It was grand larceny. Cutter opened the little refrigerator, brought out a bottle of champagne, poured two glasses, and raised his to Danny.
“Rather neat, isn’t it?”
Danny handled the compliment nonchalantly. “One has to take opportunities that come up. We aren’t really depriving the old man of anything. He has everything he wants.”
Cutter entered a cavil. “But you know, Danny, everything depends on your continued relationship with the old man.”
“Well, yes and no. If ever he got, well, mutinous, what do we do? A little paperwork, fuse the two Hyde Parks, get out of the way, point to the telephone log, shake our heads and wonder if the dear old man has truly lost his senses.”
“I wouldn’t do this if the old man were ten years younger.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t do it if I were ten years older. Cheer up, buddy.”
Caroline O’Hara reminded herself that she loved Harriet Carberry, really did. And reminded herself that Harriet’s prying was motivated only by a desire to help her friends. But this was only the first day of a three-day visit, and she confessed she was glad that tomorrow and Wednesday Harriet would be in New York during the day, returning to Greenwich only in time for dinner and to spend the night. That would complete Harriet’s annual New England tour. She would return to Pasadena, and the prying would be only over the telephone, attenuated; once or twice every month, until her next visit East.
Harriet had put on weight, perhaps because she was almost always nibbling at something—at the moment, she was nibbling at the big bowl of M&M’s. But she was still a handsome woman, determined to oversee the happiness of her friends.
“Well, does Danny have to call in on every one of the hotels in the Trafalgar chain?”
Caroline knitted as she talked. The long table behind the couch was crowded with framed pictures of her handsome brood, two girls and three boys, all of them now visiting with their aunt. She had not changed, but now her lips were slightly parted, framing a smile lit by quiet pleasure and giving pleasure to those in her company. Father Kevin, at the Riverside Church she attended, had remarked that Caroline had acquired a maternal beauty, which was different from the maidenly beauty he had merrily praised at the party after he married her and Danny, twelve years ago.
Caroline answered Harriet’s question. “Danny likes to be able to tell people—I’ve heard him do it—that he has in fact visited every one of Mr. Martino’s hotels. But of course he doesn’t do it every year. Though every year he looks in on the major hotels.”
“Is the one in Los Angeles one of the major hotels?”
“Of course. Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Boston, New York, Detroit. How’m I doing?”
“You’re doing good, Caroline. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could name the sixteen other cities where there’s a Trafalgar.”
“Even if I could, I wouldn’t. Why do you ask?”
“I was just wondering. You know, I spotted Danny in Los Angeles just a month ago?”
“Oh,” Caroline said, not looking up from her knitting. “Is the music too loud?” She got up and turned down the volume. Just a hair. “It’s the memorial album, Landowska. That’s the twenty-fifth Goldberg. She makes it so sublimely sad. You spotted Danny in Los Angeles? At the Trafalgar?”
“No. At the Bel Air.”
“Looking in on the competition, I guess,” Caroline said.
That’s one way to put it, Harriet thought. Assuming Caroline was willing to acknowledge that there was such a thing as competition for Danny, as distinguished from Danny’s hotels. She grabbed another handful of M&M’s from the bowl and decided to drop the line of inquiry.
The telephone rang, Caroline put down her knitting and reached for the receiver.
“Yes. Well, thank you for calling, Margie.” And, to Caroline, “Danny will be late. But not too late. By eight he’ll be here.”
Danny was in a convivial mood, which was good because Caroline had invited his sister, Lila, to join them for dinner. Lila had finally stopped going away for more and more schooling. And, Danny remembered, it seemed back then as though she would never stop growing. She was as tall as her brother and very talkative about her work at the Hyde Park Library, to which she drove every day from her house in Millbrook.
It was she, Lila O’Hara, she explained to Harriet, who passed on the credentials of visiting scholars. She puffed avidly on her cigarette and drank her gin and tonic in businesslike gulps. “We had someone last week, said he was preparing a life of Sidney Hillman. He was the labor leader—remember? CIO? In case you forgot, FDR—‘Grandfather,’ as I guess I’m entitled to refer to him in this household—said, ‘Clear it with Sidney,’ when he decided at the convention in Chicago to drop Henry Wallace and give the vice presidency to Harry Truman—1944, remember?”
“For heaven’s sake, get on with it,” Danny said to his sister. “We all remember 1944, we all remember reading about dropping Wallace, taking Truman, et cetera. So?”
“So—don’t be so impatient, Danny. I’m not one of your hotels. So, this ‘scholar’ said he’d like to examine White House correspondence with Hillman during 1943, ’44, and up until FDR died, April ’45. I asked him who was his publisher, and he said Henry Regnery, Chicago. And then he said, ‘Chicago made special sense to me, of course, since Hillman operated out of Chicago.’
“Now, in my business you get to know a fair amount about publishing. And it makes no difference—absolutely zero difference—to someone writing a book about somebody who lived in Chicago, whether the publisher who’s going to distribute the book also operates out of Chicago. The principal publishers are in New York City. It was clear to me that this ‘scholar’ was giving me an excuse for using Regnery. Why? Because”—Lila thrust her drink up above eye level, as if to declare independence, or proclaim emancipation—“because Henry Regnery is a conservative, reactionary publisher who has published several books critical of FDR, including the book by Tansil. His thesis—get this—is that Grandfather wanted the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, so he’d have an excuse for going to war!”
“So what did you do?” Caroline asked. “You can’t, can you, refuse material to scholars just because they publish with a conservative house?”
“Not so easy when it’s scholars you’re dealing with, but I had Mr. Henningson—that’s his name, Cyril Henningson—fill out the form we have, and told him he’d hear from us within a week. So I looked up the references, made about fifteen phone calls, and it turns out that young Mr. Henningson is a stringer for …”
Obligingly, they all waited for the revelation.
“Westbrook Pegler! Pegler is the angriest man in America and he fuels his anger by attacking FDR and Grandmother. So what he was up to was having one of his researchers, posing as a scholar, come to Hyde Park looking for dirt.”
“Is there dirt there?” Harriet asked matter-of-factly.
Lila looked at her. She knew from one or two past experiences that Harriet was unusually direct in her manner of speech. But was she also dumb? She trained her eyes, after adjusting her horn-rimmed glasses, on Harriet and said in tones she might have used at a history seminar, “Harriet, FDR was a politician. Politicians do things, make commitments—the kind of thing, well, the kind of thing you don’t want to shovel out to somebody who isn’t going to put it in the proper perspective. If he were, oh, Arthur Schlesinger, we’d know that there’d be a historian’s … sense of—”
“History?” Danny volunteered.
“Exactly, Danny. Exactly.”
Danny gave his sister a sly wink. Lila permitted herself a trace of a smile. Both took care to effect their exchange so that Harriet would not be privy to it.
Lila left, an hour and a half’s drive ahead of her. She kissed Caroline, her brother Danny, and—she thought, Why not?—also Harriet. After they were gone, Danny asked Harriet if she would like to swim out in the Sound. “The water temperature’s real nice.” She declined, but urged Caroline to join her husband. “I
have a long day tomorrow. I’ll turn in.”
Wearing terry-cloth dressing gowns, Caroline and Danny walked hand in hand to the water’s edge. It was just after Labor Day, still summer, but the heat shimmer had gone and the air was fresh and bracing. The property was pretty well sheltered from neighbors at either side by leafy trees and tall bushes. Danny dropped his robe and dived in. Caroline followed him. In the water Danny ducked and a few seconds later, sputtering water from her mouth, Caroline giggled her remonstrance.
“Stop that! Danny. You are a silly boy.” He surfaced and made out Caroline’s eyes, and her little smile, in the new moon light. He sank underwater again, his two hands on her breasts. She threw herself to one side, swam vigorously toward the beach, her foot reached land and she ran toward her dressing gown, followed closely by Danny, who threw himself over her on the grass. His hand reached between her legs.
“Danny?”
He only just managed to reply, through his ardor. “Mmmm?”
“I’m not safe yet. Not for two more days.”
Activity froze. Then Danny pushed her away brusquely. “God-damnit, Caroline. Why don’t you wear some protection? Or is it that you want another baby? How many more, ten? Twenty?” He flung his bathrobe across his lap. “Nine fucking days—no, nine non-fucking days—because Mother Church won’t allow you to take civilized measures to guard against having thirty-five children. I happen to be a normal man, Caroline, and it’s not normal to go nine days every month without—”
“Danny, Danny.” She stroked his hair. “Just try to understand how I—we—feel. Please, darling. Let’s go up to the house, have a nightcap, maybe. The children will be here first thing in the morning.”
Danny had put on his dressing gown. He was not yet smiling, Caroline could see. But the immediate crisis was over.
They walked toward the house and Danny reminded himself to pay greater attention to the timing of his out-of-town trips. They should more closely correspond with Caroline’s periods. Dumb of him not to have thought of that before. He wondered whether he would also have to worry about Florry’s periods.
Fifteen
FLORIDA CARMELA HUERTA left home when she was sixteen. Her mother, Jeanne, a native of France married to a Mexican-American soldier, had been widowed when only thirty (Enrique, wending his way more or less home from El Cielito Lindo one night, was run over) at which time ten-year-old Florida had two younger siblings, a boy (Raul), and a girl (Conchita). Their mother grieved the loss of their father and was so lonely, she shared her bed with attractive substitutes and in six years had three more children by three more companions.
Her most recent lover had attempted to seduce Florida. Jeanne, ever obliging, tried to persuade Florry in seductive French to be accommodating, whereupon Florry bashed her mother over the head with a table lamp. At this, the lover brought out his belt, grabbed her left wrist and beat Florry over head, shoulders, legs—whatever part of her was exposed—for ten full minutes. Raul, age twelve, tried to restrain the assailant, who grabbed him, pulled down his shorts, and beat him raw on the naked buttocks.
Florida was left weeping on the floor of the room she shared with her five brothers and sisters. She writhed in pain through the night, tiptoed early in the morning to her mother’s room, drew the wallet of the lover from his pants, and left the house with a canvas suitcase in which everything she owned fitted comfortably. She had the address of a friend whose parents had moved to Los Angeles.
Dorothy’s mother had met Florida back in San Diego a year or so before. She liked her, knew about the parlous situation at her mother’s little apartment, consulted with her husband in their two-bedroom cottage in Santa Monica, suffering from old age on its fifteenth birthday.
They agreed to cooperate in the fiction that Florida was an only child whose mother and father had both drowned in the terrible ferry accident a month ago in San Diego Harbor. Finding herself alone, Florry had made her way to the address of a girlhood friend in Los Angeles, and now, they hoped, “Sister Alicia, that the convent will take little Florry in, make room for her with the other orphan girls you and the other sisters so generously look after.”
It worked, and in a few months the nuns learned that Florida Huerta was badly underinstructed but extraordinarily gifted. It was only a matter of weeks before she caught up with other girls her own age. Her behavior was exemplary. She studied and read six hours every day and did chores for four hours, everything from cleaning toilets to teaching the little girls how to read.
After eighteen months, Sister Alicia told her that she was going to give her special training to study for the college boards. But how could she afford to pay tuition? Florry asked. Sister Alicia said she should set her sights on earning a full scholarship. Florry bowed her head in bewilderment. Sister Alicia looked at her, her hair braided and pinned behind her oval face, the large eyes, the full figure. Sister Alicia sighed. If she prevailed and won the scholarship, Florida would be an alluring target. But that was, very simply, the way things were. Sister Alicia closed her eyes and recited a Hail Mary, beseeching strength for little Florida to resist temptation.
Florida did yield completely, though the importunate male was not after sexual favors. What Nicola Agrippo wished to cultivate was the knowledge of Spanish and of Spanish literature. It was toward the end of her sophomore year and Professor Agrippo had become her tutor. He had officiated over the impact on her of the Spanish language. To be sure, her father had known Spanish, but conversations at home were in English, or in her mother’s hectic French. Florry knew nothing of the structure of the Spanish language, which she had never used or heard used at home.
She raced through the first year’s formal course and was ready for the final examination halfway through the first semester. Mr. Agrippo took her out of the intermediate class and entered her in advanced Spanish. Before the end of her freshman year she was reading Spanish classics. Now he encouraged her to compete for the student exchange seat endowed by the University of Salamanca, designed for two California undergraduates who were well on their way to proficiency in Spanish and were inclined to the study of Spanish history, literature, and culture.
The qualifying round was conducted by teachers of Spanish within a competing jurisdiction. Those students who passed the qualifying round went into a final round. The six finalists would be examined by Professor Juan Gustavo Amador, who traveled from Salamanca to examine finalists in six American cities.
The nervous students, two boys, four girls, met for lunch at the home of the Spanish consul. All of them were seniors in college except for Florida. Their genial host suggested that it might be both amusing and appropriate to speak to one another, and to their hosts, only in Spanish during lunch. The contenders did so, at first tentatively, then rather garrulously. They were seated around a table presided over by the consul and his wife. From the living room they could look down on the city of Los Angeles, and inevitably there was talk of smog. “Sir,” one student asked her host, “how do you say ‘smog’ in Spanish?” The consul was startled by the question, and said he would defer to Professor Amador for the answer. Professor Amador spent fifteen minutes discussing textual descriptions used by Cervantes to describe the air, from pure to extra-polluted, in his epic, then wandered over to note how Dante had handled the phenomenon in the Comedy. He did not answer the question, and nobody took the initiative in pointing this out to him.
After about ten minutes, Florida was pleasantly surprised to conclude that her Spanish was distinctly better than that of one of the girls, and infinitely better than that of everyone else. She had not quite got used to her remarkable fluency, never having tested it in a competitive situation. But it was also the case, she reflected, that she was improving every day. Her peculiar capacity to ingest Spanish was churning so intensively, she had learned a great deal even since the competition was initiated, just two months before.
To be sure, it wasn’t merely conversational fluency the visiting professor would want to sati
sfy himself about. What exactly he’d ask, Florry didn’t know. She did know that there really wasn’t very much she could say in English that she couldn’t find a way of saying in Spanish, possibly excepting the best word for smog. That was a comforting thought.
Florida caught the eye of one of the two male contestants, a trim blond young man from Berkeley who had traveled down to Los Angeles for the examination. His eyes were pale blue. From his slightly parted lips white teeth showed, and his smiles were easily ignited, though mostly he kept within himself whatever it was that amused him; Florry watched him a full five minutes, and never quite knew what it was that brought on the quick, amused, inscrutable reactions. She noticed that although it was only May, he was nicely tanned—either he had spent a week or so in southern California, or he had spent long hours lying in such sun as they got in the San Francisco area in April and May. His glance at Florida was candidly covetous. After lunch, as they walked out to the little capilla where the examination would take place, he approached her and reintroduced himself: “Nobody can remember names when more than two people are introduced—I’m Tracy Gulliver, and you’re—?”
William F. Buckley Jr. Page 12