Escape the Night (2 page)

“So,” the young guest began, challenging her listeners, “how would you define the Southern woman?”

The bearded man furthest to the left gave a gallant smile and said, “Dazzling.” Her head bobbed down the line as the next man announced, “Mysterious,” with an air of drama, the third leaning forward to purr, “Desirable,” as if hoping to top the others. Allie Fairvoort thought they were fools.

The woman turned to Charles Carey. He seemed to breathe in, as if considering whether to speak. Softly he answered, “Angry and repressed.”

Ten minutes later, the woman left with him.

That night Allie twisted in her bed, hating the dark-haired woman, imagining her cries as Carey's body moved on hers, his mouth seeking her nipple …

Two months later, lying naked under Charles Carey, Allie cried out for him to kiss her breast.

She had planned it with care. Avoiding Charles, she quietly tracked him through a mutual friend, learned that he seemed driven by things he would not reveal, tested his nerves on polo and sports cars and Black Jack Carey, dated women who were shimmering and impermanent. Quickly, she declined the offer to arrange a meeting. Instead, with the delicacy of a finely wrought drama of which she was the protagonist, Allie crept into Charles Carey's mind. A glancing smile at a party, a chance meeting at the theater, the merest hint of interest, enough for a first evening out, then another. She was planning to surprise him, just as she was planning how he would feel inside her the first time they made love.

Sensing these things, Carey still did not grasp them. He was used to women of a blithe sophistication that never surprised him, whatever form it took. Trained to coolness, he was moved by Allie's buried passion without being sure of what it meant. Instead, he began feeling that they were linked in a subtle exchange as elaborate as a minuet, and as silent. He accorded his actions new weight: quick to sleep with women, he made no move with Allie, and received no invitation. Only once did she teasingly touch the subject: in a taxicab on the way to the Stork Club she suddenly asked, “Did you ever sleep with that silly girl from Mississippi?”

Charles leaned back, curious. “I make a point of never saying. Some of the women I've known are still speaking to me.”

Allie smiled in the dark. “I wonder if
I
will,” she replied, and then was silent.

They spoke nothing more of this. Public people, they dated in public—at the ballet, opera or theater—their thoughts remaining private. They were a striking couple: Charles's look of energy without waste, Allie with the provocative air of a woman who would say what she pleased, with quicksilver movements and eyes that changed like a cat's in the light. They laughed often. He was amused by her elaborate sympathies for people she hardly knew—derelicts or writers without money—and by the way she took Manhattan personally, as if its charms and defects were meant for her. “You're laughing at me,” she challenged him early on.

They had been strolling past the Pulitzer Fountain after brunch at the Plaza—Charles in a pin-stripe suit cut crisp as a knife, Allie's hair bright as champagne in sunlight as it rippled in the fresh breeze—when she abruptly knelt in front of a stranger's poodle, ruffling its ears and cooing in a happy lilt that seemed their own language. Charles and the man passed bemused smiles across the rapt pair until Allie rose and caught Charles's look in the corner of her eye. “You
are
laughing,” she insisted. “The others never have.”

“They're too scared. Beautiful women do that.”

She smiled at the compliment. “And you're not frightened?”

He appraised her with that same sideways tilt of the head she had first seen directed at the dark-haired woman. Without smiling he had answered, “Perhaps when I know you better.”

The night it happened they had gone to
A Streetcar Named Desire
and then on to the upstairs bar at Sardi's, drinking cognac and talking about everything and nothing. Carey felt her tension: her gestures were broader, and her smile, too quick to flash and vanish, seemed wired to her nerve ends. On the way to her apartment Allie unexpectedly asked him in. Once there, she moved to the sofa without speaking and sat looking up at him.

He went to her. She kissed him avidly, pulling him down until they lay pressed against each other, then pushed him away. He stood by instinct, watching mutely as she raised her dress above her fine long legs, to show him. She quivered as he undressed.

Had Charles Carey known her fantasies, he would have said that no man could ever be that shining, and left. Unseeing, he tried to match them, then loved her for the tears in her eyes, not knowing feeling from imagination.

Allie Carey felt only sweat and revulsion as they put her on the delivery table and pushed her feet and ankles through metal stirrups bolted to its end, straddling her legs. Schoenberg and the anesthesiologist sat on metal stools by her head, next to a machine with tubes and a black rubber mask. To Allie they were dwarfs who had stolen her sense of her own body.

“I have to take the baby,” Schoenberg said. “Put her all the way under.”

Her neck twisted as the anesthesiologist pushed the mask to her nose and mouth and turned on the ether. A nurse checked the oxygen on the baby warmer and took a pack of glistening steel instruments from a bare shelf. The forceps fell clattering to the floor. As Allie passed out she could smell the faint freshness of ozone, before it rains.

It was raining when Phillip Carey reached the hospital, perfect as a male model and trailing the faintest whiff of cologne. He fished in his pocket and produced a box of English Oval cigarettes. Charles took one, snapped his lighter, had one deep drag and asked, “How's the patriarch?”

Phillip's smile was thin. “He said he's both too young and too old for this sort of thing. ‘I'll wait until they produce something,' I think were his exact words.”

“Ever the family man.” Charles glanced at the
Times
, saw
WEST BERLIN BORDER HOMES SEALED BY EAST GERMAN POLICE
without interest or comprehension. “I wonder how much emotion he expended on our mother.”

“He outlived her.” Phillip shrugged. He inspected the waiting room with distaste. “Don't let you do this with much grace, do they?”

Charles looked up with a glimmer of amusement. Phillip had grown a clipped mustache to go with his tailored clothes and pearl cufflinks. His natural movements were willowy: Charles could see the military strut of Black Jack Carey in the way he held them in, discerned a tension running parallel to his own. “Childbirth is the great leveler,” Charles answered. “Another Bolshevik plot for your friend Englehardt from HUAC: ‘I have here a list of five hundred babies …'”

“We'll never agree on that, will we?”

“Politics, or babies?”

“Either one, I expect.” Phillip carefully placed his hat on the table and sat across from Charles. “How's Allie taking to her new role? She's not generally noted for supporting parts.”

Charles paled slightly: by now anger changed only the color of his face, not its expression. Knowing that Phillip used his conceit of Allie as actress because it touched a nerve, he remained silent: to respond would be to acknowledge the unspoken war which now embraced even childbirth, but which only John Carey could end, by dying. Instead, finishing the cigarette, Charles watched the sinuous twist of smoke as it vanished, thinking of Allie's almost sensual relation to poetry, and how her moods—bright or melancholy—vibrated with the music she had heard. Pregnancy had cracked her like a glass.

Slowly, Schoenberg sliced her open: her hips were narrow and a Caesarean section too risky. But there was more blood than usual, and it took him a moment to see the head.

He opened his forceps, slid them through the incision, and clamped. His forehead glistened. Slowly, he pulled the baby from its mother. Its hair was matted with blood and its skin was blue from drugs and lack of air. The nurse cleaned mucus from its nose and mouth with quick jabs of a bulb syringe. Schoenberg spanked it.

Its head lolled. Schoenberg slapped it again. The baby neither cried nor moved nor breathed. Quickly Schoenberg cut its cord and rushed it to the baby warmer, clapping an oxygen mask on its- face. “Damned Nembutal,” he muttered.

The baby's leg moved. Slowly, its skin grew flushed. It squalled, then curled on its side, scarcely more conscious than its mother.

When Allie awoke several hours later she lay rigid, refusing to hold the baby or look into its face. They took it to the nursery.

Staring through the glass, Charles saw Allie Fairvoort in the blondness of its hair.

He glanced up, caught Phillip Carey's reflection as he looked down at the baby. For an instant, Charles read fear and vulnerability, felt their father pass between them like a feather in a vacuum, leaving no trace. Blindly, the baby reached toward its uncle with a tiny fist: Phillip's face softened.

“Ah,” he said quietly. “The son and heir.”

A nurse appeared, riffling a sheaf of forms. “Is one of you the father?”

Charles nodded. “I am.”

“The mother won't give us a name.”

Charles turned, hands in his pockets, watching his son as if wondering what its life might hold. Then he turned back again, facing his brother for a long, cool moment before he looked at the nurse. “John Peter Carey,” he told her softly. “The second.”

CHAPTER 2

Peter Carey looked nothing like his grandfather.

By the time he was four, it was clear that Peter would always be fair, that he would grow taller than Black Jack Carey, his features more fine. He had his father's cobalt-blue eyes. They were as watchful as his father's, his bearing—slim, straight back, chin tilted up—often as still. He was quiet near his mother. At other times he would careen down the grassy slopes in Central Park, arms flailing and hair bouncing in corn-blond waves as he fled the unnamed enemy he sensed that Charles watched for, until he ran out of control, stumbling and falling and rolling in a laughing frenzy of imagined terror while he looked back toward his father for help. In his fantasies, Charles Carey always rescued him.

They teased each other endlessly. One fine April Sunday Peter fell with his face pressed in the fresh-smelling grass until Charles came near, springing up with childish inspiration to shout, “Fluffy head!” and run laughing from his father's outrage.

“Peter Carey,” Charles called after him, “did you call your father a ‘fluffy head'?”

Peter chuckled deep in his throat as he slowed to ensure that Charles could catch him, and then charged forward as his father swooped with outstretched arms to pull him to the ground and pin his shoulders, demanding, “Did you call your father—ex-war hero, former publishing genius and onetime escort of Audrey Hepburn—a
‘fluffy head'
?”

They laughed into each other's eyes. “Yes!” Peter shouted and Charles began tickling his ribcage and roaring, “Promise you'll never call me ‘fluffy head' again,” as Peter wriggled and squirmed until, his heart pumping, helpless from excitement, laughter and the need for a bathroom, he yelped, “I give up!” and they rose to take the winding path home, holding hands as they walked past fresh green trees and strangers who smiled at them—lean, striking man in a blazer, blond, laughing boy—until they reached their tall brick town house on East 60th, Charles sternly reminding Peter, “No more ‘fluffy head,'” before dashing upstairs to change and await Adlai Stevenson, for dinner.

It was pheasant, served by candlelight in the Careys' dining room. Afterwards, they remained at the table—Stevenson and the Careys—sipping cognac beneath the crystal chandelier and watching tongues of orange and blue spit from the fireplace. Sensing his campaign was hopeless and liking Charles Carey, Stevenson gave himself up to laughter, hoping wistfully that John Foster Dulles might get caught with a chorus girl before November. “Perhaps a Russian ballerina,” Charles was suggesting lazily, when Peter appeared in his wool sleepers to say goodnight. He kissed his mother's cool, turned cheek with a senatorial gravity that drew a wry smile from Stevenson, before edging from the room and Alicia's sight to where only Charles could see him. He stood motionless, head tilted in watchful replication of his father, until Charles turned. Face suddenly alight, Peter cupped his hands to his mouth and whispered sotto voce, “Fluffy head,” as his father's eyes widened in mock horror and he scampered away, triumphant.

Watching the blond head disappear around the corner, Charles Carey knew at that moment that he loved his son more deeply than he had ever loved anyone, or ever would again. Remembering the crosscurrents that had seemed to flow from his conception, Charles hoped this love would be enough.

Alicia Carey turned from the softness in her husband's face.

Peter Carey first learned guilt from his mother's eyes.

Their green opacity followed him, even in his sleep; he could find neither love nor hate. Haunted by the suspension of their judgment, he came to fear his own actions for the anger they might hold.

Doubting himself, Peter became preternaturally sensitive to the moods of others. He watched his parents, divining from their silences an intricate skein of cause and effect. In his father's hugs, he felt his mother's loneliness.

He pondered how to reach her, searching for clues in his parents' barren touches. At length, deciding, he waited until she was alone.

She sat in the library, a volume of poetry unread in her lap, a champagne glass in her hand, staring into a shaft of afternoon sun which burned her fair, perfect profile to porcelain in the light. Peter approached on tiptoe, standing still and irresolute. She seemed not to notice. Hesitant, he asked, “Do you need a hug from a boy?”

She started, dropping the glass. It shattered on the parquetry. Peter flinched, reaching out to her as Alicia stared at the shards of crystal. Her eyes, rising to meet her son's, filled with hysteria and tears. “Don't you sneak up on me!” she cried. Her hand flailed at the glittering pieces. “It's
broken
now.
Look
, dammit—
look
at what you've done.”