CHAPTER 31

Chris was bringing Susan home to meet his parents in Connecticut. On a clear Saturday morning in early October, they drove for two hours, at midday arriving at a large house set in the midst of rolling green acres. His parents were often in Manhattan during the week now, but as a boy, all through his boarding school years, Chris had thought of this house as his real home. It was located outside an old Connecticut town in a neighborhood filled with similar houses, each surrounded by acres of green, tree-shaded lawn from which the dead leaves had been scrupulously raked, it seemed, within the last half hour. The quiet was such that one could not imagine the leaves had been blown away by any of those loud machines.

Susan looked especially pretty, but she felt more calm than she thought she should. On the other hand, Chris did not seem to think that this meeting meant much, and perhaps that was what made her calm. As far as he was concerned, the purpose of the trip was only to satisfy Susan’s curiosity about how he had grown up, among what sort of people. If they decided to move in together in a year or so, at least his parents would know who she was, and it would all be easier. It was just an afternoon in the country, that’s all, which he took as lightly as he took most things.

Chris’s father was older than Susan’s—late sixties, perhaps, slightly sunburned, with receding white hair; and his mother, who had that perfectly natural-looking streaked blond hair that so many rich suburban ladies resort to in middle age, was at least ten years younger. She was thin, wore a silk-tweed sweater over capri pants, and on her fingers had sparkling rings that Susan knew were “good,” as her own mother would have put it. Mrs. Wylie’s eyes were sharp, her smile of greeting ever so faintly sarcastic, and she looked at Susan without speaking. Mr. Wylie, on the other hand, grinned and spoke heartily.

“Chris,” he said loudly and with a rising inflection: Chris?

Chris kissed his mother, who then spoke to him. “Do you think Susan is hungry?”

“Are you hungry?” Chris asked Susan, although she stood between him and his mother.

“A little.”

“Mariposa is making lunch for us,” Mrs. Wylie told Chris, “and it’ll be ready soon. Why don’t you show your friend around?” Her walk, as she left, was graceful in a slightly mannered way.

“Well, Susan,” said Mr. Wylie, “you and Chris met . . .”

“At Yale,” she said with a friendly smile, and noticed that Mr. Wylie was obviously reassured by the Yale connection and indifferent to the friendliness.

“In my day, you couldn’t meet girls at Yale,” he said. He laughed a CEO laugh, Susan thought, to show that the king was relaxed and everyone could stop worrying, and then he disappeared into a room off the high-ceilinged hallway in which they were standing. Susan took it that conversation was not intended to begin until lunch.

Chris’s room was large and opulent and had the same pored-over look as her own parents’ apartment, with a painting and curios that were carefully uncoordinated with the wallpaper, draperies, and carpet. There was a four-poster bed and a breakfast table, with overstuffed chairs at either side, before a window that overlooked the lawn behind the house. It was all pretty in its way but held little trace of the boy Chris might have been—except for a single photo, which Susan studied with great interest, that showed him at about four on a bicycle with training wheels—or of the man he had become, for that matter. Curiously, aside from this absence of the artifacts of childhood in Chris’s room, Mrs. Wylie’s style and taste were not fundamentally different from Susan’s mother’s. Could it be that Chris saw something of his mother in Susan? The thought was not pleasing.

“Where are all your trophies and pennants and stuffed animals and kid books?” Susan asked affectionately. “I get to see all that, don’t I?”

“Packed away somewhere, I guess,” he said. “Mother no doubt thought she’d get me to come home more often if I had a grown-up room to stay in.”

“That’s unusual,” said Susan, betraying her discomfort with the coolness of this house and its inhabitants in spite of herself. She hoped that she would find a way to like his parents before she was forced to give him her opinion.

“Not really,” said Chris.

Maybe he already knows, thought Susan, that I don’t much care for them. “Show me the library and the garden,” she said.

They were standing in the garden, breathing in the scents of earth and vegetation, when a maid called them in, and they found lunch served in the dining room, although, as Mrs. Wylie said, they often had lunch in the breakfast nook because it was cozier. The dining room was, in fact, rather grand for the occasion, but the table was pretty, set with brightly colored Japanese porcelain. Mariposa served.

Over lunch, the Wylies asked what Susan’s father did and showed, with slight nods, that they knew his eminent firm. Susan withheld the further information that would cue them to his importance there and in the city bar, too, put off by what seemed to her condescension and arrogance. Chris, however, added these tidbits to her pleasant but brief responses to their inquiries. They relaxed further, and Mrs. Wylie, finally, spoke to Susan.

“And what do you do? Are you in theater, like Chris?” she asked, holding her sarcasm in abeyance out of respect for Peter Frankl’s prestigious partnership.

“No, I’m in graduate school in musicology, writing my thesis now.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone studying musicology,” said Mrs. Wylie, slipping back into a slightly mocking tone.

“Maybe that’s good. Maybe it means there’s a shortage of musicologists,” Susan said, despite feeling instinctively that jokes would be disruptive of the Wylie household’s domestic culture. If Mrs. Wylie heard Susan, however, she showed no sign, just smiled the same faintly snide smile before, during, and after Susan’s words; Mr. Wylie gave a brief, deflating, executive chuckle. Chris gave Susan a sarcastic, questioning look. He didn’t recognize the rebellion in her joke, she realized; he thought it was just a social mistake—a piece of nerdiness. She felt both foolish and frustrated. The rest of the meal was spent balancing on the brink of dangerous, truth-screaming silences. Chris and his father traded enough small talk about the Yankees to prevent the pauses growing dangerously long. At one point, there was a temporary release of tension when Mrs. Wylie thought to ask Chris if he’d picked up a painting she was having framed in the city. He hadn’t, and this permitted an almost normal interchange of mild accusation and apology.

“They’re not just ordinarily boring, you know,” Susan told Chris later, when the two of them were alone in the library, and she asked him right out how those two people had ever produced him. She was surprisingly aggressive in her dislike.

“You don’t need to tell me that they’re limited,” he said. “Do you think I’m blind? They’re a pair of blank checks.”

“And why doesn’t your father write one to produce your play?”

“No way. He hates what I do.”

“I’ve always wondered about that. You never tell me anything at all about them.”

“Look, Susan,” he said, all at once becoming cheerful, “the easiest answer to your question is that they didn’t produce me. I was a mess growing up, and they just paid the bills for people who would straighten me out. I had nannies and shrinks and teachers and lessons, and my parents just kind of managed the staff. They’re good at delegating. If it wasn’t for all the shrinks and hired help, I would have ended up as nutty as my sister.”

“You never even told me before that you had a nutty sister.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I have no way of understanding you if you don’t tell me the basic facts of your life. Chris, a lot of the time, I get the idea that you wish I’d stop trying to make a love affair out of our relationship, but I don’t know what you’d prefer.” Susan knew that these words might force a breach, but she felt reckless. Chris grew either thoughtful or angry, she could not tell which.

“What a bad idea it was to bring you out here,” he said at last.

“Because you don’t want me to know your family?”

“You’re going to run out on me. Just don’t spout psychobabble at me about it.”

“I’m not—unless you want me to. Not at all.”

“I think you are. Look, this is not the time and place to try to have a serious talk. Wait’ll we’re out of here.”

Susan accepted a moratorium, knowing they would have a long drive back to the city.

The additional hour that they spent in the Wylies’ home seemed like many times that to Susan, and as the time to leave grew near, she felt like a drooping plant that someone had watered. When they actually stood at the door, she watched herself, helplessly, grow lively and overtalkative, in something like an ecstasy of hope and warmth at the prospect of escape. She so sparkled in her good-byes that she actually elicited an answering glimmer in Mr. Wylie’s eye. Mrs. Wylie, once more, did not speak and smiled an almost imperceptibly sarcastic good-bye. When they were in the car, driving off, Chris admitted that it was deadly in his parents’ home, deadly, dull, and empty.

He drove fast through the countryside, and they both enjoyed the sensation of flying away. But Susan again broached the subject of his having never told her anything about his family or his past, and of their never discussing what they could or should mean to each other. Although they talked about these things, with long pauses, for most of the drive home, Chris’s contributions were languid and forced, and they reached no conclusions or insights. He kept reverting to good cheer, which Susan now recognized as a dodge. Without it, he got slow and dull in speech but drove faster than ever.

Traffic was heavy on the Cross Bronx Expressway, and it was dusk when they exited onto the Henry Hudson. As they joined the four-lane phalanx of traffic surging south along the western edge of Manhattan, the cars, close and fast moving, made Susan think of stampeding bison and movies in which Indians ran herds over cliffs to kill them.

“We’re coming up on the place where your mother was in the accident, aren’t we,” said Chris.

His tone of voice, full of good-natured interest, was jarring to Susan and somehow made her fearful. She gripped the seat belt with one hand and the edge of her seat with the other.

“Chris, you’re doing eighty. Slow down. Can’t we get off this? Let’s take Broadway down.”

“Are you out of your mind? That would take hours. We’re going to exit in a couple of minutes. Relax. You’re just getting upset remembering your mother’s accident. You’re absolutely safe. I’m a really good driver.”

“I wish you’d go slower.”

“It’s safer to keep up with the flow of traffic.”

“You’re going faster than the traffic.”

Chris glanced at Susan. Her cheeks were wet and her face distorted with suppressed sobs.

“Susan, calm down! Look there’s the Riverside exit. We’re almost—”

“Take it! Take Riverside, Chris!” Susan cried.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Susan. Jesus. Just a couple of minutes and we’re off this thing. Everything is perfectly all right.”

Chris kept looking over at Susan, almost curiously. Later, neither of them could say how it happened, but they knew that Chris’s front bumper tapped the rear bumper of the car in front of him, and both cars swerved. It was frightening, especially at such high speed, but no harm apparently was done yet. Then the other driver motioned at Chris, but Chris ignored him and half smiled at Susan, who wept silently and gripped the armrest. Still gesturing and looking furious now, the other driver maneuvered his way behind Chris’s car and accelerated enough to hit its rear bumper with considerable force. Chris’s car struck the car ahead of him, and there was an instant pileup. Air bags exploded open, and in what seemed only seconds police and ambulance workers were swarming over the scene. Susan and Chris were rushed to St. Luke’s. Chris refused to see a doctor and seemed both unharmed and unfazed by the collision. The police concluded that he was a victim of road rage and were not inclined to be hard on him. Susan was being examined when Peter arrived, white-faced even though he had been told that she seemed to be only shaken up and bruised.

“This is a bad way to meet, Mr. Frankl,” Chris began in the waiting room. Peter, who was at least four inches shorter than Chris, looked up at him with a not very friendly expression. Chris had a cell phone in one hand and a diet soda in the other. “I don’t want to make excuses,” said Chris, “but I think it happened because Susan got so hysterical.”

Peter listened coldly to Chris’s account of Susan’s growing terror and then grew serious at the story of the assault by the other vehicle. “You told all that to the police?”

“Yes, but obviously I didn’t get the license plate number, so I doubt there’s anything anyone can do.”

Peter thought that Chris wasn’t necessarily at fault, but he still felt unfriendly.

“Where had the two of you been, anyway?”

“We went to visit my parents in Connecticut. Just a little drive to the country. Anyway, I have to take off now. I was just waiting for you to get here.”

Peter was taken aback. He was leaving? While the doctors were still examining Susan after an accident in his car?

“Daddy, let’s don’t tell Mother,” Susan said when she came out, a bandage across one cheekbone. The doctors had said she should see her own doctor immediately if she experienced any dizziness or headaches, but they thought she was all right. “She doesn’t need to know. I’m fine. I’ll say I got the bruise in a cab or something.”

Peter, who had already made up a story to tell Lesley about the telephone call and why he had to go out, agreed readily. Lesley had recuperated well, but so much of her continuing disability was emotional that a shock might set her back.

“Where’s Chris?” Susan asked, looking around the waiting area at the emergency room.

“He said he had to go. You didn’t even know he was leaving?” Peter’s evident dislike and disapproval of Chris anguished Susan.

“He was upset, Daddy. Don’t get the wrong idea. He behaved completely responsibly.”

“Maybe I’m just a nervous father, Susan,” he said, “but I’d bet a lot that guy is missing a screw somewhere. And if you were so scared on the Henry Hudson, why the hell didn’t he get off when you asked him to?”

“You’re judging him under the worst possible circumstances. For my sake, please try to be a little more understanding.”

There was a little fire in Susan’s voice that Peter had never heard before, and he decided he’d better back off. He frowned at her, then said, “C’mon, honey, I’ll take you home.”

Peter tried to believe that Susan had been so afraid of an accident that she had caused one, but he couldn’t fully credit this theory. Chris’s calm indifference—about Susan, about the shocking vehicular assault on the Henry Hudson—told him that there was something more to this. On the other hand, there really were people out there committing murderous acts with their cars, and maybe that explained the whole incident.

Such things happened in part because the Henry Hudson was just a bad stretch of highway. Why, back in the thirties, when it was built, the speed limit was probably only forty miles an hour, and there were probably a tenth as many cars then, maybe even fewer. Driving now was an endless series of negotiations over road rights, in which the borderline insane struggled to enforce their need for superiority. No wonder so many of them lost control in their cars. They were just like the World Trade Center murderers. They all killed people they thought had put them down. They had no more reason than that. Osama bin Laden was not so hard to understand. It had nothing to do with religion. He had a few loose screws, and it was perfectly obvious why. The guy was one of fifty-four kids, for heaven’s sake, of a man who kept a stable of wives. Even dogs don’t have fifty-four puppies. He must have felt like dust under his father’s feet or more likely, fatherless. There certainly wasn’t any dad taking little Osama out to play catch in an oasis or something. How was a boy supposed to grow up normal when his father was a father like a stud horse is a father?

Peter might not have the greatest relation with Louis, but at least he had played catch with him. Every Sunday Peter had taken him to Little League, and every summer they went to Yankees games—because the boy was crazy about that stuff. Unfortunately, Peter himself not only had no interest in sports, but looked down on them, an attitude that Louis had surely detected. And he had always been a little down on Louis, too. Yes, granted, Louis was no Susan, but a lot of people would be very happy to have Louis for a son. Good athlete, MBA from Harvard. From this thought, however, Peter all too easily recalled things about Louis that he disliked—and they added up to his being his mother’s son. Perhaps some of his resentment against Louis was really resentment of the mother who wanted him for herself. But at least, Peter thought, I took him down to the park. I did do that. And I was faithful to his mother.

Edmond Lockhart, with Burke on his leash, fell in step with Peter as he turned the corner on Riverside Drive. Lockhart’s expressionless face shaped itself into a sardonic smile at the sight of Peter, and a manic glint shone from his eye.

“So the Gazette isn’t going to let you off easy, I see. I told you, Peter. I don’t like to say so, but you’ve brought all this on yourself. You’re very Jewish, you know. You don’t think so, but you are.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think you know what I’m talking about. You were in a situation where you had to rise above your ethnicity, and you failed.”

“You’re an embarrassment, Lockhart,” Peter replied. He waved Lockhart into the elevator and, to avoid a tête-à-tête, let the door shut and waited for the next car. Herb Holmes appeared at his side just as it arrived.

“So what do you know, Peter?” Herb asked with neighborly indifference.

“Oh, a few lines of poetry,” Peter replied, and he recited as they rode up:

For shameless Insecurity
Prays for a boot to lick,
And many a sore bottom finds
A sorer one to kick.

“No doubt about that,” said Herb.