On Green Dolphin Street (46 page)

She swung the car to the left and headed for Georgetown: a few minutes later she parked on Dumbarton Street and walked down the hill. Through the windows of the neat houses she saw bookshelves that were laden with the knowledge their owners had purposefully ingested: the rise of Napoleon, the fall of Hitler; congressional records and confessional memoirs. The shelves passed no judgment on the grist—on Gramsci’s
Prison Notebooks
as against the speeches of Mussolini—provided it was milled and turned into mental food for the Republic. To show that these people were not mere grinders of statistic and policy, there was even fiction among the alleged facts—Twain, Mark, up near Truman, Harry S; and Wilson, Edmund, leaning into Wilson, Woodrow; it could be only a matter of time, Mary thought, before the recollections of Salinger, Pierre, squeezed in against the slender volumes of Salinger, J. D.

In Fiorello’s she remembered how their life had been when they arrived in Washington, and with what delight she had set about furnishing and decorating Number 1064. Happy girl, as her mother had doubtless said.

She sold the Kaiser Manhattan that night to a bachelor defense specialist, who relished its lumpy, louche appearance and seemed not to notice the dent in the fender or to mind that it had rolled so many hard miles. “My girlfriend’s going to love this,” he said, making Mary feel unconscionably old. There was a message from Dolores to say that Frank had called, but when she telephoned his apartment there was no reply.

On Tuesday morning, with Dolores’s help, she sorted out what needed to be shipped, what could be sent to the thrift shop and what could be thrown out. She had to take a cab to Katy’s house in Chevy Chase and she asked for him to come back at three to take her to Union Station.

“How’s the book going, Mary?” said Lauren.

“Oh, that … I haven’t really had much time.”

They parted with warm embraces and lingering endearments, though in the eyes of Katy, Lauren and Kelly there was an identical look of puzzled concern as the driver stowed the bag in the trunk and Mary’s slight figure climbed into the back of the cab. All three watched intently as the car moved off gingerly in heavy rain that was on the verge of freezing.

As her train approached New York, Mary inhaled and braced herself. It was a reflexive response to the approach of the city, to the skyline that sometimes looked half charred—pocked and glowing like scorched wireless valves or the honeycombed filaments of broken gas fires. Coming over the Queensboro Bridge from the big airports, shooting out of the Midtown Tunnel up the ramp of 41st Street, even crawling in the easy way beneath the Styx into Penn Station, you needed to prepare a little; it was not a city to which you would want to cede the early points.

The street of Mary’s hotel was high and narrow, between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, and lived in a gray light. The commercial deliveries on either side meant that the traffic was permanently blocked and no car made it through without sounding its horn at least once. There was a slow construction project going on, where steel girders were hoisted and locked in place by acrobats in hard hats with wrenches dangling from their leather pouches. She walked from Penn Station with her light suitcase and stepped round the earthbound workmen who were looping steel hawsers onto long timbers, like railway sleepers, and knocking the half hitch into place with hammers. Farther up the sidewalk was blocked by wooden hoardings that surrounded the laboring crane.

It was not much of a street, it was more of a thoroughfare, she thought, or would have been if it had been passable. The hotel itself was between a Chinese laundry and a locksmith; opposite were a few tawdry clothes shops and a narrow deli selling pale buns and pink sodas. Yet once she had registered and found her room, Mary felt at home again among the fancy whitewood furniture and the crimson carpets with their shampoo whorls.

She hung up her dresses, checked that there were no messages, then called home in London. She spoke to her father, who told her he was just expecting Charlie back from Edgware. When she had sent all her words of love and encouragement, she looked at her watch and worked out how many hours she had to endure before she saw Frank at one the next day. She had kept three of Charlie’s sleeping pills when she cleared the bathroom cabinet at Number 1064 and packed them, along with the Donald Duck toothbrushes from the children’s bathroom, in her own spongebag. The best way to pass the hours was to be unconscious, she thought: she took a white pill, like her husband, though, unlike Charlie, she washed it down with a glass of water from the faucet. It was only nine o’clock when, having set the alarm against some European coma, she climbed into bed.

In the morning she waited in the hotel, not daring to leave in case Frank should call to change the arrangement. It was not until half past twelve that she went down onto the street. She was five minutes early at O’Reilly’s, a bar on 15th Street near Third Avenue, close to Frank’s office but not so close that they would see too many of his colleagues. She walked round Union Square to pass the time, and as the buildings of New York revolved about her, she felt a dread that he would not be there, or that the missing weeks would have fatally changed him. At five past one, she pushed open the saloon door.

He was sitting at the bar, holding a newspaper cautiously open, at arm’s length, as though ready to snap it shut at any moment should its contents disappoint him. He glanced up as she entered the warm room, then slid off the stool. She crossed the bare floorboards and put her arms round him; she kissed him briefly and settled on the stool next to his.

Nothing had changed. She looked at his face, the eyes with their splinters of hazel, the soft smile. Her dread vanished. She did not need to ask him what he thought or felt because she could see in his face, in his entire demeanor, that everything was the same, that no real time had passed for him since he had said good-bye to her on the night of the election.

Seeing this, she took his hand on top of the bar and kept looking into his face; there was no need to say anything. He looked back and she could
see that he also felt profoundly comforted. When, after a minute or so, neither of them had spoken, Frank said, “Well, I don’t know where to begin.”

“I suppose you could get me a drink.”

“Okay. Now tell me about Moscow.”

“I didn’t care for it at all.”

He smiled. “I heard bad things about that place.”

“Communism is not a complete success. Not entirely. I think the West could yet win this war.”

“It’s doing a good job of losing at the moment. And Charlie?”

“Charlie. He … He’ll be fine.”

“Is he coming back to America?”

“No.”

Frank looked down at the bar.

Mary said, “We don’t need to talk about this now.”

“I guess not. You back in your old hotel?”

“Yes. It’s like home.”

“You want to get something to eat?”

“Not really.” She sighed. “I just want to look at you.”

“Sure thing. Can I look back?”

“You can.”

She heard the snare-drum rattle of the swizzle stick against the glass, but his eyes did not leave hers.

“So. You gonna live in London?”

The tone of the conversation was still light. “I guess so.” She was still able to smile. “But maybe not.” It was not she who said it; someone else said these things when she was with him.

“Where does that leave me?”

“I suppose it leaves you in Washington, Frank.”

“When you going back?”

“Saturday evening. From Washington.”

“Could you change that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, call the airline and get them to reroute you from New York. I’d be free Saturday.”

“I see. I thought you meant …”

“What did you think?”

“I thought you meant … Cancel it.”

“Is that what you’d like?”

Mary let her eyes leave his face for the first time. She looked down and bit her lip. “Yes,” she said, “that’s what I’d like.”

“But you can’t do it, can you?”

“I … I’m not sure that I can.”

“It’s a moral thing, isn’t it?” he said. “After all this, it comes down to a question of right and wrong.”

“Can we talk about something else? What’ll we do on Saturday?”

“I always thought we’d find a better way of dealing with this. What I feel about you. I thought we’d find a higher plane, whatever you want to call it.”

“But I couldn’t find the words for that better way.”

“Me neither. But morality, I mean …” He threw his arms apart. “The simple goddamn right or wrong, it seems … I don’t know.”

“It seems like a blunt instrument.”

“Yeah.” He breathed in deeply. “Though I guess the good thing is that you can understand it. A kid could follow it. It all makes sense.”

“Frank, I don’t think I can take this conversation right now. I’m going to make a fool of myself if we carry on. I’m going to cry or something. There are people watching. Can we please talk about something else?”

After the pleasure of seeing that everything was the same for Frank, Mary had briefly convinced herself that the near future consequently held for her only sweetness and delight. As the conversation had progressed, however, she began to see that it was not that clear; it did not follow that because the most important thing in her life was secure, the rest would serenely flow: rather the opposite, in fact.

At that moment she glimpsed the magnitude of what was actually awaiting her.

She said, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to manage this.”

“Look,” said Frank, “I got a lot of things on the next coupla days, but I’m sure I can make some time. What do you say we make a date for lunch on Friday? I’m going to Minneapolis tomorrow, but I should be back Friday morning. Then I’ll be free later in the day. Then, what the hell, your plane’s not till Saturday evening, right? We got all the time in the world.”

“Don’t you have to get back to work?”

“Well, right now I do. But I’ll call you later.”

“What about this evening?”

“I have a job. I can’t get out of it.”

“What time will it finish?”

“Late.”

“I don’t care how late it is. Call me. Come to my hotel. Don’t even call. Just come.”

She sat up in the chair in her hotel room that night, trying hard to stay awake, assailed by wave after wave of displaced sleep—last night’s, tomorrow night’s, the sleep of the hours that had gone missing over Greenland and Labrador. She was scared that if she slept she would not hear the telephone ring up from Reception. She glared at the silent instrument, then felt her heavy eyelids falling once again. Across the room was her open suitcase, whose contents struck her as pathetic: the carefully chosen clothes, the new shoes she thought he’d like, the wicked self-delusion of the whole enterprise. Back in London her darling children slept their innocent, restoring sleep, while here in the decadent jungle she was howling like some alley cat in the darkness.

God forgive me, she thought, God help me. I didn’t make myself like this; I didn’t ask to know this awful passion.

When at last the telephone sounded on the nightstand, she did not know if she should answer. But it was him. He came upstairs and made love to her. Although she joined in avidly, wretchedly, she hated it because it confirmed that she was lost; she was desperate and out of human control.

—

Frank left at six in the morning to catch his plane to Minneapolis. He felt shocked and exhausted by the night before. Christ, he thought, as he buckled his seat belt, I had myself down as a man not easily thrown, but now I’m in some area I can’t handle. I don’t know where I am. I have no bearing, no maps—it’s like Guadalcanal.

He felt a miniature smile at the comparison. The stewardess leaned over with a tray of breakfast and smiled back dutifully, thinking that he, like all the other early business travelers, was flirting with her.

However much he resented the minutes of absence from Mary, it was almost a relief to be away, to see bright snowy air beneath him. Escape, escape, there was always that thing in a city man, he thought. The first time he had managed was during the Depression when, like so many others of his age, he had ridden a freight train from the railroad yards of South Chicago. He had gone with his brother, Louis, out east past the Studebaker plant at South Bend, where the men were on strike. There were clear skies all the way to Cleveland, and he and Louis had thought nothing of the hardship or the stench of fellow travelers in the boxcars. Louis was without a job; Frank had just left an insurance office on La Salle Street, where the winter sun never broke through the gray canyons. The idea was to get as far as Buffalo, then maybe cross the border into Canada and start again in Toronto. They liked the sound of Toronto—the Italian cadence of the name—and refused to believe that it was settled by Scottish Puritans. But they were turned back at the border and, after a month in Detroit, slipped back into Chicago, took a streetcar from the station and began once more the forlorn search for work.

The next escape had been in France, where, after a period of rest and recreation, his unit was dispatched in 1945. He had never been to Europe before and found the unscarred part of France more beautiful than any landscape he had seen outside the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue. They traveled through the small towns of Belgium in triumph, throwing candy bars from the roof of train cars to the children waiting by the track.

As they came to Aachen, they saw the rubble of a real front and their exhilaration stalled. They relieved another unit, dug in just short of the Rhine, and from his foxhole Frank could see the twin towers of Cologne Cathedral. Billy Foy was next to him and they clutched one another’s arms in wonder at the sight. Two days later they pulled out, crossed the river and ran through an area the artillery had flattened, yet even in the rubble there were courtyards with flowering fruit trees and a sense among the young men as they leaped over piles of German bodies that nothing now could halt their progress. They ran into enemy patrols and, down below them by a river, a company of German infantry. Even as they surrounded them and cut them off, Frank was aware of the beauty of the meadows, of the sheep grazing on the side of the hill as they ran through them, firing.