Bread Upon the Waters (53 page)

“Show?”

“Allen,” Solomon said patiently, “you’ve seen the lady. Would you ever fall in love with her?”

“I’m not nineteen years old,” Strand said, knowing it was the weakest of arguments.

“The whole idea is Jimmy’s,” Solomon said. “He told me as much. He came to me a month ago and made the proposal to me: their own imprint, a share of the profits, no interference from me in selection of material, playing dates, accompanying bands, the whole shebang. Pretty good for a nineteen-year-old boy whom I took in as an apprentice just a few months ago to please a friend. He said he’d give me a month, up to the date her contract ran out, to consider his proposition. If I said no, he’d take her away from me. She’s the biggest money earner we’ve got, but I said no. I may blackmail a little myself from time to time”—Solomon smiled wanly—“but I do not submit to blackmail. I told him he was fired, but Dyer put up such a hysterical performance—she was in the middle of a recording session that would take at least three more weeks even under normal conditions—that I had to keep Jimmy on for another month. But he’s out now. I just wanted to make sure you knew why.”

“Thank you,” Strand said sadly.

“I hope it won’t affect whatever friendship you feel for me.

“It won’t,” Strand said, although he knew better.

“The music business is a rough trade,” Solomon said. “Cutthroat at times. But people, especially young people, think they can go all out, run roughshod over everybody, ignore all codes. They’re mistaken. I’m afraid your Jimmy isn’t strong enough, and never will be, to accumulate enemies so early on. He’ll have his little moment of glory, Allen, but the slide will commence and there’ll be no stopping it. I’m not happy about it. In fact it saddens me that I know my prediction will come true. The lady’s a menace, a bomb waiting to explode. Her voice is going and she knows it. She needs to be protected and Jimmy couldn’t protect his own mother from getting wet in a drizzle. She’s desperate and manic-depressive and some new young genius will come along on a night when they’re booing her off the stage or when the telephone stops ringing and she’s ready for one of her suicide attempts. If you can persuade Jimmy to come to his senses I’ll take him back. In time I can turn him from a novice into a professional. And it’s not for my sake, it’s for his. You believe that, don’t you, Allen?” Solomon stared hard across the table. “Don’t you?”

“I believe it,” Strand said. “Last night I told him what he’s done was distasteful—I’m not in the habit of using strong language, as you know, and that was pretty strong for me. I told him I was ashamed of him and I got up from the table and left him there. But I know there’s nothing I can do with him. Either the last few months have changed him or he was always like this but I didn’t recognize it. Whatever it is, he’s going to go his own way.” He remembered what Jimmy had said about gratitude. Like putting a knife in a guy’s hand, he had said, and giving him lessons in how to slit your throat “My son has moved out of my life,” he said gently to the tanned, reasonable, forgiving man across the table from him. “All I can do is wave good-bye. I’m sorry.”

Solomon reached over and touched his hand. “You know what we need?” he said. “A brandy. The best brandy in the house.”

They had the brandy and then Solomon said he had an appointment with a composer in his office. “He’s a little crazy,” Solomon said. “He will only come to the office on Saturday afternoons. It’s his lucky day, he says. I’ve missed two trips to Palm Springs and a skiing weekend because of the sonofabitch. Want to go into the music business, Allen?” He smiled.

“No, thank you,” Strand said, and watched the man make his way through the restaurant to the door, the perfect image of success and hearty well-being, waving genially, with a papal gesture of benediction, to friends at the tables he passed.

He was at Grand Central Station, waiting for the three twenty-one train to Connecticut. A young couple—a tall boy and a pretty, much smaller girl—were kissing goodbye, as though whichever one of them was traveling was going to be gone for a long time. Strand stared at them, amused but a little embarrassed at the public sexuality of the embrace. On the walk across town from the restaurant he had been thinking about Jimmy, embarked on God knew what kind of adventure, on a wave of sex, of Caroline, that improbable home-breaker, tormenting all the men around her, if the anonymous wife of the biology teacher was to be believed, of Eleanor, stuck away in a small town in Georgia because, as she had said, she could not live without the one man she had chosen and who had chosen her. The prospect of spending the rest of the weekend alone on the deserted wintry campus seemed bleaker than ever. The city had revived old juices in him. For the first time he resented Leslie’s absence. Soaring, he remembered from her letter. He, too, could soar if he were in Paris. He turned away from the couple, still locked together, and went to the side of the station where there was a bank of telephones. He looked up the number in the Manhattan directory, hesitated, then put a dime into the slot and dialed. He waited for ten rings. There was no answer. Judith Quinlan was not home. He hung up the phone, fished out his dime, hurried back to the platform gate, which was now open. He got into the last car just before the train glided out of the station. As he looked for an empty seat he saw the small girl who had been kissing the boy at the gate. She was crying, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

Women are lucky, he thought as he sat down in front of her. They can cry.

For a moment he considered getting up and sitting in the seat next to the girl to console her, perhaps console himself. But he had never picked up a girl in his life and he doubted that he could start now.

Forlorn and unhappily virtuous, a sinner in intention and already suffering from a sinner’s remorse, without having tasted any of sin’s pleasure, cursing himself for not having had the sense to call when he awoke that morning to announce to Judith Quinlan that he was in New York, he stared morosely out the window as the train rose from the tunnel under Park Avenue and rumbled on the overhead tracks in the failing winter sunlight.

When the train came to New Haven, where he had to change for the line going north, he saw that the girl had long ago stopped crying, had done her face carefully with fresh powder and rouge and was talking animatedly with a young man in a long fur coat who had boarded the train at Stamford.

It made him remember Romero and his striptease artist. In essential matters, like speaking to strange young women on trains, Strand thought, Romero was infinitely more learned than his history teacher.

The weather mocked him. It was a sunny, brisk Sunday morning and the few boys who had stayed on the campus for the weekend were playing touch football, their cries reaching him through the open window, merry and young. He had never had the talent or time to play games when he was their age and the young voices outside his window in the autumnal sunlight made him think sorrowfully of the lost, beautiful days of his youth, days that had passed unappreciated when he was their age.

He was restless and lonely. During the term he had had tea in the Red Top Inn on fine afternoons when he and Miss Collins had walked into town together. He had enjoyed the quiet melody of her voice, her abstention from school gossip, and her modest explanations of what she was doing in the book she was writing on American novelists of the 1930s. Twice she had brought along papers that Romero had done for her class that she thought were particularly fine and had blushed when Strand had complimented her on getting the best out of the boy. He decided to ask her to lunch, but when he called her number, her old mother, who lived with her, told him that she had gone into New York for the day. I’m having no luck with English teachers this weekend, he thought ironically as he hung up.

He wanted desperately to talk to Leslie. But it would only spoil her holiday if he told her about Caroline’s letters and Jimmy’s move to California and his reasons for going there. If he called her, he knew she would ask him for news about the children and he would have to lie and she would detect the tone of falsehood in his voice and the conversation would undoubtedly end badly. Besides, transatlantic calls were forbiddingly expensive and he knew he would regret his impulse, even if the conversation with Leslie went smoothly, when the bill came in at the end of the month. The ads of the telephone company in magazines always showed happy parents calling happy children far away, but they did not include a warning that it was a dangerous habit that schoolteachers on small salaries were not encouraged to indulge.

He did not envy Hazen his house on the beach, his marvelous paintings, his freedom to travel and dine in great restaurants, but he did envy him the unthinking way he could pick up a telephone and have long conversations with people in California, England, France, whomever and wherever. With a touch of malice, brought on by his self-pitying mood, he thought that with all his command of the long distance wires, Hazen hadn’t succeeded all that well in communicating with his own wife and children.

He remembered that it had been Eleanor who had told him of Hazen’s son’s death from drugs. He hadn’t heard from her for more than a month and decided it was about time he spoke to her to find out if she could make it to the Hamptons for at least part of the Christmas holiday. She was not loquacious on the phone and the call to Georgia might be thought of as a necessary modest expense. He looked in his address book for her number. He had it twice—once under Strand and the other under Gianelli.

He dialed the number. It was answered on the first ring, as though whoever was there had been impatiently awaiting a call. It was Giuseppe’s voice at the other end of the line. He sounded brusque as he said hello.

“Giuseppe,” Strand said, “this is Allen. How are you?”

“Oh…Allen.” Now Giuseppe sounded disappointed. “I’m okay. I guess.”

“Is Eleanor there?”

There was silence at the other end and Strand wondered if the line had been cut “Giuseppe,” he said, “are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Giuseppe said, “but Eleanor’s not.” He laughed strangely. It occurred to Strand that perhaps his son-in-law was drunk. It didn’t seem likely, though, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

“When do you expect her back? I’d like her to call me.”

“I don’t expect her back.”

“What?” Strand said loudly. “What are you talking about?”

“That I don’t expect her back, that’s all.” His tone was hostile now.

“What’s going on down there?”

“Nothing. I’m sitting in my goddamned house and it’s raining in Georgia and I don’t expect my wife back.”

“What’s happened, Giuseppe?” Strand tried to make his voice soothing.

“She’s gone.”

“Where to?”

“Don’t know. Into the blue. Just gone. Her last words were, by a great coincidence, ‘Don’t expect me back.’”

“Did you have a fight?”

“Not really. More like a slight difference of opinion.”

“What’s the story, Giuseppe?”

“I’ll let her tell you,” Giuseppe said, his voice flat and listless. “I’ve been sitting here for five days and nights since she went, going over the whole thing in my head again and again and I’m tired of it. She’s bound to get in touch with you eventually.”

“Is she all right?”

“When she left she was sound in mind and body, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You must have some idea…” Strand stopped. There had been a click at the end of the line and then dead wire. Giuseppe had hung up. Strand stared dazedly at the telephone in his hand.

Through the window he heard a boy’s voice calling excitedly, “Cut!
Cut
!” and then a sardonic cheer which meant that the boy who had run out for the pass had dropped it.

Eleanor had been home for dinner the night that Caroline had brought Hazen, dazed and bloody, back from the park. She had gone off in the taxi with Hazen at the end of the evening, the evening when Hazen had said in parting from Strand, “I must tell you something that perhaps I shouldn’t say—I envy you your family, sir. Beyond all measure.”

Strand doubted that Hazen would say as much to him on this bright Sunday morning when, if he were asked where his children might be found, he could give the address of only one out of three. And if he, himself, wanted to visit his youngest daughter, he would first make sure that she was in her own room and alone when he arrived.

There was a battered station wagon with Georgia plates parked in front of the Malson Residence when he came back after the last class the next day. He blinked at it as though it was an apparition, then made himself walk slowly, with dignity, into the house.

Eleanor was sitting in the common room talking to Rollins. She still had her coat on and there was a large suitcase on the floor beside her chair. She didn’t see him because she was half-turned away from the door. Strand hesitated a moment, feeling a wave of relief surge over him as he saw her looking relaxed and normal, as though it was the most routine thing in the world to come up unannounced, from Georgia, to drop in for a visit with her father.

“Eleanor,” he said quietly.

She swung around and jumped up and they met in the middle of the room. The embrace was brief and she kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Dad,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you.”

“Have you been here long?”

“Only about fifteen minutes. And Mr. Rollins was kind enough to keep me company.”

Strand nodded. He found it difficult not to put his arms around his daughter and hold her tight in love and relief. But two boys came clattering down the stairs and then stood there staring curiously at them. “Let’s go into our place,” Strand said. “Is that your bag?”

“Yes. I hope you won’t mind having me around for a few days.” She smiled. Her smile, which was frank and generous, had always affected him deeply, especially as she grew older and had taken to practicing looking stern and businesslike. “I’ve heard from Mother and know she’s not getting back till Christmas and I thought you might like company.”

“I certainly do.”

Rollins picked up Eleanor’s bag and with the three boys at the bottom of the stairs watching them, they went down the hall to the apartment. Rollins put the bag down in the living room and Eleanor said, “Thank you.”