A Season in Purgatory (3 page)

“Who do these people think they are?” asked Piggy French, one of their new neighbors.

“I now live next door to the butcher’s son,” said Leverett Somerset, a remark that was repeated over and over again at the country club, a club so exclusive that it had no other name than The Country Club. “There’s a capital
T
on the
The
,” Leverett Somerset always said when he discussed the club.

Understanding the restrictions of the day, the Bradleys made no attempt at social intercourse with their polished neighbors. Nor did they mingle much with their own kind, having become separated from them by their immense wealth. But they found great pleasure in one another’s company. Loud screams of laughter and playful rivalry emanating from the Bradley swimming pool and the Bradley tennis court could be heard ringing through the air of the sedate neighborhood. “My word, don’t they make a lot of noise, those Bradleys,” Louise Somerset, Leverett’s wife, said on more than one occasion. The two families were never to understand each other. Louise Somerset was not sure whether it was an impertinence or an act of kindness when she received a Mass card from Grace Bradley following the death of her mother.

Gerald was a stern disciplinarian to his children, demanding of them that they always be a credit to their Catholic
background even while he prepared them for their infiltration into the Protestant world of private schools, dancing classes, seaside summers, country clubs, and Ivy League colleges. Grace, doing her part in the infiltration, contributed importantly to the symphony orchestra and attended every winter concert with one or more of her daughters, wearing a mink coat that Mrs. Somerset, her neighbor, told everyone was much, much too long. “She’s perfectly nice, Mrs. Bradley,” said Mrs. Somerset, after a symphony board meeting, “but I wish she wouldn’t wear gloves when she pours tea.”

There was amazement in all quarters when Gerald Bradley was proposed for membership in The Country Club, the only Irish Catholic until then ever to be proposed. The Prindevilles, longtime members, were Catholic, too, but Helen Prindeville would be the first to tell you that they were French Catholic, which was, in her eyes, quite a different matter altogether. Piggy French, Buzzy Thrall, and Neddie Pawson, speaking for the majority of the membership, were prepared to blackball the proposal of Gerald Bradley. None of them took notice of Corky, the bartender, who overheard the contretemps while serving them drinks in the men’s locker room, and later repeated it word by word to the other employees, most of whom had grown up in Bog Meadow. Piggy French went so far as to call Gerald Bradley unclubbable.

“He lacks the social graces,” agreed Buzzy Thrall.

“Where do you suppose all that money comes from?” asked Neddie Pawson. “Are we sure it’s aboveboard? I mean, how can you make that much money in that short a time and have it all be legal? I mean, there won’t be fraud stories at some time in the future, will there, Leverett?”

“No, no, no,” said Leverett Somerset impatiently. “Like him or not, and I don’t, thank you very much, the man is
a financial genius. He should be in government. He should be dealing with the deficit, not trying to get into society.”

“The only society he’s ever going to be in is the Holy Name Society,” said Buzzy Thrall, and they all laughed.

“He keeps a mistress, I hear. Sally Steers, their interior decorator,” said Piggy French.

“How do you know that?” demanded Leverett Somerset.

“She went to Farmington with Eve Soby,” replied Piggy French. “He gave her a mink coat.”

“So do you,” said Leverett.

“So do I what?”

“Keep a mistress.”

“But I don’t have priests to dinner and popes to tea. And, besides, I don’t
keep
her. I
see
her. It’s quite a different thing altogether.”

The behind-closed-doors session became stormy. Bitter things were said. Finally, however, all acquiesced, reluctantly. It was, people said, a payoff, a silent deal arrived at by Gerald Bradley and his neighbor, Leverett Somerset, having to do with a business venture in which Somerset, in financial distress, allowed himself to be bailed out by the butcher’s son. Gerald Bradley also agreed to undertake the costs of damages, not covered by insurance, caused by a recent hurricane to the clubhouse porte cochere.

One of the most outraged members of the club was old Bishop Fiddle, the Episcopal prelate lately returned from a long and fashionable ecclesiastical tenure in Paris to spend his retirement years in Scarborough Hill. His mother was a Scarborough by birth, the sister of the late governor, and he was the uncle of Louise Somerset. He found the Bradley membership in the club appalling and voiced his opinion to anyone who would listen, despite the objections of his wife.

One Thursday night, as the Bradleys entered the dining
room en masse, the bishop signaled Gerald to his table with a wave of his spoon. He was eating vanilla ice cream. His patient and long-suffering wife had tied a large napkin around his neck so that the ice cream would not spill on the purplish red rabat beneath his black suit. On a gold chain around his neck he wore a cross which he tucked into his left breast pocket. When he spoke, the stentorian tones of his clipped tight Yankee voice carried throughout the large dining room.

“I find it fascinating that the club has liberalized its bylaws to allow such a notorious person as yourself to join,” said the bishop. Vanilla ice cream dripped down his chin.

Gerald, who despised the tone of that sort of voice, leaned low toward the bishop. “Fuck you, Bishop,” he said in the prelate’s ear.

The old man turned red with rage. “What did he say?” he asked his wife.

“He said, ‘Fuck you, Bishop,’ ” replied his wife.

That night there was much laughter and gaiety at the Bradley table. Only Grace, who longed to be accepted, did not join in the fun. After all, she complained, she was the one who would have to meet Mrs. Fiddle at the next meeting of the symphony board.

“I always thought the Somersets were so damn rich,” I said to Constant when he told me the story of how his family came to be members of The Country Club.

“Well, they are, or were, but they just let their money sit, in that WASP way of theirs, while the smart people, like my father, who understand that money has to move, has to be invested, pull out at the right time, reinvest in something else, whether it’s real estate or the market or whatever, get richer and richer. And, after seven or ten years, the once-rich Somersets look poor by comparison.”

Every Thursday, which was known in the community as cook’s night out, most of the members and their families dined at the club, and the Bradleys took up the habit, arriving promptly at seven-thirty with their great brood of growing children. They occupied a long table with Gerald at one end and Grace at the other, and for the seventeen years of their membership, until they moved away from the city, after Winifred Utley’s death, they did not take it amiss that they were never more than nodded to by the Protestant membership, or ever addressed, even once, by their first names. They felt they were special, the most successful of their own kind.

My family, too, were of that persuasion and heritage. We, too, were children and grandchildren of immigrants who had prospered in New England; but our prosperity, although heralded in our city, was mild compared to the prosperity of the Bradleys, who, even then, fifty or sixty years ago, according to my grandfather, who admired them excessively, were known as having accumulated wealth comparable to the Rockefellers’. My father, however, was less admiring, specifically of Gerald Bradley. He said the Bradley money was tainted. He said Gerald Bradley consorted with undesirable people for financial gain. He said Gerald Bradley had a reputation in the business community for shady dealings. More and more, the older I get, I think of things my father told me, although, when he was alive, I did everything I could to avoid his presence after becoming aware, at a very early age, that I was a disappointment to him, not at all the sort of person he would have picked for an only son, had such an option been open to him. Had he lived, I would have disappointed him more, probably. I was a frequent source of displeasure, unlike all the Bradley children, who, for the most part, delighted their parents. But then, we were very different from the Bradleys. Not so rich. Not nearly so rich. We were merely well-to-do. Although highly thought
of, successful even, my father had never risen above the vice-presidential level in the Derby branch of a great insurance company in Hartford. We had Oldsmobiles, not Cadillacs. We had a maid who doubled as a cook. I was sent to good schools, but on partial scholarships. Even our sort of Catholicism was different. Our sort was underplayed. Never denied, but underplayed. Theirs was flamboyant, flaunted even. They attended Mass at St. Martin of Tours Cathedral, to which Gerald had given the rose window and the carillon, and they sat in two pews, one behind the other, always the same two front pews, as if they were reserved for the family, like opera seats on Monday nights. Grace, ostentatiously pious, regularly checked her brood and whispered instructions. “Look at the altar, Constant,” or, “Sing louder, Mary Pat.” Everyone carried rosary beads, always silver, always blessed by the Holy Father in Rome, and missals. Everyone received Communion, father, mother, and all eight children. They knew they were watched. They enjoyed being watched. “What a wonderful family,” the other parishioners said, as they stared at the ladies with their necks arched in devotion beneath their black lace mantillas, and listened to the resonant voices of the men loudly calling out the responses. Afterwards, on the church steps, they mingled a bit, speaking affably to the people they knew, or to the people they were introduced to, or to the priest who had just said the Mass. Grace, who even then shopped in Paris, always took great pains to dress in a manner that brought admiring glances from the women of the parish. Then they returned home for their Sunday breakfast, heaping platters of bacon and eggs, served by Irish maids in black uniforms and cooked by Bridey Gafferty, a large pudding of a woman who had been with the family for years and years and knew without being told how each person liked his eggs. There were cousins they rarely saw who lived in the part of the city known as Bog
Meadow, where both Grace’s and Gerald’s families had themselves once lived. The cousins, who were called Fatty and Sis Malloy, were the children of Grace’s brother, Vinny, who had never done well. Fatty, with his red brick of an Irish face, might have become a cop or a fireman if his father’s sister had not married a man who prospered so magnificently and who didn’t want a nephew in a dark-blue uniform who might one day prove to be an embarrassment to his Bradley sons. The Malloys didn’t fit in, but sometimes they were asked to breakfast on Sunday after Mass. It was a great treat for Fatty and Sis, but a chore for the rest of them, even Grace, whose niece and nephew they were. Afterwards, Constant, who could imitate Fatty to perfection, even the way he held his fork and drooled his soft-boiled eggs on his double chin, would bring the family to tears of laughter as he reenacted something his cousin had done at the breakfast table. Only Grace did not laugh.

Meals at the Bradleys’ were lively events. Conversation and arguments were encouraged on all topics: religion, politics, the arts. “Opinions. Have opinions,” I heard Gerald say over and over again. Wine was always served at dinner, and sometimes at lunch, even if there were no guests. Gerald believed in teaching his children how to drink at home. “I’ve always gone on the theory that a young man or woman is less likely to make a fool of himself later on in college if he learns to drink under his own roof in the presence of his father and mother. Am I right, Grace?”

“Yes, dear,” replied Grace, who did not really approve of the practice but who never disagreed with her husband. “But not when Cardinal’s here,” she added, shaking her head.

“Sip it. Don’t gulp it, Constant,” said Gerald.

“Not you, Kitt. You’re too young,” said Grace.

“Oh, Mother,” moaned Kitt.

“One glass only, Miss Kitt,” said Gerald.

With such a large family, there were frequent birthdays, and graduations, and anniversaries, and all were observed with toasts, each family member rising in turn to toast the honored person. It was conceded that Constant gave the best toasts in the family. “He’s so good on his feet,” Grace said every time.

Constant Bradley, my friend, was a spectacular young man in every way. He seemed almost too good to be true. His name, his looks, his trim six-foot-two athletic frame, strained reality. He possessed a refinement of face that his parents did not have, and his vocal pattern was less strident than that of his parents and older siblings. His bearing, wit, and style caused much comment, especially among the young ladies at the various boarding schools in Connecticut and Massachusetts who had heard of the handsome young heir to the Bradley fortune. He had a facility for sports, especially the kind thought of as gentlemen’s sports: tennis, golf, squash, lacrosse, and sailing. In spite of the fact that his family’s wealth was of only two generations’ standing, he had acquired all the outward manifestations of privilege and bore them with the not-unattractive arrogance of a patrician. Perhaps, behind his splendid looks, there was a hint of menace, but I would not have seen it then or, if I did, I would have thought it an enhancement. All the daughters of the same Protestant families who abhorred the Bradleys were mad about Constant. His blond good looks left debutantes across the ballrooms of every country club where he danced gasping with desire, especially young Louise Somerset, Leverett Somerset’s daughter, who was called Weegie. Any one of them would have defied her family if Constant had been inclined toward them, but Constant, even then, was attracted to the forbidden fruit, and the forbidden fruit was Weegie Somerset,
who was to be, in two years’ time, the prettiest debutante of her season and the social catch of the city.

They fascinated each other from the time they met in Mrs. Winship’s dancing classes, when they were thirteen. He went to her school for her dances, and she went to his school for his. He was asked to her parties at her house, where his family had never been asked, and where the only things Irish or Catholic were the maids, in their black silk uniforms and white starched caps and aprons, who beamed at him in approval, knowing that he was the son of Gerald and Grace Bradley.