are these ladies coming again?"

"They agreed on Monday." She saw that it was inevitable, but also that it kept him

off the streets. That part was a relief.

On Monday morning, he put a leaf in the table, and over the course of the next

few weeks, he installed himself as their tutor. His method was to help first one lady and

then another with basic strategy. After that, he told them a bit about card counting, and

then the higher mathematics of probability. He pitted the ladies against one another. Mrs.

Roberts stopped losing all the time, and Miss Jones began losing a little more often.

Margaret saw, possibly for the first time, just the palest shadow of Mrs. Early in the son

who was now older than his mother had ever been. She was not as uncomfortable as she

had expected to be--it was interesting to see him in the midst of so many ladies. He had a

manner, stiff but gallant, right out of 1895.

In these games, Andrew never expounded upon any of his theories about the

universe or the
Panay
, nor did he talk much in general--he was too busy whispering to his

designated pupil to hold forth to the rest of them. Margaret felt fond of him, in a distant

way.

Having succeeded with the cards, and still mindful of Mrs. Wareham's urging, she

furnished him with a dog. Andrew was not opposed to a dog. For her, the idea of owning

a dog had died with Alexander--at first it seemed like too much of a substitute child, and

then it became a habit they had not developed. But one day she went to the pound, and

she adopted Stella, whose previous owner had been transferred by the navy to South

America. The animal was a terrier mix, housebroken. She walked nicely on a leash, and

did not jump onto the furniture unless invited. Margaret was in the kitchen with the dog

when Andrew came in. Stella walked over to him, sat down in front of him, and looked

up into his face. Margaret said, "Her name is Stella."

He said, "Is it, indeed?" Of course her name was Stella--no other dog could be

adopted by an astronomer. That evening, he invited Stella onto the sofa, and she sat

quietly while he petted her on the head. That night, he made a bed for her in the corner of

his bedroom by folding an old quilt, and the first thing Margaret heard in the morning,

before she was quite awake and when it was still very gloomy with fog and darkness, was

the sound of the kitchen door opening and closing. She sat up and went to the window.

Down below, in the backyard, she could just make out Andrew, with Stella at his heels,

opening the back gate and heading out for a walk.

Such a charming, bright-eyed, and well-behaved dog imparted her own

respectability to Andrew. It was the perfect solution--he walked all over town and people

engaged him in conversation, about Stella or about dogs in general. In his usual fashion,

he exerted himself, and in short order, he had taught Stella to shake hands, sit up on her

hind legs, roll over, jump a stick, and balance a piece of bread on her nose, then toss it in

the air and catch it. When children stopped him to pet her, he took pieces of bread out of

his pocket and showed off her tricks.

Then he took up movies, although she could have counted on one hand the

number of movies they had seen. He had never liked silent movies; he had sat through

Charlie Chaplin in
The Circus
without cracking a smile. As they went home, he said,

"Tell me, my dear, why does he wear those shoes and turn his feet out in that way? Does

he suffer from the aftereffects of some childhood illness?"

"No, Andrew, it's supposed to be funny."

"But funny in what way? Incongruous? Mechanical? Simply silly or ridiculous? I

would have liked to enjoy it, I must say."

"You've enjoyed vaudeville. It's like that."

"But it goes on so long you can't stand it anymore. At a vaudeville show, at least

if you didn't like the act, you knew it would soon give way to another."

After the talkies came in, he could not tolerate scenes of the sort where the two

actors were driving in a car and a film of the passing landscape was playing behind them.

He would say, aloud in the theater, "We saw that tree five seconds ago." However, after

his interest in blackjack waned, Andrew discovered pictures. He was amazed that, while

he had been ignoring them, they had become more sophisticated. The first one he came

home and told her about was
Gunga Din
, which was playing at the Orpheum in

downtown Vallejo. He had lots of questions: Who was this fellow Cary Grant? Was this

movie based on Kipling's poem, and if so, how could you base a movie on a poem?

Didn't the Khyber Pass look rather like the Sierras?

She said that Cary Grant was a big star, as was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Andrew's

response to this was "Why is that, my dear?"), that you could base a movie on anything,

and that probably the film was made in the Sierras rather than in the real Khyber Pass.

A few days later, he went to see a movie about Jesse James. In this one, he liked

"the fellow Henry Fronda," but, he said, "how do they not know that Jesse and Frank's

mother wasn't killed? She lived to be eighty-five years old! And they had them robbing

trains. They robbed banks. That was the point." He couldn't see how a movie that was so

inaccurate could have been allowed to reach the screen. She said, "Andrew, did you talk

to anyone during the movie?"

"Well, I did tell a few people around me that the story was all wrong."