VOICES BECAME CLEARER. SHE sounds foolish at times, but I assure you she’s not foolish. The kiss of life. He recognized faces. Identities merged. He recognized himself. The world moved closer.
It was two weeks before he was out of the hospital. Dr. Caldwell had proved efficient. Dr. Prinz had come down from New York and looked grave. A great heart specialist, called by Hazen, had flown down from the city by helicopter and had been encouraging. The doctors had tested and probed and whispered together in the corridor. Conroy, ashen-faced navigator of the deeps, had been helpful in matters of transportation. Eleanor had canceled her trip to Greece and was staying at Hazen’s house with Jimmy. Leslie had started driving back and forth from New York when the worst was over, so that she could continue with her lessons and be with Caroline while she took her final exams.
The pain was gone now, but Strand still felt so weak it took a great effort to lift his arms. Hazen had driven him to the big house on the beach, where he and Mr. Ketley had carried him up to the bedroom.
He had been told by all the doctors that he needed rest, a long rest. He had let himself be handled like an infant, allowing others to make decisions about him. He did not think of the future, but accepted what was told him, what was given him to eat, the medicines they gave him to take, the installation in the big bedroom overlooking the sea on the second floor where he could look at the Renoir drawing. He was wearily grateful to everyone and didn’t take the trouble to speak.
He could live to be a hundred, the doctors told him, if he took care of himself. He had always thought that he did take care of himself. Nobody had told him about sea pussies or the malevolent power of the ocean. There was a letter on his bedside table from Judith Quinlan. He hadn’t opened it. He wondered if he had yet thanked Conroy or Linda Roberts for saving his life. Time enough when his strength came back. He was not used to illness, but relapsed into it with dreamlike pleasure. His body was for the time being no longer his responsibility.
People talked to him, Leslie, the doctors, Eleanor, Jimmy, Caroline, Hazen, Mr. and Mrs. Ketley. A moment after they had spoken he didn’t remember what they had said. He smiled benignly at everyone, believing that his smile was reassuring. He was not interested in reading or what was happening to the country or anybody else’s problems, or the weather. It was the most beautiful summer in years, someone said, he couldn’t remember who, but the climate in the big, luxurious room was always the same.
The principal of the high school came to visit him and told him not to worry about the department. “I know you’re going to be better,” the principal said. “Just take your time and when you’re ready to come back just give me a call on the telephone. Your place will be open.” He was not in the mood for telephones and he did not worry about the department.
There were always flowers in the room during the day but he never knew their names and didn’t ask.
A cot had been put in his room for Leslie and he did not question why, after so many years of their sleeping together, she now spent her nights in a different bed.
He slept more than he had ever slept in his life.
One evening, when he began to feel better, he told Leslie that everybody should have at least one heart attack.
She laughed. She was thinner and there were lines in her face that he had never seen before.
Herbert Solomon sent over a cassette machine, with selections from Beethoven, Brahms, Cesar Franck and songs by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and a man named Cohen. Strand didn’t ask for the machine to be turned on.
Linda Roberts sent a big book about the Midi, with handsome photographs. He didn’t open the book.
Caroline told him she thought she had done well on her exams. He was involved in other examinations and didn’t ask her what tests she had taken. He did ask her, though, about the man from Truscott.
“It seemed to go all right,” Caroline said, without enthusiasm. “He timed me twice and said he thought they’d accept me. He said he’d talk to Mr. Hazen.” She shrugged. “It’s not important.”
Her face, too, had grown thinner, he noticed, and she looked as though she cried often. He would have liked to comfort her, but the effort was too great. She said Alexander and Mrs. Curtis sent their best wishes and Mrs. Curtis a box of cookies she had baked herself. He told Caroline to eat the cookies.
Giuseppe Gianelli sent him an enlarged photograph of Eleanor, standing on a dune, in a blowing denim dress, laughing against the sky, with spikes of grass around her bare legs. With it, there was a note that, Leslie read to him. “Something beautiful to look at in the dark hours. And a tonic for all hearts.” He had signed the note, “Your poor poet contractor friend, Giuseppe.”
“He’s a fine young man,” Leslie said, as she put the photograph on the bureau, where Strand could see it from the bed. “We’ve had some long talks together. He’s crazy about Eleanor.”
From time to time, idly, Strand looked at the photograph. He wondered what Giuseppe Gianelli had said to his daughter to make her laugh like that against the open sky.
Sometimes, late at night, he heard Leslie playing on the piano downstairs, softly. He didn’t know if she was playing for herself or if there was anybody else listening. He meant to ask, but then when she came up to bed, forgot.
Hazen came into the room from time to time and stared at him soberly. “I must remember,” Strand said to Hazen, “only to visit people who include strong swimmers in the guest list. I must also remember to thank Conroy and Linda. Above and beyond the call of duty, wouldn’t you say?”
Hazen didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “I’ve already thanked them in your behalf. I gave a thousand dollars to Conroy—money means everything to him, he saves like a pack rat—and a little gold bracelet to Linda. A bauble.”
“Now,” said Strand, uncomfortable with the information, “now I know what my life is worth. A thousand dollars and a bauble.”
Hazen looked at him curiously. “Everything has its price,” he said curtly. “Which does not necessarily correspond with its value. I would advise you not to be embarrassed by money. Which brings up another question. Are you well enough to talk?”
“Just,” said Strand.
“Did you know that after the first ten days the doctors said you were going to pull through and be able to lead a normal, although fairly quiet life?” Hazen said.
“I don’t know. But it’s good news.”
“It certainly is. But it means that you will have to think about the rest of your life. If you take what they say seriously.” Hazen sounded almost accusing. “Which would not mean going back to your job in September as though nothing has happened.”
Strand suppressed a sigh. He had known that one day, not too far in the future, he would have to face this, but he had used the invalid’s prerogative of postponement.
“I don’t suppose,” Hazen went on, “that a New York City high school disability pension would go very far, especially in these days of inflation.”
“Subway fare,” Strand said.
“Exactly. I hadn’t wanted to talk to you about this so soon, but there are other considerations…” He waved vaguely. “I have taken the liberty of talking to the headmaster of a small school in Connecticut about you. Dunberry. It’s about two hours from New York, north of New Haven. My father endowed the school handsomely both during his life and in his will. He had known at college the man who became its headmaster and admired him. The son is the present headmaster and is inclined to think kindly of whatever suggestions I happen to make. It’s a small school—just about four hundred boys—and run on old-fashioned lines, which I approve. It might be just the place for your friend Jesus Romero, too. You could keep an eye on him.”
“You never forget anything, do you, Russell?” Strand said in honest admiration.
Hazen shrugged the compliment off impatiently. “The classes are small and your work load would be moderate,” he said. “About twelve hours a week, at least the first term, the headmaster told me. And a comfortable old apartment comes with the job, which in these days is better than income—considerably better. And when I told the headmaster—Babcock is his name, by the way, an excellent fellow, I’m sure you’ll like him—about your wife, he said he has long been wanting to institute a music appreciation course and he was sure she would be most valuable. And the strain of living in a quiet little school town is infinitely less taxing than fighting the battle of New York. Am I tiring you?”
“A little,” Strand admitted.
“It’s just that there really isn’t much time to lose,” Hazen said apologetically. “The school session is just two months off and the faculty has to be confirmed. Another thing, Babcock will be visiting friends at Montauk next week and he could drop over and have a talk with you, which would save you a trip to Connecticut.”
“It all sounds very promising,” Strand said wearily. “Of course, I’d have to discuss it with Leslie first.”
“I’ve already told her about it,” Hazen said. “She approves wholeheartedly.”
“She hasn’t said anything to me about it,” Strand said. “Or maybe she did and I don’t remember. I don’t remember a lot of things these days, you know.”
“That’ll change,” Hazen said confidently. “Anyway, she wanted me to talk to you about it first. She didn’t want to influence you unduly, she said.”
Strand nodded. “Ever since I got out of the hospital she’s treated me as though I’m made out of old china.”
Hazen laughed. “I noticed,” he said. “That will change, like everything else, as you grow stronger. Once you’re able to get out of bed and can walk around you’ll be surprised how different everything will look.”
“I don’t want any more surprises, thank you,” Strand said.
When Hazen left the room he allowed himself the luxury of the sigh that he had suppressed while the man was there. He would have to think about the rest of his life, Hazen had said. Among other things that meant money. Always and persistently—money. He had known that what was happening to him was expensive, but for the first time in more than thirty years he had not asked what anything cost. But soon the bill would be presented and it would have to be paid. He sighed again.
He closed his eyes and dozed. When he awoke he remembered vaguely that Hazen had been in the room and had spoken about a school. But he didn’t remember the name of the school or where it was or the name of the man who was coming to interview him or if Hazen had mentioned anything about salary. He lay back and dozed again.
The morning Dr. Caldwell said he could go downstairs he insisted upon dressing, although Leslie tried to convince him it would be easier just to put a robe on over his pajamas. “I will not have Russell Hazen’s terrace look like the front porch of an old folks’ home,” he said. He also shaved himself. It was the first time he had looked at himself in a mirror since the accident, as he described the event to himself. He was pale and very thin and his eyes looked enormous in the gaunt face, like two question marks in dark ink. While he was in bed, Mr. Ketley had shaved him every other day and he had been spared mirrors.
Dressing, he moved slowly and carefully, sensing that the bones and arteries in the envelope of imperiled flesh were fragile. But he moved. Leslie clutched his arm as he went down the staircase, holding on to the banister, and Mr. Ketley walked backwards before him, as though afraid that he would suddenly pitch forward and would need to be caught.
On the terrace in the warm sunlight he lay on the reclining chair, propped up on cushions, with a blanket over his knees, grateful for the sunshine and the breeze off the ocean. Everything looked and felt mint new to him, the small white clouds in the summer sky, the color of the sea, the air in his lungs. “You’re out of the woods,” Dr. Caldwell had told him. “If you take care of yourself.” Taking care of himself, Dr. Caldwell had explained, was not climbing the stairs more than once a day, eating wisely, refraining from alcohol, sex and anxiety, and, most important of all, not allowing himself to get excited. Strand had promised to take care of himself. “I will devote myself to getting a tan,” he told Caldwell, “and remaining unexcited.”
Caroline said everybody commented on how brave he was. He did not ask who everybody was and did not feel either brave or cowardly.
Lying there, with Leslie sitting beside him, holding his hand, he suddenly found that he had been interested only in himself for so many weeks. “Tell me everything,” he said to Leslie, “about everybody.” It was as though he had just returned from a long voyage to a place cut off from all outside communication. The Valley of the Shadow. Could it be reached by Western Union, satellite, the human voice? “First—you. What are you doing about your lessons?”
“I’m taking care of them,” Leslie said evasively.
“How?”
“I’ve crammed them into one day a week,” she said. “It’s easy in the summer. So many people are out of town.”
He nodded. “How’s the house?”
“Fine,” Leslie said. “Mrs. Curtis dusts three times a week.”
“Caroline?”
Leslie hesitated. “She found out yesterday she’s been accepted in Arizona. She won’t go, she says, if you say no.”
“I won’t say no,” Strand said.
“She’s stopped playing tennis. She gave all her tennis clothes and her racquet to a girl friend.”
“Why did she do that?”
“She said she was tired of the game.” Leslie’s face was grave and she turned away from Strand as she spoke. “What I think is that she’s propitiating the gods.” Her voice was flat. “Giving up something she loves in exchange for something dearer…. Do you want me to go on?”
“No.”
They sat in silence for a while, Leslie’s hand in his. Each age to its own particular sacrifice, he thought. If he died, would his daughter ask for her pretty white shorts and cotton shirts and racquet back, disillusioned, no gods left? What atavistic piety had led her into this touching and ludicrous teenage denial? “And Jimmy?” he asked. If Jimmy had given up the guitar, how would the gods weigh it against the tennis racquet?
“He’s in New York,” Leslie said. “He had an appointment to see Herb Solomon. Believe it or not, Jimmy was too shy to call Solomon himself and Russell made the date.”
“Maybe we ought to put Russell on a yearly retainer as general manager of the whole family,” Strand said. “I wonder how we got along all these years without him.”
“I’m glad to see you’re getting better,” Leslie said. “You’re recovering your sense of ingratitude.”
“I’m grateful enough,” Strand said. He paused. “I suppose. You must thank him in my name for all of us. He cuts me off every time he thinks I’m on the verge of talking about it.”
“I know,” Leslie said. “He won’t let you mention it. I tried once or twice. He was very brusque with me. I don’t know whether he was angry or embarrassed.”
“Did he tell you he gave Conroy a thousand dollars and Linda Roberts a gold bracelet for pulling me out of the drink?”
“No,” Leslie said, “but they did.”
“Don’t you think it’s a curious way of compensating people who after all risked their lives to save a comparative stranger?”
“A little,” Leslie admitted. “It’s his way. He’s a closed kind of man. He can’t show emotion, he can only act it. With money, favors…symbols.”
“Still,” Strand said, “it makes me feel peculiar. Like something in an ad from the Lost and Found columns—Misplaced: One middle-aged schoolteacher, somewhere in the Atlantic. Reward offered if returned in passable condition.”
“Don’t ever let him know that’s the way you feel about it. Generosity is his hobby, it helps offset what he feels about his work. We were talking about it the other night and he told me in a lawyer generosity is considered a weakness. It’s easy to see he couldn’t stand anybody’s thinking he was a weak man.”
“He told me he’d spoken to you about that school thing,” Strand said, pleased that his memory was coming back. “He said you approved.”
“More than that. I kissed him for it.”
“There’s no need to go to extremes,” Strand said dryly.
“It’s the perfect solution,” Leslie said. “For all of us.”
“You love living in New York,” he said. “How do you think you’ll feel stuck in a small, sleepy town surrounded by four hundred or so adolescent boys?”
“I’ll survive,” Leslie said. “Anyway, it’s not important. What’s important is keeping you alive and well. And New York is only a couple of hours away. I’ll manage.”
“Maybe when that man comes to look me over…”
“Mr. Babcock.”
“Mr. Babcock. Maybe he’ll decide I’m not the right man for him.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “I spoke to him on the phone and he’s overjoyed at the prospect of having you.”
“Overjoyed,” Strand said. “There’s a word.”
He sighed, looked around at the blue water of the pool, the immaculate bathing mats, the white dunes, the shining ocean. “We can’t stay here until school opens you know. It’s one thing to come here for a weekend and then for an emergency, but…”
“He won’t let you mention that, either. I’ve talked to him about it, at least I’ve tried to talk to him…”
“Well?”
“I told him I’d take you back to the city as soon as you could be moved.”
“Well?”
“He asked me if I was trying to kill you,” Leslie said.
“What a nuisance I’ve become.”
“Hush,” Leslie said. “Of course, he was being melodramatic, but there’s no doubt it’s worlds better for you here. The Ketleys, the sea air. We don’t have any air conditioning at home and it’s sweltering in town. Russell says keeping you here is the least he could do for a man he nearly let drown practically in front of his eyes.”
“He has a curious system of values,” Strand said.
“Would that there were more like him,” Leslie said. “By the way, I’m almost sure it isn’t Linda Roberts.”
“Linda Roberts what?”
“The reputed mistress.”
“Oh, that.” Another world. Other bodies. “Why not?”
“He just takes care of her,” Leslie said. “And her money. He’s the executor of her husband’s will. Her husband left her a fortune, but Russell says that if she’d been abandoned to her own devices she wouldn’t have a penny left. She’s a soft touch for anyone with a hard luck story. He says she’s afflicted by leeches. He’s kept her from getting married twice to men who were after her money. He takes care of her because she has a good heart and because her husband was a close friend of Russell’s and she’s lonely. That’s why she talks so incessantly when she gets a chance, he says. More generosity. In his own style. With his time, his affection, everything.”
“He is that,” Strand said. “But why would that prevent…?”
“I saw him walking along the beach with Nellie Solomon.”
“So?”
“There’s a certain way a man and a woman can walk together when they think nobody is watching.”
“Oh, come now, Leslie.”
“He’s walked along the beach with me,” Leslie said, “and I’ve seen him walking along the beach with Linda Roberts and with Eleanor. I assure you there’s a difference. A great difference.”
“You’re not gossiping, are you?” Strand asked, although he knew Leslie never gossiped.
“It’s just an intuition,” Leslie said. “Don’t take it for divine revelation.”
But he was sure she was right. He felt a twinge of envy for Russell Hazen and was disappointed in Nellie Solomon. The crosscurrents around a dinner table. He remembered Mrs. Solomon’s light pinch on his leg when Mrs. Roberts had made the remark about France.
“Good for him,” Strand said. He wondered if Herbert Solomon was a complaisant man. He did not look the type. Strand wished everybody well. He remembered Judith Quinlan’s unopened letter and knew he, too, was guilty. The sexual revolution, with its lighthearted couplings, was for the young. He was involved in a sterner doctrine. He closed his eyes, feeling the heat of the sun on his lids, and they were quiet for a while.
Another subject. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that I spoiled Eleanor’s vacation.”
“Greece’ll still be there next year,” Leslie said.
“Did she think I was going to die?” He spoke with his eyes still closed. “Is that why she stayed?”
“I don’t know what she thought,” Leslie said. “She just wanted to stay. She’s back at work now. She didn’t take the extra week off. I think we’re going to have some important news from her soon.”
“Like what?”
“Like her telling us that she’s going to get married.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“The usual. Sad and glad. They’re a beautiful couple.”
“Is that enough?”
Leslie sighed. “We won’t know for perhaps twenty years.”
“We were half a beautiful couple,” Strand said.
Leslie laughed. “I called my parents to tell them about you and they sent their best wishes. My father said he thought you didn’t look like a healthy man even the first time he clapped eyes on you.”
Strand chuckled weakly. “Palm Springs hasn’t changed him.”
“He said it’s a wonder everybody in New York doesn’t have a heart attack. He says we ought to move to Palm Springs, it does miracles for hearts.”
“Tell him I’ll move to Palm Springs the day he moves out.”
“I see you’re getting better,” Leslie said lightly.
“Anyway, I wasn’t in New York when it happened,” Strand said. “I was halfway to Portugal.”
They were quiet again for a while, Strand still with his eyes closed. “Did you think I was going to die?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” said Leslie, “I couldn’t have borne it.”
Herb Solomon came out onto the terrace, where Strand was lying. Strand was alone. Leslie was down the beach somewhere with Linda Roberts. Leslie was painting and Linda, he supposed, was talking. Leslie had had a birthday the week before and Hazen had surprised her with a gift of a portable, collapsible easel and an extravagant set of oil paints and brushes. Caroline was working at a veterinarian’s clinic in town, and Jimmy was staying in the city for a few days. Hazen was in New York, too. Solomon still looked like George Washington, even in cotton slacks and a polo shirt. He was carrying a big wooden board with something on it wrapped in tinfoil. “Good morning,” he said. “I heard you now welcome visitors.”
“The more the merrier,” Strand said. “Please sit down.” Solomon put the board on a table. “Nellie baked a loaf of bread for you,” he said, unwrapping the tinfoil. The loaf was huge and the crust was brown and it smelled delicious. “It’s still warm,” Solomon said. “She’s a great believer in home-baked bread. Unbleached flour, stone ground, that sort of thing. She says bread should be baked with love. She thought it might tempt your appetite.”
“It does indeed,” Strand said, uncertain of what the protocol should be about accepting a loaf of bread from the husband of the woman who was reputed to be the mistress of one’s host. Busy hands, in the kitchen and elsewhere. “Thank your wife for me.” He reached over and broke off an end of the loaf and tasted it. It was as delicious as it looked and smelled. “Ummn,” he said. “Don’t you want some?” Bread and salt and complicity. The bonds of friendship.
“I have to watch my weight,” Solomon said, seating himself. Other things, too, Strand thought, are to be watched. Solomon looked around him with approval. “You’re a lucky man, Allen,” he said.
“You can say that again.”
“I don’t mean being snatched from the briny. I mean being in a place like this to get over…. Well, you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“There’s nothing Russell Hazen wouldn’t do for a friend,” Solomon said. “The blood out of his veins. And I know. He’s been my lawyer for fifteen years. In the music business I’m something of a giant—but in real business, the sort Russell’s firm handles, I’m a pygmy. But he worries about me as though I’m A.T. and T. There’ve been a couple of times I’d have sunk with all hands on board if it hadn’t been for his advice. He’s not a happy man”—Solomon looked around him cautiously—“I suppose you’ve heard some of the stories?”
“Some,” Strand said, not in the mood for stories.
“He’s not a happy man, but he’s something rarer—he’s a good man. Good, but unlucky. Amazing, how often those things go together. I try to keep a sensible balance.” Solomon laughed, a deep, rumbling basso. “Russell’s afraid you’re not going to take care of yourself.” Suddenly, Solomon’s voice was serious. “He’s become very attached to you. Your whole family. With reason, I would say.”
“As you said, he’s a lonely man.”
Solomon nodded somberly. “One night, when he had a little too much to drink, he told me he knew the moment he’d made the one great wrong turn of his life—when he said, for the first time, ‘Yes, Father.’” Solomon made a small grimace. “Old American families. Fortunately, I came from a new American family. Nellie says she thought you were Jewish.” Solomon chuckled. “By now she thinks practically everybody is Jewish. Have you been married before?”
“No.”
“It shows,” Solomon said. “Nellie’s my second—and last. I have two awful kids. Not by her,” he added hastily. “There’s a subject—children. To weep vinegar.” His face grew dark as he said it. “Talk to Russell sometime. You ought to write a manual, with your litter. ‘How to Bring Up Human Beings in the Twentieth Century.’ It would outsell the Bible. Hang in there, pal. You have a lot to be thankful for.”
“I know,” Strand said, although he wasn’t sure that the reasons he had to be thankful were those that Solomon was thinking of.
Solomon squinted thoughtfully at him, Washington reviewing his troops. Was it at Valley Forge or Yorktown?
“You don’t look so bad, considering,” Solomon said. “A little thin, maybe. And you’re getting a nice tan.”
“The doctors say I can live to be a hundred.”
“Who wants to live to be a hundred?” Solomon said. “What a drag.”
“Exactly my sentiments.” Both men laughed.
“I had an interesting talk with your son,” Solomon said. “There’s a bright boy. Did he tell you he’s starting work for me on Monday?”
“No.”
“Oh?” Solomon sounded surprised.
“I think he believes I disapprove of his getting mixed up in the music business,” Strand said.
“Do you?”
“I don’t want him to be disappointed. And it’s so chancy. And I haven’t the faintest idea of how good he is.”
Solomon nodded soberly. “I explained all that to him. I listened to him again and had some of my people in to listen, too. I put it on the line for him. It isn’t Tin Pan Alley, it’s Heartache Alley, I told him. Old Chinese joke. For everyone who makes it there’re ten thousand who don’t. It’s a grim life, waiting around maybe years for your chance, and maybe the worst thing is to get your chance and then flop. I put it to him squarely. I told him he had a nice touch and a passable voice, but there was nothing original in the way he played and sang and that his own songs—the ones he wrote himself—were all derivative. I told him that I didn’t think he had that something special, that electricity, that makes a performer popular.”
“How did he take that?”
“Like a soldier,” Solomon said.
“But you said he was going to work for you…”
“In the office,” Solomon said. “Not as a performer. Oh, maybe in a couple of years, as he matures, he may find a style. A sound, as he says himself. And then, of course, I might be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.” He smiled sourly, remembering mistakes, opportunities missed. “But as I said, he’s got a true ear, and he knows just about everything about the current crop of artists, what they’re good at, where they fake, what they’ve done. He’ll be very useful, I think, to weed out the hopeless ones who flood into my office and latch on to just the one or two who might go all the way. It’s not creative in the way he wants, but it’s creative just the same. You understand what I’m talking about?”
“I believe so. And he said he’d do it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s very kind of you to give him the chance.”
“Not kindness. Business. I feel I can trust his judgment. That doesn’t happen to me too often with people.”
As Solomon spoke, Strand began to develop a new picture of the man. Not the jovial teller of jokes at dinner parties, with the sound of New York in his voice, not the pleasant neighbor delivering a gift of a loaf of bread, but a shrewd, hard-grained man, honest and implacable in his estimates of possibilities, characters, virtues and faults. “Jimmy will be lucky,” Strand said, “to have you as his boss.”
“I hope he’ll think so. And I hope it’ll be true. There’re a million traps.” Solomon stood up. “I don’t want to tire you. I’ll be moseying along.”
“You’re not tiring me at all. The doctor tells me I’m to get up tomorrow and start taking walks. A mile a day.”
“The fact is,” Solomon said, “I have to drive into town. I have to be in the office by two o’clock. There’s a singer who just made a recording for us that she’s decided she doesn’t like or her fag of a husband tells her she doesn’t like and she wants to do the whole thing all over again. There will be tears.” He grinned, relishing the scene in his office that afternoon in advance. “There will be ultimatums. I will save some fifty thousand dollars. Nellie’s staying down here. She’d love to come over and say hello to you.”
“By all means.”
“I’ll tell her. Keep well, Allen. They didn’t fish you out of the waves to have you fade on us.” He started to leave.
“Oh,” Strand said, “I’m afraid I’ve never thanked you for the recorder and the cassettes.”
Solomon shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “I dispense music the way the men with the baskets on Fifth Avenue dispense pretzels. When you’re up and around you must come over and have dinner with Nellie and me. She says she grew fond of you in one evening.”
“We shared secrets together,” Strand said and waved good-bye as Solomon left.
Strand stared out to sea for a long moment, then absently reached over and broke off another piece of bread.
“I haven’t noticed any pogroms yet,” Nellie Solomon had said at dinner. Jews, murdered and surviving, invited to everything.
Strand took a bite of the bread, tasting the earthy stone-ground wheat.
Baked with love.
He dozed. Dozing, he thought, as the sound of the surf ebbed from his consciousness, dozing can become a full-time career
He was awakened by the sound of voices. Leslie and Linda Roberts were coming up the steps to the terrace from the beach. Leslie was carrying the easel and the canvas she had been working on and Linda Roberts was carrying the big box with the paints and brushes in it and Leslie’s palette. Both women were barefooted, Linda in a flouncy pink bathing suit, which revealed that she had a good figure, long-limbed and narrow-waisted. The bony shoulders and insignificant breasts were fashionable, the feminine superstructure in vogue in the magazines in which tall, starved girls posed in the latest gowns. Once more Strand had doubts about Hazen and Linda Roberts. Men went in for that sort of thing these days. Maybe both of them—Mrs. Solomon and Mrs. Roberts. Perhaps Hazen wasn’t as lonely as Solomon had said. Not by half. He remembered Linda Roberts through the haze of foam, staggering as the waves buffeted her, her arm raised, the loop of rescuing rope ready to be thrown—then, as he dazedly came to, lying on the wet sand, the feel of her lips on his, breathing life back into his lungs. Yes, she was much better than fashionable. People were not to be judged by their talk at dinner tables. One day he would tell her all this. But they would have to be alone.
Leslie had on a short cotton skirt and a loose, woven blouse that left her arms bare. She was getting tan, too, and it became her.
“How did the morning go?” Leslie asked as she reached the terrace.
“Fine,” Strand said. “How about yours?”
“Happily smudging away,” Leslie said, putting the easel down and leaning the canvas against a chair. Strand saw that she had just blocked in the outlines of a scene of dunes, with a gray house in the distance, and put in splotches of different colors here and there as an indication of what she was going to fill in later.
“I wouldn’t call it smudging,” Linda Roberts said. “I just marvel about how sure she is about what she’s doing. Even with me gabbing away in her ear all the morning.”
“It isn’t gabbing,” Leslie said to her husband. “She’s been to all those museums in Europe that I’ve never seen and I’m beginning to get an idea of what I’m missing. Linda, don’t be modest, you know a great deal about painting.”
“Russell keeps after me,” Mrs. Roberts said. “He makes me buy pictures. Some of them very curious, indeed. He’s the one who made me buy into the galleries here and in Paris. He says I must become a patron of the arts. Patroness? Nobody knows about words like that anymore. Chairman, Madam Chairman, Chairperson, Chairlady. The world is getting just too complicated. Women in the Naval Academy. You’d be surprised how many letters I get from women’s organizations asking me to support abortion and God knows what all. Anyway, it’s a wonderful way to spend the morning, watching a pretty woman doing something and knowing what she’s doing.”
“I put on a good act,” Leslie said.
“And the piano besides,” Mrs. Roberts said. “It makes me feel absolutely stunted. Now I must go into the village and have my hair done. The beach and the sun and the sea are marvelous and I’m grateful Russell gives me the freedom of the house, but it’s sinful what it does to the hair. Leslie, I hope I didn’t disturb you about—well, what we talked about.”
“No, not at all,” Leslie said shortly.
“Well, see everybody at lunch,” Mrs. Roberts said, and went into the house.
“What was that about?” Strand asked. “What did you talk about?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Leslie,” Strand said. He could see that she was disturbed.
“Nonsense,” Leslie said. “She just chatters. Off the top of her head.” She sighed. “It was about Caroline’s nose.”
“Poor Caroline,” Strand said. “I have a lot to answer for. Has Linda been talking to Eleanor?”
“No. She thought it up all by herself.”
“Well, what in the world can anybody do about it?”
“She thinks Caroline ought to have an operation. Now. Before she goes away to college. She’d be absolutely beautiful, Linda says, the boys’d fall over themselves chasing her…”
“What’s so good about that?”
Leslie shrugged. “It would change her whole way of looking at life, according to Linda. She quoted chapter and verse. Nieces of hers, classmates in school, timid little creatures now living like duchesses.”
“Caroline seems to be doing all right down here, nose or no nose,” Strand said defensively. “There’s that boy, that sophomore from Wesleyan, George Anderson, who comes and picks her up almost every night.”
“I don’t like him,” Leslie said.
“That’s beside the point. It’s the first time a boy, any boy, has shown an interest in her.”
“He’s a spoiled young man,” Leslie said, disregarding what Strand had said. “A boy that age with a fancy car like that.” The boy drove a Corvette. “And the way he rushes up the driveway and sweeps to a stop, as though he’s a movie star. I don’t like him at all. He’s barely civil to any of us and he snarls at Caroline if she’s a minute late and his lordship has to wait. I tell you, I sit up every night until she comes home and I never did that with Eleanor and any of her beaux.”
“Eleanor was different. Noses had nothing to do with it.”
“Who can tell?”
“Anyway,” Strand said, “she comes home early and in one piece, doesn’t she?”
“So far,” Leslie said gloomily.
“I’d be grateful to Linda Roberts if she kept her opinions to herself.”
“You’ve got the wrong lady for that,” Leslie said, laughing. “Now, let’s not talk about it anymore. A man who’s just recovering from a heart attack has more important things to worry about. Eleanor’s coming down for the weekend and I’ll have a chat with her.”
“You mean you’re actually taking this seriously?” Strand asked incredulously.
“Half,” Leslie said. “Oh, Jimmy called this morning. You were sleeping so I didn’t wake you. He’s got a job.”
“I know,” Strand said. “Herb Solomon was here and he told me about it. He brought a loaf of bread his wife baked. We’re having it for lunch. Mr. Ketley took it into the kitchen.”
“That was nice of the Solomons. What do you think about the job?”
“It won’t kill him.”
“He’s awfully young for that sort of work.”
“He’ll age quickly in that business,” Strand said.
Leslie sighed. “I think I’ll go to a fortune teller and find out what’s going to happen to us in the next five years. Linda has a gypsy in Greenwich Village she says is absolutely fantastic. Horoscopes. She predicted Mr. Roberts’s death.”
“That’s just the sort of thing we need just now,” Strand said ironically. “Tell Linda Roberts to stick to being a patron or patroness or whatever of the arts.”
“She means well. She’s not as foolish as she seems.”
“Not by a long shot,” Strand said.
“She’s unsure of herself and scared about the rest of her life and she still hasn’t gotten over the death of her husband and she’s uncomfortable with the image of the rich widow and she hides it all by pretending to be frivolous. She’d rather have people laugh at her than be sorry for her. Everybody to his own disguise.”
“What’s yours?” Strand asked.
“I pretend to be a big grown-up serious woman,” Leslie said, “when I really know that I’m only an eighteen-year-old girl who isn’t sure if the boys like me or not.” She laughed, stood and leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “The sun isn’t doing awful things to your hair,” she said. “I’m going in and getting ready for lunch.”
But when she went into the house, he heard her playing the piano, something sad and complicated that he couldn’t recognize.
Once, when he had come into their living room while she was playing Bach he had asked what she thought as she sat at the piano. “I hope,” she had said, “I am addressing God.”
Now, sitting in the seaside sun, tanned to a simulacrum of health, frail and escaped from the tubes, machines and flickering dials of the hospital, he listened to the shadowed and unfamiliar music of his wife, who had been counseled to consult downtown gypsies who had warned Linda Roberts of her husband’s end. The stars in their courses, fate in the whirl of planets, death in the corridors…
Christ, he thought, fragile in his comfortable, blanketed chair, what is going to happen to me, what is going to happen to us all?