On Green Dolphin Street

  The senator passed within a foot of Frank Renzo as he rushed by; Frank saw the straight hairline, the close-shaved skin of his young face, the narrow eyes opened to their widest extent in alarm and triumph as he defied the advice of his back doctor to deliver what the boys on the plane had been asking for. Forgive me my sins, his wild gaze seemed to say, forget my reckless love of women, overlook my wealth and East Coast homes, because at heart I am like you.

  Frank noticed the stitching in his clothes, his manicured hands and the easy manner that came from years of parties in Hyannis Port and Martha’s Vineyard, of dating debutantes and making furtive love also to their mothers; of yacht clubs and dinner parties, cigars and tennis; of Harvard and oak-paneled rooms and charge accounts on which you bought shirts by the dozen. Frank found they raised in him an instinctive distrust—a reaction he could no more control than the reflex of a struck knee.

  “Frank,” said the Sun’s reporter, a man called Potter whom Frank had met on previous assignments and admired for his hardheadedness, “you’re going to love Jack. The guy’s got class.”

  “Jack? When did you start calling the enemy by his first name?”

  Potter laughed. “You’ll see.”

  Frank looked at Potter skeptically. Was this the man whose angry rectitude had chilled Senator McCarthy, who had in public told Chiang Kai-shek’s adjutant that he was a liar?

  Everyone around the candidate seemed dizzy with uncritical affection. “If you’re new on the senator’s campaign,” the press secretary told Frank, “you need to look out for the jumpers.” As Kennedy’s car drove slowly down a prepared route, a number of women in the crowd would jump up and down on the spot: schoolgirls in bobby socks, mothers with babies in their arms, ladies in suits and high heels—age seemed not to be a factor in their excitability. Those who held hands as they jumped were known as double-leapers, those who hugged themselves in glee if Kennedy caught their eye were “clutchers.” Most dramatic were the “runners,” women who attempted to break the police line, reach the motorcade and steal a kiss from the candidate.

  The senator, Frank noticed, seemed at best indifferent to the response he prompted and often perturbed by it. His speech, which varied little from day to day, was a sober account of Republican failings in office and a reasonable list of improved policy expectations at home and abroad under his presidency. There was nothing demagogic in his style, yet something in his presence seemed to excite, so that the steady paragraphs beat the air as though uttered with full oratorical intent. The logical conclusion of his argument was often lost before the end, to the speaker’s evident exasperation, in the clamor of hysterical applause.

  Frank was exhausted by his induction to the job. Pierre Salinger and the other press secretaries had viewed him with distaste after the removal of Webster Cordell, believing Frank would naturally overcorrect his predecessor’s uncritical fondness for Kennedy. He was not invited to informal briefings in hotel rooms; he was the last to be told of any changes in a prepared speech. He therefore relied on the kindness of colleagues, rapid shorthand and what he hoped would be the superior powers of his own observation. None of this endeared the candidate to him, but he allowed neither his treatment by the press aides nor his instinctive recoil from Kennedy’s gracious manner to influence what he wrote. He watched and listened ravenously, put down what he saw and heard, checked it three times over and took it to Western Union.

  —

  Coming and going in the hotel lobby, Mary lingered as she passed the desk, looked the clerk in the eye and gave him an extended greeting, so he would be reminded of the telephone call for her that he had taken earlier and would produce from the pigeonhole behind him a message of transfixing love.

  Late one afternoon, he did stop her on her way in and handed over the piece of folded paper she had so fiercely imagined. She read it as she crossed the lobby. “Will be returning evening 20th. Two days, then Augusta.” She paused at the elevator, turned and walked back to the desk.

  “This message. Can you tell me who it’s from?”

  The clerk took it from her hand and looked at it. “Let me check.” He went into the glass-fronted office behind the desk where Mary could see him questioning the obese female telephonist.

  He returned and handed her back the piece of paper. “I guess it’s from your husband, ma’am.”

  “Yes … Yes, I guess it is. Thank you.”

  Up in her room, Mary sat on the bed and clutched herself. This was the pain of death and nothing she tried could make it stop.

  I am a woman of some standing, she told herself through the hands she had raised to her face: a mother, a person others are entitled to look to with some confidence for rational behavior and good example. I cannot therefore allow this to happen to me.

  She went to the bathroom, steadied herself against the basin and splashed water in her face. She looked into her eyes, the dark brown irises, and tried to see shame or sense.

  When she had calmed herself, she called room service for some tea and searched her purse for change with which to tip the bellboy. After he had been and gone, leaving behind the wheeled wagon with the tea things, she turned on the television, kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed.

  The host of a New York early evening program was interviewing a number of famous people who were in town that night; through the fuzzy monochrome of the screen, presumably receiving insufficient signal from a cloud-piercing roof antenna, a man in a bow tie was speaking to the camera: “Later in the program we’ll be talking with Lucille Ball, who’s staying at the Plaza, but right here in the studio we have a whiff of Gun-smoke, yes it’s Marshal Matt Dillon himself, Mr. James Arness …”

  The telephone rang.

  An hour later, Mary was sitting on the subway—her flannel skirt carefully smoothed before she risked the snagging seat—heading down to the Village. The street numbers in the bare, tiled stations counted her rapidly down to zero. She tried not to hurry as she went through the turnstile but to keep some dignity; the fact that Frank had called to say he was back in New York did not mean to say she had to lose all sense of her own freedom of action.

  As the elevator rose in Frank’s building, she tried to organize her thoughts. He was waiting at the open door of his apartment down the corridor, and she had just enough presence of mind to keep herself from running.

  When she had extracted herself from his arms, Mary felt disappointed. Nothing had been solved by his absence or return and they took the same wary positions on either side of the room.

  “You look exhausted,” she said.

  “I haven’t been to bed for three days. I had a lot of catching up to do out there. I haven’t even had time to shower since I got back. You were too quick for me.”

  “You can go and have a shower now if you like. Shall I make some tea or something?”

  “Sure. There’s some in that cupboard there.”

  Embarrassed by the thought of having been “too quick” for him, Mary found a small pleasure in marshaling cups and a pot, moving among Frank’s possessions, using them as her own. She saw him emerge, damp-haired, from the bathroom in a dark green robe and go into the bedroom next door, but ten minutes later there was no sign of him and the tea was growing cold.

  Mary went cautiously to the door of the bedroom and knocked, the cup of tea in her hand. There was no answer, so she pushed the door open a little and peered round. Frank was lying on the bed asleep, still in his robe. Mary smiled as she crossed the room and set down the cup on a table by the bed, next to a crumpled pack of cigarettes. She touched Frank’s arm and shook it lightly, but he did not stir.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him. He lay on his back with his arms loosely folded across his chest, like the figure on a crusader tomb. The breath was hauled up slow and deep from his lungs and blown out almost soundlessly through his nose. Where the robe was open she could see the light covering of hair on his chest; there was a place where it did not grow, as though it had been
worn away by the friction of some heavy object.

  She reached out a hand and touched the pale freckles beneath his eyes, then ran the back of her hand down his cheek, which was shadowed and rough from the time change and the late night. She touched the soft membrane of the lips with the tip of her finger.

  While he was unconscious, he lay within her power. She looked at each indentation of his features, thinking she might reduce them to so many pores and lines, might banish the power which, when animate, they held over her. It did not work: the more she looked, the more forlornly she loved him. If she could not profit from his sleep to break the spell, she thought, perhaps she could use it in a different way.

  She went back into the lounge to fetch her purse, from which she took a powder compact. She climbed onto Frank’s bed, pulled the skirt up her thighs and straddled him; he stirred but did not wake as she settled lightly on his hips. With gentle strokes she covered the dark rings of fatigue beneath his eyes, and made pale the growing shadows on his jaw. She could not bear the thought of all the years she had not known him, how much of what was rightly hers had been withheld. By covering the marks of the years, she might recapture them: she might make time run differently.

  She felt herself aching with the furtive control she had taken over him. If she were to take some pleasure of him while he slept, he need never know; and somehow, then, it would not count. After all, could they be lovers if one of them did not know it? She pulled the tight skirt higher, so it bunched above her hips, rose up on her knees, gently untied the cord of Frank’s robe and parted it. She closed her eyes and let her left hand slide down over the fabric of the skirt, then inside, where it felt her own flesh.

  She heard her breath coming harder when his voice interrupted her, “Keep your eyes closed.” She felt her face flare and burn as his hand pushed aside her clothes. He had one hand on himself and one hand on her hip as he carefully guided her downward. She sighed as she sank and fell.

  Chapter 9

  Charlie woke up, but did not know where he was. He looked into his memory, pressed the usual buttons of recall, but nothing came. He dragged his eyes around the room and saw it as a savage might see his first interior. It appeared to be a hotel: his unopened case was on the folding baggage holder; on the glass top of the chest of drawers were keys and coins. His jacket, the sleeves bunched inside out, was lying on the carpet and next to it was a lassoed necktie. He lifted the bedcovers and looked down: he was dressed in his shirt and underwear.

  Carefully, distrusting the impact on his eyes of light and air, he made his way to the net curtain and pulled it back. In front of him was a city park: a big open area of green with sparse trees crossed by paths on which a few figures walked. He went to the desk and found some writing paper in a leather-bound folder. The hotel was in Boston. He looked again out of the window. The Common. Boston … Beacon Hill … Tea Party … Back Bay … Irish Catholics. Kennedy. Patches of the previous day began to take shape in his memory like disconnected areas of a photographic print emerging in solution. Charlie remembered the senator making a speech to a lumber company in Eugene, Oregon. But from where had he then flown to Boston? Portland? Seattle? And who had told him where to go? Presumably he had undressed himself, as a kindly helper would have hung up his jacket. From the back pocket of the suitcase, he pulled out a fifth of Wild Turkey, his emergency supply, went to the bathroom for a glass and drank it half-and-half with lukewarm water from the faucet. Then he pulled off his clothes and stood beneath the shower, from whose retractable head two dozen needles pierced his hunched shoulders.

  A few minutes later, he picked up the telephone and asked for breakfast to be sent to the room.

  “We could send up some coffee right away, sir,” said a male Bostonian voice. “And maybe a sandwich. But we can’t do breakfast. It’s two-forty in the afternoon.”

  Charlie sat on the edge of the bed. He wanted Mary to be with him. From her sprang strength and clarity of purpose. She had made all the decisions about the children, the house, how they lived, whom they invited over. Even the Kaiser Manhattan had been her idea, and that was what he loved about her best: you could leave it all to her, but she would make interesting choices. All Charlie had been supposed to do was keep his own career on course, to choose between jobs, perform them diligently and not offend his superiors.

  He lowered his head into his hands. He felt tired with the exhaustion of all the failed centuries. He was not exactly hungover; he barely had hangovers anymore, just days of gastric terror and mental absence. He sometimes pictured the workings of his mind as the jeweled movement of a Swiss watch, trembling with expensive fibrillation, into which he had poured sand. Yet what had he or the world lost by this wantonness? There was no sign that a careful husbanding of the machinery would have produced anything that would have helped to give value or meaning to his or any other existence. There was nothing he could do that could not be done by other overeducated people in the State Department, the World Bank or the Diplomatic Service. As for power … Those who sought and won it had a talent for self-abasement and sycophancy, an indifference to shame, an ability to believe the fatuous and the untrue. And all of this was in the service of … Of what? Of seeing their hand on a lever, their name on a box.

  It was not possible by art or politics to transcend the self-renewing strictures of the daily world: of that Charlie felt sure. He noticed—bore witness to the fact—that people could nevertheless perform with antic gaiety within those confines, could plan and act and laugh as though nothing were wrong, as though the design were not irremediably flawed. The more he lived, the more certain he became that the key to being able to act in such a way (for what that way was worth) lay not in analysis of the problem, not in intellectual effort, not even in experience or good fortune, but merely in the chemical inheritance that people called temperament. He saw it a little in Katy Renshaw and sometimes in Benton, his stern secretary; it was in women more often, it seemed, than in men (though in himself it could be chemically induced); but mostly he saw it in his wife.

  It had taken him several years of marriage to appreciate that this was what had drawn him to Mary; that this was his chance of survival, the blind genetic cunning that found him his mate and simultaneously tricked him into thinking it was something else—her dark eyes, her forthright emotions or the modesty of her touch.

  In the bathroom he went through his washbag, looking for aspirin, then returned to the telephone and dialed the number of his house in Washington. His head was filled with the logic of despair.

  Give me something against reason, he thought. Give me hope. Give me a voice that, however unreasonably, likes living.

  Mary lay beside Frank in his bed, kept awake by the thunder of the air-conditioning. She had one thought only through the small hours: I am not the kind of person who does this.

  There were people who “had affairs,” as the phrase went; there were people who were what they called “unfaithful”; but all their deceptions seemed banal to her. They were all failures of the imagination because the constant reinvention of her married love was more romantic than any furtive double cross could be. She was not the kind of person who did that. She was the kind of person who had a sense of value, who loved her husband fully, organically, in a way that easily encompassed his shortcomings. She was the kind of person who did not see the constraints of marriage as a sacrifice of freedom but as a necessary discipline that intensified the rewards of love, both in her husband and her children: marriage was moral and it was indefatigably interesting.

  She was wearing a cotton shirt of Frank’s and it was uncomfortable when she turned on the mattress; even though it was an old one, there was a stiffness in the seams, and periodically she had to heave it out from beneath her hip.

  Mary could not bring herself to think about what they had done. Once the taboo had been broken, there had seemed no reason to hold back; if they were convinced that the purity of their feelings justified their actions, then the candor of the act
ions might as well do justice to the fierceness of the emotion. Not that she had thought it through so clearly, on the floor of the lounge, standing against the kitchen counter, in the shower, or kneeling on the bathroom floor. She felt herself blushing in the darkness.

  She wanted to return to safety, but home no longer represented a refuge. She had infected Number 1064, and she acutely regretted it; she doubted that she could ever recapture that glad innocence and a squeeze of panic went through her. The hotel room was the best place she could think of: hers, yet neutral; and there she could sleep, reorganize her thoughts and decide what she was to do. In the course of the long night there were no thoughts too radical: leaving Charlie, moving to New York, arranging visits to the children, forsaking both men to be alone. In the morning she was certain of two things: that she remained devoted to her life at home and would not change any aspect of it; and that more than anything at that moment she needed Frank’s reassurance that what had passed between them meant as much to him as it did to her.

  She looked at his sleeping face for a long while, then got up and crossed to the window, where she looked east, over Little Italy, hoping for the sun to rise.

  —

  Frank was dreaming he was back in the Solomon Islands, where he had spent three days in a foxhole with a man from Jamestown, North Dakota, named Aaron Godley. The platoon had been cut off by a Japanese counteroffensive and, with stragglers from various other units, was stranded in the jaws of an unpleasantly intense two-pronged attack, waiting for the reinforcements promised on the surviving field telephone.

  Godley had always been the runt of the platoon, the one who would first be picked off by predators, and even within his own unit was the object of bullying derision. He was forgiven for the fact that he could not read a compass and that his gear was always deficient in some crucial respect; his colleagues were grateful that Godley’s obvious failings distracted the drill sergeant’s attention from their own. His problem was that he was inauthentic; his jokes were not funny, his attempts at comradeship were transparently self-interested. He fastened too quickly onto the slang, the nicknames and the running gags that others had in twos or threes, promiscuously switching from one subgroup to another, looking for any sign of welcome; his desire to be accepted was too palpable, and nothing he did seemed natural. He could not even march properly, sometimes making his right arm swing with the right leg, the left with the left, so that he jerked along like a man with tin legs.