On Green Dolphin Street (15 page)

She put the matches in an inside pocket of her purse and zipped it up.

“There’s a train at six o’clock,” she said.

They sat side by side in the Pullman car and she tried to discover what had happened in Chicago.

“I was talking to some people there,” said Charlie. “The Democratic organization, you know. Daley’s people. There’s a feeling Kennedy could
win this, if he gets the nomination. They truly believe he might pull it off. Seems unlikely to me, but you never know. Also, I was meant to check on a few things while I was there.”

A waiter leaned over the table with their drinks and a bowl of pretzels.

“What sort of things?”

Charlie ran his hand through his hair. “Everyone in this country is anxious at the moment. They think they’re about to be annihilated by a hydrogen bomb.”

“Are you talking about Communists?”

Mary’s plastic swizzle stick clinked swiftly on the ice, the glass and the ashtray.

“Yes,” said Charlie, leaning back. “The days when the shoe-shine boy or the lady in the laundromat was thought to be in the pay of the Kremlin are behind us, I think. But they don’t like foreign visitors. They have to be looked at closely. And they really do believe the Russians have more powerful missiles. They believe they’re losing this war, the Cold War, the only one that matters.”

“But why you, Charlie? What’s it got to do with you? Why do you get into such a state?”

Charlie turned to her, his eyes filled with tears. “People ask me questions. But I’m all right, sweetheart.” He raised his glass to her and drank, then put his hand on her arm. “We’ll be all right,” he said. “Won’t we?”

Number 1064 came into view through the taxi window, and as they unloaded their bags from the trunk and walked up the path to the house between the blossoming trees, Mary felt the familiar centripetal forces drawing her into her own home and the home of her children; at the same time she felt the falling anguish of separation from what she most wanted. The circuitry seemed confused, the polar forces variable.

Inside the house she had the comforting sensations of return and belonging; she noted with approval that Dolores had polished the tiled hall and sorted the mail; she saw that some bulbs she had planted in a pot on the kitchen windowsill had begun to sprout. She went about preparing
supper, scrambled eggs and bacon, while Charlie read through his letters with occasional derisive oaths.

As she stared at the aluminum of the pan, on which the slimy yellow mixture began slowly to coagulate, she saw through the metal atoms of its surface to another room, in which the air was filled with the sound of a soft, insinuating trumpet, and she was charged with an exhilaration so powerful that even the memory of it was hard to keep in check. She noticed her lower lip begin to tremble.

She was out of control. She shook her head, and salt drops fell into the hardening egg. Without daring to raise her eyes from the stove, she reached out a hand to the work top where her cigarettes habitually lay and fumblingly withdrew one.

“Christ!” said Charlie, throwing down a letter.

She took the book of matches and struck one. She pushed the eggs, which were done too soon, onto a cold ring and turned the flame up on the bacon.

“Who are these people? Fund managers. They couldn’t manage a bloody piggy bank.”

She sucked on the cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs till she felt giddy. Still looking down, she reached out for her glass and raised it to her lips. Her nose was running, but she did not want to blow it for fear of attracting Charlie’s attention. Her eyes were burning red.

She tried to imagine what sort of figure she made, standing there, and she had a picture of herself as her mother used to describe her when she was five or six years old: like a real person, only smaller. This sentimental memory did not help; it reinforced the sensation that she was being run over by some force greater than she could withstand. She raked her fingernails into the palm of her hand.

For Christ’s sake, she thought, I’ve seen death and birth, I’m forty years old. I can bear this, I can bear this.

She felt Charlie’s arm suddenly on her shoulder. She swung round and buried her face in his chest, feeling her nose and eyes dampen his clean shirt. She sobbed within his innocent embrace.

“There, there,” he said. “You’ve been so brave and I’ve been so useless.”

He clearly thought she was upset about her mother, and even in her distress Mary recoiled from the idea of such an alibi.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s … I don’t know what it is.”

In the moral no-man’s-land into which she had apparently been swept, the second evasion felt less reprehensible than the first.

The next day, she telephoned her mother, and they spoke for almost an hour. Mary offered to go to London and help look after her, but Elizabeth dismissed the idea impatiently.

“I’m perfectly all right. I’m still running the house. The last thing I want is another mouth to feed.”

When she spoke to her father, Mary asked to what extent this bravery was a front. He told her Elizabeth had had a tantrum of vintage proportions a day or so before and they agreed that this was a good sign. He promised to call if there was a change.

As for the other developments in her life, Mary decided that all she could do was say nothing, remain speechless and perhaps misunderstood, because that was the only way she could be sure of doing no damage. She planned her day in such a way that she was primed for jollity when Charlie returned from work, and he, meanwhile, was so absorbed in his own difficulties that he appeared to see no falsity in her manner. It was a pity, she thought, that she had such a reputation for happiness; a melancholic could have passed off the behavior she wanted to indulge in as no more than a periodic fit. But in her any sign of despondency, even a weary sigh, would be considered grounds for concern by those who loved her.

In the afternoons she lay on the bed and tried to catch up on the sleep that was eluding her at night. She discovered that it was better if she lay on her front; it was as though her physical weight helped compress the anguish.

As for a larger strategy, she had none. There were two imperatives of which she was aware, the well-being of her children, her husband and her parents, her primal care for them, which had not altered; and then her
love for Frank, and his for her, which had a power that seemed to her not just primal but almost moral in its urgency. She could not establish an order of preference between the two; as well ask her to distinguish between a tree and a cloud: no crude ranking could reflect the reality of either.

She became sure that her decisions were right, or at least not wrong, but they had one weakness: they left her without a plan of action, groaning on the bed, forcing her belly harder against the mattress. When she telephoned Frank’s number in New York, she felt no guilt toward Charlie; in fact, there was a certain self-righteousness in her manner toward him. How many women in her situation would have shown such restraint? If the price of that was a couple of forlorn phone calls, then Charlie was a luckier man than any other husband they knew. As for the calls themselves, made surreptitiously when Charlie was at work and Dolores out of earshot, the furtive comedy they provided was all the lightness in her day.

Her success in reaching him, on the other hand, was nil. By the time Charlie left for work in the morning, Frank had evidently departed for his newspaper office; by the time he was back in his apartment at night, Charlie was also back at Number 1064. One evening, when Charlie went to a reception without Mary, Frank, it appeared, also had a dinner date. Charlie did not return till one in the morning; but by a quarter to one Frank was also still out, presumably at the Vanguard or some other smoky room where the tenor saxophone was hopping over the piano rhythm. Mary did not let herself dwell on the thought of whether he was there alone; there was not enough room in her heart for that kind of self-torture, and in any case, she believed what he had said. For him too, everything was changed, set in the altered light of his feeling for her.

She spoke instead to her parents in London, surprising them frequently by the miraculous submarine connection. She gathered herself to reassure them; by scouring her store of imaginative sympathy, by the effort of will involved in comforting her mother in her last months and her father in his impending loss, she brought some solace to herself.

In her afternoon rests she sometimes thought of herself as a traveler in
a dark wood. She was confronted by paths into the forest, by the need to make pitiless choices. This was the lot of a woman of her age, to take on the lives of those older and younger than herself, to carry the weight they could not bear; while her own private grief, a disabling, more vital version of something she had known when young, was fated to be seen by her in the uncompromising perspective of her imagined self when old, where all passions came to the same inevitable end.

“Frank?”

She heard his voice answer at last. She sat down heavily on the kitchen chair.

“Is this Mary?”

“Yes. How are you?”

“I’m okay. I didn’t hear from you, but I didn’t like to call. Are you at home?”

“Yes. Charlie’s at a party. Dolores is at the pictures.” The mention of Charlie in this deceitful context almost took away the pleasure of hearing Frank’s voice.

“What are you wearing?” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I want to be able to picture you.”

“Well … Just my day clothes.”

“Don’t be shy, Mary. Remember the night you left?”

“I do, Frank. Oddly enough, I do.”

“Well then.”

“A cream blouse with a broderie anglaise collar and a black woolen skirt and loafers and a pink cardigan. It doesn’t really go. I just threw it on. I was chilly.”

“Not in your summer dresses yet?”

“No, it’s quite cold here. What about you?”

“Just an undershirt, suit pants, bare feet. I was writing a piece. The building’s always warm.”

“I’ve missed you, Frank.”

“I haven’t breathed since you left.”

Mary found her face muscles aching from a strange reflex grin in which they had set themselves. She began to talk softly to him about how she pictured his apartment and him in it; this led her to his mouth and how soft it was to kiss. She heard him laugh.

She said, “And is there a record playing in your apartment?”

“Yeah, it’s still Miles Davis. It’s ‘On Green Dolphin Street.’ ”

“That’s what was playing when we kissed.”

“Or wasn’t that—”

“No. That was it.” Uttering the word “kissed” had produced such a fierce, illicit thrill in Mary that she could not be bothered about song titles.

“So nothing’s changed,” said Frank.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Unfortunately, I’m sure. Do you remember after dinner?” He, too, started to go over what had happened between them that night, as though anxious to establish that it had not been a dream of his own alone. She laughed when his narrative slowed down at the moment he kissed her breasts; he seemed to hope he might relive it by the close retelling, and, though it was shocking to be spoken to in such a way, she did not deter him.

It was Frank who eventually said, “Maybe we shouldn’t be speaking like this. When am I going to see you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t think I can find a pretext for coming to Washington. I have to be here.”

“Oh God,” said Mary, feeling the fixed smile disappear.

“I think I could bear not having you if I could see you. Does that seem so very much to ask? Just to look at you?”

Mary had the sensation of falling. “I’ll fix it,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She felt blood scalding her face. “I’ll come.”

—

The following morning, while Mary was reading the newspaper in the living room, the telephone rang. It was Duncan Trench, asking if he could come round and see her. He told her it was something that needed to be treated with the utmost discretion, and he would therefore be grateful if she could make sure the maid was not in the house.

Bewildered, Mary put down the receiver. Insofar as Duncan Trench had registered on her mind at all, it was as an irascible, bluff colleague of Charlie’s whose disagreeable manner could be partly forgiven by the fact that he was clearly naive and often drunk. Could it be that chub-faced Duncan had all this time been nursing a passion for her? She shook her head. Not everything confidential had to do with amorous feelings; it was more likely that Duncan wanted to talk about Charlie’s work or, more probably still, his health.

She heard no car draw up outside, so Duncan’s ring at the doorbell took her by surprise. She opened her arm toward the sunny living room, but Duncan had already bolted ahead of her.

“Can I get you some coffee, Duncan? Or a drink?”

“No. No, thanks.”

He walked over to the phonograph. “How does this thing work?”

“I’m sorry?”

“This thing. I want to put a record on.” He began wrenching at the arm and twisting the knobs.

“Let me show you. Anything in particular?”

“Something noisy. A brass band or something.”

“I’m not sure how much brass band music we have. Would Duke Ellington be all right? Or Count Basie, perhaps?”

The needle dropped onto the record with an amplified thud, then skated over the surface for a moment before it settled in the groove.

Duncan turned the volume up to the maximum. He put his face close to Mary’s. Despite the rhythm of the music, she did not feel like dancing.

“You probably know what I do at the Embassy,” he shouted.

Mary recoiled from the blast of American cigarettes and hotel coffee
on his breath. She knew quite well what he did at the Embassy, but thought it unwise to tell him so.

She put her hand on his shoulder and reached up to his ear. “Not really.”

“I’m not a career diplomat, like Charlie or Eddie Renshaw. I work for a different organization. Have done since I left Oxford.”

“I’m sorry?”

Duncan grimaced. He leaned down to Mary’s level and put his lips to her ear.