William F. Buckley Jr. (13 page)

Henry thought it best to adopt his technique of evasion, which was slightly to divert. “Danny is my best friend. What more can anybody say?”

The telephone rang. “Yes, Mrs. Bennett. Okay, thanks—Yes,
Rachel.
Of course, I am happy to call you Rachel. Yes. It was terrific. Terribly nice people. Yes, I thought the music wonderful. No. Not quite, but I can be over there in fifteen minutes. We don’t have very long before flight time, do we? See you in a bit, Rachel.”

And on Wednesday, Caroline had the letter. General Bennett was taking over.
The wedding would be in Palm Beach.
… There were plenty of precedents for orphaned young people turning the responsibility for a wedding over to parents of the groom.
The Episcopal minister at Palm Beach was an old family friend, indeed as a younger man had served as assistant rector at the church in Rhinebeck, New York, to which Danny’s grandfather repaired on Sundays while governor, and, later, President.
…

Well, Caroline sighed, it had to come. She thought of telephoning Danny to discuss it with him. Then she thought better of it: If she talked it over with Danny, he’d then have to tell his mother he had had a discussion with his future bride and—lost out. Because he would from sheer inertia side with his mother, and then lose out to Caroline. So would Rachel Roosevelt O’Hara Rosenthal Incantadore Bennett.

“Dear Rachel: You are wonderfully kind to offer to relieve Henry and me of all those responsibilities, but we’ve talked about it and we think Mother and Father would have preferred that we act as hosts. The house at Lakeville isn’t much, but it has a very
nice lawn. And, Rachel, I haven’t spoken about it, though I wouldn’t be surprised if Danny has suspected it, but I became a Catholic a year ago and, as you probably know, the laws of my church specify marriage by a priest. The priest at Lakeville is a very nice man, and I hope you will like him. On the matter of the date, I will talk with Danny. I have in mind something along about the middle of September. As I said in the letter I sent you on Monday, I was enchanted by the whole affair on Saturday and was happy to meet some of your friends. Love from—Caroline.”

“Mom, it’s
not
an insulting letter.” Danny grasped the telephone in his left hand. His legs were stretched out in exasperated anticipation of a long exchange with his mother. He closed his eyes as Rachel Bennett fired on. Volley after volley. “
How
do I know it’s not insulting?
Because
, Mom,
you just finished reading it to me.
Do you want to read it to me
again?
Go ahead, I’m listening.”

Rachel read out loud again the letter from Caroline.

Danny responded: “Now, what’s
insulting
about
that?
You can say her letter is
disappointing.
You can say it’s
shortsighted.
Dumb. Stupid. Ungrateful. But look, Mom, if that is the way she
feels
about the wedding, it’s not ‘insulting’ to say so. And anyway, it’s not the end of the world, is it? A couple of weeks down the line you can give us a party in Florida with Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland singing—the wedding can be a simple affair in Lakeville—No. No, I
didn’t
know she was a Catholic. I
did
know that on Sundays in New Haven she went to the Catholic church at Yale to mass, but I assumed it was just one of those, you know, ecumenical things. But apparently she’s quite serious about it. What? Al Smith? Al Smith was a Catholic and hated Grandfather?
Mother!
Al Smith was
nominated
by Grandfather. It’s just not
correct
to say that Catholics were against Grandfather; hell, they voted
for
him, most of them.… Well, I mean, that’s too bad, and I see what you mean. I mean, I’m supposed to be an Anglican. Okay, so she is more of a Catholic, I guess, than I am an Anglican. But what are you saying I should do about it? Call the Ku Klux Klan?… No, I know, Mother. That was a joke.—A what joke? Yes. A bad joke. How about if I agree to call it an
insulting
joke? Does
that make you feel better? I’m sorry, Mom, I really am. But I really don’t think, six months after the wedding, anybody will remember where the wedding was, or what the religion was of the guy who married us.”

Danny motioned to Sally Smithers to bring him a drink.
Such a good old shoe, Sally, provides me with everything I want, including her comfy apartment, and in three years she never once suggested we get married, I mean, how perfect can a girlfriend—a lady friend—be?
He sipped his drink while letting his mother smolder out her indignation at being tamed by a twenty-one-year-old indigent Catholic convert. He more or less agreed with her as, little by little, she reduced the charges against Danny’s future wife: Yes, he said finally, that was a suitable compromise, a really terrific idea, Mom. Rachel would give a big wedding party—at Lakeville.

He would call Caroline. But not right now. Later that night, maybe; or maybe the next day. Caroline could always be reached by phone at lunchtime at Haven House at Smith.

He put down the telephone, got up, gave Sally a kiss and said, “Sorry about that; yes, it was awfully long. Do you have a mother, Sally? I mean,
obviously
you have a mother, and you must know then that mothers sometimes get out of hand. But your mother wasn’t out of hand when she had
you
, you bet.”

He loved being with Sally, more actually, than he loved Sally, and it was that way too with her, who loved her time with Danny but would not want to be with him full-time. She always made herself available to him, or mostly always, since once in a blue moon her ex-husband hove in, exercising squatter’s rights. It was wonderful that he could talk to her about all the plans he had to make in connection with marrying Caroline, but then these plans didn’t necessarily mean discontinuing visits with Sally Smithers, who always smelled like sweet hay. Funny he thought that, because he didn’t know what sweet hay was, or what it would smell like, except that it would smell like Sally.

T
HE WEDDING wasn’t going to turn out to be all that modest, Caroline realized as the date neared. Cam Beckett had told Henry that the family trust could come up with three thousand dollars for “such an important event.” And then word got around, in Lakeville and in neighboring Salisbury and Sharon, that the daughter of the late President was the mother of the groom. It was even rumored that the widow herself would turn up for the wedding of her dashing grandson—after all, Lakeville was only an hour away from Hyde Park.

Friends popped up, resourceful friends, anxious to help; many of them volunteering to put up for Friday and Saturday night members of the wedding party, or even just plain guests from out
of town. “In Lakeville, guests-from-out-of-town means practically everybody,” Caroline chatted to Henry about their home town with its twenty-five hundred inhabitants.

She sat allocating expected guests to hostesses, all details carefully logged in her thick white-leather register designated to keep a record of everything that pertained to the wedding. Already a half-dozen pages listed presents and the addresses of the friends and acquaintances who sent them. Preponderantly, they came from friends of the groom. That was to be expected. Henry looked over his sister’s shoulder. “Caroline, you will be glad to know that you will begin married life owning three toasters.”

“Yes. I’m beginning to hope that somebody will send us some bread. Have you counted the pitchers?”

“What did Mrs. Bennett—Rachel—contribute?”

“The honeymoon. Sweet. I persuaded Danny to take our two weeks in Scotland. He’s never been. We’ll fly Pan Am on the twentieth. Wish you were coming too, Henry. No! That isn’t a proper thought for a honeymoon. I’m
glad
you won’t be there, Henry!” She laughed and went to answer the telephone in the study.

Henry could hear her talking to Cam Beckett. The conversation ended and she returned to the living room. “He is a sweetheart. If I hadn’t decided on Danny, I’d have proposed to him.”

Henry said that conceivably Mrs. Beckett would have been uncooperative.

“She certainly hasn’t been uncooperative about the wedding.” The Becketts were moving into the guest house on their property, vacating the five-bedroom house for Mrs. Bennett and her retinue. “I wish we could think of something really nice to do for them.”

“Maybe I can persuade Henry Luce to put Mr. Beckett on the cover of
Time
?”

“Yes, Henry, that would be very nice. ‘Portrait of a Connecticut Yankee.’ ‘New England Lawyer Lightens the Load of Orphaned Smith Grad Marrying into Royal Family.’ How’m I doing, Henry?” She scratched an entry into the wedding-present list.

“Fair. How many people is Rachel inviting to her party on Friday?”

“Danny said she didn’t place any limit on it. I shouldn’t think all that many people would want to come in on Friday for a noon Saturday wedding. It means finding someplace around here to spend the night. My invitation list is only about forty, counting Smithies. Danny, needless to say, is inviting half the Yale class of 1950.—Henry, I haven’t told you about Madame Landowska.”

“Don’t tell me
she’s
coming? Will she bring her biographers? The studio technicians?”

“Henry, quiet. No. Actually, I rather hoped she would come. Every now and then … did you read the
Time
magazine article about her? Dumb, of course you read it. Did you do any legwork on it?”

“Actually I did. I went and spent three hours with Denise Restout, her librarian, researcher, counselor and cook. She’s not yet thirty, you know. I gave Max five thousand words of Landowskiana I got from Denise.”

“Well then you know she has been
known
to attend a party, though maybe only one every couple of years, and usually it’s a party for the fiftieth anniversary, or whatever, of a Caruso or Schnabel type, you know. But she’s been nice to me since I was ten and she made me play on her Pleyel harpsichord. She would just sit there and mumble in French to Denise, and Denise would then tell me what I was doing wrong, and the old lady would just nod. It is such a glorious sound and when she plays her fingers are like little pistons, straight up and down. So anyway, I thought: Why not ask?”

“How’d she take it?”

“It was wonderful. She got up from the chair and sat down at her harpsichord. You know, the famous one, yes, the Pleyel, and she played something very simple, not anything I knew or recognized. Just a couple of minutes, then she told me it was an epithalamium—she taught me that word, taught it to me in French, Henry—a lyrical wedding ode. It was written for her by Poulenc, who was just a young man, as a tribute to her husband when he died in 1919.”

“What did she say about the wedding?”

“She said,” Caroline’s voice was excited, “she said no, she would not come. But that she would give me a wedding present. On Thursday or Friday before the wedding I can bring up to eight people to her house, and she will play for us, for one hour. Henry! A private concert by Wanda Landowska! How do you like that!” She was radiant. The telephone rang; she darted out of the room and was back in a minute or two and returned distractedly to the acceptance list she had been discussing. “Yes, I told you Danny was inviting half your class.”

“What’s the matter with the other half of the class of 1950?” Henry got up from the floor. “There,” he said, putting down the scissors. “That’s the lot for today. God knows how many more packages will arrive tomorrow. But you’ll be on your own, Carol. I leave for New York after supper.” Impulsively, Caroline got up and embraced her brother. She hung on to him for a full minute.

Mrs. Bennett had been in residence at the Becketts’ for two days before her party began. For it, she brought in caterers from New York. A large tent, in red and white vaulted stripes, materialized on the lakeside lawn of the Becketts’. Inside the tent were chairs and tables for two hundred guests, a wooden platform for ten musicians, a substantial dance floor, clusters of roses and chrysanthemums and azaleas punctuating the seemingly endless circular buffet.

Cocktails were served in the Beckett house from two bars. The guests began to flow in at seven. By eight, the older generation was overwhelmed. Jeff Lowry suggested to Danny that Zeta Psi could proceed to do its business—“we’ve got a quorum!” Harriet bounced about, a pinball touching every base. They filled the house’s rooms, upstairs and downstairs. The buzz of animated conversation became seamless, as incessantly exuberant in the little study downstairs as in the little drawing room on the second floor.

—“
She is ever so pretty, Rachel. And the expression on her face is heavenly.
”

“What else would you expect? She spent the entire summer sprinkling holy water on Mexican orphans. You would look heavenly too, Alice, if you did that.”

  —“
I don’t mind telling you, Jim, that girl is something else. And she adores me. But that doesn’t surprise you, does it, Jim? I mean—Jim, do
you
adore me?
”

—“Gus, cut it out. You’re making me sick. Come to think of it, you’ve made me feel sick every one of the five hundred times I’ve been with you in the past four years.”

  —“
So what I’m gonna do, Johnny, is—Listen. Well, get closer then, I’m not going to go to a loudspeaker t’tell you. What I’m gonna do is spend the night at Millbrook with the Abbotts, then I’ll pick
you
up at the Coleys’ at—exactly
, exactly
10:25. That way we’ll get to the church by 10:40 which is when we have to begin ushering the
—ushering the—
Aw, screw you, Johnny. Can you remember just one thing: 10:25? At the Coleys’?
…

—He pressed her hand. “You having fun, doll?”

Caroline nodded. “As long as you’re here, Danny, I’m having fun.”

The party was down to the twenty or thirty bitter-enders. The bandleader sent in his question: Did Mrs. Bennett want the musicians to go beyond one o’clock? The same messenger who brought back the word (“No”) then went to Danny and whispered to him that his mother wished to see him right away in the main house. “In her sitting room.”