Morgan shook his head.
Sutter wanted to know: “Our torpedoing. Do you ever dream about it? The Owl’s dying in the lifeboat? Putting him over the side like he was shark bait? Do you ever dream about it?”
“Occasionally. When I’m anxious about something. The dreams take different forms. They’re not always specific, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
They went on talking for about fifteen minutes, not once smiling. That was the hardest part: that they could find nothing to smile over. Sutter had put on weight. He had a damaged man’s look of permanent fatigue, of a terrible solitariness, of being able to fall densely asleep in odd places, at odd hours. Morgan risked: “What’s keeping you busy these days?”
“Shipping. I’m with a Greek-owned shipping firm. Lots of travel. Different countries. Different ports. I’m just up from Panama. Got here yesterday; on to Boston tomorrow.” (For a minute he sounded like the old Sutter, wide-open; but fast, then, to say no more about himself.) “What about you, Mr. Shurtliff?”
“I’m still lawyering,” Morgan said. “Will you have another drink?”
“Better not,” Sutter answered. “I’ve got an appointment downtown with the guy in charge of our New York docks.” (He was clearly restive. He wanted to go. He reached for his wallet.)
“Let me get this round,” Morgan said. “When you’re next in New York, give me a ring, will you? I’m listed in the ’phone book, home and office.”
They knew they’d never see each other again.
Out on the hot street, they shook hands. Then—all of a sudden—Sutter struck an attitude, went gorgeous: “Fuck ’em all but six, and save them for pallbearers. Right, Mr. Shurtliff?”
Morgan laughed. “Right.”
Sutter turned west, toward Sixth Avenue; Morgan turned east, toward Fifth, reeling a little from the hastily downed, extremely unaccustomed mid-afternoon double Scotch.
On one of their rambles in Central Park, Julia and Bruce found a half-starved kitten. They were walking on a path that took them by a set of rocks. They heard the faint meowing and traced the sound to the opening of a small cave in the heap of scree. Bruce reached in and brought out the little cat. He handed it to Julia. Julia (later) told Morgan that when she took it, it didn’t move, didn’t meow again: “It only sighed,” she said. Except for two brown patches on its right flank, it was white; short haired. It had blue eyes. Bruce thought it was a female. Morgan came home from the office to its presence, to Elsa and Julia and Caroline and Bruce hovering over the box they’d put the kitten in, the bottom of the box carpeted with a clean kitchen towel. “Ve keep it, Mr. Shurtliff,” Elsa said. “I know of cats. It vill be no trouble and a nice companion.” Julia appealed: “Please, Morgan—” He gave a qualified consent: a vet must see it first thing in the morning. If the vet thought the kitten had a chance—yes—they would keep it. Bruce stayed for dinner. What to name the kitten? Bruce came up with Hannah. But what if the kitten turned out to be a male? “Then Hannibal,” Bruce said…. A vet was seen: Hannah would apply (the vet said) and not to worry: “She’ll be fine.” (Three days later, Morgan called Miss Sly. “We have a cat,” he told her, “named Hannah.” “Oh, I am so pleased—for all of you,” Miss Sly said.)
“Bliss”—was the word Caroline kept using about life in New York. That, and—“inspired.”
He bought a Mercedes of a color variously described as “maroon,” “chestnut brown,” “deep red”—anyhow, marvelous looking. He enthused to Geoff: “It clings to the road like a lover.” He garaged it on Seventy-fifth Street between Park and Lexington.
“Wheels!” Julia said. “Now that we’ve got wheels, we can go anywhere.” Which is what, on weekends, they did, exploring parts of Connecticut, the Hudson Highlands, the Hamptons. Elsa packed picnics for them, or they ate at inns, or had Sunday lunch at the country homes of friends. He began to think about acquiring a week-end house. Would it be by the sea? Or would it be an inland place, with woods and a creek? Think about it.
Lillie Ruth and Tessa and Dennis had begun to dismantle the Hatherton house…. In mid-July, when he went back to Cleveland for the monthly partners’ meeting, the curtains in the downstairs rooms had been taken down and layered in tissue paper and packed into boxes. Through the high, naked windows the summer light streamed in on rolled-up rugs and on covered furniture clustered in the middle of the big rooms.
He took his father’s advice and met with old, rotund Ambrose Hawes, the “legendary” antique dealer. Dwarfed in height by the tall, denuded windows, he went from room to room with Mr. Hawes, deciding what of each room’s furnishings he would keep and what would be put up for auction. He liked Mr. Hawes; trusted him. He worried only about fire: no sooner did Mr. Hawes extinguish one cigarette than he lit another. Two stiff fingers of his left hand were nicotine-yellow, like old ivory.
The house was now “officially” on the market. An agent named Arthur Griffeth was in charge of selling it.
One evening, Morgan worked in the library, packing the books he wanted in New York: books that went way back in his life: boyhood tales; his first Latin primer, and the Latin text of Commentarii (Caesar’s dry, solipsistic account of the first seven years of the Gallic War, studied and frowned over in Mr. Scudder’s class); the oil-and-salt-water-damaged Bible he’d kept with him in the lifeboat; Joyce’s Ulysses; retrieved from a top shelf, no title on its cover; the copy of Fanny Hill (purchased when he was in law school from a shady backstreet Boston dealer); the volumes of The Landed Gentry (bought in Durban, South Africa); and the Everyday Book (published in 1832) that his father had given him in 1943, half-way through the war. Dickens’s novels, and those of Trollope. All of Conrad. Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies.
Little by little the house and its ancillary buildings were being emptied out. In the garage was the old Chevrolet convertible: the Harold Teen. (If the Harold Teen could talk, many of its stories would have to do with kissing, with X-rated love made on its leather-covered front seat—passion that couldn’t wait for the marital bed. If the Harold Teen could talk, some of its stories would be about Caroline and Julia, for, in it, they had learned to drive—Julia, once, nearly ditching it.) In the way a good man takes care of an old, long-serving mare, Dennis had continued to take care of the Harold Teen. Once in a while, on a fair day, he took it for a run on the country roads. “Would you like to have it, Dennis?” “Like to have it, Mr. Shurtliff? Lord, I surely would.” “Consider it yours. I’ll see to the paper-work.”
Of the house’s myriad entities, what remained undisturbed were its terrace trees, its garden, its tennis court, its bedded brook, its pond, its long Jamesian stretch of lawn; and, up on the hill, the granite headstones in the dog cemetery—1910 to 1958—Lear, Ripsy, Solo, Duffy, Daisy, Star. Ralph.
“How much longer do you think you’ll be, Callie?”
“Ten minutes at the most.”
Fifteen minutes later: “How much longer, Callie?”
“A sec more—”
Ten minutes later: “Caroline: HANG UP.”
There were four ’phones in the apartment: one in the big walk-in closet off the front hall, one in the library, one in Morgan’s bedroom, one in the kitchen. The four ’phones were interconnected, listed in the phone book under Shurtliff, M: REgent 7–3513.
“How much longer, Callie?” he would ask. Or Julia would ask. Or Elsa: “Excuse me, Miss Car-oline, but for the grocery delivery I must call Gristede’s.” How much longer, Callie? Finally, shots were fired: commence of the Telephone War. Caroline stated her terms for a Peace Agreement: “In my bedroom, my own phone, listed under my name.” So be it. But at the time he agreed to the peace settlement, he hadn’t reckoned on the profligate way Caroline would use her “own” ’phone. The first month’s bill was a whopper.
“An accounting error,” Caroline grandly said of the bill when Morgan showed it to her.
He handed her the bill’s second page on which were listed the calls she’d made to scattered frien
ds in Minneapolis, Cleveland, Nantucket, New Orleans. “The frequency of the calls, Callie, and the length of time you talked—those three calls to New Orleans, each one over an hour—”
“I promise I’ll do better next month,” Caroline said.
He laughed. “Hold it, babe! What do you mean by ‘better’? Do you have friends in Mexico City? In New Zealand? Afghanistan? What may I expect in the way of ‘better’?”
After that, Caroline’s telephone habits shifted to the right side of “better.”
Geoff met some guy on a bus and began to spend time with him—Alan absent at a music festival in Italy, Geoff restless.
“Restless” was Geoff’s word.
Geoff talked about the guy. Morgan listened. He heard about the guy’s good looks and about how amusing he was and how “understanding.” But nothing concrete, such as how the guy earned a living, or how old he was: just Geoff’s uncharacteristically arch, infatuated abstractions, the most insidious, the most insistently harped on, the guy’s “understanding.”
“You’re not listening,” Geoff said.
“No…What I’m doing is sitting here trying to figure out what’s behind your big-deal need to go on with me about the guy.”
Geoff, with an elaborate, superior politeness, said: “Let’s drop it. I shouldn’t have told you. I thought you’d understand.”
That word again. “Since when has being ‘understood’ been so important to you? Are you talking about Alan?”
Geoff bristled: “No. I am not talking about Alan.”
“So what’s with this guy’s—‘understanding?’”
“I asked you to drop it.”
“I can’t. I’m too fond of Alan…. If Maud were alive and I told you I was flirting with some beauty on the side, you’d slaughter me.”
Geoff put down his glass; stood up, said: “I’m going.”
Three days later, Geoff telephoned. He volunteered to mention the guy again. In the past tense. “He was an aberrance, Morgie.”
Morgan laughed. “An aberrance…I’m an expert on aberrances. I had my last fling with one a week or so ago. What are you doing tonight?”
“Nothing.”
“Come to dinner. At seven.”
“I’ll be there.”
Alan was soon back from Italy. Geoff’s and Alan’s domestic life resumed as usual.
June and July had vanished. Flown away.
August next, and already half-gone. On its seventh day—a Friday—Caroline concluded her summer apprenticeship at the Balfour Foundation. On its thirteenth day, Julia attended her last class at Columbia.
Now it was Saturday, August 15, the scheduled date to depart New York for Hatherton.
At breakfast, Caroline said: “So far, it’s been a perfect summer.” Julia agreed. Morgan prayed that their declared “perfect summer” would not be ruined by the task of moving out of the Hatherton house.
Good-bye, Elsa. Good-bye, Hannah. Back soon.
They went by car. They took turns driving. They talked. They sang. They played their favorite game, “Who Am I?” They dozed. They spent the night at a pretty inn called The Blue Bottle. They made of the two-day trip a lark.
The task of moving occupied them for eleven days. Of all their labors, clearing out the attic was the hardest. Something about the attic itself, (perhaps) its very apartness from the rest of the house, which remove gave it the feel of a place stranded in Time. Its air was filmy; it smelled drowsy; all the heat of August seemed collected in it. They opened its unscreened windows. Bees flew in and droned above their heads, high up in the vaulted beams where spiders lived in woven palaces. Scattered about on the floor were what, at first view, looked like an endless number of old trunks and unlabeled boxes. Against one wall there were three shoulder-high filing-cabinets, and off in a corner, a steel safe. Gazing at these marooned receptacles, they knowingly sighed: inside each one, in the form of things, the past resided. He glanced at Julia; at Caroline. He said: “Let’s get to it” (resolutely, in a voice that forbade mourning)…. Once in a while, one of them exclaimed over something. Julia’s: “Look at this” Caroline’s: “Look at this!” His own eruption: “My God!”—when he brought out from a trunk the linen jacket supplied him (after the torpedoing) by the English padre who ran the Seamen’s Mission in Durban, South Africa (the jacket, smelling of lavender, carefully folded, stored away—so—by Maud). There were boxes and boxes filled with nursery play-things: dolls and dolls’ clothes, and frayed, lopeared stuffed animals whose eyes were beads, whose noses were buttons; and Halloween masks and costumes; a miniature tea service; picture books; figurines of knights and princesses and ballet dancers; jigsaw puzzles; board games. On and on. On and on. In their hands, Julia and Caroline held again these things of childhood, marveling at the forgotten, at the outlived. But no! Not outlived: for into new boxes, they repacked some of the things: “For the daughters we’ll someday have,” (they said). Morgan heard them say it.
It took two days to clear out the attic.
(He didn’t open the safe. He knew exactly what it contained: his and Maud’s impassioned, violently restrained courtship love-letters, ribboned together, and their war-time letters; and, in one cardboard file, their marriage certificates (church and state); and in a second cardboard file, all the legal documents pertaining to the adoption of Julia and Caroline; and in a third cardboard file, folded between an ecclesiastically embossed rectangle of soft white leather, the attestations of their christening: Julia Leigh Shurtliff; Caroline Cunningham Shurtliff. And somewhere in the safe, Mrs. Leigh’s suicide note, “My time has come”—the note sealed in a blue envelope and locked away in the safe by Maud twelve years ago. Recently, he had asked his father: “Will you keep the safe in your house, Pa? Keep it there for me? I can’t bear the thought of its going into storage.” “I’ll put it in your mother’s dressing-room closet,” Ansel Shurtliff had replied. “That’s where it will be, son, anytime you want it.”)
Promptly, every afternoon at four-thirty, they left the house and drove to Shaker Heights, to Letitia and Lewis Grant’s large, patrician home. Back in July, Letitia had collared Morgan and delivered upon him a lengthy, emotionally charged speech. “As you’ve decided to sell your Hatherton house, Morgan, you must consent to my and Lewis’s wish that you and Caroline and Julia make our home your Cleveland home. Make it your Cleveland address…. No, we’ll hear no words to the contrary…. Oh, my dear Morgan, you see how it is with Lewis and me, biffing about at our advanced age in this huge, fully-staffed house, which I pray to God we’ll finish out our lives in, but so many rooms, especially so many bedrooms—ten—count them!—ten bedrooms all crying out to be used. We don’t give those lovely week-long house parties anymore for the lugubrious reason that most of our friends prefer dying in their own beds—we’re all so old! But that’s all beside the point…. You’re to have one of the guest suites, and Julia and Caroline those two adjoining rooms overlooking the rose garden. Your father knows of this plan and hopes with Lewis and me that you’ll agree to it.” She was extraordinary. So was Lewis. Facing both of them, looking into their eyes, Morgan had simply said: “Yes, Aunt Letitia. Yes, Lewis. Thank you.”
That was how it came to be that each afternoon he and Julia and Caroline went to the Grants’ house, now their Cleveland address—quickly known to Julia’s and Caroline’s former school friends. Now it was here that the young crowd (no longer so young) flocked in the evenings. They came for dinner, two or three at a time, or they arrived in bunches, trooping in and lingering for a few minutes before going off to other named diversions. Morgan’s friends came for dinner too, and Doctor Leigh, importantly, as Julia and Caroline’s maternal grand-father; and easily, elegantly, with his orchardist tranquillity, Ansel Shurtliff came often for overnight visits. The formal order, the harmony, the pleasurable interplay of these evenings chez Grant canceled out the complexities and emotional strains of the days spent in the Hatherton house—each day checked off on the calendar by Morgan: a crawling
countdown.
And then (in retrospect quite suddenly), there were no more days to be checked off. On the morning of August 27, an immense van (empty but for eight men) rumbled down the tree-lined lane and snorted to a stop at the house’s front door. Six hours later the van departed the house, slower than it had come, the van so loaded, the men so tired.
(It seems strange that he and Julia and Caroline would remember so clearly and in such minute detail those days they spent moving out of the Hatherton house—the sheer labor, the controversies, the laughs, the often tearful moments—but that they couldn’t, afterwards, agree about what it had been “like” to undo the years they had spent in the house. “Unreal” was their closest in-common word. “Unreal,” they would say, then lapse into silence, each silently lost in a personal reflection of the word’s meaning. Yet the fact of completion—the reality of the unreality that by mid-afternoon on that Thursday, August 27, 1959, nothing of themselves was left in the house. No thing. Nothing.)
He couldn’t wait to get to the office the next morning.
Each day of the eleven days occupied in moving, he and George Colt had conferred by phone. Each day, George Colt had assured him that all was well in the Kissel, Chandler world. Still, he couldn’t wait to prove it to himself.
“Morgan—”
“George! Come in, come in—”
The famous Colt saunter, then, into Morgan’s office, and the ritual handshake. “I bet you feel like dancing,” George Colt said.
“More like going to church and falling on my knees to thank God it’s over. That old rubric about the hell of moving doesn’t half begin to state the case. But it is over, George. Done.”
“I’ve always held to the view that anybody who has survived a move has a right to crow about it. I’ll listen if you want to let forth. Not for long though. There are a couple of pending matters you’re going to be pleased to know about. They’re exciting. Really exciting.”
Matters of Chance Page 43
