Faith Partridge was alone when the telegram came. Hal had taken a job as communications clerk at Bradley Field near Hartford, coming home only on weekends. Sally was finishing her senior year at the Housatonic Valley High School. Faith Partridge read the telegram, wept for her son convulsively but briefly; she had cultivated stoical reserves on which she now drew heavily. When Hal had given permission for Ronnie to go to sea, she knew that the war would be long, and that her boy might not return. Now she wept quietly, not for her son, safely in God’s hands, but for Sally. Faith Partridge had lived tense moments in a hard life, but none so tense as these, waiting for Sally to come home on the bus, to learn about her Ronnie.
Sally was easily the leading student in her high school class and was accepted immediately by Vassar which, adjusting its academic calendar to the rhythm of the war, scheduled three semesters during the calendar year, so that Sally could expect to graduate in 1947. Hal Partridge, attending AA, was now earning a regular salary. Faith continued to teach, and Sally worked at Vassar ten hours every week as a bursary student. Her scholarship and her bursary work plus two hundred dollars per year saw her through college.
She moved, for the first year or so, palpably under a shadow and it wasn’t until the end of the spring term that her irrepressibly buoyant roommate, M’Lou Weeks, unearthed the cause of Sally’s melancholy and set out, with missionary zeal, to do something about it.
M’Lou could always make Sally laugh—that had never been a problem. Sally reacted instantly to humor, as to piquancy. Though there were the exceptions, when she was suffering one of her bouts of melancholy, and when she was reading—Was anyone, M’Lou wondered, a more concentrated reader than Sally? Book after book, notebook after notebook, day after day, month after month … It wasn’t so much that Sally didn’t like, when reading, to be interrupted, it was that she could not be interrupted, and it did not matter what M’Lou was chattering about, or how amusing that evening’s reflections on the news, national, international, and local—Sally would simply not hear it.
M’Lou, an accomplished mimic, would regularly improvise, at eight in the evening, surrounded by classmates from the adjacent rooms, a version of Gabriel Heatter doing the evening radio news at nine, which few of the girls at Jocelyn House bothered to tune in on. This became a standing social event at Jocelyn, and finally Sally made it a point to suspend her reading in order to listen in on the revelry.
“I address you, mothers and fathers of America”—M’Lou was now Franklin Delano Roosevelt, giving a Fireside Chat, “with the good news, that we shall nevah surrender. If the Axis Powers succeed in killing every one of our boys, why, we are a great nation. We will simply have more boys, and ultimately, we will triumph! There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” Sally had winced, but M’Lou’s wholesomeness overcame all, and gradually, under repeated transfusions of gaiety, Sally came up through the dark cloud, and though her mourning for Ronnie would be forever, she could now package it as yesterday’s travail—awful forever, but yesterday’s.
She had always been naturally beautiful, but it was a kind of hayseed beauty one had to stare at for a while, fully to recognize its completeness. M’Lou, with time to stare, introduced her to just a touch of lipstick and powder and perfume. M’Lou personally, with the aid of her forbidden electrical contrivance, a hair curler, put a little shape at the end of Sally’s hair. She introduced Sally, on her birthday, to the pearl necklace, bought at Woolworth’s, a progressively authentic version of which, in the years ahead, she always wore.
It was toward the end of her sophomore year that her mother called on the phone, a rare event. Her voice was totally controlled—Faith Partridge would never permit herself to break down again as she had in giving Sally the news about Ronnie. She spoke almost as though she were a Western Union operator reading a telegram. Sally’s father had had a relapse (these happened two or three times every year) and had been told by his boss in Hartford that unless he went that very night to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, he would be fired. He had set out remorsefully to do this but had stopped en route at a pub which he left three hours later, proceeding in the direction of the church in whose basement the AA meetings were held, evidently forgetting that the meeting had ended an hour earlier. He did not reach the church, crashing over a steel car railing at the curve of the road near Simsbury. “His neck was broken. He died instantly. I have scheduled the funeral for Saturday at noon, since your train only arrives at 11:05.” Sally was sobbing, but kept her hand over the phone so that her mother would not hear her. Sally didn’t want to puncture the self-hypnotic efficiency by which her mother seemed to be sublimating her grief. Sally managed merely to reply, “Yes, Mother.”
During the next six months or so Sally doubled the frequency of her visits to Lakeville, spending every second or third weekend with her mother, who though not yet forty-five had aged greatly, and was reading extensively in Christian Science. Sally kept bringing her books from her own reading at Vassar, but her mother was not easily distracted from her special interests, which were spiritual, though she did not talk to Sally about them. Sally, at nineteen, began to realize that her mother and she had only one thing in common: They loved each other. Nothing else.
By the time senior year came the war was over, and for the first time there was social traffic with the men’s colleges. Sally had been elected to the Daisy Chain, an honor accorded by popular vote to the twenty fairest sophomores. She had a few dates, mostly with West Pointers during her junior year, and, in her last year, mostly double dates with M’Lou and M’Lou’s boyfriend’s friend. Sally enjoyed herself: they would dance at the college, or meet in New York, go to a nightclub or a concert or both, returning by the late train, sometimes staying over at the highly chaperoned Hotel Thayer. She enjoyed the masculine company but, unlike M’Lou, was not dependent on it. What she was now dependent on was word from Yale. She wanted the advanced degree. Yes, she would settle for nothing less than a Ph.D., and she knew what she wished most to study—that extraordinary, reclusive, modest, infinitely disarming and complex literary genius Jane Austen. At Yale she could study with distinguished men of letters, giants like Wimsatt and Brooks and Mack.
The elm trees were budding on Vassar’s great green campus in the squalid city on the day the envelope arrived. Miss Sally Partridge had not only been accepted, but had won a full scholarship. She would break the news personally to her mother, instead of telephoning her. She hurried to catch the bus to Pawling. There she had fifteen minutes to wait for the Harlem Valley Line train. She called the Indian Mountain School to leave a message for her mother giving the time of her arrival at the railroad station in nearby Millerton.
Miss D’Arcy, the school secretary who had been at Indian Mountain since Sally was a girl, answered Sally’s greeting with unconcealed dismay. She blurted it out. “Darling Sally, your mother had a stroke last night. She was found this morning and taken to the Sharon Hospital. But it was—too late. We couldn’t reach you. Darling Sally, I am so sorry. I will see that someone meets you. No, I will meet you myself. I will help you with—the arrangements.”
That made three times in four years that Sally had stood in the front pew of the Methodist Church in Lakeville, hearing now pretty much the same words from Dr. Lerner she had heard before. She felt a knot of resentment, until she doused it with reason: What else should she expect, custom-made prayers over every coffin? There were many more people in attendance this time; practically the whole of Indian Mountain School was there, a number of villagers, and even a handful of Hotchkiss students who had studied under Faith Partridge at Indian Mountain. M’Lou had rushed up from Poughkeepsie, and Miss D’Arcy had organized a little post-funeral reception at the school, with sandwiches, soft drinks, and coffee. M’Lou had borrowed a car at Vassar, and as she drove Sally from the school to her lakeside cottage, she asked frankly whether Sally wished her to stay, or to return to Vassar.
Sally smiled her gratitude at M’Lou’s utterly reliable disposi
tion to go along with what Sally needed, which now was privacy. She reached over and gratefully clutched her hand. M’Lou understood.
The following morning, after calling him on the telephone, she visited with Campbell Beckett, who had attended to the sparse legal affairs of the Partridge family. He was ready for her.
The house still had a mortgage against it of about seven thousand dollars, she learned. Her father had died both intestate and penniless, but “your mother made out a will the week after your father’s death.” He gave Sally an envelope. “You will not be surprised that you are the sole beneficiary. The principal liquid asset is the ten thousand dollars paid by the government when your brother was killed. Faith—your mother—managed to get your father’s signature on that check”—Cam Beckett was a family friend as well as attorney, and Sally did not resent his idiomatic references to the family situation—“and she gave it to me to invest. I bought a government bond, and its value is now just over eleven thousand dollars. You can hang on to it if you want, or cash it in. My advice would be to cash it in. We are going to have even more inflation. I would advise you to let the Phoenix Bank invest it for you. In any event, Sally, when you decide, let me know if I can be of any help.
“Now your house is worth—I got an estimate yesterday from Mel Powell—about twenty thousand dollars, and could probably be sold, with summer coming, within a few months. If you decide to put the house on the market through Mr. Powell, he will make all the arrangements concerning furniture, that kind of thing. He would only need your instructions. Or you may want to keep the house and live in it during your vacations. After mortgages, commissions, taxes, funeral expenses”—he handed her a sheet of paper, with his neatly penciled figures—“you would be left with about twenty-four thousand dollars.”
Sally leaned over and studied the notations.
“There is nothing there for what I—for what the estate—owes you.”
“I don’t charge war victims. I think of you as one.”
Sally said only, “Thank you, Mr. Beckett.”
She got up, and he also did. “I hear you have made a marvelous record at Vassar and that you are going to Yale.”
She nodded.
“I was Class of 1918.” He smiled his warm, avuncular smile. “It’s hard for old fogies like me to think of women at Yale, though I know they’ve always been in the graduate school, but there are a lot of changes ahead, a lot of changes ahead.” At the door he leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
That afternoon, sitting in the living room in the chair her mother had usually occupied, Sally looked out on the lake. It was mid-April and the green was coming, coming all about her. She could see it in the surrounding trees, and the shrubs, and the little lawn. The water was choppy with the spring puffs. Ronnie’s buoy was still there, eight years after he had planted it so excitedly. The Barracuda was now hers, she realized: Her father had turned it over to Hopp Rudd, the owner of the little camp, on the condition that he should maintain it, in return for the use of it. She made a note to give the boat to Hopp Rudd, on the condition that it be renamed Ronnie. She found herself walking through the rooms, one by one. Her father’s possessions were long since gone, as were Ronnie’s: There was, really, nothing except her mother’s exiguous wardrobe, the paraphernalia of a not very modern kitchen, the radio, the books, the carpets, family photographs, a few framed color prints, and the rudimentary furniture for a family of four. She began to make a list of items she would like to be put into one of those large cardboard containers she had several times seen in connection with household moves. Everything else was to be given away to the church, after Miss D’Arcy had been invited to remove anything she wanted. Mr. Powell would look after all that—in the morning she would call him, and from Vassar she would send out typewritten instructions.
Sally Partridge was twenty years old. And, two months later, she was worth $24,275, had a year’s lease on her own apartment on St. Ronan Street in New Haven, at fifty-five dollars per month for the bedroom, living room-study-dining room, kitchenette, and bathroom. Her nearest relative was an aunt of her mother’s, who lived in England. Somewhere in England. The following week, the summer semester would begin.
12
Art Shaeffer wore a raccoon coat—he was one of those. When teased, as from time to time he was teased about it, he would say that it was his father’s, and he might as well wear it rather than let it rot away in the closet. But the real reason Art Shaeffer wore it was that he was that way, especially about intercollegiate football. His enthusiasm for the home team was so genuine, so robust, it was infectious, and Sally found herself cheering for the Yale team in the game against Dartmouth as exuberantly as though her date was with Herman Hickman, coach of the Yale football team, instead of Art Shaeffer, second-year law student. Yale’s loss by ten points put Shaeffer in a very blue mood, and when he drove Sally to fraternity row for drinks and dinner he was depressed. Sally had experienced this before in Art, whom she liked—“a bright, hulking, fifteen-year-old boy” was how she described him in a letter to M’Lou, though Shaeffer was twenty-five, had been discharged from the Marines as a first lieutenant, and was thought of as anything but a boy by his classmates, or for that matter by the Marine platoon he had led in three bloody Pacific operations.
But on entering the robustly Victorian Fence Club, to which he had been elected as an undergraduate at about the time of Pearl Harbor, Art’s spirits quickly revived. He took Sally’s coat and pointed the way to the ladies’ room. It was crowded in the hallway, so he told her her to come down to the bar when ready. “What shall I order for you?” Sally said she would have a Manhattan.
She found him fervently instructing three undergraduates at the end of the long, crowded bar on what, obviously, the tactics of the Yale team should have been after Dartmouth had scored its second touchdown. It didn’t surprise Sally that Art was talking not to old friends, putatively interested in Art Shaeffer, football tactician, but to undergraduates he had never met before. This became evident when she arrived, as he had to ask them their names before he could introduce them to Sally. The first student was called Lindsay Bradford, and Sally marveled that anyone so young could actually be in college. The slender seventeen-year-old was not, manifestly, a veteran of the war, and was only problematically a veteran of his first shave. Then there was Richie O’Neill, a tall, vivacious, handsome Irishman who took Sally’s outstretched hand and gave her a warm handshake. The third young man gave his name as Blackford Oakes.
“Black What?” Art Shaeffer asked, rising his voice to be heard over the din from surrounding voices.
“Black Ford. As in Ford V-8.” He turned to greet Sally. She saw a man perhaps twenty-two, strikingly handsome, only an inch or so shorter than Richie O’Neill, his faded blond hair framing a sensitive and expressive face. He had on a fraternity tie, a blazer, and gray flannel pants, as did the majority of the students in the room. He looked at Sally and stretched out his hand. He leaned over to her, “Your escort has just told us how Yale really won the game, even though we didn’t.”
Art Shaeffer, thrusting a Manhattan at Sally and quaffing his own scotch and soda, turned to Blackford. “You making fun of me? You don’t think it would have worked?”
“No,” Blackford said, laughing. “I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because Dartmouth’s team is better than ours.”
Art Shaeffer put down his glass on the bar and stood up, ramrod-straight. “Whatchou say?”
Blackford looked up at him and smiled. “My father was an Indian. I always root for Dartmouth.”
The others laughed. Sally said, “Come on, Art. There are other things than football.”
But Art Shaeffer, whose glass had been refilled by the attentive bartender, was aroused. “There aren’t any other things on Saturday afternoons during the season.”
Richie O’Neill, in genial diplomatic manner, turned to Shaeffer and said, “Art, explain that move to me again. I use
d to play football at Hotchkiss …”
As he spoke, Richie moved toward him, cutting his provocative roommate off from Art Shaeffer. Lindsay Bradford was now engaged in conversation with a contiguous beer drinker. Sally whispered, “Art gets carried away.” Blackford replied, “So would I be.”
Sally wrinkled her face as if to say, “Don’t get it.” Blackford stared at her, her head slightly tilted, her pearls touching the light gray tweed of her soft suit. Her eyes, in the light, were a piercing, intelligent green. She sipped her Manhattan.
“Are you here from—Smith? Vassar?”
“No,” Sally answered. “I’m in the graduate school.”
“Where?”
“Yale graduate school.”
“You are? What are you studying? Nursing?”
Sally gave her most feminine smile, but the kind that also bared true grit. “No,” she said. “Marine biology.”
Blackford looked at her. One end of his mouth winked, the other was professionally solemn. “Oh, that’s good. I have been worried about the declining population of whales. Do you intend to do something about that?”
“Yes,” Sally said. “I’m going to give up whale meat.”
But Art Shaeffer was back, and his enthusiasm was again serene. Richie nodded at Blackford: All’s well.
“C’mon, pussycat,” Art said to Sally, grabbing her by the arm. “We’ll get another drink at the table. But we’d better sit down, it’ll be crowded.” He nodded to Blackford and Richie, “See you.”
Blackford put down his own drink, unfinished. He said to Richie, “Did you ever know her, I mean, see her before? She’s here.”
“Law School?” Richie asked.
“I don’t know. In graduate school. The only thing I’m sure she isn’t studying is marine biology. Rich, I’ll see you later, okay?”
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 10
