by Brian Moore
He lay back on the pillows. A second car came up the avenue. Stopping directly outside the house, its headlights’ reflections casting long shadows on a Swedish teakwood desk, a present from his mother, his first year at McGill. At sight of the desk, the room seemed the cemetery of his failed ambitions reentered at his peril. Below, he heard the doorbell ring. Arriving guests, shedding their rubbers, stamped heavily on the wooden porch floor. Dreams should not leave this room; they do not travel. But long ago he had decided to risk it, and like a gambler winning the first hand of the evening, an omen for a losing night, his first submitted poem was accepted by Poetry. Three months later, The New Yorker took one of his poems, making him, at nineteen, a twice-published poet. His father was pleased but, ever practical, urged him to continue working for a law degree, while he, pretending indifference to his success, was secretly launched in a wild daydream of fame and so settled instead for a lazy B.A. Then something soured. Poems came back. The magazines that had written encouraging letters now wrote regrets. Those that did accept his poems were Canadian, obscure as their contributors. By the time he graduated he had not repeated his early success and, without special talents, was forced to accept his father’s offer of a job on The Gazette. There he stayed for three years, still writing poetry on the side, until he and his father decided it would be better for his future if he could work for another newspaper. And so, again through parental influence, he was hired by the Globe and Mail and left home to live in Toronto.
He heard footsteps on the stairs outside. Someone knocked on his door. “Jamie?” Margrethe’s voice. He did not answer. She opened the door slightly, but, seeing no light inside, closed it again. Laughter jollied up from the living room. He stood, switching on the bedside lamp, noticing that the picture which used to hang near the switch, a Laurentian landscape in pastels done by his mother, had been replaced by a poster entitled “The Doors of Dublin.”
“Jamie?” Margrethe’s voice again. She had knocked on the bathroom door down the corridor.
“Someone here,” a woman answered from inside.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Margrethe said.
He went out into the corridor. “Here I am,” he told her. “I put the light off and went to sleep for a few minutes.”
She accepted his lie. “Sorry if I woke you.” She had changed into a long evening dress of some shiny jersey material which outlined her young, sleek good looks. “Your father has taken a fancy to Danish pastry,” his mother once said, cattily. “I don’t think he can digest it at his age.” But it was his mother who could not stomach Margrethe.
“Jamie!” He looked down, saw Mark Magennis semaphoring at him from the hallway below, remembered that Magennis was now a panjandrum at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and thus a person who had the power to give him assignments. “Nobody told me you were in town,” Magennis said. “Where’s Beatrice?”
“She’s not with me.”
“Oh, too bad. I’ve been looking forward to telling her how good she was in that film, the French one, whatsits-name? Anyway, I saw it in New York last September. Did they dub her? She doesn’t speak French, does she?”
“Yes, she was dubbed.”
“Anyway, she was terrific. Oh, excuse me, Peg. Jamie, do you know Peg Thornton?”
No, he did not know Peg Thornton, a witchlike person whose eyebrows inched together as she focused on him. “Are you Beatrice Abbot’s husband? That’s who we’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“Yes, he is,” Magennis said. “This is her husband, Jamie Mangan. He’s also Pat’s son and heir.”
“Pat’s son! Well, you are well connected. I remember now I knew Pat had a son who married someone famous—but Beatrice Abbot! I’m like Mark, I’m a great fan of hers. Your wife isn’t with you, you said?”
“No, she’s in New York.”
“In a play?” Magennis asked.
“No. As a matter of fact, we’ve just separated.”
“Oh?” Peg Thornton looked at Magennis, who looked at Margrethe. All looked at Mangan. “Jamie, what about a drink?” Margrethe said. “Come, let me show you what we’ve got.”
She led him away. And, at once, there was Handelman, his reddish hair framing his skull like a saint’s halo, his face loose in a grin of delight. “Hey, Jamie! Happy New Year! Hey, good to see you. Where’s Beatrice?”
It was going to be that sort of evening.
Hours later, when the party was at its height and the supper plates had been cleared away, Mangan, at Margrethe’s request, carried a television set down from the master bedroom and installed it in a corner of the living room. At ten minutes to midnight his father left his guests and went over to switch on the set. Mangan joined him as he fiddled with the knobs. In a few seconds Bill Lombardo smiled from the screen. The music swelled. A tune ended. Bill Lombardo looked at his wristwatch, then put on a paper party hat. He picked up his baton again and launched his musicians on a new medley.
“Exactly right,” Mangan’s father said. “They always put on the paper hats near midnight.”
People began to crowd around. “Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians,” Handelman said. “My God, I remember dancing to them at the old Astor back in ’41.”
Times Square was shown on the screen. Faces in the crowd stared up at the television cameras; people waved, huddled together in the cold wind. Despite the announcer’s breathily excited tone, it was evident there was a poor turnout. In the living room, conversations resumed. “People don’t care any more,” Peg Thornton said, turning her back on the screen. Mangan sat down on the floor, cross-legged, facing the set. “Jamie, let me know when it’s midnight, will you?” his father called. He nodded. He felt drunk. Behind him they were talking about the chances of Quebec’s separating from the rest of Canada. His father said it was like living in the Weimar Republic. “It’s already the end of this province as we knew it,” his father told the others. But his father had, all his life, been exercised about politics. This place, these people, this conversation seemed a long way from New York. Last New Year’s Eve, he remembered, Beatrice was in a play. He had gone to the Helen Hayes Theatre to pick her up, only to find that a hired limousine was waiting at the stage door. They had three parties to go to and she said they’d never find taxis. When he made some remark about the expense of a limo, she said the play’s producer would pay for it.
Something was happening on television. “One minute to midnight!” the announcer cried. Mangan turned and called, “Dad? Here we go.” He did not get up. The midnight countdown began. “Happy New Year!” people cried in the room behind him. He watched his father kiss Margrethe. There was a glut of kissing and handshaking, people moving around like politicians at a rally. Then Margrethe bent down and kissed him on the cheek. “Happy New Year, Jamie!” He felt like crying. The Royal Canadians played “Auld Lang Syne” and his father’s guests began to sing along. But auld acquaintance had been forgot. He remembered that Turnbull was producer on that play. So it was Turnbull who paid for the limousine last New Year’s. Beatrice and Turnbull would have a limousine tonight. Probably start off at some Park Avenue address with Turnbull’s fellow Republicans. And, of course, they would drop in later at the Connells’, making an entrance, people asking, Who’s that Bea’s with, no, I didn’t know, when was the breakup? Everyone agog, everyone loves gossip.
“Happy New Year,” his father said, leaning down, putting a hand on his shoulder. “How are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Happy New Year.”
“I think we can turn that off now,” his father said, and did.
“Oh, Pat?” someone called. “Do you have any more vodka?” And his father was gone, the set turned off. He stared at his own vague reflection on the dead screen. People would be kissing Beatrice, wishing her a Happy New Year, probably saying nice things about her new romance. She smiling her Beatrice Abbot smile, telling them how wonderful she feels, how happy she is. Her graph goes up and up. Even when a play fails, she gets good n
otices. She’s a winner, one of the All-American winners. And if she ditches you, it’s because you’re a loser. A Canadian loser.
Time to rewrite Byron’s lines:
Her love was of her life a thing apart,
’Twas my whole goddamned existence.
Well, that’s over. Happy New Year. He shut his eyes and rocked to and fro on his heels. All around him the roar of talk. “Bitch,” he said softly. It was comforting to say it. It was her fault. There was no point in pretending to be fair about her any more. I hate her. I hate her.
Into the silence came a noise which grew louder until it sounded like a distant chainsaw. It did not come from the small road which led to the lake but from the lake itself. Mangan, who had been dozing in the living room of the ski cottage, got up and went to the window. Behind a scrim of bare winter boughs, the lake, opaque and white, its icy flats circled by snow-covered hills bristled with a stubble of black, stripped elm. Somewhere out there in that frozen world the angry sound grew, until his eyes, narrowed against the blinding whiteness, sighted an object moving on the ice. It came nearer, passing by, close to the window, a bright yellow snowmobile driven by a youth, his vermilion wool cap and scarlet parka giving him the look of a hobgoblin as he hunched over his irritating machine. The noise died to silence.
Beyond, in the kitchen, the old refrigerator went on cycle, beginning its high, tiny whine. Here there was no telephone. Waking in this room, he felt again linked to the shabby summer cottages of his childhood, to that remembered feeling of being at the lake, absolved from all duties, unreachable, on the edge of wilderness. How pleasant it would be to stay on here after his father and Margrethe left, reading, going for walks, cooking his own meals, maybe writing something. But that was another daydream. For although there must be two hundred thousand dollars in their joint certificates of deposit, he felt he could not in honesty touch that. He had only about five hundred dollars in his own account. It was possible that Weinberg had already instructed Beatrice to redeposit the certificates in her own name. It was her money, after all.
Money. “You mustn’t worry like this,” Beatrice used to tell him. “Worry, worry, worry,” she teased him. “I don’t want you to make a whole lot of money. We won’t need a lot of money. The way I feel about you I could live with you on food stamps in a two-room cold-water flat in the Bronx and be happier than with any other man in the world.” And she meant it. Even though, as he later discovered, she didn’t know what food stamps were. And he believed her. Because that was in the beginning when it had just happened.
He was twenty-seven at the time and a reporter on the Toronto Globe and Mail. A special overnight train had been laid on by Canadian National Railway to bring Zero Mostel and several other Broadway stars up to Toronto to perform in a charity benefit. The Globe and Mail was one of the sponsors of this event and so Mangan was sent to New York, to ride up on the train, write a general story on the benefit, and also interview Mostel for the paper’s Saturday entertainment page. At the last minute the features editor tossed three extra clippings on the desk. “That’s some stuff on Beatrice Abbot,” he said. “You might fit her in if you have time. The word is, she may be the next Mrs. René Chandler.”
René Chandler, well known in Toronto, was the heir to Algonquin Metals, twice married and in his early thirties. Mangan had never heard of Beatrice Abbot, but on reading the clippings learned that she was twenty-five and in the beginning of her fame, having won a Tony Award that year for her performance in Major Barbara on Broadway, and headlines by walking off the set at Warner Brothers on her first film because, she said, “The script is a lot of old rubbish and the star hasn’t been sober in three years.”
On the show train Mangan did not recognize Beatrice Abbot from her newspaper photograph and had to have her pointed out to him in the parlor car. When he asked for an interview, she said it was too noisy there and invited him to come back to her bedroom. After the interview she offered him a Scotch. He did not keep his appointment with Zero Mostel that night and in fact had to use her intercession to reschedule it for the following afternoon. Mangan and Beatrice Abbot spent the night together in her train bedroom. After that, they were rarely separated.
Mangan fell in love instantly and without reservation. He did not ask himself what sort of person Beatrice Abbot might be. He did not know her views on politics or on a dozen other subjects. Indeed, if at that time he had discovered them to be radically opposed to his own, it is unlikely, given his state of mind, that he would have thought twice about it. He did ask her about René Chandler, but she said that was a gossip columnist’s invention. And he did wonder why she slept with him that first night and who were his predecessors. She said she had never been in love before. She had never felt anything remotely like this. She could not believe that this had happened to her but, now that it had, nothing must ever separate them. When she had finished the benefit show, she declared she wouldn’t go back to New York until she was forced to go. And when that time did come (she had to report for rehearsals for a play to which she had been committed), they decided, impulsively, that he would give up his job on the Globe and join her in New York in a few weeks. Those weeks he spent job hunting in Toronto, finally securing a part-time position in the New York office of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The pay was not enough for him to live on, but it was his annus mirabilis when everything seemed possible, when every wish was likely to come true. And so two days before he was due to leave Toronto, Maclean’s magazine hired him to do four pieces on the U.S. and Saturday Night commissioned him to write a biweekly column on New York theater. He moved into Beatrice’s Chelsea flat at the end of June, and four months later, on her urging, they got married. The ceremony took place early one October morning at City Hall, with two of Beatrice’s theatrical friends as witnesses. The officiating clerk, seeing the name of Beatrice Abbot on the forms, ran into his private office and returned with a camera, asking if he could be photographed with the newlyweds. They went on to a wedding luncheon at the Four Seasons given by Beatrice’s agent. There were twenty guests, all of them Beatrice’s friends and colleagues. Later they spent the afternoon wandering hand-in-hand among the pictures in the Frick Collection until it was time for tea at the Plaza with Beatrice’s lawyer and his wife. That night Beatrice had a performance, and when Mangan went to pick her up afterward, he discovered her fellow actors in the company all dressed and ready to take them both out to a late-night supper at Sardi’s.
As the wedding went, so went those first years. He was in love with her. She was in love with him. And the world was in love with her. In The New York Times Clive Barnes wrote that she was “the most accomplished actress to appear on the New York stage in the last two decades,” and another critic characterized her as “the American dream girl next door.” As for Mangan, the CBC seemed satisfied with his work and he began to make regular broadcasts to Canada from the United Nations. In those years he co-edited an anthology of Canadian poetry which was published by McClelland & Stewart in Toronto and widely reviewed in Canada. He also worked on a long poem and simultaneously on a series of “imitations,” roughly translated from Cree legends, in the then-fashionable manner of Robert Lowell.
They were in love. When Mangan walked out with Beatrice on his arm, he knew that other men envied him. As for Beatrice, she had said from the beginning that she never realized what happiness was like until she met him. From the beginning it was an article of their private faith that their sudden going to bed together was much more than an overwhelming sexual attraction. It was love, that romantic falling in love one read about but rarely encountered in real life. And the second article of their belief was that as long as they loved each other in this way nothing or no one could come between them. But in the fifth year of their marriage, that belief was tested. Beatrice made a sudden leap to a new level of celebrity. She was nominated for a Motion Picture Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. At once she was invited to appear on national television talk shows a
nd shortly afterward found that she could no longer go into a New York department store without being recognized and pestered for autographs.
In that year, coincidentally, Mangan’s fortunes diminished. Maclean’s magazine, responding to the new Canadian nationalism, found it editorially inexpedient to run so many American articles. Similarly, Saturday Night changed management and dropped his New York column. As always, the CBC job did not pay enough to live on, and his efforts to find assignments in the American magazine market were unsuccessful. He wrote and submitted an outline for a book on the Canadian National Ballet. Fourteen publishers turned it down. When he worried out loud about money, Beatrice became indignant. “But money is secondary, darling. It’s being together that matters. Things will look up for you, you’ll see. Anyway, worrying like this is simple male chauvinism. If you were earning it, I wouldn’t worry. We have plenty of money. So let’s just enjoy it.”
But he could not. They had slipped into a style of living which, even in his most optimistic forecasts, he knew he alone could not provide. It also seemed to him that they were spending more and enjoying it less. Why must they always eat at Lutèce, or the Côte Basque, or whichever new and expensive restaurant The New York Times had written about the week before? The apartment on Fifty-first Street was in a cul-de-sac inhabited by millionaires. And even when they retired to their beach house in the Hamptons to live the rural life, they wound up giving catered parties which cost a thousand dollars a throw.
There were other things. If he said something witty it would often be quoted back to him as “that marvelous thing Beatrice said the other night.” In fact, as it became increasingly clear that people listened more intently when his subject was Beatrice, he had begun to act as her shill, talking of her new projects, giving out the gossip of her days. Worse than those people who wanted only to hear about Beatrice were those to whom she was the only person in the marriage. People like Bloomfield, a producer. Once, while waiting in his outer office, he overheard Bloomfield on the phone. “No, we need first-class transportation for two,” Bloomfield told a film company. “No, not her hairdresser. Her husband. Yes, her husband. Yes, Jamie Mangan is his name. No, I’m not kidding. J-a-m-i-e.” Or the headwaiter at Sardi’s, who would pick up two menus as he approached, nod to him as to a fellow servant, then move past him, his features composing a smile as he greeted Beatrice and led her toward one of the best tables. Or the people who asked, “Where’s Beatrice?” when he entered a room alone. None of it mattered, really. It was unimportant. A man who resented his wife’s success would be a man who did not love her. And he loved her.