“You know Clavet’ll give us a long, tough passage to translate. Probably from his beloved Racine. But if it is Racine, for sure it won’t be anything we’ve ever laid eyes on before.” Danny rose from his desk and lightly tweaked his nose, in the manner of M. Clavet. His voice rose a half octave: “Rien que vous avez déjà connu … Henry, I hope what I just said in exquisite French wasn’t too complicated for you to understand?”
Henry decided he’d retaliate massively, since his French was much more advanced than Danny’s, and so he replied in high-speed French words to the effect, “Obviously M. Clavet isn’t going to have us translate a passage we’re already familiar with, you—” He had a hard time coming up with French for “jerk.” He settled on “—vous bête.” And then added in English, “What would be the point of asking us to translate a passage we’ve already familiarized ourselves with?”
Danny leaned back in his swivel chair, closed his eyes and smiled. “You know what, Henry? You’re absolutely right. No point at all. I just felt like dumping on M. Clavet, and then you went and spoiled all my fun.”
Henry enjoyed Danny’s spontaneity. Danny was that way. He didn’t hide it when he was obviously guilty. It was easier to transform what was previously thought wrong to something freshly recognized as right.
“Screw,” Danny said. “Let’s go to George and Harry’s and have a beer. We can talk to each other in French, if you think that’s the only way to justify getting away from the goddamn memory work.” The memory work was a review of five thousand French words the students of M. Clavet were expected to have learned.
“Why not?” Henry said. “Did you know hamburger is established as perfect brain food?” Henry’s voice was very serious.
“No. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know that. When did the brain surgeons come through with that?”
“They haven’t yet. I am just anticipating them.”
Danny laughed. Anyway, Henry was all for forgetting the French for a while and having a beer. Or two. If Henry said okay, Danny reasoned, it had to be okay. If Henry had frowned on taking off a half hour, Danny would have left anyway. But he wouldn’t have enjoyed himself as much.
Henry poked his head out of the open window and looked down on the quadrangle, its dimensions clearly indited by the modest yellow lights under the succession of arcades. A lovely sight. And Silliman was only a block or so from the hamburger and beer joint heavily patronized by students who lived in that area of the campus. “Still warm. Well, why not, June tenth it should be warm.”
“I wish your Lakeville lake were around the corner.”
“Yeah,” they were walking toward the eatery, “that would be nice.”
“Hey!” Danny stopped in his tracks. “I got an idea. Let’s get a couple of beers, pile into the car, and go to the beach at Savin Rock.”
Henry brightened. “What the hell. I mean, pourquoi pas, Monsieur Daniel? Il faut nous amuser!”
Twenty minutes later the car was parked. The headlights had detected no other cars along the half mile of sandy stretch by the beach that led to the amusement park at the end of the promontory.
“Monastic community,” Danny said, looking about at the empty parking lot. “No lovers.” He opened the second beer, handed it to Henry and walked toward the water’s edge. A few steps from the water he took off his shoes and khaki pants, stretching the pants out on the sand to sit down on them, beer in hand. Henry joined him. The moon was new, the movements of the seawater visible, but not incandescent. Danny swigged on his beer contemplatively. He was asking himself the question, Now? He answered it. “Why not?”
“Henry? You know something?”
Henry sensed what was coming. The accents, the formulation. An invitation to learning.… It had to mean that Danny was ready—finally—to talk about the one subject of common interest never touched on. “You want to talk about Caroline.”
Danny was surprised. “Well, yes. I want to marry her.”
“I’d have guessed so. And—” he very nearly betrayed an intimacy he had got from his sister, but he caught himself in time—“I suppose you have asked her?”
“Damnedest thing about your sister, Henry. You don’t have to formulate things. I mean, not most things. She understands everything. Often she knows what I’m thinking before I’m thinking it. Like tonight, walking to George and Harry’s, she’d probably have said when we walked out of Silliman, ‘Danny, you’d like to go to the beach, wouldn’t you?’ … No. I haven’t asked her. But asking Caroline if she would marry me would feel a little like asking her if she, if she … intends to graduate from college.”
“You mean—”
“I mean she’d wonder what on earth alternative ever occurred to me. Or to her. She’d say something like, ‘What an odd question. Of course we’ll be married. The only question is when.’ ”
Henry was serious. “I know what you mean. She’s been that way always. I don’t need to tell you that Caroline is—”
“No. You don’t need to tell me. I know it. I guess what I’m saying, Henry, is that I hope you approve.”
Henry laughed now. “What does it matter? If, as you say, she expects to marry you, that leaves out any leverage I might have on the matter.”
“I want you to be happy about it.”
“I am, Danny. You know how I feel about you. I won’t even mention the most obvious debt I have to you. Well, sure, I will: If it weren’t for you I would probably be behind bars right now.”
“We agreed never—”
“Yeah, and up until now I’ve lived up to it. But it’s there, the dominant event in our relationship—in our friendship. In my life, come to think of it. And then we’ve done a lot together since then. Including a little—book-burning in Cannes.”
Henry did not see the expression on Danny’s face. Since boarding the Continental that same afternoon, Danny had never again mentioned Paul Hébert. Or whatever his name was; Henry wasn’t sure. “All I can say is that if Caroline loves you the way she obviously does, that fact would eliminate any reservation I had about you. Assuming I had any reservation about you. Though you know, Danny, you are a little … headstrong. Probably just your—our—high testosterone level, as twenty-five-year-olds. You probably know that. You should know that it’s visible to other people. Like me.”
Danny thought this was enough on the subject. He got up, clapped Henry on the back, pulled off his polo shirt, dropped his shorts, and said, “I got you, Henry; now, allons nager!”
He ran toward the water and dived in, followed by Henry. They swam vigorously for fifteen minutes. At midnight they were back with their five thousand French words.
Danny had always had trouble with penmanship. His teachers had always complained about the difficulty in making out what he wrote. One teacher, when Danny was twelve, made him print in block letters, hoping that a departure from the script of the Palmer method would clarify the letters. It helped a bit, but the result, after a year or two, was a strange amalgam of block and script, and the strain on exam readers was such that when Danny one morning got his terrific idea, at the end of the first semester of sophomore year, he found all the examining professors elatedly cooperative.
Accordingly he would arrive at his exams with his portable typewriter in hand and ask routinely for permission to type out his answers to the exam. This he had to do in an adjacent classroom, where he would not disturb other students who were writing by hand on their blue books. Today, at the exam at Strathcona Hall for French 310, the presiding monitor readily acquiesced.
Danny was happy not to have to join the twenty-five students in shirtsleeves bending over, in their standard little desk chairs, the six-page exam paper being handed out. Danny took his copy of the examination paper and walked out of the exam hall with it to a small empty classroom, adjacent. He could tell from the thickness of the stapled sheets that, indeed, there would be a long passage there to translate into French. He closed the door.
Three hours later, he walked wi
th Henry from Strathcona the half block to Silliman. It was sunny and hot. Danny carried a seersucker jacket in one hand, his Royal portable typewriter in the other. The summer was now shimmering about them. It was suddenly sweltering in New Haven: It was now, and would be for three months, a hot, humid little city.
“Funny sensation,” Danny said as they walked, slowly, as if without purpose. “That’s it! The end of college life. All that happens now is we fart around for a week, then receive a diploma.”
“In Latin.”
“Don’t worry, Henry. I’ll translate it for you.”
They reached their rooms. Danny tossed his jacket down on the couch and went out into the community bathroom across the hall.
Henry looked about at the litter in the little study-sitting room, left over from the night before—papers, books, empty bottles of beer and Coca-Cola. Students at Yale hadn’t had the luxury of a daily cleaning woman since freshman year.
What the hell. Henry set out to tidy up the room. He began by removing Danny’s coat—why on earth did Danny need a coat on June 11 in New Haven, Connecticut? He lifted the light seersucker from the couch and felt the weight of it. Surprised, he looked down into the bared pocket, slipped his hand in and brought out Cassell’s French dictionary.
Quickly he slipped it back into the pocket of the coat and laid it back on the couch. He was dismayed.
And then he walked quickly out the door and down the stairs.
He’d wait outside the dining hall until it opened. He didn’t want to lay eyes on Danny. He would not have known what to say to him. In fact he did not speak to any of the other students who milled about, waiting for the dining hall to open. Henry was silent, diplomatically diverting all efforts to engage him in conversation during lunch. He tried to sort it out.
Danny.
Cheating.
Eleven
THE DAYS that led to the wedding hadn’t been without incident. Soon after Caroline’s visit to Palm Beach, where she spent a weekend with her future mother-in-law at her seaside villa, the formal announcement was drafted.
Rachel closely supervised its composition. From time to time the society columns in Palm Beach and Newport reported on Rachel Roosevelt Bennett’s activity, and she was entirely agreeable to being referred to as a style setter, and why not? Her father had been President of the United States longer than any man in history and her mother was very nearly as famous as her father. When the King and Queen of England had visited in Hyde Park in 1939 the President had served them hot dogs and all of America had risen to cheer. Rachel was especially attuned to social possibilities to weigh in with The People, her father’s constituents, and she was the first, according to the society columnist in the Palm Beach Daily News, ever to wear pants—fancy, floral silk pants, especially made for her—at an afternoon garden party at which she was the hostess.
Yes, but Rachel knew that some occasions were born to be formal, and she was not about to deinstitutionalize such a thing as a wedding. Or what came before; and, accordingly, the announcement of the engagement party was entirely conventional, her personal handiwork, even though the stamp was, so to speak, from out there, the provenance of the bride. Henry Beckett Chafee of Lakeville, Connecticut, was proud to announce the engagement of his sister, Caroline Stimson Chafee, to Daniel Tracey O’Hara of Palm Beach, Florida. The announcement recorded the name of Danny’s late father and the current name of his mother. And—though Rachel wrestled with this for a bit, but then thought what the hell, why not?—the names of his maternal grandparents. About Caroline, the names of her late parents were given, and it was noted that she would graduate from Smith College in June, and that after graduating from Yale in 1950, her fiancé had joined the Trafalgar hotel chain in New York as a junior executive.
Rachel O’Hara had given a stellar buffet-dance party at her Palm Beach spread for a hundred guests. In the receiving line Rachel introduced Caroline, dressed in yellow chiffon, the light blond hair slightly curled; her son Danny, the poster-boy college grad, in his blazer and white duck pants; her daughter Lila, at six feet one an imposing undergraduate with brown hair, large teeth, and an iron handshake; and Henry, golden blond, with horn-rimmed glasses and a studious air about him, the brother of the bride. The young people stayed on and danced late to Lester Lanin’s music and, much later, put on swim clothes and disported in the sea. Rachel spent as much time as she could command closely observing her prospective daughter-in-law. Late in the evening she confessed to her husband almost ruefully that she could find nothing in her to criticize.
“That probably makes her too good for Danny,” Harry Bennett grunted, taking off his black tie.
Rachel was half amused (she knew that her self-indulgent son had, well, shortcomings), half resentful (she was proud of him, her firstborn, and utterly delighted by his good looks). She satisfied herself by saying, “If she’s good enough for Danny, she’s good enough for me.”
Henry and Caroline had been assigned the guest cottage, with its two bedrooms and living room. Breakfast was brought in the next morning and Henry, his eyes roaming over the headlines of the Miami Herald that came in with the breakfast, complimented his sister on her patience and charm during the long evening. Caroline accepted her brother’s bouquet as a routine fraternal courtesy and moved purposively to another subject. “How much do they pay you at Time magazine?”
Henry told her he earned one hundred dollars per week. “Eighty-eight fifty after withholding tax.”
“How much do you know about our trust?”
“Not as much as I should. We’ve both been getting the same allowance, seventy-five bucks per month, but every now and then Cam Beckett springs something like a trip to Europe. Are you wondering about the wedding?”
“Yes. It’s our … treat, right?”
“That’s what the book says. I’ll call Cam when I get back to New York. Have you set a date?”
Caroline mused, “No, actually, we haven’t. Danny, as you would expect, wants it the day after tomorrow. I thought maybe in the fall.”
“What do you plan to do during the summer?—and please pass the marmalade. No, that one.”
“I haven’t told this yet to Danny, but I’ve told Father Keller I’ll volunteer this summer at the Maryknoll Mission in Mexico. I feel I want to do something like that. The Mormons do it—they spend a couple of years doing what they think of as missionary work. I’m not thinking about preaching Christianity, but maybe practicing a little Christianity. I’ve been given a lot, maybe I should try to give back a little. My Spanish is pretty good but could get a lot better, and the mission—it’s just outside of Cuernavaca—teaches orphans aged six to twelve and looks after them.”
“Maryknollers. Why not Benedictines? You forgetting Latrobe?”
“Hardly.”
“You were only five.”
“Yes. Funny, I don’t remember anything else about when I was five, except for vague memories of Father; and Mother, obviously. But Latrobe I remember—I remember every detail. I remember Brother Ambrose giving us the first glass of Ovaltine I ever tasted. And I’d hardly forget what you did, Henry.”
The memory of it still made Henry shiver.
It was getting late that October afternoon in 1935 and the sun was beginning to go down. Henry and Caroline had spent almost two hours at the forest reserve looking for their parents. They had separated from them in midafternoon, determined to explore the forest all by themselves, unaccompanied by adults. One hour later they set out to retrace their steps. But they were lost, it seemed irretrievably.
Henry, age ten, hadn’t known what to do next. They sat down on the scrubby forest floor of decaying leaves, wondering in which direction to set out to emerge from the forest. It was then that he spotted the snake and heard its rattle as it slithered its hypnotizing way toward Caroline’s right thigh. Henry felt the hairs stand up on his head and his breath choked but he wasn’t paralyzed. He threw himself at the rattler and grabbed it under its oily head, smashing
it feverishly a half-dozen times against the big rock.
The snake was dead. Henry struggled to control his breathing. He had been bitten and he knew that rattlesnake bites could be deadly. Caroline seemed to know too because she began to cry. Henry remembered what his Boy Scout leader had told the boys about the blood flow. Accordingly he instructed Caroline. She must quiet down, then remove one of her long socks and wind it tightly around Henry’s upper arm. Caroline followed his instructions step by step, remaining silent. She was fumbling with the improvised bandage when they heard the evensong of the monks not far away. Henry began to run in the direction of the chant, then remembered what his leader had said: Exercise stimulates the blood flow, spreads the poison. He slowed down to a fast walk, and in a few moments fell into the arms of Brother Ambrose, at the head of the column of twelve Benedictines doing late-afternoon devotions while taking one of their daily walks in the forest surrounding the monastery.
Henry blurted it all out. Brother Ambrose acted quickly. He dispatched one monk to look after Caroline, a second to go at a run to the monastery to call the doctor at Latrobe; and then with a third monk he joined hands-to-wrists to form the classic seat. Brother Ambrose wanted no physical exertion made by Henry, nothing that would accelerate the circulation of the poison.
Accordingly the two monks squatted down and told Henry to sit on the improvised chair formed by their interlocked forearms and to put his arms around their necks. They then dogtrotted the quarter mile back to the monastery. At the infirmary, the matron called the doctor’s office to ask if he had brought rattlesnake vaccine with him. He had not. She called the hospital and ordered it sent by ambulance. She made incisions across, and vertical to, the fang mark, renewed the tourniquet, and put a thermometer in Henry’s mouth.
William F. Buckley Jr. Page 9