Emily asked Victor, “Do you know any young ladies at the Radcliffe College?”
“I know several, yes,” he said.
“Are they smart?”
“Many, yes.”
“And pretty?”
“Some, though few are as pretty as yourself.” By the time he said that, he had forgotten the reason he was there—to surprise the Callahan ladies. Instead, he surprised himself by inviting them for a ride. He was thrilled that Emily accepted, only slightly disappointed when her grandmother said, “I’ll get my hat.”
And what a hat. It rose a foot above her head and tied under her chin, about ten years out of date, but as Alice Callahan perched in the backseat of the touring car, with her purse held securely against her chest, she looked as regal as Queen Victoria.
It pleased Victor that Emily sat in the front seat and engaged him in small talk all the way across the new Longfellow Bridge, over Beacon Hill, and around the Public Garden. Later that night, he could not remember anything that they talked about, but he could not forget his pleasure in her presence, even when he drove by the Somerset Club just as Bram Haddon, coming out with his family, called Victor’s name.
“My sister?” whispered Jimmy Callahan as he passed Victor in Sever Hall the next morning.
“Your sister? What about her?” Victor had gotten control of his infatuation. A pretty Irish face was still Irish. He had been telling himself that since he woke up.
“You brought my sister flowers?”
“Actually, I was bringing them for your grandmother, who turned out to be a wonderful resource for my new play.” Victor spoke loudly enough that anyone who was listening, including Bram Haddon, would understand.
Jimmy leaned closer and whispered, “My sister said you were very nice to her. That’s good. But don’t be too nice. That would be bad . . . for both of you.”
And for the rest of the week, Victor Wedge tried not to think of Emily Callahan. He was too busy finishing his play. And there was a tea on Friday afternoon at Fay House, where he sat with Barbara Abbott.
Barbara had a more subtle beauty than Emily. Her hair was a plain brown, her eyes a trifle too close, her nose a bit too long, but when she swept her hair up from her face, the severity of the nose gave her the classical look of a Greek bust in a Boston museum. Simpler beauty faded, thought Victor, and Irish girls grew bunions on their feet. And if he could not remember his conversation with Emily in the car, perhaps it was not worth remembering. Barbara and he, on the other hand, had taken many of the same classes and came from the same class, so there were ideas to discuss, and when they ran out of ideas, there were all those people to gossip over. Besides, Barbara’s father had been a classmate of Victor’s father and another Porcellian.
So . . . the daughter of a Porcellian or the daughter of a man who ran an engine on the Boston & Maine? What could Victor have been thinking?
Victor’s mother had remarried and lived in New York City, so Victor always said he claimed dual citizenship in the Athens and the Sparta of America. Whenever he wanted the pleasures of family without a train ride to New York, he took the trolley to Boston and walked up Beacon Hill to his grandparents’ home.
If it was a Sunday morning, Victor would sit at his grandfather’s dining-room table, under the gaze of Reverend Abraham and Aunt Lydia, who themselves were sitting at some English dining-room table 130 years before, and he would read the newspapers with his grandparents.
“Did you see this, Grandfather?” Victor looked up from the obituary page. “Samuel Bunting has died.”
Heywood made a little snorting sound that ruffled the long white mustache drooping down around his mouth.
“There’s to be a memorial service at Trinity. Should we go?”
Heywood glanced at his grandson. “I think not.”
“But wasn’t he a close friend of the family?”
“He was a close friend of Uncle Theodore,” said Heywood. “Too close, actually.”
Victor glanced at Grandmother Amelia, who was serenely tapping her teaspoon around the top of a soft-boiled egg.
Without looking up, she said, “Heywood, perhaps you should explain yourself.”
After a moment, this was muttered from behind Heywood’s newspaper: “They had an . . . unusual attraction.”
“A bit more, dear,” said Amelia.
Heywood lowered the paper and looked over his spectacles at Victor. “Have you ever heard the expression, ‘the love that dare not speak its name’?”
“You mean, the . . . h.s. sort of love?” asked Victor.
“A polite obfuscation,” said Heywood. “Theodore and Mr. Bunting were poofs.”
“Poofs?” Victor thought a bit, then said, “Do you think they could help it?”
“Of course they could help it,” said Heywood, turning back to his paper, then lowering it again. “I hope you’re not sympathetic to such . . . feelings.”
“Oh, no, sir,” said Victor.
Amelia lifted the top off her egg.
Heywood spent another few seconds behind his paper, then he looked hard at his grandson. “Speaking of unusual attractions, Dickey Drake says that Bram Haddon saw you squiring my old footman’s wife around Boston, in my Stevens-Duryea, no less.”
“I gave Alice Callahan a ride, sir, though it was her granddaughter who—”
“A woman who spent time in my service does not ride in the backseat of my car.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Appearances matter. The help is the help and doesn’t ride in the backseat.”
iii
Grandfather was right as always, thought Victor. The help was the help.
Besides, summer would take Victor to Bar Harbor and his stepfather’s palatial cottage. Eight weeks of boat handling in the pellucid waters of Maine might clear his head of his fantasies about an Irish girl and his disappointment about a grade of C on his play, which was returned with a note from Professor Baker suggesting that he may have reached his limits as a playwright.
Barbara was headed to an art school in France, where she hoped to learn to “capture light with daubs of color, like those marvelous Impressionists.”
As far as Victor knew, Jimmy Callahan was working as a stoker on the Boston & Maine, and Emily was working at the fragrance counter at Jordan Marsh.
Many letters passed between Victor and Barbara that summer. And in August, Victor sent a picture postcard of Mount Desert Isle to the Callahan family.
But the help was the help.
Victor reminded himself when he addressed the postcard to the family, rather than to Miss Emily Callahan. He was reminded again in September, in Memorial Hall, when he glimpsed Jimmy Callahan changing into his white coat.
By then, “the help” had a new meaning for Victor—an English housemaid who worked for his stepfather. During the first week in Bar Harbor, she had paid particular attention to the handsome young stepson. In the second week, as she straightened his room one morning, she mentioned that she didn’t wear bloomers in the summer. It did not take Victor another week to discover that she was willing to bend over the washstand and raise her skirts, as long as he left a gratuity on the dresser when he was done.
For all his bragging over his success with East Cambridge girls, the maid with the Cockney accent was Victor’s first real conquest. Of course, even if the help was the help, he knew that Emily Callahan would never have offered herself like that.
So, when he was not studying his new subject, economics, or going to football practice, or thinking about that maid, he contented himself with plotting to get a kiss from Barbara Abbott.
It happened on an October night, as he walked her home. He had scored a touchdown against Dartmouth, and many flasks had been passed, so they were both a little drunk. Halfway across the Common, she admitted to him that during the summer, she had kissed a young French artist from the village of Giverny. Without another word, he grabbed her and pulled her to him. And as if she had been waiting for his kiss, she opened her mouth again
st his and then . . .
She pulled away as if he had poked her with a billy club. “Victor . . . you’re . . . no, we can’t. Not until we’re married.” And she hurried across the Common to Fay House.
Married? Well, yes, he supposed. Married. It seemed likely. Someday.
Just before Christmas, Victor went to Boston to buy Barbara a bottle of Chanel scent. He went to Jordan Marsh, because Emily worked there, and the help might help him decide between Chanel No. 5 and something else.
Emily was touching a perfume bottle to her wrist and offering the scent to a woman who wrinkled her nose and went trundling off as though she had been insulted.
Victor had almost forgotten how beautiful she was. He said hello and felt a fluttering in his stomach, as if a big game were beginning.
She was cool to him at first, even pretended not to recognize him. But soon, he was taking her to lunch at Jacob Wirth’s, the kind of German saloon where Barbara Abbott would be found only if she had been kidnapped.
Emily ate delicately enough—one knockwurst to his two—but she matched him draft for draft. And the longer they sat together, the more interesting Victor found her. She didn’t simply sell perfume. She read. She quoted Irish poets. She loved Yeats.
She said she had taken to following Harvard football because she knew the fullback. This pleased him. She licked the mustard from her fingers. This made him laugh. And for the first time, as he listened to her description of her brother’s daily routine, he saw the world through someone else’s eyes. This surprised him.
“He comes home exhausted, falls into bed,” she said. “Many’s the night I find him asleep with a book on his chest. I’ve offered him a few dollars from my salary—”
“You can’t be making a great deal,” said Victor.
“I’m not, but he won’t take what I offer. He says he’s determined to be a burden to no one. So am I.” Just then, the check came and she offered to pay half.
“No. This will be my Christmas present to you,” said Victor. “As long as you promise to have lunch with me again after New Year’s.”
She smiled, as demure as Barbara Abbott.
“And wish your brother a Merry Christmas.”
The Saturday night before Christmas brought the annual Wedge party.
The guests began arriving at six o’clock. Motorcars puttered up Mount Vernon Street to deliver ladies in mink and gentlemen in silk hats. The more traditional still arrived by coach-and-four, with side lanterns glowing in the cold air, as though the nineteenth century had never ended. And if the night was snowy, sleighs would deliver fine ladies and gentlemen.
But however they arrived, they left in high spirits, enveloped in carols and full of the best cheer that Heywood Wedge could provide, because after all those dark New England Decembers, the descendants of even the staunchest Puritans had come to realize that faith should inspire joy rather than hold it back.
Part of the celebration was a buffet—great hams, roasts of beef, trays of lyonnaise potatoes, tureens of creamed onions, pickled oysters, broccoli florets and . . . desserts, cakes, sweetmeats, oranges, tangerines, nuts . . .
Before the butler rang the dinner bell, Victor took Barbara by the elbow and pivoted her into the dining room, away from the people milling through the front parlor, the study, the foyer, the stairwell. The room was brilliant with candlelight and, for a moment, deserted. So he kissed her.
She giggled and kissed him back, and the kiss grew more passionate than either of them had expected.
Then she pulled away. “Victor, this is terribly naughty, kissing me in your grandfather’s dining room with your trousers looking like . . . like a tent at a campsite.”
Then Victor heard someone step into the dining room and discreetly clear his throat. Victor turned toward the painting on the wall and said to Barbara, “Marvelous work, don’t you think?”
“What . . . oh, yes . . . Copley, isn’t it?” Barbara stepped closer to the painting. “Of course, it looks to me as if someone else painted that Bible on the table.”
“Someone did.” Heywood Wedge stepped into the room, doing it as gracefully as a man with two good legs. “Your eye is excellent.”
Barbara smiled. “Well, I have studied in France.”
“What does the Bible cover?” asked Victor, angling his body so that the old man would not see his trousers, which had not fully deflated.
“A play, supposedly, and since Reverend Abraham was one of the authors of the anti-theater laws of 1767 . . .”
“That’s ironic,” said Victor.
“Whenever Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Theodore came, you’d find them in front of this painting, bickering over the play that is supposedly beneath that Bible.”
“What was the play?” asked Victor.
“A quarto of some sort,” said Heywood. “I once overheard Theodore asking her if they left it in England, in the house where they were exiled.”
“Have you ever been there?” asked Victor.
“No. But perhaps you two can go exploring there someday.”
Victor and Barbara shot each other nervous glances.
“Yes,” Heywood chuckled. “Young people stealing kisses at our Christmas parties quite often end up married. Rather a wonderful honeymoon can be had in England. . . .”
Victor could almost feel the heat of embarrassment from Barbara.
“Yes,” mused the old man, “Wales, the Lake District, Scotland . . .”
Victor stammered, “It . . . it sounds wonderful, Grandfather, but—”
“But not for a while.” The old man pivoted on his cane and made for the door. “Victor has much yet to learn. All that playwriting business was fine, but economics . . . money . . . there’s a future for a young man.”
When Heywood had left the room to rejoin his guests, Barbara slipped her hand into Victor’s. A moment later, a servant rang the dinner gong. Victor was glad to hear it, though talk of marriage had tightened his stomach considerably.
Commencement seemed to come in six weeks rather than six months. By then, Barbara Abbott was no longer speaking to him.
On a night in May, he had been enjoying billiards and cigars with his mates at the Porcellian when he heard a commotion, followed by the sound of someone rushing up the stairs, and one of the porters shouting, “S’cuse me, ma’am, s’cuse me, but you ain’t supposed to be in here.”
Victor looked up to see Barbara, in riding boots and jodhpurs, striding toward him, teeth clenched. “Baseball?” she growled. “You like baseball that much, do you?”
“Barbara, dear.” He put out a hand to usher her out.
“They say that you’ve sat with the same little hussy from East Cambridge at every game this year!” And with a crack that resounded like the cue ball, her open hand struck his cheek. Then she turned and stalked out.
Victor stood for a moment, his hand to his face, then he heard Dickey Drake say, “Bad form, Victor. Bad form all round.”
“Shut up,” said Victor.
“We haven’t had entertainment like that in here,” said Bram Haddon, “since Biff Mulvehill’s mother found out he was tickling burlesque cunnies at the Old Howard.”
Victor stalked out to the sound of his mates’ laughter, something he might court as a rule but did not welcome now.
The rumors had flown, and those who spread them assumed that even though this East Cambridge girl was the sister of Harvard’s right fielder, there could be only one way that she might attract a Porcellian.
Grandfather Heywood had some intuition in all of this. And in Dickey Drake, he had a fine spy. The week before commencement, Heywood heard the latest from Dickey, the son of his eldest daughter.
“And Barbara slapped him? Just like that?” said Heywood.
“Just like that,” said Dickey.
“Because he’s been to the baseball games with that . . . that Irish girl?”
“I don’t know if he’s taking her to the games, actually, but he sits with her and cheers for her brot
her.”
“And you saw them kissing?”
“I’m afraid so, sir. They got into your car on Mount Auburn Street, after one of the baseball games. They looked at each other and smiled and then, it was as if they couldn’t wait or didn’t care who saw them. They just . . . kissed.”
Heywood Wedge puffed his cheeks and blew up the sides of his mustache and made a plan to separate Victor from his Irish paramour.
But before Victor heard from his grandfather, he heard from Jimmy Callahan.
Victor was going into the Porcellian for a late dinner. He was alone, though he knew that he would meet friends inside. They would distract him from his predicament and from the sense of melancholy he felt now that his college days were almost over.
He had sent Barbara a note telling her that she had a right to her anger but that there was nothing between him and the Irish girl. This was a lie, but he knew that his attraction for Emily could not last. She could never be suitable company in places where a young man with ambition hoped to go, so he shouldn’t burn his bridges with someone as companionable as Barbara. Still, he could not stop seeing Emily . . . for lunch at Jacob Wirth’s or long walks on Boston Common, well away from the prying eyes in the Yard.
Just before he stepped into the club, Victor heard someone calling his name.
Beneath the Porcellian Gate, he saw the shadow of Jimmy Callahan. So he stepped across the street and said hello.
A flask flashed in Jimmy’s hand. “A year ago, Joe Kennedy stood here, looking up at all you swells celebrating yourselves. He was crushed that he was down here. I told him he was a fool to worry about your phony aristocracy.”
“Good advice,” said Victor, accepting the proffered flask. “What did he say?”
“Nothing, but I think he took the advice.”
“He’ll checkmate the lot of us.”
“The other night, I told my sister the same thing about a phony aristocrat. Told her to put you behind her and get on with things.”
Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon) Page 46