“Don’t tell me. You were going to tell me how long he’s been home. Don’t. I don’t want to have that kind of information.”
“Oh, I understand. There’s so little I want to talk about that I’m permitted to. Well, Charley Ellis is a safe subject. Shall I ask him to come over after dinner?”
“First, brief me on Charley and Nancy. I haven’t seen him for at least a year.”
“Nancy is living in New York, or you could be very sure I’d never see Charley. I didn’t want to ever again. It was Nancy that stirred up the trouble between Junior and me, and I’m very grateful to her now but I wasn’t then. Junior’d had lady friends, one after another, for years and years, and if he’d been a different sort of man it would have been humiliating. But as Charley pointed out to me, oh, twenty years ago, there are only about half a dozen Junior Williamsons in this country, and they make their own rules. So, in order to survive, I made mine, too. I really led a double life, the one as Mrs. Ethridge Williamson, Junior, and the other, obviously, as Ham’s mistress. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“I didn’t take anything away from Junior that he wanted. Or withhold anything. And several times over the years I did stop seeing Ham, when Junior would be going through one of his periods of domesticity. I was always taken in by that, and Junior can be an attractive man. To women. He has no men friends, do you realize that? He always has some toady, or somebody that he has to see a lot of because of business or one of his pet projects. But he has no real men friends. Women of all ages, shapes, and sizes and, I wouldn’t be surprised, colors. He married that Wave, and the next thing I heard was she caught him in bed with her sister. Why not? One meant as much to him as the other, and I’m told they were both pretty. That would be enough for Junior. A stroke of luck, actually. He’s paying off the one he married. A million, I hear. And she’s not going to say anything about her sister. What will those girls do with a million dollars? And think how much more they would have asked for if they’d ever been to the house on Long Island. But I understand he never took her there. That’s what he considers home, you know. Christmas trees, and all the servants’ children singing carols, and the parents lining up for their Christmas cheques. But the Wave was never invited. Oh, well, he’s now an aide to an admiral, which should make life interesting.”
“Having your commanding officer toady to you?”
“That, yes. But being able to pretend that you’re just an ordinary commander, or maybe he’s a captain now, but taking orders and so on. An admiral that would have him for an aide is the kind that’s feathering his nest for the future, so I don’t imagine Junior has any really unpleasant chores.”
“Neither has the admiral. He’s chair-borne at Pearl.”
“Yes, Charley implied as much. I’ve talked too much about Junior, and you want to know about Charley and Nancy. Well, Nancy stirred up the trouble. I never would have denied that I was seeing Ham, if Junior’d asked me, but that isn’t what he asked me. He asked me if Ham were the father of our son, and I felt so sick at my stomach that I went right upstairs and packed a bag and took the next train to Boston, not saying a single word. When I got to my aunt’s house, Junior was already there. He’d flown in his own plane. He said, ‘I asked you a question, and I want an answer. Entitled to an answer.’ So I said, ‘The answer to the question is no, and I never want to say another word to you.’ Nor have I. If he was entitled to ask the question, which I don’t concede, he was entitled to my answer. He got it, and all communication between us since then has been through the lawyers.”
“What about Nancy, though?”
“Oh, bold as brass, she told people that she thought my son’s father was Ham. Which shows how well she doesn’t know old Mr. Williamson. The boy looks exactly like his grandfather, even walks like him. But she also didn’t know that Mr. Williamson is devoted to the boy, wouldn’t speak to Junior for over a year, and worst of all, from Mr. Williamson’s point of view, I have my son twelve months of the year and at school in Boston, so his grandfather has to come to Boston to see him. I refuse to take him to Long Island. And Mr. Williamson says I’m perfectly right, after Junior’s nasty doubts. Doubts? Accusations.”
“But you and Charley made it up,” I said.
“Yes and no. Oh, we’re friends again, but it’ll never be what it used to be. Shall I tell you about it? You may be able to write it in a story sometime.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Charley was getting ready to ship out, his first trip to the Pacific, and he wrote me a letter. I won’t show it to you. It’s too long and too—private. But the gist of it was that if anything happened to him, he didn’t want me to remember him unkindly. Then he proceeded to tell me some things that he’d said about me, that I hadn’t heard, and believe me, Jim, if I’d ever heard them I’d have remembered him very unkindly. He put it all down, though, and then said, ‘I do not believe there is a word of truth in any of these things.’ Then he went on to say that our friendship had meant so much to him and so forth.”
“It does, too, Polly,” I said.
“Oh, James Malloy, you’re dissembling. You know what he really said, don’t you?”
“You’re dissembling, too. I know what he used to feel.”
“I never did. I always thought he was being extra kind to an awkward younger cousin,” she said. “And he never liked Junior. Well, since you’ve guessed, or always knew, you strange Irishman, I’ll tell you the rest. I wrote to him and told him our friendship was just where it had always been, and that I admired him for being so candid. That I was hurt by the things he had said, but that his first loyalty was to Nancy. That I never wanted to see Nancy again, and that therefore I probably would never see him. But since we lived such different lives, in different cities, I probably wouldn’t see him anyway, in war or peace.”
“But you did see him.”
“Yes. We’re friends again. I’ve seen him here in Washington. We have tea together now and then. To some extent it’s a repetition of my trips to Boston to see Ham. Needless to say, with one great difference. I never have been attracted to Charley that way. But I’m his double life, and the piquancy, such as it is, comes from the fact that Nancy doesn’t know we see each other. Two middle-aged cousins, more and more like the people that come to my aunt’s house in Louisburg Square.”
“Do you remember the time we came down from Boston?”
“Had dinner on the train. Of course.”
“You said then, and I quote, that all was far from well between Nancy and Charley.”
She nodded. “It straightened itself out. It wasn’t any third party or anything of that kind. It was Nancy reshaping Charley to her own ways, and Charley putting up a fight. But she has succeeded. She won. Except for one thing that she could never understand.”
“Which is?”
“That Charley and I like to have tea together. If she found out, and tried to stop it, that’s the one way she’d lose Charley. So she mustn’t find out. You see, Jim, I don’t want Charley, as a lover or as a husband. I have my husband and he was my lover, too. As far as I’m concerned, Charley is first, last and always a cousin. A dear one, that I hope to be having tea with when we’re in our seventies. But that’s all. And that’s really what Charley wants, too, but God pity Nancy if she tries to deprive him of that.”
For a little while neither of us spoke, and then she said something that showed her astuteness. “I’ll give you his number, but let’s not see him tonight. He doesn’t like to be discussed, and if he came over tonight he’d know he had been.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Polly, why did you divorce Williamson?”
“You’re not satisfied with the reason I gave you?”
“It would be a good enough reason for some women, but not for you.”
She looked at me and said nothing, but she was disturbed. She fingered he
r circle of pearls, picked up her drink and put it down without taking a sip.
“Never mind,” I said. “I withdraw the question.”
“No. No, don’t. You gave me confidence one day when I needed it. The second time I ever saw you. I’ll tell you.”
“Not if it’s an ordeal,” I said.
“It’s finding the words,” she said. “The day Junior asked me point-blank if he was the father of my son, I had just learned that I was pregnant again. By him, of course. One of his periods of domesticity. So I had an abortion, something I’d sworn I’d never do, and I’ve never been pregnant since. I had to have a hysterectomy, and Ham and I did want a child. You see, I couldn’t answer your question without telling you the rest of it.”
• • •
After the war my wife and I saw the Ellises punctiliously twice every winter; they would take us to dinner and the theatre, we would take them. Dinner was always in a restaurant, where conversation makes itself, and in the theatre it was not necessary. Charley and I, on our own, lunched together every Saturday at his club or mine, with intervals of four months during the warm weather and time out for vacations in Florida or the Caribbean. Every five years on Charley’s birthday they had a dance in the ballroom of one of the hotels, and I usually had a party to mark the occasion of a new book or play. We had other friends, and so had the Ellises, and the two couples had these semi-annual evenings together only because not to do so would have been to call pointed attention to the fact that the only friendship was that of Charley and me. Our wives, for example, after an early exchange of lunches never had lunch together again; and if circumstances put me alone with Nancy, I had nothing to say. In the years of our acquaintance she had swung from America First to Adlai Stevenson, while I was swinging the other way. She used the word valid to describe everything but an Easter bonnet, another favorite word of hers was denigrate, and still another was challenge. When my wife died Nancy wrote me a note in which she “questioned the validity of it all” and told me to “face the challenge.” When I married again she said I had made the only valid decision by “facing up to the challenge of a new life.” I had ceased to be one of the authors she admired, and in my old place she had put Kafka, Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Camus. I sent her a copy of Kilmer to make her velar collection complete, but she did not think it was comical or cute.
Charley and I had arrived at a political rapprochement: he conceded that some of the New Deal had turned out well, I admitted that Roosevelt had been something less than a god. Consequently our conversations at lunch were literally what the doctor ordered for men of our age. To match my Pennsylvania reminiscences he provided anecdotes about the rich, but to him they were not the rich. They were his friends and enemies, neighbors and relatives, and it was a good thing to hear about them as such. Charley Ellis had observed well and he remembered, and partly because he was polite, partly because he had abandoned the thought of writing as a career, he gave me the kind of information I liked to hear.
We seldom mentioned Nancy and even less frequently, Polly. If he continued to have tea with her, he did not say so. But one day in the late Forties we were having lunch at his club and he bowed to a carefully dressed man who limped on a cane and wore a patch over his left eye. He was about sixty years old. “One of your boys,” said Charley.
“You mean Irish?”
“Oh, no. I meant O.S.S.”
“He must have been good. The Médaille Militaire. That’s one they don’t hand out for traveling on the French Line.”
“A friend of Ham Hackley’s. He told me how Hackley died.”
All I knew was that Hackley had never come back from France after my evening with him in Washington. “How did he?” I said.
“The Germans caught him with a wad of plastic and a fuse wire in his pocket. He knew what he was in for, so he took one of those pills.”
“An ‘L’ pill,” I said.
“Whatever it is that takes about a half a minute. You didn’t know that about Ham?”
“I honestly didn’t.”
“That guy, the one I just spoke to, was in the same operation. He blew up whatever they were supposed to blow up, but he stayed too close and lost his eye and smashed up his leg. You wouldn’t think there was that much guts there, would you? He knew he couldn’t get very far, but he set off the damn plastic and hit the dirt.” Charley laughed. “Do you know what he told us? He said, ‘I huddled up and put my hands over my crotch, so I lost an eye. But I saved everything else.’ We got him talking at a club dinner this winter.”
“I wish I’d been here.”
“Not this club. This was at the annual dinner of my club at Harvard. He was a classmate of Ham’s. I don’t usually go back, but I did this year.”
“Did you see Polly?”
“Yes, I went and had tea with her. Very pleasant. Her boy gets out of Harvard this year. Daughter’s married.”
“We got an announcement. What does Polly do with her time?”
“Oh, why, I don’t know. She always has plenty of things to do in Boston. A girl like Polly, with all her interests, she’d keep herself very busy. I must say she’s putting on a little weight.”
“What would she be now?”
“How old? Polly is forty-one, I think.”
“Still young. Young enough to marry again.”
“I doubt if she will,” said Charley. “I doubt it very much. Boston isn’t like New York, you know. In New York a woman hates to go to a party without a man, but in Boston a woman like Polly goes to a party by herself and goes home by herself and thinks nothing of it.”
“Nevertheless she ought to have a husband. She’s got a good thirty years ahead of her. She ought to marry if only for companionship.”
“Companionship? Companionship is as hard to find as love. More so. Love can sneak up on you, but when you’re looking for companionship you shop around.”
“Maybe that’s what Polly’s doing, having a look at the field.”
“Maybe. There’s one hell of a lot of money that goes with her, and she’s not going to marry a fortune-hunter. Oh, I guess Polly can take care of herself.”
“Just out of curiosity, how much money is there?”
“How much money? Well, when Polly’s father died, old Mr. Smithfield, he left five million to Harvard, and another million to a couple of New York hospitals, and a hundred thousand here and a hundred thousand there. I happen to know that he believed in tithes. All his life he gave a tenth of his income to charity. So if he followed that principle in his will, he was worth around seventy million gross. I don’t know the taxes on that much money, but after taxes it all went to Polly. In addition, Ham Hackley left her all his money, which was nothing like Cousin Simon Smithfield’s, but a tidy sum nonetheless. I also know that when Polly divorced Junior Williamson, old Mr. Williamson changed his will to make sure that the grandchildren would each get one-third, the same as Junior. That was quite a blow to Junior. So all in all, Polly’s in a very enviable position, financially.”
“Good God,” I said. “It embarrasses me.”
“Why you?”
“Don’t you remember that day I told her I loved her?”
“Oh, yes. Well, she took that as a compliment, not as a business proposition. She’s never forgotten it, either.”
“Well, I hope Polly holds on to her good sense. When I was a movie press agent I made a great discovery that would have been very valuable to a fortune-hunter. And in fact a few of them had discovered it for themselves. Big stars, beautiful and rich, would come to New York and half the time they had no one to take them out. They depended on guys in the publicity department. I never would have had to work for a living.”
“How long could you have stood that?”
“Oh, a year, probably. Long enough to get tired of a Rolls and charge accounts at the bespoke tailors. Then I suppose I’d have read a book an
d wished I’d written it. I knew a fellow that married a movie star and did all that, and he wasn’t just a gigolo. He’d taught English at Yale. He took this doll for God knows how much, then she gave him the bounce and now he’s living in Mexico. He’s had a succession of fifteen-year-old wives. Once every two or three years he comes to New York for a week. He subsists entirely on steak and whiskey. One meal a day, a steak, and all the whiskey he can drink. He’s had a stroke and he knows he’s going to die. I could have been that. In fact, I don’t like to think how close I came.”
“I don’t see you as Gauguin.”
“Listen, Gauguin wasn’t unhappy. He was doing what he wanted to do. I don’t see myself as Gauguin either. What I don’t like to think of is how close I came to being my friend that married the movie actress. That I could have been.”
“No, you were never really close. You were no closer than I was to marrying Polly. You thought about it, just as I did about marrying Polly. But I wasn’t meant to marry Polly, and you weren’t meant to steal money from a movie actress and go on the beach in Mexico.”
“Go on the beach? Why did you say that?”
“It slipped. I knew the fellow you’re talking about. Henry Root?”
“Yes.”
“Before he taught at Yale he had the great distinction of teaching me at Groton. You know why he stopped teaching at Yale? Bad cheques. Not just bouncing cheques. Forgeries. There was one for a thousand dollars signed Ethridge B. Williamson, Junior. That did it. He had Junior’s signature to copy from, but that wasn’t the way Junior signed his cheques. He always signed E. B. Williamson J R, so his cheques wouldn’t be confused with his father’s, which had Ethridge written out. Henry was a charming, facile bum, and a crook. You may have been a bum, but you were never a crook. Were you?”
“No, I guess I wasn’t. I never cheated in an exam, and the only money I ever stole was from my mother’s pocketbook. And got caught, every time. My mother always knew how much was in her purse.”
“Now let me ask you something else. Do you think Henry Root would ever have been a friend of Polly’s? As good a friend, say, as you are?”