The Fundamentals of Play (35 page)

“Oh,
Chatham
?” the woman panted, with a sudden fond interest. “Are you a Chattie as well, then? What year did you graduate, dear?”

The apartment wore signs of being overloaded by visitors, just the way Harry’s did. There were suitcases half open in the foyer, and a cosmetic case resting incongruously on top of a bookshelf. Catching my glance, Kate’s aunt confessed, “I’ve been sleeping on the couch,” and I felt a sudden well of sympathy for the Goodenows, that they should have to camp out for a child in need, like everybody else.

Eventually Kate was produced, and Aunt Kate—Kate was her namesake—removed herself to run errands.

“George,” said Kate faintly. “You came.” It took me a moment to recover from the shock of seeing her. She was wearing a nightgown and slippers, and behind her head a mat of hair stuck out. But I only felt more tender toward her, and more sure of my conviction. “Won’t you sit down? I’ve been hoping you’d come. You know, I haven’t been particularly well.”

I watched, incredulously, as Kate took a feeble seat on the couch and drew her knees up to her chest. “I know I’m not much to look at right now—”

“Kate! Kate!” I cried. I crossed the room and took her in my arms. She let herself be hugged, limply, with a wan smile on her lips. I released her but held her icy hands still. She had begun to weep.

“George—”

“Oh, Kate, it’s been a mess, it’s been a mess!”

“It’s been horrible!”

“I know, Kate! I’m so—I’m just so sorry!”

“But it’s all right now. You came.”

“Come take a ride with me,” I urged. “I’ve got Harry’s car outside. It would do you good to get out.”

“Do you think?”

“I’m sure of it. You’ve been cooped up in here with Aunt Kate …”

She laughed a little. “Should I get dressed?”

“Only if you want to,” I said, stroking the smooth part of her hair. “Park Avenue has seen you nekkid before, remember.”

“Why didn’t you come sooner?” she asked, looking up at me as if she wanted to be kissed.

“I was at the hospital,” I murmured, “with Harry—”

“All this time?” she broke in. “There wasn’t very much to be done, was there?”

“Not to be done, but—” I stopped and looked at her. “You know they saved the baby.”

Kate drew away slightly. “I’m sorry?”

“The baby,” I said gently. “They think it’s going to live.”

“But how could that be?”

It was curious, her tone. It was very much like annoyance.

“After a certain point, the—the fetus has developed enough—”

“I didn’t mean literally!”

“It will be a miracle if it lives,” I said after a moment, though I didn’t believe in them. I just wanted to say something to close the subject.

Kate seemed to be thinking of something very far off. “A miracle,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Do you think so?”

“For Harry’s sake,” I said.

“Hmm. I suppose.”

A black, sobering thought occurred to me. “Were you thinking of going back to him, Kate?”

“Why wouldn’t I have?” She frowned. “We were
engaged
before all this started, as you may remember. None of this business is
my
fault.”

There was a long silence. “If you’d rather not go out today,” I began finally.

“It’s just that—” Kate cleared her throat, rather affectedly, and smoothed the old white nightgown over her knees. “Well, I think it’s
a bit of a shame, really.” She spoke reflectively, musing aloud: “A child like that … not much of a start in life, really. Do you know keeping children like that alive costs some unbelievable amount of our taxpayer dollars? And is it really worth it?” Her face, clearing, dismissed the unattractive subject. “But shall we? Shall we take that ride?”

It had been so long since I’d had a good night’s sleep. Now it was my hands that grew limp. Kate tightened hers around them, as if to press them into reassurance. “I knew you’d come, George,” she said softly. It was just as I had hoped. She began to say all of the things I thought she would never say. “You and I, we’ve always been the most alike. We think the same. We’re the only ones who realize that what they taught us at school—that’s what matters.
Esse quam videri
, isn’t that right?” As she spoke she grew more animated. She rose and walked to the bathroom, still chatting as she ran the tap and splashed water on her face. When she returned she had a white robe on over her nightgown. “Look! It’s from the Ritz! Dad got it for me for Christmas. Mom didn’t want me to have it, but I kept begging … George?” She swooped in front of me and struck a pose. “Should I go like this?”

At Chatham they said Kate Goodenow could get away with anything. She could get caught with a bottle in her room, drink blatantly in her room on a Saturday night, and the teacher on duty would say, “When I come back you’ll be at the dance where you ought to be, won’t you?” The more cynical among the students attributed her seemingly unpuncturable state of grace to the fat checks Artie Goodenow anted up each semester, but Kate’s friends never paid attention to the naysayers. We knew it was just Kate. Money had nothing to do with it. She was like that—that was all. It had not occurred to me that without money there would have been no Kate Goodenow. That Kate Goodenow without money would, in fact, have been a different person. And until that moment I think I had always believed that my own upbringing had been just like theirs, like Chat’s or Kate’s, that
except for the money
we had been raised in just the same
way. Anyway, I had tried to believe it. But it was like Nicko had asked me, trying to get a couple of facts straight for his history class in what was to be his last term of school: “So, except for the sun being in the center of the universe, his plan was pretty much the same?” And I wondered, sitting on that white sofa in that white room, if Cara’s parents, when they came to pack up her things and take them away, had enjoyed a moment of comfort when they took the McLean family crest down from the wall, and if her mother had perhaps intimated to Mr. McLean that, unlike other people, they at least had that.

I realized that I was not going to drive Kate anywhere and that, in any case, to do so in Harry’s car was a low notion, badly thought out.

“Well, should I, George?”

She had asked one question, but I answered a hundred. “No, Kate,” I said, my mouth dry. “I don’t think so.”

“All right,” she said indifferently, “then I’ll change.” Her face registered my response, and then she looked a second time: registering my response.

She had been well taught, Kate had, to look beyond the rudeness, the slight, instead of trying to answer it directly. “All right,” she said again. She was trembling slightly, and to steady herself she sat down and laid her hands on a book. It was the catalog from Sotheby’s sale of Americana. “It was a good idea, but I don’t much care what I do. I never do. I’ll go for a run or I’ll—I’ll read a book.”

Certain things one did not forget, and they were more real than any religion. At Chatham, it was assumed, fresh air and honest prose could cure the most malcontent of souls.

“They can’t take that away, can they George?” cried Kate, rising again. “We were
there
. I was there, and you were there. We put our boats away side by side.”

“We did,” I said.

“That’s the truth, isn’t it? And you know, I’m right about you. You’ll see it more, as you get older. You’re just the same as I am—you are! You really and truly are!”

I had been in such a hurry to see her; now I wanted to leave while there was still time, while I could still remember what had brought me there in the first place. When she was sixteen and I was fourteen—

“You’ll know what I mean about what matters!”

As I rose and walked to the door, I could sense her flitting about the apartment, looking into her closet, throwing open a window. I stopped and went back into the room. She had taken out a comb and was working vigorously on the snarls in her hair. I took both of her wrists and stilled her hands.

“Yes, George? Yes, what do you want?”

“Kate, I’ll always—” I started to say.

But her eyes laughed that off. She was better than that and we both knew it. Kate played to win; the other girls could keep the consolation prizes. I dropped her wrists. I would always—nothing.

The elevator took so long I nearly gave up and went down the stairs, but it finally stopped on Kate’s floor.

The doors opened and Chat Wethers got out with a bouquet of flowers.

“Chat.” I was glad to see he had brought something for her. Kate appreciated those concrete displays of affection more than any girl I knew. She loved gifts, even Hallmark gifts like boxes of chocolate and lingerie; she was like Cara that way.

I assumed the two of us would linger a moment, and remained standing in the hall, but Chat held the elevator door for me. “Why, let it go!” I said.

He did so, with a disgusted shrug. “You,” he said.
“You.”

“You’re lucky you got here now,” I said. “There’s a terrifying aunt who keeps everyone at bay—”

“Excuse me.”

“Chat?”

He looked bored. “Kate is expecting me.”

“Expecting you?” I said, failing to understand. “But I was going
to take her for a ride,” I considered aloud. “If you had come any later—”

“What are you talking about, Lenhart?” he said dismissively. “No one’s going anywhere. We’re all staying right here.”

“We are?”

“Not you. We. Right here, where we’ve been.”

“You’ve been visiting?” I said.

“No, I haven’t been visiting. I’ve just
been
here. Taking care of Kate.”

Kate had come to the door. She stood watching us from the threshold. “Excuse me.” Chat went to her, presented her with the flowers, and kissed her affectionately on the cheek.

“Oh, Chattie, these are sweet of you.”

“I’ll be just a moment, dearheart.”

I waited until Kate had retreated into the apartment. Then guessing, finally, at the nature of my offense, I explained, “I wanted to come sooner, but I’ve been at the hospital with Harry.”

“Yes,” Chat said coldly, “you’ve been with Harry.”

“Christ, Chat, you know I would have been here—” But even to me the words sounded hollow. I stopped abruptly, for suddenly there was nothing further to say. He had every right to be offended. He had stuck by her. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry’s not quite good enough,” Chat said evenly.

“All right. If that’s the way you feel.”

That he would not deign to accept my apology did not really surprise me. In fact, I rather respected him for it. As he disowned me as a friend, I wished to salute him:
Esse quam videri
. Instead I pushed the down button.

It was understandably awkward as we waited. I wished Chat would simply go, if he had made his point. But he shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, the kind of physical tic he was always mocking in the Lombardis of the world. “I believe you owe me some money,” he said.

F
or eight or nine generations my father’s family lived on the island they had settled and got their living from the sea. They were fishermen and whale fishers. They sailed their whaling ships as far north as Greenland and as far south as the coast of Brazil. In the winter, when the ships were laid up, the men took up a trade. One was a blacksmith, one a cooper, a block and pump maker, a painter, a house carpenter. Boys were taught a trade, as they were taught to read and write, and while they grew they practiced tying a wondrous array of knots: the clove hitch, the sheepshank, the double-sheeted carrick bend. In spiritual things their creed was the opposite of intricacy: they belonged to the Society of Friends and worshiped God on plain wooden pews.

When whaling declined in the middle part of the last century, my ancestors emigrated off-island. They bought property on the closest cape and in Boston; they turned-coat Episcopalian and crept down the coast to New York. There they applied themselves to getting and spending with the customary zeal of converts. Of these latter, my father’s
father was one, an importer, who made and lost more money in the tea trade than any of us could reckon. When I was old enough to realize that my father had been rich as a child and that I might have been too, I felt I had been done a great disservice, and said so to him. It was the only time I spoke to him of money. He set me straight right away. At the time what he said was little comfort to me, and there were many years afterward when I dismissed the advice as something only someone from the Ice Box Age would come up with. My father had told me that I would always have my good name.

And I suppose when I missed Kate and Chat, I missed the gaiety and the shared history of a hundred touchstones. But mostly I missed the silent tribute they had paid me all these years—of recognizing my name.

Lacking other ideas, I went back to work. Toff must have done the same, for I never saw him now. One night I came home and there was a note on the refrigerator. It was our preferred means of communication: the cable bill taped up at the end of the month,
Yr. share: $15.07
. Toff was scrupulous about the odd penny, and alternated who paid $.07 and who $.06. But from now on I would be paying it myself.
I am sorry about the lack of notice
, he wrote,
but in view of the present situation, I will be moving out.—Geoff

The future progressive was pure Toff; in fact, he was already gone. He had taken the couch and the television, packed them off in the middle of the day, as the most agreeable way to go. The recliner was gone, too. There was only the coffee table atop the blue carpet, stained now, and stretching dully into a deserted bedroom. I took to sitting on the floor with my back up against the wall, looking at the place where the television used to be. Toff had forgotten one important thing, and I suppose had been too shy to return for it: sometimes I would pretend to switch channels with the Cara McLean Memorial Remote. And occasionally I would turn the pretend television off and just sit there, and at those times it would occur to me that I would probably make vice president some day.