Cold Spring Harbor (6 page)

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Gloria said decisively. “When Evan comes over tonight I think the three of us had better sit down, right here, and discuss it.”

So that was what they did. The young couple sat listening together on the old sofa, holding hands, while Gloria spoke plainly. She pointed out that long engagements had always been considered unwise, for obvious reasons, and she urged them to be married not later than November. Otherwise, she said, it would be only sensible for them to “release one another from any promises.”

When she’d delivered that speech she felt acquitted of her responsibility. She had taken the right line and chosen the right words. Meeting unexpected challenges as they arose, absorbing the jolt of each surprise and then making quick, firm decisions—this was the kind of activity she had come to think of, over the years, as living by her wits.

The young people sat conferring together in murmurs; then Rachel turned back to her mother and said they’d think it over, while Evan appeared to be preoccupied with a loose thread on his coatsleeve.

“Mrs. Drake?” said a deep masculine voice on the phone, a very few days later. “This is Charles Shepard.” He happened to be in town this afternoon, he said, and he wondered if she might be able to meet him somewhere for a drink.

At the mirror she tried on three different dresses, none of them quite clean, and two ways of fixing her hair before deciding she was ready. She felt as thrilled as a girl, because it had been years since she’d gone out into the city alone to meet a man, and so she had to caution herself not to be ridiculous. She knew perfectly well Charles Shepard had called her only because he’d heard about her ultimatum; now he would want to present an opposing view. Well, she would hear him out, and then she would try to win him over. This would be still another occasion for needing to have her wits about her.

The place he’d specified was the high, wide, quietly throbbing lounge of the Pennsylvania Hotel, and it was in keeping with the style of this uncommonly congenial man to have chosen such a tasteful setting. He didn’t seem to see her until she was within a few feet of his table; then he blinked, looked apologetic, rose to his full height like a military man and made a charming little bow. When they were settled she asked the waiter for a bourbon with a very small amount of water, and the roof of her mouth began to pucker pleasurably at the thought of it. This was going to be nice.

“… So I thought we ought to discuss it thoroughly,” he was saying, “because there may be aspects of it that do require a little—” But before he could finish that sentence one of his forearms tipped over a glass of ice water that flooded the table.

“Oh!” she cried.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Here, let me try and—are you all right?”

“No, I’m fine. It startled me, is all.”

The waiter was back, expertly blotting and wiping, murmuring assurances that no harm had been done, and when he was gone again Charles said, “It’s my eyes, you see. I have very poor vision. Sometimes I go blundering into things like a blind man.”

It was possible, then, that he couldn’t see the crepey sections of her face and neck, couldn’t see the grease stain left by a fallen slice of sausage on the bodice of this best of three dresses, couldn’t guess her age, wouldn’t have to wonder what to do about the open loneliness and longing in the way she would always look at him.

He was talking now in a voice as proud and steady as it must have been in the days when he’d commanded soldiers, explaining how important it was that Evan be “entirely free” to enroll as a full-time college student; and he
said he was certain Rachel understood that too. Rachel had even told him as much, during one of the times Evan had brought her out to the house, and he hadn’t been at all surprised to hear it: Rachel was far too intelligent a girl not to understand such a thing.

“Well, of course,” Gloria said, meaning to agree only with the part about Rachel’s intelligence, and now she could feel the whiskey beginning to do its subtle, wonderful work in her blood and brains. “And I can understand it, too, Mr. Shepard, but I’m afraid I—”

“Oh, no, please,” he interrupted. “Call me Charles.”

“Well, that’s nice, Charles, and I’m Gloria. Still, I’m afraid I really can’t see Rachel going to work as a typist or a waitress or something for what might turn out to be years, with no security beyond a vague plan of marriage at some future time. The point is there mustn’t be any chance of her being hurt.”

“How would there be any chance of that?”

She had to think it over for a minute, watching her empty glass being taken away and replaced with the gleaming fullness of another drink. Young Evan might occasionally strike her as a boy who could treat a girl lightly, or badly, but he was, after all, the son of this good and thoughtful man who wanted nothing but the best for both children. Even if his going to college did entail some element of risk for Rachel, well, life itself was a risk. Maybe you had to have a man’s mind to think as straight and as clearly as that.

“Oh, well, I don’t know, Charles,” she said at last. “I suppose it’s just that I still think of Rachel as a child.”

“Well, that’s—curious,” he said, “because I think I’d describe her as a mature and responsible young woman.”

And she could tell from his face and the texture of his voice that he knew he’d won the argument.

For another hour and more, using each other’s first names a little more often than necessary, they talked and
drank as if their interest in each other were spontaneous—as if they were friends—until suddenly it was past seven o’clock. Charles had meant to be home by this time, but now it seemed only courteous to ask Gloria Drake if she would join him here for dinner. First, though, he said he would have to make a phone call.

Waiting at a phone booth with a dollar bill in his hand while an obliging bellhop placed the call for him (“There you go, sir; oh, thank you, sir”) Charles knew it was foolish to be spending so much time and money in this place; still, it couldn’t be helped.

“… Well, I’ve told you how the woman talks, dear,” he explained to Grace. “There isn’t any way to stop her. But I did accomplish the main thing: I got her to agree with us. There won’t be any more pressure on Evan now, and that’s a mercy, don’t you think?… Right … Well, of course, dear, and I’m sorry … Well, certainly. There’s a can of tuna fish on the bottom shelf of the right-hand cabinet over the sink; then if you’d like to warm up some of the cream of mushroom soup we had last night you’ll find that in the refrigerator, in the small pan, and you’ll find some crackers in the left-hand cabinet, up over the stove …”

As Gloria watched him coming slowly back toward the table she thought she had never seen a man more—well, more presentable. Cold Spring Harbor was well known as a region of “old money”—large or modest family fortunes husbanded through the generations—and the people there couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate representative than Charles Shepard. You could tell his vision was poor from the careful way he walked, but that seemed only to enhance his dignity. He certainly didn’t look as though he might go blundering into things like a blind man; he looked like the kind of man who might still, somehow, turn out to be the hero in the story of her life.

“Oh, I wish you’d tell me more about Cold Spring Harbor,
Charles,” she said when he was seated across from her again. “Because do you know what I’d like to do someday? I’d really like to go out there and stay as long as I can, and discover it all for myself.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, it’s a very quiet area; really rather dull, in many ways …”

When Gloria got back to the apartment that night all her senses thrummed and sang with the pleasure of the evening. But she’d scarcely had time to fix herself a drink for bed when Rachel and Evan came in, hours earlier than usual, and the first thing she saw in their two sober faces was that Rachel looked triumphant. They had something to tell her.

“We’ve decided you’re right,” Rachel announced, holding fast to Evan’s hand as they sat facing her again. “We’re not going to wait any longer. We want to get married right away.”

“Well, this is really—this is really very strange,” Gloria said, “because I had dinner with Evan’s father tonight, you see, at the Pennsylvania, and we came to agree on the other plan. The less definite plan.”

“Oh,” Rachel said. “Well, but then it isn’t you and Evan’s father who want to get married, is it. It’s me and—it’s Evan and me, isn’t it.”

Gloria didn’t know what to think. She supposed it was good to see this kind of spirit in a child who had always seemed entirely too soft for the world; still, there was something unsatisfactory here that wouldn’t quite come into focus.

And it was troubling too that Evan hadn’t yet said a word. He had nodded and rumbled as though in agreement while Rachel presented their case; he had allowed his hand to be squeezed by one and then both of hers; but why didn’t he
speak up? Wasn’t it supposed to be the man who did the talking on occasions like this?

“Well, Evan,” she said, “I’m afraid your father’s not going to think this is a good idea at all.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t worry about it, Mrs. Drake,” he assured her in a sleepy voice. “He’ll come around.”

This young man might have seemed disturbingly devilish for months, but tonight, in contrast to Rachel’s bright, proud face, he looked bland. He looked like a boy worn to fatigue and ready to give in, ready to submit to the stubborn terms of a girl holding out for marriage. Well, okay, what the hell, his weary eyes seemed to say; why not?

And only after making those assumptions about Evan was Gloria able to identify the unsatisfactory thing she had sensed in all this. Wouldn’t it be a pity, really, for a girl to get married just for the sex of it?

“No, but really, Charles,” she said on the phone a day or two later, “isn’t it funny how we’re letting them go ahead with the very thing you and I decided would be so—so ill-advised?”

“Well, it’s hardly a question of ‘letting’ them, is it,” Charles said, sounding tired. “They’re both old enough to do as they please, aren’t they.”

And she told him she knew that was true; still, for a long time after hanging up the phone, she could only sit on the sofa and try, unsuccessfully, to think.

She wished Phil were home, so the two of them could find a way to talk this whole thing over. Phil might still be only a boy, but there were times when the clarity in what he had to say could cut through a lot of confusion. And she wished he were home anyway, even if they weren’t able to talk—even if all he wanted to do was fool around with the cat or examine his face in the mirror, even if he lapsed into the
kind of willfully exasperating childishness that suggested he would always be younger than his age.

She missed him. His letters from the Irving School were long and sometimes funny enough to be read aloud, but they never concealed his unhappiness there. He probably wasn’t sturdy enough for prep-school life. He was too sensitive; he had too much imagination for his own good; and in those ways he was like his mother.

Rachel was different. For all the softness and the crying over ice-cream cones, Rachel was the most stable member of the family: she took after her father.

Softness and stability—it might seem an odd combination, but Gloria knew how substantial a combination it could be. She understood too that a girl getting married just for the sex of it must be a common-enough mistake–girls had probably gotten married for that reason since the beginning of the world—but it was one mistake she’d never made.

She had been thirty years old, a veteran of several affairs and extremely anxious about her future, before agreeing to marry Curtis Drake. And she’d known all along that anxiety wasn’t a very good reason for marriage; still, it had now begun to seem a better reason than this ignorant, virginal susceptibility of her daughter’s.

Or was it possible that nobody’s reasons could be all that clearly defined? Maybe men and women came together in ways as random and mindless as the mating of birds or pigs or insects, so that any talk of “reasons” would always be vain, always be self-deceiving and beside the point. Well, that would be one way of looking at it. Another way, even if it did require more piercing and poignant kinds of memory than she could bear to summon most of the time, would be to acknowledge that Curtis Drake had once won her heart.

“Oh, you say the nicest things,” she could remember telling him, many times, and she had always meant it,
though it wasn’t easy now to sift out even the nicest of the things he’d said.

She had liked the trim shape of his head and the way he held it, and the set of his shoulders. She’d liked the depth and resonance of his speaking voice, too, in times of tenderness, even though she’d always known it could take on a harsh rasp in their quarrels, and that it could rise and thin out into an almost feminine whine on a line like “Gloria, can’t you ever be reasonable?”

In the years since her divorce she had often remarked to other people that she couldn’t imagine what had ever possessed her to marry Curtis Drake, but when she was alone she knew better: she could imagine what had possessed her. Certain old songs on the radio late at night, and especially one, could still make her cry for him:

But she would have to put all that out of her mind now, for better or worse, because there were wedding preparations to attend to.

She had always fancied the Episcopal Church—everybody knew it was the only aristocratic faith in America—and so she was badly disappointed when a chilly rector told her on the phone that there couldn’t be an Episcopalian wedding because of Evan’s previous marriage. During the next few days, using the phone book as a source of reference, she drew up a short list of Presbyterian and Methodist churches that seemed worth looking into, but she couldn’t take much interest in what she was doing. She’d grown fretful and bored with the whole problem when it was happily solved in an unexpected phone call from Charles Shepard.