Bread Upon the Waters (50 page)

Two thousand dollars back in the bank, Strand thought. There
would
be presents for Christmas. “Russell,” he said, “I can’t tell you how good I feel about this. Not only for you. For you, of course. And for me, too.”

Hazen looked a little embarrassed. He took a gulp of his drink. “It isn’t all pure saintliness of character, Allen,” he said. “Hitz and Company will pass a few unhappy days. That will not exactly displease me. Tell me, now that the kid looks as though he may get a break, what did he say to you that you said was confidential, about why he thought it was Hitz who took his money and letters?”

“It wasn’t he who told me.”

The lawyer’s inquisitory tone came back into Hazen’s voice. “Who told you?”

“I promised I’d keep it to myself.”

“Promises.” Hazen wrinkled his nose in disgust. “They’re the bane of a lawyer’s existence. Did anybody find the letters?”

“No,” Strand lied.

“What could there be in a kid’s letters that could be so damned important?”

“Think back to when you were eighteen, Russell.”

“My father read every letter I received until I went to college.”

“Romero doesn’t even know if his father is alive or dead.”

“The judge had better wake up on the right side of the bed the morning of the trial,” Hazen said, “or the psychiatrist better find out Romero is the most disturbed kid in Connecticut and at the same time as harmless as a pussycat if he’s not ready to do time. The judge was agreeable today but if the prosecutor lays it on, there’s no telling…Professional courtesy is one thing. The law’s another. Ah, well…” He sighed. “I’ve done my best. At least I can go to bed tonight with a clear conscience. It hasn’t been an easy time for me.”

“Not for anybody,” Strand reminded him.

Hazen laughed. “Egotism is not the least of my faults.”

“No, it’s not.”

The smile on Hazen’s face became a little strained. He looked thoughtfully across the table at Strand again. “What do you really think of me, Allen?”

“A lot of things. Naturally. You’ve been insanely generous and helpful to us all. I imagine that you wouldn’t be surprised that I have interlocking feelings—gratitude and”—he hesitated—“resentment.”

“Nonsense,” Hazen said. “You’re not like that.”

“Everybody’s like that,” Strand said quietly.

“Christ, for the most part, it was only money. I don’t give a shit for money.”

“You can say that. I can’t.”

“Let’s forget about the gratitude and resentment and all the hogwash. What else do you think about me?”

“That you’re an unhappy man.”

Hazen nodded gloomily. “That’s no lie. Who isn’t these days? Aren’t you?” His tone was challenging.

“On and off.” Strand realized that Hazen was serious and felt that he should be serious in return. “But on balance, I feel that the happy days in my life have outweighed the unhappy ones. I don’t have that feeling about you.”

“And you’re right. By God, are you right!” Hazen finished his drink, as though to wash out of his mouth the words he had just spoken. “This is just the sort of talk for a cold winter’s evening, isn’t it? Would you mind if I made myself another drink?”

“Help yourself.”

Strand watched the big man as he rose from his chair and crossed to where the bottles and pitcher of water and the ice were standing. The old hockey player was still there, broad, virile, vaguely menacing, willing to take blows and return them. He made his drink, then wheeled at the table. “How about you? This minute? Are you happy now?”

“It’s not the sort of question I usually ask myself.”

“Ask. For old times’ sake.” Hazen sounded mocking.

“Well, for one thing, I’m glad you came. I felt our friendship was being undermined and I didn’t like that,” Strand said, speaking deliberately. “I feel it’s repaired now and I feel better about that. About other things…” He shrugged. “When Leslie’s not around, I miss her. I haven’t yet gotten over not having the children present and I miss them, too. What’s happened at the school is unpleasant and I still don’t think I exactly fit in here yet, but I prefer to hope that given time that will improve. The work is easy and for the most part rewarding. The people are…well…polite and helpful. For the future, yes, I expect to be happy, reasonably happy.”

“The future.” Hazen made a derisive, blowing noise. “The future is going to be goddamn awful. The way things are going in the world.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the world. I can be pessimistic about the world and selfishly optimistic about myself. I’ve found that when a man steps back from very nearly dying and resumes what can be called a normal life, optimism is almost an automatic response.”

Hazen came back with his glass and sat down at the table again. He looked out the window. “Miserable night,” he said. “No wonder the whole country’s moving south. Sometimes I think every city in the Northeast, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, will be a ghost town in fifty years. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Okay, Pollyanna—” For a breath he sounded as he had when he shouted at Strand over the telephone. “Everything is coming up roses, Mr. Strand says. The news of the century. So nothing else is bothering you?”

“Of course there is.” Strand thought of Leslie’s flight in the middle of the night from Dunberry, of the letters signed Caroline, burned in the basement incinerator, of Eleanor, leading her husband around by the nose in Georgia and arousing the antagonism of the townspeople, of Jimmy, aged nineteen, involved with a pop singer almost twice his age, who had already gone through two or three husbands, of his own forced celibacy. “Of course there is,” he repeated. “Family things. Routine.” He knew the word was false. “But I’d rather not discuss what they are or even dwell on them. My dreams remind me of them and that suffices.”

Hazen nodded, his head like a heavy, off-balance pendulum. “Tell me,” he said suddenly, “have you ever thought of suicide?’”

“Like everybody else.”

“Like everybody else.” Again the heavy, swinging nod. “Hell, this is a sorry conversation. The drink. It’s unusual for me. Usually drink makes me feel good.”

Strand remembered the grotesque scene the first night at the Hamptons when Hazen had arrived drunk late at night and snarled and bellowed and railed against his profession, his family, the world. He wondered how a man ordinarily so intelligent could have such a misconception about himself.

“Anyway,” Hazen said, with a plain effort at geniality, “the ladies aren’t here to watch us making self-pitying idiots of ourselves. I talked to Linda in Paris and she says they are having a marvelous time. They’re delighted that the Christmas holiday in the Hamptons is definite.”

“Is it?” Strand asked, surprised.

“I guess I forgot to tell you. Can you get your kids?”

“I haven’t asked them yet.” He didn’t tell Hazen that after their argument he had resolved not to go. “Are you sure Leslie hasn’t got other plans?”

“Linda asked her—she was in the room when I called—and I could hear her say it was a great idea.”

“I’ll get in touch with the rest of the family.” The prospect of ten days away from the school, away from the weight of the presence of four hundred boys, alone when he wanted to be with Leslie on the quiet beach along the shores of the Atlantic, lifted his spirits. “I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful time.” He smiled. “See what I mean by being able to be pessimistic about the future of the world and still be optimistic about your own? At least for ten days. Just keep us from watching the television news programs and reading the
Times
and it will be Eden.”

The bell of the apartment rang and Hazen looked at his watch. “That must be Conroy. I sent him to the main hall to keep warm while I talked to you. It’s going to be a long drive back to the city in this weather. Thanks for the drinks.” When they shook hands, he held Strand’s for an extra moment. “I’m glad I came. I’m too old to turn friends into enemies.”

“I wasn’t your enemy, Russell.”

“Well, you damn well should have been.” Hazen laughed and went out.

Strand sat down at the table, feeling the glass of whiskey sweating in his hand, and looked out through the patterns of frost on the windowpanes at the thickening snow. He thought of the great cities of the North Hazen had spoken of, half in jest, the winds looting the glass and concrete avenues, the population fleeing. He, too, in the first winter of his imminent and sea-wracked old age, longed for the South.

There were three letters waiting for him the next day when he got back from his last class. Mrs. Schiller had put his mail in a neat little pile on the table behind the sofa in the living room. It had stormed all day. On the walk across the campus snow had gotten into his shoes and down the collar of his overcoat, so before he opened the letters he took off his coat and shoes and socks, dried his feet, put on slippers and changed his shirt. He had been soaked once before that day, after lunch, and his throat felt dry and raspy and there was a peculiar hot throb in his chest. Perhaps he would take Dr. Philips’s advice and go into New York on Saturday and have Dr. Prinz take a look at him.

Then, remembering the inner warmth of the Scotch the evening before with Hazen, he made himself a whiskey and water without ice and took the first sip before he went back into the living room and picked up the letters. One, he saw from the envelope, was from Caroline, another from Leslie, and a third had no name or return address. He usually read Caroline’s letters with a small, indulgent smile on his face. They were short and bubbly and obviously hastily written and were merely signals that she was alive and enjoying herself and loved her parents. But he had had no word from her since the day he had heard from Mrs. Schiller about the letters in the basement trash basket.

He opened her letter first. There was no mention of Romero. Caroline reported that she was having a great time, that she had been chosen as the queen for the Homecoming Game of the new basketball season, that she had made two intellectual friends, a girl who was majoring in philosophy and another who was certain to be the editor of the college literary magazine in her junior year, that the coach of the track team thought that if she applied herself she could beat out the girl who always came in first in the two twenty and that she had been invited to spend the Christmas holidays with a family in Beverly Hills but had declined because she couldn’t wait to see her Mummy and Daddy. She had also received a postcard of the Eiffel Tower in a letter from Mummy and thought it was most self-sacrificing of Daddy to spend all that time in dreary Dunberry alone while Mummy gallivanted in Paris. There were five crosses at the end of the letter, above her signature.

There was a postscript, “Mummy wrote that we’re all invited to Mr. Hazen’s house in the Hamptons for Christmas and I decided that it was childish of me to tell you that I would never go there again. The past is the past and I’m none the worse for having been hit in the head by a dashboard there. In fact I’m much the better for it. Nobody would have dreamed of electing me Homecoming Queen if my nose hadn’t been busted.”

Well, Strand thought, at least she knows how to stick to a story. It was too late now—if it hadn’t always been too late—to let her know that he knew it wasn’t a dashboard that had hit her.

As he put the letter down, Strand remembered Mrs. Schiller saying that Caroline was a very popular name these days.

He opened Leslie’s letter, saw it was a long one.

Dearest,

I have the most enormous news. You are now married to a wealthy woman. Comparatively speaking, of course. What’s happened is that I’ve sold the dune painting I started over Thanksgiving in the Hamptons. Linda was as good as her word and hung it in the show. It was the first one sold. It might have something to do with the fact that it was priced at only two thousand dollars ($2,000!!! It sounds like a lot more in francs) and all the rest started at five and went sky-high after that. I’ve also sold a water color that I did in a few hours in Mougins. Linda says she didn’t believe anyone could do something new with the Riviera as subject and somehow I managed it. Even more dazzling—the man who bought it is a painter himself, a well-known painter in France, and he’s invited me to his studio and told me that if I want to paint from live models there I could do so at the same time he’s working. Incredible, isn’t it? I feel like somebody’s maiden aunt who does embroidery in her spare time and is suddenly told she’s producing works of art. Linda says that if I go on in what she calls “my new style” (ha-ha) and work hard she’ll definitely give me a show in New York next year. I’ve been working on a big canvas of a courtyard I wandered into, only it doesn’t look like a courtyard on the canvas, it looks like a medieval dungeon. “Lit by an unearthly light, like Balthus, only American,” is the way Linda describes it, but you know how she exaggerates. I’ve never felt like this before. The brush seems to move by itself. It’s the most peculiar and wonderful feeling. Maybe it’s something in the air. Now I think I know why painters had to come to Paris sometime in their careers, the earlier the better. If I’d have come when I was eighteen, I don’t think I’d ever have touched the piano again.

I’m on such a high, dear man, as though I’m soaring, that I hate to leave before I have to. Linda’s suggested that we stay on here longer than we planned and arrange to meet you at Kennedy the day you’re due at Russell’s. You have to pass the airport anyway on the way out and to tell you the truth, a little extra time away from Dunberry will fortify me for what I have to face when I get back.

I know it sounds selfish, but it’s only a few days, and it’s not like Gauguin leaving his family to paint in the South Seas, is it? Of course, if you want me to come back sooner, just send me a cable.

In the meantime, if you can do the family chores and get in touch with the kids and tell them where we can all assemble for the holidays, it will ease my mind.

I hope you’re taking care of yourself and that you miss me as much as I miss you. Please let me know as soon as possible what you decide.

Please don’t think that because I have the crazy idea that I have a chance to be a good painter I will turn into a bad wife. If I had to make the choice you know what it would be. I am no Gauguin.

Give my blessing to the kids when you speak to them.

Linda sends her love and I send you everything I have. Until the blessed holiday,

Leslie