A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

  Meals at the Bradleys’ were lively events. Conversation and arguments were encouraged on all topics: religion, politics, the arts. “Opinions. Have opinions,” I heard Gerald say over and over again. Wine was always served at dinner, and sometimes at lunch, even if there were no guests. Gerald believed in teaching his children how to drink at home. “I’ve always gone on the theory that a young man or woman is less likely to make a fool of himself later on in college if he learns to drink under his own roof in the presence of his father and mother. Am I right, Grace?”

  “Yes, dear,” replied Grace, who did not really approve of the practice but who never disagreed with her husband. “But not when Cardinal’s here,” she added, shaking her head.

  “Sip it. Don’t gulp it, Constant,” said Gerald.

  “Not you, Kitt. You’re too young,” said Grace.

  “Oh, Mother,” moaned Kitt.

  “One glass only, Miss Kitt,” said Gerald.

  With such a large family, there were frequent birthdays, and graduations, and anniversaries, and all were observed with toasts, each family member rising in turn to toast the honored person. It was conceded that Constant gave the best toasts in the family. “He’s so good on his feet,” Grace said every time.

  Constant Bradley, my friend, was a spectacular young man in every way. He seemed almost too good to be true. His name, his looks, his trim six-foot-two athletic frame, strained reality. He possessed a refinement of face that his parents did not have, and his vocal pattern was less strident than that of his parents and older siblings. His bearing, wit, and style caused much comment, especially among the young ladies at the various boarding schools in Connecticut and Massachusetts who had heard of the handsome young heir to the Bradley fortune. He had a facility for sports, especially the kind thought of as gentlemen’s sports: tennis, golf, squash, lacrosse, and sailing. In spite of the fact that his family’s wealth was of only two generations’ standing, he had acquired all the outward manifestations of privilege and bore them with the not-unattractive arrogance of a patrician. Perhaps, behind his splendid looks, there was a hint of menace, but I would not have seen it then or, if I did, I would have thought it an enhancement. All the daughters of the same Protestant families who abhorred the Bradleys were mad about Constant. His blond good looks left debutantes across the ballrooms of every country club where he danced gasping with desire, especially young Louise Somerset, Leverett Somerset’s daughter, who was called Weegie. Any one of them would have defied her family if Constant had been inclined toward them, but Constant, even then, was attracted to the forbidden fruit, and the forbidden fruit was Weegie Somerset, who was to be, in two years’ time, the prettiest debutante of her season and the social catch of the city.

  They fascinated each other from the time they met in Mrs. Winship’s dancing classes, when they were thirteen. He went to her school for her dances, and she went to his school for his. He was asked to her parties at her house, where his family had never been asked, and where the only things Irish or Catholic were the maids, in their black silk uniforms and white starched caps and aprons, who beamed at him in approval, knowing that he was the son of Gerald and Grace Bradley.

  My friendship with Constant was a surprise to me. I was one of the unspectacular members of our class at Milford, one of the quiet ones, even though I was the possessor of an unusual sort of celebrity. I remained aloof from the rest of the boys, although, in truth, my aloofness was merely an act of self-defense; I longed to be one of them. Constant played bridge very well, which made him a great favorite of Mr. Fanning, the French teacher, who wore beautiful tweed jackets and entertained the bridge-playing group in his rooms each night after dinner and before study hall. I was not part of that set. I disliked Mr. Fanning, who seemed to cater to all the rich boys.

  It was Mr. Fanning who came to me one night in study hall.

  “Harrison,” he said. “The headmaster wants to see you in his office. Immediately.”

  My heart quickened. I wondered what I had done wrong. Mr. Fanning, usually dismissive of me, was looking at me with concern.

  “Is something the matter?” I asked.

  “You must get to the headmaster’s office,” he said firmly.

  There, in Dr. Shugrue’s office, where I had only been once before, when my father entered me in Milford, I was told that my mother and father had been murdered. I did not cry, although I sank into a chair in front of his desk while he told me the facts of the horrible event.

  “Mrs. Shugrue is making up our guest room for you to stay the night. It will be better than going back to the dorm,” he said.

  By the time I returned to study hall to pick up my books and papers, word had gone round of my shocking news. Everyone stared at me. In the silence, Constant Bradley, solicitous, helped me gather up my things. The next morning Aunt Gert came to take me home. Leaving the school, aware that boys were watching out the window, I wished that she had brought my father’s Oldsmobile, black with whitewall tires, rather than her Chevrolet, four years old and badly in need of a wash.

  After Detective Stein, who was investigating the case, visited me at school one day, to report only that there were no leads in the double murder, Constant sought me out. The celebrity of the case never really exceeded the limits of the city in which it occurred, but everyone at Milford knew, and Dr. Shugrue, the headmaster, had exhorted the boys not to question me on my return, an exhortation ignored by Constant. At first, his interest in me was no more than blunt curiosity. He asked me the kind of questions no one else, for propriety’s sake, dared to ask. If they had come from anyone other than Constant, I would have ignored the questions, or walked away, but I was entranced with his attention, and replied, discovering that I was eager to have a friend in whom to confide. When he asked me to sneak into the village one afternoon, which was forbidden, to see a film he particularly wanted to see, I was thrilled to be his accomplice, although I was the type who never broke the rules. Soon we became inseparable. He had the most elaborate and expensive stereo equipment of any boy in the school, and each week all the latest cassettes arrived from a record store in New York. He knew the lyrics to every James Taylor song. We smoked pot and drank beer, risking expulsion. For me, it was thrilling. I didn’t mind telling him the answers to test questions; I even took it as an honor. Sometimes, between confession on Saturday afternoon and Communion on Sunday morning, he succumbed to powerful sexual urges and masturbated. “I beat my meat,” he said to me. In those days he beat his meat a great deal, especially after the new issue of Playboy came out each month. Occasionally, not always, I accompanied him in the masturbation experience, such acts were certainly not uncommon to boys in boarding school, but my eyes were on him, not on Playboy. The next morning, fearing the headmaster’s wrath if he did not go to Communion, he more than once paraded up the center aisle to the Communion rail, where, fearing also God’s wrath, with its attendant promises of eternal damnation and the pains of hell if he received the Blessed Sacrament while in a state of mortal sin, he became lost in the crowd of communicants, and then returned to his pew, head bowed in pious post-Communion prayer, without having received the Sacrament, although no one but I was aware of his ruse.

  There was someone called Diego Suarez in our class. A rich South American boy, the son of a fashionable diplomat in Washington, whom everyone, for obvious reasons, called Fruity. He pretended not to mind the name. A louse, a gossip, an unpopular fellow, he was the single exotic in our youthful Catholic midst. When autumn began to turn cold, he wore his top coat over his shoulders, in a flamboyant manner, the sleeves dangling by his side or swirling around him when he turned abruptly to address somebody. It was a style made famous by the Duke of Windsor, he told us, who had been a great great friend of his grandfather’s in Palm Beach, although few of us knew then who the Duke of Windsor was. Fruity had spent a summer in Beverly Hills and told lesbian stories about movie stars with great authority, which shocked, disappointed, or titillated his teenage audience. “Oh
, yes, it’s absolutely true,” he told us. “Everyone in Hollywood knows about the two of them. It’s a notorious affair.”

  It was Fruity who started the rumor that I was transfixed by Constant Bradley. “I can see the famous Bradley charisma has transfixed you, Harrison,” he said one day on our way to study hall in his loud, affected voice, for all to hear. “You cannot keep your eyes off him.” I blushed. For a while, everyone in the school talked about it. Constant, untroubled, roared with laughter at the story, while I suffered in silence. Denials were issued. The story died down. Eventually, in time, Fruity Suarez was kicked out of school for making an unwanted advance toward Jerome O’Hagen, the captain of the football team, who reported him to the headmaster. Secretly, I was delighted to see Fruity go, although I remained silent, my glee unexpressed. Years later, on the Concorde, on my way to Paris to cover Marlene Dietrich’s funeral, I ran into a classmate from that period, and we reminisced about those days at Milford. “Whatever happened to Fruity Suarez, do you suppose?” he asked. “Just sort of vanished, didn’t he?” I thought for a moment, wondering to myself whether to tell him what I knew. “Yes, vanished,” I answered finally. “Perhaps dead, for all I know.”

  Transfixed. What an odd word. Was I transfixed by Constant Bradley? Yes, I was. I was completely transfixed by Constant Bradley.

  2

  In contrast to the Bradleys, I often described my family as being merely well-to-do, but when my parents’ estate was settled, and our house sold, it developed that we were not that well-to-do at all. My father, it seemed, had made some bad investments. There was insurance, but I had very few assets and no relations to speak of, except Aunt Gert, a maiden lady, the older sister of my father, who would have taken me in, adopted me even, but it was not a prospect that I found enticing. Her life was drab. She raised money for the Maryknoll Fathers, who were missionaries in far-off places. And, by then, I had had a taste of the Bradley kind of life.

  “Are there things you want saved?” asked Aunt Gert. She was wrapping glasses and china in newspapers.

  “Why?”

  “For when you marry?”

  “Like what?”

  “The dining room table was your grandmother’s. And the sideboard.”

  “All right, I guess.”

  Later, going out, she said, “Where did you get that tie? It looks very expensive.”

  “It is very expensive. Turnbull and Asser. London. It belongs to Constant. He lets me wear his ties.”

  “Aren’t you seeing too much of those people?”

  “I don’t think so. I like them. I like their kind of life. They’re exciting.”

  “Your father wouldn’t have approved.”

  “But my father is dead.”

  She turned away. “Do you keep in touch with Detective Stein?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “If he had something to tell me, I’m sure he would have gotten in touch,” I replied. I did not like to talk about my parents’ murder.

  “Tomorrow is the anniversary of your father’s death.”

  “My father and mother’s deaths.”

  “Yes, of course. I am having a Mass said. You’ll be there, won’t you?”

  “All right.”

  “Is that beer you’re drinking? I think you’re too young to drink, Harrison.”

  “Mr. Bradley thinks young people should learn to drink at home. They serve wine at meals. Even Kitt, the youngest, is allowed a glass. That way, he says, young people will know how to drink when they go out in the world.”

  “Mr. Bradley, Mr. Bradley! That’s all I hear anymore. You are bewitched by those people, Harrison.”

  “I like them. I like their life.”

  I returned to Milford to finish the fifth-form year and then in June went to visit with Constant again, after receiving a letter from his mother inviting me. Kitt and Mary Pat were home from their convent school. The Bradley life seemed to be an endless summer of tennis and swimming and golf at the club. There were always tennis pros and golf pros to give the children lessons, and often they stayed to lunch. There were spring dances at The Country Club. The family liked having me around because I could be counted on to dance with Constant’s sisters, whom no one else danced with, while Constant was off dancing with Weegie Somerset. Constant was invited to parties that his sisters weren’t invited to.

  “Why do they all have such wonderful names, like Polly and Jiggsie and Gussie and Weegie, when we’re all Mary Pat and Maureen and Agnes?” asked Kitt, looking out at the popular girls on the dance floor.

  “Well, the Minskoff girls don’t get invited either, and they’re driven to school by a chauffeur,” said Grace.

  “Is that supposed to be a comfort, Mother?” asked Kitt.

  Although Constant was still in disgrace because of his expulsion from school, the opulence of his life was in no way diminished. For his seventeenth birthday, his father gave him a new car, a Porsche convertible, and we went for long drives. One day we drove to New Haven to have sport coats made at J. Press. I had no money for such extravagances, but Constant, with his patrician disregard of money, insisted on paying.

  His brothers and sisters treated the expulsion as a joke. Gerald minded only that he had been caught with the dirty pictures, not that he possessed them. He would have minded only if they had been pictures of men, not women, he said, and the family, except Grace, roared with laughter. His anger was directed at the headmaster who had expelled his son. “After all, I have done quite a few things for that school,” he said over and over. Grace was more troubled. She insisted that Constant confess to Cardinal during one of his visits, and he did.

  “What kind of pictures were they?” Gerald asked Constant.

  Constant, embarrassed, reddened and did not answer.

  “Beaver shots, showing pink,” interjected Jerry.

  Gerald chuckled.

  Much of the dinner-table conversation in the Bradley family that summer had to do with the reinstatement of Constant into Milford. If Constant had had more than one year to go before graduation, Gerald would have applied to any number of other schools for his son, but he felt that Constant would not be able to distinguish himself in a single year with boys who had already been together for three years. At Milford Constant had managed to become a popular figure, captain of the tennis team, and a reasonably good student, and Gerald was loath to toss all that aside, because it would figure in getting him into Yale the following year. The problem was that the headmaster of Milford, Dr. Shugrue, showed no inclination to have Constant return. He had been particularly offended by the nature of the dirty pictures that had been discovered on the top shelf of Constant’s closet, and he looked upon him as a poor moral guide to the younger students, all of whom knew the reason for his expulsion.

  One night at dinner Grace suggested giving a building to the school.

  “What do you mean, give a building? I already gave the goddamn chapel, and the carillon in the steeple,” replied Gerald from his end of the table. “And they still kicked my kid out.”

  “Don’t take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, Gerald,” replied Grace. “They must need something. Maybe a science building, Gerald. Or a new library. They always need libraries, don’t they?”

  “What about your friend, the cardinal?” asked Gerald. “Couldn’t he go over and talk to Shugrue, Grace? Couldn’t you talk him into that?”

  “He would do that, yes. Although I think Dr. Shugrue should go to see Cardinal. Not the other way around. After all, a cardinal is the next thing to the Pope. And a headmaster is only a headmaster.”

  “However you work that out. Let’s call him tonight,” said Gerald.

  “He’s coming to tea tomorrow. I’ll take it up with him then,” replied Grace.

  “Fine. Fine,” said Gerald.

  “And he can offer the school a science building from you?” asked Grace. “Or a new library?”

  I wondered if I would be so fascinated by the
relationship between Gerald and Grace if I did not remember so vividly the mink coat tossed casually on a hallway bench that was not Grace Bradley’s mink coat. At Milford, when boys talked about Constant after his expulsion, they said that his father had mistresses. There was talk of a Mrs. Steers, who was the former stepmother of a boy in our class, and a New York decorator in the fashionable firm of Cora Mandell, the most esteemed of all the decorators. I realized then that when we were in the house, Gerald was upstairs with a woman who was not his wife. I was still young enough to be shocked. Not only that Gerald Bradley had a mistress. But that he brought a mistress into his wife’s home.

  “What is Mrs. Steers’s first name?” I asked her former stepson.

  “Sally. Why?”

  “No reason.” I remembered the initials on the lining of the fur coat.

  Still, Gerald and Grace were very much a married couple and would stay that way. They agreed on things. Their religion was important to them. They had a mutual interest in their children and in the achievements that they foresaw for their family. But there was very little overt affection between them. They talked at dinner in the presence of their children, but afterwards Grace and her daughters sat together in one room and chatted, while Gerald and his sons usually sat in another room and watched television or talked about sports.