A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

“Oh, no, I’m gettin’ old. Be seventy in August. Let me look at you, Harrison. You didn’t grow too tall. You’re awful serious looking, but you was always a nice boy, Harrison. Always nice manners. Always came in the kitchen and said ‘Thank you, Bridey’ before you went back to school. Not many of them did, you know, the ones who came to visit. And once, after I did your laundry, you gave me a tip, two dollars, and I knew all the time you was in that fancy school on a scholarship and didn’t have two dollars to give away, so I stuck the money back in your pants pocket that night.”

  Harrison laughed. “So that’s where that two dollars came from? I’ve got to give you a big kiss on that one, Bridey.”

  “Do you still like your eggs poached in the morning? Five minutes?”

  “No, Bridey. I’m strictly Grape-Nuts Flakes with strawberries and skim milk these days.”

  “Shame on you. You need a good breakfast to start the day.”

  “Everybody’s out, I guess,” said Harrison.

  “They’ll be back soon enough. Golf, golf, golf, that’s the big thing now. They all play golf. Even Missus, if you can believe it. And her not so young, either. Look what I’m readin’, Harrison. I hold it like this, with your picture on the outside, and I say to the girls at Mass on Sunday, ‘I happen to know the author.’ ”

  “Oh, Bridey.”

  “Terrible man, that Max Goesler. Imagine doing such things to a little girl. Good for you for exposin’ all these awful people. And I’m glad they caught those two who killed your parents. The looks of them in the paper at the time. On drugs, the paper said. There’s the car. They’re coming back. I’m happy to see you, Harrison.”

  “Hello, Harrison,” said Gerald. “I’m sorry there was no one here to greet you. I had hoped to be back. I was out playing golf with Des and Sandro at the Maidstone Club in East Hampton, and the traffic was terrible getting back here. The worst-looking people you ever saw, in the worst-looking cars. These people are ruining the Hamptons. The condominium people, and the day-trippers who come to look at the big houses. Grace and the girls are at a committee meeting for the Southampton Hospital dance this summer. I hope you’ll be able to come back and sit with us that night. We’ve taken four tables.”

  “I haven’t seen Constant,” said Harrison in reply.

  “He’ll be along. Just between us, he’s had a little fight with his wife. Nothing serious, but he got delayed. You know how women are, Harrison. I know Constant has a bit of a wandering eye, and sometimes these little misunderstandings occur.”

  “You have not set a particularly good example, Mr. Bradley,” said Harrison.

  “What do you mean by that, Harrison?”

  “You have left a coast-to-coast trail of mink coats from Revillon Frères.”

  Caught, Gerald smiled. “I suppose you could say I’m a man with a healthy appetite for pussy,” he said.

  “An appetite your son has inherited.”

  “All my sons, I am proud to say. It is an important part of a man’s life, Harrison. Let’s face it. Constant is a young man who is mad about women,” said Gerald.

  “I’ve never been convinced of that,” said Harrison.

  “Oh, yes. He likes the way they walk, talk, smile. He finds women intoxicating. He once told me he couldn’t imagine a greater pleasure in life than being with the woman he loved. Now, that’s a beautiful thought.”

  Harrison paused. “Then why does he hit them?” he asked.

  Gerald, taken aback, paused. His nostrils flared slightly. He leaned away from Harrison and looked at him with disapproval, but the softness of the words that followed belied the anger he held in check. “Don’t you think he’s suffered enough from that old allegation?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure allegation is the correct word, Mr. Bradley.”

  “What’s the matter? You don’t like women, Harrison? What happened? Your marriage didn’t work? Who did you marry?”

  “Claire Rafferty.”

  The look on Gerald’s face suggested that the name had a familiar ring to it.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “She was a bridesmaid in Maureen’s wedding. You tried to fuck her in the guestroom of your house in Scarborough Hill the night before the wedding.”

  Gerald, momentarily nonplussed, stared at Harrison. He spoke in a hearty voice as if he were the good-natured brunt of a practical joke. “No, no, no, there is some mistake here. You shouldn’t make jokes like that, Harrison. Now, hold on. Hold on. I think I hear a car on the gravel.” He walked over to one of the long French windows, pulled aside a fluttering curtain, and looked out. “Yes, yes, yes. There he is. That’s Constant’s Testarossa. Isn’t it a beauty?”

  “Some car,” said Harrison, walking out the front door.

  “Not bad, huh?” answered Constant.

  “Some house,” said Harrison.

  “Not bad, huh?”

  “Urns in niches. Very West Egg.”

  “Very what?”

  “Gatsby. It looks like Jay Gatsby’s house.”

  “Oh, my God, you’re not still on Gatsby, are you?”

  The two old friends looked at each other. Constant was lean, startlingly good-looking, aware that he had become the focus of much attention, but there was also a complacency on his face, a slight boredom, even. Harrison wondered if his arranged life had not come all too easily for him. Constant opened his arms and walked toward Harrison and hugged him.

  “Still got all your hair,” he said.

  “You, too.”

  “That’s a given with the men in my family,” said Constant, laughing. “There’s no such thing as a bald Bradley. I’ve missed you, you son of a bitch. You just went off and dumped me.”

  “That’s not exactly how it happened, Constant,” replied Harrison. “Or words to that effect.”

  With a dismissive gesture, Constant brushed off further exploration of that line of conversation. “Let me see. You’re married, I know. Two children. Twins. Boys. And successful. On the road to fame, I hear. Oh, I keep track of you. Let me look at you. You look great. How do you stay so thin?”

  “I swim every day.”

  “Swim? You didn’t even make the team at Milford.”

  “I probably still wouldn’t. My swimming has nothing to do with speed or form. I’m more interested in distance than style. I swim every day at my club, but in the summers, or when I’m in Florida or California, I swim in the ocean. I set goals for myself. It’s the one time of day I’m not haunted. Don’t ask me what haunts me.”

  “Well, there’s a pretty big ocean right out there for you to try out.”

  “It might still be a little cold.”

  “Johnny Fuselli uses a wet suit.”

  “Maybe I’ll try.”

  “Well, I’m waiting,” said Constant.

  “For what?”

  “My compliment. How do I look after all these years?”

  “I see your picture in the paper all the time, so I’m not surprised you’re still the best-looking man I ever saw.”

  “People say you used to love me.”

  “A poor boy’s crush on a rich boy. No more than that. That was long ago. Over and out. A moment in time.”

  “You’re different,” said Constant.

  “Oh, I hope so,” replied Harrison.

  They sat in Harrison’s room and caught up. In times past, in Scarborough Hill, they had either shared a room when the house was particularly crowded, or had rooms side by side with a connecting bath, Harrison’s room being the room he always thought of as Agnes’s room, as that was what Grace had called it the first time he had visited that house. There, in Southampton, there was no room remembered as having once been Agnes’s, and Constant no longer was in the next room.

  “Pa’s impressed with you. I can see that. They’ve given you the best guestroom in the house,” said Constant.

  “It’s pretty swell. I’ve never slept in a bed with a tufted headboard and a canopy before,” said Harrison.

  “Sally St
eers did it up.”

  “Not Sally Steers? You can’t be serious. This is where I came in.”

  They burst out laughing.

  “Strictly on the up-and-up these days. All business. Sally’s almost sixty now, and a little hefty. Too many creampuffs. Pa likes ’em younger, and slimmer,” said Constant.

  “Where’s your room?” asked Harrison.

  “Charlotte and I have one of the cottages. Des and Lee have another. Maureen and Freddy have the biggest cottage, with all those kids. Sandro has a couple of rooms at the end of the hall for when he comes.”

  “Des is married then?”

  “Oh, yes. For years.”

  “Children?”

  “Two girls.” Constant stood and looked out the window toward the sea. “You’re going to launch me, I hear. Write my book for me.”

  “I told your father no. I can’t write that book for you, Constant,” said Harrison. “It’s not what I do. Besides, I wouldn’t much enjoy watching you on the TV chat shows taking credit for a book I’d written.”

  “You’ve got to give me a better reason than that,” laughed Constant.

  “I told your father this, but he insisted that I come anyway to talk it over. You know how your father is when he wants something.”

  “But it would be like old times, Harry,” said Constant. “Do you remember the Christmas speech at Bog Meadow? What a hit you made me that afternoon. The old biddies couldn’t get enough of me. Oh, and the paper for Shugrue, to get me back into Milford after the putz kicked me out. That was a wow. And my graduation speech.”

  “It was the delivery,” said Harrison.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. I was just remembering something Kitt once said in Watch Hill. You’re really going to go through with this, are you? The run for governor?”

  “Yes, of course. Pa thinks you get more exposure as governor than as a congressman.”

  “What is this necessity you have to live center stage? Explain that to me. There are less public ways of getting through life.”

  “Pa says I’m a born politician.”

  “Do you really want it, Constant? Or are you living out your father’s fantasy of having a son in the White House?”

  “Yes, I want it.”

  “You know what it will be like, don’t you? That whole business will come up again. What happened back there in Scarborough Hill. There’s people back there—”

  “You know, I never had a friend again like you. At Yale, I was a big deal. My nickname was Magnifico, did you know that? I was popular as hell. Of course, there were a few people who disliked me too, although I never much minded what people thought about me. But I never had a real friend to say everything to. Do you remember how we used to talk for hours on end?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, how’s Aunt Gert? I forgot to ask you about Aunt Gert.”

  “Poor Aunt Gert. She’s in a home. St. Mary’s Home. Gaga.”

  “No more Maryknoll Fathers?”

  “No. The amazing thing is that she’s afraid to die. She’s lived a life of utter goodness, and she’s afraid to let go. She used to say to me, ‘Bradleys, Bradleys, Bradleys. That’s all I ever hear. You are bewitched by those people, Harrison.’ ”

  “Were you? Bewitched, I mean?”

  “You are different, all of you. I’ve never known anyone like you.”

  “I don’t see what’s so different about us,” said Constant. He sounded irritated, as if he had heard this before.

  “None of you will ever have to earn a living. None of your children ever will, either. Nor, very probably, their children. Your father has made enough to guarantee that for all of you. Each child or grandchild gets a million bucks at birth that he can’t touch until he is twenty-one, by which time, in a good economy and wisely invested, as it surely will be, it will be worth a minimum of six million for the kid to start out life with. What do you mean, you don’t see what’s so different about you?”

  “You sound jealous,” said Constant.

  “Oh, what a misreading of me you have made,” said Harrison. “I’m not a believer in trust funds, especially for young men. I think you will never really realize your potential because of it. You take too many shortcuts. Too much is done for you.”

  Constant was stung. “My father believes in us serving our country by entering public life, especially the boys, and he has provided for us so we can do exactly that,” he said hotly.

  Sitting among the fashionable set at one of Grace Bradley’s beautifully arranged luncheon tables in the loggia, Harrison felt detached from much of the conversation, which was mostly society gossip about parties he hadn’t been at and people he didn’t know.

  “I’m off to India, guru hopping, with my new beau, who’s much too young for me, but divine, so good-looking,” said someone named Baba, who was seated next to him. She meditated daily, she said. She claimed to have levitated at an ashram in India. Grace had whispered to him before lunch that she was from the pharmaceutical family of the same last name.

  “This lamb is divine, isn’t it? So pink. It’s very important to have a butcher who cuts beautifully, don’t you think?” asked someone named Lulu on his other side. Kitt and Constant, who never mentioned to anyone that their grandfather had been a butcher, looked at each other across the table and tried not to laugh.

  “I arrange all my own flowers,” said Grace. “I wouldn’t dream of letting anyone else do them.”

  “Everything looks so pretty, Grace,” said a man called Count Stamirsky, who ate a great deal and spoke very little, saying only, on five separate occasions, that Grace Bradley was a great lady, thereby earning his meal that day and others to come.

  The guests talked of plays and films and fashion and auctions. A man named Sonny, who wasn’t English but spoke with an English accent, said he had left a bid at Sotheby’s on a collection of Chinese porcelain that once belonged to Fitzy Montague, who jumped out the window of 740 Park Avenue.

  “Poor Fitzy. His pajamas flew off on the way down. I bet you didn’t know that,” said Sonny.

  “I did, too. He had a boil on his ass, I heard,” said an English peeress named Honour, who held a dog in her lap.

  “Bingo told me kind of a cute AIDS joke last night at the Fraziers’,” said Lulu.

  “We already heard it,” said Baba.

  They talked of servants and summer houses and parties and dances and a wedding in Pisa that everyone was flying over for. Grace said she had known seven First Ladies, five of them on a first-name basis. They talked of a couple everyone knew and no one liked.

  “His wife is screwing the carpenter who built their new redwood deck,” said Lulu.

  “Serves him right,” said a woman named Thelma, which she pronounced Telma. “He’s awful.”

  “Shhh. Don’t let Grace hear you. She’s very opposed to adultery,” whispered Sonny.

  Bridey was called in and everyone applauded her for her fig mousse. “Yummy,” cried Thelma, who tried to lead a standing ovation. There was a great deal of laughter and a great deal of wine. “That’s enough, Kitt. No more wine for you,” said Grace.

  “You were bored with those people, weren’t you?” asked Kitt.

  “The smart set,” said Harrison.

  “You hated it, I know. But you didn’t even try to enter in.”

  “What’s the point, really? I’ll never see any of them again.”

  “Yes, you will. They’ll be at the movie tonight. Ma always invites them. I’ve decided Ma’s a secret social climber,” said Kitt. “Last year she said she didn’t want us to call her Ma anymore. She wanted us to say Mummy, but none of us could break the habit. All we could do was laugh when we tried to say it.”

  Harrison laughed.

  “Then she wanted us to say Mère, the French way, from our years at the embassy, and that really sent us all into hysterics every time we said it, even Mary Pat, who speaks French all the time, so it was back to Ma.”

  Harrison
laughed again. “I’m going swimming,” he said.

  “Too cold.”

  “I borrowed a wet suit from Johnny Fuselli.”

  “Brrr,” said Kitt, pretending to shiver.

  Gerald encouraged his wife’s efforts to move in society, although he had no interest in the sort of people she met. He rarely attended her lunch parties or her charity benefits, and he often chuckled with Jerry about the sort of men who came to lunch. “A bunch of losers,” he said.

  “Nice obituary in the Times for Rupert du Pithon,” said Grace. “I always thought he was rather a fool myself, but I didn’t know he’d done those brave things in World War II. Won a medal. Imagine. Rupert. Of all people. Of course, Sally Steers hated him. Do you remember the rude remark he made about little Sally’s wedding dress when she was coming down the aisle at St. James’s? Actually, in his own way, Rupert was right, I suppose. All that white satin billowing around little Sally when everyone in the church knew she was three months pregnant. I’d die, I’d simply die, if any of my girls did anything like that. Where are you going, Kitt?”

  “How far did you swim?” asked Constant.

  “Not so far. Maybe three miles. I’ll go farther tomorrow,” said Harrison. “Maybe four or five. In France once, I swam up to ten.”

  “I’m impressed. How long did it take you today?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “How far out do you go?”

  “About two hundred yards. Past the waves. You want to avoid the kelp. Then I always turn in a northerly direction. You only breathe out of one side of your mouth so you can judge the distance from the shore and make sure you’re going in a straight line. You keep a standard pace. Your speed doesn’t change.”

  “I repeat, I’m impressed. Even though I was brought up on the water every summer, I have this fear of deep water,” said Constant. “It’s so big, the thing you’re in, and you’re so small.”

  “That’s what I like,” said Harrison. “This vast watery space under me, floating in an unknown zone.”

  “Is that when you stop being haunted? That’s what you said to me: it’s the only time of day you’re not haunted.”

  Harrison continued as if he had not heard.