The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  He always came to France by ship, and his mother would meet him outside the customs in Le Havre. She never spoke to Julian of school or his father, or of anything that had to do with his life in America. She did not write to him in winter; he was alive to her, and real, only when he was with her. Julian spent ten summers with his mother. She never cooked except to fry eggs in a blackened skillet for their breakfast; she would arrange the eggs, yolks all broken and running into the porous grain of the bread, edge to edge on a split baguette, and then cut this long sandwich in two, giving the larger part to Julian. At other meals, taken whenever they were hungry, they ate cheese and cold meat and fruit with their fingers and drank rough red wine, diluted with spring water, from the thick tumblers that were almost their only dishes.

  Julian’s mother wore jeans, never a dress, and wiped her brushes on them as she worked, so that her lean thighs were streaked with her paints. She knew everything in nature—the names of trees and wildflowers, even those of stones and soils, the birds and their songs. She taught them all to Julian, and thirty years afterwards he could identify the call of a warbler, the bark of an oak, the petals of loosestrife with as little conscious effort as he recognized a popular tune or read English. Yet for all her love of the natural world, Julian’s mother never painted anything as it was. She reduced everything to an abstraction. Julian didn’t know whether she lacked the technique to reproduce living things in their true form, or whether she had some flaw—perhaps it was a gift—that made her see things as color only. She would work the whole day, gazing fixedly at a landscape, holding up the handle of a brush to measure perspective, and at the end of her labors show Julian a canvas smeared with pigment, suggestive of nothing. Sometimes her work had a kind of luminosity: the light in a cloud or the rain falling through the industrial smoke of Le Havre across the river would find its way through her eye to her hand and onto the surface of the painting. She was invariably happy with what she had done; she would smile at the picture, and then put it away and forget it. The cottage was filled with her works, all unframed, stacked with faces against the walls.

  Julian and his mother swam in the Seine and sailed a dinghy, exhilarated by the river’s dangerous tides and currents. At night they read and went to bed early. They talked almost never; like his father, she never asked questions. Before they slept, his mother sometimes played the mandolin and sang old parlor songs about lost and ruined girls— “Sweet Genevieve,” “Ben Bolt,” “The Gypsy’s Kiss.” Her voice was melodious even when she shouted, and could be heard a long way across the water. She had beautiful white teeth. She died of cancer at forty, in winter like Julian’s father, also alone. Julian never saw a pretty woman smile or heard his daughter, who had a sweet soprano voice, singing in some far room of the house, that he did not remember his mother.

  Now Julian had married a young woman as a second wife, just as his father had done. She passionately wanted a baby. Julian’s Emily spoke of this every day. She was in the grip of an overwhelming instinct to conceive and give birth. Each menses was a stain of failure; Emily told him in the night that she could never be a whole person, a completed female, until she had borne his child: “No one else’s baby, Julian—yours, with your life and mine mixed in him.” Julian wondered if his mother had been the same, if his father had made her pregnant with him, Julian, as reluctantly as he was bringing himself to get his own bride with child. The children of his first marriage, a son named Elliott and a daughter named Jenny, were twelve and ten, old enough to accept an infant. Julian loved them now with his whole heart, but he had detested the illnesses, the noise, the stench, the mindless tyranny of babies. He could not tell Emily that; she could not understand what she hadn’t yet lived through. Instead, he told her that there was so much in his life, since he had fallen in love with her, that he had no room for more.

  Emily insisted on her own needs. Julian must honor her emotions. “I won’t live by words! I know what I feel!” she cried.

  Julian recoiled. He had heard this before, the words and their very tone, all during his first marriage. He yielded to Emily, as he had yielded so often to his earlier wife, because they had ardor as their weapon while he, like his father, had nothing more powerful in his emotional arsenal than good humor and good manners. In his job, he was a passionate and ruthless man who rewarded the President’s friends and destroyed his enemies without compunction. In the White House, in politics, Julian was acting according to his beliefs; he was doing what was important. Emily was his pleasure. President Lockwood was his duty.

  Julian hoped that, if a baby came, it would be as lucky as he had been in his older brother. Horace had been the best friend of Julian’s childhood, as he was his best friend now—almost an extra parent because of the ten years’ difference in their age. Horace was the only confessor Julian had ever had; he could tell his brother anything. Somehow, he never asked Horace anything about himself: Horace told him what he thought he needed to know.

  Their father had been forty when Julian was born. After Julian’s mother left, Elliott and his young son were alone a good deal. They had two residences, a tall stone house an 93rd Street that Elliott had bought when he became senior partner of his law firm, and a rambling wooden mansion in the Berkshires called the Harbor—really it was an eighteenth-century farmhouse with innumerable ells and wings—which was the seat of the Hubbard family. They wintered in New York and summered on a mountainside where the lawns and the rose gardens and the rare trees planted by a botanizing ancestor were a green island in a hemlock forest that was as blue as the Atlantic on a fair day, and as unbroken.

  The Hubbards did not belong to New York society, and such society as there had been in the Berkshires withered when the mills that had been the source of its wealth and self-esteem had moved south to escape high labor costs and irksome safety laws. Elliott sold the Hubbard mills as soon as his father died, when they still had some value. He moved to New York sooner than that, right after finishing law school. He was the first member of his family who chose his own friends.

  Elliott Hubbard cared greatly for male company, and both houses were full, most evenings, with supper guests. Julian ate with his father’s friends from the time he was able to stay awake. They were, all of them, men who did things—wrote books, made movies, produced plays, ran banks and brokerage houses, dug up lost cities, pitched for the Yankees. These men accepted Julian, and Horace when he came home, as equals. They all laughed a good deal, and drank a lot of wine, but Julian never encountered a fool or a drunk until he went away to school.

  As there was never any child’s talk in Elliott’s houses, there was never any child’s food. Julian ate what his father ate, and the diet ran to raw foods: oysters, steak tartare, marinated fishes, large chewy salads. Steaks and roasts were bloody, vegetables were crisp and barely heated through by steam. Julian’s father believed that most of the value of food was lost when it was cooked. When Julian went to Exeter he had a hard time adjusting to the soft, starchy diet that the school provided, and for the rest of his life he found it difficult to deal with food prepared in the ordinary way.

  After dinner, when they were alone, father and son played cribbage or chess, one game, an alternate nights, and Julian’s rare victories were earned. It was only when Julian went to bed that his father treated him as a child. He read him to sleep—fairy tales in the years before Julian’s mother left them, then Kipling, The Jungle Books especially, and poetry: A Shropshire Lad and what Julian remembered as the complete works of Byron, bound in tan limp leather. The old man’s face, reading glasses perched on his nose, was always happiest when he was reading Byron; Julian realized now that Elliott had loved the poet’s reckless life as much as he loved the voice in the poems.

  Julian, half-crouched over the sink in his bathroom in Washington, wiped lather from his cheeks. In the mirror, he looked like his father: the same great height, horse-faced, fierce-eyed, with the identical arched narrow nose and wide mouth, the shaggy eyebrows and the dark h
air going gray at the temples. There were many similarities, and Julian was not the only one who noticed them; a good many men still alive in Washington had known Elliott Hubbard in his political phases—he’d been a government attorney in Roosevelt’s last term, and much later, a lawyer who had saved old friends who had given way to idealism from McCarthy and Nixon. Elliott had worked quietly, almost secretly, as brilliant lawyers do. He had had a reputation. Julian, working for the same causes a lifetime later, had fame. He didn’t like it, but he accepted the saturation of publicity that went with his job and made his name almost as familiar as the President’s.

  Julian grinned at his image in the glass. The main difference between him and his father, he sometimes thought, was that the older man had spent his life in large beautiful houses while Julian had lived in small ugly ones. His father had had bathrooms built specially for a man of his height. Julian had spent the quarter century since he had left home doubled over law washbasins as he brushed his teeth and removed his whiskers. He shaved morning and evening, lathering twice each time: four backaches a day. Friends told Julian that the “restored” brick house in Georgetown for which he had had to pay a million dollars was a jewel, but it was dark and narrow and low, and within his own lifetime it had been part of a slum. He had civilized the house with the things his father had left him—a few pieces of good French furniture; a dozen carpets; a row of Post-Impressionist paintings on the sitting room wall; a Sargent portrait of his grandmother as a girl: the lovely intelligent white face under a summer hat in a field of shimmering black.

  Julian had no interest in possessions for their own sake. Very early he had accepted a set of political beliefs that made the love of property impassible, and he lived by those beliefs as best he could. But these inherited objects were parts of the consciousness of his family—the Seurat and the Cezanne had been bought from the artists by his great-grandfather; the Empire tables and chairs had been found in Paris by his grandmother; the Tabrizi carpets had been owned in Shiraz by a great-uncle, an archaeologist who had lived in Persia most of his life, digging for Harvard, as his sisters had said, and had come home to die bringing nothing but the rugs with him. Julian’s brother had been named for this relative, and, like him, had spent the greater part of his adult life abroad, mostly in the Near East.

  Horace had come back from Beirut for the funeral, and he and Julian had buried their father in the Hubbard plot in West Stockbridge. It was a bitter day, fifteen below zero at noon, the sun a pale disk on the southern horizon, snow blowing against the plain stones that bore the same Christian names generation after generation: Elliotts, Horaces, Julians, Aarons, Jonathans. There were no flowers, just the plain pine coffin Elliott had ordered for himself; and no other relations. Elliott’s sisters were dead, and he had been the youngest child and the only male of his generation. Horace had never married, and Julian’s son was the last Hubbard. The Order for the Burial of the Dead was read by a young curate whose wind-stung hands, gripping the Book of Common Prayer, turned red and trembled violently. His surplice whipped around his legs, revealing green hiking boots and thick. woolen socks, and his black stole blew behind him like the tail of a school scarf. The grave seemed very deep because the workmen had gone down through four feet of snow before striking the frozen earth. As Horace and Julian drove away in the undertaker’s car they saw their father’s yellow coffin lying beside the open grave. Snow eddied around the varnished box; in the jump seat the curate held his frostbitten hands in his armpits and sucked his breath through his teeth in pain.

  Two days later there was a memorial service in New York at Saint Thomas Church, where Elliott had been baptized, confirmed, and married to his first wife—and, it turned out, where he, the unbeliever, had gone on morning prayer every day for the last quarter century of his life. The President came, along with two hundred others who had been invited by the family. Even here Elliott’s diffidence prevailed. There was no eulogy, just the plain Episcopal service: prayer, psalm, lesson, hymn, blessing.

  After leaving Saint Thomas’s, the President and his wife and a dozen others went back with the family to the house on 93rd Street. Horace and Julian gave them sherry while Wilfred and Maria, the couple who had kept house for Elliott for forty years, changed from their church clothes to their uniforms. Lockwood draped his long body in a chair that crackled under his weight and drew Jenny onto his lap. Soon he said something to make her laugh, and she covered her mouth. Lockwood took Jenny’s flying hand gently in his and kissed it through the white glove she had worn to church. “Go ahead,” he said, “a good honest laugh is the thing your grandpa would like best to hear from you.” But the house seemed cold and changed; Elliott had died in the room where they were, and Maria had sprayed something in the air that had killed the scent of him. Julian, watching his child’s solemn face as Lockwood stroked her hair, wondered if any of them would ever come back here.

  The family had supper alone, and Jenny and Elliott, tired by a long day filled with strangers, went up to bed after the dessert.

  Horace looked across the broad table at Emily. They had met only once before, at her wedding. “You look very well in the pearls,” he said. “The pearls are always worn on solemn occasions.”

  The long double rope of pearls around Emily’s neck were among the jewels Horace had returned to the family when his mother died. Caroline, Julian’s first wife, had left them behind, with the children and all the rest of the Hubbard jewelry, when she got her divorce.

  “Patrick Graham mentioned the pearls—how fine they’d looked on Caroline,” Emily said. “Was he such an intimate of hers?”

  The brothers exchanged a look. Emily caught it and said, “What does that mean?”

  “Patrick and Caroline have a long history,” Julian said. Emily, aglow with curiosity, began to ask a question, but Horace interrupted.

  “Why was Patrick there?” he asked. “Did he know Pa?”

  “They may have met.” Julian smiled. “Patrick likes to be in the right places, and he’s known me for a long time.”

  “And loved you. He went through the crowd on the church steps like a monkey going through a card index, looking for Caroline.”

  Emily rapped on the table. “What is this?”

  Julian didn’t answer, but after a long gaze from Horace, raised his eyebrows, giving him leave to speak.

  “Patrick was in love with Caroline,” Horace said. “He lived with her while Julian was in Vietnam, and for a long time afterwards. Then Julian stole her away.”

  “It wasn’t quite that simple,” Julian said. “How do you know these things, Horace?”

  “Brotherly concern. And then again, old Caro wasn’t what you’d call discreet. For years she expected Patrick to kill you.”

  Julian made an impatient gesture. “All that happened at least twenty years ago. Besides, it was Caroline’s choice. Even Patrick could see that she wasn’t the sort of woman anyone could steal. She took what she wanted.”

  “Smart girl,” said Emily. Her eyes, lit by mischief, darted from one brother to the other. She was too young and too pretty to feel jealousy of the past. “I want to know all about this.”

  Horace smiled and looked at his watch. “Pry it out of Julian. I have to take the morning plane to Beirut and Julian and I—and you, too Emily—really ought to have a talk.”

  “Ah, the reading of the will,” said Emily. “I’ll go upstairs and leave you to it.”

  She kissed them both. Horace watched her walk out of the room; he gave Julian and himself more wine. When he heard the bedroom door close at the top of the stairs he said, “I must say, Julian, you have a way of having smashing girls fall in love with you. This one isn’t as disputatious as Caroline. That must be a relief.”

  “It is.”

  Horace was his father’s executor; he was the elder son and the banker. “I’ve been through Pa’s assets,” he said to Julian. “Sebastian Laux has always been his banker, so it was simple enough. In brief, there is no ready mone
y.”

  “None?” Julian’s face broke into a fond smile and Horace returned it; both men liked this last act of nonchalance on their father’s part.

  “You may have noticed, Julian, that Pa lived in a kind of nineteenth-century rapture. He kept Wilfred and Maria in this house and Lipton at the Harbor year-round. He belonged to three clubs, kept boxes at the ball games and seats at the Metropolitan and the Philharmonic.”

  Elliott had had an income from his law practice, but he hadn’t really worked for years. He’d educated his sons and paid for his women, and all his life, he had been freehanded with himself.

  “All that’s left, really, is the two houses, both mortgaged,” Horace said. “We’ll have to sell them to pay taxes and debts and pension off Wilfred and Maria and Lipton—they’re old now, so there ought to be enough. Everything in the houses, the paintings and furniture and so on, goes to the two of us to divide as we agree.” There would be no trouble about that, and Elliott had known it. “I’d like the hunting carpet and the Pissarra,” Horace said. “All the rest you can have, I’ve no room for it.” Julian protested: the Post-Impressionists and the Sargent and the rest were worth a lot of money.

  “No more than Pa had to give my mother in reparations for falling into bed with yours,” Horace said. “That’s where the capital went, and Mother went to Paris after the divorce and spent her life throwing it away so Pa would never get it back. She’d have risen from her deathbed and flung the jewels into the Seine if she’d imagined that any wife of yours might have worn them.” This was the most Horace had ever said about his own mother.

  “Did she really hate Pa and my mother that much after all those years?” said Julian. He was incredulous.

  Horace, just for a moment, lost the expression of mild amusement that was habitual to him. When he stopped smiling he had his mother’s cold face and her pale, unreadable eyes. But when he spoke, it was in their father’s voice with its peculiar soft timbre; this was his only physical inheritance from Elliott Hubbard.