Burning the Days (6 page)

There was a moment’s silence and the dealer said, “I’ll sponsor you.”

I had two prints, a yellow Chagall marked
hors commerce,
and a Picasso bought from Peter when his gallery, in a town house off Fifth, with pure white walls, was thriving. I longed for a Matisse but hadn’t the money.

——

In the summer of 1941 my father, who had been a lieutenant more than twenty years before, was called back into the army as a major. He was stationed in Atlanta in the Office of Engineers. I forget from which field we took off but I had my first airplane flight in a great silver ship with a tailwheel, going down to visit him. We toured munitions factories along the Tennessee River, near Huntsville, and the Coosa River, in Alabama. On a narrow wooden bridge in the country somewhere, a mule lay on its side—it had been pulling a wagon that was hit by an army truck and had a broken leg. It lay there patiently, as patiently as it had lived its life, a worn, gray animal waiting for the lean-faced man who had gone to fetch a gun.

My alluring image of war had been mainly formed by a book we had with a gray cloth cover on which the title was printed in dignified black letters and which had a dedication so stirring that I knew it by heart: Erich Maria Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front,
the archtestament, with its stark ordeal, of the First World War. I was unprepared to see real acts, even as part of an obscure overture.

There was a shot. The sound stood apart. I was sickened by it, as if by the impact of a plummeting body. The mule lay there, without existence, with no name. After a few minutes we were able to drive on.

My father, though he wore the insignia of a major, did not seem authentic. Perhaps it was because he was not in command of men, something he was probably ill suited for. In a matter of months he was transferred to Washington, and for three years my mother
lived there while he was eventually sent on, to India and England. For some of these years no one knew what the outcome of the war would be, and printed orders to go overseas and join this unit or that, carrying with them the weight of the unknown, were of greatest importance. Some might be death warrants, though usually not for staff officers.

He became a colonel and began to imagine he might go higher, but that turned out to be the good fortune, as he saw it, of lesser men. He had the admiration, even love of subordinates but it is those above who are important.

The war ruined him. When it was over he was never able to fit in again. Everything had changed, he said. The vice presidents of banks were no longer able to turn pieces of property over to you to work on, and there were no old widows who owned hotels and wanted the sale of them arranged. He went to work for large companies in New York and Chicago but things never were right. It was the grandiose that attracted him. He was operatic. He lived on praise and its stimulus and performed best, only performed, when the full rays were shining on him.

The bald-headed friend and builder, Secoles was his name, had urged my mother to get a divorce and marry him. My father was a nice guy, he confided, but he would never amount to anything. He, Secoles, would.

It was a prophecy my father never heard, but gradually—it was also bad luck, two or three big hands, so to speak, that he failed to win; promises that were broken—his belief in himself faltered. He was given to grand predictions. “Mr. Brady, I believe in destiny. I told you we’d build a town together down here and, by God, we will.” To make it ring true takes aplomb, and slowly that drained away. Money went with it. Contrary to the advice of Mr. Micawber, it seems to me that those in life who spend freely are better for it, and those who are tightfisted are worse. There is at least one exception: my father.

In the fall of 1957 the bank called his loan on some airline bonds. He had bought them at 120—they were at 62. He’d lost seventy thousand dollars in the market. He had nothing left. He’d have to give up the apartment, he said, he couldn’t pay the rent. He had a close friend, a successful lawyer with a Phi Beta Kappa key and confident tone. “Could you tell him what your situation is and ask for help?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He’d have nothing more to do with me.”

He was lucky, my father said, not to own a gun. If he had, he’d shoot himself.

Finally, ashamed to be seen, he would lie in bed for hours, unable to summon the energy to go to work. His expensive shoes, all polished, were lined up in the closet, his many suits. The contents of his pockets were on top of the bureau beside his exhausted checkbook, his gold wristwatch, money, a few cigars. His hair was white, his jawline slack. He was finished.

Herman Melville’s father, his import business having failed, became a bankrupt.
He gave up the struggle, became mentally ill and died.
Melville was thirteen years old. I was thirty-one when my father performed the same unforgettable act. He was like a spent horse. We tried to urge him on. He was just lying down for half an hour, he said. We sat in the living room, my mother and I, crushed by finality while he lay in bed in the city he had meant to triumph in, in the afternoon, traffic blaring in the street, the tall buildings shining their dead windows, gulls sitting on the water.

I remember that during those days he said two things in sad summation: “They’ll never forget me” and “I’m dead.” Both were true.

Soon he was in the hospital. As a final blow, two days before he died the buyer of an apartment complex the sale of which he had negotiated was killed flying in to New York to sign the contract.

This happened at La Guardia Airport. The icy waters—it was January—covered everything.

——

Decades, ages, later I wake at night with a strange feeling in my chest on the fateful side—can it be my heart? It is a feeling I have had before, a commonplace feeling, like a cramped muscle, which will probably go away as it always has, except this is four in the morning and my thoughts somehow turn to my father. We could not encourage him, we could not make him go on. It was cruel to keep trying. He wanted it to end. “In this world there are few enough people who ever care what becomes of you,” he said. My mother long after said that the marriage had been wrong, that she had known it early but had been without the courage to act. She remained loyal to the end.

I think of the hopeless visits to psychiatrists, the shock treatments and aimless drives in the country to somehow get away. I think of him walking along the street, preoccupied, the pale wake of cigar smoke following, the blind strolls while his mind sorted through impossibilities, over and over.

——

Ethel Reiner, in her forties, decided upon the theater. She had a brief, exciting apprenticeship under a veteran producer named Saint Subber and then set out to produce on her own. After a few voyages in shallow water, as it were, she boldly took command of a ship of the line in the form of a huge musical production of
Candide
with Leonard Bernstein as its composer and the book, as it is curiously called, by another formidable figure, Lillian Hellman, with whom it was inevitable she would clash.

Candide
was a triumph and a catastrophe, in that order. Its out-of-town tryouts, before it came to New York, were dazzling. To bring it to perfection there were final little changes, and something
unidentifiable went wrong. The spring had been wound one turn too many. There was the party at Sardi’s, a transistor radio pressed to someone’s ear to hear the eleven-thirty flash report. It was disastrous, and the millions that had been invested were lost.

In her apartment that night the distraught producer had hysterics and some months later—the humiliation was too great—she retreated to England, temporarily, until the time was right to return.

She had lost confidence and whatever reputation she had built up, but not her style. At the crowded reception following her son’s second marriage she was regal in black and as eye-catching as the seductive Dutch girl, an airline stewardess, who was the bride. “My dear,” Ethel said to her, not unkindly, “I’ll probably see very little of you during this life, but tell me”—she was holding a small velvet box that contained a pair of diamond earrings, each one a single brilliant stone the size of a tooth—“are your ears pierced?” The earrings were her gift. To her credit, the untested daughter-in-law the following day wrote a note of appreciation which read, in its entirety,
Dear Ethel, Thank you for the earrings. Barbara.

As it happened, I saw more of her afterwards in Europe. She had found a man, English, divorced, who shared her tastes. He had no money but was knowledgeable and even-tempered. He helped her to begin again, or at least pick up the pieces.

He looked sturdy in his trunks at Eze-sur-Mer, well-knit. He had three bullet wounds from the war but they had almost disappeared. I remember the day because of its great calmness, the horizon as if rubbed away. He walked some distance into the sea, then swam, far out. She put on a white bathing cap, her fingers sliding under it to let her stretch it down, and swam after him. For a long time, the only figures in sight, they played together in the soft, rolling water. We watched until slowly, emerging from it like a photograph, they came out.

They were living on her money, as she frequently reminded him,
but it was worth it. Eventually they married. She became Mrs. Bezencenet. He was ten years her junior.

They traveled—these were the Aegean years, the purifying light. I saw them in London and Paris. The idea of doing something, a play or film, remained in her mind.

In Spain—it was the late 1960s—her legs began to swell. Then her ankles; they filled with fluid. Finally she went to the hospital. At length, with treatment, the fluid drained away but in its wake came something more terrible. It was scleroderma, a hardening of the skin and the tissue beneath. One gradually became petrified. They went back to England, where, as it happened, the world specialists were, but the doctors could do little and promised nothing.

I went to see her. She had bought a village house in Denham, about forty minutes from London. I took the train from Marylebone Station on a Sunday morning, the compartments sunstruck and empty. It was mid-October. I went down the long path, past meadows, from the station to the village and then down the quiet street to the house.

She came into the room, stately and shuffling. There were tears in her eyes. We sat in the library, which looked out upon a broad garden, and drank champagne, but after one taste she declared, “This isn’t good.”

“Darling, it’s what we always drink,” her husband said. He withdrew the bottle from the silver bucket to show her the label, Peiper-Heidseck.

“Come and feel my leg,” she said to me.

I put my hand on it and my heart grew weak. It was like a mummy’s leg, the lid of a wooden chest. Within this she was encased for life. Her coffin, more macabre than most, had already been made. It was in the shape of a body: her own. She could not get out of a chair by herself. It was that far advanced.

Over the months I came back. We had dinner in the bedroom. A friend, a pianist who was visiting, cooked it. We ate on a pink cloth
with fresh, stiff napkins, gleaming glasses, wine. She lay, propped by pillows, in bed. It was as if we were in St.-Moritz and she had, perhaps, twisted her knee. As an hour passed she seemed, in a frightening way, to change. Her face altered, it melted away to a mask of exhaustion and death. The midnight bells were tolling.

She would dine no more at fine restaurants, sometimes asking to borrow the waiter’s glasses to read the menu, or gamble drunk at the White Elephant, or be driven back from London late in her Rolls.

It was at about this time that her nephew, Peter, died of a heart attack in a hotel in Munich, where he was on a buying trip. It was completely unexpected, though perhaps not by him. He’d felt pains in his left arm for months.

She took the news stoically. After a bit she remarked that her first recollection in life had been of her own mother in her coffin. Ethel had been four.

A year later, in Barbados for the last time, she died.

We had sat, as boys, by the windows, the light streaming in, she and her husband spiritedly playing board games with us. Later she had tried to guide me, to be a true friend, perhaps more. Her New York terrace apartment was available to me anytime she happened to be out of town, and once, a single long telegram somehow found me when I was lying in a state of serious illness in a hospital in France. It was from her.

I did not recall these things, they were merely part of me. I did not drift back to them, they were the vessel itself.

I went back to Denham in the fall. There was the ancient brick wall beside the footpath, leaning, staved by trees. In the distance the fields were speckled with gulls. The leaves lying at the bottom of puddles on the walk were still green.

I passed the Swan, where we often ate, the house called Wrango, uneven-roofed others. At last I came to Hills House, hers. Through the blinds, in the morning sunlight, I could see an empty table.

The house had been sold. She was next door, in the churchyard, intruder among old families, the Barretts, Tillards, and Wylds with their gravestones head and foot, fading in the earth. Newer than these, destined to be less visited, was a marble plaque in the wall beside the cottage garage. There was her name,
Devoted Mother, Loving and Beloved Wife.
At the bottom,
1904–1971.
She had been born the same year as my mother.

——

There is the immortal city—Grant’s Tomb domed and distant in the early days, the great apartment buildings with their polished lobbies, the doormen and green awnings reaching out to the curb. The Metropolitan Museum flanked by worn grassy spaces where we could play beside it, and the wide second-story ledge onto which one could go far out and sit, feet dangling, to watch parades. The mansions and town houses the significance of which, as boys, we did not know.

We were shown the broad past, the Egyptian Wing with its reconstructed tombs and murals of stiff walking figures with almond eyes, and, across the park at the Museum of Natural History, the bones of whales and dinosaurs. I was only rarely taken to the theater and never to concerts.