Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  A faint smile on her mouth, she left me alone and went into the kitchen. A few minutes later she brought out a wooden tray with tea and cookies. The air-conditioned house was comfortable, but not so cool that I would have been tempted to put on my jacket. She had thrown a sweater over her shoulders to stop a chill. The teacups rattled as she placed them as carefully as she could on the saucers. She nibbled on the edge of a chocolate cookie.

  “I’m an old woman,” she said with an impish glow.

  “Not so old that I could have danced with Isadora Duncan—but frankly, not so stupid that I would have wanted to. I did not want to be something men desired; I wanted to be someone who had a value in my own eyes.

  And that’s what I wanted for Anna: to be herself, to be what she was—not what she thought someone wanted her to be.” Her head came up sharply. “The last thing I wanted was for her to try to be like a man. Isn’t it pathetic? These raging demands for equality between the sexes. Equal with respect to what? Work? Letting someone else tell you how to live? That’s what I wanted for Anna: to live!” she stared at me for a moment, then looked away.

  With a pensive expression, Vivian Malreaux sipped on her tea.

  “It’s strange what we remember, isn’t it? I see the things Anna did, the things she accomplished, and I think I see what would have happened, how she would have lived, what she would—or could—have become, but of course…”

  Pulling the sweater closer around her throat, she huddled beneath it as if the cold had reached down to her bones.

  “When is the trial?” she asked in a calm, dispassionate voice.

  “The first week in October.”

  “How is he? How is Jimmy holding up? It must be tearing him apart. I haven’t seen him in years. He used to come, once in a while, when he could; and then, for a long time, he’d write. Every year at Christmas I would get a card, but then it stopped. I hoped that maybe it meant that he had stopped believing that part of him had died that day, too. He believed that, you know. From the look in your eyes, Mr. Antonelli, I can see he still believes that, that his life ended, too; that from the moment Anna died every hope and dream he had died, too; and that whatever happened after that, it was always going to be judged with that kind of bittersweet nostalgia that tells you that nothing is ever going to be that good again. We all do that, I suppose—have something in our lives that makes other things seem not so good as they would have been if we had not had those other things first. It was worse for Jimmy Haviland, though; because what Jimmy had—what he remembers—was not anything that ever happened. What Jimmy had was that hope, that almost sacred hope, of what might have happened, what in his mind was bound to happen, once Anna understood— really understood—how impossibly and desperately serious he was; once she understood that no one would ever—could ever—love her as much as he did, as much as he always would. Jimmy was the exception that proves the rule: He would have loved her forever; and, good God, he still does—doesn’t he?”

  Vivian Malreaux faced forward, her long thin arms stretched in front of her on the space cleared in the mountain of books and papers scattered over the heavy-legged dining-room table. With the tip of her left index finger, she beat insistently on the hard dull surface, her eyes narrowed into a penetrating stare.

  “No,” she announced abruptly as that incessant drumming echoed into silence. “It isn’t reasonable; it isn’t fair. There isn’t any way in the world Jimmy Haviland could have done anything like what they say.

  Not in a thousand years. He was hurt, disappointed— I’m sure of it; but he was always a gentleman. The last thing he would have done was allow himself to get angry over the way Anna felt. Anna loved him, you know—in that way she had. She was not going to marry him, or take him to bed—Anna didn’t love him like that. She didn’t love anyone like that—until… That’s why it’s so incredibly sad.”

  “Didn’t love anyone like that until—whom? Thomas Browning?”

  Vivian Malreaux was thinking of Jimmy Haviland. At first she did not quite understand what I had asked. She blinked her eyes, a puzzled expression on her face. It was gone in an instant.

  “Yes. She brought him here once: that fall, a few months before the accident, a few months before she died. I don’t know if she was in love with him: She was intrigued by him. Who wouldn’t have been?”

  I knew what she meant. “He was different from the others,” I started to agree. “He always seemed older, more intelligent…”

  “More intelligent?” She gave me a skeptical glance.

  “Yes, I suppose he was, more than most,” she remarked, her glance subdued, thoughtful, measured. “Intelligent, charming, considerate; but those aren’t such rare qualities in the world that Anna would have had the same reaction, the same interest, to someone else who had them. No, Thomas—Thomas Browning—had another quality, a quality that set him apart from every other young man she had known, and from every other young man she was ever likely to know.”

  I scratched my ear, trying to think of what quality she meant. She peered at me from behind those defiantly intelligent eyes as if I already knew the answer and would, once she told me, wonder why I had had to wait to hear it from her.

  “He was going to become one of the richest men in the world. She would have married a man like that.”

  It was said without the trace of a suggestion that there was anything heartless or mercenary about it. She kept looking at me, daring me, I think, not to laugh, not to admit that what she had said about her daughter reflected not the tragedy, but the great comedy, of the human condition. She lifted her proud head, holding it at a confident angle, someone who can see not just to the heart of things, but to the best in things. She was what I think Anna would have become, and what, all those years ago, I had thought Joanna had been: a woman with qualities of her own, qualities that made her immune to the ill-informed judgments of the world.

  “She might have married him for that, for having that much money, in the same way she might eventually have decided to marry Jimmy Haviland for having that much love. Don’t you see why? Because she did not need either of the things they had—love or money. Because she would not have taken what they had to give, they would each of them have become astonishingly generous men.”

  Laughing with her eyes, she patted my hand. Then she twisted her head to the side as if she were about to share with me the secret that explained everything.

  “There is no equality between the sexes, Mr. Antonelli. There never has been, there never will be.

  Everything interesting or important a man has ever done was done for a woman. Men create religions, but only so they can worship women in a different form.

  Men are only what women let them think they are. It’s not my fault that so many women seem to have forgotten that rather important fact of life.”

  Through the open sliding door that divided the dining from the living room, she glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel.

  “I have to be over at my office,” she said as she rose from the table and began to clear the dishes. “I have a doctoral candidate coming by. It won’t take me a minute to get ready. If you have time, walk over with me. We can talk on the way.”

  Under a white relentless sky, we made our way along the Midway. The August heat was oppressive, inescapable; the air left a bitter burned taste in the mouth.

  We passed the Rockefeller Chapel, and then, a block or so later, walked next to the iron spiked fence behind which a grass schoolyard ran the length of a gray stone Gothic building. It was, she explained in a brief reference, the Lab School, where Anna had gone to grade school. Two blocks later we crossed the street and passed through a narrow opening between two larger Gothic structures into one of the quadrangles.

  “Anna went to school here, from the Lab School when she started, all the way through college. The university was really her home. She graduated when she was nineteen.”

  “You must have been very proud of her,” I remarked, breathing slowly
the heavy, humid air. I followed her through a leaded-glass wooden door.

  “This is Harper,” she explained as we waited for an elevator in a building that had the look of something that, instead of a hundred, had stood there for a thousand, years.

  Her office was on the top floor with a ceiling that sloped under the roofline toward the outer wall.

  The doctoral student had not yet arrived. I stood in the doorway, watching her.

  “There’s just one more thing I wanted to ask. Annie had a friend, a young woman. They were in law school together, but I think she had known her before. I can’t remember her name, and I don’t know where she might be now.”

  “You must mean Helen, Helen Thatcher.” She came around the desk, staring down at the uneven gray stone tiles, trying to remember. “Yes, they were good friends.

  I don’t know what’s happened to her. I used to hear from her. The last time—and that must have been years ago—she was living somewhere out west. California, I think; but, as I say, years ago. I don’t know if she would still be there or not. I might still have that address—I kept most of the letters and cards I was sent by Anna’s friends. Would you like me to try to find it? I’ll be glad to send it along.”

  Down the hallway, the small elevator clunked to a halt and the narrow metal doors cranked open. With tousled brown hair and dark moody eyes, the young man whose dissertation awaited what he still thought an uncertain fate came slouching toward us.

  “Would you mind waiting, Evan?” she asked him. She put her liver-spotted hand on my sleeve and started to walk me down the hall. Her heart was too gentle, and her respect for good work too great—too much a part of who she was—to make him wait in suspense. “It’s quite good, Evan,” she said over her shoulder.

  I had to look back; I had to see for myself the reaction, the inexpressible sense of relief that comes with the knowledge that something to which you have given years of your life, something that has an importance that no one who has not tried it can ever understand, has come out as good—no, better—than you had ever dared hope.

  “It’s better than good, Evan. It’s one of the best things I’ve read.”

  His eyes lit up with a youthful, bashful enthusiasm. I remembered what that felt like, when the future—your future—suddenly seems to stretch out forever and there is nothing in it except all the things you thought you could ever want. It had been like that once for all of us, for Anna, and Joanna, and for Thomas Browning, and for no one more than Jimmy Haviland, who, more than the rest of us were capable of, had loved something— someone—more than he had ever cared about himself.

  “Poor Jimmy,” said Annie’s remarkable mother while she stood with me, waiting for the elevator to come back. “You know what he did—after?”

  I was not quite sure what she meant. “After he quit school? After he came back and finished?” her eyes acknowledged the fact. “Yes, that’s right. He did quit. I made him go back.”

  “You?”

  “I told him that it was the last thing Anna would want—that he should quit and not finish. So he went back, that next fall. But after he graduated, that summer? He enlisted, went into the army. He went to Vietnam. He tried to get himself killed, if you ask me.

  How many others signed up for a second tour? Jimmy! He thinks he’s a failure because he didn’t die. Jimmy did everything right, and everything always went wrong. He should never have met Anna,” she said with a short, decisive motion of her head. “If he had not known her, none of this would ever have happened. He would have had a good life.”

  I wondered if that was true, or whether, if it had not been Anna, it would have been someone else, and though the dream would have been different, the end would have been the same. Some of us seem born to unhappiness.

  The elevator jerked to a stop; the doors creaked open. She held my sleeve a moment longer.

  “He really did love her; maybe more than anyone ever loved anyone. He did everything for me after it happened.

  I never saw him shed a tear after that first awful phone call, he was so determined to see me through it.”

  A wistful smile crossed her mouth. “Thomas Browning loved her, too; but I never heard from him, not once, not even a card.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Thomas browning had been right when he said that I had wanted from the beginning to be a defense lawyer and that I did not care what it paid. But he was also right when he said that I ended up making more than most of the attorneys who had started out with only money in mind. I had come to San Francisco to try the case that first made me famous; I stayed because I did not want to lose the woman with whom I had lived for a while in the autumn warmth of a middle-aged romance. Always restless and discontent, looking for something I could not define, I lost her anyway, but by then San Francisco had become the only place I had ever felt at home. I bought an apartment on Nob Hill for a price that was utterly obscene. And each evening as I watched the sun slip down the sky, turning into a ball of liquid fire that spread out along the purple edge of the Pacific; each evening as I watched it pull down behind it the black, impenetrable night, I knew it was worth the price.

  It was odd to think that Helen Thatcher, Annie Malreaux’s law school friend, lived in San Francisco as well. If we had not been close enough to be called friends, we had been something more than strangers; and yet I might have passed her on the street a dozen different times and not recognized her. She was married, or at least had been when she sent that last letter to Annie’s mother. Her name was now Helen Thatcher Quinn, and she lived less than ten minutes away.

  Vivian Malreaux also sent some photographs, all but one of them pictures of Annie taken while she was a student at Harvard. They seemed to have been arranged in a chronological order. In the first one, Annie is standing next to another young woman in front of the law library.

  I had not been able to draw a picture of Helen Thatcher in my mind, nothing beyond a vague, shadowy image of a girl in her early twenties, smart and pleasant, with the passable plain looks of a bookish existence. The photograph showed her to be better-looking than I remembered, with brave, cheerful eyes, and a rather sad and vulnerable mouth. If I had not noticed her much at the time it was because, as the photograph showed again, there was something magnificent and proud, something almost electric about Annie Malreaux. Her large, laughing eyes drew you toward her, promising to make even the most ordinary, everyday things seem the most interesting, exciting things you had ever seen.

  Annie drew you toward her, but now, old enough to remember how plain girls had turned into beautiful women, Helen Thatcher’s face drew me back. She had about her a sensibility, an understated confidence that allowed her not to mind so much that everyone would notice Annie first, the girl with the stunning smile and the mysterious eyes, the girl Jimmy Haviland still loved and Thomas Browning could never forget. It was hard to look at that photograph—two young women, their arms full of thick law books, laughing at themselves and at each other as they stood on the law library steps, trying to strike a comic pose—picture taken so they could remember later what their lives had been like when the best part of the future was that they did not yet know what it might be.

  There was a photograph of Annie with Jimmy Haviland, holding hands beneath the spreading branches of an elm tree somewhere on campus. She was smiling at the camera; Jimmy was smiling at her. I looked at it for a long time, trying to remember him the way I had known him then, when he was still a young man looking forward to things, before he had lost Annie not once but twice and could only look back with anger and regret. Someone must have said something funny, probably Annie. A smile had just started across his mouth, and a moment later he must have started to laugh; but the camera caught the beginning and not the end, and the smile, innocent and well-meaning, became because of what I knew the sad, unfinished prologue to a haunted, tortured past.

  In a photograph taken with Thomas Browning, Annie Malreaux seemed, if not less certain of herself, more concerned with
conveying the impression of a woman who knew what she was about. She was standing next to Browning, but they did not touch; whatever feeling they may have had toward each other, their eyes stayed straight on the camera. She was smiling, but there was none of the teasing laughing gaiety, none of the casual, friendly ease that had been there in the photograph with Jimmy Haviland. That photograph was the kind you laugh over later; the kind that reminds you of how much fun you had; the kind that when you go back to them years later make you wonder what happened to the other people in them and hope that all of it has been good.

  This photograph was too formal, too serious, for that: It seemed to announce a fact of some weight and importance, a change in the way things would be. It was the kind of photograph a young woman might send home to her parents, or a young man show his best friends; not an engagement, not yet, but an expectation, an implied promise that unless things went terribly wrong, an engagement was only a matter of time.

  I could imagine the same picture, that same look of affectionate reserve, taken later on, after the engagement, after the marriage, brought together, and held together, not by impulse or passion but by a certain sympathetic recognition of a mutual interest, of what they could do for each other. Browning, however genuine his declared willingness to run off with her to the other side of the world and live an anonymous life, had that same look of quiet self-assurance he always had, waiting for things to come to him, certain that they would. It was strange, really, how much different Jimmy Haviland looked, and how little Thomas Browning had changed. I held the photograph up to the light, examining it more closely. It reminded me of that painting by Modigliani, the one I had stared at for such a long time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the same small, protuberant mouth; the same half-circle eyes. Browning had always looked older than the rest of us; perhaps that was the reason he now looked so much younger.