A Season in Purgatory (6 page)

I found that, in writing in another person’s name, as if I
were
Constant Bradley, I possessed a courage that I did not ordinarily possess when writing in my own name. All my timidity vanished. My dead father had found me flawed and imperfect, and I had accepted his judgment; but writing as Constant I became sure of myself and experienced true joy in the writing process. I wrote about Constant’s grandfather, as if he were mine. And his father and mother. I wrote about being a member of a large Catholic family. I stressed the importance of family, something I had never felt in my own life. I wrote about the obligation of the wealthy to help others who were less fortunate. I wrote about the significance of early education, particularly an education at Milford, in preparing Catholic boys to enter the Ivy League colleges and to carry with them the Catholic values learned at school. I wrote about leadership. I wrote about a future public life that would embody the values that I had learned at Milford. All these things would have sounded preposterous coming from my lips, but not from the lips of Constant Bradley.

I mailed the twenty double-spaced typed pages to Gerald Bradley at an office he kept in New York. As per his instructions,
there was no covering letter. I waited but heard nothing in reply. A week went by. Then two. Finally a telephone call came to me at my aunt’s house. It was from Gerald. He invited me to come to spend the Labor Day weekend at the seashore in Rhode Island. He said the whole family would be there. There was to be a celebratory dinner in honor of Constant. I waited for him to say something about the paper that I had written, but he said nothing.

“What is the reason for Constant’s celebration?” I asked.

“He is returning to Milford,” replied Gerald. “The cardinal has arranged everything.”

That night Aunt Gert told me that she had received the tuition money for me to return to Milford for my sixth-form year. She told me that she had also received a donation of five thousand dollars for the Maryknoll Fathers. She was alternately joyful and perplexed.

“Why would Mr. Bradley do that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Your father didn’t like him,” she said. “He said he mixed with disreputable people.”

“I don’t believe you’re going to turn down the five thousand dollars for the Maryknoll Fathers, are you, Aunt Gert?”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “They need the money so badly. Bishop McGurkin will be so pleased.”

“So Gerald Bradley can’t be all bad, can he?”

“There are people who think that money buys everything. I think Mr. Bradley is one of those.”

“But you’re not going to turn down his money?”

“Be careful, Harrison. That’s all I ask. Their kind of life, it’s very dangerous to be around those people when you don’t have their kind of money.”

* * *

Their cottage at Watch Hill was a huge shingled structure with fourteen bedrooms and verandas across the front and sides looking out to the ocean and the golf course. Even though it was only rented for the season, Mrs. Steers, the decorator, had come from New York to pull it together for them. It was Mrs. Steers who knew of the house and told Gerald about it. She had summered in Watch Hill as a child and knew everyone there. It was Mrs. Steers, forty, handsome, twice divorced, who told Gerald all the things he wanted to know so that his children would grow up familiar with things he had never heard of when he was their age. From her he learned about sheets and towels that came from Paris, which people who knew about such things recognized at once without being told they came from Paris, and nothing would do for his house from that moment but sheets and towels from Paris with scalloped edges and floral terry cloth.

“Do you have any idea how expensive they are?” gasped Grace, on the telephone from Paris, where she was ordering her new clothes.

“I can afford them,” replied Gerald. He spoke such lines authoritatively, even to Grace. What he wanted was to be done, no further questioning, no further comments.

Chintz slipcovers were made for the sofas and chairs. Green-and-white-striped awnings shaded the verandas, and the wicker furniture was painted white. Pink geraniums were planted in white painted boxes all along the verandas, and an entire summer garden was planted. Everything was under the supervision of Sally Steers. It was in Watch Hill that the usually compliant Grace began to complain. She thought all the decorating was too much of an extravagance for so short a time, but Gerald insisted. Next year he might buy it, he said.

“But don’t you like your garden?” asked Gerald.

“Blue, blue, blue, blue, and I hate blue flowers,” said
Grace. “I wanted roses, not forget-me-nots and delphiniums.”

Gerald understood that her complaints had nothing to do with forget-me-nots and delphiniums.

At the entrance to the house, Gerald’s new maroon Rolls-Royce was parked. Like the house in Scarborough Hill, the seashore cottage became a house to be stared at and pointed out by drivers-by, but, like the house at home, only the golf pros and tennis instructors hired by Gerald to teach his children came to lunch. Even with Mrs. Steers’s introductions, the Bradleys remained outsiders.

Gerald was not a weekend father, up from the city on Friday nights and returning to the city on Monday mornings. He was there for long periods, doing his business on the telephone. While watching his children swimming in the pool, he called Dom Belcanto, the singer, in Hollywood, who was thought to have underworld connections. And Senator Zwick, and Charles Arbelli, the editor of the
World
, and Terrence Noonan, the editor of the
Sentinel
. Sometimes men came to see him. Some were introduced to his wife and children. Some weren’t. A man named Johnny Fuselli came and went from time to time, meeting behind a closed door in a downstairs room that Gerald used as an office. He drove a bright red car. He was never introduced. He was never asked to lunch, but he always took a swim in the ocean, and we were impressed with his powerful strokes.

“He’s quite a swimmer, isn’t he? I believe he had Olympic aspirations once, but something went wrong. He probably flunked a urine test at one of the trials,” said Gerald to Jerry. “Moe Dailitz told me the story, but I can’t quite remember.”

“A little cocaine in the bloodstream perhaps?” suggested Jerry.

“Something like that. So he went to Vegas and Atlantic
City instead,” said Gerald, chuckling over his joke. “The Olympics’ loss is our gain.”

I supposed Mr. Fuselli was one of the disreputable people Aunt Gert had mentioned to me. Maureen, the elder sister, said he was handsome in a cheap sort of way. She told her mother that all the maids had crushes on him.

“Who’s Mr. Fuselli?” I asked Constant.

“One of Pa’s lieutenants, I suppose,” he replied. He elaborated no further. I did not persist in questioning. It was Kitt who enjoyed chatting about the people who came and went in her father’s life. Mr. Crotty, she said, was in cement. Mr. McSweeney in tugboats. Mr. O’Malley in taxicabs. And Johnny Fuselli in crime, she said, breaking out into gales of laughter. “He used to have something to do with slot machines in New Jersey.”

“Shut up, Kitt,” said Constant. “You talk too much.”

Gerald wanted his children to excel. He sat by the court and watched them play or stood on the green and watched them tee off, barking out instructions. “You should have used your backhand on that shot, Constant,” he called out. “And returned it to the other side of the court, where Des couldn’t reach it.”

“You’re right,” said Constant. He pulled up the front of his Lacoste shirt to wipe the sweat off his face. Weegie Somerset, who loved him then, watched from the sidelines, looking longingly at his exposed stomach and chest.

Gerald always wore a large straw hat to protect his white skin from the strong rays of the sun. Even with protection, his skin turned red with the minimum of exposure, and lotions were always being applied. He sat under an umbrella and removed his terry cloth robe only to go into the pool to swim his forty laps, dropping it at the edge of the pool so that he could put it on again instantly as he was walking up the steps to leave the pool. Grace came to the
pool only after the sun had gone down. On my first day there, the afternoon of the celebration in honor of Constant, I was lying on a lounge chair by the pool, reading
Gatsby
, and I heard the following conversation between Gerald and Mrs. Steers, who seemed unaware of my presence.

“You’re not a popular man, Gerald,” said Mrs. Steers. “You have no close friends. Haven’t you noticed that? There are many people who are afraid of you, who will invite you to their house for dinner for that reason, but they don’t like you. You’re always on the telephone, but no one calls you up just to chat, No one invites you to play tennis. Do you think your children notice those things?”

“I have plenty of people to play tennis with,” replied Gerald.

“Yes. People you pay. Why keep bucking your head against the wall, Gerald? The old guard, what Cora Mandell calls the good families, are never going to accept you, no matter how much money you have, no matter how big your house is, no matter how many sets of Porthault sheets are on your beds.”

“Give me time.”

“It won’t happen, Gerald, believe me. You’re an outsider. You always will be. Oh, sure, they’ll take your contributions for the symphony. They’ll let you pay for the repairs to The Country Club after the hurricane damage. They’ll even have you to dinner once a year. But when your son wants to marry one of their daughters, you’ll see what they really think about you. To them, you’re a mick. You’re the butcher’s son who still smells of raw meat, and nothing you ever do is going to change that.”

Gerald winced. His face turned scarlet.

“I know, Gerald. That’s the world I grew up in,” she said.

“So what do I do?” he asked.

“Get out of there. You are simply in a wrong location.”

“I can’t.”

“For part of the year you can. There’s Florida. There’s California. You can buy a big house in Palm Beach, or a big house in Beverly Hills, and make a splash there. Less provincial. Your kids will be assimilated in a way that they’ll never be here.”

“What about home?”

“Use it for your country seat. Keep it up. Keep the gardeners. Keep the butler. Visit it a few times a year. It will be a reminder of who you are and what they’re missing. Because, by that time, they’ll be reading about you and your kids.”

“The butler couldn’t take care of that place.”

“That is a tidbit problem. What’s that cousin of yours? Sis Malloy? The one who knows where all the furniture goes. Move her in. Put her in charge of the house.”

“Grace will never want to leave.”

“Buy the new house first. Then tell her about it.”

“She won’t want to leave Cardinal.”

“Cardinals are a dime a dozen.”

“No, they aren’t.”

“Then Cardinal will come to visit.”

Mrs. Steers flew back to New York that afternoon. Cora Mandell, in whose firm she worked, was doing up a house in Southampton and said she needed her help.
Immediately
. Cora knew what was going on and didn’t like it. It was she who had first been called in to do up the Bradleys’ brand-new Tudor house, and then, because she was so busy, she had turned it over to Sally Steers to do the follow-up work. “Actually,” Cora said, “they’re my favorite upstarts. One step beyond antimacassars, but Grace is really quite nice, when you get used to all that talk about novenas and stations of
the cross and holy days of obligation. She’s avid, terribly well meaning, very religious, not very bright, but I like her immensely. But be careful of him, Sally. Gerald Bradley has wandering hands. You’ll feel his hand on your knee, and higher, under the tablecloth, at the same time he’s talking with Cardinal Sullivan on the other side about Church matters.”

“I know how to handle that,” said Sally.

“I hope so. He is irresistibly common, not unattractive in an Irish sort of way, and wildly rich. He is, you will discover, a giver of mink coats from Revillon Frères.”

In the beginning, the Bradleys were so unused to the splendors of furniture and decoration with which Cora Mandell had surrounded them that when pieces or objects were moved about in the course of family life, their correct positions in the rooms could never be found exactly. Only Sis Malloy, the cousin, could remember, but no one wanted to ask Sis. Twice Mrs. Mandell returned to the house to rearrange things and restore her perfect balance. “Symmetry, Mrs. Bradley,” she said. “Always remember symmetry.” On her second visit, she brought Sally Steers with her to photograph each room, as well as each tabletop, and the photographs were used for reference should things be moved out of place again. Mrs. Steers placed discreet pieces of tape on console tables and mantelpieces to show exactly where the export china plates were to be placed on stands. Often she stayed to lunch.

“Let me see, let me see, how should I do this?” said Grace. “You here, Des, next to me, and you, Constant, sit by Maureen, and Father Daly, on my right, and Mrs. Steers, next to Father, and Gerald on the other side of Mrs. Steers. And Mary Pat next to Daddy.”

“You do that so well, Mrs. Bradley,” said Sally Steers. “It takes me forever, and I always end up with a husband
and wife sitting next to each other, or two people who hate each other.”

“Do your miracle with the lobster, Bridey. You know how Mr. Bradley adores your thermidor. Or is it your Newburg? I never can remember, but you know, Bridey,” said Grace. That night the family gathered for a festive evening with toasts and speeches to Constant. Nice old Irish maids in summer pink uniforms passed cheese puffs before dinner. There were eighteen in the group. The men dressed in blazers and white trousers, and the women in linen dresses. The tennis pro was there. The golf pro was there. Some business friends of Gerald’s from Boston. A convent friend of Maureen’s who was being looked over as a possible wife for one of the older brothers. And Weegie Somerset, who was staying with the Utleys down the beach.

“Oh, take off your jackets. Do. Do. It’s frightfully hot, and the air conditioners are not really working well,” said Grace, who enjoyed her role as hostess. “No, no, don’t you talk, you two. I’ve seated you next to each other at dinner.” After a whispered conversation with Bridey, who appeared on the veranda, Grace moved from group to group and with a timorous wave of her hand toward the dining room gave the signal that dinner would be served.