The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) (25 page)
He stared at me with wide-eyed admiration. ‘You are so damn smart.’
‘Hardly,’ I said.
‘You’re cultured.’
‘You’re not exactly from the Bronx, George. I mean, you did go to Princeton.’
‘That’s certainly no guarantee of ending up cultured,’ he said - and we both laughed like hell.
I liked his self-deprecatory humor. Just as I also liked the way he showered me with books and records and nights at the theater and Sunday afternoon New York Philharmonic concerts - even though I knew that, for George, listening to Rodzinski conduct an all-Prokofiev program was the musical equivalent of two hours in a dentist’s chair. But he would never let on that he was bored. He was so eager to please; to learn.
He was also a voracious reader - largely of hefty factual books. I think he was the only man I ever met who’d actually read all four volumes of Churchill’s
The World Crisis.
Fiction, he admitted, was not one of his great interests. ‘But you can teach me what to read.’
So I gave him a present of Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms.
The morning after, he called me at
Saturday/Sunday.
‘God, what a book,’ he said.
‘You’ve finished it already?’
‘You bet. He can really tell a story, can’t he?’
‘Yes, Mr Hemingway does have that ability.’
‘And the stuff about the war … it’s real sad.’
‘Were you moved by the love story between Frederic and Catherine?’
‘I had tears running down my face during that final scene in the hospital.’
‘I’m glad to hear that.’
‘But you know what I was thinking after I put the book down?’
‘What, my love?’
‘If only she’d had a good American doctor looking after her, she would have probably pulled through.’
‘Uh … I’d never thought that. But, yes, I’m sure that’s true.’
‘I mean, I’m not knocking Swiss doctors.’
‘I don’t think that was Hemingway’s idea either.’
‘Well, after reading his book, I certainly wouldn’t want you to have a baby in Switzerland.’
‘I’m touched,’ I said.
All right, so he was rather
literal.
But I decided I could live with such artlessness because of his decency, his obliging nature - and because I was so overwhelmed by his devoted attention. In the weeks running up to the wedding, I would silence any of my nagging doubts about my future with George by reminding myself:
he’s so nice.
‘Yeah, all right, I’ll admit it,’ Eric said after he finally met George. ‘He is a perfectly affable guy. Too affable, if you want my honest opinion.’
‘How can anybody be
too affable?’
I asked.
‘He’s so damn eager to please. He wants to be liked at all costs.’
‘That’s not the worst thing in the world, is it? Anyway, he was understandably nervous about meeting you.’
‘Why on earth would anybody be nervous of meeting me?’ Eric asked sweetly.
‘Because, to George, meeting you was like meeting Father. He felt that if you didn’t approve of him, the marriage might not happen.’
‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in years.’
‘He is a little old-fashioned …’
‘Old fashioned? Try Paleozoic. But it really doesn’t matter what I think - since there’s absolutely no way you’d ever listen to my advice.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Then answer me this: if I told you I thought he was a disaster, a huge mistake, would you have agreed with me?’
‘Of course not.’
‘The defense rests.’
‘But you
don’t
think that, do you?’
‘Like I said, he’s a perfectly okay guy.’
‘Just okay?’
‘We had a pleasant chat, didn’t we?’
Actually, that was true. We all met for an after-work drink at the bar of the Astor Hotel on Broadway - as it was right around the corner from the radio studios where Eric still turned out gags for
The Quiz Bang Show.
George was nervous as hell. I was nervous as hell. Eric was calm as hell. I had warned George that my brother could be a little idiosyncratic, and had somewhat left-of-center political views.
‘Then I shouldn’t tell him I’m on the campaign committee to get Governor Dewey the Republican nomination for President?’
‘It’s a free country - you can tell Eric whatever you like. But know this - he’s a real Henry Wallace Democrat, and he hates the Republican Party and everything it stands for. Still, I’ll never,
ever
dictate what you should say or do. So, it’s your call entirely.’
He thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘Maybe I’ll sidestep politics.’
He managed to do this during our hour with Eric. Just as he also managed to talk in a surprisingly informed manner about the current state of Broadway, about the work of the Federal Theater Project (he got Eric to reminisce about his years with Orson Welles), and to ask a few intelligent questions about whether this new-fangled medium called television was going to undermine radio (to which my brother mordantly replied: ‘Not only will it kill radio as we know it… it will also reduce the public’s general level of intelligence by at least twenty-five per cent’).
I was impressed (and rather touched) by how well George had briefed himself on subjects of interest to my brother … especially as I’d only mentioned to him in passing Eric’s years with the Federal Theater Project. But George was like that - always meticulous, always well prepared, always wanting to get on the right side of someone. Listening to him talk intelligently about the forthcoming Broadway season - knowing full well that the theater actually bored George, and that he must have been studying
Variety
and the other showbiz magazines for the week before this drink - made me feel real love for him. Because I knew he was doing this for me.
Towards the end of our hour together, George excused himself to call his office. As soon as he was out of earshot, Eric said, ‘Well, you certainly primed him well.’
‘Actually, I told him very little about you.’
‘Then I am impressed.’
‘Really?’
‘For a Republican, he’s reasonably cultured.’
‘How do you know he’s a Republican?’
‘Oh come on. He so looks the part. I bet you anything he’s backing Dewey for the nomination.’
‘I wouldn’t know …’
‘Yes, you would. And I’d lay money on the fact that Daddy Grey is a big cheese in the Westchester County Republican Party.’
Damn my brother for being so perceptive. Only he was wrong about one thing: Edwin Grey, Sr, was actually the chairman of the entire New York State Republican Party - a man who considered Governor Dewey his closest friend, and who acted as an unofficial adviser to a young, upcoming politican named Nelson Rockefeller.
Yes, my future father-in-law was something of a power broker, not to mention a serious white-shoe lawyer - a senior partner at a major Wall Street firm - and a man with the same stern Victorian countenance as Father. His wife, Julia, was a tall, contained woman with a decidedly aristocratic mien, and an unspoken (but readily discernible) belief that the world was divided into two groups: the ghastly hoi polloi, and a small number of people she would deign to find interesting.
The Greys were Presbyterian - both in faith and temperament. They lived like frugal members of the squirearchy in that corner of Greenwich, Connecticut, which, back in the forties, was still deep country. Their house - a fourteen-room mock-Tudor manse - was situated on a seven-acre parcel of woodlands, bisected by a stream. It was bucolic. Shortly before George popped the question, he brought me up for a weekend.
‘I know they are going to love you,’ he said on the train north from Grand Central Station. ‘But I hope you won’t be put off by the way they do things. They are formal kind of people.’
‘Sounds just like my parents,’ I said.
As it turned out, the Greys made my late parents look like mad bohemians. Though they treated me with courtesy and a relative degree of interest, they were deeply absorbed in their own rigid domestic protocol. They dressed for dinner. Drinks were served by a liveried manservant in the living room. All meals took place in a formal dining room. Mrs Grey deferred to her husband in all conversational matters. He was the one who voiced the opinions, whereas Mrs Grey either made small talk, or posed questions to me. Hers was a polite, but skillful interrogation, during which she got me talking about my parents, my education, my professional resume, my overall world-view. I knew what she was really doing: probing my suitability for her son. I answered her questions in a pleasant, unadorned manner. I tried not to sound either too nervous or too ingratiating. My answers were always met by a tight smile - which meant that I couldn’t read her reaction to me. George stared down at his plate during these Q&A sessions. Daddy Grey also detached himself from the interrogation - though he was still listening intently to everything I said … something I noticed when I glanced away from Mrs Grey for a second and saw him assessing me with care, his fingers interlocked and propped under his chin like a judge on the bench. Only once did he interrupt his wife - to ask me if my father had been a member of the Hartford Club: the very starched, very WASP meeting place for Hartford’s captains of commerce.
‘He was its president for two years,’ I said quietly. I glanced quickly across the table at George. He was trying to suppress a grin. When I glanced back at Daddy Grey, he gave me the slightest of approving nods: as if to say,
if your father was president of the Hartford Club, you can’t be all that bad.
Taking a cue from her husband, Mrs Grey afforded me another of her tight smiles - slightly wider than usual, but constrained nonetheless. I smiled back, secretly thinking: formality is always a way of defending a narrow view of the world; a belief that you can categorize people simply by the schools and colleges they attended, their political allegiances, the clubs to which their parents belonged. My parents also operated according to this rigid principle - and I suddenly felt this wave of sympathy for George, as I realized he too was raised in an emotionally arid household.
Unlike me, however, he didn’t have an Eric to counterbalance his parents. Of course, I knew all about his older brother, Edwin. He was the family star. The valedictorian of his class at Exeter. Captain of the school’s lacrosse team. A brilliant student at Harvard, from which he graduated
summa cum laude
in 1940. And though he was accepted at Harvard Law, he decided to accept an Army commission as second lieutenant. So he deferred his admission to Harvard Law and went off to war - where he was killed during the invasion of Normandy.
‘I don’t think my parents have ever really recovered from his death,’ George told me on our second date. ‘He was the repository of all their hopes, their ambitions. They adored him.’
‘I’m sure they adore you too,’ I said.
He just shrugged sadly, then said, ‘I’ve never really been much of a jock or an academic whizkid.’
‘You got into Princeton.’
‘Yes - but only because my dad went there … as he still often reminds me. My grades at Exeter weren’t up to much. And at college, I didn’t make any of the Varsity teams, nor did I graduate with honors. I was a B minus student. I did all right - but for my parents, “all right” was a synonym for “failure”. They expected excellence. I didn’t deliver.’
‘There’s a lot more to life than good grades or making the lacrosse team. But my parents were the same way. Their social benchmarks were all to do with an extreme form of rectitude. Probity at all costs.’
George later told me that that was the moment he fell in love with me - because I was somebody who, thanks to my own background, so understood the milieu which shaped him … and also because I used words like
rectitude
and
probity.
‘You’re not just beautiful,’ he said later that night. ‘You also have one hell of a vocabulary.’
Now, seated across the table from his profoundly constrained parents, I felt this immense kinship with George. We were cut from the same austere, uncomfortable cloth. We were both - in our own quiet way - trying to break away from the limitations of WASP-dom. We understood each other. Like me, George had been hurt in love. Though he didn’t tell me much about it, he mentioned that there had been a two-year romance with a woman named Virginia: the daughter of some well-known Wall Street lawyer, thereby garnering her ‘high approval status’ in the eyes of his parents. When she broke off the engagement (because she had fallen for the son of a Pennsylvania senator), George’s parents took the news badly - considering it yet another failure on the part of their son when it came to achieving anything. He’d asked me about Jack - but I supplied him with scant details, except to say that it was a bit of ‘romantic silliness’ that amounted to nothing, especially as he disappeared back off to Europe before it could develop into anything substantial.