“Yes. They’re fascinating, aren’t they.”
“Beyond words.” Morgan smiled: “Maud tells me they call you ‘Pip.’”
“At my request…. Soon after they began to talk, I ran into Warren Bassett one evening at the Hunt Club, and he chewed my ears off talking about his grand-children. He’s got three of them, two boys presented to him by his daughter, Louise—do you remember her from your cotillion days?” (Morgan had a flashed image of Louise Bassett with whom he’d once warmly necked in the front seat of her father’s racy white Cord.) “She married into the Cincinnati branch of the Walsingham clan. Warren junior sired a grand-daughter. So there you have the three grand-children of Warren senior…. At the time I saw Warren at the Hunt Club—that would be about two years ago—all his grand-kids were under age four, but he touted their intelligence in a way that led me to suppose they were prodigies fluent in Greek, masters of Euclidean geometry, tying their own trout flies. No limit to the Bassett brains,” Ansel Shurtliff flared on. “But when Warren told me, proud as a peacock, that his grand-kids call him—brace yourself—‘Chief-daddy,’ the whole construct of his grandpaternal glory tumbled in my eyes…. That’s when I decided to be Pip to Caroline and Julia. Pip. It’s spirited and easy to say and I very much doubt my borrowing of his hero’s name has set Dickens spinning in his grave. Honestly, really, don’t you think my being Pip is an innocent egotistical aberrance next to Warren Bassett’s enthronement of himself as Chief-daddy?…May I take your laughter as a display of agreement?”
They had stepped from the meadow onto the lawn. Before them, a view of the house and terrace that showed Maud and the twins sitting together on a bench, their heads bent toward their laps, absorbed in something, the dressing of a doll perhaps. Morgan whistled. Ralph, as yet unseen, answered with a bark. Maud raised her head. “Hello,” she called. And then, in a tumble, at their best speeds, they came: Ralph first, Caroline next, Julia after, and, goddess-herder of them all: Maud.
Morgan, standing in place, arms opened out to catch, thought: This. This is happiness.
Doctor Leigh came by before dinner. “Hello, hello. A drop-in,” he told Morgan, “to welcome you home.”
He looked exactly as he had the first time Morgan ever saw him: righteous, terribly clear eyes, a jaw firm in its set, complexion burnished of health and sensible living, brindle hair parted as by a bread-knife, chest-span imposing.
He refused the offer of a drink, even of a chair, stressing that he couldn’t, mustn’t linger, citing “duty”: “Evening bed-rounds at the hospital.” Thus, like a sudden valley wind, he blew into the family circle, dispelling its prior ease and intimacy and, by his continued vigorous insistence that he not allow himself the luxury of sitting down, causing, too, Maud and Ansel Shurtliff and Morgan to remain on their feet and Julia and Caroline to wilt and linger in large-eyed silence as he railed on about the wartime paucity of doctors and nurses at the Hatherton Hospital (of which he was the head), and at the clinic in Cleveland (on whose surgical staff he served). Aside from his admirable, high-ethic dedication, Morgan had never been able to figure out what Doctor Leigh was all about. What fueled his heart and mind…Maud spoke often of his religious faith. Maybe that was his motor.
He stayed not a second longer than his self-allotted respite from duty permitted. “Good-bye, good-bye”—quitting their company, backing carefully, as if he were a large car, out of the room.
In the hall, momently alone with Morgan, he made a glancing reference to Morgan’s morning call on Mrs. Leigh: to “her increase of psychological dislocation.” That was his phrase, chilling to Morgan’s ears. And, half-way out the front door: “I’ll make time next week for a longer visit with you. Grand to have you home.” And, in his hurry, as he walked down the porch steps: “I never doubted you’d return just as you have, sound as a dollar.” On which last remark, flung over his shoulder, he completely departed.
A picture surfaced in Morgan’s mind. Of Sutter. Sutter in Durban, describing with his twisted smile a decorated British infantry officer whose path his own had briefly, haplessly crossed: “Him,” Sutter had said, “with his swagger-stick and boots polished to a shine a blind man could see his face in. From the time they’re hatched right up to the day they get their heads axed off, turkeys have his kind of confidence.”
After the twins were bedded down for the night, dinner: a wonderful affair that provided him his first glimpse of the friendship which had developed in his absence between Maud and his father, its fastness independent of their in-law relationship and, as fascinatingly exists in most opposite-gender friendships, its latent spice of sexual attraction.
It was nearing midnight. The house was cloaked in silence.
In their bedroom he stood with Maud by an open window, admiring the lit globe of a mounted moon. Then a slow, kissing progress toward the bed, the end of the second day of his leave, determined.
…Reunions with kin—cognate, agnate, and affinal (in legal parlance). Reunions with friends; with acquaintances.
…Celebrations: of his thirty-third birthday on June 1, and on June 4, of his and Maud’s sixth wedding anniversary.
…Church on Sundays: prayers of Peace; for the safety of those serving in the armed forces; for Mercy to the enemy.
…The daily routine of reading in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the progress of the war, and of hearing about it each evening on the radio. At sea, for weeks on end, absent of any news, they had floated in ignorance of the war’s history as it was being made. Now, an assailing currentness: reports of land, naval, and air battles being fought in Europe, in Asia, the regions referred to as “theaters.” Defeats, gains, setbacks, fresh attacks, surrenders. Estimates of losses: men, ships, aircraft, tanks. Accounts of bombing raids, pigsties and cathedrals alike destroyed. The jungles of never-heard-of Pacific islands blasted skyward by shells sent from the weaponry of off-shore flotillas and by explosives let from the bellies of skimming planes. Ended lives mentioned in numbers and with a candor that awed and which in his mind he saw as individual faces with surprised eyes like the Owl’s…No let-up, everyone said. No escape.
…The eerie arrival in one afternoon’s mail of a letter from himself to Maud. “February 25, 1943. Darling,” it began. Exclaiming on the date, Maud asked: “Where were you when you wrote it?” “Port Said,” he answered: “February twenty-fifth was the day we arrived there”—marveling as much at the fact of the letter’s existence as that it had been composed in a place so fantastically far away and at a time previous to the altering experience of the torpedoing, therefore (almost) as if written by a stranger. And equally weird: being in the room with Maud as she read it: a certain confusion: himself a postscript to the letter? or the letter a postscript to his presence?
…And on another day, a letter from Lucy Blackett, serving now with the Red Cross in England. Lucy: quiet, conscientious, unpresumptuous, well-born, shy Lucy. Unsung until now. In her small, tidy handwriting, the one-paragraph text of her letter covered only one page: “I’m writing this, dearest Maud, in an underground shelter while an air-raid is going on. Such a lot of noise! Imagine me in such a situation! I’m scared to death, but so is everyone I’m with, so it’s a shared fear and cozy in its way. I’ve been reassigned here (London) to work at the American Red Cross Club for Women. The club is on Charles Street, just off the famous-of-song Berkeley Square. (‘Nightingales sang in,’ etc.). The club’s a haven for American nurses, WACs, WAFs, etc. I’ve been so surprised by the number of women pilots there are who ferry cargo planes from the United States here to England! ‘My goodness’ (as my Mother would say) ‘what ladies do these days!’ The noise is really loud now and getting louder. I’d best bring this to a close. Hug C. and J. for me. Stay cheerful and please keep writing as regularly as you do. I count on your letters. Love ever, Lucy.” Maud read the letter aloud to him…. Lucy’s odyssey, he thought. Brava, Lucy.
…Games: played with Caroline and Julia and Maud and Tessa and anyone else who might be
around. Tag. Follow the Leader. Blindman’s Bluff. Rover, Rover, Try to Come Over. Hide and Seek, liked best at dusk for the shiver of hiding in a place more secret for being sunless, and for the darker sound of the called-out “dare”: “Come out, come out, or you’ll be it.” Caroline always called him “Daddy.” Sometimes Julia did too, but in the heat of the game she would forget. “Run, Morgan!” she would yell as he was sprinting toward the “home” tree, Maud hot on his heels: “Run faster, Morgan—” windmilling her arms, thrilled through, loving the moment, absolutely loving the moment when he would reach the tree—touch it, and crow: “Ollie ollie oxum, Freedom!”
…The Captain and Sarkis and Sutter and Anderson and the others of the crew. At the oddest times one of them would enter his mind and take possession of it. Sometimes they would all appear before him and he would see their faces clearly, as in a group photograph; and that was very strange for the reason that his face was in the picture, there in their sovereign midst. This image was the one that most filled him with a sense of loss, their unity being now all scattered. It felt wrong that he had no current knowledge of them: wrong, not to know where they were and how they were faring…. As often as he thought of them, he thought of Geoff.
…In the woods, on a bed of moss. On the way home from a late-night party in Cleveland, unable to wait, in the car, parked in the obscurity of a conspiring off-the-road lane. At the lake one night, after a swim, naked, in the aerie of Maud’s childhood treehouse. Over and over in the constancy of their own room, again and again at that remotest, blackest, stillest hour of night, owl-to-lark; and fabulously during rainstorms. It was as if Time had cast them back to the first sexually obsessed days of their marriage.
On the thirteenth day of his leave, they quarreled.
The twins had just been put down for their nap. Maud asked him: “What would you think of some tennis and a swim at the club?”
“A good idea, especially the swim. I’ll be a cripple on the court,” he laughed.
Maud laughed too: “So will I. It’ll be the first time I’ve played since last September.”
She was a very good tennis player…. Before the war, on such summer weekend afternoons as they had chosen to spend at the club, he had always preferred to watch her play than to play with her, he enjoyed so much observing her on the court in contest with a first-rate opponent, she was physically so well suited to the game’s demands: long legs, free stretch of arms, the limbs attached to her body’s slender frame in a strung, ready way. She played with concentration and a peculiar kind of glowing esprit that men found stimulating, and responded to by sending her hard, fast shots that were flatteringly difficult to return and when the set was finished, by flirting with her off the court.
“Can I have a few minutes before we go?” he asked her. “There are a couple of things I want to do.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“No, love. It’s telephone stuff. I told George Colgate I’d call him today, and I’d like to try to reach Miss Sly.”
“Miss Sly?” Maud froze in place. “Did you say Miss Sly?” She did not wait for an answer. “Why?” She was furious. “Why in the world do you want to call her?”
He searched her face, her eyes, and saw she had made of him an enemy.
“Why?” she demanded again.
“For reasons of friendship,” he said gently.
“Friendship?” she jabbed: “On what basis do you claim friendship with her?”
“Through an exchange of letters,” he said. “I wrote to her after I enlisted and she very kindly replied, and we’ve written back and forth since then. Her letters helped me.” He was prepared to go on, to tell her about the diverting nature of their correspondence, but she cut him off.
“You mean you’ve kept up with her! Behind my back!”
“Oh Maud, for God’s sake, calm down…. You asked me why I want to call her and I’ve told you. Now you tell me why you’re so angry.”
“Because she’s Tilden-Herne is why, and I put Tilden-Herne behind me three years ago. I thought you had too. You’ve misled me,” she accused.
“Maud—”
But she would not be stopped: “Your staying in touch with her,” she began, not looking at him—addressing the wall—“it keeps her in my life and in Caroline and Julia’s. It’s mean of you. Awful.”
He strove to stay calm: “You’re way off base,” he said quietly. “Let’s talk about it later.”
Perhaps it was his restraint that pushed her on: “My feelings don’t matter to you.”
“You know better than that.”
Now she looked right at him: “But you’re going to go ahead and call her anyhow, aren’t you?”
What he couldn’t stand was her affronting tone and manner. “Yes,” he said, and walked out of the room.
Until the quarrel, he had languished in a marital Garden of Eden, gamboling and feasting and drinking and making love, all as if his occurring brilliant sojourn in the Garden might, as an opportunity, never come his way again. For all its perturbation, the quarrel, for him, had one good side effect: it kicked him up from off his sybaritic ass and sent him forthwith to his desk, where, with the door of his study firmly closed, he got out the files Judge Malcolm had given him nearly two weeks ago. Faced with the task of reading them he sighed and gazed at them, piled neatly as they were now in front of him, representing to him a kind of instrument—the equivalent of a violin to a violinist, or a piano to a pianist—and he thought of that famous broad-browed legal scholar, Joseph Story, who, in 1829, on the occasion of his inaugural address as Dane Professor of Law at Harvard, had said the words known since by every lawyer worth his salt: “The Law is a jealous mistress, and requires a long and constant courtship.” Considering those words, he suffered fear that through long disuse, the gallantries and tendencies and exuberances and processes of legal thought which in the past had been so fluently his, might now be rusted beyond application…. To his everlasting surprise he was wrong. Which isn’t to say that all came immediately easy (as in the instant of driving his car) but that, a few pages into his reading of the first file, his juridical faculties began to limber up, and by the end of an hour, were flexed enough to make him feel he could competently appraise the files’ contents. In all, the exercise took over three hours—a defining time as it turned out, for it focused his critical attention on his professional life to date and set him musing on the ways he would alter its course when the war was over.
He came out from his study in time to hear the six-o’clock news. Maud was already seated in front of the radio. “Would you like a drink? Your usual?” he asked her. She was cold as ice, but worse: monumentally polite. “Yes,” she said, “as you’re getting one for yourself; yes, thank you.” He had a partial recall of a tune and its lyrics: “It’s June in January.” La laaa, la lalalala. The tune didn’t work, though, if the words were reversed: “It’s January in June,” which unsingable reversal aptly described her unseasonable marital chill.
From out of the brown radio, a Voice was theorizing about the on-going great build-up of Allied forces in the Mediterranean region. “There is speculation,” the Voice was saying, “that Sicily will be the likely first target of an Allied campaign designed to bring Italy to heel. General Eisenhower and General Sir Harold Alexander Cunningham will—”
He went to the pantry. In the kitchen, Tessa was giving the twins their supper. In their world, all was as usual. He chatted with Tessa for a moment, then told the twins that when they were finished eating he would take them for a quiet, evening walk.
“Ralph too,” Caroline said.
Julia said: “And then a story.”
Maud turned from him that night in bed, as if his touch, made peaceably to her hand, was a scalding one. She fell asleep at once. Beside her, awake, he pondered deeply on their quarrel, on what—as he saw it—lay behind it: namely, that any brush of reference relating to the matter of the twins’ adoption triggered in her an armed reaction reminiscent of the
bitter, self-abusive anger she had heaped upon herself at the time the doctors had told her she could have no children of her own. Intuition forged the link. Sense affirmed his conviction that during this brief interval of his leave, it would do no good to force the issue into the open, particularly if his hunch was correct as to the psychological makeup of the problem. When the war is over, he thought: when I’m home to stay and when we have Time on our side, we’ll face it together and set it right…. It began to seem as if everything that mattered depended on the war coming to an end….
He telephoned Miss Sly the next morning.
She said at once how “relieved” she’d been to receive a recent letter from him, mailed from Miami. (He had written it his last day aboard the Dutch freighter.)
“I’d like so much to see you,” he told her, stating it that way, as a kind of wish for her to fulfill or not.
“And I you, Mr. Shurtliff.”
From her absence of a following qualifying remark, he risked the single word: “When?”
“As it happens, I’ve a fairly easy schedule this week. Tomorrow would be fine. Or Friday. Would a time on either of those days suit you?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “May I take you to lunch?”
“How very nice…. There’s quite a good restaurant not far from my office. It’s a quiet place.” She gave him the name and address. “Could we meet there at twelve-thirty?”
“Perfect,” he said. “Perfect.”
He waited for her outside the restaurant, under the awning that announced its ordinary name: THE CARRIAGE STOP. He had already spoken to the elderly headwaiter and secured a table in a windowed alcove that overlooked a small garden.
He saw her coming down the street, walking at an easy pace that suggested a pleasure of exercise taken at noon under a fair sky. She wore a summer dress of a soft, flowered fabric that floated around her large-boned body, the drapery of its ample skirt trailing her forward steps, and he had again the impression of a deeply feminine woman, who, for this occasion, had dressed for him; as he had dressed for her: he was in uniform. He went to meet her. “Miss Sly.”
Matters of Chance Page 17