So Stephen stayed with Bratian's agency and worked harder than ever on the job of keeping the name of Harper planes in the public mind. But he was growing too old to take frustration in the same manner he had learned to accept it in the Depression.
The months and the years passed. His big body made him conspicuous in any crowd and he had the feeling that people were criticizing him behind his back for not being in uniform. His restlessness frequently made him irritable. He fell into the habit of drinking two cocktails before lunch and three before dinner. Sometimes he picked up service men in the city, took them into bars, and gave them drinks; often he would go into a bar, see a group of boys in uniform at the other end of the room, slip the barman twenty dollars, and tell him to give the boys drinks as long as the credit lasted. Too often he lay awake in bed thinking about the war, seeing with self-accusing eyes the long layers of protection between himself and the enemy – the workers in war plants, the sailors on transports, the Negroes unloading matériel at the docks in Africa and Italy, divisional headquarters, the brigade, supplies rolling up the roads behind the fronts, aircraft covering them, artillery flashing from gun pits, and finally half a dozen lonely bastards crawling forward on their bellies into the mortar fire. On the nights when he did sleep he dreamed about it, seeing himself a hero in one of those outer layers, imagining new and impossible technical inventions for doing the enemy some incalculable damage that would end the war overnight.
In the life of every man there is at least one group of words, one phrase or sentence spoken carelessly by a friend or a stranger, which lingers like a barb and hurts whenever it stabs its way to the front of his mind. To Stephen, the words had been spoken by Myron Harper the day he asked for a war job in his plant. “You're better at agency work than you'll ever be at engineering.” Because of his admiration for Harper and his inability to get into uniform it didn't occur to Stephen to question the validity of the words. They meant that he was a natural public relations man, a bluffer, a user of coked-up phrases to make a public of demi-morons conscious that men of genius were worth the taxes that kept them in business! They meant that in his fortieth year he had discovered his true level.
During the month before Sally was born Stephen's restlessness increased so markedly that Lucy became acutely worried about him. Night after night he got out of bed and roamed about the apartment, and while she was in the hospital he spent most of his visiting hours talking about how much they needed a real home, some ground under their feet, something more permanent than a city apartment. Before she was ready to leave the hospital and go home, he had bought a house in Princeton.
After that his exuberance seemed to return. They disposed of the apartment overnight and sold most of their modern furniture to the new tenants. His mother's fine old furniture, and the contents of her trunks, which had been in storage for years, were moved into the new house and Stephen worked furiously to get the place settled in a single weekend. Lucy was as delighted as he was because Stephen seemed to be himself again. He told his friends how wonderful it was going to be to sleep in fresh air for a change, to grow vegetables, to catch up on his reading on the trains to and from the city. And most of his friends agreed because they were now living in Princeton, too.
The following summer was nearly over before Stephen discovered that a man should never go back to the place where he was young in the expectation of rediscovering his youth. He remembered Princeton as a place teeming with life and excitement. He found it a quiet, mannerly town with no niche for outsiders who had little part in its inner life. Once he had been recognized as a big man on the campus. Now he was just another of the three hundred-odd commuters who lived on the fringes of Princeton society. He liked it best on Saturday nights and weekends when he could get together with old classmates who also commuted to New York. But on weekdays the long train trip in and out of town tired him. He had fallen into the habit of stopping at a Madison Avenue bar with men from the office when they left at six o'clock, but the habit had to be broken when he moved to Princeton for fear of missing the last train that would get him home in time for dinner. Finally there were many nights when his work piled so high that he couldn't get home at all. That winter he found a room in an uptown hotel near Madison Avenue, where he kept enough of his clothes to last him from one weekend to the next.
And Lucy found herself virtually alone again. She was busier than ever with the children, for her nurse had enlisted in the Spars and her maid had refused to leave New York, but she no longer had the sense of belonging to the life of a man, of being an integral part of his maleness, of understanding what was happening in the world as she saw it through his eyes. The war was everywhere, yet she was totally secluded from it. Stephen was no longer there to tell her of his problems in the office and find his way through them simply by listening to his own voice as he talked. On the weekends when he did come home he was too tired and too depressed to do more than sleep and play with the children.
Imperceptibly, Lucy's old Grenville habit of quiet and watching reserve began to ebb back, so gradually they both seemed unaware of the change.
FOUR
ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN MID-APRIL in 1945, Carl Bratian and Stephen drove out to Princeton in Bratian's convertible. When they came out of the tunnel onto the skyway the whole countryside smoked and throbbed like a single gigantic factory extending on all sides as far as the eye could see, spiked by thousands of belching chimneys, threaded by oily black canals, hideous as a battlefield, indifferent as a locomotive plunging over a cliff, the most important piece of land in the world.
They passed Newark Airport and Lassiter looked out over the flat pan of it to a Liberator taxing along a runway, turning slowly like a dinosaur and finally coming to rest with its props fanning. The Cadillac raced smoothly on through the jungle of barbecues, diners, gas stations, taverns, billboards, crossings, and traffic lights that fringed USI, past the raw edges of Rahway, Metuchen, and New Brunswick and finally into the rolling open country that Lassiter loved. The heavy tires screamed on the concrete as Bratian cruised at sixty miles an hour, mopping up the trucks and old cars rolling along on worn rubber and recaps. Along one section of the road they overtook a convoy of army trucks moving at a steady pace with even distances between each of them. Soldiers stood in the backs of the trucks with their heads turned from the wind. Bratian pulled into an open lane and swept past the whole convoy in a further burst of speed, while Lassiter stared straight ahead and huddled his big body a few inches lower behind the glass. Being in a car like Bratian's in times like these made him self-conscious, particularly in the presence of soldiers.
They turned off at the Princeton Circle; the tower of the Graduate School rose over the trees and Lassiter relaxed. The rich, familiar feelings returned. To him, Princeton was the one priceless jewel in an otherwise loathsome state, whether it was approached through the New Jersey marshland of factories or through the desert of Philadelphia and Trenton.
As they crossed the bridge over Lake Carnegie he watched eight men lifting a racing shell out of the water onto the dock while the cox stood by giving his orders. The surface of the lake was dark near the banks and the thin threads of water streaming off the tilted keel made widening circles that fanned out of the shadows into the light. The crew got the shell over their heads and walked it into the boat-house and Lassiter eyed them enviously.
“There's your new American type,” he said. “Everyone of them tall with wide shoulders and long legs. I wonder if they're as strong as they look.”
“They don't have to be,” Bratian said.
“Remember Bill Sayre? He played next to me in the line. I was talking to him the other day in the club and he says these longwaisted kids haven't got much stamina. And that was one thing Bill always had.”
“Why not? He had to have something.”
The air was clear and cool, and the tree branches, dusted with opening buds, were delicate against a saffron sky. Grey clouds towered over the fields to the so
uth; it was turning into the kind of evening that always bred mists in Princeton. They passed Palmer Stadium on the right and skirted the end of the campus on the left, then turned into Nassau Street. It was blue with naval uniforms and Renwick's looked crowded. Bratian slowed down for a woman who was pushing a baby carriage. They passed Jack Honore's barber shop and when Stephen saw Jack in the doorway wearing his fawn alpaca jacket he waved.
“How about a quick one at the Nass?” he said.
“I want to see Lucy's garden before it gets dark.”
“What the hell do you care about gardens?”
“Not a damn thing, but it flatters her and she can use more than she's been getting lately. Women are like the lower classes: if you flatter them enough you can get away with murder. Something for you to remember, Steve.”
“You're a crazy bastard. If you think you've got Lucy figured out you've got another guess coming.”
Bratian's quick sidewise glance was lost on him, for Stephen had recognized another friend standing on the corner near the memorial and was shouting something unintelligible to him. The man waved and called back.
“Who was that?” Bratian said.
“Joe Hickman. You remember him. He used to drive a hack. He's still around.”
Bratian laughed silently. “God, they're all still here!” He passed the memorial and idled out of town at thirty miles an hour along the Trenton pike. “You've been living here two years now. When are you going to move on again?”
“Why should I move on? This is the best town in the whole damn country.”
“You could sell your house for twice what you paid for it.”
Stephen leaned back and looked at the great trees lining the road. At the end of a sudden vista of lawn between shrubs he saw a bed of blue scillas and a burst of forsythia in bloom.
“It's the earliest spring I can remember,” he said. A second later he added, “I bet it looks good to the boys in Germany.”
“Twenty years from now they'll be talking about the war the way you talk about Princeton at reunions.”
“Maybe. And what if they do?”
Bratian changed the subject in his quick, sharp voice. “Tell me something – has Lucy made any friends out here?”
“Of course. She makes friends wherever she is.”
“Real ones or Saturday night ones?”
Stephen let the question go. He knew that Bratian found Lucy of more than passing interest, even that he was attracted to her sexually, but he was shrewd enough to guess that the basis of the interest lay in the fact that she was one of the few individuals Bratian saw repeatedly whom he couldn't fathom.
“She's too intelligent for the sort of people she meets here,” Bratian said. “Old classmates – they must be tough to take more than once.”
“Oh, can it,” Stephen said, his voice on the defensive. And he knew that Bratian observed it. The little bastard noticed everything. He'd always been an outsider at Princeton and he'd never been able to understand what a place like Princeton meant to a man who had once been a real part of it. At least their friends here were real people, even if most of them were old classmates who had lost their great expectations in the Depression, made money in the war boom, and moved their families out to decent surroundings.
“The funny thing about Lucy,” Bratian went on, “is that she's the sort of woman an ordinary man never notices while a first-class man always does. I told her that years ago. She's the sort of woman who ought to be at the top. She's deep.”
Bratian was right, Stephen thought. Lucy was deep. But beyond that, what did Carl know about her? What did any man know about women unless he'd been married to at least one of them? He thought of Joyce and for a moment he remembered how attractive and desirable she had once seemed. The last time he'd heard of her she was married to a man in California and she still had no children. Yet Joyce, now a stranger, owned a small part of him still. Women did that to a man when he lived with them. They entered his mind and it was no longer entirely his. Nobody had ever done that to Carl. Let him live with an intelligent woman day after day and no matter how nice she was, no matter how generous she was or how eager she was in bed, he'd soon discover there wasn't a corner of his mind he could call his own.
Lassiter frowned, hunched lower in his seat, and said, “Some day I'd like to see a woman give you the business.”
Bratian grinned as he turned off the main pike into the side road leading to Stephen's house. “No woman gives any man the business if he knows what he wants from her.”
The car dipped into a pothole and lifted voluptuously out of it. The unpaved road had once been a farmer's track and it was little more than that now. Only two houses had been built on it, separated and concealed from each other by a hundred yards of trees and shrubs. It ended in Stephen's garage on the far side of his house. Beyond that was open country, an historic country dotted here and there with metal plaques which had been erected by patriotic societies.
The Lassiters’ house was made of grey fieldstone with white clapboards encasing the upper storey. It had been built in 1928 by a New Yorker who had lost his money the following year, and since then it had changed ownership three times. It still looked so new it was impossible to imagine that it would ever look old. The flowering shrubs in the front had been there when they bought the house, but the perennial borders in the back had been laid out by Lucy and Stephen.
They drove up before the house and turned into the narrow drive that led to the garage. Beyond the garage a sizable patch of ground had just been harrowed for vegetables and the moist earth glowed in the slanting sunlight. Beyond the patch the land sloped abruptly down a bank to a stream so shallow that its bed was usually dry by the first of August. On the other side of the stream a field fanned out, part of a farm owned by a man named Sam Hunter who had been born on the place, a fact which made him oddly authentic in a town like Princeton, where antiquity was so prized that most of the famous buildings in Oxford and Cambridge had been studiously copied in the college architecture, and the old Nassau Inn had been replaced by a new Nassau Tavern carefully built to look more typically mid-eighteenth century than the original structure had ever looked.
“You'll have to leave the car here,” Stephen said as Bratian idled the motor. “The station wagon's inside the garage.”
Lucy came out the side door wearing a grey flannel skirt and a blue cardigan sweater. She smiled and waved and Stephen jumped out of the car and swung her off her feet as he kissed her. Bratian watched them with an inscrutable expression drawn over his face. When Lucy was on her feet again he reached behind the front seat of the car, pulled out a long box, and handed it to her.
“You promised you'd stop doing this,” she said as she took the box.
“They're only store roses. I want to see your daffodils.”
“Oh, let's go inside. I've been out all afternoon. How are you, Stephen? Has it been a bad week?”
A small boy wearing a pair of overalls came from behind the garage, stopped to look at them for a moment, then ran to his father. Stephen picked him up under the arms and lifted him high while John squealed with excitement and kicked his legs. The moment he was put down he begged to be lifted again.
“Mummy and I went to the Junction last night, Daddy.” John's voice was breathless as he spoke in starts. “You said you were coming. Why didn't you?”
Bratian slipped his arm through Lucy's. “Some day John will make a first-class examining lawyer.”
At the same moment Stephen answered his son, “You'd better ask Carl. He knows everything.”
John stood looking up at Bratian. “Why didn't Daddy come home last night, sir?”
“Oh, he had work to do in town. He was making lots of money yesterday.”
Bratian was never at home with children or even vaguely interested in them and John had long ago sensed it. He was aloof with this man who called himself his Uncle Carl, though his feeling had nothing to do with the formality of his language; Lucy had taught
him to call all older men “sir.” John had coarse blond hair like his father's and he was so strongly built that he looked at least two years older than his actual age, but otherwise he was predominantly Lucy's son. His eyes were wide and brown, his features slim and finely cut, and he had much of Lucy's reserve of manner. He never gave much response to heartiness in his elders and Stephen sometimes had the uncomfortable feeling that his son saw through him and made allowances for his behaviour; yet Stephen was proud of the boy and there was no doubt of John's affection for his father.
They went into the house, Lucy and Carl leading the way, John following, and Stephen bringing up the rear with Bratian's bag. Carl complimented Lucy on the spring flowers from her garden he saw on a table in the hall and stood in the living-room doorway, looking it over with his usual appraising air as if he were calculating not so much what it had cost as the effect it would have on various kinds of people who might see it.
“New slipcovers?” he said.
Lucy smiled wryly; she could change half the details in the house without Stephen noticing, but Bratian observed everything. “They're made from some curtains I had in town. If they look new it's because they've just come from the cleaners.”
“Once you get inside this place it's got distinction. You've managed to disinfect it from the suburbs.” He turned back to the hall while Stephen went upstairs with his bag. “Come into town one day next week. I want to do my drawing room over again and I'd like your advice. It's got no more distinction than a Calvert whiskey ad.”
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