by Belva Plain
How Alfie loved it all! At five o’clock on a winter morning in the city he would rise to drive out here to “the place,” to walk around and see how his trees, the locusts and birches he had planted with his own hands, were weathering the cold. With what innocence he boasted about his strawberries, the largest, and his Jersey cows whose milk was the richest! But then, everything that belonged to him was the best, his daughter, his grandchildren, everything. Imagine him losing it all! Driving out through these gates for the last time! It would kill him, or kill his spirit, which was the same thing.
“I guess I’ll go upstairs for my nap,” Emily said, folding the needlepoint back into its bag. “You won’t mind?”
Neither of them minded. Alfie said, “I’ll just let the dogs out. Be back in a minute, Meg. I have to wait outside with the young one. She’s taken lately to running down the road.”
He stood with his back to her, almost ankle-deep in leaves. She saw that his head was sunk on his chest.
“It’s really bad, Meg,” Paul had told her when she had called to ask. “He’s got four more mortgage payments due next month. He did too much pyramiding. I’ve been trying to use what connections I have to get extensions for him, but even if I can get them, and I probably can’t, what would be the use? Taxes are due and the next quarterly payments will be coming up—”
Pyramided. Yes, he would have done so. And it hadn’t been greed, Meg thought now. It was only because he was careless with money, never knowing how much he had. It went out as fast as it came in, and that had been all right as long as it had kept coming in through all the boom years during the war and after. His simple love of luxury was so different from Donal’s, who kept on wanting more and more than anybody could possibly need, because of the power it gave him. Alfie, poor Alfie, like a child in a toy store, just wanted his few pleasures, chiefly the pleasure of being what he called a “country gentleman,” which really didn’t cost all that much when compared with what some others spent.
He came back in and sat down. One of the dogs jumped into his lap, almost pushing him off the chair.
“There’s something I wanted to ask you, Meg,” he said almost shyly, not looking at her, just stroking the dog’s ears.
“Yes, Dad?”
“It’s something not easy for me to ask. It’s never easy for a parent to ask a favor of a child. It should be the other way around.”
He was going to ask her to speak to Donal about a loan. A cold shiver shook her. The man from whom she had expected shelter and comfort now waited, hoping for rescue from her.
“Go ahead, Dad,” she said.
“Well, I thought, Paul thought maybe—would you ask Donal whether he might maybe tide me over?”
Tide him over. It’s all gone, Paul had said. He’s up to his ears in debt.
“I have security, good properties. This place, and the Lexington Avenue piece and the two West End Avenue houses, all the best locations.”
Meg swallowed hard. “Why don’t you ask him, Dad? It would be better if you did it.”
“You can’t?” His eyes pleaded.
There was just so much any one human being might call upon himself to do. She felt the tension, the muscles tight in her forehead.
“Really, I think you should do it, Dad.”
“You see, he and I—we’ve never been close. I don’t have to tell you.” Alfie gave a little dry laugh. “And after all, you’re his wife.”
Oh, my God! Meg thought. She said evenly, “I can’t describe properties, can I? I don’t know anything about them. You’d have to talk to him yourself in the end anyway, so you might as well do it yourself from the beginning.”
There was a long pause. Then, “I suppose you’re right,” Alfie admitted. “Yes, of course you’re right, but you can’t know how I hate to do this, Meg. What it costs me.”
“I do know, Dad. Believe me, I do. And I’m just so terribly sorry, I can’t tell you.”
Indeed, I can’t tell you. If you only knew! I hope Donal won’t be too cold when he refuses. Oh, he’ll be courteous, one can be sure of that, but his courtesy can be hard and cold as ice.
“Is there any particular time I should call? I don’t want to intrude.”
He’s terrified, poor man, poor Dad. Poor cocky Alfie is terrified.
“You won’t intrude. The phones ring anytime. He won’t mind.”
“Then if it’s all right with you, I’ll just pull myself together and make that call.”
Alfie’s face brightened. He had somehow retrieved a portion of his old optimism. Mr. Micawber. Probably he already saw himself with the big check in his pocket, saw everything solved just like that, with the bright sun shining again.
Until Donal lets him down.
Meg’s heart ached for him when she left. It ached for herself. She felt a small, bitter smile on her mouth. Mrs. Micawber. My father’s daughter.
She was upstairs, feeding the baby, when she heard Alfie calling to her. He was coming up.
“In here,” she answered. “In the baby’s room.”
He had been downstairs for over an hour with Donal, and she dreaded seeing him.
“Well, Meg,” he said, pausing in the doorway. The greeting came out like a chuckle, like joy gurgling in his throat.
“Well, Meg.” He bent to kiss first her and then the baby, who continued undisturbed to slurp mashed banana. “He’s a prince, your husband. So easy, he made it. Considerate, didn’t press me for a thousand details, just took my word as a gentleman in the old-fashioned way. We shook hands on everything only a minute ago.”
She was bewildered and incredulous. “You mean that he lent you enough to cover everything?”
“No loan. He bought everything. Seven properties. Not Laurel Hill. I’m keeping Laurel Hill. It’s going to be our all-year home. You know, that was the thing that would have killed me, Meg. I swear I can stand a lot of loss, but Laurel Hill is in my blood. It’s like a living thing.” His eyes filled. “God, I don’t know how I could ever have walked away from the place.”
Donal had paid for the New York properties exactly what Alfie had paid for them, so that Alfie had broken even, and now had a small amount of cash, not much, because there had been little equity in any of the properties. In addition, Donal agreed to pay Alfie a modest salary to manage the properties. So, by being careful about expenditures and living very quietly in the country, he and Emily had come out of a debacle and were safe, thanks to the unbelievable generosity of Donal Powers.
“I can’t believe it! I hardly hoped—” Alfie paused for breath. He put on a shamefaced expression. “He was the last man in the world we wanted you to marry. I’m sorry to say I wasn’t nice to him in the beginning. When you think about it, he’s a pretty large-minded man to overlook that now.” He sighed. “However, I suppose it was understandable. I know it was. We all thought his business was scandalous. But after all, when you think about it, some of the fanciest families in this country got their start a hundred years ago in the slave trade, or bringing opium to China. That’s true, isn’t it?” Alfie’s tone was almost hopeful.
She was thinking that she was now forever in Donal’s debt.…
“Oh, I know you worry about what he does, Meg; you never say, you have pride, and I’m proud that you have, but I know all the same. Let me tell you, though”—and here Alfie leaned forward as if he were implanting a secret—“listen to me, that fellow Hoover is finished. The Democrats will be in with the next election, Prohibition will go, and Donal will be aboveboard. He can either stay in the liquor business or take his cash and go into any other thing he’s a mind to. An enviable position.” Alfie looked dreamy for a moment. “So you needn’t worry, Meg, it won’t be long.”
She didn’t answer, just removed the mashed banana and began on the cereal.
“Donal told me—you don’t mind if I speak openly to you, Meg? After all, who cares more about you than I do? Donal told me you and he hadn’t been getting along together too well lately. He didn�
�t tell me why, and I—”
And you want me to tell you, Meg thought fiercely.
Receiving no comment from her, Alfie continued, “I guess it’s none of my business, but it seems to me it can’t be anything too bad. People have their little spats. Your mother and I haven’t gone through all these years without a few words now and then, but gosh”—and here he waved his arm toward the white crib, the lace curtains, and the pink walls— “gosh, what woman could ask for more than all this?” He put out a finger and the baby curled her hand around it, while staring back at her grandfather. “And a family like this! Five of them, one more beautiful than the other. Your mother and I always wanted more, but it never happened. Say, may I use your phone a minute? I want to call your mother. Poor soul, she’s been trying not to let me see it, but she’s been dying inside. She won’t believe this.” He stood up. “I can hardly believe it myself. Oh, Meg, I feel like a man who’s been rescued from drowning.”
It was, of course, necessary for her to say something to Donal. After her father had left, she went into the room, known as the office, where he was sitting at his desk. She stood in the doorway.
“I came to tell you that what you did for my father was extraordinary. It was a kind of miracle for him. I came to thank you.”
He swung about in his chair. His eyes twinkled. “I made a good deal. I was glad to do it. He’s not a bad sort, kind of foolish at times, but still he did pull himself up by his own bootstraps. Like me. I’d have hated to see him thrown back where he started.”
“I know,” she said stiffly, “and I appreciate that. I do. More than I can say.”
Donal hadn’t looked as friendly in many weeks.
“So! Truce, Meg?” he asked now.
“I’m a peaceable woman, you must know that about me.”
“Yes, I know. Why don’t you come in all the way and sit down?”
He drew up a chair. When she sat their knees almost touched, and a little tremble went through her. She thought, there was a time, such a short while ago, when he would have leaned over to kiss her or he would have pulled her to him.
“I’m over my anger,” he said now. “I’ve thought it all out. Somebody—Leah or Paul, probably Paul—filled you up with a lot of hokum.”
“No,” Meg said. “Neither one.”
“Well, what difference who? I shouldn’t have let it get to me. You weren’t feeling like yourself, and you’re an innocent anyway. That’s what I liked about you in the first place. Loved about you. I do love you, you know.”
She pouted. It was a kind of flirtation. “You haven’t shown it recently.”
“I was hurt. Really hurt. Really deeply hurt.”
Two tears stood in Meg’s eyes. “I was, too, Donal.”
“So we’re even. Come here and kiss me.” He stood up and drew her to him tightly. “There. That’s better. Isn’t it better, Meg?”
It was good to be taken into his arms again. It was like coming home. And she wondered, while his mouth was on hers, whether when the moment actually arrived, she would really have been able to leave him. For he still held her, had always held her, even when she was beset and frightened. Even then.
He said, when he let her go, “If it weren’t broad daylight and the house full, I’d take you upstairs. You’re ready for it again, aren’t you?”
The two tears fell. She wiped them away and smiled. “I guess I am.”
“You always are. That’s another thing I love about you. Say, shall we take the kids out for Chinese dinner tonight? It’s been a long time since we did.”
The news of Donal’s amazing rescue went around the family.
“He’ll do fine, Donal will. Someday this panic, this depression will be over” was Paul’s comment.
“Not for years,” Leah replied, “in spite of the songs.” And she began to sing sardonically, “ ‘Mr. Herbert Hoover says that now’s the time to buy.’ ”
“Exactly. Now is the time to buy if you’ve got anything to buy with.”
“Not for years,” Leah repeated.
“No matter. One day it will end, and when it does, Donal will be sitting with a fortune in real estate. Never underestimate him.”
Ten
It had long been Paul’s custom, inherited from his father, as a philanthropist and community leader, to talk things over from time to time with his rabbi.
The old man was tired. He was old when he married us, Paul thought irrelevantly, as the conversation rested for a moment.
“And how are things with you? Marian well and happy, I hope?”
He gave the expected smile. “Everything’s fine, thank you.”
He wondered whether the benign old man would be at all dismayed to know the truth; most likely not, for he had lived long enough to know that much was not what it appeared to be.
“Yes,” the rabbi said. “In times like these, we must guard more dearly than ever the love and peace of the home. It’s the only place to shelter a little bit from the storms.” He lit a pipe, blew out the match, and continued from where they had left off. “That scoundrel in Germany is filling the camps with innocents. It’s insanity.”
“Organized insanity. I stopped in at the movies to watch the news yesterday and saw a Nazi torchlight parade. Thousands marching and hundreds of thousands cheering as if they were drugged with some substance that turns rational human beings into savages.”
“You have German relatives. What do you hear? Anything?”
“My cousin, God bless him, is an educated fool. He’d been writing for years that Hitler would never get anywhere. And now that Hitler has gotten somewhere, he writes that the reports are exaggerated, that the arrests have mostly been of Communists and troublemakers who deserve to be put out of the way.”
“Is it possible that he doesn’t mean what he says? That his remarks are deliberate?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look here. This is a copy of a cablegram from the Berlin Jewish community. They protest, they urge all Jewish organizations here to stop slandering the German government with these untrue reports and to stop the boycott of German goods. It seems we are doing undeserved injury to Germany and to German citizens who—who happen to be Jews.”
“I don’t make any sense out of that, do you?”
“Yes. Obviously they’ve been told they had better call us all off if they know what’s good for them.”
“It makes you wonder what’s really best for us to do.”
“I sometimes think that it won’t matter what we do. The future is black, and the sooner they all get out, the better.”
“Where are they all going to go? Who will take them in?”
Silence answered. A sound truck went by in the street below, blaring the usual enthusiastic election slogans. It flashed across Paul’s mind that no matter who won, this fellow or that one, there’d be nobody battering the doors down at night to haul people away.
He said after a minute, “If one were really there on the scene, one could get more of a feel in an hour than through all this correspondence.”
The rabbi stared at him. “Are you thinking what I think you are?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“You had a dreadful experience there before.”
“All the more reason.”
“I don’t know, Paul. Prominent as you are in Jewish affairs, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a whole dossier on you. I don’t think that going to Germany is the safest thing.”
Paul was back on the street with Joachim. The band was playing, and people were running to keep up with it; hard-faced men they were, and the delirious women were more frightening even than the men. He seemed to remember that they were carrying flowers. Then there were the guns, and he and Joachim caught in the narrow street.…
“Perhaps not,” he said. “Anyway, I’m in the middle of the hospital drive. These are hard days. People aren’t able to fulfill their pledges and the new wing’s waiting to be completed. No, I’ve got my hands
full right now.”
But he was restless that night. For a long time he watched the shadows on the ceiling, his mind roving from the day he had met Iris back to the morning on which she had been conceived; his mind roamed like a vagrant, picking up papers in odd corners of the path. He went as far back as Alfie’s house, where he had spent so many sunny summer hours with Marian, who, in her helpless innocence, now lay in the other bed. He could see every corner of Alfie’s place, the tennis court and the pool and the walk through the cedar woods where he had first kissed Marian and sealed the bargain.
Then, falling asleep, he flitted through wretched dreams. He was in the dentist’s chair and told that all his teeth had to come out. But teeth were indestructible. How can that be? he cried in his dream. And then he was at Leah’s house, and Hank was crying because the dog had been run over and lain suffering in the street. He woke with relief.
Without raising his head, he could see the bedside clock. It was only six, and although he was ready to rise, he lay awhile, not wishing to awaken Marian. And while he lay watching the ceiling turn from gray through pearl to white, a thought took shape; surprising him at first, it grew solid and firm, until after an hour or so it emerged as a decision. It was quite clear and simple: He would buy a country house.
No doubt the idea had developed from the night’s detailed recall of Alfie’s place. But that makes no difference, he thought. I must have something for myself, an adult toy, if you want to call it that. It would be a place on Long Island at the shore. He’d have a sailboat and teach Hank to sail. He’d get Dan and Hennie out of their stuffy flat in the heat.
Yes, he must have something for himself, trivial as that something might seem to be. The making of money, community service, friends—all these were not enough.
