Greenwich

by Howard Fast

  “I understand,” Sally said.

  “Do you believe in God, Sally?”

  “Oh, yes—yes, of course.”

  “Then something must have influenced you in that belief. Do you know what religion your parents had?”

  Sally shook her head.

  “Are they still alive, my dear?”

  Sally hesitated, and then said straightforwardly, “I tell lies. If I tell you the truth, will you promise not to tell Richard?”

  Sister Brody nodded. “Absolutely—I promise.”

  “I don’t know who my parents are.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know. When I was two or three years old, I’m not sure, a Mexican family in the Simi Valley found me in an irrigation ditch. They kept me for two years, I think, but they weren’t nice to me and I ran away. The police picked me up, as near as I could remember, but no one reported me missing. Most of that part is very confused, and I don’t remember it very well. They put me in an orphanage, and I went to school and learned to read—and I ran away. No one wanted to adopt me because I was sickly. I got rides to Los Angeles, and I met men who gave me money and I guess I was sort of a hooker—is this like a confession?”

  “No, my dear. I’m not a priest. We’re just talking. Now I must ask you something. This Mexican family that found you in the irrigation ditch, did they have you baptized?”

  Sally shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “And you were never baptized at any other time?”

  “No.”

  Sister Brody took a deep breath, spent a moment or two in silence, and then said, “Here is what I would suggest—providing that you have thought about being a Catholic and would like to take the step?”

  Sally nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure.”

  “Then we will arrange for you to take instructions. Father Donovan will take care of it. He celebrates mass every day at St. Matthew’s. The baptism, after you’ve completed the instructions, is a simple and beautiful ceremony, and then, if you want to go on with it and join our church, we will arrange that for you. Now I must tell you that in the normal course of things, you would go to St. Michael’s, which is the parish church for this area. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t choose St. Matthew’s, and I understand why you might be more comfortable there.”

  “Must I tell my husband?”

  “No, not if you don’t want to, and what you have said to me remains with me. And any time you want to talk to me, call me at the church or leave a message for me.”

  Abel Hunt’s son, Joseph, 4.0 average through his freshman year at Harvard, pre-med, sat at the kitchen computer—it was Richard Castle’s boast that his was the first kitchen in Greenwich with its own computer—printing out the menus. He observed to his father that this kind of thing might permanently impair the neural structure of his brain. “I don’t know,” Joseph said, “whether I am crazy or the rest of the world is crazy.”

  “Both,” Abel replied shortly. “You’re on vacation. I do this all year round on every night off. I get four hundred dollars for cooking dinner for some demented Greenwich millionaire. That’s the world you live in.”

  “Yes. And in Boston, there’s an old black lady who spends the winter on an iron grate, because some hot air seeps up through it. I give her a dollar when I can get there. I came there once, and she had six inches of snow over her.”

  “She doesn’t have three kids in college on a chef’s salary.”

  “I’m on scholarship.”

  “That’s your payoff for being a smart-ass nigger. Your sisters are normal, not smart-ass.”

  “I hate that word.”

  “Then don’t use it.”

  “I don’t. Let me go over this before I print it out. First course: crabmeat ravigote.” He spelled it out. “Is that right?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “Second course, trout amandine with beurre blanc and capers. I spell it a-m-a-n-d-i-n-e—right?”

  “I keep reading,” Abel said, “about these poor little black kids a kind and gentle government sends to college and they can’t even spell.”

  “You got me,” Joseph replied. “Escalope de veau finished with shallots and white wine. I don’t take French. You want to be a doctor in this besotted land, you study Spanish. I’m trying to read your handwriting. Asparagus tips, mélange of baby carrots, zucchini, and pattypan squash. What on earth are pattypan squash?”

  “The little white things that look like land mines.”

  “Risotto with chanterelles, morels, and truffles.”

  “So far so good,” Abel said.

  At this point, Josie, the regular Castle cook, had entered the kitchen and was listening with all the admiration she felt for her occasional substitute and his good-looking son.

  “Mesclun salad with fresh raspberries and raspberry vinaigrette. Dessert—tarte Tatin, crème fraîche, chocolate-dipped sorbet berries. How do I put in this business of grapefruit gratinée with fresh mint? Can I just print it at the bottom?”

  “The bill at Hay Day,” Josie snorted, “was larger than my week’s pay.”

  “Not my problem, baby,” Abel said, grinning at her.

  Seven

  You know,” Herbert Greene said to his wife, driving across Greenwich from Old Greenwich over and into the Back Country, “he’s not going to give you anything for the library. He doesn’t know what a library is. He doesn’t know what a book is.”

  “Why must you always be so damn judgmental? You really don’t know the man. You’ve only met him a couple of times.”

  “He’s rich, he’s pretentious, he’s ignorant, and he beat the shit out of his last wife.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Seth Ferguson told me about it.”

  “He shouldn’t have.”

  “Why not? Seth’s a doctor, not a priest.”

  “He treats Sally well.”

  “Yes, he gets a medal for that.”

  “Herb,” she said firmly, “be nice tonight. I’m asking you to do that for me. Sally is so excited that you agreed to come, and it’s going to be interesting. Harold and Ruth Sellig will be there and Monsignor Donovan and Pat Brody—you know her—”

  “Come off it! You mean Castle’s invited a Catholic priest and a nun to dinner at his house! Come on! Why?”

  “Sally invited them. I mean she just brought it up, telling Richard that she happened to run into them, never expecting any positive response from him, and then to her amazement, he said, Sure, invite them to dinner.”

  “That is really amazing,” Herb agreed. “I’ve heard that Donovan is a brilliant and thoughtful man. All right, you win. I’ll be properly behaved and controlled.”

  “And one more enticing bit. Abel Hunt is cooking the dinner.”

  “Who is Abel Hunt?”

  “You don’t know? Of course, you wouldn’t know. You abhor the clubs, but I teach at the Central Middle School and I hear things. He’s the chef at the Hill Crest Club, and on his night off he’ll do dinner for one or another local tycoon. He’s cooking for the Castles tonight, and you just might enjoy it.”

  When Ruth Sellig called Sally Castle, earlier that day, and told her that her father faced a serious operation that same day, Sally was both bewildered and upset. Since all of Sally’s attitudes toward a father were theoretical, gleaned for the most párt from TV and films, she felt she had to respect Ruth’s last-minute cancellation. On the other hand, she knew that Richard would be irritated by an uneven number of dinner guests, and when Richard was irritated, he became mean and directed his venom at Sally. The cause of the venom could be large, small, or nothing at all. Sally rummaged through her acquaintances for a possible replacement, someone who was alone and free this evening and would not let pride stand in the way of such a last-minute invitation. She did not know too many people who might stand in for Ruth Sellig; as a matter of fact, there was only one she could think of, Muffy P
latt, whose husband worked for the Swiss Union Bank and was abroad in Switzerland most of the time.

  And Richard liked Muffy. Once, at the club, Sally had stumbled on Richard and Muffy in an embrace, with Richard’s hand up her short skirt, fondling her ass, but neither of them noticed Sally and she was able to slip away unseen, greatly relieved that she did not have to deal with their awareness of her knowledge. It was not that Sally was indifferent to this sort of thing on Richard’s part; she simply knew no way of responding to it, and therefore she ignored it.

  Nor did it change her attitude toward Muffy, even though it bewildered her. Her two previous Hollywood marriages were short-lived and cruel. She married because she so desperately needed to be loved and protected, and she had used her beauty almost without ever realizing that she was using it. Once she had spoken to Ruth Sellig about the incident with Muffy, asking Ruth, “Can I continue to be her friend?” a question to which Ruth had no answer.

  “How can anyone live like that?” Ruth had asked her husband.

  And to that, Harold had no answer.

  People who knew the Selligs and observed how easily they lived with each other fell back on the cliché that opposites attract, but this was an idle and somewhat obvious conclusion. Ruth Sellig was tall, slender, and dark, with dark eyes and close-cropped gray hair. Her features were well-defined, her nose small, nothing effusive about her, her brown eyes searching rather than inviting, and only in her full, wide mouth any hint of passion lying somewhere in her tight, well-controlled body. Her husband, Harold, was a full three inches shorter, plump; a sandy mustache; sandy, whitish hair around a bald pate; good-natured; open to anything and everything; blue eyes peering out of metal-rimmed glasses; originally from Flatbush, Brooklyn; a Rhodes scholar with a sort of English accent, which he had cultivated assiduously after a year at Oxford. He had done a long tour in Vietnam—the most unlikely member of the armed forces ever enlisted—as a naval historian on an aircraft carrier off the coast; and while this resulted in a book, still unpublished, he was somewhat ashamed of the fact that his days ashore amounted to less than a month.

  Ruth had remarked to her father that she never spent a boring hour with her husband. Frequently his way of thinking drove her up the wall, but at least it was never the expected.

  The manuscript, which he had persuaded her to take with her to the hospital and to read once again while she waited through the hours of the operation, contained the quality of being both the expected and the unexpected—unexpected when she first read it years ago and very much expected now. He had begun to write it after the Vietnam tour was over, and as he explained to her, “I am going to write an autobiography of an assassin, and I am going to call it ‘The Assassin,’ because no one in Greenwich, which is absolutely a capsule of the United States in every way I can think of, would ever dream of being in the shoes of an assassin.”

  Her reaction was summed up in one short word, “Oh?”

  “Just oh?”

  “What else can I say, Hal?”

  “You don’t think Greenwich is a capsule of the U.S. today?”

  “I never thought about it,” Ruth replied.

  “What is Greenwich?”

  “You really want me to play this game with you, Hal?”

  “If you will, humor me.”

  “All right. Greenwich is a town in Connecticut that borders on New York State. It is partly a commuter suburb and partly a local financial and big-business center. It contains a number of very rich people, a lot of middle-class people, and our own share of the poor. It is a well-kept decent town with excellent schools and a very low crime rate, and no assassins that I have ever heard of.”

  “Exactly,” Harold said.

  Ruth sighed. “And therefore,” she said patiently, “you’re going to write the autobiography of an assassin and base it on Greenwich, Connecticut. Do I follow you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Each to his own,” she said, and left it at that.

  Then Harold wrote his first draft and Ruth read it. He asked her whether she had enjoyed it.

  “Not very much.”

  “Do you see why I base it on Greenwich?”

  “No,” Ruth admitted.

  “Look at it this way: There is the gun and there is the shooter. They add up to a weapon. Each is part and parcel of the world we live in. Each is nothing without the other. Both together add up to you and me, and every one of us. The guilt is collective.”

  “Oh, Hal, come on! If you want to lay all this Jewish guilt on yourself, fine—but don’t include me. Thank God I’m a housewife, a mother, and a photographer. I take pictures of what is. I don’t approve of killing anyone—not even mice.”

  And now, Ruth Sellig sat in a waiting room in Greenwich Hospital reading the story of the assassin. She was reading without being aware of what any word meant or intended, which didn’t matter much because this would be her third reading of a manuscript she did not like. She had mastered the delicacy and intricacy of being married to someone she loved who was a writer. Fortunately, she enjoyed most of what he had written. When he wrote something that, to her mind, was either bad writing or bad thinking, she enjoined herself from an immediate response. “I must think about it,” she would say, which meant either an exploration of various ways of indicating that it was lousy or simply letting time pass. That was the best way; a time would usually come when he would reread it and put it to rest with, “This stinks.”

  But his book about assassination was something else. Sellig had linked the process of assassination to a sort of national Jungian guilt, which Ruth simply rejected; and reading the manuscript again to assess his changes was the last thing that interested her now, and with her father in the operating room, it was an untimely wifely obligation. Thus she read without reading.

  Ruth Sellig adored her father. He was an internist, a family physician in this era of specialization. His wife had died many years ago of cancer, when Ruth was twelve years old, and he had never remarried, raising his child alone, treasuring her, yet using her as the reason he was unable to make a connection with another woman. When, as a student at Smith College, she fell in love with an English professor very much her senior, who had once given up his job teaching to become a naval historian in Vietnam—and become a fierce pacifist—her father was first amused and then concerned. But when they both decided to settle in Greenwich, he as a writer and she as a photographer, Seth Ferguson and Harold Sellig became fast friends. That was so many years ago, and now Dr. Seth Ferguson was in the operating room for a bypass operation that he had dismissed with a wave of his hand as, “Nothing, nothing at all.”

  Nellie Kadinsky, David Greene’s date for the evening, was an operating-room nurse at the hospital. At age twenty-three, she was young for an OR nurse, an only child, fathered and mothered by two Polish immigrants, her father a janitor in a Stamford apartment house. At school at Tufts, she met David at an intercollegiate dance, and they had been going together for two years now, mostly weekends and summertime. Her story of her struggle for an education and a profession put David Greene in utter awe of her. She was a tall, rawboned young woman, with blue eyes and straw-colored hair and almost graven features, sometimes beautiful when she smiled, sometimes very plain. When she was off duty, they biked together.

  His competition was Dr. Harvey Loring, a very handsome divorced surgeon, whom Nellie dismissed as “no competition at all” but nevertheless confessed a certain indebtedness to him for bringing her along as part of his team.

  On this night, when David picked her up at the entryway of the hospital, her face was drawn and tired, her hair pulled back and tied in the knot she used in the operating room. “I’ve had my own day of hell,” she said, “so forgive me the way I look.”

  “You look good to me.”

  “You’re a dear boy,” she said, kissing him, “a very dear boy.”

  “I’m a grown man of twenty-one years, ready to complete my last year of college. I don’t enjoy being called
a dear boy.”

  “OK, you’re a dear man.”

  “And why did you have a day of hell?” he asked as they got into his car—and then added, “It’s none of my business, is it?” He was examining his words as he spoke, having never seen her quite like this, so drawn and intense. He had not started the car yet, a 1988 Ford Mustang.

  “Where should we go?” he asked gently. “Are you hungry?”

  “No.” Then she added, “Forgive me, Davey. I feel rotten and I’m being rotten.”

  “Oh, no. Absolutely not—I mean not rotten—I mean maybe you feel rotten but you’re not being rotten.”

  She turned to smile at him and kissed his cheek. “I do love you, Davey. I spent the last hour with Dr. Ferguson’s daughter. He had a three-way bypass today, more than five hours, and I was one of the scrubs. Do you know Dr. Ferguson?”

  “Seth Ferguson? Sure. He’s been our family doctor since I was born, I guess. One of an old dying breed. I hope he’s all right.”

  “Start the car, Davey. I want to get away from here.”

  He nodded and turned the key. “I wanted to take you to dinner tonight, but I’m down to seven dollars and forty cents. I get paid tomorrow, but that doesn’t help me tonight. We have a houseful of food at home. You want to come and pick and choose?”

  “I have a pot of soup in my fridge, good soup. Soup and bread—would that satisfy you?”

  “Bread and water—a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou, of course—I love you, Nell, why won’t you marry me?”

  “Because you’re dirt poor, and you don’t even have a rich father. That’s a mortal sin here in Greenwich.”

  “I have enough for a bottle of wine. And if I go to your place, can I stay over?”

  “We’ll see,” Nellie said.

  Eight

  Hugh Drummond was not a sentimental man, and there were those who said he was incapable of any sentiment whatsoever, but they had never seen him with his dogs. He loved dogs passionately, British bulldogs, one of which now slept comfortably in a big leather armchair in his office. The dog’s name was Churchill, and a large inscribed portrait of Mr. Churchill—the man, not the dog—hung on one of the walls of his office. On his desk were two other inscribed portraits, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Drummond had once been Colonel Drummond, but that was in the past.