A Season in Purgatory

by Dominick Dunne

  Jerry stared at Harrison.

  “Your friend Johnny Fuselli ought to wash up in Shinnecock Bay by tomorrow morning, Jerry. I believe that was the direction of the tide. That is, if he hasn’t been eaten by sharks. I thought for a moment he was a shark. He came from behind and below me. He grabbed my leg. He pulled me under. He held his hand on my head to keep me from surfacing, but my rage to live exceeded his strength. I kicked him pretty hard and broke his nose. He was bleeding badly.”

  Jerry, speechless, listened openmouthed to what was told him, scarcely able to believe his ears.

  “Then, after we talked, he had a heart attack in the water,” said Harrison. “All that swimming at his age. That was quite an assignment you gave him, Jerry. You sent him on a mission his heart wasn’t in. Even people like Johnny have their limits. We had a very nice talk there in the water, in the last minutes of his life. I would like to have brought him in, but I wasn’t sure I was going to make it in myself, I was so tired out from the struggle. He said he understood. Nice fellow, Johnny.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Kitt, moving to the door of the taxi. “What are you saying, Harrison?”

  “Go into the house, Kitt,” said Gerald.

  “No, I won’t go into the house,” she replied.

  “Go into the house. Now,” screamed Gerald.

  Kitt, shocked, looked at her father. He had never spoken to her in such a fashion before. The sound of his harsh voice speaking so loudly brought several maids to the windows of the house. Then Kitt turned to Harrison, trying to understand what had been said. She turned and walked back to the house, where she stood in the hall and looked back.

  “Oh, for your records, Jerry, when you confess this to Father Bill next Saturday, so you can receive Communion on Sunday, Johnny drowned bravely,” said Harrison. “ ‘Say hi to Maxine’ were his final words before he went under. We had a mutual friend, Johnny and I, in Arizona, called Maxine Lonergan. I believe your father knew her, too. Didn’t you, Mr. Bradley? She was celebrated for her oral expertise.”

  “Did he say that Fuselli drowned?” Gerald asked Jerry, ignoring Harrison.

  “Yes,” replied Jerry.

  Gerald, gray faced, suddenly looked old and sickly. “Good God,” he said. Years before, Gerald Bradley had hired the brash Johnny Fuselli away from Salvatore Cabrini when he was in charge of the slot-machine operations in Atlantic City. It was the habit of Grace Bradley never to acknowledge Johnny Fuselli’s presence and to instruct her daughters to do the same, but over the years Gerald Bradley had developed an affection for Johnny, although he had failed ever to tell him so.

  “Is your father suggesting I should have allowed myself to be drowned so that Fuselli could carry out your orders successfully?” Harrison asked Jerry, ignoring Gerald, in the manner and voice that Gerald had just ignored him.

  Jerry nervously looked toward the taxi driver to see if he had heard.

  “Third World. Don’t worry,” said Harrison, indicating the driver with a movement of his head.

  “I wish you had never come here,” cried Jerry.

  “Your father shouldn’t have insisted when I declined his offer,” replied Harrison.

  “I mean, in the first place—back in Scarborough Hill!”

  “So do I. Finally, Jerry, you and I agree on something.”

  “Get out. Stay out. We don’t ever want to see you again. I am speaking for my sister, Kitt, as well. Stay away from her. Right, Pa?”

  Gerald Bradley, watching the exchange, suddenly toppled over and fell onto the gravel driveway. “Pa!” screamed Jerry.

  Kitt ran to the porch, down the flower-bordered path, and onto the driveway where her father was lying. “Pa! Pa!” she cried. The sound of her troubled voice carried. Charlie heard it in the chauffeur’s quarters above the garage. From elsewhere in the house, maids came running, as did the maids and gardener from the Webster Pryde house next door.

  Gerald lay on the ground muttering something, but his tongue had become useless. His stern and forbidding expression had altered to one of fright and submission. His eyebrows twitched. His eyes, fearful, looked timidly and uneasily at the people looking down on him. He saw them exchanging glances. Then his eyes closed. Charlie, the chauffeur, crossed himself in the Catholic manner with an automatic movement of his right hand, knelt on the ground, and with downcast eyes bowed his head in prayer.

  “Get up, get up!” snapped Jerry. “Don’t let him see you like that, Charlie, for God’s sake.”

  Gerald, hearing, slowly opened his eyes. Seeing his children, he moved his lips to speak but only a choked sound came out, its meaning unintelligible. Again his eyelids drooped.

  “I’ll get Ma,” said Kitt, quickly.

  “No,” said Jerry. “We’ll carry him inside. Charlie, come here and help. Will you help, too?” he asked the Prydes’ gardener, who was standing watching the family drama. “Please, take a leg, will you?” he said to one of the maids. Gerald moaned piteously, and there was difficulty raising him.

  “I read somewhere you’re not supposed to move them until the ambulance comes,” said the Prydes’ gardener.

  “Just lift him!” snapped Jerry. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “It said you could get sued if something goes wrong,” insisted the gardener.

  All this Harrison watched from the interior of the taxi. Kitt looked over at him beseechingly.

  “You gonna miss train,” said the driver.

  Harrison reached into his pocket and took out a ten-dollar bill. “Here,” he said to the driver. “I’m getting out. Get my bags out.” He walked over to where Gerald was lying on the ground and took the leg that the Prydes’ gardener was reluctant to lift.

  Slowly, they lifted Gerald by his shoulders and legs and carried him inside. Grace, standing at the doorway with Bridey, watched as her husband was carried past her.

  Gerald looked at Grace imploringly and tried but failed to hold out his hand for her to take.

  “Call Father Bill at the parish house,” Grace said calmly to Bridey. “Tell him to come quickly.” Bridey turned and ran toward the kitchen. “Bridey,” Grace called out after her.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Grace spoke in a loud whisper. “Tell him the last rites.”

  “He’s wet his pants,” said Jerry, as they lifted him toward a long sofa.

  “Don’t put him there, for heaven’s sake,” said Grace. “That’s just come back from the upholsterers. Put him there on the cane seat. Get some paper towels, Kitt. Don’t you think perhaps an ambulance, Jerry?”

  “Yes, yes, an ambulance is coming, Ma,” said Jerry.

  “Your mother doesn’t appear to be grieving too much,” said Harrison, as they waited for the ambulance.

  “Oh, but she is, in her own way,” replied Kitt, shaking her head almost imperceptibly, as a slight scowl appeared, clouding the clearness of her forehead. He had seen that look before, on Constant’s face. It appeared whenever there was what was perceived to be a criticism of anyone in the family.

  When the ambulance arrived, the family watched as the attendants expertly placed Gerald on the stretcher.

  “Try to get him the room next to Constant’s,” said Grace. “Bridey, call Cardinal.”

  “Wait for me,” whispered Kitt to Harrison. “Don’t leave until I get back.” She went in the ambulance to the hospital with her father.

  When she returned to the house two hours later, she raced in the front door and asked Bridey where Harrison was.

  “He’s in the loggia, Miss Kitt,” she said.

  “Oh, thank God, Harrison. I was afraid you would have gone,” Kitt said when she saw him. “It took forever at the hospital.”

  “Things are bad, apparently?” asked Harrison.

  “Yes. Terrible. There’s doctors coming from everywhere. I should go back, but I wanted to see you.”

  “I’m going to go now, Kitt,” said Harrison, putting down the newspaper he had been reading. “I just wa
ited to say good-bye.”

  “You were kind to carry Pa,” she said. “After what happened. You must tell me this: did I hear correctly about Fuselli?”

  “That he drowned?”

  “No, that he pulled you under.”

  “Let Jerry tell you.”

  “Oh, Harrison, I’m sorry.”

  “I am too, Kitt. It’s over. You know that. It has to be,” said Harrison.

  “I know. I knew. I knew from the day you got back from lunch with Pa at the Four Seasons that it was a matter of time. There was a look in your face I hadn’t seen before. It was a mistake. I should never have told them I’d found you in Maine. I should have kept you all for myself. Your afternoon mistress. I would have settled for that, you know. I could have gone on for years and years, Harrison.”

  “Oh, Kitt. You’re worth much more than that.”

  “Will you go back to Claire?” she asked.

  “I think maybe I’m one of those people who was born to be a solo act,” said Harrison.

  “I don’t believe that for a minute. You were a continued surprise to me,” she said. She opened her bag and took out a handkerchief and touched the corner of her eye. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to cry. I promise you that.”

  “I know.”

  “Let me ask you something, Harrison. Think back, years ago. Breakfast in Scarborough Hill. What we didn’t know then, sitting around that table, was that Winifred Utley was dead. At least some of us didn’t know. But you were so silent that morning. You knew something, didn’t you? I could tell. You didn’t say a word all through breakfast.”

  “I never had much to say in those days, if you remember.”

  “You laughed at my jokes, as if I were the funniest person alive. I was always so touched by that. But you knew something that morning, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to understand something about us, Harrison. About being a Bradley, I mean. I’d lie under oath on the stand if I had to.”

  “You don’t really mean that, Kitt.”

  “Yes, I’m ashamed to say it, but yes. I hope I won’t ever be asked to, but in our family you do what you’re told.”

  Outside, a horn honked.

  “That’s Charlie,” said Harrison. “He said he’d drive me.”

  “Listen, Harrison. It was great,” she said.

  “It was great,” he repeated. He took her hand.

  “I know I wasn’t supposed to fall in love. That was part of the arrangement. But I did.”

  “Maybe it’s better to have a lot for a short time.”

  “You mean, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That old crap? I suppose I can come around to believe that in time, but not now. I ache. I’m going to ache worse. Until this minute, I never believed there was such a thing as a broken heart.”

  “What will you do, Kitt? What will happen?”

  “Oh, I’ll be very predictable. Nothing out of the ordinary. Probably I’ll drink too much. People will say, ‘That’s Gerald Bradley’s youngest daughter they’re carrying out of the party.’ ”

  “I can’t bear to think of you like that.”

  “Oh, darling, you wouldn’t be to blame. It’s what you might have saved me from. It’s not what you led me to.”

  Alone in her room, Grace sat upright on a peach damask bergère chair, rosary beads in hand, in preparation for receiving the impending news of her husband’s death. Thoughts of black veils bordered in black grosgrain ribbon filled her mind. There was an ample selection of black dresses in readiness in her closets; each year in Paris she ordered one or more, “just in case,” which, abetted by pearls and brooches, did double duty for cocktail parties and theater evenings. Thoughts that had never entered her mind, thoughts of a new life, free from her errant and faithless husband, filled Grace’s head. Widowhood will become me, she allowed herself to think. She had seen so many wives who, like herself, had lived in their husband’s shadow and then emerged in widowhood to full self-realization. She knew that was the way it would be with her. She saw herself as a great benefactress, much beloved, surrounded by her famous and successful children, dispensing her great wealth to the needy and hopeless, and becoming, in time, a papal countess, honored by the Holy Father in Rome for her philanthropic works. It was her most ardent secret wish to be known as Countess Bradley.

  Then, horrified, she grasped her silver rosary beads to her breast and prayed that she not be tantalized by such thoughts, as if they were temptations from the devil. She asked for strength to be able to handle the tribulations that lay ahead for her and her family. She had long since ceased loving her husband, a revelation that she had only alluded to once in her life. That one time was to Cardinal, in one of their long afternoon chats over tea in Scarborough Hill, after she realized that Sally Steers was her husband’s mistress and had slept in her bed while she was away in Paris for her fittings, a disclosure she had managed to extract from the ever-faithful but reluctant Bridey. That bed, its mattresses, pillows, blankets, blanket cover, sham, sheets, and pillowcases, had been removed from her room and burned. She could look away from Gerald’s ruthlessness in business, but she could not forgive in her heart that he had strayed from his marital vows.

  Alas, she was to be denied her widowhood. Gerald did not die that day. He simply became paralyzed and lost the power to speak.

  14

  From afar, the Malloys, Fatty and Sis, kept up on the doings of their affluent cousins. “One day they’ll be back,” Sis Malloy always said. Once a week, usually on Thursday nights, they dined together in the maids’ dining room of the Bradley house in Scarborough Hill, which had not been lived in by the Bradley family for years, although it was visited from time to time by one or another of the members of the family when they had business in the city. Their visits were short, hardly longer than a day and night in residence, and then they were off again to the house in California, or the apartment in New York, or the house in Southampton. Sis, at the insistence of her aunt Grace Bradley, the sister of her late father, Vinny Malloy, had become its chatelaine. Although it was Grace who first used the word chatelaine, in an expansive moment to describe Sis’s position, she actually meant housekeeper, and Sis understood. She never overstepped the bounds of her position. She slept in the room that had always been referred to as Agnes’s room, not in one of the frillier rooms that had belonged to Maureen, or Mary Pat, or Kitt. She entered the living and dining rooms only to see that everything was in place after the weekly dusting and vacuuming by the single maid who now ran the house. Sis fervently believed, and Fatty agreed, that one day the great house in Scarborough Hill would be alive with activity again.

  Sis had grown up plain. It was a given that she would never marry. Most nights she sat in the library, read the Scarborough Hill paper, and watched television. Occasionally she entertained girlfriends from her Bog Meadow childhood or from her parochial high school days and treated them to tours of the grand house where she now lived, although her role was that of guide, even in front of her friends, never of proprietor. “That is the chair where His Holiness the Pope sat when he came to visit the family. He blessed them all and gave Constant his white biretta off his head. That’s it, there, under the Lucite covering. Constant was the dearest little boy you ever saw. Like an angel.” Her friends, who had become teachers or nurses or secretaries in the great insurance companies of the city, always exclaimed in wonderment over the Pope’s visit, no matter how many times they heard the story. They complimented Sis on her clothes. And she was always quick to answer that the smart suit or dress she was wearing had been Kitt’s or Maureen’s, sent to her by Aunt Grace, as she shyly showed her friends the Paris labels.

  The single evening dress in her closet, which she wore every year to the Sodality of Mary dance at the St. Martin of Tours parish hall, was her bridesmaid’s dress from Maureen’s wedding sixteen years before. Once rose colored, it had long since been dyed black for practicality. Being a bridesmaid f
or Maureen had been one of the great experiences of her life, and her girlfriends often got her to recall the events of that memorable day. “There she was, Cora Mandell, the fanciest decorator in New York City, already an old lady, pinning up this French fabric to the inside of the tent, and, boom, she fell off the top of the ladder, twenty feet down, and she broke both her legs.”

  “No, Sis!” exclaimed her friends in horror, clapping their palms together.

  “As God is my witness,” said Sis, raising her right hand. “Thank heaven for my cousin Des. He was chief of staff at St. Monica’s then. He set both legs for the old woman, and the wedding went right on, and no one knew anything about it. They have a way in the family of keeping things silent and going about their business as if nothing is wrong.”

  Sis had no inkling of any of the family scenes that had preceded her role of bridesmaid.

  “Oh, Ma, please don’t make me have Sis Malloy as a bridesmaid,” Maureen had pleaded. “None of my friends know her, and she won’t fit in.”

  But Grace was firm. “She’s your first cousin. She’s your same age. And she’s going to be a bridesmaid whether you like it or not. Whatever would I say to your uncle Vinny if you didn’t have her?”

  “Please, Ma,” begged Maureen. “Please, please, please. She’ll talk about Bog Meadow and priests and nuns and the butcher shop, and I won’t know where to look.”

  “If you’d only had three or four bridesmaids, it would have been fine not to have her, but you’re the one who insisted on ten, Maureen. Besides, she sent you a lovely silver tray.”

  “Silver-plated,” snapped Maureen.

  “Even so, it was very nice of her,” replied Grace.

  Sis, who got hives when she was nervous, was covered with red blotches on her face, neck, and arms, and her bouquet of white orchids shook perceptibly in her hands as she walked down the aisle, paired with Claire Rafferty, but no one noticed her discomfort; she was not one of the ones stared at that day.