by Irwin Shaw
“You can say that again.” Jimmy shook his head wonderingly. They started walking again toward where Conroy was packing their bags into the car in front of the terminal. “Where’re they now? I’d like to call her and tell her her loving brother wishes her many happy returns of the day.”
“You can’t call her. She didn’t tell us where she was.”
Jimmy shook his head again. “She’s devious, that girl. Devious.” He put his hand gently on his father’s arm. “I wouldn’t worry, Pops. She’ll be all right. He’s okay, Giuseppe. They must know what they’re doing. And you’ll have a little tribe of angelic bambinos to dandle on your knee.”
“I can’t wait,” Strand said gloomily as he climbed into the big Mercedes, where the others were already installed.
Caroline had a stubborn, set expression on her face and she looked grotesque with the bandage on her nose and the swollen, discolored eye. He leaned over and kissed her. “My dear little girl,” he said softly.
“Oh, leave me alone,” Caroline said, shrugging away.
It was not a happy group that drove away in the big car in the direction of the city.
As the car crossed the bridge into Manhattan it occurred to Strand that since the first night Hazen had staggered into the apartment, bloody and stunned, he had had more to do with the medical profession than at any other period of his life.
3
NATURALLY STRAND THOUGHT, AS he listened to the doctor, who was talking to them in his brisk, best-man-in-the-business manner, naturally it was worse than it looked. It was a period when things were worse than they looked.
“The bone’s pretty well smashed and the left septum is blocked,” the doctor said to Leslie and Strand in the elegant Park Avenue office into which he had called them after he had looked at the X rays and completed his examination of Caroline, whom he had left with an assistant in another room where the assistant was putting on another bandage and drawing samples of blood. “I’m afraid that it will mean an operation,” the doctor said. He didn’t look afraid, at all. The English language, Strand thought, with all its polite ambiguities. “We’ll have to wait a few days until the swelling goes down. I’ll reserve the operating room. That is, if you agree.”
“Of course,” Leslie said.
Strand nodded.
“She’ll only have to stay overnight,” the doctor said. “There’s really nothing to worry about, Mrs. Strand.”
“Mr. Hazen tells me she’s in the best possible hands,” Leslie said.
“Good old Russell.” Dr. Laird smiled at this reported vote of confidence. “In the meanwhile, I advise putting the young lady to bed and keeping her quiet. She’s too brave for her own good. Will you stay in New York or do you plan to go out to Russell’s place on the Island?”
“We’ll be in New York,” Leslie said quickly.
“Good. The less she moves around the better.” He stood up to show that the interview was over. The best man in the business had no time for idle talk. “I’ll call you after I make the arrangements at Lenox Hill Hospital, that’s just around the corner from here on 77th Street, and tell you when to bring the young lady in.” He accompanied them into the waiting room, where Linda and Hazen were sitting, Linda thumbing nervously through a magazine and Hazen staring, his face set, out the window.
“Russell,” the doctor said, “might I have a word with you in my office?”
Hazen got up and followed him out of the room. Linda put down her magazine and looked at Strand inquiringly.
“There’re some complications,” Strand said. “He’s got to operate.”
“Oh, dear,” Linda said. “The poor girl.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, the doctor told us,” said Leslie. “I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Has he told Caroline?”
“Not yet.”
“I hope she won’t be too upset.”
“When she learns that if she wants to breathe normally from now on she has to have an operation, I’m sure she’ll be reasonable,” Leslie said calmly.
They were still waiting for Caroline when Hazen came out. There was no indication from his expression of what private communication the doctor had had with him. “Is there anything Dr. Laird told you that he didn’t tell us?” Strand asked.
“Nothing important,” Hazen said. “He hasn’t got time to lie. No—all he said was that in a case like this with young girls, when he has to operate anyway, there’s always a chance that at the same time, if the patient wants it, he can easily do a little cosmetic job.”
“What does that mean?” Strand asked suspiciously.
“Make the nose more esthetically pleasing to the eye is the expression he used. He does a lot of plastic surgery and from what I hear he has a satisfied clientele.”
“Why didn’t he tell us that?” Strand asked.
“Sometimes, he said, parents are apt to get angry at the suggestion. Their vanity is touched. He’d rather that you get angry at me than at him.”
Strand glanced at Leslie. She was looking at Linda. Linda was nodding her head vigorously.
“Of course,” Hazen said, “you’d have to see what Caroline wants.”
“I know what Caroline wants,” Leslie said. “She’d be delighted.”
“How do you know that?” Strand asked, taken aback.
“We discussed it, long before we went to France,” Leslie said, sounding defiant. “Way back, when Eleanor talked about it.”
“Why didn’t you say something to me then?” Strand demanded.
“I was waiting for the right moment,” Leslie said.
“And you think this is the right moment?” Strand tried to keep his voice from rising.
“Providential,” Leslie said calmly. “Maybe we ought to give a vote of thanks to that boy George for the way he drives.”
“I think it’s nonsense.” Strand knew he didn’t sound convincing.
“Allen,” Linda said, “please don’t be medieval.”
“Well, there’s one sure thing,” Strand said, although he knew he was beaten. “I’m going to talk to the young lady myself.”
“Oh, Allen,” Leslie said impatiently, “don’t make a drama out of it. They do it a million times a year.”
“Not in my family, they don’t.” He turned toward the door to one of the inner offices as Caroline came out with the assistant who had been taking care of her. She had a new rakish bandage tilted over her nose and bad eye.
“How do you feel, baby?” Strand asked.
“I’m breathing my last,” Caroline said.
“Don’t be flip. We’re taking you home. Come on.” Strand held the door open and Caroline, holding her mother’s arm, went out with Linda. Hazen held back a little, as though reflecting. “You coming?” Strand asked.
“Yes, yes, of course.” Hazen seemed flustered.
“Is there something else the doctor told you?” Strand felt that he was surrounded by conspirators.
“No, nothing,” Hazen said. “I’ll tell you some other time.”
What a day, what a goddamn day, Strand thought as he and Hazen followed the others to the waiting car. Millions of people are starving to death and killing each other all over the world and we’re worrying about whether a girl’s nose should be a quarter of an inch shorter.
The apartment was a mess in the following days. Leslie had started packing immediately for the move to Dunberry and the place was a confusion of barrels and crates and excelsior to protect the dishes and pictures and there were long discussions between Leslie and Caroline, who refused to go out while she still had bandages all over her face, about what to throw out and what to take along. They had had the apartment for twenty-five years and Strand was aghast at the amount of junk they had piled up. Leslie refused to let him help at all because she didn’t want him to overexert himself and he couldn’t find anything in the confusion. New York was suffering a heat wave, there was no word from Eleanor, and Jimmy was no help at all, appearing
briefly at odd hours, monopolizing the telephone when he was home and often not sleeping there but merely rushing in early in the morning to shave and dress for work. Strand was annoyed at what he privately called the boy’s distasteful habits, but, heeding the doctor’s advice about not getting excited, said nothing about it. He found himself wandering around the streets of New York, reading the newspapers over too many cups of coffee in cafeterias, feeling lonely and at a loss and useless. He had called Dr. Laird’s office to find out what the operation on Caroline’s nose would cost. He had not been able to get hold of the doctor himself, but had been told by the doctor’s secretary, who sounded as though she had been interrupted in the middle of an operation herself, that the matter had already been taken care of. He had called Hazen’s office to protest, but Mr. Hazen, he was told, was out of town and could not be reached.
He saw a great many movies, sitting alone in the cool darkness to escape the heat of the streets, and enjoyed none of them. There was one asset in being in New York in August. It made the prospect of moving away from it pleasurable. If he had been twenty years younger, he told himself, he would have gone to the outskirts of the city and hitched a ride on the first car that picked him up and gone anywhere the road would take him.
One afternoon he found himself on the street where Judith Quinlan lived. He nearly went into the hallway of the building and pushed the button of her apartment. Some of the movies he had seen had been pornographic in the extreme, in the new style, and to add to his general discomfort he was subject these days to wild erotic reveries. With his hand poised above the knob on the outside door he pulled back. He imagined headlines: SCHOOLTEACHER FOUND DEAD IN MISTRESS’S BED. He had not lived the life he had led to come to that end. He let his hand drop and walked into the park and sat on a bench and watched the pigeons, who did not seem to mind the heat.
The day before the operation was scheduled Jimmy moved out of the apartment. He scribbled an address. Care of Langman on East 53rd Street. It was convenient, Jimmy said, near the Solomon office. Jimmy did not say whether it was a Miss Langman or a Mrs. Langman or a Mr. Langman and both Leslie and Strand were too embarrassed to ask. Jimmy said it was about time they got rid of the old apartment. It was like carrying 1890 on your back to live there, he said. Strand remembered all the joys, all the sorrows he had lived through in the capacious rambling rooms—the cries of children, the music of the piano, the quiet afternoons poring over books, the smell of cooking—and had told Jimmy to shut up.
He and Leslie took Caroline to the hospital in a taxi on a rainy afternoon. Caroline was as merry as if she were going to a dance. Strand wondered if he would recognize her when the operation was over. He had not been consulted by the best-man-in-the-business about what kind of nose she would finally come out with. Roman, upturned, scooped, like Garbo’s, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, like the nose of the Duchess of Alba, Mrs. Harcourt?
What would she be like? Your face molded your character, no matter what anyone said. He loved her as she was and believed she was beautiful and knew she loved him. Had she not given up her passion for tennis as a childish offering on some mystical altar to trade for his life? Would she, in her new incarnation, ever offer anything for him again?
Leslie sat sedately on the other side of their daughter in the sweltering taxi, occasionally patting the girl’s hand reassuringly. Had he lived for twenty-five years with a woman who had no imagination at all? He wished Eleanor had been there. She would have said something matter-of-fact and sharp and good for his soul. He regarded her absence as a betrayal. Love fled all other responsibilities. He would have one or two things to say to her when she finally showed up. He cursed the day he had gone into the ocean all by himself. Now, he thought self-pityingly, he was on the sidelines of his own life.
They left Caroline in the hospital bed where she would spend the night before being wheeled into the operating room in the morning. Caroline had not hidden her desire to get him out of the room. “You’ve put on your long face, Daddy,” she had said. “Why don’t you and Mummy go out and have a nice dinner and go to a concert? You make me feel guilty standing there looking as though the sirens were blowing and you were leaving me alone in an air raid.”
The apartment, with books strewn around on the floors and the carpets rolled up and light spots on the walls where pictures had hung for so many years, did not look like home anymore. His voice and Leslie’s as they discussed whether they should have dinner in or go out rang hollowly in the stripped rooms. For once, Strand missed the sound of Jimmy’s guitar. It was hard to forgive his son’s lighthearted and callous farewell. The young, he thought bitterly, spurned possessions, not understanding how much love can accumulate in a battered piano, a chipped vase, a scarred desk, a lamp which had shed light on a quarter century of books.
The family was finished. Now it would be a telephone call, a scribbled note, from Georgia, Arizona, from an address on East 53rd Street. Children grew and departed. It was the law of life, or at least of the times, but like everything else in the hurried century, it all flashed past in a dizzyingly accelerated tempo. It had happened so quickly. A matter of weeks. A man had burst in, his head bloodied, one evening and all orbits had been tilted. He knew it was unjust to blame Hazen but found it hard to be fair.
Fretfully, Strand turned on the radio. The evening news was on. The news was bad, a report from chaos. He remembered a line from a Saroyan play—“No foundation. All the way down the line.” He turned off the radio and switched on the television set. He heard the sound of canned laughter and switched the machine off before the image came on the wavering screen.
He wandered around the apartment, his own ghost. He would have liked to look at the photograph album in which they kept the family snapshots: he and Leslie on their wedding day, Caroline in a baby carriage, Eleanor in cap and gown, her newly won degree in her hand, Jimmy on a bicycle. But the album had been packed away.
Suddenly, the apartment was intolerable to him. He went into the kitchen, where Leslie was opening cans. “Let’s go out for dinner,” he said. “I want to see other people tonight.”
Leslie looked at him strangely for a moment, then put down the can opener she had in her hand. “Of course,” she said softly. “Can you wait till I wash my hair?”
“I’m not hungry,” he said. “I can wait.” Whenever Leslie was troubled, she washed her hair. Her serenity, he realized, was a mask that she had put on for his sake. But he hated the sound of her hair dryer. It was like the sound of ominous engines he heard in the background of his dreams. “I’ll wait for you at O’Connor’s.” O’Connor’s was the bar on the corner of their street. He only went into it two or three times a year, when he had unpleasant news to break at home and wanted to postpone the moment.
Leslie came over to him and kissed his cheek. “Don’t be melancholy, please, darling,” she said.
But all he said was “I could use a drink. And there’s nothing in the house. Jimmy must have had some uproarious parties while we were gone.”
“They couldn’t have been so uproarious,” Leslie said. “We didn’t leave more than half a bottle of Scotch when we left for Europe.”
“Even so,” Strand said, knowing he was being unreasonable. As he left, he heard the water running in the bathroom. When Leslie met him at O’Connor’s an hour later he still had most of his first Scotch in his glass as he sat by himself at the deserted bar.
They had dinner in a nearby restaurant they had used to like. There were only two other couples in the restaurant and the owner, who knew them, said, “Next August I am shutting down. August is a plague month in New York.”
After the meals they had eaten in France the food seemed tasteless, and Leslie found a long hair in her salad. “This is the last time I’m going to set foot in this restaurant,” Leslie said.
Last, Strand thought, is becoming the most common word in our vocabulary.
When they opened the door to the apartment, the telephone was ringing. When the next w
ar starts, Strand thought, as he hurried to pick it up, it will be announced to me by that nerve-rasping clanging. Disaster, courtesy of A.T. and T. But it was Eleanor. “I’ve been frantic,” Eleanor said. “I’ve been calling all night. Then I called Russell out on the Island thinking you might be there and he told me about Caroline. Where’ve you been? Is she all right?”
“Fine, fine,” Strand said, trying to keep the resentment out of his voice. “Where are you?”
“My apartment. I just got in this evening. I want to come over.”
“What for?” Strand asked, meanly.
“Don’t be angry, please, Daddy. All I’ve done is get married. Can I come over?”
“I’ll ask your mother.” He turned to Leslie. “It’s Eleanor. Do you want to see her tonight?”
“Of course. Ask her if she’s eaten dinner. I can fix her something.”
“We’ll be waiting for you,” Strand said. “But your mother wants to know if you’ve had your dinner. If you haven’t she’ll rustle up something for you here.”
Eleanor laughed. “Good old Mummy. Feed the beasts first and ask questions later. Tell her not to worry, I’ve put on three pounds since the wedding day.” Strand hung up. “She’s eaten,” he said to Leslie.
“Promise me you won’t yell at her,” Leslie said.
“Let her husband yell at her,” Strand said. “I don’t have the energy.” He picked up a magazine and went into the kitchen, which had the last light in the apartment by which you could read, and sat at the table and stared at cartoons that did not seem funny in the harsh glare of the neon fixtures, which Leslie had installed when she found that she needed glasses to sew and read.
“Now,” said Leslie, “from the beginning.”
They were all sitting in the living room, which was mostly in shadow since all but one of the room’s lamps had already been packed. Eleanor had asked about her sister’s morale. “Disturbingly high,” Strand had said glumly, but Leslie had been reassuring.
Now Eleanor sat on the edge of a hard chair, looking younger and more beautiful than ever, Strand thought, at ease, unrepentant. “The beginning, of course,” Eleanor said, “was last summer, not this one, when I clapped eyes on him in somebody’s house in Bridgehampton and decided then and there that there was a man I must have.”
