by Ward Just
He said softly, It is not boring, Wils. Experience and discretion will make you seem to them just the slightest bit dangerous, not a man who’ll say anything that comes to mind, and it’s my guess that dangerous is what you are. You go your own way, that’s for damned sure. Women like danger, my father said and cocked his eyebrow. Let me put that another way. Women like to be around a dangerous man, perhaps a man who seems in his nature to be not entirely reliable. Not entirely predictable in his emotions or anything else. Because, he said, taking a thoughtful sip of whiskey; and he said no more.
Because what? I asked after a moment.
Because women like excitement, too, same as the rest of us.
I said something noncommittal because I did not believe he said what he meant; he had something else in mind but was not ready to disclose it.
Loyalty also, he added, and when he said it the word had the weight of the world. And then he went to the heart of the matter: You have to exercise some control over yourself or someone else will do it for you.
Women, I said, catching on at last, though my father’s sidelong glance suggested otherwise. After a moment he said, Women are among them.
My father had many theories about women, older women and younger women, loose women and modest women, girls he had grown up with and dated, and how things changed when he went away to Dartmouth and the wider world of Hanover, New Hampshire. He freely admitted his experience was limited, yet when he arrived in Hanover he discovered a strait-laced attitude at odds with the earthier climate of Quarterday.
You would have thought it would be the reverse, but it wasn’t.
Quarterday was Sodom and Gomorrah compared to Hanover.
And believe me, not much was happening in Quarterday.
But at least we knew what girls looked like. And they knew what we looked like, too.
Well, there were the town girls. Girls out for some fun.
I’d forgotten about them.
I didn’t know them. My roommate did.
Those girls were too much like the girls I’d grown up with.
He grew apart from his childhood friends, those who had stayed home and gone to work on the farm or in one of the shops or become teachers or policemen, like Tom Felsen. My father’s vocabulary changed, the slang he used and the jokes he laughed at. He came home for Christmas wearing a long green scarf and whistling Gershwin tunes. “Lady Be Good” was a favorite. He had taken up the drums and was playing in his fraternity’s jazz band. His second night home he went to a party and got into a scuffle with a boy he had known for years, and after that his Quarterday friends avoided him, except the girl he had known since grade school who sought him out to ask him about college life. What do you learn? Is it fun? What is there about it that can change a person so? And is it worthwhile? My father felt he was living in two worlds at once, the adult world of Hanover and the childhood world of Quarterday, and these worlds did not fit. The first year he was away, my father had dreams at night, homesick dreams of the prairie teeming with skaters in strange hats speaking exotic tongues. The prairie went on forever, a monotonous tableland with not a house or a tree in sight. When he awakened from these dreams he went at once to his desk and began reading where he’d left off, making notes as he went, as if they were sentences of atonement. He thought of forfeiting his scholarship and returning home for good, though his experience at Christmas was not encouraging. He felt he had abandoned his family and friends and only later did it occur to my father that the reverse could as easily be said; he thought of these friends as leftovers and hated himself for thinking it but knew also that he was not the first American to betray his origins, moving on. When he tentatively mentioned his fears to his parents, his mother said she would love him no matter what he did or who he became, but perhaps it was a good idea to return home for a semester and take stock. His father listened impatiently and stated that if he forfeited the scholarship he was not welcome in “my house.” You started it, now you finish it. Harsh words from the best dad a guy ever had.
Then hockey came along and in the spring his roommate suggested they spend the summer in Maine as sailing instructors, his family had a house there with a cottage they could live in and sailing was a cinch, anyone could learn to sail; and Teddy Ravan said yes, why not, so he spent that summer in Maine and the subsequent summers as well and that was where he met Jo Wilson, a freshman at Pembroke, whose family summered in the neighboring village. It took a while for my father to understand a society that summered in one state and wintered in another, but he was always quick so he caught on soon enough, as he had caught on to hockey, jazz, sailing, the stammer in the dramas of Eugene O’Neill, and the urban architecture of the Italian Renaissance. He was especially successful with older people, mature for his age, serious-minded, good at games, altogether winning.
Doesn’t that Ravan boy have the most beautiful manners?
Where is he from again?
What does his father do, actually?
That long-ago summer, my father acknowledged, he and my mother were at odds, bitter arguments that would spring from nowhere. The importance of “background” in the life of a family. The beauty of a triple pass approaching the crease of a hockey rink, game on the line. He was unable to identify the sources of these arguments that arrived from nowhere, so emotionally complex; and much later he came to understand that they were not complex at all but simple. He and my mother did not believe in the same things. They were equipped with different measuring sticks as to the people they admired and the qualities they valued. My father believed this was the direct result of the differences of family background and the values of the region they each grew up in. My father believed that you arrived in the world unencumbered and my mother did not; encumbrances were what you were given and not allowed to surrender. Encumbrance was my mother’s word for personality. Yet the mutual attraction, the force of nature, was so strong they knew they belonged together whatever their differences of taste and outlook.
Her family had a place on the Connecticut shore, the gray-green waters of Long Island Sound glittering in the distance. The morning light was crystalline. On bright days the light was so sharp it hurt your eyes. It had the quality of platinum, as opposed to the dull iron of the Midwest. My father, standing on a sand dune at Westport, called it the edge-of-the-continent light, an eastern doomsday light without interference until you reached Portugal; and when he mentioned this to his girlfriend Jo she looked at him with a slow smile and said, Well, yessss, except Long Island would get in the way, wouldn’t it?
And you’re looking at Venezuela, actually.
My father thought the East was crowded, a land of small-holdings, too settled, too complacent and sure of itself, so different from Illinois that it might as well have been France, he said, pointing across the dinner table to the wallpaper, the dandies in their plumed hats. In the East you did not know your place. You thought you could get away with anything.
The Wilsons loved their house, its age especially, three hundred years old and counting, the stone walls, the stone foundation and the walk-in fireplace, a flintlock and powder horn from the Revolution above the mantel, Audubon prints left and right, Mr. Wilson’s own watercolors on the wall opposite. The house was situated on a rocky outcropping, five acres of land surrounded by other five-acre parcels, each with its centuries-old house and a stone wall, and where the property met the road a swale, which Jo’s mother called a ha-ha. The garden, however, was the jardin des plantes and beside it a five-sided folie. They had a housekeeper, too, an ancient Chinese who ran things. Jo never, knew where she came from, only that she showed up one evening with Jo’s father and had been with the family ever since; her father said the woman had been in trouble, and he got her out of the trouble in return for her services. Remarkable creature, rarely spoke and seemed to be everywhere at once, gliding in and out of rooms like a ghost. She was definitely part of the family, called Ling, not her real name, a made-up name. She and Jo were especially close and
whenever Jo was sick Ling would arrive in her room with a mysterious Chinese potion dissolved in tea; and the ailment, whatever it was, would vanish.
Everyone called Jo’s father “Squire,” Squire Wilson, Esq. He was a maritime lawyer at one of the small, very old Wall Street firms, founded before the Civil War, representing shippers and the owners of ships and the leasing syndicates and the insurance firms, often all four at the same time. Squire thought maritime law a cut above any other branch of law. Being a maritime lawyer gave one standing, like coming over on the Mayflower or having the Hapsburg lip.
My father said, Squire thought the law of the god damned sea was holy writ, and maritime lawyers the crème de la crème. He let you know it was lucrative, too. And he had the little Hinckley sloop to prove it.
He called the sloop Marine Tort.
An awful snob, my father said.
Ravan? Where does that name come from?
Hungary, I said, choosing the first nation that came to mind.
It doesn’t sound Hungarian, Squire said.
Maybe Swiss, I said. I’ll ask my uncle Laszlo.
And he thought I was an Indian from the West, some Potawatomi come to seize his daughter by force and take her back to the tepee. But he couldn’t ignore what was in front of his eyes so he suggested instead that we settle in Westport or Cos Cob, one of those places, so we’d be nearby and come to lunch every Sunday, deviled eggs and cold roast beef after a pitcher of martinis. But I could never live in Connecticut, my father said, or any place near Connecticut, and I have to say Jo saw the logic to that. She saw the logic and at the same time she saw the hilarity, her husband-to-be and her father at daggers drawn—her phrase, daggers drawn. She and her mother laughed about it but they didn’t give up. Jo never gives up easily. Can’t you give way just a little? Would it cost you so much? She wondered if we couldn’t compromise on New Jersey or Westchester County or some place near Boston, and I said I didn’t think so; we needed a thousand miles between us, her father and me. I think it was perversity that caused me to join up with Butch Greenslat and his nephew because I knew what he’d say when I called to give him the good news, an associate in the law offices of Greenslat & Greenslat.
Jew firm, isn’t it?
They do political work, I said.
Of course they would, Squire said.
It’s big business in Chicago, I said.
Dirty business, he said.
Everyone has the right to counsel, I said with the gravity of an attorney from the ACLU.
Mixed up with Capone’s people, are they?
They’re fixers, I said. They can fix anything. Elections, grand jury indictments, traffic tickets, probate irregularities, municipal taxes, a construction contract. They’re Chicagoans through and through. Chicagoland thrives on the broad backs of Greenslat & Greenslat and now I’ll be thriving with them and before too long it’ll be Greenslat, Greenslat & Ravan, and on that day I’ll be buying Jo a powder-blue Cadillac, a mink coat, and an apartment in Miami Beach. And then I sat back and listened to him go on the boil.
Squire? I said when he finished his Jew rant. We can throw some business your way. Does the law of the sea extend as far as the inland lakes—Michigan, for example? Because if it does, we’ve had some suspicious yacht fires...
Jo was their only child, my father said. The Wilsons were a close family and there were a hell of a lot of them, aunts and uncles, cousins, stepcousins. I think there was even a stepgrandmother somewhere. I could never keep them straight, scattered all over the country but mostly in New York and New England. So when your mother insisted on naming you Wilson, I was in no position to object. Do you like the sound, Wilson Ravan?
I haven’t thought much about it, I lied. The truth was, I tried out new names all the time. At the jazz club, I sometimes introduced myself as Bill. Another time I tried Eddie, but Eddie didn’t fit.
I said, Where does the name Ravan come from?
Damned if I know, my father said. I was never much for family trees. Middle Europe somewhere, I suppose.
By then we had finished dinner and retreated to the den, where I was shuffling the cards for pinochle. My father was content to listen to the fall of the cards while he pulled on his cigar and leafed through phonograph records, discarding Duchin in favor of his favorites: Sidney Bechet, Fred Astaire singing George Gershwin, Art Hodes at the Blue Note, and Georg Brums. We played cards for an hour or more, not talking much, a companionable game with neither of us winning big. Art Hodes had yielded to Fred Astaire and now we were listening to Georg Brunis, whose band was permanently in session at the jazz club on Bryn Mawr, the one called the Eleven-Eleven, my haunt on the weekends.
He plays in Chicago, my father said.
Does he?
Some joint on the Far North Side. We should go some night.
That would be great, I said.
Ever been there? he said.
Not that I can remember, I said.
That’s strange, my father said. I found this the other day. Next to the phonograph, he added, and handed me an Eleven-Eleven Club matchbook.
Maybe I’ve been there once or twice, I said.
And I’ll bet you didn’t use your real name, either, he said.
I looked into his eyes, two black marbles, and decided not to answer. Where I went and the name I went under were none of his business. So we sat across the table from each other in silence, and it was then I noticed the stubble on his jaw and the smudge of ink on his shirt pocket. He continued to move the cards listlessly from one hand to the other, his knuckles huge and skinned as if he had been in a fistfight. At last he put the cards on the table and sat back, staring at the ceiling.
You’re not a very good liar.
Sorry, I said, and put the matchbook on the table.
The room was filled with Brunis’s music and I wondered if he was manipulating the slide with his foot, as he had been known to do; the jazzman as comedian. I was thinking also about a new tuxedo with a shawl collar and wondering if my father would allow me to buy it at Brooks, along with a vest and two lightweight shirts and a pair of dancing pumps; probably not-very-good liars would have to settle for Field’s. I had wanted to ask him if he would let me borrow his silver flask for the car later, after the dance. But now was not the time, nor tomorrow or the day after. My father had resumed shuffling cards. I took that as a sign that the crisis had past, though he remained mute and the expression on his face was not encouraging.
When the telephone rang, I knew it was my mother, and when I looked at my father across the table—do you want to pick up, or shall I?—he shook his head and I answered.
Squire’s gone, she said brokenly.
Oh, I said, and my voice caught. The hum of the telephone wire seemed unnaturally loud. Gosh, I’m so sorry.
Oh, Wils—
Mom, I began.
He passed away this afternoon, she said.
This is terrible, I said, let me get Dad. My father was staring at me from the card table. He was still shuffling cards and listening to the music but I knew he had heard what I said and what it meant. I put my hand over the receiver and mouthed, Grandpa’s dead.
We thought he was rallying, she went on. He ate a good lunch and then we put him down for a nap and he never woke up. He just slept away. My mother was openly crying now and her next words were disconnected, her thoughts coming in random order. He’d lost so much weight you’d hardly know him. We called the ambulance but the crew could do nothing. He was gone. They said he didn’t suffer and I’m sure they’re right. He was seventy-nine and he’d had a good life, but still. It was too soon for him. Me, too, and Grandma. I made him iced tea because that was what he said he wanted, a summer drink, to be reminded of summer in Connecticut and sailing Marine Tort on the Sound. He talked about you, Wils, what a fine boy you were and how proud he was. He talked about all the great things in store, and asked me if I thought you’d choose a career in law. I said I didn’t know but I’d ask. So I’m asking. He�
��d be so pleased. I happen to know he left you his law books, all his books relating to the law of the sea. Piracy. Salvage. I don’t know what-all, but he said his maritime library was the finest in New England.
She paused then and said, Is that music you’re listening to? I suppose it’s your father’s music. Her voice trailed off and I thought she had hung up but then I heard her say something to her mother and she was crying again.
Dad’s right here, I said. My father had turned down the volume of the phonograph and was standing at the sideboard pouring a scotch, his face expressionless. He motioned impatiently for me to give him the telephone, as if I were the one prolonging the conversation.
The funeral is Friday, she said.
Yes, I said.
Have your father make the reservations. The Twentieth Century Limited would be best and I’ll pick you up at Grand Central.
I will, I said. He’s right here—
I wanted a private funeral, family only, but Mother insisted and wouldn’t give way. Squire had so many friends, his bridge friends, his boating friends, tennis friends, and his law partners. Never was a man with so many friends. It doesn’t seem fair. But you know Grandma. Always thinking of others. Poor Daddy, she said, and her voice broke again. She went on to describe the funeral arrangements, the location of the church and the Episcopal minister who would conduct the service, the selection of music and the eulogists. She said, Mother wondered if we should speak briefly, she and I, but I didn’t think so. I don’t think I could do it and she couldn’t, either. And he’ll be well taken care of by his partners and his boating friends and the other friends. Men always know what to say, the mot juste. That sort of thing comes naturally to men. Everyone offered, it was hard for us to choose ...
My father had opened the French doors and now stood looking across the lawn to the fairway. The moon was full, the fairway bathed in bright, thin light, a kind of glow. Beyond the fairway was a shallow sand trap and above the sand trap an undulating green with its limp flag. All this was visible in the moonlight. My father stood smoking his cigar and sipping scotch. When he stepped outside I thought he was walking away but he returned at once, bending to look at the repairs to the mullions broken when the brick flew through the window months before. He was bent in his hockey crouch and I knew he was remembering that evening, when so much changed in our family. Now he moved his foot over the scar in the parquet where he had ground the shard of glass that had torn his thumb; and I thought I saw a smile. The night air was still and the smoke from his cigar rose straight up, and when he turned to look at me, giving a little weary gesture, I saw the look of dismay on his face; and then he turned and pitched the cigar through the open doors.