Mr. Ferrers consulted his wristwatch and then said, “Much as I hate to do this, Ruth, we’ve got to be moving on. We’re due at the Franklins’ at five.”
Dr. McBride winked at Edward and said, “Your father is the slave of time,” and went on telling the story of his life.
Edward got up from the bed only because it was the third time his father had spoken to him about leaving, and even then it was very hard to do. The stories he did not hear now he never would, and he had the feeling that he was depriving himself of his birthright.
“I thought you’d decided to spend the rest of your life there,” Mr. Ferrers said crossly when they were in the car. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“I know, Dad,” Edward said, “but I couldn’t bear to leave. He’s the most wonderful storyteller I ever heard, and I didn’t even know it.”
“I’ve heard Doc’s stories,” Mr. Ferrers said dryly. “He’s always the hero.”
What made Mr. Ferrers’s anger so impressive was that it was never unleashed. The change in him now was less than it was in Edward, whose voice rose in pitch, in spite of his efforts to control it. He stammered as he defended himself from his father’s remarks. The effect of this skirmish was to move them both back in time, to Edward’s fifteenth year and Mr. Ferrers’s forty-fifth — the difference being that Edward regarded it as a personal failure in steering the riverboat upstream, whereas Mr. Ferrers five minutes later had dismissed the incident from his mind.
AT the Franklins’, Edward threw himself into one conversation after another, enjoying himself thoroughly, and trying, as always, to make sure that no one was skimped — as if the amount of attention he paid to each person who had known him since he came into the world was something that he must try to apportion justly and fairly. Why this should be, he had never asked himself.
From the Franklins’ they drove downtown again, to join Helen’s family in the cafeteria of the New Draperville Hotel. With several drinks under his belt, Edward looked around the noisy dining room. The faces he saw were full of character, as small-town faces tend to be, he thought, and lined with humor, and time had dealt gently with them. By virtue of having been born in this totally unremarkable place and of having lived out their lives here, they had something people elsewhere did not have.… This opinion every person in the room agreed with, he knew, and no doubt it had been put into his mind when he was a child. For it was something that he never failed to be struck by — those sweeping statements in praise of Draperville that were almost an article of religious faith. They spoke about each other in much the same way. “There isn’t a finer man anywhere on this earth,” they would say, in a tone of absolute conviction, sometimes about somebody who was indeed admirable, but just as often it would be some local skinflint, some banker or lawyer who made a specialty of robbing widows and orphans and was just barely a member of the human race. A moment later, opposed to this falsehood and in fact utterly contradicting it, there was a more realistic appraisal, which to his surprise they did not hesitate to express. But it would be wrong to say that the second statement represented their true opinion; it was just their other one.
He saw that somebody was smiling at him from a nearby table, a soft-faced woman with blond hair, and he put his napkin down and crossed the room to speak to her. He even knew her name. She lived down the street from him, and when he was six years old he was hopelessly in love with her and she liked Johnny Miller instead.
When they walked into the house at ten o’clock, he was talked out, dead-tired, and sleepy, and aware that the one person who had been skimped was the person he had come to see in the first place, his father, and that he couldn’t leave without a little time with his father, and that his father had no intention of permitting him to.
As they put their coats away in the hall closet, Helen said, ‘Ned, dear, you must be dead. I know I am. What time do you want breakfast?”
“Eight-thirty or nine o’clock will be all right,” Mr. Ferrers said. “His train doesn’t leave till eleven. You go on up. Ned and I want to have a little visit.”
“I think I will,” Mrs. Ferrers said. But first she went around the room emptying ashtrays and puffing up satin pillows, until the room looked as if there had never been anybody in it. The two men walked through the sun parlor and out onto the screened porch. Mr. Ferrers sat down in the chair that was always referred to as his, and lit a cigar. Edward sat on a bamboo sofa. They did not turn the light on but sat in the dim light that came from the living room. Mr. Ferrers began by remarking upon the many changes he had seen in his lifetime — the telephone, electric light, the automobile, the airplane — and how these changes had totally changed the way people lived. “It’s been a marvellous privilege,” he said, drawing on his cigar, “to have lived in a time when all this was happening.”
Edward managed not to say that he would gladly have dispensed with all of these inventions. He listened to his father’s denunciation of the New Deal as he would have to some overfamiliar piece of music — “Fingal’s Cave” or the overture to Rosamunde — aware that it was a necessary prelude to the more substantial part of the conversation, something uppermost in his father’s mind that had to be said in order to get around to things that were deeper and more personal.
So long as Edward did not argue with his father or attempt to present the other side of the political picture, Mr. Ferrers did not investigate his son’s opinions. As for converting Mr. Ferrers to the liberal point of view, history — the Depression, in particular — had done more than Edward could possibly have hoped to accomplish with rational arguments. Mr. Ferrers was aware that there is such a thing as social responsibility, and he merely complained that it had now gone far enough and any further effort in that direction would weaken the financial structure of the country. So far as Edward could make out, his father’s financial structure had weathered the storm very well.
When Edward put his feet up and arranged the pillows comfortably behind his head, Mr. Ferrers said, “If you’re too tired, son, go to bed.” But kindly. There was no impatience in his voice.
“Oh, no,” Edward said. “I just felt like stretching out.”
“It’s too bad it has to be this way. When we lived in Chicago, there was no one to consider but ourselves, and we could talk to our hearts’ content.”
Actually, in those days it was Mr. Ferrers who talked. Edward was full of secrets and couldn’t have opened his mouth without putting his foot in it.
“Very nice,” he said, when his father asked what he thought of his Aunt Alice’s apartment. “She seemed very comfortable.”
“She keeps very peculiar hours. She likes to read till two in the morning. But you can’t tell other people how to lead their lives, and I guess she’s happy doing that. And she’s got all her things around her — all those old drop-leaf tables and china doodads she sets such store by and that no secondhand dealer would give you more than two dollars for, if that.”
“Aunt Alice’s things are better than you think,” Edward said.
“If you like antiques,” Mr. Ferrers said. “I used to argue with her, but I don’t anymore. I’ve given up. There’s a first-floor apartment coming vacant in the same building that she wants to move into. It’s more expensive, but she complains about the stairs, and at her age they are a consideration. I’ll probably have to help her with the rent.… She could have been in a very different situation today. I know of three very fine men who were crazy to marry her. She wouldn’t have them. They’ve all done well for themselves.”
They probably bored her, Edward said to himself in the dark.
“Father begged her with tears in his eyes not to marry Gene Hamilton,” Mr. Ferrers said. “But she wouldn’t listen to him.”
“She’s had lots of pleasure from her life, even so,” Edward remarked.
“Now she wants to sell all her securities — she hasn’t got very much: some Quaker Oats and some U.S. Gypsum and a few shares of General Motors — and buy an annu
ity, which at her age is the silliest thing you ever heard of.”
Silly or not, she had his father to fall back on, Edward reflected philosophically. And then, less philosophically, he wondered what would happen if his Aunt Alice outlived his father. Who would look after her? Her only son was dead and she had no grandchildren. The question contained its own answer: Edward and his brothers would take on the responsibility that until now his father had shouldered alone.
“What was he like?”
“What was who like?”
“Grandfather Ferrers.”
“He was as fine a man as you would ever want to know,” Mr. Ferrers said soberly, and then he added to a long finished picture a new detail that changed everything. He said, “Father never saw me until my brother Will died.”
Edward opened his eyes. His father very seldom ever said anything as revealing as this, and also it was in flat contradiction to the usual version, which was that his father and his grandfather had been extremely close.
The earliest surviving photographs of his father showed him playing the mandolin, with his cap on the back of his head and a big chrysanthemum in his buttonhole. His brother Will died at the age of twenty-five, leaving a wife and a child, and Grandfather Ferrers’s health was poor, and so Edward’s father, who had wanted to study medicine, dropped out of school instead and began to help support the family.
From where he lay stretched out on the sofa, Edward could see into the lighted living room of the house next door. The son-in-law sat reading a copy of Life under a bridge lamp. The two Scotties, whose barking Mr. Ferrers complained of, were quiet. There had been a divorce that had rocked the house next door to the foundations, but that, too, had quieted down. The whole neighborhood was still. Not even a television set. Just the insects of the summer night. His father would have been a good doctor, Edward thought, staring at the outlines of the house next door and the trees in the backyard, silhouetted against the night sky. He felt his eyelids growing heavier and heavier.
“But all that changed,” Mr. Ferrers said. “Toward the end of his life we got to know each other.”
Edward heard his stepmother moving about upstairs, and then without warning his mind darkened. When he came to, after he had no idea how long, Mr. Ferrers was discussing his will. Though Edward could hardly believe that this conversation was taking place at all, what made it seem even stranger was the fact that his father spoke without excitement of any kind, as if all his life he had been in the habit of discussing his financial arrangements with his children. The will was what Edward had assumed it would be. There was nothing that he could object to, nothing that was not usual. Everything was to go to his stepmother during her lifetime, and then the estate would be divided among Mr. Ferrers’s three sons.
“I wanted very much to be able to leave you boys something at the time of my death,” Mr. Ferrers said. “About fifteen thousand dollars is what I had planned. I wanted you to have a little present to remember me by. But with the state and federal inheritance tax, I don’t see how this can be managed.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Edward said.
“It matters to me,” Mr. Ferrers said, and there they were, right back where they started.
Mr. Ferrers drew on his cigar and the porch was illuminated by a soft red glow. “When I was a young man,” he said, “and just trying to get my feet on the ground, my father said to me, ‘If you can just manage to save a thousand dollars, you’ll never be in want, the whole rest of your life.…’ ” Though Edward had never heard Dr. McBride’s stories, this story he knew by heart. His father had done it, had managed to save a thousand dollars, and his grandfather’s words had proved true. As a young man, having been told the same thing by his father, Edward had put this theory to the test; he also had saved a thousand dollars, and then, gradually, unlike his father and his grandfather, he had spent it. Little by little, it went. But strangely enough, so far at least, the theory still held. He had never been in actual want, though the balance in their — his and Janet’s — joint checking account at this moment his father would not have considered cause for congratulations.
It was an amusing thought that the same reticence that prevented his father from telling him just how much money he had would prevent him also from inquiring into Edward’s financial circumstances. But it would not prevent him from asking if Edward was saving money. The conversation was clearly heading for this point, and so Edward braced himself and was ready when it arrived.
Mr. Ferrers said, “I assume you have managed to put something aside?”
Edward neither confirmed nor denied this.
“If you haven’t, you should have,” Mr. Ferrers said sternly. Then a long circuitous return to the same subject, this time in the guise of whether or not Edward had enough insurance, so that if anything happened to him Janet was taken care of.
Janet was taken care of. But not through Edward’s foresight. She had money of her own, left her by her grandmother. They did not touch the principal but used the income.
“If anything happens to me, Janet is taken care of,” Edward said. And it was all he said.
“That’s fine,” Mr. Ferrers said. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
He passed on to the subject of Edward’s two brothers, who were in business together, and, though very different, were adjusting to each other’s personalities. His older brother had already done extremely well; his younger brother, just starting out after a two-year period in the Army, when his schooling was interrupted, had, of course, a long way to go, but he was showing such a determination to succeed that Mr. Ferrers could find nothing but satisfaction in contemplating his son’s efforts.
“I know,” Edward said, and “That’s true,” and “He certainly does,” and his answers sounded so drowsy that at last Mr. Ferrers said with exasperation, “If you’re so sleepy, why don’t you go to bed?”
“Because I don’t feel like it,” Edward said. “I’m fine here on the sofa.” Leaving the riverboat with nobody at the wheel, he began to talk about himself — a thing he did easily with other people but not with his father. He talked about his teaching — what he tried to put into it, and what he got from it. And about a very talented pupil, who showed signs of becoming a writer. And then about the book that he himself had been occupied with for the past five years — a study of changing social life in nineteenth-century England as reflected in the diaries of the Reverend John Skinner.
His older brother, it appeared, considered that Edward was a failure — not only financially but as a teacher. If he were a successful teacher he would be called to Harvard or Princeton or Yale.
“I don’t know that I’d be happy teaching at Harvard or Princeton or Yale,” Edward said. “And I am happy where I am. And valued.”
“He doesn’t understand,” Mr. Ferrers said. “He lives very extravagantly — too much so, I think. They’re flying very high these days. But he judges people by how much money they make. I explained to him when he was here that you care about money, too, but that you also care about other things, and that you are content to have a little less money and do the kind of work that interests you.… But, of course, you two boys have always been very different. And I don’t interfere in your lives. I’ve given each of you a good education, the best I could manage, and from that time on you have been on your own. And you all made good. I’m proud of each of you. I have three fine boys.”
Edward, floating, suspended, not quite anywhere, felt the safety in his father’s voice, and a freedom in talking to him that he had never had before, not merely with his father but perhaps not even with anybody. In an unsafe world, he was safe only with one person. Which was so strange a thought — that his father, whom he had consistently opposed and resisted his whole life, and at one time even hated, should turn out to be the one person he felt utterly safe with — that he sat up and rearranged the pillows.
He would have gone on talking, half awake, drowsy but happy, for hours, and when Mr. Ferrers said, “Well, son,
it’s almost midnight, you’d better get some sleep,” he got up from the sofa reluctantly. They went back through the sun parlor into the living room, and Edward blinked his eyes at the light, having been accustomed to darkness. He sat down at his stepmother’s desk, took her pen, and wrote out a check for twenty dollars, and handed it to his father, who, smiling, tore the check up and dropped it in the wastebasket and went on talking about how much it meant to him to have Edward home.
The Thistles in Sweden
THE brownstone is on Murray Hill, facing south. The year is 1950. We have the top floor-through, and our windows are not as tall as the windows on the lower floors. They are deeply recessed, and almost square, and have divided panes. I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but even so, these windows are romantic. The apartment could be in Leningrad or Innsbruck or Dresden (before the bombs fell on it) or Parma or any place we have never been to. When I come home at night, I look forward to the moment when I turn the corner and raise my eyes to those three lighted windows. Since I was a child, no place has been quite so much home to me. The front windows look out on Thirty-sixth Street, the back windows on an unpainted brick wall (the side of a house on Lexington Avenue) with no break in it on our floor, but on the floor below there is a single window with a potted plant, and when we raise our eyes we see the sky, so the room is neither dark nor prisonlike.
Since we are bothered by street noises, the sensible thing would be to use this room to sleep in, but it seems to want to be our living room, and offers two irresistible arguments: (1) a Victorian white marble fireplace and (2) a stairway. If we have a fireplace it should be in the living room, even though the chimney is blocked up, so we can’t have a fire in it. (I spend a good deal of time unblocking it, in my mind.) The stairs are the only access to the roof for the whole building. There is, of course, nothing up there, but it looks as if we are in a house and you can go upstairs to bed, and this is very cozy: a house on the top floor of a brownstone walk-up. I draw the bolt and push the trapdoor up with my shoulder, and Margaret and I stand together, holding the cat, Floribunda, in our arms so she will not escape, and see the stars (when there are any) or the winking lights of an airplane, or sometimes a hallucinatory effect brought about by fog or very fine rain and mist — the lighted windows of midtown skyscrapers set in space, without any surrounding masonry. The living room and the bedroom both have a door opening onto the outer hall, which, since we are on the top floor and nobody else in the building uses it, we regard as part of the apartment. We leave these doors open when we are at home, and the stair railing and the head of the stairs are blocked off with huge pieces of cardboard. The landlord says that this is a violation of the fire laws, but we cannot think of any other way to keep Floribunda from escaping down the stairs, and neither can he.
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