Eagle Eye (7 page)

“How’d it work out down there? With Maeve?”

“So-so. No, not good, why should I lie to you? She looked beautiful, absolutely. Your mother’s still a—” His father smeared two fingers over an eye and stretched his mouth. “But it doesn’t seem to help. Sit down, boy. Sit down.”

He sat on a satin bergère, on the edge.

Through his father’s account, he saw the whole scene: the reception line, the photographer’s fireworks.

“She hostessed it all just fine, just as if she hadn’t walked in cold on the arrangements, but had done it all herself. Cool she was, like born to it. And I thought, now I’ve got it for her, it’s all turned out right. She even posed with Mrs. Blum.”

His father’s secretary, from way back when. Whom Maeve had displaced. Who had again taken Maeve’s place. What a continuity, now that one thought of it.

“Then some confounded girl reporter—big tall girl with a shiv in her purse instead of a pen—asked her if she hadn’t been my secretary, once. And I could see it begin to fall apart.” His father leaned into one of the mirrors as if he was seeing it there. “Once again.” Buddy smoothed his shave, clenched a fist and rested his chin on it, wide-eyeing himself in the glass—there was a picture of him in that posture as a newsboy, in knickers and shouldersack. “I shouldn’t have started that secretary joke with her, years ago. When a person hurts, and you keep rubbing it in—maybe it all started with that secretary joke.”

“I don’t buy that.”

“You don’t? Bunty, wanna know something? Neither do I. But the psychiatrist does.”

“She going to one?”

“No. Mine.”

“You? What do you need a—”

“Thanks, pal. Because she wouldn’t. Better than nothing, they said. She’s in a bad state of equilibrium.”

He hung back, then. Why was his father hanging back? “Will I find her—changed?”

“No, son.” His father said it mildly. “Just the same.” He got up suddenly. “Say Bunt, take a look through here.”

His father was applying his left eye to what looked like a metal-rimmed hole in one of the mirrors.

“What is it?”

“No secrets, no more secrets.” Buddy applied the other eye to the hole. “Came with the house. A spyglass. From room-to-room. The public ones. First I thought I’d block them off; now I can’t do without. Who’s ever at the party I wanna bypass, I can. Right up to my room. Take a look.”

He saw a room in reverse opera-glass scale, at first only the floor. The device had a swivel, and a lens adjuster, very clever. There was nobody in the next room.

“Your room’s on the same line as mine. Next to the armory.”

“Armory?”

“The guy was a military buff. Wanna wash up?”

“No thanks.” He couldn’t resist though. “What’s it like?”

“Living like this? Aren’t I used?”

“My room.”

“Not so bad, you know. She gave a lotta thought.”

“Hell. I won’t be staying, Buddy.”

“She knew that, Bunty. She knew that. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like a room in an Italian hotel.”

His father closed the little round door of the spyhole, wiped its mirror with a handkerchief. You could hardly see it was there. “Smart, always so smart, isn’t she?” Buddy said. “When I pushed about the doctor. ‘What’ll he tell me—’ she says. ‘That I’m a quick learner? Who learns only dreck?’ … Excuse me, Bunty—you understand that language?”

He’d forgotten his father’s delicacy with a son’s other half. “Why not? She does.”

“Dreck. That an Irish girl should learn only that from us. From New York.”

“Why New York?” It burst from him. “Why not from Amenia?”

At once—echoes. Blaming the suburbs. He smiled to himself. Hadn’t thought of Witkower in a long time.

“You think? You think?”

“Now I remember, Buddy—” he said, grinning “—whenever you have one of those things on your head, you start talking like Gramps.”

“
Right.
City College drops from me like a
lei.
” His father took off the embroidered circle, smoothed it. “Or maybe because I went back to Amenia,
enn wye.
A while back, Bunt. She was so low. I thought—up there’s the only audience Maeve ever wanted; maybe I never tried hard enough to get it down here.”

“You tried. Lots of times.”

“I never went down on my knees before. Catholics love the knee position.” He folded the yarmulka and put it in his pocket. “Brace yourself, Bunty, your Granma’s here.”

“Mother MacNeil?”

“Herself. Her winsome self and all her broomsticks. She finally sold the farm. She had it up for sale for a long time.”

“Sold it, huh.” He’d like to think of it there, regardless.

Quentin smiled at him. “To me. Oh she doesn’t know that. Through an agent. Yeah. I worked hard.”

“And mother—how did she—?”

“With
her
mother? Oh Maeve hated the idea—gave her something to live for. That’s when we moved here—remember?”

“Sort of.” He recalled a letter, that must have been asking him if he wanted to come to the office gala, though Quentin hadn’t called it that, or even made quite plain that it was an invite. Said letter, and its successor reminding him to write to the office until they got settled—because he hadn’t written at all, of course—had been left behind on the washbasin of a convenience hotel in Montmartre; he remembered the basin very well, and the girl he’d picked up at the American Express—a last resort—and had spent a day with her until he tipped she was on speed. Streaking around the room after him like a candidate for Dracula: “Sure, I’m still Algiers-nutty; when it’s gone I’ll lay off. Done it before.” He’d had a time getting her down. Bundled in her ski-cap and cape, she looked as pink and princess-faced as when they met. “Being in the skin always sets me off, though. Ta-ta, Bunny.” She went off to meet her folks, who were picking her up to see Paris with them, before college. She never did get his name right, which had annoyed him. And now he couldn’t dig up hers.

“But that was only three months ago, Bud.” He looked down at the bergère he was sitting on, the mirrors, outlined in gold gesso, that reflected it, and him. Since first in Europe, he had begun to look. “Even for Maeve—this is some place to get together.”

“Oh no, we bought it lock, stock and barrel, we did practically nothing. Wasn’t time. Well—let’s move on.”

They went through a couple of rooms that resembled the old first one of their succession of places on Park—or what that one had been modeled on. Cooled down too, but older, and more windows—arched.

“A harpsichord!” The family pictures on it, his father’s parents and collaterals, were in silver now; he remembered which place that happened in—the first East Side one, off Madison. But the last place, the one he’d left them in, some three blocks east of here, was pretty much of a blank.

Buddy patted the instrument on its flower-painted case. “Came with. Two others, we sold off.”

“Some shopping spree.”

“That was the idea.” Buddy stopped square under a pink-and-green china chandelier that flew and stopped at the same time, like a hunk of Mozart. “Wasn’t that—always the idea?”

All this confidence they had kept from him, now must he have it in one big wad? To make a man of him?

“Will you move again?”

“Where?” His father swept the keyboard from top to bottom. No sound came out of it. It was a mute. Or else had to be pumped. Buddy looked mollified. “No. No more moving. A family ought to be hemmed in.”

It all sounded like shit. A world-dwarfing—the kind families picked. “It works with Maeve, then. Having—G-Granma—here.”

Buddy was picking up the photos, putting them down again, one by one. “We forget, kid. Audiences don’t wait.”

Mother MacNeil had had a stroke two days after getting here. “Maybe a compliment,” Buddy said. “Anyway, know all these nasty or stupid-looking old women in winghats and wheelchairs get walked around this neighborhood by some sweetfaced colored woman—I don’t know why but they always both are—well we’re in that class now too. Only Mother made clear, even with her whole left side paralyzed, that she doesn’t like blacks. So we have a broken-down gentlewoman—think that’s what you’d call her—instead. Think that’s what you
will
call her.” Buddy gave him a meaningful smirk he didn’t get. “If you weren’t a grown man, we could have a governess even. And the family would be complete … Well, here’s the dining room. We haven’t eaten here yet.”

And no wonder. Bunty put down the safari bag he’d dragged with him. “Wh—when will you start.”

“Today. All for you, Bunty-boy.”

“It looks like—like the monk’s refectory on Mount Athos.”

“Where’s that?”

“A monastery. Greek. On an island. Where no women can come, not even hens.”

“So?”

“This place where we ate.” But not so fake brown-gaunt, so fake bare as this. And not so big. It was the long table reminded him. He should have said the Cloisters. If he’d seen that tapestry in time, hanging on the bouldered wall like a muffled report from Art History I, he would have said it. For he could tell that he and Buddy, with all else shared—even at Maeve’s cost—had all of a sudden reached a low. Their lowest since he got here. Maybe because it was at Maeve’s cost, his father had now reneged. Anyway, for his son to show off his foreign medals, when Buddy, no fool, so delicate—he could feel it—had been offering him his confidence!

He gobbled something to his chest—no time to find out what.

Buddy’s nostril twitched—had he been onto Bunt’s habit long since? No, his eyes had what Maeve called his Ellis Island look. Greenhorn. Even Gramps had had it sometimes. “Monasteries. You go for them?”

“Just a place I went.” Irritated. Wrong. Slowly his boot-toe circled a floorboard wide as a modest coffin. The groined ceiling was like a cloister, only insufferably hot. His raw-wool shirt still smelled of its lanolin. Maybe his father had meant him to wash. If I stink like a sheep, he could say, it’s just Wales and emotion. Truly. Truth came out of him. “I g-guess, huh—we must be pretty rich.”

Gawp. He could have picked nothing worse. He watched his father grind a fist on the table, turn sharply, and march to the window, where he turned his back—a family trait when agitated. A Bronstein trait like the shibboleth his son had just stepped on. For a Bronstein, money was only the game behind the dream. Gramps, a CPA turned actuary, and always as much interested in other peoples’ incomes and probabilities as in his own, had drawn a stiff line between what you could do for money and what you must do with it—particularly for “those of our race” who had got past the starvation line with any sort of bounce. Maeve’s side of Bunty was resignedly accepted and given over to the women—who both took care of the assimilation that had to be in the new country, and took the blame for it. Exposure of what you had was the sin—the more you had. Every Sunday that Bunty sat with the men before dinner Grandfather had reached out of the endless conversation at some point to put a hand on his head for emphasis. “Bunty, be a Montefiore, not a Rothschild.” Not many of the family had adhered to this high standard, either way. Buddy, the youngest son, whom the eager, hawk-nosed females had belatedly named Quentin—“in 1925!” for Teddy Roosevelt’s dead hero-son—had done his best.

“You boys, you slop around Europe, running around all the circles we left it for—what do you know?” Buddy turned round, choked on his fury, yellow with it, clutching the curtain behind him. Whenever he grew fat and waxy, he dieted himself thin, until the newsboy’s face sat on his fifty-year-old shoulders. And had his blood run through all sorts of purifications, and returned to him—maybe not for health alone. “Knapsacking around, never coming home, God forbid we should die and who do we notify—
poste restante
? A street address two weeks old, in Bombay? In Holland a nightclub—who goes to nightclubs in Holland? And once in a while—lucky lucky—the American Express … What do you know about it all?”

“About what, Buddy?” He knew the question well. Asked of himself at every address.

“About
life
in this country. About what goes on here, has to be done here.”

“Compromises?” He could never raise his voice to match Buddy’s. Maybe only fathers could manage it. He thought of Tarzan.

“About what”—Buddy’s voice sank to a wheeze. “About what can be
done
in this country.” His eyes bulged; he was tallying it. Opera houses. Prisons. Landmarks. Wayward boys.

A swinging door opened. A capped maid peered in to see what the rumpus was. Buddy waved her back, with a drowning gesture. The door closed.

“Maybe you forgot, Dad, hmm. Did you? Why I left.”

Homerun. How quickly the honeybrown, moneybrown eyes went wet, covered themselves with a hand.

He could hear murmurs in the kitchen. To one side of the tapestry there was one of those portholes. He crossed the floor to peer in, seeing only black, but waiting for Buddy to compose his face. When he did turn, Buddy was toeing the safari bag. “Still got it, huh.”

He crossed the floor and stood beside him, nodding. Carry it everywhere. It’s my life.

Lips tucked in, they nodded at each other with the barely perceptible orbit of mourners. But it was also as if his father, hands clasped, was worshipping him.

Yes, I’m your riches, your only. You helped hide me, or would have. What can an idol not made of stone say to you?

“Papa. You want me to wash?”

H
IS ROOM ON THE
second floor was so like the hotel, his foot stopped at the door, as if another step would sink him deep in a cloud. A matter of wood that was old and marble that was cheap, how had she caught that plain, sweet meagerness, even here? Of a room privy to anything, but in-the-faith. She hadn’t imitated any one thing, and she had remembered to include Marlene’s old bureau. There was no more bookspace, though, than at Montecatini—a small ledge. She knew he couldn’t stay. The room told him what she had observed. Was meant to. When a man keeps telling a woman she’s smart, he wondered, when does she catch on he means smart
but,
even if he doesn’t know it yet? From the first?

A few minutes later, he and Buddy, standing on a balcony overlooking the main hall—you had to call it a hall—were still avoiding her. To do so together was a comfort, and therefore worse. He put his head down and muttered something.