by Jeremy Scott
I met Christoph at their house. Ten years older than myself, he’d just published a novel set in Capri in which one of the characters was identifiably my old pal Ivor Mottron, whom he’d known in an earlier incarnation. Like myself, he’d found Ivor enchanting and undependable.
Christoph was entertaining company. Living now in Connecticut, he taught at Choate. He told me a family he knew, the Buckleys, had decided it was impossible for their children to receive a sufficiently right-wing education within the US system and had therefore decided to start their own school. He had been invited to set it up and teach there, ‘Why don’t you come and do the same?’ he suggested.
The several sound reasons I shouldn’t had not deterred me. I said I’d love to.
There were two classes on the SS United States, first and cabin. I had a grub-stake to fund my new life which amounted to only £100 and was travelling cabin. Though small, my accommodation was quite pleasant and the saloon was large and comfortable, but my fellow passengers in their Sta-Prest suits and nylon frocks were a bit of a disappointment.
I’d booked my passage on the United States through a girl I’d met at a party, whose father was a vice-president of the shipping line. Though this got me no reduction on the price, it provided a basket of fresh fruit in my cabin and, on the last-but-one night of the voyage, an invitation to dine first class at the Captain’s table.
The surroundings here were very different from cabin class. Fitted out in pale leather and chrome, the décor of the saloon was ultra-modern and glossy; the passengers had the air of well-travelled sophisticates. Though not everyone was a member of the beau monde exactly, all of them looked rich.
There were ten people already seated around it when I joined the group at the Captain’s table that evening. To my left was Mrs Rothenstein, wife of a wholesale garment manufacturer in NYC; on my right Mary Western, a cool American blonde with a husband, Carl, seated on the far side of her. I asked her if they’d been holidaying in Europe.
‘No. Carl’s been working in Prague, he’s in the State Department. We’re on our way home to Washington,’ she said.
On my other side Mr Rothenstein poked his bald head forward of his large wife to bark, ‘Where ya bin then?’
‘I’m sorry?’ I queried.
‘Haven’t see ya before. What ya bin doing all this trip?’
Unwilling to confess my lowly status, ‘Reading Proust,’ I told him languidly.
An outright lie, it didn’t deflect him. ‘Proust, smoust, where ya bin noshing, then?’
I informed him I’d taken all my meals in my cabin but he wasn’t convinced and later was seen interrogating the Purser. Doing my best to ignore him, I concentrated with quickening interest on Mary Western.
Aged twenty-nine, she was tall, sophisticated, very well dressed and strikingly good looking, with the ice-blonde composure of a Hitchcock heroine. I was stricken with a hopeless longing to make love to her. A band was playing in the large saloon, and after dinner we danced. ‘Carl won’t mind, he hates dancing,’ she said, and her husband beamed approval, settling back into his chair.
The band were playing smoochy numbers: ‘J’attendrai’; ‘La Vie en Rose’. Her body pressed against mine as we danced, she moved beautifully. Her hair brushed my face, I smelled her perfume. I realised with alarm that I was becoming aroused. Would she recoil from me in revulsion?
It was warm on the dance floor. After a couple of numbers Mary suggested we get some air. Minutes later we stood in the chilly dark beside a lifeboat. The sea was calm and the moon threw a speckled road across the pattern of the waves. I was tongue-tied by desire. ‘So what does Carl do for the State Department?’ I asked ineptly.
‘He’s an … operative,’ she breathed and, stepping forward, melted into my astonished arms.
The Buckley dynasty consisted of its patriarch, his wife and five grown-up children, including William F. Buckley Jnr, founder of the National Review. These, together with their young children, lived in several houses centred around the patriarchal compound, a mansion with picture gallery containing portraits of them all, in Sharon, Connecticut. An Irish Catholic family, churchgoers and ardently political, the origins of its patriarch and the reasons for his conspicuous wealth were hard to make out. An overbearing, rather frightening man, he possessed none of the education and culture he’d ensured for his children. Sometimes after dinner he told rambling stories of the Mexican war and tipping crates of weaponry from a moving train.
Disembarking from the SS United States, and on the train to New England, I was exhilarated by my first sight of Manhattan and this new country unreeling past the carriage windows. It was not until we drew near to Cornwall, Connecticut, where Christoph lived, that I started to have serious doubts about my ability to do the job I had undertaken. How and what could I teach? Apart from wine, demolition, silent killing and guns, I knew nothing.
I need not have worried. Christoph, who met me at the little railroad station in a red Pontiac convertible, told me cheerfully that the Buckleys – whom he had been playing tennis with only that afternoon – had completely lost interest in the idea of starting a school. With the same ready spontaneity as they’d conceived it, the project had been discarded.
To learn this within minutes of my arrival was disconcerting. But it taught me a valuable early lesson about the rich: Their whim is not to be relied on. Don’t trust them.
I stayed throughout that spring and summer as a guest in Christoph’s house. To earn money I tutored a couple of boys in French and mowed lawns. The people I came across were open, friendly and hospitable. Through Christoph and the Buckleys I was invited to parties at their houses and the country club. Charles Addams, creator of the Addams family, had a house in the area and attended some of these evenings. Familiar to me from the New Yorker, his macabre humour intrigued me. I believed he had access to some weird vein of truth, but communicating with him proved impossible. A profound melancholic, he spoke only in monosyllables and what he said was incomprehensible.
Another local resident was James Thurber. A brilliantly amusing man, the subversive wit in his writing and cartoons had enchanted me since Stowe. In the flesh not a trace of it was detectable. I found myself listening in dismay to a resentful drunken diatribe. He complained of everything – but mostly about his mother, who was in an iron lung. Nursing care and auxiliary power were costing him $500 a week. So sharp was his sense of grievance, he grumbled about it endlessly. ‘The old bitch won’t die,’ he told me furiously.
Thurber was almost completely blind by this date. Always crotchety, when drunk he became aggressive; he was a prestigious though frequently a problem guest. The evening I met him, late that summer, I was going around with a girl, Posy Tyson, whose mother owned a house near by. Soon after my unsatisfactory conversation with him she and I went to leave the house to go to a drive-in movie. Thurber and his wife were ensconced in the hall, both equally drunk. Stick in one hand, glass in the other, he was wedged across the front door. We tried to negotiate our way round him but it wasn’t easy. ‘Where ya goin’?’ he demanded belligerently.
‘To a movie,’ I said.
‘A movie? What ya tryin’ to do, wreck the party?’ he snarled.
I glanced back at the animated crowd of tanned and laughing people filling the room. ‘They seem to be managing without us,’ I said.
‘Seem to be managing, do they? Huh! If you get any more British …’ He did a strangled mimicry of my English accent, ‘… You won’t be able to talk at all. Party pooper! Get back in there and drink!’ he ordered.
We retreated, forced with other departing guests to escape the house through an open window in the living room. Dylan Thomas, Chas Addams, now Thurber … what a mistake it was to meet the men behind the myth.
It was lovely country around Cornwall and Sharon, pretty rather than spectacular. The Housatonic river burbled through a landscape of woods, low rounded hills and lakes. Villages and small orderly townships were built of white clapboard h
ouses with shingle roofs and close-cropped communal lawns.
People could not have been nicer. They showed an openness and generosity of spirit never encountered in Britain. I had no car. Hearing this, Reid Buckley said, ‘I’ll lend you one,’ and did so freely as someone providing an umbrella. I was wildly impressed by the gesture, it seemed to epitomise America.
Many of those I met at parties and the country club were highly educated, gifted individuals. I’d met intellectuals before at Margot Howard’s literary salons; they wore leather patches on their elbows and bought gin by the half bottle. Here they owned kidney-shaped swimming pools, became outrageously drunk at weekends and slept with each other’s wives.
Throughout that spring and early summer I continued to pursue the affair which had started so unexpectedly aboard the SS United States. I travelled to New York City to see Mary Western whenever the opportunity offered. That is when she found the chance, for I was always available. I waited with nervous anticipation for her calls telling me where and how to meet.
On the first occasion she’d told me to take a room at the Hotel Taft and call her from the lobby when I got there. I took the train to the city and checked into the hotel as instructed. In room 1010 I hung up my suit, had a drink, lit a cigarette and picked up the telephone.
‘I’m in room 1402. I’m taking a shower, come up in thirty minutes,’ she said.
Half an hour later she opened the door to me, wearing a bathrobe. ‘How did you get here?’ she asked.
‘Train, taxi, elevator,’ I told her.
‘I’d rather you didn’t use the elevator,’ she said. ‘And don’t call me from your room.’
Room service had stopped by before I arrived, a bottle of champagne stood in an ice bucket. She poured me a glass. As she went to sit down her bathrobe fell open to the thigh. She had long, beautiful legs, and more. I stood there, dazzled and awkward and twenty years old. Lounging in her chair, she glanced me over coolly. ‘You look hot in all those clothes, why don’t you take them off,’ she said.
Mary Western had been around a bit before marrying her husband. A poised, unusually handsome woman, there had been no lack of suitors. She frankly enjoyed sex and was clear about what she liked. Once, while we were making love, Carl called from Washington. Picking up the telephone, ‘Hi, darling!’ she said, and embarked on a long conversation while her free hand encouraged me to continue in what I was doing. I realised I was part of another and larger agenda, and the thought was oddly rousing.
I was worried at times by the thought of her husband. Not so much by the commandment about adultery and coveting one’s neighbour’s wife – so compulsive was my new-found fascination with sex that I’d effortlessly managed to isolate it from my Christian beliefs – as by his job. Exactly what he did for the State Department in Prague and elsewhere was hard to make out, but from the little Mary let drop it sounded pretty dubious. If he found out I was sleeping with her he had the connections to have me rubbed out, I thought, during occasional bouts of paranoia.
Another spy! It seemed such an overcrowded profession. These were the boom years for it, of course, the Cold War was at its height and there was glamour and a certain cachet in the occupation; not for some while would the invention of the photocopier bring espionage within range of the man in the street.
I was leading an enormously enjoyable life, fraternising with a bunch of people older than myself whom I found unusually interesting. But I didn’t have a proper job and was earning only pocket money. I existed on Christoph’s generous hospitality, and felt at times a little uncomfortable in doing so.
I knew I had to start in a career. I still dreamed of becoming a professional gambler; I planned to take a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas and apply myself at the roulette tables, but I knew it was pointless without a substantial grub-stake. There was also another job I’d wanted to try for years, though I hadn’t felt able to tell Father about it when he pressed me on my plans for the future. While still at Stowe I’d seen a French film in which the suave hero – if such a word applies – wore a white suit and two-tone shoes and was a gigolo. It was not just the clothes but the lifestyle that appealed to me, the mix of lowlife with high gloss, the hotels, international travel and cosmopolitan diversity of people I believed I’d come across in bars. That was how it was in the film, anyway, and the profession had attracted me ever since. I’d never had the faintest idea of how to get started in the work. Presumably, like most jobs, it meant beginning at the bottom – but whose? In Cornwall I was presented with an unexpected opening.
One day Christoph returned from the village with a load of groceries and remarked, ‘I ran into Hazel Guggenheim in the liquor store. She says she’ll pay you $100 to sleep with her.’
I’d come across Hazel on several occasions during the summer. A member of New York’s haute juiverie, she’d been born into one of a group of families known as ‘Our Crowd’. Both her grandfathers had been foot peddlers who prospered to become bankers and millionaires. As children, she and her sister Peggy had lived in the St Regis Hotel, raised by nurses and governesses. Their father had perished as a passenger on the Titanic. Both daughters had determinedly gone wrong from an early age in the inexorable pattern followed by kids of the self-made hugely rich.
What I did not know until later – and which might have given me pause – was her marital record. She was only twenty-five when her second husband, Milton Waldman, left her. The split was bitter and acrimonious, she told him she’d kill their two children rather than let him have them and was mortified when Waldman only laughed; custody was the last thing he wanted. Taking the little boys, aged four and one, with her in a taxi, Hazel went to the penthouse apartment of a friend at the Hotel Surrey on East 76th Street, and flung the children from the terrace on the thirteenth floor.
The year I met her, Hazel was just short of fifty. Grossly fat, she weighed around fifteen stone and looked like a butcher’s wife, with meaty arms and frizzy, bleached hair. Suffering from piles, she carried with her a child’s inflatable lifebelt which she would place in a chair before sitting down.
Christoph’s suggestion of a night with her came out of the blue, I was unprepared for it. Furthermore, the idea of servicing that mountain of very white flesh was extraordinarily unnerving. Christoph stood before me, arms filled with brown paper bags and waiting for an answer. Clearly I must respond. But was I up to this, I wondered in growing panic.
It’s impossible to estimate the extent of one’s genetic heritage, but I believe it helped me at that moment. Both Father and Uncle Gino were men of action, resolute and decisive. Faced by the unexpected or the hard choice, neither of them hesitated. They went for it boldly. I knew I could not let them down. ‘Tell Hazel yes,’ I said.
Our date was arranged for the following evening. That morning started ominously with radio warnings, repeated every half-hour, that hurricane Betsy, expected to strike the coast in Massachusetts, had altered its course to veer in our direction. All day people in the village were busy putting up storm shutters and nailing planks across their windows. The hardware store had sold out of candles by lunchtime. Radio reports continued throughout the afternoon, confirming that the storm was headed directly for us. As I drove to Hazel’s house in Christoph’s Pontiac in the early evening the sky had a strange bruised colour and fierce gusts of wind were blustering through the trees.
Hazel’s was a clapboard New England home, standing in its own well-tended land some way from the nearest village. Neat and pretty, it nestled in the woods. Beside it grew a magnificent oak tree, planted when the house had been built 150 years before.
She opened the front door wearing a tent-like cotton print dress reaching to her ankles. Greeting me, she peered up at the darkening sky. ‘This storm …’ she muttered in her curious adenoidal voice. Leading me into the house, she poured me a stiff drink. We sat down and started on a rather stilted conversation. I was nervous and so too was she, though not because of my presence – this was a familiar situation
for her; she regularly ordered up oxboys from the city, Christoph said – but because she was worried about the storm and what it might do to the house. The radio continued playing as we talked. The frequent weather warnings said the hurricane would pass right by us.
We spoke awkwardly; Hazel’s attention wasn’t on what she was saying but on the mounting storm outside. In stilted pauses we listened to the hurricane banging around the house and the sound of the wind tearing through the trees. After a while Hazel suggested we’d be more comfortable upstairs. Before adjourning she took me to the kitchen, where she laid a tray with plates, two silver forks, a box of Kleenex and a large iced cake from the refrigerator. Carrying this while I followed with our glasses she plodded heavily up the stairs. In the bedroom beneath the roof the noise of the storm was louder. The windows looked out on the immemorial oak tree only yards from the house; its branches were lashing in the wind. Hazel went to the bathroom. Undressing, I climbed on to the bed. I took a slug of bourbon and tried to imagine how Gino would have acted faced with this challenge, but it didn’t do the trick. I thought of the wicked wiles Mary Western had showed me, and that helped a little.
Hazel returned wearing another tent, this time a white lace peignoir. Stepping to the window, she stared at the wild agitation outside. ‘That oak,’ she snuffled, biting on her lip. She came to sit on the bed. Cutting herself a thick wedge of cake, she ate it voraciously. Finishing the slice, she plucked a tissue from the box and fastidiously wiped her lips. Discarding the Kleenex, she hinged forward on her enormous bum and clamped her mouth around my cock.
The radio on the dresser continued with its reports on the hurricane, whose eye passed only two miles from the house in the course of that night. The wind rose. Above its howl and the ominous creaking of the oak tree came two sudden sharp reports. They sounded like twin barrels of a shotgun discharged below the window and Hazel bounded up, quivering all over in mortal terror. ‘Go see what it is!’ she ordered.
