by Irwin Shaw
Hazen nodded, almost genially, to the other men at the table, who were sitting there woodenly, and stood up and left.
Strand reached over and turned the set off. He sat, staring at the blank screen, feeling dazed, as though he had just witnessed a grotesque accident.
Then he stood up and went over to the little desk in front of the window. He had not brought along the copy book in which he made the occasional entries in his journal and so he took some notepaper out of the drawer and began to write.
I am alone downstairs in the East Hampton house and I have just seen a man destroy himself on television. The man is Russell Hazen. In what can only have been a valedictory speech, he was saying good-bye to his career. What his reasons were I do not know, but he has denounced himself, his profession, the rules we all live by and which have enriched him and brought him honor. I can only consider it an aberration, but an aberration for which he will not be forgiven. Since I met him I knew there was a dark side to his character, an all-pervading cynicism about men’s motives and behavior, a melancholy streak that was present even in his lightest moments, but I never suspected that he was tormented enough by it to allow himself to be overwhelmed by it. Where he will go from here it is impossible to foresee…
Suddenly he felt terribly tired and even the effort of writing was too much for him. He put his arm across the sheet of paper and leaned over, his head resting on his wrist, and fell instantly asleep.
He awoke with a start. He had no idea of how long he had slept. There was the sound of a key in a lock and a door opening, then closing. He stood up and went into the living room just as Hazen came in.
Strand stared at him wordlessly as Hazen smiled at him and stamped his feet vigorously to shake the snow off his shoes. He looked the same as always, calm, robust. The expression on Strand’s face made Hazen scowl.
“You look peculiar, Allen,” he said. “Is anything wrong?”
“I saw the television program.”
“Oh, that,” Hazen said lightly. “I thought those dreary men needed a little excitement. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And I got a few things off my chest that I’ve been thinking for a long time.”
“Do you know what you’ve done to yourself tonight, Russell?”
“Don’t worry about me. Nobody takes television seriously, anyway. Let’s not talk about it, please. The whole thing bores me.” He came over to Strand and put an arm around him and gave him a brief hug. “I was hoping you’d still be up. I wanted to talk to someone who was not a lawyer.” He took off his coat and threw it, with his hat, over a chair. “What a miserable night. The drive out in this snow was grim.”
Strand shook his head as if to clear it. He felt confused, uncertain of himself. If Hazen was so debonair about the evening, perhaps he had overreacted to the television program. He watched television so rarely that it was possible he misjudged its capacity to make or break a man. Maybe, he thought, he had been wrong in despairing for his friend. If Hazen had no fears of the consequences of his speech, he wouldn’t disturb him by voicing his own. “You drove yourself?” he asked.
Hazen nodded. “I let the chauffeur go for the night. His fiancée came into town and I did my share for young love. Where’re the ladies?”
“They’re up in their rooms. They’re making an early night of it.”
Hazen looked at him keenly. “They’re all right, aren’t they?”
“Fine,” Strand said.
“Leslie told me about Eleanor’s going back to Georgia. That’s quite a mess down there, isn’t it?”
“Ugly,” Strand said. “Gianelli’s acting like a fool.”
“He’s got guts. I admire that.”
“I admire it a little less than you do,” Strand said dryly.
“I called the police chief down there and told him he had to put a man on to guard their house. I made it plain to him that if anything happened to those kids I’d have his hide.”
“I hope it helps.”
“It better,” Hazen said grimly. “Now, what I need is a drink. How about you?”
“I’ll join you.” Strand went over to the bar and watched while Hazen poured them two large Scotch and sodas. They carried their drinks back to the fireplace and sat facing each other in the big leather wing-back chairs. Hazen took a long gulp of his drink and sighed contentedly. “Man, I needed this,” he said.
“The last time we had a drink like this,” Strand said, “the telephone rang and you were gone like a streak. I hope you’ll at least be able to finish your drink before you have to go again.”
Hazen laughed, a pleasant low rumble. “I’m not going to answer the telephone for a week. I don’t care who’s calling, the Pope, the President of the United States, any one of a dozen assorted lawyers, they’ll have to struggle along without me.”
“I’m glad to hear that. How’re things going?”
“So-so.” Hazen stared into his glass. “Nobody’s declared war—yet.”
“Leslie told me about your wife’s threatening to name her as correspondent.”
“She’s threatening every woman I’ve said hello to for the last thirty years. She’s digging up graves from Boston to Marseilles. I felt I had to tell Leslie that there was a possibility it would leak. But I told her I didn’t want you to know about it.”
“We’re on a new policy here,” Strand said. “Full disclosure.”
“A dangerous experiment.” Hazen peered intently at him. “You don’t believe for one instant…?”
“Not for one instant,” Strand said. Looking at the powerful, fleshily handsome man in his immaculate clothing Strand could understand why any woman, even his wife, would be attracted to him. Nixon’s Secretary of State Kissinger, in one of his less diplomatic messages, had said when asked about his success with women that power was an aphrodisiac. By any standards Hazen was powerful and certainly by comparison with an ailing, obscure, disabused schoolteacher he must be overwhelming. Love finally could withstand only so much temptation. He wondered just what Hazen had said or done or looked that had made Leslie understand that Hazen had wanted her. Better not to know, he thought.
“I’ve kept my wife at bay, at least for the moment. The sticking point is this house,” Hazen said. “I’ve agreed to let her strip me of just about everything else, but I have other plans for the house. We’ll see.” Hazen drank thirstily, emptying his glass. He got up and went to the bar and poured himself a second drink, “Oh, by the way,” he said as he came back, “our man in Paris happened to call and I spoke to him about you. He says he thinks it can be easily arranged for next September, when the new school term starts. They have a big turnover in the faculty, people drifting in and out, like the wandering teachers of the Middle Ages. He’ll be getting in touch with you. Do you think you can stand Dunberry for another five months?”
“I can. I’m not sure Leslie can.”
“Ummm.” Hazen frowned. “I suppose she could go alone. It would just be a few months.”
“That’s a possibility. Don’t worry about it. We’ll work something out.”
“Allen, there’s only one thing wrong, as far as I’m concerned, with you and Leslie,” Hazen said. His tone was earnest and Strand feared what he was going to say.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“When I look at you two, it makes me realize what I’ve missed in my life.” Hazen spoke reflectively, sorrowfully. “The love, spoken, unspoken, intimated, that passes between you. The dependence upon each other, the unwavering support of one for the other. I’ve known many women in my life and I’ve enjoyed most of them and maybe they’ve enjoyed me. I’ve had money, success, a kind of fame, even that very rare thing—occasional gratitude. But I’ve never had anything like that. It’s like a big hole in me that the wind goes howling through—endlessly. If you’re lucky, you’ll both die the same minute. Oh, hell…” He rattled the ice in his glass angrily. “What’s come over me tonight? Talking about dying. It’s the weather. Snow on a seacoast. Maybe people are w
ise to close down their houses, put the shutters up, when the leaves begin to turn.” He finished his drink, put his glass down deliberately, with a gesture of finality. “I’m tired.” He ran his big hand over his eyes, stood up. “I’m going to treat myself to a long, long sleep. Don’t bother to put out the lights. I don’t want the house to be dark tonight.” He looked around him. “This room could stand a new coat of paint. A lighter color. Well, good night, friend. Sleep well.”
“Good night, Russell. You, too.” Strand watched him walk heavily out of the room. He stumbled a little as he crossed the threshold and Strand thought, He must have had a lot to drink in New York before he started out, it’s lucky a cop didn’t stop him on the road or he’d have spent the night in jail instead of in his big warm bed. Then he climbed the stairs to the room where Leslie was sleeping, breathing gently, her bright hair spread out on the pillow, shining in the light of the bedside lamp. He undressed silently, put out the lamp and slipped into bed beside his wife.
Sometime during the night he awoke because in his sleep there had been a noise of an automobile engine starting up, then dwindling in the distance. He wasn’t sure whether he had heard it or if he had been dreaming. He turned over, put his arm around his wife’s bare shoulders, heard her sigh contentedly. Then he slept.
He awoke early, just as the dawn started to show through the windows. It was still snowing. Leslie slept on. He got out of bed, dressed quickly and started out of the room. He stopped at the door. An envelope was lying on the floor, half under the door. He opened the door silently, picked up the envelope. It was too dark in the hallway to read something that was scrawled on the envelope. He closed the door softly and went downstairs quickly to the living room where the lights still burned and the last ashes were glowing on the hearth. The envelope was a long, fat one and on it was written one word—Allen. He tore it open. Dear Allen, he read in Hazen’s bold, steady script.
By the time you read this I will be dead. I came here last night to say good-bye to you and wish you happiness. Everything has piled up on me—my wife, the investigation in Washington, Conroy threatening me with blackmail. I’ve been subpoenaed to appear before the Committee on January second. I can’t appear without committing perjury or implicating, criminally, old friends and associates of mine. One way or another I would have no shred of reputation left at the end of it. I’ve figured this out carefully and I am taking the only possible way out. When my will is read it will be discovered that I have left the beach house to Caroline. For good and sufficient reason. To pay for its upkeep, she can sell off several acres of the property. There’s plenty of it—forty acres—and it’s very valuable. All my liquid assets I’ve left to my wife, with the proviso that if she contests any clause in the will she will be completely cut off. My daughters have substantial trust funds my father set up for them when they were born and there’s nothing they can do to break the will. I’m a good lawyer and the will is ironclad. All my pictures have long since been donated to museums with the understanding that they were to remain in my possession during my lifetime. The tax laws make death something of a morbid game, a game at which I was expert. As I look back at it now I knew how to play too many games—legal, corporate, legislative, philanthropic—the sleazy, profitable American gamut. One of the things that endeared you and Leslie to me most was that you were not entrants in the competition. It wasn’t that you were above it all. It was as though you didn’t realize its existence. It undoubtedly made you a worse historian, but a better man.
Thoughtlessly and without malice, I involved you and your family in my world. Lonely and bereft of family myself, I believed I could insert myself into a happy family. What I thought was generosity turned out to be disaster. Jimmy learned all too quickly how to succeed. Caroline is on the competitive American merry-go-round, whether she likes it or not. Eleanor and her husband have learned failure and live in fear. I hate to say this, dear Allen, but Leslie’s new career can only push you further apart and uproot you once again. Opportunity is a two-edged weapon. It might have turned out well, but it didn’t. The same might be said in the case of Romero.
The Renoir drawing in your bedroom was bought after I made the arrangement with the government, and I am happy to be able to leave it to you in the will which is now in my partner’s safe.
Strand stopped reading for a moment. The enormity of the document in his hand left him numb and the fact that it had been written so carefully, so neatly, by a man preparing to take his life by his own hand made him marvel at the almost inhuman rigor of his friend’s self-control. Along with reading law, Strand thought, Hazen must have read Plato on the death of Socrates. “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius: will you remember to pay the debt?” A cock for Asclepius. A Renoir for Strand. An antique grace in dying. Famous last words.
Dry-eyed, Strand continued reading.
In the smaller envelope, which is enclosed with this letter, there is ten thousand dollars in five hundred dollar bills to help make the Paris adventure more pleasant for you and Leslie. I suggest you do not mention this to anyone.
You and your family have made this last year of my life an important one for me and I have learned too late what it should have taught me.
Since these will be my last words and we are now, as you said, on a course of full disclosure, I will make one more confession. It sounds absurd for a man my age to say this, but I fell in love with Leslie the very first time I saw her. If ever a woman could make me happy it was she. When it looked as though you were going to die in the hospital in Southampton, I wished for your death. Not consciously or willfully, but for a fraction of a second the thought was there. Then I would not be only the friend of a family I loved, but of the family, not merely the guest at the table, but at its head. The fact that I was happy that you survived could never make me forget that dark and evil moment.
Please burn this letter as soon as you have read it and don’t let anyone but Leslie know that it was written. I have written another note, which I will leave in the car, explaining merely that I have decided to commit suicide. In it I’ve written that I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown and fear for my sanity. I have a gun in my pocket and it will be quickly over. They will find me at the end of some lane beside the car.
Don’t grieve for me. I don’t deserve your grief.
I embrace you all, Russell
PART FOUR
1
IT IS A FEW DAYS before Thanksgiving again, and the first snow is whirling in the darkness outside my window, flurries of white specks flickering through the beams thrown by the lamp on my desk. I am in Dunberry, but not in the apartment in the Malson Residence. I am alone, since Leslie is in Paris.
I did not permit either Leslie or Caroline to accompany me to the funeral of Russell Hazen. There would be no telling what sort of scene Hazen’s widow might have made and neither my wife nor my daughter were in any condition to confront that mad and vengeful woman at such a moment. I sat in one of the back pews and she did not see me. Beside her sat two tall young women whom I took to be Hazen’s daughters. They were all three dressed elegantly in black and behaved with sorrowful decorum.
I got a glimpse of the daughters’ faces as they passed up the aisle at the end of the service. They were not un-beautiful, but they were at the same time hard and self-indulgent and suspicious. Of course, when we finally see people about whom we have previously formed opinions, we are likely to see what we have imagined, rather than what is actually there. Be that as it may, they were two women I would prefer to avoid.
Both the minister in his eulogy and the Times in its obituary spoke of Hazen’s great civic contributions, his probity and his many useful services to the City of New York. I could imagine Hazen’s bitter laughter if he had been alive to hear and read the tributes to his memory.
Hazen’s death and especially the manner of it left Leslie prostrate. For days after it, she would suddenly burst into tears. It was as though all the complex emotions she had kept for th
e most part under control for my sake and the sake of her children at last had been too much for her and had burst through some psychic dam. It was impossible to comfort her. The depression that had assailed her before our Thanksgiving trip to the Hamptons last year was like a mere passing shadow compared to what she was going through now. She gave up all pretense of teaching classes, had me cancel all lessons in the city, didn’t touch the piano or a paintbrush and sat all day, stone-faced when she wasn’t in tears, in the repainted kitchen of our apartment in the Residence. She blamed herself and me for what had happened. Somehow, she felt, if we had been the friends that we believed we were, we should have sensed what Hazen was going through and where it was leading and stopped him. There was nothing I could say to convince her otherwise.
When Linda suggested to me that it was dangerous for her to continue in her mourning and that perhaps Paris and work would heal her, I agreed. Leslie listened like an automaton as both Linda and I urged her to take off immediately for France. Finally she said, “Anything is better than this.”