At Vanderbilt’s second Thanksgiving on Fifth Avenue, Lisette had given way to Loulou, Uncle Harry had a Georgie on his arm, and Celise had moved on to cousin Billy.
‘We really should see more of each other,’ she said to Vanderbilt, leaning towards him.
‘In what way?’ he asked.
‘In whatever way you would like,’ she said demurely.
Later, he said to Shannay: ‘She’s like a puppet. She’ll say whatever she thinks you want her to say. She’ll let anyone pull her strings.’
‘That one,’ Shannay told him, ‘is pulling her own strings, and everyone else’s strings too. One day she’ll pull the wrong string and choke her own neck in her very own noose, but plenty folks gonna get throttled along the way before that.’
7.
Dawn by dawn, neck and neck, month by month, year by year, McVie and Vanderbilt stayed at the head of the pack on the cross-country run. Day by day, after the run, they were inches apart in the showers. They rarely spoke to each other but Vanderbilt knew there were electromagnetic currents that surged and sparked across the gap between their bodies.
They met only once a week for chess, but they played for hours. McVie almost always won. ‘I play Thanksgiving and Christmas and summers too,’ he explained. ‘You ever play with anyone else?’
‘No one to play with,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘I get rusty.’
‘I’ve got my parish priest,’ McVie said. ‘And Brother Damian too. I never win. Maybe you should spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with us.’
Vanderbilt sighed. ‘I’m locked in. Thanksgiving with my father in New York, which is hell. Christmas with the Cabots, which is heaven.
‘You didn’t accept my invitation to visit while you were in Boston last Christmas or the one before,’ McVie said. ‘Any particular reason?’
‘I did want to visit. I tried.’
‘How did you try?’
‘I asked Cabot how to get to Somerville, but he didn’t know.’
‘Hah!’ McVie said. ‘That’s quite funny. Checkmate, by the way.’
By November 1962, at Thanksgiving dinner, Celise was flashing a huge diamond engagement ring, present of William George Cornelius Vanderbilt. ‘Billy and I are planning a lavish wedding,’ Celise told Vanderbilt. ‘I would love to invite your friends the Cabots. Could you let them know?’
‘Of course,’ Vanderbilt said politely. ‘Though, you know, I don’t often see Cabot anymore. He’s at MIT now.’
‘But you’re still in touch with his family, right? Have they invited you for Christmas again?’
‘They have, yes.’
‘I’ll send them an invitation,’ Celise said.
Vanderbilt spent Christmas with the Cabots in Boston once again. As always he felt charmed by the family warmth, especially by the graciousness of Cabot’s mother.
‘Gwynne,’ she said, late on Christmas night after the traditional rum-soaked plum pudding, ‘do tell me about your own mother. She must miss you. She must be lonely.’
Anything that evoked, even momentarily, his pre-Dryden self gave Vanderbilt vertigo. One step and he would be over the edge of the precipice, freefalling back down the rabbit hole, blue shifts buffeting him like starlings, the iron ring below the stone bridge rusted, the opening jammed, the bloodied bodies blocking any exit. He would shut his eyes tightly but he could never block out the sight of Ti-Christophe’s slashed body and his own culpability and he would have to excuse himself and bolt for the nearest bathroom to vomit.
‘Will you excuse me, Mrs Cabot?’ he managed to say. In the bathroom, he composed himself, he washed his face, he drank quarts of water from his cupped hand beneath the vanity faucet, he put his Dryden mask back in place and returned to the elegant room and the roaring fire.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Cabot,’ he said. ‘Must be adrenaline backwash. Post-exam exhaustion, so much glorious rich food, so much pleasant tranquillity after the Spartan regime at school.’
‘Perhaps the truth is that you are sad you are not back home with your mother,’ Mrs Cabot said.
Vanderbilt searched her face for any hint of irony but there was no trace. He said carefully, ‘I don’t come from a happy family like yours, Mrs Cabot. I just … I can’t talk about it. Even thinking about it makes me feel depressed. I’m sorry.’
‘You poor boy,’ Mrs Cabot said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘Sometimes,’ Vanderbilt said, ‘I feel like the first man on the moon. I would not have even known what “happy family” meant except that now I’ve had the privilege of being part of two of them: your family, and the family of my mother’s gardener in France.’
‘Tell me about the family of your mother’s gardener,’ Mrs Cabot said, but the room suddenly tilted and Vanderbilt felt dizzy.
‘I can’t talk about that either,’ he managed to say.
‘Dear boy,’ Mrs Cabot said. ‘You will always be welcome here. Your father is, shall we say, not cut from the best paternal cloth. The Vanderbilts never were. To be blunt, and if you’ll forgive me, they were vulgar upstarts who became obscenely rich and the only strand of the family that developed any signs of civilised behaviour was George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of that thug, Cornelius. He would be your second or third cousin, or some such thing, I suppose. He was the one who designed and built that chateau in North Carolina. The Cabots have always considered Biltmore un peu de trop, but George Washington Vanderbilt was a literary man of culture and taste. He was a voracious reader and his library at Biltmore, I understand, is quite extraordinary. More than ten thousand books and they say he read every one.’
‘I love to read,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘I had a tutor in France who gave me a passion for books.’
‘That makes you an honorary Cabot. We are so very fond of you, you know.’ Cabot’s mother touched Vanderbilt affectionately on the shoulder. ‘You’ll always have a home away from home with us.’
‘Mrs Cabot, can I ask you a question?’
‘Of course, dear boy.’
‘Since Cabot left Dryden, my closest friend is a scholarship boy named McVie. He loves books and chess as much as I do. You saw him in the graduation play a year ago. He played Gwendolen.’
‘Oh yes, I remember. You were all so brilliantly and wickedly funny.’
‘McVie lives in Somerville and I promised I’d visit him this weekend. Could you tell me how to get there?’
‘My goodness!’ Mrs Cabot said. ‘Well, that’s not a question I was expecting. Probably you can get there on the subway, but I’ve never taken the subway myself so I’m not much help there. I’d certainly be happy to have our chauffeur take you and bring you back. What time would you like to go?’
When the Cabot limousine pulled up outside McVie & Sons, Butchers, in Union Square, Somerville, the commotion was considerable. Neighbourhood children pressed up close to the tinted windows, noses and fingertips leaving smudged prints on the glass. Before the chauffeur even reached the rear passenger door to open it, Vanderbilt had already let himself out, an action that did not meet with the driver’s approval.
‘I’m looking for Patrick McVie,’ Vanderbilt said to the kids. ‘Is this his father’s shop?’
‘Good God, what have you done?’ McVie stared in disbelief from the door of the shop.
‘I came to visit,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘You said you wanted me to.’
‘Tell the driver to take off before the kids scratch the car or let down the tyres. You’ll have us hauled up for damages.’
‘But how will I get back to the Cabots’? I don’t know the way.’
‘I’ll take you back on the subway. Come inside, you maniac. Upstairs. We live over the shop.’
‘Can I see your cold storage room first?’
‘Are you serious? My father’s working in there.’
‘Can I watch?’ Vanderbilt begged.
8.
The summer of 1963 could have been the dreariest summer of Vanderbilt’s life but turned out otherwise. He had been invite
d to spend July and August with the Cabots in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, not far from the Kennedy compound. But he knew instinctively that his summer clothing and his summer loafers would not pass muster in such company. He knew that unless he mentioned Cabots and Kennedys to his father, no clothing allowance would be forthcoming. He was too angry and disgusted to play this card.
He had rather hoped he would be invited to spend the summer months above the butcher’s shop in Somerville, Mass., but in the last week of the spring semester, when he ventured to raise this possibility, McVie said: ‘Things are rough for my dad right now. I have to work for him all summer.’
‘I’d be happy to work for him too,’ Vanderbilt offered.
‘My dad can’t afford you.’
‘I don’t need to be paid. I’d do it for pleasure.’
‘My dad is too proud to agree to that,’ McVie said. ‘And we don’t have room for you above the shop. I share my room with two younger brothers.’
And so Vanderbilt faced three months on Fifth Avenue. This turned out better than expected. His father spent the time in the Hamptons and did not invite his son. His son was relieved. He dined in the kitchen with Shannay three times a day. He spent his mornings exploring the inexhaustible mysteries of Central Park and his afternoons in art museums or libraries. He would have loved to attend concerts and opera in the evenings but his father left no money for fripperies such as that. He was, nevertheless, inordinately proud of himself for obtaining positions as an usher at Carnegie Hall and at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. In between usher duties, for which he was paid a pittance, he heard splendid free performances three nights a week.
In the third week of August, Shannay startled Vanderbilt by saying: ‘Honey chile, I am going to leave you on your own for six days. I’ve packaged all your meals in the freezer. I’ve left thawing and heating instructions for each one.’
‘Where are you going?’ Vanderbilt asked.
‘I’m going to Washington D.C. I’ll be staying with family.’
‘I didn’t know you had family in D.C.’
‘I have family all over,’ she said. ‘My mother was born in South Carolina, my father in Georgia.’
‘Are you going to visit the White House and the Capitol, or what?’
Shannay regarded him levelly for some time. ‘What do you think I’m going to do?’
‘I don’t know. What are you going to do?’
‘What is going to happen in D.C. this week, Mr Gwynne? Do you sleep through the television news or what?’
‘Oh! You mean that march? The black Communist?’
‘I mean the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, yes. I am joining his march for justice.’
Vanderbilt was shocked. ‘Shannay! You can’t be serious. That’s the criminal Communist rabble.’
‘You think demonstrating for the right of black folks to vote is Communist, do you, Gwynne Patrice? Is that your idea of democracy? Is that what you believe?’
‘Everyone knows that Martin Luther King is a Communist.’
‘Everyone knows that, do they?’
‘Well, yes … Everyone does.’
‘That’s what they teach you at Dryden, is it? You are not so different from your father, Gwynne Patrice.’
Though he would not otherwise have done so, Vanderbilt watched every televised moment of the March on Washington, the largest demonstration in American history, all two hundred and fifty thousand people, black and white, from all over the country, converging on the Mall and moving as one surging mass from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. He watched and listened to Martin Luther King’s speech. I have a dream … He was stirred, he was stricken, he was conflicted, he felt accused and did not like it.
He watched for Shannay in the crowd but never saw her.
He waited for her return. Six days, seven days, eight. She did not come back. He was reduced to raiding the butler’s pantry and scarfing cookies. He opened soup cans and heated them. There were dried beans and pasta but he did not know how to cook.
He asked the doorman if there had been any sign of Shannay.
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ the doorman said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the building manager informed all the owners about the black domestics who went AWOL for that march. They all got laid off. The manager told them not to bother coming back.’
‘What?! Why?’
‘What kind of a question is that?’
9.
About a week before Thanksgiving 1963, during morning run, McVie asked: ‘You going to spend the holiday with your father again? Or with the Cabots?’
‘It’s always Thanksgiving on Fifth Avenue, Christmas with the Cabots,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘So I’m stuck with my father – except he doesn’t have a new housekeeper yet. Our other housekeeper got fired for joining that march on Washington, so I suppose I’ll be forced to go to the Hamptons with my father because I know he won’t leave me any money for food.’
‘You want to try Somerville? Flirt with the dangerous underside of Boston?’
‘Are you inviting me?’
‘I am. But on one condition. You are not to arrive by limo.’
‘I thought you didn’t have room in your house.’
‘We don’t. You and I will have to sleep on the pull-out sofa in the living room.’
‘I accept,’ Vanderbilt said.
It was a Friday. Abruptly, in early afternoon, classes were cancelled. Vanderbilt passed McVie in a hallway. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘Kennedy’s been shot and killed,’ McVie said. ‘In Dallas.’
All through Friday night, all Saturday and Sunday and Monday, the entire school, masters and students, sat numb and sleepless and owl-eyed in the assembly hall watching TV, mostly silent, sometimes weeping, sometimes holding each other. They watched Jackie Kennedy in her bloodstained pink suit, they watched LBJ being sworn in, they watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald dead on live TV, they watched the lying-in-state of the flag-draped coffin in the Capitol rotunda (exactly where Abraham Lincoln had lain in state slightly less than a century before), they watched the hundreds of thousands who lined up in the rain throughout the night to file by the coffin, they watched the funeral procession, they watched the riderless horse pulling the caisson, they heard the slow solemn beat of the drum corps, they watched three-year-old John Jr salute his father’s remains.
Dryden boys who had never wept in public before, and never intended to, held each other and wept.
No limo came for McVie and Vanderbilt. They took the college shuttle into Springfield and from there they took the bus to Boston. ‘I’ve never been on a bus before,’ Vanderbilt admitted.
‘Jesus,’ McVie said.
‘It’s fantastic. We’re so high up.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ McVie said.
‘We can see the tops of cars. We can see into them. Look at that!’
‘What? Oh. A truck driver feeling up his girlfriend? Or his truck-stop whore? Big deal.’
‘Why are you angry with me?’
‘I’m not angry with you,’ McVie said. ‘I’m just angry. And depressed. And … and desolate. About the country, about my future, about everything. Aren’t you?’
‘I don’t think I feel anything,’ Vanderbilt said.
They were silent for the next two hours until the bus entered the traffic tangle of the western edge of greater Boston. ‘We’ll get off in Harvard Square,’ McVie said, ‘and take another bus from there. It’s not far, but there’s no telling how long it will take. Depends on traffic.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Only if it’s not about the assassination and not about growing up Irish Catholic in Boston and not about being depressed.’
‘Tell me about Brother Damian.’
‘If it hadn’t been for Brother Damian and our games of chess, I’d probably be behind bars by now instead of at Dryden. But I’m less an
d less sure that the bargain I made was a good one.’
‘Don’t you like Dryden?’
‘Do you?’
‘Well … yes. I didn’t expect to, but I do.’
‘That’s because you’re part of the tribe. I’m not and I’ll never be admitted. What scares me now is I’m turning myself into an outcast in my own tribe. I have no idea how to prepare you for the McVie family circus.’
‘I know I’m going to feel at home with your family. My best friend in France was a butcher. Well, a butcher’s apprentice.’
‘Yeah, I remember. You told me.’
‘And you didn’t believe me, but Ti-Christophe was an artist with a boning knife. He taught me. My happiest memories in France were in the cold room at the butcher’s.’
‘And did the butcher accept you as part of the tribe?’
‘Ah …’ Vanderbilt experienced a shock of enlightenment. ‘No. He didn’t. I think his son hated me. In fact, his son hacked my best friend to death.’
‘What?!’
‘Ignore that. Strike that. That wasn’t real. My worst fear showing up in a nightmare, one of those recurrent things you see in movies.’
‘You’ve got the shivers.’
‘No I don’t. The nightmares do that. But you’re dead right. I was not allowed to change tribes.’
‘Exactly. It’s against everyone’s rules.’
At the family gathering for Thanksgiving dinner, which was as noisy and convivial and violently argumentative as it was full of shared communal weeping and sorrow, McVie’s mother startled Vanderbilt by enveloping him in a welcoming hug and then stepping back, shocked with herself, a hand over her mouth. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t thinking. You’re Pat’s best friend and I’m so happy to meet you … But you’re a Vanderbilt, for heaven’s sake, and I shouldn’t take liberties.’ She wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Oh dear, now you’ve got breadcrumbs on your shirt. I hope I haven’t offended you.’
Vanderbilt hugged her back. ‘You haven’t offended me, Mrs McVie. I’ll take six of those hugs if you’ve got some to spare.’
‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘You’re not what I was expecting. Not at all what I was expecting. I can see why Pat won’t shut up about you.’
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