Bread Upon the Waters (56 page)

“It did turn out well,” Strand said, without enthusiasm. “Maybe a little too well.”

“What do you mean by that?” Hazen scowled at him.

“She wants to go back.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“She wants to go back right now if she can.”

“Oh.” Hazen stared thoughtfully into his glass.

“She seems to think that the man whose studio she worked in can show her the way to becoming some sort of genius.”

“Did she say that?”

“Not in so many words,” Strand admitted. “She wants to make a career of painting and she thinks Paris is the place where she can get it to happen.”

“What’s wrong with that? You’re not the sort of man who believes his wife should remain eternally chained to the kitchen stove, are you?”

“No, I don’t think I am.”

“You know I thought she had talent, right from the first night in your apartment when I saw her landscapes. Not a big talent, perhaps, but a true one. And now Linda says the people in Paris are very excited about her work and her possibilities. Sometimes it takes strangers to recognize the virtues of things that we’ve been looking at for years.”

“I know all that, Russell, but…”

“But what? What’s the hitch?”

“The hitch is that she wants me to go to Paris with her.”

Hazen didn’t say anything, but whistled softly.

“I didn’t whistle when she said it,” Strand said. “She wants me to ask you if you know anybody connected with the American School in Paris who might be induced to give me a job there. For at least a year. I’d ask Babcock if he’d give me an unpaid leave of absence for the year. Listen, Russell, you’ve done enough for this family. If it’s the slightest bit of trouble for you, just tell me so, and Leslie and I will work something out on our own.”

“Let me see, let me see…” Hazen put his head back in the chair and squinted up at the ceiling. He didn’t seem to have heard what Strand had just said. “Let me see, whom do I know? Of course. Our head man in the Paris office has two kids who go to the American School and he’s on the board. I’ll drop him a note tomorrow. I’d call him, but it’s Christmastime in France, too, and I know he takes ten days off to ski someplace. I’m sure something can be arranged.”

“I hate to use you as an employment agency,” Strand said.

“A lot of other people use me for a lot worse things. Don’t fuss about it.”

Mr. Ketley came in and said, “There’s a telephone call for you, sir.”

Carrying his drink, Hazen went into the library. Strand noticed that he closed the door after him, so that his conversation could not be overheard.

When he came back to the living room, he looked grave. “Allen,” he said, “you’ll have to make my excuses to everybody. I have to go back to New York. Immediately. That call was from my wife. She arrived in New York from Paris this afternoon. She was on Air France. If she’d picked TWA Leslie and Linda would’ve had the pleasure of her company for three thousand miles. She’s drunk and she says that if I don’t get right back into New York tonight she’ll drive out in a limousine and show us one and all that she’s not to be trifled with. One scene like that a year is more than enough. I have to see what I can do. I’m sorry to be a damper on the party. Tell the others it’s business. Tell everybody to eat, drink and be merry.”

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know. I’ll keep in touch.” Hazen took a long lingering look around the room, shook his head wearily. “God, I hate to leave this place,” and he was gone.

Strand finished his drink, then walked slowly upstairs to tell Leslie their host had been called back to New York on business.

They had eaten and drunk, but had not been particularly merry. Eleanor and Leslie had talked themselves out in the car and Linda was drooping from jet lag and went up to bed early. Caroline was restless and suggested to Eleanor that they drive into Bridgehampton and see if Bobby happened to be playing the piano that night in his bar. “After Georgia and Dunberry I can use a little night life. Like ten brass bands,” Eleanor said and the girls kissed their parents good night and went off.

“Well,” Leslie said, “it looks like it’s old folks by the fireside night, doesn’t it?” She came over to where Strand was sitting and bent and kissed his forehead and ran her hand along the back of his head. He reached and held her around the waist.

“I don’t feel so old,” he said. “And as for you, if you’d gone into the bar with the girls, the bartender would’ve asked to see your I.D. card. This is more like the times we used to wait in the parlor until your folks had gone to bed so we could begin to pet.”

“Oh, God.” Leslie laughed. “I haven’t heard that word in thirty years. Pet. Do you think people still do it?”

“From what I hear they just rush into bed,” Strand said. He let the hand that was around her waist slide down and he caressed her thigh. “A sensible, time-saving custom. We ought to try it sometime. Like right now.”

Leslie leaned back so that she could focus on his face. “Do you mean that?”

“Fervently,” he said.

“Is it all right? I mean…”

“Prinz gave me the green light. Slightly blurred. But green.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“He said, moderation in all things, but…He also said it might kill me or it might make me feel like a twenty-year-old fullback.”

Leslie kissed him hard, on the lips, then took his hands and pulled him from the chair.

It didn’t kill him and he didn’t feel like a twenty-year-old fullback when he gave her a last kiss and rolled over on his back in the soft, wide bed, but it did make him feel enormously happy.

“We’re back home,” she said softly. “It’s somebody else’s house and somebody else’s bed, but we’re finally home.”

“You sleepy?”

“No. Floating.”

“I have an elegant idea.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to go down to the kitchen and steal a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator and two glasses and come back here and we’ll have a pre-Christmas, post coitum private party.”

“The party of the other part votes yes,” she said.

When he came back upstairs with the bottle and glasses, Leslie was sitting in front of the fire that she had lit and had drawn up another chair in front of it for him. He popped the cork out of the bottle and poured the cold champagne into the two glasses that Leslie held for him. He took one of the glasses and held it up in a toast. “To Paris,” he said.

She didn’t drink, but looked at him questioningly. “What does that mean?”

“It means that I talked to Russell before he was called away and of course as usual he knows a man and he’s going to get in touch with him and I’m buying a French dictionary tomorrow.”

“Oh, Allen…” She seemed about to cry.

“Drink,” he said and they both drank.

“Allen,” she said, “you don’t have to do this for me.”

“I’m doing it for myself,” he said. “I had a chance to think about it in the car and the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea.”

“You’re sure? You’re not making it up just for me? You seemed aghast when I spoke about it at the airport.”

“I wasn’t aghast. I was surprised. It took a little time to get used to the idea, that’s all. My, this is good champagne.”

“May we never drink worse.” She giggled and held out her glass for more. “The way I feel now,” she said as he poured the wine, “I want to say, And then they lived happily ever after.”

Hazen called the next afternoon and told Leslie he would try to make it back for Christmas, but he wasn’t sure. He hoped they were having a good time, he said, and Leslie told him they all missed him and to hurry back.

They spent the day lazily. It was too cold to paint outside so Leslie started a pencil sketch of Caroline for a later portrait in oil. Strand was content merely to sit and watch and occasionally to go over to the other side of the room where Linda and Eleanor played backgammon.

But when Hazen called the next day to say that he couldn’t make it for Christmas, it was Linda who took the call and she came away from the phone with a worried look on her face. “He sounded very strange,” she said to Leslie and Strand, who were in the living room. “Not at all like himself. Very disconnected, he rambled on and on, he kept talking about momentous decisions, I could hardly make sense out of him. I asked him if he was drunk and he blew up and shouted ‘None of your goddamned business, Linda!’ and hung up. Allen, do you know what it’s all about?”

“No.” He hoped he sounded convincing. “Some sort of business, he said.”

“Thank God, Allen, that you’re not a businessman,” Linda said.

“I do just that every night when I say my prayers,” Strand said.

The Christmas dinner, although delicious, was gloomy. Hazen’s absence weighed on them all. They had all put their presents under the tree but decided not to open any of them until Hazen’s return. The gap at the end of the table made all of them, even Linda, glum. The conversation around the table was sporadic and they were glad when the meal was over.

The weather had turned gray and foggy by the time they finished dinner with a Calvados apiece at three in the afternoon, but Leslie and Linda and Eleanor bundled up and went for a walk along the beach, as though something was drawing them out of the house. Caroline settled herself in front of the television set and Strand went up and lay down to take a nap. In his sleep he dreamt that he was locked in a room with Conroy and Mrs. Hazen and had to watch while they tore their clothes off and jumped obscenely upon one another. He woke up sweating, not remembering the dream clearly, but with a sickly sensation of horror at the grotesque turmoil of his sleeping hours.

He went downstairs and saw that the women had not returned. Caroline was on the phone in the library, but when she saw Strand through the door in the living room, she said hastily, “I can’t talk anymore. Good-bye.” She put the phone down and with a quick glance at her father turned and sat down again in front of the television set.

Curious, he went into the library. “Caroline, whom were you talking to?”

“Nobody in particular,” she said, without looking at him.

“Nobody talks to nobody in particular,” he said.

She sighed and pushed the remote-control button to turn the set off. “If you must know,” she said defiantly, “it was Jesus. Jesus Romero. He called me. I sent him a Christmas card from Arizona and the school forwarded it to him. He tried to call us at Dunberry and the cleaning lady told him we were here and he wanted to wish me a Merry Christmas. Is there anything criminal in that?”

Strand sat down on the couch next to her and took her hands gently. “Caroline,” he said, “we have to have a little talk, you and I.”

“We certainly do,” Caroline said. She was angry now or was trying to seem angry. “Why didn’t anybody tell me Jesus was in jail and is out on bail and has been expelled from the school and is going to have to stand trial?”

“We didn’t know you were that interested in the boy. Until very recently.”

“Well I am. Very interested.”

“I gathered that when I heard about the letters you were exchanging.”

Caroline pulled her hands away from his loose grasp. “What do you know about any letters?”

“Quite a lot, at least about the nature of them, although I never read them. Don’t worry, they’ve been destroyed.”

“I’m not worried.” Her tone was harsh.

“Here are two letters that haven’t been destroyed.” He took Romero’s letter and the one from the biology teacher’s wife from his inside jacket pocket, where he carried them to make sure Leslie wouldn’t happen on them by chance. He stood up and kept his back to Caroline. He looked out to sea while she read the letters. Then he heard the ripping of paper and saw her throwing the tattered remnants into the small fire that was spreading a cozy warmth into the small library.

Caroline was sobbing now and she threw her arms around Strand as he came over to her. “Oh, Daddy, Daddy,” she wept, “what’s the matter with me? How can people write such awful things about me?”

“Because you’ve been cruel and hurt them,” Strand said, still holding her, shocked by the violence of her sobs.

“I was just having fun,” she wailed. “Most of the letters I sent to Jesus I copied from love letters the girls in my dormitory got from their boyfriends or I took from
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
or Henry Miller. I wanted to sound sophisticated and daring, but I thought he’d laugh, too, because when
we
read those letters,
we
laughed. Then when he wrote he was coming out for Thanksgiving, he scared me, he was so serious. And old Assistant Professor Swanson just kept following me around like a sick dog and kept saying he and his wife never touched each other and she was leaving him anyway and I took pity on him. And I told him to spend Thanksgiving with his family. I had to get away from him
and
Romero and I went to Tucson the day after Thanksgiving with a football player who gave me a play-by-play account of every game he played since his sophomore year in high school and I never spent a drearier weekend. That’s the kind of screw I am.” She had stopped sobbing now and she put an angry vehemence into the “drearier,” as though by emphasizing her boredom she was minimizing her guilt. Strand let go of her and gave her his handkerchief to dry her tears. He was relieved that the two letters were finally burned. She looked at him fearfully. “You think I’m awful, don’t you? And you’re going to bawl me out.”

“If I thought it would help I would bawl you out. And I don’t think you’re awful. I think you’ve been thoughtless and sometimes that’s worse than awful. Why did you hang up when you were talking to Romero and you saw me?”

“Does Mummy know about the letters?” She was stalling for time and Strand knew it.

“No. And she never will, if you keep quiet about them. Now—why did you hang up?”

“I was apologizing for not being there when he came to Arizona. And”—she lifted her head and stared challengingly into his eyes—“I invited him to come out here.”

Strand sat down. He feared that it was going to be a long and painful conversation. “This isn’t your house, you know, Caroline,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm.