Geoff, savvy, said: “You’ve rejoined the world.”
Miss Sly said: “You’ve recovered. Amen.” That was all she said.
Sidney said: “I’ll quote you a line. ‘His tunes were frozen up in his horn, and come out now by thawing.’”
Morgan laughed: “Who the hell said that?”
Sidney, the eternal educator, answered: “A German named Rudolph Rapse, born in 1737, died in 1794.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“It’s a line from one of his books, The Travels of Baron Munchausen. I’ll give you a copy. It’s very amusing.” Then, lawyer-like: “Am I correct in thinking that the quote applies?”
“You’re correct.”
“I’m glad for you, Morgan. So’s Linda.”
“God, Sidney, is it so obvious?”
“Yeah.” Sidney laughed: “Yeah, it is.”
Next to Geoff, Sidney remains his closest friend. Of all his contemporaries, Morgan feels about Sidney’s life that it is the most anchored, the most complete, personally and professionally. He sees Sidney often. Their meetings easily occur: Sidney and Linda have long since moved from their small post-war brownstone apartment and live now in a sprawling, book-lined apartment on East Seventieth Street, just a few blocks away from Morgan’s apartment. With Sidney, he often takes an end-of-the-day walk. Sometimes Sidney’s and Linda’s two children—David, now thirteen years old, and Judith, eight—come along on these walks, accompanied by the family dog, a blue-eyed Dalmatian whose name (not surprisingly) is Goethe. Once in a while, Linda joins them, but only once in a while. Usually she remains at home, cooking, firmly fixed in her belief that food, as prepared by her and only by her, will keep Nature’s troubles, indigestion to earthquake, at bay.
She won’t consider employing someone to help her with the cooking. She must do it all, and all by herself. Often, when Morgan and Sidney hook up for a walk, Sidney will hand Morgan a message she has scrawled on a piece of kitchen note-paper: “I’ll be disappointed if you don’t come back with S. for dinner.” Or some other differently worded invitation: “I’m counting on you to help eat up what I’m concocting. I’ve doubled the recipe, so you have to come.” Morgan is devoted to her. How could he not be? In heart, she is one of the world’s great women.
Lawrence too saw the difference in him. But he didn’t directly speak of it. He commented instead on Morgan’s new suit and on the more colorful neckties he’s wearing these days…. Over the last five years, since Lawrence and Pamela re-married, Lawrence has become more and more “abstract” (Morgan’s word). Sidney puts it another way: “He’s out of touch with himself,” Sidney says. Morgan thinks the cause of Lawrence’s abstractness is that he’s given himself completely over to Pamela, that Pamela consumes him. Sidney rebuts that the same thing could be said about Pamela: that Lawrence consumes her. “It’s an interchangeable obsession.” What worries Sidney and Morgan about this interchangeable obsession is that it seems to be based so much on regret: regret about the years lost between the time Pamela and Lawrence divorced and the time they re-married. Those lost years are the reason they are childless. That they have no children is a subject they can’t put to rest. The lack haunts them. “My fault,” Pamela will say, harking back to the hurly-burly years she wasted, the years when she “could” have been having babies, when she and Lawrence “should” have been rearing a family. “No, it’s not your fault, Pam,” Lawrence regularly counters, “it’s just the way things happened,” absolving her of blame, excusing them both, nurturing that way their mutual regret, keeping it alive…. What’s interesting is how they compensate for their childless state. Pamela spends three days a week as a teacher’s aide at a big public school up in Harlem, helping slow children to read and write; Lawrence is now the president of the board of directors of a long-established, privately funded foster-care agency (“The Shepherd’s Home” is its sentimental, Victorian name) for children from families broken apart by poverty or sickness or addictive vices. Every so often he says he’d like to “quit the law” and devote himself full time to making the Shepherd’s Home a model for other institutions of its kind. He could easily afford to quit the law; he has a handsome income from monies inherited from his grand-father. But he goes on, not quitting. The sorry truth is that his career as a lawyer is in no way distinguished, its mediocrity due (too) to those five years spent in the wake of his and Pamela’s divorce—unfocused years of missed chances and flubbed opportunities that put him out of step with his contemporaries and caused him, within the profession, to lose rank. Blown years he’s never been able to make up for. In his firm, he is a lower-echelon partner, regarded as a post-war casualty. Yet his professional life, dim and routine and ordinary as it is, appears to mean a lot to him. “The attraction of the predictable” is how Sidney sums the mystery. More deeply, Sidney thinks Lawrence is terrified of making any major change in his life. “I think he sees change as disaster,” Sidney further says. “Maybe, more than anything, it’s his fear of change that’s behind his abstractness.” Whatever: the fact remains that the only time Lawrence’s air of abstractness disappears is when he talks with Sidney and Morgan about the war. That’s when he sits up straight in a chair, eyes slightly narrowed, the expression on his face keen and eager and again potential as he brings up, like a thirsty man bringing up water from a well, incidents, scenes, stories from the war years, romancing his accounts; building on them. From those remote 1943 limbo months he and Morgan and Sidney spent in Miami, he remembers the names of streets, the names of bars they frequented—details such as Morgan and Sidney have long since forgotten…. O the brotherhood of those strange times, Sidney poetically says, smiling, one of his hands on Lawrence’s arm, the other on Morgan’s arm. Thus, on the basis of the bond forged between them in those by-gone times, their tripod friendship continues.
Soon after Morgan met Ann Montgomery, he took Lucy Blackett (as he very often does) to dinner. They had a drink at Lucy’s apartment before going on to a downtown restaurant. In the cab on the way to the restaurant, Lucy remarked: “It’s been ages since I’ve seen you so—relaxed.”
Ah…. From her remark, he took its two key words—ages (understood as the length of time that has passed since Maud’s death), and—relaxed (inflected by Lucy in a way insinuative of carnal abatement). By which tonal nuance, he knew that Lucy knew. Normally, he would have laughed and told her straight out that he knew she knew. That’s the usual way their friendship works. And anyhow, between him and Lucy there are no secrets. But in this instance, he decided to remain silent, certain that she would soon abandon insinuation and honestly address the subject: honestly, as a subject, nail it. He preferred that she be the one to do so.
Since the day three years ago when Lucy ended her affair with Gerry Davis, her life, as far as men are concerned, has been a blank. After she had recovered from her near breakdown sorrow at losing Gerry, Maud, sibyl-like, had predicted that Lucy would never look at another man. Not, at least, sexually. And she hasn’t…. Her history with men had been one of late discovery and tardy emergence: at age nearly thirty she had still been a virgin. Once, a long time ago, in an almost clinical way, she had reviewed with Morgan her cosseted girlhood spent under her mother’s puritanical eye, which rigid scrutiny had caused in her the gender shyness that had all but ruined the younger years of her life. She had spoken of her residual amazement that she had found the courage to go behind her mother’s back and to volunteer, in 1941, for overseas duty in the Red Cross, thereby freeing herself from her mother’s proprietorial gaze. (She had reviewed too the irony of the fact that whereas World War II had liberated her, World War I had made of her mother an early, bitter, wintry widow; Lucy, three years old when her father was killed in France in 1917.)…In late 1943, from blitz-torn London, Lucy had written a letter to Maud in which she revealed that she had been deflowered by an RAF pilot. About her deflowerer, she had given no details. Whether he was older or younger than she, how she had met him, if, after losing her v
irginity to him, she ever saw him again remain to this day (at least to Morgan) a mystery. She has never, though, made a secret of the fact that subsequent to her deflowering, she led an extremely active sex life. It wasn’t until after she met and fell in love with Gerry Davis that she stopped her marathon couplings (candidly self-described as “promiscuous”) and settled down to that single relationship with Gerry, committing herself whole-heartedly to it until, by her own doing, the affair had ended.
She did not at once pursue the matter of her remark made in the taxi. She let it rest until after they were seated in the restaurant, until after they had studied the menu and decided what they would eat, until after he had given their order to the waiter; put it off further, still wearing her glasses, looking around the restaurant, looking at the other diners until, at last, in complete control of the moment, splendid in her confidence, she took off her glasses and, naked-eyed, gazing at him, stated: “You’ve found a skirt.”
How she nailed the subject, reverting to that jaunty WW II phrase used by soldiers with soldiers, perfectly conveyed her understanding of its character: as purely sexual; no motivation of love in it.
“Ah, Luce,” he said: “You do see everything.”
Spontaneously, they joined hands, the gesture natural between them, natural to their long friendship, to their indestructible bond of Maud; natural too that they would sit like that for a moment, quietly, in a removed corner of a public place, silently facing each other, bridging time, seeing themselves through each other’s eyes—what they know about each other, what they’ve been through separately and together, the condition of their lives now, mid-point of life itself: how they individually manage. He sees Lucy as unique in her mastery over repinings for happinesses that were never fully hers in the past and that she knows will never occur for her in the future; unique in her imagination of what isn’t hers, but of what does exist for others, pitfalls and passions and possibilities, sightings of which never cease to excite her. The prodigious way she attends upon these sightings, the way she woos them to her and engages in their existence is what keeps her amusing and feisty and stylish and warm—qualities now freshly displayed: “About this skirt, Morgan, let me tell you my sense of her. She’s—well—bedroomish by nature. But not a nympho. She’s unmarried, probably divorced. No kids. Not a burning intellect, but plenty bright…. It’s not anything that will last.”
“You’re right on all counts.”
“But it’s a breakthrough for you. You couldn’t have stayed celibate forever. You’re not the celibate type.”
“What’s the celibate type?”
“Stoics.” Lucy spat out the word. “I hate stoics. The way they settle into being resigned to fate but still stay hopeful. The Job theme. Or a variation on the Job theme. I’ve never admired Job.” She caught on, suddenly, to how wound up she was, and dismissed her tirade with: “Anyhow, thanks to the found skirt, you’re safe from all that. It’s a debt you owe her.”
“I know.”
“Just don’t fall into the trap of making it an eternal debt.”
“I won’t.”
“Now I’m going to shut up.”
She made him laugh. “You’re sure you’re finished?”
“I’m sure.”
The waiter came, bearing their food. They moved on to other topics. Lucy reiterated her satisfaction with her recent promotion at the Red Cross, a professional elevation by no means inconsiderable. In turn, Morgan spoke of his work, much on his mind: he would be going to Cleveland next week for the purpose of bringing the firm’s partnership up to tick on the venture of the New York office: “A promising report,” he told Lucy. “Cause for cautious celebration.” Then, somewhat anxiously, he talked about Julia and Caroline—of what a large adjustment it will be for them to be spending the bulk of the fast-approaching summer in New York instead of in Cleveland.
“You’re worrying unnecessarily,” Lucy said. “It’ll be a real adventure for them. They’re thrilled with their plans.”
Plans fully in place. Julia is already enrolled in a summer-school course at Columbia: subject: The American Novel in the Twentieth Century; Caroline’s wish for a “worthwhile” part-time summer job has been granted by Geoff (ascended, a few months ago, to the presidency of the Balfour Foundation). Under Geoff’s direction, she will be researching grant applications pertinent to urban environmental problems (the environment her current “big interest”). Reflective of her quixotic temperament, her interests have a way of changing from month to month, a tendency worrisome to Morgan. In the past year, her avowed “big interests” have been psychology, political science, and anthropology, in that order. Now, the environment. “That’s some scattering,” Morgan said. “I hope it’s not indicative of deeper confusions. Do you think I give her too much leeway, Luce?”
Lucy smiled: “If you didn’t give it to her, she’d take it anyhow. I think she slipped in the environment as one of her interests in order to cinch the Balfour job. Geoff thinks so too, but as he says, it shows she made it her business to find out that one of the Balfour major concerns has to do with environmental problems. Her curiosity’s a plus.”
“I have a hard time keeping up with her these days—”
“She seems perfectly normal to me,” Lucy cut in. “I think she’s doing exactly the same thing most of her friends are doing—looking around. Surveying the scene. Why hurry her? Julia’s an altogether different story…. Alan and Geoff had me to dinner last week—didn’t I tell you about it? Maybe I’m losing my mind—”
“Tell me now.”
“I meant to tell you because Alan talked quite a bit about Julia—”
“Oh?”
“Mostly about her writing. He was fascinating. He said she reminds him of himself when he was nineteen—that in the same way he knew for sure he was going to be a composer, damn all else, she knows she’s going to be a writer. He said that that kind of certainty, when it’s backed by talent, is the be-all and end-all of self-knowledge.”
“Alan’s one of Julia’s heroes. Living heroes—”
“Mine, too!” Lucy exclaimed. “Do you know what he’s up to now?”
“The last time I saw him he mentioned that he’s working on an opera—”
“That’s it! He’s working on an opera! But he won’t give a hint about the story. I tried and tried to wangle it out of him, but he wouldn’t budge an inch.”
Ten years ago, when Lucy and Alan first met, who would ever have guessed they would become friends? Militating against the possibility, their thoroughly different backgrounds and the vast disparity between Alan’s formidable talent and Lucy’s plainer endowments. So what was it that attracted them to each other in the first instance and that binds them today? Foremost is their love of speculation. (In Geoff’s words: “They’ll consider anything.”) Anything. Who’s to say that the Kentucky Derby won’t someday be won by a mule? That the lines in the palms of our individual hands don’t hold the secret to our future destinies? That swans aren’t adulterous? That somewhere in the skies there’s not another world populated by Whatevers who don’t look like us but who know more about us than we know about ourselves? Which last speculation invariably leads them to their mutual, unshakable belief in UFOs. When they talk with each other about UFOs they look like a pair of religious zealots experiencing a transport of faith. They collect and codify newspaper and magazine accounts of people who have seen UFOs, in whose backyards UFOs have landed. Their most recent UFO thrill is the “sworn” statement of a commercial airline pilot to the effect that his plane was “tracked” by a UFO on a night flight between Boston and Bermuda, the plane’s instrument panel “blacked out” for nearly half an hour, during which time the plane was “guided” by the UFO—“lit up like an ocean liner, huge and blindingly beautiful, silvering the heavens for miles around.”
“Wow!” Morgan said in response to Lucy’s telling of this most recent marvel.
“You’re irreverent,” Lucy told him.
Morgan
laughed. “What would you like for dessert?”
“Crème brûlée.”
“I hope they have it.”
“They do. I saw it listed on the menu.”
Wednesday night, May 13, 1959
He had spent the evening with Ann. They had had their time in bed. Afterwards, Ann had rustled up some food—scrambled eggs and toast, Stilton cheese and fruit with a glass of port for dessert. He’d left her around eleven. He’d walked home.
When he entered his apartment, the telephone was ringing, any call at that late hour always somewhat alarming, at the very least, disconcerting. He ran down the hall into the library, switched on the ceiling light and picked up the phone. “Hello—”
“Morgan—”
George Colt’s voice. “George. I just walked in the door this instant.”
“So I gather. I’ve been trying to reach you all evening.”
“What’s up?”
George Colt cleared his throat. “Sad tidings, Morgan. Roger Chandler died this afternoon. Collapsed in his office. Tom Gervase and Willard Blair were with him when it happened. As you know, Roger’s been working with them on the Seidiman-Kinkaid merger. According to Tom, Roger was holding forth, sharp as ever, when he began to choke—a violent spasm, kind of a whole-body seizure. Willard ran off to call a doctor. Tom tried to help Roger, but wasn’t able to. Not a damn thing really to be done. Nothing. By the time Willard got back to Roger’s office, Roger was all but gone…. Morgan?”
“Sorry, George. It’s difficult to take in—”
George Colt went on, supplying a few more details, all more or less easily imaginable about any mid-afternoon death in such an unlikely place as a law office—one word following another, like beasts of burden moving along in single file, orderly, obedient to a difficult task: “The funeral could be as early as Saturday, as late as Monday, depending on aspects of organization. It’s bound to be something of a state occasion. Natalie’s taken hold.” (Natalie Chandler Sears, Roger’s oldest daughter, a methodical, vigorous woman in her mid-fifties; Roger’s wife long dead.) “I spoke with her at length earlier this evening. She seemed to be bearing up very well, hard as it is at any age to lose a parent. She has it in mind for the Governor to give the eulogy. He likely will. She wants you or me to speak—‘to represent the firm’ was the way she put it.”
Matters of Chance Page 38
