by Louis Begley
Funerals affect people in ways that those who are most immediately concerned—such as I, the grieving son—do not think about in advance. Too busy or inward turned for it? I am not sure. An example that I was made aware of immediately, and that came across to me as bittersweet, but also slightly comical, was the way the Frank contingent suddenly realized that my parents were really important people, in spite of what Bunny and Judy Frank used to regard as their lack of seriousness and, in secret, perhaps even foolishness. Bunny took Lydia and me aside when we all came back from the cemetery to the reception at O Street and confessed that he was shaken. With all his achievements, past and ongoing, he did not think he would rate a send-off like my father’s. Or such obituaries in the Timesand the Washington Post.I couldn’t tell him he was wrong, or that such things didn’t matter, because he wasn’t going to believe me. Instead, for the first time in my life, I clasped Bunny in my arms and said, Don’t talk like that, you will be with us for a very long time still. Besides, I said, it’s not your fault you were too young to be in the war and to do all the follow-up stuff the Establishment then reserved for its own. Those were the rites of a dying world; you have been building for the future.
I did that for Lydia. It didn’t matter that I was telling him the truth; I wouldn’t have been kind or said those words except as an offering to Lydia. And I didn’t do it only because I knew that without her help I would have broken during that week of death, or because I felt guilty about Spetsai, although these things surely had their effect. Do you believe in redemption? North asked.
I didn’t answer.
Of course, said North, either you have no view or you won’t express it. One is at a loss trying to decide whether you are a case of low affect or caution. I don’t believe in redemption, North continued, in a religious or even a Tolstoyan sense, because I don’t believe in God and the associated claptrap. But with my whole being I believe in the possibility of change. Two powerful demonstrations, like masques staged to instruct more than to entertain. Could they have done it? The Masque of Lust in Spetsai, wherein the hapless wanderer disports himself in a waste of fevered pleasure, and the Masque of Love that heals. I abjured adultery. You might say that was the easy part, though I realized that a lifetime of penitence and effort might not suffice to expiate. For once, you are laughing. Is it the liturgical aroma of the word “penitence” or my buffoonery? Please, don’t mind me, keep laughing. Depending on your point of view, you may come to think that further events have proved you right.
By the way, North asked, have I told you that after I was born my mother entered into an adulterous relationship that lasted until she began to lose her mind? She did. When Ellen and I were little, we began to understand that something was wrong, and that it was mother’s fault. Yet we loved her without reserve because she was good to us, and beautiful, and perfect in every other way. We also loved our father. He had to leave on missions, and when he wasn’t away he and mother were usually busy in the evening, entertaining at home or going out to dinner with important people, and he was aloof—naturally aloof and reserved, not at all indifferent to others—but he was also very fair and even tempered. He always talked to us as though we were grown-ups, listened carefully to what we had to say, and remembered it. He knew about a great many things—and his information was accurate and detailed. We admired him.
At some point, I suppose I must have been seven or eight, and Ellen is two years older, we realized what was wrong: mother had a lover. We didn’t need to talk about it; we knew quite naturally who he was. To my knowledge, there was never anyone else. We didn’t find out about it through an indiscretion or through any specific thing either mother or father said or did. One day, the knowledge materialized; it sat there like a very large piece of furniture. I think we were too little to speculate about what mother and her lover did and how it was arranged. Those matters became the subject of endless and sometimes heated discussions between us only after our understanding of the mechanics of sex expanded. Can you guess who he was? I don’t expect you to, you don’t know the milieu or the cast of characters. Surprisingly, but, in fact, I think also quite inevitably, it was none other than father’s closest friend at school, the best man when he married mother, his comrade-in-arms—yes, that’s right—the once-upon-a-time secretary of the navy. No wonder he eulogized father with such authority, intimate knowledge, and penetration. As long-running affairs go, I suppose this one was uncomplicated. The secretary had never married, so there was no betrayed wife or confused and embittered children as our opposite numbers. Does this bit of family history help you peer into my soul? I loathed the connivance among that trio— to this day I cannot understand why any one of them accepted it. How could father go on being such good friends with that man? But were they really good friends? I can’t tell. I used to think that perhaps father enjoyed tormenting him; the fact that the secretary couldn’t so much as yelp. Because, I should add, insofar as Ellen and I could tell, father and mother never stopped living like a real husband and wife. They gave each other elaborate birthday and anniversary presents, organized parties, and so forth. So you might say that mother was moonlighting. Why didn’t they divorce? Money couldn’t have been the reason or, for that matter, fear of society’s disapproval. Their friends were divorcing left and right. As I have said, the secretary was unmarried and, therefore, theoretically available as a husband if my mother felt she needed one. But they stayed together, this improbable threesome, drawing on inexhaustible reserves of voyeurism, masochism, and sadism. I wish one of them had explained to me what they thought they were doing, but they didn’t, and I never had the courage to ask. It may not be too late to put the question to the secretary, even if it brings on a massive heart attack. I can just see him in his corner office at the law firm, where he is still a partner, rising to his full height—he is six foot four and weighs a good two hundred pounds, all of which if you happen to touch him feels like muscle—frothing at the mouth a little, and hitting the floor, spilling in the process his tea, overturning the chinoiserie gueridon, perhaps gashing his forehead on a corner of the desk. Believe it or not, until we were teenagers, Ellen and I thought we were the only ones to know. My Vineyard uncle disabused us of that notion one summer. We were staying with him alone, and after a day’s hard sail and his fourth whiskey sour, he began a rambling lecture on character traits prevalent in our family and step-by-step got to the case of mother and father and the spectacle their form of ménage à troisoffered to their friends, and to society at large in Washington and Paris. A lot of this was hearsay, because my uncle was an eccentric architect and did not move in any society, but Ellen and I didn’t disbelieve him. In fact, it wasn’t a ménage à troisin the classical vaudeville sense, because the secretary never spent a night under our roof that I can remember, not even when the house was full of weekend guests, for instance on Spetsai. I read some time ago a memoir by Nigel Nicolson about his celebrated and very interesting parents. They were both bisexual, the mother’s orientation toward women being probably more pronounced than the father’s toward men. The father, a diplomat like my own, had to be more careful, I imagine, than the Bloomsbury mother. He seemed to me more the typical product of English public school education than an out-and-out queer. The son used a pretty phrase to sum up the moral aspect of the parents’ way of life. “Honor was rooted in dishonor,” he wrote, or something just like it. Balls, is what I say. At best, it was honor among thieves, if you think that being polite in the midst of depravity is a badge of honor.
I need to stretch, North said suddenly. It’s the stirrings of my sciatica. Arm in arm we walked to the door. The light outside was still quite harsh. He took out his dark glasses and, whether because his handkerchief wasn’t clean or he had forgotten to put one into the pocket of his trousers, wiped them carefully with his necktie. I had seen him perform this act with a silk square taken from the breast pocket of his blazer, but for once his breast pocket was unadorned. In the process, he noticed the egg-yolk sta
in. He worked on it for a moment with the nail of his right index finger, but the result didn’t satisfy him. Shaking his head with an air of despondency, which might have been intended to be humorous, he took my arm and led me back to our table. It’s the great retreat from daylight, he said, and ordered more whiskey.
To finish the story of my mother’s adultery, you can imagine how Ellen and I felt when we learned that in his testament father specified that, if he died first, the secretary was to be asked to deliver the eulogy. Fiendish, don’t you think? And absolutely no other speakers; the instructions couldn’t be clearer. The task of conveying father’s wish fell on me, and it cost me dearly to carry it out. Since adolescence, I had been careful to avoid contact with that man. So had Ellen. By the way, I don’t think I would have had the strength to telephone him and get those words out if it hadn’t been for Lydia. Until a few minutes ago, when I began to tell you about this page of my family history, there had been only two people on earth with whom I had spoken about it: Ellen, naturally, and Lydia. It was Lydia’s tenderness and good sense—I don’t know how to separate one from the other—that calmed me and gave me the necessary courage. She made me understand that I didn’t have to see in father’s wish a diabolical scheme designed to visit public humiliation on mother and her lover. You see, said North, at the time father had his testament drawn up, there was no hint that mother was sinking into dementia, so that one could imagine father constructing and refining his pillories for the disloyal friend and the adulterous widow. For the man the pulpit from which he would address the assembled congregation, for her the front pew where she would sit enthroned between Ellen and me. Such was my firm conviction. But Lydia showed me that one could quite as well imagine father’s having in mind a definitive reconciliation: the recognition of the permanent value of a friendship, admittedly imperfect, that until the last moment bound him to his wife and schoolmate. A public reconciliation, of course, for the benefit of those who knew the facts, of whom there must have been more than a few in attendance. I will never know whether Lydia’s interpretation was the right one—unless I speak to the secretary and he doesn’t have that heart attack or refuse to speak. Father did not leave any clues. But her view was in keeping with father’s character and the influences that had formed it. Team spirit, you know. Come to think of it, the old man, unlike me, would have loved the concept of honor rooted in dishonor: it can give cover to more than one kind of shame, including activities associated with certain aspects of government service. But I don’t want to drift away from my purpose, which is to give you a true if miniature likeness of Lydia. She had poured balm on Ellen’s wounds and mine. She had formed an absolutely just opinion of a complex and fundamentally secretive man whom she had seen only at family gatherings—and that over only the relatively short interval between our marriage and father’s decline.
I am tired, said North abruptly. I will leave you here—I don’t mean to say that, of course, why should you stay here?—and take a walk or sit down on a bench and put my face in the sun. I had a bad night. You have probably deduced as much.
Within some thirty minutes he was back. Soon after the funeral, North told me, Lydia and I resumed our yearly summer routine: weekdays in the city and weekends in East Hampton, three-day weekends whenever Lydia’s work at the hospital allowed. The manuscript of Losswas waiting for me; finishing it, I decided, was a challenge I had to meet. I reread the one hundred eighty or so pages anxiously, and was relieved to find I didn’t completely distrust or dislike the story I had written. It would be a rather short novel in an age when it seemed that the proof of serious purpose and rich imagination was to write a work of eight hundred pages without a plot and without a single memorable character. But my method of composition has always been to write down all that I have to say on a given subject and stop. To strain for more is like adding Hamburger Helper. Usually, after so long a separation from a text, I would start by reviewing it from the first to the last page, making big and small changes as I went along. This time I was astonished to discover that I did not need to do that. Nor did I feel that I had to do over the chapter I had finished just before I left for Spetsai in order to jump-start the book or get back in the mood. Those are tricks I have used successfully when I have felt stuck. Quite miraculously, there seemed to be no obstacle to resuming work right away, at a steady pace. I welcomed the arduous task and the heavy fatigue I felt at the end of each day: these were, I thought, the only possible means of reestablishing my physical and mental health. By the beginning of August, I was able to hand to Lydia, always my first reader, a completed first draft. I decided that I would revise it only if her judgment was favorable. You must understand that revisions are a task to which I invariably look forward, however long I estimate they may take, because at least the book is palpably there. It’s a blessing to be relieved of every writer’s recurring nightmare: that he will find himself, perhaps without warning, unable to complete what he has begun.
North paused for a moment. Then he said: I want to correct myself, because I am in danger of misleading you. I should have said my own recurring nightmare just now, my own dread of the failure of imagination or will. How other writers function is the ultimate mystery, no matter what sort of absurd or mendacious revelations they have volunteered on that subject in memoirs or interviews. Also, you are not to think that I had overcome the doubts about the quality of my work that had been tormenting me since The Anthill.They were still there, horribly alive and present, but I was able, at least for the time being, to suffer them as one of the apparently infinite number of aches that afflict us. The failure of a project because of a lack of means—imagination, to be precise—to bring it to a close, I think, cannot be borne because it announces paralysis and utter annihilation. Clearly, a return to the serenity of my life with Lydia had become the indispensable condition to going ahead with productive work on my novel. That condition had been met: the unease I had felt, and had suspected in Lydia, was gone. As though there had never been such a thing. Whether in bed, or in our banal daytime activities of a working, childless couple accustomed to living face-to-face with little room for anyone else, everything functioned happily. I knew that I could once again turn to Lydia with perfect confidence—she had earned it so richly in the days that preceded and followed my father’s death—and receive her advice and myriad kindnesses without constraint or suspicions of occult meanings behind her words and gestures. I was also able to observe an unexpected development in my attitude toward Lydia’s family. It could be traced, I believed, to the moment when I found myself able to give a tactful response to what I had come to call—in my thoughts only, never in conversation with Lydia—the beautiful manifestation of Bunny Frank’s obituary envy. When I answered him then, I spoke out spontaneously. I was too consumed by past and present grief to think, and for once I forgot I owed it to myself to be unpleasant! That was ground for hope that I could purge myself of my greatest shame: ignoble envy of the Franks, their opulence and their simpleminded happiness. Perhaps there was enough goodness in me for that. I longed to suppress once and for all the resentments that had been thriving on it like anaerobic bacteria. If I succeeded, Lydia would know it at once—I was convinced of that—and I would have added to her happiness.
Meanwhile, my manuscript had remained on her desk exactly where I had put it. She didn’t seem to have begun to read it. That was, I have to admit, an unexpected annoyance, but I understood the reason. She was herself writing a long paper that was overdue at the medical journal, and she had not solved problems of argumentation and structure that worried her. I hesitated at first, and then began revising Losswithout further delay. If I had waited, doing nothing, she would have noticed. And that might have put unfair pressure on her; she might have imagined I gave greater weight to her opinion than was ultimately the case. There was a well-known side benefit from moving forward that I took into account as well: the process of revising a book has always absorbed me totally, steadying my nerves. If it turned o
ut later that Lydia did not like what I had done, being at work, I thought, should make me able to deal with my disappointment more calmly. Besides, my thinking about Losshad changed somewhat. Without articulating it, I had reached the decision that the test of whether this novel should ever be shown to my agent would be the success of the revisions, not Lydia’s response to the first draft. In some ways, my state of mind was not dissimilar from what I have experienced upon the publication of any one of my novels: a moment of panic, followed by the realization that the best remedy is not to leave town or refuse to read newspapers but to be busy writing.