‘So when are you and Elsa going to have number two?’ Andrew’s saying brightly.
‘Mind your own business.’
‘Okay, okay, okay! Jesus, you’re as prickly as an old grizzly! I just wanted to show some interest, that’s all. Say, isn’t
it great being a father? I just love it! I like playing cowboys and Indians again and fixing up Chuck’s train set—’
Scott comes to rescue me. He’s part of the family as Aunt Emily’s stepson, and he always takes at least one main meal with
us during these family gatherings.
He talks to Andrew. He asks Andrew how he feels when he’s cruising at twenty thousand feet.
‘Great!’ says Andrew happily, ‘I look at the ground and think gee! Somewhere down there Chuck’s playing with his train set
and Lori’s preparing some wonderful French meal and Nurse is changing the baby’s diaper …’
Scott somehow manages to keep the conversation going. How he does it, I don’t know. God, Scott’s a smart guy.
‘You ought to be married, Scott!’ says Andrew with enthusiasm. ‘It’s just wonderful!’
Mother, slinking up behind him, stands on tiptoe to give him a kiss. ‘It’s lovely you’re so happy, darling!’
They stand there, thinking how wonderful marriage is, while I wonder again what the hell’s happened between her and Cornelius
to trigger this marital renaissance. I wish Mother wouldn’t dye her hair.
Elsa joins us with the baby. Poor Scott must be feeling wiped out by all this marital bliss.
‘Hi,’ I say to Elsa, giving her a reassuring smile. Easter at the Van Zale mansion makes Elsa feel like an outsider, so I
try not to feel irritated when she follows me around as if she’s terrified to let me out of her sight. ‘Hi Alfred!’ I add,
giving him my finger to clasp. Alfred’s seven months old and he flays around making noises as he attempts to get what he wants.
Alfred’s trying to communicate and he’s discovered how dumb most adults are. It must be hell to be a baby. Everyone thinks
it must be so wonderful to do nothing except eat, sleep and play, but think how traumatic it must be when you have so much
trouble making yourself understood.
Alfred’s wriggling in Elsa’s arms. He pushes my fingers away.
‘Put him down, Elsa. He wants to be free.’
Alfred tries hard to crawl away across the floor.
‘Boy, he’s cute!’ says Andrew good-naturedly.
Cute! Alfred’s smarter than all Andrew’s kids put together.
Vicky’s sitting on the couch at the far end of the long room, well away from all the kids who are running around trying to
kill each other. I stroll over to her just as Mother tells the nurses to remove everyone under ten to the nursery.
‘Getting sick of the big family occasion?’ I say.
Vicky looks up. Suddenly she smiles. My guts feel weak, as if I were responding to some folk-memory of King Alfred’s uncertain
bowels. ‘Of course not!’ she says. ‘It’s lovely to see the family together.’
She means just the opposite. It’s exhausting, boring and irrelevant to the true meaning of Easter. She knows that as well
as I do but she’s locked up in the classic dilemma of feeling obliged to say one thing while she privately thinks another.
I try to bust through her psychological shackles by saying: ‘I’ve got tickets for Kevin’s new play. It’ll do you good to get
out of this place and defrost those brains you’ve been keeping on ice for so long.’
She smiles uncertainly. ‘Maybe it would. Thanks. Daddy said only the other day that it would do me good to get out – he even
asked me to join him and Alicia for dinner at the Colony, but I didn’t want to go. I felt it would be … well, an intrusion.’
‘Noticed, have you?’
‘Of course! It’s so obvious. But why do I also feel it’s so bizarre?’
‘I’m just rereading Sophocles and Aeschylus to find out. Have supper with me after the theatre and I’ll tell you why we can’t
stand the sight of our parents frolicking around as if sex had just been invented.’
She laughs. My guts feel weaker than ever.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll be looking forward to it.’
The play interests me. It’s about an Irish-American political boss at the turn of the century, and I guess it must be based
on Kevin’s father who pulled a lot of political strings in Massachusetts in those days.
Luxuriating in the trappings of power, the boss is appalled to discover that the road to power is the road to isolation –
and finally to a death of the spirit, a death in life, the ultimate human hell. This guy can only communicate through exercising
his power but paradoxically the exercise of his power precludes true communication. He loses his friends, his wife and eventually
the election. The last scene shows him with his mistress and ends not with words but with silence.
‘Why doesn’t he say something?’ says some moron in the row behind us.
I have a terrible feeling the play will be a box office flop. A large
proportion of the Broadway theatre audience can only handle musicals and farces, and perhaps a large proportion of them too
dislike being reminded of their own emotional failures which Kevin dissects with such honesty. The critics may go on praising
Kevin, but some impresario who holds the purse-strings will probably tell him to stop writing in blank verse and throw in
a happy ending to keep the morons happy.
I wish I could tell Kevin how great an instrument his verse is. I wish I could tell him not only to stand up to the impresario
but to those critics who say that such twentieth-century conversation as ‘Have you a light for my cigarette?’ inevitably renders
blank verse bathetic and obsolete. Kevin’s not Eliot and he’s not Fry but he’s one of the few English-speaking dramatists
who dare to strive for literary elegance by shouldering the discipline of metre. He should be encouraged over and over again.
He should be cheered on by all those who care about twentieth-century drama.
By one of those strange coincidences which make one almost believe in idiotic words like ‘destiny’ and ‘fate’ we bump into
Kevin himself outside the theatre. He’s with some handsome young actor and they’re on their way to Sardi’s. I know I have
only a few seconds to express myself so I grope for the words to thank him for all those hours he must have spent toiling
over his play. Just to say ‘thank you’ would be inane, of course. To say ‘I liked your play very much’ would sound as if I
really hated it but wanted to be polite. I’ve got to praise it but I can’t just say something meaningless like ‘It was great!’
I’ve got to say some thing no one else would think of saying; I’ve got to pull something electrifying out of my vocabulary.
It doesn’t matter if I exaggerate. So long as I hit the right original note, he’ll see straight through to the core of what
I want to say.
‘It was a triumph over language,’ I say. ‘You remind me of John Donne.’
‘My God!’ gasps Kevin. ‘Why the hell aren’t you the theatre critic of the
New York Times
!’
The actor’s laughing but Kevin, sparkling as ever, just exclaims ‘Pay no attention to him! He probably thinks John Donne was
one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence – perhaps related to Thomas Jefferson on the distaff side! Look, for
God’s sake join us for a drink – Vicky, persuade Sebastian!’
‘We’ll take a raincheck,’ I say, smiling at him, ‘because we’re on our way to eat. But thanks, Kevin.’
‘Then come down to the Village and see me sometime,’ says Kevin urgently over his shoulder and the actor looks annoyed, but
he doesn’t
understand. The actor’s like Elsa. He’ll never understand how exciting it is for Kevin to be compared with a poet who’s been
dead for over three hundred years.
We’ve communicated.
‘Kevin’s so attractive!’ sighs Vicky. ‘What a waste!’
‘It’s love itself that’s important,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter how you love or whom you love just so long as you’re capable
of loving, because if you’re incapable of loving you die. That’s an Ingmar Bergman theme. Have you seen any Bergman movies?’
‘No. Sam only liked westerns and thrillers.’
We go to Le Chanteclair on East Forty-Ninth Street and have onion soup, ris de veau and a bottle of white burgundy.
‘It’s so nice to have French wine,’ says Vicky, remembering all the years of hock with Sam and California hooch with Cornelius.
We talk about our parents.
‘What do you think happened?’
‘We’ll never know.’
‘Isn’t it
odd
!’
‘Maybe it’s not so odd,’ I say. ‘We know so little of what goes on in other people’s lives.’
‘True.’ She looks nervous suddenly.
‘Everyone puts up such a front.’
‘Yes,’ she says, her eyes dark with memory. ‘They do.’
I quickly switch the conversation back to the play and I soon realize she’s understood every line of it. It’s wonderful to
be able to talk to a woman whose conversation isn’t confined to her home, her kids and the latest mink she’s picked up at
Bergdorf Goodman.
I take her home. I don’t touch her.
‘Say Vicky, let’s do this again. It was fun.’
‘Well, I … Sebastian, this evening was just great, such a change, but—’
‘It’s okay, isn’t it?’ I say carelessly. ‘I’m just the stepbrother safely married off. You’re the pregnant widow. If Cornelius
reads into this what he read into that goddamned idiotic scene at Bar Harbor he’d need to be certified.’
‘Oh …’ She’s embarrassed. ‘Well …’
‘Of course I’ll bet you don’t give a damn now what happened all those years ago,’ I say swiftly. ‘You’ve lived with a man
for nine years and you know how easily men get aroused by the sight of pretty girls in swimsuits. And you know too, just as
I know, that it wasn’t you that aroused me – I mean
you
– Vicky. It was just the sight of a female body semi-nude. It was certainly no big deal, no bigger than the sight of a
fat lady salivating outside a bakeshop window, and you couldn’t have less of a big deal than that.’
Her serious strained expression suddenly fades. She laughs. ‘You mean I was no more important than a sugared doughnut?’
‘No, you’ve always been important to me, Vicky. It was the incident itself which was so breathtakingly trivial.’
She thinks it over carefully. She probably hasn’t allowed herself to face the memory in its entirety since she was fourteen.
I wait. I don’t rush her. This is very important.
‘Yes, I guess you’re right,’ she says off-handedly at last. She can’t quite bring herself to look at me but her voice is calm.
‘What a fuss about nothing, wasn’t it?’
These are brave words, a splendid funeral oration over a corpse which we can now duly bury and smother with flowers. I still
don’t touch her but I want to very much. I want to let her know how much I care about her. But I don’t want to let her know
that my one desire at this very moment is to undress her and kiss her and make love to her all night.
Vicky needs time and I’m going to give it to her. I want her to know I have all the patience in the world.
‘Okay, Vicky,’ I say casually as I leave her at her father’s house. ‘So long. I’ll call you.’ But underneath those casual
words I’m very, very excited. The foundations of my dreams have just been hammered into a base of granite, and now at last
I can start to visualize the house I’ve wanted so long to build.
At home Elsa’s sitting humped up in bed and looking like the wrath of God – her God, the one who’s so mean the whole damned
time, the God who sent ten plagues one after the other to make life hell for the Egyptians. The older I get the sorrier I
feel for Pharaoh.
‘So where were you?’ she says, staring at me with her father’s pale eyes. ‘What happened?’
‘Where do you think I was? In bed knocking up a pregnant woman?’
‘Sex is all you think about,’ she says, wiping away a tear.
‘Sex is all you want me to think about,’ I say, and slam away until she’s too breathless to complain any more.
‘Oh Sebastian!’ she says cuddling up to me afterwards. ‘Sorry I was so mad at you.’
I like Elsa. She’s warm and soft and cosy. I like her best of all when I’m in bed with her and she probably likes me best
of all there too. I’m not talking about sex exactly, nor love, but just that good comfortable
feeling you get when you’re close to someone and know they’re your friend.
Elsa goes to sleep, large body still pressing against mine and reminding me how soft and warm and feminine she is. I lie awake
in the dark. I see no conflict in the future. I’m not interested in marrying Vicky. Marriage is just part of the front you
put up for society. It took me a while to realize that but Cornelius spelt it out for me in the end. ‘I don’t pick my partners
from maladjusted neurotics who are incapable of leading normal lives,’ he said. I got the message. To get on in life you have
to make everyone believe you’re normal and well-adjusted. Of course practically no one is, particularly on Wall Street, but
that’s not the point. The point is that everyone has to pretend that everyone outside a mental home is some kind of robot
with NORMAL stamped on its forehead. When you get married you’re flashing a sign saying: NORMAL, NORMAL! and everyone stops
worrying about you. You settle down, provide your wife with a nice home, start a family and order champagne and flowers on
each wedding anniversary. NORMAL, NORMAL! trill the little signals, communicating to the world that you’re a regular guy.
I shift closer to Elsa in the dark and think how nice she is. We’ll be married for ever, Elsa and I, no fuss, no mess. There
couldn’t be any fuss because if there was the Reischmans would grab Alfred.
Nobody’s taking Alfred away from me.
But Vicky’s going to be part of my life too. Vicky won’t want marriage. Vicky’s had marriage, had it up to the hilt. I know
Vicky and I understand her better than anyone else does.
We’ll have what in the old days would have been described as a liaison. That’s a good word. It conjures up images of brilliant
women reclining on couches, like Madame Recamier. Paul Van Zale had a liaison for about thirty years with a woman called Elizabeth
Clayton who’s dead now. His wife knew about it and so did her husband, but everyone accepted the arrangement and lived with
it. It wasn’t normal but everyone worked so hard to make their marriages look respectable that the abnormality was overlooked.