Authors: Louis Begley
That’s Lebanese stuff. According to my father, Saudis are wimps.
Some wimps! That must be when they aren’t lapidating adulterers or cutting off the hands and feet of pickpockets! I have been told by a friend who lived there—I think in Jidda—that on Fridays adulterers are sewed in burlap bags up to the neck and then released in a public place. They waddle around like ducks. The authorities prepare neat piles of fist-sized rocks for the occasion, from which the faithful help themselves and start stoning!
He stared at me. I think that stopped a while ago.
Perhaps, but they were still at it in the sixties, I insisted. My friend, a very precise person, said he would first go to the barber to get a shave and then watch the executions. Saudis also like floggings. Then there is their fixation on hawking.
Training hawks is a very cruel process. The eyelids of young birds are stitched closed, to make them blind, and therefore dependent on their owner. Then, when the bird’s dependency is judged sufficient, they cut the stitches open and real instruction begins.
Toby covered his eyes with his hands and turned away from me.
Stop, he said. I don’t want to think of these things. I guess the old man was joking or was wrong.
More likely he was only thinking of Saudis he meets in the casino!
Toby didn’t reply. From the other room, Charlie was calling us to the table. I brought myself to ask the question I had been avoiding.
How do you really feel?
He smiled. Pretty bad—or good. Depends on the day, and what you compare it with. But I’ll be all right.
I was seated next to Edwina Howe, whose rank if not age had given her the place of honor next to Charlie. On my own right was Toby. This was something of a surprise. I had, in fact, completely forgiven Toby such injury as there was to forgive, but how were he and Charlie to know it? It was tempting to conclude that their natures were trusting, in a way that mine was not. On the other hand, it was equally possible that they had not thought about my feelings, or were indifferent to them.
Edwina wore one of her habitual embroidered silk sheaths—associated in my mind with old photographs of Madame Chiang Kai-shek—that would have been a challenge to a woman half her years, but in fact revealed a shape
at once trim and feminine. At seventy or more, Edwina had a bosom that was, as she might have said,
sortable!
Over beautifully stretched skin, she was made up as though to appear on stage; necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings of striking colors and great complexity were displayed from her neck plunging into her décolletage, on her wrists and fingers, and from her ears. “Howe paste” was Edwina’s name for her jewelry, as if to forestall any question about the provenance and nature of these cunning garnitures and, incidentally, to underline her disarming simplicity. The merest hint of an emerald tiara perched in her thinning but still quite red and well-organized hair. I wondered whether she entrusted the curling of this endangered part of her charms to a Lenox operator or had found Charlie’s birthday worth a rapid trip to New York.
Toby had turned his back on me to talk to a journalist. Edwina was in conversation with Charlie. Across the table, voices were raised in a debate about Pete Rose’s exclusion from baseball. Bart Giamatti had died the previous day, only one week after that decision was made. Was there a causal link between the two events? Had the heart attack been brought on by the stress the controversy had generated, or was it retribution for what Giamatti had done to Rose? The latter suggestion was shouted down: there had been no vendetta, the suggestion one might be “punished” by an illness was barbaric. Someone interjected: How about cholesterol and cigarettes? The publishing magnate wanted my opinion on whether Rose had had the benefit of due process. I answered, truthfully, that as I didn’t follow the game I had paid little attention to the proceedings. My answer was received
with the scorn I had anticipated. I raised the ante: the only aspect of the Giamatti affair that had interested me was his decision, after he had resigned as president of Yale, to enter professional baseball.
Go back to the rule against perpetuities, you wet macaroon, boomed Charlie. That was the whole point of his departure. He wanted to run baseball!
Doubtless, I would have been remitted to my black hole if Charlie, now aroused about baseball, had not abruptly abandoned Edwina. We had not seen each other since my divorce. Without missing a beat she spoke to me.
We are so sorry about Camilla. It was lovely, especially for Ricky, to have her as a neighbor, and so unexpected!
I acquiesced.
You too, of course! Although we haven’t seen you nearly enough. Lawyers work too hard, even during their holidays. Dean always did. I am certain Foster did too, when he was in practice. But they always found time to be charming to everybody! Don’t you agree?
If you mean Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, I can’t tell. I didn’t know them.
What a pity! You would have liked them so much. Dean, especially, was always kind to young people. Such a tragedy!
You mean that Dulles turned out to be Acheson’s successor?
Young people today; that poor Toby.
She had not lowered her voice. Reflexively, I looked over my shoulder.
She reproved me: People never hear what’s said about them except if one whispers. You mustn’t allow yourself to
be too busy to help out here. Charlie’s patience won’t last. I have known him for such a long time.
So have I.
There, then you understand. His kindness is skin-deep. We leave in two weeks, unfortunately.
Really.
She reviewed their travel plans for me. The inference to be drawn was that, if a large number of important people were not at risk of being seriously inconvenienced by a change in the program, she and Ricky might have stayed to succor Toby themselves.
Soon after I met them, Camilla had explained to me the Howes’ modus operandi. It had its roots in the high rate of English income tax, which led Ricky to choose Bermuda for his residence; Billington was out of the question, as it would have subjected Ricky’s personal fortune to American tax. The advent of Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher had changed the arithmetic, but not the noble couple’s habits. No longer accustomed to living under their own roof, except in the Berkshires, they had become highly adapted nomads—regular guests in the houses of the more sedentary rich—with patterns of migration as regular as those of certain birds Rick studied. In late September, they could be spotted at the house of an Oriental prince in Paris, subsequently, toward Christmas, on a commodity store magnate’s estate in Florida, then on a Central American island refuge of a family that owned the adjoining country, et cetera. This was an ecosystem of great delicacy. I sympathized with Edwina’s unwillingness to disturb it.
I will leave our addresses and telephone numbers, she promised. It would be dreadful to be without news.
The effect of Charlie’s habit of eating slowly, his imperturbable disregard of the empty plates of guests who had already been served twice, and the incompetence of the servers he had imported from Pittsfield was cumulative. We drank a heavy Italian red. Neither Charlie nor Ricky, who presided at the other end, paid attention to the general flow of the conversation. My attempt to attract Toby’s attention failed. I realized that unless I rose to make a toast I was in Edwina’s thrall for the rest of the evening—Charlie did not like leaving the table for coffee. It was my intention to make a toast, but I doubted that I had the right to go first. There were other people present whose initiative Charlie would find more flattering.
Meanwhile, Edwina returned to the subject of Camilla.
You do know that she is about to marry Roland?
No. Really?
Except for his age it does seem rather natural. They have always been so close. She has a good job and a little money of her own, and that will be a big help. Just as well the two of you didn’t have any children. Is it because you can’t?
I don’t know. I am not sure that I ever had an opportunity to find out.
Ricky can’t. So many men seem to be like that, but it’s women who get the blame!
The news about Camilla and Roland hurt, although, of course, it didn’t matter whether she married him or another. I was about to make my toast, after all, without having
thought out what I would say, when Toby turned to me and whispered, Please help me get upstairs. I am not well.
A sort of bashfulness reinforced by its opposite, suppressed unhealthy curiosity, had previously confined me to the ground floor of Charlie’s house. I had seen his bedroom only once, when he invited me to view the recently inherited Sargent portrait of a great-aunt he had installed there. On that occasion, I had also noted and admired his sculpted, blond art nouveau suite of furniture, particularly the bed, which recalled a giant seashell over which peeked smirking mermaids. It was large enough for two. Did Toby share it? Did he and Charlie lounge on the panther skins thrown over that aquatic couch? Leaning against me as I supported him with both arms, whimpering very softly, Toby said, No, not here, when I instinctively turned at the top of the stairs in the direction of Charlie’s room. It’s on the other side, at the end of the corridor.
This room was huge too, directly over the back flower garden. Unless this Victorian house had been built with two master bedrooms, they had surely added to Toby’s room an adjoining guest room. I deposited Toby in an armchair and asked what the matter was, what I should do to help.
It’s my eyes. Like black spots before me. I’m scared.
Are you fainting? Do you want a cold compress?
No, I’m so scared. I think I’m going blind.
I helped him climb on the bed and put pillows behind his back. All the while, he kept on making his little crying noises. I said I would leave him for just a moment, to get Charlie.
Don’t, not now. Maybe you should. Turn on the television. I want to be able to look.
A baseball diamond filled the screen.
Is that better?
I can see. It’s just these whirs that don’t stop.
I stood at the dining room door. Dick Moses was working his way through a sort of catalogue raisonné of Charlie’s buildings, publications, and medals. Just as I thought the end had been reached, he meandered back to their days together at the School of Design. There had been a joint project for a library, which a now-forgotten chairman of the jury had had the temerity to criticize before the class as “weakly derivative.” Like all your work! was Charlie’s loud rejoinder. During Moses’s description of the ensuing pandemonium, and the clinking of glasses around the dinner table, I made my way to Charlie and said, loud enough to be heard by Edwina and the press magnate, Come upstairs for a moment, there’s a call for you from Tokyo. It’s some incomprehensible man whose name I didn’t catch. Perhaps he wants to wish you happy birthday. Toby answered and is trying to keep him on the line.
At the foot of the stairs, I told him what had happened, and returned to my place next to Edwina. My glass was empty. Feigning distraction, I drank Edwina’s, although Toby’s was full as well.
How extraordinary that you boys heard the telephone ring! I was so engrossed by our conversation, my dear Max. You really must come to lunch just with Ricky and me. One is always interrupted at large parties.
It’s Toby’s own line. I guess he is used to listening for it.
That dear child! He stayed upstairs to share in Charlie’s joy!
Minutes passed. Majestic and grim, Charlie entered the room. His voice filled it.
Your carriages are waiting. What I must do upstairs will keep me for a while. And he raised his arms, palms open, as though to bless the congregation.
I did not follow the others. Pretending to look for a book in the living room—although in fact I was sure that no one paid attention to me—I waited until the last guest was out the door and then went back upstairs to Toby’s room. Just as I had left him, immobile, he was staring at a commercial for small Ford trucks. Perhaps the game had ended. Only now he was weeping, his face was wet with tears, and he was doing nothing to dry them. Unintelligible, Charlie could be heard over the jingle from somewhere down the hall. He slammed down the receiver and came into the room.
Aha, you’re still here. Little Miss Discretion. No, forgive me. It’s just as well you lied. They’re mostly like me: cold, insincere people, barely polite enough to hide it. Get Toby into other clothes, something warm, while I also change. We will start for New York. The doctor wants to put him on some drug.
Will you call me?
He did, a few days later, after I had returned to Cambridge and my teaching. It was a neurological problem, he told me, more frightening than serious. Toby was already back at Pratt. He, Charlie, was going to Europe, Düsseldorf principally, to keep promises he had made when the city engaged
him to build the new lyric arts theater. Was I planning to be away? No? That’s what he had thought, so he counted on me to look a bit after Toby. Wasn’t it strange how the world revolved? Even in Beijing he had felt there was a link between the boy and me, a dependency of a younger brother on his elder. Very beautiful, really. I might want to come to New York on some weekends. Otherwise, his driver was available; he would bring Toby to me—Billington or Cambridge, it didn’t matter. That would tide Toby over until he felt confident enough of his vision to drive a car.
And when will you return?
Certainly by Thanksgiving. I can always fly back for a few days if there is a problem.
T
HAT OLD WITCH
, Edwina, had been at least half-right, though I refrained from writing to her about my new duties or any other aspect of the situation. She had a network of other informants, I imagined, busy on the telephone from messy lukewarm beds after the tisane, toast, and stock tables. We settled into a routine, the boy and I. After the hospital, where they stopped the black spots, he did not go back to his apartment. A friend, possibly a fellow student, moved in—to water plants, clean the aquarium, and discourage burglars from entering through the skylight. Toby had refused to have bars placed over it, claiming they would make him feel he was imprisoned in a small Max Ernst. He lived instead at Charlie’s. When I came to see him on weekends, in the city, I declined the use of the vaunted guest quarters of the River House apartment and stayed instead at the Peninsula—convenient, pompously refurbished, and half-empty,
having in common with the sparkling white establishment in Kowloon only the name and occasional clumps of Hong Kong Chinese guests, done up in suede, waiting for their stretch limos to pull up—and, as he was still rather shaken and tired easily, first thing in the morning I would walk eastward to the river, the half mile I covered giving me the impression that I was managing to combine attention to my own health with watching over Toby’s. We sat together in the study. Either he managed to get his schoolwork done during the week, or his interest in it was waning. Huddled in the corner of the couch, an alpaca plaid over his shoulders, the TV volume turned down, so as to let me get on with my reading and occasional note taking, he absorbed what the pundits were saying of that month’s clownish and premonitory events. Then during lunch he would comment on Cardinal Glemp, like some transvestite Joan of Arc, emerging as the champion of the nuns of Auschwitz, the navy’s glee at having found the perfect scapegoat—a “loner” (therefore gay, not one of us) and already dead—to blame for the humiliation of the
Iowa
, and Ed Koch and the Evil Empire unraveling in unison. These were companionable meals, served by Charlie’s houseman. I made a point of disregarding the pills he set out for Toby. The intrusive memories of how my father ate, awakened somehow by the diet additives Toby was consuming, were harder to keep at bay.