“Jesus,” Michael said as they started up an elegant flight of stairs. “How much do you suppose it costs to hire a mounted cop for a wedding reception?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “Not much, I shouldn’t think. Fifty?”
“Gotta be a lot more than fifty, honey,” he told her, “if only because you’d have to buy oats for the horse.” And she laughed and hugged his arm to show she knew he was only fooling.
A small orchestra played a medley of Cole Porter tunes in one of the three or four big, open rooms of the reception, and crouching bartenders raced under the pressure of their orders. Michael spotted his parents once in the sea of guests and was glad to find they had a sufficient number of strangers to talk to, and that their Morristown clothes looked all right, but then he lost sight of them again. A very old, wheezing man, wearing the silk rosette of some rare honor in the lapel of his custom-made suit, was trying to explain that he’d known Lucy since she was a baby – “in her pram! In her little woolly mittens and her booties!” – and another man, much younger, with a knuckle-crushing handshake, wanted to know how Michael felt about sinking-fund debentures. There were three girls who had known Lucy “at Farmington” and who rushed with squeals of happiness to embrace her, though she could scarcely wait until they were gone to tell Michael that she hated them all, and there were women of her mother’s age who dabbed at invisible tears in saying they had never seen such a lovely bride. It was while pretending to listen to the drink-fuddled talk of a man who played squash with Lucy’s father that Michael thought again of the mounted policeman at the curb. Surely it wouldn’t be possible to “hire” a cop and his horse; they could have been stationed here only through the courtesy of the police department, or of the mayor, and that suggested an element of “influence” in Lucy’s family as well as of money.
“Well, I think it all went pretty well, don’t you?” Lucy said much later that night, when they were alone in a lavish suite at the Copley Plaza. “The ceremony was nice, and I guess the party did get a little messy toward the end, but then that always happens.”
“No, I thought it was fine,” he assured her. “Still, I’m glad it’s over.”
“Oh, Jesus, yes,” she said. “So am I.”
Not until about halfway through their week’s stay in that splendid hotel, a week of paid-for luxury dispensed with casual rudeness under the stares of strangers – only then did Lucy make a shy announcement that would greatly complicate everything between them.
It happened after breakfast one morning, when the room-service waiter had trundled away their plates of melon rind and egg yolk and the heavy flakes of broken French croissants. Lucy was at the dressing table, using its mirror both to brush her hair and to watch her new husband pace the carpet behind her.
“Michael?” she said. “Do you think you could sit down for a minute, please? Because you’re sort of making me nervous? And also,” she added, putting her hairbrush down as carefully as if it might break, “also because there’s something important I have to tell you.”
As they took conversational positions, partly facing each other in two overstuffed Copley Plaza chairs, he thought at first she might be pregnant – that wouldn’t be great news, though it wouldn’t be bad news, either – or maybe that she’d been told she couldn’t have children at all; then his racing mind touched on the frightful possibility that she might have a fatal illness.
“I’ve wanted you to know about this from the beginning,” she said, “but I was afraid it might – change things, sort of.”
It seemed to him now that he scarcely knew her, this leggy, pretty girl to whom the word “wife” might never be comfortably applied, and he sat with a chill of dread from his scrotum to his throat as he watched her lips and waited for the worst.
“So now I’ll have to stop being afraid, that’s all. I’ll just tell you, and I can only hope it won’t make you feel – well, anyway. The thing is, I have something between three and four million dollars. Of my own.”
“Oh,” he said.
Remembering it later, even after many years, it would always seem to Michael that they filled their remaining days and nights in that hotel with nothing but talk. Their voices only rarely took on the tension of an argument and never once broke into quarreling, but it was a steady, dead-earnest discussion that kept circling back over the same issues time and again, and there were decidedly two points of view.
Lucy’s position was that the money had never meant anything to her; why, then, should it mean anything to him beyond an extraordinary opportunity for time and freedom in his work? They could live anywhere in the world. They could travel, if they felt like it, until they found the right setting for a full and productive life. Wasn’t that the kind of thing most writers dreamed of?
And Michael would admit he was tempted – oh, Jesus, talk about tempted – but this was his position: He was a middle-class boy and he had always assumed he would make something of himself on his own. Could he really be expected to abandon that lifelong habit of thought overnight? Living off her fortune might only bleed away his ambition, and might even rob him of the very energy he needed to work at all; that would be an unthinkable price to pay.
He hoped she wouldn’t misunderstand him: it was certainly fine to know she had all that money, if only because it meant their children would always have the security of trust funds and stuff like that. In the meantime, though, wouldn’t it be better if she kept it all strictly between herself and her bankers, or her brokers, or whoever the hell it was that looked after it?
She assured him repeatedly that his attitude was “admirable,” but he always turned away that compliment by saying it was nothing of the kind; it was only stubborn. All he wanted was to carry out the plans he had made for them long before the wedding.
They would go to New York, where he’d take the kind of job that other fledgling writers took, in some advertising agency or publishing house – hell, anybody could do that kind of work with his left hand – and they’d live on his salary like an ordinary young couple, preferably in some plain, decent apartment in the West Village. The only real difference, now that he knew of her millions of dollars, was that they would both have a secret to keep from the other ordinary young people they’d meet along the way.
“Isn’t this really the most sensible thing,” he asked her, “at least for the time being? Do you see what I’m getting at, Lucy?”
“Well,” she said, “when you say ‘for the time being’ I guess I – sure I do. Because we’ll always have the money to fall back on.”
“Okay,” he conceded, “but who said anything about falling back? Have I ever struck you as a falling-back kind of man?”
And he was instantly glad he’d come up with that line. There had been times, in all this talk, when he’d caught himself almost at the point of blurting out that to accept her money would jeopardize his “very manhood,” or even that it would “emasculate” him, but now all the queasy implications of such a weak and desperately final defense could be forgotten.
He was up and pacing again, fists in his pockets, and he went to stand for a while at the front windows, looking out over Copley Square at the sunny parade of weekday-morning pedestrians along Boylston Street and at the endlessly deep blue sky beyond the buildings. It was good flying weather.
“I just wish you’d take a little time to think it over, is all,” Lucy was saying from somewhere in the room behind him. “Couldn’t you at least keep an open mind?”
“No,” he said at last, turning to face her. “No, I’m sorry, baby, but we’re going to do this my way.”
Chapter Two
The place they found in New York was almost exactly what Michael had specified: a plain, decent apartment in the West Village. They had three rooms on the ground floor, on Perry Street near the corner of Hudson, and he could shut himself into the smallest room and hunch over the manuscript of a book of poems he wanted to finish and sell before his twenty-sixth birthday
.
Finding the right kind of work for his left hand, though, was a little more difficult. In the course of several interviews he began to suspect that a job in an advertising agency might drive him out of his mind; instead he settled for employment in the “permissions” department of a medium-sized publishing house. His duties there amounted to little more than idleness: he spent much of every office day at work on his poems, and nobody seemed to care or even to notice.
“Well, that certainly sounds like an ideal situation,” Lucy said – and it might have been, except that the paychecks he brought home were barely enough to cover the groceries and the rent. Still, there was a reasonable hope that he’d be promoted – other people in that sluggish department were sometimes “taken upstairs” to receive real salaries – and so he decided to stick it out for a year. That was the year his twenty-sixth birthday came around and found his book still far from finished, because he had thrown out many of its earlier, weaker poems; it was also the year they discovered that Lucy was pregnant.
By the time their daughter Laura was born, in the spring of 1950, he had quit fooling around in the publishing house and found a better-paying job. He was a staff writer now for a slick, fast-growing trade magazine called Chain Store Age, hammering out copy all day about “bold, revolutionary new concepts” in the business of retail merchandising. It wasn’t exactly the kind of work he could do with his left hand – these guys wanted a hell of a lot for their money – and there were times at his clattering typewriter when he would wonder what a man married to a millionairess could possibly be doing in a place like this.
He was always tired when he got home, badly in need of a couple of drinks, and there wasn’t even any hope of seclusion with his manuscript after dinner, because the room he’d once used for writing was now the nursery.
He knew, though, even if he did keep having to remind himself of it, that only a God damn fool would complain about the way things were going. Lucy had become the picture of a serene young mother – he loved the look that came over her face when she breast-fed the baby – and the baby herself, with her petal-soft skin and her round, deep blue eyes, was a constant source of wonder. Oh, Laura, he wanted to say when he slowly walked her to sleep, oh, little girl, just trust me. Trust me, and you’ll never be afraid.
It didn’t take him very long to get the hang of the work at Chain Store Age. When he was singled out for praise on several of his “stories” he began to relax – maybe it wasn’t really necessary to knock yourself out over this shit after all – and soon he made friends with another staff writer, an affable, talkative young man named Bill Brock whose disdain for the job seemed even greater than his own. Brock was an Amherst graduate who had spent a couple of years as a labor-union organizer for electrical workers – “the best, most rewarding time of my life” – and was now deep in the writing of what he called a working-class novel.
“Look, I’ll give you Dreiser and Frank Norris and those guys,” he would explain, “and I’ll even give you the early Steinbeck, but for the most part there hasn’t been a proletarian literature in America. We’re scared shitless of facing the truth, that’s what it amounts to.” And then at other moments, as if sensing something faintly absurd in his own passion for social reform, he would laugh it off with a rueful little shake of the head and say he guessed he’d been born twenty years too late.
When Michael asked him over for dinner one night he said, “Sure; love to. Be okay if I bring my girl?”
“Well, of course.”
Then when he saw Michael writing down the Perry Street address he said, “I’ll be damned; we’re practically neighbors. We’re only a couple hundred yards from you, over on the other side of Abingdon Square. Good, then; we’ll look forward to it.”
And from the moment Bill Brock brought his girl into the Davenports’ apartment – “This is Diana Maitland” – Michael began to be afraid he would find himself secretly, achingly in love with her forever. She was slender and black-haired, with a sad young face that suggested a fine mobility of expression, and she carried herself a little like a fashion model – or rather with the kind of heedless, lanky grace that any training as a fashion model might only have refined and destroyed. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her, and he could only hope that Lucy wasn’t paying attention.
When the four of them were settled over their first or second drinks, Diana Maitland cast a brief, twinkling look at him. “Michael reminds me of my brother,” she said to Brock. “Don’t you think? Not so much in the face, I mean, but in the general build and manner; sort of the whole personality.”
Bill Brock frowned and didn’t seem to agree, but he said, “That’s a great compliment anyway, though, Mike: she’s always been crazy about her brother. Very nice guy, too; I think you’d like him. Little moody and morose at times, but essentially a very –” And he held up one hand to ward off any objection from Diana. “Well, now, come on, baby, I’m not being unfair. You know he can be tiresome as hell when he goes in for all this brooding, heavy-drinking, Great Tragic Artist horseshit.” And as if confident of having silenced her, he turned back to the Davenports and explained that Paul Maitland was a painter – “Damn good one, too, from what I hear, and I mean at least you gotta give him credit: he works hard as hell at it and doesn’t seem to care if he ever makes a nickel out of it or not. Lives way the hell downtown on Delancey Street or some awful place, in a studio as big as a barn that costs him about thirty bucks a month. Does rough carpentry to pay the rent and buy the booze – are you getting the picture? A real tough customer. Anybody ever came along and offered him a job like we’ve got – you know? As a commercial artist or something? – if that ever happened he’d punch ’em right in the mouth. He’d think he was being compromised. He’d say they were trying to make him sell out – and that’s exactly the way he’d put it, too: ‘sell out.’ No, but I’ve always liked the hell out of Paul, and I admire him. I admire any man with the courage to go – you know – the courage to go his own way. Paul and I were at Amherst together, you see; if it hadn’t been for that I’d never have met this creature here.”
The phrase “this creature” echoed in Michael’s head throughout their dinner and for a long time afterwards. Diana Maitland might be only a girl at the table, courteously praising Lucy’s cooking; she might be only a girl in the conversational hour or two that followed, and still a girl when Bill Brock helped her on with her coat in the vestibule and they said goodnight and their footsteps rang and faded across Abingdon Square toward Brock’s place, “their” place – but once they were home, with the door locked behind them and their clothes on the floor; once she lay thrashing and moaning in Brock’s arms, in Brock’s bed, she would be a creature.
There were other visits back and forth across Abingdon Square in the fall of that year. Each time Michael would steel himself to take the risk of glancing quickly from Diana to Lucy, hoping Lucy might turn out to be the more attractive of the two, and he was always disappointed. Diana kept winning the contest time and again – oh, Christ, what a girl – until, after a while, he decided to quit making those wretchedly secret comparisons. It was a dumb, dumb thing to do. It might well be something other married men did now and then, for little other purpose than to torture themselves, but you didn’t have to be very smart to know how dumb it was. Besides, when he and Lucy were alone and he could look at her from different angles and in any kind of light, it was always easy to believe she was pretty enough to last him a lifetime.
One ice-cold December night, at Diana’s urging, the four of them rode downtown in a cab to visit her brother.
Paul Maitland turned out to look nothing at all like Michael: he did have the same general kind of mustache, which he touched and stroked with shapely fingers in the momentary shyness of meeting strangers, but even that provided no real similarity because it was far more luxuriant – a fearless young iconoclast’s mustache as opposed to that of an office worker. He was lean and limber, in a masculine version of h
is sister’s style, dressed in a Levi jacket and pants with a merchant seaman’s sweater worn under the jacket, and he spoke very courteously in a light, almost whispering voice that made you bend a little toward him for fear of missing something.
As he led his guests across his studio, a big, plain loft once used for small-factory facilities, they found they couldn’t see any of his paintings because everything lay in shadows cast by the glare of a streetlamp beyond the windowpanes. But in one far corner a great many yards of heavy burlap had been hung from ropes to form a kind of tent, and it was within this small enclosure that Paul Maitland made his winter home. He lifted a flap to usher them inside, and they discovered other people sitting around with red wine in the warmth of a kerosene stove.
Most of the names were lost in the perfunctory introductions, but by now Michael was less concerned with names than with clothes. Seated on an upended orange crate with a warm glass of wine in his hand, he was unable to think of anything but that he and Bill Brock must look hopelessly out of place here in their business suits, their button-down shirts and silk ties, a couple of smiling intruders from Madison Avenue. And he knew Lucy must be uncomfortable, too, though he didn’t want to look at her face and find out.
Diana was plainly welcome in this gathering – there had been cries of “Diana!” and “Baby!” when she’d first come crouching in under the burlap – and now she sat prettily on the floor near her brother’s feet, talking in an animated way with a partially bald young man whose clothes suggested he was a painter, too. If she ever got tired of Brock – and wouldn’t any first-rate girl get tired of Brock soon enough? – she wouldn’t have long to wonder where to look next.
There was another girl called Peggy who looked no more than nineteen or twenty, with a sweet grave face, a peasant blouse and a dirndl skirt, and she seemed determined to prove she belonged to Paul. She sat as close as possible to him on the low studio couch that was apparently their bed; she never took her eyes off him, and it was clear that she would like to have her hands on him, too. He seemed scarcely aware of her as he leaned forward and lifted his chin to exchange a few laconic remarks over the top of the stove with a man on the orange crate next to Michael’s, but then when he sat back again he gave her a lazy smile, and after a while he put his arm around her.