Geoffrey howled. “Then what?”
“Well, nothing really,” Morgan answered. “He offered me a cigar—a very good one, I might add—and just as we were lighting up, Maud came in. The three of us talked together for a few minutes—I have absolutely no memory about what—and then Doctor Leigh said he had to catch up on his reading of a current crop of medical journals, so he’d repair to his study and leave us to entertain ourselves…. End of story.”
Geoffrey’s long mouth sustained its smile. “It’s a—”
—but whatever he was about to say was never concluded: Morgan’s father, clad in cutaway and striped trousers, appeared in the doorway, “Pa,” Morgan greeted him; “Come in.”
“Sorry to interrupt, but Maud’s wielding her camera. She wants you both in the garden.”
“Ah, the camera,” Morgan said: “Posterity’s revenge.” He made a head-to-toe, prizing sweep of his father’s figure. “You do look splendid, Pa.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Ansel Shurtliff laughed. “I felt the occasion warranted resurrecting the rig from the cedar closet. The last time I wore it was two years ago when old Senator Cleary’s granddaughter was married. The bride’s father assigned me the task of keeping the senator sober.”
“And did you succeed?” Morgan asked.
“We mutually suffered,” his father replied. He turned to Geoffrey: “It’s very touching to us, your coming the distance from Philadelphia for today’s doings.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Geoffrey answered.
“We’d better go,” Morgan urged, “or Maud’ll have our hides,” on which note, with a hand-touch to the knot of his tie, he led his father and Geoffrey from the room.
That night, after dinner, after Ansel Shurtliff had departed, after the twins were asleep and Maud had gone to bed, Morgan and Geoffrey talked late. Over brandy, they sat in the lamplight, the thick pungencies of clipped boxwood-bushes drifting in through the open window, and from the yonder meadow the calling of a whippoorwill, lonelier in sound than an owl’s bark. Relaxed, sure of one another, they spoke of the past and present, the exchanges intimate, made with a renewal of the old sequestered languor that had so characterized the long confabulations they had used to have in the large, book-lined, randomly furnished room shared throughout their law-school years.
…In their senior year, Geoffrey had resisted Morgan’s decision to begin his legal career in Hatherton. “With your marks, law review and all, and your connections, you’re a shoe-in with the best Cleveland firms. For God’s sake, why Hatherton?” Because (Morgan had defended) over the next ten years Cleveland would grow out to Hatherton, and he wanted to be in on the ground-floor makings of zoning-restrictions and the like: wanted to use the law as an overseeing instrument of control so that there would be a reason and plan to the expansion—not just an expedient, free-and-hard-dealing suburban and industrial raping of the rural lands he loved. Plus—he’d pressed on—the man in Hatherton with whom he’d be practicing was Judge Eustace Malcolm—a powerful figure in Ohio legal circles—retired as a federal district judge, but still active in the gold-plated Kissel, Chandler firm in Cleveland, of which he was a founding partner and in which he still retained a majestic “Of Counsel” relationship. “Professionally, I’ll have the best of both worlds, urban and rural,” had been Morgan’s closing argument. But the issue had remained an internecine one between them: For weeks they had chewed it over, Geoffrey aggressively; Morgan with a stubborn sureness.
…And here they were, these few, fleeted years later, just as they had positioned themselves into being: Morgan, in Hatherton, a partner in Judge Malcolm’s bristling, gaining firm; Geoffrey in his father’s echt, long-established, staid Philadelphia firm…. Geoffrey had reported in considerable detail about what he was up to legally these days, and then it had been Morgan’s turn, after which Geoffrey had conceded: “You sure have a greater variety of cases than comes across my desk and about a hundred times the responsibility…. I never thought I’d be saying this,” he went on, stroking his cheek, his voice confiding, “but it was a wrong move, my going into Dad’s firm. He wanted me to and I wanted to please him, but being the son of a senior partner in a shop rife with legal talent—all hard-breathing contenders for the big prizes—is a stickier proposition than I ever imagined it would be…. Dad bends over backwards not to show paternal favoritism, but he keeps tabs on the work I do for the other partners and he does it in a way that really burns me; you know—that convivial, intramural, inter alia approach: ‘How’s the boy doing? How’s he proving out?’” Geoffrey’s mouth twisted into a wintry smile: “Maybe I do him an injustice. Maybe the problem’s all in my head…. However,”—Geoffrey drew out the word—“as a problem, it’s about to go away. I’ve been waiting to tell you: I’ve decided to join the Air Force.”
“Geoff!”
“Look: it’s only a matter of time before we get in the war. Do you want to bet it’ll be within a year?”
“No,” Morgan said, “because I think so, too…. The Air Force…as a pilot?”
“If I qualify. I’ve been led to believe there’s no reason why I won’t.”
“Sometime soon I’m going to have to decide what I’m going to do about the war. I’ve been thinking a lot about it.”
“It’s an easy call for me, Morgan. It’s different for you, especially now with Caroline and Julia. You’ve powerful ties…. Speaking of which”—he brightened—“I had a positive twinge of envy this afternoon seeing you standing with Maud at the baptismal basin in all the accrued glory of your marital bliss. For a minute”—his smile was open now—“I almost regretted that I’m still single.”
“No permanent attachment in sight?”
“None. Lots of activity, but nothing deathlessly significant. It’s probably just as well, considering.”
“Don’t say anything to Maud yet about the Air Force, will you, Geoff? Any talk of war upsets her. I can’t get near the subject with her.”
“Right.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then, acknowledging the lateness of the hour, agreed that they ought to turn in. The whippoorwill was still calling, its plaint coming now from the woodland west of the meadow. Even after Morgan closed the window they could still hear it. Geoffrey said: “It’s a haunting sound.”
“I hope it won’t keep you awake.”
“Not a chance.”
Upstairs, at the door of the guest room, Morgan whispered a last question: “When do you expect to know about the Air Force?”
“Soon. I’m scheduled for a physical on Thursday. I’ll keep you posted.”
(A letter came from Geoffrey about two weeks later: “I’ve just learned I’ve been accepted as a ‘fly-fly’ candidate. The examining medics were impressed by my good eyes, my sound heart and the health of my entrails. Their findings and those of a psychiatrist who certified me sane, did the trick. I’m to report in three weeks’ time for training at Pensacola, Florida, particulars of address etc. to follow. I’ll telephone soon. Pick your moment to tell Maud. Meanwhile, love to her, to my Caroline, to Julia. As ever, Geoff.”)
Over the course of the following weeks, Morgan came to marvel at Maud’s stamina and equanimity. Hercules’s labors in the Augean stable (he often thought) must have been an easier task than was hers as an attender to the twins’ myriad, often fracturing needs. Each dawn, at their wakened cries of hunger, she would be out of bed like a shot, eager to see them and to serve them, and in that spirit went on through the arc of the day. Evening after evening, he would return home from the office and find her in the twins’ room, singing to them, bent over their crib, or, sometimes, holding both of them in her arms (how did she do it?), showing them something out the window—the sunset, or the silver of a rising new moon—telling them about it, laughing. Her hair would be loosened, her face flushed, her beauty wanton. All in a rush, in one breath, he would cross the room and kiss her, then each twin…. It became an evening ritual that deepened in
a meaning like the plot of a great book…. He felt for her a tenderness that sometimes verged on fear. “You’re tired,” he would say, touching her brow with the cushion of his thumb. And she would yield: “Yes, I am.” But the satisfied look she gave him was the vital one of a victor.
Of their old, larky evenings, no vestige remained. No more the nights theirs to do with exactly as they pleased—a dinner in or out; a new movie at what older Hathertonians still called the “Opera House” a dance at the country club; a rapidly conceived and executed supper party; a drive into Cleveland for a symphony concert or a play or a black-tie “do” at the grand house of a relative or older, nabob family friend (oh, those lovely, late homecomings); and gone, too, the simple, spontaneous act of leaving the house on a whim—a stroll together in the meadow before bed, or a spin downtown to Milar’s Drug and Fountain Emporium for a suddenly yearned-for hot fudge sundae.
Now, when they sallied forth into the world of an evening, it was by a carefully worked out Plan, with Caroline and Julia left in the care of a Hatherton Hospital nurse recommended by Doctor Leigh. (Maud would never have considered using one of the high-school baby-sitters whose services were so popular with her friends.) Now, evenings out were Events, charged with the excitement of rarity.
He became what is called “a light sleeper.”
As a boy, in the earliness of certain calm evenings, he had liked to take his canoe onto the large pond that lay past the south-ending tree line of his father’s orchards. (This was the same deep, spring-fed pond which, in his grandfather’s time, had provided the winter ice for the summer tea.) He would paddle out to the middle of the pond and as the canoe glided forward under the impetus of a final stroke, he would take a balancing hold of its sides and in one deft action, swing his body off the thwart onto the canoe’s cedar floor-boards, from which place, with his legs stretched out full length and the back of his head pillowed in his hands, he would close his eyes and sightlessly drift: drift with the lambency and oblivion of a floating feather, letting whatever thought strayed into his mind wander free over the surface of his consciousness in the same unguided, will-o’-the-wisp way the gentle evening breeze ferried his canoe, wherever, over the pond’s surface…. There would be sounds so familiar he almost didn’t hear them: the taking, snap-jawed, last-of-the-day feast of a bass; the solemn wing-beats of a low-flying, homing heron; the flicked rise and plop of a playful perch; the tuning up, setting-sun thrums of bullfrogs….
…Now, neither fully asleep nor fully awake, he would lie in the dark beside a soundly sleeping Maud, and, in feel, be again on the pond in his canoe at the hour of twilight, drifting. Once, in the dead of the night, he laughed silently (or did he imagine his laughter?) over the fact that at age twenty-nine he had become the ghost of himself as a twelve-year-old boy.
It was mid-October. He had been a father for four months.
“You’ve become ambitious,” Judge Eustace Malcolm said to him one morning in the office. “It shows in your work.”
“Mouths to feed,” Morgan replied.
“That’ll do it.” Judge Malcolm laughed. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Please do, sir.”
The judge’s portly figure complemented his love of conversation. “Did you know I was in the great war, Morgan?” he began; and to Morgan’s affirmative nod: “I was well above the upper draft age when we entered the fray in 1917—married seven years, father of three young children—obviously not a foot-loose lad. But I wanted to serve in some capacity, so applied for a place in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. I was sent to Washington for a training course that lasted about three months and after I received my commission, to my considerable surprise and great delight, I was assigned to General Cornell’s staff in Paris…. General Robert John Cornell…. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“It crops up now and again in the odd history book. I’ll tell you about him another time…. Anyhow”—the judge exhaled—“I was billeted with a family who lived outside Paris; a very Catholic, hard-working, bourgeois family. The rather elderly paterfamilias—Monsieur Machavoine—held to the views of his ancestors with the same zeal a wise dog holds on to a bone that’s still got a bit of marrow in it. He was a strict man, but charming in his way. Very well-mannered. Morally four-square. He’d inherited his land—quite a considerable tract—from his father, who’d inherited it from his, et cetera, going back God knows how many generations. You get the picture…. My French was pretty good; it still is, as a matter of fact. To put it simply—I could understand Monsieur Machavoine, and he could understand me. He liked to talk history with me and to mull over his life, and one evening he told me that when he heard the cry of his first-born child—a son, he was quick to tell me—he left his wife’s bedside and went out into the field behind his house, and for the first time in his life, gazed on the land with a possessor’s eye…. You follow me, Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“He then went on to tell me that the next morning, he committed the only cruel act of his life. He rose at sunrise, he said, to a fair day—the first fair day after a long stretch of rainy ones. The month was April, and he had some plowing to do, a lot of plowing, and he wanted to get it done as quickly as possible so that he could set in his crops…. So he did that old, savage thing—long outlawed, by the way—that was once the habit of impatient peasants: he attached, as a prod, a bit of barbed wire to the inside of his plow-horse’s crupper. He wanted, you see, to make the horse move faster, and, of course, the poor beast did, what with the barb pricking its rump every time it lifted a hoof. But then, Monsieur Machavoine noticed the blood…. With tears in his eyes, he told me of the shame he felt for causing his horse to suffer. He took his sin to his priest and confessed it, citing to the priest his son’s birth on the previous evening as his reason for committing the sin of cruelty, claiming that, just in a matter of hours, a desire to conquer the world—that was the phrase he used—had taken possession of him.” Judge Malcolm paused; then: “I’ll never forget how perfectly I understood what he meant.”
A parable, Morgan thought. But he did not attempt a grand response. He only sat back deeper in his chair, and with a smile, said, “Well, sir, I can’t say I’ve developed a desire to conquer the world, but I know for sure that before long I’m going to have to add a new wing to my house.”
Judge Malcolm laughed: “That’s a sufficient prod, Morgan.” He stood up: “And how are Caroline and Julia?”
“Marvelous.”
“And Maud?”
“She admitted to me yesterday that once in a while she feels like a one-armed paper-hanger. But other than that, she’s fine, thank you. Wonderful in fact.”
“Might you all be home next Sunday afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Clara and I might likely drop by for a visit.”
“That would be lovely. Please do.”
“We’ll phone first to make sure you’re not in the middle of a nursery crisis. Meanwhile, give Maud my love.” He glanced at the papers on Morgan’s desk: “Is that the Veblen matter you’re working on?…Durance vile…Slog on, young man, slog on….” In the doorway he turned and bowed: “I’m off to the county courthouse. Marston against Baines…God help me.”
At home one night (this happened in early November), he worked late in preparation of an impending hearing which involved a client’s right-of-way over a large parcel of land recently purchased for an unprecedentedly high price by an overly ambitious, opportunistic Cleveland developer. He finished writing the brief around midnight and, on his tardy way to bed, crept into the twins’ room, expecting to find them as usual—that is to say, lying apart, asleep in the large of their double-crib, their pink faces silhouetted against the white sheet, the action of their breathing a gulping one, like that of birdlings. This was the sight he anticipated as, by the muted glow from the hall light, he peered down into the crib’s latticed depths…. But—no! On this night, as if each were a magnet
to the other, they had come together and were clasped at the crib’s center in so merged and involved a way that for a moment he could not make out which arms and legs were Julia’s, and which Caroline’s…. And then—the sight rocked him—he saw that the thumb in Caroline’s mouth was Julia’s, and that in Julia’s mouth, Caroline’s thumb was fastened and being dreamily sucked.
The thought rushed upon him: they are each other: and he stood amazed, and truly for the first time and, with a gasp, took in the confounding implication of twinness as being a riddle of divided wholeness…. Until this moment, he had been reasonably confident that with will and a bit of luck, he could fulfill the basic tenets of responsible paternity: as provider, as protector, as instructor and nurturer. Now, though, as he gazed at the infants in the enigma of their girdled unity, his confidence was flawed by the question of a first sorrow: was he capable of being the severer of such an innocent phenomenon of oneness?
Had Maud ever found them thus immingled?
He put the question to her first thing the next morning. No, she had never seen them like that. Perhaps the time had come, she suggested matter-of-factly, for each to have her own crib. “I’ll call Doctor Franklin and find out what he thinks.”
Matters of Chance Page 4