He listened closely to George Colt’s account of the “pending matters.” They were exciting. Really exciting. By noon-time, the move had receded so far in his consciousness as to seem distant, like something that had been completed quite a while ago: certainly much, much longer ago than just yesterday.
He had lunch with Miss Sly.
“The move is behind you, my dear Mr. Shurtliff!” By which exuberant words, with open arms, she greeted him.
She was the fair sky after the clouds. She was celebration. She shone, like the sun, even over the matter of what she would have for lunch: “The lobster salad or the crab cakes! What a wrenching decision! I’m always so hungry when I’m happy. The crab cakes, please. Are you starved too?”
“Yes,” he smiled. “Yes, I am—” enjoying the distinctive sound of her alto voice and the very sight of that extraordinary, head-topping, done-up dome of her hair.
He had brought three photographs of Hannah to show to her. Hannah teasing a ball with her front paws. Hannah asleep. Hannah making an upward leap toward a toy mouse suspended at the end of a string.
“Oh, she is charming,” Miss Sly said. “May I keep this picture of her leaping?”
“Yes. I’m touched you want it.”
She kept looking at the picture. “I like to sketch cats at play. I don’t claim to draw well, though I am improving. I used to stew over every pencil stroke, but no more. I’m learning to be fast, to let the strokes occur—‘in the spirit of the perceived action’—is the way my new teacher says it.”
“Ah! You’ve a new teacher.”
“Mr. Bancroft. I enrolled in his class at the Art Institute about a month ago. I’m so thrilled to be studying again I hardly dare speak of it for fear I’ll wake up and find it’s a dream…. I have, you see, truly begun to withdraw from Tilden-Herne. And you watch me! Come January, when I’m fully retired, I shall really improve as a sketcher of cats…. But I mustn’t ramble on, though when I’m with you, I always do ramble on. It’s because you oblige me by giving an impression of patience. And you’re not by nature patient. You’re impatient. As impatient as I am. It’s a virtue we share.”
“Impatience isn’t usually regarded as a virtue.”
“It’s allowing it to show that makes of impatience a fault.”
The twist of her reasoning made him laugh. “Would you ever consider giving me one of your sketches of a cat at play?”
She fairly blushed. “I might. When I’m improved.”
“I’ll keep asking.”
“I’ll count on you to keep asking.” She put the picture in the side pocket of her commodious purse. Then she said: “You were so concerned about the move’s possibly harsh effects on your daughters. Are your anxieties in that regard laid to rest?”
Over the course of the summer, he had kept her informed of Julia’s and Caroline’s different pursuits and of their repeatedly expressed happiness of their life in New York; so it was on the solidity of that known base that he structured an answer to her question. “As it’s turned out, my anxieties appear to have been excessive; more, I think, applicable to myself than to them. I don’t mean to imply that the move was easy for them, only to say that they managed it with surprising style. Maybe grace is the better word.” He smiled; or almost smiled. “They’re stunningly grown up. Much more than I’d realized. And they are marvelously individual; individually equipped; individually confident.” He did, then, truly smile. “I’m beyond words proud of them.”
“Justly so,” she said. She was looking at him very hard. “But you seem troubled.”
“Less troubled than humbled,” he countered. “The fact is, I’m having a bit of a problem adjusting to the magnitude of their adultness. They’re independent of each other, and certainly independent of me—” He halted. Then: “I feel side-lined: as a father, I mean.”
“That’s a very ancient, very universal feeling,” she said, “and very appropriate. But you know that.”
“Yes, I do—”
“—and I have no doubt you’ll accommodate to their maturity very well.” She leaned then, as if seeking closer contact, toward him across the table. “Forgive me, Mr. Shurtliff, if I appear too presumptuous in saying that I think what you’re really struggling with is the move’s effect on you—that it’s freshened in you a consciousness of your singleness, your single loneliness.”
Two things checked him for a moment: first was the amount of comfort he took from her comprehension of his truer condition (about which, on his own, he would never have spoken); and second (and more) was the arresting precision of her word—singleness.
“Mr. Shurtliff?”
“I was wondering what I’d do without you,” he said.
“Oh my dear, thank you. For a moment, I was afraid I’d terribly overstepped myself.”
“Never.” He might have (but did not) attempt to tell her that her insight released him to be, with her, tacitly, honestly himself. “You relax me,” was what he did say (which remark, as they both understood it, closed the subject).
He asked her then: “Have you chosen the person who will succeed you at Tilden-Herne?”
“We’ve narrowed the field down to two candidates. They’re both well qualified. I’m hoping the board of trustees will…”
And so they talked on…. They parted, after their lunch, in their usual way, with a strong embrace. “When do you and your daughters return to New York?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Call me,” she said. “I’ll want to know you’re safely home.”
“I will. And remember: I want one of your sketches.”
“You inspire me.” She laughed. “Good-bye, Mr. Shurtliff, until soon.”
“It will be soon. Good-bye, Miss Sly.”
He handed her into a waiting taxi; then he hailed a taxi for himself, and went back to his office.
Saturday, August 29
“Everyone who matters is here,” Lillie Ruth said.
Every one (Morgan thought). Julia, Caroline, Dennis and his wife Louisa, Ansel Shurtliff, Letitia and Lewis Grant, Doctor Leigh, Pastor and Mrs. Eldon, all gathered in the living room of Lillie Ruth’s and Tessa’s new home—the room a near duplication of Lillie Ruth’s “parlor” in the Hatherton house: same curtains (recut and sewn to fit the smaller windows), same couch, same chairs, same timeless photographs displayed on the same tables, flowers arranged in the same remembered vases. It was mid-afternoon of a blue sky day. They talked about the past and about the future and were happy. For this party, Doctor Leigh had surprised them all by deviating from his usual drill of arriving well in advance of a party’s due hour, then of leaving almost at once, pleading “the call of duty,” or whatever: anyhow creating confusion. On this occasion, he showed up some twenty minutes late and settled himself somewhat theatrically in a chair, where he (amazingly) remained. Sitting so, large and vigorous, he made a speech (interrupting all conversation)—a kind of toast, raising high his glass of iced tea, treating it like a filled glass of champagne: “To everyone here,” he bawled out, picking up Lillie Ruth’s words, “everyone—my grand-daughters in the springtime of their lives—my son-in-law in the prime of life—I won’t touch on the ages of the rest of us—no need to because what’s important is that we’re all sailing on, young and old,”—looking from face to face as at a fleet of royal vessels, himself the King’s admiral (as if, Morgan thought, as in Longfellow’s poem, they were each a “Ship of State”)—“that’s the great thing to do—to sail on—sail on—”
“Amen!” Pastor Eldon flashed: “Amen.” By which churchly code, everyone was freed to resume their conversations—
…“We’ll be back for a three-day visit between Christmas and the New Year,” Julia was saying to Lillie Ruth.
“And between now and then, you’d better write plenty of letters to Tessa and me,” Lillie Ruth said. “You hear me, Julia? Callie?”
The happy chatter continued. More reminiscence, more gathered pleasure—until about an hour late
r, Letitia stood up and said good heavens, her group would have to leave or they’d be late for dinner. She herded her group—Lewis and Ansel Shurtliff and Julia and Caroline and Morgan—and made a comedy of spanking them out the front door, everyone laughing at the way she did it. No time for prolonged good-byes. No chance for tears to collect in anyone’s eyes.
Morgan was driving. Julia was sitting beside him on the Mercedes’s front seat; Caroline was in the back seat. They were on the last leg of the trip home to New York. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours,” he said.
“It’s the last day of August,” Julia mused.
“Summer’s end—” he said.
“—and so swift in passing,” Julia said.
They fell silent. One of those soft, contemplative silences people sink into when they’ve been traveling for several hours. Even Caroline, silent; though, when he glanced in the rear-view mirror, he saw that she was busy pushing a pencil around on a sheet of tablet paper; frowning. And about fifteen miles down the road later, she said: “Listen to this! I’ve done the arithmetic—”
“What arithmetic?”
“Listen! You have to listen…. June plus July plus August equals three months, which particular three months add up to ninety-two days. Are you with me? Okay…those ninety-two days are equal to two thousand two hundred eight hours. Two thousand two hundred eight hours are equal to one hundred thirty-two thousand four hundred eighty minutes—and those one hundred thirty-two thousand four hundred eighty minutes are equal to seven million nine hundred forty-eight thousand eight hundred seconds. How about that!”
“All those seconds—nearly eight million—sound like forever,” Julia said.
“Oh, Julia, you’re crazy!” Caroline scowled: “Three months is what sounds like forever.”
“It all depends on whether you’re looking ahead or looking back,” Julia replied.
He tended to agree with Julia, but withheld comment, needing to concentrate on the road, on—as they steadily neared the city—the increase of traffic…. Now, Caroline and Julia were occupied in drawing up and comparing separate lists of what they had to do and of what, in the matter of clothes, they had to buy before they returned to college. “I can’t believe we’ve only got a week to do it all in,” Caroline said.
Julia agreed: “I can’t believe it either.”
He drove on. And then, in a fast-gone while—
—Hello, Elsa! Hello, Hannah! Hello, hello! It’s wonderful to be home. Wonderful.
On Tuesday, September 8, Julia and Caroline departed for college.
“Now is only you and Hannah and myself,” Elsa said to him. “To keep me busy, and you not to miss Miss Car-oline and Miss Chew-lia too much, you must invite many people for dinners, Mister Shurtliff.”
“I will, Elsa. Thank you. I will.”
In mid-September, the Hatherton house was sold to a couple named Trask: Bernard and Emily Trask: parents of a boy, Otto, age seven, and a girl, Antonia, age four.
…Morgan had stipulated that he wanted the house to pass into the keeping of just such a family as the Trasks appeared to be. There had been other prospective buyers hot to acquire the house, but of them all, only the Trasks had young children, and only the Trasks (as reported by Morgan’s agent) had taken touching notice of the dog cemetery: had stood and read aloud the names commemorated on each headstone—the while their children, Otto and Antonia, with their two Jack Russell terriers, ran free, here and there and back, over the lawn.
3 Adjacent Destinies
He had come to Cleveland from New York for the monthly partners meeting, held usually on the second Wednesday of every month; this month, however, an exception: the meeting had taken place yesterday, Tuesday, October 13, 1959. He had arrived on Monday in the late afternoon and gone straight from the airport to the Grants’ house. There, after a pleasant dinner with Letitia and Lewis, he pleaded the need to retire early. “Tomorrow’s going to be a non-stop day,” he told them, evoking Roger Chandler’s old phrase. Letitia said: “I assumed it would be. I’ve told Maisie you’ll want an early breakfast.” (Maisie was the Grants’ longtime cook.) Lewis and Letitia walked him up the stairs and down the hall to what were now established in their home as his rooms. “Good night, Morgan darling,” Letitia said. In tone and lift, her voice was her dead sister’s voice: his mother’s voice. “Thank you, Aunt Letitia.” He kissed her, then shook Lewis’s hand. “Thank you,” he said again. As always, they gestured his thanks away.
He slept like a rock, arose at six-thirty and was in his office by eight. Most of the morning was spent with an elderly, physically feeble but still mentally keen client who voiced an “imperative need” to revise his will. (He had seven grand-children, all male, all young adults, four “promising,” three “regrettably irresponsible,” distribution of wealth the issue, and by what means? Outright inheritance for the “promising” four? Controlled trusts for the “irresponsible” three?) Then a conference lunch with George Colt. Finally, at three-thirty, the partners meeting, longer than usual, dusk by the time it ended. Then back to the Grants’ for dinner, after which (with apologies to Letitia and Lewis) more desk-work, then bed (late), and another early rise, another intense work morning at the office.
Now it was Wednesday afternoon and he was at the airport, waiting to board the plane for the return trip to New York. He was sitting down, idling away the minutes in observation of the variety of human scenes taking place around him—airports, theaters of a sort, audience and players one and the same, revealing themselves in all conditions of pleasure, anxiety, regret, ennui, even anger: that middle-aged couple standing over there, obviously miserable, turning away from each other, then facing each other again, something gone bitterly wrong between them, yet they could not separate, the plot of their problem now audible: “You lied to me,” the woman was heard to say—“Lied to me”—beginning to cry; the man flushed and desperate—
To be privy to their distress was wrong. He looked away—
—and saw, coming down the terminal’s long middle aisle, Miss Sly, and, with her, a woman—instantly recognized, instantly placed: that Carnegie Hall concert he and Maud and Julia and Caroline had attended more than four years ago: that moment when, as they were leaving the hall, they had encountered Miss Sly in the company of this woman—the chaotic, crowded, complicated encounter vividly recalled, and in so replete a way that he sat over it, reliving it, thinking on it in relation to all that had happened—since: wondering at the remarkableness of reencountering Miss Sly and the woman here in this other crowded public place this long time later.
They—Miss Sly and the woman—had by now advanced so far as to be at the airline’s check-in counter. There, into the hands of an attendant, the woman put her ticket and her suitcase. The attendant weighed the suitcase, tagged it, placed it on the luggage belt, looked again at the woman’s ticket, stamped it, and, with a nod and commercial smile, handed it back to her. Having been “cleared” for the flight, she rejoined Miss Sly.
He had watched all this as it had occurred, fascinated by the woman: by the quiet beauty of her intelligent face, her tallness, her calm bearing, which calmness above all else impressed and strangely touched him, causing him to wonder what had so distinctly formed it, what it was composed of, what it would take to shatter it. He put her age as younger than his own, perhaps by as much as a decade.
He stood up then, and made his way to Miss Sly’s side. He put his hand on her arm. She turned, all sharp surprise: she had not seen him coming. “Mr. Shurtliff!” she exclaimed. “Miss Sly,” he said. He kissed her lightly on her left cheek. Then he turned and met the woman’s eyes, resting, blue, full on him. She smiled—a swift, positive smile. He was sure she remembered him. He looked at her for a longer than usual couple of seconds—
—the lingerance broken by Miss Sly, who, with a ceremonial politeness to the point of stiffness, said: “I recall the former time the three of us met as being so hectic I wasn’t able to properly introduce you. Miss P
helps, Mr. Shurtliff. Mr. Shurtliff, Miss Phelps.”
Added to her extreme formality (in itself daunting) was a tight-lipped coldness of a kind denying. The combination stunned him. He could not account for it except to think that his voluntary act of publicly seeking her out when she was in someone else’s company and greeting her with so intimate a thing as a kiss, had offended her strict professional scruple that their friendship be always privately conducted. The other possibility was that he had intruded at a critical moment on some matter of personal importance to her and Miss Phelps. He thought of all this, and felt it in a second, and, as quickly, decided to withdraw. He bowed, and took a step away, backward—
—but Miss Phelps, then, extended her hand: “Hello, again,” she said.
Her emphatic underscoring of the word—“again”—confirmed his conviction that she remembered him. He took her hand and shook it and said: “Yes; again,” then added her name: “Miss Phelps.”
Her smile freshened. “I remember your wife and daughters too,” she said, “—especially your one daughter’s excitement about going on to the Russian Tea Room for supper after the concert.”
“You’ve an amazing memory,” he said. “That was Caroline. She’s so grown up now that I doubt she’d be similarly excited, though in her defense, I have to say she remains a great devotee of the Russian Tea Room, as does my other daughter, Julia.” He was conscious that he was perhaps being too exact, too extending, but because Miss Phelps kept smiling and because her smile conveyed interest—and, having accounted for Caroline and Julia, a wish to tell her about Maud seized him—a compulsion—acted on almost before he knew it: “My wife died some while ago,” he said.
“Oh,” she said; struck. “Oh—”
By stepping forward, Miss Sly interposed herself between him and Miss Phelps, virtually blocking them from further contact, and, with her eyes concentrated on him, said: “When we last spoke on the ’phone, Mr. Shurtliff, you told me you’d be in Cleveland this week for your monthly partners meeting and that it would be a whirlwind trip. I incorrectly assumed you’d come on Tuesday and return to New York on Thursday as you usually do.”
Matters of Chance Page 44