Echo House (24 page)

Leila was put out, because Alec had promised to come to her dinner, a fund-raiser in a private room in a restaurant downtown. She and her partner were raising money to establish their own research institute. They were selling ideas and trying to estimate the market. Leila wanted Alec on hand because she was nervous and he was a calming influence, never obtrusive or insistent but always reliable and shrewd about money; he knew Washington so well, and he was Axel Behl's son. She thought it would be good for him, too, meeting fat cats as opposed to the usual alley cats. It would help me if you were around, she said, and naturally he agreed because he loved her and wanted her to succeed in Washington. They had been apart now for a year and he could sense that she was moving into a new phase of her life, one with much opportunity but some danger also. Moreover, he enjoyed her fat cats.

Alec explained that Sylvia had not visited Echo House in many years and that her arrival now meant she was in a crisis of some kind and needed him. But what about me? Leila said. I have the most important dinner of my life and I want you there and you want to be with your loony mother instead. What did she ever do for you? Leila demanded and threw a pillow at the wall. Alec promised to cut off the meal with Sylvia as quickly as he decently could and go directly to Leila's dinner. I'll be there before ten, Alec said, but Leila wasn't buying. I won't forget this, she said, a threat that sounded like a prophecy.

He moved forward with the tea tray, hearing the floor creak, and watching Sylvia stiffen.

"Tea's on," he said.

"You startled me." Then, "This room gives me the creeps."

"Is it the Goya?" Alec asked, knowing it was not the Goya.

She looked at him sideways. "The Goya's all right; it's an ordinary appalling Goya. But years ago there used to be a picture of a
jeune fille,
a pretty little peasant in a beret. Where's she?"

"His bedroom," Alec said.

"How adorable," Sylvia said, but she was smiling as she said it. She wondered what story Axel told the occasional visitor to that bedroom, or if on such an occasion he turned the picture to the wall. "I heard the most fantastic story the other day, Axel arriving at a benefit with that Italian actress on his arm. Lovey-dovey was the way they were described, though surely the age difference was conspicuous." Alec was looking at her with a half-smile and she knew she would get nothing from him, even if there was anything to get. The Chinese boxes of Axel's life were closed, and admittance to one did not mean admittance to the others. Months would pass without a sighting of any kind; then his name would show up as one of those present at a White House ceremony or international conference or benefit for some obscure cause, always worthy and neglected. Her stepmother had seen him and the Italian actress—she had a nickname. Belladonna or some such—at a benefit for refugees of the Spanish Civil War. They were holding hands, according to Grace, who described the actress as
really cute,
nuzzling Axel. Axel laughing, Axel nuzzling back, Axel feeling like a boy again.

"Let's have the tea," Alec said.

They sat in the garden room; Alec poured. They talked for a moment of this and that, Sylvia trying mightily to work the conversation back to Axel; and when that failed, she inquired about Alec's work at Fisher, Gwilt, and what it was precisely that he
did
and for
whom,
Alec stubbornly leading her back into her own life. When he asked if she had discovered what was nagging at her, she said she hadn't and hadn't expected to, really. It was a long shot, like a hunch bet at the racetrack, but you never knew when you'd come up winners. It was strange that Echo House was at the center of her thoughts, asleep and awake, and some part of it present in all the poems she had written lately, the dense Cold War poems that were so disturbing and autobiographical. No muse ever lived at Echo House, she said. Echo House was a climate. You wrote into the climate whether you wanted to or not, yet it was important to understand that beyond the storms, the thunder and electricity, lay a vast and pregnant silence, and it was the silence that beckoned. You had to discover a way to give voice to the silence between explosions. This subconscious was her true subject, but so far she was groping in heavy weather, unable to achieve the radiance she desired. She listened for the poem's heartbeat. She was listening hard for the silence that eluded her. She had always possessed a third ear that came alive at moments of high emotion, and she thought that Echo House would inspire her. If it represented the grammar of Cold War, it seemed also to represent the marriage that had failed in the city she despised, and no doubt there was a direct link between them. Or conceivably they were the same thing.

"But there it is in my dreams," she said, reaching for the sugar, selecting two lumps, and slipping them into her teacup, stirring idly. "So what do you think, darling? You're a lawyer, trained in observation. You're supposed to have ideas about these things and be able to explain them, or at least weigh the equities. Assess what lies beneath. When I'm in Echo House in my dreams I feel as if I'm about to fall from a great height."

Alec was tempted to reply, "Repressed infantile longings," but did not. Sylvia's sense of irony seldom extended to herself. He thought it likely that her dream Echo House was a surrogate for the house she had grown up in, a Gramercy Park fortress no less opulent, no less forbidding, and no less populated by ghosts. Her father was a sportsman as obsessed with horse racing as Axel was with statecraft. He was quick to leave her mother for a showgirl—"chorine" the word was then—and move to Saratoga and never look back. He lived there still with his showgirl, splendidly fit in his seventies, appearing younger than his wife, whose china doll beauty did not survive the hot summers and brutal winters and extended cocktail hours in all seasons. Sylvia had written poems about him and her, too, witty poems, if you could overlook the condescension.

Grace's daily double
curned you inside out
Old War Admiral
Winning by a neck

Every Christmas Alec received a tie from Charvet and a check drawn on a bank he never heard of. What kept the old man from being a cliché—another rich dimwit taking the usual revenge—was his conversion, late in life, to liberal politics. He hated Republicans with the passion of a Tammany Hall boss. Sylvia maintained that it wasn't really Republican politics he hated but his Saratoga neighbors, who snubbed him in the paddock and refused to attend his Sunday lunches or include him and the showgirl at theirs. And so in 1952 and again in 1956 he gave conspicuously large sums to Adlai Stevenson and was among the sponsors of causes ranging from Israel to the NAACP and the closed union shop. David Dubinsky was one of his favorites, and any advertisement placed by the ILGWU was certain to have among its signees Harry and Grace Walren, Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1960 he had a crisis of conscience because Joseph P. Kennedy had failed to recognize him at a party, a lapse he interpreted as a cold shoulder—Curly patronizing Moe, he called it—and sent a large check to the American Labor Party.

Alec said, "Pay attention to the details. Write them down."

"I don't have to write them down. I remember them. André Przyborski showed up in one last week. And Lloyd Fisher. I'm in my house. The lights are turned up full and there's traffic in the street. It's nighttime. Axel's away and so are you. Lloyd and André are in the study talking about some operation. I can't hear them but I know that it has to do with the next war. Because Lloyd is there, I think you're involved in some way. Are you involved with André Przyborski?"

"Lloyd knows him," Alec said.

"They all had lunch here, every Wednesday. All the spooks. And I suppose they still do."

Alec said nothing to that.

"Of course Lloyd left: Washington about the time your father bought that bank."

Alec said nothing to that, either.

She looked at him and shrugged, an apology of sorts. "You know how it is with poets. No regular hours, so much mischief."

"Sometimes a headshrinker can help with dreams."

"I prefer clairvoyants. I knew one once here and she was a tremendous help. She saw to the heart of things, though she was better on the past than the future. I have no use for headshrinkers. You start letting people tinker with your memories, you're through as a writer." She lit a cigarette and leaned close to him, the prelude to a confidence. "It's true about my friend they've got in the bin in Hartford now. They've ruined her memory. They've given her shock and God knows what else. You know who I'm talking about."

Alec opened his mouth to say something, then didn't. He had no idea who was in the Hartford Retreat.

"She's a dear friend and a fine writer."

Alec carefully held his face in neutral.

"I hear she's a mess and all I want to know is, how much of a mess. And can I help out. But they won't let me in to see her."

He looked at her a long moment and inquired, "Why are you here really?"

"Willy and I are quits," she said in a clear voice, her head high.

She thought she would have a drink, if he didn't mind. There wasn't much story to tell but what story there was went down easier with a drink. Alec served her and they sat quietly a moment, looking into the damp darkness. Lights from the garden room cast long shadows on the croquet court. She noticed that and smiled crookedly, saying that she was surprised it was still there, intact and unspoiled. Axel always hated croquet.

"I'm not saying it was the greatest marriage in the world, because it wasn't," she said after a pause, still looking out the window at the wickets and the stakes. "But we had good times together and loved each other and got along pretty well most of the time, which is more than I can say of the marriages of ninety percent of my friends, although maybe I have the wrong friends. But Willy's gone."

"I'm sorry," Alec said. "I'm very sorry."

"I haven't begun to miss him yet, but I will. We were used to each other."

Alec nodded, uncomfortable listening to this news in the room where they had often gathered as a family in the years just after the war, Sylvia in the wing chair next to the window and his father facing her, the air redolent of flowers. On Saturday afternoons they listened to the opera. But now Willy Borowy was in the room, too.

"I can't imagine New York without Willy. You liked him, didn't you?"

"Very much," Alec said.

"He likes you," she said. "He always liked it when you came to visit."

"I had no idea," Alec said.

"Oh, he did," Sylvia protested. "You were one of his favorites."

"No," Alec said. "I meant that things weren't all right between you. I had no idea there was trouble."

"Willy was naughty." she said. She stared at her drink and again at the croquet court. She was holding the drink with both hands, and when she lifted it her rings clicked hollowly against the glass. "The croquet court looks so forlorn."

Alec looked out the window and nodded.

"Does he actually use it?"

"I can't remember the last time," Alec said.

"We were together fifteen years; it's hard to believe."

"Fifteen years both times," Alec said.

"Willy forced my hand," she said. "He left me no choice."

Alec looked up as if he understood; she was leaving so much unsaid and that was unlike her. He was grateful for her tact, having no wish to hear the details of Willy's transgressions, whatever they were. He had not seen Willy in months and the last time was at a restaurant in New York. He had seemed preoccupied then, almost morose, without his usual supply of jokes. He and Sylvia had a complicated argument over where they would spend August. She wanted to rent a house on Long Island and he wanted Nantucket. She insisted that first they visit her father and Grace at Saratoga, a plan Willy vetoed. The only thing worse than horse players were trust-fund liberals and with Harry and Grace you got both at once. He was tired of being lectured to about the many virtues of the plucky little state of Israel and the organizational genius of David Dubinsky, with the usual side references to the vigor and tenacity of "the Mediterranean races," by which Harry seemed to mean the Jews, forgetting that Willy's family had flourished in New York since the eighteenth century, having emigrated from Holland on a family-owned vessel; and if there was any tenacity and vigor in the Borowy clan, it had escaped Willy's notice. They were hanging on by their fingernails. It was a burden, being rich for three centuries, and now the family was as desiccated as Harry's, though for the opposite reason. Borowy
père
believed there had been too much intermarriage in his family, while in Harry's there had been none at all, until Willy. But at least the Borowys didn't talk sentimental claptrap about Israel, or the ILGWU either. The Borowys were traders and indifferent to national boundaries. National pride was a calamity, even in the Mediterranean. Besides, Willy said, in Saratoga they drank all the time, beginning in the morning with bloody marys and by evening they were talking claptrap. Your problem is, you never win at the track, Sylvia said; you pick by hunch and it never works out. That's only the most obvious problem, Willy said. He could be very droll. Sylvia settled the argument by saying she would go by herself to Saratoga, spend a week at Yaddo and three days with her father and Grace, and then meet Willy at Nantucket if the fog lifted long enough for the airplane to land.

"This is between us," Sylvia said with a sharp look at her son. "I don't want Axel to know. I won't have it."

"He usually—finds things out."

"I know that," she said. "The news will find its way to Palm Beach. Bad news travels with the speed of light to Palm Beach. But not for a while yet. Axel—" She went on to complain about Axel, a sponge where gossip was concerned, no item too small to escape his attention or merit his comment. Alec listened with a show of polite interest to this speech he had heard many times.

"Willy has no pride," she said suddenly.

Alec looked at her, startled.