…And now, nearly two years later, as on this rainy morning Morgan approaches the outskirts of Cleveland—what of Geoff and Alan? Simply: they prosper, individually and together. Geoff has settled into his position as trust officer at the Hanover Bank; he likes the regular hours; he finds the work interesting (“solid in its demands”); he says he’s relieved to be out of the “gladiatorial arena” of a law firm. Alan is teaching at Columbia and is “momently” completing the score of a new ballet (commissioned by Martha Graham, premiere scheduled for April ’48). About five months ago they moved into an apartment on Washington Square, but Alan maintains the apartment on Grove Street as his separate workplace…. Ever since Morgan has known him, Geoff has been an avid admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He reads and re-reads Emerson. Soon after he and Alan moved into the Washington Square apartment, he quoted to Morgan Emerson’s line, “Blessed are those who have no talent.” Then he said: “I’m coming to understand what the line means, Morgie. In part, it’s a comment about being a slave; talent the master. Not a kind master. A whipper. I watch Alan under the lash—” He broke off, frowning, and dropped the subject. But recently, when Morgan was in New York and he and Geoff lunched together and Morgan (indirectly) asked: “How are things going?” Geoff had answered: “Very well. Very well. It’s taken me longer than it maybe should have, but I’ve finally, I’m sure finally, made peace with Alan’s talent. I don’t resent it anymore—which I guess is another way of saying I’ve gotten over being jealous of it.” Then he laughed: “Well, you did ask…. You’re transparent, Morgie…. Now I’ll tell you about that matter at the bank we discussed the last time you were in town.”
(A parenthesis: One noon-time about two months ago, Morgan ran into Geoff’s father at a Wall Street luncheon club. “Morgan!” “Mr. Barrows, sir.” Amidst the white-clothed dining tables and the scurrying waiters, the clatter of dishes and the low, reverberating voices of the all-male diners, Mr. Barrows—his mouth close to Morgan’s ear—announced that he was “thoroughly reconciled” to Geoff’s move from Philadelphia to New York, “as is Mrs. Barrows.” Paroxysmally intent, he whispered on, giving his “theory” of the reason behind Geoff’s move to New York [“Geoff’s plight of motivation,” he called it]—the thrust of his argument being that whereas some veterans of the war had suffered physical injuries, others had suffered psychological injuries: “Geoff a case in point.” Disjointedly, he’d continued: “I don’t know if you know that the fellow with whom Geoff is sharing bachelor digs spent time in the same prisoner-of-war camp Geoff was in. We haven’t met the fellow. Have you?…Good to hear that you think well of him. I’ll tell that to Mrs. Barrows…. Fine to see you again, Morgan. Family all well, I hope…. Come often to New York, do you?…How’s your father?”
It seemed an eternity—the length of time it took before Mr. Barrows, still shadow-boxing, finally let him go).
…What of Maud in all of this? When he had returned home after that January 1946 reunion with Geoff, when he’d settled down, drink in hand, and told her about Geoff—about the extraordinary turn his life had taken—she was infinitely more interested in Geoff’s having “found the courage to leave home” (as she matter-of-factly put it), than in what he’d left home for. Then, with that finite, decided look on her face that always presaged an avowal of strong conviction, she stated: “The sexual part of his relationship with Alan Litt is a private matter between them, the same way the sexual part of our relationship is a private matter between us.”
She was a dream, he thought: a lawyer’s dream of what a “peer juror” ought to be. That was his first, fast, admiring estimation of what she’d said, any musing about it, though, interrupted: because she was onto another subject—love—running after it at top speed, cheeks reddened by the chase. Love was what most mattered, she kept saying; love the great gift bestowed at last on Geoff. “That’s what’s important. That’s what counts,” she ended.
…Now, to Morgan/Geoff/Alan, Maud is their center. She became so the minute Alan met her. He took to her like a duck to water, (and like a duck to water, she took to him). They have traits and tastes in common: tendencies of impatience; tremendous faith in their (individual) convictions; both like ritual, form, order; each has an antic sense of humor; both despise pretense; each is easily, emotionally stirred—but watch out! each is tough—impassioned, and fervent, yes—but not sentimental. No slop.
Geoff’s hugest hold on her heart is Caroline, whose godfather he is. It is a role he takes seriously, Caroline, by his own say, being the closest he’ll ever come to having a child of his own. Caroline is thrilled that she is allowed to call him by his name—“Geoffrey”—(sometimes, when she’s in a hurry, just—“Geoff”). (Morgan often thinks that in Caroline’s mind, and in a way important to her, her “Geoffrey” balances out Julia’s “Morgan.”)
…He’s in the city now, stopped by a red light. The light turns yellow, then green, and as he revs the Buick’s engine and glides past a delivery van, he thinks what a blessing it is, superb to anticipate, that Geoff and Alan will be coming to Cleveland for a four-day visit between Christmas and New Year’s. Soon. Very soon they will pass between the griffin-topped pillars that mark the entrance to his and Maud’s and Caroline’s and Julia’s new home and drive down the poplar-treed lane and be at the house: be there; arrived! Imagine the boost: how their presence will counter the residual sorrows of Mrs. Leigh’s death.
He sighed when he entered his office. On his desk were two pyramids of mail, and a third, smaller pile, more possible in look. His secretary, Miss Corey, told him she had done her best to separate the letters she thought looked “legal” from the ones she thought looked “personal.” “That one,” she said, indicating the topmost envelope on the smaller pile, “came a few minutes ago, delivered by a messenger boy.” He glanced at the envelope; saw the distinctively large, looped handwriting. “Thank you, Miss Corey.”
He waited while she crossed the room; waited until she had closed his office door.
Early A.M. November 24, 1947
Dear Mr. Shurtliff,
From out of what you have from time to time told me about your mother-in-law, I developed my own set of affections for her, my own pictures of her. The image of her I hold most dear is the one derived from your description of her sitting in her barn in company with your children, watching the comings and goings of the barn’s resident swallows.
You may recall that when you first told me of her immense liking for swallows, I mentioned John Ruskin’s name—some vague memory I had of some words written by him about those birds. Yesterday (Sunday), I raked through the pages of my Ruskin books and found the passage. Here it is.
“The swallow is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves the morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender domestication of a trout.”
I’ve been thinking steadily of you since last Wednesday (the 12th) when I read in the newspaper of Mrs. Leigh’s death. As I have a hunch you will be back in harness this Monday morning, going on with life, I’m sending you this note to your office. I do hope we can see each other soon. Will you call me? Do take care of yourself.
Yours ever,
Zenobia Sly
He held the letter in his left hand, and with his right hand reached, at once, for the telephone.
8 Running Through a Decade
1948–1957
On school-days, Caroline and Julia had their evening meal at six o’clock (Morgan and Maud later, around eight). They were always finished eating by the time Morgan got home from Cleveland (usually by seven), and they regularly spent what they called “drinking time” with him and Maud. The four of them would be together, usually in the library, in the winter-time always before a log fire. The hour had no set procedure to it, no pattern; it unfolded willy-nilly: a sort of family “show-and-tell” time. One evening, Julia and Caroline reported that Mrs. Sturgess, their fourth-grade teacher, had begun the day by rolling down a big wall map an
d placing the tip of her long wooden pointer on a far-away country called India, where, Mrs. Sturgess told the class: “Yesterday, Sunday, January 30, 1948, a great man died.” Caroline said that the next thing Mrs. Sturgess said was that the man’s name would last in time for ever so long, years and years. Julia, frowning, aiming to be a full and accurate reporter, cut in with: “Mrs. Sturgess said the man had a ‘saintly’ character, that he spent his life in good ways, wanting to.” The next thing Mrs. Sturgess did was to hold up a newspaper picture of the man and then the picture was passed around, desk-to-desk, so that they could all have a closer look at it.
Caroline said: “He was bald-headed and he wore glasses and he didn’t have many clothes on. You could see his legs. They were very thin, like sticks.” Mrs. Sturgess said that the man had been killed by another man, an “impatient” man who didn’t agree with what the saintly man thought and felt about a lot of things, so had murdered him. “An awful thing to have done, and for so silly a reason, just out of disagreement.” (Julia stressed Mrs. Sturgess’s words.) Then Mrs. Sturgess went to the blackboard and wrote out in big letters the saintly man’s name. Caroline said: “She had us write down the man’s name in our copybooks, and then she told us how to say his name, and we did, out loud, ten times.” Caroline looked at Julia, and Julia nodded, and then, solemnly, in unison, they spoke the man’s name: “Ma-hat-ma Gan-dhi.” Morgan lowered his eyes, his eyes misted over by tears: these little girls, for the first time in their lives, pondering the sudden lessons of history.
Magical, that first year in their glorious new home. In May the hillside above the pond became a blaze of daffodils, the varieties named in a book Morgan found in an old wooden box tucked away in a remote corner of the attic. On the book’s first page was written: “This is the Planting Book kept at my request by my gardener, Everett Dryden. It is a record of his landscaping scheme undertaken for the purpose of enhancing the grounds which surround the house. Many of the flower-sets, particularly those of the tuber kind, were imported from England; their names are listed in the sketches (drawings) of each garden-plot.” The message bore the signature: “Ernest Ottingen—1902.” And so the varieties of blazing daffodils were identified as Dragon’s Fire, Canary, Mary’s Hair, Yellow Diamond, Swan’s Eye, Sunrise…. At dusk, deer often came to drink at the pond…. There was an owl that regularly roamed the night-skies, hooting as it hunted…. Ralph loved the place. In the morning when Tessa let him out the back door, you’d hear him barking up the new day and see him in all kinds of weather streaking over the lawn, crazy in his joy, crazy in his freedom. You couldn’t have clocked him, he ran so fast…. One hot Sunday in August, Morgan saw a man come out of the woods and stand at the wood’s edge, looking at the house. Morgan accurately took him to be a professional tramp. He beckoned to the man to come forward, and himself strode across the lawn toward him. The stranger was elderly. He was “just passing through,” he said: “For old time’s sake.” He was raggle-taggle in look, but clean; harmless and entertaining and talkative. He charmed Morgan into going with him on a walk through the woods, retracing the steps of what he called “the hobo path.” He told Morgan that during the 1930 years of the Great Depression, it was word-of-mouth knowledge in the hobo underground that if you turned off the main road “right here by this stand of limpy willows, and took this marked, tree-notched path, and showed yourself decently at the kitchen door of the Ottingen place, you’d never be refused a hot meal and something put in a paper bag handed to you to take away with you.” (When they parted, Morgan slipped the man a sawbuck: “Something for the road.”)…In November of 1948, on Election Day, to the amazement of many people, Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey in the race for president. And on the same day, from the library window Morgan saw a flock of wild turkeys marching over the frozen ground, the cocks with their tail-feathers all fanned out, looking, he said to Maud, “like outraged Republicans.”…It was by now a year since Mrs. Leigh’s death. With Mrs. Leigh “gone” (as Lillie Ruth put it), and Dr. Leigh spending less and less time in Hatherton (more and more in Cleveland), there wasn’t all that much for her to do at the Leighs’ old house. Nor for Dennis, either. So in late November, Lillie Ruth and Dennis began to work nearly full time for Morgan and Maud. Dennis drove Julia and Caroline the fifteen-or-so miles into Hatherton to school in the morning and picked them up in the afternoon. Lillie Ruth came out with him every morning (except Sundays) and spent the day helping Tessa with the cleaning and cooking, the two of them swathed in their big white duster-aprons, talking and singing as they worked. Maud said it was lovely to hear them and that it meant the world to her to have Lillie Ruth’s “darling presence” in the house. And Dennis made himself a wizard around the place, anticipating everybody’s needs, bringing in logs for the fireplaces and laying fresh fires, manning the tractor on winter days, clearing the long lane and the front-door turnaround and the garage area of snowdrifts, polishing the cars, seeing to this and that for Tessa and Lillie Ruth. As Lillie Ruth put it: “With Dennis in charge, what needs to be done, gets done, and thorough.”…Ansel Shurtliff spent the 1948 Christmas with them. He arrived on Christmas Eve afternoon. From their room, Caroline and Julia spotted a car coming down the lane. “It might be Pip,” they called out from the top of the stairs. And in a moment: “It is Pip”—their whoops bringing everybody, from all directions, into the front hall, Morgan in a rush from the library, flinging open the wide front door to the memorably dashing sight of his father stepping out of the driver’s seat of what, on the telephone, he had (darkly, mysteriously) forewarned was his new car. “Pa! Pa. My God!” he gasped. The car was a Jaguar, as sleek as its name. “My God,” Morgan said again: “Pa!” Ansel Shurtliff, still standing by the car, threw up his hands, boy-like: “There’s a chap in Cleveland who’s set himself up as a distributor of foreign cars. I passed his place last week and just out of curiosity, I went in to see what he had on hand, and when I saw this”—he bowed his head over the Jaguar’s hood—“I couldn’t resist it. Simply couldn’t, couldn’t, resist it.” He looked young. His voice sounded young. From the front door, Maud called out to him: “Pip—you’re sexy.” That, just before she ran to him and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Kissed him on the lips. Ansel Shurtliff, when he could, said: “Holy smokes!”—Gary Cooper-like, loose. Handsome. Really handsome. Morgan stroked the Jaguar’s fender: “Wow,” he said: “Wow!”
1949. In March, a box-like piece of furniture, big, was carried into the library and “installed” by a pig-nosed, heavyset man dressed in a pair of immaculate, white overalls. “Now this here contraption, Mr. Shurtliff, is your antenna. It controls your reception, and what you want is the best reception you can get, so if you’ll just stand by me here with the antenna, I’ll show you how to work it for your best results. Now these two steel rods, you want to be sensitive to the way you wing them out so they’ll coordinate with your getting yourself your best picture…. That’s right…. Slant that right rod up straighter a mite more. Good…I can see you’re sensitive to the coordination. It’s a knack. Some have it, some don’t. You do. Good…Call me if you develop a problem. I doubt you will. You’ve got the best set money can buy.” Then the man departed, leaving behind in their lives, to their wonder, television.
South Pacific opened on Broadway, and suddenly everybody was singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” and “Younger Than Springtime,” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” (the twins’ favorite).
Toward the year’s end (two years after Mrs. Leigh’s death), Doctor Leigh turned up at Morgan’s office and told Morgan he had a “situation” on his hands. Imogene Truffant. (Ah.) “She works in administration at the clinic,” Doctor Leigh said. “Some fool from the clinic, I’ve never found out who, ferried her out to Hatherton for Mrs. Leigh’s funeral, then had the gall to take her back to my house after the church service. I mention this because it’s possible you met her at that time.”
Morgan, silent, nodded. In his mind was a clear image o
f Imogene Truffant’s blowsy presence, a clear memory of how she’d cast a predator’s eye on the Leighs’ fine house and possessively cooed into his and Lucy Blackett’s ears Doctor Leigh’s name—“Douglas.”
“She’s threatening to sue me,” Doctor Leigh ploughed on. “A kind of breach-of-promise suit.” Well, yes, (he answered Morgan’s question), for quite some time prior to Mrs. Leigh’s death, he had indulged himself with Imogene Truffant, an indulgence he now regretted, but in the circumstance of what he referred to as—“the sexual abstinence forced on me by Mrs. Leigh’s long mental illness”—the indulgence seemed to him—“understandable.” An error, true: “But man-to-man, Morgan, an understandable error.” And what about after Mrs. Leigh’s death?…Well, yes. Afterwards, too, the indulgence had continued: “A habit, Morgan, purely of convenience.”
Matters of Chance Page 28
