I know of few places I would rather be on a summer weekend than Connecticut—more precisely, Weston, Connecticut, where my family has lived for at least six generations. Before that, the Barlows were Virginians, and before that—well, like everyone else, I have a family history, and even a family tree, but I’m firmly convinced that if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson observed, then ancestor worship is the last refuge of a snob—and I refuse to indulge in it.
Refuge, however, is not a bad way to describe the Casa Barlow in Weston. It is where I go to recharge my batteries, as well as to touch base. By now I think I’ve made my point: nothing is more satisfying after a week or two in New York City than to get the hell out of town.
I’ve been asked why I don’t live in Connecticut full time and commute to New York; many of my colleagues do it without too much complaint. Certainly my father did it for years—but I have always felt that he who is tired of Manhattan is tired of life, to paraphrase the good Doctor Sam once more. Forgive me if I sound like Bartlett’s Quotations.
I sometimes have Oscar drive me out to the country, but I usually take the Metro North train from Grand Central, that fabulous cathedral for wayfarers. First I pick up a New York Post, to find out what is going on in the underbelly of the city. “Headless Corpse in Topless Bar.” No one will ever top that famous old Post headline. There is a bar car available, and I usually get one for the road. Sometimes I have company, sometimes I travel alone.
This trip I was startled to run into Harry Bunter on the train. There he was, slouched on an aisle seat, one of those seats that have no headrest, looking quite miserable. He was clutching a paper cup filled with what I assumed was Scotch.
“Harry,” I said, “what are you doing here?”
“I suppose I’m taking a fucking train ride,” he replied. “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
“I mean, Harry, what brings you to Connecticut?” I knew that Harry and his wife, Claire, lived on Jane Street, in Greenwich Village.
“I’ve moved to Stamford.”
“Since when?”
“Oh, couple of weeks now.” He began to fidget, shifting back and forth in his seat. He appeared desperate for a cigarette, which of course is a no-no these days on Metro North. Gone, thank God, are the days when certain smoke-filled cars took on the aroma of army latrines, although I admit to being nostalgic for the occasional good panatela.
I looked at him with inquiry written in my features; he had used the singular noun in describing his relocation. What about Claire?
He read my inquiring look and said: “Claire and I have separated.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Harry. Want to talk about it?”
He shrugged. “Not particularly.” He apparently felt that he might have hurt my feelings, because he quickly added: “Well, why not? You’ve been a good friend, Nick.”
I’d known Harry Bunter for more than ten years, even longer than he’d worked for me. In fact, I wooed him away from William Morrow because I had seen him in action at Frankfurt, and knew how good a salesman he was.
“Let’s see if we can find a seat built for two,” I said, and led the way up the aisle, toward the doors at the end of the car, past the customary assortment of homebound travelers, some reading, others sleeping, not a few staring into space with expressions void of any interest in the passing parade. There were bags galore in the overhead racks, bags in the aisle and stacked in front of the doors in the center of the car—all the impedimenta and confusion of a Friday rush hour. Meanwhile, the conductor threaded his way through the hapless standees, uttering his familiar mantra, “Tickets, please. Tickets?”
We finally found an empty double, several cars forward, and just past Mount Vernon. Harry’s cup was pretty well drained by now, and I was somewhat surprised to see him rattle the ice cubes and then pull a couple of miniatures out of his pocket and replenish it.
“Okay, Harry, give.”
The intimate confidences of men who are estranged from their wives are all too familiar these days, are usually couched in threadbare phrases and marred by obvious omissions. Harry’s tale of woe was no exception, but because of auld lang syne, I felt sympathy for him. I understand well enough the pain of a man who still loves a woman who has fallen out of love with him. This was Harry’s plight, compounded by her having fallen in love with someone else.
Harry snorted, raised his cup to his lips, and drained it. “Foxcroft was only the last one,” he said.
“You’re sure?” I found this picture of Claire Bunter hard to credit. I had met her perhaps half a dozen times, no more, but I had always thought of her as a straightforward woman, reserved but not unfriendly, and certainly not promiscuous—not in appearance, at any rate. I have met beautiful women who make their sexual interest in a man known quite frankly, whether anyone is watching them or not. I would have sworn that Claire was a woman who would have been difficult to seduce; moreover, that she would have had to be seduced; that she would never have made the first overtures. Still, I had to assume that Harry knew what he was talking about—or else he was paranoid.
Theirs was a marriage, I knew, of two working people, two dedicated publishing people. I would have suspected that they took their respective manuscripts to bed with them—Claire those she was writing, and Harry those he was reading. Their marriage, like so many of that nature, was childless, but I had always thought it close-knit. Until the rumors started—and now Harry had confirmed them.
“What are you planning to do?” I asked.
“Divorce, I suppose,” Harry grunted. Out came another pair of miniatures.
“Does Claire agree?”
“She’d better,” he said, lowering his voice almost to a whisper. It was though he was talking only to himself now—that I was no longer really there.
And then he said the strangest thing of all: “Claire is capable… of anything.”
Of Parker Foxcroft he said only: “I’m glad the son of a bitch is dead,” which hardly surprised me. After this remark, he lapsed into a silence which lasted until the train reached Stamford, where he rose unsteadily, hoisted his briefcase, and left the train with a murmured goodbye.
Home again, home again, riggety-jiggety, as my father used to say whenever the family Cadillac approached the driveway of our spread on Kellogg Hill Road. Harry Dennehy, my mother’s factotum, met me at the Westport station and drove me home with his customary skill and tact. After a brief and not unfriendly greeting, he kept his own counsel on the way.
When I arrived, it was almost seven o’clock, time only for a dry Rob Roy and a few crackers spread with Roquefort cheese dip, and then dinner. My younger brother, Tim, who has been paralyzed from the waist down since an accident some fifteen years ago, glided into the dining room in his wheelchair. My mother, Gertrude, as usual presided over the feast. There were no guests, which I found a relief, since I didn’t really feel up to company, least of all anyone I didn’t already know. We started off with raw oysters (I’ve never paid much attention to that superstition about months with “r’s” in them), followed by roasted guinea hens with new potatoes and carrots in a light gravy, washed down with a fine, crisp Sancerre. When Mother’s cook had cleared away the empty dishes and platters, I sighed in contentment, dabbed my mouth with my napkin, and prepared to rise. Mother motioned me to stay seated.
“Yes, Mother?” Although I am old enough to be lord of the manor myself, I defer to her, grande dame that she is, as though I were still a schoolboy.
“Nicholas,” she said, rather brusquely, I thought, “I would like us to have a conference.”
“Now?” Visions of a warm brandy snifter danced in my head, and faded away.
“Now.”
The truth is, when Mother, Tim, and I sit down at a table, it’s the same thing as a stockholders’ meeting of Barlow & Company. Mother owns fifty-one percent of the shares, I own thirty-four percent, and Tim fifteen percent. Although I am president and chief executive officer of the firm, as well as chief operating officer, Mother retains the title of chairman, and Tim is vice-president and secretary, and our controller, Mortimer Mandelbaum, is treasurer. We have thought of going public now and then, but either the economic climate has not been right for a stock issue or we have been reluctant to let the outside world in on our deliberations. I would not wish to have some elderly gent from New Jersey or a middle-aged lady from Miami Beach second-guessing my publishing decisions. Not that they are always perfect, not by any means. Still… I like to make my own mistakes and to be accountable for them only to my family.
“We must discuss the matter of the bank line of credit,” Mother announced.
I was prepared for this, and reported on my meeting with the officer of the bank, which Mandelbaum had rescheduled for Friday afternoon, after my lunch at the Century with Kay McIntire and Herbert Poole.
The bank officer, a young man named Clifford Franklin, had been solicitous but firm. Yes, he understood our situation. He was aware that we were publishers of both Warren Dallas, the dean of military-hardware thrillers, and Prudence Henderson Harte (”What is she really like, Mr. Barlow? My wife loves her books”), the American Agatha Christie, as she has often been called. Actually Franklin hardly looked old enough to have a wife. It always disgruntles me to deal with someone in authority who looks younger than I—policemen, for example. However, I smiled and smiled, and nodded and nodded, and hoped for the best, which was that young Franklin would come to our rescue. For the sake of American literature, of course.
“I must arrange to have a copy of Miss Harte’s next book autographed for your wife, Mr. Franklin,” I said. He beamed at me, while locking his hands behind his head and, figuratively, the door to the bank vault as well.
“Come, come, Nicholas,” said my mother, “get to the point.”
“That’s just it,” I replied. “The point.”
“I don’t understand’.”
“He restored our line of credit—”
“Good,” she said.
“—but we must pay another percentage point in interest.”
“What?”
“And that could of course wipe out our profit for this fiscal year—unless we get lucky.”
Tim, who had said nothing up to now—finance was not his strongest suit, although if he had chosen to be an economist, he could have given Alan Greenspan a run for his money, I’m sure—murmured: “Something will turn up.”
I grinned at him and gave him the high sign. Mother looked, as I’m sure she felt, as though she had eaten something indigestible. “A point,” she said. “Dear me.”
That was Friday evening. Saturday the three of us got on the subject of Parker Foxcroft’s murder.
“Lay it out for us, Nick,” said my brother. “What does it look like at this stage?”
If Tim had not brought it up, I certainly would have, because I was eager to have his opinion on the case.
“Suspects,” I said. “After me, of course, there is—”
My mother was shocked to her roots. “Nicholas! How can you possibly think of yourself as a suspect?”
“I don’t, but the police obviously do.”
“Who else?” said Tim.
“First off, there is Harry Bunter. Also Lester Crispin.” I explained what had happened at the ABA and the scene with Crispin in my office. “Harry looks to be the most likely prospect.”
“Why?” asked my mother.
“I would say because he seemed to have the most resentment against Parker. I’d even go so far as to say he was enraged—fairly off his conk on the subject.”
“Oh yes,” I added, “and there’s also Frederick Drew.”
Tim did a double take. “The poet?”
“Yes. Parker cost him his job. He was both drunk and angry that night. Drunk for sure, but angry most of all.” I described the scene in The Players.
“I don’t see how he could have known that Mr. Foxcroft was in his office,” said Mother.
I reconstructed the events before the murder in my mind. “Suppose,” I said, “that he overheard the concierge tell me that Parker was on the phone. While I went back to the phone booth, he could have lifted up the extension on the bar and listened in on our conversation. When I got back to the bar, he was gone, ostensibly to the men’s room. But suppose he actually left the club and headed for my office…”
“Yeah,” said Tim, “that all makes sense. I think I like the case against Drew right now. Very much.”
“But he’s a poet.” I said. “Not a violent man. And where would he come by a gun?”
“We don’t have all the answers yet,” said Tim. “Which means we go on asking the questions.”
Like old times, I thought. Just like playing Clue.
On Sunday morning, I visited my brother in his room. It was one of his bad days; he was depressed, understandably rather bitter, and obviously in pain. His face was heavily lined and dreadfully pale. I found him lying in bed covered with a light cotton blanket, his head turned to the wall. Under that blanket and under the robe he was wearing lay his legs, withered and useless. “Tim,” I said.
He looked up at me, unsmiling. “Shitty world, isn’t it?” he said.
Once again I realized how fragile both he and his hold on life were, and how tragic the loss of his mobility. “Sometimes.”
“Oftentimes,” he corrected me.
I picked up the book on his end table. The Art of the Mystery Story, a classic anthology edited by Howard Hay-craft. I leafed through it, skipping over essays by G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Wrong, and Willard Huntington Wright (that was an interesting juxtaposition, Wrong and Wright), Dorothy L. Sayers. Tim had stuck his bookmark in the middle of an essay by Edmund Wilson called “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”
“Wilson didn’t care much for the genre, presumably,” I said.
Tim snorted. “ ‘Reading them,’ Wilson said, ‘is like looking for a rusty nail in a crate of straw.’”
“Pretty harsh.”
“Anyway,” said Tim, “we know he never read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, or he would certainly not have picked the title he did for his essay.”
We sat in silence for some time. I decided to let Tim pick a subject. “Nick,” he said after a while, “you haven’t said much about the ABA.”
“There isn’t much to say.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.”
Out of the ordinary? What had I done out of the ordinary? I do not do much sight-seeing at ABAs; there’s not really time for it, but I did make an exception for Washington. There were two places I felt I ought to visit, as pilgrimages, so to speak.
The first was the Lincoln Memorial. Inside that massive Doric temple is what many consider one of the great sculptures of the modern world, Daniel Chester French’s statue of the seated, contemplative Lincoln. One can only stand in silence before it, and marvel—if there are not too many busloads of rambunctious children around; unfortunately this day there were. Much better to visit it at night, when it is floodlit and spectral. “He was a mountain in grandeur of the soul,” wrote Walt Whitman. “He was a sea in deep undervoice of mystic loneliness, he was a star in steadfast purity of purpose and service, and he abides.”
That might be a touch hagiolatrous, but still… I have always admired Abe Lincoln, not least because he wrote one of the best and most succinct book reviews ever published. It was one sentence long. “For those who like this kind of book,” he observed, “this is the kind of book they will like.”
“I went to the Lincoln Memorial,” I said to Tim.
“And?”
“And afterward I walked the short distance northwest to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” At least three of the more than 58,000 names inscribed on those two long black-granite walls were friends of mine—classmates at Princeton.
“What a sad and futile waste of the young that war was!” I said.
“Sad, all right. Futile, sure. Even more futile…” He let out his breath in a sigh that was almost a moan. I could read Tim’s thoughts in his face. Even more futile and sad than to be crippled for life in a stupid accident. The tree Tim fell from while attempting to climb it had long since been cut down, but neither of us would ever forget it. One day Tim walked and ran and swam and rode horseback; the next day he was a paraplegic. He was right; at times it is a shitty world.
Yet, as I reminded Tim, every visitor to Washington ought to see the memorial, I feel, to run their fingers along those walls, to remember and honor those dead. The walls are enough; the statue of the three soldiers and the three women at the entrance plaza, even the flag flying nearby—in my prejudiced opinion—are superfluous. No, the walls are enough.
“Both those memorials commemorate wars,” I said, “for after all, Lincoln was only a wartime president. The tragedy is that he was never given the chance to govern in a time of peace.”
Tim nodded. “How different our history might have been,” he said.
“That son of a bitch John Wilkes Booth. I’ve never forgiven him.”
“Or Lee Harvey Oswald. Or Sirhan Sirhan.”
The solitary killer, I thought. Always striking without warning. Like whoever murdered Parker.
Sunday afternoon was bright and clear, and there was a breeze just soft enough to ruffle the deepening grass in our meadow. I walked out with Bonnie and Zachary, our two Labs, who romped happily through their own green pastures, barking, sniffing the wild timothy, and chasing in vain after the resident birds. Summer in Connecticut is a season of incomparable small pleasures: fresh berries, cool running streams, the shade of towering oak trees, and the occasional glimpse of a deer straying out of the forest to nibble on our bushes and trees.
Yes, I find summer in Connecticut a source of considerable satisfaction. As is spring in Connecticut. And fall. And while we’re at it, there’s a little something to enjoy about winter, too, although I’m not quite sure what it is, if you don’t ski, go ice-skating—or shovel snow.
As usual, I was storing up sensations as one absorbs sounds and odors, fleeting memories that would strengthen me against whatever pressures or obligations the coming week would bring.
To begin with, Parker Foxcroft’s funeral tomorrow.