The Golden Cup

by Belva Plain

  (Like joining the Episcopal church, Hennie thought.)

  “—you have to admit he’s the best-hearted man in the world. And as I always say, with the golden touch!”

  Hennie walked back to the piano. The sight of it moved her to tears. If there were any possession that might bring joy to Freddy, this one might. Here in this airy room, he might make music again. That, at least, was left to him. She slid her hand in a caress over the slippery keyboard.

  Yet one didn’t have to live in a place like this to make music!

  Of course, Freddy would need money. The government’s pension would hardly support his family, even with Leah working. So it was understandable that Dan would take some of what—because it was death’s money, tainted and hideous, from sources that he rejected and fought all his life—he had refused before now. But this grandeur?

  The women came babbling up the stairs. She recognized, in the voices of Emily, Florence, and Mimi, clear notes of surprise and admiration. And Angelique’s again: “—the golden touch, yes, Alfie has it.”

  If I have to hear that once more, I don’t know what I’ll do, Hennie thought, gritting her teeth.

  The women were followed up the stairs by two men lifting a desk, and these were followed by a smaller, fussy man who was apparently in charge.

  “The desk goes here,” he directed. “The two wing chairs in the back of the van are for here too. The pair of florals. And the clock!” he called, as the men started back down. “The gilt wall clock. Bring something up to hang it. I don’t want it lying around.”

  He turned to the women and introduced himself. “You’re all family, I suppose? I’m Mr. Scaline, the decorator. I’ve not had the pleasure … Mr. Roth has been doing all the ordering alone,” he explained, with a lift of the eyebrows to indicate that that was extraordinary in itself.

  “But Mr. Roth has excellent taste,” he assured the astonished women. “Excellent, indeed. I’ve had no problems with him at all.”

  “Now, who would think it of Dan?” asked Alfie.

  Hennie alone would have thought it. The others were judging him by his careless dress, but she knew his taste and was not surprised by it.

  Now appeared a pair of handsome chintz-covered chairs, along with the clock and a Sheraton table. Mr. Scaline clapped his hands to his forehead.

  “Dear me, I forgot about the table! And the lamp that’s to go on it, of course! You must forgive me,” he explained to the onlookers, “but Mr. Roth is so particular about rushing things through in a hurry that I find myself in a state of confusion. However, we’re getting there, we’re getting there,” he finished with satisfaction as two Chinese ginger jars were brought in and placed on the mantel to flank the clock.

  When the man had gone, Alfie took all but Hennie on the tour of the house. Left behind, she sat down on one of the new chairs. The scintillating sunlight played over the parquet floors, revealing an intricate golden grain, like the whorls on a fingertip. From the clock, which hung between two miniature gilt Ionic columns, there came a cheerful chime, as though the mechanism were aware that its duties in the new home must be promptly begun. Already the house was coming alive. Dan might have said that Leah could go to blazes if she didn’t like it, but the fact was, Hennie was sure that Leah would. Its costly simplicity was what she would recognize. Yes, this was beautiful, no doubt of it.

  Beautiful and wrong.

  The voices came back, still babbling their amazement.

  “It’s elegant, Hennie,” Florence cried. “Really elegant.”

  Far more so than her own dark brownstone off Central Park West.

  “And on such a splendid street!” There was no envy in Florence’s tone. “I hope it will be very, very good for Freddy,” she said softly.

  Mimi inquired who was to take care of such a large house—easily twice the size of her apartment.

  Alfie explained, “The couple who worked for the former owner will stay on. A Mr. and Mrs. Roedling. Swedish. The man will help Freddy, lifting and—” He stopped, glancing at Hennie.

  “And Dan has bought a car. Mr. Roedling knows how to drive,” Emily reported. “There’s to be a nurse for Hank too,” she added in a tone of mild disapproval, “since Leah will not give up her job.”

  “I’ve spoken to her about that,” Alfie said, “and so, I believe, has Dan, but she likes her work. She says she doesn’t want to be dependent on Dan’s money.”

  Angelique made a correction. “But it’s Freddy’s money now.”

  “Well, yes, but after all, Dan earned it,” Alfie answered.

  Earned it! Hennie thought. Dan wouldn’t say so!

  Alfie frowned at her. “You’re so silent. Is something wrong?”

  “I’m often silent. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “She’s just thoughtful,” Mimi said gently. “And why not? She has enough to be thoughtful about.”

  A silence fell momentarily upon the little group, a silence that seemed to echo, making the empty house larger and emptier. Into it, Mimi spoke again.

  “It seems as if Paul’s been gone a hundred years.”

  “They say the war will be over soon,” Angelique said desperately.

  “Oh, it surely will be. Any day now,” Alfie assured them. “Well, shall we go?”

  And they followed him, one by one, down the red carpet and out through the door of Freddy’s sumptuous new house.

  6

  In the early spring of 1919, on an afternoon of blowing wind, Paul, having made his first visit at his parents’ home, made his second one to Freddy.

  A fire snapped in the comfortable library, a snug enclosure of burnished ruddy wood, Oriental rugs, and lamplight. Freddy’s “man” having brought a tray with tea things, Mimi poured and served. The little sandwiches and iced cakes were the same as they’d always had at the Werner house and were quite familiar to Paul. It was just that it seemed so odd to be having them in a house that belonged to Freddy!

  The wheelchair had been drawn up near the fire. Its warmth had caused Freddy to throw off the plaid rug, peppered with cigarette burns, that had covered him from the waist down, so that now what had happened to him could be seen in its full horror. Stumps. Half a human being, with the swollen broadening of the shoulders that comes from using crutches. Paul felt twinges in his own legs; a grimace pulled in his jaw and forehead; he couldn’t bear to look and couldn’t avoid looking. Mimi, more fortunately, was able to be busy with the tea things.

  “You have your boy and Leah. They need you.” Paul was ashamed of the cliché, yet what other way was there to answer Freddy’s lament?

  Freddy let the cliché pass. “Captain’s bars, I see. What is it? Can’t bear to take off the uniform?”

  Paul winced. The sarcasm, if it was sarcasm, was so unlike Freddy.

  “No, I’ve lost a lot of weight and my suits have to be altered.”

  “Mine too,” said Freddy.

  Mimi took another cake, remarking pleasantly, “I’ve got my appetite back since you’ve come home, Paul. They’re so good! Have another, Freddy?”

  “The thing is,” Freddy said, “I’m of no use to the boy. He’s a lively little kid, much more than I ever was.”

  I taught you to ice-skate, Paul thought, and said almost frantically, “But you are of use! There’s more to life than sports. The real you is here, even though—” And he stopped short, unable to finish, “even though you’ve lost your legs.”

  “And Leah loves you,” Mimi said.

  “You’ve been wonderful,” Freddy told her. “Your wife’s come regularly, Paul, and brings me books.” For a moment the old, soft, dreamy look passed across his face. “And Meg comes after school. She’s only fifteen, but we can talk. Your mother comes, and mine … whenever she’s sure my father won’t be here. Whatever all that’s about! Do you know?” he demanded suddenly.

  “I don’t think anyone does,” Mimi told him.

  “As if there isn’t enough misery without making more.… You knew when Uncle David
died, I suppose.”

  “Yes, on Armistice Day,” Paul answered.

  “With all the crazy celebration in the streets and the whistles blowing. Do you remember New Year’s Eve in 1900, Paul? Well, it was like that.”

  “Oh, I can remember,” Paul said. “But can you, really?”

  “Yes. I was lifted up to the window and my father said, ‘He’ll always remember this night.’ ”

  Freddy’s eyes were cast down toward the fire, which, flaring, made his pale lids almost transparent. What else was he seeing in the flames? No one spoke. The teacup clinked when Mimi put it down, jarring the stillness.

  “What do you think of this house?” Freddy asked abruptly, looking up.

  Paul was not sure whether he was supposed to have a favorable opinion or not; something in Freddy’s voice made him unsure. He took, then, the cautious middle road.

  “It’s a fine, solid house.”

  “Well, you’re accustomed to fine, solid houses. I’m not. Frankly, I don’t know what to think of it and don’t particularly care. Well, maybe it’ll make a difference to my son someday. He’ll be an American gentleman, almost as good as an English one.”

  Mimi and Paul, troubled by this terrible bitterness, exchanged quick glances.

  And Freddy cried out, alarming the dachshund, who had been asleep in his basket, “The people who started this war ought to be shot! Wilson, too, the whole lot of them.”

  Paul said nothing. A sadness filled his chest. The words that he could have spoken and would not speak, because they would have been too cruel, came to mind: And what about you? With your great crusade and your scornful attacks on pacifists like your parents?

  “You know that line of Wilfred Owen’s,” Freddy said slowly, “ ‘These are men whose minds the dead have ravished’? At least I have got my mind left. Maybe that’s not so good, though. I can remember too much. Mud and rats and bodies and rats eating the bodies.”

  Neither Paul nor Mimi stirred as he leaned forward and held them with a blazing stare.

  “Do you know we fought three and a half months at Passchendaele? Fought in the mud, and lost a quarter of a million English boys? Yes, we fought. I learned to fight hand to hand. With grenades. They’re more efficient than bayonets. Yes, and I remember Gerald’s letters, his mother’s too. ‘Gerald died a hero,’ she wrote.” Freddy laughed. “Oh, yes, a clean, neat, instantaneous death with a bullet through the heart, or toppling gracefully from a white horse with your country’s banner held high!” He subsided.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Paul caught his wife’s frail shoulders trembling. And he said very quietly, “Still, in spite of all, you know, the world would be a very different place if the Kaiser’s side had won.”

  “I can’t say it would, Paul.”

  No, it probably wouldn’t matter to him. Without legs, nothing would matter very much. And Paul grasped at something else to talk about.

  “You’ve a good head for detail. It’s just occurred to me”—actually it just had, and might or might not be such a good idea—“that maybe you’d like to study banking. Bankers sit most of the day. What do you think?”

  Freddy’s eyes went back to the fire, which was flickering into cinders.

  “I can’t think about anything yet. But thanks anyway.”

  Paul stood then. “We’ll talk about it another time. I’m afraid we’ve tired you.”

  “No. I’m just tired, that’s all. You didn’t do it.”

  Intensely shaken, Paul and Mimi went downstairs, out onto the street, where a cold cheerful wind was blowing.

  “I keep remembering what he was like,” Paul said. “All that poetry, before he went away! Thanking God for this brave hour or that fine hour or something.” He brushed his hand over his forehead, which ached. “What terrible innocence, I thought then. And now this bitter despair—it could break your heart.”

  At the street corner they met Leah, hurrying home. It was not until Mimi and she called out to each other that Paul recognized her; without that, he might possibly have passed her by. She had grown much older, and yet was young: her sleek bobbed hair was a cap worn under the peak of a small bright blue hat; two flat curls lay on her lightly rouged cheekbones, and her skirt was as short as the most daring fashionables in Paris had been wearing them before Paul set sail for home.

  “Oh,” she murmured, “so you’ve seen him … isn’t it frightful?”

  Paul kissed her cheek, from which breathed a warm perfume.

  “Isn’t it frightful?” she repeated. “What do you think of him? What’s to happen?”

  “Unanswerable questions, Leah.”

  “I know. He just sits there. Sometimes, oh, very rarely, he’ll go to the piano and let his hands drift, not really playing anything. He won’t let us wheel him into the backyard because he says people can look down from other houses on him. And here we are, only a few yards from the park, but he won’t go there either, because people will see him and pity him.” She sighed. “He’ll only see people in the house.”

  “We’ll keep coming,” Mimi assured her.

  “I know, you’ve been so good, Mimi. I must say that people really have been. Ben Marcus comes. He cheers Freddy a little, I think. And, of course, Dan comes. But that upsets Freddy some; he can’t understand what’s happened between Hennie and Dan. Nor can I, God knows! Everything’s fallen apart.”

  “In spite of it all, you manage to look well,” Paul told her. It was the only remark that came into his head.

  “I have to. It’s my job. That’s the only thing that’s going right. I’ve had a big raise and it feels good. Good not to be dependent on Dan Roth. I have to live under the roof he paid for, I can’t help that, but at least I can support myself.”

  “I must go and see Dan,” Paul said. “How is he these days?”

  “Working, the same as always. But if you ask me, he’s tormented. I think he must be remembering his last words to Freddy before he went overseas. You know what he said to him? He called him crazy, a crazy damned fool. ‘You’re insane,’ he said. He was so angry, he was almost mad with it.”

  The wind blew around the corner where they were standing.

  “We’re keeping you,” Mimi said, and Paul knew she wanted to get away.

  Leah held Mimi’s arm. “No, it’s all right. I can’t ever talk to anyone about this, you see. It’s pent up in me. I can’t be honest about my feelings, they’re so ugly. I can’t tell Hennie, can I, that the day I first saw Freddy in the hospital I had to run to the bathroom to be sick? It’s not all because of pity, either—although it’s mostly that—but also, when he’s undressed, I can’t bear to look, and I’m so ashamed of myself.” She was pleading. “These are things you don’t say.”

  Mimi did not speak, and for the moment Paul could not.

  “And I can’t talk to Freddy at all. He won’t talk to me.”

  Now Leah’s round, intelligent eyes appealed to Paul. Mimi had imperceptibly withdrawn. She was not comfortable with the conversation; Paul knew it, and probably Leah had sensed it too.

  “You’re a man, you’ve seen life, even before you went to France and went through hell; you won’t shrink away from the truth even if it’s ugly—will you? Or shall I just keep still?”

  “No. Say what you have to say.”

  “What’s so awful is that sometimes I wish I could disappear. Just vanish. Or, what’s worse, that Freddy would. When I think of all the thousands of days of my life that will be like this, I don’t want to bear it, although I know I have to, and I will. And then I’m ashamed to be the least bit sorry for myself, when it’s he who—” Leah’s face collapsed for an instant into the ugly mask of grief, with lips pulled away to show wet gums. Then she straightened it and raised her hand. “No, don’t answer, don’t be comforting.”

  Paul answered gently, “We won’t say anything. We’ll just try to be kind.”

  “Thanks. Well, I’d best go in. Thanks for listening.” She took a few steps, and then turned aro
und with a question.

  “Are you shocked?”

  Paul shook his head no. He supposed that the pity in him should all be kept for Freddy, and yet at this moment it overflowed for her.

  Mimi tugged the needle through the canvas, the final piece in the set of twelve chair-seats that she had begun before Paul went overseas.

  “I do think it’s quite, quite awful what Leah said, don’t you, Paul? I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind all day. Poor, poor Freddy.”

  He wished she didn’t have that habit of doubling adjectives.

  “How can she have said such a thing about wanting to disappear? It’s not right, it’s not loyal. I simply can’t understand it.”

  Paul looked up from his book. The curtains had not been drawn and in the low sky he was able to see the reflection of city lights, a dull sullen pink bleeding upward.

  “ ‘Not right.’ What did that mean?”

  Was it “right” that he should be sound and Freddy crippled? “Right” that a president was elected on the slogan “He kept us out of war” and then promptly got us into it? Yet what else could the man have done? Was it “right” that the Werners’ small bank, along with Morgan, Rockefeller, the Bank of England, and so on, and so on, should have prospered from war loans? Had Freddy and Leah’s marriage been “right” in the first place? Dan had said no to it, but then, Dan was hardly infallible either. None of us is.

  God knows I am no judge of anyone, Paul said to himself. And he could answer his wife only by saying that he thought Leah had not meant it the way it might have sounded to her.

  Mimi put the needlepoint down.

  “You know, you look absolutely worn out, Paul. I’ll make some tea. It’s a wonderful reviver.”

  “But I don’t need reviving. Really.”

  She stood close to him. “Well, I don’t know.” Her voice quavered mournfully. “Heaven forbid if it had been you—I would love you so, Paul. Always and always. I love you so now.”

  He looked up at her. Tenderly, earnestly, her fine eyes looked back.

  And he thought, assuring himself, Yes, yes, I have much to be grateful for after all. Poor Freddy. Poor Leah …