“Well, Jesus, I went home feeling crippled, feeling like I’d been run over by a truck. I threw myself down on the bed” – here he lay back in the sofa and flung one forearm over his eyes to suggest a total abandonment to grief – “and I cried like a child. I couldn’t stop. I cried for hours, and I kept saying, ‘I’ve lost her. I’ve lost her.’ ”
“Well,” Lucy said, “it doesn’t sound so much as though you’d lost her, Bill; it sounds more as though you’d thrown her away.”
“Well, of course,” he said, his arm still covering his eyes. “Of course. And isn’t that the worst kind of loss? When you don’t even realize the value of something until you’ve thrown it away?”
Bill Brock spent the night in their spare room – “I knew it,” Lucy said later; “I knew he’d end up sleeping here” – and he didn’t leave until after lunch the next day. “Have you ever noticed,” she asked when they were alone again, “how your sympathy for someone’s story – anyone’s story – tends to evaporate when they get to the part about how long and hard they cried?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, at least he’s gone for now,” she said. “But he’ll be back, soon and often; you can count on that. And do you know what the worst part is? The worst part is we’ll probably never see Diana again.”
Michael felt his heart contract. He hadn’t even thought of that, but from the moment Lucy said it he knew it was true.
“You’re always expected to take one side or the other when a couple breaks up,” she went on, “and isn’t it funny how that can seem to work out almost entirely by accident? Because I mean if it had been Diana who called us – and it might just as easily have been – then she’d be our friend, and it wouldn’t’ve been much trouble to sort of drop Bill Brock out of our lives.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it, dear,” Michael said. “Maybe she’ll call us anyway. She might call anytime.”
“No. I think I know her well enough not to expect that.”
“Well, hell, we’ll call her, then.”
“How? We don’t even know where she is. Oh, I suppose we could find out, but even so I don’t think she’d be very happy to hear from us. We’re all stuck with the way things are.”
After a while, when she’d finished with the lunch dishes, she stood sadly drying her hands in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, and I did have such high hopes of being friends with her,” she said, “and with Paul Maitland, too. Didn’t you? They’ve both always seemed to be such good – such good people to know.”
“Mike Davenport?” said a shy, light-textured voice on the phone a few nights later. “Tom Nelson. Listen, my wife and I were wondering if you folks might come over Friday night. Can you come for supper?”
And so it came to seem, for both the Davenports, that they hadn’t lost out forever in their need for good people to know.
Chapter Four
“Place isn’t much, as you’ll see,” Tom Nelson warned them after he’d come hurrying down from his upstairs apartment to let them in at the glass-paned front door. “Hard to keep things nice when you’ve got four kids.” And at the top of the stairs his wife stood smiling in welcome, the girl whose once-stubborn Catholicism might almost have jeopardized her husband’s career.
Her name was Pat. There were remnants in her face of a devout and fearful child of Cincinnati as she bent in the steam to pierce the boiling vegetables, or as she crouched and squinted at the oven door to withdraw and baste the roast, but when she sat laughing with her guests in the small living room, with a drink in her hand, it was clear that the Museum of Modern Art had had its way with her. She held herself very straight but without tension, wearing a fashionably simple dress, and her large, attractive eyes and mouth were able, as if by nature, to look merry and responsible at the same time.
The three younger boys had been put to bed, but the oldest, a pudgy six-year-old named Philip whose round face looked nothing like either of his parents, had been allowed to stay up and peer suspiciously at the visitors. At his mother’s urging he passed around a plate of salted crackers spread with liver paste; then, after depositing the plate on the coffee table, he went back to stand beside his mother’s knee.
“We’d begun to think there wasn’t anybody in Larchmont,” Pat Nelson was saying, “who wasn’t just – you know – who wasn’t just sort of all Larchmont, inside and out.”
And Lucy Davenport assured her, eagerly, that she and Michael had begun to think the same thing.
They didn’t talk of painting or of poetry, as the Davenports had thought they might, but it didn’t take the Davenports long to see how foolish that expectation had been: professionalism could be taken for granted in company like this. Instead they talked almost entirely of trivial things.
They all abhorred the movies, though all admitted to having seen a great many of them, and so they entertained one another with movie jokes. What if June Allyson had been cast as Scarlett O’Hara? What if Dan Dailey had been given the Humphrey Bogart role in Casablanca? Would Bing Crosby or Pat O’Brien be the better choice to star in a movie biography of Albert Schweitzer? Then Michael asked, rhetorically, if anyone would ever know how many hundreds of movies of all kinds – comedy, love, war, crime, or cowboy – had contained the line “Look: I can explain everything.” And that, to his own shy surprise, struck the others as the funniest thing that had yet been said.
Philip was sent to join his brothers in what must have been a crowded, double-decked bedroom, and soon after that the party moved to the kitchen table. It was big enough to serve as a dinner table for four, but just barely, and the kitchen was still too warm from the cooking. On one corner of the floor, beyond the table and away from the stove, Michael saw the flat piece of galvanized tin beside a cardboard box, advertising Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, from which several fresh rolls of shelf-paper protruded. He supposed that the paints, the ink, and the pens and brushes must be kept in the same box.
“Oh, please take off your coat and tie, Michael,” Pat Nelson said, “or you’ll die in here.” Then, a little later in the meal, she gazed at one of the steamed-up windows as if it might open onto bright vistas of the future. “Well, at least we’ll only be here a few more months,” she said. “Has Tom told you we’re moving to the country this summer? For good?”
“But that’s terrible,” Lucy said, with more heartfelt emphasis than seemed warranted. “I mean it’s wonderful for you, but terrible for us. We’ll have hardly gotten to know you before you go away.”
And Pat assured her, kindly, that it wouldn’t be far away: they were only going up into Putnam County. That was the next county north of Westchester, she explained, and it was mostly rural – there was scarcely any suburban element at all. She and Tom had made several trips up there to look around, until they’d found what struck them as the right house on the right piece of land, near the village of Kingsley. The house itself needed work, but the work was being done now; they’d been promised it would be finished and ready in June. “And it’s only a short drive from here – what is it, Tom, a little over an hour or something? – so you see it’ll be easy to keep in touch with all our friends.”
Lucy cut into another slice of cooling roast beef, and Michael could tell from her face that she was hurt by the phrase “all our friends.” Hadn’t the Nelsons made clear that they had no other friends in Larchmont? But then, chewing, she seemed to understand that Pat had meant all their friends in New York – the Museum of Modern Art crowd and the Whitney crowd, all the well-heeled, admiring people who’d taken to buying as many Thomas Nelson pictures as they could afford, as well as the jolly, witty, insiders’ crowd of other young painters who were rapidly becoming successful too.
“Well, it sounds great,” Michael said heartily. Since removing his coat and tie he had unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt and rolled up the sleeves; now, hunched over his wine and speaking in a voice that he knew might strike Lucy as being just a little loud, he was determined to suggest that he too might
soon be a man unburdened of mundane necessity. “Once I can manage to get the damn job off my back,” he said, “we’ll be ready to make a move like that ourselves.” And he winked conspicuously at his wife. “Maybe after the book’s out, babe.”
When dinner was over and they moved back to the living room, Michael discovered a bureau bearing six or eight precise miniatures of British soldiers in the full-dress uniforms of historic regiments – the kind of collector’s items that might have cost a hundred dollars apiece. “Hey, Jesus, Tom,” he said. “Where’d you get these?”
“Oh, I made ‘em,” Nelson said. “It’s easy. You start with an ordinary tin soldier, melt it down a little to change the look of it, build it up here and there with model-airplane glue, and all the rest of it is in the painting.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” One of the soldiers held a tall staff with a partially unfurled Union Jack, and Michael said “How’d you make the flag?”
“Toothpaste tube,” Nelson told him. “Piece of toothpaste tube’ll give you a pretty good flag, if you can get it to wrinkle the right way.”
Michael felt like saying You know what you are, Nelson? You’re too fucking much. Instead, after taking a drink from the heavy glass of bourbon in his hand, he said only that the soldiers were beautiful.
“Well, it’s just something I do for kicks,” Nelson explained, “and besides, the boys like to watch. But I guess I always have been hooked on soldiers. Here, look—” and he pulled open a deep drawer of the cabinet. “These are the combat troops.”
The drawer was packed with hundreds of jumbled tin soldiers from the dime store – riflemen in all firing positions, or hauling off to throw grenades, machine-gunners seated or prone, other men crouched at the tubes of mortars – and it brought an unexpected pang of longing to Michael’s throat. He had once thought he must be the only boy in Morristown, New Jersey, if not in the world, who went on loving tin soldiers after the age of ten, when all other boys gave them up in favor of athletics. He had kept his own hoard of them in a box in the shadows of his closet and would often take them out and play with them during the hours before his parents woke up in the morning, until his father caught him at it once and told him to throw the God damn things away.
“You can have real battles with ‘em, too,” Tom Nelson was saying.
“Real battles?”
“Oh, well, you can’t do the small-arms fire, of course, but you can do the artillery.” And from another drawer came two plastic toy pistols of the kind made to shoot four-inch sticks tipped with rubber suction cups. “Friend of mine back in Yonkers and I used to have battles that’d last all afternoon,” Nelson said. “First we’d get the right terrain – no grass; just dirt with a few little ridges and hills; or if it was supposed to be the First World War we’d dig ourselves a series of trenches on both sides. Then we’d divide up the troops and we’d spend a long time deploying them, trying to figure the best – you know – the best tactical advantages. Oh, and we had a strict rule about the artillery: you couldn’t just blast away at random, or it would’ve been a shambles. You had to get back six feet behind the rear of your own infantry, and you had to keep the heel of your hand on the ground at all times” – and he demonstrated this by dropping to his haunches and setting the butt of one toy pistol firmly onto the carpet.
Across the small room, where the girls were sitting, Pat Nelson rolled her eyes in fond exasperation and said “Oh, God, they’ve started in on the soldiers. Well, never mind; pay no attention.”
“You could control your elevation and your range,” Nelson said, “and you could even change positions – we used to allow each other three changes of position during a battle – but you always had to fire from a fixed point on the ground, like real field artillery.”
Michael was entranced by all this, and by the unashamedly boyish, dead-serious way Nelson was telling it.
“Then afterwards,” Nelson went on, “I mean if it was a good battle, we’d lay down cigarette smoke very low over the whole scene and take photographs. It didn’t always work, but some of those photographs really did look like the real thing. You’d think they were pictures of Verdun, or something.”
“I’ll be damned,” Michael said. “And can you do this indoors, too?”
“Oh, we’d do that sometimes on rainy days, but it’s nowhere near as good; you can’t have hills or trenches or anything.”
“Well, look, Nelson,” Michael said in mock belligerence, and took another drink. “I fully intend to engage you in military combat at our earliest convenience – my backyard, your backyard, or wherever else we can find the best terrain” – he felt he was getting drunk but couldn’t tell if it was on whiskey or friendship, and it pleased him to see that Tom Nelson was smiling agreeably – “but I’ll be at a severe disadvantage unless I can get some experience on maneuvers first: I won’t even know how to use my field artillery piece. So whaddya say we set up a few companies right here. Now. In this room.”
“Naw, the carpet’s no good, Mike,” Nelson said. “You need a wood floor to get ’em to stand right.”
“Well, hell, can’t we roll the carpet back? Just until I get a little artillery practice?”
He was dimly aware of Nelson saying “Naw, look, it’s—” but he had already lunged off to where the carpet bordered the kitchen doorway. He backed beyond it, crouched, and got a grip on the edge of it with both hands – noticing for the first time that it was green, cheap, and badly worn – and he’d just heaved it up from the floor when he heard Nelson call “Naw, I mean wait – it’s tacked down.”
Too late. A hundred carpet tacks flew and danced in shuddering clouds of house dust along three borders of the torn-up rug – all the way across the room to where it remained feebly secure, within a few inches of the coffee table and the girls – and Pat Nelson was instantly on her feet. “What’re you doing?” she cried, and Michael would never forget her face at that moment. She wasn’t angry, at least not yet: she was only shocked beyond belief.
“Well, I—” Michael said, still wretchedly holding his end of the rug at his chin, “I didn’t realize it was fastened, is the thing. I’m terribly sorry if I—”
And Tom Nelson quickly tried to help him out: “We were gonna set up some of the soldiers, dear,” he explained. “It’s okay; we’ll put it all back.”
Pat set both small fists on her hips and she was angry as hell now, red in the face, but she addressed her husband instead of their guest, as if that were more in keeping with the rules of sociability. “It took me four days to drive all those tacks into the floor. Four days.”
“Ma’am,” Michael began, because he had found in the past that calling a girl “ma’am” could sometimes help to ease him out of difficult situations, “I think if you’ll let me borrow a small hammer and some new carpet tacks, I can have this whole disaster repaired in practically no time.”
“Oh, that’s dumb,” she said, and this time she wasn’t speaking to Tom. “If it took me four days, it’d probably take you five. What you can do, though – both of you – is get down and start picking up the damn tacks. Every one of them. I won’t have the boys coming out here in the morning and cutting their feet.”
Only then did Michael risk a look at his own wife – he couldn’t have borne it until now – and her face was partly turned away, but he was fairly sure he had never seen her so embarrassed.
For what seemed more than an hour, on their hands and knees, the two men slowly patrolled all sectors of the floor and the wrinkled rug in search of rusty or bent or broken tacks. They were able to exchange small, shy jokes as they worked, and once or twice the girls joined hesitantly in the laughter, until Michael began to entertain a wistful hope that the evening might still be saved. And with the pouring of what Pat Nelson called “one last drink,” after the job was done, it seemed that her graciousness was mostly restored – though he knew that if it were wholly restored she wouldn’t have said “one last drink.” Mercifully, then, all their talk was of
other things until the time came for the Davenports to say goodnight.
“Ma’am?” Michael inquired at the door. “If you can ever forgive me for the rug, do you think we can still be friends?”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Pat said, and she touched his arm with what felt like kindness. “I’m sorry I got mad.”
But walking home alone with Lucy was another matter.
“Well, of course she ‘forgave’ you,” Lucy said. “What are you, some little boy who feels all goody-good again because his mother’s ‘forgiven’ him? Oh, couldn’t you see how poor they are from the moment we walked into that place? Or at least how poor they’ve always been until the past year or so? And now that he’s begun to earn real money they’re putting every dollar of it into the country place they’ve bought. They’ll be making a whole new life for themselves on the strength of his work, and you can be sure it’ll be a splendid life, too, because they’re just about the most admirable people I’ve ever met. In the meantime they’re stuck here for a little while longer, so they made the awful mistake of having us over tonight. And when I saw you rip up that carpet – I really mean this, Michael – when I saw you rip up that carpet it was like watching a total stranger do some insane, destructive thing. All I could think was: I don’t know this man. I’ve never seen this person before.”
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