He said that, justifying, sitting there, erect and virile, his complexion, as always, vigorously red, his manner, as always, vigorously confident. Morgan could barely stand to look at him.
“She’s said she’ll settle for a bit of money. ‘Recompense’ is the word she uses for what she’s after. To my mind, it would be pay for services rendered.” Doctor Leigh’s smile, vague as it was, was coarse. Then the kicker: “I’d like you to negotiate for me, Morgan. Get her paid off and signed off.”
Listening to Doctor Leigh, bearing the brunt of his robust, confident gaze, Morgan thought of Mrs. Leigh, of the torments and confusions and hurts and sorrows of her drowned heart; of the way Doctor Leigh had relegated her to madness. And he thought of Maud, of how, if she knew about this—how, for her beloved mother, she would be wounded. Oh, more than wounded…“What sum of money do you have in mind to offer Miss Truffant?”
Well, (Doctor Leigh told him), she’d mentioned the sum of fifteen thousand, but that was ridiculous, of course; she’d settle, he was sure, for ten thousand. Yes. Ten. He was absolutely sure a solid ten thousand would do the trick.
Morgan said: “I’ll offer her twenty-five thousand and hope she’ll take it. And I’ll draw up some form of document designed to release you from any further claims she might make. The document may or may not stand up to legal scrutiny, and I have no way of guaranteeing you that she’ll sign it.” (Stunned. Stunned blind was the way Doctor Leigh looked.) “I’ll do my best to negotiate for you on those terms.”
It was a nightmare, this confrontation with this man esteemed as a skilled doctor, a brilliant surgeon, lauded for his professional dedication, commended for the gratis care he lavished on the sick poor: this man about whom people said that if you lined up all the impoverished folk whose lives he’d saved, the line, men, women, and children, would reach in number to a point that would bore you to count. That was the public reputation of this man, his father-in-law, viewed now, privately, in a disparate light. A nightmare.
In his lap, Doctor Leigh fisted his large hands—hands as red from surgical scourings as his face was red: “What you call your ‘terms,’ Morgan: why, they’re nothing short of absurd. Comical,” he sputtered: “Preposterous.”
“But they stand,” Morgan rebutted. “Unless you agree to them, I can’t help you.”
Doctor Leigh made a last attempt: “I’d expected a broader sympathy from you, Morgan, a greater man-to-man understanding. And I’d thought that for Maud’s sake—”
“No,” Morgan warned. He didn’t have to say more, the solo word rang so of finality.
The ensuing, hard-eyed awkwardness between them was horrible; and inevitable, Doctor Leigh’s compliance to Morgan’s terms.
Within a month, Morgan brought the curtain down on Doctor Leigh’s “situation.” He never met with Imogene Truffant. He did it all by letter, using all the tact he had in him: offered Miss Truffant a twenty-five-thousand-dollar settlement, in return for which she signed a document of agreement that once and for all (as it turned out) brought the matter to a conclusion. In the last communication he received from Miss Truffant, she stated that it was her intention to retire from her position in the administrative offices of the clinic and to move to the drier climate of Arizona, outside of Phoenix, to a place she’d been told was beautiful and good for her asthma. “Paradise Valley” was the name of the place.
(Ah, God! What a risible irony!)
About any part of any of this, Maud never knew.
1950: mid-January. “It had to have been an inside job, Mr. Shurtliff,” Dennis said.
“Inside or out, some job!” Morgan had laughed.
What inspired this exchange was the robbery by masked men of the Boston Express Office of Brinks, Inc. The haul: 2.8 million dollars; 1.2 million in cash!
The Brinks caper opened the year, and for six months, life rocked along in a fairly usual way. But in June, everything changed: the Korean War erupted, and Americans gasped with disbelief and choked back tears that the nation was at war again, that lives would again be lost on soil in a place so distant, so far far away. And this time, in the minds of many many people, about this war, the question arose: Why? Why are we involved?
1951. Early in February, early in the morning, Sidney Aranov telephoned Morgan and Maud: “It’s a girl,” he crowed: “Judith. Born a bit after midnight…. Linda’s fine…. We’re thrilled.”
In April, President Truman booted General Douglas MacArthur over the moon, out of sight. “Removed General MacArthur of his Korean command” was the way the radio announcer put it—the general having made the fatal mistake of voicing to a listening world a series of policy statements (self-devised) about the conduct of the Korean War. “Unauthorized statements,” a feisty Harry S. Truman said. Hence the boot.
People were beginning to talk more and more about a Republican Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph R. McCarthy.
And a book was published that was causing a lot of talk. Title: The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger.
In late summer, Caroline, having climbed higher in a tree than her friend Billy Humphrey, fell out of the tree and broke her left arm. She was way up high, perched on a limb well above Billy, daring him to join her, when she lost her balance and fell to the ground. It was a heart-stopping, awful accident. Yet she was lucky. She could easily have been killed.
THE HOLLIS ACADEMY
—A School for Day Scholars—
—Founded by Ethan Hollis in 1885—
(So reads the sign at the school’s entry-gate).
In September of 1952, Julia and Caroline, now twelve years old, entered the eighth grade of Hollis Academy. To this day, a large portrait of Ethan Hollis hangs in the school’s assembly hall. The portrait was painted in 1907, when Mr. Hollis was seventy-two: white hair, sideburns, pince-nez glasses dangling from a black ribbon, a round face, a double chin, lips almost smiling, Platonic blue eyes. In his right hand, Mr. Hollis holds a book against his chest. Missing, is his left arm. It was amputated (at the shoulder) when he was twenty-seven years old (in 1862) after the battle of Fredricksburg, Mr. Hollis having served in the Civil War: Infantry, Company C, 7th Regiment, Ohio Volunteers (the bronze plaque mounted beneath the portrait informs). In academic circles, Hollis Academy is still held in high repute, still known to be a school “difficult to get into.” For Caroline and Julia, possessors of first-rate minds, it was ideal. Caroline’s mind was a truly fast one, sometimes dangerously so, tending to gloss. At Hollis, she learned to go slower; to see more. Julia’s was a deeper mind. She had fewer fast answers than Caroline; in the classroom, she was rarely the first to raise a hand, not for lack of comprehension, but for reasons of her own private searchings, which searches often caused her to get stuck in a small aspect of the larger whole. You could watch her, frowning, working her way out of her “stuckness,” moving her thoughts on…. Morgan, ever the fascinated observer of the twins’ rapidly developing minds and beings, learned as he watched them something about himself, something that surprised him: a gladness—that he was free to view them without self-reference, the freedom due of course to their not being children of his own blood and genes: not Shurtliffs; not, as Shurtliffs to be edited by him—but impersonally viewed and loved and marveled at, in the actual way they actually were.
“How fast time flies, Mr. Shurtliff,” Miss Sly said to him one noon in October as they lunched together: “It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been four years since the last presidential election…. I fear President Truman will lose to General Eisenhower, not that I’d object so much to having Eisenhower as president, but that man he’s picked for the position of vice president—I don’t like him one little bit. In my opinion he’s an opportunist and a sentimentalist, and it’s been my experience with human nature that that’s a very dangerous combination.” The man Miss Sly spoke of was Richard M. Nixon.
As to 1953, four events took place that remained for Morgan forever fresh in memory.
In March, Joseph Stalin die
d, and Russia passed into Nikita Khrushchev’s hands.
In July, at Panmunjom, an armistice was signed that ended the Korean War.
And, wonderfully, two men—a New Zealand-born British mountaineer named Edmund Hillary and a Sherpa guide named Tenzing Norgay—conquered Mount Everest.
And Sidney Aranov took on as a client an actor (a friend of Alan and Geoff), a gifted actor whose name was familiar to theater buffs and movie-goers; “took him on” in August and in October went with him as his legal counsel to official Washington, D.C., and defended him before a legislative body that called itself the House Un-American Activities Committee—a group that for some time had busied itself investigating “Communism in Hollywood.” So it was in October that Sidney was pictured in the New York Times—seated at his client’s side at a table set up in the stately chamber of the House of Representatives; Sidney, facing the committee—the picture taken while he was addressing the committee, faced forward, speaking without notes, eyes wide open, his suit-coat unbuttoned as for a fight, no vest, his shirt, across the span of his chest, a wavy mass of wrinkles. (Morgan, gazing at the picture, felt he could positively see Sidney breathing, in and out, hard, like a boxer). The New York Times printed the entire text of Sidney’s eloquent speech—a speech, as reported, that drew cheers from many of the gallery spectators (and, as Morgan said to Maud: “from invisible God, praise”). Time magazine described Sidney as “a modern-day Solon.” An apt description of what Sidney, now, in many people’s eyes, was considered to be: of what (in Morgan’s memory) he had been, ten years ago, in 1943, in gloomy Miami—a Solon in uniform—sitting at a barroom table, musing aloud about what he often referred to as “the case of life,” venting his thoughts and feelings, sometimes poetically, sometimes in a ribald way, sometimes satirically, often as a mourner—always as a participant. Ah: inherently marvelous Sidney: updated.
In February 1954, eight years after they had been divorced, Lawrence and Pamela re-married.
At seven in the evening, in a private reception-cum-dining room at the Pierre Hotel, about thirty celebrants (Maud among them) stood by as the marital tie that had been untied was retied by a state judge. Drinks and dinner followed the brief civil ceremony. It was an oddly moving affair, marked by a lot of water-over-the-dam nostalgia; by, on Lawrence’s and Pamela’s part, a lot of intelligent humility—the dangers not lost on them of a second attempt to succeed at what they had so spectacularly failed at the first time around. Lawrence had never been able to get Pamela out of his system. As for Pamela, her flings had left her (in her words) “merely flung”—that is to say—dropped at a place in life nowhere in particular. She was now a calmer creature, not by any means meek, but definitely tamer. During the years since she’d divorced Lawrence, she’d lived for a while on the West Coast, then for a while in Denver, then Washington, then Chicago; then about three months ago, she’d returned to New York, and she and Lawrence met again, this time at a charity ball—one of those big, splashy, Friday night society “do’s” with balloons strung from the ceiling and large flower arrangements set in the middle of tables that encircle a ballroom floor, Lester Lanin’s band playing a lot of Cole Porter. Lawrence saw her dancing, unsmiling, in the arms of a stockbroker whom he vaguely knew: and he’d cut in. Pamela said: “Larry. Oh Larry,” in the old hazardous way she’d always said his name, but with the addition, this time, of that loaded, wistful, unhinging—“Oh.” Lawrence danced her off the ballroom floor and they went together to the cloak-room and retrieved their coats and went out into the winter night, and Lawrence hailed a cab and they went to his apartment and made love. (From gleanings supplied to them by Lawrence, that was the scenario Morgan and Sidney put together about Lawrence’s and Pamela’s reunion, the “made love” part of the scenario strictly their own surmise.) As moving as the re-wedding was, it was also hilarious. How many weddings have you been to where the groom had not one best man, but two—Sidney and Morgan—neither of whom, in appearance, was at his best: Sidney had conjunctivitis in his left eye, so was wearing an oversized pair of dark glasses that made him look fraudulent and sinister; Morgan’s left ear-lobe, nicked (that morning) by a barber’s scissors, was a protuberance of layered coverings—cotton covered by adhesive tape covered by a rubbery pink substance that was supposed to mask the entire mess so as not to be noticed. Not noticed? Horse-feathers. And how many weddings where the bride’s matron of honor, hugely pregnant, halfway through the wedding feast looked suddenly beyond description alarmed and, in a loud, imperative, white voice—down the long length of the dining table—called out to her husband: “Sam! We’ve got to go. Right now.” (The baby, a boy, the couple’s third child was born three hours later at Lenox Hill Hospital.)
…1954’s finest public moment came at the end of the year, on December 2, when, by a vote of 67–22, the United States Senate censured Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Condemned him. Rendered him useless. Kaput. A great day.
Enter 1955. During the year’s first quarter, life strode along in its customary way. In April, though, a short episode of long consequence took place: a chance episode which Morgan (in time) came to believe was fated.
Here is the setting, and this is what happened:
Thursday evening, April 7
City: New York
Place: Carnegie Hall
Occasion: A symphony concert.
The prolonged applause of appreciation for the performance of Brahms’s Third Symphony began to subside. Switched on again at full strength, the hall-lights blazed, ceiling to floor, and the audience, blinking, came fully to life, bursting into talk, standing up, collecting its possessions, putting on its coats, commencing to move from seat to aisle—a human herd hoofing its way toward the nearest exit, Morgan and Maud and Caroline and Julia among them, Morgan, as paterfamilias, leading the way up an aisle, fronting a passage for Maud and the twins, glancing back at them every few steps, making sure they were still with him, as close behind as possible. They were about three-quarters of the way up the aisle, moving slowly, Morgan already anticipating the outdoor fresh air and the short walk down Fifty-seventh Street to the Russian Tea Room, the twins having been promised an after-concert “supper” there. He had again just glanced back over his shoulder, had caught in his glance Maud’s smile and Caroline’s really beautiful, conscious, extroverted, developed fifteen-year-old face, and Julia’s face, so differently beautiful, more tenderly young, lifted ceilingward, secretive in its pleasure, dreamy—“I beg your pardon,” he said, drawing back. He had bumped into a woman, and quite hard: “Please excuse me”—and as the woman turned toward him: “Miss Sly!” he exclaimed.
“Mr. Shurtliff! My dear.” She wrung his hand, laughing: “Imagine!” (Maud, now, was at his elbow.) “And Mrs. Shurtliff,” her manner and the tone of her voice at once more formal: “And these young ladies must be your daughters,” her eyes profoundly set on the twins’ faces—the moment chaotic, people shoving against them, murmuring impatience, jostling—so that they all moved over to one side, into a row of empty seats, or rather into three rows, for there was another woman, noticed now by Morgan and immediately defined by him as Miss Sly’s companion at this concert: an arresting woman, elegant, much, much younger than Miss Sly, younger than himself—who slipped into one row and waited there, watching; and in the next, second row, Miss Sly, who faced him and Maud and Julia and Caroline, strung out in that order in the third row. There was then the action of outstretched hands, Maud’s to Miss Sly’s, and the twins’ hands forwarded—a fluttering reach—when Maud introduced them to Miss Sly—and then Miss Sly, remembering her removed friend, pivoting around toward her, saying her name (completely lost in the din), and her friend’s well-mannered instant smile of acknowledgment and performance of a highly amusing gesture that pantomimed the social hopelessness of the whole situation: the crowd, her removed position, the hubbub of voices, plus—the separating solidity of Miss Sly’s majestic figure, standing there in a planted way, between all of them.
Morgan,
immensely attracted to the woman, returned her smile, his, like hers, amused; and, still looking at her, her eyes now meeting his, her smile deepening and aimed right at him (or so he felt, almost as a sensation), the odd thought formed in his mind that between the woman and himself, a complicity existed, a complicity of understanding which had to do entirely with Miss Sly: that, to the two of them, and in their eyes—as to the moment’s whole scene—they knew that Miss Sly, in her inimitable way, would take charge of it and direct it as she saw fit…. So relax, was the instruction he took from the woman’s sustained smile; under Miss Sly’s direction, what would be, would be.
“—their spring vacation from school,” Maud was telling Miss Sly, “and we thought it would be fun to spend a few days of it here in New York.”
“Lovely,” Miss Sly said: “Lovely, for all of you.” (Caroline was studying Miss Sly’s face; Julia’s eyes were on the large, amber, rhinestone-studded comb stuck through the domed bun of her horse-tail hair.) “A fine concert to my ears, the Brahms a celestial work.” Miss Sly’s gaze moved from Maud’s face back to the twins—a special scrutiny (Morgan thought), like that of a portrait painter who, beyond surface appearance, searches for insight into his subject’s intelligence and spirit—
—other aspects of the scene then taking root in his mind: Maud’s poise, for instance, which surprised him, given her long-ago expressed aversion—her avowed loathing—of the very idea of his remaining in touch with Miss Sly, virtual years since he had as much as mentioned Miss Sly’s name to her. (About the lively continuance of his friendship with Miss Sly, she knew nothing, for it remained a fact that Miss Sly really was his secret life.) Yet right now, right at this moment (he was actually witnessing it), Maud was clearly pleased by the chance circumstance of this meeting, palpably enjoying this fleeting opportunity to introduce Caroline and Julia to Miss Sly these fifteen years later: Maud, made secure by the passage of time, carrying off the moment, radiant, flushed with maternal pride.
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