Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  “We had the cook at the club pack us a cold lunch,” Tipton said, “and we climbed out a window of Sever to have a picnic on the roof. Cort Wilder, Moody, Kreegs, Tom Patten, and myself—they were the fellows I was running with at the time. You know Cort Wilder, don’t you?” This was directed at the English master. “Oh, I thought you might have crossed paths. He was a classics man, too. Anyhow, it was the first nice day of spring, which is always a marvelous day, isn’t it? Everyone comes out of hibernation. We wanted to get the bird’s-eye view, so we had a picnic basket that belonged to Kreegs’s girlfriend and sandwiches from the club, and we were drinking champagne straight from the bottle, which is always such fun, isn’t it? I doubt anyone would have noticed us, except the wind picked up Kreegs’s sandwich wrapper and whooshed it around for a minute before dropping it right down on the head of Professor Fieldston, who was on his way to lecture. You know Fieldston, don’t you?”

  “The name rings a bell,” the English master said, dropping a cube of sugar into his coffee with silver tongs.

  “Anyhow, it turned out that Kreegs, the goose, had been using that wrapper to wipe the mayonnaise off his sandwich, and so it stuck rather wetly to the side of Fieldston’s face. He looks up, and there we all are, lined up on the roof like pigeons. So, of course, he goes charging into Sever, and I’ll tell you, we panicked. We thought we were done for; Kreegs started whining about how he was on probation and would get kicked out, and Moody said his dad was already talking about cutting off his allowance and this would be last straw and so on and so forth. But fortunately I knew Sever inside and out, and so I led the bunch of us over to the other side of the roof where I scrambled around and found an open window. I’ll tell you, there’s never been a more surprised French class, you can bet on that, seeing the five of us drop in one after the other. Cort was a wit and managed to turn around and say something about la fenêtre before I brought us out and down a back stairway. Fieldston was probably still craning his head around out the window and wondering where in hell we’d gone when we were already back at the club. We had to leave the picnic basket behind, and someone told me Fieldston kept it on a shelf in his office for a whole year. If anyone happened to glance at it, he’d get a suspicious look on his face and say, ‘Look familiar?’ He held out hope, the old coot. Kreegs did get kicked out, though, a few weeks later. I can’t remember for what. Something silly. He went back to Baltimore.”

  Leaving it at that, he began forking up his tarte tatin while the others sat marooned in a silence broken only by the clinking of silver on china. It was typical of Winn’s father to append his story with a sad and vague fact, oblivious that his listeners were still waiting for a punch line. The English master raised an eyebrow at Winn from across the table. “Coffee spoons,” he said, tapping the air with one such implement. “Van Meter, I have measured my life in what?”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “Finish the line, Van Meter. ‘I have measured my life in …’ what?”

  “Coffee spoons?”

  “Yes, who’s it by?”

  “Sir?”

  “What is the poem and who is it by?”

  As the silence stretched out, student and teacher recognized in each other’s eyes the same growing alarm, the student because his father would think he had not learned and the teacher because the father would think he had not taught. The coffee spoon wavered between them. Just before Winn was going to take a guess and say Eliot, the master’s wife stepped in and said, “James, you are merciless. Quizzing the boy at dinner. He’s going off to Harvard in a week; he’s too excited to remember all the this-and-that you taught him.”

  The master, pipe clenched in his teeth, began patting his pockets. “Fortunately for you, Van Meter, I learned long ago to listen to my wife.” Tipton flicked a book of matches from the head of the table, which the master missed and swatted to the floor. “Looks like you’re off the hook,” he said to Winn, straining to reach under the table.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I never had much of a mind for poetry myself,” Tipton said.

  When dinner was cleared away and guests gone home, Tipton told the stories that Winn would have preferred he keep to himself.

  “Probably one of the fellows in the Ophidian had a grudge against me. I overheard one of them maligning my father once, passing on trash he’d heard from his own father, no doubt. I would have liked to have joined, though. I made it to the final dinner. Willy Abernathy was president at the time, although they have some odd word for it in the Ophidian. Oro-something. Can’t remember. But what a stand-up fellow Willy was. Always dated the most beautiful girls, and they loved him even after he broke their hearts because he did it with such perfect manners and so much kindness. He had a straw hat that I admired, kind of a boater. I got one just like it. But it never looked right on me, and I tossed it in the river as a joke.”

  IN HIS UNDERGRADUATE YEARS, Winn was everything he had been raised to believe a Harvard man should be. He belonged to many clubs, appeared in farcical plays, sang tenor in an all-male ensemble. The top of his bureau was obscured by a masculine still life of half-forgotten objects: a cigar cutter, a flask in a leather sleeve, a pile of coins, a large plaster duck stolen as a joke from someone’s garden. In his mirror was a young man who wore a tennis sweater with confidence and about whom blew the salt breeze of youth and promise.

  The gold wristwatch turned out to be not quite right. The boys who seemed most aristocratic wore watches with straps of plain leather. The more Winn observed those boys, the more evidence he found to support certain suspicions that had sprouted at Deerfield: his father, not always but from time to time, behaved like a member of the nouveau riche, a glitzy echelon much less desirable than the dusty shelf that held the old money and where he, Winn, had eked out a rickety perch. By junior year he had perfected a certain calculated shabbiness and showed it off with the scuffed toes of his cracked and flattened loafers and the tiny rip that he made and then mended on the lapel of his favorite sport coat. Though he enjoyed squash and the occasional game of touch football, his brief association with freshman crew ended when an older boy, a boy in the Ophidian, remarked that a sunrise should only be seen from the sidewalk outside a girl’s room or on the opening day of deer season. He bought a new watch with a plain brown strap at a store in Boston. The gold one was brought out only when he went home for Sunday dinner. Certain boys in the Ophidian got away with wearing dandyish clothes or pursuing sport or school with unabashed striving, but Winn was given neither to idiosyncrasy nor ambition and was never tempted to risk deviating from the Ophidian way of doing things, an unspoken code that prioritized irony, insouciance, and drunken mischief above all else.

  Eventually he forgave his father’s rare gaffes because he knew that Tipton’s father had been the one to pull the family up and establish them in the white stone house. Tipton, then, really was new money, and his missteps, while unfortunate, were understandable. Winn’s mother came from genuine society stock, but she had been away for much of his childhood making her slow migration through various places of recuperation. She returned home for good only when he was fourteen and off at Deerfield.

  The Ophidian Club was a brick building on a brick street, tall and narrow with black shutters and, over its door, the graven image of a snake swallowing its own tail. Though it would not have Tipton—Tipton had been a member of the slightly inferior Sobek Club for Gentlemen—the Ophidian welcomed Winn, and after his initiation (a night of equal parts revelry and good-humored humiliation), he went home for a day to rest and to gloat. He had thought his father would ask about the secrets he was now privy to, and he looked forward to demonstrating the dignified silence all Ophidian members were sworn to adopt in the face of inquiry, even though, really, he longed to tell about the roasted rattlesnake, the Greek mottoes, the medal with the club seal he was given to wear around his neck, the bawdy recitations, the feeling of being anointed. But Tipton only sat in his chair and listened to the radio, and for
dinner he went out to the Vespasian Club and did not invite Winn along. Winn ate alone beneath Tipton’s portrait and then went up to see his mother.

  “Is this club any good?” she said. She was lying on a sofa beside a window, a tray of untouched dinner on a low table beside her. She seemed much older than she was. Her hair had been allowed to go gray; her hands and neck were withered, her face slack, and the rest of her was hidden in the folds of her robe and blankets.

  “It’s the best one,” Winn said. “They hardly take anyone. Everyone wants to be in it.”

  “That’s fine, then,” she said, gazing down at the street below.

  He waited, and then he said, “Daddy wanted to join, but he wasn’t invited.”

  She turned back to him, her colorless lips pursed. “Really?” she said. “How marvelous for you, Winnie, how really wonderful. What did your father say when you told him?”

  “He congratulated me.”

  “But was he happy? Did he seem truly happy for you? Tell your mother the truth.”

  “He was happy.”

  She picked at her bedclothes. She waggled her head and shrugged her shoulders as though engaged in silent conversation. A car passed outside, drawing her eyes to the window.

  “Actually,” Winn said, “he wasn’t as happy as I thought he’d be. I thought he’d want to know things. I thought he’d be pleased a Van Meter got himself on the Ophidian books.”

  “Do you think he’s jealous?” Her fingers clutched her blanket. “Oh, my Tipton. Jealous as can be. It was the same way with him and his father—you couldn’t tell where the envy stopped and the disappointment began. They’d rather have you think they’re disappointed, you know. Keeps them up on their throne.”

  Winn thought of the Ophidian snake with its tail in its mouth, called, like the club’s president, the Ouroboros. “I did what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to be in a club, and since he always talks about the Ophidian, I thought he’d want me to be in the Ophidian. If he wanted me to be in the Sobek, he should have said so.”

  “Cold fish,” his mother said to her hands as they worried the blanket. “Cold fish.”

  Beneath the Ophidian’s beamed ceiling, long days were lavished on the triangular bliss of club chair, snifter, and cigarette. His nights, whenever possible, were spent pursuing girls. Radcliffe girls were fine when he could get them, but since they tended to be serious and scholarly and lived in chaperoned fortresses, he mixed in some local girls who worked in the shops in the Square, a few Wellesley girls, and the occasional high school girl. Youth is the best excuse you’ll ever have, he told himself. He dated girls as varied as the dogs in a dog show—tall and studious Miranda Morse; busty Deborah Latici; Michelle Fleming, the violinist and rank bitch; Bobbie Hodgson, who worked in a bakery. All had something to contribute to either his social standing or his sexual experience, and any girl who was an asset to both he was happy to call his girlfriend for a while. These were the liaisons of youth, made lightheartedly and extinguished with a delicate touch. And when, in one memorable afternoon, Winn kissed Lily Spaulding and touched her breasts and then walked up a flight of stairs to kiss her friend Isabelle Hornor and make forays beyond the woolen frontier of her hemline, he did so in the spirit of good fun.

  As graduation approached and then passed, sending him into the city to join the white-collared, steel-livered ranks of young working bachelors, he began to experience a nagging inkling that his father’s benediction was nearing its expiration date. Tipton never said so, never expressed any disapproval, but neither did he make any further mention of youth and excuses. When Winn went home, which he did with diminishing frequency, Tipton took him to the Vespasian for long, somber meals during which father and son commented only on the news of the day and the deaths and marriages of family acquaintances.

  While Winn believed that worthwhile young men must be carefree, he also believed that worthwhile grown men must bear up under the burden of respectability. He puzzled over when exactly the music should be stopped and the drunks sent home and the crepe paper swept from the floors to make room for cribs and Labradors. Is it now? he wondered as he set down his drink and turned from a conversation with a beautiful girl to vomit into the swimming pool of his friend Tyson Baker. When he heard some months later that Tyson Baker had died during a game of pond hockey, dropping through the ice like a lead weight, he thought, Is it now? Waking up to find a clammy section of his date’s stocking draped in a gauze mask across his face, breaking a champagne flute with a butter knife at a wedding when he meant only to chime for a toast, chipping a tooth on the sidewalk outside an all-night pancake house. At Christmas. Every New Year’s. Every birthday. At funerals, weddings. When he listened at the door while a girlfriend lay crying in her bathwater. Is it now? Is it now? Is it now?

  He had thought in college that the age of twenty-eight sounded like an appropriate endpoint to youth, and he resolved, as the day drew nearer, that he would indeed turn over a new leaf. He spent his twenty-eighth birthday at the house of a friend, playing croquet on a lawn that, beyond the last wicket, dropped dramatically to the sea. His partner was a silly girl who said, “I thought I had that one!” after every botched shot. She tried to turn her incompetence into a joke by saying that he didn’t like her for her croquet skills anyway, but he had, in fact, brought her along because she claimed to be good at croquet. Between her ineptitude and the rum cocktails they had invented at lunch, he managed to lose a hundred dollars on the game. He decided he could not begin his adulthood so ignominiously and postponed it yet again.

  In the end, it was his father’s death that made Winn, then thirty-one, a man. At the funeral, while some school friend of Tipton’s droned a reading from scripture, Winn felt the last grains of his youth run out. His father had kept the hourglass tilted up on one edge for him, cheating time a little, but now, with the evaporation of those paternal hands, the glass had thumped level, the sand an ash heap in the bottom. Tipton had been seventy-one, taken out by an aggressive prostate cancer that he refused to fight. His golf partner stepped up to the podium and cleared his throat. “A reading from the book of Revelation,” he said into the microphone. He looked strange in his dark suit, without his argyle vest and pom-pommed club covers. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” With his father gone, Winn was the man of the family, and since his mother was certain to be soon pulled under by the collective suction of her imagined ailments, there would not be much time before he would, in fact, be the family, one man with all the departed Van Meters riding on his shoulders. He had pockets of cousins and aunts and uncles around the Northeast: none on his father’s side but all drooping from the same listless Brahmin branches as his mother, all short and with overlarge Hapsburg chins, members of a dynasty that had lingered a few generations too long. He scarcely counted them as family.

  While giving his eulogy, Winn noticed a girl in the fourth or fifth row, Elizabeth Hazzard, called Biddy, whom he knew but not well, only as the daughter of a distant associate of his father’s. She handed her handkerchief to the woman beside her, perhaps her mother, but she did not dab her own eyes. The sight caused him to pause, and he cleared his throat as though fighting back tears. When he continued, he found himself speaking mostly to Biddy, telling her about his father, how Tipton had been a dignified, honorable man, well respected by all who knew him, a fine role model. He liked that she was not someone who cried at funerals as though tears were a requirement like applause at a tennis match. He liked her navy blue dress, the no-nonsense cut of her hair, the lingering traces of her summer tan, the upright way she held herself. Possibly he was being untoward to cruise for a girlfriend at his own father’s funeral, but he could summon no guilt, only gratitude, for Biddy’s presence. In her tidy face he saw hope and freshness, while all around him hung tapestries of decay.

  They married less than a year later on the lawn of her parents’ house in Maine. The guest lis
t was kept short because he was still mourning his father. Biddy put a cherry blossom in his lapel that later fell out unnoticed. His mother stayed inside and watched from a window, claiming she was too fragile for the sea air. Biddy’s dress was restrained, almost plain. Harry Pitton-White, Winn’s best man, had a stomach flu and swayed beside him during the vows like a nearly felled tree. In his toast, Biddy’s father said he was glad Biddy had married a man who would never do anything foolish, which Winn took as both compliment and threat. After he and Biddy departed for their oppressively floral room in a creaky bed and breakfast, the tanked-up groomsmen and bridesmaids went skinny-dipping in the frigid springtime Atlantic, a stunt that made Winn wistful and jealous when he heard about it at brunch the next day. Underneath her wedding dress Biddy wore a white garter belt and stockings that he found unbearably sexy but did not tell her so, not wanting to embarrass her by making a fuss and also incorrectly assuming she had a whole trousseau of lingerie that she would, without prompting, trot out over their first year. Silence over stockings—the first regret of his marriage.