Man Who Was Late

by Louis Begley

  To top it all, there was the matter of Rachel, which I believe he discussed only with me. I really cannot think whom else he would have taken into his confidence. Was it not there that he missed the chance of all chances, the prize sweeter than any other, the bliss of being loved by her? And was not that too a case of being late, arriving after others had raided the pantry of her affections and had left, in place of the sweet honey he craved, only the smudgy marks of their frequent passage? These older, well-traveled, and confident men (such, at least, were the ones Rachel named: such had been her late husband) seemed to have been pedagogues of merit. Not content to “show her the ropes”—Rachel’s own colloquial expression, Ben assured me—so that there was no gesture or inclination of the body an occasion might call for that she had not already experienced and memorized, had they not also formed her taste in drink, books, and clothes, taught her the names of hotels to avoid in the principal capitals, walked at her side down the galleries of the museums where she in turn guided Ben’s novice gaze? The late husband had fathered Sarah and Rebecca, her queerly named, dangerously black-haired twins, and then was electrocuted in the course of some complex repair he was attempting to perform on the roof of his barn. Rachel was still in mourning, was actually dressed in black—a violation of Cambridge mores, but how could she forgo the thrilling contrast that widow’s weeds made with her improbably white, impeccable skin?—when they met at the home of a Bostonian classmate. In Ben’s freshman year, of the large-boned adolescents who mysteriously all knew one another, knew all the prettier girls at Radcliffe, and attended club punches, this curly-haired hockey player alone had manifested considerable and benevolent interest in his strange fellow student who talked like a book and seemed to know nobody. Ben was seated beside Rachel at the table; his eyes could not leave her creamy, lightly powdered cleavage. He was a drowning man; another moment, and he would plunge his face into it. His sentimental and worldly education were about to begin: Was not his tutor, mistress, and wife-to-be asking, at the end of lunch, whether he wanted to see her two-year-old girls, and did he really know fairy tales by heart, and would he come the next day to tea?

  Toward the end of Ben’s sophomore year, Rachel’s widowed father died. There were no brothers or sisters to share in the cornucopia of terminating trusts. The dollar was strong. Rachel took a large house outside Hyères for the summer—Edith Wharton’s former presence affecting the choice—and invited Ben to join her. A Harvard scholarship student to take care of the twins was just the thing; he would be like an older brother and supply the masculine presence needed for their correct development. She would pay his passage and a small salary. That there should be a salary confused Ben’s parents sufficiently about their son’s relations with the worrisome older woman from Boston. They gave their consent; Ben believed he must have it.

  The house was, in the custom of that place, romantically dilapidated. Through the garden and a grove of parasol pines that prolonged it, one reached a shallow white beach. That is where, in the morning and also in the afternoon, after they had finished their long nap, Ben led the twins, rubbed suntan oil into their skin, engaged them in French conversation, and, when they tired of splashing in the water, fished for them à la palangrotte, five hooks on a line, with bits of bread as bait, lowered from a rock at the end of the beach so that the hooks hovered just above the sandy bottom, where tiny fish darted back and forth in the shade cast by the rock. During the twins’ nap, if there were no guests in the house, the cook watched the girls, and Ben and Rachel swam. At last, wafted by the Mediterranean swell, he was no longer a virgin: they made love beyond the rock, where their feet could barely touch, in Rachel’s room when she retired after dinner, in Ben’s bed when she awoke in the night and abruptly wanted him.

  As it happened, Rachel was rarely without guests. The exchange rate had put wind into many people’s sails. Some of the great men at the helm of little magazines then beginning to bud in Rome and Paris came to Hyères in wheezing black Citroëns; others got off the train at Toulon, where Ben would meet them. They smoked Gitanes made with yellow paper, drank pastis in the sun and scotch when it set, and organized raucous games of boules under the dusty plane trees. They were friends of the writers Ben was beginning to read; later in the summer they would stay with those writers. The house filled with the boom of voices. When Ben joined in the conversations, he thought these well-pitched and resonant organs pushed his voice aside, as though it were a deux chevaux in the way of one of their automobiles. His accent had an overlay of strangeness of which he was always aware; it would glide out of control until, dry mouthed, he listened to his own words with panic, waiting for their end. The twins’ uncle, a Mainline Philadelphia doctor, sailed over on a chartered boat that Ben learned to call a ketch. He wore lime-green shorts and a faded blue shirt. The aunt’s face was covered with red blotches. They talked to Rachel about money and cruising: a world of summers he had never known, and, it seemed to him, he would never fully understand, yawned before Ben. He was late and would never catch up; their awkward careless grace was destined to elude him; his pleasures, his happiness, lay only between Rachel’s legs.

  I have dwelt on this interlude because Ben himself returned to it so often in our conversations: he said it was the summer that determined the direction his life took thereafter. When I questioned Rachel recently, in the course of writing this story, she agreed with Ben’s view; in fact, she supplied corroborating details I had forgotten or Ben had not mentioned.

  At the end of that season of miracles, he returned to the States on the now-familiar student ship. As he made his way home, seasickness combined with bitter reflections to dissipate his sense of displacement and defeat. After all, was he not, although perhaps the youngest and least well prepared, at the head of his college class, and had not he won his place effortlessly, without care or plan, while the struggles of those happier classmates, rich with memories of golden summers, purchased mediocrity? Did not his thoughts outrun what the others trumpeted so confidently around Rachel’s table? And was it not he, once the Little Lord Fauntleroy of a Central European town with a name these Houyhnhnms could not pronounce, and now denizen of a Jersey City they smirked at, who slept with Rachel, whose cock was nightly sucked by her, who was so miraculously able to love Sarah and Rebecca and to be loved, yes loved, by them? What did it matter if all his younger years had been emptied of meaning by the New World? He would shut a gate of bronze upon them. The storehouse of all the shame and vulnerability in his life would be locked; a private museum of curios with but one visitor, himself, to stare at the degraded and rejected lares and penates. Only new acquisitions and artful forgeries would be on show. Clothes make a man and, with even greater power, so do lessons learned in the right sort of childhood. Within the limits of verisimilitude, he would have both; to his own skill he foresaw no limit. He repeated the words of a sampler Rachel owned: “Give me, O Lord, Thy early grace, nor let my soul complain that the young morning of my days has all been spent in vain.”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the laying of Ben’s new foundations did not seem to involve many outright lies. If one paid close attention, one might notice, sooner or later, some of his strange zones of unreliability in recollection—when had he made a crucial acquaintance, under what circumstances had he learned to jump a horse (if indeed he knew how!), how could so many experiences appropriate for a gentleman have been compressed into the few years that separated him from the prehistory of wartime Europe, or from the nameless high school in New Jersey through which he had passed briefly on his way to Harvard and a New Life? These slips surprised in a man with a memory and a bent for precision as prodigious as his. But Ben was very careful; he would correct the occasional improbable inconsistency in dates and, in the end, offer explanations that, for all the envelope of self-effacing charm, came down to his having been in these subjects, as in all others, a rapid and gifted student. One surmised that he had quietly put himself through a crash course in living the good life—good above al
l in its difference from the one in which he had feared he might be confined. It was a course of such rigor that the boot camp at Quantico, which seemed to have taught him exclusively map reading and how to maintain a parade-ground posture, must have felt, in all but its physical-fitness drills, like a comfortable spa.

  And for all my well-bred prejudice against strivers and achievers—we said in my family that one was, one did not become, even as Boston matrons need not buy hats because they have them—I saw nothing repellent, and certainly nothing dishonoring in what he had done. It had been performed so pleasantly and effortlessly. As his ascent to gentility proceeded (I rely on Rachel’s account of how the first grand friends were acquired at college), Ben neither checked at the door nor took trouble to emphasize the fact that he was a refugee Jew; probably, the worst that can be said is that he seemed to expect to be forgiven for it and did not appear vexed when he wasn’t. Along the same line, Ben did not, in my opinion, make an effort either to hide or to display his Jersey City connection—more particularly, his baffled parents while they still lived. Who except those parents could blame him for not putting them at the center, as it were, of his social life? The family home in Jersey City was easy enough to reach from Park or Fifth Avenue, but where, in that dusty street of red row houses, was the tennis court or pool in which Ben’s friends might disport themselves, and were those parents, starved for the presence of their strange, furtively obsessed only child, of a mind to receive those friends with the equanimity and graceful ease Ben might have wished?

  I used to amuse myself—and perhaps Ben as well—by rehearsing with him scenes that would have gone with the life he was beginning to live so successfully. For instance: His truly good-looking mother and father, in their worn but easeful togs, relax after the day’s toil. They are happy that Ben and his merry band of revelers stop by unannounced. In a matter-of-fact, casual way the father is offering a choice of drinks—perhaps slivovitz (nothing wrong with being true to one’s ethnic habits) and martinis shaken by Ben upon paternal urging; the old man is telling dryly humorous stories of prewar courtroom triumphs, with just a hint of disparagement, drawing therefrom lessons for today’s humbler activities. Meanwhile, the mother flirtatiously upbraids a young man for never coming to see her alone or—stroke of genius!—explains to an attentive Rachel when a gardenia begins to need repotting.

  The reality—I knew Ben’s parents and sometimes actually took the train to Jersey City without Ben’s urging—was less comical. Irretrievably diminished by America, the severe, confident civil-law pleader now operated a small insurance business for a clientele of immigrant friends; his once-languid wife answered the telephone and pored over claim forms in the downstairs office. Love and pride (who else had a son like Ben, if only he would be reasonable?), confusion about the road that brilliant son had taken, and dread of the road ahead of them—thin days dragging on in that decaying place until some final bad end—no, these were not themes Ben cared to have developed for the general public. A friend such as I sufficed.

  The mother had the good luck to die first. In the two years of his ultimate loneliness, the father’s principal distraction was Ben’s divorce: a chance for the old courtroom fox to guide and restrain his impetuous banker son. One might have thought the whole thing would be simple enough. Rachel and Ben had had no children together, and, what with her own and her first husband’s money, Rachel did not think it really worthwhile to press a man with no capital for alimony. But an unexpected element envenomed the proceedings. It turned out that while Ben was willing to be convinced that Rachel was through with him, in his opinion that fact was an insufficient reason for severing his ties with Sarah and Rebecca. He held that these raven-haired matching adolescents were his daughters in fact, if not in law. Did not Rachel know that he would not, he could not have others? This deficiency had been, after all, at the time when it mattered, one of his prime qualities: explosion upon explosion within her, torrents of effluvia mixing, and no fear of conception! Now he wanted wages for the hours he alone had spent on their care—changing diapers, pulling on snowsuits, sliding down icy hills, pacing past dinosaur displays, reading aloud—greater in number than Rachel’s and all the nurses’, mother’s helpers’, and babysitters’ hours combined. And he had conquered and kept their love; of this he was sure. His lawyer would prove it; justice had to prevail. Ben’s father listened. He heard the twins. He claimed a world record for listening to Rachel. In the end, there was no trial, but there was (as Ben’s Wall Street lawyer put it) a deal: so long as the twins wished, they would spend part of their vacations with Ben, there would be dinners with him, and, if schoolwork allowed, perhaps occasional weekends. In this way Ben came to think that, however high the waves might billow around him, the precious cargo would be saved: Sarah’s and Rebecca’s childhoods, the delicate, miraculous realization of his dreams.

  Like most such arrangements, the deal did not hold for long. Rachel returned to Boston or, more precisely, to the family acres on the North Shore. Sarah became a boarder at Milton, and, over Ben’s tactless and quaint objection that she did not need instruction in breaking farm machinery, Rebecca went far north in Vermont to progressive Putney. Tucked into unoccupied corners of midterm vacation, the dinners took place mostly in the familiar pomp of the Boston Ritz, the twins tasting Chambertin under the indulgent eye of the headwaiter, who was Ben’s friend. That hamburgers could have been eaten somewhere, without the benefit of crystal chandeliers, and shared with classmates clad in jeans did not occur to Ben. To meet Ben the twins wore the kilts and cashmeres he packed from London; in the lobes of their ears (pierced, he would claim, when his back was turned) glowed his peace offering—pink-hued pearls lovingly chosen in Tokyo.

  During the second Christmas vacation, Sarah stood him up without warning: friends were staying with her. She laughed queerly at his telephoned suggestion that she might have brought them. Ben returned to the table and a closed-faced Rebecca. It was too bad her genius sister Sarah hadn’t shown up, she informed him; she knew Ben thought everything about her own friends and Putney was dumb, but it took someone really dumb like her to want to hang around the Ritz; he should know his Wallace Stevens freaked her out. Heading for Beverly Farms on Route 128, driving her back to her mother’s home very slowly, Ben told her a story: In the king’s palace, the carpet of childhood is woven by a blind weaver with silk and wool of many colors from many spools. His fingers have learned the outlines of figures he must give shape to, but not the placement of the colors; his master changes them each year. When the child is grown, the master and the prince or princess who was that child examine the work and the weaver is lashed with whips or praised and released from toil for a while, according to their pleasure. He, Ben, is that weaver. Rebecca remained silent. When Ben turned to look at her, he saw that she was asleep.

  The next summer, like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime, Ben rented a house on an island off Hyères for his month of vacation. There was a terrace crowded by bougainvilleas, a beach below, and a fisherman’s boat with a two-stroke motor that took all of Ben’s strength to start. An Italian woman cooked. Sarah and Rebecca turned the color of copper in the sun. The tops of their bikinis off, bandannas in their hair, toes of arched feet touching, they lay foot to foot on the stone balustrade like rococo Indians.

  Ben’s heart ached with happiness and gratitude. He had not asked any of his friends to stay with them—there were people he knew on Porquerolles he could invite occasionally to dinner; L’Arche de Noé served bouillabaisse and the best profiteroles in the world when they got tired of pasta; Saint-Tropez was but two hours away. Mostly, however, the twins and he would fish à la palangrotte, as before, and dive for sea urchins. They would read the piles of books he had brought; the record player in the staid mahogany cabinet seemed to work, they would listen to music. The telephone also was working. From Antibes, where she was staying at Eden Roc, Rachel called each evening to talk to the twins. She was lonely; the hotel was expensive;
one could water-ski in Antibes; boys from Andover, whose parents she knew, had a catamaran. By the end of the week, Sarah and Rebecca had gone to visit their mother; Ben had arranged to have them driven over. When the same driver went to fetch them, the young ladies were out sailing. A day or so later, Rachel called to say the twins would stay with her: she had already reequipped them with bikinis and beach towels; he could bring the rest of their stuff to New York when he returned and mail it from there; he should be grateful he was on Porquerolles and did not have to pay Antibes prices.

  I knew you could not be trusted, she added, I was right to be next door. How did you dare to fix it so you would be alone there with those beautiful girls, staring at their breasts! This was not the first time that Rachel had accused Ben of deviate conduct or desires. As he reviewed her words, however, first in rage and then coldly, with great care, he came to think that some of Rachel’s inspiration must have come from the twins: it was possible that this was what they thought. In such case, he would henceforth keep his distance. He was truly alone.