On Green Dolphin Street (2 page)

“Who’s that man talking to Mary?” Charlie felt his elbow taken by Edward Renshaw.

“He’s a journalist, I think. I bumped into him this morning at the Spanish Embassy do and he claims we’ve met before somewhere.”

“Let’s go and say hello.”

“Eddie,” said Mary, “this is Frank Renzo. Frank’s in town for a few days.”

“Good to meet you.” Frank Renzo was a tall, lean man, his cropped hair showing the first dust of gray; his accent was from the Midwest, perhaps Chicago.

“Do you need a drink, Frank?” said Charlie.

“No, I already have one.”

“What are you doing in town?” said Edward Renshaw politely.

“Just a piece for my paper. I’m based in New York.”

“Well, enjoy yourself,” said Charlie. “Call if we can do anything to help.”

Mary watched as Charlie left the small group and went toward the bar he had set up in the corner of the room. Normally they hired a barman from the Embassy staff to stand behind the row of liquor bottles, but tonight, as a small gesture of economy, Charlie had taken the task on himself. He scooped more ice cubes into the ornamental bucket from a pail concealed beneath the tablecloth.

“They say the Kennedys are buying a new house on N Street,” said the man from the
Post
. “Martha knows the Realtor who showed them around. Apparently Jackie was crazy for it.”

“Oh yes?” Charlie poured bourbon over ice and heard it snap. “I thought they were buying Joe Alsop’s.” He felt the scotch beginning to take hold, or rather to relax his grip, as he approached the state of uncritical bonhomie he most enjoyed. He smiled to himself. It was of course an irony that only in these moments of inebriation, these instants of perfect balance, did he have the philosophical poise to see his difficulties in their true perspective and to know that he could one day banish them. For the moment he was alive, and he glowed with the pleasure of these people’s company. At bad times he suspected that the fire was not renewable, that, for their delectation, he was burning away the core of himself; he feared that few of them shared his embrace of the minute, or were even momentarily diverted by his defiance of pettiness and tedium and time passing. He had never reached the lowest point of all, at which he might have wondered whether there was something morbid in his being so solitary in his flight from an unnamed terror.

Feeling as good as he did, generosity surging in his veins, tobacco unfurling in his lungs, he had no choice but to push onward.

“We meet on Wednesdays after we’ve taken the kids to school,” Lauren Williams was telling Frank Renzo. “Then for lunch Kelly makes the appetizer, Mary-Beth or I do the entrée and Katy does the dessert. She does the best desserts you ever tasted.”

“And you always have a project?”

“Sure. Sometimes we just have a book we’ve all read, sometimes we’ll go see a show.”

“And is that all the ladies in your group?”

“Oh, no, there’s more. That’s just the inner circle. We’re usually seven or eight. Mary comes along pretty often.”

“And what does she do?”

“You mean, like, what’s her specialty? Well, she brings wine sometimes. You know, coming from Europe. I don’t know.” Lauren Williams began to laugh. “Katy, what does Mary bring to our group?”

“Mary?” Katy Renshaw, too, looking at Frank’s grave face, began to laugh. “I guess she brings culture. Isn’t that right, Mary?”

“Isn’t what right?” said Mary, turning from another conversation.

“In fact,” said Lauren Williams, “Mary’s writing a book.”

“Am I?”

“Charlie always says you are.”

“He has to find an explanation for me.”

Mary went with a tray out into the kitchen, where Dolores was stirring a pan.

“Happy, Dolores?”

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. van der Linden. You happy?”

Mary considered, as she leaned back for a moment with her back to the stove and sipped from the glass of gin and tonic with its clashing ice. Happy …

When Louisa was twenty months old, she could talk with the fluency
of a child of three or four, yet what was in her mind was quite unformed. On the Home Service in London she had heard the stations of the shipping forecast and talked back to them, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, her head cocked to one side, her concentration earnest. In moments of exalted love, of rapture, Mary believed Louisa’s mind was not empty, but filled with clouds of glory from a previous and purer world. She had spent many weeks in hospital with Louisa while doctors tried to discover the source of some violent allergy. When they eventually came home, they were seldom out of the same room. At bath time, while Mary lay back in the water, the child stood hammering at her mother’s raised and closed knees, demanding to be let into the castle that would be formed by their parting. Once inside, she would ask questions about things that puzzled her: America, for instance: how big it was, how far, how different and then, after a long, considering pause: “Do they have children in America?” Now, at ten years old, she had retained that unworldly grace, though she had been bruised by some encounters with the everyday that would have left no mark on others.

Richard, her brother, felt no such pain. To begin with, Mary had worried that she could not love a second child as much. He was so different from his sister that she was astounded to concede that he had eventually quarried out a comparable place in her affections for himself; by brute persistence he commandeered a territory as rare and irreplaceable as that occupied by Louisa. Perhaps it was the smell of him that first intoxicated Mary, of his neck along the hairline when she lifted him from his cot on her return from an evening out: the faint aroma of honey, calico, half-baked bread, wild strawberries, of warmth itself, was so delightful to inhale that she made excuses to “resettle” him, though it was clear that he was already as tranquil as a sleeping child could be. His fierceness was the opposite of Louisa’s detached and dreamlike curiosity; he wanted the same lunch each day, the same program on the wireless and then, at the same hour, to visit the bathroom where he would sit on the wooden seat, the cat clamped beneath his arm while, with tears rolling over his cheeks, he sang “The Camptown Races.”

Happy, thought Mary, as she folded the apron over the back of the chair and straightened her hair in the mirror over the kitchen counter: maybe not exactly happy, not in the facile way the word itself suggested, but who in these circumstances could not at least be touched from time to time by the ridiculous joy of existing?

Back in the sitting room, beneath the simmering layer of fresh cigarette smoke, Duncan Trench was stabbing his finger at Katy Renshaw, Edward’s American wife. Trench’s huge, slabbed cheeks and small eyes gave him what people called a chub-face, though the color of his complexion always reminded Mary not of fish but of undercooked beef.

“If the Negroes in North Carolina want to sit at the lunch counters all day without being served,” he was saying, “then the storekeeper is quite entitled to use reasonable force to evict them. They’re preventing him from making a living.”

Few people knew what Trench’s job in Chancery entailed, but his manner was seldom diplomatic.

“Sure,” said Frank Renzo, “and he’s preventing them from having lunch.”

“There are plenty of other places they can go.”

“But they want to go to Woolworth’s. They like the sixty-five-cent turkey dinner. You ever try it?”

“No, but that’s not the point. What I’m saying is—”

“You should. It needs some gravy. But, you know, it’s pretty good.”

“By refusing to move they’re preventing customers being served.”

“But they are the customers.”

“You know what I mean.”

Mary could see Duncan Trench’s color go from beef to borscht as she moved swiftly into the group.

“Who’d like another drink?” she said. “Duncan, have you met Kelly Eberstadt? She and her husband have moved into Bethesda and—”

“Did you ever hear of a young man named Emmett Till?” said Frank.

“I don’t believe so,” said Trench, as Mary took his elbow and guided him away.

“You’d have liked him. Your kinda guy.” Frank Renzo watched Trench depart; Katy Renshaw stared down at her shiny shoes for a moment.

“Well,” said Katy, looking up brightly again. “Qué será, será.”

“Nice song.”

“Nice movie. You like Doris Day?”

“Sure I like Doris Day, though I guess I like jazz even better,” said Frank.

“Oh, so does Charlie! Let’s put on a record and we can dance.”

The guests began to leave soon after one, though it took so long for them to be gone that Charlie was able to drink a half bottle of burgundy he found in the dresser and a tumbler of Four Roses on the rocks as a nightcap. From time to time he tottered to the doorway, chastely pecking Lauren Williams on her powdered cheek, pummeling her husband, whose name always just eluded him, on the shoulder, taking the opportunity to bury his face in Katy Renshaw’s fragrant hair as he squeezed her waist.

“A stoop full of kisses and good-byes,” he murmured. “Do you know that line?”

“What?”

“It’s from Wallace Stevens.”

“Not in the
Collected
I read, Charlie,” said Edward Renshaw, as he threw a wrap round the shoulders of his wife.

“You’re right, Eddie. I made it up.”

The night had grown woundingly cold with a breeze whistling down out of Canada. Charlie lit one more good-night cigarette as he leaned against the door frame; Mary stood beside him as the last of their guests started up their cars. An upstairs light went on opposite: it was the Chinese couple who dined on bowls of clear soup and went to bed at seven. Mary flinched. The guests had left quietly, but the rumble of Detroit machinery was enough to shake the storm windows gently in their frames.

As Mary looked down again, she saw a tall figure making its way toward them, hunched, veering from side to side. It was Frank Renzo. He
was clasping his right hand in his left, and behind him, along the snowy sidewalk, there ran a trail of blood.

“Jesus … goddamn car door,” he was muttering.

Mary went forward anxiously. “What happened? Come inside. It’s all right, it’s just tiles,” said Mary as she led him, dripping, through to the kitchen.

“What happened?” said Charlie. “Do we have a bandage or something?”

“Upstairs. In the bathroom.”

Frank’s face was pale. Mary held his hand beneath the kitchen faucet and the cold water pounded onto the metal sink, swilling with its rosy flow the last of the jettisoned clam dip. Mary pushed back the shirt cuff and rolled up the sleeve of his suit with its gray nailhead pattern. The cut was deep but clean; it ran through from the base of the thumb down into the blue wiring of the wrist.

“Goddamn car …”

“Maybe we should call a doctor. Perhaps it needs stitches.”

“Stitches? No, no, it’s fine. As soon as it stops bleeding.”

“Is this any use?” said Charlie. He was holding a first-aid box.

“Let’s have a look,” said Mary. “You’d better keep that hand under the tap.”

“What happened?” said Charlie.

“It was an accident. Could I use your telephone?”

“I’m sure we had a bandage.”

“It’s in the hall.”

“Did Louisa take it for her Barbie?”

When Frank came back into the kitchen, Mary dressed the cut with what she could find in the box.

“You sure you’re all right?” said Charlie. “Would you like a drink?”

“Maybe some scotch? Tell me, who was that guy with the red face?”

“Duncan Trench,” said Mary. “He’s at the Embassy.”

“Is he a thimble-belly?”

“What?”

“Can he hold his liquor?”

“I think he was tight.”

Frank sat back with his drink. “Thank you.” For the first time since he had been back in the house, he smiled. “To tell the truth, I’m a little scared of blood.”

“Let’s go and sit in the living room,” said Charlie, as though sensing the chance that the party might reignite. He poured himself a measure of Four Roses to keep Frank company and lit another cigarette as he put on
Songs for Swingin’ Lovers
. It no longer seemed polite to ask Frank exactly what had happened to his hand.

“That girl told me you like jazz,” said Frank.

“I certainly do,” said Charlie. “We don’t get to hear much in Washington. You live in New York, don’t you?”

“That’s right,” said Frank. “I have an apartment loaned to me by a friend who’s on a foreign assignment. It’s in the Village.”

“How lovely,” said Mary.

“I don’t like it,” said Frank, grinding out his cigarette. “I don’t like the Village.”

“Really? Why?”

“Too many bakeries and antique stores.”

Mary, standing with her back to the fireplace, looked at Frank closely for the first time. It was impossible to tell how serious he was being. Surely anyone below the age of fifty, particularly if he liked jazz, would want to live in Greenwich Village more than any neighborhood in the United States of America; but Frank didn’t seem to be joking. His face, with its long, narrow jaw on which the first shadows of the morning’s beard were darkening, was not smiling. He looked drawn and anxious: the thin lapels of his suit, the narrow tie pulled halfway down over his cotton shirt, the long limbs folded over one another combined to suggest fragility. His pants had ridden up a little, showing where the gray woolen socks hung from his shins in slouched, concentric rings. There were dark hemispheres beneath his eyes, yet he showed no signs of wanting to leave. A drop of blood fell from the saturated dressing onto the maple parquet beside his chair.

Charlie said, “Have you heard this fellow Ornette Coleman I keep reading about?”

“I went to see him once. At the Five Spot. I didn’t really like it. That free stuff. I’m not sure it’s as difficult as it looks.”

“Apparently he can play the piano and the violin and the trumpet as well.”

“Sure. But how well does he play them? That’s the point. Do you like Miles Davis?”

“Quite,” said Charlie. “But I’m pretty much lost with anything after Duke Ellington. This hard bop stuff, you know Charlie Parker and Dizzy—”

“Yeah, but Miles Davis is kind of melodic, too. Did you hear the
Kind of Blue
record?”