HE STOOD AT THE window of the Hotel Crillon and looked out at the obelisk, the rearing stone horses set in the noble expanse of the Place de la Concorde. In the milky sunlight with the Seine and the Chamber of Deputies in the distance it was almost empty, because, as Hazen had explained when they arrived, everybody left Paris in August. His being there seemed almost miraculous to Strand. When Hazen had told them that he had pressing business in Europe and that a company for which he worked was lending him their corporate Lear jet to cross the ocean and had proposed that since there was room and he detested traveling alone the Strands and Linda Roberts accompanying him, he had immediately said, “Impossible.” He had suggested to Leslie that she make the trip on her own, but Leslie had said she wouldn’t go without him. He had tried to plead illness, but he had been walking a mile a day on the beach and the truth was that he was fit as a man his age who had been at death’s door only six weeks before had a right to feel and Dr. Caldwell had said the trip would do him good. The munificence of Hazen’s offer had embarrassed him but Leslie was so painfully anxious to go that he had felt that it would be cruel to deprive her of the experience. Eleanor, too, had said that it was sinful to reject the gifts that a benevolent fate, in the form of Russell Hazen, was offering him. Women, he had thought, accept favors more naturally than men. He had said yes reluctantly, but now, after a week in Paris, strolling slowly along the streets whose names he had known from his reading since he was a young man and sitting in the sidewalk cafés and making his way slowly through Figaro and Le Monde, pleased that he still half-remembered his college French, he was grateful that Leslie had insisted.
Actually, there had been no urgent reason to keep him in America for the moment. Mr. Babcock had visited him and, as Hazen had promised, had been a likable, diffident, rather dusty small man. The interview had been tactfully brief, and after he had outlined the nature of Strand’s duties Strand was relieved to see that after all his years of teaching history there was no need to prepare his courses. Leslie had gone to Dunberry to inspect the house they were to live in and pronounced it livable. They needed a car to get to town but Hazen had volunteered the old station wagon and Mr. Ketley had given her lessons in driving it. She was a nervous driver, but she had passed the test at the first attempt and now had her license.
Although from her gallery and her social life Linda knew, as she said, shoals of French, she had advised them that for their first short visit they’d have a better time just seeing what the French had produced and collected during the centuries rather than grappling with the race itself. Taking her advice as wise counsel, they had kept to themselves and escaped the rigors of not quite bilingual socializing. As Linda said, they had been spared the disappointment of comparing what the French had accomplished with what the French had become.
His own sightseeing was limited, as Dr. Caldwell had warned him not to overdo things. His trying to keep up with Leslie and Linda Roberts in their tireless raids on museums, galleries and churches certainly wouldn’t have met with Dr. Caldwell’s approval. He had quickly fallen into a happy and comfortable routine, spending most of the days by himself. He slept late, waking in the beautifully appointed large room to breakfast with Leslie. When she went out to meet Linda Roberts he would go back to bed and sleep for an hour or so. Then, shaved and bathed, he would walk idly, looking at the windows on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré or the Rue de la Paix, admiring the lush displays of the shops, but with no itch of acquisition. He would meet with the ladies for lunch at a bistro, listening with amused detachment to their descriptions of the treasures they had viewed that morning, then go back to the hotel for a siesta, unhurried, content to let Paris bustle on without him for a while, before going out again to sit on an open terrasse with the newspapers, lulled by the sound of a language he could not quite understand, half-reading, half-watching, with a small smile on his lips, the lively show of pedestrians, approving, without lust, of the pretty, well-turned-out women and girls who passed by, and intrigued by the Japanese tourists who like himself were in Paris for the moment.
Hazen himself appeared only at odd times. He flew to a different city almost every day, Vienna, Madrid, Zurich, Munich, Brussels, trying to disentangle, as he put it, multinational chaos. “You won’t miss me,” he had said to Strand. “Linda knows Paris better than most Frenchmen and you couldn’t have a better guide.”
Among the things that Linda Roberts knew about Paris was where to find the best restaurants that were open in August, and for the first time since his twentieth birthday Strand found himself gaining weight and going to bed nightly a little drunk on French wine.
Hazen had invited Caroline to accompany them, but Caroline with an unexpected newfound seriousness had said she couldn’t interrupt her track training. When she wasn’t at the small animal clinic, she worked out for hours every day with the track coach of the East Hampton high school and had already improved her time in the hundred and was working on the two twenty. “I don’t dare go,” she had said when she was told she was included in Hazen’s invitation. “I have the rest of my life to see Europe, but this is the summer I have to get down to at least ten-five. I couldn’t stand the thought of showing up in Arizona and being an absolute flop and knowing everybody was asking, ‘What is that fat horse doing in the race?’” Hazen had agreed with her and assured Strand that the Ketleys would take perfect care of her. Mr. Ketley had become interested in her new career and had found a book on diet for athletes from which his wife prepared special meals for her.
So it was a man at peace with himself, soberly tasting foreign joys at age fifty, who stood in the late afternoon sunlight at the window of the large room gazing out at the heart of a country he had loved from afar and never hoped to visit.
Hazen arrived that evening from Madrid in time to take them all to dinner at an elegant small restaurant that offered a Burgundian cuisine and the accompanying wines. He was in a holiday mood and joked with the maître d’hôtel about how the prices of La Tache had gone up since he had been there last. Strand didn’t see the wine list but from the figures on the carte he could guess that the meal for the four of them would cost well over two hundred dollars. When he had been installed in the grandiose room in the hotel overlooking the Place de la Concorde, he had protested mildly to Hazen about his extravagance. “Nonsense, man,” Hazen had said. “A taste of luxury is part of the education of any intelligent human being. It teaches him how unnecessary it is.”
Easy enough to say, Strand had thought, for a man who has inherited a house with sixteen bedrooms.
Linda Roberts, who had overheard the exchange, said to him later, “Don’t thwart his Santa Claus complex. He gets very cross when he thinks people are trying to keep him from distributing largesse to us peasants.”
The “us” was diplomatically inclusive, Strand thought, and was typical of Linda’s sweetness of nature. His gratitude toward her grew daily as he saw how she devoted all her time to making Leslie’s visit as rewarding as possible and how Leslie’s face glowed when they returned from an afternoon at the galleries or a visit to the studio of a young painter who, according to Linda, was sure to make a name for himself in the future. “If a person couldn’t paint here,” she said, her enthusiasm for the city overcoming her usually well-developed critical sense, “he couldn’t paint anywhere.”
During the meal of jambon persillé and entrecôte marchand de vin and a hot pear tart, Linda had said, “I’ve crossed the ocean forty-five times and this is the best time of all.” She raised her glass. “I think we should drink a toast to the group that has made it possible.”
So they all drank happily to themselves.
Hazen had drunk copiously and by the time they were at their coffee was expansive and jovial. “I have an idea,” he said. “I’ve got three days before I have to fly to Saudi Arabia and I propose we make the most of it. Leslie, have you ever been to the Loire valley?”
“I’ve barely been to New Haven,” Leslie said, flushed with the wine. She had bought a new dress because Linda had said that a girl couldn’t just pass through Paris but had to have something to show for it, and it was very becoming, deep plum-colored and close-fitting and cut daringly low in front, displaying her Hampton honey-colored skin and the fetching outline of her bosom. “My slinky outfit,” she had described it to Strand as she dressed. “I hope you’re not shocked.”
“I am ravished,” Strand had said loyally, not exaggerating by much.
“Why don’t we hire a car tomorrow morning and go take a look at the châteaus and drink some Vouvray?” Hazen said. “And if they’re still putting on the Son et Lumière shows, good old Allen can brush up on his French history.”
“At Chenonceaux,” Strand said, showing off a little, “Catherine de Medici used to have her prisoners tortured in the courtyard for the delectation of the ladies and gentlemen who happened to be her guests.”
“The bloody French,” Hazen said.
“From what I’ve read,” said. Strand, “they’ve stopped the practice. At least as a public amusement.”
“Now they do it for profit. To Americans. In business and politics. But give them a century or two,” Hazen said, “and they’ll probably get around to prisoners again. Anyway, they won’t be doing it in the next three days, unless the government happens to change or the Communists take over Orléans. What do you say, can we all be ready by ten o’clock in the morning?”
“Russell,” Linda said, “you’ve been gadding around so much, I think you could stand a day or two of just sitting in one place. Why don’t we all fly down to Nice and go to my place in Mougins? I hear the weather is divine just now and the garden is at its best.”
Hazen scowled. “Linda,” he said, with surprising harshness, “Leslie and Allen haven’t flown three thousand miles just to sit in a damned garden. They can sit in my garden all they want when they get back. Anyway, I told the pilots they could have three days off. They need the rest.”
“We could always fly down to Nice on Air France,” Linda said, “like the rest of the human race. And the Loire valley will be jammed with tourists. We’ll be lucky to find hotel rooms.”
“Let me worry about that,” Hazen said, his voice rising.
“It’d be a shame if Leslie and Allen went back home without seeing my little place in Mougins,” Linda persisted. “They must be getting tired of hotels by now. I know I am. There’s more to France than hotels.”
“It’s a shame that they have to go back to America without seeing Verdun and Mont-St.-Michel and the cathedral in Rouen and the Lascaux cave and a million other things,” Hazen said loudly. “But they only have two weeks. Christ, you’re a stubborn woman, Linda.”
“Leslie, Allen.” Linda turned toward them. “What do you want to do?”
Leslie glanced quickly at Strand, looking for a signal. Strand would have been happier just to remain in Paris doing exactly what he had done since he had arrived there. But the exasperation in Hazen’s voice was not to be ignored. “I’m sure,” he said tactfully, “that Leslie would love to see your house, Linda. But I know she’d regret missing the chance to see the châteaus.”
Leslie gave him a quick, grateful smile.
“There,” Hazen said with satisfaction, “it’s settled. And no more insane arguing, Linda. If there’s one thing I hate it’s arguing when you’re on a holiday. I get enough arguments at the office.”
“Do you ever lose, Russell?” Linda asked gently.
“No.” Hazen laughed, his good spirits restored.
“I’m glad I don’t work for you,” Linda said.
“So am I.” He reached for her hand and kissed it graciously. “So—ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Country clothes.”
“Leslie,” Linda said, “you know what we can do when we get rid of this brute—we can let him fly his toy plane back to America and we can stay on and go down to Mougins on our own and fly back home in our own good time.”
“That would be wonderful,” Leslie said. “But I have to go home and start getting ready to move. We have to be at Dunberry by September tenth. Maybe next year. That would be something to look forward to, wouldn’t it, Allen?”
“I’m looking forward to it already,” Strand said. If there will be a next year, he thought, as he said it.
He lay in his bed watching Leslie, in her nightgown, brushing her hair in front of the dressing table mirror. “It was a nice evening,” he said, “wasn’t it?”
“Better than nice,” she said. “Like all the evenings. Except for that little clash of wills between Russell and Linda.”
He lay in silence for a moment. “Tell me,” he said, “was I right in saying that you’d prefer going down to the Loire instead of to Linda’s place?”
“You were right in saying it,” she said, her arm rising and falling in smooth even strokes, “but it wasn’t the truth. I’m gorged for the moment with sightseeing. A few days in a garden in the south would have made a perfect ending to our trip.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
Leslie laughed softly. “Darling,” she said, “it’s his holiday.”
“I guess we really didn’t have any choice.”
“Not for a minute.” She stopped brushing her hair and stared at herself in the mirror. “Do you think I look younger than I did two weeks ago?”
“Years,” he said.
“I think so, too.” She resumed brushing her hair. “Still,” she said, “I would like to look at least once at the Mediterranean.”
“Next time we come to Europe,” he said, “we pay our own way.”
“Next time,” she said softly. “Who knows if there’ll be a next time?”
He was disturbed by the echo of his own thought. Vaguely, he felt that somehow tonight they both needed comforting and he almost asked her to come into his bed so that he could sleep with his arms around her. But he didn’t speak. He didn’t know whether he should be proud of his prudence or despise himself for his cowardice. He closed his eyes and went to sleep to the silken sound of his wife brushing her hair in the shadowy room.
There was a surprise for Strand and Leslie and Linda Roberts when they came down from their adjoining rooms to the lobby the next morning at ten o’clock. Hazen was waiting for them with a striking-looking blonde, who was holding a smart black attaché case. She was dressed severely in a simple tweed suit and low-heeled shoes. “This is Madame Harcourt.” He said the name in the French manner, leaving off the final t. “She’s from our office here and she’s driving us down. She’s going to Saudi Arabia with me and we have some business to work out before we leave. Don’t worry, you don’t have to talk French to her. Her mother’s English.” He spoke hurriedly, as though a little embarrassed by Mrs. Harcourt’s unannounced appearance.
“Mr. Hazen always says that right off, whenever he introduces me to Americans,” the woman said, smiling. The businesslike severity of her face disappeared, and her voice was low, pleasant, easy, and her accent was clipped but not obnoxiously British. “It’s as though he doesn’t want to be accused, even for an instant, of favoring the French.”
“She’s a lawyer,” Hazen said. “I deal with French lawyers only out of dire necessity. Well, the luggage is in the car. Shall we take off?” He started out of the lobby with Mrs. Harcourt and the others following.
“Quite an improvement on good old Conroy, wouldn’t you say?” Strand whispered.
“Cosmetically, anyway,” Leslie said.
A big black Cadillac was waiting for them at the door and Mrs. Harcourt got in on the driver’s side, with Hazen beside her. “Mrs. Harcourt will drive,” Hazen said. “I hate to drive and I’d have to jump out of the car before we reached the Pont St.-Cloud if I let Linda behind the wheel and I know Allen hasn’t a license and Leslie’s too new at the sport for French roads. You all comfortable back there?” Although he had said country clothes, he was dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt, tight around the collar, and a sober tie, making Strand wonder what Hazen would wear to a funeral. Even with the weight he had put on in Paris, his own collar, Strand felt uncomfortably, left an unfashionable gap at his Adam’s apple.
“We’re fine,” Strand said. “Couldn’t be better.”
Mrs. Harcourt turned on the ignition and the car started off. She drove deftly and confidently through the light traffic.
It was a beautiful morning, sunny but not too warm, and Strand leaned back contentedly, enjoying looking at the buildings of Paris and then at the green rolling country they were in when they passed through the tunnel under the Seine and sped south.
They stopped in Chartres and went into the cathedral. Strand would have liked years of slow study to absorb it, but Hazen was visibly annoyed at a loud group of German tourists who were being addressed, in their own language, at a decibel count suitable for a political meeting, by their guide.
“Let’s get out of here,” Hazen growled, after they had been there for only ten minutes. “I’m hungry.” He refused to have lunch in Chartres, though. “I recommend the cathedral, but not the food.” He said there was a wonderful place just off the highway about a half hour away.
They had a fine lunch out in the open air at a table set in a garden and Hazen was jovial again and ordered two bottles of Montrachet to go with the trout, while making a good-humored point of not allowing Mrs. Harcourt to drink any of it because she was doing the driving and the cargo of the Cadillac was precious. She listened politely but hardly spoke while the others talked. She sat quietly, erectly, almost stiffly, as though the holiday atmosphere did not include her and she remained conscious that she was an employee and her employer was present. She locked the car carefully because she had left the attaché case on the front seat
But as Strand and Leslie were walking back to the car after the others, Leslie said, “It’s a fake.”
“What’s a fake?” Strand asked, puzzled.
“The junior employee and the big boss act,” Leslie said. “For our benefit.”
“Oh, Leslie.”
“You don’t have to be a detective to guess what business they have to work out in the Loire valley before they take off for Saudi Arabia.”
“I don’t believe you,” Strand said, slightly shocked by the hostility he sensed in his wife’s voice. “And even if you’re right, it’s no business of ours.”
“I just don’t like people to think they can pull the wool over my eyes, that’s all,” Leslie said, her lips tight. “Madame Harcourt! They’re a cool pair, those two.”
Strand was glad when they reached the car. It was a conversation he had no wish to continue.
They all had rooms on the same floor in the hotel in Tours and Strand noticed the malicious gleam in Leslie’s eyes when she saw that their room and Linda’s were at one end of the corridor and Hazen’s and that of Mrs. Harcourt, again carrying the attaché case, at the other.
“What do you think she’s got in that case she lugs around everywhere?” Leslie asked.
“Industrial secrets,” Strand said. “Russell told me he’s negotiating for a company that’s putting in a bid to construct an atomic plant in Saudi Arabia.”
“My guess is that it’s a douche bag,” Leslie said.
“Good Lord, Leslie!”
Leslie merely giggled as she went through the doorway of their room.
Leslie continued to be reserved and cool toward the woman the next day when they visited Chambord and Chenonceaux, but if either Hazen or Mrs. Harcourt noticed it, they didn’t show it. But Leslie made no secret of her delight in the glorious piles of masonry and told Hazen, as they stood in the formal garden looking at the gallery of Chenonceaux built on stone columns over the Cher River, “This moment alone is worth the trip.” Then she kissed his cheek.
Hazen smiled happily. “I told you this would beat sitting and sweating in a garden while being eaten up by mosquitoes.” He glared at Linda. “Next time I hope you’ll go where I tell you to without my having to get out a subpoena for you.”
“The mosquitoes only come out after it rains,” Linda said with dignity, “and it hasn’t rained all summer.”
“There it starts again. You know you’re lying.” Hazen appealed to the others. “Will you listen to that? Only after it rains!”
“Please,” Leslie said, “please. Let peace and harmony reign. Stop teasing the poor man, Linda.”
“He has such a low boiling point,” Linda said, smiling, “sometimes I can’t resist, just to see how fast the steam starts to spout.”
“Low boiling point! Mrs. Harcourt, you’ve known me for many years and you’ve seen me tried in important matters, sorely tried in important matters, sorely tried, by low dealing and gross incompetence, and outright chicanery. Have you ever seen me blow up?” By now Hazen, too, was amused.
“You have always been a model of decorum, Mr. Hazen,” Mrs. Harcourt said demurely, “in my presence.”
“Now you’re doing it, too,” Hazen said and then joined in the general laughter.
But back in the room in the hotel, getting ready for dinner, Leslie had forgotten the comradely laughter of the afternoon. “I heard something about that Madame Harcourt this afternoon,” she said.
“What?” Strand sighed inwardly. He had grown to like the woman. She seemed modest and intelligent and cheerful and her presence seemed to lighten Hazen’s moods and make him a more agreeable companion.
“There is no Monsieur Harcourt,” Leslie said. “She’s divorced.”
“How did you find out?”
“Linda told me. The last time she and Russell were in Paris together the junior attorney was there all the time, too. Divorced.”
“Divorce isn’t a crime. Most of the people anyone knows are divorced.”
“I just thought you’d be interested, that’s all. You seem so interested in the lady I thought you might be interested in her marital status, too.”
“Oh, come on, now, Leslie,” Strand said, annoyed, “I’m just decently polite.”
“Everybody is so decently polite.” Leslie’s voice had a dangerous edge to it. “‘You have always been a model of decorum, Mr. Hazen’”—she mimicked Mrs. Harcourt’s English accent—“‘in my presence.’ Mr. Hazen! Do you think she calls him Mr. Hazen in bed, too?”
“Oh, cut it out, Leslie,” Strand said sharply. “You’re being absurd.”
“Don’t you snap at me!” she shouted. Then she bent over in her chair, raised her hands to cover her face and sobbed.
Strand was too astonished to do anything for a moment. Then he went over to Leslie and knelt and put his arms around her. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “I guess we walked around too much in the sun today and we’re both a little tired.”
She pushed his arms away from her violently, still sobbing, her mascara running. “Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.”
He stood up slowly and went to the door. “I’m going downstairs,” he said quietly. “When you come down, look for me in the bar.”
He closed the door silently behind him.
When the others found him in the bar, Leslie had not yet appeared. He had spent a half hour alone trying to figure out what was wrong with her and had come to no conclusion. She was an emotional woman but not an irrational one and her outburst was mysterious to him. He had never given her reason for jealousy and the times when he had openly admired a pretty woman she had joked with him mildly about it. Too many new and different experiences, he decided, crowded into too short a period. He told the others that Leslie was tired and lying down for a while and that they should begin dinner without her.
They were only on their first course when Leslie came into the dining room. She had redone her face and was smiling and looked serene. “Forgive me for being late,” she said as she took the chair that Hazen was holding for her. “It’s been a long day. I’m starving. Everything looks and smells delicious. Thank you, Russell. What are you having, Mrs. Harcourt? That looks especially good.”
“Hot local sausage and hot potato salad,” Mrs. Harcourt said.
“I heard men do like women with hearty appetites,” Leslie said and Strand began to worry about her again. “I’ll have the same. I’d be much obliged if you’d order it for me. With my French I never know what I’m getting until I taste it.”
The dinner progressed normally with a great deal of talk about wine on the part of Hazen and Linda, who defended the wines of Provence, although Leslie put in a few good words for several bottles of California white wines.
“Tomorrow,” Hazen announced as they were served their dessert, “we’re through with sightseeing. Mrs. Harcourt has a friend in the neighborhood who has a vineyard and cellars where he bottles Vouvrays, and she tells me they’re very good indeed and we’re going out to his place in the morning and taste a few of them. Everybody agreed?”
Everybody agreed. Strand decided that tomorrow he was going to call Mrs. Harcourt by her first name, if he ever discovered what it was.
“His name is Larimmendi,” Mrs. Harcourt said. “The wine man, I mean. He’s a Basque, but he fell in love with Touraine. I went to law school with him, but he decided to give up the law for the grape. A wise man. I nearly married him after I saw all those beautiful bottles in the cellars. He’s a charming man but he drinks so much of his product himself, I doubt that he’d be much use as a husband…”
As she was speaking, Strand saw a tall woman in a gray wool coat that exactly matched the silvery color of her hair enter the dining room and stand at the door looking as though she were searching for someone. Then she started toward their table. As she moved toward Hazen, who was sitting with his back to the room, Strand saw that she was an impressive looking woman, with a bony, fine face and a long sharp nose, like the paintings of eighteenth-century beauties in English portraits. She stopped behind Hazen, stared down at him for a moment and then bent over and kissed the top of his head. “Good evening, dear Russell,” she said. Her voice was sharp and the emphasis on the “dear” was ironic.
Hazen pivoted in his chair, looked up. “Good God, Katherine, what are you doing here?” He stood up, hastily, dropping the spoon he was holding onto his plate with a clatter, his napkin falling to the floor.
“I came to see how my husband was faring,” she said evenly. “In case you’ve forgotten, that’s you, Russell.”
The silence after these words was oppressive around the table. Mrs. Hazen’s eyes were blank and the pupils curiously dilated and Strand wondered if the lady was drugged.
“How did you know I’d be here?” Hazen’s tone was aggressive.
“Not through any fault of yours, dear. Your communications are few and far between, aren’t they? Your office was kind enough to tell me. And of course friends in America are quick to let me know of your activities. Legions of friends.” She looked deliberately around the table, fixing each of them for a moment with an appraising glance. “Ah,” she said, “I see you have your portable harem with you. And this handsome couple must be the Strands, of whom I’ve heard so much.”
Strand stood up, because he didn’t know what else to do. Hazen looked as though he were trying to speak but finding it impossible.
“Good evening, Linda,” the woman went on. “I’m glad to see you looking so well. I hope dear Russell is taking good care of you.”
“Very good care,” Linda said, her hands moving in a flustered little gesture. “As always.”
The woman nodded. “As always,” she said. She turned toward Mrs. Harcourt. “And you, Madame Harcourt, I see that you’re still in the lineup, to use a sporting term that might be considered appropriate for the occasion.”
Mrs. Harcourt folded her napkin and stood up with dignity. “If I may be excused, Mr. Hazen,” she said, “I’d like to go up to my room.”
“Of course, of course.” Hazen sounded hoarse, as though suddenly afflicted with a constriction of the throat.
Mrs. Hazen turned and watched Mrs. Harcourt make her way across the room and did not turn back to the table until Mrs. Harcourt had gone through the door. “It’s admirable,” she said to no one in particular, “how she keeps her looks. I do approve of a woman who doesn’t let herself go. Russell, don’t you think it’s about time to introduce me to your new friends?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Strand,” Hazen mumbled.
“I’m delighted finally to meet you,” Mrs. Hazen said. “I hope you’ve recovered from your experience with the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Strand.”
“Yes, thank you,” Strand said, because it was plain that Mrs. Hazen expected him to say something and might stand there for minutes in accusing silence if he didn’t speak. “Largely because of the efforts of your husband and Mrs. Roberts,” he said, trying to make the moment socially bearable. “Along with Mr. Conroy, whom I presume you’ve met. I owe my life to them.”
“Ah, the faithful Conroy. Always available. Although I was not aware that service as a lifeguard was included among his duties.” In her way of speaking she sometimes fell into the ornate rhetorical rhythm that she must have picked up from her husband. “Yes,” Mrs. Hazen said, “my husband is well known as a saver of lives. Except for those of his family. But I hadn’t known that Linda had added that to her list of good works.”
“Katherine, you’re embarrassing everybody in the place.” Hazen looked wildly around him. There was a quartet of middle-aged English tourists at the table next to theirs and they were clearly interested in the conversation. “I’m going to be in Paris tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t we talk there?”
“I won’t be in Paris tomorrow,” Mrs. Hazen said calmly. “I’m on my way down to the Basque country by car for a holiday and I find it more convenient to talk here. Besides”—she moved around the table to Mrs. Harcourt’s vacant chair—“I believe a glass of wine would do me good. Is there any left in the bottle, Russell?” She sat down firmly.
“Leslie, Linda,” Strand said, “I think it would be wiser if we moved on.”
Leslie half-stood up to leave, but Mrs. Hazen put her hand firmly on her arm. “Please stay. I would feel terribly guilty if I thought I was breaking up Russell’s charming little party. And there are things I have to say to our host that I think you ought to hear….”
“Please take your hand away,” Leslie said. “My husband and I are leaving.”
Mrs. Hazen kept her grip on Leslie’s arm. “If anybody leaves I warn you I am going to scream,” she said. “Loudly.”
Leslie made a move to pull her arm away and Mrs. Hazen screamed. It was a wild, shattering, sirenlike wail. When she stopped, the room was absolutely silent and the other diners sat immobilized, as though frozen in place by some new and devastating instantaneous industrial process. Mrs. Hazen smiled and dropped her arm. “Mr. Strand, Russell, I suggest you sit down, too. And Russell, the wine is near you.” She picked up a glass from the table and held it out toward her husband. “If you’d be so kind.”
“Sit down, Allen,” Hazen said hoarsely. “The woman’s crazy.” He sat down, too. His hand trembled as he took the wine out of the cooler and poured some into Mrs. Hazen’s glass.
She sipped daintily. “One thing I must say for you, Russell, you always knew how to choose wines. I must apologize to you ladies and gentlemen for the extreme measures I have had to take, but lesser measures have failed, like letters that have gone unanswered for three years and countless transatlantic telephone calls, and this may be the only opportunity to make my point, with other people present, as it were, to bear witness and be able to recount the truth later on if necessary. Russell…” She paused, like an orator on a platform, and sipped once more at the wine. “Russell, what I have to say to you is that I am giving you a choice. I am prepared for one of two actions. I will sue for a divorce and a large, a very large settlement, a vast settlement, or I shall kill myself.”
“Katherine,” Linda said, “that’s maniacal.”
“Linda,” Mrs. Hazen said, “you always talked too much. I see you haven’t conquered the habit.” Then she addressed herself to Hazen, who was sitting with his eyes closed and his head bent, an old man dozing in a corner. “Russell,” she said, “you know that I can take care of myself perfectly adequately so I’m not speaking out of avarice. Frankly, all I want is to hurt you. For all the years of bullying, of ignoring me, despising me, of making love to me as though it was a particularly onerous penance you had to pay…”
“Oh, shit,” Russell said without opening his eyes or lifting his head. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“In a word, since I have given up hope of anything else, I want revenge,” Mrs. Hazen went on in the eerie flat tone with which she had begun her tirade, her manner that of a woman reading a prepared and carefully rehearsed speech, “revenge for breaking up the family, casting my daughters out, destroying all their confidence in themselves so they’ve become promiscuous, foolish tramps whose only ambition is to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their family. Revenge, finally, for killing my son and then trying to put the blame on me….”
Finally, Hazen lifted his head and glared at her. “You pampered him, you turned him into a fairy, you entertained his fairy friends in our own house, you knew he was shooting heroin and God knows what else and you gave him the money to buy the stuff…”
“And you made him feel worthless. You couldn’t make him into your own glorious captain of industry pious image,” Mrs. Hazen said, the words snapping out of her mouth vindictively now, the sound the breaking of glass, “so you abandoned him and let him feel that nobody cared if he lived or died.”
Strand tried to hunch into himself, make himself invisible, make himself not hear or understand. He looked across at Leslie. She was weeping, her face contorted. Twice in one night, tears, he thought mechanically. It was all he was capable of thinking.
Suddenly Mrs. Hazen’s voice became businesslike. “So. If you make the divorce difficult, if your generosity does not stretch quite far enough to cover your wife, I’ll make sure to have your list of conquests well publicized—all those foolish Mrs. Harcourts, the secretaries, the plump little wives of our friends whom you so kindly helped in business and politics, the fluffy actresses who comforted you and helped you forget the frigid embrace of your wife and whose names would make such interesting reading in the newspaper columns.”
“You’re a witch,” Hazen whispered.
“If I am, you made me one. I don’t forgive you for that, either. Once more back to the shopping list,” Mrs. Hazen said, almost gaily. “You can keep the house in New York. It’s a vault and I always hated it, anyway, from the first day, it was haunted by the saintly ghost of your beloved father. But I get the house in the Hamptons, with everything in it.”
“I was brought up in that house,” Hazen said.
“I will do my best to forget that fact when I move into it and try to make a life in it once more for my daughters,” said Mrs. Hazen. “And I hope it will not be too much trouble for you, Mr. and Mrs. Strand, and your brood, to which my husband seems rather curiously attached, to find ample time to remove yourselves and your belongings before my arrival. I hope your taste of a more gracious style of living has not spoiled you for the modest appointments to which you must now return. I like to choose my own parasites as guests, whose tastes and habits are compatible with mine. I’m not fond of guitar players, lady athletes, young women who live openly with men without the formality of marriage, nor am I fond of amateur painters, piddling schoolteachers dangling their young daughters before a foolish old man or Jews.”
“You can stop there,” Strand said, thinking, Christ, there must be somebody there who sends in a daily bulletin to this weird lady. “You’re an ugly and unpleasant woman and we’re leaving. I don’t care if you scream loud enough to be heard on Long Island. Come on, Leslie. And Linda, I think you must have heard enough, too.”
“I certainly have,” Linda said, as she and Leslie stood up.
Leslie had stopped crying as Mrs. Hazen had gone on about the family and Strand could see she was furious. But he wasn’t prepared, as she turned around, for her slapping Mrs. Hazen as hard as she could, squarely across the face.
“Leslie!” Strand cried. “That’s enough.”
Mrs. Hazen sat without moving or even putting her hand up to her face, as though she had expected the blow and welcomed it.
“Russell,” said Strand, “if you want my advice I’d suggest that you take up your wife’s kind offer to commit suicide.”
“You will not be let off, you two,” Mrs. Hazen said quietly. “He will destroy you with his goodwill. You will slip once and he will disapprove of you and cast you and your hopes and schemes out without a backward glance. Remember my words, you silly, grasping little people, your holiday will soon be over.” She was stretching her glass toward Hazen, saying “I do think I’d like some more wine, dear,” as Strand, with the women on either side of him, started out toward the door through the hushed room full of diners.
It was a long, long walk.