Eric sighed loudly.
“Sure—and while you’re at it, why don’t you shoot yourself in the foot with a tommy gun, pausing twice to reload.”
“Ouch.”
“You asked for my opinion, there it is. But, S—you’re a big girl. Believe him if you want. You know what happened before. For your sake, I hope it doesn’t happen again. So if you want a ten-cent piece of advice: caveat emptor.”
“There’s nothing to buy here, Eric. He’s married, for God’s sake.”
“Since when has ‘being married’ ever stopped anyone from engaging in extra-marital stupidity?”
“I won’t be stupid here, Eric.”
I really had no intention of being foolish. At three in the morning—having finally let insomnia win that night’s war—I sat down at my desk and typed a letter.
January 6th, 1950
Dear Jack,
Who was it who said that hindsight was always 20/20? Or that if you come to a fork in the road, you should always take it? I’m glad I read your letters . . . which I am returning to you now. They explained a lot. They made me sad—because, like you, I too felt something close to certainty in the aftermath of that Thanksgiving night. But everyone comes equipped with a back story . . . and yours mitigated against any future between us. I don’t feel rancor or animosity toward you because of Dorothy. I just wished you’d had the courage to mail those letters.
You intimated that you have a reasonably good marriage. Having myself made a very bad marriage, “reasonably good” sounds more than reasonably good to me. You should consider yourself a lucky man.
In closing, may I wish you and your family all good things for the future.
Yours,
And I signed it Sara Smythe. Because I wanted to be doubly sure that he got the letter’s underlying message: goodbye.
I looked up the address of Steele and Sherwood in the phone book. I found a large manila envelope and addressed the letter to him there. I threw on some clothes, dashed to the mailbox on the corner of Riverside Drive and 77th Street, then dashed back to my apartment. I got undressed and climbed back into bed. I could now sleep.
But I didn’t sleep late. Because, at eight AM, the intercom began to buzz. I staggered into the kitchen to answer it. It was someone from my local florist. My heart immediately sank. I answered the door. The delivery guy handed me a dozen red roses. Inside was a card:
I love you.
Jack
I put the flowers in water. I tore up the card. I spent the day away from my apartment—loitering with intent in a variety of midtown screening rooms, watching this month’s releases for my movie column. When I got home that night, I was relieved to see no letters awaiting me on the inside doormat.
At eight the next morning, however, the intercom rang again.
“Handleman’s Flowers.”
Oh God . . .
This time, I received a dozen pink carnations. And, of course, a card:
Please forgive me. Please call me.
Love, Jack
I put the flowers in water. I tore up the card. I prayed that my letter would arrive at his office this morning, and that he would get the message and leave me be.
But, at eight the following morning . . . buzz.
“Handleman’s Flowers.”
“What’s it today?” I asked the delivery guy.
“A dozen lilies.”
“Take them back.”
“Sorry, lady,” he said, thrusting them into my hand. “A delivery is a delivery.”
I found my third (and last) vase. I arranged the flowers. I opened the card.
I am taking the fork in the road.
And I still love you.
Jack
Damn him. Damn him. Damn him. I grabbed my coat and stormed off in the direction of Broadway—to a Western Union office on 72nd Street. Once there, I went over to the main counter and picked up a telegram form and a much-chewed pencil. I wrote:
No more flowers. No more platitudes. I do not love you.
Stay out of my life. Never see me again.
Sara
I walked over to a hatch in the wall, and handed the form to a clerk. He read the message back to me in a deadpan voice, saying Stop every time I had indicated a period. When he was finished, he asked me if I wanted the regular or fast rate.
“As fast as possible.”
The charge was a dollar fifteen. The telegram would be delivered to Jack at his office within two hours. As I reached into my purse to pay for the telegram, my hand began to shake. On the way home, I stopped in a luncheonette and stared down into a black cup of coffee, trying to convince myself that I had done the right thing. My life—I told myself—was finally going well. I was enjoying professional success. I was materially comfortable. I had gotten through the marital breakup as cleanly as could be expected. All right, the knowledge that I would never have children continued to haunt me . . . but it always would be there, no matter who I was with. And it would most certainly be there if I was involved with a married man. Especially one who already had a child of his own.
All right, all right, I still loved him. But love cannot succeed without a pragmatic foundation. And there was nothing pragmatic about Jack’s situation. It would only lead us—me—to grief.
So, yes, I had done the right thing in sending that telegram. Hadn’t I?
I was out for the rest of the day. When I got home that night, I opened the door and felt an acute stab of disappointment when there wasn’t a telegram from Jack waiting for me. I slept until nearly noon the next morning. Waking up with a jolt, I immediately went downstairs to see if the mail yielded anything from Mr. Malone. It didn’t. The thought struck me: no flowers today. Maybe I was so asleep I didn’t hear the intercom . . .
I made a call to Handleman’s Flowers.
“Sorry, Miss Smythe,” Mr. Handleman said, “today wasn’t your lucky day.”
Nor was the next day. Or the day after. Or the day after that.
A week went by without a word from Jack. Stay out of my life. Never see me again. Oh God, he’d taken me at my word.
Again and again, I told myself I had made a wise, sensible decision. Again and again, I longed for him.
And then, nine days after I sent that telegram, a letter finally arrived. It was short. It read:
Sara:
This is the second hardest letter I’ve ever written in my life. But unlike the first letter, I will mail this one.
I will respect your wishes. You won’t hear from me again. But know this: you will always be with me—because I will never get you out of my head. And because you are the love of my life.
I didn’t tear this letter up. Perhaps because I was too stunned at the time. Later that morning, I took a taxi to Penn Station and boarded the train to Chicago—where some local ladies’ club had invited me to give a lunchtime talk to their members, and were paying me two hundred dollars, plus all my expenses, for an hour’s work. I was supposed to have been away for four nights. Instead, I arrived in Chicago in time for the city’s worst blizzard in thirty years. As I quickly discovered, a Chicago blizzard made the equivalent Manhattan climatic event look like a mild sprinkling of flurries. Chicago didn’t simply come to a standstill—it became petrified. The mercury dipped to ten below zero. The wind off Lake Michigan sliced you like a scalpel. The snow kept falling. My talk was canceled. My train back east was canceled. Venturing outside was impossible. For eight days I was incarcerated within the Hotel Ambassador on North Michigan Avenue, passing the time by punching out a few more “Real Life” columns on my Remington, and reading cheap mysteries. Thinking: this isn’t the American Midwest. This is a bad Russian novel.
Every hour of every day, I kept trying to convince myself that sending that telegram to Jack was the correct decision. He’d fractured my heart once before. I was right not to let him do it again. Or, at least, that’s the justification I kept repeating over and over, in an attempt to stop myself from thinking I had made the wors
t mistake of my life.
Eventually, the trains started running again. Getting a reservation back to New York was a nightmare. After forty-eight hours, the concierge at the Hotel Ambassador finally managed to wangle me a seat, but no berth. So I sat up all night in the bar car, drinking black coffee, trying to read the latest J. P. Marquand novel (and getting rather fed up with the alleged spiritual crisis suffered by his starchy Boston banker hero), nodding off, and waking up with a stiff neck to sunrise over beautiful Newark, New Jersey.
It was cold, but clear in Manhattan. I deposited myself in a taxi, and slept all the way up Broadway. There was a pile of mail on the mat outside my apartment door. I shuffled through it. Nothing with Jack’s telltale scrawl. He was really taking me at my word. I went inside. I checked my ice box and cupboards, and noticed that, yet again, I was low on stocks. I picked up the phone, called Gristedes, and gave them a big order. Because it was still early in the morning, they said they would send a delivery boy around with the groceries in under an hour.
So I unpacked, then had a bath. As I was drying myself off, the intercom rang. I threw on a bathrobe, wrapped my hair in a towel, dashed into the kitchen, picked up the receiver, and said, “Be there in a sec.”
I went out into the hallway. I opened the front door. Jack was standing there. My heart missed about four beats. He smiled one of his anxious smiles.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I said, sounding toneless.
“I got you out of the bath.”
“Yes. You did.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll come back later.”
“No,” I said. “Come in now.”
I led him into my apartment. As soon as he closed the door behind him, I turned to face him. Less than a second later, we were in each other’s arms. The kiss went on for a very long time. When it ended, he said my name. I silenced the possibility of any further talk by putting my hand behind his head, and kissing him again. It was a deep, long kiss. There was no need for words. I just wanted to hold him. And not let go.
FOURTEEN
LATER THAT MORNING, I turned to Jack and said, “I want you to grant me one small wish.”
“I’ll try.”
“Let me have you to myself all day.”
“Done deal,” he said, slipping out of my bed and walking naked into the kitchen. I heard him dial the phone, and make low muted conversation for a few minutes. Finally he returned to the bedroom, clutching two bottles of beer.
“I’m now officially out of town on business until Friday at five PM,” he said. “That’s three days, two nights. Tell me what you want to do, where you want to go . . .”
“I want to go nowhere. I just want to stay here with you.”
“Fine by me,” he said, crawling back into bed and kissing me deeply. “Three days in bed with you sounds like the best idea imaginable. Especially as it also gives us the license to drink Schlitz at ten in the morning.”
“If I’d known you were coming, I’d have bought champagne.”
You always know when you have true rapport with someone. When you’re in each other’s presence, you find you can’t stop talking to each other. Or, at least that’s how it was with us during those three days. We never left the apartment. We barricaded ourselves from the world. I didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t answer the door—except when I had arranged for a delivery of supplies. Groceries arrived from Gristedes. I called my local liquor store, and had them send over some wine and bourbon and beer. And Gitlitz’s Delicatessen was willing to dispatch anything from their menu at short notice.
We locked ourselves away. We talked. We made love. We slept. We woke up. We started talking again. We actually knew so damn little about each other. We were both greedy for information. I wanted to learn everything—to pick up where we left off four years ago, and hear more about his childhood in Brooklyn, his tough-guy father, and his mother—who died when he was thirteen.
“It was the damnedest thing,” he told me. “I was in the seventh grade. It was Easter Sunday nineteen thirty-five. We’d all just come back from Mass—Mom, Dad, Meg, and me. I got out of my suit, and went out with a couple of pals in the neighborhood to play stickball in the next street. My mom told me to be back within an hour tops, as we had a bunch of relatives coming over for lunch. Anyway, there I was, playing with my pals, and Meg came charging down the street, tears running down her face . . . she was all of eleven at the time . . . screaming, ‘Mom’s real sick.’ All I remember after that was running like hell back toward our house. When we got there, an ambulance was out in front, along with the cops. And then, suddenly, these two guys came out of our front door, carrying a stretcher, with a body on it covered by a sheet. My dad was behind the stretcher, being supported by his brother Al. My dad never cried, but here he was sobbing like a kid. That’s when I knew . . .
“An embolism is what caused it. Some artery to her heart got blocked, and . . . She was only thirty-five. No history of heart trouble. Nothing. Hell, Mom never got sick. She was too busy looking after all of us to even think of getting sick. But there she now was on that stretcher. Gone.
“I felt as if the bottom of my world had just been snatched from under me. That’s what my mom’s death taught me. You go out to play stickball, thinking your life is secure. You come back, and discover it’s been permanently maimed.”
I ran my hand through his hair. “You’re right,” I said. “Nothing’s ever secure. And I don’t think anyone gets through life without being dealt some truly bad cards.”
He touched my face. “And the occasional four aces.”
I kissed him. Then said, “You mean, I’m not a royal flush?”
“You’re the best hand imaginable.”
Much later that night—after feasting on two of Gitlitz’s famous corned-beef-on-rye sandwiches, and a few bottles of Budweiser—he got talking about his work in public relations.
“Naturally, I saw myself leaving Stars and Stripes and landing a big job on the Journal American or even the New York Times. But when I found out I was about to be a dad, I decided to opt for something a little more lucrative than the usual sixty-dollar-a-week starting salary at one of the big papers . . . if, that is, they were even willing to take me on. More to the point, the London bureau chief on Stars and Stripes—Hank Dyer—had been working at Steele and Sherwood before the war, so I had a pretty easy entrée into a job. And I kind of like it—since most of the time, it’s about three-martini lunches with journalists, and schmoozing the client. At first, I was doing all Manhattan-based stuff, but our business has really started to expand and we’re now handling a lot of corporate accounts. So, for the moment, I’m the liaison with a string of insurance companies up and down the eastern seaboard. It’s not as much fun as the early days, when I was looking after a fight promoter and a couple of midlevel Broadway producers. But they’ve upped my salary by seventy dollars a week, and the traveling expenses are good . . .”
“You should be well compensated for having to go to Albany and Harrisburg.”
“Believe me, I’m only going to keep with the insurance boys for another two years max. Then, if I can, I’m leaving PR and getting back into newspapers. My sis, Meg, tells me she expects me to win a Pulitzer by the time I’m thirty-five. I told her, ‘Only if you’re editor in chief of McGraw-Hill by then.’ Mind you, she might just get there. McGraw-Hill have just made her a fully fledged editor . . . and she’s only twenty-five.”
“Is she married yet?”
“No way. She thinks all men are bums,” he said.
“She’s dead right.”
Jack looked at me warily. “Do you really mean that?”
“Absolutely,” I said with a smile.
“Was your ex-husband a bum?”
“No—just a banker.”
“Something bad happened during the marriage, didn’t it?”
“What makes you think that?”
“The way you’ve dodged telling me anything about him.”
&
nbsp; “Like I said before, marrying George was a major error of judgment. But, at the time, I thought I had no choice. I got pregnant.”
Now I told him everything. The grim shotgun wedding. The appalling honeymoon. My circumscribed life in Old Greenwich. My nightmare of a mother-in-law. Losing the baby. Losing my ability to have children. When I was finished, Jack reached over across my kitchen table and took both my hands.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said. “How do you deal with it?”
“The way you deal with any loss: you just do. There’s no other option, except excessive booze, alcohol, pills, nervous breakdowns, depression, or any of those other self-pitying options. But do you know what I sometimes wonder? Especially late at night, when I can’t sleep. Was I to blame? Did I somehow will the miscarriage myself? Because, at the time, I kept thinking: if only I would miscarry, I’d be free of George . . .”
“That was a perfectly legitimate way to think, given that your wimp of a husband and his goddamn mother were making your life hell. Anyway, we all think dark stuff when we’re scared or trapped . . .”
“The thing is: I got my wish. The miscarriage happened. And I also destroyed my chance to ever have children . . .”
“Will you listen to yourself. You didn’t destroy anything. It was . . . I don’t know . . . rotten goddamn luck. We think we have command over so much stuff. We don’t. Sure, there are the really rare moments when we have to make a ethical call. But, by and large, we’re victims to things over which we have little control. You had no control over this. None.”
I swallowed hard. I looked at him with care. His vehemence had surprised—and pleased—me.
“Thank you,” I finally said.
“For nothing.”
“I needed to hear that.”
“Then I needed to tell you that.”
“Stand up,” I said.
He did as ordered. I pulled him toward me. I kissed him deeply.
“Come back to bed,” I said.
Around nine PM on our second night together, he got up out of bed, and said he had to make a phone call. Pulling on his trousers and fastening a cigarette between his lips, he excused himself and walked into the kitchen. I heard him dial a number. He spoke in a pleasant, low voice for around ten minutes. I went into the bathroom, and tried to distract myself by having a shower. When I emerged ten minutes later—swathed in a robe—he was back sitting on the edge of my bed, lighting up a fresh cigarette. I smiled tightly, wondering if my sense of guilt and rivalry was apparent.
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 33
