William F. Buckley Jr. (12 page)

Danny had always had trouble with penmanship. His teachers had always complained about the difficulty in making out what he wrote. One teacher, when Danny was twelve, made him print in block letters, hoping that a departure from the script of the Palmer method would clarify the letters. It helped a bit, but the result, after a year or two, was a strange amalgam of block and script, and the strain on exam readers was such that when Danny one morning got his terrific idea, at the end of the first semester of sophomore year, he found all the examining professors elatedly cooperative.

Accordingly he would arrive at his exams with his portable typewriter in hand and ask routinely for permission to type out his answers to the exam. This he had to do in an adjacent classroom, where he would not disturb other students who were writing by hand on their blue books. Today, at the exam at Strathcona Hall for French 310, the presiding monitor readily acquiesced.

Danny was happy not to have to join the twenty-five students in shirtsleeves bending over, in their standard little desk chairs, the six-page exam paper being handed out. Danny took his copy of the examination paper and walked out of the exam hall with it to a small empty classroom, adjacent. He could tell from the thickness of the stapled sheets that, indeed, there would be a long passage there to translate into French. He closed the door.

Three hours later, he walked with Henry from Strathcona the half block to Silliman. It was sunny and hot. Danny carried a seersucker jacket in one hand, his Royal portable typewriter in the other. The summer was now shimmering about them. It was suddenly sweltering in New Haven: It was now, and would be for three months, a hot, humid little city.

“Funny sensation,” Danny said as they walked, slowly, as if
without purpose. “That’s it! The end of college life. All that happens now is we fart around for a week, then receive a diploma.”

“In Latin.”

“Don’t worry, Henry. I’ll translate it for you.”

They reached their rooms. Danny tossed his jacket down on the couch and went out into the community bathroom across the hall.

Henry looked about at the litter in the little study-sitting room, left over from the night before—papers, books, empty bottles of beer and Coca-Cola. Students at Yale hadn’t had the luxury of a daily cleaning woman since freshman year.

What the hell. Henry set out to tidy up the room. He began by removing Danny’s coat—why on earth did Danny need a coat on June 11 in New Haven, Connecticut? He lifted the light seersucker from the couch and felt the weight of it. Surprised, he looked down into the bared pocket, slipped his hand in and brought out Cassell’s French dictionary.

Quickly he slipped it back into the pocket of the coat and laid it back on the couch. He was dismayed.

And then he walked quickly out the door and down the stairs.

He’d wait outside the dining hall until it opened. He didn’t want to lay eyes on Danny. He would not have known what to say to him. In fact he did not speak to any of the other students who milled about, waiting for the dining hall to open. Henry was silent, diplomatically diverting all efforts to engage him in conversation during lunch. He tried to sort it out.

Danny.

Cheating.

T
HE DAYS that led to the wedding hadn’t been without incident. Soon after Caroline’s visit to Palm Beach, where she spent a weekend with her future mother-in-law at her seaside villa, the formal announcement was drafted.

Rachel closely supervised its composition. From time to time the society columns in Palm Beach and Newport reported on Rachel Roosevelt Bennett’s activity, and she was entirely agreeable to being referred to as a style setter, and why not? Her father had been President of the United States longer than any man in history and her mother was very nearly as famous as her father. When the King and Queen of England had visited in Hyde Park in 1939 the President had served them hot dogs and all of America had risen to cheer. Rachel was especially attuned to social
possibilities to weigh in with The People, her father’s constituents, and she was the first, according to the society columnist in the
Palm Beach Daily News
, ever to wear pants—fancy, floral silk pants, especially made for her—at an afternoon garden party at which she was the hostess.

Yes, but Rachel knew that some occasions were born to be formal, and she was not about to deinstitutionalize such a thing as a wedding. Or what came before; and, accordingly, the announcement of the engagement party was entirely conventional, her personal handiwork, even though the stamp was, so to speak, from out there, the provenance of the bride. Henry Beckett Chafee of Lakeville, Connecticut, was proud to announce the engagement of his sister, Caroline Stimson Chafee, to Daniel Tracey O’Hara of Palm Beach, Florida. The announcement recorded the name of Danny’s late father and the current name of his mother. And—though Rachel wrestled with this for a bit, but then thought what the hell, why not?—the names of his maternal grandparents. About Caroline, the names of her late parents were given, and it was noted that she would graduate from Smith College in June, and that after graduating from Yale in 1950, her fiancé had joined the Trafalgar hotel chain in New York as a junior executive.

Rachel O’Hara had given a stellar buffet-dance party at her Palm Beach spread for a hundred guests. In the receiving line Rachel introduced Caroline, dressed in yellow chiffon, the light blond hair slightly curled; her son Danny, the poster-boy college grad, in his blazer and white duck pants; her daughter Lila, at six feet one an imposing undergraduate with brown hair, large teeth, and an iron handshake; and Henry, golden blond, with horn-rimmed glasses and a studious air about him, the brother of the bride. The young people stayed on and danced late to Lester Lanin’s music and, much later, put on swim clothes and disported in the sea. Rachel spent as much time as she could command closely observing her prospective daughter-in-law. Late in the evening she confessed to her husband almost ruefully that she could find nothing in her to criticize.

“That probably makes her too good for Danny,” Harry Bennett grunted, taking off his black tie.

Rachel was half amused (she knew that her self-indulgent son had, well, shortcomings), half resentful (she was proud of him, her firstborn, and utterly delighted by his good looks). She satisfied herself by saying, “If she’s good enough for Danny, she’s good enough for me.”

Henry and Caroline had been assigned the guest cottage, with its two bedrooms and living room. Breakfast was brought in the next morning and Henry, his eyes roaming over the headlines of the
Miami Herald
that came in with the breakfast, complimented his sister on her patience and charm during the long evening. Caroline accepted her brother’s bouquet as a routine fraternal courtesy and moved purposively to another subject. “How much do they pay you at
Time
magazine?”

Henry told her he earned one hundred dollars per week. “Eighty-eight fifty after withholding tax.”

“How much do you know about our trust?”

“Not as much as I should. We’ve both been getting the same allowance, seventy-five bucks per month, but every now and then Cam Beckett springs something like a trip to Europe. Are you wondering about the wedding?”

“Yes. It’s our … treat, right?”

“That’s what the book says. I’ll call Cam when I get back to New York. Have you set a date?”

Caroline mused, “No, actually, we haven’t. Danny, as you would expect, wants it the day after tomorrow. I thought maybe in the fall.”

“What do you plan to do during the summer?—and please pass the marmalade. No, that one.”

“I haven’t told this yet to Danny, but I’ve told Father Keller I’ll volunteer this summer at the Maryknoll Mission in Mexico. I feel I want to do something like that. The Mormons do it—they spend a couple of years doing what they think of as missionary work. I’m not thinking about preaching Christianity, but maybe practicing a little Christianity. I’ve been given a lot, maybe I should try to give back a little. My Spanish is pretty good but
could get a lot better, and the mission—it’s just outside of Cuernavaca—teaches orphans aged six to twelve and looks after them.”

“Maryknollers. Why not Benedictines? You forgetting Latrobe?”

“Hardly.”

“You were only five.”

“Yes. Funny, I don’t remember anything else about when I was five, except for vague memories of Father; and Mother, obviously. But Latrobe I remember—I remember every detail. I remember Brother Ambrose giving us the first glass of Ovaltine I ever tasted. And I’d hardly forget what you did, Henry.”

The memory of it still made Henry shiver.

It was getting late that October afternoon in 1935 and the sun was beginning to go down. Henry and Caroline had spent almost two hours at the forest reserve looking for their parents. They had separated from them in midafternoon, determined to explore the forest all by themselves, unaccompanied by adults. One hour later they set out to retrace their steps. But they were lost, it seemed irretrievably.

Henry, age ten, hadn’t known what to do next. They sat down on the scrubby forest floor of decaying leaves, wondering in which direction to set out to emerge from the forest. It was then that he spotted the snake and heard its rattle as it slithered its hypnotizing way toward Caroline’s right thigh. Henry felt the hairs stand up on his head and his breath choked but he wasn’t paralyzed. He threw himself at the rattler and grabbed it under its oily head, smashing it feverishly a half-dozen times against the big rock.

The snake was dead. Henry struggled to control his breathing. He had been bitten and he knew that rattlesnake bites could be deadly. Caroline seemed to know too because she began to cry. Henry remembered what his Boy Scout leader had told the boys about the blood flow. Accordingly he instructed Caroline.
She must quiet down
, then remove one of her long socks and wind it tightly around Henry’s upper arm. Caroline followed his instructions step by step, remaining silent. She was fumbling with the
improvised bandage when they heard the evensong of the monks not far away. Henry began to run in the direction of the chant, then remembered what his leader had said: Exercise stimulates the blood flow, spreads the poison. He slowed down to a fast walk, and in a few moments fell into the arms of Brother Ambrose, at the head of the column of twelve Benedictines doing late-afternoon devotions while taking one of their daily walks in the forest surrounding the monastery.

Henry blurted it all out. Brother Ambrose acted quickly. He dispatched one monk to look after Caroline, a second to go at a run to the monastery to call the doctor at Latrobe; and then with a third monk he joined hands-to-wrists to form the classic seat. Brother Ambrose wanted no physical exertion made by Henry, nothing that would accelerate the circulation of the poison.

Accordingly the two monks squatted down and told Henry to sit on the improvised chair formed by their interlocked forearms and to put his arms around their necks. They then dogtrotted the quarter mile back to the monastery. At the infirmary, the matron called the doctor’s office to ask if he had brought rattlesnake vaccine with him. He had not. She called the hospital and ordered it sent by ambulance. She made incisions across, and vertical to, the fang mark, renewed the tourniquet, and put a thermometer in Henry’s mouth.

Caroline was at his side and would not let go of Henry’s free hand. He felt dizzy, then fell asleep, waking to the jab of the needle in his arm. The night was a painful blur through which he remembered nausea, the sound of his mother and father saying unintelligible things to Brother Ambrose, the proddings of a doctor, heavy perspiration.

And, the next morning, a sedated sense of having arrived out of the dark forest onto a grassy plain. He opened his eyes. His mother was sitting in the armchair. One hour later, Brother Ambrose invited the family into the chapel to offer a prayer of thanksgiving. Henry was stretched out on a sofa cushion in the chapel. Caroline knelt behind him during the exercise, and he heard her child’s voice attempting to pronounce the prayers of
the college of monks, but the Latin was beyond her, as it was beyond Henry.

But from then on, no Christmas went by without an exchange of cards with Brother Ambrose; and when, fifteen years later, word reached them that he had died, Caroline left Smith on a long bus journey, prayed at the grave of Brother Ambrose and, returning to Smith, acted on an impulse she had felt for a year but never yielded to. She went down the hall to talk to her classmate, Maureen Buckley, who had spoken of the work she did during the summer for Father Keller in New York. Would Maureen take her to meet Father Keller and to learn about the Maryknollers? Maureen said sure—she went to New York every month or so and it was always nice to visit with “FK,” as his non-clerical associates and volunteers referred to him.

What then happened, one year later—a year ago—was that Caroline had become a Catholic. But for reasons she never explained even to herself, she wished her conversion to be entirely private. Henry had guessed the reason, which was that his little sister would go to great lengths to avoid attracting attention to herself. At one point he had mentioned this to Danny. “She is so striking naturally, she shies instinctively from, well, from making that light any brighter.” The last thing she would do at Smith, for instance, was join the drama group, or consent to sing solo in the choir. Anyway, FK baptized her, Maureen served as godmother and another priest in the Maryknoll mission as godfather. She went quietly to church at Smith, and in New Haven when visiting with Danny. But she did not let on, except to Henry, that she had become a communicant.

Caroline returned to her theme. “On the wedding—you know, Henry, I don’t see any need for a big wedding. Even if the trust has money for it, I wouldn’t want to spend it. Just—well, we don’t have to go into detail.”

“No. No, Caroline. But from what I know of Mrs. O’Hara—of Mrs. Bennett—of Rachel—she’s going to think big about the wedding. You’ll need Danny’s support.”

Caroline paused. Then she turned inquiringly to her brother.
“Henry, I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m sure you think so too. But maybe, I don’t know, maybe I want to hear you say it, in your words. ‘Is there anyone in this company who has reason to object to the bonds of matrimony? If so, speak, or forever hold your peace!’ ” Caroline laughed when she spoke the words, but she didn’t do so in such a way as to repeal their having been spoken. More gravely, she went on, “Is there anything about Danny you, well, you wonder about?”