by Brian Moore
“No.”
“Well, do you want the apartment?”
“I told you. No.”
“What about the beach house? Maybe you’d rather have that? At least we own that outright, so you’d have no payments to make.”
“I don’t want the beach house. I don’t want anything from you. And what’s this rush about the divorce? Are you going to marry Turnbull?”
She hesitated. “Weinberg said if I told you you might try to hold things up. You wouldn’t, would you, Jamie?”
As she spoke she leaned forward, her knees coming like polished ovals out of the sleek brown hide of her boots, her face, smiling now, framed in the three sides of a rectangle formed by her blond, bobbed hair, that face so familiar, yet now the face of a stranger. He felt a slight shiver of fear that this stranger could know so well the winning cards to deal against his resolve.
“Why would I hold things up?” he heard himself ask. Indeed, he had been meaning to make trouble if she wanted to marry Turnbull, but now dead pride invaded him like a dybbuk. “Are you trying to buy me off? Is that it?”
“Of course not. That’s mean.”
“Anyway,” he told her, “there’s no settlement that could make up for what you’ve done to me.”
“What exactly have I done to you?”
“Nothing, nothing.” Humiliatingly, tears filled his eyes. “Go on,” he said. “You can go now. You can tell Weinberg it’s okay, you’ve fixed me. But you’d better warn him you’ll have to take over this apartment. Because I’m moving out.”
“But there’s absolutely no need to do that. It will just be sitting here empty.” She got up, came to him, and put her arms around him. “Oh, Jamie, I’m sorry. I am sorry.”
And once again he had been the weak one, once again he had confessed to her what he least wanted her to know. A nobody has no pride. The dybbuk left him. He stood, letting her embrace him, a shameful person who had wept to gain her sympathy. “I didn’t mean to insult you,” she said. “I know how awful all this has been for you.” And his voice, controlled now, said he hadn’t meant to shout at her. He did mean it about the apartment, though. And he would call Weinberg tomorrow.
“Tomorrow is New Year’s,” she said, releasing him. “The day after would be better.”
Turning from him as she spoke, picking up the long fur coat, slipping into it, her back to him, showing him only the brown fur, the polished leather boots, the fur shako and blond bob, as though she were some animal, all hides and hair. How could he have imagined he could confide his new fear to that furred animal back? Then she turned to face him and for a moment was the girl who had improbably asked him to marry her, who had joined with him in matrimony before a clerk at City Hall, who in Doctors Hospital had delivered the stillborn son he had never seen. All that, that life, was over. Tomorrow would be New Year’s Day and Weinberg’s office would be closed. The day after would be better. She had finished her business here.
“By the way,” he said, “you’re not going to the Connells’ tonight, are you?”
“I don’t know. I thought we might drop in for a few minutes, later on. Why? Are you going?”
“Not now.”
“Oh, come on, Jamie, that’s silly. There’s always an enormous mob there. We can easily avoid each other if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“Did Bob Connell ask you? I mean, specifically.”
“I don’t remember. I suppose there was an invitation.”
“Well, they invited me. Specifically. The Connells are my friends.”
“I thought they were my friends, too,” she said. “But let’s not argue about it.”
“You and Turnbull must have a dozen other parties you can go to.”
“All right. Whatever you like. You go. We won’t.” She opened the front door, then put her hand on his sleeve and looked up at him. “And listen. Please use the apartment. It’s just going to go to waste.”
“I don’t want it. Clear?”
She removed her hand at once. “Fine,” she said and walked off down the corridor, all moving mink and wobbling polished boots. Absurdly, he wanted to call her back and start the encounter all over again. For days he had planned how he would behave if they met. He would be polite. He would make her believe he was better off without her. He would be magnanimous, yet indifferent, for indifference is the ultimate revenge. Instead, he had wept, had lost his temper and had even begged for a favor, asking her to stay away from the Connells’ party.
“Beatrice?” he called in a loud, uneven voice. She had reached the elevator. His voice went up to a shout. “I’m not going to the Connells’ tonight. I’m going to Montreal to spend New Year’s with my father. I may not be back for a while. I’ll leave the keys with the super.”
“What about Weinberg?”
“I’ll call him from Montreal.”
“Good.” She pressed the elevator button. He slammed the door on her image. Polite, magnanimous, indifferent. Didn’t that describe her behavior perfectly? He went into the living room, saw her coffee mug, and carried it into the kitchen as though to rinse out this evidence of her visit. But, irrationally, was filled with a wish to have one more look at her and so ran to the bedroom window in time to see a movement of fur and boots as she got into the little Mercedes. Kevin, the doorman, shut the door. The Mercedes slewed around awkwardly, then, accelerating, skidded slightly in the snow as it zoomed toward Second Avenue. She’ll wreck it, he thought. She never did know how to drive.
So she would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
That was her way. Primitives fear the photograph, the shutter click, their image stolen, then given back to them as a lifeless souvenir, entombed in a piece of paper. Beatrice had snapped the shutter, stealing away the man he once had been, presenting him with himself as her useless husband. He took that husband figure into the bathroom, stripped it of its garments and stood it for a time under the shower, the water too hot, reddening the skin. He dried body and hair, then went naked into the bedroom, where, in the triptych mirror she had installed, he saw a face in stasis, eyes which had no light behind them, a waxwork countenance, lifelike, but not alive. The primitive photographed, robbed, abandoned.
He began to dress. He hung up the suit he had taken out to wear to the Connells’ party, instead picking out a turtle-neck sweater, tweeds, wool socks, and brogues. He did this without premeditation, just as a few minutes ago he had called out to her that he was going to visit his father in Montreal. He had not seen his father in seven months and when he called him on Christmas Day had not felt able to admit to him that Beatrice had walked out. Yet now, suddenly, he needed his father. His father might be the one person who could help him. To his father he was his father’s only son, continuance in a line which stretched back to Ireland and their grandfather’s claim to be descended from the poet Mangan himself. Fumbling with the address book, he found and dialed his father’s number. Our Father Who art in Montreal, please be at home. It rang, it rang. Waiting, he looked out of the window. Gray channel of river under a whited sky; two cargo ships, light in the water, moving downriver toward the ocean.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
In Montreal someone picked up the receiver. He heard his father’s voice.
“Where do you live?” The immigration officer’s intonation was French-Canadian.
“New York.”
Seven years ago when Mangan moved to the United States he had applied for American citizenship. Thus, it was an American passport which he now passed across the counter to identify himself to the officials of his native land. The officer gave a cursory look at his photograph and returned the passport to him, saying: “What is the purpose of your visit?”
“To see my father.”
“Do you have any gifts, liquor, or cigarettes with you?”
“N
o.”
The officer stamped a customs form, handed it to him, and, for the first time in their encounter, smiled. “Happy New Year, sir.”
“Thank you. Same to you.”
Carrying his bag, he entered the customs area, handed the form to a customs officer, and was waved through automatically opening doors to a mill of waiting faces in the arrivals lobby. On the phone, a few hours ago, when he told him about Beatrice, his father had treated it as a true bereavement, saying, “Of course, come on up. And—look—we’ll meet your flight.” Now, in evidence of this concern, here was Margrethe, “larger than life,” in his mother’s bitter phrase, pushing to the front of the waiting crowd, tall as Mangan himself, her blond hair falling down about her shoulders, dressed in a blue ski parka and matching stretch pants, her Viking eyes steely with delight as she ran to fold him to her in a warm, moist, kissing embrace.
In the past, during similar displays of affection, Mangan had experienced an illicit sexual thrill at holding and being kissed by this handsome prize of his father’s old age, a Danish girl six years younger than himself. But tonight when her warm lips touched his cheek he did not feel his usual droit de sang and entertain his fantasy of cuckolding his father. Instead, he felt, suddenly, grateful, glad to be seen at last not as Beatrice’s husband, but welcome in his father’s house, a son come home.
“Come, I have my car,” said Margrethe, speaking in the clipped, English-accented tones she had learned in a Danish school. And so he went with her into the blear vise of a Montreal winter’s night, waiting in freezing wind as she unlocked the Volvo. Then, snug beside her, the heater roaring, they drove out onto an access road lined with snowbanks high as horse jumps, pitted with yellow dog piss, great gray dirty slabs which would not melt till spring. Facing them, waving them on, his fur hat and greatcoat hoar as Banquo’s Ghost, a Montreal policeman, whistle in mouth, leather mitts pawing the smoking Arctic air. Canada: cruel landscape, its settlement a defiance of nature. Home.
“So,” Margrethe said. “When did she leave, exactly?”
“Three weeks ago.”
“Maybe you don’t want to talk about it?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Was it Perry Turnbull she went with?”
He turned to her in astonishment. She ignored his look, her attention on the traffic as she slipped in and out of lanes at high speed, her profile immobile as an image on a coin. “How did you know about Turnbull?” he asked.
“Ah, so it was him.” She turned for a moment and gave him a warm triumphant smile. “It was something she said when she was here last time.”
“But that was more than a year ago.”
The Volvo leaped forward as though running away from this dangerous revelation. “I remember,” Margrethe said. “She told me this man has a big place in Jamaica.”
“Yes. She’s going down there with him.”
Margrethe laughed. “What an extraordinary person she is. Were you sad when she left?”
“Sad?” Nobody had asked him this question. “I think I felt insulted.”
“She must have been a difficult person to know. I mean, to really know. She’s such an actress.”
CÔTE-DE-LIESSE said the green and white expressway sign leading him back in memory to his boyhood, to a time before Beatrice, to turnings he wished he had not taken.
“And so charming,” Margrethe said. “I used to watch her working on your father. Poor Pat, I think he sort of fancied her.”
So as I lusted for Margrethe my father lusted for Beatrice. “How is Pat?” Mangan asked.
“He’s in great form. He’s having a party tonight, did he tell you?”
“A big party?”
“Oh, you know.” Margrethe leaned forward, concentrating as the Volvo rushed up an off ramp then slowed with a lurch at the approach to Côte-de-Liesse Road. “The old gang. We’re having drinks and then, later on, a buffet.”
Windshield wipers rose and fell, guillotining the view. Down Sherbrooke Street past Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where he had been born in crisis, a placenta previa, his mother in danger. Margrethe was silent: the only sounds the roar of the car heater, the wipers’ slick downslap and dragging rubbery upsweep. Ahead, a townscape little changed from the years when this was his world, Westmount Park, the public library, the hockey rink, the rows of suburban avenues climbing steeply up to the Boulevard, dividing line on the social Monopoly board between the managers of banks and businesses, who lived, aspiring, on the lower slopes, and the owners of those banks and businesses, who were ensconced on the higher reaches of Westmount Mountain. The Volvo turned in at Lansdowne Avenue, the street on which Mangan grew up, beginning a climb past red-brick Victorian-style houses, their wooden porches silted with old snowdrifts, their walls and steps salted down to break the carapace of winter ice. Halfway up, the Volvo turned in at a narrow driveway, facing the front steps of a semidetached house with a front of gray Scots fieldstone. Mangan and Margrethe got out. To the left of the door, a lighted window, its curtains undrawn. Framed in this window, looking down at him, his father, dressed for a party in navy blazer, royal-blue shirt, red silk foulard. His father inclined his head in a mock-comic bow of welcome, exposing a tonsure of baldness ringed by longish gray hair. “There’s Pat,” Margrethe said happily, running up the steps, pushing open the front door, beckoning Mangan to follow her.
He waved to his father, then went up into the small entrance hall, picking his way through its familiar winter confusion of scattered rubbers, circulars, and unopened suburban newspapers to enter the living room, a place of contrasts, its wooden Bauhaus chairs and end tables bought in the thirties at great expense, now old and warped as a thrift-shop assemblage. Books furnished the room. In an Adam-style grate a log fire burned brilliantly. His father, kissing and being kissed by Margrethe, raised a hand to wave to him.
Don Duncan, his father’s oldest friend, stood with his back to the fire, glass in hand, smiling and nodding in welcome. His father, releasing Margrethe, came to shake hands. “How was your flight?”
His father’s grip was firm. His father’s way of dealing with people and crises was to be brusque, cheerful, a little distant, a trait developed in his work as managing editor of The Gazette, where people and crises were the daily material of his trade. Possibly he had copied this manner from some managing editor he had known in his youth, but in Mangan’s eyes it gave his father a gravitas which other men seemed to lack. Incongruously, it occurred to him that to his father he was tonight’s top local news story. son cuckolded by celebrity mate.
“What about a drink?” his father asked. “Scotch and water, isn’t it?” He nodded. His father went to the pantry.
“I have to go up and change now,” Margrethe said. “You know your room, Jamie.”
And went off, leaving Mangan alone with Don Duncan, who stood, his back to the fire, immense in a light-gray suit, his thick white hair matted like some badly cleaned sheepskin rug. “So how’s it been, Jamie?”
“Oh, so-so.”
“Pat told me.”
“Oh, did he?”
“Yes, he mentioned it. Well, what can I say.”
“How have you been, Don?”
“Oh, comme ci. Is she in a play or a movie, right now?”
“She’s opening in a play in March.”
“I only saw her in the one thing,” Don said. “It was with Henry Fonda. I must have told you about it. Hell of an actress, though.”
“Yes.”
“My daughter Deirdre is crazy about her, you know. I remember when she came up here that first time with you, a few years back, right? Deirdre made me get her autograph.” Don smiled and shook his head at his empty glass. “Well, it should be a nice party tonight. No celebrities, of course. It’s not New York, Jamie. No movie stars.” He laughed.
His father reappeared. “Here’s your Scotch. Don, how about a refill?”
“That’s okay. I’ll get it myself. I know the good place.”
“Wi
ll you? Thanks.”
Don went out.
“Are you hungry, Jamie?” his father asked.
“No.”
“We’re going to eat some supper around ten. Will you be all right till then?”
“Yes, fine.”
His father hesitated. “On the phone you said you wanted to talk about something. Was it something special?”
“No, I just wanted to see you, I guess. And suddenly I feel I want to ask you a lot of questions. Family history, mostly.”
“Ah,” said his father. “Interest in the family tree is said to be a first sign of middle age. Anyway, I have the family records upstairs, such as they are. The Bible with births and so on. And those books about James Clarence Mangan that I once tried to interest you in. Maybe you’re ready for them now. You’ll stay a few days, I hope?”
“I’d like to.”
“Why don’t you drive out to the Townships with us tomorrow. You could go out with Margrethe in the morning and I’ll join you at suppertime. We’ll stay out a couple of days, if that’s all right.”
“Fine. Where is it this year?”
“We’ve rented a cottage near Knowlton. It’s only fifteen minutes from the ski lifts.”
“I thought you’d given up skiing.”
“Self-defense. Margrethe.”
“Oh, right.”
“Good. So that’s settled, then.”
“Yes. I think I’ll go upstairs for a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” his father said. “Take your drink with you.”
“See you, then.”
Drink in hand, he went up the familiar stairs, up to the room which had had no regular tenant since his day and so retained the furniture and look of his boyhood and college years. He did not switch on the lamp but, closing the door behind him, went confidently in the dark toward the single bed. Headlights from a passing car swept the ceiling, bringing back a clear memory of himself at nine lying there, pretending his bed a boat, the car headlights lighthouse beams, the ceiling an ocean. Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. But unlike Marcel, I did not lie here longing for Mama to come up and kiss me good night. I was happiest in those hours, the day done, the door shut, alone, turning beds into boats, an only child who did not want a little brother.