Bread Upon the Waters (32 page)

The tea was being served on the lawn behind the headmaster’s house, a sprawling white clapboard building with a pillared entrance. The guests were dressed informally and the whole affair reminded Strand of some of the assemblages Hazen had taken him to that summer in the Hamptons. Babcock’s wife, a thick, powerful-looking woman in a flowered print dress and a large, wide-brimmed straw hat, took him around to introduce him and he heard a great many names and saw more than fifty faces he would have to sort out later. A surprising number of the guests were either bachelors or spinsters. Leslie, he knew, would regard that as a mark against the institution. She thought of the unmarried state as unnatural for anyone over twenty-five. He regretted that she wasn’t there. She always remembered names and he always forgot them.

The people all seemed pleasant enough, although the marks of failure and resignation were on some of the faces, especially those of the older members of the teaching staff, and he guessed from the stiffness of some of his colleagues that they, too, were there for the first time and that the rate of turnover in the school was probably high. Babcock, the headmaster, invited him to dinner with his wife, but he declined, saying he’d pick up something in town, which was only a half mile from the campus. He thought he saw a look of relief on Babcock’s face. The man probably saw enough of his staff throughout the school year and was in no hurry to cope with the problem of a semi-invalid stranger who had been wished on him by a man to whom he owed favors.

The walk into town in the summery dusk, with the first touch of autumn spicing the air, was a pleasant one and the little cafe in which he ate a simple meal was clean and welcoming. A new life, he thought, as he drank his coffee in the nearly empty restaurant. Aged fifty and I’m starting all over again.

God be with you, Jimmy had said.

He ordered another cup of coffee and thought back on what would probably be his last week in New York for a long time. Hazen had called him from his office and told him that he had Romero in his office and that the boy was looking forward to going to Dunberry.

“I don’t think you’re going to have any trouble with him. We had a nice talk and he listened carefully as I told him how we expected him to behave once he got to the school. He’s in the outer office now. I told him to wait until I finished talking to you. I told him he’d be assigned to your house, so you can keep an eye on him.”

“Charming,” Strand murmured. He half wished that Romero would change his mind.

“He seems meek as a lamb,” Hazen said. “He’s obviously highly intelligent and motivated. I think he’s going to be a credit to us. Anyway, it’s certainly worth taking the chance. I told him I’d stake him to a set of new clothes and he was pleased. He needs every advantage we can give him and he certainly can’t appear at the school in the kind of clothes he’s wearing today. I’ve made up a list of the sort of things the other boys’d be wearing. I have an account at Brooks Brothers and I wonder if it would be too much bother for you to meet him tomorrow and outfit him.”

“Of course not,” Strand said. “Leslie wants me out of the house as much as possible these days.”

“Good. Ten o’clock, in front of Brooks Brothers. Okay with you?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll give him the list. My secretary’s typed it up and I’ll give it to Romero to show you. Of course, you can use your discretion, too. I’ve just put down the fundamentals. I think five hundred dollars should take care of everything, don’t you?”

“I have no idea.”

“If you have to go over that, don’t hesitate.”

“Just tell him that if he packs in that damn football jersey he wore every day to school, I won’t acknowledge that I’ve ever seen him before in my life.”

Hazen laughed. “I’ll tell him. Well, when I have the time, I’ll come down to the school to see how you’re both doing. I’m sure it will be a welcome change for you if not for Romero.”

As he hung up Strand was not so sure.

The next morning Romero was waiting for him at the Brooks Brothers entrance, which was a surprise in itself. At school Romero was almost invariably late for classes. To Strand’s relief, the boy was reasonably presentable. He had had his hair cut and wasn’t wearing the football jersey, but instead a battered jacket that was much too large for him.

“Here’s the list, sir,” he said as they entered the store. It was the first time, Strand noticed, that the boy had called him sir, and he took it as a good sign. “Mr. Hazen said your word would be law.” He didn’t sound hostile. Perhaps, Strand thought, Hazen had been right in his estimate of Romero’s new attitude.

In the store he had the air of a tense and watchful hunting animal as Strand ordered a large traveling bag and Romero was fitted for pants, jackets, sweaters and shirts, shoes and socks and an overcoat. He made no suggestions and accepted what Strand chose without a word. He had grown a little over the summer, but would never be a tall man. Strand hoped that the other boys in the house would not be football players or wrestlers.

Strand was shocked at what everything cost, but managed to keep the bill just under five hundred dollars. However, he doubted that five hundred dollars or even five thousand dollars worth of Brooks Brothers clothing would ever succeed in making Jesus Romero, with his dark, sardonic face and wild, resentful, wary eyes, look as though he belonged in a sleepy New England school which had prepared boys to go to Harvard and Yale and Williams and Dartmouth for over a hundred years.

While the clerks were making up the bill, Romero said, “I got a favor to ask you, sir. Do you think you could tell them to send everything up to your apartment, so I could pick them up on the day I leave for the school?”

“Why?” Strand asked, puzzled.

“If they’re sent to my house either my mother or my brother’ll steal them and sell them.” He said this without criticism, as though this was to be expected in all families.

“I suppose that can be arranged,” Strand said and wrote out his address and told Romero that he’d make sure his wife would be expecting the delivery.

“Thank you, sir.”

When they had finished in the store it was time for lunch. Strand thought it was as good an opportunity as any to see how Romero behaved at the table. Fearing the worst, he took him to a small, dark restaurant which seemed to be patronized by clerks and stenographers from the big office building in the neighborhood. In the dark, Strand thought, only he would be able to see just what Romero’s manners were like. But his fears turned out to be groundless. Romero ate like a hungry boy, but he didn’t wolf his food or mangle it or use the wrong knives and forks. From what he had said about his mother, Strand doubted that it was because of his mother that he ate decorously. Probably, Strand thought, it was the result of watching hours of television, where actors were always sitting down to meals and pretending that they had eaten at “21” all their lives. Score one for television, he thought.

He had to make most of the conversation. When he asked Romero what he had done during the summer Romero merely shrugged and said, “I hung around.”

“Do any reading?”

“Some. Most of it crap.”

“What books, exactly?”

“I’ve forgotten the names,” Romero said. Strand was sure he was lying. “The only thing that stuck with me was
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
By a guy called Gibbon. You ever hear of him?” He was glancing across the table at Strand with an expression that on an ordinary boy his age would have been mischievous.

“Yes, I’ve heard of him,” Strand said, not giving Romero the satisfaction of showing that he was annoyed at the taunt. “What did you like about it?”

“I didn’t say I liked it. It just agreed with some of my ideas.”

“Like what?”

Romero took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and what looked like an expensive lighter. He offered Strand a cigarette, but when Strand shook his head, he said, “Oh, I forgot. You don’t smoke. My ideas…well, that nothing is permanent. Those old Romans, they thought they had the world by the tail, they lorded it over everybody and went around telling people how wonderful they were and thought they were doing the poor dopes in other countries a big favor by making them Roman citizens and thought they were real tough bastards and would last forever. So the real tough bastards, the barbarians, the Goths, they didn’t take baths or use vomitoriums and they didn’t write poetry and waste their time throwing people to the lions and making big speeches and putting up triumphal arches to themselves and they didn’t wear purple togas and they came from the wrong side of the railroad tracks and all they knew how to do was wipe out Romans. They were my kind of cats and I rooted for them all the way. And Mr. Gibbon wasn’t just writing history. Two centuries before the shit hit the fan he was really writing about the English Empire, where the sun never set, whether he knew it or not, and the fat-ass bastard Americans and it made me realize that when the time comes I’m going to be one of the Goths. And a lot of people who live in my neighborhood and neighborhoods like mine are going to find out they’re tough-bastard Goths too, and do their own wiping out even if some of them like me get up and disguise themselves in purple togas from Brooks Brothers.”

It was the longest speech Strand had ever heard him make and he couldn’t say he was pleased with it, despite the logic and despite the fact that many older and more erudite men than Jesus Romero had written more or less the same thing about Gibbon, although in somewhat politer terms.

“My advice to you, Romero,” he said, “is to keep ideas like that to yourself when you have to write essays in your history classes.”

He grinned at Strand malevolently. “Don’t worry, Professor, I’ll wear my purple toga at all times. I wouldn’t like to see you kicked out of your job.”

Strand stood up and paid the bill and told him he’d see him at the school and that he knew there was a rule there that the only place boys could smoke was in the basement of the main hall. And they had to be seniors at that.

God be with you, Strand thought.

He went out into the balmy night.

Back in the Malson Residence he saw that the maid, whom he had not yet met, had been in and made the twin beds and drawn the curtains. He would have to make sure that Leslie sent their big double bed down with the rest of the things. Since the terrible night in Tours, they had slept together. He wasn’t going to start sleeping alone at his age.

Then he sat down at the desk in the living room under the glow of the student lamp and began writing in the student’s copy book that he had brought with him from the city.

I am starting a new life and I intend to keep a diary from now on. Perhaps if I put everything down in writing, or at least bits and pieces that may eventually form a pattern, I will better understand what is happening to me. Everything is changing and I am being overtaken by events. Time is pressing me and I feel my age. If history is a means of understanding the past, a small, everyday record of the present may help make some sense of the future.

It is a season of departures. First Eleanor, happily driving off to her new husband and a new profession, leaving the city in which she was born and reared with a brisk kiss and a wave of the hand. Then saying good-bye to Caroline; no happiness there. She is progressing well, the doctor says. Progressing toward what? Since she still is wearing bandages, there is still no telling what she will look like when they are all finally taken off. She is outwardly composed about the whole thing and I heard her humming cheerfully to herself as she went about packing, getting ready for her trip to Arizona. Leslie is going to accompany her and help settle her in, although Caroline is impatient with the idea.

Although I am not happy about having to go off to Dunberry by myself, I am convinced that Caroline should not make the trip alone and have told her so. Her ostentatious humming and her composure seemed false to me from the beginning. My fears were confirmed in the worst possible way when I passed her closed door one day when Leslie was out and heard sobbing from behind it. I opened the door and saw her crouched on the floor in the corner of the room beating her head against the wall and weeping. I bent down to her and held her in my arms and after a while she calmed down. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and essayed a smile. “It’s just only once in a while, Daddy,” she said. “Maybe it’s the rain.”

I am also almost equally worried about Leslie. Although on the surface she is matter-of-fact and in control of herself, there are little things that have changed in her. She has always been competent and sure of herself, but in the last days I spent in New York I caught her in moments when she was remote, irresolute, floating from room to room with a few books in her arms or carrying sheets of music as though she didn’t know what to do with them and putting them down in odd places, then hunting for them distractedly later on, only to put them down again a few minutes later in unlikely corners.

I haven’t spoken to Leslie or Caroline or anyone else about how Caroline had her nose broken. I imagine Caroline would like to forget about it and about lying to us. And I dread to think what Leslie would do if she knew the truth. I am still not so sure about myself, either. If I were to happen to see the boy who hit her and there were a murderous weapon handy I’m afraid I might use it.

Strand’s hand trembled and he stopped writing and stared at the last paragraph. His usual neat handwriting had suddenly degenerated into an almost unreadable scrawl. He put the pen down and pushed away from the desk. Time, he realized, had not immunized him against the almost intolerable rage that had first swept over him in the hospital corridor when Hazen had told him about Caroline’s confession to Dr. Laird.

Jimmy would say he was overreacting. Parents are made to overreact. He stood up and went to the French door that opened onto the garden. He went out and breathed deeply, trying to calm himself, taking in great gulps of the fragrant night air. He wished he had had the foresight to buy himself a bottle of whiskey.