The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  And she loved him. She still said there was no one else she wanted to be with. Trouble was, while he now had more free time than ever to be with her, she was constantly in rehearsal, taking ballet classes, at the hairdresser’s, performing, being interviewed, lunching with a producer, attending a business meeting, planning an actors’ benefit or some other function at which his presence would be superfluous. He finished his long epic poem. He assembled and wrote an introduction to a book of Canadian stories. Neither of these ventures succeeded in finding a publisher, and so he had a serious talk with himself and decided that Beatrice was right. One only lived once. He should enjoy it. And so, when she was asked to do a film in London, he applied for a leave of absence from his CBC job and flew with her, first class, all expenses paid by the film company. They stayed in a suite in the Dorchester and were surprised to find themselves the only non-Arabs on their floor. When Beatrice finished her work in the film, they flew on to Paris, where the studio had booked them into the Ritz, and their few excursions to the Left Bank were, for Mangan, painful reminders of how much his life had changed since the carefree impoverished summer he spent long ago living in a student hotel in the rue Jacob. But Beatrice did not miss the Left Bank. Her memories were of the Ritz, Ledoyen, Lucas-Carton, schoolgirl outings with her father, dinner parties with his rich friends. She called some of these friends, and they were duly asked over for luncheons and drinks. She shopped and went to the opera and the ballet. She said they must go on to Venice and Rome, but Bloomfield called on the transatlantic phone, asking her to please read a great new play by a young playwright called Frank Fortini. She read the play and pronounced herself excited. They flew back to New York at once. When Mangan walked into the CBC offices on Park Avenue after an absence of nearly three months, no one asked where he had been. His immediate superior told him the new man on the UN broadcasts had done an especially good job. “He has a fresh perspective on the Canadian role,” Mangan’s superior said. “I’m tempted to let him do a few more. Don’t worry, Jamie. We’ll find other things for you.”

  Beatrice went into rehearsals, and at once Fortini, the playwright, began to show up at the apartment at all hours of the day and evening, usually bringing new revisions of his script. He was twenty-eight years old and six feet four inches tall. He was trying to kick the smoking habit by chewing some foul-smelling tobacco plug, frequently spitting the juice into their living-room plants. From the beginning he treated Mangan as though he were a stranger who had wandered in illegally off the street. Beatrice had the only speaking role in the play. The other actors were mimes. So when Fortini would show up at the apartment, he acted out the mime roles himself, while Beatrice spoke his new lines in monologue. Mangan found himself spending a great deal of time in the bedroom with the door shut, trying to avoid the sound of her voice. “Why can’t Fortini hold his rehearsals in a theater like everybody else?” he asked her.

  “Don’t you like him, then?”

  “It’s not a matter of whether I like him. He’s disrupting our life, coming here at ten o’clock at night without even phoning first. I mean, do you like it?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Then why do you allow it? You never allowed anyone else to treat you this way.”

  “Frank is not an ordinary person.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think he’s a genius.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “No, I do. I really do. And I think it’s my job to recognize his genius and help him do things the way that’s best for him. Very few people are geniuses. I’m not one. You’re not one. So how can we judge the way they behave?”

  “I see. All right, so I’m not a genius. And I don’t chew tobacco. Come to think of it, what am I?”

  “Well, you’re my husband, for one thing. So stop shouting at me. It’s not like you.”

  But he could not stop. “I’m your husband. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what I am. That’s exactly what I am. In fact, it’s all I am.”

  “Darling, don’t say that. It’s not true.” She began to cry. “I love you. You’re the one who matters. I’ll tell him not to come here any more.”

  At once, he felt foolish and in the wrong. “No, no,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ll buy him a spittoon.”

  They laughed, kissed, made up. But when Fortini’s play opened to good reviews, a gossip columnist wrote that “there’s talk of a starring relationship between Beatrice Abbot and Broadway’s hottest new playwright.” When Mangan read that, he experienced a rage of jealousy. He went to her and held out the newspaper. “Have you read this?”

  “Well, what about it?”

  “That’s my question,” he said. “What about it?”

  “I’ll tell you what about it,” she said. “I want to have a baby. Why don’t we?”

  “But you said you didn’t want children. I thought we decided.”

  “I want one now. I think it’s time.”

  Almost a year later she was delivered of a son, stillborn, at Doctors Hospital. She said they would try again, but soon afterward went off to California to play a cameo role in a disaster movie in which a great many stars were playing similar roles. When she returned, she told him stories about Laurence Olivier, John Wayne, Bette Davis, and others. The baby was not mentioned.

  Mangan was relieved. The way he felt just then, he could see that if they had a child he would end up being father and mother to it. He had the time. She had not. That summer, in the sixth year of their marriage, they bought the beach house in Amagansett. He spent most of the summer out there working with the painters and single-handedly built a deck and a walkway to the sea. Beatrice came out from town every Wednesday and stayed till Sunday night. They worked on the house, gave no parties, and spent long lazy afternoons walking on the beach. It was a good time. They were together. He forgot his worries and resentments. They had only one life. And they were living it.

  But that was the summer she met Perry Turnbull. He was to produce the play she would open in that fall. Mangan had met Turnbull only briefly, and when he asked Beatrice about him, he got the impression that she did not like him. She said the play’s director called Turnbull “Cubelets” in reference to his family’s sugar fortune. And that someone had said of him: “Money talks all right, but this money needs remedial speech therapy.”

  The play opened in October and got good reviews. It also played to sellout audiences. On the first Saturday in December, when she was playing a matinee, Beatrice phoned Mangan from the theater and asked him to meet her in the bar of the Stanhope Hotel at six. “I have to talk to you,” she said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Well, something has come up. But it will keep till I see you. Don’t be late though, will you? I have to meet someone at the Metropolitan Museum at six-thirty.”

  “The Met?” he said. “Are you mixed up with that now?”

  “I’ll tell you about it at six.”

  When he arrived at the Stanhope, she was already sitting in the bar and had ordered drinks. He was surprised. The matinee got out at five-thirty so she must have jumped in a cab right after the final curtain. She was wearing her usual daytime uniform of pink Brooks Brothers shirt, tweed skirt, penny loafers, and a loosely tied camel’s-hair overcoat. “Is Scotch all right for you?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He was surprised, too, at this ordering drinks in advance.

  “I didn’t want to waste any time,” she said, smiling the Beatrice Abbot smile, but in a willed way, as though she was having difficulty with it. “I have to tell you something,” she said. “I want to tell it to you quickly and then I want to go. Will you promise I can do that?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve thought of all kinds of ways to say this, but there isn’t any way that’s going to make it easy. So I’ll just tell you I’m in love with Perry Turnbull and he’s in love with me. I’m going to leave you. And you won’t believe this, but I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

&nb
sp; “Perry Turnbull? But you said he was a fool.”

  “I did not.”

  “You made jokes about him.”

  “Other people did,” she said. “I just told you what they said.”

  “But Turnbull? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It didn’t make sense when you and I met,” she said.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Jamie, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how I was going to face you today. But it’s something I can’t help. It’s happened. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, when did it happen?” he asked, stupidly.

  “Why go into it? Look, yesterday when you were at the CBCI went home in the middle of the day and packed some of my things and sent them to a hotel. I can pick up the rest of my stuff some other time.”

  “What do you mean? Do you mean you’re leaving now?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God.”

  “I thought the best thing would be if you hold on to the apartment and I’ll move my things out to Amagansett. Is that fair? Or would you rather I kept the apartment and you took the beach house?”

  “Look, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, anyway, I made a list of my things that are still there. I left it in the drawer in the hall table. It’s just a suggestion of what you could send me. If you disagree with any items, strike them off.”

  He stared at the mural on the adjoining wall. It was a Dufy sort of pastel of the Eiffel Tower, some flowers, the Madeleine. Last spring they sat in this very bar talking about their trip to Paris. Now she was sleeping with Perry Turnbull. He remembered what he had been doing today. Addressing their Christmas cards.

  “Do you know what I did today?” he told her. “I addressed our Christmas cards.”

  “You mean you’ve already done them?”

  At once he was sorry he’d brought it up.

  “Have you sealed the envelopes yet?” she asked.

  “Oh, for Christ sake, I just said it ironically.”

  “But have you sealed them?”

  “No. I left them open in case you wanted—what’s it matter?”

  “All right,” she said. “I have an idea. I’ll have a little notice printed saying we’ve separated and that from now on my address will be the beach house and that you’ll be at the apartment. You could slip the notices in with the cards. It would be a way of letting people know what happened and how they can reach us.”

  “You mean, reach you.”

  She ignored that. She looked at her wristwatch. “By the way, I’ll be speaking to Sy Weinberg tomorrow. I’ll ask him if he can work out some financial settlement, okay? I realize that I’m the guilty party, so to speak. Whatever settlement we decide on, it should take that into account.”

  “Guilty party. So we’re going to end in a cliché.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose so. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t feel guilty. I feel sorry for you. But I don’t feel guilty. It’s happened and I feel happy—happier than I’ve ever been before.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” he said bitterly.

  She gave him a look like a slap, then stood up, pulling her camel’s-hair coat about her shoulders. From habit, he stood, too. “I’ll say goodbye, then,” she said. “Will you pay for the drinks? I have to meet someone. Goodbye, Jamie.”

  She turned and walked past the bar. The bartender smiled and waved to her. “Hi, Miss Abbot.”

  “Hi, Mike.”

  Mangan looked at the bar chit and left some money. He waited until she was out of the bar, then followed her. He did not know why he was following her. He did not want her to see him. He came out onto Fifth Avenue just as she crossed the street to the opposite side. She did not look back. He followed her as she walked toward the Metropolitan Museum, and stood watching as she walked up the monumental front steps under a set of huge flapping banners advertising the current show. A man in a camel’s-hair coat the color of her own came out of the crowd of people waiting at the museum entrance and ran down, jumping three steps at a time, until he reached her. They embraced. He watched them for a moment as they talked excitedly. He saw her look back toward the Stanhope. But she did not see him. After a few moments, arm in arm, she and Turnbull walked down the steps and Turnbull signaled for a taxi.

  Now, three weeks later, lying on the sofa in his father’s rented cottage in Quebec, he saw them again, as they were that day, two people walking arm in arm down monumental steps under huge flapping white-and-red banners. It was the last time he had seen her until she showed up at the apartment yesterday afternoon, a stranger, a woman living another life.

  Somewhere in the rear of the cottage the outer porch door slapped open. He had heard no car. He went to the kitchen to investigate, but found no one there. Inside the porch door, propping it ajar, was a dog-eared briefcase embossed with the letters ER, souvenir of his father’s year of service as a member of a Canadian Royal Commission on the Press. He went outside. In the failing light his father, wearing a fur hat and a heavy Irish sweater, wrestled a wooden box from the trunk of his battered Dodge, and turned, calling out a greeting. With his high color and long gray hair, Pat Mangan, hefting the wooden box, reminded his son of a fish seller in some market.

  “Let me help you with that, Dad. What is it, by the way?”

  “It’s the stuff you asked about. Family records. And the Mangan stuff.”

  Together they carried the box inside and set it on the kitchen table. Mangan picked a book out, turning its pages.

  “Where’s Margrethe?” his father said.

  “What did you say, Dad?” he asked, still reading.

  “Margrethe, is she still out skiing?”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Why don’t you look at those later,” his father said. “Let’s get supper underway. All right?”

  “Fine.”

  His father rummaged through the containers of food, then opened the refrigerator. Reluctantly, Mangan put down the book, a biography of James Clarence Mangan by the Reverend T. R. Drinan, M.A. “Pork chops,” his father said. “Potatoes, peas, applesauce. Yes, that should do. So, tell me. What’s your plan now? Are you going to get a divorce?”

  “Yes. She wants one.”

  “And you. Do you?”

  “Of course. I realize now I never should have married her.”

  “Do you like Cherries Jubilee?” his father asked. “I see we have tinned cherries and ice cream. All right, we’ll have Cherries Jubilee for dessert. Tell me. Why do you think you never should have married her?”

  Mangan hesitated. He had come here to talk to his father, but now realized he would not have chosen him as confidant were he in a normal state of mind. But I am not in a normal state, he told himself. And besides, who else will listen to me?

  “Well, for one thing,” he said, “I have no friends any more. Everyone I know now is Beatrice’s friend. Including the people who used to be my friends.”

  His father sat down at the kitchen table. “Well, Bea’s always been very popular. I can understand that.” He smiled and gestured. “But surely that’s not . . .” He did not finish the sentence.

  “Since she left,” Mangan said, “something strange has happened to me. It’s as if I—the person I was—your son— the person I used to be—it’s as if there’s nobody there any more. Sometimes I feel as if I’m going mad. Except that there’s no me to go mad.”

  “Wait now,” his father said. “I’m not sure that makes sense.”

  “I know it sounds weird. But I mean it. Beatrice and I have been living her career. And to tell you the truth, we’ve been living on her money. And now that she’s walked out on me, it’s as if I don’t exist any more. Does that make sense?”

  His father got up, took Scotch from a cupboard, and poured some neat into two jelly glasses. “Here,” he said, handing one over. “It’s like any breakup. It’s rough. But surely this business of her career and her money is secondary. Surely the important thing is that you were in love wi
th her and she was with you, and now she’s left you. The person who’s been left always feels badly. Remember your mother.”

  “But it’s not the same thing at all,” Mangan said. “After you left, Mother was angry, but she was still in love with you. Still is, perhaps. I’m not in love with Beatrice.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I saw her yesterday. It was like meeting a stranger.”

  “You felt nothing at all?”

  “I don’t know. I know that I don’t think about her any more. I think about me. The main thing I feel now isn’t anger, it’s a sort of panic. I think what those years of being married to her have done to me. The phone never rings now that she’s gone. Nobody writes to me. Nothing happens. It’s as though I’d ceased to exist.”

  “Nonsense,” his father said. “You broke up, when? Three weeks ago? You’ll get over this. You’ve got your life ahead of you.”

  “Have I? When you were thirty-four, you were already managing editor of The Gazette. At thirty-six I’m nothing. Just an underpaid CBC hack.”

  His father rose, filled an aluminum pot with water, and put it on the stove. He seemed embarrassed by this turn in the conversation. “Well, most people don’t achieve just what they hoped for,” his father said. “Not the very ambitious ones. And yours is a special ambition.”