“But that was only three months ago, Bud.” He looked down at the bergère he was sitting on, the mirrors, outlined in gold gesso, that reflected it, and him. Since first in Europe, he had begun to look. “Even for Maeve—this is some place to get together.”
“Oh no, we bought it lock, stock and barrel, we did practically nothing. Wasn’t time. Well—let’s move on.”
They went through a couple of rooms that resembled the old first one of their succession of places on Park—or what that one had been modeled on. Cooled down too, but older, and more windows—arched.
“A harpsichord!” The family pictures on it, his father’s parents and collaterals, were in silver now; he remembered which place that happened in—the first East Side one, off Madison. But the last place, the one he’d left them in, some three blocks east of here, was pretty much of a blank.
Buddy patted the instrument on its flower-painted case. “Came with. Two others, we sold off.”
“Some shopping spree.”
“That was the idea.” Buddy stopped square under a pink-and-green china chandelier that flew and stopped at the same time, like a hunk of Mozart. “Wasn’t that—always the idea?”
All this confidence they had kept from him, now must he have it in one big wad? To make a man of him?
“Will you move again?”
“Where?” His father swept the keyboard from top to bottom. No sound came out of it. It was a mute. Or else had to be pumped. Buddy looked mollified. “No. No more moving. A family ought to be hemmed in.”
It all sounded like shit. A world-dwarfing—the kind families picked. “It works with Maeve, then. Having—G-Granma—here.”
Buddy was picking up the photos, putting them down again, one by one. “We forget, kid. Audiences don’t wait.”
Mother MacNeil had had a stroke two days after getting here. “Maybe a compliment,” Buddy said. “Anyway, know all these nasty or stupid-looking old women in winghats and wheelchairs get walked around this neighborhood by some sweetfaced colored woman—I don’t know why but they always both are—well we’re in that class now too. Only Mother made clear, even with her whole left side paralyzed, that she doesn’t like blacks. So we have a broken-down gentlewoman—think that’s what you’d call her—instead. Think that’s what you will call her.” Buddy gave him a meaningful smirk he didn’t get. “If you weren’t a grown man, we could have a governess even. And the family would be complete … Well, here’s the dining room. We haven’t eaten here yet.”
And no wonder. Bunty put down the safari bag he’d dragged with him. “Wh—when will you start.”
“Today. All for you, Bunty-boy.”
“It looks like—like the monk’s refectory on Mount Athos.”
“Where’s that?”
“A monastery. Greek. On an island. Where no women can come, not even hens.”
“So?”
“This place where we ate.” But not so fake brown-gaunt, so fake bare as this. And not so big. It was the long table reminded him. He should have said the Cloisters. If he’d seen that tapestry in time, hanging on the bouldered wall like a muffled report from Art History I, he would have said it. For he could tell that he and Buddy, with all else shared—even at Maeve’s cost—had all of a sudden reached a low. Their lowest since he got here. Maybe because it was at Maeve’s cost, his father had now reneged. Anyway, for his son to show off his foreign medals, when Buddy, no fool, so delicate—he could feel it—had been offering him his confidence!
He gobbled something to his chest—no time to find out what.
Buddy’s nostril twitched—had he been onto Bunt’s habit long since? No, his eyes had what Maeve called his Ellis Island look. Greenhorn. Even Gramps had had it sometimes. “Monasteries. You go for them?”
“Just a place I went.” Irritated. Wrong. Slowly his boot-toe circled a floorboard wide as a modest coffin. The groined ceiling was like a cloister, only insufferably hot. His raw-wool shirt still smelled of its lanolin. Maybe his father had meant him to wash. If I stink like a sheep, he could say, it’s just Wales and emotion. Truly. Truth came out of him. “I g-guess, huh—we must be pretty rich.”
Gawp. He could have picked nothing worse. He watched his father grind a fist on the table, turn sharply, and march to the window, where he turned his back—a family trait when agitated. A Bronstein trait like the shibboleth his son had just stepped on. For a Bronstein, money was only the game behind the dream. Gramps, a CPA turned actuary, and always as much interested in other peoples’ incomes and probabilities as in his own, had drawn a stiff line between what you could do for money and what you must do with it—particularly for “those of our race” who had got past the starvation line with any sort of bounce. Maeve’s side of Bunty was resignedly accepted and given over to the women—who both took care of the assimilation that had to be in the new country, and took the blame for it. Exposure of what you had was the sin—the more you had. Every Sunday that Bunty sat with the men before dinner Grandfather had reached out of the endless conversation at some point to put a hand on his head for emphasis. “Bunty, be a Montefiore, not a Rothschild.” Not many of the family had adhered to this high standard, either way. Buddy, the youngest son, whom the eager, hawk-nosed females had belatedly named Quentin—“in 1925!” for Teddy Roosevelt’s dead hero-son—had done his best.
“You boys, you slop around Europe, running around all the circles we left it for—what do you know?” Buddy turned round, choked on his fury, yellow with it, clutching the curtain behind him. Whenever he grew fat and waxy, he dieted himself thin, until the newsboy’s face sat on his fifty-year-old shoulders. And had his blood run through all sorts of purifications, and returned to him—maybe not for health alone. “Knapsacking around, never coming home, God forbid we should die and who do we notify—poste restante? A street address two weeks old, in Bombay? In Holland a nightclub—who goes to nightclubs in Holland? And once in a while—lucky lucky—the American Express … What do you know about it all?”
“About what, Buddy?” He knew the question well. Asked of himself at every address.
“About life in this country. About what goes on here, has to be done here.”
“Compromises?” He could never raise his voice to match Buddy’s. Maybe only fathers could manage it. He thought of Tarzan.
“About what”—Buddy’s voice sank to a wheeze. “About what can be done in this country.” His eyes bulged; he was tallying it. Opera houses. Prisons. Landmarks. Wayward boys.
A swinging door opened. A capped maid peered in to see what the rumpus was. Buddy waved her back, with a drowning gesture. The door closed.
“Maybe you forgot, Dad, hmm. Did you? Why I left.”
Homerun. How quickly the honeybrown, moneybrown eyes went wet, covered themselves with a hand.
He could hear murmurs in the kitchen. To one side of the tapestry there was one of those portholes. He crossed the floor to peer in, seeing only black, but waiting for Buddy to compose his face. When he did turn, Buddy was toeing the safari bag. “Still got it, huh.”
He crossed the floor and stood beside him, nodding. Carry it everywhere. It’s my life.
Lips tucked in, they nodded at each other with the barely perceptible orbit of mourners. But it was also as if his father, hands clasped, was worshipping him.
Yes, I’m your riches, your only. You helped hide me, or would have. What can an idol not made of stone say to you?
“Papa. You want me to wash?”
HIS ROOM ON THE second floor was so like the hotel, his foot stopped at the door, as if another step would sink him deep in a cloud. A matter of wood that was old and marble that was cheap, how had she caught that plain, sweet meagerness, even here? Of a room privy to anything, but in-the-faith. She hadn’t imitated any one thing, and she had remembered to include Marlene’s old bureau. There was no more bookspace, though, than at Montecatini—a small ledge. She knew he couldn’t stay. The room told him what she had observed. Was meant to. When a man keeps
telling a woman she’s smart, he wondered, when does she catch on he means smart but, even if he doesn’t know it yet? From the first?
A few minutes later, he and Buddy, standing on a balcony overlooking the main hall—you had to call it a hall—were still avoiding her. To do so together was a comfort, and therefore worse. He put his head down and muttered something.
“What?” Buddy said.
“Oh, nothing.” He had caught his own words just in time, always unnerving. Comforts are aging—Jasmin would have laughed. “Who built this place, some dictator?” Two steps more and they could look down unseen, from a prayer-corner torn from some church.
“Dunno. Man I bought it from was a former tenor at the Met. See those spotlights in the ceiling? Work out fine for the art.” Buddy coughed. There was pride here.
“Rothko’s, are they? And Clifford Still.” Down below, each panel glowed like a looking-glass entrance to a provence just behind it. Or an exit.
“You know about them, huh. What do you know!” Buddy held out his hand. “Sorry kid. What I said. Go round the world again, you want to.”
“Please.” Button up.
“Right. But we won’t move from here. You can depend on it.”
What a place to stop. Even the pictures want out.
“Some South American had the place before that. The original owner, I don’t know.”
People should save those things. There ought to be a bank for it.
“Gangsters maybe? Al Capone, that period? Those peepholes.” The niche they were standing in came from a church, maybe forty years back. It would be an interesting place to take a girl.
“Bunt, the whole place went up only five years ago.”
“Wuddya know.” Already he was talking like Buddy. “Well, let’s not lurk.”
“I don’t see your mother down there. Maybe she’s in the terrarium.”
“Where’s that?”
“We couldn’t put it on the Avenue side. Around the corner, on the court. Even for that, we had to have a variance.” He cast Bunt a look. “I’ve had to take an interest. More and more.”
There were about fourteen people down there, wandering party-style, their heads vulnerable to any boy on a viaduct. He saw that it was old party-style, twos and threes. No clusters, nobody on the floor. A grouty homesickness jumped him from behind and hung on him like an ape-girl, from that world of fur pillows, jack-in-the-beanstalk boots, cavalier hair, and music cuffing the neck like a steady training partner, which he had made for and hit in any town in Europe. If he turned his head, he would surely see her topaz lantern-eyes, blubbery from the smoke-tickle. A lovely gorilla girl, with a look of Jane Fonda about her little nose. Then she would get off his back, and turn into maybe a girl in a shabby greatcoat with a pile like rinsed feathers—Clara Rentschle, Dutch girl working for Air France as an airport-meeter for middle-aged Americans who liked to be shoe-horned into their hotels—saying “You’re new to Lipps. Care to join us in a kir?” And the town would begin.
Trouble was, he didn’t want to go back. He wanted it to begin here.
“Maybe Maeve doesn’t want to see us.” Or me.
From as far back as summer camp, they had always written jointly, the same couple of pages, rambling over the sparse facts, and full of their dependable duty to him.
“Come on. I just told her a later plane, so we could have our talk.”
“Do I see a couple of priests down there?”
A wheelchair, containing a clawy little creature in a church hat, was being pushed toward the pair by a figure in blue. No Maeve.
“Only two? Soon they’ll send the army. Bunt, I should warn you. You’re the one really bought this place.”
“Me? Gramp’s policy? You’re kidding.” A twenty-year endowment for $10,000, payable on his majority. In the load of insurance Buddy had mortgaged for his stake, that had been the only one left out. Thanks kid, it won’t help.
“My sacred promise to the old lady. To get her down here.”
“You don’t mean you promised? That we’d convert?” After the funeral visit, there’d been a breath of it. If they’d send him up there to St. Joseph’s-in-the-Valley, Mother MacNeil would board the New York orphan, as well as reform him. Cut her Mother’s throat first, Maeve said.
“Me, they’re satisfied if I go back to being a good Jew. The church is very liberal these days. You’re the tender morsel they’re hungry for.”
“Sonofa gun.”
“So I’m a rascal. Allow me, once.”
They were both grinning.
“How do I know I brought you up right? I have my guilts.”
“You know I’ve never been anything. You took advantage of it.”
“What a thing to say, you’re a nothing. No, I only took advantage you’re young. It’s your turn now.”
“Jesus, what a birthday present.”
“You want the farm?” Swiftly. “You can have it. I won’t sell it, then.”
Canny canny. He turned on his heel in the prie-dieu, puzzling.
“Mother MacNeil loves it up here. Brings up her portable Virgin every day.”
Maybe the old Brooklyn money-fear wasn’t so false. Deuces wild, the money says to you. You have a fantasy?—act it out. You can move. You’re not hemmed in.
“I’ll h-have a cow, maybe.”
“Fine. She’ll look just right in that dining room.”
“Well, let’s go down, huh.” He took his father’s arm, as height permitted. “Maybe they’ll make a man of me.”
“Of us,” Buddy said.
On the bottom step, he stopped. “What are they doing about Maeve?”
His father held up his newsboy face. “For her—they pray.”
The two of them had to get all the way down the stairs to see all of it before he understood what had happened to the Bronsteins, and how rich they were. Anybody who had been reared in his collection of angles, walls, views, courtyard-juttings that almost provided the city-coveted “double exposure,” fire escapes that did at last bring the morning sun—a whole mute storehouse of wistful accommodation—could be excused for thinking it.
The Fifth Avenue side was all glass—so much of it, and so clean, it seemed all air. Maybe angels came and licked it in the early morning—Paulina Vespasi again, telling him why the Chrysler Building’s needle always shone so clean, “same as the Vittorio Emmanuele monument.” And the air curved and wrapped itself nonchalantly, accepting a roofline, but dispensing with smaller privileges. Outside there, the whole upper city offered itself at sunset-level, no cover-charge, a gorgeous cloud-cafeteria for all bums. Strain for more meaning at your own risk. In case of too much ardor, on the terrace beyond the windows there were parapets.
To the left, where the building curved in, an open door—yes, that was air, like summer on his boots—gave on a striped party-marquee and all the fixings, white tables and spots of chrysanthemum bushes, stacked against the dusk. He had no trouble believing they were real. There were even a couple of girls in front of the nearest bush. I see you, he signaled to himself. I’ll get back to you. Stay there.
To his right, on the far north corner, about fourteen feet back from the angle, he saw the terrarium, a bulb of opaline glass perhaps ten feet in diameter, extruded on air again, as if the building had blown a last bubble before it gave up its climb. Outside a just-perceptible sliding-door, a life-sized porcelain lion raised its chub head. Inside, all the shapes of hothouse-green pressed lovingly toward him. They wanted to get in here, why was that? In their center, behind lattice, vine and spike, a life-sized statue with its back turned—the old Kwan-Yin from Park Avenue Two, its ivory coif bent, looking out. Clever.
No, it’s Maeve.
You must know, Betts, that she was absolutely lucid. Perhaps more absolutely lucid than she had to be. Her only aberration was that she had to go into that place once an hour—not on the hour, nothing so bald as that—and gaze down. Whatever was being looked at there, the former owners of such vantage points as
tree-houses, captain’s walks and pergolas—or a small porch in the Berkshire past—are not required to say.
She tripped out of there, not seeing him at first, in the same white wool dress and bronze shoes he and Buddy had had to applaud over and over before she could trust herself to wear them to his graduation, an event she had trained for—as she did for all public appearances outside their house, and some in it—as if she were a movie star. “There’ll be so many bigwig parents there.” Though nothing ever came of that for her—she always became ashamed of the impudence that had brought her thus far, and hung back inside the shell she had made to be looked at—he had been proud of her, when he saw some of the other boys’ old bags. And Buddy had afterwards lunched downtown with one of the fathers, who in a whisper to his own son, had asked to be introduced to him.
As his mother came toward him, seeing her now, it was hard to believe she was not a girl. Since he’d last seen her, she must have given up “keeping up the red” of her hair. It was now a silvery white, brushed high off her face and clipped at the back George Washington-style, in an exaggerated version of half the girls he knew—why should going white make her look like a girl? Thanks to the procession of them between her and him, he could wonder now if she had a lover—something in the way she looked over her shoulder and away from him—looking back:
“Welcome to your party,” she cried toward him.
There were people about; this was for their benefit. He understood her need of falsity, compact between them since their shopping days.
She fell upon him then, saying the archly natural thing. “Where’s your beard?”
“Left it with a friend.”
Maeve tapped his shoulder. A little smile. “Mick mouth.”
His heels were bumped from behind.
“Sor-ree!” Too loud to be.
He turned. Wheelchair croquet. The woman who was manning it shed him a hard-nosed glare from behind her navy-blue. Same as the mothers in the park: babies take precedence. Or because they had to be with the carriage all day. And you were with a girl.
“Mother, this is Bunty,” Maeve said. “He’s been in Wales.”
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