Almost Paradise

by Susan Isaacs

  James took a double gulp of his double scotch. His father-in-law’s club was so exclusive that only two members of his own exclusive law firm had been admitted as members. “You make it sound so frivolous. It’s not.”

  “It is. You have no business being a spy. You have a family.”

  “I’d be working in Washington. There would be relatively little traveling. Please, just hear me out, Mr. Tuttle. I think the need for an overseas network of—”

  “Mrs. Tuttle does not wish her only daughter to move to another city and live the life of a wife of a civil servant.”

  “For Christ’s sake!”

  “And I think there is a time in each man’s life when he must abandon his urge to slay the next dragon and seek the Holy Grail. In short, he must grow up. His quest must lead him to the world of commerce.”

  “Please—”

  “And I might add it would seem unwise, most unwise of you, to leave Ivers and Hood now that a partnership may be just around the corner.”

  “Just around the corner and five years away. I have no patience—”

  “That is eminently clear. You have no patience for normality. You are an adventurer. Alas, although you are very clever, you married a Tuttle, and we are a placid lot and do not like our lives disturbed. Your adventures ended on V-E Day. Your spying days are over. You will be an attorney for the rest of your life. It’s time for you to realize that. As I’ve indicated, it might not be so painful. I believe a partnership is imminent.”

  “Mr. Tuttle, I don’t want to be tapped for a partnership way before the other lawyers in my class. I don’t want to be treated differently because I’m your son-in-law and you’re a major client of the firm.”

  “You don’t believe you deserve to be a partner?” Samuel hefted his goblet of water and took a deep drink.

  James upended his scotch and finished it in one great gulp. “I deserve it, yes, but—”

  “Then perhaps it is a case of virtue being rewarded a bit prematurely.”

  “I won’t accept it, Mr. Tuttle. I’m going to Washington. Win agrees—”

  “Winifred would agree to immolation if you lit the match. It’s unfortunate but true. However, I don’t think Washington is in the picture for you.”

  “I’ve been offered a job as—”

  “Have you? I heard the offer was rescinded, James.”

  “What do you mean? What did you do, damn it? Whom did you speak to?”

  “Everyone concerned seems to think you’d be far more content practicing law in New York. Naturally, there may come a time when you would be called on to serve your country again, but that time would not seem to be now. Another scotch?”

  James lay on a towel in the short grass just beyond the sandy edge of the lake near the Cobleighs’ Berkshire cabin. He covered his eyes with the crook of his arm. His pearly skin, which had not felt such heat since the summer before Pearl Harbor, began to roast in the sun.

  Nicholas sat beside him cross-legged. Slowly, holding his breath, he lowered his hand until his palm grazed the tiny circles of hair on his father’s chest. The hair went from the bottom of his throat all the way down his chest and stomach into his bathing trunks and reappeared on his legs, curly and gold in the sunlight. Nicholas withdrew his hand and stroked his own smooth chest.

  “Daddy,” he whispered. James grunted. “Daddy, are you sleeping?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we go fishing again?”

  “Later.”

  “Can I have hot dogs and cookies for lunch?”

  “Come on, Nick. Let me have a few more minutes.”

  “Will I get hair like you?”

  “What?”

  “All over my belly?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “On my legs?”

  “Look, I had a rough week, Nick. I need some rest.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Just let’s be quiet for a while. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Nicholas watched his father maneuver into deeper ease on the towel and slide his hands beneath his head as a pillow. The hair under James’s arms was straight and so pale it was almost white. Nicholas wished he could snuggle his head under his father’s arm, throw his arm over James’s chest, and enjoy the heated skin and the pungent, up-close smell of a man.

  Nicholas’s ideal father would have been a combination Yankee third baseman and W. S. marshal, an athlete-moralist; James preferred deep chairs and oblique behavior. But living as Nicholas had in such a haphazard, manless household, he was a flexible child, and within a day of James’s return from the war, Nicholas was pitching his voice so low it hurt and sneaking into his parents’ bathroom to rub his face with the wet fur of James’s shaving brush.

  Nicholas studied his father and then copied him, arranging his small, strong body on the grass, but the damp, pebbly ground as well as his own unliberated energy made him uncomfortable. He sat up and rocked back and forth, observing his father, trying to will him awake and athletic.

  But no matter how inactive his father was, Nicholas wanted to be with him. He would have preferred sitting motionless on a Chinese rug watching James examine a contract than going rock climbing with his mother. Life with father was uneventful, but Nicholas needed calm. Weary from six years of domestic chaos, of nannies swooping in and out of his life, of his mother’s unpredictable daily visits—bestowing a chocolate bar at eleven in the morning or a midnight kiss after the opera—of the social demands of family friends, of the continual refurbishment of the apartment, and of the pressure he felt to spare Thomas from this pressure, Nicholas wanted to be with his father.

  “Daddy, how come you only brought me up here and not Tommy?”

  “Nick, let me be.”

  “Because he’s too little?”

  “Yes. He’s better off at the farm with Nanny…”

  “Nanny Stewart.”

  “Yes, Nanny Stewart and Grandma and Grandpa.”

  “And Mummy needs to stay home and take naps before the baby gets born.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why don’t you take a little walk? Okay, Nicky? Come back in fifteen minutes.”

  “Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have a watch.”

  “Nick—”

  “And I can’t tell time anyway. Should I go over there and dig some worms for fishing?”

  “Yes. Good idea.”

  “What should I put them in?”

  “Nick, figure it out yourself. All right? Just let me relax.”

  “You had a rough week.”

  “Right. I had a rough week.”

  A month later, it was still rough. On Monday, James had stayed at his desk from eight in the morning until ten at night, reviewing a draft of a securities registration statement for one of Ivers and Hood’s biggest clients, Republic Petroleum. Although he’d been made a partner three months earlier, his interest in his law firm was minimal. Nor, as he rubbed his hand over the soft evening stubble on his cheeks, did he care about the regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission or the prospects of Republic Petroleum as it gouged deeper into the bowels of Texas and Arabia. He who had helped save Western civilization now found it boring.

  On Tuesday, he and Winifred dined at Le Nuit Bleu as guests of Dwayne Petrie, the president of Republic, and Mrs. Petrie, a big woman whose thick lips were so smeared with dark red lipstick they looked like raw hamburger hanging beneath her nose. Mr. Petrie wore a tie pin with the initial D in large diamonds and Mrs. Petrie a diamond necklace with a ruby, diamond, and sapphire D suspended over her abyss of a cleavage. “Deedee,” Mr. Petrie said to his wife, “Jim here spent the war in France. In the OSS. The Oh So Social. All Ivy League boys playing foreign agent. Sitting in cafés and passing secret messages.”

  “Mr. Petrie,” Win said softly. James, sitting opposite her, clamped his mouth shut so his sigh was filtered through his nose. In her ivory maternity dress, a double s
trand of Maisie’s pearls, and her brown freckles, Win faded into the beige velvet banquette until she seemed almost invisible to James. As usual she wore no makeup. Her carrot hair might have redeemed her, but she must have spent that afternoon flattening and taming it into a flat knot at the nape of her neck in order to look, James assumed, sophisticated, a fitting wife for a worldly husband. As a result, before she spoke the only attention she’d received were the polite hellos due the wife of a young partner and the much warmer how-are-yous due the daughter of Samuel Tuttle. James sighed once again, a more attention-getting sigh, but Win’s attention was locked on Mr. Petrie. “You see…about the OSS…”

  “It’s all right, Win,” James murmured.

  “Oh, James, please.” She put down her fork and clasped her hands on top of her balloon of a pregnant belly. “I think—well, perhaps some people have the wrong idea about the OSS. James risked his life—”

  “Win—”

  “Jim, big fella,” Mr. Petrie said. “You got one loyal wife there. I like to see that in a woman. Shows character.” His wink to Win was so broad it would have been noted in the last row of the last balcony of a large theater. “I like your spirit, honey. I really do. Now come on. Finish up your lamb.”

  Joining them that evening was the senior corporate partner of Ivers and Hood, Hamilton Cummings, and his wife, Ginger. Ham Cummings wore thick wire-rimmed glasses and had no lips at all. His straight line of a mouth smiled only for Republic Petroleum. Ginger, a woman in her middle forties, had a delectable blond beauty not unlike that which James’s mother, Louise, had possessed before James was born. She even had Louise’s thin nose with flaring nostrils. Unfortunately, she was afflicted with the same disease, alcoholism, and after dessert her embarrassing slurred overtures to James—pressing her spoon full of mousse to his lips: “Would you like to taste mine, Jim?”—had diminished into silence. She stared into the flame of the candle in the middle of the table, regal in pinned-up pale hair and black silk; still, like a duchess in mourning.

  That had been Tuesday. On Wednesday he sat down for dinner and discovered a small Impressionist painting hanging over the sideboard. He couldn’t recall the painter’s name, but the triumph of lemon daylilies over ground and moss, lit by an afternoon haze, was unmistakably the work of genius.

  “Well, James?” Win breathed. Flushed with heat and pregnancy and eagerness, she glanced from the painting to her husband and back again. “James? Isn’t it something? I mean, there I was in the Wasserman Gallery with Westy Redding—she was having her Boullet watercolor appraised—and I nearly gasped, but then I said to myself, I said, ‘Win, you mustn’t,’ but it was so marvelous and it hypnotized me, pulled me into it. I mean, there I was, in that garden, what Eden must have been like, and—what’s wrong? Oh. Don’t you like it, James?”

  “‘Don’t you like it, James?’”

  “James—”

  “Ring the bell, please. She forgot my iced tea.”

  “James, I simply assumed you’d think it was beautiful. It never occurred to me you wouldn’t like it. Please, please don’t look through me like that.”

  “I’d like my iced tea.”

  “I’m sorry. I never thought—”

  “That’s a habit, isn’t it.”

  “James…”

  “Winifred, how many times do I have to say it? I’m drowning in your money. We live in an apartment I can’t afford with furniture I can’t afford and servants I can’t afford and you wear a pair of goddamn earrings that would cost me a year’s draw and—”

  “But Mama gave them to me.”

  “And Mama gave you the nice watch too. And the nice pearls and the nice clothes. And Papa gave you the nice car and the nice check and the nice—”

  “James, he gave the money to us.”

  “My ass he did.”

  “You’re just talking like that because you think it will upset me.”

  “I’m talking like that because I’m sick of it. What’s wrong with you? That check was made out to you. Every time I turn around someone is slipping you another few thousand and you’re running out and buying something to improve my life. I tell you I have enough clothes, and two days later I find three shirts and a silk evening scarf—”

  “But you needed one, James.”

  “You needed it. All I needed was to be left alone. How about that, Win? Could you manage that?”

  “I do leave you alone. When you go into your study and close the door I never even think of knocking. But what does that have to do with a scarf?”

  “A scarf and trusts for both boys and now a new painting I couldn’t buy if I—”

  “I used the money Uncle Joseph left me. And it’s beautiful. You have to admit it, James. It really is. And everyone says it’s a good investment. All I want is a beautiful house for you to come home to and for us to be happy, the way we were before the war. And everything I have belongs to you, James. You know that.”

  “Good. Then you won’t mind if I sell the painting.”

  “James, stop it.”

  “Then it’s not ours, is it? Is it, Win?”

  “James, I hate to say it, but you don’t seem to mind having Ogilvy’s make your suits and going on trips and having your dinners cooked and served and your shirts pressed and the boys all fresh and shiny when you come home from work. You know I can’t do any of that.”

  “You can. You won’t.”

  “But it’s silly.”

  “It’s not silly, Win. It’s just unpleasant.”

  “Well, why should things be unpleasant if they don’t have to be? Do you really want me on my knees, scrubbing floors?”

  “Winifred, I’m not a coal miner. I’m a partner in a Wall Street law firm, and you know damn well you wouldn’t have to get on your knees.”

  “But why should we live like all the other young partners in those teeny two-bedroom apartments or those suburban Tudor things? There’s no need for it, James. All I’m doing is making it nicer for us.”

  “You don’t want a husband, Win. You want to do exactly what your family wants you to do, and then have a man around because that’s just another Tuttle requirement. What you really want is a whore, and you’re trying to turn me into one.”

  Winifred rose, walked to James’s chair, and went down on her haunches, so she could look up to him. “James, please. James, don’t talk like that. You know how much I respect you. I know it’s been difficult since you’ve been home, making adjustments to civilian life and all, but everyone’s going through it. Really they are. It must seem terribly dull, but you’ll get used to it again. And you know all my sympathies are with you. If I can do anything—”

  “Come on, Winifred, go back to your seat. I mean it. Just leave me alone, damn it.”

  “Oh, James, I know you don’t like me to go on about it, but I love you so much, and it—”

  “Win.”

  “Yes?”

  “Let me be.”

  On Thursday morning, his secretary slunk into his office and closed the door behind her. She hid her mouth with her hand and mumbled through her fingers like a convict in a prison movie. “Mr. Cobleigh, the reason I didn’t buzz is there’s a lady on the phone who wants you but she refuses to give her name and I’ve asked her three times.”

  “Hmm. Oh, I know. It must be Mrs. Snoud. Hudson Container’s widow. Her daughter is trying to have her declared incompetent.”

  “Oh. Gee, sorry to have come in here like this, Mr. Cobleigh, but I didn’t know—”

  “That’s all right, Gert.”

  A moment later, James lifted the telephone to take the call he had not exactly expected but was not surprised to receive.

  At noon on Friday, the interior windowless area of the law office where the secretaries sat was so hot that an hour earlier one of the women had collapsed, pitching forward and concussion her head on the keyboard of her typewriter. James glanced at his secretary. Her round face looked dangerously pink, and her white blouse was glued to her ample
wet back. She managed a weak “Fine, Mr. Cobleigh” when he told her he’d be having lunch at his club.

  Instead, James entered the tropical rain forest atmosphere of an uptown Lexington Avenue IRT station. A quarter hour later, only four blocks from his own apartment, his tie in a tight knot, his jacket properly buttoned, not a single hair out of place, he strode one block west on pavement that had softened in the heat.

  A half hour later he was sipping his second iced gin and tonic and having his thighs stroked by the cool hands of the wife of the senior corporate partner of Ivers and Hood, Ginger Cummings.

  Late on the night of September 1, 1947, when Win lay stirruped and exposed on the delivery room table in Lying-In Hospital, sweating and grunting, giving birth to Olivia Rebecca Cobleigh, James was in Southampton, Long Island, in the sea-scented white wicker bedroom of the Hamilton Cummingses’ summer house, making love to Ginger Cummings for the third time that day, even though Ginger was so drunk she did not seem to comprehend she was having sexual intercourse and kept announcing it was late and time to say good night. (Ham Cummings, in Chicago for a five-million-dollar real estate closing, was at that moment lying back in his bed at the Ambassador, having a fifty-dollar prostitute do to him what Ginger had done to James two hours earlier.)

  That same night, Nanny Stewart, a thick-jointed, six-foot-tall Scotswoman with dark brown eyes and a light brown mustache, allowed Thomas, who was crying, and Nicholas, who was not, to get into bed with her. “Now, Thomas. Do not fret. Be my big man.” Her voice was so deep it made her body vibrate in a comforting hum. “Now, boys. Now, now. Your mother will soon be home with a new brother or sister, and your father will come home from his business trip just as soon as he hears about your mother, and all will be fine.”

  Thomas slept in the crook of her arm, his thumb a respectable half-inch from his mouth. Nicholas lay flat against her stomach, under her giant bosom, which shielded him the way a canopy might shelter him from the rain.

  “There now. Such good boys. Oh, yes. Very good. Nicholas, are your eyes closed? You’re a big, brave boy, aren’t you? Too old for a nanny, of course, but stay here with Thomas. Shhh. Such a big boy. Don’t fret any more. All mothers and fathers have words. Everyone will be home soon. You’ll see, Nicholas. Shhh now. Sleep.”