by Susan Isaacs
James’s cousin Bryan was the outgoing sort who led the conga line at country club dances and hoisted his friends’ undershorts up the flagpole at the yacht club, but he became a partner in the Providence law firm of Broadhurst & Fenn anyway because his father’s costume jewelry company was the firm’s third largest client. “The law is so effing boring, J. C.,” Bryan said. The two men saw each other twice a year, when Bryan came to New York on business. “Is it boring in New York, too?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“Law school was boring, but I said what the hell, it’s Harvard and it’s supposed to be boring. But this is even worse because it’s still effing boring but there aren’t any girls around. I mean, it’s one thing to sit through Evidence if you know five minutes after it’s over you can go out and squeeze titty. But here. Jeee-sus, J. C., I’m working my dick to the bone and then going over to old man Potter’s desk to get his okay for every diddly-shit paper I draw up.”
“Well, you have Jeannie and the kids.”
“J. C., Jeannie’s idea of a hot night is eating cheese toast in bed. And the kids are okay, nice kids, but not at ten at night.”
“Jeannie’s not…
“Definitely not. Three kids and closed up shop. ‘I caaan’t, Bryan. I’ve got my little visitor and it would be all icky for you.’ And on the two days a month she’s not on the rag she’s…forget it. Ever see those ice cubes with the holes in the middle? That’s what it’s like wonking Jeannie. Even practicing law is better.”
“Um, do you have anyone else?”
“Sure. I don’t have a choice, do I? I’ve got one of the secretaries, sweet, kind of dumb, takes care of her mother in a wheelchair and can only sneak out for a fast poke Wednesday nights. And the golf pro’s daughter, built like an Amazon, get smacked by one of her tits and you can get knocked from here to Newport, but she’s giving it to half the club so I don’t get to see her that much. And then…you know, some sweet numbers who need a couple of twenties to lubricate their little cylinders. What the hell. It beats bar association meetings.”
“I suppose.”
“Hey, J. C., don’t look so glum. It’s not so bad.”
“I suppose not.”
“Stop supposing, for Christ’s sake. What’s wrong? Hmm? Having trouble with Winnie the Pooh?”
“No.”
“No, I guess not. She must really crave it, popping out kids like it was more fun than a clambake. How many now?”
“Five. Nick, Tom, O—that’s Olivia—and the twins, Michael and Abby. But that’s it. Win knows it.”
“She wants more?”
“I think so. It makes her feel important. Look, Bryan, she just has them and then there’s the nanny and the maids and she doesn’t have to actually fuss with them, but it gives her something else to do, another body to take for dancing lessons or buy skates for or talk about with her friends. She runs around with all those girls she went to school with—they’re all wealthy and social and she’s related to half of them—and they gossip about their lovers and she talks about her children and they give her a little pat on the head and say, ‘Aren’t you too, too marvelous, Win, managing the way you do.’ She needs something to make her stand out so she forgets to put in that thing, and what do you know, eight months later she’s guest of honor at another baby shower and she and her mother are planning the christening breakfast and then—one, two, three—the baby goes to Nanny Stewart and Win’s off riding and shopping and lunching. You know Win. Perpetual motion. Busy with fifteen charities. Making dinner parties for some crippled harpist or spending a week looking for a new brush for her horse.”
“Ah. So she doesn’t have time for you?”
“No. She’ll give me all the time I want. So would a couple of those friends of hers. What a crew they are.”
“The question is, how much time do you want from her, J. C.? Come on. Talk to me. I’m your cousin. Your oldest buddy. Your best man, for Christ’s sake. Didn’t I get you into this in the first place?”
“I’m seeing someone.”
“Jesus, I knew it. I just knew it.”
“It’s not—I’m not in love with her. I like her. She’s great to look at. Blond, everything nice and tight with a kind of thin, cold bitch face, but…well, she really likes to be persuaded not to be such a cold bitch. Really likes it a lot.”
“Christ, J. C. You are something. I mean, everything you touch turns to gold. Jesus, she sounds…Jesus, you are one lucky effing bastard. No kidding. I get Jeannie with her fat-mouth father and his chain of three lousy drugstores and some dumb little secretary with a flabby ass and you get a Tuttle and—”
“And a drunk. She knocks down more than a fifth of brandy a day. It takes her all day to work on it, but by nine, ten at night she’s completely gone.”
“Oh. When do you see her?”
“At lunch, usually. That’s when she’s best. Or when her husband is out of town I spend nights with her, dole it out so she doesn’t turn into a rag doll before I’m ready to go to sleep. It works pretty well. Win thinks I have important business in Boston. My—um—lady plays long-distance operator.”
“Sweet Christ, J. C., you’ve got some pair of brass balls. No kidding. What does the lady’s husband do?”
“A lawyer.”
“In a big firm?”
“Yes.”
“Which one? Come on, J. C.”
“Mine.”
“Yours? You’re kidding. Oh, shit.”
“He’s the senior corporate partner.”
“Oh, shit! Are you crazy?”
“Why?”
“Dicking it to some drunk whose husband’s over you? Are you kidding? What happens if she ties one on and starts blabbing about what you’ve been doing?”
“She has. At a party one night, about six months ago. We all laughed at her. Win said she thinks the lady has delusions about me. Delusions.”
“You’re out of your mind. Don’t you realize what you’re risking? You could screw up your whole life. Your job. Your family. Why pick her? You’re not in love with her.”
“No. But she’s fun.”
“Fun? She’s poison. She could kill you. Jesus, didn’t you get your fill of danger during the war? Why don’t you just find someone and have a good time? This one is walking trouble. What if her husband finds out?”
“I think he knows. He’s not as naive as Win, that’s for sure.”
“Oh, Christ. What’s he going to do?”
“Nothing, probably.”
“But what if he does?”
“Then I’ll have a problem.”
“J. C., don’t you understand? You could piss everything away. Everything. If old man Tuttle—”
“So far, so good. I’m still on top.”
“You could fall flat on your ass, J. C.”
“Haven’t yet, Bryan, have I?”
Gray stone window boxes, like miniature sarcophagi, rested on the window ledges outside the Cobleigh nursery eighteen floors above the street, and Win had planted them so lavishly with trailing blue lobelia and upright pink phlox that if Nanny Stewart had not shepherded the children downstairs each day, they might think Manhattan was a pink and blue paradise, a vast alfresco nursery.
That was the beginning. As if to deny the pressures of Manhattan, Win tried to bring the clean country life of her parents’ farm to Park Avenue. In January of 1949, eight months pregnant with Abigail and Michael, she had begun ordering large quantities of seed from catalogs and sowing them in hundreds of tiny pots until Nicholas and Thomas could no longer use their bathroom. African daisy sprouts filled the tub, and the sink and toilet seat cover were obscured by a future salad of lettuce and parsley and tomato. When spring came, she divided her bounty between the Cobleigh cottage in the Berkshires and the Tuttle kitchen garden and bestowed homeless seedlings on friends, neighbors, and servants.
She could not be fruitful enough. In the autumn of 1949 a small white truck with a discreet Les Fleurs painted
on the driver’s door began pulling up to the delivery entrance, and a white jacketed Mr. Plotsky and his green-jacketed assistant would spend nearly an hour arranging the week’s cut flowers in twenty freshly washed vases and bowls.
On Christmas morning, the children opened their presents under a gleaming blue spruce. Mr. Plotsky had decked the halls with holly and ivy, and the bill for the red and white poinsettias encircling the living room was nearly five hundred dollars, although Win gave them away that afternoon when she learned they were poisonous and might inadvertently be chewed by Olivia or the twins or one of the two new Doberman puppies she had bought for Nicholas and Thomas.
When the noise of five children watching a puppy urinate on the rug compounded by six visiting Tuttles and Tuttles-in-law offering to clean it up and calling for rags and club soda and paper toweling reached such a crescendo that it blasted James out from his fog of scotch and cognac, his eyes opened on masses of red and white roses scattered on chests and tables throughout the bedroom. He lifted the crystal bud vase from his night table and slammed it, along with its single perfect red rose, across the room, where it shattered against a silver pitcher of white roses that rested on Win’s dresser.
Beyond the bedroom there was sudden silence. Within seconds, Winifred entered the room. “What was that noise?” she whispered.
“Who asked you to open the goddamn door?”
Winifred closed the door behind her and leaned against it, as if afraid of the consequences of getting too close to her husband. “It’s eleven o’clock.”
“Win, can’t you leave me alone?”
“It’s Christmas. James, you were gone all last night, and—”
“Get out.”
“Nick knows something is wrong, James. And Tom—”
“I told you, get rid of that thing.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“Oh, God. Oh, please, James, please. It won’t be any bother to you. I swear it. I can’t. I can’t.”
“I told you once and I’ll tell you again. Either you go to Puerto Rico and get an abortion or I’ll never touch you again. I mean it. I told you I’d had enough. I’m not going to be some goddamn stud to keep up the Tuttle line.”
“It was an accident.”
“They were all accidents.”
“No they weren’t, James. Please, if you’ll just—”
“Get out of here.”
“Dinner’s at three. Tom and O made place cards. They’re so cute, James—”
“I have other plans.”
“Please. You can’t.”
“Can’t I?”
The sky hung leaden, the air damp and heavy. It was one of those gray days that persist in Manhattan, chill, seasonless weather which underscores how far from unambiguous nature—from clear sun, cleansing storms, silent snow—the city has shifted. But the boys who ran through the thick air of the playing field, boys with red cheeks and shiny hair and brilliant school colors, seemed alien to the dullness, as if they’d been bred in a healthier place, an English meadow, a Danish seaport, and were immune to New York.
Nicholas shone. His arms stretched skyward, his fingers spread wide, and he sprang at precisely the right moment to grab the soccer ball as it hurtled toward the St. Stephen’s goal he was tending. His coordination was equaled by his grace, and he would have drifted to the ground, a prepubescent demigod descending to earth to present a black and white orb to mankind, if the Cunningham center forward, an ox of a ten-year-old in green and gold, hadn’t tried to head the ball toward the goal and, in doing so, butted his thick skull into Nicholas’s chin.
The pain started narrow as a dagger, but as it moved up through his jaw and the roof of his mouth into his head, it burgeoned until it felt like a shovel digging into his brain. Nicholas screamed, but the noise was muted as his cracked jaw locked onto his tongue, filling his mouth with blood. He came down on his right side, trying to open his mouth to spit out the blood and the broken teeth, afraid he would choke. But his jaw wouldn’t work and the best he could do was blow a little blood out between his lips.
“You okay, Nick?” Coach Jensen demanded. “Nick? Nick, say something. What hurts, son?”
The pain that was tearing apart his head spread down his neck into his shoulder. Nicholas tried to take a deep relaxing breath, but his mouth was closed and his nose filled with mucus from involuntary tears, and the only way he could get air was in short, panicky sniffs. He lifted his hand to gesture the hovering coach away and then realized part of his agony was coming from the hand. He had fallen on it and his wrist was broken; his hand hung before him swollen, deformed, a fat flipper. When he saw it, and the red-purple streaks where the skin of his arm had come off in strips, he moaned, but his own voice sounded like an animal’s, and it frightened him.
It frightened the Cunningham and St. Stephen’s teams too, for he saw pairs and pairs of cleated shoes stepping back from him. “Nick!” Coach Jensen demanded. He sounded angry. “Nick! Say something.”
“Jesus. Shit.” The Cunningham coach sounded hoarse and angrier. “You better get an ambulance fast, Jake. His arm looks like a piece of raw meat. And the mouth.”
He either fainted or slept on the way to New York Hospital, but that was a short respite. They swabbed his cuts with burning cold liquid and said “Hey! Hey!” when he tried to twist his way out of their grasp. They let his head droop as they lifted him from the bed on wheels to the X-ray table and said “Okay!” when he shrieked from the pain in his jaw. The doctor who wired his jaw held a huge needle up in the air and said, “You’re what, ten years old? Come on, be a big boy! It’s just a broken jaw and a broken wrist. We’ll put you back together in no time. Easy as pie. You’ll just be out a couple of back teeth. Who needs back teeth, huh? Now come on. Stop the crying. Be brave.” When he tried to scramble out of the restraining straps that held him, the nurse demanded, “How can we help you if you’re acting like this?” And when he wept when they pulled straight his curled fingers as they applied the cast, they said, “All right, now. It’s been a little rough but it’s almost over.”
They would not release him because there was no one to claim him. Nicholas lay on a spare bed facing a white tiled wall in a corner of the emergency room, plastered and bandaged and very cold. The coach had told him to grab some sleep and then had excused himself to find a pay phone. “I’ll keep trying your house and your dad’s office, Nick.” He also called the school’s lawyer.
He kept his eyes closed and tried to think happy thoughts, but the pain would swell until it broke through in tears or a loud moan. Now that there was nothing more to be done to him, the interns and nurses behaved as if his bed were empty. They leaned against it and gossiped and drank coffee and whispered about him, that he was a spoiled rich kid from a private school. One said, “Yeah? What ever happened to the stiff upper lip they’re supposed to have? Noisy little stinker. No, he’s out like a light.” But a minute later they forgot Nicholas and circled around their newest patients, the victims of a fire in a dry cleaning store.
Nicholas shut his eyes but it was too late; he had seen them, three people, one perhaps a woman, and he could smell them. He prayed, “Dear God. Please save these people. Don’t let them die. Let their skin grow back. Please. Help them so it doesn’t hurt and they stop screaming. Oh, God, let my mummy come. Please. Or my daddy. Just make my throat stop hurting, and my head and ear, and I’ll never be fresh again, and God, please fix these people or let the doctors give them some better medicine so they stop the screams. Please, where is everyone?”
It was one of the few times he asked. Nicholas was the eldest, the strongest, the bravest, the quietest. He did well in school and in sports, and had a sweet smile, so his mother tousled his hair or kissed him as she passed on the way to soothe Thomas, Olivia, Michael, Abigail, or Edward, and the utter gentleness of her touch, the sweet odor of her perfume, softened the moment she was beside him and was so precious he would have felt greedy demanding more. His
father worked late nearly every night and when he was home seemed perpetually stunned by the assault of the younger children and the dogs and the cat and the parrot. Nicholas could almost feel his father’s temples throbbing and couldn’t bear to burden him further with a demand for a game of checkers. And of course he never sought his brothers and sisters, for they were always there, on his lap, in his toy chest, yanking his sleeve, screeching in his ear, drooling on his shirt. Nicky! Nicky! Nicky! Hug me, read to me, take off my Band-Aid, tell Nanny I don’t have to eat tapioca, fix my barrette, show me how to hold the ball for a sinker.
But now he needed someone. “Dear God, please let Mummy or Daddy know I’m here. Please let Nanny Stewart or Grandma or Grandpa. Anyone. Please find them. Thank you.”
Win was five blocks from New York Hospital, at her friend Prissy’s, where she was sipping a second martini and helping divide three hundred charitable New Yorkers into thirty congenial tables for the annual Cranberry Ball. James was two miles away, in the steam room of the New York Athletic Club, getting ready for cocktails with his latest mistress. (Her name was Germaine Bonnier. She was the French teacher at St. Stephen’s. James had met her two days after Ginger Cummings was admitted to a small institution in New Jersey to dry out. James had spied Mlle. Bonnier at Thomas’s class’s Fête Française and had propositioned her moments later—in French—while Win stood at his side smiling and nodding and trying to catch a word here and there.) Nanny Stewart was a mile away in Central Park, supervising Michael and Abigail as they wheeled the big pram with the baby, Edward, along the path to the zoo.
“Dear God, please have someone stop and come over here and ask me if I want some water. And let them give me a blanket. I’m sorry I hit O. I’ll never do it again. Please make that man stop screaming like that. Please, the pain is going up behind my eye.”