“If that were to be done at all, Nick should do it.”
“My thought too, but I can’t see it happening. He’s physically too infirm. I think it’d strain him beyond reason.”
“Does he know Roger’s died?”
“Not yet. Natalie asked me to call Noland. As you know, she can’t stand Noland—” (Noland Kissel, Nicholas Kissel’s black-sheep son; the father-son relationship for many years a notoriously uneasy one.) “Have you reached Noland?”
“Yes. He was decency itself. He pleaded against telling Nick tonight—said he was sure it would be best to wait until morning. He’s very protective of Nick these days. Odd the way things work out, isn’t it—Noland, I mean, being protective of Nick.”
Morgan said: “I’ll get to Cleveland sometime tomorrow, George, with luck on that noon-time flight I usually take.”
“Call me in the morning when you know your schedule. I’ll meet whatever plane you’re on.”
Morgan replaced the phone in its cradle.
Alone in the library—the room itself and the apartment still relatively new to him, in feel still somewhat strange—he looked above the desk at the wall on which he had hung several informal photographs of friends. There, in one of the photographs, faced into the light of a summer day, eighty-year-old Roger Chandler was seen sitting on the top step of a fence stile, a meadow stretching off behind him, gleam of a pond’s water in the distance, image of the resting man a part of the landscape’s finality. On the bottom of the photograph, written in pen strokes as fine as a spider’s thread, Roger Chandler had quoted from Hamlet: “Those friends thou hast…Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.”
He crossed the room and opened one of its windows, letting in a needed stir of fresh air. He looked down on the cars going by on Fifth Avenue. On the park side of the avenue, seated on a municipal bench, a man and a woman were locked in each other’s arms, kissing; kissing…. He turned around; turned back to the photograph of Roger Chandler. From the height at which the photograph was hung, Roger Chandler’s eyes gazed out through the photo’s covering glass, out through the room’s open window, out into the extremes of space. Ultima Thule: Recalled from a long-ago Latin class, the two words sprang to mind, accompanied by an image of the Latin master, Mr. Scudder, (clad in a worn, elbow-patched tweed jacket and unpressed gray flannels) writing the words on the school-room blackboard, then verbally defining them: “Thule is the place thought of by ancients as the northernmost part of the livable world, hence the Latin phrase, ultima Thule, by literal translation, farthest Thule; by implication either a very remote, near-mythical region, or, in terms of human aspiration, as an ideal goal.”…Ultima Thule: the site-aim, perhaps, of Roger Chandler’s gaze.
On the municipal bench, the man and woman continued to kiss.
By evening of the next day, the fact of Roger Chandler’s death was nationally known, his life and career written about in newspapers and verbally aired on the radio and pictured, a bit, on television. The funeral was on Monday. Filling the church were people from all walks of life, modest to mighty, each with his or her private memories of Roger Chandler: memories of when and where they had met him and of how he had illuminated or influenced or even entirely altered the course of their lives. He was that capable kind of Zeus-like man…. Among the mighty at the funeral were Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson; and Michael Andress (sent to represent President Eisenhower); and Ed Murrow and John Gunther; state and federal judges; a flock of ideologically mixed ecclesiastics. The Governor delivered the eulogy. Neither Morgan nor George Colt spoke, both of them, pre-funeral, being in accord that Natalie’s idea of having one of them speak (“to represent the firm”) showed what George Colt called “a delicate lapse of judgment.” They didn’t of course put it that way to Natalie. Instead, they spoke with her about “protocol”: of the propriety of allowing the Governor full and solitary sway. To their immense relief, she took the bait, hook, line, and sinker.
A final particular about the funeral: conspicuously placed at the head of the church’s center aisle was a well-worn, straight-backed leather chair. Residing in the middle of the chair’s seat was an urn, obelisk in shape: container of the decedent’s ashes. At the gathering after the funeral, old, enfeebled Nicholas Kissel said to Morgan: “I liked Natalie’s touch of having Roger’s desk-chair on display.” Then, with a blue-veined trembling hand raised to brush away the tears in his eyes: “It was the urn occupying it I couldn’t bear the sight of.”
For a week, the bronze naming plates riven into the entrance doors of the Kissel, Chandler, Shurtliff & Colt law offices (in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New York) remained draped in black ribbon.
From May 14 to May 28, Morgan stayed in Cleveland. He spent the greater part of this lengthy stay working with George Colt on the foremost problem created by Roger Chandler’s death—namely, the reassigning of Roger Chandler’s clients and on-going cases to others of the firm’s partnership, which changes of representation altered the rank of some partners, necessitating thereby a realignment of share in the firm’s income, etc. etc. Inevitably, other problems arose, some complex, some mundane, all, though, in solution, time consuming.
Each day was a binge-day of intense work and of catching up on the doings of people he loved and had seen little of in the last four and a half months: his father, Miss Sly, Letitia and Lewis Grant, Peter Leigh, Lillie Ruth, Mrs. Malcolm (Judge Malcolm’s widow, now ancient, by her own laughing say: “Older than Methuselah’s cat.”); and others of long-standing, affectionate social relationship (seen as a group at an evening party given by Charlie and Louise Blair); and one other—Doctor Leigh.
Throughout this stay, he reverted (regressed was the more accurate word, albeit bitter) to his old routine of leaving the Hatherton house early every morning, driving into Cleveland to his office, and at the late end of each day (usually very late) driving back to the house. Each time he returned to it his hatred of entering it deepened. The very thought of walking through its front door into the hushed gloom of its empty rooms filled him with dread: for there the fact was that now, except for Dennis’s and Wills’s daily, checking walk-throughs of its tall rooms, and Lillie Ruth’s and Tessa’s weekly cleanings and dustings, it knew no life, so had become, in feel, an elaborate tomb. Increasingly, he feared the affects of its enshrined memories on his sanity, even that the power of its memories might somehow kill him. Unable to bear the mischief solitudes of his and Maud’s old bedroom, he slept in one of its guest rooms.
In the last couple of months, amid the professional satisfactions and personal pleasures of his New York life, the thought of parting from the house had occasionally occurred to him, always though in a fleeting, almost fugitive, and certainly undeveloped, unurgent way. But now, at this time of this protracted stay, the truth came clear to him that the house had nothing to do with his current life and still less with any future life he desired to make for himself. This truth—now fully understood—comprised his ultimate estrangement from it.
Now he knew he would sell it. The knowledge toughened in him a privacy of intent. About his decision to sell it, he dismissed as intrusive the idea of seeking a second “objective opinion.” By himself, he had anguished over his decision enough, and at a cost too emotionally dear to repeat.
At the right moment, he would simply announce his decision: declare it as irrevocable.
(A parenthesis: When he was eight years old, his father had taken him to what had been advertised in the county newspaper as ‘A Homing-Pigeon Race Meet.’ The event had been terribly slow in getting under way—a long, long couple of hours milling around in a dusty, stubbly field under the noon-time heat of a blazing August sun, looking at caged pigeons and listening to the owner of each pigeon yammer on about his pigeon’s champion qualities—width of its wingspan, strength of its wings, its swiftness in flight, its infallible sense of direction—the point of each owner’s brag being that his pigeon was the one best qualified to set the speed record for getting back to i
ts home roost, in short, to win the race: take the prize. The sun was awfully hot. The men who owned the pigeons seemed a cookie-cutter lot, clumped together, sweaty and purple-faced, standing in the hot sun, gabbing on and on about their pigeons. The only men who weren’t standing were the four “officials.” They were sitting down on canvas camp-chairs under the shade of a makeshift awning, passing back and forth between themselves sheets of paper, endlessly, importantly studying what was written on each sheet, the sun getting hotter and hotter…. Finally, finally some action. One of the officials—a square-shouldered, heavyset man in a red shirt, lumbered to his feet and mounted a wooden box. He flapped out the white fabric of a rolled-up pennant: signal that the race was about to start. The pigeons’ owners, stop-watches in hand, bent to their pigeon’s cages. Attend the white pennant…. The word ready was at last yelled out, followed at once by the slipping sound of cage-locks being unbolted. A breath. The red-shirted official lowered the flag. Then: then a noise instant and awing as the released birds took to the air, spearing it like arrows shot sunward, rising higher and higher, traveling—compassed on their homeward paths, all of them arced suddenly out of sight, gone from view at the horizon’s rim, gone!—Morgan’s eyes, though, still raised to where they had been, searching. Someone, not his father, nudged him: “You’ll go blind, boy, looking into the sun like that.” The stranger’s words were his last clear memory. Because then he fainted…. When he came to, his father was kneeling on the ground beside him, murmuring his name, blurred and floaty, over and over: “Morgan, Morgan, Morgan.” Little by little, everything righted itself. He drank water from a tin cup held to his lips by his father’s hand. He heard someone say: “Too much excitement for the lad.” And someone else: “Too much sun.” Then his father lifted him up and cradled him close in his arms and carried him all the way across the field to where the car was parked. “I’ll roll down all the windows and we’ll get going. Cool you off. I’m so sorry, Morgan. I feel such a fool.” “I’m all right, Pa. Really I am. It wasn’t the sun. It was the birds. The way they took off! The way they went! They were spectacular!” (It thrilled him to use the big word: it matched his feeling about the birds, that they were thrilling.) “Not worth fainting for, though,” his father said. “But Pa, they were spectacular!” “Sit back, son. I’m going to drive fast. I want to get you home as quickly as possible. What you need is some cool tea with a lot of sugar in it. Here we go.” Like the arrowed pigeons, Morgan thought. Oh the way they’d shot skyward out of their cages: that spectacular lift!)
He owed to Lillie Ruth the first utterance of his decision to sell the house: because of her granted “heart’s wish” to live out her days in it. He intended to provide for her another home—a comfortable, agreeable place within walking distance of her church and close enough to Hatherton’s town-center so that she could shop and go, whenever she wanted to, to what she still called “moving picture shows” (her favorite worldly entertainment). She was now in her eighty-second year; she should not live alone. Her new home must be large enough to accommodate a companion. He was certain that, given time, this could all be achieved. Still, he could not quite imagine rendering upon her the blow that she was to be removed from the home that had been created for her. But at some point he must do it; the sooner the better. Not yet, though—still not quite able to imagine doing it—suffering the thought, wearying.
Lord, the liberating surprises that in life occur! As on the Saturday after Roger Chandler’s funeral.
…He had spent the morning in the library, working on a brief. Lillie Ruth brought him lunch on a tray. “There’s something I need to tell you, Morgan,” she said. “If you have time this afternoon, come and see me.” He surely would, he told her. Three o’clock? Yes…At three sharp, he put aside his work and went from the library’s relative haven into the front hall, center of the large house, of its beauty—middle of its immense and heartbreaking, terrible, unbearable quiet—on, through the darkened dining room (curtains drawn across the tall bank of its easterly windows), through the lifeless order of the butler’s pantry, through the kitchen (even the kitchen quiet this afternoon; Tessa off for the day), on, further, down the length of the back corridor.
She heard his approaching footsteps. “Morgan—” she called out.
As she always did, she made a little ceremony of welcoming him into this room she called her “parlor.” And there were daffodils in a glass bowl (Canary, Swan’s Eye, Dragon’s Fire, Sunrise…). In chairs drawn close together, they seated themselves, combined, immediately, by the ineradicable atmosphere of that other time of Maud alive. Usually, they tended to speak of that other time, not to dwell on it, but briefly to think aloud of it before moving on to current subjects. But not today. Between them, today, it felt not the thing to do—to hark back—the feeling (as he experienced it) so strong that it silenced him, as it seemed for a moment to silence Lillie Ruth until, of the two of them, she found the voice to say: “We don’t belong here anymore, Morgan. We know in ourselves why.”
Instantly he told her: “I’m going to sell the house.”
She didn’t as much as blink, only touched his hand and said: “There’s no reason left in the world for you to hang on to it.”
Remember, after the long, hot affliction of waiting around, the way the end had suddenly come? The pigeons released from their cages, going up sunward like shot arrows, higher and higher—elevated—arced away in the sky all at once at the horizon’s rim—escaped! Remember? Amazing—that he did not faint at Lillie Ruth’s feet, her words were of a magnitude that freeing to him to hear.
He tore on: “I’ve been thinking about where you’ll live. I want—”
She stopped him: “It’s all settled, Morgan, where I’ll live.”
“Settled?” he exclaimed: “In what way, settled?”
She reached out and picked up from off the top of an adjacent table an envelope—and handed it to him: “For you to see, Morgan.”
For him to see…He drew out from the unsealed envelope a couple of pages of stiff paper—a legal document, to which was attached a short, typewritten note. The note bore no salutation—only the recent date—11 May 1959—followed by a two-sentence text: This is a deed made out in your name, to the house you indicated to me you would like to own. I have purchased it for you.
Then the windy, big-as-life penned signature: Douglas Leigh.
“Now don’t look like that, Morgan. That’s the look Callie gets on her face when she’s been crossed.”
“How did this happen, Lillie Ruth?”
She started off by reminding him of Doctor Leigh’s habit of visiting her—
—which erratic visits had begun soon after Maud’s death. To Morgan, Doctor Leigh had defined the visits as “doctoral calls” he felt “obliged” to make on Lillie Ruth: “Given her age and all, it makes sense for me to keep tabs on her health,” he had regularly said (or words to that effect). Much as Morgan disliked his father-in-law, he had credited him this pedigree of loyalty to Lillie Ruth, while at the same time believing that the truer reason for his calls on her was that Maud’s death had havocked him in ways he couldn’t handle on his proud own—Lillie Ruth the more actual physician, sitting with him, assuaging the pain of his sorrow by means of her simple-hearted human goodness and near providential patience.
What Morgan learned now from Lillie Ruth was that since last January (at which time Morgan had virtually residenced himself in New York), Doctor Leigh had been coming to see her more and more frequently; as often as once a week…. Here, in her narrative, Lillie Ruth told Morgan that early in April, she had asked her church minister, Pastor Eldon, to help her look for some other place she could move to. “I knew you’d understand, Morgan, how it doesn’t feel right anymore, living here without Maudie, you in New York and Callie and Julia grown up and away too, and I knew if I did find another place, you’d help me get it.”
Morgan nodded. “Tell me about the property.”
The fine thing was that as Lilli
e Ruth described it, the property fitted his idea of what he had had in mind to look for, for her. It was in a decent neighborhood, near her church, near town (on Linden Street in the block between Forster Street and Gidden Street). The house was a one-story stucco “bungalow” it had a front porch and “a nice little garden-patch of a backyard.” As she spoke, she looked intensely at him, and he at her, seeing her back through time, through the many years he had known her, and then forward again to this moment. She was leaning toward him in her chair, her hair cloudy white, her face deeply wrinkled, the pupils of her eyes dimmed a bit by age, but her mind clear as fresh water: that wonderful word—sane: she had so brilliantly thought through her continuance.
Having finished describing the house, she went on: “I hadn’t a notion Pastor Eldon and I would find a place as soon as we did. It got me a little ahead of myself. I can tell you the date we found it—April the twenty-ninth. That same day, late in the afternoon, Doctor Leigh came by the way he does, I never know when it’ll be. I was sitting right where I am now, going over everything in my mind, crying a little bit, feeling betwixt and between, and he caught me at it. What was the matter with me, he wanted to know. You know how he can be, Morgan, how he can wear on. I felt awkward…. Right or wrong, he got it out of me about staying on here and he straight out asked me if I wanted to move, and I told him the truth. Where was I thinking I’d move to, he asked me, and I told him about the place Pastor Eldon and I had found that morning. He asked a lot of questions about the place, where it was and the size and did I really, really like it, and then he asked me about you, Morgan—if you knew about it, and I told him you didn’t but I was going to telephone you in New York and tell you. He said I shouldn’t do that, I should wait and tell you face-to-face the next time you were here. He said he doubted the property would sell in the meantime, that I shouldn’t feel rushed about getting it. I knew you’d be coming soon, the way you do every month…but Mr. Chandler’s dying, his funeral and all—”
Matters of Chance Page 39
