Cold Spring Harbor (19 page)

“Philly?” Gloria called. “Why don’t you take Flash out in the yard?” And she explained to Mrs. Talmage that the yard was really the nicest thing about this funny old damp house.

Phil had felt all summer that even if the yard could be purged of its rocks and humps and thistles, there would still be far too many years’ worth of dead leaves in all directions for it ever to be nice. He had made a few stabs at cleaning up parts of it with the landlord’s rake and lawnmower, but the tines of the rake kept getting ensnared in long, wet, weak strands of grass that made the sliding lawnmower almost useless.

Still, Flash Ferris apparently found it a good-enough setting for a conversational stroll. He seemed to know just what he wanted to say, and if the words were a little more nervous-sounding than he’d planned, their substance was clear and straightforward.

He said he didn’t see any reason why Phil couldn’t quit the parking lot and come on out for bike rides again. Wouldn’t it be a shame to waste the last few weeks of their vacation? “And frankly,” he concluded, “I haven’t even been getting out of the house much any more. I mean it isn’t any fun any more to go for rides alone.”

Phil knew at once how easy it would be to demolish the argument with a quiet little snort of disdainful laughter, but that was the trouble: it would be too easy, considering how openly Flash had asked for it—and considering too that the poor bastard had so little time left to brace himself, with companionship, for his new start at Deerfield. Plainly, the
better thing would be to reply with a carefully reasoned argument of his own.

“Well, but the point is I can’t do that, Flash,” he began, “because I’ll need all the money I can make between now and September. I’ve got to buy a new tweed jacket—those things cost more than you might think, if you go to a decent store. And I need a lot of other stuff too: new pants, new shirts, new shoes …”

He was lying about all this—earlier in the summer his father had agreed to buy him the jacket and at least one new pair of flannel pants, if the shirts and shoes could wait until Christmas vacation—but the lies seemed well worth telling for Flash Ferris’s sake. “And then if there’s anything left over,” he went on, “I’ll need it for spending money. Last year I think I must’ve been the only kid in school that didn’t have an allowance from home.”

There was such a long silence then, as they paced the ruined yard, that Phil began to hope he’d said enough; but he hadn’t.

“Okay,” Flash said at last, “so how about this: I’ll ask my grandmother to let you have two hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars.”

And Phil was disgusted. The hell with trying to be nice. “Ah, Ferris,” he said, “you’re hopeless. Look, I’m gonna forget you said that, okay? Because it’s just so dumb it’s enough to make me puke. But I wanna tell ya something: if you go around propositioning people that way, at Deerfield or anywhere else, God help your ass.”

“O
kay,
” Flash said in a wretchedly quiet voice. “O
kay;
o
kay.
”

Phil was a little sorry for his outburst, if not quite sorry enough to take more than a glance at Flash’s mortified face. He said curtly that he’d better go back inside and get ready for work now, and that was another lie because he still had hours to kill. But then, just before they reached the house,
he gave Flash a qualified smile and a slow cuff on the shoulder, rubbing the knuckles in hard to acknowledge how foolish the quarrel had been, and Flash looked grateful and forgiving.

“… Well, this was back when we lived in Pelham,” Gloria was saying in one of her long, drink-thickened monologues. “Personally I would never’ve dreamed of moving to a barren little middle-class town like Pelham and I’ve had nightmares about it ever since, but the children’s father happened to find a house for us there that year, you see, when we had nowhere else to go, so there we were. And I don’t think Rachel really minded it—she’s always been the most adaptable member of the family—but Phil seemed to hate the environment there as much as I did. I mean for one thing I was the only divorced woman for miles around and the neighbors were very ‘kind’ to me about it, if you can imagine anything worse, and Phil could sense all that …”

It was an anecdote Phil had often heard before, intended to show what a precocious little fellow he’d been at eight or nine, but he was fairly sure he could sidle around the party and get upstairs before she came to the climax of it.

“
Any
way, I’ll never forget our Phil at that immaculate Pelham dinner table. He looked up at our host and said ‘Is insurance all you ever talk about, Mr. Blanding?’ ”

But whatever hesitant chuckles she had won around the room were drowned in the deep and heavy rhythms of her own laughter.

Harriet Talmage was aware that Gerard had come to hover near the arm of her chair as a way of saying he was ready to go home, and she wished he were still small enough to be shooed away. She didn’t feel at all like leaving yet, and probably wouldn’t for quite a while, so it was a relief when he found a chair for himself against the wall.

She had taken a liking to this melancholy army man, with
his quiet wit and his furtive glances of hoping she hadn’t yet noticed how stiff with alcohol his wife had grown. If it weren’t for the wife—and perhaps the wife wasn’t always this way—Harriet felt sure he would fit in admirably with her own small circle of friends.

“Where were you stationed in the service?” she asked him. “Were you overseas?”

“Well, only for a few minutes, so to speak, and that was very long ago. No, I spent most of my army years here in the States, and mostly in very boring—”

Rachel Shepard was suddenly up and striding for the kitchen, almost ready to cry, and she didn’t care if everyone thought she was rude.

She had always despised her mother’s Pelham stories because Pelham was where she’d met the only two dear friends of her life, Susan Blanding and Debbie Shields. They’d been as close as any three girls can be—sharing all each other’s secrets, often “staying over” at one another’s houses to try new hair styles, to talk far into the night and giggle helplessly about boys.

When Rachel left Pelham they all agreed it wasn’t necessarily a tragedy, because they could write eagerly awaited letters of many pages apiece, and for a while they all kept that promise. Still, nothing as fragile as a three-way friendship can survive long spaces of time and absence, and Rachel hadn’t heard from Susan or Debbie in years. She couldn’t say what had become of them now, except that they’d both probably gone away to college somewhere.

Last winter she had written careful letters to each of them, addressed to their parents’ homes, saying she was married to a wonderful man and expecting her first child; but she hadn’t really expected either girl to reply, and neither of them did.

She had meant only to hide in the kitchen now until her mother’s awful little gathering was over, but soon, impelled
by a stronger and purer sense of rebellion than she’d ever known before, she left the house and started walking firmly toward the road.

She thought she had never seen an uglier, more brutal-looking man than the chauffeur who rested his rump against one fender of Mrs. Talmage’s limousine. He watched her approach as if this were the first time he’d ever seen a pregnant woman; worse, his lewd stare seemed to be calculating how it might be to have her for himself. In order to keep her footing secure on the driveway, rather than risk a slip in the masses of dead leaves, she had to turn sideways and edge past him that way, facing him—this was horrible—before she could turn toward the road again and keep walking. She glanced back once to see if he was still watching her, and he was, and she trembled as if from a narrow escape. Down at the roadside she took cover behind a clump of evergreen bushes where the big tin mailbox stood (it was hardly ever used except for bills, because nobody could be expected to write letters to any member of this false, crazy family), but she didn’t have to wait there more than a minute or two before Evan’s car came along and slowed down for the turn. She took several clumsy steps into the road and waved him urgently to a stop with both hands, and he looked puzzled.

“Darling, I came to get you here because I can’t bear to let you go into the house tonight, and I’m not going back there either. Listen—” The rest of her message was so rushed and jumbled she was afraid he’d tell her she wasn’t making sense, but all he said was “Get in.”

Then later, when he’d calmed her down with a gin and lime at an inexpensive restaurant they knew on Route Nine, she began to speak slowly and unemphatically enough for anyone’s understanding.

“… Because she really is crazy, Evan; that’s what I’ve come to recognize. And I don’t mean ‘crazy’ in any harmless
or funny way, I mean out of her mind. Divorced from reality. Off in some other world of her own. Oh, I’ll probably go on ‘loving’ her, whatever she is, but I can’t
live
with her any more—that’s the thing. So look.” And Rachel leaned across the table to take his hand. “Whether it’s fair to her or not, I think we’ve got to get out of that rotten old house as soon as we possibly can.
That’s
what I wanted to tell you.”

With his bright eyes narrowed in a smile of love, Evan raised his drink as if to propose a toast. He said he was very, very glad to hear her say all that. He said it was the best news he’d had in years; and now he had some pretty interesting news of his own.

Did she remember his mentioning Frank Brogan, at the plant? The guy who’d lent them the apartment in Jackson Heights that weekend, before they were married? Well, Frank would be getting drafted any time now—he didn’t know how soon, because all the draft board could tell him was “any time”—and he’d offered to turn the place over to Evan as soon as he’d cleared out. Wouldn’t that be a break?

“Because I mean a lot of guys going into the service are subletting their places for terrific profits, but Frank doesn’t want to mess with any of that: we’d have the same rent he’s been paying there for years. Oh, and I know you didn’t much like the looks of it, dear, but we could change all that to suit ourselves—fix it up any way you want.”

She agreed that getting Frank Brogan’s apartment would be fine, though her memories of it didn’t kindle much enthusiasm: a stark, threadbare, masculine place where she’d spent the whole weekend on the verge of hysteria, afraid of losing Evan forever if she couldn’t overcome her fear of sex. Still, it was only an “any time” kind of thing; something better might easily turn up first.

When their dinner arrived—plates of lukewarm filet of sole with boiled potatoes—she settled down to tell him
more about this galvanizing afternoon. “… Oh, and your mother’s pickled, Evan. I mean I’ve seen her drunk before, but this is different: she’s embalmed. It’s like having to look at a corpse in an armchair. And your father can’t even begin to get her home, you see, until this terrible old millionaire lady leaves—and the millionaire lady keeps staying and staying, talking and lapping up the booze. She must be seventy-five, but I think she’s got as much of a yen for your father as my mother’s ever had. Oh, and you can see my mother sensing the competition, too, rising to the—wait. Excuse me a sec.”

Rachel went off to the ladies’ room, holding the seat of her dress bunched oddly in one hand. She was gone a long time, and when she came back to her chair she looked very pale.

“Darling?” she said. “Listen: don’t get scared, but I think I’m starting to have the baby right here in the restaurant. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

A son was born to them at Huntington General Hospital, early the next morning. He was healthy and perfectly formed, and Rachel had what her doctor called an easy time of it, considering the birth was at least two weeks premature.

On Rachel’s instructions (“I don’t care if my mother
ever
finds out”) Evan made the first phone call of the day to Curtis Drake, who said he hoped to be at the hospital by nine o’clock.

Then he called his own father, and he could tell at once that things weren’t going smoothly at home.

“Well, that’s—splendid news, Evan. I’ll give Gloria a call, then, and I’ll stop by her place and bring her on over there. That probably won’t be until sometime sort of later in the
morning, though, because there are still quite a few things to be done here. Your mother had a difficult night, you see, and she isn’t feeling at all well.”

Gloria wasn’t feeling well either, though she was fairly sure she’d managed to convey the appropriate sentiments of joy on the telephone.

Years ago, and especially during Prohibition, having a hangover could be almost as much of an adventure as drinking itself: you could waste a whole day in absent-minded idleness, laughing easily and often with whoever you’d gotten drunk with the night before, mistrustfully sampling various kitchen “remedies” until the time came to agree, with all your heart, that a little hair of the dog might be the best thing after all.

Age and loneliness had spoiled all that. The only advantage now was that you knew what the best thing was from the start and didn’t hesitate to make use of it. On any other bad morning she would have poured a decent amount of whiskey into a bedside glass, cut it with water from the bathroom tap, and swallowed it all before even trying to get dressed; but this would have to be a day of decorum. Clothes and cosmetics came first; then she went downstairs and made coffee, surprised at her own skill and patience, and she was able to force down nearly a cup of it before taking her medicine like a lady, with ice.