Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  I got out of the car. The rain was a drizzle now, a ghost of its former strength. The temperature was mild. I hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella or jacket. Still, for a few moments I stood with my face turned up to the sky, so full of longing I was afraid of myself. The rain fell on my body with the muted, whispery sound of secrets. Then I walked up the driveway.

  I rang the doorbell and waited. A middle-aged woman with brassy hair opened the door and glared at me as though I were a confused deliveryman.

  “Yes?” she demanded. Her eyes were at once blurry and hard and her aquiline nose was veined from drink.

  “Mrs. Marvel,” I said, “I’m Julian Rose.”

  “Who?”

  “Julian Rose.”

  “How do you know me?” she demanded harshly.

  “I’m a friend of your daughter’s, Mrs.—”

  “I said how the hell do you know who I am?” she shouted.

  “I don’t, I …”

  She turned on her heels. Through the open door I heard her stomping up stairs. Silence then, except for the eerie whispering of the rain. My hair was stuck to my temples, my shirt was damp and steaming; had I come for any other reason, I would have fled.

  Then the known sound of her feet on the stairs, approaching.

  She appeared in the foyer dressed in old pajamas and socks, her hair a tangled nest and her eyes visibly dimmed.

  “Julian,” she said in a dull voice that I hardly recognized. “What are you doing here?”

  I hesitated. During the trip down I had planned what I imagined would be an appropriate apology. But standing before her now everything vanished but instinct.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t with you for the funeral,” I blurted out. “I should have been. I wanted to be.”

  Her head tipped up, her eyes and voice waking angrily from their stupor. “Then why weren’t you?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” she demanded.

  “Disappointing you. Which is exactly what I’ve done.” I took a breath. My hands were trembling and I gripped them in front of me. “I’m a fool, I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I’m asking you to forgive me.”

  She said nothing. She stood there thinking. Her gaze was oddly deliberate, as if she were seeing me through the haze of our disparate griefs. The waiting was a torture. Then, almost imperceptibly, she nodded once. Relief of a kind coursed through my body, easing fear and urging hope toward the daylight. My arms opened and I stepped toward her.

  And for a few seconds it worked. She held me as I held her, fiercely, emboldened by the resilient force of our feeling, our arms silent benedictions of an unbreakable bond.

  Then she went cold and still. Cold in my arms, stilled by some new thought or decision. Shaking her head, she stepped back, murmuring, “No.”

  “Claire …”

  “No, Julian. I can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t have it in me right now to make everything okay. Maybe when I’m feeling stronger.” She paused, her eyes welling—until, with a clench of her jaw, she willfully hardened them to glass. “I really appreciate your coming down,” she concluded formally, as though I were but the stranger her mother had assumed me to be. And then she stood there, staring at her feet, waiting for me to leave.

  twenty-one

  I RETURNED TO CAMBRIDGE, and for a while did not attempt to see or speak to her. I hung back in the shadows of desire, thumbing thoughts of her like worry beads, her grief as visceral to me as my own longing.

  Through Kate I learned that Claire was still in Stamford. And so at night I lay awake for hours imagining her in that house, that childhood room whose bookshelves and private corners I’d never seen. I imagined her on her bed hugging her knees and weeping.

  I thought about her so hard that a paralyzing confusion spread like a cloud over my life. Until I could take no real action toward her at all, could do nothing but think about her.

  Inaction is not the same thing as patience. It is instead a kind of perpetual waiting room, a sterile holding pen for unlived desire, a negative sanctuary. You wait and wait, but the receptionist is very stern and, somehow, the appointment book always full. To make matters worse, crowded into the adjoining cell like so many desperate immigrants, and separated from you by nothing more than the thin permeable wall of your own fear, are all the anticipated rejections of your life. You would think it might be noisy in there, but you’d be wrong. It is totally silent. There’s a small Plexiglas window through which you can study these things, this silence, if you have the inclination and the nerve. And eventually, if you have been a diligent enough student and not wasted your time in dreaming, you come to understand that it is not the rejections that make this a prison, not the defeats, but rather your own grim expectation of defeat; not life but its bodily outline drawn in chalk, where the body should be but isn’t, where it once was, this ingrained cowardly pessimism, this relentless betting against love and instinct. This is where the silence comes from.

  twenty-two

  IT WAS NEARLY THE END of the school year. The days were growing warm and balmy as I sat in Mary’s garden grading final papers for my section in Davis’ course. My number 2 pencils were honed like scalpels, the stack of papers neatly arranged.

  Back in March, during long office hours at Café Pamplona, there’d been the gratification of helping my students choose their paper topics. This was teaching, after all, guiding, putting spark to the kindling of curiosity and seeing what sort of fire burned. Learning as a blaze of light.

  But here now, alone and at a loss, it seemed suddenly preposterous to think of myself as a force of illumination. By afternoon I would find myself erasing comments I’d written on papers that morning, doubling back in my tracks, scribbling revised thoughts over the shadowy corpses of previous ones—reminding myself with each new scratch of the pencil of my own tenuous hold on certainty.

  It was little wonder that my own work was crawling along at an enfeebled pace. For every new chapter of Congress and the Constitution that Davis typed I seemed to produce, like some hair-shirted monk in a cell, but a single elaborately illustrated footnote for my dissertation. Viewed in thin light, my introduction might have appeared promising: the full scope of my argument laid out with clarity and boldness; my intellectual arsenal made apparent, with a surprise or two cannily held back for the conclusion; the Progressive movement in American political history never again to be seen the same way. This was not inconceivable. The problem, of course, was that the introduction was all there was.

  And Davis, for all his lip service in support of my publishing future, had offered no concrete help. On the contrary, I had the growing suspicion that he was all too content to keep me buried in the landfill of his tremendous output, toiling away like some beleaguered clerk, thereby ensuring that I would never produce anything consequential of my own.

  One afternoon he called and asked me to come by his office. I arrived expecting the usual handout of fresh pages, but instead saw two cardboard manuscript boxes sitting on his desk beside a bottle of single-malt whiskey.

  “I think this calls for a toast,” he said. Opening a drawer, he brought out two glasses and poured a finger for us both. “To Congress and the Constitution,” he declared. He was beaming.

  “Congratulations, Carl.”

  We drank.

  “So,” he said. “Think you can get your notes to me by Wednesday?” It was Friday.

  “Actually, Carl, I’m right in the middle of grading papers. How about a week from Monday?”

  His smile, without altering physically, took on a noticeable stillness. “It’s my course,” he said calmly. “I give you permission to hand your papers back late.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I replied.

  I carried the boxes home. Three pounds, 767 pages. I made a pot of coffee, finished grading my students’ papers at four that morning, slept a couple of hours, then began reading through the big man’s book. And when I finished early in the week I humbly offered him the last remnan
ts of my months of research, throwing in a few random notes of minor criticism. How intelligent and well written, I concluded, which was true, undeniably, even if his “Reagan Revolution” was not my idea of a revolution. The poor and homeless, the disenfranchised, the minorities—the needs of these people were everywhere assaulted in this mammoth volume. Though at present I didn’t have the stomach for a fight. And so my editorial remarks did not reflect my true beliefs, and my mentor’s satisfaction with my work remained, I believed, undimmed.

  Then without warning it was June, commencement week, alumni reunion week: the big dollars rolling in, the crimson flags raised high, the pomp and circumstance, the invocation before the convocation, the protective ropes removed from around the quadrangles of freshly seeded grass, the departmental festivities and familial celebrations, the private dining rooms at Locke-Ober’s, the gowns rented, the suits and dresses bought on Newbury Street, the champagne drunk, the sun taken by the river.

  Every year before graduation, Davis threw a cocktail party at his home for some of his colleagues in the government department and the Institute of Politics, and a few carefully chosen Beltway insiders from Washington. The governor usually made an appearance, and a Kennedy or two. There had been sightings in the past of high-ranking members of the Reagan administration. And Davis’ old pal Kissinger could be counted on to show his perpetually tanned face, casting a Mitteleuropa glamour over the assembled guests and ensuring at least a mention in the Globe.

  When I next saw him, Davis assured me I was invited, and even suggested the date I ought to bring.

  “What about your friend … ?” he said, snapping his fingers to himself, as if her name were there at his fingertips awaiting instant recall. It was all just there for him, I thought darkly, all of life’s essential information all the time, constantly being sorted through that prodigious brain, an endless returning to the well, a perpetual orgy.

  I’d come to his office on a Saturday morning to discuss his next project. Now that the political book was done and the publication date set, he wanted to get going on the memoir. There was a lot of fascinating material from the early part of his career, he assured me, half a dozen file cabinets alone in the basement of his house, the house he was currently renting since the divorce from his wife last winter; and there was a lot of stuff too in his mother’s house back in Scranton, an entire garage full of documents, memorabilia, trophies, letters, photographs. Enough certainly to keep me busy all summer from dawn till dusk, if I was inclined. A researcher’s heaven. And that was just the early years. This one would be fun. The last book had been business of a kind, but this would be pure pleasure, including the fat contract he intended to get for it. Possibly instructive too, if he said so himself, would be the experience, digging up touchstones of a life spent thinking about government and its consequences, its ramifications and contradictions and meanings, yet spent also in the thick of things, the front line, in politics, the two sides, ideas and action, the branching of these great rivers and then the uniting of them in one man’s life, thus far. It would be a hell of a time, he said, wouldn’t it, working together, the two of us, on a book like that.

  The day was hot. The tall twelve-paned window was wide open to the breeze and Davis stood before it, his hands loosely clasped behind his back, looking out at the Law School.

  “What’s her first name again?” he asked.

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do. Your friend, the marvelous Miss Marvel.”

  “Claire,” I said, to get him off my back.

  “That’s it. Claire. How’d it end up with her anyway? Are you two together?”

  I didn’t answer. It had never been our habit to talk about personal matters and I did not want to start now.

  “Unless, of course,” he added, “you’d rather not discuss it.” He cocked his head and looked at me as though I were being oversensitive, squeamish.

  “There’s nothing really to discuss.”

  He raised his eyebrows but did not comment. For a while, drawing his own conclusions, he returned to gazing out the window. I saw birds out there, a squirrel climbing a tree. Then he said, “Well, all the more reason to ask her. It’s going to be a hell of a party, for one thing. It always is. And if you won’t ask her for yourself, then at least do it for the party.” He stressed the last word to make the pun evident, and then turned and shot me a clubby grin. “Because I’ll tell you, nothing makes the old boys happier than a pretty face.”

  twenty-three

  IT ALL STARTS SPEEDING UP NOW. The story. One moment I am here and it all seems remote; the next she is right in front of me, she is everywhere, and I am back in my old life, years younger, scurrying around, prostrate on my bed, getting excited, getting depressed, trying not to fear anything, holding my head in my hands, holding my head high, being stupid, being brilliant, making decisions, making choices, all of them wrong—and yet filled, filled with such ardent love, such good intentions, and such resilient hope.

  She agreed to come to the party as my guest, an acceptance that sparked in me an optimism I hadn’t known in weeks. Though there was something she had to do that afternoon, she added, an appointment she chose not to specify, which would make her a little late. She would meet me at Davis’ house, if that was all right. And I said that it was.

  The day arrived. I dressed in my bathroom, in front of the chest-high medicine cabinet that was my only mirror; in order to see my bottom half, I had to back out of the bathroom and stand on the bed. My blazer was a crisp navy blue, my pants a summer-weight gray flannel, my tie, which I had tied and retied three times, a light paisley from Liberty of London. My loafers were spit-shined. I moved from bathroom to bedroom to bathroom, peering and crouching, tugging at cuffs.

  I didn’t feel unlucky. There was nothing evil today in the sleeping stars or the moon, it seemed to me, or even in the mirror. And so, checking my watch for the tenth time that hour, intending above all not to arrive at the party earlier than was appropriate, I strode out into the bright afternoon with my spirits rekindled. It was a typical late-spring Cambridge day, a day of privilege and beauty, sunny and fair but not too hot, the air graced with the sweet green notes of grass and privet.

  I walked. It wasn’t far. I came off Brattle Street toward the river. And from half a block away I began to hear it—a clench-jawed, drink-smoothed murmuring. I had never been to Davis’ house. It was not one of the old ones but modern, with a generous front yard enclosed by a picket fence. And it was in that yard, above the arched teeth of the fence, as in some kind of white-collar barnyard, that I observed the crush of partygoers.

  Then I was in that crowd, among them, and there was no more distance or perspective to be had. I was up close, flat against it, where nothing could be gleaned but the stark angles of people, facades like snapshots, clothes, outfits, blues and pinks and whites, wrinkled linen and pleated cotton, the wild glances of sunlight off a hundred champagne flutes. A uniformed waiter handed me a glass. I swallowed half of it and tried to get my bearings. Everybody was there, just as advertised: the governor, short and large-headed and dour; only one Kennedy, but at least it was Teddy, the patriarch, who in event-terms counted for two; a major real estate developer and Republican fund-raiser; and the state’s junior senator, with his noble visage and stellar war record. And Parker Bing was there, of course, in a straw boater and white bucks, conversing intently with the deputy secretary for Near Eastern affairs, a fellow Fly Club member, who as I watched slipped a leather-backed memo pad out of his pocket and wrote something down—no doubt Bing’s number, I thought, turning away in disgust and almost bumping into Mike Lewin, my Littauer comrade-in-arms, who muttered, “Did you get a load of Bing’s hat?” I said I had and he shot me a gallows grin. I asked if he’d seen Davis yet and Mike shrugged, gesturing across the sea of heads to the other side of the yard. “Probably over that way. And don’t miss Kissinger holding court by the shrimp boat.”

  I swallowed mo
re champagne and checked my watch, wondering when Claire would arrive. I’d already lost track of how long I’d been at the party. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? Telling Mike I’d catch up with him later, I headed off for the far shore, looking for her, beginning suddenly to feel the anxiety of it, hoping that somehow, someway, I’d be able to whisk her out of the party quickly, get her alone. Perhaps for the first time since France we’d have dinner together. And late into the night we’d sit declaring to each other all the feelings we had not yet declared, the hard-to-say feelings, perishable because true. Feelings that had to be spoken now or else thrown away. And I would not allow them to be thrown away. For the life of me I would refuse…. So many people, I was musing, as I emerged from the backside of the throng of partygoers…. And yes, the shrimp boat was there, just as Lewin said it would be, but Kissinger wasn’t in it. Though he easily might have been, I concluded, for it was a kind of Chinese junk made of plastic, with a cargo of pink boiled shrimp piled high above the gunwales, and miniature wooden barrels of cocktail sauce. Egregious, I thought, turning away—and saw nearby, at the edge of the big yard, a hammock strung up between two trees, with an esteemed professor of political philosophy sprawled in the netting, asleep.

  I stepped through the front door of the house and into the foyer. Immediately the murmuring of the crowd was left behind, replaced by interior quiet and shaded repose. I stood listening. From the back there came faint sounds of the catering staff at work in the kitchen, and the strangely comforting smell of brewed coffee.

  At that moment, drifting out of the living room, I caught the sound of Davis’ voice. Not his usual speaking voice but softer. Not the words but the tone—no less forceful for being lowered, still uncanny in its confidence, though something lighter in it today, I thought, quietly jaunty, like that of a man at a party, late at night, in smoke and haze, telling an intimate joke—