“I was asked to. When I finished divinity school I went directly into mission work in Chinatown. After a while I found myself doubting the wisdom of bringing the light to unchristian Chinatown when around the corner from it the Bowery was full of Christian derelicts. Unfortunately, the elders of my church did not agree with me on that, so I had to leave the church and go my own way. I returned to carpentering, and I made my home on the Bowery, and I took those who needed help into it to live with me where I could heal them and instruct them. But not for love,” Fisher rapped out with sudden harshness. “Only because it had to be done. If you deal with men taken out of the gutter like refuse, how can you love them? And if you ever make the mistake of loving them, what can you expect but betrayal? Yes, yes, the danger in what I did was that you may start to play God, to love the humanity you are shaping out of the dirt, and then you will discover, like God, that when a man is led near temptation he will always fall, always leave you choking on your love! How much better than that to know your duty, and do it, and expect nothing in return for it.”
“And what all this comes to,” I said, “is that my duty right now is to walk out of the picture and let Avery do what he pleases to his wife. Or, for that matter, to me.”
“Yes.”
“Including assault, murder, or whatever else happens to strike his fancy.”
“You know as well as I do, Mr. Egan,” Fisher said with some heat, “that I don’t intend any of that to happen. I have a strong influence over Michael. If I talk to him, if I meet with him and his wife and counsel them, I think I can help them.”
I said: “If you find that divorce is the only answer for them, would you tell them that?”
“No, I am opposed to divorce under any conditions. Marriage is an eternal bond, and for good reason. Divorce is flagrant immorality.”
“Even when it’s entirely legal?”
“Legalizing immorality does not make it any more moral.”
“In other words,” I said, “it’s better for two people to live a lifetime of unhappiness rather than find a way out.”
“It’s neither better nor worse, it’s what they must do. Obviously, you’re a child of your times, Mr. Egan. Somehow or other, everyone today has gotten the idea that happiness has been ordained to them from on high, and that unhappiness is the only sin. And, oh, how they seek deliverance from it! They pray to a god of happiness in church, they swallow pills, they lie in the psychoanalyst’s parlor, they make new laws to ease the way, and the more they strive, the less they succeed. Look around you and tell me if that isn’t the truth. ‘Let us worship the golden calf of happiness in all these ways,’ sayeth the lost souls, and they never seek the meaning of Ecclesiastes which says only, ‘There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor.’ In his labor, Mr. Egan, not in coveting other men’s wives.” He turned to Joe and held out a hand, palm upward, in a questioning gesture. “Do you think I’m wrong about this, Mr. Guion? You know your friend better than I do. Would you say that I’m misleading him?”
“Maybe,” said Joe.
“In what way?”
Joe shrugged. “You make everything cut and dried. You make it too easy. As far as divorce goes, the way it used to be with my people—”
Fisher poked his head out nearsightedly. “You’re Indian, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Mohawk? Most Indian ironworkers are Mohawk, I believe.”
“That’s right,” Joe said. “But most of them are from Caughnawaga on the Canada side. I’m St. Regis on the New York side. You know the place?”
“No, but I’m from Vermont which isn’t far away. And I do know something about the way your people regarded divorce. It was one of the problems that my church mission up there was concerned with.”
“Well, it’s not much like that now,” Joe said. “Even so, it used to work out all right back in those days. You take my grandfather. He was married six times, and when he died there were five of the old ladies around to help bury him. And none of them had a word against him. They all thought he was a great old guy right up to the end. See what I mean? There’s different cases for different people. You take Egan’s case, I’d say he was right for the girl and Avery is all wrong for her. The only thing I don’t like about it is that somebody might get hurt.”
“And we don’t want that, do we?” said Fisher.
“Not me,” said Joe.
Fisher smiled a wintry, old man’s smile. “And since we can’t have it both ways, it’s better to choose the right way, isn’t it?” He turned those distorted, all-seeing eyes back in my direction. “Would you consider doing that, Mr. Egan? I mean, drop your acquaintance with Mrs. Avery, and make it that much easier for me to help her and Michael?”
“No,” I said. “Not on your terms.”
“You’re a young fool,” said Fisher. “Do you know what can come of this if you stand between those two people? Do you know the state Michael is in already?”
I said: “I know the kind of heaven you’ve created for yourself, Mr. Fisher, and it’s as cold and barren as the moon. I don’t want any part of it. I leave it all to you.”
“You’re making a dangerous mistake, Mr. Egan.”
“It won’t be the first one,” I said, and since that was all I had to say, I left him to his cold and barren heaven and went down the stairs with Joe following me.
The car had been parked not far from the shop. We got into it and sat there, Joe drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel in a steady rhythm. “You asked for it,” he said at last. “Nobody told you to come down here and talk to him. Don’t take it out on me.”
“I’m not taking it out on anybody.”
“The hell you’re not. You look like you’re ready to go off like a bomb. And what’s the use? Barbara already said she won’t get a divorce. That Fisher guy can’t make it any tougher for you than it already is.”
I said: “He can if he tries hard enough. I’ve got a way of selling Barbara on a divorce, and he can wreck everything if he gets to work on her.”
“Sell her how?”
“By giving her a lot more than a second-hand mink coat. I’m getting a job in a pine-paneled office with everything that goes with it.”
“And when does all this happen?”
“As soon as I can make it happen. I’m seeing an uncle of mine about it tomorrow. He knows everybody worth knowing, right up to the Pope. If he can’t fix it up for me, nobody can.”
“You mean you’re on the level about this?” Joe said suspiciously.
“All the way.”
“But I thought you were on the outs with your family. You think they’ll do you any favors after all this time?”
“Only my uncle. And it won’t be a favor. Any job he can get me I’ll give all I’ve got. He won’t have to make any apologies for me. Once I’m up there with Barbara alongside, the sky’s the limit. And if Fisher doesn’t keep away from her—”
“Simmer down,” Joe said. “Stop working yourself up until it happens. Say, did you get any sleep last night?”
“No.”
“I thought not. You look all beat. What you need—”
“What I need is a couple of drinks and twenty hours of sleep. I’ll take care of that as soon as I get back to Brooklyn.”
“I thought that’s what you had in mind,” Joe said. “Only I’ve got news for you. First, you’re not getting yourself stewed and then picking a fight with somebody, and second, you’re coming on the job tonight. We’ve still got a night’s work on that lousy Centrale before she can go out of drydock, and it won’t get done short-handed. What you need right now is to come along with me.”
“To the races? Man, I couldn’t tell one horse from another, the way I feel.”
“That’s why we’ll skip the races.” He turned the ignition key and started the motor. “There’s that Turkish bath over on Second Avenue. Once you get a sweatbath and
a rubdown and a couple of hours’ sleep you’ll be ready to put out for Voorhees in a big way, won’t you, pal?”
And, as it turned out, I would.
FIVE
Of all my youthful Sunday Afternoons, when the Egans and the Asquiths alternated as hosts of the weekly bloodletting, the most bearable I can remember were those spent in my uncle Charles’ home. That was not because my embattled relatives were any sweeter to each other there; it was simply because the house offered compensations of its own. The Murray Hill section south of Grand Central where it stood was undergoing a transition even then, the old families decamping to Park Avenue north of the station, their mansions becoming headquarters for clubs or associations or being torn down to make way for glossy new apartment skyscrapers, but the Asquith place, a weathered graystone out of the 1870’s, remained a sturdy part of the past in the midst of the garish present. We were sympatico, that old building and I, and had been from the day I had first walked into it hanging on to my mother’s hand.
Inside it was more spacious than one might have guessed from its outward dimensions, its rooms large and high-ceilinged, its furnishings a testimonial to the good luck and good taste of the early Asquiths. They had backed the winning side during the Revolution, had profited greatly and expended their profits with a lavish hand, and evidence of this was everywhere around you in their house. The furniture that was not satinwood was mahogany, and that which was not Sheraton was Duncan Phyfe. The Turkish rugs underfoot were worn thin by long use but were no less works of art because of it. The porcelains on the shelves had come around the Horn under sail, but were no more magnificent than the chased silver pieces nearby, the handiwork of smiths who had learned their craft from Paul Revere. And the collection of pictures on the walls ranged from the awkward and wonderful portrait of Abigail Asquith, the ancestress of all the Asquiths, beady-eyed and toothless, scowling at some frightened Colonial limner, up to various noteworthy modern Americans whose work my uncle had gotten his hands on before their boom set in.
Best of all, there was no museum air about the place. There were no orders to worship its properties from afar, no commands to tiptoe and whisper, no hands-off policy to observe. Along with anyone else I was allowed to look closely, touch, and handle to my heart’s content. My mother and sister lived in trembling fear that some day I would poke a finger through a painting or drop one of those porcelains and would instruct me accordingly every time we entered my uncle’s door, but once inside and under his authority I did what I wanted. Which, I suppose, was how I came to know the feel of art before I came to understand the look of it.
And, of course, the house had, in the grand tradition, a library, a genuine and undeniable library packed full of books, and deep leather armchairs into which you would sink, minute by minute, like someone going down in quicksand, and which, when you rose from them, would hold on to the seat of your pants like an adhesive, parting from it finally with a regretful, ripping sound that made the getting up an adventure in itself. Once in that room I was well away from the Egans, Asquiths, and the world at large, which was exactly where I wanted to be during most of my childhood.
It takes quite a ménage to run a place like this, and it takes an expert hand to run such a ménage, and that was where Mrs. Quinn, the housekeeper, came in. Once there had been Quinn and Mrs. Quinn, he serving as majordomo and chauffeur and she as housekeeper, but then he had died and she alone became the acknowledged supervisor of the works. Somewhere behind the scenes, one knew, there were people who cooked, cleaned, repaired, and performed the other services required to keep my uncle living the gracious life, but the only one who stood forth in the spotlight and at whom instructions or complaints were directly aimed was Mrs. Quinn.
That is, she was Mrs. Quinn when addressed to her face. What the Egans called her behind her back was something else again. The most common charge leveled against her by the senior Egans was that she was a smiling bitch out to rob poor Charles blind, and the most titillating charge discussed by the junior Egans was that she was madly in love with Uncle Charles and regularly shared his bed with him. For all I knew, both charges may have been true. The job of bachelor’s housekeeper is traditionally one which suggests excursions along shady bypaths, and Mrs. Quinn herself was not badly cast for the traditional role. Despite her graying hair, her sensible dresses, and her even more sensible shoes she was a remarkably pretty little woman with a lush figure and an agelessly youthful complexion. She purveyed a highly deceptive air of charming femininity that way, but it took only one brief demonstration of her temper to see the iron hand in the gingham glove. That was what enraged the Egans most: the feeling of that hand now and then rapping them on the jaw, mixed with the feeling that there was no way of rapping back since one does not deign to fight openly with the hired help. At least, not with someone else’s hired help. And all of which was intensified by their conviction that if it came to choosing sides, my uncle Charles would cheerfully consign all of them to hell in favor of Mrs. Quinn, who smoothed his way to being The Last Gentleman with the devotion of an ornithologist tending the last whooping crane.
When I rang the doorbell of the house it was Mrs. Quinn who answered it. “Well,” she said coyly, “I believe you’re the young man who wouldn’t give his name on the phone, aren’t you?”
As the beggar at the gates there was nothing for me to do but play the game with her. “I believe I am,” I said, being amusingly hangdog for her benefit.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” She led me in and closed the door behind me. “Really, Daniel, you can be the most aggravating person.”
“Even if I am, is that a way to say hello to an old friend?”
“It’s all you deserve. Here, let me look at you.” It was a familiar command from her, and out of childhood habit I stood at attention while she surveyed me up and down. “You look quite nice, but the lapels of that jacket are much too broad. Do get something more conservative next time. And you never have learned how to knot a tie, have you?” I held at attention while she briskly remade the tie. “There, that’s better.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re very welcome,” said Mrs. Quinn, twinkling at me, and it was impossible to tell whether she was unaware of my sarcasm or was deliberately overlooking it. I had gone through this same routine with her many times during my kneepants days, and had emerged from it every time with the feeling that my clothes fitted me badly and that, all evidence to the contrary, there must be dirt on my hands and face. Now I found that nothing had changed, neither the routine, nor the feeling it gave me. For that reason as well as for my awareness that I was the beggar at the gates, when I entered the room where my uncle awaited me I was simulating a carefree ease that I did not feel at all.
My uncle was not waiting alone. Seated in the room with him was a woman, enormously pregnant, who held in her hand a leather leash against which strained a small child. My sister, Margaret, and her son. And the son—it took me a moment to realize that he was also my nephew—looked almost frighteningly like the pictures of my father taken in his own babyhood.
I stopped short at this unexpected sight. The bad part of it was the way Margaret was looking at me with her eyes much too bright and her mouth working. These were, I knew with dismay, the symptoms of tears to come, but luckily it was a sight that must have disconcerted my uncle as much as it did me.
“Don’t be a fool, Peg,” he said irritably. “I didn’t invite you here to make a weepy display of yourself. Try to act your age, will you?”
It may have been his tone that did it, or it may have been the unkind reminder that she was no longer a girlish young thing. In any case my sister swallowed hard and took control of herself. “I am not crying,” she said with some irritation of her own. She tugged at the leash to call her son’s attention to me. “This is your uncle Danny,” she said to him. “Don’t you want to say hello to your uncle Danny?”
“No,” said my nephew. He struggled against the restraining h
arness, his feet scrabbling on the floor, his arms flailing the air.
“He’s really very friendly,” Margaret told me apologetically. “It’s just that he doesn’t know you yet.”
“He looks very much like Father, doesn’t he?” I said.
“Much more like Austin,” said my uncle. “And must you keep him tied to that thing, Peg? I cannot see handling a child like a dog. Here, give him to me. You two probably want to be alone anyhow, so Charlie and I will have ourselves a time looking at picture books in the library. Won’t we, Charlie?”
“Yes,” said Charlie who knew a good thing when he saw it, and departed in style perched on my uncle’s not very broad shoulders.
“Well,” I said when they were gone, “now I’ve seen everything.”
“He used to do that with you, too,” Margaret said.
“You mean, carry me around like that and have games with picture books?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“You were very little then,” Margaret said. “Not much more than a baby. But he did it, all right. I used to be terribly jealous of you.”
“No reason to be jealous any more,” I remarked lightly. “Little Charlie’s got the situation well in hand, I’d say. And there’s another one coming, too, isn’t there? When’s it due?”
“Oh, in about six more weeks. God, I wish it was tomorrow. I don’t know how I’ll hold out that long if this heat keeps up.”
“How did it go with Charlie? You didn’t have a bad time, did you?”
“Not too bad. The worst part was Father. You’d think he was having the baby instead of me. He almost drove poor Austin crazy.”
“And how is Austin, by the way?”
“All right. He works too hard but he doesn’t seem to mind it.” Margaret dipped into her purse and came up with a lipstick and mirror. She made up her lips and studied her face critically in the mirror. “Golly, what a mess,” she said without noticeable resentment. She replaced the lipstick and mirror in the purse and looked at me frowningly. “Danny, what do you want to see Uncle Charles about?”
The Winter After This Summer Page 40