“Well, aren’t you going to introduce us,” Nick said. “Don’t tell me the Army took your manners, too.”
Pierro was standing slightly flushed now, embarrassed by having been carried away in front of his new acquisition, Nick could tell.
Old Pete was sitting in his master chair and there was a satisfied smile on his face, and his eyes were slightly misty again. “My family,” his voice trembled slightly. “All together again. Mary—my family.”
“Well,” Nick said again to Pierro.
Finally Pierro introduced Marci around and Old Pete asked them to sit down and Mary went for brandy for them.
“This is quite a surprise,” Pierro said.
“He looks great, eh, Pierro,” Old Pete said.
“He looks terrible,” Pierro said. “Terrible. What ever happened, Nick?”
Nick grinned. “The same thing that happened to a lot of people,” Nick said. “I’m here. I’m not complaining.”
“You’re so—”
“Old,” Nick said.
“Pierro,” Mary said.
“Are you—are you out?” Pierro asked slightly awkwardly.
“Not yet,” Nick said, then quickly glanced over at Old Pete. Well, Nick thought, I might as well throw it in now. “In fact,” Nick said to Pierro, but eyeing Old Pete, “I’m staying in for a while.”
“You mean voluntarily?”
“Voluntarily,” Nick said triumphantly.
Old Pete jerked upward a moment, then quickly suppressed his shock.
“What are you doing, Greek?” Nick asked Pierro.
Greek. It knifed into Pierro as nicely, as easily as it always had when Nick said it the way he did. He glared at Nick.
There was a silence.
“Or should I say what are you going to do?” Nick asked.
Pierro sat there still hurt and glaring for a moment, then his eyes lowered and he dumped his cigarette ash into a tray methodically, then holding the cigarette between his fingers as if it were some gentle and delicate thing, he said:
“I haven’t really decided, Nick. I was thinking of going on to Bloomfield Hills for a while,” he said, conscious of Old Pete’s eyes on him. “To work on the cities project. You know of that. But I thought I’d rest for a few weeks now. You know I was hurt rather severely.”
Mary had come in with the brandy while Pierro was talking. “We’ll never know what our boys went through,” she said dramatically. Then in a completely new voice: “Marci, dear, would you like a little creme de cacao with yours?”
Marci smiled warmly. “No thank you, Mrs. Stratton.”
“I would,” Yvonne said.
“You’ve had enough brandy,” Old Pete said.
“I don’t come home every day,” Nick said to Old Pete, then quickly eyed Pierro.
“Really, uncle,” Pierro said, “this is an occasion.”
“See what I mean, Marci,” Old Pete said suddenly smiling charmingly. “I don’t know how long it’s been since I won a vote around here.”
“But you win the elections, I bet,” Marci said with a deliberate and obvious flirtatiousness that obviously pleased Old Pete.
“It doesn’t take a woman long to get your number, Pete Stratton,” Mary said.
“Better have some brandy, Yvonne,” Old Pete said smiling charmingly again. “You can’t beat women. They run everything nowadays. Everything, I say. Bowling was never a success until women took to it. And cigarettes were never a real success until women started smoking. Remember that, Nick,” Old Pete said. “When women take to anything nowadays, there’s money in it. You remember that too, Pierro.”
Marci laughed.
“You can’t do anything without the dollar,” Old Pete said, puffing his cigar. “The mighty dollar.” Then picking up his brandy glass, “To our boys. To Pierro and Nick.”
They drank around.
“I remember a professor from the University of Chicago that used to come into The Mill,” Old Pete said reminiscently. “He was a hell of a hard drinker. When he got feeling good he used to tell a story about a friend of his that said money didn’t mean a thing. In fact, this friend of his was so nuts on the subject of how little money meant that he always said he was going to write a book on it. And you know, Marci, he would have written the book, too, the professor told me, if he had enough money to take the time to write it.”
Pierro and Nick were grinning at each other. “Pardon us, Marci,” Nick said, “but we’ve heard that one a few times before.”
Then Marci gave her regards to Old Pete from her father. Pete remembered her father well, and her grandfather too. He sent his regards right back.
“What do you think about Nick staying in?” Pierro asked Old Pete now. He had thought about asking it before but it was really such a delightful question for him to ask Old Pete that he hadn’t been able to resist savouring it for a while first.
“If Nick likes the Army, that’s his business,” Old Pete said without hesitation. “Of course, Pierro, I don’t like it. What father would. The way I worked all my life building up this business for my son. My family. What man would like it? But if Nick’s made up his mind, I guess it’s made up—I’ll carry on some way. If it kills me, I will,” Old Pete said, and reached into his pocket and pulled out his pill box. “Yvonne, get me some water,” he added stoically. And then sat there unconcernedly and knowing that he had made the correct play and had not only thrown Nick off balance but Mary and Yvonne, too, and at the same time, probably, allied Pierro to his cause.
“Why the Army, Nick?” Pierro asked.
Nick sat there feeling not at all out-maneuvered but sincerely hurt and bewildered that his father could so cold-bloodedly dismiss him from his life—what kind of a man was this, Nick wondered, who would take the responsibility of bringing you into this world and then didn’t even care what happened to you. Didn’t he know anything of love? Was his love buried in his ignorance, too?
“What else do I know except the Army?” Nick said, his eyes shifting quickly to his father who was staring indifferently at his cigar.
“You’ll never stay in,” Pierro said to Nick. “You weren’t constructed for it.”
“What am I constructed for, Greek?” Nick asked.
“You’ll have to find that out,” Pierro said softly.
I suppose that’s so goddamn easy, Nick said to himself. I suppose he thinks everyone is like him. Knows what they want from the time they’re twelve on. And knows how to go about getting it. The superior, snobbish bastard.
“It’s not easy for some guys,” Nick said. “For most of us.”
“I think you both talk crazy now,” Old Pete said. “The kid’s got the world by the tail and don’t know it. I’d like to have had half the chance he’s got. A fifth of the chance—what’s he going to do? My God. A big business for him to step into. Handed to him. And he wants to stay in the Army. What kind of a son we got? What kind of a son you raise, Mary?”
“I guess we never will understand each other, Dad,” Nick said.
“I’ll never understand you,” Old Pete said. “I’ll tell you that. You get hit in the head or something?”
“Peter!” Mary exclaimed.
“Don’t it look like I got hit in the head,” Nick said, and belted his brandy down.
“Don’t you dare talk to my son like that,” Mary continued to Old Pete.
“Get me some brandy, Yvonne, please,” Nick said.
“Daddy didn’t mean it,” Yvonne said to Nick.
“I know,” Nick said to her.
“See, Mary,” Old Pete said, “I didn’t say anything wrong. You took it wrong.”
Mary turned her head as if she hadn’t heard. “I apologize, Marci, for all of us,” Mary said as if Marci were the only one in the room who could possibly comprehend the dignified way in which she had said it, and at the same time momentarily feeling the warm assuredness of her dignified American heritage. You couldn’t buy that. “Everyone’s a little excited—Nick coming h
ome so unexpectedly.”
“It’s really not Very polite,” Pierro sided with Mary.
Then Pierro began to tell them about Marci and her background, which, because of Mary’s recent dignified statement, they were all compelled to listen to attentively and politely so as to at least partially compensate for their inadequate consideration for a guest.
And Nick, assured of Marci’s attention to Pierro, invaded her again. He was looking out of the corner of his eye at the dress strap that fell slightly off one shoulder now, and the way her red hair came forward on the right side almost to her eye, and then back at the shoulder-strap which, hanging as it was, dropped the dress slightly on that side so that the smooth white but slightly freckled upper ski-run slide of her right breast was exposed slightly, then craftily he turned and very attentively listened to Pierro, who was now temporarily sidelined on the subject of Marci and was speaking of a mutual friend at the Sorbonne, and while very attentively listening to Pierro, slyly turned in his seat and raised up slightly and craftily looked back at the exposed welling of white flesh, earnestly contemplating whether or not she had on a bra, which he finally, delightedly, decided she did not.
He wondered where Pierro got her. Or more important, how he got her. She wasn’t like any of his other acquisitions, he told himself. At least not like the ones he brought around here. At least she didn’t look like it. Or act like it, even. Christ, the way she smoked was almost like a man. Well, not that it wasn’t feminine. But she didn’t smoke like most women, as if the cigarette were a diamond-studded hand grenade that must be used advantageously not only to dazzle the eye but must be handled gently so as not to explode.
I KNOW, he said suddenly to himself. She’s part of his plan. His MASTER plan. Didn’t she tell Old Pete her father had gone to LIT and her grandfather, who had known Pete, was one of the most successful and influential engineers Chicago ever had, having been chief consultant not only for the Navy Pier but also for the Art Institute and the Field Museum. You’re goddamn right she said it, he said to himself. You heard it with your own ears, didn’t you.
Pierro was so like Old Pete, Nick thought, in so many ways. He never stopped any more than Old Pete stopped. They knew what they wanted and behind all their hypocritical pretenses that they so cleverly and skillfully used not only as a camouflage but also like some secret weapon, they were twenty-four hours a day every day relentlessly and vigorously driving to attain whatever only they knew secretly they wanted to attain.
That was one thing they would never know: What it was to meet one person body to body and soul to soul, knowing that this meeting was completely segregated from the illusion and was for real; that one moment when you could take the whole truth and tie it all in one little whiskey-shot-glass full of truth, and touch for one moment that which was hidden behind these centuries of sins and lies; that one shot-glass full of truth and beauty and purity where for one moment you knew everything that there ever was to know while at the same time knowing absolutely nothing; that one shot-glass full that was buried in you in spite of these centuries of society and propriety that by hook or by crook or by jiminy or by golly had stamped its impression on you since the day you were born, and if the impression didn’t stick? out you went—defective.
The miracle was, Nick thought, that in spite of their country clubs and Elks clubs, their scotch and their soda, and Ex-Lax and Alka-Seltzer, and sanitation and sewage system with its beer bottles and cundrums floating down this, the stream of our twentieth century life, in spite of all this, he thought with a kind of sudden veneration, the one shot-glass full of cure-all was still buried there uncontaminated and waiting for you to tear down the barriers that you yourself had not only subjected yourself to but helped to erect—yes, still there. And till death do you part, too. Or maybe that should be until death do you not part.
And did it make any difference how you got it? I mean as long as you didn’t trample on anyone in your anxiety to get it. If you had to get drunk and wild and turbulent and throw yourself into it as you and Nora had thrown yourselves into it, that was all right too. Though you and Nora didn’t quite really have it all. Not quite. But you were close. Obviously very close. And yet, somehow, you couldn’t relate it specifically to sex. It was certainly more than common sex, he analyzed, or the sex itself would have been sufficient—Sufficient. That’s an understatement of a joke. Sufficient. Oh my God.
But what was passion but a form of tenderness? Well, not passion itself. Actually, it was the subjugation of passion that was tenderness, wasn’t it? Then, logically, doesn’t that mean the net result of the subjugation of passion was compassion. Anyhow, sex didn’t have everything to do with it really, he thought. I mean sex was probably a means, a solitary means, and therefore an opportunity, of showing us that it was at least possible to tear down the barriers if only for a second. But there were other ways too. At least he thought there were. Didn’t he himself almost drink the shot-glass full of truth the last time he was in the hospital and had thrown himself so completely into the pain that the pain suddenly wasn’t at all what he supposed it was. And there alone with the pain that he hardly felt after he had thrown himself into it, and with his mind like a clear-sounding bell (regular and polished and unhindered), hadn’t he almost tasted the full contentment of that truth of all truths.
And that was what was wrong with them: With Old Pete. With Pierro. With Marci. They simply wouldn’t throw themselves into anything that was real, real as separated from illusion and delusion; real as separated from society and its present propriety. And if they thought you would throw yourself into the real, or even thought about throwing yourself into it, they would descend on you like a swarm of locusts in a wheat field and after they had stripped you clean, would more than likely exile you as a heretic of sorts.
That every one of them, and each and every one of us, had the equipment didn’t seem to make any difference. Pierro certainly had it. And in his way Old Pete had it. And Marci—she was really equipped. I wonder what she’d be like in bed, he thought. She looked like she’d really be something in the bed. But like many women who looked it, even actually at times exuded it (another phase of the illusion), she probably wasn’t any good simply, he thought now, tying it all up, because she would never be able to throw herself into it totally, simply (again) because she was so moulded by what she had read and where she had traveled, being always at the correct place at the correct time and with the correct company, and always with that unassuming confidence (as if everyone had the same confidence, didn’t they?)—because of this she would probably never have the opportunity of committing herself totally, and if she did, would out of habit avoid it. But that strange forwardness, that chameleon-like adaptability that she presented. Was that part of his, Nick’s illusion? Or, he wondered suddenly, was the forwardness really not a forwardness but rather a simple curiosity that gave the appearance of an uninhibited forwardness mainly because of her authentic confidence.
In any event, Marci was no Nora. And never would be. Or should I say, Nick said to himself, never would let herself be. Yes, that was better. I mean the least you can be is fair. I wonder where Nora is. I’d better call her soon. What do you suppose she meant when she said she’d be busy for a few days, he wondered suspiciously. Could there be anyone else? God, he must really be a war lunatic leaving her after only two days to come home to this. You could always come home to this. Well, not everyone could. Maybe you could come home to Nora though. If she threw herself into marriage the way she did other things she’d make some wife. MARRIAGE, he thought suddenly as the reality sank in. He wasn’t in any position, or condition, he told himself, to be contemplating marriage. How would he ever support a woman like her? Christ, he couldn’t even support himself except in the Army.
Then suddenly Nick’s mind focused in on the table again. Pierro was still talking and Mary was looking at Marci admiringly, obviously intrigued by Marci’s dramatic accomplishments, which was only natural considering that Mary
herself had aspirations regarding the stage, or theatre, as she preferred to call it. In fact, the first argument she ever had with Old Pete after they were married was when Pete had found out she was taking singing lessons in hopes of getting up an act and then going on, for a starter, at The Mill. (Of course in those days you didn’t start at The Mill—you arrived there.) This sudden revelation of his wife’s activities and ambitions had, of course, initially shocked Old Pete. In fact, at first, he was completely flabbergasted. Actually voiceless. His wife on the stage! God forbid. God in Heaven forbid. What was this world coming to? Pete Stratton’s wife on the stage! The mother of his son (Mary wasn’t even pregnant at the time)—the mother of his son on the stage!
Of course Mary was then forced to remind him, even though it was public knowledge, that Old Pete himself had carried on an affair for over twelve years with a celebrated entertainer of that era That was prior to his meeting Mary, of course. In fact Old Pete hadn’t for years been seen in public with any other woman. A lot of people even thought they were married. And when Old Pete decided to marry Mary, the entertainer made a public statement that if the marriage was actually consummated she would personally kill Old Pete. Whether this was said in a fit of genuine jealousy or merely as a publicity gimmick no one had ever determined. But when Mary had brought up her name, when she had actually mentioned her name out loud, Old Pete was severely hurt. After all, the past was the past. His life was his own prior to the time he had met her and like everyone else, he had made plenty of mistakes. The only thing that counted for them was the future. It really wasn’t fair, not fair at all, he told her, to bring up the past. It just wasn’t, well, ethical. So during those three days of arguing and crying, Mary Stratton being only seventeen at the time and that being her first marital quarrel, had for the first time and last time cried almost as much as Pete.
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