by Ward Just
Did he turn off the phonograph? my mother asked. I can’t hear the music.
Yes, he did, I said.
We were playing pinochle, I went on. And listening to music.
Are you getting on all right, Wils?
It’s awful news about Grandpa—
I mean generally, she said. You and your father.
Yes, I said. Of course. We’re fine.
What were you doing when I called?
Playing pinochle. Listening to the music.
Your father and I used to play all the time, she said.
I remember, I said.
After a little silence, she said, All right. Put your father on.
I went out onto the terrace to give them some privacy. I could hear the rise and fall of my father’s voice and an occasional phrase: so sorry ... great guy ... be missed ... terrible shock ... Of course I heard also hypocrisy, though his tone of voice seemed in no way insincere. Forgivable hypocrisy, I thought, intended to give comfort; and I hope my mother thought the same and understood that there were moments when a line had to be drawn between past and present; both sides of that line seemed to me blurred as I stood in the darkness, the bright lights of the den casting long shadows. Things were quiet now and I heard my father’s voice again, this time a monotone, and I knew my mother was crying and that my father’s words had not brought consolation. Certainly this was a moment when anyone would accept the hand of sympathy, a form of apology, even as you understood that what was done could not be undone, nor forgotten. It would be hard for my mother to be generous. I tried to imagine my grandfather dead but could not; and now I wondered how we would manage the funeral, the vast differences between us. Hypocrisy was difficult face to face. My father was not good at hiding his emotions and I knew my mother would see through him, and he would know it and try harder, and fail more completely. I began to understand that their separation—never acknowledged between us, nor to friends, my mother merely in the East to help her mother care for her father—might be permanent. They would never reconcile. She would remain in Connecticut and my father and I in Quarterday.
I listened to him conclude the conversation in monosyllables, his voice soft and polite, the voice he used when reserving a table at a restaurant. When my father hung up at last, I returned from the terrace to find him with his hands plunged in his pants pockets, staring bleakly at the scar in the parquet.
She’s so sad, I said, and tears came to my eyes.
Yes, he said, his hand suddenly on my shoulder. It was a shock.
We have to help her, I said.
We’ll do our best, he said. She needs you.
Both of us, I said.
She said I never loved Squire, my father said. And that’s what comes between us. And now it’s too late to make it right.
Well, I began, and said nothing further.
Something’s broken that can’t be fixed, your mother said.
It’ll be all right, I said.
No, it won’t, my father said.
She’ll understand. It will take some time, and when she has time to think, she’ll understand.
I don’t think she will, my father said. She thinks I’m responsible for his death.
She’s in shock, I said.
Probably, he said.
It’s understandable, I said. People say things all the time that they don’t mean, when they’ve had a shock. I thought of my mother and grandmother alone in the Connecticut house, deciding somehow that my father was responsible for Squire’s death. I understood then that I did not know her at all; and my father and I had grown so close that she was on the outside. Talking to her on the telephone was like talking to a stranger and I did not know how that had come about.
My father sighed. She thinks Squire would be alive today if we hadn’t had all those arguments. If I hadn’t baited him. Unmercifully, she said. If I had agreed to live in the East. If I had gone to work on Wall Street. His high blood pressure, the stroke. Wouldn’t’ve happened if I’d shown the slightest understanding of him and the life he led and how close they were, he and your mother. But I never accepted her family, she said. So she suffered and Squire suffered most of all because I had been—the word she used was “obtuse.”
She couldn’t mean that, I said.
But she does. Every word. She said I did not know the meaning of family because my own parents were so—mediocre, she said. Apparently my mother did not know the meaning of love. Mediocre as she was. He lifted his hands and let them fall, a gesture I had never seen before from him. I knew that he had been deeply wounded, his voice so soft it was almost a whisper.
Are you going to the funeral? I asked.
He looked at me angrily and said, Of course. And you are, too.
Mom’s broken up, I said. We have to help.
Her heart’s broken, my father agreed.
She needs us, I said.
Yes, she does.
To get her through this.
The death of a parent—
Yes, I said.
I never liked him, my father said.
I did, I said loyally.
You didn’t know him, my father said.
That’s not fair, I said, my voice rising.
Tell me something, Wils. At the jazz club. What’s your alias?
None of your business, I said.
What do you call yourself? Sassoon? Adlai Stevenson?
I call myself whatever I feel like calling myself, I said. It’s me, my life. I’ll choose the name I want—
But my father had already turned his back and was walking out of the room, upstairs to bed.
4
MY MOTHER stayed on in Connecticut after the funeral to help her mother with the estate. She said her mother could not cope with the details of probate and there were all Squire’s things to dispose of, his clothes and his wristwatch and cuff links and other personal items, his golf clubs and collection of ships’ models. She came home to Quarterday just as the party season on the North Shore was beginning. We met at Union Station and went to the Blackstone for lunch. She looked frail and seemed distracted, insisting on sitting in the back seat of the car as if to emphasize her separation from my father and me. She admitted she had hardly any energy and had been seeing a doctor for her nerves, a comment to which my father did not respond. She was silent then, resting her head on the seatback, looking indifferently out the window at the shoppers crowding the sidewalks of the Loop.
The restaurant was noisy so my father handed the maitre d’ a bill and asked for a quiet table in the corner. None was available so we settled for one in the middle of the room next to an assembly of aldermen who were complaining loudly about the administration in Washington, ignorant fat-cat Republican businessmen who didn’t know their ass from third base, and a recession was coming on as it always did when Republicans were in charge, and their answer to it was to screw the workingman—that, too, a favorite Republican trick. My father moved closer to my mother, draping a protective arm over the back of her chair. He glared at the aldermen, who glared back but turned down the volume.
At lunch my mother asked questions about the parties I would attend, which debs were the most popular, and whether there were any I particularly liked. She said sternly, I want you to behave yourself, Wils. No monkeyshines. Wils is going to be a great success, my father said without explanation, except for the look that passed between us. I told her that my father and I had gone to Brooks to buy a dinner jacket and vest and dancing shoes. The kind with bows, my father said. My mother smiled and reminisced about debutante parties in her youth, at yacht clubs and golf clubs here and there in Connecticut and hotels in Manhattan and one especially splendid dinner dance in Old Westbury on Long Island, Claude Thornhill’s orchestra. Of course the dances were not as opulent as they are today, especially on the North Shore. I guess those people feel they have something to prove, she said. Still, in the East the orchestras were always top-notch, and everyone danced until dawn that time in Old Westbury
.
I met your father later that summer, she said to me, but I had three or four serious beaux before he came along. Oh, but it was fun, she said, dancing until all hours. It was a mating dance, she went on. We were all looking for husbands. And the boys were looking for wives, but not just then. College came first and wives came next. You’ll remember this summer your whole life, Wils, so have fun. Remember to dance with the deb and the deb’s mother, and say hello to her father and thank him for the party.
They cost a fortune, you know.
Especially the way they do them on the North Shore.
She said to my father, How many are we going to?
He said, Six, I think. The Bowdens and the Kendricks. The McManaways. That couple who go steeplechasing in England—
The Wickersons.
Yes, the Wickersons. They have twins so it should be quite a show. There are others, I don’t remember the names. Friends of yours.
Oh, good, she said. I want to see Wils on the dance floor.
I taught him how to waltz, my father said.
You don’t know how to waltz, my mother said.
I learned, he said.
My mother cheered up as lunch progressed, telling stories of her father, amusing stories that made my father and me laugh. There had been quite a to-do over the will, an exacting document that ran to more than fifty pages, much of it written in arcane maritime language. Squire’s estate was large, larger than she or her mother expected, heavy in municipal bonds and New York real estate. She said I was getting the law books, gold-tooled and calf-bound. Squire had mentioned my father also, bequeathing him a silver picture frame (with a photo of Squire himself in a blue blazer and yachting cap at the helm of Marine Tort) and a privately printed volume detailing the Wilson family tree, eight generations of towheads traced back to a crofter’s hut in Scotland. At that, my mother raised her eyebrows and my father grinned gamely. She drank a manhattan and said she was glad to be home at last; she had stayed away longer than she intended. I’ve missed you both, she said. My father and I replied in unison, We’re glad to have you back, and then it was her turn to smile gamely.
My mother set about redecorating the house, as if she wanted to remove all evidence of the former environment. Before long, her mother’s housekeeper Ling arrived from Connecticut to help her. They rearranged furniture and the pictures on the walls, paying particular attention to the location of mirrors and the affinity of primary colors, yellow for one room, red for another, all according to some formula of Ling’s. The old beige davenport was re-covered in yellow silk. My father arrived home one night to find his favorite chair turned ninety degrees, facing not the terrace but the fireplace. The Oriental rug in front of the fireplace had been removed and a white shag substituted. The French doors were gone, replaced by a glass slider; and its view was no longer of the sixth fairway and the sand trap and the raised green beyond but of a fat blue spruce, newly planted and flanked by stone birdbaths. She had added a ha-ha between the spruce and the fairway.
My father did not question any of these changes, except to idly inquire whether there was some guiding principle behind them. Harmony, my mother said. Feng shui, Ling explained, to which my father nodded and pressed no further. He missed his view of the fairway, as he missed the Oriental carpet and the scar in the parquet, the scar having been sanded down and the parquet retouched. About as successful as a toupee, my father muttered to me one night. But he held to his view that a woman had the right to decorate her house as she saw fit, and it was true that my mother seemed content. Her fatigue had vanished and she was cheerful in the evenings, according to my father. He mildly objected when she removed an Edward Hopper etching of a steam engine and replaced it with a watercolor of Squire’s sloop. But he admitted that the watercolor was attractive and the only thing he had against it was that it had been painted by Squire. In due course, Ling returned to Connecticut, having given my mother detailed instructions on how to maintain feng shui.
My mother and father struggled through that summer and by the end of it had reached an accommodation, making do in the way that older people did. My mother made new plans for a screened-in porch and a swimming pool, all arranged according to the principles of feng shui as she understood them. Our house had become a different house, its ambiance muted and unfamiliar, its furnishings such that you wanted to move around it on tiptoe, as Ling had done. It was no longer the place where you could play Georg Brunis, or Fred Astaire singing Gershwin, while you dealt the cards for a companionable round of pinochle.
By then I was preoccupied with my own life, my summer job at one of the newspapers downtown, and my strenuous after-hours carousing. The summer had turned out better than I ever imagined, and I realized soon enough that I was inhabiting three parallel worlds: the newspaper, the parties, and the house in Quarterday. Each day was a fabulous journey to the unknown, Stanley to the Congo or Lewis and Clark to the American West, yet when I arrived home there was little that was familiar. London and St. Louis were changed utterly, the Houses of Parliament disappeared, the Mississippi a pitiful creek. The teller of tales needs a well-worn chair when he describes his adventures, for an adventure always implies a return for the settling of accounts. I found narrative difficult in these new surroundings. One night I came home late from a party, keyed up after the long drive from Winnetka, and found an antique oval mirror in the foyer and an armoire next to the mirror and an ornate Chinese chair next to the armoire, and reckoned I had somehow entered the wrong house, except the red duffel was resting on the chair. I wandered onto the terrace to find my father sitting alone in the moonlight, a nightcap in his hand. He asked me to join him and after a moment of frank appraisal—he was looking at me to assure himself that I was steady on my feet, no menace to him or to others—he disclosed that he had agreed to drain the pond and cut down the sycamores.
Your mother wants a gazebo, he said. She calls it a teahouse.
You can’t give up your hockey, I said. That’s crazy. Who needs a teahouse?
He looked at me sharply and replied that it wasn’t crazy. The teahouse would be a fine addition on warm summer evenings. He added that his arthritic knees could no longer stand the strain of ice hockey, and without hockey—well, what was the point of the pond, a breeding ground of mosquitoes and muskrats. The sycamores were a nuisance and one was dying. It’s not crazy at all, he said. He went on about his bum knees but I wasn’t listening carefully because I had had an argument with a girl and I was trying to fathom why she began it. I was replaying the argument while my father talked about his knees and what a splendid addition the teahouse would make.
I didn’t know you had arthritic knees, I said.
They flared up a few weeks ago, he said. Once or twice I’ve had to use a cane. It’s a pain in the ass.
I didn’t know, I said, looking at him in the darkness. Only a month before, I would have known. I would have known how much he was hurting, known the name of his doctor and what his knees felt like and the prognosis and the medicine prescribed. But he had said nothing to me, or if he had, I was not listening.
Much pain? I asked.
The look he gave me was the answer.
I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t know. Seen the doctor?
Live with it, the doctor said.
Don’t worry about it, my father went on. You have other things on your mind. You’ve been busy. He took out a cheroot, lit it, and blew a cloud of smoke in the direction of the pond, and then back to me, another look of appraisal.
You look good in a tuxedo, he said.
Thanks, I said.
Look like you were born in it. Most men don’t look good in one, they move as if they’re in a straitjacket. They look dressed up, and’ve got expressions like they expect a guillotine’s behind the bandstand and when the music stops the tumbrils arrive in the ballroom and that’s it for them.
I began to laugh.
Squire looked good in a tuxedo. Probably you got it from him, naturalness. You can’t
teach it and you can’t learn it. You’re tall and that helps, and you’re fit. You’re a god damned good-looking kid and you don’t act as if you know it.
My father had never said anything like that to me before, and I didn’t know why he was saying it now.
At least you’re not a towhead, he went on, still staring into the darkness. He said something about my needing a haircut and then asked me if I would fix him a drink, a short scotch. Have one yourself, he said.
When I returned with the drinks, he said, How’s work?
It isn’t work, I said. It’s a circus. I described the newsroom, cigarette butts on the floor, overflowing wastebaskets, pint bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags, a side-of-the-mouth atmosphere common to a racetrack or pool hall, each day a high-wire act. And your old partner Judge Greenslat is in the news again. Nasty, nasty divorce, and his scorned second wife is singing to anyone who’ll listen. “Love Nest” will figure in the morning headlines, and they tell me there’s a photograph. Showgirl, I said.
Poor old bastard, my father said, and was silent.
You liked him, didn’t you?
Butch? Everyone liked Butch. His nephew was nothing much but Butch was good as gold. A rogue, but good as gold. Loved showgirls, the gaudier the better. Started with waitresses, graduated to showgirls, but waitresses were his first love. It was a treat watching Butch stroll into the office at three in the afternoon, a spring in his step and a glint in his eye. Butch and I would spend hours after work talking about life. He was a philosopher, Butch was. I learned a lot from him.