Rich Rewards (9 page)

Well, a problem that could not be discussed in a public restaurant. Was Agatha finally in love with someone? Could she be pregnant? A variety of such fantasies went through my mind as I said yes, I’d love to come, I’d be there around six-thirty.

Curiosity, I guess, as well as my compulsive punctuality, made me get there somewhat early; it was only six-fifteen
when I found a parking space on Polk Street, near her corner. Not wanting to fluster a nervous cook, and one with a problem on her mind, I decided to walk a few blocks.

Polk Street at that time was, and maybe still is, a mecca for hard-core, out-front leather gays. Lots of bared chests, and earrings, some makeup, dyed hair, extremely tight pants and high-heeled shoes. As I walked along, among those “gay” guys, I felt more and more uncomfortable, and at the same time a little guilty over my discomfort.

I was glad when it was time to go to Agatha’s.

Whenever I went to her house, the flatness of Agatha’s taste made me wonder why she would ever want a decorator, even me, her old friend. Her apartment was like a disguise, and maybe that is just what she was doing, hiding herself there among all that blond Danish modern—what was not Danish was upholstered in corduroy. I had plainly told her that all of it would have to go, which made her very unhappy until she thought of a needy place to give it to.

That night the rooms looked a little messier than usual, but there was a pretty bowl of spring flowers on the coffee table—out of character for Agatha to buy, her taste running more to daisies.

And she looked even more flustered than usual.

Again I thought, Ah, she’s having an affair with someone, and that’s what I’m here to hear about. The old expert on troubles of the heart.

She said, “I’m sorry I’m so disorganized. Someone came by for a drink, and stayed longer than I’d planned.” She blushed, confirming my suspicions.

First we talked, as in these days we often did, about how her house was coming along. I said how pleased I was with
the work of Tony Brown, how displeased with delays in fabric shipments, upholstery workshops.

I said that I’d seen Caroline, and that things sounded bad between her parents: separated, no one happy. At that, Agatha’s face assumed a closed look which over the years I had learned to read: it meant that she had seen one or the other of the Houstons; one of them would have come into her office, probably, to talk to her. Ruth, most likely.

Agatha gave me a glass of wine, and we moved into the kitchen. By then I was quite hungry, looking forward to food and wine, as well as to hearing about her love affair.

Pot roast, and baked potatoes.

“I’m afraid I’ve overdone it,” she apologized as we sat down at her blond maple table.

“Agatha, you can’t overdo pot roast, it’s really good.” And it was, accidentally, one of her best efforts. I was enjoying my food, along with the anticipation of interesting confidences. But why was she so long in getting to it?

At last she repeated the words that she had said before: “Well, I seem to have this problem,” and she smiled, in her old wry way.

“Oh?”

“Yes. It’s sort of crazy.” She paused, it seemed for a long time, while I waited. “It appears,” she said at last, “that some woman in Washington is contesting the General’s will. They were—I guess ‘intimate’ is the word, and she feels left out. She says that he made ‘certain promises.’ ”

“Jesus Christ” was all I could say, out of a complex of reactions: disappointment, since talking about the General with Agatha always made me uncomfortable; we both knew that he was an ass, or worse, but that was impossible to say, he being her father. Also I felt genuine surprise; the General had been most adept at keeping out of scandals, not always
an easy thing for a hyperactive playboy in a town like Washington.

And then I had another thought. “It could be sort of interesting,” I said, rather heedlessly. “It might bring out how he came by all that money. Someone like Jack Anderson will wonder.”

“I thought of that,” said Agatha unhappily. “It could be a lot more embarrassing than interesting. And would it really do the world a lot of good to find out that he bribed the right Koreans, or took bribes from Iranians? Well, I guess it could.”

I suddenly felt awkward, apologetic, and I saw something that I had not quite known before: I saw that I cared more about Agatha’s possible discomfort than disclosures of national moment. I thought of Forster’s remark about preferring to betray his country rather than a friend, and I wondered, How would Jean-Paul feel about that, such a highly personal morality?

“I really hate all this.” Agatha spoke with unusual vehemence, forthrightness. “I think that woman really should get some money, if he promised it to her. I don’t need as much as I have, God knows. But my lawyer says I absolutely must not get in touch with her. We have to wait. In fact he seems to take a very dark view of her character. But I don’t care about her character.”

“What a mess.” It really was, and as I thought about it, it seemed worse and worse. I understood belatedly how nice it had been with the General just peacefully dead, leaving Agatha rich and me usefully occupied. Agatha no longer embarrassed by his love affairs and his Grecian Formula hair, nor enraged by his politics.

Agatha said, “It certainly is a mess. Betty Smith is the lady’s name. You see? I couldn’t get in touch with her if I
wanted to.” And then she said precisely what I had just thought, a thing that happened fairly often with us, no doubt a function of our having been friends for so long. She said, “It was so nice with the General just peacefully dead, wasn’t it.”

Such a surprise: the money from my robbery turned out to be a much larger settlement than I could have imagined; my secret certainty is that somehow a mistake in my favor was made. Agatha would have investigated; I did not, but deposited and spent the money as fast as I could. I had a wonderful time replacing my wardrobe.

That year the clothes were what advertising copy terms “classics”; as I see it, my height makes classics necessary, and so I bought blazers and skirts and pants, silk shirts—the classiest classics I could find, and I had never, really, been so well turned out.

Strange, if it was really Whitey whom I had to thank for all that finery.

Out of old habits of thought—or, rather, of feeling—for a while it seemed too bad, and sad, that no one (that is to say, no man, no lover) was around to appreciate my fashionable look, but then I thought, No, that’s ridiculous. I’m dressing for myself.

One Sunday—I’m afraid partly out of an impulse to get dressed up—I went to church with Agatha. It was a small, very pretty church, on Union Street. And the funny thing
is, I really enjoyed it, sitting there in the stained-glass filtered light, among all those nice-seeming serious people, listening to the hymns and prayers, the collects and lessons, thanksgivings. Or, “enjoyed” is not quite right: actually I was deeply moved. I had known all those words all my life, and to me they were entirely beautiful. At the same time, however, I experienced a kind of guilt in my pleasure; after all, I didn’t really believe all that, not in the way that Agatha did. It was okay for her to enjoy going to church; for her it would be an experience of quite another order.

Then I had a curious but apposite memory: I was with Jacob, on the porch of one of those Atlantic coast hotels that he favored in midwinter—this was in Ocean City, Maryland, the same hotel in which he later turned me on to dope. We sat in high Victorian wicker chairs, overlooking the boardwalk, rocking, talking about what we had been reading, what novels, what poetry. And I confessed to Jacob that while I very much enjoyed reading poetry, and had read a fair amount, I often guiltily felt that I was not entirely grasping it.

And Jacob said, “But guilty, how perfectly ridiculous. If you enjoy it—fine. Any poet would be delighted. I, for example, often read Neruda in Spanish, of which I know only a very few words.” Later he confessed that he liked to get really stoned and read Sappho in Greek, which he did not know either.

If I sound elegiac speaking of Jake, it is because he died a short time after that. A sordid heroin O.D., so unnecessary, so terrible. Alone, in a Howard Johnson motel, near Portland, Maine.

But remembering Jacob made me decide that it was okay for me to enjoy an Episcopal service, probably—and how
terrifically funny he would have thought that was. “You gentiles are all alike,
au fond
,” he might have said.

After church Agatha and I went out to lunch, on Union Street. We chose one of those ferny places with an open patio that are awful at night, crowded body shops, but perfectly pleasant for a Sunday lunch. We ordered white wine and crab, and we talked about what a pretty day it was. Sunny November, California basking in the drought.

Out of the blue, then, Agatha said, “There seems to be a Chilean connection.”

“Whatever are you talking about?” Such a strange remark; at first I had thought she must mean the wine.

“The General seems to have spent most of the last few years with some very rich Chileans, and after Allende was killed he and ‘Betty Smith’ spent a lot of time down there, in Santiago.”

“Jesus.”

“I told you it would get worse and worse.”

“Yes.”

“In fact one of his last letters to me was his usual line of vituperation—come to think of it, maybe stronger than usual. He’d seen my name on some petition, something supporting Allende.”

“What a total bastard.” This slipped out; I do know that it’s dangerous to bad-mouth other people’s families, even hated ones, like possibly murderous right-wing generals.

But Agatha agreed. “Yes, it’s hard to think of a redeeming feature,” she said, and then, with a tiny laugh, “The General was always a strain on my notions of Christian charity.”

I laughed too, but I felt a sort of chill: suppose it did
come out that the General had been involved in the murder of Allende? I found it easy to believe that in some very high-level financial way he had, and for all I knew in Vietnamese-Korean high-level bribes and scandals prior to that as well. I found it harder, though, to imagine the ramifications that would follow the public disclosure of such activity on the part of an American general, a West Point graduate, class of ’32. Except for the embarrassment to Agatha, it would be quite wonderful, really. In much the same way that Watergate was wonderful, those hearings so deeply gratifying to watch, so assuaging, for a time, to one’s most punitive instincts.

The waiter arrived with our crab—a welcome diversion. I could not exactly tell Agatha that I was looking forward to the posthumous disgrace of her father.

At a table across from ours was a handsome young Californian couple, athletic-looking, both very blond. I watched their play of smiles, touching hands, and heard them laugh. They were obviously just out of a late Sunday morning happy bedtime, and mean-spiritedly I thought, How do you two get to be so happy? I knew this to be absolutely unfair, not to mention uncharitable; it was perfectly possible that they were most deserving of happiness—were kind and talented, generous people, as well as handsome and happy. But I doubted it.

Partly to break that ugly mood, I said to Agatha, “Why don’t we do something really Californian this afternoon? It’s so beautiful. Maybe we could drive up to Mount Tamalpais. Hike about.”

Agatha blushed before she answered. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m meeting Royce.”

“Oh.”

“Well, yes.”

I’m afraid I sat there staring at her for a while, taking it in, thinking: Agatha and Royce.

Agatha and Royce.

The metamorphosis of Agatha: overnight, it seemed, from being a silent, withholding listener, once she had started she talked endlessly about Royce. His fascination for her was apparently interminable, every aspect of his history, his character. Of course I did not feel quite that way about him, but I tried to summon what interest I could; over the weeks that followed our revelatory Sunday lunch, I listened and took in a great deal about Royce.

His parents had come out from the Oklahoma dust bowl, in the early Thirties. But their luck was always just slightly better than that of those around them.

To begin with, their skills were fortunate. Josiah Houston, Royce’s father, may have been a mechanical genius; in any case he was incredibly skillful with cars; he could diagnose and usually cure any of their ailments. Thus the Houstons’ Ford kept running faithfully when other cars just died and were abandoned to rust and corrosion in some hot dry California ditch, a host to weeds. Deborah Houston sewed; she was a perfectionist, fanatical over perfect seams and finishings; when things were at their worst, around 1932, the year Royce was born, she would stay up most of the
night turning collars and cuffs, so that worn-out shirts were good for another six months, and well worth the twenty-five cents she charged. Sometimes Josiah would fix someone else’s car, and that gave him an extra buck or two. And so they did not quite starve on the starvation migrant-worker wages they were paid for picking fruit and vegetables, in the rich San Joaquin Valley, near Stockton and Modesto.

But maybe the Houstons’ most important reason for luck was that they were both such large and strong, exceptionally handsome people. Josiah’s height, and his thick white-blond hair (like Royce’s), his blond moustache must have engendered some respect, as did Deborah’s strict tall dark beauty. It is very possible that even the growers were nicer to them because they looked so good, not beaten down and haggard, gaunt, like so many of those migrants. And the Houstons were churchgoers, Presbyterians; they stayed away from the Communist agitators, union organizers, Eastern Jews.

By the time Royce was three or four—always the tallest, handsomest child around—his father, Josiah, owned a small farm in the delta, near the slews; ten years later, when Royce was in junior high, his father owned and ran the Ford agency in Manteca.

Royce as an adolescent was a natural athlete, terrific at every sport: captain of the football team, a baseball star, champion swimmer, all that. He even learned to ski, in the nearby Sierra foothills—then a crude, homespun sport. Royce loved skiing, the dizzying downhill rush, like flying, in the dazzling clean white snow.