Matters of Honor (27 page)

His near-term future seemed decided, he told me at dinner my first night back: he would take that vacation Mr. Hornung had suggested, perhaps with Margot, if her own situation became less puzzling. Then he’d go to work as an associate at George’s firm, Wiggins & O’Reilly.

I said that congratulations were clearly in order. It was a surprise to everyone, he told me, especially George. Archie—he had then four years to live—had been very funny about it. What next? he said. Jews in the DAR? George told me in confidence, Henry continued, that knowing how anxious I had been about the job situation, Edie had asked her father to approach Nick Allen, who pretty much runs Wiggins, but her father said that could only backfire, because they’ve made a shibboleth of not letting even the biggest clients interfere with hiring and partnership decisions. Edie thought that her father had been absolutely straight with her and would have made the call if he had thought it could help. According to her, he remembered me from the wedding and had said nothing that indicated that he knew that I’m a Jew. So that couldn’t have been the reason.

And Margot, I asked, what does she think?

That’s really quite unexpected. She told me in November that I was a fool not to go to one of the Jewish firms, where they would welcome me with open arms and I would have a normal life. I said I wouldn’t. So of course I called her as soon as I heard from Wiggins & O’Reilly.

What an unusual girl, I said.

She is strange, he agreed, and very intelligent. But there I think she was wrong.

He was more confused about her than ever and no less convinced that they were destined to be together. At the same time, although he understood her insistence on sexual freedom, he couldn’t imagine accepting it if they were to marry, not that he thought she would marry him. Or the strange game she was playing with him. For instance, in November, when he came to New York to see her, he got a room at the Waldorf so that they could be together.

The Waldorf? I interrupted again.

I see that you remember Madeleine’s visit, he replied, I do too. I didn’t decide to go there on account of that memory. It was just that I thought that if Madeleine picked that hotel it had to be all right. I know nothing about New York hotels.

Am I to think that you and Margot do it now? I asked.

He shook his head and said, No, not exactly. In November, she would get in bed with me. It was all right if I was naked, and all that I wanted to do was all right except the thing itself. She said it was again a matter of purity and coherence. I grew faint when I heard this and asked whether Etienne had come back. That wasn’t it, she told me, although she had dinner with him occasionally in Paris. He’s more or less getting married to a French heiress. No, now it’s someone else she’s met in Europe. An American lawyer. Apparently he’s in Europe all the time and tells fascinating stories about his cases. I wonder whether he is a spy.

So that’s how she has become so knowledgeable about lawyers, I said. And how about the clerkships?

He let my crack go and replied that he would go to Wiggins only if the clerkship with Judge Friendly didn’t come through. He wouldn’t know that until the spring. If he had to bet, he added, he would give odds against himself. He was silent for a moment and then said, You know, I am beginning to have second thoughts about the Jews. Perhaps I should call one of those firms and say here I am, will you take me, and, if they say yes, let Wiggins know what they can do with their racial purity. Don’t you think I’m nuts—worse, plain wrong—to go where I’m not wanted?

I pointed out the fallacy: if they hadn’t wanted him at Wiggins, he wouldn’t have been asked to work there.

He nodded and said that was logical.

Tom Peabody arrived the next day. He was spending the reading period at my place, justifying his absence from Cambridge to me and perhaps his conscience by the availability at the Forty-second Street Library of manuscripts he wanted to consult. Henry cut short his stay. He had remained on good terms with Tom, but I suppose he thought three might be a crowd.

XXVI

S
LEEPLESSNESS
, fatigue, and heartbreaking sadness—a state of being all too familiar—once more descended on me like a lead cloak as we won and lost in the valley of Ia Drang and our B-52s went into action to support the First Cavalry on the ground. I did not attempt to flatter myself by thinking that my sickness and those events were connected; I did not yet understand that the country was lurching into madness. Dr. Kalman changed my sleeping pill prescription and suggested adding one of the new antidepressants for which claims were made, paradoxically in my opinion, that it also helped with sleep and anxiety. I refused to take it on the grounds that my work depended on my being myself, such as I was with all my sorrows, not only when I sat down at my desk but also when I puttered about without any apparent purpose. Dr. Kalman raised his eyebrows and said it seemed to him that my first objective should be to feel better. I suggested that he didn’t know what he was talking about. On that footing, we continued our explorations. They did no good. Kalman and I were stuck, unable to progress or find an exit.

Meanwhile, my career was perking along. My third novel, which, unlike the second, I wrote in a sustained élan of creativity, was published. The publishing house called me on the promise I had made to be available for a book tour and interviews. The general view in the house was that the sales of my second novel would have been less anemic if I had been willing to cooperate. Kalman once again proposed the antidepressant. This time I listened to him and muddled through readings and book signings in an interminable series of cities I hoped never to revisit. When I returned to New York, however, the sessions with Dr. Kalman seemed no better than before. I screwed up my courage and asked whether he could recommend someone in Paris, if I went to live there. Not permanently; I had no intention of becoming an expatriate.

Aha, he replied, you find that we’ve gone cold. You may be right. I can think of one or two people in Paris, but I would prefer to speak to Jake Reiner first.

Shaken suddenly by the enormity of what I had done, I tried to assure him of my affection and respect, but all I could get out of him was a vague nod. Manifestly, he thought I was a parricide. Nevertheless, a few sessions later he told me that Dr. Reiner and he agreed that if I did move to Paris I could call Madame Bernard. He had already taken the liberty of speaking to her over the telephone, and it appeared that she had a place for me in her schedule. I asked whether she was a medical doctor.

Oh no, he replied, that’s hardly necessary. She’s a Freudian analyst, and a member of the Paris psychoanalytical society.

I told him I sensed that he was throwing me into the arms of Lacan. No no, he said, nothing like that. Anyway, you’re not committed to her. There are other possibilities.

Thus began the season of my daily treks to the rue de la Faisanderie, so inconvenient to reach by public transportation from rue de Tournon—where I had taken an apartment with a view of a large garden behind the building—that I bought a Peugeot 404 principally to go back and forth between the Sixth and the Sixteenth Arrondissements.

Fortunately, I had a parking space in the rue de Tournon courtyard. The money spent on the car—indeed, the whole cost of my Parisian installation—did not seem unreasonable given my earnings. Also, Mr. Hibble, preparing to retire and hand over his duties as trustee to a trust company in Boston, had submitted to me the accounts of my trust. My respect for the old geezer shot up into outer space. He had invested heavily in IBM almost from the start, when I was still at school, taking a big risk, he told me, considering the rule that trust assets should be diversified. Unable to restrain my curiosity, I asked whether this was his own personal strategy or one that Jack Standish had also followed. For the first time in our acquaintance, he smiled, then put his finger to his lips and whispered, Shhh.

The habit of August vacations, so peculiar to American analysts, was also the norm in France, but it applied to the entire population. Not only Madame Bernard, but seemingly all of Paris was on the road. Wondering whether members of the psychoanalytical society had a particular roosting place of their own, I asked where she planned to spend the month. Unlike Dr. Reiner, she eschewed cutting rejoinders. She simply left my question unanswered. In fact, I was going away as well. When Tom Peabody wrote that he was coming to Europe without fixed plans other than to be at the Bodleian in the first three weeks of July, I proposed that when he finished we drive from Paris to Montreux and spend August at the hotel overlooking the lake. I wouldn’t be the first novelist to have tried working there.

Before our departure, I received a telephone call from Margot. Henry had told her that I was in Paris. For a moment I considered proposing a dinner at my apartment, but that would have been the first meal I had served to a guest, and I wasn’t sure that my very nice
femme de ménage
was up to preparing a summer meal of which Margot would approve. I invited her instead to a restaurant in the rue Marbeuf, around the corner from her parents’ pied-à-terre, where she was staying. I hadn’t seen her since the late evening when Henry took me to her apartment for a drink. She had changed some more; the quintessential Radcliffe girl had turned into a woman. I asked whether she was in Paris on a visit, Henry having told me about her attending the Courtauld or perhaps working in London. She said it was up in the air where she would live; it depended on news she was about to tell me—if I promised to remember that nothing is settled, nothing is guaranteed to happen. Then she said: I may be getting married!

I offered the customary congratulations, even while imagining how hard a blow this must have been for Henry.

She told me rapidly her intended was a Frenchman living in Paris, so that London might be out of the question. He was Jean du Roc, a novelist some fifteen years older than she.

To her visible relief, I assured her that I knew his name and reputation, that we had the same publisher, and that I had read one of his novels—probably the second one—with great interest.

I’m so glad, she exclaimed. Did you like it?

Very entertaining, I told her. In truth, I recalled being surprised that this tale of a young man infatuated with a married countess and fast automobiles, which could have been a joint venture between Louise de Vilmorin and Françoise Sagan, had been written by a man.

Margot went on to tell me that du Roc’s real name was Lebon, that his parents lived in Chatellerault, where his father owned a pharmacy, that Jean began by studying political science and then, out of boredom, decided to try journalism and happened to write a novel. Of all people, she said, you understand how such things happen.

I nodded and asked about the wedding plans.

There’s a complication, she said. Jean is married, and we’re waiting for the divorce to come through. The wife is dragging her feet. It’s malice or refusal to face facts or both. By the way, my parents don’t know anything about Jean; they haven’t even met him. The age difference will be a problem and, of course, money. He doesn’t have a cent. The wife he is divorcing is his second. He’ll have to pay her something, and he’s already paying some sort of alimony and child support to the first. I guess Mommy will like him because he’s so polite. They’ll be in Cap Ferrat in August. That’s when I’ll spring him on them.

And Henry?

I told him last week.

That must have been tough to tell and tough to hear.

Her eyes filled with tears. Then she collected herself and said it hadn’t gone so badly. Henry had made a real effort to be nice.

Utter callousness on my part? Inveterate meddling? As though there would never be a better moment, I asked point-blank why she was marrying Jean du Roc instead of Henry White, who’d been in love with her for seventeen years, was single, and had never married. I thought it was the strangest story.

It is, she said, but do you realize that he has never asked me?

I told her that, in fact, I hadn’t known, but she and I both knew it was a technicality. If he hadn’t asked it was for only one reason: he was sure she’d say no, and he didn’t want to lose what little he had.

She lowered her eyes and whispered that even her father wanted her to marry Henry. He had offered to propose to him on her behalf.

I said I was renewing my question.

It’s very personal, she answered. You know that I sleep with him.

I nodded.

From time to time, she corrected herself. I’m never sure that it will happen. And you know that I’ve had others, and that he’s had others too.

I told her I knew he loved her and that their relationship took various forms. I knew nothing beyond that.

She reached out to pat my hand and said, You’re talking nonsense. I know that he gives you at least the highlights of everything. You know it’s tawdry on both sides. It doesn’t matter anymore: Jean makes me do what he wants. Henry doesn’t and never will. He got down on his hands and knees before me right at the beginning, and he has never known how to get up. Etienne—remember him?—knew how to make me get down on my hands and knees and crawl. I made a terrible mistake letting him go.

What’s become of him? I asked.

Just what you’d expect. Since his father’s retirement, he’s been running the family businesses, he has married a blond Frenchwoman from the best French society, and any day now the king will make him a baron in his own right, so he won’t have to wait for his old man to die. Oh, and he has three children, little boys, she added. Probably they’re all blond and beautiful too. Then there was a lawyer: yes, another lawyer. I’ve been with him for years, literally for years, if you can be with someone whom you see so little. Someone who shows up without warning and leaves a message: Come to the hotel. As if I were a call girl. It doesn’t matter. He’s married and works so hard and travels so much that even when he’s supposed to be in Europe it’s as if he weren’t here. He’ll never leave his wife. I’ve even begun to think that he’s tired of being unfaithful to her.

I remained silent while she carefully finished her grilled sole.

Apropos of lawyers, why haven’t you asked me about Henry?

Haven’t we been talking about him? I protested.

I don’t mean Henry and me, she said, I meant how he is doing in his career, at the firm, all those things. You know, the way law firms deal with associates the coming year will be the fatal moment for Henry. Either he’ll be made partner or he’s out in the street. Of course he will get another job—there’s always my father. As soon as she said that she giggled.

I said that didn’t sound right. George had gone to Wiggins two years earlier than Henry and was still an associate and seemed very calm about it.

That’s different, she told me. Lawyers who do estates are made partners more slowly—because they don’t work as hard and don’t bring in as much money.

I protested again. George worked very long hours.

That’s not how they see it, she said. George will have to wait until Henry’s law school class is up, perhaps longer. Of course he isn’t worried. They love him at Wiggins, and they certainly won’t do anything to tick off Mr. Bowditch.

And Henry? I asked.

You really haven’t kept up with him, have you? They’ve asked him to come to their Paris office because they really need someone here who can do very big international deals with tax complications. Right now, no firm has anyone like that in Paris. Henry could give Wiggins a real competitive advantage—if it all works out. But he’s very worried, because being sent to a foreign office as senior associate can be the kiss of death: out of sight, out of mind. You’ll be passed over when your group is considered. At the same time, he realizes that they may be saying to him in their wonderfully subtle way, Go to Paris, Henry, or you won’t be a partner.

That’s rough, I said. You certainly know a lot about law firms. That thought had occurred to me, I remembered, the last time we had met.

One picks up these things here and there.

Won’t Monsieur du Roc make coming to Paris that much harder for Henry? I asked.

She admitted that was true, but not becoming a partner might be harder.

But what if he comes here and doesn’t make it? Isn’t that the worst case? Isn’t there some senior person at the firm he can ask for advice? I seem to remember that there was an important partner for whom he did international deals. What does he say?

Jim, she said, you mean Jim Hershey.

She blushed and I quickly averted my eyes.

This time I told her the truth: I couldn’t remember the name.

He did speak to Hershey, she said. He told him to trust the firm.

What about you, Margot, won’t this be hard on you? I asked.

I don’t know, she said very slowly. It depends on Henry, on what he is willing to accept.