An Unfinished Season

by Ward Just

  THE DEBUTANTE’S ARCHIPELAGO

  5

  IN JUNE AND JULY there were debutante parties nearly every other night, two hundred of us dancing under high-topped tents with girls in armored evening dresses, pearls swinging against their throats, the orchestra playing on and on until midnight, when breakfast was served, shirred eggs, scrambled eggs, eggs benedict, eggs daffodil, in copper chafing dishes arrayed on a long buffet table while white-coated waiters opened fresh bottles of Piper-Heidsieck. That summer the Charleston made an unexpected comeback, along with a jazz band from somewhere in Mississippi, its members very old black men. The jazz band played during orchestra intermissions and was the surprise hit of the season. They were tremendously sympathetic, the oldest well over ninety years old. He was rumored to have been born a slave, and you could believe it. He stood in a crouch and his fingers were gnarled as tree roots, as black as the clarinet he played. The jazz band played all the old standards, “Basin Street Blues” and “South Rampart Street Parade,” and hymns like “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” He seemed to float above the others, his eyes neither here nor there. If you spoke to him he always nodded politely but declined to speak back. My God, you thought, he was born at the time of the Civil War.

  The dances had a timeless quality, as if things had not advanced for a quarter century—Coolidge in the White House, Capone in the Loop, Gatsby in the bookstores. Some nights you could believe that the entire North Shore was dancing to “Mountain Greenery,” the musical phrases handed off from one country club to another up the debutante’s archipelago from Chicago to Lake Bluff, two thousand dancers whirling in a blur of cream and black, black and pink, aqua and white, the sound of saxophones rising and settling over the vast monotonous lake like a nervous mist; and the mist vanished at midnight, when the orchestra played its finale and the sweating musicians gathered up their instruments and left the bandstand, disappearing into the night. Then there was a sudden crush around the buffet table. The eggs had arrived.

  Everyone knew each other, old and young brought together through acquaintance of the debutante or her parents or school connections or if you were on the List. The origins of the List were obscure, but it was updated every year by a committee, the object being to ensure an adequate supply of presentable young men. I remember reading somewhere, probably in Sassoon, that the great objective of Britain in World War One was to ensure an adequate supply of heroes for the Somme and the Marne; this was a weak-kneed version of that. At first I knew only about a dozen people, but by the end of the first week I had met most everyone, including the houseguests, school friends or cousins from the East and one from England. We roamed in a pack, circling the dance floor, commenting on the action. Each debutante party had a narrative and we knew in the first hour whether the narrative would be successful; that is, if we were still around for the eggs. Now and then I would dance with a popular girl, and when I was cut in on, return happily to the bar and continue to prowl the perimeter, observing the social rituals of the young marrieds. The hierarchies of these gatherings bore a resemblance to life aboard ship. We had set sail aboard a hilarious Pequod, young Ishmaels fascinated by the obsessions of the black-tied Ahabs and their women. The young marrieds seemed to us always in search of some fantastic grail, eternal youth or the ring of the Nibelungen, the presidency of the bank, the perfect crime, or the ultimate revenge. Their lives seemed to us unimaginably exotic, as if they were a tribe of the Caucasus or South Sea Islanders or French voluptuaries. The married life was storm-tossed and momentous and until you entered into it you were still an adolescent, becalmed.

  They were rowdy, drinking heavily and dancing with abandon, as if their settled state entitled them to a valedictory spree—tomorrow they would be a day older, and the day after that the children would begin to arrive along with gray hair and arthritis and nighttime fatigue owing to various responsibilities at home and at work, too, the bank or the brokerage house where someone was always looking over your shoulder, and if you made a mistake the word would spread at once and your father would be on the telephone with a friendly word of warning and your wife would indicate disapproval in the usual ways. Naturally your father-in-law would also be informed, so there would be the obligatory lunch with him, offering sober assurances that the mistake, whatever it was, would never happen again. The excuses were well honed from years of use with headmasters and university deans and highway patrolmen. The married men never failed to dance with the debutante, if she was pretty or if her father was influential, and the deb was usually delighted because married men were so at ease and amusing, experienced as they were, not left-foot clumsy and looking down the front of your dress like the boys your own age. The married men treated you with courtesy even as they flirted a little, reminiscing about their college years, driving five hours from New Haven to Vassar or Bennett, arriving at dawn for a breakfast of doughnuts and scotch, weekends in New York and meeting under the clock at the Biltmore and going on to Jimmy Ryan’s and ending up at someone’s apartment and talking seriously about the state of the world, the war in Korea and how the Reds were trying to take over, the toll taken by the Yale class of ’51 when so many boys joined the Marines, a life-altering experience. Like whales, they knew the secrets of the deep.

  The other reason the young marrieds drank heavily and danced with abandon was because next year there would be fewer party invitations and the debs would be even younger, a Rebuke to husband and wife alike. My friends and I were not welcome in their company, in the way that sergeants were not welcome at the Officers Club. The married men—they were only a few years older than we were but seemed middle-aged—were sarcastic, spoiling for an argument, and their wives were condescending, as if they knew something that we didn’t, that something being, of course, married life, its ardor, its pleasures and miseries, its intimacies, its compromises and boundaries and burdens, its envied seriousness. They knew the score and we didn’t. During intermissions they would press close to the jazz band, nodding to the beat, listening with perfect nonchalance, managing to imply that they and the old black men shared a certain knowledge of the wider world of hard knocks and disappointment, casual slander and crimination for imaginary offenses and the simple struggle to stay on top—and although they could not aspire to the natural rhythm of Negroes, they could certainly appreciate the melancholy soul of the blues, an American birthright. The blues were part of every life, even a privileged life on the North Shore; and while it was unnecessary—pointless, really—for one of them to imagine a sharecropper’s life in Mississippi (everyone was dealt a particular hand, and how you played the hand was the acid test of character), it was no less pointless for one of the Negroes to imagine their life—the expectations that went with kinship in a good family and matriculation at a fine prep school and an Ivy League degree and the right sort of marriage and all the rest of it, a lifetime of measuring up, with the temptation all the while to say the hell with it, and that decision came with a price also. Not that the price wasn’t sometimes paid, and with unpredictable, often hilarious results. Point was, even the North Shore wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Whatever hand you were dealt, someone at the table always had higher cards; and the stakes were not small. You went through the mill the same as everyone else, including the Negroes, though it would be a stretch for them to understand that. In any case, the blues crossed racial lines, even the divisions among the classes; each group would have its own special affinity. Behind the finger-snapping façade of the blues was a glum house of betrayal, thwarted ambition, sexual totalitarianism, lies, and misprision. The idea was to stay at the table to get what was coming to you; that was the lesson of the blues, especially the stoic example of the clarinet player, born a slave at the time of the Civil War.

  There was a man I wanted to meet, a silent presence at all the parties, always standing in the shadows off the dance floor, a gin and tonic in his hand and a cigarette burning in his fingers. He was gaunt with gray hair, crewcut, and I estimated his age at
somewhere in the vicinity of fifty, ten years either side. It was impossible to be more precise. He seemed to have a prematurely aged head on an athlete’s sinewy body, as if his head had lived an entirely different life. He was evidently unmarried. Now and then during the evening a woman would join him for a few moments of one-sided conversation, her attitude solicitous, looking up at him with something like awe. And then she would touch his elbow and drift off, leaving him alone and watchful in the shadows. I had learned his name, Jason Brule, and I knew he was a doctor, a psychiatrist with offices off Lincoln Park on the North Side, downtown. I knew nothing of psychiatry, except for my father’s view that it was a shabby discipline one step removed from voodoo. Jason Brule did not seem to enjoy himself. He was often lost in thought, staring at his shoes or off into the distance. He rarely danced and usually left before the eggs. But he was present at most every party, and I came to think of him as a sentry on night watch. I wanted to meet him because he looked and behaved so out of the ordinary, but no one I knew was acquainted with him and it was not done to walk up to a stranger and introduce yourself, not at these parties, and certainly not if the stranger was an older man. His distant manner discouraged familiarity anyhow.

  One night I was dancing with a girl I had not met before. She gave her name as Aurora and her conversation instantly set her apart from Debbie, Mimi, Gigi, and Dana. Dana was the girl I had argued with weeks before and this was her party at her parents’ house, one of the lakefront mansions in Lake Forest, a perfect evening in July. I was trying to stay out of her way, and when I saw Aurora standing alone I asked her to dance. She had been watching the floor as if she expected a knife fight or other bloodletting, and when I asked her about it she said there was trouble among the bachelors and the benedicts and if I was smart I’d keep my head down because they were drunk and unpredictable, the benedicts particularly. Honor was at stake, she said, and she was trying to discover whose honor it was. A girl was at the bottom of it. So to speak, she added with a smile. And that’s all she knew about that, subject closed. We were dancing well and getting to know each other better when I felt a tap on my shoulder and yielded to one of the wolfish benedicts. I re-cut a dance later, and asked her if she wanted a drink, that way we could talk without being interrupted by men who should be dancing with their wives. We fetched drinks—she took a Dubonnet and soda, a drink I had never heard of—and wandered to the shadows of a great oak and stood with our backs to the dance floor and watched the lake ruffle the moon’s reflection. When Aurora told pie she lived in Chicago, I asked her if she knew the gaunt man with the aged head. I turned to point him out but he had vanished.

  Jason Brule, I said.

  Why do you want to know? What’s he to you?

  Nobody, I said. He looks interesting, is all.

  I suppose he is, she said. That’s what everyone says.

  What do they say?

  That he’s interesting, she said with a smile.

  Bachelor, I said.

  That, too, she said.

  Head doctor, I said.

  Is that so? she said.

  See, that’s interesting.

  Why is that interesting?

  How many psychiatrists do you know? And everyone around here is either married or too young to be married—

  Not everyone, she said, and named a bachelor of flamboyant manner and ambiguous reputation, odd in that he was seen only in the company of older women.

  He’s different, I said. That isn’t what I mean.

  What do you mean, then? That smile again, insinuating something, I didn’t know what.

  I mean—and then I wasn’t certain what I meant, except that there were different sorts of bachelors and that Jason Brule was not the odd sort, and this conversation was moving in a direction I did not want to follow. I said, At any event, someone who isn’t married stands out. Also, the doctor’s head doesn’t go with the doctor’s body. It’s as if they haven’t been introduced. And he doesn’t say much, does he? Doesn’t dance, doesn’t mix, drinks little. He’s a psychiatrist and that isn’t usual, either, around here. All these things together make someone who isn’t run-of-the-mill, and therefore he’s worth knowing.

  If you say so, Aurora said. She took a step outside the shadows to stand near the lip of the bluff that sloped down to the lake. She wore a pale blue gown that shimmered in the moonlight, and a plain gold necklace that shimmered as well. She wound her finger around the necklace as she sipped her drink and looked at the reflection of the moon on the lake. Behind us the band struck up what sounded like the last dance. I offered her a cigarette but she shook her head.

  They call him Jack, she said.

  Who?

  Jason. Jason Brule. Thought you’d want to know.

  I haven’t seen you around, I said.

  I don’t get up here very often. But I’m a friend of Dana’s, so here I am, dancing in the moonlight. She smiled thinly and added, But I know you. You’re the boy with the stories, Wils Ravan, the boy with all the gossip from downtown. Dana was telling me all about you and how you wouldn’t go to bat for her sister at the newspaper. Dana thinks you’re a bad friend and a menace. Subversive was the word she used, though she was probably just repeating her father. Dana said that if we met I was supposed to give you a piece of my mind, and I promised but now I don’t know. You don’t look subversive to me. Are you subversive?

  I do my best, I said.

  Try harder, she said.

  Aurora was silent a moment, rocking on her heels, and suddenly threw her glass high in the air. We watched it rise and fall to the underbrush near the water’s edge. We heard a faint explosion when the glass hit a rock. She leaned over the lip, squinting in the darkness. She said, Where do you live?

  Quarterday, I said.

  Where’s Quarterday? I never heard of it.

  The other side of Half Day.

  I never heard of Half Day, either.

  You’ve been missing something, I said. You’ve led a sheltered life.

  Not as sheltered as yours, she said, and I had an idea this was a reference to the confusion of bachelors. She said, As a matter of fact, I do remember now. Quarterday. Where they ride horses.

  We need them for the spring plowing, I said.

  She smiled at that and said, Why don’t you tell me one of your stories?

  It’s Saturday, I said. I didn’t go to the office.

  That’s where the stories come from?

  Well, it’s a newspaper office. A newspaper office is a story factory. You make stories the way a furniture factory makes chairs. The stories are supposed to be well made and comfortable, so that you can sit in them without fear that they’ll break down or disappoint you in any way.

  Consoling, she said.

  Definitely, I said.

  Tell me an old story, then.

  I never tell old stories, I said. My stories are all fresh stories. Today’s news, not yesterday’s news. Nothing deader than yesterday’s news.

  Behind us people were clapping. The orchestra had stopped playing. I lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring into the moonlight. Aurora was staring into the darkness and frowning, as if she had seen something there that annoyed her. But the only visible movement was the running lights of an ore boat bound for Duluth.

  I said, Do you want some eggs?

  She said, I want to go home.

  I’ll take you home, I said.

  I don’t live anywhere near your Quarterday, she said. I live in Chicago. As I told you.

  That’s all right, I said. I’ve been there. I know the way.

  All right, she said.

  If we skip the eggs we can stop at the jazz club on Bryn Mawr. Listen to the last set and I’ll drive you home. It’s a wonderful band in the old style, you’ll love it. I smiled at her, waiting for an answer, explaining that the Eleven-Eleven Club was located under an El station in a rundown neighborhood near the Edgewater Beach Hotel, the crowd always noisy and friendly, and sometimes Georg Brunis played the trom
bone with his toes. The bartender had become a friend and every time I came in late in my tuxedo, he shouted, Stop the presses! Mr. Hearst is in the house!

  I’ve been there, she said. I was put out, having the idea that this very well-known jazz club was my own private discovery, and my expression must have shown it because Aurora raised her eyebrows and added, But we can go there anyway.

  Let’s go now, I said.

  You mean—no eggs?

  I’ll get us some champagne instead. For the car.

  We walked back to the house and made our goodbyes. The buffet table had a crowd around it and the bar was doing a brisk business. Dana was nowhere in sight but her parents accepted our thanks with curt nods and no handshake from him. It seemed to me that Aurora was included in the general frost but it was hard to tell because they turned almost at once to say an effusive goodbye to a young married couple, both drunk and cute as buttons. They had the Englishman with them and everyone was laughing at something he had said. I fetched two glasses of champagne and waited for Aurora while she spoke to a friend, explaining that she had a ride home, not to worry. The friend looked dubiously at me and leaned forward to say something to Aurora, taking her hand in a kind of warning gesture. As we walked to the car, Aurora shivered slightly so I took off my jacket and put it around her shoulders. The breeze off the lake was cool.

  I said, What was that about?

  She’s been talking to Dana.

  Bad news, I said.

  I’m a fool to trust anyone as unreliable as you.

  Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, I added.