Authors: Louis Begley
And for all my well-bred prejudice against strivers and achievers—we said in my family that one was, one did not
become, even as Boston matrons need not buy hats because they have them—I saw nothing repellent, and certainly nothing dishonoring in what he had done. It had been performed so pleasantly and effortlessly. As his ascent to gentility proceeded (I rely on Rachel’s account of how the first grand friends were acquired at college), Ben neither checked at the door nor took trouble to emphasize the fact that he was a refugee Jew; probably, the worst that can be said is that he seemed to expect to be forgiven for it and did not appear vexed when he wasn’t. Along the same line, Ben did not, in my opinion, make an effort either to hide or to display his Jersey City connection—more particularly, his baffled parents while they still lived. Who except those parents could blame him for not putting them at the center, as it were, of his social life? The family home in Jersey City was easy enough to reach from Park or Fifth Avenue, but where, in that dusty street of red row houses, was the tennis court or pool in which Ben’s friends might disport themselves, and were those parents, starved for the presence of their strange, furtively obsessed only child, of a mind to receive those friends with the equanimity and graceful ease Ben might have wished?
I used to amuse myself—and perhaps Ben as well—by rehearsing with him scenes that would have gone with the life he was beginning to live so successfully. For instance: His truly good-looking mother and father, in their worn but easeful togs, relax after the day’s toil. They are happy that Ben and his merry band of revelers stop by unannounced. In a matter-of-fact, casual way the father is offering a choice of drinks—perhaps slivovitz (nothing wrong with being true to
one’s ethnic habits) and martinis shaken by Ben upon paternal urging; the old man is telling dryly humorous stories of prewar courtroom triumphs, with just a hint of disparagement, drawing therefrom lessons for today’s humbler activities. Meanwhile, the mother flirtatiously upbraids a young man for never coming to see her alone or—stroke of genius!—explains to an attentive Rachel when a gardenia begins to need repotting.
The reality—I knew Ben’s parents and sometimes actually took the train to Jersey City without Ben’s urging—was less comical. Irretrievably diminished by America, the severe, confident civil-law pleader now operated a small insurance business for a clientele of immigrant friends; his once-languid wife answered the telephone and pored over claim forms in the downstairs office. Love and pride (who else had a son like Ben, if only he would be reasonable?), confusion about the road that brilliant son had taken, and dread of the road ahead of them—thin days dragging on in that decaying place until some final bad end—no, these were not themes Ben cared to have developed for the general public. A friend such as I sufficed.
The mother had the good luck to die first. In the two years of his ultimate loneliness, the father’s principal distraction was Ben’s divorce: a chance for the old courtroom fox to guide and restrain his impetuous banker son. One might have thought the whole thing would be simple enough. Rachel and Ben had had no children together, and, what with her own and her first husband’s money, Rachel did not think it really worthwhile to press a man with no capital for alimony. But an unexpected element envenomed the proceedings. It
turned out that while Ben was willing to be convinced that Rachel was through with him, in his opinion that fact was an insufficient reason for severing his ties with Sarah and Rebecca. He held that these raven-haired matching adolescents were his daughters in fact, if not in law. Did not Rachel know that he would not, he could not have others? This deficiency had been, after all, at the time when it mattered, one of his prime qualities: explosion upon explosion within her, torrents of effluvia mixing, and no fear of conception! Now he wanted wages for the hours he alone had spent on their care—changing diapers, pulling on snowsuits, sliding down icy hills, pacing past dinosaur displays, reading aloud—greater in number than Rachel’s and all the nurses’, mother’s helpers’, and babysitters’ hours combined. And he had conquered and kept their love; of this he was sure. His lawyer would prove it; justice had to prevail. Ben’s father listened. He heard the twins. He claimed a world record for listening to Rachel. In the end, there was no trial, but there was (as Ben’s Wall Street lawyer put it) a deal: so long as the twins wished, they would spend part of their vacations with Ben, there would be dinners with him, and, if schoolwork allowed, perhaps occasional weekends. In this way Ben came to think that, however high the waves might billow around him, the precious cargo would be saved: Sarah’s and Rebecca’s childhoods, the delicate, miraculous realization of his dreams.
Like most such arrangements, the deal did not hold for long. Rachel returned to Boston or, more precisely, to the family acres on the North Shore. Sarah became a boarder at Milton, and, over Ben’s tactless and quaint objection that she did not need instruction in breaking farm machinery, Rebecca
went far north in Vermont to progressive Putney. Tucked into unoccupied corners of midterm vacation, the dinners took place mostly in the familiar pomp of the Boston Ritz, the twins tasting Chambertin under the indulgent eye of the headwaiter, who was Ben’s friend. That hamburgers could have been eaten somewhere, without the benefit of crystal chandeliers, and shared with classmates clad in jeans did not occur to Ben. To meet Ben the twins wore the kilts and cashmeres he packed from London; in the lobes of their ears (pierced, he would claim, when his back was turned) glowed his peace offering—pink-hued pearls lovingly chosen in Tokyo.
During the second Christmas vacation, Sarah stood him up without warning: friends were staying with her. She laughed queerly at his telephoned suggestion that she might have brought them. Ben returned to the table and a closed-faced Rebecca. It was too bad her genius sister Sarah hadn’t shown up, she informed him; she knew Ben thought everything about her own friends and Putney was dumb, but it took someone really dumb like her to want to hang around the Ritz; he should know his Wallace Stevens freaked her out. Heading for Beverly Farms on Route 128, driving her back to her mother’s home very slowly, Ben told her a story: In the king’s palace, the carpet of childhood is woven by a blind weaver with silk and wool of many colors from many spools. His fingers have learned the outlines of figures he must give shape to, but not the placement of the colors; his master changes them each year. When the child is grown, the master and the prince or princess who was that child examine the
work and the weaver is lashed with whips or praised and released from toil for a while, according to their pleasure. He, Ben, is that weaver. Rebecca remained silent. When Ben turned to look at her, he saw that she was asleep.
The next summer, like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime, Ben rented a house on an island off Hyères for his month of vacation. There was a terrace crowded by bougainvilleas, a beach below, and a fisherman’s boat with a two-stroke motor that took all of Ben’s strength to start. An Italian woman cooked. Sarah and Rebecca turned the color of copper in the sun. The tops of their bikinis off, bandannas in their hair, toes of arched feet touching, they lay foot to foot on the stone balustrade like rococo Indians.
Ben’s heart ached with happiness and gratitude. He had not asked any of his friends to stay with them—there were people he knew on Porquerolles he could invite occasionally to dinner; L’Arche de Noé served bouillabaisse and the best profiteroles in the world when they got tired of pasta; Saint-Tropez was but two hours away. Mostly, however, the twins and he would fish
à la palangrotte
, as before, and dive for sea urchins. They would read the piles of books he had brought; the record player in the staid mahogany cabinet seemed to work, they would listen to music. The telephone also was working. From Antibes, where she was staying at Eden Roc, Rachel called each evening to talk to the twins. She was lonely; the hotel was expensive; one could water-ski in Antibes; boys from Andover, whose parents she knew, had a catamaran. By the end of the week, Sarah and Rebecca had gone to visit their mother; Ben had arranged to have them
driven over. When the same driver went to fetch them, the young ladies were out sailing. A day or so later, Rachel called to say the twins would stay with her: she had already reequipped them with bikinis and beach towels; he could bring the rest of their stuff to New York when he returned and mail it from there; he should be grateful he was on Porquerolles and did not have to pay Antibes prices.
I knew you could not be trusted, she added, I was right to be next door. How did you dare to fix it so you would be alone there with those beautiful girls, staring at their breasts! This was not the first time that Rachel had accused Ben of deviate conduct or desires. As he reviewed her words, however, first in rage and then coldly, with great care, he came to think that some of Rachel’s inspiration must have come from the twins: it was possible that this was what they thought. In such case, he would henceforth keep his distance. He was truly alone.
A
S
B
EN’S EXECUTOR
and devisee of all his papers (as well as of his collection of neckties, cuff links, and shirt studs), I retrieved, with the help of Ben’s distraught secretaries, file folders of papers from his offices in New York and Paris and, from warehouses, serially numbered, sealed cartons. Each bore a label with the words “Pandora’s Box” written on it in Ben’s hand. There were also documents and tapes of his dictation in the hotel in Geneva.
Thus I came into possession of Ben’s pocket notebooks and diaries with notations (often illegible) of the events of the day that lay outside his business life—what he had eaten
at each meal and in whose company—dates on which the reading of a book was commenced or finished, streets down which he had walked in foreign cities, as well as numbers, algebraic symbols, and little drawings to which I never found a key. On certain blank pages of these diaries—but also on sheets of paper clipped together or rolled and held by rubber bands—were lists of women’s names: sometimes the full name was given and sometimes only the first name and an initial in lieu of the surname. Occasionally, one or two letters appeared on a line, without a name. Were these initials? Some names were followed by dates. Having known Ben and at least the New York world he had moved in so very well, I realized that these were records of his more ephemeral “possessions,” and gradually I came to deduce that they had been made in airport departure lounges, on trains, or while Ben pretended to listen to financial presentations. He wrote them to test his memory or to break in a new fountain pen or perhaps for insertion in the curriculum vitae he would present to the arbiter of some ultimate place of repose—much as another man might have cataloged articles he had published in learned journals. The lacunae in certain of the lists and the inconsistencies, which at first I found surprising, I came to relate, in moments of frustration, to what in the past I had sometimes assumed to be Ben’s mythmaking. At other times, I adhered to another, more benign explanation: Could it not be that Ben was capable of forgetting, that his memories became confused, and that, at least once in a while, his attention flagged?
Much later, when I was brought to reflect bitterly on what
must have been a signal Ben had tried to give—speaking to me so insistently and mysteriously of a novel by Pierre Jean Jouve—a signal that I had not understood but that could have been a plea for help, I read, as though in contrition, much of that writer’s work and came upon the following passage, which I have translated:
A notebook is found, containing all these names of women, with and without addresses, a chaos of names: sluts, you say, and “useful addresses.” But that entire notebook, if only because it is so jam-packed, cannot correspond to experience. A man responsible for a great task could not have entered so many women. That entire notebook contains figures which correspond to one Figure only, before which the Poet is a Supplicant. It is a vow of union to the woman who belongs to all, and to all women, and thereby the notebook dissolves into a prayer. All these names adored under the vestment of nudity intercede for the poet.
I have wondered whether there too was a sign Ben had intended me to decipher.
But the most precious content of the lode of trivia, mischief, and lyric self-expression Ben bequeathed to me were notes, many typed (when Ben was traveling with his portable Olivetti), others written in his large slanting hand, rarely dated, a large majority filed in apparent chronological order under the name “Notaben”—the sort of pun of which Ben was monotonously fond—and a few letters addressed to him. Ben did not make copies of letters he had written, but there were in Pandora’s Boxes some drafts of letters he had written in
French. Apparently, he was not sure of getting them right on the first try.
Some of these materials are reproduced in the narrative that follows. I changed certain names and details that might reveal the identity of my cousin, the woman I call Véronique.
T
OWARD THE END
of August 1969, Ben moved to Paris, taking charge of his bank’s long-established office in the place Vendôme. At the time, for a young partner, this was the equivalent of canonization. For someone of his tastes, it could also be seen as the entry into the Garden of Earthly Delights: when Ben turned his back on the green and gold expanse of his Empire desk top, his eye would behold the verdigris of Napoleon’s column; he would lunch at the Ritz unless, to please a client sophisticated enough to know that Maxim’s must be shunned in the evening, he determined to stroll down the rue Saint-Honoré to the rue Royale and welcome his lunch guest in the sanctum of the omnibus. It was understood that the assignment was for the usual period of two or three years only, and that he would continue to follow matters of certain clients occasionally requiring his presence in New York. Ben decided to keep his apartment on Central Park West: it was where Sarah and Rebecca had last stayed with him. Now that they were in college they might be induced to return—especially if he wasn’t there! The day before he sailed we took our customary noontime meal. Although we were in Vermont as we were every August, I came down to the city for the occasion. He handed me a set of keys and said the maid had been told to expect
my presence on weekdays: for work, he emphasized, not trysts, it being Ben’s theory that I used my cubicle at the magazine principally as a telephone booth and would never finish the book I was writing on Indian use of the land in Maine unless I was removed to the comfort and silence of his library. Another gesture of affection was to come: Ben remembered that my wife and I had not been to Europe since our honeymoon. Would we not leave the children in the care of the current señorita and visit him in Paris as soon as he had a place to live? He was going to look for one that would make good memories for him and for us. I accepted on the spot. Prudence would agree—of that I was sure. Like many of Ben’s friends’ wives, she had a soft spot for him.