In feel of relation to her, it was as if a field separated them.
She hung her purse over the back of her chair, checked with a hand-touch the eternal amber comb that secured the dome of her done-up hair, arranged around her shoulders the triangle of a paisley scarf. Fussing; not looking at him. Fussing, the way a committee-head fusses just prior to wielding the gavel and calling an assemblage to order. Her hands finally came to rest on the table. “There’s a great deal we must talk about,” she said at last.
(Ah: an agenda.) As a lawyer, trained not to assume but to listen, he settled into silence.
“I will be direct,” she said. And immediately was. “The last thing I ever imagined would happen is that you and Sylvia would meet and become friends. Sylvia has told me you have become friends.” She paused.
It wasn’t quite a question, the way she said it, but he heard it as a probe for him to affirm, even perhaps to enlarge upon. He did not comply, thinking that do so would draw him prematurely in.
Her pause was twice lengthened, first by his retained silence, secondly by Vincent’s placing before them their sherries. With Vincent’s withdrawal, his silence, maintained, forced her on. “I find myself in the difficult position of needing to intrude myself into the progress of that friendship. You’ll see why in a moment. But I must begin by asking you if the fact that your daughters are adopted is a fact known to Sylvia, because if she doesn’t yet know—if and when she might find out, it’s possible—because I’m the link—that she’ll piece together about your daughters, that—”
Over her hesitation, he entered. “She does know they’re adopted. As of day before yesterday, she knows.”
“And when she found out, did she piece everything together?”
“To the degree I understand your question, yes.”
“So now you know. How it all came about, I mean. Katherine. Everything. Everything—” she repeated.
She seemed preyed upon by—“everything.” In some way the word’s victim.
He took too long, wondering—
“And now that you know everything, will you go on seeing Sylvia, Mr. Shurtliff?”
He heard her question as an admonition. “Can you give me a reason why I shouldn’t?”
“Why, because—it seems to me so obvious—because if you do go on seeing her, the possibility of your daughters finding everything out is greatly increased.”
“How so?”
“Because as a impulse, the human sentiment to divulge can overcome one’s better judgment, and—”
At a sudden boil, he stopped her: “Are you suggesting that I’d ever volunteer to disturb Caroline and Julia with any of this? My God, they’ve suffered the death of their real mother and the idea that I’d ever impose on them the initial death of their birth mother—surely you can’t think I’d ever do that, or that it’s in Sylvia to do such a thing—” He arrested himself. He’d heard the whip-tone of his voice, and regretted it. “Forgive my ferocity—”
She went white, but she did not slump. “I—I deserve your ferocity. I am grateful for it. It has set me straight. I wonder at myself that I could ever have gone so wrong.” There were tears in her eyes. “I was taught never to weep in a public place,” she finished.
He couldn’t believe the speed of what had happened between them, the ignited way, within seconds of their being together, they had locked horns, and now, gazing at each other, the speed even faster, of reconcilement.
“Drink your sherry,” he said. “We’ve passed our crisis. I’m not even sure what it was about—our crisis.”
“Oh I know, for myself, what it was about: losing control. After all these years, losing control of everything I thought—falsely, I now understand—was up to me solely to control: all that I’d put in place after the twins were born: all that I felt responsible for: all those things I feared not to control.” There were tears streaming down her cheeks, but in her great emotion, she was sturdy. “Thank you for assuring me our crisis has passed.”
“Thank you for accepting that it has passed.”
If it were a day in August, if they were outdoors lazing under a shade tree, if birds were singing, if—if they weren’t here in a restaurant, if they had the longer time, they would have just sat, whole and at peace, maybe yawning, they were, in their deliverance, that exhausted.
She brought them back to where they actually were: In the restaurant, with its restaurant’s sounds and busyness, and to Vincent, waiting to tell an aproned cook to begin to stir up their omelets. She it was who fully wakened him. “I’ve grown quite hungry,” she declared.
He signaled Vincent—
With a tug at her paisley scarf, pulling him with her further along, she said: “Now about my sketches of Hannah, Mr. Shurtliff: I’ll send a packet of them around to your office tomorrow. There’s one my teacher deemed good enough to display for a few days on our classroom bulletin board, and that’s the one, due to my inflamed amateur’s ego, I’ve had framed for you.”
“I can’t wait to have it. To have all the sketches—”
“As you go through them, I do hope you’ll see a sequence of improvement.” She did, then, smile.
And he, then, smiling too, began to describe to her his father’s extraordinary hat.
…Outside the restaurant, on the street, they embraced. Just before she walked away, her last words to him were: “Give my love to Sylvia.”
Wednesday, November 11, 1959
In the late afternoon, after the partners meeting, in a car borrowed from the Grants, he drove out to Hatherton to see Lillie Ruth and Tessa. He had called them earlier in the day: “I won’t be able to stay more than a few minutes, but I’d very much like a glimpse of you.”
They’d acquired a male puppy of a kind the AKC had no place for in its books. It was a terrier (of sorts), short-legged and curly-haired and mongrel-smart. It’s name? “Charlie,” Lillie Ruth laughed. There were sprays of bittersweet in a familiar vase. He had brought some chrysanthemums. Tessa arranged them in another familiar vase. Lillie Ruth gave him (to read) Julia and Caroline’s most recently received letter. “Dearest Lillie Ruth and Tessa.” Two paragraphs in Julia’s legible handwriting; two in Callie’s scrawl. At the letter’s end, over their signatures: “Hugs.” “Hugs.” Tessa reported that Doctor Leigh “dropped by every week or so.” Lillie Ruth had a new set of dentures. “They fit better than the old ones,” she said. He told about the Leigh mantel, installed now in the New York apartment. And yes, he and Julia and Caroline would be coming to Cleveland between Christmas and the New Year, so they’d all be together then…. “But now I must go.” He stood up; hugged Tessa. “Don’t you get up, Lillie Ruth.” He bent to her; kissed her. “Morgan,” she said. Tessa saw him out.
In the car, he thought how memorable it was bound to be—that coming day when he would introduce Sylvia to Lillie Ruth and Tessa.
Thursday, November 12, 1959
About an hour out from New York, they ran abruptly into fog, as it were through a door. Rain next. Turbulence. Fasten seat belts. Across the aisle there was a boy, age about five, traveling with his mother. The boy reveled in the bumps; he didn’t know about danger. His mother was promptly, hugely sick. Morgan rang for the stewardess. She came at once. The seat next to Morgan was empty. “Put him here,” he said to the stewardess. A deft transfer of the boy to the empty seat. The stewardess strapped herself in beside the boy’s vomiting mother. “What’s your name?” he asked the boy. “Cameron. Mom’s got an upset stomach.” The plane bucked starboard, recentered itself, bucked port. “It’s like riding a horse,” Morgan said. Cameron said: “It’s fun.” They leapt a fence. “Wow!” Morgan said. “That was the biggest bump,” Cameron said. Morgan hoped there wouldn’t be many more like it. “When will we get to New York?” Cameron asked. “In a little while.” He signed to the stewardess to hand him Cameron’s coloring-book and crayons. “By the time you finish coloring this picture, we’ll probably be there.” Three pictures later—lots of cows and
sheep and birds and humans vividly crayoned over (far from neatly)—the plane’s captain informed: “We’re starting our descent.” Cameron said he wished he could “see down.” “There’s nothing to see yet, Cameron.” “Well, how much longer before we get there?” “How much of the alphabet do you know?” “All of it.” “Tell it to me.” “A-B-C-D-R-L-” “Let’s start over. We’ll say it together.” “A-B-C-D-E-F-” Descend, descend. “Can you see New York yet? Mom said there’ll be skyscrapers.” Bump, bump. “When will we see New York?” “We won’t see much of it, but we’ll be there soon.” Beneath them, suddenly, through the mist, ribbons of road and clustered houses. Descend. “I can see the runway,” Morgan smiled at Cameron. Glide. TOUCHDOWN. “We’re here,” Morgan said. “Hey, Mom, we’re here!” From across the aisle, Cameron’s mother waved to her son; waved too to Morgan….
…Into the telephone’s coin-slot, he inserted a dime and dialed her number. Two rings. “Hello—”
“Sylvia.”
“You’re safe. I’ve been worrying about you in this scummy weather. Are you tired? If you aren’t, come by. I’ll give you a drink.”
“I’m on my way.”
…If they had been younger, at an age when the power of mere sensation can’t (won’t) be curbed, they wouldn’t have waited until tomorrow night. That they would wait was implicit in the transcended way they kissed (just inside her apartment door) with an older, informed passion enforced to endure. It was enough, right then, to be again together; to sit quietly for a bit, in each other’s arms, on the couch: to anticipate: “Tomorrow night.”
“It’s nice to know you’re not afflicted by triskaidekaphobia—”
“Dobson! What the hell is trisk—how do you spell it?”
“Tris-kai-deka-phobia. It’s fear of the number thirteen. Tomorrow’s the thirteenth, and a Friday too.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll render both evils harmless.”
“Tomorrow night—”
“We’ll let Elsa give us an early dinner—”
“Then we’ll come back here.”
When it is combined with love, sex exceeds its own limitations. “Glorious,” they said. There seemed no other word.
Between glorious instances, they talked. During one in-between interval, lying close, heads pillowed, faced toward each other, their eyes meeting clear in the light of a turned-on bedside lamp, he said: “We’ll be married as soon as possible.”
“It will be an eccentric marriage.”
“Is there anything you can name, anything that counts as life—that isn’t eccentric?”
…Friday the thirteenth had been superseded by Saturday the fourteenth. They parted at one-thirty A.M. When he was putting on his overcoat, he took up again the theme of marriage. Marriage would be to walk freely on firm ground. Marriage would provide greater space for, and make profounder the “eccentric.” He said they should set six months as the limit of their “soon.” Julia and Caroline would be home for the long Thanksgiving weekend, less than two weeks away. Sylvia would meet them then. “Six months will be long enough—” Kissing, they let the end of that sentence dangle.
He would be back: “At six this evening.” They would go to some quiet place for dinner. Quo Vadis, maybe. Over dinner they would plan how this insanity of parting from each other at night would be made, soon, to cease. Garbed in the thick fabric of his overcoat he held her, silky in a dressing gown.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
Outdoors, on the lighted avenue, a thin scattering of winter’s first snowflakes were falling. They were large—the snowflakes—and they fell slowly, straight down. And there weren’t many of them, so few in fact that you could almost count them as they fell. He reached out and captured one in his hand. It disappeared at once: melted away. Oddly, his lifted hand that had caught the snowflake, brought a taxi to the curb. He decided, quickly, to take the cab. He opened the door, got in, gave his address to the driver; sat back. He was marvelously tired. He was deeply happy. What he had supposed would never again happen to him had, in Sylvia, occurred.
Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 26, 1959
He worked in the morning. Julia and Caroline slept late. (They had arrived from Bryn Mawr the evening before. Within half an hour they were unpacked and settled in, all in a way undoubted, as if they hadn’t been gone for two and a half months.)
At two o’clock, by Julia’s invitation, Bruce Wilson turned up, carrying over his arm in a dry-cleaner’s bag the suit he would don later for the Puritan feast. Morgan and Julia and Bruce took a walk in Central Park. Caroline did not join them: she had to wash her hair, she said. At five, Lucy Blackett rang the front doorbell; then Geoff and Alan; then Whitney Aiken (called “Whit”), a lanky, self-confident Haverford senior with restless hands and an obstinate laugh: Caroline’s “current.” At six, Elsa announced dinner. Seated in the dining room at the large, oval, candle-lit table: Lucy, at his right; Caroline on his left; between Caroline and Julia, Whit; Bruce at Julia’s left; next to Bruce, Geoff; next to Geoff, Alan; next to Alan, Lucy—back to himself: the circle thus completed. Eight in all. (Sylvia. He hadn’t seen her since Tuesday night. She was dining with friends whom he had not [yet] met. All through dinner he kept thinking of her, kept wondering what color dress she was wearing and how its color was influencing the irises of her eyes). The feast was a jolly, lengthy affair, in Alan’s word—“Lucullan.” After dinner, Caroline and Whit went off: they had a ten P.M. date with some college pals at a Village jazz place called “The Parrot.” (“Be back no later than one, Callie,” Morgan told her; told Whit. Callie said, “Yes, yes”—grimacing at being reminded.) Julia and Bruce sought the refuge of the library: they were far from talked out. The “grown-ups” went into the living room and lingered there together for another hour or so. It was when Lucy and Geoff and Alan were putting on their coats to leave that Morgan said to them: “If you’re free on Saturday, come around for a late cup of tea or an early drink. Five-ish. Callie and Julia have asked some college friends to drop by. It would be nice for me if you could look in for a little while…. See how you feel. Play it by ear.”
Geoff: “I’m game for a look in.”
Alan: “I’ll be here.”
Lucy: “So will I.”
He didn’t mention the great point: that Sylvia would be there.
The Saturday gathering was not a quiet affair. The front door was kept open. Through it came college friends in the company of other college friends in the company of “link-ups.” About half of them weren’t known to Caroline, but she greeted them all as if they were long-lost brothers and sisters. Julia and Bruce seemed a bit out of it. There were few surnames: most were Carols and Bens and Eds and Susies and Sheilas and Joes and Hals and Alices and Jims and Bettys. There was a Dorcas with a mass of curly, wiry red hair, and an Andrew in tails: he was going on to somebody’s sister’s coming-out dance. They were all ravenous, like racoons. They went at a huge baked ham and denuded it down to the bone in no time. They made sandwiches and cleaned up platters of cheeses and ate bowls and bowls of mixed nuts. “Ain’t youth grand?” Geoff laughed. Lucy and Geoff were the party’s at-large minglers. What pleased Morgan most was seeing Julia and Alan and Bruce and Sylvia sitting together in the library, talking, huddled close to hear one another’s words over the background noise. (He had—earlier—told Julia he’d invited the author of A Night at Dsiatzdavo to the party. Julia had said: “I can’t wait to meet him.” “Her,” he’d corrected. “Her name’s Sylvia Phelps. S. K. P. Dobson is her nom de plume.” Julia’s eyes had widened.)
Lucy and Geoff and Alan stayed until seven-thirty. In the hall, by the front door, Alan said: “Sylvia Phelps is a joy, Morgan. And it’s a small world. She and I have several friends in common. Teachers, at Columbia. I’m looking forward to seeing her soon again.” Geoff—no slouch—said: “I have a hunch you won’t have to wait long, Alan.” Lucy, buttoning her coat, was mute.
Caroline did, did, did abstrac
t herself from the crowd and spend a few minutes with Sylvia. But it was a hasty meeting. New faces kept appearing. “Please excuse me, Miss Phelps—”
The young crowd was here to stay. Now they were playing records in the living room, pairing-off, dancing. Morgan’s old records. Harry James, Shep Fields, Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman (“Benny the Good,” Whit said), Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. “The Man I Love,” “In the Mood,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Troubled Waters,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “The Thrill of You”—
It was when the tune and words of “A Slow Boat to China” came clear that he sang with the record to Sylvia: “‘I’d love to get you on a slow boat to China / All to myself alone / Out on the briny with a moon big and shiny’”—
—then, that he took her hand and said: “Come on, dearest. Let’s get out of here.” He caught Caroline’s eye and waved. Julia and Bruce went with him and Sylvia to the front door. “I’m going to take Miss Phelps home,” he told Julia. “I’ll be back in about an hour. Don’t let Callie turn the Vic up any louder.” Sylvia shook Julia’s hand, and Bruce’s. Julia said: “I’m honored to have met you, Miss Phelps.” (Ah, Julia.) Bruce said: “A privilege”—(shy and serious).
In the taxi, they kissed. “God, I’ve missed you so much, so much.” At Sylvia’s apartment they sat for a few minutes on the couch, Sylvia in his arms. As far as the world was concerned, today—in their view of it—marked their beginning. They had planned it so: that the busy world be given a six-month chance to notice them, however it chose to; however it would…. About Julia and Caroline, Sylvia, in a way searching, said: “It’s strange, Morgan. Strange, that I can’t see a trace of Katherine in them. Or of my father. No Phelps at all. I kept looking for something, anything—a mannerism or a voice inflection, but there was nothing to remind me…. They look a lot like you, and what’s not you in them, must be Maud…. There’s a hint, in Caroline, the merest hint, of Richard. Or I think there is—in the way she stands, sort of with her weight on one leg, the left one, as if she’d stopped herself in the middle of a step. Richard used to stand like that. Maybe Maud did?”
Matters of Chance Page 49
