On Green Dolphin Street (5 page)

“No. No, I was just doing a little work and then … I’m going out in about half an hour. Can I get you some breakfast?”

Frank sat at the table while she made coffee. He leaned back in the chair and looked through the paper. He opened it only a few inches and held it at arm’s length, as though worried that he might be blinded by the glare of its contents.

“What are these?” he said, picking up a pile of woven nametapes.

“They’re for the children’s clothes. We’re sending them to boarding school in England.”

Mary turned back to the electric percolator. She was wearing a shirt-waisted catalog dress just back from the cleaner; it was part of the family’s
agreed economy measures that she should cut back that year on new clothes, though she felt a little self-conscious about it as Frank scrutinized her from behind.

“You don’t sound too happy about that,” he said. “The school thing.”

“I’m not really.” Mary put the cups on the table and sat down. “It’s another economy measure. It’s one of the perks of the job that when you go abroad your children get subsidized schooling in England. They’ve been too young until now, and anyway I wanted to keep them here. But Charlie says we can’t afford the private schools here so they have to go back home.”

“You’ll miss them.”

“I think I will.”

“You could send them to the public schools here.”

“We could …” Mary felt uneasy, as though she were implying some criticism of American education. In fact, it was Charlie who had been against it: beyond the diplomatic vacuum, he pointed out, Washington was not an easy place.

“But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Why?”

“High school I went to in Chicago you just hoped to get out alive at the end of the day. My father made the mistake of settling his family in an all-colored neighborhood. Jesus.” Frank lit a cigarette and folded up the newspaper. “It’s not as if there weren’t enough Italian families in town. There were whole streets you’d think you were in Naples. You been to Chicago?”

“Not yet. But Charlie travels a lot, and when the children have gone off to school I’m hoping to go with him.”

“Nice guy, your husband.”

Mary smiled. “Well, I think so.”

“So do I.” Frank stood up. “I’d better get back to the hotel, get a change of clothes. No taste in music, though. Don’t tell him I said so.”

When Frank had gone, Mary went back to sewing nametapes onto Richard’s socks (six pairs, gray, woolen, knee-length, the printed clothes list specified). She loved looking at his name in print: Richard van der
Linden—so solid, so real. It was ridiculous: he was a creation of her and Charlie’s imagination, an idea they had fancifully invested with a character, not a proper person with a grown-up printed name. Someone was bound to find them out sooner or later.

Charlie was due to have lunch with two congressional aides and had booked a table in the upstairs room at a recently fashionable Italian restaurant on 17th near the junction with L Street. The venue was convenient for one of his favorite bars, the tall sitting room of the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the price of drinks was offset by the discretion of the assiduous staff. At twelve-thirty, he set himself down in a wing chair by the vast fireplace and lit a cigarette while the waiter brought his dry martini, straight up, with no risk of alcohol displacement by ice, and no olive or twist. With both hands, he raised the trembling meniscus to his lips and sucked; he closed his eyes as he rested his head against the back of the chair.

The bar with its exalted ceilings reminded him of childhood Gothic, the illustrations to fairy tales or the castle home of a sinister uncle. Logs crackled in the fireplace as the waiter answered Charlie’s brief wave and replaced the empty glass with a new one; he lacked only a basking Irish wolfhound at his feet. It amused him to linger in this play world while a brief walk away the earnest young men in button-down collars pounded the corridors of the White House, gabbling, minuting, telephoning; and five minutes’ taxi ride the other way, the real city, the southern settlement hacked from the surrounding swamp, carried on in its impoverished way, unmoved by the proximity of world decisions and the jabbing fingers of a thousand intent stenographers.

The second martini filled Charlie with a sense of peace, though he could feel a tightness in the skin of his forehead and the approaching thrum of pain behind the temples. He took two aspirin from a small tin in his jacket pocket and sluiced them down; when he had finished his drink, he played briefly with the idea of having another. The moment of balance he was looking for, the instant of perfect pitch, was becoming harder to
find each day. Once there had been a time when two martinis at noon had made him feel like a king; not only that, but the feeling had lasted, with a glass of wine here or there, for two or three hours, even sometimes until the evening scotch. In that mood, he could see all his troubles for what they were—insolent, negligible—and he could live off the feeling of reassurance. Now it was almost impossible to prescribe the mixture, or the volume, that would liberate that powerful sensation; and on the rare occasions that he found it, it seemed to last only a few minutes.

He was late for his two lunch companions, who were at the restaurant’s downstairs bar, where, after the handshakes, he was offered a drink.

“What are you chaps having?” he said, peering at their glasses.

“Martinis.”

“Well, I suppose I might as well join you.”

He took a second one up with him to lunch. The sight of the others drinking white coffee with their food made him queasy, and he pushed his buttered macaroni and
fegato alla veneziana
more or less untouched to one side. He drank some iced water and for a moment reached a stage of hot balance, as one of the aides talked of foreign policy realignments. Charlie was so bored that he thought he might weep, there at the table, in long hysterical sobs: he detested every word they said and the tawdry, life-denying world they represented. Perhaps all they really wanted was an invitation to the Ambassador’s residence, something they could tell their wives about or to which they even hoped to bring them.

Charlie’s neighbor plowed his last piece of chicken through the red sauce on his plate, then raised his cup, on which the milk had separated from the coffee, and drank it down.

“Excuse me.” Charlie rose from the table and went to the head of the stairs: he felt drops of sweat on his chill forehead and upper lip. The stairs looked vertiginous; the floor at the foot of them heaved beneath his gaze. Clasping the handrail, he limped down step by step. With all the mental power that had once been bent to solving academic problems, he forced himself to concentrate on negotiating the width of the slippery room to the door marked “Signori.” The sweat felt like a full, cold mustache as he twisted the handle and went inside. He made it no farther than the doorway
before he vomited an arc of colorless liquid across the tiles. He pulled open the door of a cubicle and slumped down on the floor. His cheek was cold against the porcelain, but his head was too heavy to move.

After her lunch with Kelly Eberstadt, Mary had time to do some food shopping before she went to collect the children. Christmas was approaching. The lights were glimmering on early trees in the living-room windows of the residential streets; the gas station on Woodley Road had a giant spruce with flashing crimson bulbs; the supermarket had frosted greetings sprayed across the windows. Perhaps at this moment, a few minutes down the road, Mrs. Eisenhower was putting some final touches to her own tree, which were sure to be stylish in a store-bought, Mamie kind of way.

Mary liked being in America at this time of year: people had not yet grown tired of the festival; its rigmarole still seemed to strike them as sincere and new, not exhausted by repetition. As she waited by the school gates, she saw Richard and Louisa emerge inside the wire-fenced compound and sounded her horn. Louisa looked up and waved unhurriedly; Richard was too absorbed by some cards he was showing a friend. Once they had climbed into the back of the car, Mary tried to find out how the day had gone. “What lessons did you do?” “History.” “How was that?” “Okay.” “What else?” “We had a spelling bee.” “How was that?” “Okay.” Louisa had developed a slight Maryland inflection which she could exaggerate at will; Richard’s voice was unchanged by America.

“And we had A-bomb drill.”

“Yeah, our class went down to the basement, all in line, two by two. It was horrid and smelly. We had to stand by the furnace.”

“You’re lucky. We had the emergency drill. You know, in the classroom? You have to cover your head so your brains don’t blow out and dive down like this!”

“Ow, stop it, Richard. You hurt my leg!”

They were always hungry, having eaten their packed lunches at noon, and, as it was a Friday, Mary gave way to their clamoring insistence to stop
off for a milk shake at the soda fountain. The traffic was so slow, she thought, it would make no difference to their journey.

The children ran ahead of her from the car across the lot, jostling and shouting. Louisa had Mary’s small bones and dark hair; her younger brother was already an inch taller, strong, and pulsing with an unguided joie de vivre. At home, they often fought or played on their own, but when they were happy together they sank into a self-contained contentment that had a peculiar tranquillity, signaled by Louisa’s gurgling laugh and Richard’s uncharacteristic quietness. These moments were so few and so valuable to Mary that she could have named and numbered them; yet on the memory of these finite instants would be based an agreed history of their childhood.

Mary watched as Richard and Louisa reached up to the counter with their coins. Did strangers see them as just high-spirited kids, or did they know how provisional they were, and how gently they must therefore be treated?

It was later than usual by the time they arrived home, and the telephone was ringing in the hall. As the children dropped their bags and coats on the floor and ran upstairs, Mary answered it.

“Mary? It’s Edward Renshaw. Charlie was taken ill at lunchtime. It’s nothing to worry about, but some imbecile at the restaurant rang an ambulance and they’ve taken him off to hospital. Now he wants you to go and pick him up.”

“You sure he’s all right?”

“Yes, he’s fine. They wanted to keep him in overnight, but you know what Charlie’s like.”

“I do.”

Calling instructions to Dolores and the children, Mary ran out to the Kaiser Manhattan, which, for once, started the first time. When she arrived at the address in Bethesda she found Charlie sitting on a hospital gurney in a treatment room, looking pale and impatient: he was irritated that the staff would not let him smoke.

Mary kissed him and took his arm as she led him out to the parking lot; through the sleeve of her overcoat she noticed the tremor in his hand.

“What did they say was the matter?”

“The doctor said I should have my blood pressure checked again next week. He said I should get Weissman to do some tests—diabetes, that kind of thing.” That was not all the doctor had said.

“But he wasn’t worried?”

“Not in the slightest. How’s your day been?”

“My day? Fine. Very ordinary.”

“What time did that fellow leave?”

“Frank? Quite late. I thought I might not be in time for lunch, but it was all right. Now let’s get you home and into bed.”

Back at Number 1064, while Mary was downstairs, telephoning Dr. Weissman, Charlie put on some pajamas and took a sedative from the bottle in the bathroom cabinet. A long night’s sleep would help him to see things in the old perspective: he didn’t need much, just a lucky break or a change of scene. He switched on the bedside light and reached over to Mary’s night table for a book; he found a volume of stories by Irwin Shaw, which he began to read as Mary’s anxious voice came up from the hall.

“… ask you for some tests. The doctor at the hospital thought he might have diabetes.”

Charlie pictured Weissman’s snort. “Sure, and maybe W. C. Fields died of too much 7UP.”

One of the most touching things about Mary, in Charlie’s view, was that she still viewed him as irreproachable. Of course she knew he drank a good deal, but so did all their friends in Washington, and none of them in Mary’s opinion benefited from it as much as Charlie: no one became as magnanimous, as death-defying as Charlie late at night. She did not wonder why his previously frictionless movement through the diplomatic labyrinth now seemed fraught: there were political considerations in a large embassy like in Washington; other men’s lives and paths had to be accommodated; and he was only there to do a specific political job for a limited period. She repeated to him what the ambassadors in two former postings had told her: that Charlie was unique, one of the very best.

Louisa arrived with a cup of tea and kissed her father on the cheek. He
held her to him for a moment, losing his face in her dark hair, which smelled of soap and cookies. He felt detached from her, he felt old and tarnished: how far apart had been their contemporaneous experiences of the day.

The other thing about Mary, Charlie thought when he was alone again, was that she lacked the capacity to envisage disaster. He knew that she had lost a fiancé in the war, but she seemed somehow to have eliminated the experience. It was not that she did not remember David, but that she did not allow the tragedy to alter her trust that all was well, that while she believed in those she loved, no harm could come to them.

Later, Mary brought him scrambled egg on a tray, and sat on the edge of the bed to eat hers with him. Charlie forced down a little and drank some black coffee, but was reasonably able to plead sickness as a reason for not eating. When Mary had gone back downstairs, Charlie reached for another pill and turned off the light. He fell into a profound and sweaty sleep, too drugged to dream or hear the telephone ringing by the bed.

Mary picked it up in the kitchen. She heard her father’s voice at the other end, and this was in itself a cause for anxiety. Her parents were unsure of the time difference between London and Washington and did not really believe, despite the evidence of their ears, that the telephone was capable of connecting them over such a distance; and even if it could be made to work, the cost of a call was certain to be punitive.