The Last of the Savages (17 page)

When we finally entered the so-called chapel a hush fell over the half-dozen wedding parties, followed by furtive glances and whispered comments. I wanted to tell them to mind their own goddamned business, but I realized this was only the preview. Will and Taleesha were about to embark on a lifetime of being noticed. Will had long since gone silent and drawn into himself, a dangerous sign. Taleesha looked miserable.

Finally their names were called. As we rose and stood up before the judge, the voices subsided once again. Will looked back and scanned the faces in the room, as if to demand in advance whether anyone knew any reason why he and his bride should not be united in matrimony. Taleesha’s hands, clutching a bouquet to her chest, were trembling. Will leaned over and kissed Taleesha’s neck, then nodded defiantly to the judge.

The service itself took only a couple of minutes. When the judge said, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” everyone in the room seemed paralyzed, including the newlyweds. Neither of them moved until a voice called out, “Right on,” breaking the silence and sparking a volley of applause that continued as the bride and groom—as if awakened from a spell—finally turned toward each other and kissed.

We walked out between the rows of folding chairs. It was a fairly extraordinary eruption—perhaps a dozen couples and their witnesses clapping and cheering, the black man in the pink tuxedo shaking Will’s hand and slapping Taleesha on the back, escorting them to the door with a bright proprietary air, a benevolent stranger launching them into their hazardous new life.

“Peace, brother and sister.”

“Be cool,” Will said.

“We did it,” Will said uncertainly, as the driver closed the door behind us. He opened another bottle of champagne and poured each of us a glass.

“Oh, shit, Will,” Taleesha said, “are you
sure?
” She was dazed, not certain whether she should allow herself to be happy.

He said, “Sure as I’ve ever been in my life.”

“Well,” she said, “we all better fasten our seat belts and hold on is all I can say.”

Will leaned over and kissed her again, licking the champagne from her lips. “Let us not forget our best man,” he said. Taleesha removed from her purse a tissue-wrapped package, which proved to consist of two leather-bound volumes. The first was the 1909 Doves Press edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, in full vellum with gilt title. “I’m afraid the actual first edition proved a little beyond my means,” Will said. “Just promise me you won’t show it to Matson.”

The second volume was a notebook of some sort. Opening it up, I read, on the brittle title page, handwritten in sepia ink:
BINNIE PILCHER SAVAGE, HER PRIVATE DIARY, 15 FEB 1861 A.D.—

“You told me you were thinking of majoring in history. Well, there’s a little piece of history you might find of some interest.”

Despite my protests that it belonged to his family, he insisted I keep it.

“It’s better off with you,” he said, with a cryptic smile.

They dropped me at the club; I had a paper to finish so I would never know how sweet Taleesha sounded at the Apollo on her wedding night. The next day they were on their way to Paris for their honeymoon. It seemed there should be something more than this dangling curbside parting to publicly mark the beginning of their wedded life; I suddenly understood the purpose of the big wedding with its sense of communal witness and closure.

As the limousine pulled away they were snuggled—or was it
huddled?
—together in the backseat, but as I rattled toward New Haven in the cigarette-stinking train, I couldn’t shake a plummeting feeling of anxiety for their future.

T
he Saturday after the two detectives interviewed me about Felson, a young man came calling on my daughter for her first date. My wife, Stacey, was picking up our youngest from her playdate. I was already in a morbid frame of mind; Felson’s funeral was scheduled for the following Monday. At that moment in particular you’d think I would have been reassured by the sight of the handsome boy who arrived at our door in his blue blazer and chinos. Except for the annoying backward baseball cap, he was the very image of the boy I’d always wanted to be; and the cap was itself testament to his insouciance, his easy certainty of his place in the world, which allowed him to affect the generational flourish. I’d already heard his vitae, and the surname announced by our doorman was one that would have been familiar to Edith Wharton. His father had a seat on the exchange, his mother served on several boards with Stacey, and the young master himself attended Buckley. Of course I disliked him immediately.

True, my whole life had been directed toward acquiring just this sort of escort for my daughter, but suddenly that seemed like a sad, even shameful, realization.

He looked me in the eye, shook my hand firmly and removed the stupid cap at the threshold. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Keane.”

We sat in the library and talked about the prep schools he was applying to, while Caroline strategically postponed her entrance. She finally appeared in the doorway wearing jeans and a faded denim shirt over what appeared to be a tie-dyed T-shirt, her wrists adorned with colorful string bracelets she’d woven at camp last summer. It’s been several years now since I had any input in the matter of her wardrobe and I have learned not to try. But what really got to me somehow was the beaded choker she wore around her neck, from which dangled a bronze peace sign. She looked like one of the groupies that used to attach themselves to Will. Like them, the stoned chicks I met backstage with Will, Caroline was a vegetarian prone to lecture me about health and ecology.

Trying to be a semi-cool dad, I squelched the reflex to inquire into their plans. But if my restraint was noted, I was not rewarded with the customary kiss on the cheek.

Although I almost never take a drink before six, I mixed myself a scotch and soda after Caroline and her date hurriedly departed. It would be at least an hour before Stacey came home. Not that talking to my wife would help. Suddenly I thought of calling Lollie Baker, whom I hadn’t spoken to in more than a year. I dialed information in Los Angeles and then called the Chateau Marmont, the return address of her last Christmas card. Lollie had been living in Los Angeles for more than three years—doctoring scripts for obscene wages, procrastinating the commencement of her fourth play—but she continued to live in a hotel, as if to proclaim her transient status.

“ ’ello, Chateau.” The voice, which I recognized from my last call, suggested a curious amalgam of doped languor and haughtiness. When I asked for Lollie and was told that she was not on the premises, the tone of the response seemed to hint that even if she were, it is unlikely that she would wish to receive my call.

Then I called Will in Malibu. I didn’t want to talk about anything special, certainly not about the sources of my dark mood. Small talk was what I needed, pleasant and aimless distraction. Will’s line was answered by a surly character, one of his functionaries, who said Will was
out of town and asked, when I tried to find out where, what my call was in reference to.

“It’s in reference to my life, smart-ass,” I said, and slammed down the receiver.

For almost thirty years, through all the erratic twists and turns of his curious journey, I’ve always sensed that Will was out there somewhere, and that I would hear from him in due course, but just at that moment I would have liked to verify it.

After the wedding, Will had checked in from the Crillon in Paris. “Fat, happy and disinherited,” he pronounced himself. The night before, he said, they’d hooked up with two of the Rolling Stones, one of whom was smitten with Taleesha. Before that they’d been in Morocco, where Will had recorded some of the native music and smoked an immense quantity of hashish.

Cordell was drinking scotch, I would guess, when he called a month later to inform me “just for the record” that Will had disgraced the family and was henceforth no son of his. He did not refer to my part in this
travesty
, or ask about my knowledge, and I certainly didn’t volunteer any information. But as I listened I couldn’t help feeling chastised. “His mother is absolutely devastated,” he said; apparently, if I could take his word on the subject of his wife’s feelings, horror over Will’s marriage apparently was one of the few things they’d been able to agree upon in years. “Bad enough Elbridge getting kicked out of Sewanee for damn marijuana and liable to get drafted any minute. Get himself killed in Viet-fuckingnam unless I can pull strings to keep him stateside. Then …
this.
And Will actually has the balls to stay on in Memphis. He’s bought a big piece of land in Germantown, not ten miles from where I sit—planning on building some goddamn eyesore is what I hear.”

He paused to take a drink. “Tell me this, Patrick. Would you say he did this thing specifically to mortify his mother and father. Was that the primary motive here?”

Not the primary motive perhaps, though surely not irrelevant. “I think … think he’s in love.” I knew this would not be a popular answer.

“Don’t give me that shit, Patrick. You’re pissing me off now. Would that be your intention, here?”

I couldn’t imagine anyone but Will who would go out of his way to piss Cordell Savage off.

“Does he think the two of them can just walk around the streets holding hands? That the decent people he was raised among are going to stand for this?”

“I really don’t know, sir.”

“Because they’re not.”

I didn’t ask what, precisely, the decent people of Memphis were going to do. I listened patiently, and conceded that it was a difficult and even a foolish course that Will had chosen, and then I resumed my safe and cloistered pursuit of Light and Truth.

Matson came to New Haven to visit that spring. Bearing a bottle of single-malt scotch, he arrived on a Friday night shortly after Aaron had decamped for Smith. After a white-clam pizza downtown, we sat in the living room which Aaron and I had turned into a gallery of posters and lithographs: Picasso, Giacometti, Braque, Buffet, Huey Newton on his rattan chair throne and Raquel Welch in a revealing bearskin wrap from the movie
One Million Years
B.C.

In his three-piece tweed suit Matson looked smaller and more artificial than I remembered, and I had forgotten the way he wet his lips with his tongue between sentences, a tic that seemed to have become more pronounced in the year since I’d seen him. Though flattered by his visit and eager to show him the campus, I also felt a new sense of equality. We stayed up half the night drinking the single malt and discussing poetry, gradually increasing the volume of the
Brandenburg Concertos
and the “Moonlight Sonata” as I became increasingly brilliant and vocal, grateful for the opportunity to show myself off. Here was someone who could appreciate my learning and discrimination.

“I see your taste in music has improved since you’ve been away from Will Savage.” Matson relit his pipe. “His embrace of popular culture and black music was obviously some kind of Oedipal reflex—a blatant attempt to thumb his nose at his family background.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t genuinely felt,” I said, the whiskey making me feisty.

“Oh, I don’t necessarily deny it’s genuinely felt—the great problem
with pop culture is that it’s
only
about
feelings.
Civilization is constructed on the premise of subjugating the emotions, is it not?”

“I guess Will would say we’ve become too civilized.”

Matson laughed. “You can’t be
too
civilized. Which is not to say I’m in favor of repression. There’s a public, civil self and then there is the private realm, and the twain need never meet. That’s where Will and his fellow primitivists go so wrong, trying to collapse the distinction. Here, for instance, in this room, we happily occupy the private sphere.” And with that he poured us another drink.

Aaron spent most of his free time with Cameron, the blonde princess of Smith College, until she broke up with him just before midterms. Having felt left behind, I experienced a brief surreptitious thrill when he told me she had refused to come down from her room that Friday when he arrived at her dorm at Smith. When he finally reached her on the phone, she said, without explanation or apology, that she didn’t want to see him anymore.