Second Chances (7 page)

“I know you worry about his cough,” puts in Celeste, a little sharply; she is generally opposed to a scrutiny of symptoms and especially to talk about those symptoms, in one’s self or one’s friends.

“Oh, I do,” Dudley admits contritely. “I can’t help it. You know, you read so much, one simply does, all this in the papers about coughs and lungs.”

“I never read those articles,” Celeste tells her, now enjoying this part of the conversation. Feeling in charge. “What earthly good? You never learn anything useful. Doctors change their minds every couple of years about almost everything. Don’t eat salt, do eat salt, don’t exercise. Do. Next they’ll be saying that everyone really should take up smoking.”

As she continues, though, in this silly vein, Celeste’s enjoyment lessens; she is increasingly aware of having said all this before, quite possibly too often. She is talking to hear herself talk, as her father used to say. And so she stops.

But Dudley—oh, bless her!—continues. “Speaking of walks,” she interjects, “as we just were. This morning Edward and I went to that new diner sort of place for coffee. It’s quite attractive. And a quite adorably bearded young man waited on us there. David, he told us his name.” Dudley laughs. “I could see that Edward was quite taken with him. I’m afraid Freddy would be even more so. But I don’t think he’s, uh, gay.”

Celeste has spent considerably more time in restaurants than Dudley has, in San Francisco. With Bill. “So annoying, this new friendly way with names, don’t you think? I don’t care bugger-all what their names are, as dear Charles might say.”

Dudley, however, is struck with a new idea, or an idea new to her conversations with Celeste. “Have you noticed,” Dudley asks, “how we seem to impute much stronger sexual feelings to homosexuals than we do to each other? We really do.”

“Oh, do we?” vaguely asks Celeste, who has begun to think again of her anticipated call: perhaps she is overdoing this keeping busy of her phone? He might give up?

“Well, I do think so,” Dudley tells her. “Even old Edward, honestly. Do you think it’s a sort of outgroup thing, like white people all hung up on the sexual prowess of blacks? I remember girls at college who were convinced that going out with Jews would get them instantly pregnant. Or was that Catholics?”

“Well, maybe.” So ironic: now Celeste can hardly get Dudley off the phone. And all this about sex, really the last subject one would choose, although she has an impression that Dudley thinks about sex considerably, more than one would expect in a woman of her age. “Well,” Celeste attempts. “You’re so good to chat with me like this. Letting me keep you away from dear Sam all this time.”

“Dear Sam and I have been chatting for almost forty years, dear Celeste. We can stand an occasional break.”

“Well, darling, of course you can. I guess I just wanted reassurance about Sara, and you know how I get about parties. I worry.”

“But, Celeste, your last big party was terrific. Lord, it must be ten years ago, is that possible? With all those attractive people.”

Dudley would clearly like to reminisce in detail about that party, when all Celeste can remember of it is that everything was yellow, the yellow-gold night, and the dress she wore. Was that the night that Dudley, uh, drank too much—something to do with Brooks Burgess? She can’t remember, and in any case does not want to discuss it now. “I might just have a small dinner, after all,” she tells Dudley. “You and Sam, Edward and Freddy. Sara and me. And, uh, Bill.”

“You could have Polly, make it eight.” Helpful Dudley.

“Of course Polly would make it eight. But then suppose someone can’t come, or something.…” Celeste hears her own voice trail off unconvincingly. “Well, of course I’ll probably invite Polly, after all. You know I always do.”

“Besides, Polly’s used to being odd, so to speak.” Dudley meant: When Charles was alive, we were often seven at dinner.

This unspoken remark is afflicting to Celeste, though; she feels it cruelly, yet she cannot bring herself to blame Dudley, who did not even utter it, actually. But,
Charles
, cries out Celeste, within her heart.

Sensitive Dudley, however, seems to have heard her own unvoiced remark; her tone is much gentler, is infinitely affectionate as she tells Celeste, “In any case your parties are always fabulous,
dearest Celeste. You know that. Sam and I always so look forward—”

“Well, you’re dear to say so. And now I do believe I should say good night. Good night, and sleep well, dear Dudley.”

“Oh! the same to you. And much love, Celeste.”

This note of great affection is natural to all these people. To the occasional outsider, invited into their midst (no one could just wander there), it might have a sound of exaggeration, even of extremity, but to them, this group of almost very old people, it is both genuine and sustaining. What they say to each other is true, and real: they feel great affection for each other. One could call it love. And particularly at partings. Any parting, even the end of a phone conversation. They all need blessings, reassurance. The old have that need in common with small children, seemingly.

And, though indeed reassured, Celeste observes that it is still too early, really, to go to bed. And so she stalks about her room, a caged lioness, sniffing at shadows.

The tall, handsome Biedermeier bureau, with its tiny linen runner, holds many (seven or eight, at least) large, heavy silver-framed likenesses of Charles. Of Charles and Celeste together, but mostly just Charles. Attractive Charles, an American classic, with his sad-boyish, sincere blue eyes, his clear wide brow and those eyebrows. His nose is a shade too small for true handsomeness, but his chin is deeply cleft.

Celeste herself never photographed well at all—interestingly, age has made her more photogenic. Then, in those pictures, her eyes and nose both seemed somewhat too large, and her expression tended, in pictures, to be severe. When she did smile, the smile looked reluctant, forced.

Celeste does not just now look at any of those pictures.

Instead, pausing momentarily, she inspects a small carved desk, hers since childhood, and the only piece of furniture from that distant time. The desk was in fact brought out across the plains by her grandparents from Vermont, in post–gold rush days. Long ago Celeste had some trouble wresting it from her brothers, when both parents
died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Finally, “It’s the only thing I want, I need to have it,” she told them, over the objections of a sister-in-law, who predicted, “You travel all the time. It’ll break.” “It won’t.” Celeste got the desk, and she did travel and move a lot, and the small desk remained intact, always perfectly polished. A lovely piece, which always seemed part of Celeste, an essential.

Now, though, it is piled with letters, so many, though neatly stacked. All something to do with Charles. And inside are more letters, and old photographs, snapshots from everywhere. For a long time now, Celeste has meant to go through them all: suppose she died and some interested person (Sara? Dudley? Edward? Those three first come to mind, as survivors)—suppose someone found all these pictures, these letters. “Well, how extremely interesting.” (She can hear this in Dudley’s voice, those loud implacable accents of the East Coast rich.) “Celeste seems to have grown up on some sort of
farm
, not terribly far from here, up in the Valley. And her first husband was a shoe salesman, can you imagine? With her big feet? Explains quite a lot, don’t you think?”

She has got to go through and get rid of most of that stuff, but is this the moment? She is very tired but she knows that she won’t be able to go to sleep. Not yet.

But—no. No, no.

She cannot go through letters and pictures now, any more than she can make any more long-drawn-out phone calls. She is
waiting for Bill to call
. And my God, thinks Celeste, to be doing that—
at my age
.

Sitting down abruptly on her bed, she even smiles a little to herself at this truly frightful irony, that she should spend her old age waiting for a handsome man (looking very much like a younger Charles, is the truth of it)—for a much younger man to call. She, who as a young woman never waited for anyone, never for a minute. Well, thinks Celeste, with a small involuntary lift of her chin, I never had to. Then.

At that very moment, though, the phone begins to ring. Her heart jolted, Celeste breathes deeply, for peace; she allows three rings before she answers. “Hello?”

At the other end is silence, but it is the whirring silence that signifies long distance, and signifies, to Celeste, not Bill.

“Hello?” she says again. To nothing.

After a minute or two she hangs up; she is shivering, although she is now less cold than she is tired, most terribly tired. Perversely, though, she begins again to walk about, to stalk.

From their bedroom she walks through her dressing room, through what was Charles’s study (more photographs, chronicling Charles’s long, highly public career: studies of Charles with important people, Roosevelt, Einstein, de Gaulle. But none of course of Charles with former wives). Celeste stalks on through the dining room and into the guest room, slated now for Sara.

Very quickly she passes through all these rooms, all unseeingly. And then back to her own room. Their room.

Outside, the night is very cold. And dark, and still. All the winds have died.

Celeste thinks, New Year’s Day. She thinks, 1985.

And then with no warning at all a great scream comes up from her throat. A small woman, old and thin and most elegantly erect, in a dark blue, heavy silk robe. She stands there in her beautiful bedroom, stands screaming. One syllable:
CHARLES
!

She screams, and screams.

Dudley, at that time Spaulding, née Frothingham, and Celeste, then Finnerty, became friends in a very gradual way, beginning sometime in the early forties, in New York. And their friendship was unusual in having its origins at cocktail parties, at a time when at parties young women were not supposed to talk to each other at all, not ever. Received opinion then held that women in the presence of men became instant enemies, as wholly dedicated to rivalries with each other as they were to pleasing men.

But Dudley and Celeste kept meeting at upper East Side parties, during those lavish wartime years of fashionable complaints over rationing, restrictions. They seemed to be on all the same guest lists, those two; and, for whatever reasons, they were drawn to each other in the way that those destined to be permanent friends sometimes are. And they did talk, breaking the rule.

One source of mutual attraction may have been sheer oppositeness: red-haired California Celeste; and tall, very Bostonian Dudley, with her thick short curly dark hair, and sea-blue eyes. Her Back Bay voice.

Dudley’s first husband, Hammond Spaulding, was killed soon after the outbreak of the war, not in combat but in a frightful (partly because so avoidable) training accident at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina: a defective cannon backfired, killing Hammond, a marine lieutenant, just out of Yale. That “incident” was hardly mentioned in the newspapers (only the
Yale Alumni Magazine
made much of it) in those days of unadulterated marine heroics.

Dudley remained in shock, or nearly, for almost a year, shock darkly tinged with rage.

And then she picked up and went down to New York; she got a receptionist job with some friends of her father’s, a job she did not much like, but still a job, on lower Park Avenue. And she began to go out.

Meeting Celeste, Dudley thought Celeste was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, with her pale red hair, pale skin, her impressive sculptured nose and her huge dark, dark eyes. Celeste, coming into parties, would have been conspicuous even had she not learned that trick of the momentary pause just at her entrance. But she had learned that trick, and she almost always wore black—although one of her most successful dresses of that time was a green so dark that it too looked black, a fine green silk. She was highly visible.

She looked very shy, though, almost frightened, and Dudley, observing her, began to suspect that the pause at the entrance to parties was as much for retrenchment, for self-assurance, as for display.

“That’s the most beautiful dress.” Dudley to Celeste, in a floral powder room, on East Seventy-second Street, just off Park.

“I like it too, thank you.” Wide-eyed Celeste. “But I think I wear it too often.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. You’re a friend of the Bradfords?”

“I must be, they keep inviting me here.” Celeste’s edgy laugh. “Actually I think they’re mostly grateful. I found this place for them.”

Dudley: “I’d imagine they are.” Her own edgy laugh. “In this day. However did you?”

“Well, that’s what I do now. Apartments.” Shy dark eyes, now somewhat evasive.

“Oh.” Unasked, Dudley volunteers, “I’m a sort of receptionist. Apartments sound better, I must say. You’d be out and around.”

“Oh, not really. Or maybe too much out and around. I should try staying home.”

They both laugh.

Another powder room, this one boldly striped French wallpaper, on lower Fifth Avenue.

Celeste: “Oh dear. I have on the dress again. I seem to always, when I run into you.”

“No, actually you don’t. Last week you had on that black, with the ruffles. At the Ameses’. How’s the apartment business?”

“Slow.” Again powdering her nose, Celeste then remarks, half to Dudley, “Oh, if only I had somewhat less nose, you know?” A look from the huge black-brown eyes.

Wanting to say, But you’re so beautiful, your nose is beautiful, Dudley did not say that (although she may have conveyed that message to highly intuitive Celeste). She only observed, “We all seem to think we have something wrong, have you noticed?”

Celeste, thoughtfully: “Yes, women do. I don’t think men worry in just that way, do you?”

“No, they don’t seem to.” Hammond Spaulding was a confidently handsome young man, generally untroubled. (And uninteresting, Dudley has almost admitted to herself.)