by Irwin Shaw
Hazen pivoted in his chair, looked up. “Good God, Katherine, what are you doing here?” He stood up, hastily, dropping the spoon he was holding onto his plate with a clatter, his napkin falling to the floor.
“I came to see how my husband was faring,” she said evenly. “In case you’ve forgotten, that’s you, Russell.”
The silence after these words was oppressive around the table. Mrs. Hazen’s eyes were blank and the pupils curiously dilated and Strand wondered if the lady was drugged.
“How did you know I’d be here?” Hazen’s tone was aggressive.
“Not through any fault of yours, dear. Your communications are few and far between, aren’t they? Your office was kind enough to tell me. And of course friends in America are quick to let me know of your activities. Legions of friends.” She looked deliberately around the table, fixing each of them for a moment with an appraising glance. “Ah,” she said, “I see you have your portable harem with you. And this handsome couple must be the Strands, of whom I’ve heard so much.”
Strand stood up, because he didn’t know what else to do. Hazen looked as though he were trying to speak but finding it impossible.
“Good evening, Linda,” the woman went on. “I’m glad to see you looking so well. I hope dear Russell is taking good care of you.”
“Very good care,” Linda said, her hands moving in a flustered little gesture. “As always.”
The woman nodded. “As always,” she said. She turned toward Mrs. Harcourt. “And you, Madame Harcourt, I see that you’re still in the lineup, to use a sporting term that might be considered appropriate for the occasion.”
Mrs. Harcourt folded her napkin and stood up with dignity. “If I may be excused, Mr. Hazen,” she said, “I’d like to go up to my room.”
“Of course, of course.” Hazen sounded hoarse, as though suddenly afflicted with a constriction of the throat.
Mrs. Hazen turned and watched Mrs. Harcourt make her way across the room and did not turn back to the table until Mrs. Harcourt had gone through the door. “It’s admirable,” she said to no one in particular, “how she keeps her looks. I do approve of a woman who doesn’t let herself go. Russell, don’t you think it’s about time to introduce me to your new friends?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Strand,” Hazen mumbled.
“I’m delighted finally to meet you,” Mrs. Hazen said. “I hope you’ve recovered from your experience with the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Strand.”
“Yes, thank you,” Strand said, because it was plain that Mrs. Hazen expected him to say something and might stand there for minutes in accusing silence if he didn’t speak. “Largely because of the efforts of your husband and Mrs. Roberts,” he said, trying to make the moment socially bearable. “Along with Mr. Conroy, whom I presume you’ve met. I owe my life to them.”
“Ah, the faithful Conroy. Always available. Although I was not aware that service as a lifeguard was included among his duties.” In her way of speaking she sometimes fell into the ornate rhetorical rhythm that she must have picked up from her husband. “Yes,” Mrs. Hazen said, “my husband is well known as a saver of lives. Except for those of his family. But I hadn’t known that Linda had added that to her list of good works.”
“Katherine, you’re embarrassing everybody in the place.” Hazen looked wildly around him. There was a quartet of middle-aged English tourists at the table next to theirs and they were clearly interested in the conversation. “I’m going to be in Paris tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t we talk there?”
“I won’t be in Paris tomorrow,” Mrs. Hazen said calmly. “I’m on my way down to the Basque country by car for a holiday and I find it more convenient to talk here. Besides”—she moved around the table to Mrs. Harcourt’s vacant chair—“I believe a glass of wine would do me good. Is there any left in the bottle, Russell?” She sat down firmly.
“Leslie, Linda,” Strand said, “I think it would be wiser if we moved on.”
Leslie half-stood up to leave, but Mrs. Hazen put her hand firmly on her arm. “Please stay. I would feel terribly guilty if I thought I was breaking up Russell’s charming little party. And there are things I have to say to our host that I think you ought to hear….”
“Please take your hand away,” Leslie said. “My husband and I are leaving.”
Mrs. Hazen kept her grip on Leslie’s arm. “If anybody leaves I warn you I am going to scream,” she said. “Loudly.”
Leslie made a move to pull her arm away and Mrs. Hazen screamed. It was a wild, shattering, sirenlike wail. When she stopped, the room was absolutely silent and the other diners sat immobilized, as though frozen in place by some new and devastating instantaneous industrial process. Mrs. Hazen smiled and dropped her arm. “Mr. Strand, Russell, I suggest you sit down, too. And Russell, the wine is near you.” She picked up a glass from the table and held it out toward her husband. “If you’d be so kind.”
“Sit down, Allen,” Hazen said hoarsely. “The woman’s crazy.” He sat down, too. His hand trembled as he took the wine out of the cooler and poured some into Mrs. Hazen’s glass.
She sipped daintily. “One thing I must say for you, Russell, you always knew how to choose wines. I must apologize to you ladies and gentlemen for the extreme measures I have had to take, but lesser measures have failed, like letters that have gone unanswered for three years and countless transatlantic telephone calls, and this may be the only opportunity to make my point, with other people present, as it were, to bear witness and be able to recount the truth later on if necessary. Russell…” She paused, like an orator on a platform, and sipped once more at the wine. “Russell, what I have to say to you is that I am giving you a choice. I am prepared for one of two actions. I will sue for a divorce and a large, a very large settlement, a vast settlement, or I shall kill myself.”
“Katherine,” Linda said, “that’s maniacal.”
“Linda,” Mrs. Hazen said, “you always talked too much. I see you haven’t conquered the habit.” Then she addressed herself to Hazen, who was sitting with his eyes closed and his head bent, an old man dozing in a corner. “Russell,” she said, “you know that I can take care of myself perfectly adequately so I’m not speaking out of avarice. Frankly, all I want is to hurt you. For all the years of bullying, of ignoring me, despising me, of making love to me as though it was a particularly onerous penance you had to pay…”
“Oh, shit,” Russell said without opening his eyes or lifting his head. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“In a word, since I have given up hope of anything else, I want revenge,” Mrs. Hazen went on in the eerie flat tone with which she had begun her tirade, her manner that of a woman reading a prepared and carefully rehearsed speech, “revenge for breaking up the family, casting my daughters out, destroying all their confidence in themselves so they’ve become promiscuous, foolish tramps whose only ambition is to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their family. Revenge, finally, for killing my son and then trying to put the blame on me….”
Finally, Hazen lifted his head and glared at her. “You pampered him, you turned him into a fairy, you entertained his fairy friends in our own house, you knew he was shooting heroin and God knows what else and you gave him the money to buy the stuff…”
“And you made him feel worthless. You couldn’t make him into your own glorious captain of industry pious image,” Mrs. Hazen said, the words snapping out of her mouth vindictively now, the sound the breaking of glass, “so you abandoned him and let him feel that nobody cared if he lived or died.”
Strand tried to hunch into himself, make himself invisible, make himself not hear or understand. He looked across at Leslie. She was weeping, her face contorted. Twice in one night, tears, he thought mechanically. It was all he was capable of thinking.
Suddenly Mrs. Hazen’s voice became businesslike. “So. If you make the divorce difficult, if your generosity does not stretch quite far enough to cover your wife, I’ll make sure to have your list of conquests well publicized
—all those foolish Mrs. Harcourts, the secretaries, the plump little wives of our friends whom you so kindly helped in business and politics, the fluffy actresses who comforted you and helped you forget the frigid embrace of your wife and whose names would make such interesting reading in the newspaper columns.”
“You’re a witch,” Hazen whispered.
“If I am, you made me one. I don’t forgive you for that, either. Once more back to the shopping list,” Mrs. Hazen said, almost gaily. “You can keep the house in New York. It’s a vault and I always hated it, anyway, from the first day, it was haunted by the saintly ghost of your beloved father. But I get the house in the Hamptons, with everything in it.”
“I was brought up in that house,” Hazen said.
“I will do my best to forget that fact when I move into it and try to make a life in it once more for my daughters,” said Mrs. Hazen. “And I hope it will not be too much trouble for you, Mr. and Mrs. Strand, and your brood, to which my husband seems rather curiously attached, to find ample time to remove yourselves and your belongings before my arrival. I hope your taste of a more gracious style of living has not spoiled you for the modest appointments to which you must now return. I like to choose my own parasites as guests, whose tastes and habits are compatible with mine. I’m not fond of guitar players, lady athletes, young women who live openly with men without the formality of marriage, nor am I fond of amateur painters, piddling schoolteachers dangling their young daughters before a foolish old man or Jews.”
“You can stop there,” Strand said, thinking, Christ, there must be somebody there who sends in a daily bulletin to this weird lady. “You’re an ugly and unpleasant woman and we’re leaving. I don’t care if you scream loud enough to be heard on Long Island. Come on, Leslie. And Linda, I think you must have heard enough, too.”
“I certainly have,” Linda said, as she and Leslie stood up.
Leslie had stopped crying as Mrs. Hazen had gone on about the family and Strand could see she was furious. But he wasn’t prepared, as she turned around, for her slapping Mrs. Hazen as hard as she could, squarely across the face.
“Leslie!” Strand cried. “That’s enough.”
Mrs. Hazen sat without moving or even putting her hand up to her face, as though she had expected the blow and welcomed it.
“Russell,” said Strand, “if you want my advice I’d suggest that you take up your wife’s kind offer to commit suicide.”
“You will not be let off, you two,” Mrs. Hazen said quietly. “He will destroy you with his goodwill. You will slip once and he will disapprove of you and cast you and your hopes and schemes out without a backward glance. Remember my words, you silly, grasping little people, your holiday will soon be over.” She was stretching her glass toward Hazen, saying “I do think I’d like some more wine, dear,” as Strand, with the women on either side of him, started out toward the door through the hushed room full of diners.
It was a long, long walk.
2
LESLIE WALKED STEADILY, ALMOST woodenly, her makeup streaked but her expression cold and artificially serene. Linda stumbled as they started up the stairs toward their rooms and Strand caught her by the arm. She was trembling. All the color had drained from her face, the touches of rouge on her cheeks standing out like small wounds. When they came to their door Strand knew that he couldn’t let her go to her room and face the rest of the night alone. “Come in with us for a while,” he said gently. “What we all need is a drink.”
Linda nodded numbly.
In the room, Strand telephoned down for a bottle of whiskey and some ice. He didn’t know about Linda but he and Leslie had never drunk out of despair before. Linda fell limply into a chair, as though her bones had liquefied. Her hands shook on the chair’s arms. Leslie went into the bathroom, saying “I’m going to repair the ravages of the soirée.”
“That awful woman,” Linda said, her voice quivering. “And I’ve always tried to be her friend. I knew she was having a dreadful time after her son…” She dabbed at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “I made sure to see her every time I came to Paris and had her as my guest at Mougins. Those nasty insinuations!” Now she was indignant. “There was never anything like that between Russell and me. Good God, I’m not like that. Allen, tell me, did you ever think for a moment…?”
“Of course not,” Strand said, not quite honestly.
“That poor Mrs. Harcourt,” Linda said. “Don’t you think we ought to ask her to come in here and…?”
“I don’t think she wants to see any of us anymore,” Strand said. “Or at least, not tonight.”
“You don’t believe I ever shared any of Katherine’s sentiments about Russell and the friends he invited to the house, do you, Allen?” There was a desperate appeal in her voice. “I couldn’t stand it if you thought…”
“Linda,” Strand said, going over and holding her hands, “listen to me. I think you’re one of the most decent women I’ve ever met in my life.”
“Thank you,” Linda whispered.
“You mustn’t take it so hard. The woman’s deranged. No one in his right mind would believe a word she says.”
“She never was a good wife,” Linda said. “She made his life hell. I don’t know how he stood her as long as he did. She was constantly putting him down. She has a tongue like a razor. At a party, when somebody would ask him about a case he was working on—you know, he’s in the papers all the time, he’s in tremendous demand, some of the biggest people in the country, in business, in the government, come to him for advice—well, when he would explain some legal technicality that somebody had asked him about she would sneer at him openly and say ‘Stop boring our guests. They all know you’re the greatest fixer in the profession.’ Fixer! A man like Russell. Of course, you had to feel sorry for her, losing a son like that and seeing how those daughters turned out, but there are such things as human limits. Once there was a senator at the house for dinner, a most respected man, but he belonged to the wrong party as far as Mrs. Hazen was concerned and she said, ‘You’re a damned, bleeding-heart fool,’ right to his face after he said he’d voted for a bill she didn’t approve of. How can you expect a man to live with someone like that? And even so, no matter what she says, she was the one who walked out, not him.”
There was a knock on the door and Strand opened it to let the waiter in with the whiskey. He poured stiff drinks into three glasses and handed Linda hers. She drank half of the drink in one convulsive gulp. “I’ll tell you something,” she said. “I don’t blame him for Mrs. Harcourt and whatever others there were. In spite of everything, Russell was the soul of discretion. Whatever he did, he kept to himself. I was absolutely dumfounded when he appeared with Mrs. Harcourt. He must have been at the end of his patience. Although even in just this short time I’ve gotten to like her, really like her a lot. She’s so pretty and considerate.” She finished her drink and held out her glass and Strand refilled it. “Frankly, I was pleased for Russell and I never saw him so gay before.”
Strand heard the sound of laughter from the bathroom and turned, puzzled, as Leslie came into the room, giggling, her face rearranged. “What’re you laughing at?” he asked, trying not to sound angry. With Linda in the state she was, laughter seemed callous.
“I was thinking about my hitting that woman,” Leslie said, still giggling. “It was one of the most satisfactory moments of my life. I broke a fingernail on her, too. I didn’t know I was going to hit her. It was automatic. Deliciously automatic. Ah, whiskey. Just the thing to make the evening perfect. I may get drunk tonight to celebrate. I’ll depend upon you, Allen, to put me safely to bed. I knew Europe was going to be interesting, but I never thought it would be that interesting.” She raised her glass. “To my fingernail,” she said. “And to amateur painters and piddling schoolteachers and their brood and to the Jews. I’m getting to love parties among the upper classes, I really am, they’re so refined.”
“Are you all right?” Strand asked anxiously.
“Tip-top,” Leslie said airily. “Tonight has made my summer.”
The telephone rang and Strand picked it up. It was Hazen. “Allen,” Hazen said, “I’d like to talk to you if you don’t mind. Can you come to my room? Just you, please. Are the women okay?”
“I think so. They’re drinking.”
“I don’t blame them. I’d drink too if I weren’t afraid my ulcer would kick up, if it hasn’t already.”
It was the first time Strand had heard that Hazen had an ulcer. He was gathering a great many new facts this evening. “I’ll be right over,” he said. “Leave some of the booze in the bottle for me,” he said to Leslie and Linda.
“Give my regards to the lovebird,” Leslie said. Her tone was not friendly. “We’ll be here, waiting for the next bulletin from the front.”
He was finding out some new things about his wife, too, Strand thought as he walked down the corridor to Hazen’s room. There was a streak of toughness in her that he hadn’t suspected was there. It might be useful in facing up to the shocks that life had in store for her, but he wasn’t sure that he liked it.
Hazen’s door was ajar and Strand knocked and went in. Hazen was sunk deep in a chair, scowling. He still had all his clothes on, jacket and vest rumpled now. He had unbuttoned his collar and pulled it open and loosened his tie as though he had had trouble breathing and he didn’t look as he usually did, ready for a board meeting or an address to the jury. He glanced up as Strand came in and ran his hand wearily across his face, the scowl vanishing, replaced by a twitch of embarrassment.
“I want to apologize for this goddamn evening,” he said. His voice was still hoarse.