HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW long he’d walked because his watch was useless in the dark, when he decided to turn and head back. He had come to no decisions, had just known he wanted to escape the house. Now, alone in the gray vaporous world, the steady movement of his limbs through the soft, engulfing mist had soothed him, hypnotized him into a state where nothing else mattered but the next step, nothing claimed his attention but the changing ghostly shadow of one tree for another as he passed. But as he started to retrace his way in the darkness, he realized he was lost. He had gone aimlessly down lanes, skirted dunes, seen blurred shapes looming to one side or another that he knew must be houses deserted for the winter. He had heard no voices nor seen a bird.
Even in bright sunlight he wouldn’t have been familiar with the countryside. When he had gone for walks it had been along the beach. On the trips into town they had been in a car with someone else driving and he had not learned the geography of the neighborhood. He wasn’t disturbed himself because he was lost but knew that Leslie must be back in the house by now and worried about where he had gone. He quickened his pace, arrived at a dead end with a shuttered house sitting across the driveway and forest all around it.
He took crossroads at random, couldn’t figure out whether he was moving north, south, east or west. Now he was beginning to tire and his face was wet with sweat and mist. He tore off his muffler and stuffed it into a pocket. He had never felt more like a city man. Accustomed to the logical, neat, marked rectangles of the gridwork of Manhattan, he had atrophied the American talent for the wilderness. He walked on the sandy roads, full of holes, on macadam, gravel. He realized that he hadn’t seen a light since he had left Hazen’s house. Twice cars had passed him, one from behind him, lights looming in the fog. The last time the lights had appeared suddenly, from around a curve, and had come right at him and he had saved himself only by throwing himself headlong onto the side of the road. He had pushed himself up, trembling, after the car had disappeared, the red gleam of its taillights suddenly extinguished, as though a curtain had dropped behind them. He had fallen into an icy puddle and he could feel the water freezing on his trousers at the knees and around his ankles.
Finally, convinced that he was going in circles, he stood still. For a moment he heard nothing but his own labored breathing. Then, far away, there was a low rumble. The ocean. Cautiously, moving slowly, stopping every few steps to listen, he walked in the direction of the sea’s steady music. Slowly it grew louder. At last he reached the beach. He sat down for a few moments to rest. There were no lights anywhere and he had to gamble on going either to his left or right. He cursed his lifelong lack of a reliable sense of direction, stood up and struck out to his left, walking along the waterline, where the hiss of waves sliding in and ebbing out guided him. His feet froze as he plodded painfully in the wet sand that sucked at his soaked shoes at every step.
He was just about to turn around and go in the other direction, had decided to give it one hundred more paces then go the other way, when he saw a glimmer of light through the fog high up to his left. He knew there was a path leading over the dunes to the house from the beach, but he couldn’t find it. Now he could feel that his whole body was drenched with sweat and there was an enormous pulse pounding in one temple. He clambered up the side of a giant dune, pulling at the coarse grass to help himself climb, crawling over obstacles on his hands and knees. But the light grew brighter and brighter, dancing in the shifting mist, as though from a ship bobbing on waves. Finally, staggering, he made it to the terrace steps and went up. Through the French doors, now hazed over, he could see shadowy shapes moving within. He tried to open one of the doors, but it was locked. He pounded on the door, shouted. His voice rasped hoarsely in his throat. The shapes behind the glass panes wavered from side to side, but did not approach. They’re playing a foolish children’s game with me, he thought insanely, pretending not to hear. He shouted again, the effort making him feel that he was tearing blood vessels and tendons inside his throat.
The door was thrown open.
Leslie was standing there. “Oh, my God,” she cried.
“Do I look that bad?” Strand said. He tried to smile. Then he began to sneeze. Again and again and again, mixed with a coughing fit, with his eyes streaming, as he bent over, racked by the coughs. Leslie pulled him into the room and slammed the door behind him. Eleanor came running over and pulled at the buttons of his coat to get them open. “He’s soaking wet,” she said.
“I got…I…lost,” Strand said, between sneezes and coughs. “What time is it?”
“After ten,” Leslie said. “We were just about to call the police.”
“I think the doctor would be a better idea.” Eleanor had managed to get the coat off him. Strand saw that it was matted with mud and ice and clumps of grass.
“I’m all ri—” The next sneeze kept him from finishing the word. “I just took a lit—”
“Let’s get him to bed,” Leslie said.
With the two women supporting him by the elbows, needlessly, Strand thought, they went upstairs. Eleanor got a big warm towel from the bathroom and Leslie undressed him, clucking distractedly each time he sneezed. Strand noticed, with interest, that his feet were dead white and were numb and that he had cut his knee and a frozen rivulet of blood ran down his shin from the wound.
When he was naked and Leslie had rubbed him roughly with the towel, he felt the circulation starting to reach his feet, which began to sting. Leslie wrapped him in the towel and put him under the bedcovers like a puppy after a bath. Then the shivering began and he wondered, somehow without concern, if he was in the first throes of pneumonia.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Leslie, who was standing at the side of the bed looking worriedly down at him. “I didn’t realize the fog…” Suddenly he was overpoweringly weary and he closed his eyes. “I think I have to sleep a little now,” he murmured. He opened his eyes and smiled wanly up at Leslie. “I hope somebody got me a compass for Christmas,” he said and fell into a deep sleep.
He slept all through the night, only dimly conscious at moments of the warmth of Leslie’s body next to his. The sleep was so delicious that after eating breakfast in bed he slept most of the next day and night, content to dream, not to think or speak. When he woke up early on the second morning after Christmas, with Leslie breathing softly in her sleep beside him, he got silently out of bed, feeling fresh and rested and hungry. He dressed quickly and went downstairs and had the Ketleys serve him a huge breakfast, which he ate alone in front of the window facing the ocean, which glittered in long blue swells under a wintry sun.
Frightening as the wandering in the dark fog over lost roads had been and even though he could have been killed by the car that had sped around the curve at him, he was glad that it had happened as it had. It had given him a precious breathing spell, had erased the anguish of the confrontation with Caroline, had eased his sense of shame and betrayal. In the clean early morning light, problems were diminished and soluble. What the family had done to him or what Caroline had suggested it had done he now accepted on Caroline’s terms. They had acted, however wrongly, out of love for him and in his heart he embraced them all. It would never be the same again, he swore to himself. His eyes would now be open and they would all be the better for it.
When Caroline came down for breakfast and saw him a wary look came over her face. But he stood and hugged her and kissed her forehead. “Oh, Daddy,” she murmured into his shoulder, “I’m so glad you’re okay. I was so scared. And it was my fault…”
“Nothing is your fault, baby,” he said. “Now sit down and eat your breakfast with me.”
He noted with disapproval that Caroline told Mr. Ketley that she only wanted some black coffee. “Is that all you have usually for breakfast?” Strand asked.
“I’m not hungry today,” Caroline said. “Daddy, there’s something peculiar going on and I don’t know what it is and Mummy won’t tell me. Do you know that Linda and Eleanor left yesterday?”
“No.” He put his cup down slowly. “Where did they go?”
“Linda went to New York.”
“She said something about that. She’s worried about Mr. Hazen.” He took a deep breath. “Do you know where Eleanor went?”
“I’m not sure. She and Mummy had a big argument and they sent me out of the house. Eleanor was getting into the car with Linda when I came back and Mummy looked as though she’d been crying and I heard her say to Eleanor, ‘At least you ought to say good-bye to your father,’ and Eleanor said, ‘I’ve thought it all out and I’ve had enough arguing and I don’t want to have him try to talk me out of it. Just tell him I love him and I’m doing what I have to do.’ Then they drove off. I think she’s going back to Georgia. Is there something wrong about that?”
Strand sighed. “Very wrong,” he said.
“I’m not a baby,” Caroline said. “Don’t you think it’s about time I was told what’s happening with this family?”
He looked at his daughter consideringly. “You’re right,” he said. “It is about time you knew what’s happening with this family. It’s about time we all knew. Eleanor left Georgia because some people who didn’t like what Giuseppe put in the paper bombed their house and threatened to kill Giuseppe and maybe Eleanor, too, if they stayed on.”
“Oh, Christ,” Caroline said. He had never heard her say Christ before. “And Giuseppe wouldn’t leave?”
“The last Eleanor knew he was sitting up at night in the dark with a shotgun in his lap.”
Caroline put her hand to her mouth and began to bite at a nail. She hadn’t done that since they had broken her of the habit when she was seven. “She’s right to go back,” Caroline said. “Her place is with her husband. She shouldn’t ever have left.”
“How will you feel if something happens to your sister?” He tried to keep his voice from sounding harsh.
“I’ll feel terrible,” Caroline said. “But I’ll still think she was right to go back. Daddy…” She reached out and touched his hand. “This is an unlucky house. We ought to get away from it. Right away. Before it’s too late. Look what’s happened here—you nearly got drowned and you nearly died. I got hurt in the car accident with George…”
“Honey,” Strand said, “you’re lying. It wasn’t any accident. He hit you and broke your nose. You were lucky you weren’t raped.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I have my secrets, too. Like everybody else, honey. Actually, you didn’t fool the doctor.”
“I had to tell him. I asked him not to tell you. I was afraid of what you’d do.”
“The doctor told Mr. Hazen. Mr. Hazen beat your handsome young friend to a pulp.”
“He deserved it. He said I was a tease. Only what he said was worse. These days, you go out once with a boy, if you don’t put out, they think they can call you anything they want. Daddy…” She appealed to him. “Nobody teaches you the rules.”
“Well, you know them now.”
“I sure do. Does Mummy know, too?”
“No. But she will. Because I’ll tell her.”
“All right.” She sounded hostile. “But tell me something. When you started going out with her, what did you do?”
Strand laughed. “Fair question, honey,” he said. “I tried.”
“What did she do?”
“She said stop. And I stopped.”
“Times’ve changed,” Caroline said sadly. “Nowadays boys like George with their cars and fancy clubs and rich fathers think they have the droit du seigneur or something. A sandwich, a drink, a movie and then if you don’t open your legs you’re a peasant. If I’d had my tennis racquet with me, Mr. Hazen wouldn’t’ve had to beat him up. At least Professor Swanson begged. Daddy, you don’t know how hard it is to know what to do. I know you didn’t like that boy. Why didn’t you say something?”
“There’re things that one generation learns that another generation never dreams of,” Strand said. “All charts get quickly outdated. Consider yourself lucky. You learned your lesson and it only cost you a broken nose. Be more careful with Romero. His blood is a lot hotter than your friend George’s.”
“Daddy,” Caroline said levelly, “you disappoint me. You’re a racist.”
“On that happy judgment I must leave you.” Strand stood up. “I have to go have a word with your mother,” he said. He left Caroline holding back tears, pouring herself a second cup of black coffee.
Leslie was sitting in a robe at the window seat, staring out at the ocean, when Strand came into the room. He went over and kissed the top of her head gently. She looked up and smiled. “I guess you’re feeling better,” she said.
“Much better,” he said. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “I just had breakfast with Caroline. She told me about Eleanor.”
Leslie nodded. “I did everything I could to stop her. I asked her to talk to you. She wouldn’t.”
“I know. Caroline knew that much. Did Eleanor speak to Giuseppe?”
Leslie shook her head. “She said she didn’t want to argue with him, either. What’re we going to do, Allen?”
“I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to call Giuseppe.” He went over to the telephone next to the bed. There was a small console with buttons on it to call other rooms in the house and outside lines. He pressed an outside-line button and dialed Giuseppe’s number. By now he had memorized it. When Giuseppe said “Hello,” Strand spoke quickly. “Giuseppe,” he said quickly, “this is important. Don’t hang up until you hear what I have to say. Eleanor’s on her way back to Georgia.”
There was silence on the other end for a moment. Then Giuseppe said, “That’s good news.” His voice was toneless, exhausted.
“Has anything happened there?”
“Not yet.”
“Giuseppe,” Strand said, “I want you to tell her that she can’t stay, she’s got to turn around and come right back.”
“You want,” Giuseppe said. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“Listen, Giuseppe, she got her job back, she’s due to start on January second, she’s been promoted, she has a big career ahead of her in a job she likes, in a city she loves. You can’t let her throw it all away. Giuseppe, I can’t let you kill my daughter.”
“That’s not how I think of her, Allen,” Giuseppe said. “I think of her as my wife. It’s about time she realized that. And the wife’s place is at the husband’s side. It’s an old Italian custom. Maybe you’ve forgotten that I’m Italian.”
“Being Italian doesn’t mean that you have to be a martyr. And for what? A miserable little country newspaper that even Eleanor says a parcel of high school kids could do a better job on than you two.”
“I’m sorry that she thinks we’re so inept,” Giuseppe said. “But that doesn’t change anything. When I married her I didn’t promise I was going to win the Pulitzer prize for journalism. All I did was promise to love and cherish her, forsaking all others until death did us part. I’m happy to see that she remembers she signed the same contract.”
“You’re acting like a maniac,” Strand said. “I’m afraid I have to hang up now, Mr. Strand,” Giuseppe said politely. “I have to clean up the house and get some flowers and some stuff for dinner and a bottle of wine to celebrate the reunion. Thanks for letting me know she’s on her way home.”
“Giuseppe…” Strand said helplessly, but Giuseppe had already hung up.
Leslie was still sitting in the window seat, staring once more out at the ocean, her face emotionless. “Did you know there was a chance she was going back?” she asked.
“Yes. She told me she was going to try to forget him. If she couldn’t, she said, she would go back. She didn’t try hard enough, I guess.”
“Sex,” Leslie said tonelessly. “I suppose she’d call it passion. Love. What damage those big words can do. I did everything I could to try to stop her. I asked her how she could go off like that knowing that every time the telephone rang from now on we’d be terrified it would be a message that she was dead.”
“What did she say to that?”
“That she knew the feeling—she’d had it ever since she left Georgia. That we’d have to learn to live with it. I tried to keep it from Caroline, but I’m sure she guessed. How much does she know?”
“Just about everything. I felt I had to tell her. There’ve been too many secrets up to now.”
“It’s natural to try to protect the young.”
“And the old,” Strand said. “Christmas, before I got lost in the fog, I had a talk with Caroline. She said there was a conspiracy in the family to protect me, too, keep things from me. You were in it, too, she said.”
“So I was,” Leslie said calmly.
“She intimated that there were things you hid from me.”
“What things?”
“That you put Caroline on the pill on her sixteenth birthday.”
Surprisingly, Leslie laughed. “How dreadful,” she said. “In this day and age.”
“But you didn’t tell me.”
“I guess I didn’t think you were in this day and age,” Leslie said. “Are you so anxious to join your contemporaries, dear?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see…” Leslie squinted, as though searching the distance for further revelations. “What other sins have I committed that I’ve hidden from you to keep you happy in your illusions? Oh, yes. Of course. I arranged for Eleanor to have an abortion when she was seventeen. Would you like the details?”
“Not really.”
“Wise old husband and father,” Leslie said. “I also knew that she had a lover twice her age, a married man with three children, when she was in college. And she didn’t work to save the money for that car she drove in. He gave it to her. Transportation, too, can be a sin, can’t it? And while we’re at it, I conspired with our dear Jimmy to hide it from you that he was stoned out of his mind on marijuana almost every night and rather than have him leave our apartment once and for all I let him keep the stuff under my brassieres in my bureau. Would you have been happier if I had let him wander the streets?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“More news from the front,” Leslie said. “Russell called yesterday with some happy information. He asked me not to tell you. But you’ll probably hear soon enough and it’s better if you find out from me than if you read it in the papers. If he can’t shut her up somehow—and soon—his wife is going to name me, among quite a few other ladies, as a correspondent in her action for divorce.”
“That bitch.”
“She says she has proof. Conroy swears he saw me go into Russell’s apartment one day when I was in New York for my weekly lessons. He says I stayed two hours.”
“Russell said he’d seen you. I wondered why you didn’t tell me.” Strand spoke calmly, waiting for the explanation.
“They’re both right. I went to his apartment and Russell did see me and the lunch took two hours. The reason I went was that I was worried about you. I don’t think you can stand another year of living in the same house with all those boys and I asked Russell if he could persuade Babcock to let us live off the campus by ourselves. I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t want you to think I was fighting your battles for you. Do you think I’m lying?”
“You’re not in the habit of lying.”
“Thank you,” Leslie said. “But Conroy wasn’t wrong by much. It was the first time I’d been alone with Russell and suddenly I remembered certain dreams I’d had about him and I realized that I thought about him a great deal of the time and that I wanted him.” She spoke flatly, as though going through a speech she had memorized. “And I’m still enough of a woman to know when a man wants me. And I knew Russell wanted me. But he didn’t say anything and neither did I and we ate our lunch and he said he’d talk to Babcock and I went back across town for my three o’clock lesson. Are you disgusted with me?”
“Of course not,” Strand said gently. “If you must know, I’ve come closer than that. Considerably closer. If a certain lady had been at home when I telephoned her from Grand Central Station…” He left the sentence unfinished. “Secret sinners all,” Leslie said. “It’s about time we unburdened ourselves. Our imperfections are the bonds that hold us together. We might as well recognize them. While we’re at it,” Leslie said, intoning, rocking gently back and forth, like a child crooning to itself, with the oceanic sunlight streaming through the window shaking her long blond hair glitter, “did you know about Caroline’s biology teacher?”
“I got a letter from the biology teacher’s wife.”
“I heard from a more accurate source. Caroline. She told me she was crazy about him but he was so awful in bed she dropped him. Girl talk. The sexes mingle, but they’re short on communication. Do you love Caroline—or me—or Eleanor—any the less for all this?”
“No,” he said. “Maybe I’ll love you in a different way. But no less.”
“While on the subject of sex,” Leslie went on, “there’s Nellie Solomon. Did you know she’s having an affair with Jimmy?”
“Who told you?” For the first time since he had come into the room Strand was shocked. “She did.”
“I had lunch with Solomon. He didn’t say anything about it.”
“For a very good reason,” Leslie said. “He doesn’t know. Yet. But he will soon. She’s going to follow Jimmy to California. They’re going to get married. That’s why she told me the whole story. I guess she wanted my blessing. If she did I’m afraid she’s in for a disappointment.”
“When did she tell you all this?”
“When I was staying with Linda, right before we left for Paris. I tried to get hold of Jimmy, but he wasn’t in town.”
“What about that dreadful Dyer woman?”
“Oh, you know about her, too?” Leslie wrinkled her nose in distaste.
“I met her.”
“Jimmy seems to be able to handle them both.” Leslie smiled ironically. “Do you think we ought to be proud?”
“I think he’s acting disgracefully all around.”
“He is. And in the long run he’ll suffer for it. But in a case like this, a young boy and a woman maybe fifteen years older than he, you have to put most of the blame on her.”
“She’s not a member of my family.”
“She will be. Unless they come to their senses before it’s too late. Oh, dearest, dearest Allen, please don’t take it so hard. They’re grown-up people, our children, and they have to lead their own lives.”
“They’re doing it damn badly.”
“Forget them for a few years. Let’s concentrate on leading our own lives—well.” She stood up and put her arms around him and kissed him. “As long as I know you’re all right, I can be happy, no matter what else happens. If we make their lives miserable with our disapproval, we’ll be miserable too and they’ll fly from us. Permanently. Let’s be gentle with them. And most of all, let’s be gentle with ourselves. Let’s hold our peace and wait for them to come back. As Eleanor said, we’ll have to learn to live with it. Whatever it is. Now I think the confessional box is closed for the day and it’s time for breakfast. Will you join me in a second cup of coffee?”
He kissed her, then followed her downstairs, a wiser although not necessarily a happier man than he had been a few minutes before when he had climbed the same stairs.
It was snowing the next morning. Strand was sitting in the living room looking out over the dunes as the snow drifted down, powdering the spikes of grass, drifting into the gray sea. It was nearly noon and he was alone. Leslie had gone into the village with Mr. Ketley in the pickup truck to do some shopping. Caroline had come down late for her black coffee and had gone back to her room saying that she had some letters to write. There was a slight hum of machinery off in the servants’ wing which meant that Mrs. Ketley was working there. Strand had a book in his hands but he allowed himself to be lulled by the slow rhythm of the falling snow outside the window. The front doorbell rang and he knew Mrs. Ketley couldn’t hear it over the noise in the laundry room, so he heaved himself to his feet and went to the door. He opened it and Romero was standing there. A taxi from the village stood in the driveway, its motor going.
Romero was dressed in a bright green oversized parka, faded jeans and a red wool ski cap and pointed scuffed boots. He had started to grow a moustache, a thin black line over his lip that made him look like a child made up for Halloween. At Dunberry he had always dressed carefully in his Brooks Brothers clothes.
“Romero,” Strand said, “what are you doing here?” He knew there was no welcome in his voice.
“I told Caroline I would come,” Romero said, unsmiling. “Is she here?”
“She’s upstairs. I’ll call her. Come in.” Strand held the door open.
“Will you tell her I’m waiting for her?”
“Come in and get warm.”
“I’m warm enough. I’d rather not come in. I’ll wait here.”
“I’d rather you didn’t see her, Romero,” Strand said.
“She invited me.”
“I still would prefer that you didn’t see her.”
Romero put his head back and shouted, loudly, “Caroline! Caroline!”
Strand closed the door. He heard Romero still shouting over and over again, “Caroline!” Strand went slowly up the stairs and knocked on Caroline’s door. It opened immediately. Caroline had her coat on and a scarf tied around her head.
“Please, Caroline,” Strand said, “stay where you are.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.” Caroline brushed past him and ran swiftly down the stairs. From an upstairs window in the hallway Strand looked down. Romero was holding the door of the taxi open and Caroline was getting in. Romero followed her. The door slammed shut and the taxi drove off, making wet tire marks in the new snow.
Strand went downstairs and sat down again in front of the window that gave onto the dunes and the sea and watched the snow falling from the gray skies into the gray Atlantic. He remembered what Caroline had said over breakfast the day before. “This is an unlucky house. We ought to get away before it’s too late.”
When Leslie got back he told her about Romero. Her face was pale and strained. She was having her period, always a painful time for her. “Did she take a bag with her?” Leslie asked.
“No.”
“What time will she be back?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Do you know where they’ve gone?”
“No.”
“It’s not much of a day for sightseeing,” she said. “I’m sorry, Allen, do you mind having lunch by yourself? I’ve got to go up and lie down.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Shoot Romero. Forgive me.”
He watched her slowly mount the stairs, gripping the banister.
It was already dark, although it was just past four o’clock, when he heard the car drive up. He went to the door and threw it open. The snow was coming down more thickly than ever. He saw the taxi door swing open and Romero get out. Then Caroline jumped out and ran through the snow toward the door. She pushed past Strand without saying anything, her head bent so that he couldn’t see her face, and ran up the stairs. Romero stood near the taxi looking at Strand. He started to get back into the cab, then stopped, slowly closed the door and came toward Strand.
“I delivered her safely, Mr. Strand,” he said. “In case you were worried.” His tone was polite, but his dark eyes were sardonic under the bright red wool ski cap.
“I wasn’t worried.”
“You should have been,” Romero said. “She wanted to go back to Waterbury with me. Tonight. I hope you’re happy that I said no.”
“I’m very happy.”
“I don’t take charity from people like you,” Romero said. “Any kind of charity. And I don’t hire myself out to be a stud to flighty little rich white girls.”
Strand laughed mirthlessly. “Rich,” he said. “There’s a description of the Strand family.”
“From where I stand,” Romero said, “that’s exactly the word. I took one look at this house this morning and I decided I wouldn’t touch anybody who even spent one night of her life in a house like this. You’ve got a problem on your hands with that little girl of yours, but it ain’t my problem. I won’t bother you anymore. If you ever hear of me again it will be because my name’s in the papers.” He started to turn away.
“Romero,” Strand said, “you’re a lost soul.”
“I was born a lost soul,” Romero said, stopping. “At least I didn’t go out and lose mine on purpose. I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Strand—I like you. Only we got nothing to say to each other that makes any sense anymore. Not one word. You better go in now. I wouldn’t want you to stand out here and catch a cold on my account, Professor.” He wheeled and jumped into the cab.
Strand watched as the lights of the cab disappeared in the flurries of snow. Then he went in and closed the door behind him, shivering a little and grateful for the warmth of the house. He thought of going up and knocking on Caroline’s door, but decided against it. This was a night, he was sure, that his daughter would want to be alone.
“Is there anything more you’ll be wanting tonight, Mr. Strand?” Mr. Ketley was saying.
“No, thank you.” He was sitting alone in the living room. He had had an early dinner by himself. Before dinner he had gone upstairs to see how Leslie was. She had taken some pills and was drowsing and didn’t want to move. She had asked if Caroline was in yet and then didn’t ask any more questions when Strand had said that Caroline had come in shortly after four o’clock. He had tried Caroline’s door, but it was locked. When he knocked Caroline had called, “Please leave me alone, Daddy.”
He wished he was someplace else. A wave of homesickness overtook him. Not for Dunberry, never for Dunberry. For the apartment in New York, with Leslie’s paintings on the walls, the sound of Leslie’s piano, Jimmy’s guitar, Eleanor’s bright voice as she talked to one of her beaux over the telephone, Caroline murmuring as she tried to memorize a speech from A Winter’s Tale for an English course the next day. He missed sitting in the kitchen watching Leslie prepare a meal, missed the quiet dinners on the kitchen table when the children were out, missed the Friday nights when they were all together, missed Alexander Curtis, in his old combat jacket, glaring at the city from his post next to the front door of the building, missed walking down to Lincoln Center, missed Central Park. What changes a year, not even a year, had made, what uprootings, blows, sad discoveries, defections.
The rumble of the ocean oppressed him, the waves rolling in implacably, eroding beaches, undermining foundations, menacing, changing the contours of the land with each new season. Old harbors silted over, once thriving seaports lay deserted, the cries of gulls over the shifting waters plaintive, melancholy, complaining harshly of hunger and flight and the wreckage of time.
An unlucky house. Tomorrow he would tell Leslie and Caroline to pack, the holiday which had been no holiday was over, it was time to leave.
He tried to read, but the words on the page made no sense to him. He went into the library and tried to choose another book, but none of the titles on the shelves appealed to him. He sat down in front of the television set and turned it on. He pushed button after button at random. As the screen brightened he saw Russell Hazen’s image on the tube and heard a voice saying, “We regret that Senator Blackstone, who was to be on this panel tonight, was unable to leave Washington. We have been fortunate in finding Mr. Russell Hazen, the distinguished lawyer, well known for his expertise on tonight’s subject, international law, who has graciously agreed to take the senator’s place on our program.”
Hazen, impeccably dressed and imperially grave, bowed his head slightly in the direction of the camera. Then the camera switched to a full shot of the table, with three other middle-aged, professorial-looking men and the gray-haired moderator seated in a circle.
Strand wondered if Hazen’s story about having to go to New York to see his wife had been a lie and if the call he had answered in the library had actually been from the broadcasting studio. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to let Strand know that he was abandoning his guests for what Strand might think was a frivolous reason.
Strand listened without interest as the other three participants gave their intelligent, well modulated, reasonable views on foreign affairs and international law. There was nothing in what they said that Strand hadn’t heard a hundred times before. If he hadn’t been waiting to hear what Hazen was going to say he would have gone back into the living room and tried his book again.
But Hazen’s first words made him listen very carefully. “Gentlemen,” Hazen said, his voice strong and confident, “I’m afraid we’re confusing two entirely separate things—foreign affairs and international law. True, whether we like it or not, we do have foreign affairs. But international law has become a fiction. We have international piracy, international assassination, international terrorism, international bribery and bartering, international drama, international anarchy. Our national law perhaps is not quite fiction, but the most generous description of it that we can accept is that it is at best semi-fiction. With our legal codes, under our adversary system, in any important matter, he who can afford to hire the most expensive counsel is the one who walks out of the courtroom with the decision. Of course, there are occasional exceptions which only go to prove the rule.
“When I first went into the practice of law I believed that at least generally, justice was served. Unhappily, after many years of service, I can no longer cling to this belief…”
Good Lord, Strand thought, what does he think he’s doing?
“The corruption of the judiciary, the regional and racial prejudices of the men who sit on the bench have too often been exposed on the front pages of our newspapers to warrant further comment here; the buying of posts through political contributions is a time-honored custom; the suborning of testimony, the coaching of witnesses, the concealment of evidence has even reached into the highest office in the land; the venality of the police has entered our folklore and legal evasion by men in my own profession who have sworn to act as officers of the law is taught in all our universities.”
The moderator of the program, who had been shifting uncomfortably in his chair, tried to break in. “Mr. Hazen…” he said, “I don’t think that…”
Hazen stopped him with a magisterial wave of the hand and went on. “To get back to the international conception of law…on certain small matters, like fishing rights and overflights by airlines, agreements can be reached and observed. But on crucial concerns, such as human rights, the inviolability of the frontiers of sovereign states, the safeguarding or destruction of nations, we have progressed no farther than in the period of warring and nomadic tribes. We have instituted theft and calumny in the United Nations, where on the territory of the United States, in a forum supported in great part by our own taxes, a cabal of all but a few of our so-called and infinitely fickle friends daily mocks and insults us and with impunity does all it can to damage us. I am a so-called expert on international law, but I tell you, gentlemen, there is no such thing and the sooner we realize that and remove ourselves from that parliament of enemies on the bank of the East River, the healthier it will be for us in years to come. Thank you for listening to me and forgive me for not being able to stay for the end of this interesting discussion. I have an appointment elsewhere.”
Hazen nodded, almost genially, to the other men at the table, who were sitting there woodenly, and stood up and left.
Strand reached over and turned the set off. He sat, staring at the blank screen, feeling dazed, as though he had just witnessed a grotesque accident.
Then he stood up and went over to the little desk in front of the window. He had not brought along the copy book in which he made the occasional entries in his journal and so he took some notepaper out of the drawer and began to write.
I am alone downstairs in the East Hampton house and I have just seen a man destroy himself on television. The man is Russell Hazen. In what can only have been a valedictory speech, he was saying good-bye to his career. What his reasons were I do not know, but he has denounced himself, his profession, the rules we all live by and which have enriched him and brought him honor. I can only consider it an aberration, but an aberration for which he will not be forgiven. Since I met him I knew there was a dark side to his character, an all-pervading cynicism about men’s motives and behavior, a melancholy streak that was present even in his lightest moments, but I never suspected that he was tormented enough by it to allow himself to be overwhelmed by it. Where he will go from here it is impossible to foresee…
Suddenly he felt terribly tired and even the effort of writing was too much for him. He put his arm across the sheet of paper and leaned over, his head resting on his wrist, and fell instantly asleep.
He awoke with a start. He had no idea of how long he had slept. There was the sound of a key in a lock and a door opening, then closing. He stood up and went into the living room just as Hazen came in.
Strand stared at him wordlessly as Hazen smiled at him and stamped his feet vigorously to shake the snow off his shoes. He looked the same as always, calm, robust. The expression on Strand’s face made Hazen scowl.
“You look peculiar, Allen,” he said. “Is anything wrong?”
“I saw the television program.”
“Oh, that,” Hazen said lightly. “I thought those dreary men needed a little excitement. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And I got a few things off my chest that I’ve been thinking for a long time.”
“Do you know what you’ve done to yourself tonight, Russell?”
“Don’t worry about me. Nobody takes television seriously, anyway. Let’s not talk about it, please. The whole thing bores me.” He came over to Strand and put an arm around him and gave him a brief hug. “I was hoping you’d still be up. I wanted to talk to someone who was not a lawyer.” He took off his coat and threw it, with his hat, over a chair. “What a miserable night. The drive out in this snow was grim.”
Strand shook his head as if to clear it. He felt confused, uncertain of himself. If Hazen was so debonair about the evening, perhaps he had overreacted to the television program. He watched television so rarely that it was possible he misjudged its capacity to make or break a man. Maybe, he thought, he had been wrong in despairing for his friend. If Hazen had no fears of the consequences of his speech, he wouldn’t disturb him by voicing his own. “You drove yourself?” he asked.
Hazen nodded. “I let the chauffeur go for the night. His fiancée came into town and I did my share for young love. Where’re the ladies?”
“They’re up in their rooms. They’re making an early night of it.”
Hazen looked at him keenly. “They’re all right, aren’t they?”
“Fine,” Strand said.
“Leslie told me about Eleanor’s going back to Georgia. That’s quite a mess down there, isn’t it?”
“Ugly,” Strand said. “Gianelli’s acting like a fool.”
“He’s got guts. I admire that.”
“I admire it a little less than you do,” Strand said dryly.
“I called the police chief down there and told him he had to put a man on to guard their house. I made it plain to him that if anything happened to those kids I’d have his hide.”
“I hope it helps.”
“It better,” Hazen said grimly. “Now, what I need is a drink. How about you?”
“I’ll join you.” Strand went over to the bar and watched while Hazen poured them two large Scotch and sodas. They carried their drinks back to the fireplace and sat facing each other in the big leather wing-back chairs. Hazen took a long gulp of his drink and sighed contentedly. “Man, I needed this,” he said.
“The last time we had a drink like this,” Strand said, “the telephone rang and you were gone like a streak. I hope you’ll at least be able to finish your drink before you have to go again.”
Hazen laughed, a pleasant low rumble. “I’m not going to answer the telephone for a week. I don’t care who’s calling, the Pope, the President of the United States, any one of a dozen assorted lawyers, they’ll have to struggle along without me.”
“I’m glad to hear that. How’re things going?”
“So-so.” Hazen stared into his glass. “Nobody’s declared war—yet.”
“Leslie told me about your wife’s threatening to name her as correspondent.”
“She’s threatening every woman I’ve said hello to for the last thirty years. She’s digging up graves from Boston to Marseilles. I felt I had to tell Leslie that there was a possibility it would leak. But I told her I didn’t want you to know about it.”
“We’re on a new policy here,” Strand said. “Full disclosure.”
“A dangerous experiment.” Hazen peered intently at him. “You don’t believe for one instant…?”
“Not for one instant,” Strand said. Looking at the powerful, fleshily handsome man in his immaculate clothing Strand could understand why any woman, even his wife, would be attracted to him. Nixon’s Secretary of State Kissinger, in one of his less diplomatic messages, had said when asked about his success with women that power was an aphrodisiac. By any standards Hazen was powerful and certainly by comparison with an ailing, obscure, disabused schoolteacher he must be overwhelming. Love finally could withstand only so much temptation. He wondered just what Hazen had said or done or looked that had made Leslie understand that Hazen had wanted her. Better not to know, he thought.
“I’ve kept my wife at bay, at least for the moment. The sticking point is this house,” Hazen said. “I’ve agreed to let her strip me of just about everything else, but I have other plans for the house. We’ll see.” Hazen drank thirstily, emptying his glass. He got up and went to the bar and poured himself a second drink, “Oh, by the way,” he said as he came back, “our man in Paris happened to call and I spoke to him about you. He says he thinks it can be easily arranged for next September, when the new school term starts. They have a big turnover in the faculty, people drifting in and out, like the wandering teachers of the Middle Ages. He’ll be getting in touch with you. Do you think you can stand Dunberry for another five months?”
“I can. I’m not sure Leslie can.”
“Ummm.” Hazen frowned. “I suppose she could go alone. It would just be a few months.”
“That’s a possibility. Don’t worry about it. We’ll work something out.”
“Allen, there’s only one thing wrong, as far as I’m concerned, with you and Leslie,” Hazen said. His tone was earnest and Strand feared what he was going to say.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“When I look at you two, it makes me realize what I’ve missed in my life.” Hazen spoke reflectively, sorrowfully. “The love, spoken, unspoken, intimated, that passes between you. The dependence upon each other, the unwavering support of one for the other. I’ve known many women in my life and I’ve enjoyed most of them and maybe they’ve enjoyed me. I’ve had money, success, a kind of fame, even that very rare thing—occasional gratitude. But I’ve never had anything like that. It’s like a big hole in me that the wind goes howling through—endlessly. If you’re lucky, you’ll both die the same minute. Oh, hell…” He rattled the ice in his glass angrily. “What’s come over me tonight? Talking about dying. It’s the weather. Snow on a seacoast. Maybe people are wise to close down their houses, put the shutters up, when the leaves begin to turn.” He finished his drink, put his glass down deliberately, with a gesture of finality. “I’m tired.” He ran his big hand over his eyes, stood up. “I’m going to treat myself to a long, long sleep. Don’t bother to put out the lights. I don’t want the house to be dark tonight.” He looked around him. “This room could stand a new coat of paint. A lighter color. Well, good night, friend. Sleep well.”
“Good night, Russell. You, too.” Strand watched him walk heavily out of the room. He stumbled a little as he crossed the threshold and Strand thought, He must have had a lot to drink in New York before he started out, it’s lucky a cop didn’t stop him on the road or he’d have spent the night in jail instead of in his big warm bed. Then he climbed the stairs to the room where Leslie was sleeping, breathing gently, her bright hair spread out on the pillow, shining in the light of the bedside lamp. He undressed silently, put out the lamp and slipped into bed beside his wife.
Sometime during the night he awoke because in his sleep there had been a noise of an automobile engine starting up, then dwindling in the distance. He wasn’t sure whether he had heard it or if he had been dreaming. He turned over, put his arm around his wife’s bare shoulders, heard her sigh contentedly. Then he slept.
He awoke early, just as the dawn started to show through the windows. It was still snowing. Leslie slept on. He got out of bed, dressed quickly and started out of the room. He stopped at the door. An envelope was lying on the floor, half under the door. He opened the door silently, picked up the envelope. It was too dark in the hallway to read something that was scrawled on the envelope. He closed the door softly and went downstairs quickly to the living room where the lights still burned and the last ashes were glowing on the hearth. The envelope was a long, fat one and on it was written one word—Allen. He tore it open. Dear Allen, he read in Hazen’s bold, steady script.
By the time you read this I will be dead. I came here last night to say good-bye to you and wish you happiness. Everything has piled up on me—my wife, the investigation in Washington, Conroy threatening me with blackmail. I’ve been subpoenaed to appear before the Committee on January second. I can’t appear without committing perjury or implicating, criminally, old friends and associates of mine. One way or another I would have no shred of reputation left at the end of it. I’ve figured this out carefully and I am taking the only possible way out. When my will is read it will be discovered that I have left the beach house to Caroline. For good and sufficient reason. To pay for its upkeep, she can sell off several acres of the property. There’s plenty of it—forty acres—and it’s very valuable. All my liquid assets I’ve left to my wife, with the proviso that if she contests any clause in the will she will be completely cut off. My daughters have substantial trust funds my father set up for them when they were born and there’s nothing they can do to break the will. I’m a good lawyer and the will is ironclad. All my pictures have long since been donated to museums with the understanding that they were to remain in my possession during my lifetime. The tax laws make death something of a morbid game, a game at which I was expert. As I look back at it now I knew how to play too many games—legal, corporate, legislative, philanthropic—the sleazy, profitable American gamut. One of the things that endeared you and Leslie to me most was that you were not entrants in the competition. It wasn’t that you were above it all. It was as though you didn’t realize its existence. It undoubtedly made you a worse historian, but a better man.
Thoughtlessly and without malice, I involved you and your family in my world. Lonely and bereft of family myself, I believed I could insert myself into a happy family. What I thought was generosity turned out to be disaster. Jimmy learned all too quickly how to succeed. Caroline is on the competitive American merry-go-round, whether she likes it or not. Eleanor and her husband have learned failure and live in fear. I hate to say this, dear Allen, but Leslie’s new career can only push you further apart and uproot you once again. Opportunity is a two-edged weapon. It might have turned out well, but it didn’t. The same might be said in the case of Romero.
The Renoir drawing in your bedroom was bought after I made the arrangement with the government, and I am happy to be able to leave it to you in the will which is now in my partner’s safe.
Strand stopped reading for a moment. The enormity of the document in his hand left him numb and the fact that it had been written so carefully, so neatly, by a man preparing to take his life by his own hand made him marvel at the almost inhuman rigor of his friend’s self-control. Along with reading law, Strand thought, Hazen must have read Plato on the death of Socrates. “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius: will you remember to pay the debt?” A cock for Asclepius. A Renoir for Strand. An antique grace in dying. Famous last words.
Dry-eyed, Strand continued reading.
In the smaller envelope, which is enclosed with this letter, there is ten thousand dollars in five hundred dollar bills to help make the Paris adventure more pleasant for you and Leslie. I suggest you do not mention this to anyone.
You and your family have made this last year of my life an important one for me and I have learned too late what it should have taught me.
Since these will be my last words and we are now, as you said, on a course of full disclosure, I will make one more confession. It sounds absurd for a man my age to say this, but I fell in love with Leslie the very first time I saw her. If ever a woman could make me happy it was she. When it looked as though you were going to die in the hospital in Southampton, I wished for your death. Not consciously or willfully, but for a fraction of a second the thought was there. Then I would not be only the friend of a family I loved, but of the family, not merely the guest at the table, but at its head. The fact that I was happy that you survived could never make me forget that dark and evil moment.
Please burn this letter as soon as you have read it and don’t let anyone but Leslie know that it was written. I have written another note, which I will leave in the car, explaining merely that I have decided to commit suicide. In it I’ve written that I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown and fear for my sanity. I have a gun in my pocket and it will be quickly over. They will find me at the end of some lane beside the car.
Don’t grieve for me. I don’t deserve your grief.
I embrace you all, Russell