Two Weeks in Another Town (2 page)

“I’ll have a cherry tart and a bourbon on the rocks,” said the little old lady. She was on the left side of the plane and she didn’t get up to see Mont Blanc. “That makes a nice little tea.” She giggled, on her way to Damascus from Portland, Oregon, daring to do things at an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet that she would never do in Portland, Oregon.

“Would you like something, Mr. Andrus?” The stewardess tilted her smile in the direction of Mont Blanc.

“No, thank you,” Jack said. He had wanted a whisky, but when he heard the little old lady ask for bourbon he had had a small ascetic flicker of revulsion against the continual senseless ingestion of air travel.

He looked down at the white slab of Mont Blanc, couched on cloud, surrounded by the stone teeth of the lesser peaks. He put on his dark glasses and peered at the sunlit snow, looking for the broken helicopter in which the two climbers had been left to die when the storm had risen and the guides and the crashed airman who had come to their rescue had had to make their way to the refuge hut to save themselves. He couldn’t see the helicopter. The Alps moved slowly below him, peaks shifting behind peaks, deep blue shadows and a huge round, thin sun, like an afternoon in the Ice Age, with no dead visible.

He pulled the curtains and sat back and reflected on the events that had so surprisingly put him on this plane. He had known that Maurice Delaney was in Rome, from reading the papers, but he hadn’t heard from him for five or six years and it was with a sense of disbelief that he had heard the voice of Delaney’s wife, Clara, on the crackling connection a week before, from Rome.

“Maurice can’t get to the phone just now,” Clara had said, after the preliminary explanations were over, “but he’s writing you a letter telling just what the situation is. He wants you to come down here right away, Jack. You’re the only man who can help him, he says. He’s desperate. These people down here are driving him crazy. He’s got them to agree to give you five thousand dollars for two weeks—Is that enough?”

Jack laughed.

“Why’re you laughing?”

“Private joke, Clara.”

“He’s depending upon you, Jack. What’ll I tell him?”

“Tell him I’ll do everything I can to come. I’ll send a wire tomorrow.”

The next day Morrison had said he could spare Jack for two weeks and Jack had sent the wire.

The letter that had come from Delaney had outlined what Delaney wanted Jack to do for him. It was so little, and in Jack’s eyes so comparatively unimportant, that it was inconceivable to him that anyone would pay him five thousand dollars just for that. Delaney, he was sure, had other reasons for asking Jack to come to Rome, reasons that Delaney would divulge in his own time.

Meanwhile, Jack leaned back luxuriously in the first-class seat that was being paid for by the company, and thought with satisfaction of being away from the routine of his job and the routine of his marriage for two weeks.

He looked forward to seeing Delaney, who, long ago, had been his best friend, and whom he had loved. Whom I still love, he corrected himself. Aside from everything else, Jack thought, trouble or not, anything involved with Maurice Delaney won’t be routine.

He loosened his collar, to make himself more comfortable. In doing so his hand touched the bulk of the letter in his inside pocket. He made a grimace of distaste. I’d better do it now, he thought. In Rome I probably won’t have the time.

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the letter that he had read three times in the last two days. Before rereading it again, he stared gloomily at the envelope, addressed to him in the artificially elegant finishing-school orthography of his first wife. Three wives, he thought, and two of them are giving me trouble. Two out of three. Today’s recurring ratio. He sighed and took the letter out of the envelope and began to read it.

“Dear Jack,” he read, “I imagine you are surprised to hear from me after all this time, but it’s a question that involves you or should involve you as much as it does me, since Steve is your son as well as mine, even though you haven’t taken much interest in him all these years, and what he does with his life should be of
some
concern to you.” Jack sighed again when he came to the ironic underlining. The years had not improved his first wife’s prose style. “I have done everything humanly possible to influence Steve and have nearly brought myself to the edge of a nervous breakdown in the process, and William, who at all times has been most loving and correct and tolerant with Steve, more so than most real fathers I have seen, has also done his best to make him change his mind. But Steve, since the earliest days, has exhibited only the utmost, iciest scorn for William’s opinions, and no amount of reasoning on my part has been able to improve his behavior.” Jack grinned malevolently as he read this passage, then went on. “When Steve came back after visiting you in Europe last summer, he spoke of you more favorably, or, anyway, less unfavorably than of most people he knows…” Jack smiled again, wryly this time. “…and it occurred to me that at this moment of crisis, maybe you are the one to write to him and try to put him straight.

“I don’t like to burden you, but the problem has become too much for me. In the last few months, in Chicago, Steve has fallen under the spell of a terrible girl by the name of McCarthy, and now he says he is going to marry her. The girl is twenty years old, a nobody, from an absolutely nondescript family, without a penny to their name. As you can tell from the name, she is Irish, and I suppose was born a Catholic, although like Steve, and all his other friends, she just laughs ironically when the subject of religion comes up. Steve, as you know, is completely dependent upon the goodness of William for whatever money he gets, outside the bare minimum you send for his tuition and board and lodging at the University. I just can’t see William handing over enough money to a boy, who is, after all not his son, and who has openly showed his scorn of him since he was five years old, to set up housekeeping with a silly little coed he picked up at a dance somewhere, and I must say, I don’t blame him.”

Once more Jack found himself puzzling over the rich confusion of his first wife’s syntax, although the general idea was all too clear.

“What’s worse,” the letter went on, “the girl is one of those rabid little intellectuals of the kind we both knew in the thirties, full of half-baked provocative ideas and rebellious opposition to authority. She has infected Steve and has led him into some very dangerous activities. He is the president of some sort of group which is constantly agitating against H-bomb experiments and signing all sorts of petitions all the time and generally making himself very unpopular with the authorities. Until this came up, Steve was doing marvelously, as you know, at the University, and was practically assured a research fellowship after he had taken his Ph.D. Now, I understand, they are beginning to have doubts about him and he has been warned once or twice by older men in the department, although you can guess how he responded to that, especially with that girl egging him on. What’s more, as a straight A student, he’s been deferred from the draft until now, as a matter of course, but he’s threatening to list himself as a Conscientious Objector. You can just about imagine what that will do to him. He’s at a crucial point in his life now and if he persists in marrying this girl and in his idiotic political activities, it will mean absolute ruin for him.

“I don’t know what you can do, but if you have any love left for your son or any desire to see him happy, you will at least try to do
some
thing. Even a letter might help, coming from you.

“I’m sorry that the first communication from me in so many years is such a disturbing one, but I don’t know where else to turn.

As ever,

Julia.”

Jack held the letter in his hand, watching the pages vibrate gently with the throbbing of the plane.
As ever,
he thought. What does she mean by that? As ever false, as ever foolish, as ever incompetent, as ever pretentious? If the “as ever” was an accurate description of herself, it was no wonder Steve didn’t listen to her.

Jack asked the stewardess for some stationery and, when it came, set about composing a letter to his son. “Dear Steve,” he wrote, then hesitated, as a vision of his son’s cold, narrow, intelligent young face interposed between him and the paper on his knees. Steve had visited him and Hélène the summer before, handsome, aloof, taciturn, observant. He had spoken surprisingly good French for a boy who had never been in France before, he had been polite with them all, had drunk, Jack noticed gratefully, very little, had explained in simple terms what his thesis was going to be about, had made Jack vaguely uncomfortable, and then had disappeared toward Italy with two friends from Chicago. It had been an edgy time, although there had been no incidents, and Jack had been relieved when Steve had suddenly announced his departure. Jack had not been able to love the boy, as, rather foolishly, he had hoped he might, and Steve himself had been merely proper, not loving. He had gone off toward Italy leaving Jack with an uneasy sense of guilt, of opportunities lost, of dissatisfaction with his son and himself and with the course his life had taken.

Now, here he was, high over the bony white spine of Europe, committed to writing a letter that must be loving and tactful, and helpful and instructive, to that taciturn cold young man who was, as his mother pointed out, ruining his life in Chicago.

“Dear Steve,” he wrote, “I’ve just received a disturbing letter from your mother. She’s worried about you, and from what I can tell from here, justifiably so. There isn’t much sense in my going through all the reasons why a young man of 22, without any money, and with all his way to make in the world, should not marry. I, myself, married early, and you should know better than anyone how disastrously it turned out. There is a Greek saying, ‘Only a foolish man marries young and only a foolish woman marries old,’ and from my experience, I would say that the first half, at least, of the adage is all too correct. I would wait if I were you, at least until you’re through with your studies and established somewhere. Marriage has crippled more young men than alcohol. If you’re ambitious, as I think you are, you will finally be grateful to me if you heed this advice.”

Jack looked up from the letter. He was suddenly conscious that the little old lady across the aisle was staring intently at him. He turned his head and smiled at her. Embarrassed, she looked quickly out the window on her side.

“Your mother also writes,” Jack continued, “that you are endangering your future by certain political activities in the University. Perhaps you are justified in your opinions and probably you feel very strongly that you have to express them, but you must realize that for a young man today who intends to pursue a career as a nuclear physicist, either as an experimenter or teacher, or both, open opposition to the government’s policies can only be dangerous. The government of the United States today is under a continuing strain and the men who run the government (which, as you know as well as anyone, is now involved in a great deal of the research and financing of the work in your chosen field) are fretful and suspicious. The government also has a long memory and is not hesitant about using its powers to put pressure on organizations, or people, who might be inclined to hire a man who attacked its position at such a vulnerable and controversial point. Here again, as in the idea of marriage, it might be wise to wait quietly for a while, until you are less dangerously exposed, before taking any irrevocable steps. Just from the viewpoint of practical accomplishment, you might consider whether your protest now, the protest of an untried young man, would serve any real purpose, or merely expose you to the punishments which the system is perfectly prepared and willing to hand out. It is not necessary, Steve, as young people are likely to believe, to say everything that comes to your mind, openly and with complete disregard for the consequences. Strategy and tact need not be taken for submission. It is only recently that reticence has come to be thought of as a flaw of character…”

He reread what he had written. Lord Chesterfield to his son, he thought with disgust. I have been writing too many speeches for generals. If I really loved him, this letter would be entirely different.

“Let me try to express what I feel more completely,” he wrote. “It is not that I do not understand why you are aghast at the prospect of more nuclear explosions, another war. I, too, am aghast, and would like to see the experiments halted, the war avoided. I realize that it is because men on both sides are bankrupt of fruitful ideas that the experiments continue, the threat of war is not laid. But even bankrupts have the right to try to survive, under whatever terms are open to them. What we Americans are doing is perhaps dictated by a bankrupt’s policy of survival, but who has offered us a better policy? I am involved with our present policy, and while I am not satisfied with it, I am not satisfied with any alternative that has been put forward until now. Your half-brother Charlie has expressed my feeling about what I am doing better than I have done to date. When asked by a classmate what his father did in life (a French way of saying what a man’s work is), he answered, ‘My father works at keeping the world from having another war.’”

Jack smiled to himself, thinking of the little boy at the airport, frail against the steamed glass, saying, “I like Air France better. Blue is a faster color.” Then he looked down once more at the letter, frowning, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to tear it up, try to get Steven to fly over to Rome so that they could have it out at length, man-to-man. It would cost at least a thousand dollars, and if the events of the last summer were any way of judging, not much good would come of it. So he continued to write.

“I am dissatisfied with this letter,” he wrote, “but my motives for writing it are pure. I want to save you from dangers that I see perhaps more clearly than you and that you do not necessarily have to run. Please do not be rash.” He hesitated. Then he wrote, swiftly, “Your loving father,” and folded the pages and put them into an envelope and addressed the envelope. One lie more, he thought, to fly the ocean at four hundred miles an hour.