Echo House

by Ward Just

  "But there it is in my dreams," she said, reaching for the sugar, selecting two lumps, and slipping them into her teacup, stirring idly. "So what do you think, darling? You're a lawyer, trained in observation. You're supposed to have ideas about these things and be able to explain them, or at least weigh the equities. Assess what lies beneath. When I'm in Echo House in my dreams I feel as if I'm about to fall from a great height."

  Alec was tempted to reply, "Repressed infantile longings," but did not. Sylvia's sense of irony seldom extended to herself. He thought it likely that her dream Echo House was a surrogate for the house she had grown up in, a Gramercy Park fortress no less opulent, no less forbidding, and no less populated by ghosts. Her father was a sportsman as obsessed with horse racing as Axel was with statecraft. He was quick to leave her mother for a showgirl—"chorine" the word was then—and move to Saratoga and never look back. He lived there still with his showgirl, splendidly fit in his seventies, appearing younger than his wife, whose china doll beauty did not survive the hot summers and brutal winters and extended cocktail hours in all seasons. Sylvia had written poems about him and her, too, witty poems, if you could overlook the condescension.

  Grace's daily double

  curned you inside out

  Old War Admiral

  Winning by a neck

  Every Christmas Alec received a tie from Charvet and a check drawn on a bank he never heard of. What kept the old man from being a cliché—another rich dimwit taking the usual revenge—was his conversion, late in life, to liberal politics. He hated Republicans with the passion of a Tammany Hall boss. Sylvia maintained that it wasn't really Republican politics he hated but his Saratoga neighbors, who snubbed him in the paddock and refused to attend his Sunday lunches or include him and the showgirl at theirs. And so in 1952 and again in 1956 he gave conspicuously large sums to Adlai Stevenson and was among the sponsors of causes ranging from Israel to the NAACP and the closed union shop. David Dubinsky was one of his favorites, and any advertisement placed by the ILGWU was certain to have among its signees Harry and Grace Walren, Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1960 he had a crisis of conscience because Joseph P. Kennedy had failed to recognize him at a party, a lapse he interpreted as a cold shoulder—Curly patronizing Moe, he called it—and sent a large check to the American Labor Party.

  Alec said, "Pay attention to the details. Write them down."

  "I don't have to write them down. I remember them. André Przyborski showed up in one last week. And Lloyd Fisher. I'm in my house. The lights are turned up full and there's traffic in the street. It's nighttime. Axel's away and so are you. Lloyd and André are in the study talking about some operation. I can't hear them but I know that it has to do with the next war. Because Lloyd is there, I think you're involved in some way. Are you involved with André Przyborski?"

  "Lloyd knows him," Alec said.

  "They all had lunch here, every Wednesday. All the spooks. And I suppose they still do."

  Alec said nothing to that.

  "Of course Lloyd left: Washington about the time your father bought that bank."

  Alec said nothing to that, either.

  She looked at him and shrugged, an apology of sorts. "You know how it is with poets. No regular hours, so much mischief."

  "Sometimes a headshrinker can help with dreams."

  "I prefer clairvoyants. I knew one once here and she was a tremendous help. She saw to the heart of things, though she was better on the past than the future. I have no use for headshrinkers. You start letting people tinker with your memories, you're through as a writer." She lit a cigarette and leaned close to him, the prelude to a confidence. "It's true about my friend they've got in the bin in Hartford now. They've ruined her memory. They've given her shock and God knows what else. You know who I'm talking about."

  Alec opened his mouth to say something, then didn't. He had no idea who was in the Hartford Retreat.

  "She's a dear friend and a fine writer."

  Alec carefully held his face in neutral.

  "I hear she's a mess and all I want to know is, how much of a mess. And can I help out. But they won't let me in to see her."

  He looked at her a long moment and inquired, "Why are you here really?"

  "Willy and I are quits," she said in a clear voice, her head high.

  She thought she would have a drink, if he didn't mind. There wasn't much story to tell but what story there was went down easier with a drink. Alec served her and they sat quietly a moment, looking into the damp darkness. Lights from the garden room cast long shadows on the croquet court. She noticed that and smiled crookedly, saying that she was surprised it was still there, intact and unspoiled. Axel always hated croquet.

  "I'm not saying it was the greatest marriage in the world, because it wasn't," she said after a pause, still looking out the window at the wickets and the stakes. "But we had good times together and loved each other and got along pretty well most of the time, which is more than I can say of the marriages of ninety percent of my friends, although maybe I have the wrong friends. But Willy's gone."

  "I'm sorry," Alec said. "I'm very sorry."

  "I haven't begun to miss him yet, but I will. We were used to each other."

  Alec nodded, uncomfortable listening to this news in the room where they had often gathered as a family in the years just after the war, Sylvia in the wing chair next to the window and his father facing her, the air redolent of flowers. On Saturday afternoons they listened to the opera. But now Willy Borowy was in the room, too.

  "I can't imagine New York without Willy. You liked him, didn't you?"

  "Very much," Alec said.

  "He likes you," she said. "He always liked it when you came to visit."

  "I had no idea," Alec said.

  "Oh, he did," Sylvia protested. "You were one of his favorites."

  "No," Alec said. "I meant that things weren't all right between you. I had no idea there was trouble."

  "Willy was naughty." she said. She stared at her drink and again at the croquet court. She was holding the drink with both hands, and when she lifted it her rings clicked hollowly against the glass. "The croquet court looks so forlorn."

  Alec looked out the window and nodded.

  "Does he actually use it?"

  "I can't remember the last time," Alec said.

  "We were together fifteen years; it's hard to believe."

  "Fifteen years both times," Alec said.

  "Willy forced my hand," she said. "He left me no choice."

  Alec looked up as if he understood; she was leaving so much unsaid and that was unlike her. He was grateful for her tact, having no wish to hear the details of Willy's transgressions, whatever they were. He had not seen Willy in months and the last time was at a restaurant in New York. He had seemed preoccupied then, almost morose, without his usual supply of jokes. He and Sylvia had a complicated argument over where they would spend August. She wanted to rent a house on Long Island and he wanted Nantucket. She insisted that first they visit her father and Grace at Saratoga, a plan Willy vetoed. The only thing worse than horse players were trust-fund liberals and with Harry and Grace you got both at once. He was tired of being lectured to about the many virtues of the plucky little state of Israel and the organizational genius of David Dubinsky, with the usual side references to the vigor and tenacity of "the Mediterranean races," by which Harry seemed to mean the Jews, forgetting that Willy's family had flourished in New York since the eighteenth century, having emigrated from Holland on a family-owned vessel; and if there was any tenacity and vigor in the Borowy clan, it had escaped Willy's notice. They were hanging on by their fingernails. It was a burden, being rich for three centuries, and now the family was as desiccated as Harry's, though for the opposite reason. Borowy père believed there had been too much intermarriage in his family, while in Harry's there had been none at all, until Willy. But at least the Borowys didn't talk sentimental claptrap about Israel, or the ILGWU either. The Borowys were traders and indif
ferent to national boundaries. National pride was a calamity, even in the Mediterranean. Besides, Willy said, in Saratoga they drank all the time, beginning in the morning with bloody marys and by evening they were talking claptrap. Your problem is, you never win at the track, Sylvia said; you pick by hunch and it never works out. That's only the most obvious problem, Willy said. He could be very droll. Sylvia settled the argument by saying she would go by herself to Saratoga, spend a week at Yaddo and three days with her father and Grace, and then meet Willy at Nantucket if the fog lifted long enough for the airplane to land.

  "This is between us," Sylvia said with a sharp look at her son. "I don't want Axel to know. I won't have it."

  "He usually—finds things out."

  "I know that," she said. "The news will find its way to Palm Beach. Bad news travels with the speed of light to Palm Beach. But not for a while yet. Axel—" She went on to complain about Axel, a sponge where gossip was concerned, no item too small to escape his attention or merit his comment. Alec listened with a show of polite interest to this speech he had heard many times.

  "Willy has no pride," she said suddenly.

  Alec looked at her, startled.

  "Axel's up to here with it and Willy doesn't have any at all. Willy's ashamed of who he is and where he comes from."

  Alec managed, "Willy?" He thought Willy Borowy the most civilized man he knew

  "Willy doesn't like being a Jew."

  "Willy loves being a Jew!" Alec almost shouted. "A Jew at the end of the line. A Jew living on an inheritance, just like your father, except it's a smaller inheritance and getting smaller each day. Willy"—he remembered something Leila Berggren had said to him that morning, a comment on John F. Kennedy's ambassadorial appointments—"likes to cast against type. Who did he vote for? Nixon. Who's his favorite movie actor? David Niven. His favorite city? Berlin. His favorite poet?" He let the question hang.

  "You seem to have given quite a lot of thought to my Willy," Sylvia said. "I never would have guessed. So who's his favorite poet?"

  "You," Alec said.

  "As a matter of fact it's Delmore Schwartz," Sylvia said dryly.

  "And Auden," Alec said.

  Sylvia shook her head. Poor Alec, so ignorant of the wider American world, so bewitched by Willy's well-known charm. But the charm was a mask to hide his true soul. He lived always in Washington's shadow. His father worked for FDR, so he grew up in Washington and for the longest time didn't think of himself as a Jew. Jew didn't come into it because his family was not religious and no one else cared. In Washington the New Deal was a secular religion and Willy and his family were Feds just like the neighbors. He discovered anti-Semitism later and was surprised by it. Anti-Semitism was new to him and it was disgusting. Growing up in Washington, you weren't Irish or Italian or German or Jewish; you were a Fed. Willy grew up deracinated, even the name, Willy Borowy. And when he found out that Washington was a special island of ethnic agreement—"broad-mindedness," they called it—it bothered him. It drove him crazy. He decided that Washington in its American way resembled Moscow under the Reds, communal hatreds suppressed in the name of patriotism or morale or public relations or setting a good example. And instead of admiring Washington for its tolerance and good sense, he despised it for its deceptions. There was a kind of snobbery among worldly Washingtonians, who believed they were above the coarse prejudices of the mob. In one sense, of course, they were—until there was a crisis, an election, or a sweet piece of legislation or a nominee to the Court, a place at the trough, in other words, and then their elbows were as sharp as axes. Willy grew up living in an illusion and he thought he had been cheated. No one had ever told him the way the world worked really, so he was twenty years old before he heard the word "kike." No one had ever used that word or its many synonyms in polite and civilized Washington and snickered at its use elsewhere, as French-speaking Muscovites belittled the earthy language of the peasant masses. Axel would have slit his throat before using that word or permitting it to be used in his presence...

  "Willy thought that growing up in Washington was not a good preparation for life," Sylvia said mildly.

  "It doesn't sound like shame to me," Alec said.

  "Shame takes many forms," she said imperiously.

  "He never seemed to me ashamed of who he was. Shame's not a word I associate with Willy. Willy's attitude toward life is ironic. Willy lives by irony."

  "Sometimes it's the same thing."

  Alec looked up at that.

  "Willy likes to undermine himself," she added.

  "He never took himself seriously, if that's what you mean."

  "Oh, no," she said. "You're wrong there. He took himself very seriously. That was the trouble. Not on the surface, though. Never on the surface. That's one of the things that attracted me to him right away; you could see his mind go in one direction while his mouth went in another. Nine-tenths of Willy was between the lines, like a good poem. It took time and effort to appreciate Willy, who never understood where he fit in or whether he was supposed to. "

  Alec was silent, suspecting that a comparison with Axel was at hand.

  She fluttered her fingers, smiling brightly. "And one thing I knew for sure, the moment I met him. Willy hated Washington even more than I did."

  "Another bond," Alec said.

  "That's why he voted for Nixon. He thought Richard Nixon was Washington's exemplary specimen. Washington created him, Washington should have to live with him. Willy believed that Nixon was a creature of his environment no less than a clam in the mud. He was heartbroken when Nixon lost; an opportunity like that only comes along once in a lifetime. He believed that Washington wanted Kennedy to win so that it could think better of itself, an appalling prospect. So he got me to vote for Nixon, too. A Nixon victory would bring Washington to its knees in disgust and self-loathing, though that was probably too much to hope for."

  "Much too much," Alec said.

  "They'd blame the country."

  "Probably they would. Blame the people who voted for him."

  "I don't know why things never work out," Sylvia said quietly. "If only men were consistent. If they didn't have one personality for the inside and another for the outside If they didn't spend so much time prowling. If only they'd stop and think." Sylvia turned to look out the window. The rain had stopped and the moon was visible over the giant elm. The croquet court was very bright and frozen as if caught by an artist. Nothing moved; even the trees were still. She was staring intently at the croquet court the way she would stare at a picture in a gallery. If she stared long enough, it would speak and tell her something important. Alec stole a look at his watch and was alarmed to discover that the time was almost seven. Leila's dinner was due to begin in thirty minutes. Sylvia continued to stare out the window, her glass dry.

  "Can I make you another drink?"

  When she shook her head, Alec thought to ask, "Where are you staying?"

  "Some people in Bethesda," she said wearily. "Friends of Willy's."

  He was suddenly afraid that she would fall to pieces without Willy Borowy, nine-tenths between the lines. They had always looked after each other, and Sylvia was not the sort of person who easily lived alone; at least she never had. She had never paid attention to the mundane details of life; that was Willy's job. Alec looked at the ceiling, calculating the time it would take to get to the restaurant.

  She said, "I suppose I'll go back to New York tomorrow."

  He said quickly, "Stay a few days. We can go to the National Gallery tomorrow."

  She turned from the window and looked directly at him. "I wanted to tell you about this myself, my own words, and now I can go back to New York. When Willy left he took only his library and his dog; can you believe it? I don't even know where he is."

  He said, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

  "Yes," she said promptly. "There is. You can take me to dinner. We can have a little dinner together, just us two, like the old days."

  When were
they? He could not remember dining alone with her in the old days, unless she meant London during the war. She was grinning broadly, delighted with this thought. In the sudden silence that followed, Alec moved his shoulders indecisively and gave an unwilling sigh. For the last ten minutes he had been thinking about Leila, her long legs and the down on her belly, and her purr when she was excited. He heard her voice in his ear saying how important it was, how crucial and urgent, that he be at dinner to romance her fat cats—

  Sylvia carefully put her glass on the table and prepared to rise.

  "Of course," he said

  "Oh, goody," she cried. "Sure it's all right? Did I hear some hesitation? I'm not disappointing some adorable girl?" She smiled brilliantly. "I'll tell you something; it'll come as a surprise. I never liked being a mother. That's the truth. I love you, God knows, but the details of maternity always baffled me. It was like trying to learn French, too many verb declensions and they were always criticizing your accent. I never knew what to say or do. I never knew how much to tell and how much not to tell and what a child ought to know. I knew a lot, but I wasn't sure that the things I knew had an)—relevance. Small children frightened me; they seemed so insistent and demanding and so fragile and incapable. God, what a nightmare. The laundry! I couldn't wait until you were grown up. And now you are!"