On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  Up in the room Mary paused before telephoning. She could perfectly easily spend the day alone, doing what she wanted to do. This would entail some of the things for which New York was more obviously well known: going to the Frick Collection and looking in some of the shops on Madison Avenue behind it; a light lunch overlooking the park and then, one of her particular pleasures, a film in the afternoon, emerging while it was still light for a cocktail at the top of a midtown skyscraper, and the self-indulgence of a room-service dinner alone with her book.

  Did she really want to be taken on another random and exhausting trek through low-rent neighborhoods, plague areas, secondhand bookstores, streets with “interesting” ethnic history, fish and garment markets, pausing infrequently to be presented with a glassful of stupefying iced liquor and a lecture on recent American politics?

  It would be company, at least. She lifted the receiver and dialed. It was arranged that he would stop by the hotel at midday; Mary calculated that this would give them only an hour before lunch, and this time she would have some say over the venue. As a precaution, she invented a call from Charlie which she would expect at five o’clock; in fact, he seldom rang when he was away, but she wanted to have an escape route.

  Frank called up from the front desk at ten to twelve.

  “I’m a little early. I took the subway. I can wait if you like.”

  “No, no. I’m ready.”

  The elevator sank eighteen floors and the uniformed attendant hauled open the rolling accordion doors. Frank was standing by the desk, turning his hat slowly round in his hands. Mary moved swiftly across the lobby.

  “Hi.” Frank took her by the arm and moved her toward the door.

  Mary paused at the curb, expecting him to hail a cab, but he set off on foot, down 45th Street, then right onto Third Avenue.

  “How’s Charlie?” Frank said loudly above the traffic noise, as they waited to cross the street.

  “He’s fine. He’s had to go to Chicago. Where’s the tour taking us today?”

  “I haven’t decided. I like it down here, though. Toward Murray Hill. It’s kind of blank.”

  “You like that?”

  “I like the fact that it’s impersonal. No one troubles you. That’s what cities are for. Frankfurters, cabs, you know. Loud noises. Come on.”

  Frank walked more slowly than the previous day so that they could continue their conversation. He guided her over to Madison, past the J. P. Morgan home, back onto clamorous Lexington with its long blocks of furniture stores, then over again onto Third, where they walked down past the old gin mills. Despite the proximity of many skyscrapers, the city was less overpowering than in the seething boxes farther west; there was a sense of the island sloping downhill to the East River and of the tight grid beginning to shake loose.

  “When I first came to New York I had a room in a railroad flat way uptown on 95th, and I used to take the train down Third every morning.”

  “Is that when you got the habit of looking into people’s windows?”

  “I guess so. They took it down a few years ago. I never imagined how pretty Third Avenue would be beneath the tracks.”

  “Pretty?” It seemed to Mary a strange word for the blur of commerce, the undistinguished tenements, where a police siren had begun to shriek in front of a clothing store.

  At lunchtime they took a cab back uptown to a chophouse on Lexington of which Frank spoke warmly. Most of the clients seemed to be businessmen in suits, sitting at a long mahogany bar or gathered at tables with blue checked cloths, speaking with low urgency over their powerful drinks.

  “So what’s Charlie doing in Chicago?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve learned not to ask over the years.”

  “Why? Is it confidential?”

  “No, not really. Charlie’s job really is to follow the election. We’d been in London for a bit and we were expecting to go to Paris. Charlie was Assistant Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary at a very young age. They made him a counselor when he was only thirty-six.”

  “So he’s what they call a high flyer?”

  “It’s an awful expression, but I suppose that’s it. With the election coming up the Embassy political staff in Washington needed someone extra, and Charlie’d done a doctorate on American politics, so he was asked to come for a couple of years. He’d met Senator Kennedy when his father was Ambassador in London and it was thought he had some kind of special line to him.”

  “And does he?” said Frank.

  “I think so. He claims he remembers nothing about their meeting at all. He says he was drunk at the time. In fact he does have some kind of access. I don’t quite know how it works, but I’ve seen the results. It’s all a bit of a gamble, because at the moment it doesn’t look as though Kennedy’ll even get the nomination. But Charlie does other things as well. When someone’s on leave or off sick, he’ll cover for them, then you have to take over their speciality, which might be the Soviet Union or Indochina or something. And he’s supposed to liaise with the American press as well. They all are, to some extent.”

  “So why don’t you ask what he’s doing?”

  “Because he gets so cross with me.” Mary pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bag and offered one to Frank. “Charlie’s not a very happy man. He doesn’t like the work. Or maybe he doesn’t mind the work, he just doesn’t like being alive. It’s a kind of illness.” She paused. “I shouldn’t tell you these things.”

  “We’re still off the record, aren’t we? Does he see a doctor?”

  “Yes, two, but it doesn’t do any good. One of them gives him pills and the other one, the analyst, just makes him talk. He’s fuming when he comes back. The man never says anything, apparently, just sits there with his arms folded and hands him the bill at the end.”

  “And what do you think the problem is?”

  Mary sighed. “I don’t know. I doubt whether there’s a single thing you could just identify and cure. I think the world has disappointed him, that’s one thing. He can’t bear to be bored. He’s impatient. He drinks so much to try to drown out his need for stimulation, to stifle the clamoring in his brain. I think. I also think he feels the futility of everything more than most people. I mean, I know it’s all pointless, that I’ll just go on for a few years, then die—but I like it. I’m happy. This drink, this bar, my conversation with you. The thought of my children. I can’t help it, I just feel uplifted by them. But I know that that’s dishonest in some way, that I ought to take more account of the tragedy of existence, or whatever you might call it. Occasionally I feel frightened that in some way I’ll get found out. That something will come along and I won’t be ready for it. Or that when I die, God will say, ‘Well, you had a good time, didn’t you? Too busy to stop and think, were you?’ Charlie’s got it right, probably, but it makes him so unhappy.”

  She was looking into Frank’s eyes, which met hers without blinking. “He’s a nice guy, Charlie.”

  “Oh yes. He’s certainly that. He’s a wonderful man.” Mary smiled. She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Would you like to see a photograph of my children?”

  “Sure.”

  The waiter arrived to tell them about the specials, and Frank questioned him about their provenance and whether he personally would recommend them; Mary had noticed that he thought it a point of politeness always to engage the waiter in this way. She rummaged in her purse and came up with a folding leather wallet which she handed across the table.

  Frank made admiring noises. “Tell me about them,” he said.

  Mary had the broiled snapper and a green salad, Frank had the chops with gravy and mashed potatoes. At her request he ordered her some white wine to go with her fish, after which she had a slice of key lime pie and a cup of black coffee. All the time, she spoke of the passion she felt for the children, and it warmed her even to mention their names.

  As she replaced her cup in the saucer, she said, “I’m sorry. I seem to have gone on rather. It’s your fault. You sho
uldn’t have asked me.”

  Frank handed back the photographs. “It’s my fault. But they sound like fine kids.”

  “They are. But don’t get me started again. Tell me something about you.”

  Frank pulled out a cigarette. “You ever been to Indochina?”

  “No. But Charlie has. When we were in Japan.”

  “I know. That’s where I met him. He didn’t seem to remember.”

  Mary laughed. “He was probably drunk. He certainly was at the party.”

  Frank smiled. “Me too. Should’ve switched to highballs earlier on.”

  “Anyway. Tell me something about yourself. I’m embarrassed to have gone on so much about Richard and Louisa. It’s a thing you should never do—bore people about how sweet your children are. Charlie goes mad when people do it to us.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell you something.” Frank sat back and lit his cigarette from a book of matches on the table. His face was for a moment shadowed and illuminated against the dark wood paneling behind him. “I have this plan. One day I’m going to build a house. Maybe in the Adirondacks, or the Catskills. It would have to be somewhere mountainous, with woods and a river nearby. But it would also have to be near a town with bars, bookstores, that kind of thing. I’d find an architect and we’d make the plans together. It would be large, but it wouldn’t be pretentious, not like a Hollywood mansion. It would be in a simple kind of style—pitched roof, clapboard, pretty traditional, I guess. But inside, there’d be three staircases, a lot of different passageways and corridors so that strangers could easily get lost.”

  “It’s important that your visitors get confused?”

  “That’s pretty central to the plan. It would have a lot of big storerooms for fuel and liquor and household things so they could be kept right out of the picture. And there’d be a hall in the middle with a gallery running around above it.”

  “And bedrooms?”

  “Sure, we’d have bedrooms, with long views down the Hudson valley. And the bathrooms would have stone floors and plain walls. No tiles like you have in New York with roaches in the grout.”

  “And who would live there?”

  “Me. A few other people maybe.”

  “And what would you do there?”

  “Fish in the river. Shoot deer. Play pool in the poolroom.”

  “But you’d be bored. You like the city and newspapers. You haven’t even got any country clothes.”

  “Don’t you think you could live somewhere like that without driving a pickup and wearing a fur-trimmed hat?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it seems to be impossible.”

  Frank laughed.

  She said, “Do you know, that’s the first time I’ve seen you laugh.”

  “Is it?” Frank ground out his cigarette. “That’s curious, because since we met at noon I don’t think you’ve stopped.”

  “Haven’t I?” Mary found her cheeks burning. “You haven’t said anything funny, have you?”

  “Not intentionally.”

  Mary regathered her composure. She said, “I think maybe you’ve just got a ridiculous face.”

  When they went outside, a cab sounded its horn loudly next to the curb; Mary looked up and down the avenue and saw that although the light had begun to fade, the frenzy of the street had not diminished. She had the feeling of how inessential she was to the life of the city; and, with her mother dying, her children and husband absent, how insubstantial was her existence.

  Back at the hotel there was a message from Charlie to say that he would have to spend another night in Chicago and would not now be back until midday on Friday. He left a telephone number, which Mary called as soon as she reached the room: the invented excuse for her early return to the hotel had in fact materialized.

  He was not drunk, but he was unhappy. Over the years, Mary had grown used to the sound of his voice, lonely and uncertain, trembling, sometimes breaking on the long-distance wires. She found it compellingly strange that someone so confident was capable of so completely unraveling.

  She wondered what he did when he was away. He liked to disappear, to leave no trace, yet she knew that his need for human company was such that he would not be alone in whatever city he was staying. He would find a bar and inveigle himself into some sort of friendly exchange; even a conversation that bored him would be better than the terrible emptiness of his own company. The problem seemed to be that without other people there he was unable to shut out the clamor of the world’s atomic pointlessness; it overwhelmed him.

  She reassured him on the telephone as best she could, spoke to him of their children, told him about her day and said it would not be long before he saw her again. He was pacified when he eventually rang off. Mary loved him more for his bewildering weakness than for any of his explicable strengths and felt invigorated when she could be helpful to him.

  Frank had said he would call the next day and, with the evening free, she had a cocktail in the hotel bar. As she sipped the drink, she read a magazine article about the Democratic primary in Wisconsin, where Muriel Humphrey’s black bean soup had not been enough to sway the voters to get behind her man. There was a photograph of Hubert Humphrey standing by a chrome-covered Greyhound bus and one of the improbably young Mrs. Kennedy looking startled and lovely in a sleeveless dress with a heavy bead necklace. Senator Kennedy had pitched camp on the third floor of the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, the article said, and she remembered Frank telling her about McCarthy’s bar bill at the same hotel. The next contest, in West Virginia, would decide the nomination: if an overwhelmingly Protestant state could elect Kennedy as its candidate, the problem of his being a Catholic was buried and he could win.

  Mary began to feel excited by the idea, not so much of a Catholic or a Democrat being president, but by the process itself; she could understand how passionately Frank must long to be part of it, to see firsthand what was happening.

  Reluctantly she retired from the bar and went back to the room. At about nine she asked for a Caesar salad and a bottle of beer to be sent up, watched the Arthur Murray Dance Party and Alcoa Presents on television, then read her book until she was tired. She opened the window for a moment onto the howl and thud of Lexington, then decided to forgo fresh air and switch the air conditioner to a cooler setting instead. In the clean sheets, she fell almost at once into a bottomless, but not dreamless, sleep.

  Meanwhile, down in the Village, on the top floor of his apartment building, Frank lay back on the bed and lit a cigarette. The door through to the sitting room was open to allow him to hear the Lester Young record that was playing there.

  He was finding sleep elusive, as he often did.

  Chapter 5

  One of the things that kept Frank awake at night was thinking about the men he had killed. The speeches and the broadcasts that encouraged volunteers at the start of 1942 appealed to ideas of freedom and tyranny, to homeland and to the right to live in peace. They did talk of courage and the idea of “sacrifice,” so that those who enlisted were aware that they might not return; what they did not mention was that the purpose of being a soldier was to kill other soldiers, and that, for most men, each killing would have an individual flavor.

  You were encouraged to forget because to mention it, even to think about it, was in bad taste. But it was there, and that was what it meant to be born an American male in his generation; these were the big facts, the capes and straits of the world in which you navigated.

  And in the last ten years, the other given, the other unavoidable in his life, had been the maneuverings of the men in trench coats, agents of “security” who had made his profession almost impossible to work in with freedom of thought, or at least with lightness of heart. Frank had no more wish to deal with them, to find an accommodation with them, than he had had with the Emperor of Japan. Some of what they did was necessary; much of it was not; but it really mattered very little what he thought, because like the Depression or the war, they were bigger than individuals, an
d all he could do was play straight. He had himself belonged to no party and incurred no debts to the agents of the law; he had never played their game. The closest he had come to political action was to go with his brother Louis one night in Chicago, at the age of sixteen, to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League in a basement on California Avenue, because Louis had promised him they would meet hot girls in low heels and leather jackets.

  Frank climbed off the bed and walked through to the sitting room to turn the record over; it was the drowsy “Peg o’ My Heart,” so he rotated the volume knob a few degrees. On his way back, he went to the window and lifted the lid on the noisy air conditioner; he switched the dial to zero and hauled up the window. Night was so quiet in the Village, especially on a top floor, that he could hear a distant fight between two people shouting in Spanish and a crash of garbage cans, presumably from the restaurant on the corner of Grove Street.

  He liked the sounds of the city at night, though he preferred a more solid rumble of traffic; nothing helped his wakefulness better than the sleepy kiss of car tires on an uptown avenue after rain. He could gaze around the walls, the limits of a life he had made, let in the night or close it out, entirely as he chose, by listening to the street or to the music in the apartment.

  When he went out from his newspaper office at lunchtime to get coffee and a sandwich, he looked at men of his own age and wondered whether they too had killed others. The counterman at Schrafft’s had a deft way with a knife when he made up the egg salad sandwich, but it didn’t worry Frank. The fellow had probably been in the catering corps, or perhaps still living in Poland, or Latvia, in which case he might even have fought for the Nazis. What made Frank pause were the men in the suits and striped ties who rode the express elevators with their eyes locked onto the front pages of the Times and The Wall Street Journal When he stood in the car with them he believed he could sense where they had been: Guadalcanal, Naples, Iwo Jima, Normandy. Their Yardley aftershave and Brooks Brothers clothing meant nothing to him; he looked at their hands, their haughty eyes, their fingernails: part the fronts of their drip-dry shirts and you could expect to see a patch of chest hair worn away by the dangling twin dog tags. Most of them had never knowingly killed a soul; some had been officers in a staff headquarters miles from the front; even the GIs just let off a few rounds, threw a grenade or two, but no one stood around to watch out for the results. But occasionally Frank thought he could sense a fellow killer who was now going calmly about his business, on the subway, strolling over Rockefeller Plaza, trotting down the steps to the bars of Grand Central for a drink before the evening train to Stamford or Yonkers, back to the embrace of his wife and child, a cookout with the neighbors, ruffling his child’s hair with the hands responsible for the unconfessed slaying.