An Unfinished Season

by Ward Just

  Let me go, she said.

  Not yet, I said. Listen to me.

  You are not on my side.

  Of course I am, I said.

  Then why are you on her side? What does she mean to you?

  I’m not on anybody’s side, I said.

  I knew it. You’re like the rest of them, Aurora said, beginning to struggle again.

  At that moment I saw myself as a referee, the one who steps in to stop the bar fight in the name of good order. I suppose I saw myself as acting in behalf of Jack Brule, a decent respect for the memory of the dead man, loved by both women. I was appalled by Aurora’s bullying and discouraged by Consuela’s passivity, yet at the same time I knew there was something between them that I would never fathom, a kind of complicit rivalry. They each loved Jack Brule in a way the other could not. They each owned a piece of him but the pieces overlapped, and to claim one was to claim part of the other. The dead man had no say in the matter. I had never heard one woman speak to another as Aurora had spoken to Consuela. Of course I had heard the usual snide remarks made by one woman against another, and from them I had deduced that female friendships were complicated affairs, with much hidden from view; and now it seemed that I was like the rest of them, meaning men. I knew that at some fundamental level I was being disloyal to Aurora, my girl, the one I had promised to look after. But I thought her attack on Consuela was unworthy of her, malevolent almost, and it was my duty to put a stop to it. I had always believed that loyalty was the greatest of virtues and betrayal a vice, but it could not be as simple as that because justice was present somewhere; and just then I realized that I could not help Aurora. She had drawn a line I could not cross.

  Go away, Aurora said wearily. You don’t belong here.

  I belong to you, I said. We belong to each other.

  Not now, she said.

  Yes, now, I insisted.

  Then get her out of here, Aurora said.

  What was the argument about? Why are you behaving this way?

  Aurora frowned, then made a curt dismissive gesture with her hands. I did not know what the gesture meant, and I wondered if she did. It was not natural to her. It seemed the sullen motion of an older woman, a woman of the world who had heard every quarrel under God’s sun and was exhausted by them, fruitless, enervating quarrels in which there were no winners or losers, only frustrated combatants. Her hands fluttered, then came to rest, a gesture at once eloquent and enigmatic. I had an idea the flutter was involuntary, a family tic, handed down like blue eyes or a dimple. Like an ideogram, the stroke began as one thing and ended as another—from defiance to resignation in a fraction of a second; and still her expression did not change. I saw one of her Dutch ancestors look up from her dressing table at something her oafish husband had said, frown, and flutter her hands—and the husband was as nonplused as I was, staring dumbly at this pantomime. I plunged on with a sudden understanding that I no longer knew the girl, I called Aurora.

  I said, Isn’t that what’s behind this?

  Go back to Quarterday, she said.

  I’m trying to help—

  This was all a mistake.

  No, I said.

  Then help, she said. Stop talking and help.

  Tell me about the quarrel.

  It’s none of his business, Consuela said from the couch. We both turned to her, startled, as if a corpse had spoken. She uncoiled her legs and sat upright, staring hard at Aurora. Consuela’s face was set, gaining strength as we watched her. She removed the empty glass from her lap and put it on the table with a smart click. The silence gathered, lengthening until it filled the room, muffling even the tick of the clock in the bookcase.

  She’s right, Aurora said finally.

  Aurora doesn’t know what it was about, Consuela said.

  Aurora nodded slowly, still glaring at Consuela. I didn’t hear it all, she said. The time was so late, after midnight. I was in bed. I had been reading and fell asleep over my book. I only heard voices. And then, much later, I heard the explosion. I don’t remember the other things.

  It was not an ordinary quarrel, Consuela conceded. One thing led to another. I would call it a soul quarrel. It was unfinished. But it was the sort of quarrel that people who love each other have. You cannot have a soul quarrel with someone you do not love deeply.

  Aurora did not reply to that.

  In any case, the quarrel would not translate, Consuela said. To repeat only the words would not be accurate because the words had specific private meanings. People who love each other have their own language, that’s well known. The language is for them alone, not meant to be shared. At a sudden movement from Aurora, she added, Much as you would like to share it.

  Not always, Aurora said dully.

  Rarely, Consuela agreed. The quarrels are always about the same thing anyhow. The words change, the subject remains the same.

  Do you want to say what the subject is? I said, and waited for Consuela’s answer, certain that it would come in euphemism. The quarrel surely was about sex or money, perhaps some unfathomable combination of the two, a quarrel that would go to the deep structure of both subjects. Pride would be there somewhere, too, the organizing principle. And the quarrel would be savage, nothing withheld or glossed over, tigers’ claws straining for the vulnerable point—

  Consuela said, Virtue.

  I did not know what to say to that.

  We had different definitions of virtue, Consuela added.

  How a life is lived, I said.

  On what basis, she said.

  Loyalties, for example, I said.

  Loyalty comes into it.

  And betrayal, I went on.

  That also, Consuela said.

  And you and Jack disagreed—

  That night we did. It was only last night, wasn’t it?

  Yes, I said.

  Well, that was what pur argument was about. We could not agree. The quarrel was bitter and got worse. But that was only because we could not find the words. I’m sure we agreed in our hearts. But our hearts could not speak. And Jack shot himself.

  Aurora uttered a little broken cry, moving away from me and pouring a glass of water from the carafe on the table, spilling a little. She stood with her back to Consuela and me and I knew without being told that my presence was no longer welcome. Aurora and I had gone from lovers to enemies to strangers in minutes. We no longer knew each other. We had gotten crosswise to each other, and I am bound to say that this involved her pride and my ignorance. I was the mariner who knew the surface of the sea but had no understanding of the life beneath it. She was hurt greviously in a place I could not reach. Her father had turned his hand against her; and so her world was suddenly upside down. Her intuition was no good to her now, and neither was mine. There we were. I put my hands on Aurora’s shoulders, feeling her tremble. She seemed unaware that I was touching her. I said that I would leave now, that if there was anything she wanted or needed, anything at all, she had only to call. I would be at home, Quarterday. I kissed her but her lips were stiff as cardboard. I said goodbye to Consuela and hurriedly left the apartment in Lincoln Park, as crowded now as when I had entered it. It did seem to me that ghosts were present, and that ghosts were life’s defining characteristic.

  12

  I TOOK A CAB back to the Loop to fetch my car from the parking lot across the street from the newspaper. Traffic was light except around the movie theaters. Traffic was light on the Outer Drive but slow because a fishy mist had drifted in from the lake. The lights of the apartment buildings back of Lincoln Park were blurred. I was well north of Aurora’s place before I knew it, gliding into the sweeping curve before the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Then the Outer Drive ended and the city ended with it, the buildings low and dimly lit and the sidewalks vacant, a modest indoor Chicago diminishing to the city limits and strait-laced Evanston. Ahead was the Bryn Mawr El station and the lights of the Eleven-Eleven Club. The time was seven-thirty. The first set would not begin for another ninety minutes, and su
ddenly there seemed no better place to be on a Friday evening. I parked on the street and hurried inside, the club wonderfully cool, smelling of beer and heavy with cigarette smoke even though there were only half a dozen men at the bar and a middle-aged police officer talking earnestly to the owner at a table in the corner, the cop worried about something and the owner listening intently, though not so intently that he did not find time to nod cordially at me; the week before I had won the club a mention in the paper’s gossip column. I took a seat at the end of the bar, lit a cigarette, and waited for Earl. Back of the bar was the bandstand with a cabaret piano, a set of traps, and five ladder-back chairs arranged in a semicircle behind metal sheet-music stands, though Brunis’s jazz band rarely used sheet music. What they played, they played by ear. I thought of a row of easels without artists, blank spaces waiting to be drawn to life in an atelier with a few friends invited to watch. With a sly nod to the cop at the table, Earl asked loudly for my proof of age and winked when I handed him my press card. I sat alone at the end of the bar, fully at ease for the first time that day; and then I remembered walking out of the newspaper building at noon, my pay packet bulky in my pocket, as reassuring as a rabbit’s foot. I was fully at ease then and fully at ease in the Art Institute later. Earl brought me a drink and said I looked terrible. What happened, did you get run over by a mother-in-law? When I told him I was finished at the paper he made a face and said, Stop the presses. Then he retreated to serve the cop another bourbon and ginger ale, bending close to listen to something the owner said.

  When he came back, Earl said, Sorry about the job.

  It was only a summer job. Thirty-five a week.

  Shit job, Earl said.

  Shit job, I agreed. Except for the glamour.

  Right, he said, and laughed.

  You meet such interesting people when you’re working in news. Newspaper reporters and bartenders, one excitement after another all day long. How’s it with you?

  Can’t complain. You staying for the set?

  No. I have to drive north.

  Putting on your monkey suit?

  I shook my head, no monkey suit. I realized then that I was starving. I had had no breakfast and nothing to eat at the apartment. I said, Any chance for a sandwich?

  I can send out, Earl said.

  Chicken sandwich?

  Sure. Be a minute. He moved to go, then reached behind him and slid a copy of the newspaper across the bar.

  Here, he said. While you’re waiting, have a laugh.

  And another of these, I said, tapping my glass.

  They’re on the house, Earl said.

  Thank you, I replied, and turned to nod at the owner, who smiled in return.

  I sat alone, avoiding the newspaper. I did not read the headlines. I was avoiding the day altogether, looking at the empty bandstand and remembering the times I had been at the club late in the evening, listening to Georg Brunis and his sidemen with the solemnity of a communicant at Mass, some old blues played adagio and then, to wake us all up, he and the band would fly into “Muskrat Ramble” or “South Rampart Street Parade,” the faces of the musicians gleaming with sweat. Brunis, looking like a portly small-town accountant with his barbered hair and tidy mustache, led the ensemble with theatrical sweeps of his trombone, and then gave way so that the sidemen could take their solos. How many evenings had I sat and listened to this antique music—thirty? forty? Since the age of fifteen, with a doctored draft card and a composed manner to make my act plausible, careful in the beginning not to drink too much and never, ever to smoke more than one cigarette at a time. The Eleven-Eleven Club was so far away from Quarterday and the North Shore that it might have been in another country, in another century, the time always midnight—

  I love to see

  The evening sun go down.

  The last time had been some Saturday night in July, after a party that had ended early. I had yet to meet Aurora. Six of us had raced in from Winnetka for the last few sets. The rude Englishman was with us, out of pocket as usual. He didn’t care for the music, “dingo music” he called it. So he drank five or six scotches, not listening to the band but talking to Earl or whoever was in earshot—baiting them, asking impertinent questions and receiving puzzled answers. I was waiting for Earl to smack him but Earl never did, setting up drink after drink, a few of them on the house. Earl said later that he was tickled by the English accent. He had never heard one before, and then someone told him the limey was a lord, and he had never met a lord. Lord-in-waiting, I said. Earl said he had never met a lord or a lord-in-waiting; and so Sutcliffe or Wycliffe or whatever his name was got away with murder that night as he did most nights, towering over the people at the bar, his huge head thrown back, asking question after question, a kind of interrogatory monologue accompanied by his bray-laugh. He had begun his American tour in Boston and made his way to Long Island and then to Baltimore and Grosse Pointe before showing up in Chicago. He had introductions to people in each city and indicated he would be moving on soon to St. Louis and Louisville, where he had “connections.” The rude Englishman traveled without money, though you would never guess that because he was beautifully groomed and tailored with all the correct accessories, MacGregor golf sticks in a St. Andrews bag, a Faberge cigarette case, bench-made shoes, a gold signet ring, and a silver whiskey flask that looked as if it had seen service at Waterloo. He borrowed money as he traveled and there were stories that he had gotten a girl into trouble in Ipswich and brawled with an older man in Larchmont and was no longer welcome in either locality or on the North Shore of Long Island. Still, allowances were made because—God, he was amusing, with his stories of Harrow and dimwitted royals and their dogs and horses and losses at the baccarat table and swimming pool debaucheries in the wee hours of the morning. Also, he brought an unfamiliar vocabulary. Two of his favorite epithets were “swine” and “bounder,” and soon we were all using them, even the debs and their fathers. Of course he never got anyone’s name straight and that, too, was seen as an amusing eccentricity, typical of the English, so delightfully vague. That night I left the jazz club early because I did not want to chauffeur the rude Englishman back to wherever he was staying and being hit up for a tenner in the process.

  Thanks awfully, Willy.

  Left m’ pocketbook at the links.

  I ran out of distracting memories. My sandwich arrived along with another drink and I began to eat. The club was filling up and I moved to the last stool at the bar, resolved to leave when I had eaten my sandwich. Someone was pressing me from behind and I looked up, irritated, to discover Georg Brunis himself, signaling to Earl. I wished him a good evening and made room for him but as soon as the drink was safely in his hand he disappeared through a side door, his trombone case under his arm. The great jazzman was pink-cheeked and redolent of after-shave. It looked to me as if Brunis was prepared for a long and productive evening, hoping to God he didn’t have to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” more than seven or eight times. I took my time finishing the sandwich and then, unable to find more excuses, I pulled the paper toward me, the club’s cheerful ambiance falling away as if I had entered a tunnel. There was nothing on page one and nothing on page two or three, and when I found the headline on page five I almost read over it, beginning to turn the page before the words registered—

  BATAAN

  HERO DOC

  A SUICIDE

  —over eight terse paragraphs that began with name, age, address, cause of death, location of the body, and probable motive, “despondency.” Paragraphs two and three had to do with the Bataan Death March, the number of dead overall and the number said to have been saved by the heroic Dr. Brule. Paragraphs four and five listed his civic activities and various commendations from medical and charitable groups and the Silver Star from the army. Paragraph six described where the body was found but not who found it. Paragraph seven noted that the doctor was divorced and lived with his daughter, Aurora, eighteen, his only survivor. Paragraph eight: “Chica
go authorities said a note was found, but refused to disclose its contents. Funeral services are pending.” I turned from the paper, grateful that Consuela’s name was nowhere mentioned but startled by the reference to a note. Aurora had said nothing about a note and I tried now to imagine its form, written hurriedly in the minutes before the gun was cocked and fired—or perhaps not written hurriedly at all but at leisure, Jack wanting to be certain of the wording because there would be no rewrites in the last effort to explain himself. Probably he had had the words in mind for years and now they would be distilled, as concentrated as haiku. I wondered if he had brought a notepad into the bathroom with him along with the gun, an army-issue Colt .45, according to Henry Laschbrook. That seemed unlikely, but what, in these circumstances, constituted likely or unlikely? I wanted to know the contents of the note but doubted now that I ever would. Perhaps, someday, from Consuela.

  No need now for the abusive, if futile, telephone call to Ozias Tilleman. Henry Laschbrook’s piece was nestled between three paragraphs on an oil spill off New Jersey and an ad for auto parts, below the fold. Readers would likely pass it by as I almost had. I closed and folded the paper but Jack Brule did not go away. I glanced up at the vacant bandstand, the piano and set of traps, the five chairs, the metal stands and the chrome microphone, horn-high. A jazz club was no place to be in the hour before the first set. It was no place to be alone, trying not to think about Aurora back in Lincoln Park. I pushed off from the bar, time to go. The room was filling up rapidly; the cop was gone. I laid a five-dollar bill next to my empty glass and began to move through the crowd, two-deep now. Someone jostled me and I wheeled, prepared to jostle back, and stared into the chilly half-lidded eyes of the rude Englishman. He had the season’s prettiest deb on his arm, and I guessed she had been warned what to expect because she had her purse open and her hand on her wallet. I thought the lord-in-waiting had left for St. Louis and Louisville, but apparently his “connections” had failed to materialize, for here he was, back again, full of brio and an attractive girl to pay his way. He stared at me without recognition. I smiled at her and said hello, disappointed to see a faint blush as she turned away, averting her eyes as she fussed with the wallet. Antoinette was not a worldly girl and was only now discovering how truly attractive and desirable she was. I was certain her very rich and adoring parents did not know where she was or who she was with, a source of dismay because she was not the sort of girl who would enjoy deception. They hurried past, the Englishman waving his arms and shouldering people aside to clear a space at the bar below the bandstand. I went on out the door into Bryn Mawr Avenue, a sultry early evening. I lit a cigarette and waited. When I heard wild applause in the club and the first soaring notes of “Lover Come Back to Me,” I strolled away to my car down the street, though the song’s melody stayed with me for quite some time along with Antoinette’s blush.