Leila drove Spurgeon to Dr. Ferrell’s office. Suzanne Steinitz was sympathetic enough to attend Hedda Gabler’s wake with me in the Red Lagoon Bar. But it was so crowded that I was eventually squeezed into the narrow tip of a conch shell by others rudely joining us. Pinned, I was subjected to the hollow mirth of Joely Finn and his following among the apprentices—Ronny, Pete, Jennifer.
“They jest in bars that never smelt a wound,” I told them. Suzanne patted my arm.
As yet I wasn’t prepared to laugh at the way somebody had turned the wine of my set designing into the brackish water of defeat.
“We sure smelt that bomb next door,” Joely unfeelingly persisted. “Oh, boy. If you’re gonna build Rome in a day, you know. Oh, boy, why didn’t I have a camera? What a decline and fall was there! Oh, boy!” and so on.
His jocular hoard japed with him until, during a brief lull in the laughter, Sabby came by and asked me if I had picked up my mail. Usually the mail delivery figured with eager preeminence in my morning schedule. In fact, I was so often on hand for its arrival that the postman and I had developed a chatty familiarity with each other, and were accustomed to exchange weather predictions the way people do who have no basis for relationship except encounter. This postman had an apocalyptic hunger, which was continually frustrated by the mild climate of Floren Park. For as he only worked summers, he never had an opportunity to complete his rounds through rain, sleet, snow, nor dark of night, and felt misled by the job’s promise of such adventure.
But my infatuation with the postal service—which is really a passion for possibility—had been superseded on that particular day by the building of a temple for Hedda Gabler. Now that Spurgeon, himself the vociferous jawbone of an ass, had brought the house down around everyone’s head in his fury against the Philistines, I could turn my attention back to the possible arrival of messengers with news of home. For though I was certain that Jardin had no intention of writing to me, I insisted every day on confirming my chagrined hypothesis at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, I had unilaterally written to her once since coming to Colorado, just to assure her that her actions had been forgiven and forgotten.
So, extricating myself from our conch shell, I walked next door to the theater. Late-leavers were still standing about, still laughing. In the box office mail basket, three letters and a package lay waiting for me, imperturbable and composed. Nothing from Jardin, but still the best day I had had all month. The package contained four pairs of socks and a dozen very dry brownies from Mama, who never got the aluminum foil around anything properly. She had also written a long letter.
Her letters had always been long, but up in Cambridge, I had enjoyed getting them, even the ones without checks, because they were like reading books, not at all like the letters the other guys got from their parents, and that made me proud of her. Jane Austen, I would boast, could have written those letters. Typically, the news came in the first few pages; the next ten or so were observations and speculations. In this one I learned that baby Harnley was walking again (flatfooted); that Detroit might take the pennant, but not the series; that Colum had met a nurse in physical therapy who had come over for dinner and was very pleasant, despite holding rather vigorously to a “postural” view of salvation: the slumped would be damned; that having just reread Jude the Obscure, she thought it should be more so; that she herself was feeling intermezzo; that in regard to the awful grief of Robert Kennedy’s death, America took a smug satisfaction in the way its great symbols graciously fulfilled their myths by dying off in sudden, Greek-like fashion so that they could be indulgently mourned over rather than dealt with or tired of; that Fitzgerald, who had been visiting friends in Laramie since his convention, would be arriving in Floren Park on June 25th (at Leila’s invitation) and that I was to keep an eye on him to prevent him from selling uranium stock to the tourists or getting elected to some city office that would prevent his getting back to Earlsford by early August; that with regard to the pain of loss that I was feeling about Jardin…and here followed five pages of hypotheses on the attainment of personal peace.
Next I opened a letter from Verl, wishing I had him there to talk to instead. He wrote, in part: “I know you’re upset about this thing with Jardin. Nobody’s denying how you feel. It’s just that (mind if I preach?) I think there’s probably an awful lot of complicated and very ambivalent emotional motives going on in all of us, and sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to parts of it. Are too lazy. I wish there were something I could do to make you feel better. Meanwhile, be glad at least to offer an ear. Be back over in a couple of days. Take it easy, okay? And you know, there’s no good reason why you can’t come down to Boulder one of these days. Catch a breath of serenity.”
This letter was a comfort. Also a surprise, as it had since slipped my mind that in a moment of depression the previous week, I had written him a rather gloomy appraisal of my misunderstood emotional state. But now, what with the play and everything, I was depressed again, so Verl’s response was a timely succour. I thought for a minute about why I didn’t want to go to Boulder, didn’t want to leave Floren Park; it wasn’t just that there was enough new in it to last me a while; it was like a ritual. I had this almost mystic feeling that by staying, something was going to be figured out.
Verl and Mama had cheered me up enough so I could open the other letter. It was a brief note from my older brother and had his name engraved across the top of the page all in little blue letters: “james dexter donahue,” with an address under it so that anybody who cared to could get right back in touch with him.
I looked it over; the message was typed, and it was signed in black ink with a bunch of thin loops and gyres. In the first paragraph, he advised me to grow up. In the second, he suggested that I was inconsiderate and selfish. In the third, he mentioned that if I wrote to Jardin again, the letter would be returned to me unopened. In the last, he assured me that the above three paragraphs should not be taken harshly, but in the spirit in which they were intended, with everyone’s best interests at heart.
I decided to keep J.D.’s memo; it would be handy to have around as documentation of his character if Jardin ever came to her senses.
Feeling better, I went back to the Red Lagoon Bar. It was still crowded inside. A large-boned woman with copper hair loosely twisted up on top of her head was ringing the cash register behind the bar. Joely told me that she was the manager’s wife, Lady Red. So she had come back to claim her estate, as Mittie and I had been gloomily warned. There were rumors she was going to change the place, maybe put in a dance floor; she liked things lively. Suzanne was gone; I sat down and watched the manager watch his wife. Menelade was right about his weakness; he looked moist with a sort of doting pleasure he seemed to take just in her simple physical reality. I watched him keep staring at her as though she might stop being, like one of Bishop Berkeley’s trees, if he ever took his eyes off her. Then he walked past her from behind and floated his hand across her rear as he went by. She tucked in her buttocks by tightening the muscles and went on punching more buttons on the register. I recalled seeing Mittie try to touch Leila in that unacknowledging, and unacknowledged, way.
Joely was talking about the problems of being his father’s only son; there were five girls in his family. And suddenly, Nathan Wolfstein sat up from the corner of the booth. He had been so slumped into his seat that I hadn’t noticed him there before then. It looked as though he might have drunk quite a bit of bourbon, but because of his shakes, only about half of each of his drinks got to his mouth, so you really couldn’t judge his condition from the number of accumulated glasses.
“I have a son too,” Wolfstein said. “I never met him. He doesn’t know who I am.”
We were surprised when Wolfstein said he would tell us the story. Twenty-seven years ago, he had had an affair with a Hollywood script girl. Though she became pregnant, she had declined to marry him. He was Jewish and she was Catholic, or maybe she simply didn’t like him. His son was now Calhoun Grange, the cowboy star. Five years ago, this information had been given to him by Calhoun’s mother (whom he had traced down), but she had told him only under pressure and with his promise that he would never make himself known to the boy. He didn’t explain to us why he had agreed to this promise.
“I’m glad I know, though. Otherwise I wouldn’t know if he were dead or alive. A child dead or living.” He shook a drink over his suit and to his lips and was finished.
I wasn’t sure whether I believed him or not. There had been a picture of Calhoun Grange in a magazine in the bathroom at the house. In the article he said that if his draft number had been chosen, he would have been proud to go to Vietnam; maybe that put the name in Wolfstein’s head. Maybe it was true, maybe reading that would make a father want to talk to someone about his son. I supposed my knowledge of what fathers might do had always been rather limited.
Wolfstein knocked a drink over, and Joely asked him if he didn’t want us to drive him home. He dropped his cigarette on the table, and I stuck it back between his fingers. After staring at each of us in turn, as if he were deciding whether or not to trust us, he finally nodded yes. We slid him out of the booth, walked him to the door, and he pointed us in the direction of his battered sports car.
Back at the house, we found Sabby Norah at her baby-sitting post again, finishing up the book she had started on Hedda Gabler’s garden bench.
“Where’re Leila and Mittie?” I asked her.
“Oh, didn’t they tell you? They went to Denver. Leila’s mother’s come to visit.”
“Leila’s mother?”
“Leila’ mother. I think it was unexpected.” She went back to her book.
“Now, that ought to be something,” Joely smiled.
“More than you know,” I said. “We don’t like each other.” Leila’s mother. Amanda Sluford Beaumont Thurston. I told him the story.
Then we went downstairs to our room and talked of America until we fell asleep.