by Susan Isaacs
His father wouldn’t have fidgeted. James would have sat straight and perfect, his wing tips polished to a cold gleam, his hair so flawlessly cut it didn’t move, his handsome hauteur daunting Dr. Wigglesworth. But when they were summoned by Mr. Keil, the housemaster said to Charlie, “Your father is with Dr. Wigglesworth.” He turned to Nicholas. “Yours was apparently at some legal function and could not be reached. Instead, your mother is here.”
Winifred squirmed in her chair as if trying to locate the softest spot with her backside. She had tied her hair in a bun at the back of her neck—a proper visit-the-headmaster style—but it had reasserted itself, and frizzy wisps of red stuck out all over her head. It was the hair of an overwrought person.
Nicholas looked at Charlie. Although it was four in the afternoon, sixteen hours after their first taste of vodka, Charlie still looked drunk. His eyes were open unnaturally wide, and he was staring at his father with a doltish expression, his mouth agape, his tongue resting on his bottom lip. Nicholas still was queasy. His eyeballs felt swollen. He had a terrible taste in his mouth, as if he had bit into something mushy with decay.
“And you, Mr. Harrison?” Dr. Wigglesworth asked Charlie’s father. “Do you have any idea why I asked you to repair to Trowbridge immediately?”
Louis Harrison (known as Big Lou to his colleagues in the supermarket industry and to the FBI, who was investigating his sweetheart contracts with truckers, butchers, and warehousemen) grunted. “What?”
“I asked, merely, if perhaps Mr. Keil or Charles happened to mention to you just why it was necessary to make this trip, no doubt at great inconvenience to yourself.”
Mr. Harrison sat beside Winifred facing Dr. Wigglesworth’s desk, but his chair was angled so that Nicholas could see his quarter profile. He was of average height, his torso long in comparison to his stumpy legs, but his two hundred fifty pounds of hard, authoritative fat made him look imposing. And he was impressive in his disregard for the ambience of Trowbridge. Most nonalumni fathers tried to look like the sort of man their sons were becoming, but Mr. Harrison wore a sky-blue suit with an open-necked red sports shirt with tiny dog faces printed in black all over the fabric. Nicholas shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Mr. Harrison was taking more time to respond to the headmaster than anyone ever had. He looked, and his mother had pulled her handbag strap tighter, choking off the circulation to her finger, and Dr. Wigglesworth had lifted one of the glass paperweights on his desk and hefted it in his hand. It dropped with a hideous clunk when Mr. Harrison finally spoke. “We got a problem, Doc. Let’s talk.”
“Well, naturally, it is my hope we can do just that.”
“Okay. Now listen. I get a call at six this morning.” Mr. Harrison’s Boston accent was much more pronounced than Charlie’s, and Nicholas had difficulty hearing where one word ended and the next began. “I drove over from Boston. Mrs. Cobleigh here came—what did you do, drive up?” Winifred shook her head. “Fly?” She nodded, turning from Dr. Wigglesworth to Mr. Harrison. Nicholas noted she seemed more fascinated than appalled by him, staring at his chins and his dog-print shirt. “She flew up from New York, Doc. You can see she’s white as a ghost, all upset, so why don’t you just tell us what the boys did.”
Dr. Wigglesworth’s entire face seemed to narrow, as if forming itself into the cutting edge of a cleaver. He bent sideways, opened a low desk drawer and lifted the empty vodka bottle to his desk. “They have admitted drinking the entire contents of this very bottle.”
“They smash up anything?”
“Fortunately, no.”
“Fight?”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Harrison. Perhaps you don’t realize the import—”
“Did they hurt anyone?”
“No.”
“So what happened?”
“They were drunk, sir. Drunk and making a horrible spectacle of themselves, coming out of their pigsty of a room and shrieking the most obscene, the most—”
“That’s it?”
“Perhaps you don’t understand our ways, Mr. Harrison. Alcoholic beverages are strictly—”
“You called me six in the morning because two kids tied one on?”
“We restrained ourselves, actually. We didn’t want you driving through the night.”
“Doc, tell me. What’s the big deal?”
Winifred reached out and gently touched Louis Harrison’s cuff. “Mr. Harrison,” she said, so low Nicholas could hardly hear her, “they’re really quite unbending about this sort of thing.”
“Well, let’s see about that, Mrs. Cobleigh.” He gave her hand a reassuring pat, the way a trainer does his boxer between rounds. “All right? Let me handle it.” Winifred nodded. “Now listen, Doc, you’re a minister, right? So why don’t you just have a little—what do you call it?—a little compassion. These kids made a mistake. It happens. Turn the other cheek and forgive and forget.”
“Mr. Harrison, both as a minister and as headmaster of Trowbridge, I am obliged to uphold certain standards of behavior. I am afraid we cannot tolerate this flagrant violation of our rules. Even from—or, perhaps, most especially from—two of our finest students, two young men for whom I personally held the most exalted hopes, two boys who might have reached the heights of excellence, who I prayed might bring honor to—” He stopped because Win had suddenly dropped her head and hidden her face in her hands. Nicholas looked away, wishing he were alone so he could cry, wishing for the hundredth time that day that his father could have been found. Dr. Wigglesworth was too much for his mother; she could not even correct a surly maid. “Mrs. Cobleigh, your family’s history has been interwoven with Trowbridge’s and it pains me more than I can say to have to—”
“Cut the crap!” Mr. Harrison’s voice was so powerful that Nicholas and Charlie started, banging into each other, and the headmaster gripped the edges of his desk. “You got her all upset! Now what is it? In or out? Your two best boys, one of them from a family who’s been coming here since before the flood, and my Charlie, who’s bringing along you-know-how-much for that new field house you say you have to have. So just get it over with. In, out. Yes, no. Don’t upset her any more. You don’t treat women that way.”
“Perhaps if we might discuss the matter alone, Mr. Harrison.”
“Doc, I don’t have time to stay for tea. Know what I mean? The Teamsters are trying to organize my cashiers.”
“Mr. Harrison—”
“Look, Mrs. Cobleigh’s a New York society lady, and her Nick can write his own ticket and she’ll pull the little kid out for good measure—what’s his name?”
“Thomas,” Winifred whispered.
“So she’ll pull Nick and Thomas. And she has a couple more boys—right?—who’ll go someplace else, that St. Somebody’s, and who knows, half their New York friends could go with them. And for me, Doc, do you think I give a flying—a hoot about Trowbridge? My wife says Charlie should go to private school; I say fine. She says Trowbridge; I say fine. You say no Trowbridge; I tell my wife we buy another school a field house. You think I give a—”
“A student’s academic record is always a mitigating factor,” Dr. Wigglesworth said quietly.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Although I am profoundly disappointed in both these boys, I would certainly not wish to have them leave Trowbridge. Of course, we will have to invoke certain disciplinary measures.”
“That sounds okay to me. Okay with you, Mrs. Cobleigh?” Winifred nodded.
“I believe I am a balanced man, Mr. Harrison.”
“Good. Me too.” Louis Harrison stood and, for a man of his astounding girth, strode toward the door with terrifying speed. Nicholas tried to move aside, but Mr. Harrison grabbed his shirtfront with his left hand and grabbed Charlie’s with his right. He dragged both boys toward him until their faces were so close to his Nicholas could feel the heat from his skin. “Charlie,” he said so low only the boys could hear him, “you little stinkpot. You do this again and I’ll break y
our legs.” His small puffy eyes turned to Nicholas. “We’re all gonna go out for dinner in Beale before this discipline shit begins, and you’re gonna bust your butt telling your mother how sorry you are, how you’ll never do anything like this again. You hear me, pretty boy?” Nicholas nodded. “She can’t take this kind of thing. Look at her. She’s stretched as far as she can go.”
Nicholas looked. His mother’s hands, now folded in her lap, were trembling. She was staring out the window, away from Dr. Wigglesworth, the Harrisons, even him.
It was two days before Thanksgiving, 1956, and Samuel Tuttle knew he was dying. He lay in a cranked-up bed in a suite in a wing of New York Hospital his father had endowed. He was eighty-seven years old and his heart was failing. His lungs were so filled with fluid that each breath came with a horrible gurgle, the sound of a drowning man trying to drag oxygen from the water. The sound disturbed him more than the pain in his chest, for each time he inhaled he saw Maisie stiffen, bracing herself so she would not wince or show that she knew he was dying and that his dying terrified her. Her chair was pulled to his bedside. Her posture was unnaturally erect, as if invisible hands were lifting and holding her under her chin. “I’m comfortable, my dear,” he managed to whisper. She nodded but could not look into his eyes. Instead, she watched her own finger trace a stripe along the length of his pajama sleeve.
He didn’t want to die because he knew it would end Maisie’s happiness. She would go on, of course, but it would end her shine just as surely as her silver candle snuffer killed the light, leaving nothing but smoky darkness. It was such a shame, he thought, for at seventy-five she was still lovely. Her complexion seemed as flawless in the merciless hospital fluorescence as it had that first day on Washington Square; the only lines on her face were the spiky shadows cast by her long dark lashes. She was too good to leave, and although he believed absolutely in a heaven, he did not know what it would be, whether heaven meant all souls sitting by the hand of God or if each soul created his own heaven and he could sit by Maisie for all time.
He could leave his sons, for they would mourn him but not really miss him. He hated to leave Winifred, though, because her life was incomplete. Or perhaps it was complete. Perhaps for the rest of her life she would sit waiting for that husband, pinching her pale, freckled cheeks to give them color to lure the unlurable, a box of shirts or ties or cuff links or a watch beside her, as though he were a gigolo whose favor she had to purchase each night, even though he invariably came home late and often drunk, stinking of liquor and some other woman’s perfume. Plain, simple Winifred, still trying to entice the handsome, cunning, cold man she’d married, after eighteen years and six children still unable to keep her eyes from him, still grabbing onto his hand or reaching to stroke his hair, pleased to humiliate herself, like a peasant crawling on his belly to kiss the hem of the king’s robe. And such a disdainful king.
Samuel knew that James Cobleigh could keep him out of heaven. He hated his son-in-law; how he played Winifred and the children in his game against Samuel. Using his hold on Winifred to get Samuel—a major client of his law firm—to plead his case after he’d disgraced himself in a flagrant affair with the wife of the senior corporate partner.
On the family occasions when Samuel had to see his son-in-law, James had wrapped his children around himself, listening to loquacious Olivia’s half-hour recounting of her exhausting internal debate over whether to have her hair cut, marveling at Thomas’s biographies of the twelve apostles, reading Treasure Island to the twins, even helping Edward assemble a model ship—all to insulate himself from Samuel. And he used Nicholas most of all, because he was astute enough to realize the boy was Samuel’s favorite. Just two months earlier, the weekend before Nicholas left for his final year at Trowbridge, James was in the Tuttles’ library, sitting beside the boy and studying the world atlas for hours while Samuel, the outsider, watched the two fair heads bent over a map of France, James following the coastline with his fingers, stopping here and there to recount one of his adventures in the OSS. Samuel had hoped that at his age Nicholas would be past hero-worship, but the boy was unable to resist James’s cool recollections of extraordinary danger, and while his father sat back, legs stretched out and crossed casually at the ankle, Nicholas flushed, paled, clenched fists, and flexed muscles as the narrative progressed, fighting Nazis beside his father on a camelback sofa.
Samuel loved Nicholas the most because the boy was most like him: serious, truehearted, a little sad, with a deep hidden pocket of passion most other Tuttles and Cobleighs seemed to lack, the same sort of passion that had allowed Samuel’s love for Maisie. He could see it behind the boy’s eyes when, home from school, Nicholas opened his arms to receive his brothers and sisters; when—even while being whipped by his mother on the tennis court—he watched Winifred’s great strides and awesome backhand with pride and delight; and when, alas, he saw James merely walk into a room and smile at him. Samuel considered this weakness for James the only flaw in the boy’s character; he would not allow himself to think Nicholas might have inherited anything besides his father’s admittedly good looks. And he was an admirable-looking boy, not with the cheap appeal of his father, but with a face that reflected his fineness. As usual, Maisie had said it best: “The marvelous thing about Nicholas,” she’d remarked, “is that if you told him what an absolutely splendid boy he is, he’d believe you’d confused him with Thomas.”
So at the moment he died, Samuel Tuttle was thinking of the two people he loved most, his wife and his grandson. Fittingly, his final thought was a quiet little prayer that Nicholas find someone as good and beautiful and, yes, as grand as Maisie. He might have asked for more, but he had no more time.
The cuffs, collar, and shirtfront of Nicholas’s evening shirt were so stiffly starched that when he touched them they emitted a tapping sound, but his father didn’t hear. James rested his arms on the ledge of the box at the Metropolitan Opera House and strained forward, trying to position himself directly in the path of the music as it soared upward from the stage. Nicholas ran his index finger under his collar, but while it relieved one side of his neck, it pulled the starched fabric tighter on the other, and the itching and the rawness were nearly unbearable. He tried to concentrate on the opera—Mimi was in bad shape, lying in bed and singing “Rodolfo! Rodolfo!”—but she was such a skinny little thing, and besides, he had seen La Bohème twice before and knew it was hopeless. The other soprano, however, looked strong and healthy, with broad shoulders and big feet like Heather’s best friend Patty Bollinger’s. It was too bad she couldn’t give Mimi a transfusion. He fidgeted with his cufflinks, trying to take them off in the dark box so he could roll up his sleeves and at least relieve the terrible itch on his wrists, but the movement disturbed his father, who turned and shot him an irritated look.
Nicholas sat still. He did not dare annoy his father, because James had been in a tense mood all during Christmas vacation. When Nicholas had come down from Trowbridge with Thomas, who was a fourth-former, and Charlie Harrison, they had walked in on a mood that had not lifted, although much was done to cover it over. His mother had come out of her bedroom to greet them nearly two hours after they’d arrived. The underneath part of her eyes were red, but they were not swollen, as though she’d been crying frequently, but not recently. She was dressed for dinner in a long, dark green velvet skirt and a white frilly blouse, but her hair was uncombed. Not just messy the way it usually got after a long day, but untended to. She’d kissed the two boys, and even Charlie, but in a strange, slow-motion manner, as if someone were behind the scenes whispering, All right. Now kiss Thomas. Put your hands on his cheeks and bring his face up to yours. That’s right.
None of them remarked about it, of course, even though at dinner she didn’t say a word except “No, thank you” when she was offered something. She looked drawn, and the skin beneath her freckles, always pale, was a sickly yellow white. James, who rarely ate dinner with his children, presided over the table that first nig
ht as if his wife were absent, eliciting amusing tales of Trowbridge from the three oldest boys, admonishing Edward not to clang his knife against the bread plate, and ringing a small crystal bell for the maid, as though there were no electric buzzer under the rug right by Winifred’s foot. After dessert was served, James had peered across the table to his wife. She had her hands in her lap and was staring down at her fruitcake. He said quietly, neutral and cold, “Why don’t you go and rest, Win.” She left the table without a word, an obedient, slow-motion child with tangled hair. James glanced at Charlie and explained, “Her father died last month. She’s a bit down about it,” and Charlie nodded.
But Olivia, who was nine, slipped into Nicholas’s room after that dinner and at great length explained that Winifred had been acting strange even before Samuel had gone into the hospital. “Do you think,” Nicholas began, “I mean, you know she had to come up to school for me. Do you think—”
“No, Nicky. God. It’s been going on since school started, and it’s really awful. She doesn’t go out any more. I swear. She’s not going anywhere and she doesn’t want to take phone calls and she cries a lot.”
“She wasn’t that bad when she came up to school.”
“It’s getting worse and worse,” Olivia said. Of all the children, she looked most like Winifred, with the same horsey face and large teeth. Her hair, red and wild, was trapped into a ponytail and tied with a red and green plaid grosgrain ribbon. “I mean, you know Mummy, Nicky. The day after Thanksgiving she starts Christmas shopping. Well, she couldn’t because that was Grandpa’s funeral—I’m not trying to make sick jokes, really—but she didn’t even make up a list; and you know December first she takes out the tree ornaments to make sure nothing’s been broken, but she kept putting it off even though I reminded her a million times and so did Abby, and it turned out we had to make Daddy go and buy the tree yesterday even though he’s very tired because he’s working late all the time, and then Abby and Michael and I decorated it by ourselves and when we called Mummy to come look she didn’t want to but when we finally got her to see the tree all lit up she started to cry.”