Cold Spring Harbor (18 page)

“Charles?” Grace Shepard said at lunch one day. “I suppose I might as well go and meet Mrs. Drake this afternoon, if you’re still determined to take me there.”

And her statement sounded so deceptively casual that he didn’t trust it at first. He tried to look as though he were thinking it over; then he said “Well, as long as you’re willing, dear, I can just as easily arrange it for tomorrow, or for sometime over the weekend; wouldn’t that be better?”

“No, let’s do it today,” she said, “and get it over with.”

She had ignored her breakfast and only picked at her lunch, while smoking heavily all morning; that was one way he could tell she’d had to fortify herself before making her decision, and now the early hours of the afternoon would require her to fortify herself still further.

But it was almost the first of August now; he had long grown tired of his own argument, and he knew he’d better take advantage of her rare social bravery while it lasted.

He helped her get settled on the sun porch again—“Now, then; why don’t you just think about the nice clothes you’re going to wear this afternoon, and I’ll come and get you in plenty of time to go upstairs and change”—then, after the table was cleared and the dishes scraped and stacked for washing, he called Gloria Drake and told her they’d be over sometime after four.

He found other things to do in the kitchen when the dishes were done—you could always find work in a kitchen if you wanted it to work for you. Once he nipped into the dining room and checked the liquor supply in the sideboard, just to see if he’d made the right assumption about all that fortifying, and he had. A quart of bourbon, placed here last night with its seal still unbroken, was now less than half full. Well, it might be a tricky afternoon, but there was no getting out of it now.

In another section of Cold Spring Harbor, a world away, Harriet Talmage was seriously vexed with her grandson for what seemed the first time in years. He was pacing back and forth in front of her chair and making wide, theatrical gestures with his arms as if she were impossible to reason with, while it seemed increasingly clear to her that he was the one beyond reason.

“Well, because I don’t especially
like
the woman, Gerard, that’s why,” she said. “I found her rather tiresome that day, as I must surely have told you at the time, and I saw no point in having any further—any further connection with her.”

“But isn’t that kind of rude, though? Just dumping a person that way?”

“I don’t see any element of rudeness at all,” she told him. “I was perfectly pleasant when she asked us over there last month, or whenever it was; I simply said I’d made other plans for the afternoon but that I hoped we’d keep in touch.”

“So? Won’t this just be keeping in touch? Dropping in for an hour or two? Where’s the harm in that?”

“Well, it’s hardly a question of ‘harm,’ Gerard. And I can’t imagine why you’re per
si
sting in this argument. If it’s so terribly important to see the Drake boy, why can’t you simply ride over there on your bicycle?”

“Because it’ll be
nicer
this way, is all, don’t you see? Like the time they came here? Going there alone would be too obvious.”

And his saying “too obvious” gave it all away. He was still at an age when an unpopular boy might need to pursue other boys as craftily as if they were girls, and his long unhappiness at school must have taught him, harshly, that being too obvious was the worst mistake you could make. It was almost enough to break her heart.

Very seldom, in raising her daughter’s only child, had Harriet felt any real confidence that she was doing it well—there had been so many unexpected difficulties and so many hasty settlings for the easiest way. Now that he’d become a courteous deep-voiced adolescent she often felt she could take some pride in her earlier judgments after all, but at moments like this she knew better.

And in a few more years, when he’d begin to fall in love with girls, he would probably bring far too much emotional intensity to every new attachment. He’d be the kind of boy who could frighten a girl with unwarranted possessiveness, the kind of boy who would say things like “How do you
know
you don’t love me?” And if no girl could bear him very long he might slip down among less and less desirable girls until he’d settle for some dim little girl of the wrong kind
and possibly the wrong class as well; then he might easily spend his life as one of those slack, amiable, underdeveloped men that everyone feels sorry for.

Well, but even so, the drifting pattern of the way he was could scarcely be resolved in this one insecure afternoon: his next important lesson in manliness would have to wait.

“Oh, well, dear,” she said at last, “if it really means that much to you, of course we’ll go together. Why don’t you tell Ralph to have the car ready at four thirty, then.”

Charles’s phone call hadn’t given Gloria enough time to do very much about straightening up the living room, so she’d chosen to attend to her clothes and her hair instead. Then from a window, peering through hanging foliage that gave her only a partial view of the driveway, she saw the Shepards’ cab arrive. She saw Charles get out and turn back to help a slow, surprisingly bulky woman settle one foot and then the other on the ground. When they began walking toward the house together, bending under low branches, Gloria couldn’t suppress a tremor of satisfaction at how fat Grace was, but at closer range the afternoon light came to play on Grace’s face and it was lovely. Anyone could see now where Evan’s good looks had come from.

“Well, at last,” Gloria said. “How awfully nice to meet you at last, Grace.” She wondered if she ought to reach out and give her a kiss—wouldn’t that be appropriate, under the circumstances?—but an almost imperceptible flinching in Grace’s smile held her back, so she moved to the liquor table and busied herself there, talking steadily.

“… And I’m afraid everything’s sort of disorderly here today; we’ve been trying to rearrange the furniture in different ways but we haven’t decided on anything definite yet, as you can see.…”

But at least Phil was here, being polite in his best private-school
manner, making a good impression, and Rachel would be coming downstairs at any minute. It was always gratifying for Gloria, in times of social tension, to know that her children were presentable; she was reminded now of that first day in New York when she might have talked herself weak and sick in her fascination with the Shepard men, trying and trying to hold their interest, if the children hadn’t come home just in time to save her.

“… Oh, Costello’s, of course,” Grace was saying. “And the old Island Palace, a little farther out. Do you know the Palace?”

“No, I’m afraid I—”

Then Rachel came in, seeming to parade her pregnancy in a fresh maternity dress, and said “Oh, Grace!” with an enthusiasm that struck Gloria as excessive until she realized Rachel had probably come to be on affectionate terms with her during the leisurely weekends of her engagement.

“You look wonderful, dear,” Grace said. “You look like the very picture of a healthy, happy, child-carrying girl.”

“Well, thank you—and I
hope
I’m healthy; I know I’ve never been happier.”

It seemed to Gloria that she’d never heard quite such a silly claim to personal well-being except in Academy Award ceremonies on the radio, and it made her sullen with envy and malice. It reminded her of Curtis Drake at his most vapid; but then, Rachel had always been her father’s child.

“Oh, that’s so good,” Grace was saying, and she turned to Charles for confirmation. “Isn’t it good when a wife can say a thing like that?”

He agreed that it was, and he even said it was enough to make any husband proud, but he was watching her closely now with special attention to the brilliance of her eyes. This was the high-hearted, keyed-up, “delightful” phase of her drunkenness: it would begin to dwindle soon, but there’d
still be time to get her out of here and home before she sank.

“Do you know, Rachel,” Grace went on, “from the moment Evan brought you out to the house that first time I knew you were the right girl for him. You’ll always be the right girl.”

And Rachel might have let that compliment stand, but this was evidently a day for extravagant feelings. “Well,” she said, “I certainly hope you know how much I’ve come to love you both.”

It seemed to Gloria now that these three strangers were trying to cut her off and shut her out; they wanted to make her feel alone in the world, and they might as well have been trying to kill her. But she could still fight for her life in the only way she knew: she started talking again.

“Grace?” she said, but the babble of their self-congratulating voices was so solid a barrier that she had to say it twice before she could break in. “Grace? Has Charles ever told you how we all met, back in the city? And the funny, wonderful way we—”

“Oh, the car breaking down,” Grace Shepard said. “Yes, that’s a marvelous story. It’s funny, though, you know; people talk about ‘chance meetings’ but there’s really no such thing because
every
meeting is a matter of chance, isn’t that true? Especially between a boy and a girl? Even the most carefully planned, carefully arranged meeting you can imagine—the way Charles and I met, for example. I was great friends then with another girl who told me I would absolutely have to come out to a dance at Fort Devens because there was a boy there she knew I was going to love. So I went—not even
wanting
to go, especially, because I was practically engaged to another boy at the time—and there he was, this perfect dream of a young lieutenant, and I loved him at once and I’ve never been sorry in all these years.”

“Yes, well, that’s—lovely,” Gloria said. “That’s really wonderful.” But all she knew for certain, looking into this glowing, aging face, was that she wished Grace Shepard were dead.

“What’s this?” Rachel cried. “There’s this big—this big limousine kind of car in the driveway.”

Phil went quickly to the window and then turned on his mother. “Did you invite
them
today?”

“No, I didn’t,” she said in all innocence, as though he ought to know she wouldn’t do a thing like that without consulting him, but then she said “Still, I think it’s
nice
to have the kind of house where people feel free to drop in any time, don’t you?” And she felt a little frightened but essentially glad. Nobody in this family group would make mistakes of the kind that Harriet Talmage might take to heart; and if Harriet Talmage was surprised at first to find herself in this shabby room, with its insulation-board walls, it wouldn’t be long before she discovered what superior people they all were.

“Well, Harriet T
al
mage,” she said in the doorway. “How very nice to see you. And Flash. Do come and join us. I can’t offer you tea, I’m afraid, because we’ve all been having a drink. This is my daughter Rachel; this is her mother-in-law, Mrs. Shepard, and Captain Shepard.”

“Well, we were passing by,” Harriet explained, “and Gerard suggested we might drop in for a few minutes.… Oh, yes, thanks so much; a little scotch, if you have it.”

Phil sprang to pluck the cat and a newspaper out of the chair she was about to sit down in, but that was the only awkward moment of the visit so far: Mrs. Talmage seemed accustomed to finding her ease almost anywhere.

“So how’ve you been, Phil?” Flash said quietly.

“Oh, not bad. How about you?”

“Good.”

It couldn’t have been easy for Ferris to arrange this reunion,
and it was just like Ferris to assume that bringing the old lady along would give it more weight. Was Phil now supposed to say “Show you my room” and take Ferris upstairs? What kind of horseshit was this?

“Working hard?” Flash asked him.

“Well, putting in the hours, anyway. And the money’s been nice.”

“Good. Except I don’t see any—”

“Don’t see any what?”

“Well, never mind.”

It seemed to Phil that he would never understand how he’d come to be standing here with one of the worst outcasts of the Irving School, each of them nursing a bottle of Coke, while an ill-assorted company of grownups pretended to enjoy themselves.

“How long were you in the navy, Captain?” Mrs. Talmage inquired.

And Charles’s blushing, blinking embarrassment lasted only a second before he said “Well, no, I’m afraid that’s a misunderstanding on Mrs. Drake’s part. I was in the army, you see, and I’ve never—cultivated the term ‘captain’ in civilian life.”

“Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, most of the men in my family were naval officers. My father and grandfather were both rear admirals, and my husband retired as a full commander. He was on active duty for twenty-five years—much to my displeasure, I’m afraid. I can remember telling people he cared more about the navy than he cared about me, though even now I’d prefer to believe that was only a joke. Mostly a joke, in any case.”

“Oh, that’s charming,” Grace Shepard said, with a fuzziness in her voice that suggested she was beginning to fade. Charles risked another look at her eyes, and there was the proof of it: they were still bright but were losing their life; she could still recognize a charming remark but in a few
more minutes she wouldn’t hear a shout. One good thing, though, was that she was seated in a deep old armchair with her head against the back of it: she might subside and pass out in all that upholstery without anyone’s having to notice until the time came to rouse her for the taxi ride home—and by then, with luck, Mrs. Talmage would be gone.