A Season in Purgatory (39 page)

When the ambulance arrived, the family watched as the attendants expertly placed Gerald on the stretcher.

“Try to get him the room next to Constant’s,” said Grace. “Bridey, call Cardinal.”

“Wait for me,” whispered Kitt to Harrison. “Don’t leave until I get back.” She went in the ambulance to the hospital with her father.

When she returned to the house two hours later, she raced in the front door and asked Bridey where Harrison was.

“He’s in the loggia, Miss Kitt,” she said.

“Oh, thank God, Harrison. I was afraid you would have gone,” Kitt said when she saw him. “It took forever at the hospital.”

“Things are bad, apparently?” asked Harrison.

“Yes. Terrible. There’s doctors coming from everywhere. I should go back, but I wanted to see you.”

“I’m going to go now, Kitt,” said Harrison, putting down the newspaper he had been reading. “I just waited to say good-bye.”

“You were kind to carry Pa,” she said. “After what happened. You must tell me this: did I hear correctly about Fuselli?”

“That he drowned?”

“No, that he pulled you under.”

“Let Jerry tell you.”

“Oh, Harrison, I’m sorry.”

“I am too, Kitt. It’s over. You know that. It has to be,” said Harrison.

“I know. I knew. I knew from the day you got back from lunch with Pa at the Four Seasons that it was a matter of time. There was a look in your face I hadn’t seen before. It was a mistake. I should never have told them I’d found you in Maine. I should have kept you all for myself. Your afternoon
mistress. I would have settled for that, you know. I could have gone on for years and years, Harrison.”

“Oh, Kitt. You’re worth much more than that.”

“Will you go back to Claire?” she asked.

“I think maybe I’m one of those people who was born to be a solo act,” said Harrison.

“I don’t believe that for a minute. You were a continued surprise to me,” she said. She opened her bag and took out a handkerchief and touched the corner of her eye. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to cry. I promise you that.”

“I know.”

“Let me ask you something, Harrison. Think back, years ago. Breakfast in Scarborough Hill. What we didn’t know then, sitting around that table, was that Winifred Utley was dead. At least some of us didn’t know. But you were so silent that morning. You knew something, didn’t you? I could tell. You didn’t say a word all through breakfast.”

“I never had much to say in those days, if you remember.”

“You laughed at my jokes, as if I were the funniest person alive. I was always so touched by that. But you knew something that morning, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You have to understand something about us, Harrison. About being a Bradley, I mean. I’d lie under oath on the stand if I had to.”

“You don’t really mean that, Kitt.”

“Yes, I’m ashamed to say it, but yes. I hope I won’t ever be asked to, but in our family you do what you’re told.”

Outside, a horn honked.

“That’s Charlie,” said Harrison. “He said he’d drive me.”

“Listen, Harrison. It was great,” she said.

“It was great,” he repeated. He took her hand.

“I know I wasn’t supposed to fall in love. That was part of the arrangement. But I did.”

“Maybe it’s better to have a lot for a short time.”

“You mean, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That old crap? I suppose I can come around to believe that in time, but not now. I ache. I’m going to ache worse. Until this minute, I never believed there was such a thing as a broken heart.”

“What will you do, Kitt? What will happen?”

“Oh, I’ll be very predictable. Nothing out of the ordinary. Probably I’ll drink too much. People will say, ‘That’s Gerald Bradley’s youngest daughter they’re carrying out of the party.’ ”

“I can’t bear to think of you like that.”

“Oh, darling, you wouldn’t be to blame. It’s what you might have saved me from. It’s not what you led me to.”

Alone in her room, Grace sat upright on a peach damask bergère chair, rosary beads in hand, in preparation for receiving the impending news of her husband’s death. Thoughts of black veils bordered in black grosgrain ribbon filled her mind. There was an ample selection of black dresses in readiness in her closets; each year in Paris she ordered one or more, “just in case,” which, abetted by pearls and brooches, did double duty for cocktail parties and theater evenings. Thoughts that had never entered her mind, thoughts of a new life, free from her errant and faithless husband, filled Grace’s head. Widowhood will become me, she allowed herself to think. She had seen so many wives who, like herself, had lived in their husband’s shadow and then emerged in widowhood to full self-realization. She knew that was the way it would be with her. She saw herself as a great benefactress, much beloved, surrounded by her famous and
successful children, dispensing her great wealth to the needy and hopeless, and becoming, in time, a papal countess, honored by the Holy Father in Rome for her philanthropic works. It was her most ardent secret wish to be known as Countess Bradley.

Then, horrified, she grasped her silver rosary beads to her breast and prayed that she not be tantalized by such thoughts, as if they were temptations from the devil. She asked for strength to be able to handle the tribulations that lay ahead for her and her family. She had long since ceased loving her husband, a revelation that she had only alluded to once in her life. That one time was to Cardinal, in one of their long afternoon chats over tea in Scarborough Hill, after she realized that Sally Steers was her husband’s mistress and had slept in her bed while she was away in Paris for her fittings, a disclosure she had managed to extract from the ever-faithful but reluctant Bridey. That bed, its mattresses, pillows, blankets, blanket cover, sham, sheets, and pillowcases, had been removed from her room and burned. She could look away from Gerald’s ruthlessness in business, but she could not forgive in her heart that he had strayed from his marital vows.

Alas, she was to be denied her widowhood. Gerald did not die that day. He simply became paralyzed and lost the power to speak.

From afar, the Malloys, Fatty and Sis, kept up on the doings of their affluent cousins. “One day they’ll be back,” Sis Malloy always said. Once a week, usually on Thursday nights, they dined together in the maids’ dining room of the Bradley house in Scarborough Hill, which had not been lived in by the Bradley family for years, although it was visited from time to time by one or another of the members of the family when they had business in the city. Their visits were short, hardly longer than a day and night in residence, and then they were off again to the house in California, or the apartment in New York, or the house in Southampton. Sis, at the insistence of her aunt Grace Bradley, the sister of her late father, Vinny Malloy, had become its chatelaine. Although it was Grace who first used the word
chatelaine
, in an expansive moment to describe Sis’s position, she actually meant housekeeper, and Sis understood. She never overstepped the bounds of her position. She slept in the room that had always been referred to as Agnes’s room, not in one of the frillier rooms that had belonged to Maureen, or Mary Pat, or Kitt. She entered the living and dining rooms only to see that everything was in place after the weekly dusting and vacuuming by the single maid who
now ran the house. Sis fervently believed, and Fatty agreed, that one day the great house in Scarborough Hill would be alive with activity again.

Sis had grown up plain. It was a given that she would never marry. Most nights she sat in the library, read the Scarborough Hill paper, and watched television. Occasionally she entertained girlfriends from her Bog Meadow childhood or from her parochial high school days and treated them to tours of the grand house where she now lived, although her role was that of guide, even in front of her friends, never of proprietor. “That is the chair where His Holiness the Pope sat when he came to visit the family. He blessed them all and gave Constant his white biretta off his head. That’s it, there, under the Lucite covering. Constant was the dearest little boy you ever saw. Like an angel.” Her friends, who had become teachers or nurses or secretaries in the great insurance companies of the city, always exclaimed in wonderment over the Pope’s visit, no matter how many times they heard the story. They complimented Sis on her clothes. And she was always quick to answer that the smart suit or dress she was wearing had been Kitt’s or Maureen’s, sent to her by Aunt Grace, as she shyly showed her friends the Paris labels.

The single evening dress in her closet, which she wore every year to the Sodality of Mary dance at the St. Martin of Tours parish hall, was her bridesmaid’s dress from Maureen’s wedding sixteen years before. Once rose colored, it had long since been dyed black for practicality. Being a bridesmaid for Maureen had been one of the great experiences of her life, and her girlfriends often got her to recall the events of that memorable day. “There she was, Cora Mandell, the fanciest decorator in New York City, already an old lady, pinning up this French fabric to the inside of the tent, and,
boom
, she fell off the top of the ladder, twenty feet down, and she broke both her legs.”

“No, Sis!” exclaimed her friends in horror, clapping their palms together.

“As God is my witness,” said Sis, raising her right hand. “Thank heaven for my cousin Des. He was chief of staff at St. Monica’s then. He set both legs for the old woman, and the wedding went right on, and no one knew anything about it. They have a way in the family of keeping things silent and going about their business as if nothing is wrong.”

Sis had no inkling of any of the family scenes that had preceded her role of bridesmaid.

“Oh, Ma, please don’t make me have Sis Malloy as a bridesmaid,” Maureen had pleaded. “None of my friends know her, and she won’t fit in.”

But Grace was firm. “She’s your first cousin. She’s your same age. And she’s going to be a bridesmaid whether you like it or not. Whatever would I say to your uncle Vinny if you didn’t have her?”

“Please, Ma,” begged Maureen. “Please, please, please. She’ll talk about Bog Meadow and priests and nuns and the butcher shop, and I won’t know where to look.”

“If you’d only had three or four bridesmaids, it would have been fine not to have her, but you’re the one who insisted on ten, Maureen. Besides, she sent you a lovely silver tray.”

“Silver-plated,” snapped Maureen.

“Even so, it was very nice of her,” replied Grace.

Sis, who got hives when she was nervous, was covered with red blotches on her face, neck, and arms, and her bouquet of white orchids shook perceptibly in her hands as she walked down the aisle, paired with Claire Rafferty, but no one noticed her discomfort; she was not one of the ones stared at that day.

Fatty, like his sister, had never married. He continued to live in the old Malloy house on Front Street in Bog Meadow.
His early dreams of being a policeman had been thwarted by his uncle, Gerald Bradley, who did not want a relation of his in a blue uniform when his sons rose to the heights that he expected them to attain. Gerald offered to pay Fatty’s tuition to Holy Cross, or Villanova, or Loyola, or St. John’s, but Fatty, who had never been much of a student, wanted to get down to work and on with life. For a while he sold shoes at Kofsky’s Shoe Store in Bog Meadow. Then he spent several years as a salesman at Ted and Joe’s Hardware, also in Bog Meadow. Then he became assistant manager of Riley’s Market near the Malloy family home, where during peak hours he often doubled up his duties packing grocery bags at the checkout counter, a task at which he was considered an expert. “Fatty’ll show you how to pack a plastic bag right,” the manager often said to new employees, and Fatty always beamed with pleasure at the compliment. He enjoyed it when the other employees pointed him out to customers as a nephew of Gerald Bradley, or a cousin of Senator Sandro Bradley, or Dr. Desmond Bradley, or Congressman Constant Bradley, or even the Countess de Trafford of Paris, whichever one of them happened to be in the news at the time. On Saturday nights, after his friend Corky got off work at The Country Club in Scarborough Hill, where he had risen from bartender in the men’s locker room to the post of maître d’ in the dining room and assistant banquet manager, the two often got together to knock back a few beers and talk over old times. Fatty and Corky had been friends since they were classmates at Our Lady of Sorrows High. There was just one subject that Fatty and Corky never discussed. Corky had his suspicions about what had happened that night years ago in Scarborough Hill, and he had told Captain Riordan what he thought at the time. He also told Fatty, and Fatty told Sis. “If you know what’s good for you, stay out of that one,” Sis had said to her brother at the
time. His Saturday nights with Corky and his Thursday nights with his sister were the nights of the week that Fatty most looked forward to.

“Poor Kitt,” said Sis, giving her brother her weekly news report. Sis kept in close touch with Bridey, at whichever of the residences the family happened to be in, through weekly Sunday afternoon telephone calls. “She has fallen in love with that writer who used to be so quiet when he stayed here in the old days. They called him Harry then, but now it’s Harrison.”

“Kitt’s in love with him?” asked Fatty, between mouthfuls of roast beef and mashed potatoes. “What about what’shisname she married? Who skied all the time?”

“Cheever Chadwick,” replied Sis. “They’ve separated, or at least they’re living apart. You know Bridey. She goes only just so far with a story, and then she stops. With her, the sun rises and sets with Aunt Grace.”

“Is Kitt getting a divorce? I can’t believe it. A divorce in the Bradley family.” Fatty whistled in wonderment.

“Certainly not until after the election,” said Sis. “They couldn’t afford that kind of publicity. I said at the time, and I still say, she should never have married a non-Catholic, and I know for a fact that Aunt Grace concurs with my feelings on the subject.”

“I remember that guy Harrison. He wrote the speech for Constant that Christmas in Bog Meadow, when we handed out the turkeys and the oranges to the poor people. Remember?”