Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

  “He was your decent sort of WASP—no sting.”

  An architect should never be entrusted with words. A shallow conceit like that one was bad enough in itself, but beyond that it was a knowing falsehood. Moose was all sting. Winston Fief knew him. It had never occurred to me before to wonder whether Win was Jewish. I felt in the line a hint of that reciprocal face of anti-Semitism, the Jew’s despising of the goy. That hostility, though, is usually relieved by, discharged through, wit, and Win’s line was not only unwitty, it was witless. But it did have a lot of veiled malice in it, condescension, and even hatred. All from Moose’s “friend.” This was really why I had tried to argue Margot out of the affair at Thurston’s, and why I had refused to speak myself. A stylish funeral service of that sort can’t help giving license to subtle encodings of anger, and some not so subtle, and I knew that Moose alive had planted a great deal of that feeling, which dead he would harvest. Anyone as big as he was, literally and figuratively, comes in for his share of envy, resentment, sexual jealousy, and, above all, skepticism—especially where there has been a larger-than-life sense of honor in the makeup. Those negatives were richly embedded in the praise of the so-called tributes. All you had to do was listen with care.

  It was worse outside on the bright sidewalk afterward. People lingered. It was a dazzling May noontime, and the scene sparkled like a bottle of mixed hard candies in a sunny window. The maple trees on the cross street, which would be so drab in full leaf in a few weeks, were dressed now in their new lime leaves, shuffling wafer-thin slices of light in the gentle breeze. The gold-on-black lettering of the Thurston’s legend running around above the first floor of the building was circumspectly consoling. Dark-suited attendants with pale averted faces, seeming to share some monstrous secret about the deceased, were carrying armfuls of gladioluses of all colors out the side entrance and were banking them in a sunlight-pricked black Cadillac pickup parked in front of the so far empty hearse. The jerky movements of the women in their soft-colored clothes—who wants to look dreary at a funeral?—and their turning, searching glances suggested an irritable restlessness in the letdown of knowing that Moose’s enormous sensuality, of which they had all been aware, even from great distances, was quelled now. I saw Cynthia Bigwood’s gaze land like a perching bird on Fay Callender’s pale green cashmere outfit, which must have been a Donna Karan. Fay Callender stared at the halter—Givenchy?—that made the most of Barclay Delavanty’s creamy neck. Round and round the eyes kept flying, as if looking for a promise that time would break its rules now and stand still.

  People were embarrassed to see me. I was in my rage. My wife Deborah was dead and buried. My best friend Moose was dead but not buried. I had to hang around, waiting for the motorcade that would carry him out to the country, to the shady plot Margot and I had chosen in Weston. When these people saw me looming, they would break off whatever they were chatting about and say, “Beautiful service,” or, “Wasn’t Win good?” or, “Dear Hugh, what a charmer old Moosey was.”

  The ride out to Weston seemed to me to take a month. The three wives rode in the first car, behind the pickup banked with glads. Did those three talk about Moose all the way? What might they have been saying to each other? I was stuck in the second limo, on a jump seat, of course. With me were Grischa Wallenstein, his pale girl Wanda Somethingski, Phil Sieveringhaus, and Phil’s wife, the actress Pamela Brighton. When we got in, the great poet shoved his way into the back seat between the two women, and poor Grischa got the other jump seat, while behind him the poet applied his usual feelies to pale Wanda, who kept exclaiming in an East European accent. We went by way of the Merritt. The many dogwoods were stretching out their pretty paper hands to the sun. Sieveringhaus kept asking the limo driver to pull out of line and go someplace to a bar, but the man pretended not to hear.

  The graveside ceremony included some fine old language from The Book of Common Prayer of the sort Moose liked, and then they put him down, and we heard the thud of the first shovelful of dirt. Afterward there was a kind of cocktail party at Margot and Moose’s house—not a word about Moose that I could hear. I was driven back to town alone in one of the limousines.

  And yes, the next morning I found the Times had had Emily Friller, the social reporter with the heavy ironic touch, cover the service, and she handled it—quite correctly—as a sign of the astonishing change in the culture since the early fifties.

  I called Margot. “I hope you’re satisfied,” I said.

  “It was beautiful,” she said. “Artur came. Did you see that Lenny was there? I was so happy.”

  “Happy? That was a funeral. Remember? Moose died?”

  “I was happy for him.”

  I half expected Margot to say that I had a few things to learn, that a memorial service isn’t to remember the dead, it’s to be glad that that person died and not you.

  “I have to have a talk with you,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  Grief first struck me a hard blow in the chest when I walked into the Weston living room the next evening, and Margot was there in her red chair but Moose was not standing in front of the fireplace with one hand up on the mantel near his Old Grand-Dad on the rocks, his weight on one hip-sprung leg, his broad, mobile face working itself around an anecdote neither of us had heard before. In the grip of this vivid notness, I think I saw him in memory as clearly as I ever had in the flesh.

  First, the head. It bobbed and tucked with emphases, was lifted for an expectant pause. It was one of the great heads of all time. During the period when Moose was a frequent tenant of the gossip columns, his head was compared with those of John L. Lewis, Judge Learned Hand, Arturo Toscanini, Pablo Picasso, Wendell Willkie. When we think of such men, we speak of the lion, which, besides his huge mane, has a prodigious sack of stones between his hind legs, and indeed there was an open maleness and a hint of profligate raunchiness about all those men. There certainly was about Moose. There is no sensualist like a massive Puritan.

  He moved like a big cat. I remember the first time I saw him running down under a pass on Baker Field at Hotchkiss. I was in the bleachers, exiled from sports by a heart murmur. (My flawed ticker out-ticked his.) In those days football players wore pliable leather helmets snug on the skull, and because of his enormous shoulder pads even his great head seemed proportionately small. He ran, made a head fake and a cut, looked back, and took the ball softly in his huge hands. Once I asked him if he had a sense of dancing as he went downfield for a pass, and he said, “No. It’s all in the eyes. You have to narrow your field of vision. It’s like looking through a tube. Rufus throws: all I can see is the ball coming into the other end of the tube. I just put my hands around the near end of the tube, and the ball comes into them.”

  All in the eyes. The shaggy brows—like a wingspread—remained black as his hair grayed. Under them the brown-irised eyes were disconcerting. When they narrowed their focus, they projected, through his “tube,” a laserlike beam that could set fire to things; at other times, the look in them went fuzzy, as if the pupils were dissolving, and then the eyes seemed scooped out and blackly hollow, and in the hollow place there was a chill like that in an ancient cistern.

  How could a Puritan have such thick lips? Deep parenthetical lines ran down from the flanges of his nose to the sides of his mouth—they always had, even when he was a boy—so his wide and otherwise cheerful face always looked haunted.

  His great hands flopped around like flags. They were broad, spatulate, and remarkably dry, as dry as papyrus. His right hand, as you gripped it in greeting, was a shock: limp, dead-fishy, veddy British. Many people, having once shaken hands with him, thought Moose Bradford cold and snooty, a New England snob to the fingertips. What they couldn’t know, because he never talked about it, was that three of the flexor muscles on the inside of his right forearm were snipped off clean by a ricocheting hunk of the Zero that kamikazied on the signal bridge of the Horn
et the day she was sunk—on that mysterious day that cast a shadow over all the rest of his life.

  So there he was, or rather wasn’t, in front of the fireplace, just as powerful in absence as he had been in the flesh.

  “What did you want to talk about, old Hugh?”

  Moose had called me “old Hugh” ever since prep school, and I did not at all like Margot’s appropriating that phrase. I said, “I want to write a piece about Moose.”

  Margot looked as if I’d insulted her; perhaps she thought I’d come—or should have come—to offer condolences, to comfort her in her bereavement, and it was not nice to talk about what I wanted to do.

  “How can you write an article about such a close friend? No one will believe you.”

  “I know, but I’d like to try.”

  “My Lord, Hughie, have you come to interview me?”

  “I want to try to understand some things,” I said.

  “But, Hugh,” she said, not one to waste any time putting on the old brass knuckles, “you wouldn’t be able to be fair to him after the way he fooled around with Deborah. Remember? That time? Forget it, Hughie. Requiescat in pace.”

  * * *

  —

  Moose lived two lives. He aspired to sainthood and became a sybarite. “I married him,” Margot said later that evening, “because he was so decent. He was the first really good man I ever met—the crowd we grew up with, God. Did you ever know any other lawyer who had the kind of integrity he had? Lawyers are trained to take either side, but you knew damn well, Hughie, with every case there was a side Moose wouldn’t take no matter how much moola you offered him. But by the time I got him, you know, I found out—too late—the treads were worn off his tires. He’d had it. I don’t mean he wasn’t sexy, he was all too—but the edge was off the other business, his moral influence, whatever you want to call it. Hazel had the best of him. She had his best years. We talked about that in the limo on the way out to the graveyard. She got him when he came back from the war; he was so gutsy in those years. Poor Maria got him after he came out of prison; she found out that he cheated on her once, one time, and you know what happened to her. Then Carol—she was a little too good at cheating herself, huh? Then poor me, what?”

  “Poor you,” I said. “You kept your hooks in him longer than any of the rest of them.”

  “I was the only one who knew what he was made of.”

  “But you two fought all the time.”

  “He didn’t know what he wanted, so he got mad with me when I agreed with him.”

  I went home that night in a fury at Margot. That was a very strange line of hers: “He didn’t know what he wanted.” I had always believed that he firmly wanted to do the right thing. Except, of course, where desire was concerned—though there, I suppose, he might have thought that the right thing, every time, is to help yourself. This was the side of him Margot had used to get under my skin, saying, “Remember? That time?”—the time when Moose had “fooled around” with my dear, dead Deborah, who, she seemed to be suggesting, was at that very moment frolicking on the Elysian Fields in the altogether with old stud Moosey. But I did not remember. I never knew that Moose had had a fling with Deb—if he had. “That time?” she’d said. I couldn’t ask her, What time? But she must have known I’d spend a lot of effort asking myself that question from then on.

  Before I went to bed that night, I thought of my visit to Moose in the federal pen at Attica, and I remembered he was waiting on the other side of the barrier as I sat down, and I was just trying to take in the unfamiliar bulk of him in a gray prison outfit that was much too tight for him—they must not have had anything his size—when he said, first thing, “How’s that beautiful Deborah?” Was “that time” before that? After?

  I lay awake far into the night trying to chase those questions out of my mind by thinking back to those days, thinking about why Moose had landed in prison in the first place. It was so hard to recapture the crazy hysteria of the first three months of that year. I tried to sort it out. The first thing was the Hiss sentence, must have been January. Then the Klaus Fuchs confession in London. Then McCarthy getting off that first insane speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, “I have here in my hand…” And then the case that mattered, of course, to Moose, since he’d represented three of them: the Supreme Court upholding the convictions of the eleven Communist leaders accused under the Smith Act. And then, as the moves came against Moose, barely noticeable in this more sensational context—the Judith Coplon conviction, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Harry Gold and David Greenglass arrested for selling the Russians atom-bomb secrets, the Amerasia business, and McCarthy back at it with the first charges against Owen Lattimore. The House Un-American Activities Committee picked up on Moose ostensibly because he’d defended three Communists—ignoring the fact that he had always gone on the line for underdogs, no matter what their politics may have been. He got himself in trouble, I’d heard back then, because of his scrupulousness about telling the truth in the hearings he was called in for. He kept saying, “I can’t remember precisely.” Maybe he was afraid of being caught perjuring himself; he certainly didn’t want to go to prison. He refused to take the Fifth because, he said, everyone thought that to do that was to confess guilt, and he knew he wasn’t guilty of a damn thing. All of Moose’s friends believed he’d managed pretty well, but HUAC trumped up a charge of contempt of Congress, and he was sentenced to three months, of which he served one. It wasn’t long as prison terms go, but it made him famous, at least in New York, made him one of the heroes or one of the Commies, depending on where you came from. Even the “friends” who said they admired his guts kept away from him for months after that, just to be on the safe side.

  As I pondered trying to write about all that, I had, more and more, an uneasy feeling that something was missing. His record was spotless. He’d never had anything to do—except as an attorney—with radicals. If you looked closely, he was conservative: a classic New Englander who would be very doubtful about hasty change of any kind and would certainly register to vote as an Independent. Even in those mad-dog days, with McCarthy and HUAC on the rampage, they weren’t going around throwing many straight lawyers like Bradford into prison. I didn’t get to sleep until nearly dawn.

  As soon as I was dressed the next morning, I went downtown and put in an application, under the Freedom of Information Act, for the Bradford file at the FBI.

  * * *

  —

  The things I care about most are hardest for me to do, and in the weeks after that I kept putting off working on the Moose piece. Then one night at a dinner party I was seated beside Hazel, who according to Margot had “had the best years” of Moose. She’s secure in a happy remarriage, these days, to a cheerful, fat, easygoing guy who follows the odd and evidently very profitable occupation of buying and selling diamonds. She was relaxed and generous as she talked about Moose, though I remembered that their divorce—she had brought it—had been messy. And what had made it so unpleasant was that she moved out on him just after he came under fire from HUAC, so that the gossips kept saying she’d found out something nasty about his political past.

  “The lovely thing about Moose,” she said now, “was that he seemed forever to be trying to figure out how to be an honorable person. It’s not so easy, Hughie. He’d charge off in one direction and then another—and then there’d be these little selfishnesses. Self-serving lies. Or anyway inconsistencies. Did you ever play tennis with him?”

  “I have a funny heart.”

  “Of course you do, I’m sorry. It was always ‘Nice shot!’—‘Beauty!’—never a quarrel about in or out. This behavior used to make some people really mad, they said he was so god-a’mighty Christian, so playing fields of Eton. Because, you see, they knew he was out to win. He really and truly wanted to win. He could put a dirty slice on the ball. But then with me, alone, he was never mean or competitive—a million surprises. Prankish,
you know, suddenly at breakfast, ‘God damn it, Hazel, why is this toast buttered on the wrong side?’ ”

  “Was it with you or with Maria that he moved out to the country?”

  “God help us, it was me. Southport, don’t you remember? You and Deborah were there. It was a divine house, but this was the kind of thing, Hugh: there was this meadow in back, it had been let go and was all grown up with underbrush, so there was nothing for it but Moose had to buy a tractor with a cutter bar. Hughie, he scared me; there was a kind of fury about the way he had to keep that meadow cleared with that horrible, dangerous slicing thing. His forebears stuck out all over him. I began to understand stone walls for the first time. The work! And such bleak work. And then, Hugh, he was time-bound. He looked at his watch a thousand times a day, every minute was important. This made for thrills, you know. This big hulk would see a dewy spiderweb on the grass early in the morning, and you had to go out on the lawn in your bare feet and look at it with him at once, before it faded in the sun. But the clock thing also led to a feeling he was wasting time, not enjoying the minutes as much as he should have. And what was so quirky about all that urgency was that it somehow made him procrastinate to beat the band. He had endless lists of things to do and never did them. It drove me batty.”