“And when will it really hit me?”
“I don’t know when, but I know how. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason. When your guard is down. You’ll be in the subway, or walking along the street, not any favorite street full of memories, but any anonymous street. Or in a cab. And the whole God damn thing will come down on you and you’ll be weeping before you know it. That’s where nobody can help you, because it’s unpredictable and you’ll be alone. It’ll only happen when you’re relaxed and defenseless. But you’re not relaxed, really. It’s just that you’re weak, been weakened without realizing what it’s taken out of you. Emotional exhaustion, I guess it is. Then there are two other things, but I won’t talk about them now. They may not happen to you, and I’ve told you enough.”
“Thanks, Jim.”
“Charley, you know what let’s do? Let’s go for a walk. We won’t run into anybody.”
“Yes. Nothing against your club, but I think I’ve had it here.”
So the two of us went for a not too brisk walk, down Fifth Avenue, up Fifth Avenue, and to the door of Charley’s apartment house. The doorman saluted him and said: “Sorry fur yur trouble, Mr. Ellis. A foine lovely woman, none foiner.”
I happened, and only happened, to be looking at Charley as the doorman spoke. He nodded at the doorman but did not speak. I took his arm and led him to the elevator. “Mr. Ellis’s apartment,” I said, and frowned the elevator man into silence. He understood.
We got off at Charley’s floor, the only apartment on that floor, and he went to the livingroom and sat down and wept without covering his face. I stayed in the foyer. Five minutes passed and then he said: “Okay, Jim. I’m okay now. What can I give you? Ginger ale? Coke? Glass of milk?”
“A ginger ale.”
“It hit me sooner than we expected,” he said. “Do you know what it was? Or what I think it was? It was the doorman saying nice things, and he didn’t really know her at all. He’s only been here a few weeks. He doesn’t know either of us very well. Why don’t you stay here tonight, instead of going back to that God damn dreary place?”
“I will if you’ll go to bed. And don’t worry, you’ll sleep.”
“Will I?”
“Yes, you’ll sleep tonight. Twenty blocks to a mile, we walked damn near four miles, I make it. Take a lukewarm tub and hit the sack. I’ll read for a while and I’ll be in Mike’s room. Goodnight, Charley.”
“Goodnight, Jim. Thanks again.”
• • •
One afternoon in 1937 I was having breakfast in my apartment in East Fifty-fifth Street. I had worked the night before until dawn, as was my custom, and I was smoking my third cigarette and starting on my second quart of coffee when the house phone rang. Charley Ellis was in the vestibule. I let him in and he shook his head at me in my pajamas, unshaven, and with the coffee and newspapers beside my chair. “La Vie de Bohème,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Come on out, Mimi, and stop that damn coughing.”
Charley looked at me with genuine alarm. “You haven’t got a dame here, have you? I’m sorry if—”
“No dame.”
“I don’t want to interrupt anything.”
“I wouldn’t have let you in,” I said. “But I’ve just been reading about you, so maybe I would have. Curiosity. Who is Nancy Preswell?”
“Oh, you saw that, did you? Well, she’s the wife of a guy named Jack Preswell.”
“All right, who is Jack Preswell?” I said. “Besides being the husband of a girl named Nancy Preswell.”
“Well, you’ve met him. With me. Do you remember a guy that we went to the ball game with a couple of years ago?”
“I do indeed. I remember everything about him but his name. A very handsome guy, a little on the short side. Boyish-looking. And now I know who she is because I’ve seen them together, but I never could remember his name. Not that it mattered. He didn’t remember me at all, but she’s quite a beauty. Not quite a beauty. She is a beauty. And you’re the home-wrecker.”
“According to Maury Paul I am, if you believe what he writes.”
“He’s often right, you know,” I said. “He had me in his column one time with a woman I’d never met, but I met her a year or so later and he turned out to be a very good prophet. So it’s only your word against his.”
“I didn’t come here to be insulted,” he said, taking a chair.
“Well, what did you come here for? I haven’t seen or heard from you in God knows how long.” It always took a little while for Charley Ellis to get started on personal matters, and if I didn’t talk a lot or kid him, he would sometimes go away without saying what he had intended to say. “Now I understand why, of course, but I gather Mrs. Preswell hasn’t even gone to Reno yet.”
“If you’ll lay off this heavy-handed joshing, I guess you’d call it, I’d like to talk seriously for a minute.”
“All right. Have a cup of coffee, or do you want a drink? If you want a drink, you know where it is.”
“I don’t want anything but your respectful attention and maybe some sound advice. What I really want is someone to talk to, to talk things out with.”
Charley Ellis was about thirty-three years old then, and not a young thirty-three. He had stayed single because he had been in love with his first cousin, a lovely girl who was the wife of Junior Williamson, Ethridge B. Williamson, Junior; he had wanted to write, and instead had gone to work for his father’s firm, Willetts & Ellis. His father knew about the second frustration, but I was now more convinced than ever that I was the only person to whom Charley had confided both.
“You may be right, you know,” he said. “I probably am the home-wrecker. At least a good case could be made out against me. Nancy and Jack never have got along very well, and made no secret of the fact. But I guess I’m the first one that shall we say took advantage of the situation. They had a couple of trial separations but they always went back together until I happened to come into the picture during the last one.”
“But you’re not blaming yourself or anything like that, I hope.”
“Not one bit. That’s a form of boasting, or so it always seemed to me.”
“And to me, too. That’s why I’m glad you’re not doing the mea culpa act.”
“Oh, hell no. I didn’t create the situation,” he said.
“Do you know who did?”
“Yes, I do,” said Charley. “Franklin D. Roosevelt, your great pal.”
“Yeah. The inventor of bubonic plague and the common cold, and now the louser-up of the Preswell marriage. You’ve been spending too much time at Willetts & Ellis. You ought to come up for air.”
“You were bound to say something like that, but it happens to be a fact. Preswell was one of the bright young boys that went to Washington five years ago, and that didn’t sit too well with Nancy or her family. Then two years ago Preswell himself saw the light and got out, but he’d made a lot of enemies while he was defending Roosevelt, and he came back to New York hating everybody. He said to me one time, ‘They call me a traitor to my class, like the Glamor Boy himself, but my class has been a traitor to me.’ He used to go around telling everybody that they ought to be grateful to him, that he and Roosevelt were holding the line for the American system. But then when he quit, he was just as violent against Roosevelt as anybody, but nobody would listen. He’d been so God damn arrogant when he was with Roosevelt, said a lot of personal things, so nobody cared whose side he was on. And of course he began to take it out on Nancy.”
“What does this gentleman do for a living?”
“He was with Carson, Cass & Devereux, but they don’t want him back. That’s just the point. Nobody wants him.”
“Was he a good lawyer?”
“Well, Harvard Law Review, assistant editor, I think. I don’t really know how good a lawyer he was. With a firm like Carson, Cass, you don’t
get any of the big stuff till you’ve been there quite a while. He has nothing to worry about financially. His father left him very well fixed and Nancy has money of her own. Her father was, or is, Alexander McMinnies, Delaware Zinc.”
“Oh, that old crook.”
“Why do you say that? You don’t know whether he’s a crook or a philanthropist.”
“He could be both, but even if he is your girl’s father, Charley, you know damn well what he is. I’ll bet the boys at Carson, Cass have sat up many a night trying to keep him out of prison.”
“And succeeded, in spite of Roosevelt and Homer S. Cummings.”
“Those things take time,” I said.
“Get your facts right. Mr. McMinnies won in the Supreme Court. Unless you were looking forward to the day when Franklin D. decides to abolish the courts and all the rest of that stuff. Which is coming, I have very little doubt.”
“You don’t really think that, but you have proved beyond a doubt that Roosevelt loused up Preswell’s marriage. Aren’t you grateful?”
“You’re a tricky bastard.”
“It’s so easy with you guys. You have a monomania about Roosevelt.”
“Monophobia.”
“No, wise guy. Monophobia means fear of being alone. So much for you and your four years at the Porcellian.”
“I could correct you on that four years, but I hate to spoil your good time.”
“All right, we’re even,” I said. “What’s on your mind, Charley?”
“Yes, we can’t even have a casual conversation without getting into politics,” he said. “Can we forget about politics?”
“Sure, I like to rib you, but what’s on your mind? Nancy Preswell, obviously.”
He was smoking a cigarette, and rubbing the ashes from the glowing end into the ash tray as they formed, turning the cigarette in his fingers. And not looking at me. “Jim, I read a short story of yours a few months ago. Nancy read it, too. She liked it, and she said she’d like to meet you. It was that story about two people at a skiing place.”
“Oh, yes. ‘Telemark.’”
“That’s the one,” he said. “They agree to get married even though they weren’t in love. Was that based on your own experience—if you don’t mind my asking?”
“No. I was in love when I got married, we both were. But it didn’t last. No, that story was invention on my part. Well, not all invention. What is? When I was in Florida two years ago I saw this couple always together and always talking so earnestly, so seriously, and I began to wonder what they were talking about. So I thought about them, forgot them, and remembered them again and changed the locale to a skiing place, and that was the story.”
“Nancy liked the story, but she didn’t agree with you. You seemed to imply that they should have gotten married.”
“Yes, I believe that, and they did.”
“That’s what Nancy didn’t agree with. She said they were both willing to face the fact that they weren’t in love, but where they were dishonest was in thinking they could make a go of it without being in love.”
“I didn’t imply that they’d make a go of it,” I said. “But it seemed to me they had a chance. Which is as much as any two people have.”
“I didn’t get that, and neither did Nancy. We both thought you were practically saying that this was as good a start as two people could have.”
“So far, so good, but that’s all I implied.”
“Do you think they really had a chance? Nancy says no. That marriage hasn’t any chance without love, and not too much of a chance with it.”
“Well, what do you think? How do you feel about it?”
“I wasn’t ready for that question.”
“I know damn well you weren’t, Charley, and that’s what’s eating you. It may also be what’s eating Nancy. Does she know you were in love with Polly Williamson?”
“Never. You’re the only one that knows that. But here I am, thirty-three, Jim. Why can’t I get rid of something that never was anything?”
“Go to Polly and tell her that you’ve always been in love with her, and can’t be in love with anyone else.”
“I’m afraid to,” he said, and smiled. “Maybe I’m afraid she’ll say she feels the same way, and divorce Junior.”
“Well, that’s not true. She doesn’t feel the same way, or you’d have found out before this. But if you admit to yourself that you’re afraid, then I think you don’t really love Polly as much as you think you do, or like to think you do. I was in love with Polly for one afternoon, and I told her so. I meant it, every word of it. But every now and then I see her with Williamson and I thank God she had some sense. A girl with less sense might conceivably have divorced Williamson and married me, and how long would that have lasted? Polly is Williamson’s wife, prick though he may be. And if she wants Williamson, she certainly doesn’t want me, and probably not you. Has Polly ever stepped out on her own?”
“I think she did, with a guy from Boston. An older guy. I don’t think you’d even know his name. A widower, about forty-five. Not a playboy type at all. Very serious-minded. Just right for Polly. You know, Polly has her limitations when it comes to a sense of humor, the lighter side. She was born here, but her father and mother both came from Boston and she’s always been more of a Boston type than New York. Flowers and music and the children. But she does her own work in the garden, and she often goes to concerts by herself. What I’m saying is, no chi-chi. She’s a good athlete, but there again it isn’t what you might call public sport. The contest is always between her and the game itself, and the things she’s best at are games like golf or trap-shooting. Skiing. Figure-skating. Polly damn near doesn’t need anyone else to enjoy herself. And God knows she never needed me.” He paused. “Did you ever hear her play the piano?”
“No.”
“She’s good. You know, Chopin. Rachmaninoff. Tschaikovsky.”
“Charley, I just discovered something about you,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re a Bostonian.”
“Maybe.”
“The admiring way you talk about Polly, and of course you’re a first cousin. Isn’t it practically a tradition in Boston that you fall in love with your first cousin?”
“It’s been known to happen, but I assure you, it had nothing to do with my falling in love with Polly.”
“Do you mind if I take issue with you on that point? I have a theory that it had a lot to do with your falling in love with Polly, and that your present love affair, with Nancy, is your New York side.”
He laughed. “Oh, God. How facile, and how stupid . . . I take back stupid, but you’re wrong.”
“Why am I wrong? You haven’t given the theory any thought. And I have, while listening to you. You’d better give it some thought, and decide whether you want to be a New Yorker or a Bostonian.”
“Or you might be wrong and I won’t have to make the choice.”
“Yes, but don’t reject my theory out of hand. You’re a loner. You wanted to be a writer. You’re conventional, as witness working in the family firm against your will, but doing very well I understand. And you were talking about yourself as much as you were about Polly.”
“Not at all. I was a great team-sport guy. Football in school, and rowing in college.”
“Rowing. The obvious joke. Did you ever meet that Saltonstall fellow that rowed Number 5?”
“I know the joke, and it was never very funny to us. A Yale joke. Or more likely Princeton.” He seemed to ignore me for a moment. He sat staring at his outstretched foot, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his cheek resting on the two first fingers of his left hand while the other two fingers were curled under the palm. “And yet, you may have a point,” he said, judicially. “You just may have a point. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Larry Lowell and Jimmy Walker. Waldo Emerson and Walter Winchell. This
conversation may be the turning point of my whole life, and I’ll owe it all to you, you analytical son of a bitch.”
“That’s the thanks I get. Watery compliments.”
He rose. “Gotta go,” he said.
“How come you’re uptown at this hour?”
“I took the afternoon off,” he said. “I have a perfectly legitimate reason for being uptown, but I know your nasty mind. Will you be in town next week? How about dinner Tuesday?”
“Tuesday, no. Wednesday, yes.”
“All right, Wednesday. Shall we pick you up here? I’d like Nancy to see the squalor you live in.”
“Others have found it to have a certain Old World charm,” I said. “All right, Mimi. You can come out now.”
“Listen, don’t have any Mimi here Wednesday, will you, please?”
“That’s why I said Wednesday instead of Tuesday.”
“Degrading. And not even very instructive,” he said.