NATURALLY STRAND THOUGHT, AS he listened to the doctor, who was talking to them in his brisk, best-man-in-the-business manner, naturally it was worse than it looked. It was a period when things were worse than they looked.
“The bone’s pretty well smashed and the left septum is blocked,” the doctor said to Leslie and Strand in the elegant Park Avenue office into which he had called them after he had looked at the X rays and completed his examination of Caroline, whom he had left with an assistant in another room where the assistant was putting on another bandage and drawing samples of blood. “I’m afraid that it will mean an operation,” the doctor said. He didn’t look afraid, at all. The English language, Strand thought, with all its polite ambiguities. “We’ll have to wait a few days until the swelling goes down. I’ll reserve the operating room. That is, if you agree.”
“Of course,” Leslie said.
Strand nodded.
“She’ll only have to stay overnight,” the doctor said. “There’s really nothing to worry about, Mrs. Strand.”
“Mr. Hazen tells me she’s in the best possible hands,” Leslie said.
“Good old Russell.” Dr. Laird smiled at this reported vote of confidence. “In the meanwhile, I advise putting the young lady to bed and keeping her quiet. She’s too brave for her own good. Will you stay in New York or do you plan to go out to Russell’s place on the Island?”
“We’ll be in New York,” Leslie said quickly.
“Good. The less she moves around the better.” He stood up to show that the interview was over. The best man in the business had no time for idle talk. “I’ll call you after I make the arrangements at Lenox Hill Hospital, that’s just around the corner from here on 77th Street, and tell you when to bring the young lady in.” He accompanied them into the waiting room, where Linda and Hazen were sitting, Linda thumbing nervously through a magazine and Hazen staring, his face set, out the window.
“Russell,” the doctor said, “might I have a word with you in my office?”
Hazen got up and followed him out of the room. Linda put down her magazine and looked at Strand inquiringly.
“There’re some complications,” Strand said. “He’s got to operate.”
“Oh, dear,” Linda said. “The poor girl.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, the doctor told us,” said Leslie. “I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Has he told Caroline?”
“Not yet.”
“I hope she won’t be too upset.”
“When she learns that if she wants to breathe normally from now on she has to have an operation, I’m sure she’ll be reasonable,” Leslie said calmly.
They were still waiting for Caroline when Hazen came out. There was no indication from his expression of what private communication the doctor had had with him. “Is there anything Dr. Laird told you that he didn’t tell us?” Strand asked.
“Nothing important,” Hazen said. “He hasn’t got time to lie. No—all he said was that in a case like this with young girls, when he has to operate anyway, there’s always a chance that at the same time, if the patient wants it, he can easily do a little cosmetic job.”
“What does that mean?” Strand asked suspiciously.
“Make the nose more esthetically pleasing to the eye is the expression he used. He does a lot of plastic surgery and from what I hear he has a satisfied clientele.”
“Why didn’t he tell us that?” Strand asked.
“Sometimes, he said, parents are apt to get angry at the suggestion. Their vanity is touched. He’d rather that you get angry at me than at him.”
Strand glanced at Leslie. She was looking at Linda. Linda was nodding her head vigorously.
“Of course,” Hazen said, “you’d have to see what Caroline wants.”
“I know what Caroline wants,” Leslie said. “She’d be delighted.”
“How do you know that?” Strand asked, taken aback.
“We discussed it, long before we went to France,” Leslie said, sounding defiant. “Way back, when Eleanor talked about it.”
“Why didn’t you say something to me then?” Strand demanded.
“I was waiting for the right moment,” Leslie said.
“And you think this is the right moment?” Strand tried to keep his voice from rising.
“Providential,” Leslie said calmly. “Maybe we ought to give a vote of thanks to that boy George for the way he drives.”
“I think it’s nonsense.” Strand knew he didn’t sound convincing.
“Allen,” Linda said, “please don’t be medieval.”
“Well, there’s one sure thing,” Strand said, although he knew he was beaten. “I’m going to talk to the young lady myself.”
“Oh, Allen,” Leslie said impatiently, “don’t make a drama out of it. They do it a million times a year.”
“Not in my family, they don’t.” He turned toward the door to one of the inner offices as Caroline came out with the assistant who had been taking care of her. She had a new rakish bandage tilted over her nose and bad eye.
“How do you feel, baby?” Strand asked.
“I’m breathing my last,” Caroline said.
“Don’t be flip. We’re taking you home. Come on.” Strand held the door open and Caroline, holding her mother’s arm, went out with Linda. Hazen held back a little, as though reflecting. “You coming?” Strand asked.
“Yes, yes, of course.” Hazen seemed flustered.
“Is there something else the doctor told you?” Strand felt that he was surrounded by conspirators.
“No, nothing,” Hazen said. “I’ll tell you some other time.”
What a day, what a goddamn day, Strand thought as he and Hazen followed the others to the waiting car. Millions of people are starving to death and killing each other all over the world and we’re worrying about whether a girl’s nose should be a quarter of an inch shorter.
The apartment was a mess in the following days. Leslie had started packing immediately for the move to Dunberry and the place was a confusion of barrels and crates and excelsior to protect the dishes and pictures and there were long discussions between Leslie and Caroline, who refused to go out while she still had bandages all over her face, about what to throw out and what to take along. They had had the apartment for twenty-five years and Strand was aghast at the amount of junk they had piled up. Leslie refused to let him help at all because she didn’t want him to overexert himself and he couldn’t find anything in the confusion. New York was suffering a heat wave, there was no word from Eleanor, and Jimmy was no help at all, appearing briefly at odd hours, monopolizing the telephone when he was home and often not sleeping there but merely rushing in early in the morning to shave and dress for work. Strand was annoyed at what he privately called the boy’s distasteful habits, but, heeding the doctor’s advice about not getting excited, said nothing about it. He found himself wandering around the streets of New York, reading the newspapers over too many cups of coffee in cafeterias, feeling lonely and at a loss and useless. He had called Dr. Laird’s office to find out what the operation on Caroline’s nose would cost. He had not been able to get hold of the doctor himself, but had been told by the doctor’s secretary, who sounded as though she had been interrupted in the middle of an operation herself, that the matter had already been taken care of. He had called Hazen’s office to protest, but Mr. Hazen, he was told, was out of town and could not be reached.
He saw a great many movies, sitting alone in the cool darkness to escape the heat of the streets, and enjoyed none of them. There was one asset in being in New York in August. It made the prospect of moving away from it pleasurable. If he had been twenty years younger, he told himself, he would have gone to the outskirts of the city and hitched a ride on the first car that picked him up and gone anywhere the road would take him.
One afternoon he found himself on the street where Judith Quinlan lived. He nearly went into the hallway of the building and pushed the button of her apartment. Some of the movies he had seen had been pornographic in the extreme, in the new style, and to add to his general discomfort he was subject these days to wild erotic reveries. With his hand poised above the knob on the outside door he pulled back. He imagined headlines: SCHOOLTEACHER FOUND DEAD IN MISTRESS’S BED. He had not lived the life he had led to come to that end. He let his hand drop and walked into the park and sat on a bench and watched the pigeons, who did not seem to mind the heat.
The day before the operation was scheduled Jimmy moved out of the apartment. He scribbled an address. Care of Langman on East 53rd Street. It was convenient, Jimmy said, near the Solomon office. Jimmy did not say whether it was a Miss Langman or a Mrs. Langman or a Mr. Langman and both Leslie and Strand were too embarrassed to ask. Jimmy said it was about time they got rid of the old apartment. It was like carrying 1890 on your back to live there, he said. Strand remembered all the joys, all the sorrows he had lived through in the capacious rambling rooms—the cries of children, the music of the piano, the quiet afternoons poring over books, the smell of cooking—and had told Jimmy to shut up.
He and Leslie took Caroline to the hospital in a taxi on a rainy afternoon. Caroline was as merry as if she were going to a dance. Strand wondered if he would recognize her when the operation was over. He had not been consulted by the best-man-in-the-business about what kind of nose she would finally come out with. Roman, upturned, scooped, like Garbo’s, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, like the nose of the Duchess of Alba, Mrs. Harcourt?
What would she be like? Your face molded your character, no matter what anyone said. He loved her as she was and believed she was beautiful and knew she loved him. Had she not given up her passion for tennis as a childish offering on some mystical altar to trade for his life? Would she, in her new incarnation, ever offer anything for him again?
Leslie sat sedately on the other side of their daughter in the sweltering taxi, occasionally patting the girl’s hand reassuringly. Had he lived for twenty-five years with a woman who had no imagination at all? He wished Eleanor had been there. She would have said something matter-of-fact and sharp and good for his soul. He regarded her absence as a betrayal. Love fled all other responsibilities. He would have one or two things to say to her when she finally showed up. He cursed the day he had gone into the ocean all by himself. Now, he thought self-pityingly, he was on the sidelines of his own life.
They left Caroline in the hospital bed where she would spend the night before being wheeled into the operating room in the morning. Caroline had not hidden her desire to get him out of the room. “You’ve put on your long face, Daddy,” she had said. “Why don’t you and Mummy go out and have a nice dinner and go to a concert? You make me feel guilty standing there looking as though the sirens were blowing and you were leaving me alone in an air raid.”
The apartment, with books strewn around on the floors and the carpets rolled up and light spots on the walls where pictures had hung for so many years, did not look like home anymore. His voice and Leslie’s as they discussed whether they should have dinner in or go out rang hollowly in the stripped rooms. For once, Strand missed the sound of Jimmy’s guitar. It was hard to forgive his son’s lighthearted and callous farewell. The young, he thought bitterly, spurned possessions, not understanding how much love can accumulate in a battered piano, a chipped vase, a scarred desk, a lamp which had shed light on a quarter century of books.
The family was finished. Now it would be a telephone call, a scribbled note, from Georgia, Arizona, from an address on East 53rd Street. Children grew and departed. It was the law of life, or at least of the times, but like everything else in the hurried century, it all flashed past in a dizzyingly accelerated tempo. It had happened so quickly. A matter of weeks. A man had burst in, his head bloodied, one evening and all orbits had been tilted. He knew it was unjust to blame Hazen but found it hard to be fair.
Fretfully, Strand turned on the radio. The evening news was on. The news was bad, a report from chaos. He remembered a line from a Saroyan play—“No foundation. All the way down the line.” He turned off the radio and switched on the television set. He heard the sound of canned laughter and switched the machine off before the image came on the wavering screen.
He wandered around the apartment, his own ghost. He would have liked to look at the photograph album in which they kept the family snapshots: he and Leslie on their wedding day, Caroline in a baby carriage, Eleanor in cap and gown, her newly won degree in her hand, Jimmy on a bicycle. But the album had been packed away.
Suddenly, the apartment was intolerable to him. He went into the kitchen, where Leslie was opening cans. “Let’s go out for dinner,” he said. “I want to see other people tonight.”
Leslie looked at him strangely for a moment, then put down the can opener she had in her hand. “Of course,” she said softly. “Can you wait till I wash my hair?”
“I’m not hungry,” he said. “I can wait.” Whenever Leslie was troubled, she washed her hair. Her serenity, he realized, was a mask that she had put on for his sake. But he hated the sound of her hair dryer. It was like the sound of ominous engines he heard in the background of his dreams. “I’ll wait for you at O’Connor’s.” O’Connor’s was the bar on the corner of their street. He only went into it two or three times a year, when he had unpleasant news to break at home and wanted to postpone the moment.
Leslie came over to him and kissed his cheek. “Don’t be melancholy, please, darling,” she said.
But all he said was “I could use a drink. And there’s nothing in the house. Jimmy must have had some uproarious parties while we were gone.”
“They couldn’t have been so uproarious,” Leslie said. “We didn’t leave more than half a bottle of Scotch when we left for Europe.”
“Even so,” Strand said, knowing he was being unreasonable. As he left, he heard the water running in the bathroom. When Leslie met him at O’Connor’s an hour later he still had most of his first Scotch in his glass as he sat by himself at the deserted bar.
They had dinner in a nearby restaurant they had used to like. There were only two other couples in the restaurant and the owner, who knew them, said, “Next August I am shutting down. August is a plague month in New York.”
After the meals they had eaten in France the food seemed tasteless, and Leslie found a long hair in her salad. “This is the last time I’m going to set foot in this restaurant,” Leslie said.
Last, Strand thought, is becoming the most common word in our vocabulary.
When they opened the door to the apartment, the telephone was ringing. When the next war starts, Strand thought, as he hurried to pick it up, it will be announced to me by that nerve-rasping clanging. Disaster, courtesy of A.T. and T. But it was Eleanor. “I’ve been frantic,” Eleanor said. “I’ve been calling all night. Then I called Russell out on the Island thinking you might be there and he told me about Caroline. Where’ve you been? Is she all right?”
“Fine, fine,” Strand said, trying to keep the resentment out of his voice. “Where are you?”
“My apartment. I just got in this evening. I want to come over.”
“What for?” Strand asked, meanly.
“Don’t be angry, please, Daddy. All I’ve done is get married. Can I come over?”
“I’ll ask your mother.” He turned to Leslie. “It’s Eleanor. Do you want to see her tonight?”
“Of course. Ask her if she’s eaten dinner. I can fix her something.”
“We’ll be waiting for you,” Strand said. “But your mother wants to know if you’ve had your dinner. If you haven’t she’ll rustle up something for you here.”
Eleanor laughed. “Good old Mummy. Feed the beasts first and ask questions later. Tell her not to worry, I’ve put on three pounds since the wedding day.” Strand hung up. “She’s eaten,” he said to Leslie.
“Promise me you won’t yell at her,” Leslie said.
“Let her husband yell at her,” Strand said. “I don’t have the energy.” He picked up a magazine and went into the kitchen, which had the last light in the apartment by which you could read, and sat at the table and stared at cartoons that did not seem funny in the harsh glare of the neon fixtures, which Leslie had installed when she found that she needed glasses to sew and read.
“Now,” said Leslie, “from the beginning.”
They were all sitting in the living room, which was mostly in shadow since all but one of the room’s lamps had already been packed. Eleanor had asked about her sister’s morale. “Disturbingly high,” Strand had said glumly, but Leslie had been reassuring.
Now Eleanor sat on the edge of a hard chair, looking younger and more beautiful than ever, Strand thought, at ease, unrepentant. “The beginning, of course,” Eleanor said, “was last summer, not this one, when I clapped eyes on him in somebody’s house in Bridgehampton and decided then and there that there was a man I must have.”
Leslie looked uneasily over at Strand. He knew that his face showed what he thought of a daughter of his talking in terms like that, married or not.
“After a week, he asked me to marry him,” Eleanor went on, a little note of triumph in her voice. “But he told me that sooner or later he was going to get out of New York and go work as a newspaperman in some little town that might be thousands of miles away from the city and he didn’t believe that marriages ever worked if the husband lived in one place and the wife in another and I said, ‘No, thank you, friend,’ and we just—well—we just went on seeing each other. He introduced me to his family and most of them were as nice as could be, but his mother smoldered when she saw me. She was born in Italy and she’s Catholic as they come and she goes to Mass Sundays and holidays and whenever there’s an excuse in between and while it was all right for her darling son to spend an occasional sneaky weekend with a Protestant temptress, the idea of marriage would send her on her knees, holding a candle, to the nearest statue of the Virgin. Can you imagine it? In this day and age?”
Yes, Strand thought, I can imagine it. In this day and age oceans of blood have been shed because of a belief in one god or another. And the blood of children as yet unborn will flow for the same reasons. In that respect the devout mother of Giuseppe Gianelli was more up to date than his daughter.
“The old lady would get over it, Giuseppe said,” Eleanor went on, “and as long as I didn’t have to see her it was okay with me and we went our merry way until”—she stopped and her tone became grave—“until he went down to Georgia and the man said he could come and start in on the paper immediately. He called me from Georgia, I suppose Russell has told you about that part….”
“He told us,” Strand said.
“He said he was taking the job,” Eleanor said, serious now, “and that if I ever wanted to see him again I would have to marry him pronto.” She sighed. “It was seven o’clock in the evening when he called me from Georgia. I told him I had to think about it. He gave me until the next morning. I can’t pretend that I slept well that night. Mummy,” she cried, “I can’t live without him. What would you have done if Daddy had given you an ultimatum like that—and you knew he meant it?”
Leslie leaned over and touched Strand’s hand. “I’d have done exactly what you did, dear,” she said.
“You’d have been a damn fool,” Strand said.
“No, I wouldn’t,” Leslie said softly.
“When I called Giuseppe back in the morning, I told him yes,” Eleanor said, her voice so low that Strand nearly couldn’t make out the words.
“But Las Vegas,” Strand said angrily. “What was the rush?”
“What would you have preferred?” Eleanor got up and paced around the room. “A big wedding with a priest and the relatives singing ‘O Sole Mio’ and the Mama looking dark Italian curses at the whole family? Frankly, if you must know, neither Giuseppe nor I wanted to give ourselves time to change our minds. What difference does it make? Anyway, Las Vegas was fast—instantaneous marriages—and it was fun. Giuseppe won twelve hundred dollars at blackjack. It paid for the ring. And the hotel. Please, Mummy, Daddy, don’t be angry with me. I’m happy and I mean to remain happy. Would you feel better if I stayed in New York and went from one singles bar to another and got my name on the door as Assistant Vice President to the Assistant Vice President of the Overcharge and Complaint Division of the hundred and twentieth biggest computer company in America?”
“Stop raving,” Leslie said crisply. She stood up and put her arms around Eleanor and kissed her on the forehead. “If you’re happy, we’re happy.”
Eleanor looked over her mother’s shoulder at Strand. “Does that go for you, too, Daddy?”
“I suppose so,” Strand said wearily. “Where’s your husband now?”
“In Graham, Georgia,” Eleanor said. “The fastest growing, greatest little old town in the Sun Belt of the U.S. of A., Rotary Club meetings every Tuesday.”
Strand couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying. “Isn’t he coming up here at all?”
“Only under cover of night. He’s a brave man, but not brave enough to face Mama for a year or two. Do I have your blessing?” She broke away from Leslie and stood challengingly in front of him.
“I’m not the Pope. Blessings aren’t in my line.” Strand stood up and embraced her. “But I’ll kiss you.”
She hugged him fiercely. “Don’t you think you ought to offer a toast to the newlyweds now?”
“There’s nothing in the house,” Strand said crossly. “Jimmy drank it all.”
Eleanor laughed and Leslie said, “Oh, Allen.”
“Now,” Eleanor said, as she sat down comfortably, “the night’s still young. Tell me about your holiday.”
“It was glorious,” Strand said, “but I’m sure you two ladies have a lot to talk about. I’ve had a big day and I’m going to bed.”
Eleanor and Jimmy and Linda Roberts were already in the waiting room of the hospital early the next morning when Strand and Leslie arrived. Jimmy was wearing blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater and had some sort of gold ornament hanging on a chain around his neck. His working clothes, Strand thought. But for once, at least, Jimmy looked grave. Caroline had just been wheeled up to the operating room, Eleanor said. She had already been under sedation but had waved sleepily once as she was wheeled past in the hall. Strand tried not to think of what was going on upstairs at the moment. The hospital smell was familiar, comforting, to him. He had been through it and had emerged. He had dreamed a great deal while he had been in the hospital, but had not remembered what the dreams were about, except that they had not been unpleasant. He hoped that in his daughter’s dreams she won races, accepted trophies, danced in the arms of handsome young men.
Leslie had brought along some knitting and the sound of the needles clicked in the silence. She was knitting a sweater for him, he knew. The last time he remembered her knitting was when she sat beside him in the intensive care room. She was strictly a hospital knitter, he thought. The sweater, he hoped, would not be ready to wear until he was ninety.
The first time Leslie had gone to the hospital—to have Eleanor—he had started reading a Raymond Chandler mystery. As a rule he never read mystery stories, but it had been lying on a table in the hallway and he had picked it up. Leslie’s confinement had been short and he had only managed to read a few pages before the doctor had come in to tell him he was the father of a daughter. Later, he hadn’t remembered what was in the pages he had read and then when Leslie had to be rushed to the hospital when Jimmy was being born, he had taken along the same book, out of superstition. He had started the book all over again and again had only gotten through a few pages. He had kept the book in a safe place, to be ready for future births, and had taken it along when Caroline was born. But now, in the confusion of their preparing to move out of the apartment, he didn’t know where the book was. He would have to find it before Eleanor had her first baby. Maybe then he would finally find out who had killed whom.
Hazen came in after they had been waiting almost an hour. He was tanned and healthy looking out of place, Strand thought, in a hospital, although he had a bandage on his right hand. He had jammed it in a car door, he explained. He had also talked to Dr. Laird the day before and Laird had said the operation shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half, at most, and that there was nothing to worry about. Caroline would be ready to go home after twenty-four hours.
Leslie was knitting faster and faster and the clicking was getting on Strand’s nerves. He got up and went out into the corridor and began walking up and down, trying not to look into the open rooms in which people were lying with plastic bags on stands above their beds and tubes in their arms. The laughter of nurses at the end of the corridor offended him.
Hazen came out of the waiting room and paced silently beside him. Hazen cleared his throat, as though to gain Strand’s attention. “Allen,” he said, “this is as good a time as any to tell you. I don’t want to talk in front of the others. First of all, Caroline wasn’t in any automobile accident.”
Strand stopped walking and stared at Hazen. “What’re you talking about?”
“Remember when Laird asked me to come into his office when he got through examining Caroline?”
“Yes. When he told you he could change the shape of Caroline’s nose.”
“That wasn’t all he said. He didn’t just examine Caroline. He quizzed her about what had happened. He told her it couldn’t possibly have happened the way she said it had and that as her doctor he had to know the truth. She told him. The truth was that that boy, George, beat her up.”
“What?” Strand’s knees suddenly felt watery.
“They were sitting in a car all right,” Hazen said soberly, “but not on any road. Near the beach. Alone. He tried to undress her and she fought him and he hit her.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Filthy little swine. He’ll never try anything like that again,” Hazen said grimly. “Yesterday I gave him the thrashing of his life.” He raised his bandaged hand. “I dislocated two knuckles. It was well worth it. And I went to his father and told him that if I ever saw his son around the Hamptons again, I’d ruin him. And the miserable old man knows I can do it. What’s more, he’s paying for the hospital and the operation.” Hazen smiled grimly at this triumph of negotiation. Then his face grew serious again. “I’ve been debating with myself whether to tell you or not and finally I came to the conclusion you ought to know.”
“Thank you,” Strand said dully. “Of course.”
“I don’t think you ought to tell anybody else. Especially not Jimmy. Jimmy might think he would have to do something about it and God knows what that might lead to. The matter of young Master George is settled and it’s best to leave it as it is. I’m afraid it was my responsibility. I invited the little shit to my house and he met Caroline there and it was up to me to take the necessary steps and they’ve been taken. I apologize to you and to your whole family.”
“There’s no need for apologies.” Finally, Strand found a chair outside a closed door and sank into it, trembling, feeling waves of helpless fury sweep over him. If the boy had been standing in front of him at that moment he would have flung himself at him and tried to murder him, although he had never fought in his life and he wasn’t strong enough yet to harm a kitten. But even knowing this he felt dishonored and ashamed that the punishment that should have rightly been his prerogative had been taken out of his hands.
“Are you all right?” Hazen asked anxiously, bending over him. “You’re white as a sheet.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Strand said thickly. “Just leave me alone for a minute, please.”
Hazen took a long look at him, then went back into the waiting room. Strand was still sitting there, trying to keep his hands from shaking, when Dr. Laird came striding down the corridor. The doctor stopped when he saw him. “It’s all over, Mr. Strand,” the doctor said. “It came out perfectly. Your daughter will be down any minute now.”
“Thank you,” Strand said, without rising from the chair. “The others are in the waiting room. Please tell them.”
The doctor patted him once on the shoulder, the gesture above and beyond the call of duty of the best-man-in-the-business, and went into the waiting room.
Strand was still there when they wheeled Caroline past him toward her room. He stood up and looked down at her. What he could see of her face which was half covered with bandages looked peaceful and like that of a sleeping and happy child.
He wept without knowing that he was weeping.