Bread Upon the Waters (19 page)

“Bright young people don’t like systematic climbing,” Hazen said. “They want to get promoted in leaps and bounds. They’re sure they could run the company ten times better than some old fuddy-duddy who should be working standing at a high desk and using a quill pen. I imagine there are quite a few ambitious young people in my office who say the same thing about
me
.”

“That must have been a long drink,” Strand said.

“Two, to be exact. The young man with her, Mr. Gianelli, seemed to have had several more. To be honest, he was somewhat under the weather, as though he had stopped at more than one bar during the afternoon. He became quite excited during the course of the discussion. He said to her that she kept saying she was fed up being bossed around by idiots but when she is offered a chance to get out and be her own boss she looks at him as though he’s crazy.”

“Did he say just what he was offering her?” Strand asked carefully.

“The implication, as far as I could figure it out, was marriage,” Hazen said. He stared closely at Strand.

Strand managed to keep his face blank. “I did gather they were—well—fond—of each other.”

“Mr. Gianelli then appealed to me,” Hazen said. “It seems he feels that he’s not cut out for the job with his father—he’s the middle one of five sons in his father’s business and understandably he feels somewhat constrained. He asked me, rather loudly, if
I
thought it was crazy to start a small newspaper somewhere, the two of them together as publishers and editors.”

“What did you tell him?” Strand asked, thinking, There must be some aura of wisdom and power, some secret quality, that Hazen has for the young, that makes them bare their souls to him immediately. “Did you ask the young man where he expected to get the money for this noble project?”

“He said something about his brothers agreeing to chip in to help him if he finds a suitable spot. They quite obviously would not be displeased to see him gone. Five brothers in the same business. There are also two sisters and brothers-in-law. Italian families.” He smiled indulgently at Mediterranean abundance. “I know something about the father. A client of mine deals with him. Hardheaded but fair, my client says. And quite successful. It is a group that has shown remarkable upward mobility in recent years. Except, of course, in Italy.” He smiled bleakly at his witticism. “The father, I take it, with some justice, is not enthusiastic about the enterprise.”

“Did
you
tell them anything?” Strand asked, almost accusingly.

“I said youth is the time for risks and I had to go home to dress for dinner.” He paused. “How would you and your wife take it?”

“We try not to meddle,” Strand said shortly.

“I’m constantly amazed,” Hazen said, “about how you let your children go their own way.” There was neither approval nor disapproval in the way he said it. “It was different in my own house. We were told very definitely what we were to do. My brother rebelled, of course. He didn’t even come back from California for my father’s funeral. We hardly communicate. I hear that he is happy. It may just be a rumor.” He smiled ironically.

From upstairs came the sound of Jimmy’s guitar, random chords, some dark and sad, others suddenly light, as though Jimmy were having a dialogue with himself on the instrument, one part of him gloomy, the other mischievous and mocking.

“If the noise bothers you,” Strand said, “I’ll go up and tell him to stop.”

“Oh, no,” Hazen said. “I like the sound of music in the house. I told him I’d like to hear him play.”

“He said as much. I thought perhaps you were being polite.”

“I’m not as polite as all that,” Hazen said.

The two men listened for a while. Jimmy started a song that Strand had never heard before. Jimmy was singing, but Strand could not make out the words. It was not a dialogue anymore but a plaintive, sweet solo murmur, with sudden harsh interjections.

“My mother, as I believe I told you, used to play the piano for me,” Hazen said. “Only when she was still young. She stopped. Several years later she died. She went in silence.”

Went in silence, Strand thought. What a way to describe the death of your mother.

“I think I’m going to treat myself to one more drink,” Hazen said, lifting himself from his easy chair. “Can I get one for you?”

“Not just yet, thank you.”

While Hazen was at the sideboard mixing his drink, there was a bustle at the door and a tall woman with a scarf wrapped around her head like a turban came in. “Make one for me, Russell,” she called as she came through the door. Her voice was high and vigorous and she smiled at Strand nicely as she entered the room. She was dressed in a skirt and sweater and she was wearing shoes with low heels. Forty years old, bony, not my type, Strand thought automatically.

“Oh, Linda,” Hazen said from the sideboard, “I was afraid you were going to be late.”

“The traffic was ferocious,” the woman said rolling the r to emphasize how ferocious. “Friday night. The march of the lemmings to the sea. Hello.” She extended her hand to Strand. “I’m Linda Roberts. Russell can’t do two things at the same time, like making drinks and introducing his guests.”

“Good evening,” Strand said. “I’m Allen Strand.” Her hand was surprisingly callused. He guessed she was a golfer. She had large gray eyes, carefully made up, and a bold sweep of lipstick on what otherwise would have been a narrow mouth. She went over to Hazen and kissed his cheek, leaving a little scar of red. “The usual,” she said.

Hazen had already begun to mix her a martini. She watched approvingly. “Martinis make everything worthwhile, don’t they?” she said, smiling at Strand.

“So I’ve heard,” Strand said.

“Russell, do I have to dress for dinner or can I sit at table in my traveling rags?”

“There’ll just be a few friends,” Hazen said, coming over to her with her martini.

“A blessing,” she said, accepting the martini and sipping it. “A benediction on you, dear Russell. I
will
comb my hair, though.” She sank into a chair, cradling the stemmed glass, frosty with cold.

“Linda is staying with us for the weekend, Allen,” Hazen said, as he went to get his own drink.

“I’m the last-minute addition,” Linda Roberts said to Strand. “I didn’t think I could get away. I just got back from France to find out there was a mess at the gallery. A shipment of pictures arrived from our French branch and a half-dozen of them looked as though they had crossed the Atlantic in a canoe. I’ve been dreaming of this martini since the Triborough Bridge.”

But Strand noticed that her drink was only half-finished before she started up to comb her hair. She halted at the doorway and frowned. “Good heavens,” she said, “what is that funereal wail?”

Hazen laughed. “It’s Allen’s son, Jimmy. He’s a guitarist.”

“Oh, my.” Mrs. Roberts put her hand up to her mouth in mock dismay. “You must forgive me, Mr. Strand. I’m absolutely stone-deaf. I was exposed to Wagner at an early age and have never gotten over it.”

“That’s all right,” Strand said, amused. “At home we let him practice only behind locked doors. I’m afraid different generations have different notions of what constitutes music. I stop at Brahms myself.”

“I like your friend, Russell,” Mrs. Roberts said and went briskly out of the room, carrying her martini.

There was silence in the room for a few seconds as Hazen stirred the ice in his glass with his finger and Strand wondered if this was the reputed mistress. Offhand, he liked the woman, but he wouldn’t have chosen her as his mistress. If someone had seen him going up to Judith Quinlan’s apartment and then coming out with his hair mussed and a bemused expression on his face would Judith be known as his reputed mistress? Reputations are easily made.

“She visits here from time to time,” Hazen said, as though he owed Strand an explanation. “Always on the spur of the moment. The house is so big…” He stopped. “She’s the widow of one of my best friends. Forty-seven years old. Went off like…” He snapped his fingers. “Playing golf. Heart.”

“She seems to be bearing up bravely,” Strand said and Hazen gave him a peculiar sharp look.

“She wisely keeps herself busy. She’s half-owner of an art gallery and is very clever at the business. It’s associated with a gallery in France and it gives her an excuse to visit Europe several times a year. She sounds foolish at times, but I assure you she’s no fool,” Hazen said stiffly. “And she devotes herself extensively to charities.”

“I hope that when I’m gone my widow will be able to devote herself extensively to charities, too.”

“He was in Wall Street. Very shrewd,” Hazen said, ignoring Strand’s remark, which Strand now realized had been facetiously rude. “Boy wonder. Overwork. Did you read that postmen live longer than the executives of large corporations?”

“All that walking,” Strand said, wishing that the others would come down before the level of conversation sank any lower.

“You can take off your tie, you know,” Hazen said. “Probably nobody else will be wearing one. East Hampton has become proletarianized. Not like the old days. My father insisted that we dress for dinner almost every night. Now almost anything goes. See-through dresses, jeans, red pants like the goddamn things I’m wearing. I’m sure it all has the most somber sociological implications.”

Strand undid his tie and stuffed it into his pocket. His neck was so thin that it was almost impossible to get shirts that were long enough in the sleeve for his arms and still snug around the neck. Hazen looked at him curiously. “I’ve observed that you eat very well…”

“Like a horse,” Strand said.

“And yet you remain so thin.”

“Meager.”

“I wouldn’t complain. If I ate like you they’d have to wheel me around in a barrow.” He sipped at his whiskey. “But none of your family runs to fat.”

“No. Eleanor sometimes goes on a crazy diet if she sees she’s gained a few ounces.”

“Ridiculous,” Hazen snorted. “At her age, with her figure.”

The doorbell rang. “My dinner guests,” Hazen said. “I hope they don’t bore you. Parties in the Hamptons can be stuffy.”

At dinner, Hazen sat at the head of the table, with Leslie on his right, her hair swept up, and Caroline on his left. Next to Caroline was one of the young men she had played tennis with three weeks before. Strand noticed with some amusement that it wasn’t the good-looking one, Brad or Chad, whom Hazen had warned him about. Next to him was a lady named Caldwell, who had one of the houses down the dunes and who had come with her husband and daughter. The daughter sat next to Jimmy and looked about Jimmy’s age, although Strand was never sure about how old girls really were. In his classes he had girls he knew were sixteen who looked twenty-five. A big, jovial man by the name of Solomon, with long straight gray hair that made him look like George Washington, sat next to the girl. Then came Linda Roberts, on Strand’s right, who was not dressed in her traveling rags, as she had described them, but in a long, flouncy mauve-colored gown that left her rather bony shoulders bare. Mrs. Solomon, a sharp-faced but pretty woman with a boyish haircut and a deep tan, sat on Strand’s left and Caldwell, who had been introduced as Dr. Caldwell, a middle-aged man with the mournful diplomatic face of an ambassador who has just been ordered to deliver a nasty note to a volatile government, completed the table, sitting between Mrs. Solomon and Leslie. Conroy, Strand saw, although he lived on the grounds, was not on his employer’s social list.

The conversation was lively and Strand was pleased to see that Leslie and Caroline were obviously enjoying themselves and that the Caldwell girl who had been invited for Jimmy seemed deeply interested in what Jimmy was telling her. But it was difficult for Strand to hear more than snatches of what people were saying because Linda Roberts kept talking to him in a high, piercing voice. “I’ll be terrible company tonight,” she had warned him as she sat down. “I’m exhausted. Jet lag.” She had just come back from France, where, she said, besides the work at the gallery in Paris, there had been a wedding that she just couldn’t avoid attending. “Four hundred guests,” she said. “Luckily it didn’t rain so the reception in the garden didn’t turn into a marine disaster. I’ve been flooded out of one June wedding after another and you always feel that when a marriage starts with everybody cowering for shelter, there’ll be a divorce in a year or two. Russell has told me all about you and your lovely family and how much you’ve done for him. You must be proud of your daughter. If it had been me I’d have just screamed and fallen into a dead faint. I don’t know what’s ever going to become of dear old New York. Nobody dares wear jewelry anymore. It’s all in vaults in banks. The insurance.” She sighed, heaving her bony shoulders. “Russell says you’re a history teacher. What fun that must be. It was one of my best subjects in the University of Michigan, but I don’t read the newspapers anymore—just the society page and the movie reviews—everything else is so
pessimistic.
You must forgive me. I can hardly speak, I’m so exhausted. Airports are hell, anyway. The worst is Fiumicino. I’ve almost stopped going to Rome because of it. Everybody travels so much these days, you see the strangest people in first class. My husband was on the verge of buying a Lear jet, but then he died. I always like to arrive at Nice. The airport’s just along the sea and it’s a little like the good old days when you could take one of those glorious plush ships to Europe, with bouillon served at eleven by those smart stewards going along the deck chairs. And now they’ve even taken those beautiful Italian boats out of service. Heavenly pasta. I don’t like to sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but there’s such a thing as carrying progress too far. They’ve ruined the Côte d’Azur, of course, it might just as well be Miami Beach, but I just rush from the airport to my little nest, it’s in the hills above Mougins and never put my foot out of it except to walk around my garden. You know Mougins, don’t you, Mr. Strand?”

“Allen,” Strand said gallantly, wondering how fast and how long Mrs. Roberts could talk when she wasn’t suffering from jet lag.

“Allen,” she said. “I had a beau by that name. Lovely young man. Divine looking. People were always asking him if he wanted to go into the movies. But he was a serious horseman. He absolutely wilted when I married my husband and he immediately married a woman who’d been divorced four times. Stupendous alimony. He came with his wife to visit me and my husband, and Allen sulked for three days and we had to pretend we were packing to go to Ischia to get them out of the house. Vulgar little thing, the wife, I mean, she sunbathes with her breasts bare. She was inordinately proud of them, her breasts, I mean. She came up from being a cheerleader at the University of Texas and her first husband played football and beat her all the time. I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame him. You and your beautiful wife—my heavens, she is stunning—must come and visit me in Mougins. Do you get to France often?”