by Louis Begley
Then she added that Greg had had those girls late. He’s a couple of years younger, but I’m not robbing any cradles.
She was clearly expecting me to say something, so I said it was too bad about the girls and the money. She nodded and told me that drinks would be at the usual time and dinner would be at seven-thirty. While my father was alive, that meant as soon as he came home from the office and had taken a leak. Dinner, so far as he was concerned, could always wait. I told her I’d be there. A beautiful afternoon was ending. I got into the Hertz car and drove over to Stockbridge. I first deposited my presents for the Standishes and Edie, who was spending the holidays with George. That accomplished, I made a tour of the village, which I had always liked better than Lenox. On Main Street, Riggs was lit up and festooned with wreaths and pine-branch garlands. Through the windows I could see that a large crowd was milling around in the rooms downstairs, presumably munching on sugar cookies, drinking eggnog (laced with bourbon for those who were allowed and plain for those who weren’t), and singing carols. For all I knew, my mother and this Greg character were there getting into the Christmas spirit. There was no risk of my going to look for them. I turned up toward Snake Hill, parked when I got to property belonging to people I knew who were living in Europe, and walked to the terraced garden in the back from which there was a view in all directions. During the few minutes I remained, night fell and the snow that covered the valley turned from a delicate shade of violet to a color that was darker and menacing. It was time to go home.
I found a note for me on the table in the front hall. My mother and Greg were washing up and would be right down. I was as washed as I cared to be, so I went into the kitchen, put water on to boil, and checked the oven. Roast beef surrounded in the pan by potatoes—one of my mother’s standbys. Having made myself a cup of tea, I sat down in the library and waited. It was a while before Greg and my mother came down, my mother’s face flushed from the hot bath or contentment or perhaps both. She was wearing a long black skirt I had never seen before and a cheap white cardigan with red buttons in the form of hearts that I had given her for her birthday four or five years ago. Greg was in festive dark red corduroys, a yellow turtleneck, and a green blazer with some club’s silver-stitched insignia over the breast pocket. Perhaps to show that he felt at home, he had donned black velvet slippers. He was easily as tall as my father but more solidly built. We shook hands pleasantly and I sat down with my mother while Greg went to the kitchen to get ice and then to the pantry to assemble the martini components. I wondered whether his would be as good as my father’s and what troubles or vices had brought this fine carefree-looking fellow to Riggs, away from those daughters he loved and their unspeakable mother.
Isn’t he nice? my mother whispered. It’s such a help that he’s of good family. Just before you came in, May Standish telephoned. She asked me to bring him to the party they’re giving for you, and she invited us both to their New Year’s Day lunch. Can you imagine? She has never once invited me with your father.
I REMEMBER THE DAY and time of Henry’s call with the precision usually reserved for nightmares: St. Valentine’s Day, seven in the evening. I had gotten a late start that morning, having returned only the previous evening from San Francisco, where I had been for two weeks, leading a seminar at Berkeley. The florist’s delivery boy awakened me, bringing my mother’s present, a large white azalea. I called to thank her, did the usual morning chores, and went to the Forty-second Street library, where I spent the rest of the day, with one interruption for a hamburger at the Harvard Club. The key was still in the front door of my apartment when I heard the phone ring. I realized at once that something was horribly wrong: it was Henry, and his voice was cracking as if he were out of saliva and breath. Between gasps, he kept repeating, Please come right away, for God’s sake, come over. I asked where he was. At home, he said, please hurry. Within minutes I was in a taxi on my way to Dorchester Road. He was waiting for me on the front stoop. This time she’s done it, he told me, she’s really gone. He led me upstairs to his parents’ bedroom. Mr. White was there, crying.
She’s in here, said Henry and opened the door to the bathroom.
Mrs. White, dressed in a nightgown, lay in a shallow pool of blood. Her head was twisted to the side as though in an immense final effort to see something over her shoulder.
She slit her wrists, Henry said. An open straight razor lay in the fold of the nightgown between her legs.
How long has she been like this? I asked. Have you called the police?
No, we haven’t, he said. He wouldn’t let me get near a telephone. I had to beg him to let me call you. He’s out of his mind. Will you talk to him?
Mr. White, I called out, I am terribly sorry. We have to get the police. Please understand.
He made no reply and didn’t move. I turned to Henry and said, Do it. Please make the call. You must do it.
As I pieced it together in conversations that night with Henry first at the morgue, then over the meal Henry and I had alone toward the early morning—Mr. White was unable to hold down any food—at the same restaurant at Flatbush and Church to which Mr. White had taken me, and later at the funeral parlor where Henry and I had gone to make arrangements for the burial, the story was a jumble of the old family misery and specific new horrors. Father and son meanwhile seemed unable to take any action beyond insisting that Mrs. White had to be buried; they wouldn’t allow her to be cremated. Otherwise, all I could get out of them were gestures I interpreted to mean I can’t answer, you do it. In the end I did the things I imagined had to be done, although I had no experience with death or the care of the dead other than the burial of my father, every detail of which had been arranged by my mother. Thus I found myself going through the Whites’ address book and calling people who seemed initially suspicious of my unaccented American speech and then became unnaturally polite when I explained my business, addressing me in careful stilted phrases about conventions I didn’t understand.
Henry had come home on five days’ hardship leave. As soon as he arrived he telephoned me, and had tried my number many times in the days that followed, getting no answer. I had no service that could have told him I was away and how I could be reached. The reason for the leave was a series of frantic appeals from his father, begging him to do whatever it took to spend a few days with his mother. She had taken sleeping pills again, although in a smaller quantity this time. The same doctor who had pronounced her dead the last time had come to examine her. In his opinion, it wasn’t necessary to empty her stomach. Let her sleep it off, he said. And get her some help, I mean real help, in a clinic with a psychiatrist who knows what he’s doing.
Did they? I asked.
She wouldn’t hear of it, Henry told me. To tell you the truth, my father didn’t want it either. It was too humiliating, he said; he didn’t want to treat her like a crazy woman; she didn’t deserve it. I knew, Henry said, what my father meant: if one of their friends found out that she had to be in a mental hospital he would die of shame. Instead, he bought her a Persian lamb coat and booked passage on a cruise ship going to Bermuda in April. At first this seemed to cheer her up; she had been after him to get her this fur coat and to go on a nice spring vacation but, some two or three weeks ago, everything turned black again; she told Mr. White and Henry as well on the telephone that this was the end. Conversations with her from a phone booth in Fontainebleau had become unbearable and more surreal than ever. Either she got angry and hung up on him, or she berated and insulted him to the point where he’d hang up on her even though he remembered vividly where that could lead. Finally, he applied for leave and, when he got it, caught a flight to New York and showed up in Brooklyn. It didn’t take more than one meal at which he did something or didn’t do something quite right before she put on what Henry called her “Why are you here?” act. She wanted to know where he had learned to exaggerate everything and throw money out the window, wasn’t the army in Fontainebleau going to think that he was taking advan
tage, shouldn’t he go back and make up the work he had missed, and so on. There hadn’t been one pleasant moment. She killed herself on his last day in New York; he was scheduled to fly to Paris that evening. They were meant to have a farewell dinner the evening before at a restaurant his parents particularly liked in Sheepshead Bay, which served good broiled lobsters and steamed clams. However, when his father came home from work—Henry had in the meantime gone to the Brooklyn Museum but had already returned—his mother said she didn’t feel like going out. There was nothing to celebrate: Henry had better go to bed and get a good night’s sleep since he was spending the following night on a plane. There was a scene after that. He wasn’t sure how it started, but she ran up to the bedroom and slammed the door, and his father went into his office and wouldn’t talk to him although Henry pleaded with him, saying that it would be a long time before they saw each other again. Mr. White kept saying, You want everything your way, you make trouble and then leave the trouble to me. In the end, Henry decided he was in an absurd situation and saw no point in staying home. He hadn’t told Margot he would be in New York. On the off chance that she was at her apartment, he called and found her free. They had dinner and he spent the night at her place. That had not been his plan; he had fully intended to come home but didn’t; nor did he call to say that he’d be out until the morning. To call would have only led to one more scene on the telephone.
You spent the night with Margot? I asked.
Yes, he said, she’s working at the Metropolitan Museum. Never mind all that now.
He came home at about ten in the morning. His father was there; he hadn’t gone to the factory. Both he and his mother had these blank and stony faces, and, when he addressed them, they didn’t simply remain silent: they made a show of looking past him. That form of punishment wasn’t new to him. His mother reserved it for major transgressions. But his father’s joining in represented a novelty. After a while, he gave up and went upstairs to take a bath and change his clothes. When he came down, his father was gone, and his mother sat at the window, staring out at nothing. He spoke to her; in fact he implored her. He wanted to be forgiven. Nothing. He went for a walk, saw about half of a movie matinee, and was home by two-thirty. His father had come home by then and greeted him with, Where have you been, your mother had to call me at the factory because you’d disappeared. What was I supposed to do? Henry answered, You wouldn’t speak to me, Mother wouldn’t speak to me, so I went out. Now I’m back. That was followed by some shouting, but by then he was on automatic pilot preparing himself to go to the airport. He went upstairs, threw the stuff he was taking to France into his duffel bag, got into uniform, and went downstairs carrying the bag. They were right there, waiting. I’m leaving, he said in their direction. Thanks for a great visit.
His father barred the door and told him, You can’t go away like that. You have to apologize to your mother. All right, he answered, I apologize, I am sorry, I regret everything, and now goodbye. With that he tried to kiss her. She pushed him away and said, If you leave now, this is the last time you will see me alive. No it isn’t, he replied, and said goodbye again and kissed his father, who let him. Meanwhile his mother was screaming, You can’t let him leave, you can’t let him leave, I know I am going to die. At this point, Henry said, he was so confused he didn’t know anymore whether he was speaking English or Polish and when he did try to speak Polish he found he couldn’t. The words weren’t there. He faced them and very self-consciously told them in English that there was no use arguing, he had to go to the airport at once and get on the plane or he would be AWOL. It was a while before a taxi passed by the corner of Flatbush Avenue where he was waiting. He got in and slept all the way to the airport. When his turn came to check in, the man behind the counter told him there was an emergency message for him to call home at once. Although he was convinced that this was another one of his mother’s stunts, he went to the telephone and found out what had happened.
The rest he got from his father. His mother said that she was exhausted and needed a sleeping pill. All right, he said, I’ll get you one. After the first suicide, he had put their store of barbiturates in a drawer in a bedroom desk to which only he had the key. He went upstairs without realizing that she was right behind him. The thick carpet had muffled her steps. When he opened the drawer, he saw her hand suddenly appear to swoop up the vial of Nembutal. She dashed into the bathroom. He opened the door before she could lock it, forced her fist open, and flushed the pills down the toilet. She became hysterical, screaming, Get out of my bathroom, leave me alone, and trying to scratch his face. He backed out of the bathroom keeping her at arm’s length. The moment he was through the door, she slammed it shut. Assuming that the door was locked, he wondered whether he should call a locksmith to force it, but he didn’t want to break the door or aggravate the situation. In the end he lay down on the bed planning to wait for her to calm down. Of course, he fell asleep. When he awakened, he saw that more than an hour had passed. The house was absolutely silent. He tried the bathroom door. It opened at once.
XXIII
IT WAS A RACE to the grave. It had taken less than a year for Mrs. White to follow my father, the clear winner. Then it was Mr. White’s turn. He died, as he had feared, of a stroke, in the first days of January 1957. The funeral was held later than Jewish custom prescribed in order to give Henry time to get back from Fontainebleau. Meanwhile, Mr. White’s executor and business lawyer took charge of all the arrangements. George later told me that this was fortunate, because Henry seemed completely disoriented. I received the cable notification a week after the funeral. No one seemed to have my correct address in Rome, where I was living in a pensione near the Piazza del Popolo, busy revising my second novel.
The revisions done and reworked, I dispatched the manuscript to my agent, toured Tuscany and Umbria with Tom Peabody, who was on sabbatical in Florence, and finally made my way alone to Athens, Istanbul, and Vienna. I had submitted to a magazine a proposal for a very personal account of my first visits to these capitals of fallen empires. It was accepted; a photographer met me at each location. I was able to travel in style without worries about paying rent on my New York apartment, which I hadn’t been efficient enough to sublet. Away all summer, I sailed home from Southampton. By the time I landed in New York, Henry had already gone up to Cambridge to start his life as a law student, and I didn’t see him or George until one Saturday in October, at the engagement party Edie’s parents gave for her and George. When I moved to New York I resolved not to be impressed by the glamorous ways of the rich. As May Standish was fond of saying, there were too many of them in New York. The Bowditches’ double brownstone on East Eighty-first Street, and the walls of its two drawing rooms, dining room, and library covered with Renoirs, Manets, and Monets, put my resolution to a severe test. It would be hard hereafter to treat Edie as just another nice Radcliffe girl without reflecting on her robber baron ancestors or the extraordinary collector of impressionist art and benefactress of the Metropolitan Museum, who I now realized, having put two and two together, must be her grandmother.
My newborn small celebrity, pleasant enough in itself, was useful in certain practical ways: for example, I couldn’t believe that Dr. Kalman would have otherwise acquiesced without fuss in my long absence, and without the payment of some sort of retainer fee, or found for me a slot in the early morning when I returned. At large parties such as the Bowditches’, even if I knew only the host and hostess and a handful of their guests, I could make my way through the crowd confident that when I introduced myself my name would elicit a response along the lines of You must be the novelist, I am so glad to meet you, I haven’t read your book, but I’ve read the reviews, and what are you working on now. I would answer such questions more or less pleasantly, depending on the degree of inanity and the attractiveness of the person putting them, and then move on. That is how, after a few words exchanged with Edie and her parents and George’s, I slowly reached Henry. He had just come in from the
garden, and asked whether I would be having dinner with George and Edie and the two sets of parents, in my role of cousin, friend, and bodyguard. I laughed and said that I hadn’t been invited; in fact, I hoped to spend the evening with him if he was free. There was someone he needed to see first, but we agreed to meet at nine at a restaurant in Irving Place that served late.
This gave me time to talk briefly to George. He had spent the past summer—crucial for law school students because firms decide during that summer between the second and third year of law school on the students they want to hire upon graduation, and students look firms over—working at Wiggins & O’Reilly, a firm that, in spite of the Irish name of one of the founding partners and the world of small-time courthouse politics it evoked, was at the summit of New York’s legal establishment. He had been offered a position as a regular associate, and, having had a fine experience during the summer, he was going to accept it.
It didn’t hurt, he told me, that Lee Sears & Bowditch sends most of its work to Wiggins, which makes it the most important client of the firm. One of the most important, he corrected himself; they keep that kind of specific information very secret. It shouldn’t hurt in the future either, when they decide who is going to make partner.
Lee Sears, I knew, was the investment bank of which Edie’s father was the senior partner and essentially the owner. The Wiggins hiring partner must have rubbed his hands in glee when he roped in the future Bowditch son-in-law.
I asked George whether he had lived at the Bowditches’ over the summer. He laughed and said that had been the idea, since Edie had decided she’d be in the city as well, but the parents on both sides nixed it. They’re dead set against making the course of young love run too smooth. He was forced to share a sublet with one of his Yalie roommates from law school. On weekends, however, either he went out to the Bowditches’ place in Syosset or else Edie and he drove up to Stockbridge. He’d brought his car to the city just for that purpose.