Let Me Finish (22 page)

In London, I know, we caught Laurence Olivier as Chorus and Vivien Leigh as an anguished Antigone at the New Theatre, but not a word or gesture of it comes back now. Instead, I see us sitting down to dinner at the Café Brevaux, in Paris, with
The New Yorker
's Janet Flanner, where another guest of hers, Tennessee Williams, seizes Evelyn's hand and presses it to his forehead. "What do you think?" he asks, and Evelyn, shaking her head sadly, supplies the right answer. "I think you're really getting sick," she says. Looking for a second opinion, he produces a thermometer from an inner pocket, shakes it down, and furtively takes his temperature behind a menu. "Go home, Tenn," says Flanner, in her field marshal's contralto, but he stays on and does away with a white-asparagus salad, his veal Marengo and
fonds d'artichauts à la crème,
and, a brave though gravely ill playwright, remains as well for a
mousse au chocolat
and the cheese platter and coffee and a tiny Armagnac and then, why not, one more.

Southward in our Citroën, we came out of the mountains at Alès and on from there to Les Baux (no one else turns up for lunch at the fabled Baumanière) and Arles and Nîmes (there's a bloodless Provençal bullfight in the blazing-hot Roman amphitheatre) and Tarascon, and, with the sea now shining off to our right, Saint-Tropez and Antibes. Arrived at our destination, we're at breakfast on the terrace of the modest Hotel Metropole, in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, when we are startled by the unmistakable sounds of a Boeing 377 starting its four propellers—
WHEE-EEE-eee-ouzzzze
—and warming for takeoff—
RhhhOUUMMMM!
—from a room
on the second floor. It is the S. J. Perelman family—Sid and Laura and twelve-year-old Abby and ten-year-old Adam—or, more accurately, the pair of caged mynah birds they have brought along from Singapore to this wildly accidental meeting, here by the lapping Mediterranean. The Perelmans had been in the Far East for three months and, with many stops along the way (giving the mynahs a chance to tune up their act), were by degrees heading home.

Perelman, already a Mt. Rushmore eminence on the landscape of American humor, was more a friend of my mother and stepfather's than mine, but, anxious for company as tourists are, we two families palled up, ate and drank and swam and talked together and, jamming all six of us into the Citroën, drove up the corniches and then back down from Menton, mousing around (as Sid put it) among the white villages, with their withered trees, dusty pétanque courts, and alley-like streets, half empty in this off-season. Mornings, Abby serenaded our breakfasts from above, practicing on her well-travelled cello. Sid, natty and with his gagman's jaw always fractionally agape, followed every conversation with terrifying attention. He and the tall, dark-eyed Laura liked it here and arranged to rent a villa in Èze for an extra week or two. When we looked the place over one morning, the kids went rocketing off down a steep path to the shore, while Perelman conferred with the owner and a rental agent. There was a discussion of some sort between the two locals, and Sid, his eyeglasses glittering, offered free translation: "
Hélas,
these hectares themselves find encumbered."

That afternoon, we went to Monte Carlo in two cars, and, while Laura took Abby and Adam off somewhere, ventured into the Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Étrangers de Monaco for a spot of gaming. The long rooms were not stuffed with slot machines and customers in shorts, as they are said to be now, but did not exactly come up to expectation. A bare two tables were in business in the curtained, fusty Public Gaming Rooms, with others shrouded in tattered baize. The handful of players, bending over their skimpy stacks of thirty-franc chips, appeared to include some local widows, making a late-afternoon stop-off before the evening rates and lighting came on. But the quiet commands from the formally garbed croupiers were straight out of E. Phillips Oppenheim, and the suave Sid now faltered a moment before a vacant seat. "Do you know how to do this?" he whispered. "Sure," I said and slipped in. I lost two early bets on Rouge and another on Passe, got eleven chips back for my one on a Transversale Pleine, and, encouraged, plunked down four on No. 26—the traditional spot for an opening thirty-seven-to-one long shot. Around went the little ball, to the croupier's "
Mesdames, messieurs, faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits—rien ne va plus!,
" then slowed and bounced—rickety-tackety tipitty-tup—and nestled sweetly into my slot. There was a gasp—it came from me—and piles of oblong chips, triangular chips, and variously tinted round chips slid smoothly to my part of the green. "Jesus, what did you do!" Perelman cried, but I was no longer of his party. Seizing a casual stack of counters from the top of the pile, I tossed it
toward the man at the middle of the table—I really did this—who raked it into a slot next to the wheel. "
Merci, monsieur,
" came the murmured response (with little bows) from the band of croupiers. "
La maison vous remercie.
" I smiled, extracted a Sobranie from my silver case, and accepted a light from the slender, white-gloved countess at my shoulder.

I had won perhaps fifty dollars and, staying on, added a lucky ten or fifteen more before we arose. Perelman, betting his kids' birthdays, then his hotel-room number subtracted by the number of letters in his name, worked like a trooper and wound up seven or eight bucks to the good. "Never again, Étienne," he said as we walked out into the late sunlight. "You must swear to stop me." Not till the next day did I give him a break and confess that my expertise and gambling manners had all come out of the Encyclopædia Britannica, consulted back home before my departure, which had a terrific "Roulette" entry in the "RAY–SAR" volume. I took notes.

Our last stop—Evelyn and I had to start back—came the next afternoon, when we pressed a call on W. Somerset Maugham at his Villa Mauresque, next door on Cap Ferrat. Perelman, a fabled reader, told me he had once written the grand old man of British letters to express admiration for his effortless style, and won a similar mash note in return. Now they had a date. In the Perelman wheels this time, I think, we noticed Maugham's adopted Moorish symbol—for good fortune—here worked into an iron arch at his entranceway. The same sign appeared on the covers of
Of Human Bondage
and
The Moon and Sixpence
and
Cakes and
Ale
and the rest, which the world had snapped up in staggering numbers over the previous decades. A flood of bestsellers and long-running West End plays had earned him this comely retreat, in a part of the world that even then looked lightly on his private life. Here, twisting and turning around corners, up hill and down dale, we followed the raked driveway onward through stunning groves of palm and pine and splashy bougainvillea. "The royalties! The royalties!" cried Sid in pure admiration and purer envy, as we drew up at last at the flowering stone steps and spreading red-tiled roofs of the shrine.

Maugham appeared, a frail gent of seventy-five, slightly bent in his soft shirt, pleated summery trousers, and suede pumps. With his skimpy, slicked-back hair and heavily lidded eyes, he suggested a Galápagos tortoise, wise and of immense age. He shook hands with us each, repeating our names, and told Abby and Adam to make themselves at home. Indoors, tea was produced and Maugham's cheerful partner, Alan Searle, introduced. Two house guests, the tall poet C. Day-Lewis and a slim, long-necked woman in gray, floated in and silently took places in the vast low living room. All went well except the conversation, which soon became a trickle, unhelped by Maugham's famous and extraordinarily demanding stammer and my sudden realization that the woman next to me, Day-Lewis's companion, was the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, whose
Dusty Answer
and
The Weather in the Streets
I had sighed over while in college. Silences fell, broken by thumpings and running feet above, from Abby and Adam. "They're in my st-study, I believe," Maugham said, smiling, as Sid bolted from the
room. Dadly noises arose from the stairs. We picked up a bit after a round of Maugham Specials, a grenadine concoction prepared by Searle. Sipping mine, I saw Evelyn gesture with her eyes toward the window over Maugham's shoulder, and, shifting my gaze, caught sight of a paper airplane as it sailed slowly down from above and impaled itself in a jacaranda.

Ever the host, Maugham pulled over his footstool and sat down again, one leg tucked beneath him. "Tell me, Mister Angell," he said, "have you ever worn a s-s-sarong?" I had to ask him to repeat the word and then said no, not yet. "Oh, but you m-must!" he cried, wrinkling his wrinkles with kindness. "V-very
cool
—but they do f-f-fall off!" On the way back, Perelman lit into his progeny. "This was a big, big disappointment," he said. "I don't see how we can take you anywhere." Silence. "Listen," he resumed in a different voice, "what was it like up there?"

 

These tales and name-droppings grow dim with repeating, and hearing them once again, in the fashion with which we stare into the too small black-and-white snapshots in a family album, we look into their corners and distant porches or mysterious windows in search of something more—times of day, a day of the week, other names and other tones of voice, beyond recall. What in the world did Evelyn and I talk about—beyond our adored but absent baby, I mean—all those weeks and miles? How did we survive the shrivelling boredom of long days on the road, through landscapes relentlessly renewed and snatched away but never entered? Conversation saved us, but I can't bring back a word now.
What books were we reading, which crisis were the French and British papers and the Paris
Tribune
full of each day? What fears or sadness woke us up at night, either or both of us, and made it hard to sleep again? With effort, if I wait not too eagerly, I can sometimes bring back her voice. She was happy on this trip, and could prove it. She was a fullblown diabetic, but here in France, while eating two exceptional meals every day, all over the map, and drinking down the splendid wines, she was able to cut down her daily insulin—a stab in the thigh, mornings and evenings—to her lowest levels in a lifetime. We divorced in the sixties and she died—can it be?—almost ten years ago.

On the
De Grasse
again, homeward bound, we were old hands. We told our new friends the Sidney Simons—he was a painter and sculptor coming back from a spell in France—which deck chairs were out of the wind and which dinner service to sign up for (the
deuxième,
except on cabaret nights, so you could leave earlier and grab a better table by the floor). In our cabin, Evelyn told me that she had wept a bit in the taxi on the way to our train to Cherbourg, but couldn't tell if it was from leaving Paris or missing Callie. I said we could do this again, maybe next year, and make it a shorter trip. We never did. Life and work and a second daughter intervened, and there was the money problem and the kids' summers to think about, and almost before we knew it the
De Grasse
and every other Atlantic passenger vessel were gone, swept clean away by the airliners' seven hours to Orly, and by Eurail Pass and Junior Year Abroad, and by the hundreds of thousands of kids and travelers and shifting populations, from all over the world, who
filled the fabled capitals and charming roads and did away with our postwar afternoon, leaving only these moments.

On the
De Grasse
the night of the Captain's Gala, a day and a half before New York, Evelyn and I are in close embrace, dancing to the Jerome Kern chestnut "You're Devastating." Our dancing has picked up, and we know how to let the slow lift of the floor tip us together, and to wait for the sensual tilt and counterflow of the departing wave. The bandleader, Tony Prothes, gives us a little nod as we swing by. He remembers us from the trip over, I've decided, but of course he's good at this. Like our cabin steward and the second sommelier and the barman Charles—Jules? Gérard?—he goes back to the
Normandie,
before the war. Half an hour later—or is this on another crossing, years later?—I am sitting at a cabaret table next to Mme. Hervé Alphand, the wife of the French Ambassador, whom I met at a cocktail party earlier in the evening. Tall and olive-skinned—I think she is Greek by origin—she will become one of the great Washington hostesses. She is wearing an amazing evening gown, and when I say something about it she suddenly spreads the skirt's thick folds so they cover my knees and those of the man on her opposite side. The three of us are under the multicolored skirt, which lies in glistening heaps, holding us together. "Mainbocher," she says, smiling. "It's
élégante,
don't you think? It brings pleasure."

I'
VE
gone off to work at
The New Yorker
on more than ten thousand mornings, and can't quite get out of the habit. My second office there was a slotlike space inherited from the august, pipe-smoking Geoffrey Hellmann, and next door to the saintly William Maxwell, who became my colleague and mentor in the fiction department, and the editor of my nonbaseball stuff. In time, I edited him, as well—a happy back-and-forth that was often the custom in those days. In editorial temper, he was a keeper-inner and I was a taker-outer, but we so enjoyed each other that the difference never came up. Later on—this was still in the magazine's red office building on the north side of West Forty-third Street—I became august, too, and moved into a nice corner office down the hall, where one of the windows offered views into other
New Yorker
offices up or down a flight or directly across from me, all containing fellow-writers and editors, who could be observed typing or
telephoning or reading newspapers or snoozing or (a lot of the time) staring morosely at the wall. My new space had been occupied twenty years earlier by my mother, then the fiction editor of the magazine; the first time I opened the closet door I found myself facing a long vanity mirror and, preserved beneath it as if in the Smithsonian, a round box of her Coty face powder. When I mentioned the coincidence of occupancy to the psychiatrist I was visiting back then, his jaw fell open. "The greatest single act of sublimation in my experience," he proclaimed.