I was impressed (and rather touched) by how well George had briefed himself on subjects of interest to my brother . . . especially as I’d only mentioned to him in passing Eric’s years with the Federal Theatre Project. But George was like that—always meticulous, always well prepared, always wanting to get on the right side of someone. Listening to him talk intelligently about the forthcoming Broadway season—knowing full well that the theater actually bored George, and that he must have been studying Variety and the other showbiz magazines for the week before this drink—made me feel real love for him. Because I knew he was doing this for me.
Towards the end of our hour together, George excused himself to call his office. As soon as he was out of earshot, Eric said, “Well, you certainly primed him well.”
“Actually, I told him very little about you.”
“Then I am impressed.”
“Really?”
“For a Republican, he’s reasonably cultured.”
“How do you know he’s a Republican?”
“Oh come on. He so looks the part. I bet you anything he’s backing Dewey for the nomination.”
“I wouldn’t know . . .”
“Yes, you would. And I’d lay money on the fact that Daddy Grey is a big cheese in the Westchester County Republican Party.”
Damn my brother for being so perceptive. Only he was wrong about one thing: Edwin Grey Sr. was actually the chairman of the entire New York State Republican Party—a man who considered Governor Dewey his closest friend, and who acted as an unofficial adviser to a young, upcoming politician named Nelson Rockefeller.
Yes, my future father-in-law was something of a power broker, not to mention a serious white-shoe lawyer—a senior partner at a major Wall Street firm—and a man with the same stern Victorian countenance as Father. His wife, Julia, was a tall, contained woman with a decidedly aristocratic mien, and an unspoken (but readily discernible) belief that the world was divided into two groups: the ghastly hoi polloi, and a small number of people she would deign to find interesting.
The Greys were Presbyterian—both in faith and temperament. They lived like frugal members of the squirearchy in that corner of Greenwich, Connecticut, which, back in the forties, was still deep country. Their house—a fourteen-room mock-Tudor manse—was situated on a seven-acre parcel of woodlands, bisected by a stream. It was bucolic. Shortly before George popped the question, he brought me up for a weekend.
“I know they are going to love you,” he said on the train north from Grand Central Station. “But I hope you won’t be put off by the way they do things. They are formal kind of people.”
“Sounds just like my parents,” I said.
As it turned out, the Greys made my late parents look like mad bohemians. Though they treated me with courtesy and a relative degree of interest, they were deeply absorbed in their own rigid domestic protocol. They dressed for dinner. Drinks were served by a liveried manservant in the living room. All meals took place in a formal dining room. Mrs. Grey deferred to her husband in all conversational matters. He was the one who voiced the opinions, whereas Mrs. Grey either made small talk, or posed questions to me. Hers was a polite, but skillful interrogation, during which she got me talking about my parents, my education, my professional résumé, my overall worldview. I knew what she was really doing: probing my suitability for her son. I answered her questions in a pleasant, unadorned manner. I tried not to sound either too nervous or too ingratiating. My answers were always met by a tight smile—which meant that I couldn’t read her reaction to me. George stared down at his plate during these Q&A sessions. Daddy Grey also detached himself from the interrogation—though he was still listening intently to everything I said . . . something I noticed when I glanced away from Mrs. Grey for a second and saw him assessing me with care, his fingers interlocked and propped under his chin like a judge on the bench. Only once did he interrupt his wife—to ask me if my father had been a member of the Hartford Club: the very starched, very WASP meeting place for Hartford’s captains of commerce.
“He was its president for two years,” I said quietly. I glanced quickly across the table at George. He was trying to suppress a grin. When I glanced back at Daddy Grey, he gave me the slightest of approving nods: as if to say, if your father was president of the Hartford Club, you can’t be all that bad. Taking a cue from her husband, Mrs. Grey afforded me another of her tight smiles—slightly wider than usual, but constrained nonetheless. I smiled back, secretly thinking: formality is always a way of defending a narrow view of the world; a belief that you can categorize people simply by the schools and colleges they attended, their political allegiances, the clubs to which their parents belonged. My parents also operated according to this rigid principle—and I suddenly felt this wave of sympathy for George, as I realized he too was raised in an emotionally arid household.
Unlike me, however, he didn’t have an Eric to counterbalance his parents. Of course, I knew all about his older brother, Edwin. He was the family star. The valedictorian of his class at Exeter. Captain of the school’s lacrosse team. A brilliant student at Harvard, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1940. And though he was accepted at Harvard Law, he decided to accept an Army commission as second lieutenant. So he deferred his admission to Harvard Law and went off to war—where he was killed during the invasion of Normandy.
“I don’t think my parents have ever really recovered from his death,” George told me on our second date. “He was the repository of all their hopes, their ambitions. They adored him.”
“I’m sure they adore you too,” I said.
He just shrugged sadly, then said, “I’ve never really been much of a jock or an academic whiz kid.”
“You got into Princeton.”
“Yes—but only because my dad went there . . . as he still often reminds me. My grades at Exeter weren’t up to much. And at college, I didn’t make any of the varsity teams, nor did I graduate with honors. I was a B minus student. I did all right—but for my parents, ‘all right’ was a synonym for ‘failure.’ They expected excellence. I didn’t deliver.”
“There’s a lot more to life than good grades or making the lacrosse team. But my parents were the same way. Their social benchmarks were all to do with an extreme form of rectitude. Probity at all costs.”
George later told me that that was the moment he fell in love with me—because I was somebody who, thanks to my own background, so understood the milieu which shaped him . . . and also because I used words like rectitude and probity.
“You’re not just beautiful,” he said later that night. “You also have one hell of a vocabulary.”
Now, seated across the table from his profoundly constrained parents, I felt this immense kinship with George. We were cut from the same austere, uncomfortable cloth. We were both—in our own quiet way—trying to break away from the limitations of Waspdom. We understood each other. Like me, George had been hurt in love. Though he didn’t tell me much about it, he mentioned that there had been a two-year romance with a woman named Virginia: the daughter of some well-known Wall Street lawyer, thereby garnering her “high approval status” in the eyes of his parents. When she broke off the engagement (because she had fallen for the son of a Pennsylvania senator), George’s parents took the news badly—considering it yet another failure on the part of their son when it came to achieving anything. He’d asked me about Jack—but I supplied him with scant details, except to say that it was a bit of “romantic silliness” that amounted to nothing, especially as he disappeared back off to Europe before it could develop into anything substantial.
“He was a fool to lose you,” George said.
“And she you,” I replied immediately.
“I doubt she thinks that.”
“Well, I do. And that’s what counts.”
He actually blushed, then reached over across the table and took my hand. “At least I got lucky this time around,” he said.
“Timing is everything, I guess.”
Without question, the timing was definitely on our side. We shared similar family backgrounds, educational levels, social perspectives. Most importantly, we were both ready to get married (despite all my private protestations, I knew this to be true). George was sound. He was balanced, responsible. He loved me without reservation. Though I didn’t feel any grand passion for him, I convinced myself that the absence of ardor wasn’t truly important. After all, I had lost my heart to Jack and ended up feeling like a sap. Passion—as I had come to conclude—was for fools. It fogged the brain. It muddled rational thought. It led you down all the wrong paths. It was a mistake—and one which I would never make again.
And so, catching his eye across his parents’ dining room table—seeing him gaze at me with such unconditional fondness—I made a decision. If he proposed marriage, I’d accept.
The rest of the dinner was a reasonable success. We made polite chitchat. I told a few anodyne anecdotes about my work at Saturday/Sunday. I said nothing when Daddy Grey went into a tirade about how Harry S. Truman was nothing but a socialist haberdasher (if only my father had been alive to meet Daddy Grey—it would have been love at first sight). I feigned interest as Daddy Grey engaged George in a discussion about a pressing issue of the day: a new set of rules for Princeton’s eating clubs which compelled them to accept members of all religious persuasions (“It’s the Jewish lobby that’s forced this issue,” Daddy Grey thundered; a comment which George shrugged off with a noncommittal nod of the head). I smiled a lot and didn’t speak unless spoken to.
After dinner, we retired to the library. Though I really felt in need of a brandy, I didn’t ask for one. Then again, I wasn’t offered one—as Daddy Grey poured out a measure for George and himself. A fire was blazing in the hearth. I sipped a demitasse of coffee. An entire wall of the library was devoted to framed photographs of Edwin at assorted junctures in his life. The end table next to the sofa was also filled with additional portraits of Edwin—all in Army uniform. He did look exceptionally dashing. The room was a shrine—and my eyes scanned all additional walls and tabletops for any photos of George. There were none.
As if reading my mind, Mrs. Grey said, “We have plenty of pictures of George elsewhere in the house. The library is for Edwin.”
“Of course,” I said quietly, then added: “I don’t how anyone could cope with such a loss.”
“We’re not the only family who lost a son,” Daddy Grey said, his voice betraying a slight tremor.
“I didn’t mean to imply . . .”
“Grief is a private matter, don’t you think?” he said, turning away from me to refill his brandy glass.
“I apologize if I said something wrong,” I said.
Silence. A silence that must have lasted a full minute. It was finally broken by Mrs. Grey. Her voice was hushed.
“You are right. The sense of loss will never end. Because Edwin was exceptional. A man of astonishing gifts.”
She glanced briefly at George, then stared down at her hands, threaded tightly together in her lap.
“He was utterly irreplaceable.”
Another long silence. George stared into the fire, saying nothing, his eyes full.
I excused myself shortly thereafter, and went up to the guest room in which I was being billeted. I undressed, put on my nightgown, and got into bed, pulling the blankets over my head. Sleep did not arrive—which was not a surprise, considering that I was still trying to make sense of the dinner, the scene in the library, and the way in which George’s parents were subtly making him pay for Edwin’s death.
The sense of loss will never end. Because Edwin was exceptional. A man of astonishing gifts . . .
Had she not turned toward George at that moment, I would have thought that she was simply attempting to express a mother’s inexpressible grief. But by narrowing George in her sights, and saying that his brother was irreplaceable, she was letting him (and me) know: if I had to lose one child, it should have been you.
I couldn’t believe her cruelty. It made me felt intensely protective toward George. It also gave me a project: to emancipate this man from his family by loving him.
And I was certain that, in time, I would love him.
I stared at the ceiling of the bedroom for nearly an hour. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs, followed by the door of George’s room (located directly opposite mine) opening and closing. I waited five minutes. Then I got up, left my room, and tiptoed quickly across the corridor. Without knocking, I quietly opened George’s door. He was already in bed, reading. He looked up at me, startled. I put my finger to my lips, shut the door behind me, and walked over to the bed, sitting down next to him. I noticed that he was wearing striped pajamas. I stroked his hair. He was wide-eyed with bemusement. I leaned down and kissed him deeply. He returned the kiss—nervously at first, but then with considerable ardor. After a moment, I gently broke away. Standing up, I pulled my nightgown over my head. The chill of the room made me shiver. I crawled under the covers next to him. I took his head in my hands and began to kiss him gently on the face. He was tense.
“This is crazy,” he whispered. “My parents . . .”
“Shh,” I said, putting a finger to my lips. Then I climbed on top of him.
It was the first time we’d made love. Unlike Jack, George played according to the carnal rules of the day—when sex before marriage was still considered foreign, perilous territory, to be traversed only after a sizeable amount of time had been spent with the other person. Though we’d kissed, George’s natural tendency toward circumspection meant that he’d yet to make a proper move. By the way he’d asked me about my involvement with Jack (and whether “Shore Leave” was autobiographical), I sensed that he knew I was no virgin. But now, sharing a bed with him for the first time, I realized that he was.
He was anxious. He was awkward. He was fast. So fast that, afterward, he lay slumped against me and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said, my voice as hushed as his. “There’ll be other times.”
“Will there?”
“Yes. There will. If you want.”
“I want.”
“Good. Because I was starting to wonder . . .”
“Wonder what?”
“Wonder when on earth this was going to finally occur.”
“Seduction has never been one of my great skills.”
“Never?”
He turned away from me. “Never.”
“Not even with Virginia?”
“She wasn’t interested.”
“That happens, I suppose.”
“Yes—but usually not with someone you’re engaged to.”
“Then you had a lucky escape. Think of what an arid marriage that might have been.”
“The best bit of luck I’ve ever had is meeting you.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. You’re wonderful. My parents thought so too.”
“Really?”
“They were impressed with you. I could tell.”
“Well, personally, I found it very hard to guess what they were thinking.”
“It’s just their manner. They have two religions: Presbyterianism and diffidence.”
“That still doesn’t give them the right to be diffident toward you.”
“It’s all to do with Edwin’s death.”
“His death should make them value you even more.”
“They do value me. They just have difficulty expressing such things.”
“They undervalue you. They shouldn’t.”
He looked at me with amazement. “Do you really think that, Sara?”
I ran my index finger down along his face. “Yes,” I said. “I really do think that.”
I sneaked out of his room just before daybreak. I fell into bed for around an hour, but couldn’t sleep. So I had a bath. Then I dressed and went downstairs, deciding to head out for a walk. En route to the front door, I passed by the dining room, and heard a voice: “You must ha
ve slept badly, Miss Smythe.”
I stopped and saw Mrs. Grey seated at the end of the dining table. She was already dressed and coiffed for the day, a cup of coffee in front of her.
“Not that badly.”
She gave me a look of ironic disdain. “If you say so. Is George still asleep?”
I tried to fight off a blush. I don’t think I succeeded as she arched her eyebrows.
“I wouldn’t really know,” I said.
“Of course you wouldn’t. Coffee?”
“I don’t want to disturb you . . .”
“If you were disturbing me, I wouldn’t ask you to join me in a cup of coffee, now would I?”
“Coffee would be lovely,” I said, sitting down. She got up and went over to a banquette, on which sat a sterling silver coffee pot and the appropriate china. She poured me a cup, returned to the table, and set it in front of me.
“I’m certain the coffee will be most welcome after your restive night,” she said.
Oh God . . . I lifted the coffee cup up to my lips and took a quick sip. Then I set it down again. In the space of that simple movement, I’d decided to ignore her last comment. Instead I asked: “Did you yourself sleep badly?”
“I always sleep badly. And you’re dodging my question.”
I met her gaze. “Had you asked me a question, Mrs. Grey, I would have promptly answered it. Because it would have been impolite otherwise. But you didn’t ask me a question. You simply made an observation.”
Another of her tight smiles. “I can see now why you are a writer. Your powers of observation are formidable.”
“I’m not a writer.”
“You’re not?” she said. “Then what about that story in Saturday Night/Sunday Morning?”
“One published story doesn’t make someone a writer.”
“Such modesty . . . especially given the immodesty of the story. Were you in love with that Navy boy?”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 21