“The thing is, I knew that life was bound to treat them unevenly, that it would strain their golden, happy love for each other. Still, who’d have thought the whole idea wouldn’t just have evaporated after college? I can’t help but think that would have been the case with virtually any such collegiate group—but not these characters. But maybe I knew it wouldn’t just go away.
“What I did know is that there was a damned good chance that the dark side of the Ruffians would show itself sooner or later. There was bound to be a stain of sheer bloody-mindedness before they were done. For that matter, there were signs of that darkness long before they ever left Harvard, Belinda.”
The sun was climbing higher and the shade was receding across his roof garden. Chalmers struggled out of the canvas chair and started moving from pot to pot with the hose, standing squinting, puffing his pipe, telling me the story as I followed him. It all had hinged on my leaving the relationship with Harry and beginning to date Jack. In any kind of normal situation it wouldn’t have amounted to anything, wouldn’t have made a story to remember more than a day or two. But Harry and Jack were Ruffians, a fact of which I at that time had been utterly unaware. So far as I knew, they might have been nothing more than casual acquaintances.
Jack had been the one to break the code. He knew that I was dating Harry but he’d asked me to go out anyway. I had enjoyed meeting him at a mixer. I suppose I thought I was being a trifle naughty, but on the other hand, Harry and I weren’t going steady—that is, though we had slept together, nothing had been said about exclusivity. I knew I was taking advantage of a technicality, as it were. Among the people I knew, if you slept with a guy there wasn’t any doubt about it, you were definitely going together. We may not have been representative of the sexual revolution of the sixties but we knew our own rules. Still, I had liked Jack Stuart and gone out with him, more or less behind Harry’s back.
But Harry wasn’t angry with me, or if he was, he was a hell of a lot angrier with Jack. A girl couldn’t be expected to understand the code of the Ruffians, but Jack had helped create it.
Harry put up with it for a couple of weeks, asked me just what the score was, and I told him that I thought we needed a break from each other because we’d been getting too intense. The sort of things girls say to guys at times like that. And I told him I intended to date Jack if Jack wanted me to. Harry took it like a man, told me he hoped we would remain friends, and I breathed a sigh of relief and said I hoped so too. But Harry wasn’t about to let Jack off so easily.
As Chalmers told the story, Jack and Harry were living on the third floor of Eliot House then. Harry spent one evening that Jack and I were out working himself into a fit of temper. When Jack pulled in about midnight Harry was waiting for him. They argued. The argument escalated into a shoving match. And Harry wound up going for Jack with a lamp and breaking it on Jack’s head. Jack, streaming blood from scalp lacerations, went over the top, methodically knocking Harry down the three flights of stairs, stopping at each landing to straighten him up before knocking him down the next flight.
Mike had found them. Harry was unconscious and Jack couldn’t see through the blood. Mike had called Chalmers, who had appeared at Eliot House in the middle of the night, gotten the combatants back up to the room, and checked for damage. It was a stupid risk to take, Chalmers acknowledged, but they’d waited until morning and then gone in his car to a doctor near Central Square in Cambridge. Chalmers had never seen anything like what they’d done to each other, but at the time, secrecy seemed of the utmost importance. The doctor had taken some stitches in Jack’s scalp. Harry had three broken ribs, a broken bone in his left hand, and a hairline fracture of a bone in his foot. And lost two teeth. The doctor observed to Chalmers that Harry looked as if he’d been worked over by a couple of professionals.
Chalmers finished soaking the last of the trees on his deck. He turned off the water tap and rolled the hose up on a rickety old stand. “Quite a dust-up, quite a lot of very bad feeling. Neither one of them was prepared to forget it. Harry made a good many threats and Jack welcomed them, said he’d be glad to keep dishing it out if Harry wanted to keep taking it. For a few weeks I didn’t think we’d ever mend it. But, corny as it sounds, it was the Ruffian spirit that carried the day. Mike and Hacker and Venables brought them together right here, in my parlor, and we talked for a long time. We talked of life and love, of men and women and the troubles and jealousies we’re all heir to, and in the end the lads shook hands. You, my dear, were awarded to Jack and that was the end of it.”
I stood there in a state of amazement. “I was awarded to Jack …” The absurdity of it overcame my anger at the very idea. I burst out laughing. “That’s incredible!”
Chalmers looked at me, nodded. “Times change, don’t they? Yes, now it does seem rather quaint. Yes, I see your point. But that’s the way it was then.”
“Crazy, to think this happened and I never knew anything about it. Nobody said a word.”
“Well, no, they wouldn’t, would they?”
I followed Chalmers inside. “There’s also a story about the unfortunate Venables,” he said, busying himself at the kitchen sink, rinsing cups, washing his hands. “I’ve never told a soul. I never break a confidence, Belinda, which is why I’m such a repository of odd information. Now, with Peter shot to death and Jack arrested for the murder, it may be that the sanctity of the Ruffians needs to take a back seat. Let me change out of these filthy duds. Then we’ll go for a walk and I’ll empty out the vault for you.”
Chapter Thirty-six
WE WALKED DOWN JOY STREET, crossed Beacon, where the heat shimmered off the pavement, and entered the Common. The leaves of the trees were dulled by a patina of dust, the grass before us had a skinned and browned-out look to it. Hundreds of kids were splashing in the huge shallow swimming pool, a band was playing music from Gilbert and Sullivan in the quaint little bandstand, and the shouts of a ballgame or two drifted lazily up the hill from clouds of dust far below. Old men wearing straw hats and suits and ties sat reading newspapers on benches and black mothers in spandex shorts wheeled tots in strollers and tourists seemed weighed down by the cameras draped from their necks like millstones. They were headed for the Freedom Trail and Old North Church and the redeveloped waterfront and Locke-Ober and the Quincy Market. But Tony Chalmers and I were headed deeper into the past, an antique place centered on Harvard Square where I’d once lived life so blissfully unaware of the currents all around me. It was an odd feeling, like a swimmer in the Charles realizing he’s being towed under not by an icy undercurrent but by the memory of one, drowning in something that happened a long time ago.
We stood watching the band playing and the crowds surging around the Park Street subway station. He leaned against a tree and we tried to catch a breeze to dry us off.
“Venables came to me at the end of senior year,” he said, knocking a different chipped and blackened pipe against the heel of his hand. Then he was scraping inside the bowl with an old penknife. “He was a secretive fellow, quiet, and I’d never been quite as close to him as the others. Still, I was the one he came to at this point, the one he confided in. By this time you and Jack were thinking about marriage and Harry and Sally were a fixture on the scene. Sally had just announced that she was going to Europe for the grand tour … everything was going quite nicely. And alone comes Peter late one night, right there to the Joy Street place, it was a warm spring night and we drank beer and sat out on my deck … God, almost twenty years ago and now he’s dead. Well, he had quite a story to tell.
“He had been seeing this girl, he said, but for a variety of reasons he’d had to keep it quiet. Couldn’t tell a soul, and positively not the Ruffians. But now he had a problem and he didn’t know whom else he might turn to—but me. Well, I knew what was coming and sure enough, I was right. It didn’t take a genius, and you have to remember that things were different then. He’d gotten the girl pregnant … at least he thought it was his doing and the girl said
she was sure. She had another boyfriend they both knew about, Peter accepted the situation, but she said she knew the baby she carried was Peter’s. She was pretty upset, she hadn’t been able to tell even her closest friend, and she’d finally decided to have an abortion. Somewhat more involved then than now. Peter wasn’t t so sure she should. He came to me to ask me what to do. He wanted me to talk with her. He wasn’t asking me to apply any pressure, he just wanted me to talk with her. My feeling at the time was that he loved her, wanted her to have the child for that reason, even though she was apparently going to marry this other boyfriend. It was a delicate situation.”
Chalmers leaned back, took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and crammed the pipe full. “This is all very interesting,” I said, “but I don’t see the connection, you know? What did it have to do with Jack? Or the rest of the Ruffians?” I watched the breeze blow out two matches before the third one got his pipe going.
“Well, there is a connection,” he said, puffing. “But I had to see if you already knew the story. Apparently you don’t.”
“Of course I don’t. Venables would hardly have confided in me.”
“I realize that. But Sally might have.”
“How would Sally have found out about Venables’ tawdry love life?” I couldn’t keep the impatience out of my voice.
“Sally was the girl in question, I’m afraid. She was pregnant by Venables.”
I sat down on the grass and leaned back against the tree. Chalmers told me I looked like I’d seen a ghost and went to get us hot dogs and Cokes from a vendor. He came back and sank down beside me. I looked at the hot dog as if I’d never seen one before.
“Go ahead, eat it, drink up,” he said. “You’ve had a shock.”
“I ought to be getting used to them,” I said weakly. “But somehow I just keep getting caught off guard.”
“You don’t have much guard,” he said. “Never have had. It’s your nature. Anyway …”
I sat chewing my hot dog without tasting it, listening to his recreation of the events so long ago. They had all met in the old rooftop bar at the Parker House. The sun had been setting across the city, burning off the golden dome. Sally had been so pretty, so pale and intense with her straight black hair and dark, deep eyes. Venables dark and fine-featured, worried, so attentive. It was all true, as Venables had told Chalmers. Sally and Peter had begun an affair almost by accident. She was drawn to his introversion, his darkness, his mystery, all in such contrast to Harry. He had simply fallen in love and to hell with the Ruffian code. He’d been through Harry and Jack beating hell out of each other over me, he knew Harry might have gone even further had it happened again, so he made sure the affair was kept secret. Chalmers thought Peter hoped the pregnancy would change Sally’s mind about marrying Harry. But Sally was committed and Venables struggled to understand. But he begged her for the baby. He wanted the baby.
“It all may have turned on my Catholicism,” Chalmers said, carefully balling up his wrappers and dropping them into the empty Coke cup. “I’d left all that behind me, hadn’t been inside a church in years, but this atavistic thing came out—I didn’t want her to snuff out that baby, that life inside her. Call me what you will, but I—subtly, I think—orchestrated the pros and cons of the argument in such a way as I knew would shift her toward Peter’s point of view. She could have it both ways, she could have their baby and in that way always retain a tie to Peter, to this passionate love affair she’d already decided must be a temporary thing … and she could have Harry, too, the life she’d committed herself to.” He shrugged his round shoulders and ran his hand through the curly gray puffball of hair. “So in the end that’s what she did. She went off to Europe, looking at museums and whatnot, hanging around Florence and Venice, staying longer than she’d planned … and having the baby in Switzerland. Peter was there. He took the baby. He and his parents raised the child in England—”
“And,” I gulped, “she just got married …”
He nodded. “After she had the baby, she came home and married the man she really loved, Harry Granger. She and Peter somehow managed to put their romance behind them and got on with their separate lives.”
“And the baby? Sally just forgot about the baby?” I was shaking my head, like somebody having a spasm. “No, I can’t believe that, a mother couldn’t do that.”
“Sally? Oh, I think Sally could. The bargain was her own. How is it different from adoption?”
“Incredibly different! The baby was with a man she’d had deep feelings for, the baby was growing up, she knew she could have seen her, watched her grow up … and she just turned her back and walked away? Impossible.”
“Not for Sally,” Chalmers said. “Very strong-willed woman, Sally. Don’t you think? It may have cut her to pieces inside, but she’d handle it, that’s her way. She’d made her deal, she was going to live with it. And she had Harry to think about, they had a life to live … She didn’t know Peter anymore, nor the child, and the years went by and life went on and it somehow wasn’t connected to Sally anymore.” He dug the pipe out of his pocket again, knocked it against the tree, and the ashes sprinkled down into the dry, brown, dusty grass. “Remember that wedding at Sag Harbor? That was quite a life too, Belinda. That life mattered too.”
The afternoon wore on but I wasn’t paying much attention. Chalmers had run through his classified memories, spilled what he knew. The rest was just generalized chatting, reminiscing, and a refusal on his part to speculate on who might have killed Peter Venables. We finally walked across the Common and stopped. He looked up the path that led to Beacon Street and Joy.
“I’ve told you what I know in confidence, Belinda. You do with it whatever you think is right. Ruffian secrets don’t seem to have much priority anymore. At least not in my mind. They—we—did some stupid things. Who doesn’t? But somehow we all clung together for a long time, still are. Clinging to the wreckage at this point, I guess. But … but it’s what we wanted. Back then, anyway. We saw it differently then. We didn’t know how complicated things might get. …”
I watched him trudge up the path. When he reached Beacon he turned around and waved to me, as if he knew perfectly well I’d be watching. Then he went across the street and out of my sight. He’d unloaded a lot excess baggage. But somehow he looked more weighed down than before.
Chapter Thirty-seven
THERE WAS NO QUESTION OF not believing it.
Tony Chalmers was utterly convincing. And now that I knew, I didn’t really know what to do with the knowledge. What most amazed me, I suppose, was the fact that Sally carried it all off so perfectly when it was happening. I had never dreamed she might be having an affair with someone else while she was seeing Harry. And to have gotten pregnant! By one of the Ruffians, yet!
I was simply stunned and it took me several hours and a long bath back at the Ritz to begin pulling myself and my reactions together. Quite a few things made more sense now, at least superficially, but I still couldn’t imagine what Sally must have been going through all these years … let alone the period since Peter Venables had come back to New York.
I remembered most of all the moments over coffee in the Village when she’d shown me the photograph of Delilah Venables. The shine in her eyes and the happiness on her face as she’d talked about the girl, her marriage, and how she and Peter had been breakfasting together in the garden, enjoying the renewal of their friendship. Delilah Venables. Sally’s daughter. God, it was so obvious! At least it was once you knew. The hair, the eyes, they were so utterly Sally. And the coloring, of course, was Peter’s.
The way she’d spoken so pleasantly about Venables, what a nice boy he’d always been. It made sense now, almost as if she’d been trying to hint something to me. Afraid to just tell me. Why, I wondered, had she been afraid? Wasn’t it just the kind of thing you confided to your best friend? I should have known the truth all these years, been able to help her through the hard times and the sense of loss, abandonment. But she had
n’t told. Why? Had she simply not wanted to burden me with the truth? That might have been Sally in one of her flights of nobility … yes, that was the only real bet. Sparing me the lie and its moral imperatives.
What must it have been like in that house? At the party for the show? Seeing him every day? Managing to keep Harry in the dark? Had she made love with Peter after so many years? Had they been strangers or friends? Or lovers, still?
Had Jack been right on the money with his first assumption? That Venables had indeed come back for Sally? Perhaps all the rest of his diary entries meant nothing. Maybe he had put his finger on it right away.
When Hacker and I had been floating in the rowboat and seen the terrible confrontation between Harry and Sally—what had that been about? There had been the sheet of paper fluttering between them and Harry had laughed, and later, at the ice-cream stand, he’d been so calm. And later still, telling me the fight in the park had been over her accusations about his having a girlfriend, had Harry been lying?
How much had Harry been lying, anyway?
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