William F. Buckley Jr. (8 page)

“It’s hot. But so am I. Are you hot, handsome?”

She moved Henry toward the door of a dark gray building and with her index finger counted down five call buttons from the top. She depressed it, signaling, dash-dot-dash. He could hear the door lock snap open. At the elevator she pushed the button for the fourth floor. Inside the elevator she kneaded him between his legs, smiling sleepily, moistening her lips with her tongue. On the fourth floor she led him to a door which she opened with her own key. Inside was a narrow corridor, a middle-aged woman seated at one corner of it reading a paperback under the light. At her left was a refrigerator and next to it, in what had been a bookcase, assorted liquors.

“What you having tonight, lover boy? You can leave your kit over there.” Lena pointed to a closet behind the woman.

Henry said he would settle for a beer, though he felt frustrated
by the delay. This he assumed was a part of what he knew to designate as foreplay. But not of the kind he had ever envisioned; his idea of foreplay wasn’t something you did in a corridor getting drinks from an old lady.

The woman put down her book, opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of beer. She poured a rum and Coca-Cola for Lena. “Two dollars,” she said, opening the cash box. Henry heard a woman’s laughter and a man’s voice saying something, but he did not make out the words. Lena motioned Henry to follow her. She led him to a small room with a large bed. She took the beer from his hand, put her own glass down on the night table, slid open Henry’s fly, kissed him ardently on the lips, and whispered, “That will be twenty dollars, lover boy, cash up front. Put it there,” she pointed to the night table, “and I’ll be right with you, handsome.” She disappeared into a bathroom.

As suddenly as the switch had turned on, another now took hold of him, and his reaction was instantaneous.

He yanked a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and dropped it on the bed. He zipped his pants shut, opened the door quietly, walked down the hall, picked up his bag and walked quickly down the stairway to the street. He felt a pang in his groin, but his head was composed, and the hot air tasted summer-sweet.

T
HE PASSENGER LINER wasn’t much but the send-off was out of sight terrific, as Caroline’s officious friend and classmate Harriet put it. It was just the right time of day for that kind of thing, Danny thought, and Caroline agreed: late afternoon, so that when the sun actually fell, you were snaking out of New York Harbor, traveling to Europe! The
S.S. Continental
was a hastily rebuilt merchant ship designed to help cope with the overflow of Americans who wanted to travel to Europe in the summer of 1949. She was slow, the recreational facilities were limited and the food brought back memories of wartime belt tightening. But she was inexpensive, clean, entirely adequate for Henry and Caroline. The prospect of seeing Europe was the one silver lining in the death of their mother, a death that caused funds to materialize
that they did not know existed. Cam Beckett, the trustee, told them at Christmas that their trust could handle a modest trip to Europe, and a few weeks later sent them each a check for one thousand dollars.

The stateroom Danny and Henry shared was a few square inches larger than the room Caroline shared with a stranger, a quite striking, entirely poised redhead who was instantly invited to join the Yale party, did so, and eventually told somebody who asked that her name was Lucy. When the sixth consecutive Yale classmate arrived, Danny said to Henry, Hey, let’s call this thing off! It was beginning to look like the famous Marx Brothers stateroom sequence.

Caroline agreed and everyone followed her up to the lounge, which had only the disadvantage that the guests had to pay for their own drinks instead of using up Danny’s and Henry’s private supply in the stateroom. There were two hundred passengers and at least four hundred well-wishers, a piano player plunking away absolutely outside anyone’s range of hearing except the waiter, who kept cleaning the piano player’s cigarette tray. The stentorian loudspeakers eventually convinced those who were going ashore that there probably wasn’t in fact any alternative to going ashore, unless they wanted to stow away; the companionway was removed.

It was all quite dreamy, Danny thought, looking at Caroline’s soft golden hair and oval face and brown eyes with an air of propriety, because although she had spent a total of only six weekends at Yale, beginning when she went to Smith to study after her mother’s death, something of a durable nature had begun. Danny had taken Caroline here and there, to campus parties, to fraternities, to sports events, and he liked later to accost his friends and put to them the question, Had they ever seen a dreamier girl? Most of them deferred to Danny. Now, looking at her as she stood alongside her brother peering over the ship’s rail at the receding Manhattan skyline, he knew suddenly what it was about her that was distinctive. Because of course a dozen—five dozen—girls crossed the campus every weekend who were knockouts to look at. What gave Caroline that special lift was a
detachment from whatever the surrounding focus, never suggesting she wasn’t enjoying the hockey game or the post-game cocktail party or, at the moment, the wonderful view of a diminishing skyline, receding from sight even as the sun did; it was the other light in the eye. Required one day to say it in as many words, Danny told his roommate that it gave Caroline “four dimensions.” He confessed he did not know exactly what that meant, but then he did not know exactly what was the meaning of that other look in Caroline’s eye.

Caroline quite apart, Danny thought, this trip was much more fun than last year’s, when he had traveled alone—more exactly, had set sail alone; because Danny was never alone for very long unless he made a strenuous effort to be alone, and he hadn’t on the
S.S. Georgic.
He had picked up a girl named Lala and also, he discovered when he got back to Yale, a case of clap.

Caroline was entirely different, in that sense. He would never flirt sexually with Caroline. Besides, he felt in no hurry with Caroline, maybe because her own poise was somehow uninterruptible. There was an intactness there one didn’t play with. The first time he had seen her she was desolate, as who would not have been under the circumstances, but she was never quite—vulnerable. He loved to be in her company and when she was with him he was never asking himself, as characteristically he almost always did, what was he going to do next. What he was going to do next, he now reminded himself with pleasure, was sit down at the dinner table next to Caroline. And of course Henry. And, he supposed, the
S.S. Continental
’s management would stick a fourth person down at the table, presumably Lucy. He hoped Henry and Lucy would get on well together, hoped they would absorb each other.

The European holiday would last eight weeks. On September 6 the
Continental
would end its eight round-trip journeys to New York, beginning in Nice. The route was Nice-Cherbourg-Southampton. Caroline would travel, during most of the vacation, with her brother, but the eighth and final week she would spend in Scotland at the summer house of the family of her Smith friend,
Gladys Gibney. After leaving her, Henry would drive south from Paris along the Loire Valley and meet Danny at Nice. Together they would board the boat for the return passage, picking Caroline up at Southampton three days later.

Accordingly they had separated when the
Continental
reached Southampton. The Chafees had their own itinerary, Danny his, which included some sailboat racing in Copenhagen and a leisurely drive in a rented car from Rome through Florence and Monaco to Nice.

On the Monday before meeting up with Henry and boarding the ship for the return passage, Danny was at the Casino Royale. It was one in the morning and the great old gaming palace was still filling up. When he first saw it he wondered if anything at all had changed since the turn of the century. If he closed his eyes he could imagine it filled with men in Edwardian longcoats with muttonchop whiskers and maybe a monocle or two. There were no windows in the Casino Royale, no more than in the Brayeux brothel he had visited in Paris. Everywhere there was velvet. The walls were a shimmering red, broken up only by the gilt that adorned the mirrors and sconces. It must have been a shattering concession by management—surely some duke or count or deposed dowager empress—to have taken down the candleholders and replaced them with yellowed lights? Or were they gas ports? Danny would look into it. He fixed his eyes on the dazzling green of the gaming tables, and on the company at hand.

Only half of the players were Americans, the balance pretty much the same mix as the year before, heavily adorned Frenchwomen of all ages, Dutch burghers, slim-boned Italian polyglots, English aristocrats speaking in single syllables. But during the preceding hour Danny had paid no attention to the backgrounds of the other guests, or indeed to his surroundings; he was aware only of resources suddenly, drastically, depleted.

Danny O’Hara was not used to bad luck. Only the weather, he once told Henry jauntily, had ever really let him down. Last year he had returned to Yale after his summer in Europe with gifts for everybody in sight, with special gift cards written out for his mother, for his stepfather, Harry Bennett, and for Bill Fenniman,
the bank official who presided over his inscrutable trust. Even with the gifts all paid for, he had had almost four hundred dollars left over. To each of his gifts he had appended a card, “With love from the Casino Royale, Nice.” His mother told him over the telephone that yes, darling, she loved her gift—a Fabergé cigarette case—but that it was really very childish for him to advertise that he had gambled at a casino inasmuch as there was no stupider activity on earth than to gamble when the odds are fixed against you. Danny had handled that telephone conversation with a Yes-Mom sequence while watching television. Television sets were forbidden at Silliman College in students’ rooms, for electrical reasons, which made matters slightly inconvenient for Danny, but he quickly devised means to keep his set nicely camouflaged. Now, one year later, he was disporting at the same casino at which exactly one year earlier he had triumphed—and was very hard-pressed.

When the little Neapolitan croupier looked over at him to see whether, in the upcoming round, he was going to put a chip down at the roulette wheel, Danny motioned with his hand, no—he would pass. What he badly needed to do was to check his wallet, but he didn’t want to be seen doing so. Certainly not by the blasé chain-smoking thirtyish beautiful blonde with the tiara seated on his right; or by the fat imperious Egyptian on his left—could that be King Farouk? King Farouk was betting ten-thousand-franc notes, the blond lady on his right, a thousand francs. It would not do—no, not do at all!—for the dashing young American
beau idéal
, dressed in black tie as the casino demanded, to be seen reaching into his wallet and peering into it, a beggar foraging for scraps. He would pretend he was going to the men’s room.

But what he knew he had to do would take up more time than even a protracted pee, and therefore he mustn’t—not in that crowded room—preempt a player’s slot at the roulette game. “
Je reviendrais,
” he nodded to the croupier, “
mais ça sera question de quelques minutes.
”

There. The croupier was free to interpret “a few minutes” as he chose. He might decide that a few minutes was a modest
enough holding time for the comely, urbane young American who hadn’t won a hand in an hour; on the other hand, “a few minutes” might be interpreted as just indefinite enough to justify the croupier’s giving over the player’s slot to someone standing in line to play the game.

What Danny needed to do was something he very much didn’t want to do, which was to telephone his mother.

He went back to the Negresco Hotel next door to the casino. Transatlantic telephone calls were something of an operation, so he stopped at the hotel switchboard, slipped five hundred francs into the hands of the operator, kissed her on the forehead and said, “
S’il vous plaît, chère madame, aidez-moi, c’est horriblement
”—he threw up his hands and closed his eyes in feigned agony—“
important Je vais à mon chambre, trois cent vingt-deux. Voilà le numéro.
” He gave her the slip of paper with his mother’s number, took the elevator, opened the door to his room, flung off his coat and sat down by the phone waiting for it to ring. His eyes wandered over the morning’s paper, without focus. A few minutes later the phone rang. She was on the line.

“Hello, Mom!”

“Danny, how are you, dear?”

“Well, I could not be better. We were runners-up at Copenhagen, got a silver cup. Saw two operas at Milan, including one with that really hot soprano, Licia Albanese.”

“Which operas were they?”

“Ah. They were—
Traviata
and
Aïda.
”

“I hope you did not vamp the soprano.”

“Oh, Mother, come on. She must be”—what age would Rachel O’Hara think it right that her son should think remote?—“fifty.”

He could hear her laugh. Rachel enjoyed her son’s verbal raffishness. “I don’t suppose you heard
him?
”

“Franki?”

“Who do you think?”

“No. I did ask, but apparently he is in Australia. Do they sing in the nude on Australian beaches, Mom?”

That was dumb of him.
Granted, it made him sound normal.
That was good, in one way—he didn’t want her to know how panicked he really was. But then she probably did not like being reminded of Franki nude on her beach, doing something she once accepted as romantic.

“You have a lewd memory. Danny dear, why are you calling me? Are you broke?” Rachel could get right to the point.

“Well as a matter of fact, Mom, I wonder if you could lend me a few bucks?”

“Like how many bucks?”

“Five hundred?”

“Five hundred dollars! Danny! Danny? Have you been gambling?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, just tonight, and you know, it sometimes happens, when everything goes wrong? A little like”—this too was risky, but maybe he could fasten her mind on how proud she had been of her little boy’s resourcefulness—“like the weather on that awful sail to Nantucket.…”