A Season in Purgatory (20 page)

Harrison swallowed. “Any takers?” he asked.

“No. Not yet. Captain Riordan always thought you knew something you weren’t telling.”

“Me?”

“I mean, he didn’t suspect you. He thought
you
might be covering for someone.”

“No. I wasn’t, Mrs. Utley. I wasn’t covering. I was in bed that night. Mrs. Bradley came in my room when you called her, and Mrs. Bradley never told a lie in her life.”

“Good. I always liked you, Harrison. From that car ride. Do you remember?”

“Oh, yes, I remember. In your blue Buick. But Constant did all the talking. I’m surprised you even remembered me. I hardly opened my mouth.”

“That’s what I liked about you. Boys like Constant Bradley are too smooth for me. And then you came by our house on the day it happened, with the ham and the casserole.”

“Yes. From the Bradleys. I was only delivering.”

“I know. I’d like to give you my card.”

“I’d like that.”

“I have an apartment at Park and Sixty-second. The telephone number’s on it.”

“Thank you.”

“Good-bye, Harrison.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Utley.”

By then the Bradleys had settled into their money. People now called them wealthy rather than rich, sometimes even “fabulously” wealthy, when they were written about in columns. No one ever called them
nouveau
anymore. They kept but rarely used the house in Scarborough Hill, as if following the suggestion of Sally Steers to Gerald Bradley many years before, when she was his mistress. Instead, since returning from the ambassadorship in France, they maintained establishments in New York and California, as well as a large summer cottage at the end of Long Island, with several smaller cottages on the property for the married members of the family and their children. They had moved into the small world of people who followed one another’s lives in newspaper columns and saw pictures of one another’s houses in
Architectural Digest
. They were on terms of friendship with the sort of people who were written about—film stars, socialites, and politicians—and their own names and pictures frequently appeared in the press as having been at this fashionable event or that. The trained eye of the media watcher could detect the assistance of public relations in their recurring mentions. The people from Scarborough Hill watched from afar. They were still not impressed with Gerald Bradley and his brood, although Kitt, the youngest daughter, had made her debut there, not at a grand private dance in her own home like Weegie Somerset’s four years earlier, but with a group of debutantes at a cotillion at The Country Club. The following year she had been asked to join the Junior League, the first Catholic girl to be so honored in Scarborough
Hill. She had been a bridesmaid in more weddings than she could count. Still, however, the Bradleys remained outsiders.

In Scarborough Hill, Mrs. Utley’s tragedy was largely forgotten. Whenever the story surfaced, as it sometimes did, people had begun to say, “What was that girl’s name who was killed with the baseball bat?” The Utleys had been new there when it happened. They had no history in the community and had moved away afterwards. The part of the story that everyone remembered was that the Bradley boy, the handsome one, Constant, was briefly suspected but never indicted. Some even began to say he got a bum rap, that he was suspected only because people at The Country Club hated his father and spread the word that he had roughed up Weegie Somerset one summer in Watch Hill, a story that Weegie herself denied. Except for cheating in an ethics examination, for which he had been suspended for a term, and for an altercation with a state trooper who once stopped him for speeding—“Do you know who I am?” he was alleged to have shouted at the trooper—his record at Yale had been admirable. Most agreed, however, that when the time came for Constant Bradley to marry, he would have to look for a wife elsewhere than Scarborough Hill. And he did.

In the meantime he took up polo. He had his own string of ponies. He played in Palm Springs and Palm Beach and Colorado Springs, and one of the columns reported that the Prince of Wales had been heard to say, “Good play, Constant,” during a chukker. Adoring women followed his every match. In time it stopped. He ceased to play. His ponies were sold. It was Jerry who pointed out that it made him look unserious, like a playboy rather than the politician his father wanted him to be. “People on food stamps might have a hard time relating to a candidate in jodhpurs with a string of polo ponies,” said Jerry.

There had been another incident, as the men in the family had begun to call Constant’s transgressions. This one had been without notoriety, known only to the participants and the family. The girl, Maud Firth, a Chicago debutante, whom the family firmly believed was lying, said she had become frightened of him and, in trying to leave the hotel room where she had gone with him, had been tackled from behind and knocked down. In the process she hit her head on a bedside table and received a cut on her scalp that required seventeen stitches. Constant claimed that she was drunk, which she was.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? You’re young. You’re handsome. You’re rich. Every girl is crazy about you. You can get anyone you want. Why did you have to hurt her?” asked Jerry.

“I didn’t hurt her. She hurt herself,” replied Constant. “She tripped and fell.”

“It’s me, Constant. Jerry, your brother. I’m on your side. I’m not Detective Riordan back in Scarborough Hill. I want to know why.”

Constant looked at his brother. “I couldn’t get a hard-on,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Until you got rough with her, isn’t that it?”

Constant looked away. “Something like that.”

Jerry reported the exchange to his father and Des and Sandro.

“Well, as we all know, there’s no anger like the anger of a soft dick,” said Gerald. Gerald’s enthusiasm for his favorite son never wavered. In Constant, Gerald saw the aspirations for national prominence, even a place in the country’s history, that he himself had been denied because of his unpopularity and the size of his fortune, which the jealous would always believe had been come by illicitly.

“Pa, you’re not taking this seriously enough,” said Jerry.

“I admire a man with a healthy appetite for pussy,” said Gerald.

“I’m not sure how healthy his appetite is, Pa. We just might have a sicko on our hands here,” said Jerry.

“Constant is no sicko,” said Gerald firmly. “Let me talk to him.”

They met in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons in New York. Gerald lit a cigar, much to the annoyance of the group in the booth to his left, book publishers, and the group in the booth to his right, a former secretary of state and a former senator.

“They don’t like that you’re smoking a cigar, Pa,” said Constant.

“Fuck ’em,” replied Gerald, puffing, inhaling, exhaling. “They’re out of office. Now, tell me exactly what happened.”

“I did not commit an offense of any kind, Pa. They know who we are. They know there’s money,” said Constant, in explanation of the incident.

“I hardly think the Firths of Lake Forest are after our money,” said Jerry. “You know who her father is, Pa, don’t you?”

“Seventeen stitches is a lot of stitches, Constant,” said Gerald, ignoring Jerry. “Were you drunk?”

“No, Pa. I had a few drinks, but I wasn’t drunk. She was shit-faced, however. She tripped. That’s what happened.”

“This guy’s got a drinking problem, Pa,” said Jerry.

“No, he doesn’t,” said Gerald emphatically.

“He needs help,” insisted Jerry.

“No son of mine is going to go to one of those public meetings in a church hall and raise his hand and say he’s a drunk. Listen to me: that is not going to happen.”

“Pa, he won’t have to go to those public meetings and raise his hand. There’s a place in Minnesota, and another one
in Palm Springs. They work miracles there. Do you remember how Pierce O’Donnell used to drink? He threw up in the tent at Maureen’s wedding, do you remember? Well, he stopped. Completely.”

Gerald, displeased, puffed his cigar. “If there’s one thing that drives me up the wall, it’s these holier-than-thou people who are always off to their stupid meetings for their public confessions,” he said.

“Pierce didn’t even drink when Alice ran off with Andy Mahoney and left him with the kids,” continued Jerry.

“Now, everyone listen to me,” said Gerald, laying down the Bradley law. “What is going to happen is that you are going to stop drinking for a month, Constant. Completely. Pretend it’s Lent. That means beer as well as liquor. And that means wine, even with meals. Starting right now. Here, waiter. Take this glass away. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Yes, Pa, of course.”

“Then we’ll discuss whether he has a drinking problem or not. One other thing. If you need to get rough, tell Fuselli. There’s girls you pay for that. There’s girls who enjoy it. I’ve told you this before. I’m not going to tell you again. Stay away from the nice girls. Is everything understood?”

“Yes, Pa.”

For several minutes they ate their grilled swordfish in silence.

“Who did you say Alice O’Donnell ran off with, Jerry?” asked Gerald.

A distinguished elderly man, a former senator and cabinet minister, passed the table on his way out of the restaurant and waved the cigar smoke away from his face.

“Hello, Abe,” called out Gerald. “Say hello to my sons here, Constant and Jerry.”

* * *

The next day, Johnny Fuselli was called in. Money was paid to Maud Firth. Police records were removed. Constant was grounded. No Aspen that Christmas. The incident was forgotten.

“We have to think about getting him married. Then he’ll settle down,” said Gerald. “But it has to be someone absolutely right. A Weegie Somerset type, but Catholic.”

The search was on for a wife for Constant, someone who would fit in with Gerald’s dream.

The night Harrison Burns dined at Borsalino’s was to have been a quiet evening for him, an early solo dinner, at the same table Arrigo always gave him toward the back of the room, where he wouldn’t be disturbed. He liked to be finished with his meal and gone before the arrival of the crowds who filled the place to capacity every night. Then he had intended to go back to his apartment on Lexington Avenue and write an article on a madwoman in a mental institution in Maine, incarcerated for shooting her father’s lover, who carried within her a secret that he hoped to discover. Secrets meant to be carried to the grave had become somewhat of an obsession with him in his writing.

But the encounter with Luanne Utley had upset him. He briefly allowed his mind to wander into an area of thought that he had banished from his sensibilities sixteen years earlier, on a 747 flying to London. Scraps of conversation came back to him. “Somebody knows,” Luanne Utley had said then. “I am that someone,” he had told Gerald Bradley. And Gerald, on the day before Harrison left for Europe, had said over the telephone, “These things don’t last long, you know, this media concentration on a single story. Something else will happen. You mark my words. A plane crash with someone famous on board. Or an embezzlement involving a society figure. Or a bank scandal. Or the suicide
of a film star. And then the spotlight will be off this story. Off us. The focus will shift. By the time you come back home, people will have forgotten.”

“Yes, sir,” he had replied, wanting to be off the telephone, already regretting the deal he had made.

But Gerald was not to be hung up on. Gerald was not finished with his lecture. “Attitude has a great deal to do with it, Harrison. Constant understands that. He doesn’t look guilty. He doesn’t act guilty. He doesn’t think guilty. People who might have suspected him finally say to themselves, ‘No, it can’t be him. He couldn’t have done it. It’s a bum rap.’ Learn a lesson from that, Harrison.”

He traveled that summer from London to Paris to Rome to Madrid. It was, as Gerald Bradley had stated more than once, a dream trip for a young man. Each day he was dutiful in his visits to museums and churches and architectural wonders. Nights he attended plays and operas and concerts. Nearly always he was alone. The trip lacked only the elation that such an adventure should have inspired. Never once did his spirits soar with the joy of good fortune.

There was a letter from Grace, poor Grace, who was never told anything, who didn’t know that he had been expensively dismissed from the family circle. She sent it to Ansonia, and Aunt Gert forwarded it to a pensione where he was staying in Florence.

“My dear Harrison,” she wrote:

He knew he would never answer her letter. He had made a bargain. It had rained the night before, and the Florentine morning was dark and chilly. There was a fire in the fireplace. He rose from the breakfast table and dropped Grace’s letter into the flames. She did not write again.

One day in the Uffizi Gallery, he ran into Mr. Fanning, the French teacher from Milford, who was spending the summer abroad. Although they had never been close at Milford, they greeted each other warmly and dined together one evening at Harrison’s pensione.

“Quite nice, your pensione here,” said Mr. Fanning, looking about the dining room. At a corner table, an old countess entertaining teenage grandchildren gave an unmistakable air of well-being to the surroundings. “You seem to be doing all right for yourself. I take it that your parents left you well off to be able to enjoy this sort of holiday.”

Harrison blushed and did not reply. He hoped that Mr. Fanning mistook his reddened cheeks for modesty over the good fortune of his inheritance from his slain parents rather than shame over the hush money on which he was living.