Secrets & Surprises (12 page)

“God,” he said. “Your loyalty is still with him.”

“Don’t start that,” she said. “Please.”

“It’s so easy for me to see. It’s so clear, and sometimes I know you see it. I know you do, and sometimes you’ve even agreed with me. If you see it, then break away. Break the tie.”

“Griffin, I haven’t called or written my father for nearly a month.”

“But you don’t have to. That’s what’s so insidious about it. During that month he reminded you of who he was and how he was because his long poem was printed in the magazine you subscribe to. He was on your mind, even if you didn’t call, even if he didn’t call you. Jesus—at least admit the truth.”

“What do you want me to say? That I hate my father?”

“Admit you’ll never leave him—or you’ll leave him for somebody he approves of. Some man he’ll find for you.”

“Griffin, he has never told me who to date.”

“He has to approve, though, doesn’t he? And he doesn’t approve of me, does he? Did he like me there at Christmas, eating roast goose across the table from him, sitting next to his only daughter in his classy Village apartment? Did you think he radiated warmth?”

“He had just met you,” she said.

“And did he want to meet me again? You got the phone calls. Did he?”

“He’s never told me who to bring there and who—”

“He didn’t. Just give a simple answer.”

“Don’t tell me how to answer you. Answer yourself if you know all the answers.”

“Please,” he said, bowing his head and coming toward her with his arms outstretched. “Do you think I asked you to marry me because I hate you? Do you think I’m saying this because I only want to hurt? I’ve been through this too. Once you face it, you can get away from it.”

“I’m not going to let you make me hate my father,” she said. She was so confused, wondering now what her father had thought, why even her mother had not said what he thought. But maybe her father and mother weren’t getting along—Griffin had said they weren’t—and it had to be true that he was not saying these things because he hated her. He was standing and holding her, very sad; he was at least doing what he thought was right.

“It’s all so simple,” he said. His arms closed around her.

These were the things in their apartment: a sofa with two usable cushions, the other cushion ripped to shreds; one large pillow for floor seating; draperies at the window left by the former tenants; a kitchen table and two chairs, one of which always needed gluing; a bed in the bedroom and a bureau they shared. Nothing else. The clutter was not the result of trying to cram large furniture into small spaces, but piles of books, clothes, shoes and boots. They threw out little, keeping almost all the mail, stacked first into piles of a dozen envelopes or so, the piles later cascading, being walked over—letters getting littered across the floor. So when they were in the apartment and wanted to be close to each other, they gravitated toward the bed, the sofa with two cushions too small to stretch on comfortably.

Tonight they were on the bed—he at the far end, his feet under her thigh for warmth, she with a pillow behind her head, looking down at him. She was recovering from a cold and did not have much energy. She had been asleep when he came in, but had roused herself to ask about his day, to talk to another human being in the hopes that if she stopped drifting in and out of sleep, she might feel less sick. He had gone out with Tony two nights before and had come home sober. She had been grateful and happy, sure that he was changing. He hardly ever talked about Joseph Berridge, and she wondered if she had finally gotten through to him. But, to keep peace, she hardly ever mentioned Horace Cragen either, and she felt ridiculous omitting mention of someone she cared for and thought about. Her mother had sent her a letter saying that his back still bothered him, after two doctor appointments, and that he was not working well, and growing despondent. She had meant to call, but each time she thought of it Griffin was in the apartment.

“If you got a job,” he said, “with my dividend checks and my job, and your income, too, you wouldn’t have to take money from him.”

She held up a hand, palm toward him, to tell him to stop talking. His words flowed right through it.

“And you’re being childish not to do it,” he said.

“You don’t want me to take my parents’ money, and you drive around in a new Volvo your father gave you,” she said.

Whether because she was sick and he was sorry for her, or because she had just effectively silenced him, he said nothing more. In retrospect, she would continue to think just what she thought at the time: that he had shrugged off what she said. When he and Tony, drunk again, were in the accident—when Griffin, going thirty miles over the limit, went off the road and crashed the Volvo into a tree, she did not even think of their conversation in the bed two nights before. Tony was cut and scraped; Griffin, with a broken arm and a concussion, was pulled out of the car by Tony. She got the call about the accident from the hospital. She had no money to get a cab to go get him, so she called Louise. “Let him wrestle with his own demons,” Louise said, her own foot heavy on the pedal. “I’m glad you weren’t in the car.” That must have been what started her thinking about the conversation in which she accused him of accepting the car from his parents. But surely crashing it into a tree at high speed was an extreme response. He seemed almost desperately happy to see her, and was very polite to Louise, thanking her over and over for putting herself out for him. He did not seem disturbed—not disturbed the way a person who crashes into a tree would act. It was probably foolish to keep wondering if it had been deliberate. But il it had been, she should be more careful about what she said to him. He was more upset than she knew, if it had been deliberate. She would have asked him if he meant it to happen, but he seemed so peaceful after the accident that she didn’t speak. She was also afraid that he would admit to doing it to spite her, even if the car had really gone out of control. He was sneaky sometimes—or a better way to put it was that he was an actor: Louise had been right the time she told her who Griffin Berridge was when she said that he
decided
to be fucked up about his father’s fame.

A week later when her mother called, she felt guilty for not having called or written. She told her mother about Griffin’s car accident, by way of explanation, and her mother said only, “I’m sorry.” Her mother was calling to tell her that her father was suffering, that he would not take the pain pills the doctor had given him because they made his mind fuzzy, but that he couldn’t work or, some days, even go out, because the disc in his back bothered him so. She said that she had thought that Diana’s coming home might cheer him—or perhaps Diana could talk him into taking the pills.

Alarmed, she called the airline, forgetting she could not reserve a seat on the shuttle, even before she spoke to Griffin. Then she went into the bedroom and told him she had to go home, and why. She hoped that it would not result in a tirade—that for once he would be reasonable and see it as the simple situation it was.

He said, “That’s where your parents live. This is home,” and went back to his reading.

Her father was not very pleasant to her, which surprised her and disappointed her mother, she knew. He was glad to see her, but brooded that his wife had summoned her, when she had a life of her own. Did he protest too much—could he be doing it to make his wife feel badly? Diana was ashamed for wondering. Here was her father, depressed and hurting, and she was wondering if mind games were being played.

She stayed for three days, and once each day—as much as she thought he would tolerate—she tried to talk him into taking the pills. When, at the end of the third day, he still would not, she resented his iron will, his thundering “I will not!,” which made her back off, so far that she backed over the threshold to the living room, where she found her mother weeping. “He’s so damn stubborn,” her mother said, brushing away the tears. And it was not like her mother ever to disagree with her father; when her mother disagreed, you knew it by her blank face.

That night, when she left, a neighbor drove her to the airport. His name was Peter Jenkins—everyone called him Jenkins—and he could afford to live in the Village because of the money he got when his parents were killed in a plane crash. She could not remember how she got that information, but from the time she was small she had known it, and because people in the neighborhood talked about it often, she was able now to understand that they liked Jenkins, but they also looked down on him. Even calling him by his last name indicated that he was a little apart from them.

All Peter Jenkins wanted to talk about was her father (a great man, he always said—talented and also kind) and his difficulties, and what difficulties she might be having adjusting to life in Boston. She felt hypocritical presenting her life as interesting and peaceful. She knew that he would want to hear the truth, and she did not mean to be condescending to him—it was just that she did not want to think about the truth herself. She was doing badly in school and the man she lived with might have deliberately smashed up his car, and she had found her father remote, obstinate, wanting sympathy rather than help. She had felt sorry for her mother.

“Ever go rowing on the Charles?” he asked, weaving through traffic.

She told him she hadn’t.

“You jog?” he said. “Last time I was there it looked like a marathon was going on, there were so many people running.”

She said that she didn’t run.

“If you ran, you might make it to the airport faster than I’m getting you there.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “If I miss one flight I can get another.”

When they got to the airport he smiled at her and got out to lift her bag to the sidewalk.

“You take care,” he said. “Everything’s going to work out all right.”

“Thank you very much for bringing me,” she said.

To fill an awkward moment of silence he said, “You know, your father is really a fine man. I don’t understand every word of what he writes, but God—the tone of those poems—the mood he can create. And he never has his head in the clouds. The week before he got sick he came around to see if he couldn’t steady the ladder for me so I could fix the shutter on the second floor that had blown loose in the storm.”

She thanked him again and walked into the airport. She was sad to leave with nothing resolved. She was depressed because she knew Griffin was going to be waiting with some sarcastic comment, or something to be said in the guise of enlightening her. She was going back to Griffin, and everything in that world seemed so complicated, yet so vague, and the man who had just brought her to the airport was so nice and sensible. But neither did it cross her mind to get something going with Peter Jenkins. Griffin was, as Louise had said, obsessed with his own demons, and that did not make it easy to live with him, but she respected that intensity. In the long run, someone like Griffin was important, in spite of his faults. Peter Jenkins was even a little dull, although he was a very kind and caring man. If she had had to talk to him longer than the car ride, what would she have said?

Getting onto the plane, she thought she might have asked him for help—or made some move toward him, to break his exterior. Then she settled into her seat, convinced her thoughts were crazy—she was imagining a whole situation in her mind that did not, and would not, exist. She was like Griffin.

No one, including Horace Cragen, imagined he would die. When they operated they found a malignant tumor, and the cancer had already spread through his lymphatic system. Diana had not even gone to New York for the operation. She had talked to him the day before he was hospitalized, and tried to cheer him by promising to go with him to Paris in the spring, to a conference he wanted to attend. Before the operation he had started to care again about poetry, and an old friend—another famous poet who was the subject of a week-long conference in Paris in June—had invited Horace to attend with him. And Horace Cragen did go to the conference, taking along his medicine and checking in with an American doctor. When Diana and her mother showed delight with his progress and told him they would both go with him to Paris, he said—and not even nicely—that he would go with William, alone.

William, besieged by reporters and having had enough of listening to himself talked about, having shaken enough hands, left Paris for the States two days before Horace was to leave. Horace waited two days, did not cancel his flight, talked in the morning to a reporter and gave him information about his youth with William at Princeton, ordered dinner to be sent to his room, ate it, then shot himself in the head, the radio playing music he did not understand because he had adamantly refused to learn French.

“Oh, parley-voo and fuck these Frogs,” Horace had said to William as they stood in the lobby of the big hotel, William having checked out and lingering for a final cigarette before he left for Charles de Gaulle Airport. William had laughed at that; Horace had been profane in his youth, but he had become—both of them had become—so dignified, so cultured. William himself did not even use bad language, with the exception of a “goddamn it.” Or, as Horace told the interviewer who came two days later, on the morning of the day he was to kill himself, “He became a gentleman.” The interviewer, wondering if Cragen’s phrasing was not perhaps a subtle way to indicate something about the other poet’s character, and used to interviewing writers who knifed other writers in the back, wrote simply that Horace Cragan considered William Duvall a true gentleman. He took the last photograph of Horace Cragen alive. Cragen was pictured, thin from his recent medical treatments but still strikingly handsome, sitting in a tufted chair in the hotel lobby, an uncharacteristic cigarette in his hand. (The pack was given to him by William, who said that now that he was leaving the tension behind, he was leaving the cigarettes too—Horace Cragen reached out and took them and, to William’s surprise, lit one. Then they embraced for a slap on the back, shook hands, and William left for the airport.)