‘No problem at all. My best friend in France was a butcher,’ Ti-Loup said, but without even thinking about it or making any conscious decision, without even being aware of what he was doing, he spoke as though he’d grown up on the same block as McVie.
McVie’s eyes widened with shock and anger. ‘Fuck you,’ he said, ‘you arrogant patronising prick.’
Cabot leaned against his doorway. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course.’
‘I have to say, you got the ancestral Vanderbilt genes in spades when it comes to competitiveness and conquest, even if you didn’t get the athletic genes of your father or his racehorse body.’
‘Coach pushes hard,’ Vanderbilt said.
‘You push hard. You push harder. No matter what pace we set, you keep up. Amazing stuff for a rookie who was skinny and, well, who wasn’t exactly …’
‘Who looked like a milksop,’ Vanderbilt supplied.
‘Not what I was going to say. Hell, you’re a Vanderbilt, a self-made dynasty. You can look however you want to look. But you sure didn’t look like a track star. And now you’re giving me a serious run for my own spot on the team.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘You’ve got the right stuff for Dryden, that’s for sure. What are your college plans?’
‘My college plans?’
‘Where are you applying? Where are you planning to go?’
‘I haven’t decided,’ Vanderbilt said cautiously, briefly panicked.
‘I’m going to MIT,’ Cabot announced.
‘Oh, you mean which university? Well, uh, the Sorbonne, I think.’
‘Wow. Paris. That’s cool. What majors do they offer? Mine’ll be physics. What’s yours?’
Vanderbilt concentrated on decoding this question. ‘Uh … I’m still thinking about it. Philosophy maybe.’
‘Good heavens!’ Cabot said affectionately. ‘My father will wish he’d switched us at birth. Dad teaches philosophy at Harvard. Well, actually, political philosophy. He’s been an adviser to the State Department, a consummation devoutly not to be wished for in my opinion. He just can’t get his head around why I would want to do physics.’
‘Why do you?’
‘Oh. Well. I went with Dad to a lecture by this guy named Mandelbrot who’s a kind of quirky mathematician. He’s a Polish-Jewish-French refugee with IBM and my father thinks he lives in sci-fi fantasyland, but I was transfixed. He said something I can’t get out of my mind. He said chaos is really order with some missing information, and I decided on the spot that I wanted to go in search of what was missing.’
‘Wow!’ Vanderbilt said, torched by Cabot’s adrenaline rush. ‘And your father? What sort of thing does he …?’
‘Well, come to think of it, I suppose he’s not so different from Mandelbrot. He studies why governments do what they do. Why did Nazi Germany do what it did? Why did Franco? Why did Stalin? Dad’s searching for the missing information so we can stop the next war before it happens.’
That is what I want to do, Vanderbilt instantly decided. I will major in political philosophy at Harvard and I will study with Cabot’s father.
‘Listen,’ Cabot said, ‘I imagine you’re going home for Thanksgiving, but just in case you’re not – I mean, in case your father is in Europe or otherwise engaged or something – you’re welcome to spend the weekend with us in Boston. We have a big extended family thing if you think you could stand a lot of Cabots.’
‘Thank you,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘I’m not sure of my plans at the moment.’
Coach extended the length of practice time and the distances for the cross-country team. It became a private compulsion with Vanderbilt to run at the head of the pack regardless of the pace or the distance. Clearly the same compulsion drove McVie.
Neck and neck, thud for thud, they stayed in the lead. They never spoke.
In the showers, their teammates lobbed mock-insults through the steam: Listen, you rookies. Cross-country’s not about egos, it’s about the team. You newbies are going to burn yourselves out, which is not the point. The point is for the team to beat Choate.
But Coach said: ‘I can use people who are driven.’
‘Even if they sound like a thug from the Somerville crime mob?’ someone murmured in a voice that he intended to be almost heard.
‘You want to repeat that to my face?’ McVie grabbed the boy by the shoulders and spun him around so that their eyes were inches apart. They butted foreheads.
‘Enough!’ Coach stepped between. ‘One more incident like that and you’ll both be off the team. You, Benson, should know better. You’ve had two older brothers graduate but you’ve broken a cardinal Dryden rule. We expect civility and courtesy from students. Say something like that again and I’ll sign you up for remedial lessons in manners. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Nevertheless everyone saw Benson give the finger to McVie behind Coach’s back.
5.
John Semple, college adviser, asked Vanderbilt if he knew how to play chess.
‘Yes,’ Vanderbilt said, surprised. ‘I do. I love chess. I miss it. In France, I had a Jesuit tutor who taught me and sometimes I even beat him.’
‘Great,’ John Semple said. ‘Ideal. We have a school club. Not a large one, but those who play go for the kill. They’re intense. We call it the Bobby Fischer Club and I’m the convener. We meet on Sunday afternoons in the assembly hall, six games, tournament-style, and we rotate until we get an outright winner. We pick up where we left off the weekend before. Can I expect you this Sunday, three p.m.? We play until dinner time, and then again after, until lights out.’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘McVie’s also a member, by the way.’
‘Is Benson?’
‘Benson’s not the chess-playing type. The game requires patience.’
Vanderbilt’s first opponent was McVie.
He thought of asking John Semple: Was this arranged? And if so, why? Is this some sort of Dryden experiment? Throw two outsiders into the chess pen, pit them against each other and watch what happens?
They played for three hours and did not speak a word until McVie said, ‘Checkmate.’
They held each other’s gaze steadily, without blinking, for so long that Vanderbilt’s eyes began to prickle. He wanted to say: Well played. Congratulations. But he was not sure which voice would come out and was afraid that whichever came out would give offence. He also wanted to ask, if he could have thought of any delicate way to put it: Who could have taught a butcher’s son to play chess like that?
McVie seemed to sense this question. ‘I was sent to a Marist Brothers school in Lawrence, Mass., and we were all taught to play. My parish priest at St Ann’s in Somerville was a keen player too and he and I played every week. I never won.’
‘I was taught by my Jesuit tutor in France,’ Vanderbilt said. He thought he said this in his Father JG voice, but was not certain. ‘He almost always won, but I did beat him twice.’
‘You’re Catholic?’ McVie was astonished. ‘In a WASP school like this?’
‘I was baptised Catholic.’
‘But your father’s on the Board of Trustees.’
‘My mother’s Catholic. She’s French.’
‘So you’re only half Catholic.’
‘I’m one hundred percent Catholic. Baptised in St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. First Communion in the parish church of St Gilles in France when I was seven.’
‘We’re probably the only two Catholics in this school,’ McVie said.
Vanderbilt had never even thought about this. Was it worse than being a boy who had worn a blue dress?
‘But now suddenly,’ McVie said, ‘in two weeks, there’s a good chance we’ll have a Catholic president in the White House. It’ll be interesting to see how that’s going to go over round here.’
‘Actually, to be perfectly honest,’ Vanderbilt said, ‘I’m bona fide one hundred percent Catholic as far as baptism and confirmation goes, b
ut I’m lapsed. Not just lapsed, but angry lapsed. I’m one hundred percent ex-Catholic. I don’t go to confession or mass.’
‘Not much opportunity at Dryden,’ McVie said. ‘But you should understand a thing or two. I had a poster of JFK for president taped to my bedroom door. Last week, it was ripped off and torn to confetti. D’you get it? This is not a time to be quitting the team.’
‘I’m not quitting in that sense. I’ll be happy to tape a JFK poster on my door. I’ll do it today. I hadn’t given any of that a thought because American politics is still like outer space to me. I know the presidents and what order they came in from George Washington onwards, and I know American history up to World War II, but American politics since then … that’s unknown territory. It’s the New World. My Catholic problem is my mother.’ Vanderbilt sighed. ‘I got an overdose of daily confession and daily mass and daily praying the rosary in my childhood. I get an allergic reaction.’
‘Well, yeah,’ McVie said. ‘Who doesn’t?’ He held out his left hand as evidence. The knuckles were gnarled and swollen, the fingers crooked. ‘Marist Brother discipline,’ he said. ‘On moral principle, they don’t mash up your writing hand. But that’s not everything, is it? Brother Damian taught me chess.’
On November 8, as election returns were bouncing back and forth, up and down, hour by hour on broadcast news, there was so much jostling around TV sets in dormitory common rooms that the whole school was invited to watch the large screen in the assembly hall. Minute by minute the numbers changed, the electoral college votes swooped this way and that, the popular vote was neck and neck, the evening dragged on towards midnight but no one, neither masters nor students, was willing to leave the room.
Just before midnight, the New York Times called the election and the TV channels quoted the Times: KENNEDY DEFEATS NIXON BY NARROW MARGIN.
Some of the Dryden audience cheered, some booed, others were stunned and silent, but McVie whispered to Vanderbilt as they left: ‘Want to join me for a victory lap at five tomorrow morning?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it,’ Vanderbilt whispered back.
Pre-dawn on November 9, McVie and Vanderbilt met outside the gym and raised their hands high and slapped palms. ‘To us,’ McVie said. ‘From the potato famine to the White House. Took more than a century, but we did it. Team loyalty, Vanderbilt. I can still hardly believe it, but our team has finally won.’
Vanderbilt wondered if he would ever know to which team he belonged or if any team would ever acknowledge him as a member.
In the last week of November 1960, family cars and limousines choked the Dryden drive. Limos took boys to Bradley International Airport outside Hartford, fifty-five miles south on Interstate 91, the Connecticut side of the border. From Bradley they flew to cities across the country and sometimes to assorted American embassies around the world. The international students, however, the genuine non-citizens, the mega-wealthy foreigners, were invariably invited to Thanksgiving dinners at the homes of American boys.
The family limousine arrived for Vanderbilt. ‘Your father is putting on quite a show for you,’ Castano informed him on the long drive back. ‘He usually spends Thanksgiving out in the Hamptons but he’s arranged a caterer for Fifth Avenue this year. He’s invited your Uncle Harry and your cousin Billy and I don’t know who else.’
‘What about you, Castano?’ Vanderbilt asked.
‘What do you mean, Mr Gwynne?’
‘I mean, when and where will you join your own family for Thanksgiving dinner?’
‘I will remain available to your father and his guests until late evening,’ Castano said. Then he added, in a carefully uninflected voice, ‘I am not required to answer personal questions, Mr Gwynne.’
Vanderbilt was startled. ‘Oh no, of course not,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘It’s none of my business. I just wanted to wish you and your family a happy Thanksgiving.’
‘Thank you, Mr Gwynne.’ For the next ten miles, Castano said nothing at all, and then a rush of words rose from his lips like the popping of champagne corks. ‘I have worked ten years as your father’s chauffeur but your father does not know where I live or even if I have a family. He has never asked me.’
‘It was quite improper of me, Castano, and quite rude. I apologise.’
‘We live in Newark, New Jersey, my family. Big family, very big – uncles, aunts, cousins, little ones underfoot. I have eight grandchildren.’
‘Wow. Congratulations. You don’t look old enough.’
‘Thank you, Mr Gwynne. I am like Abraham, father of many. We have two Thanksgiving dinners, an early one for the grandchildren, nieces, nephews, all the little ones. A late one for the rest of us who have to work. My brother’s a chauffeur too, and one of my sons. My father, who has passed on, was a doorman at the Carlyle.’
Vanderbilt wanted to ask How late is the late dinner? He wanted to ask: Do you drive the Vanderbilt limo to New Jersey? Where do you park it? Do you worry about vandalism in Newark? What time do you drive it back the next morning? But he understood he was already far overdrawn on his decorum account.
Quite suddenly, Castano became loquacious. ‘Second-best night of the year after midnight mass and Christmas Eve dinner. We all go to my mother’s house. She was born in Sicily, my mother, but she was a baby when she arrived on Ellis Island. She’s eighty-eight but no one else better dare offer to stuff or roast the turkey. We don’t eat till midnight because by the time I get the limo parked in the underground lot and take the subway to Penn Station and then the commuter train … well, usually I miss the sweet-potato soup. But from then on, it’s eating and drinking and arguing and singing and dancing until the morning hangover wakes us up. Second-best night of the year.’
Vanderbilt noted, with avid interest, that Castano switched accents quite radically when he spoke as patriarch of a large extended family rather than as a Fifth Avenue chauffeur. Mentally, Vanderbilt rolled the sounds around his own tongue and inside his own head, listening carefully to each one, trying them out, decoding them into phonetic symbols on the backs of his eyelids. He began to have trouble remembering his own Vanderbilt voice (his Dryden-Vanderbilt voice, which was that of Father JG), and when the limo pulled up outside his father’s building on Fifth Avenue he had still not consciously decided which voice he was going to use, but his greeting came out in pure New Jersey-Sicilian. ‘Castano, I hope you have such a great Thanksgiving that you don’t sober up until one hour before you have to pick me up next week.’
Castano turned in his seat in astonishment and slid the glass divider open. He said something rapid and passionate and warmly affectionate in Sicilian.
‘I’m sorry, Castano,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘I know English and French, but no Italian. I’m just good at mimicking accents, that’s all, and I don’t really know how or why. I don’t even do it consciously. It just happens.’
‘You are very unusual, Mr Gwynne,’ Castano said in his chauffeur voice. There was a long pause. ‘I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. And, uh, perhaps I should warn you …’
‘Yes?’
‘On second thought, perhaps I should not.’
‘Warn me of what, Castano?’
‘Of nothing,’ Castano said. ‘A chauffeur who speaks ill of his employer has a death wish. He will be fired. I need to keep my job, which is a very good job.’
‘Castano,’ Vanderbilt said in his New Jersey-Sicilian voice, ‘I swear to you on my oath that you will not be fired because of me. Anything you say to me will not be repeated to another living soul.’
Castano crossed himself. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I must be nuts to believe you but I do, so here’s my Hail-Mary pass. Your father has a girlfriend here for the weekend and so does your Uncle Harry. They have many girlfriends. Their girlfriends get younger every year and none of them last very long. The girlfriends get five-star restaurant dinners and jewellery and trips to the Caribbean and Paris and then they’re gone. If you ask me, but this is none of my business, none whatsoever … but if you were
to ask for my opinion, your inheritance – if you’re waiting for one – is seeping away like water through sand, but what do I know?
‘Anyway I have to stay within call until eleven p.m. and by then, believe me, you’ll be on your lonesome because your relatives will be very drunk or will have disappeared into their bedrooms with their girlfriends, or both, and you will be left with a choice between late-night TV or Shannay’s family in the Bronx or my family and me. I’m sure Shannay would love to take you home to her family dinner but I can tell you that the Line 4 Local to the Bronx at that time of night is not a safe ride and nor is the Express, but I don’t think the Express even runs that late. After every holiday, every long weekend, I expect Shannay to report in dead. So if you’d like to give the Castanos a try, get Shannay to call me before she leaves and you can come to Penn Station with me. Your father won’t even notice you’ve gone and I’ll take you across the river to a New Jersey Thanksgiving I promise you’ll never forget. And this year, this November, we’ll be giving special thanks for the election. A Catholic president! Who could have believed it would happen? Deo gratias.’
‘Castano, whether or not I take advantage of that generous invitation, I won’t forget it.’
Shannay was waiting for him when the elevator doors opened on the penthouse floor. She opened her arms. ‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘Look at you.’ She tested the muscles of his upper arms with her thumbs, pressing and pinching, the way she might test melons in a market.
‘You think I look good?’
‘You turning into one of those TV ads for gym equipment. You sho’ ain’t that frightened little boy anymore.’
‘I sho’ ain’t.’
‘Get on with you,’ she said, laughing and slapping his backside. ‘I got to warn you about something, Mr Gwynne.’
‘I think Castano already warned me.’
‘About the bimbos, you mean?’
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