Harvard Yard (58 page)

After all, Professor Baker urged his students to absorb experience wherever they could, because experience was the raw material from which the playwright fashioned his drama. If his play about the Civil War was going to electrify New York, or get an A from Professor Baker, Victor should take the opportunity to talk to a footsoldier’s widow.

So, on a beautiful Sunday in May, he donned a seersucker suit and straw boater, went to Boston and borrowed his grandfather’s motorcar, then drove over to East Cambridge, the neighborhood that had grown up around the New England Glass Company in the 1840s. Smoke from local factories still stained the sky, and the rumbling of trains in the freight yards could be heard night and day, and the men went off to work with lunch pails in their hands and came home with dirt under their nails.

Victor could not imagine that anyone around here would ever have seen a 1910 Stevens-Duryea six-cylinder touring car parked at the curb. So he gave a boy five cents to watch over it. Then he took the bouquet of flowers he’d bought, went up the stoop of the two-family house, and knocked on the door.

As it opened, he believed that he was looking at the face of an angel.

“Yes?” Her auburn hair fell to her shoulders, her eyes had an ethereal greenish hue, and while she seemed suspicious at the sight of a stranger bearing flowers from a car worth more than any house on the block, there was curiosity beneath her suspicion and beneath that, a layer of warmth so beguiling that Victor thrust the flowers into her hand.

“I’m a friend of your brother’s,” he said. “Jimmy told me how beautiful you were, but I didn’t believe it until now.”

Emily Callahan laughed and told him that her brother was playing baseball and their parents were at the game. Then she invited him into the parlor.

The house smelled of onions and herbs and braised lamb, because someone was cooking a stew. Antimacassars covered stains on the furniture and well-placed tables covered holes in the rug. There was an upright piano in the corner and—Victor almost laughed—lace curtains on the windows.

As he took a seat, Emily’s grandmother, Alice Callahan, came in from the kitchen. She was a heavy old woman wearing a gingham bib apron over her Sunday dress, a gold locket around her neck, and slippers with the insteps cut out so that there would be room for her bunions.

She seemed suspicious, too. What did a Wedge want with her? She had left their service nine months after her husband’s death, when her only child was born.

Victor explained that he wanted to meet the woman whose husband had saved Heywood Wedge. “I’ve come just to say thank you.”

And the old woman’s suspicions melted.

In the next hour, Victor heard Alice Callahan’s tale of Dan, son of a Harvard goody, who courted her on long walks through the Yard and marched off to war because he believed it was the right thing to do. When he came home, he proposed to her. But instead of a ring, which he couldn’t afford, he gave her a gold locket with his picture in it.

“It’s inscribed,” she said, holding it up under her chin. “‘From D. to A.’—Dan to Alice—‘With All My Love, May God Keep You.’ And never’s the time I’ve took it off.”

Looking at the oval photograph of the man in his soldier’s forage cap, he told her that her husband was as handsome as her story was beautiful, and her smile told him that his charm could work even on an old Irish woman with bunions.

And she kept talking . . . of the Great Fire, the birth of her son, and her return to Fay House in Cambridge. “Once the Fays gave the house over to the woman’s college, I took over the food service. Served meals there for twenty-five years. And now, I have a Harvard grandson. My Dan would be so proud.”

Emily asked Victor, “Do you know any young ladies at the Radcliffe College?”

“I know several, yes,” he said.

“Are they smart?”

“Many, yes.”

“And pretty?”

“Some, though few are as pretty as yourself.” By the time he said that, he had forgotten the reason he was there—to surprise the Callahan ladies. Instead, he surprised himself by inviting them for a ride. He was thrilled that Emily accepted, only slightly disappointed when her grandmother said, “I’ll get my hat.”

And what a hat. It rose a foot above her head and tied under her chin, about ten years out of date, but as Alice Callahan perched in the backseat of the touring car, with her purse held securely against her chest, she looked as regal as Queen Victoria.

It pleased Victor that Emily sat in the front seat and engaged him in small talk all the way across the new Longfellow Bridge, over Beacon Hill, and around the Public Garden. Later that night, he could not remember anything that they talked about, but he could not forget his pleasure in her presence, even when he drove by the Somerset Club just as Bram Haddon, coming out with his family, called Victor’s name.

“My sister?” whispered Jimmy Callahan as he passed Victor in Sever Hall the next morning.

“Your sister? What about her?” Victor had gotten control of his infatuation. A pretty Irish face was still Irish. He had been telling himself that since he woke up.

“You brought my sister flowers?”

“Actually, I was bringing them for your grandmother, who turned out to be a wonderful resource for my new play.” Victor spoke loudly enough that anyone who was listening, including Bram Haddon, would understand.

Jimmy leaned closer and whispered, “My sister said you were very nice to her. That’s good. But don’t be too nice. That would be bad . . . for both of you.”

And for the rest of the week, Victor Wedge tried not to think of Emily Callahan. He was too busy finishing his play. And there was a tea on Friday afternoon at Fay House, where he sat with Barbara Abbott.

Barbara had a more subtle beauty than Emily. Her hair was a plain brown, her eyes a trifle too close, her nose a bit too long, but when she swept her hair up from her face, the severity of the nose gave her the classical look of a Greek bust in a Boston museum. Simpler beauty faded, thought Victor, and Irish girls grew bunions on their feet. And if he could not remember his conversation with Emily in the car, perhaps it was not worth remembering. Barbara and he, on the other hand, had taken many of the same classes and came from the same class, so there were ideas to discuss, and when they ran out of ideas, there were all those people to gossip over. Besides, Barbara’s father had been a classmate of Victor’s father and another Porcellian.

So . . . the daughter of a Porcellian or the daughter of a man who ran an engine on the Boston & Maine? What could Victor have been thinking?

Victor’s mother had remarried and lived in New York City, so Victor always said he claimed dual citizenship in the Athens and the Sparta of America. Whenever he wanted the pleasures of family without a train ride to New York, he took the trolley to Boston and walked up Beacon Hill to his grandparents’ home.

If it was a Sunday morning, Victor would sit at his grandfather’s dining-room table, under the gaze of Reverend Abraham and Aunt Lydia, who themselves were sitting at some English dining-room table 130 years before, and he would read the newspapers with his grandparents.

“Did you see this, Grandfather?” Victor looked up from the obituary page. “Samuel Bunting has died.”

Heywood made a little snorting sound that ruffled the long white mustache drooping down around his mouth.

“There’s to be a memorial service at Trinity. Should we go?”

Heywood glanced at his grandson. “I think not.”

“But wasn’t he a close friend of the family?”

“He was a close friend of Uncle Theodore,” said Heywood. “Too close, actually.”

Victor glanced at Grandmother Amelia, who was serenely tapping her teaspoon around the top of a soft-boiled egg.

Without looking up, she said, “Heywood, perhaps you should explain yourself.”

After a moment, this was muttered from behind Heywood’s newspaper: “They had an . . . unusual attraction.”

“A bit more, dear,” said Amelia.

Heywood lowered the paper and looked over his spectacles at Victor. “Have you ever heard the expression, ‘the love that dare not speak its name’?”

“You mean, the . . . h.s. sort of love?” asked Victor.

“A polite obfuscation,” said Heywood. “Theodore and Mr. Bunting were poofs.”

“Poofs?” Victor thought a bit, then said, “Do you think they could help it?”

“Of course they could help it,” said Heywood, turning back to his paper, then lowering it again. “I hope you’re not sympathetic to such . . . feelings.”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Victor.

Amelia lifted the top off her egg.

Heywood spent another few seconds behind his paper, then he looked hard at his grandson. “Speaking of unusual attractions, Dickey Drake says that Bram Haddon saw you squiring my old footman’s wife around Boston, in my Stevens-Duryea, no less.”

“I gave Alice Callahan a ride, sir, though it was her granddaughter who—”

“A woman who spent time in my service does not ride in the backseat of my car.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Appearances matter. The help is the help and doesn’t ride in the backseat.”

iii

Grandfather was right as always, thought Victor. The help was the help.

Besides, summer would take Victor to Bar Harbor and his stepfather’s palatial cottage. Eight weeks of boat handling in the pellucid waters of Maine might clear his head of his fantasies about an Irish girl and his disappointment about a grade of C on his play, which was returned with a note from Professor Baker suggesting that he may have reached his limits as a playwright.

Barbara was headed to an art school in France, where she hoped to learn to “capture light with daubs of color, like those marvelous Impressionists.”

As far as Victor knew, Jimmy Callahan was working as a stoker on the Boston & Maine, and Emily was working at the fragrance counter at Jordan Marsh.

Many letters passed between Victor and Barbara that summer. And in August, Victor sent a picture postcard of Mount Desert Isle to the Callahan family.

But the help was the help.

Victor reminded himself when he addressed the postcard to the family, rather than to Miss Emily Callahan. He was reminded again in September, in Memorial Hall, when he glimpsed Jimmy Callahan changing into his white coat.

By then, “the help” had a new meaning for Victor—an English housemaid who worked for his stepfather. During the first week in Bar Harbor, she had paid particular attention to the handsome young stepson. In the second week, as she straightened his room one morning, she mentioned that she didn’t wear bloomers in the summer. It did not take Victor another week to discover that she was willing to bend over the washstand and raise her skirts, as long as he left a gratuity on the dresser when he was done.

For all his bragging over his success with East Cambridge girls, the maid with the Cockney accent was Victor’s first real conquest. Of course, even if the help was the help, he knew that Emily Callahan would never have offered herself like that.

So, when he was not studying his new subject, economics, or going to football practice, or thinking about that maid, he contented himself with plotting to get a kiss from Barbara Abbott.

It happened on an October night, as he walked her home. He had scored a touchdown against Dartmouth, and many flasks had been passed, so they were both a little drunk. Halfway across the Common, she admitted to him that during the summer, she had kissed a young French artist from the village of Giverny. Without another word, he grabbed her and pulled her to him. And as if she had been waiting for his kiss, she opened her mouth against his and then . . .

She pulled away as if he had poked her with a billy club. “Victor . . . you’re . . . no, we can’t. Not until we’re married.” And she hurried across the Common to Fay House.

Married? Well, yes, he supposed. Married. It seemed likely. Someday.

Just before Christmas, Victor went to Boston to buy Barbara a bottle of Chanel scent. He went to Jordan Marsh, because Emily worked there, and the help might help him decide between Chanel No. 5 and something else.

Emily was touching a perfume bottle to her wrist and offering the scent to a woman who wrinkled her nose and went trundling off as though she had been insulted.

Victor had almost forgotten how beautiful she was. He said hello and felt a fluttering in his stomach, as if a big game were beginning.

She was cool to him at first, even pretended not to recognize him. But soon, he was taking her to lunch at Jacob Wirth’s, the kind of German saloon where Barbara Abbott would be found only if she had been kidnapped.

Emily ate delicately enough—one knockwurst to his two—but she matched him draft for draft. And the longer they sat together, the more interesting Victor found her. She didn’t simply sell perfume. She read. She quoted Irish poets. She loved Yeats.

She said she had taken to following Harvard football because she knew the fullback. This pleased him. She licked the mustard from her fingers. This made him laugh. And for the first time, as he listened to her description of her brother’s daily routine, he saw the world through someone else’s eyes. This surprised him.

“He comes home exhausted, falls into bed,” she said. “Many’s the night I find him asleep with a book on his chest. I’ve offered him a few dollars from my salary—”

“You can’t be making a great deal,” said Victor.

“I’m not, but he won’t take what I offer. He says he’s determined to be a burden to no one. So am I.” Just then, the check came and she offered to pay half.

“No. This will be my Christmas present to you,” said Victor. “As long as you promise to have lunch with me again after New Year’s.”

She smiled, as demure as Barbara Abbott.

“And wish your brother a Merry Christmas.”

The Saturday night before Christmas brought the annual Wedge party.

The guests began arriving at six o’clock. Motorcars puttered up Mount Vernon Street to deliver ladies in mink and gentlemen in silk hats. The more traditional still arrived by coach-and-four, with side lanterns glowing in the cold air, as though the nineteenth century had never ended. And if the night was snowy, sleighs would deliver fine ladies and gentlemen.