“Please, Father, let’s not have any more of this morbid stuff about dying,” I said, getting the upper hand on myself. “It’s my notion you’re both goldbricking, that you’ll be out on the links again in no time, your handicap lower than ever.”
“It’s heart, Brew,” Father said gloomily. “It’s Ménière’s disease. It’s TB and a touch of MS that hangs on like a summer cold. It’s a spot of Black Lung.”
“Black Lung?”
“Do you know how many matches I’ve struck in my time?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, Father, if there were another slogan in you yet. ‘I Would Rather Light an Ashenden Match Than Curse the Darkness.’ How’s that?”
“Too literary. What the smoker wants is something short and sweet. No, there’ll be no more slogans. Let others carry on my work. I’m tired.”
“There’s this Israeli ace,” I said as a stopgap, “Izzy Heskovitz, who’s…”
“What’s this about a duel, Brewster?” Father asked.
“Oh, did you hear about that? I should have thought the Prince would have wanted it hushed up, after what happened.”
“After what happened? He thinks you’re mad. And so do I. Exposing yourself like that, offering a target like a statesman in an open car, then tossing your pistol into the sea. It was irresponsible. Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“It was a question of honor.”
“With you, Brewster, everything is a question of honor.”
“Everything is.”
“Stuff and nonsense.”
“I’m looking for myself.”
“Brewster, you are probably the last young man in America still looking for himself,” Father said. “As a man who has a certain experience with slogans, I have some sense of when they have lost their currency.”
“Father, you are probably the last old man in America to take to a deathbed.”
“Touché, Brew. He’s got you there, Noel,” Mother said.
“Thank you, Mother, but all I intended was to point out that obsolescence runs in our family. I am the earth, water, fire and air heir. Let the neon, tin and tungsten scions prepare themselves for the newfangled. I have pride and I have honor. My word is my bond and I’ll marry a virgin. And I agree with you, Father, about the sanctity of the deathbed, though I shall continue, out of chivalry and delicacy, to maintain the imposture that this…these”—I took in the twin beds—“is…are…not that…those.”
“You’re marvelous, Brewster. I…”
“Is something wrong, Father?”
“I…we…your mother and I…”
“Father?”
“I love you, Son.”
“I love you, sir,” I told him. I turned to Mother. She had opened one eye again. It was wet and darting from one side to the other like an eye in REM sleep. I understood that she was trying to choose my real image from the two that stood before her. In a moment her eye had decided. It stared off, focused about four yards to my right. I smiled to reassure her that she had chosen correctly and edged slowly to my right, an Indian in reverse, unhiding, trying to appear in her line of sight like a magician’s volunteer in an illusion. “And all I have to say to you, you great silly, is that if you’re not out of bed soon I’ll not answer for your zinnias and foxgloves. I noticed when the taxi brought me up the drive that Franklin, as usual, has managed to make a botch of the front beds.”
“Franklin is old, Son,” Mother said. “He isn’t well.”
“Franklin’s a rogue, Mother. I don’t know why you encourage him. I’m certain he’s going to try to trade Mrs. Lucas the three hundred feet of lovely rubber garden hose I brought him for her Scotch cooler so that he can have a place to hide his liquor.”
Mother closed her eye; Father grinned. I wrung out Father’s hundred-dollar bill and handed it back to him. Excusing myself, I promised to return when they had rested. “Brr,” Father said.
“Were you speaking to me, Father?”
“It’s the chill again,” he said.
I went to my room, called up their doctors and had long, discouraging talks with them. Then I phoned some specialist friends of mine at Mass General and a good man at Barnes in St. Louis and got some additional opinions. I asked about Franklin, too.
I kept the vigil. It was awful, but satisfying, too, in a way. It lasted five weeks and in that time we had truth and we had banter, and right up to the end each of us was able to tell the difference. Only once, a few days after Mother’s death (her vision returned at the end: “I can see, Brewster,” she said, “I can see far and I can see straight.” These were not her last words; I’ll not tell you her last words, for they were meant only for Father and myself, though I have written them down elsewhere to preserve for my children should I ever have them) did Father’s spirits flag. He had gotten up from his bed to attend the funeral—through a signal courtesy to an out-of-stater, the Governor of Massachusetts permitted Mother to be buried on Copp’s Hill Burying Ground near the Old North Church in Boston—and we had just returned to the house. Mrs. Lucas and Franklin were weeping, and I helped Father upstairs and back into his deathbed. He was too weak to put his pajamas on. “You know, Brew,” he said, “I sure wish you hadn’t thrown that d____d pistol into the ocean.”
“Oh Father,” I said, “never mind. Tomorrow when you’re stronger we’ll go to town and buy a fresh brace and stroll the woods and shoot the birds from their trees just as we used to.”
He was dead in his own tree a few days later. I sensed it coming and had moved into the room with him, where I lay next to him all night in the twin bed, only Grandmother Newpert’s nightstand between us, Mother’s effects—the lovely old apothecary bottles and her drinking glass and medicine spoons—having been cleared away. I was awake the entire night, hanging on his broken breath and old man’s groans like a detective in films on the croaks of a victim. I listened for a message from the coma and tried to parse delirium as if it were only a sort of French. Shall a man of honor and pride still searching for himself in his late thirties deny the sibyl in a goner’s gasps? (I even asked one or two questions, pressing him in his terminal pain, pursuing him through the mazes of his dissolution, his deathbed my Ouija board.)
Then, once, just before dawn, a bird twittered in the garden and Father came out of it. For fifteen minutes he talked sense, speaking rapidly and with an astonishing cogency that was more mysterious somehow than all his moans and nightmares. He spoke of ways to expedite the probating of the two wills, of flaws in the nature of his estate, instructing me where to consolidate and where to trim. He told me the names of what lawyers to trust, which brokers to fire. In five minutes he laid down principles which would guarantee our fortune for a hundred years. Then, at the end, there was something personal, but after what had gone before, I thought it a touch lame, like a P.S. inquiring about your family’s health at the end of a business letter. He wished me well and hoped I would find some nice girl, settle down, and raise fine children. I was to give them his love.
I thought this was the end, but in a few moments he came round again.
“Franklin is a rogue,” he said. “For many years now he and Mrs. Lucas have been carrying on an affair below stairs. That time during the war when Mrs. Lucas was supposed to have gone to stay with her sister in Delaware she really went away to have Franklin’s child. The scoundrel refused to marry her and would have had money from us to abort the poor thing. It was Mrs. Lucas who wouldn’t hear of it, but the baby died anyway. Mrs. Lucas loves him. It’s for her sake we never let him go when he screwed up in the garden.”
Those were Father’s last words. Then he beckoned me to rise from my bed and approach him. He put out his right hand. I shook it and he died. The hundred-dollar bill he always held came off in my palm when the final paroxysm splayed his fingers.
The grief of the rich is clubby, expensive. (I don’t mean my grief. My grief was a long gloom, persistent as grudge.) We are born weekenders anyway, but in death we are particularly good to ea
ch other, traveling thousands of miles to funerals, flying up from Rio or jamming the oceanic cables with our expensive consolation. (Those wires from the President to the important bereaved—that’s our style, too.) We say it with flowers, wreaths, memorial libraries, offering the wing of a hospital as casually as someone else a chicken leg at a picnic. And why not? There aren’t that many of us—never mind that there are a thousand who can buy and sell me. Scarcer we are than the Eskimaux, vanishing Americans who got rich slow.
So I did not wonder at the crowds who turned up at Mother’s funeral and then went away the long distances only to return a few days later for Father’s. Or at the clothes. Couturiers of Paris and London and New York—those three splendid cities, listed always together and making a sound on the page like a label on scent—taxed to the breaking point to come up with dresses in death’s delicious high fashion, the rich taking big casualties that season, two new mourning originals in less than two weeks and the fitter in fits. The men splendid in their decent dark. Suits cunningly not black, off black, proper, the longitudes of their decency in their wiry pinstripes, a gent’s torso bound up in vest and crisscrossed by watch chains and Phi Beta Kappa keys in the innocent para-militarism of the civilian respectable, men somehow more vital at the graveside in the burdensome clothes than in Bermudas on beaches or dinner jackets in hotel suites with cocktails in their hands, the band playing on the beach below and the telephone ringing.
And all the women were beautiful, gorgeous, grieving’s colors good for them, aloof mantles which made them seem (though I knew better) unattainable, virgins again, yet sexy still as secret drinkers. God, how I lusted when I was with them! I could barely put two words together for them or accept their condolences without feeling my importunate, inopportune blood thicken, my senses as ticklish as if Persian whores had gotten to them. Which added to my gloom, of course, because I was dishonoring my parents in their death as I never had while they lived.
Only the necessity to cope saved me from some sacrilege. (Oh, the confidence of lust! Surely that’s the basis of its evil. The assumptions it permits one, glossing reality like a boy in the dark, touching himself and thinking of his mother’s bridge guests.) Somehow, however, I managed to see my tailor, somehow got the arrangements made, somehow wrote the necessary checks and visited the near-at-hand safe-deposit boxes before they were red-flagged, somehow got through the inventories, spoke to the obituary people at the Times, prepared the eulogies somehow, and fielded all the questions of the well-meaning that are asked at times like these.
“Will there be a foundation, do you suppose, Ashenden?” asked an old friend of the family who had himself been an heir for as long as we had known him. (And oh, the effect of that “Ashenden”! It was the first time one had been thus addressed, at least officially, since one’s roommates at boarding school and college, thinking of their own inheritances, had used it.)
“I don’t know, sir. It’s too early to tell. I shall have to wait until the estate is properly probated before I can be certain what there is.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, “but it’s never too soon to start thinking about a foundation, fixing your goals.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me give you a little advice on that score. The arts. There are those who swear by diseases and the various social ills, but I’m not one of them. And of the arts I think the performing arts give you your best return. You get invited backstage.”
“I’ll have to look into it.”
“Look into it.”
And one of Mother’s friends wondered if marriage was in the offing. “Now you really are eligible, Brewster,” she said. “Oh, you were before, of course, but now you must certainly feel a bit of pressure to put your affairs in order and began to think about the next generation.”
It was a rude thing to say (though something like these had been almost Father’s last words to me), but the truth was I did feel it. Perhaps that was what my shameful lust had been about, nature’s way of pointing me to my duty. My search for myself seemed trivial child’s play now. Honor did subsist in doing right by the generations. I know what you’re thinking: Who’s this impostor, this namby with no will of his own? If he’s so rich, why ain’t he smart? Meaning glacial, indifferent, unconscious of the swath of world he cuts as the blade of what it leaves bleeding—the cosmos as rich man’s butter pat. Listen, disdain’s easy, a mug’s game, but look close at anything and you’ll break your heart.
I was inconsolable, grave at the graveside, beside myself like a fulfillment of Mother’s prophetic double vision.
“People lose parents,” a Securities and Exchange Commission cousin told me. (Yes, yes, it’s nothing, only nature bottoming out.) “Sons lose mothers,” he said, his gray hair trimmed that morning, wet looking. “Fathers die.”
“Don’t look,” I said wildly, “shut an eye. I am beside myself.”
I keened like a widow, a refugee from hardest times, a daughter with the Cossacks, a son chopped in the thresher. I would go about in black, I thought, and be superstitious. My features will thicken and no one will know how old I am.
“There, there,” he told me, “there, there.”
“There, there. There, there,” said this one and that.
My pals did not know what to make of me.
“My God, Ashenden,” one said, a roommate from boarding school, “have you seen the will? Is it awful?”
“I’ve been left everything,” I told him coolly.
He nudged me in the ribs. I would have called him out had I not been in mourning.
Only the sight of Mrs. Lucas saved me. The thought of that brave woman’s travail enabled me to control myself at last. I no longer wept openly and settled into a silent, stand-offish grimness, despair like an ingrown toenail on a man of fashion.
The weekends began.
All my adult life I have been a guest in other people’s houses, following the sun and seasons like a migratory bird, an instinct in me, the rich man’s cunning feel for ripeness, some oyster-in-an-r-month notion working there which knows without reference to anything outside itself when to pack the tennis racket, when to bring along the German field glasses to look at a friend’s birds, the telescope to stare at his stars, the wet suit to swim in beneath his waters when the exotic fish are running. It’s not in the Times when the black dinner jacket comes off and the white one goes on; it’s something surer, subtler, the delicate guidance system of the privileged, my playboy astronomy.
The weekends began, and the midweeks and week- and two-week stretches in the country. I was very grateful to my friends’ sense of what I needed then. Where I was welcome before, I was now actively pursued. My friends were marvelous, and not a mean motive between them. If I can’t say as much for myself.
In the luggage now with the bandboxes of equipment, the riding boots and golf clubs and hiker’s gear, was a lover’s wardrobe: shirts like the breasts of birds, custom ties that camouflaged themselves against their backgrounds or stood out like dye in the sea, ascots like bunting for the throat’s centennial, the handmade jackets and perfect trousers and tack room leathers. I dressed to kill, slay should I meet her, the mother of my children. (These were my mourning togs, mind.) And if I brought the best that could be had, it was not out of vanity but only respect for that phantom girl who would be so exquisite herself, so refined and blessed with taste that it would have been as dangerous for her to look at the undistinguished as for another to stare directly into the eclipse. So it was actually humility that made me dress as I did, simple self-effacement, the old knight’s old modesty, shyness so capitulative that prostration was only a kind of militant attention, a death-defying leap to the earth. And since I had never met her, nor knew her name, nor had a clue to where she might be, I traveled alone, for the first time taking along no guest of the guest. Which my friends put down to decency, the thirty- or sixty- or ninety-day celibacy of the orphaned. But it wasn’t that.
It was a strange period of my l
ife. My friends, innocent of my intentions and honoring what they supposed to be my bereavement, omitted to invite any girls for me at all, and I found myself on this odd bachelor circuit, several times meeting the same male guest I had met at someone else’s house a few weeks before. We crossed each other’s paths like traveling salesmen with identical territories. And I rode and hunted and fished and stayed up all hours playing whist or backgammon or chess with my hosts or the other male guest, settled before fires with sherry and cognac, oddly domestic, as if what I owed the generations was a debt already paid, a trip in the time machine, keeping late hours in libraries until the odor of leather actually became offensive to me. On the few occasions I retired early it was at my host’s instructions. (I am an obedient guest.) The next morning there was to be an excursion in the four-wheel drive to investigate property he had acquired in backwoods forty miles off—a lodge, an abandoned watchtower, twice an old lighthouse. And always, nodding my approval if the purchase had been made or giving my judicious advice if it hadn’t, I had this sense that I’d had the night before in the library: that the property in question was my property, that I was already what I was dressed to become.
I was not bored; I was distraught.
A strange thing happened. It occurred to me that perhaps my old fastidiousness regarding the inviolability of a friend’s wife was wrong, morally wrong. Had not these women made overtures, dropped hints, left doors ajar so that returning to my room with a book I could see them in nightgowns beside bedlamps; hadn’t they smiled sweetly and raised arms? Perhaps I had been a prig, had placed too high a value on myself by insisting on the virginity of my intended. Perhaps it was my fate to figure in a divorce. I decided that henceforth I must not be so stand-offish with my friends’ wives.
So I stroked their knees beneath the whist table and put down their alarm to surprise. I begged off going on the excursions and stayed home with them when my friend and the other guest climbed into the jeep. I followed the wife all about the house and cornered her in stairwells and gardens.
Searches & Seizures Page 16
