by Louis Begley
I shook my head.
The fact is that I do, he said. As I’ve just told you, you’ve seen right through me, from the first. You realized that I didn’t want to be what I was: a Jewish refugee from Poland with a Brooklyn address and a Brooklyn high school diploma. Archie told me that you put it very succinctly: Henry is trying to pass. Or perhaps he said that to you; it doesn’t matter, in either case it was said without malice and it was true. I had come to the land of the free so I wanted to be free, and that meant ridding myself of the chains, the weight that held me back: Krakow and the morass of Jewish history and Jewish suffering before, during, and after the war. All of it. All the Jewism.
That was a word I had not heard him use since college, and I couldn’t help smiling.
He nodded and said, That seems heartless and immoral, doesn’t it? Well, nothing’s changed. You try living with something like that and we’ll see how much piety you’ll have left. My parents had to be immolated too; otherwise the rest was impossible. They personified my past, barred my way, called me to account. I wouldn’t have changed places with Archie—he too was a misfit but with one advantage over me: he didn’t have a refugee skin to shed. You and your cousin George were another matter. If only I could have stolen from you the way you looked, the way you spoke, the way you dressed, the schools you had gone to, in fact every single one of your credentials, each of the trappings that made the unfair difference between you and me. Your stronger, tougher bodies too. After that beating in New Orleans, you told me you hadn’t been changed by it. Can you imagine what that meant to me? How much higher you stood? I would have probably wanted to keep my brain, because I thought it was better than anyone else’s. If I had known about your talent, though, I might have settled for your brain too, and taken everything else that would entail.
Having said that, Henry giggled.
I raised my eyebrows.
Forgive me, Henry said, it’s just me, you know that, and held out his hand, which I shook.
You might rightly ask what has my self-negation got me. My Jewism is still with me, like bad breath. Then what have I gained by betraying my parents? We’ve talked about my career as a lawyer. They would have approved, after some indoctrination. For instance, I don’t believe they had ever heard of Wiggins & O’Reilly. But they would have understood that I’m earning a lot of money and would have been glad to be told that my job is secure, even though Hubert de Sainte-Terre has recently dispensed with my services and other clients may do so in the future. Come to think of it, I am not sure that they would have bought that. One or the other might have said, Be careful, Rysiek. Once you’re no longer useful, those goyim will kick you out. The fact is that, for better or worse, I will not be putting the firm to that test. And my apartment, my furniture, my fine English suits? I can hear my mother saying, You need such a big apartment? For what? You’ve got no children; you haven’t even got a wife! How would I answer? I can’t imagine trying to make sense out of Margot for them. I’m not sure that I can make sense out of what happened to us either. That leaves on my balance sheet friendships. I have valued yours above all, but I hope you will forgive me when I say something you know better than anyone: Like books, friendships do furnish a room. They don’t put life into it. So to answer the question I put in your mouth, I have gotten nothing, zero, or less than zero. My wages are disgrace and shame.
We spoke very little during the rest of the dinner, each lost in his thoughts. Mine had put me in a state bordering on panic.
I declined the offer of coffee, but there was something solemn about Henry’s suggestion that we have a brandy, and I didn’t object when, after another consultation with the sommelier, he ordered two glasses of a very old Armagnac. He drank his quickly, asked for another, and then said, I will now tell you the conclusion I have come to. I am going to leave this loathsome life. I am saying adieu.
Henry, I cried out, you are insane. You’ve been ill treated by that swinish Belgian, you’re exhausted and overwrought, you need to rest and clear your head. Or see a doctor—I’ll get a reliable recommendation.
I’m not insane, he replied, and unlike my mother I’m not obsessed by thoughts of suicide. I don’t suffer from depressions. If I am obsessed, it’s by the vision of a completely different life. I want it desperately. But I can’t conceive of starting it without shutting the door on this one. My way will be to disappear. I will miss you, Sam—probably only you—but that’s how it must be. Please don’t try to see me after we have parted tonight. Of necessity, you will hear about what I have done from George. Do not come looking for me. If I’m as good a lawyer as I think, you won’t be able to find me anyway. And if by some fluke you do succeed, leave me in peace. Otherwise you’ll do me harm. If you want to stay in touch with me, go on writing your books. You may be sure that I will read them and that you will have fan letters from me. Of course, you’ll have no obvious way of recognizing them as mine.
With that, he stood up. We embraced and he signaled for me to leave. His evident emotion had choked him into silence.
I went home to cry. The next day I spoke to George. Henry had not asked me to keep his decision secret, but I thought I should be careful not to say anything that might affect his position at his law firm. As soon as I mentioned Henry’s name, however, George told me that he had been about to call to tell me about an early morning emergency meeting of Wiggins partners that had just ended, at which Jake Weir announced that he had been secretly negotiating Henry’s withdrawal from the firm. This had been done at Henry’s insistence, against Jake’s will and best judgment—he made that very clear. He asked the partners to approve the financial package as well as a letter from him to Henry expressing the firm’s wish to have him come back. He’s nuts, George concluded. Were you aware of any of this?
His decision to leave Wiggins, and somehow go underground, yes—since yesterday evening, when he told me at dinner.
He’s nuts, George repeated, completely nuts.
I asked whether Henry would be able to live comfortably without working.
That’s the least of his problems, George answered. He has savings; he has what he inherited from his father, which turned out to be a tidy sum of money; and the deal he made with Jake is rich. Put it all together, he’s got a lot of money. I don’t know whether you realize it, but he has lived very frugally. That fancy apartment in Paris, for instance, has always been paid for by the firm.
What are we going to do? I asked.
Try to see him, I suppose, said George. He called me minutes before the partners’ meeting to give me the heads up. Very decent of him. As soon as we get off the line, I’ll try to get him and ask whether the three of us can meet next week.
Within the hour, George telephoned. He said, It’s too late. He cleared out his office during the night. When his secretary came to work this morning, she found boxes all ready to be shipped lined up along the walls. Henry was in his office having coffee and reading a newspaper. He asked her to sit down and told her very nicely how he had decided to retire. A plan he had been preparing for some time, he said, but he didn’t want anyone to know until he was ready, and this was the day he was going to leave. He gave her a generous present—one hundred thousand francs in cash and a round-trip first-class airplane ticket to Tahiti, which is a place she has wanted to visit. And he asked her to send the boxes and all personal mail to his notaire. As to business mail, he told her to give it to the junior partner who had been working with him. There wouldn’t be much, he said, and it would dry up altogether when the firm announced his retirement.
I was struck by a premonition and told George we should hang up so that I could try Henry at home. A phone company message told me that the line had been disconnected at the subscriber’s request. I got George and told him I was taking a taxi to Henry’s apartment. The familiar houseman opened the door. Ah Monsieur Standish, he said, Monsieur White has left. I am here to clean everything before we surrender the apartment to the landlord.
And the
furniture, and Monsieur White’s clothes?
What’s left here has been given away or will go next week to the Salle Drouot.
I shook the man’s hand and, suddenly feeling very weary, went home to speak to George. But we found it difficult to talk. He too felt tired and discouraged. I asked whether he knew anything about Henry’s notaire. He said he didn’t but would find someone to talk to him. When George and I spoke next, the following week, he had nothing new to report except that the notaire had been quite firm: his professional duty made it impossible for him to disclose anything about Monsieur White or his arrangements.
But for God’s sake, I said, your firm must be making payments to him, and probably needs to communicate for other reasons. What are you doing about it?
Actually that has all been taken care of, said George. It’s basically a lump sum settlement. The money was paid into Henry’s bank account in New York—which I suppose he has closed or will close soon if I understand the pattern of what he’s doing. He and Jake have a deal that if Jake or anyone else in the firm needs something important from Henry, for instance in case we get sued and he has unique knowledge of the facts, he is to send a letter to Henry, labeled urgent, in care of the notaire. He will respond promptly.
There was no reason to prolong my stay in Paris. I returned to New York. At George and Edie’s a couple of days later, our conversation at table was about Henry—the old times and also the torrent of letters from clients and lawyers who had worked with him at one time or another expressing shock at the news of his retirement. The firm acknowledges these letters on Henry’s behalf, George said, and forwards them to the notaire. It’s unlikely that he will answer any of them himself. It was one of the subjects Jake discussed with him in detail. They agreed on this procedure as most likely to make Henry’s silence least offensive.
DESPITE HENRY’S PLEA, I made many attempts over the following years to reestablish contact with him. Armed with a letter of introduction from a member of the Conseil de l’Ordre of the Paris bar, I visited the notaire in Paris only to run into a wall of polite silence. I wrote to the Harvard alumni office requesting his address, and, having been told that there was none, I took advantage of a stay in Cambridge—I was giving the Charles Eliot Norton lectures—to comb through the files myself. One day it occurred to me that surely Henry continued to read The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. I knew the editors of both periodicals well enough to ask whether Henry was a subscriber. Both came back with the answer that Henry’s subscription expired in 1983 and had not been renewed. Minitel, an extraordinary computerized means of searching addresses and telephone numbers, had been launched in France by the telephone company. An editorial assistant at my French publisher, who was reputed to be a crack in using this new technology, conducted several searches designed to zero in on Henry’s name if it appeared on any list in France. Finally, during a prolonged stay in Paris, I found the telephone number of Henry’s old secretary, who no longer worked at Wiggins, arranged to meet her for a drink, and tried to worm out of her a clue as to what Henry did and where he had gone during his incognito absences. She assured me with evident sincerity that she didn’t know. He was very discreet, Monsieur White, she told me, very discreet.
Margot seemed another road that should lead to Henry. My publisher didn’t know where she was living but doubted it was anywhere in France. Jean du Roc, like many other French writers, had left in search of a more favorable tax regime. Ireland was especially suitable for creative artists; I was able to find out that he was living in County Clare. I telephoned and wrote. He wouldn’t agree to see me or to tell me where I might find Margot. Unwilling to give up, I tried the Radcliffe alumnae office, only to be told what I should have known, that it had ceased to exist, having been folded into the Harvard administration. The Harvard alumni office drew another blank.
Henry’s silence, his fate, and the most recent efforts that George or I had made to connect with him preempted all other subjects of conversation between us. But there was nothing to report, unless, perhaps, those single-spaced letters showing a remarkable knowledge of my literary production that I received following the publication of my new novels were from him. They were signed with an illegible initial, bore no return address, and were postmarked from Paris. As a rule, readers who go to the trouble of writing a careful letter to the author hope for an answer. These were the only effectively anonymous fan letters I had ever received. The anomaly made me think they were from Henry.
XXXIV
SO MATTERS STOOD for many years, in the course of which I drifted into the habit of living away from New York, my time divided between Venice and the Berkshires, to which I escaped from heat and tourists of the Venetian summer. Then, for various reasons, the sour anti-American mood George W. Bush’s presidency had engendered in much of Europe being foremost among them, I decided to spend the winters once again in New York. Out of inertia or perhaps an instinct for good real estate value, I had never given up my place on East Seventieth Street. I was still living haphazardly out of suitcases when Edie telephoned with an invitation to a surprise birthday party for George’s seventieth. It would be held at her club; before she realized what she was doing, she had invited more guests than she could feed comfortably at home. She was counting on me for a speech.
It turned out to be a large gathering of what at first seemed to be strangers. With Edie’s help, however, I gradually placed a number of the faces, relating them to people I had once known, some at college and some when George was an associate and then a young partner at his law firm, and he and Edie were a bright young couple. One woman I recognized without difficulty was Peggy O’Neill—now, as I found out, Mrs. Gordon Lattimore. We had both been in Renato Poggioli’s formidable course on symbolist poets when I was a junior at Harvard and she a senior at Radcliffe. She said that she had a welcome-home present for me, having heard from Edie that I was living again in New York and would be at the party. The present was inside a large manila envelope on which was written “Don’t Bend—Open When You Get Home.”
Call me in the morning, after you’ve looked at it, she said.
I got home late. Inside the envelope was a grainy black-and-white enlargement of a snapshot of a group of young people posing in the stern of what I supposed was some sort of excursion boat. A young woman wearing a straw boater, a tall glass in her hand, seemed to be executing a dance step. To her left, a young man had raised his glass to make a toast. The shoreline was blurred, but I thought I recognized the Charles, east of Harvard Bridge, where the riverbed has been widened. Small sailboats, all of the same class, were to be seen off to the side, indicating that a regatta might have been in progress. As for the revelers on deck, I couldn’t identify any of them even when I peered at the photograph through a magnifying glass.
I called Peggy and confessed that I was mystified.
But it’s a great shot of Henry White just before Commencement, she wailed. I thought you’d love it. That’s why I so wanted to give it to you.
Henry, I asked, where do you see him?
He is the one in profile, she said, making a toast. And next to him, with his hand on his shoulder, is poor Archie.
Suddenly, I felt very sad. It should have been impossible for me not to recognize him. I asked whether she was the dancing girl.
What a silly idea, she answered laughing. My legs were never that good. I don’t even think that girl was at Radcliffe. I must be somewhere in the back. The funny thing is that I can’t find Margot. Of all people she should have been there.
If this picture had really been taken at the end of Henry’s senior year that would have been impossible, I said. She left Cambridge a month or two before.
Oh that’s right, Peggy said, after I had reminded her of the circumstances. I’d forgotten all that. But you’re there, she added, behind Henry.
Again she was right. She told me she had found the original snapshot in a shoebox full of photographs that had never made it into one of her albu
ms and confirmed what I had guessed. We had been aboard a chartered boat, on the Charles. The point of the expedition was to root for the Harvard crew, which explained why George wasn’t in the picture. He would have been in the Harvard eight, pulling his oar. She thought Archie was one of the hosts, and that sounded right; it was the sort of party he and his high-living rugby and Latino friends had liked to organize.
Then Peggy told me how her younger son, the curator of photographs at the fine arts museum in Philadelphia, had scanned the snapshot and after cleaning the image and sharpening the focus on his computer blew it up to this size. Isn’t it extraordinary? she asked.
It was, and not only because her son’s manipulation had made it haunting and otherworldly, reminding me of images of the earth taken by orbiting satellites, but also for a personal reason that I didn’t want to discuss with Peggy. It was objective visual evidence of the apogee of Henry’s first great transformation, into an elegant and graceful young man disporting himself on the river, apparently completely at ease in this company of gilded youths. It was also a painful reminder of his disappearance.
Certainly until the end of the 1980s Henry had been very much on my mind, in part, no doubt, because of the intermittent but sometimes almost compulsive efforts I made to find him. Then, at first without acknowledging it to myself, I accepted defeat. Except for those fan letters that continued to arrive, there was no reason to believe that he was alive, and no reason to assume that he was dead. George’s firm either knew nothing or persisted in making that claim and keeping secret from George whatever information it had. I thought about Henry less and less often and, when I did, it was with the sort of piety that expresses itself in metaphors—untended graves, friendless bodies of unburied men, and such like. Nothing is more soothing. One mumbles this verse or that, and presto, the quotation usurps the place of memory, and once again the pale ghosts of the dead have been kept at bay. But the jolt delivered by Peggy’s photograph was both powerful and timely. I resolved to press my search for Henry to a more certain conclusion.
