The big, immediate thing Geoff and Alan Litt had in common was a passion for chess. “We were Capablanca and Alekhine,” Geoff laughed. “We had a running tournament, the other guys our gallery. I had my claque; Alan had his. But when it came time to bet on a match game, the bettors always favored Alan: he always won.” Of those on-going chess bouts, Geoff’s summing phrase was: “The effort of trying to best Alan at the game kept me from going crazy.” It was necessary, Geoff went on, that he paint as he had such a detailed picture of group life in the camp, and particularly of the chess tournaments with Alan Litt: “As background, Morgie, to what’s happened since.” To make a long story short: in late April, 1945, word got out—leaked by one of the German guards—that U.S. Army contingents under General Patton were closing in; that most of the guards were shoving off, leaving behind only a skeleton force who would turn over the camp to the Allies when they arrived. Which great event took place soon thereafter. “When the troops moved in and we were released—an insanely glorious moment—we were invited to share dinner in their chow line, and of course we did—ate like wolves—but the food was so different from the stuff we were used to that we suffered, and I do mean suffered, gastroenteritis, and had to be treated for a few days in a field hospital. There was a chaplain attached to the hospital who was a great help to us. He spent hours with us, bringing us up to date about the war, campaign sequences and the like, and what was currently happening. The really immense jolt to us was the very recent death of President Roosevelt…. We were such blanks, Morgie, so totally out of it that everything he told us sounded like the spin of some kook fabulist making it all up as he went along…. I can’t imagine what he must have thought of us, hanging on to every word he said, trying to make sense to it, open-mouthed and mystified, like a bunch of idiots listening to Einstein. Weird!…Anyhow, when what was left of our insides got to functioning fairly normally again, we were dismissed from the hospital and taken into Munich, and from Munich, flown to Paris. Got there in time to celebrate V-E Day on May eighth. Then off to Cherbourg, and after a fantastic number of physical and psychological tests, put aboard a pre-war British luxury liner and sent home.”
It was on the voyage to New York that Geoff and Alan Litt emerged in each other’s eyes as persons, distinct from their passion for chess, distinct from the group; on the voyage home that they became friends. Slowly. They talked, at first purely on the basis of compared memories referenced in their planes being hit (“Our similarly experienced colossal sensation of disbelief and fear”) and of parachuting out, landing in the lap of the enemy: their same fate of ending up alive in the same POW camp. Which experience, as a topic, led to other topics which in turn opened doors—“to interiority, mostly, in the beginning, concerning our professions. What it’s like to be a lawyer; what it’s like to be a composer: topics that by contrast told a lot about ourselves. I’d never before thought about myself and my background in such detail and so honestly, and certainly never before out-loud—not even with you, Morgie. That’s the part, as between us, it may be hardest for you to understand.”
“Don’t underestimate me, Geoff. Go on.”
Well, with the voyage ended, the ship tied up to a Hudson River pier, the moment of dispersal at hand, Geoff and Alan had told each other that they at least probably would stay in touch. Here’s my address and telephone number. Here’s mine. Hastily, amid the moment’s great confusions, the slips of paper had been exchanged.
Geoff went to Philadelphia, to a homecoming of enormous (“elegantly displayed”) parental relief and happiness. (Morgan, knowing Geoff’s extremely reserved, patrician parents, thought how perfectly Geoff’s phrase suited his own imaginings of what Geoff’s homecoming must have been like.) But after the first prodigal days had passed, and the first long evenings of long dinners with gatherings of parental friends—“myself more or less on constant parade, the inaccuracies of the situation began to get to me…. Think about it, Morgie…. You came back to Maud, to love and sex and all the animations of a life that works for you. I came back—Jesus, at my age!—the heir-apparent bachelor son, to my father’s house…. Within hours of being back, Dad was laying out his plans for my immediate future, that I’d go with him and Mother to Maine for the month of August, the same as we always had, and get in some good sailing, sleep late, get thoroughly rested, then return to Philly in September and replant myself in his law firm. He didn’t have to say the rest—it was all implicit—that in time I’d meet some suitable girl to marry, et cetera, et cetera…. All of which, if it hadn’t been for the war, I probably would have done. Could have. No problem, I mean, about my being physically and morally able to…. Believe me, Morgie, I don’t fault Dad. The presumptions he made about me were all ones I’d set him up for: there I was in the flesh, having volunteered myself, presented myself, to be seen by him on the basis of his past sense of me—the war behind me, and me home again, right back, in his mind, to the way I’d been in 1940.” Modulations of melancholy and self-disdain had crept into Geoff’s voice and he stopped; and in a second: “Hell, I’ve gotten off track,” he said: “Give me a minute.”
Morgan used the interval of Geoff’s stop to consider Geoff’s words about how he “could” have spent his life: could have gone on fulfilling his father’s ornamental dreams of the ideal life wished for a mortally idealized son. Almost vehemently, he said: “But you wouldn’t have, Geoff! You wouldn’t have gone on the way you were going. God, the last time we were together—”
“When the twins were christened,” Geoff cut in, smiling at the memory.
“Right. That far back you told me you had doubts about the path you were on.”
“But I’m not sure, but for the war, that I’d have had either the sense or the guts to act on my doubts, Morgie, the path, as you call it, that I was on was so exactly the one I’d been brought up to be on. And as for the war—to volunteer to serve in it was a part of the ethic of the path I was on. Don’t get me wrong: I believed then, and still do, in the war’s correctness. I did have the brains to reason that part accurately. I’m only saying that aside from that conviction, volunteering, for me, was as easy as eating cake. It was different for you. For you, it was a real sacrifice, what with being married and having just adopted the twins. I remember we talked about it…. And I’ll tell you here and now something about myself that applied back then that I didn’t tell you at the time: that what I most wanted for myself was a taste of danger. I really desired it. I had the idea that if I put myself in the way of danger, something might happen to me big enough to make me feel it, and terrifically. That’s how emotionally desperate I was. I’d really begun to wonder if I had it in me to feel deeply about anything, let alone any person.”
But there had been all those girls, Morgan reminded him. “You talked about two or three of them with what seemed to me to be a lot of feeling.”
Oh, yes, now that Morgan mentioned it, there had been all those girls. “Going out with girls—courting them,” Geoff elaborated, “was one of the things one was expected to do. So I did it.” And yes, with at least two girls, there had been—“moments.” The moments, though, ones of “sensation only.” Not—“in heart sustainable.” So, when over—“afterwards”—sad. Sad, in that they increased a growing fear, self-accusing, of an inability to love. But that was how it had been then. “A millennium change between then and now. As I am now, Morgie. Because of Alan.”
Ah. Candor, at its greatest, has behind it two possibilities: heat of impending action, or serenity of accomplishment. It was the latter Morgan saw in Geoff’s eyes and heard in his voice—that peace was upon him—and that the only part of his story remaining to be told was just how, and when, vis-à-vis Alan Litt, he had reached the milestone.
They sat for a moment, silent, calm; older. Then Geoff picked up with: “A couple of days before we were due to leave for Maine, I got a letter from Alan. Nothing much in it, just to ‘report in’ was the way he put it, and that if I felt inclined to, he’d like to hear from m
e. Best wishes. As I said, nothing much. But for me it was light at the end of the tunnel.”
Geoff telephoned Alan that evening. The upshot of the call was that they arranged to meet in New York the following Saturday. Not surprisingly, there had been a bit of a scene between Geoff and his father. What about the planned trip to Maine? and so forth. “I oared my way through that set of rapids by promising I’d turn up in Blue Hill no later than the middle of the next week.”
So Geoff had gone to New York. Met Alan as arranged. “When I saw him, it was as if the world had reappeared.”
Morgan had a flashed memory of his old stateroom aboard the Stubbins (lying then at anchor in Aden), of himself sitting on the stateroom’s bunk and of Rupert Wilkins sitting in the stateroom’s only chair, leaning forward in it, telling of the day he had discovered the sea; of how the captain’s face had been emotionally lighted, as Geoff’s was lighted now: as love, whatever its found source, irrefutably causes. “When do I get to meet Alan?” he asked.
“Tonight, for dinner. It’s all arranged. As I told you earlier, I’ve banked on my belief that you wouldn’t have changed. I’ve been sure, I mean, that you’d be glad for me.”
(A parenthesis: Long years later—in the jaw, jaw, jaw 1990s—Morgan, at age nearly eighty, often thinks of that speedy, fully sophisticated verbal exchange between Geoff and himself, valuing it, still, for its simplicity, and proudly, as being in its faith, quite glorious.)
“When I left Alan after that weekend,” Geoff resumed, “I was certain enough of the future of our relationship not to defer telling Dad that I’d made up my mind to leave Philadelphia and set myself up to live and work in New York. You can guess how he took it: as a real scalp. His first approach was to ‘reason’ with me. He had a paternal duty, he said, to point out to me all I’d be giving up. My settled future in his law firm—those were his words—was his biggest argument, and that to relinquish such an advantage would be ludicrous. That approach was easy for me to handle compared to what followed, when he began behaving like a Christian martyr. What I hadn’t anticipated was Mother’s sympathy to the idea of my making the break. It’s one of the few times I’ve known her to take a position in opposition to Dad’s. That did really put him off her and me. You know—twice betrayed—son and spouse. It was an awful time for the three of us. Really awful. No point in rehashing it…. Oh, God, no, Morgie. No, I didn’t tell them about Alan. They’d never accept it, so why try? But I don’t even think about that, particularly right now: there’s too much else in the fire at the moment.”
Which he went on to reveal: first, that he’d had the luck of finding an apartment a block away from Alan’s (Alan’s too small to accommodate the two of them). “Both apartments are downtown, on Grove Street; believe it or not, I’ll be moving into my place on the first of February.” And second: that he had in his pocket three solid job offers, two from good law firms and the third from the Hanover Bank, as a trust officer. (“That’s the offer I’m feeling most inclined to take.”) He expressed surprise at how quickly, after the interviews, the offers had been made. He put it down to his name: “Geoffrey S. Barrows, junior…All those interlocking connections with Dad’s reputation—”
“Hooey,” Morgan cut him off: “Nobody gets hired purely on the basis of his name. You’re a well-qualified lawyer with a spectacular war record. You’re hot stuff.” Then: “Are you hungry? I’m starved. Let’s break for lunch.”
…(“Come at seven,” Geoff said when they parted mid-afternoon.)
A tenant roster was mounted on one wall of the building’s small outer lobby.
LITT-3D
At the side of the name, encircled in brass, a white ceramic bell. Which Morgan pressed. Six or seven seconds slipped by. Then, flighted down through a voice-tube: “Morgan Shurtliff?”
“Here.”
“Grand. Third floor. I’ll buzz you in.”
He had expected Geoff’s voice; Geoff to buzz him in. Instead, Alan. Alan, too, waiting for him when he got off the elevator.
Fully in view at the end of the hall, Geoff, silent, was leaning against an open door, a belly-up black cat in his arms, introduced (in a moment) as—“Cleo.”
But first, Alan’s handshake and entire, slightly squinted look at Morgan, unsurprised: “Geoffrey’s an accurate describer,” he said. “Welcome.”
Curious, and without benefit of any previous description of Alan, Morgan was the one surprised: by his height, relieved at the shoulders by the merest stoop; by his wide, pale, thin-skinned, tightly stretched brow topped by a black crop of untamable hair (how had he ever managed to comb it in compliance with U.S. Air Force standards?); by his eyes, a deeper brown even than Maud’s; by his well-sized, expressive mouth beneath a thin nose (of the kind Trollope often ascribes to rural clerics); by the way all the features of his face actively combined to emphasize his reaction to what was momently being said or done—reactions that immediately showed (for you to come to grips with); by his arrestingly male, dense voice, and, when it (soon) came, by his rampant, unarranged, impious, wonderfully infectious laugh.
Geoff, even as Alan and Morgan walked toward him, remained mute: until they were literally upon him. Then he said—“Morgie”—(almost retrospectively, Morgan felt); then smiled and announced, “This is Cleo” bent and rolled the cat gently out of his arms onto the floor; then rose up, tall.
The three of them then, standing at matched altitudes.
Alan, fastest, was the first to laugh.
In some former year, the common wall between two large rooms had been torn down, creating the huger space of a single five-windowed room. A sixth window had been turned into a door that let onto a fire escape, its long glass panel criss-crossed by a steel trellis. In the daytime, the room would collect the outside light and be brilliant; at this January evening hour, a profusion of lamps lit it: one at the left side of the grand piano’s keyboard, three among chairs grouped around a Victorian couch, two on side tables, one on the top of a large desk, one on a four-legged gaming-board inlaid with alternately colored squares on which warrior chessmen were lined up for impending battle; above a round, oak table (set for dining) a three-armed wall sconce—entry into the room an illumination of the mind and will of its lead occupant—sheets of music—manuscript paper on the piano, the staves covered with the musical symbols of compositions-in-progress, more such sheets on the desks; in cabinets and on wall-shelves, volumes of music scores and books and record albums and framed images of immortal composers and photographs of artist-performers—famed, familiar faces—some dead, some living—singers and dancers and instrumentalists and conductors; on a swatch of black velvet, a plaster cast of a left hand (identified for Morgan by Alan as: “Rachmaninoff’s paw! Look at its flexibility! That span!”); set up in the curve of the piano, two musicstands; on the couch, a metronome residing beside two large-paged, hefty volumes: 32 Sonatas for Pianoforte—Ludwig van Beethoven—Edited by Artur Schnabel (Morgan read).
You’d have to be blind not to see that what the room was—what it represented—was Alan Litt: that what he did in the room, what, in it, he pursued, was work of a nature that kept him breathing: work that was his very life. Not to be interfered with. Not, at least, for long, and then only at granted times. (Did Geoff know this? That he would never be first?)
Over the course of the evening, Morgan learned that Alan’s surname was of Welsh extraction. His parents, dead: killed together instantly, in an automobile accident on the Connecticut Turnpike. At the time the accident occurred, Alan was in California at UCLA studying composition with Arnold Schoenberg. His father had been a doctor; his mother a well-trained violinist (“If she’d wanted to, she could have had a career”). He spoke with obvious pleasure of his sister, Gwen, (his only sibling): “She lives in Princeton, married to an art history professor. They’ve two boys, age four and six. Exhausting, grand little savages.” And with a charming lack of presumption, yet as if he already knew them, he spoke of Maud and Caroline and Julia.
From out of a small kitchen, a good meal had been produced. At dessert-time, Alan brought to the table a terrific array of fruit. “My mania,” he said. Then he told Morgan that in about the seventeenth month of being a POW, his craving for fresh fruit had reached a point where it took over his dream life; that night after night, fruit was all he dreamed about. “Nothing else. Just—fruit. Erotic dreams about Granny Smith apples peaches papayas sloes strawberries blueberries blackberries raspberries gooseberries plums grapes bananas pineapples honeydew melons apricots mangoes oranges cherries kumquats”—ticking off the fleshy names, his inducing laugh taken up by Morgan and Geoff, Geoff’s face criminally alive, and Alan—suddenly—zoom—like a hawk on a rabbit—reaching out and seizing Geoff’s hand, the same way in an instance of lucid zaniness, Morgan seizes Maud’s hand, and the fingers of Alan’s and Geoff’s hands interlacing as he watched, just as his and Maud’s entwined—gripping: not for proof, oh, not for proof: they are way, way, way beyond a need to prove…. In the entire evening, it was the single physical gesture that passed between them. What told Morgan the most about the pitch of their relationship—that is, the magnitude of its ardor—was the tremendous command each had of the other’s attention…. A voracious interest spliced of great animation and great sobriety; sun and shade: blends of engagement reminiscent of himself and Maud in the first heat of their first days as lovers.
Matters of Chance Page 27
