A Multitude of Sins

  “I wasn’t close enough,” I said.

  My father looked around again at the decoys as if they could prove something. “Wasn’t close enough?” he said. “I heard the damn duck’s wings. How close do you need it? You’ve got a gun there.”

  “You couldn’t hear it,” I said.

  “Couldn’t hear it?” he said. His eyes rose off my face and found Renard Junior behind me. His mouth took on an odd expression. The scowl left his features, and he suddenly looked amused, the damp corners of his mouth revealing a small, flickering smile I was sure was derision, and represented his view that I had balked at a crucial moment, made a mistake, and therefore didn’t have to be treated so seriously. This from a man who had left my mother and me to fend for ourselves while he disported without dignity or shame out of sight of those who knew him.

  “You don’t know anything,” I suddenly said. “You’re only …” And I don’t know what I was about to say. Something terrible and hurtful. Something to strike out at him and that I would’ve regretted forever. So I didn’t say any more, didn’t finish it. Though I did that for myself, I think now, and not for him, and in order that I not have to regret more than I already regretted. I didn’t really care what happened to him, to be truthful. Didn’t and don’t.

  And then my father said, the insinuating smile still on his handsome lips, “Come on, sonny boy. You’ve still got some growing up to do, I see.” He reached for me and put his hand behind my neck, which was rigid in anger and loathing. And without seeming to notice, he pulled me to him and kissed me on my forehead, and put his arms around me and held me until whatever he was thinking had passed and it was time for us to go back to the dock.

  My father lived thirty years after that morning in December, on the Grand Lake, in 1961. By any accounting he lived a whole life after that. And I am not interested in the whys and why nots of what he did and didn’t do, or in causing that day to seem life-changing for me, because it surely wasn’t. Life had already changed. That morning represented just the first working out of particulars I would evermore observe. Like my father, I am a lawyer. And the law is a calling which teaches you that most of life is about adjustments, the seatings and reseatings we perform to accommodate events occurring outside our control and over which we might not have sought control in the first place. So that when we are tempted, as I was for an instant in the duck blind, or as I was through all those thirty years, to let myself become preoccupied and angry with my father, or when I even see a man who reminds me of him, stepping into some building in a seersucker suit and a bright bow tie, I try to realize again that it is best just to offer myself release and to realize I am feeling anger all alone, and that there is no redress. We want it. Life can be seen to be about almost nothing else sometimes than our wish for redress. As a lawyer who was the son of a lawyer and the grandson of another, I know this. And I also know not to expect it.

  For the record—because I never saw him again—my father went back to St. Louis and back to the influence of Dr. Carter, who I believe was as strong a character as my father was weak. They lived on there for a time until (I was told) Dr. Carter quit the practice of medicine entirely. Then they left America and traveled first to Paris and after that to a bright white stucco house near Antibes, which I in fact once saw, completely by accident, on a side tour of a business trip, and somehow knew to be his abode the instant I came to it, as though I had dreamed it—but then couldn’t get away from it fast enough, though they were both dead and buried by then.

  Once, in our newspaper, early in the nineteen-seventies, I saw my father pictured in the society section amid a group of smiling, handsome crew-cut men, once again wearing tuxedos and red sashes of some foolish kind, and holding champagne glasses. They were men in their fifties, all of whom seemed, by their smiles, to want very badly to be younger.

  Seeing this picture reminded me that in the days after my father had taken me to the marsh, and events had ended not altogether happily, I had prayed for one of the few times, but also for the last time, in my life. And I prayed quite fervently for a while and in spite of all, that he would come back to us and that our life would begin to be as it had been. And then I prayed that he would die, and die in a way I would never know about, and his memory would cease to be a memory, and all would be erased. My mother died a rather sudden, pointless and unhappy death not long afterward, and many people including myself attributed her death to him. In time, my father came and went in and out of New Orleans, just as if neither of us had ever known each other.

  And so the memory was not erased. Yet because I can tell this now, I believe that I have gone beyond it, and on to a life better than one might’ve imagined for me. Of course, I think of life—mine—as being part of their aftermath, part of the residue of all they risked and squandered and ignored. Such a sense of life’s connectedness can certainly occur, and conceivably it occurs in some places more than in others. But it is survivable. I am the proof, inasmuch as since that time, I have never imagined my life in any way other than as it is.

  Reunion

  When I saw Mack Bolger he was standing beside the bottom of the marble steps that bring travelers and passersby to and from the balcony of the main concourse in Grand Central. It was before Christmas last year, when the weather stayed so warm and watery the spirit seemed to go out of the season.

  I was cutting through the terminal, as I often do on my way home from the publishing offices on Forty-first Street. I was, in fact, on my way to meet a new friend at Billy’s. It was four o’clock on Friday, and the great station was athrong with citizens on their way somewhere, laden with baggage and precious packages, shouting goodbyes and greetings, flagging their arms, embracing, gripping each other with pleasure. Others, though, simply stood, as Mack Bolger was when I saw him, staring rather vacantly at the crowds, as if whomever he was there to meet for some reason hadn’t come. Mack is a tall, handsome, well-put-together man who seems to see everything from a height. He was wearing a long, well-fitted gabardine overcoat of some deep-olive twill—an expensive coat, I thought, an Italian coat. His brown shoes were polished to a high gloss; his trouser cuffs hit them just right. And because he was without a hat, he seemed even taller than what he was—perhaps six-three. His hands were in his coat pockets, his smooth chin slightly elevated the way a middle-aged man would, and as if he thought he was extremely visible there. His hair was thinning a little in front, but it was carefully cut, and he was tanned, which caused his square face and prominent brow to appear heavy, almost artificially so, as though in a peculiar way the man I saw was not Mack Bolger but a good-looking effigy situated precisely there to attract my attention.

  For a while, a year and a half before, I had been involved with Mack Bolger’s wife, Beth Bolger. Oddly enough—only because all events that occur outside New York seem odd and fancifully unreal to New Yorkers—our affair had taken place in the city of St. Louis, that largely overlookable red-brick abstraction that is neither West nor Middlewest, neither South nor North; the city lost in the middle, as I think of it. I’ve always found it interesting that it was both the boyhood home of T. S. Eliot, and only eighty-five years before that, the starting point of westward expansion. It’s a place, I suppose, the world can’t get away from fast enough.

  What went on between Beth Bolger and me is hardly worth the words that would be required to explain it away. At any distance but the close range I saw it from, it was an ordinary adultery—spirited, thrilling and then, after a brief while, when we had crossed the continent several times and caused as many people as possible unhappiness, embarrassment and heartache, it became disappointing and ignoble and finally almost disastrous to those same people. Because it is the truth and serves to complicate Mack Bolger’s unlikeable dilemma and to cast him in a more sympathetic light, I will say that at some point he was forced to confront me (and Beth as well) in a hotel room in St. Louis—a nice, graceful old barn called the Mayfair—with the result that I got banged around in a minor way a
nd sent off into the empty downtown streets on a warm, humid autumn Sunday afternoon, without the slightest idea of what to do, ending up waiting for hours at the St. Louis airport for a midnight flight back to New York. Apart from my dignity, I left behind and never saw again a brown silk Hermès scarf with tassels that my mother had given me for Christmas in 1971, a gift she felt was the nicest thing she’d ever seen and perfect for a man just commencing life as a book editor. I’m glad she didn’t have to know about my losing it, and how it happened.

  I also did not see Beth Bolger again, except for one sorrowful and bitter drink we had together in the theater district last spring, a nervous, uncomfortable meeting we somehow felt obligated to have, and following which I walked away down Forty-seventh Street, feeling that all of life was a sorry mess, while Beth went along to see The Iceman Cometh, which was playing then. We have not seen each other since that leave-taking, and, as I said, to tell more would not be quite worth the words.

  But when I saw Mack Bolger standing in the crowded, festive holiday-bedecked concourse of Grand Central, looking rather vacant-headed but clearly himself, so far from the middle of the country, I was taken by a sudden and strange impulse—which was to walk straight across through the eddying sea of travelers and speak to him, just as one might speak to anyone you casually knew and had unexpectedly yet not unhappily encountered. And not to impart anything, or set in motion any particular action (to clarify history, for instance, or make amends), but simply to create an event where before there was none. And not an unpleasant event, or a provocative one. Just a dimensionless, unreverberant moment, a contact, unimportant in every other respect. Life has few enough of these moments—the rest of it being so consumed by the predictable and the obligated.

  I knew a few things about Mack Bolger, about his life since we’d last confronted each other semi-violently in the Mayfair. Beth had been happy to tell me during our woeful drink at the Espalier Bar in April. Our—Beth’s and my—love affair was, of course, only one feature in the long devaluation and decline in her and Mack’s marriage. This I’d always understood. There were two children, and Mack had been frantic to hold matters together for their sakes and futures; Beth was a portrait photographer who worked at home, but craved engagement with the wide world outside of University City—craved it in the worst way, and was therefore basically unsatisfied with everything in her life. After my sudden departure, she moved out of their house, rented an apartment near the Gateway Arch and, for a time, took a much younger lover. Mack, for his part in their upheaval, eventually quit his job as an executive for a large agri-biz company, considered studying for the ministry, considered going on a missionary journey to Senegal or French Guiana, briefly took a young lover himself. One child had been arrested for shoplifting; the other had gotten admitted to Brown. There were months of all-night confrontations, some combative, some loving and revelatory, some derisive from both sides. Until everything that could be said or expressed or threatened was said, expressed and threatened, after which a standstill was achieved whereby they both stayed in their suburban house, kept separate schedules, saw new and different friends, had occasional dinners together, went to the opera, occasionally even slept together, but saw little hope (in Beth’s case, certainly) of things turning out better than they were at the time of our joyless drink and the O’Neill play. I’d assumed at that time that Beth was meeting someone else that evening, had someone in New York she was interested in, and I felt completely fine about it.

  “It’s really odd, isn’t it?” Beth said, stirring her long, almost pure-white finger around the surface of her Kir Royale, staring not at me but at the glass rim where the pink liquid nearly exceeded its vitreous limits. “We were so close for a little while.” Her eyes rose to me, and she smiled almost girlishly. “You and me, I mean. Now, I feel like I’m telling all this to an old friend. Or to my brother.”

  Beth is a tall, sallow-faced, big-boned, ash blond woman who smokes cigarettes and whose hair often hangs down in her eyes like a forties Hollywood glamour girl. This can be attractive, although it often causes her to seem to be spying on her own conversations.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s all right to feel that way.” I smiled back across the little round blacktopped café table. It was all right. I had gone on. When I looked back on what we’d done, none of it except for what we’d done in bed made me feel good about life, or that the experience had been worth it. But I couldn’t undo it. I don’t believe the past can be repaired, only exceeded. “Sometimes, friendship’s all we’re after in these sorts of things,” I said. Though this, I admit, I did not really believe.

  “Mack’s like a dog, you know,” Beth said, flicking her hair away from her eyes. He was on her mind. “I kick him, and he tries to bring me things. It’s pathetic. He’s very interested in Tantric sex now, whatever that is. Do you know what that even is?”

  “I really don’t like hearing this,” I said stupidly, though it was true. “It sounds cruel.”

  “You’re just afraid I’ll say the same thing about you, Johnny.” She smiled and touched her damp fingertip to her lips, which were wonderful lips.

  “Afraid,” I said. “Afraid’s really not the word, is it?”

  “Well, then, whatever the word is.” Beth looked quickly away and motioned the waiter for the check. She didn’t know how to be disagreed with. It always frightened her.

  But that was all. I’ve already said our meeting wasn’t a satisfying one.

  Mack Bolger’s pale gray eyes caught me coming toward him well before I expected them to. We had seen each other only twice. Once at a fancy cocktail party given by an author I’d come to St. Louis to wrest a book away from. It was the time I’d met his wife. And once more, in the Mayfair Hotel, when I’d taken an inept swing at him and he’d slammed me against a wall and hit me in the face with the back of his hand. Perhaps you don’t forget people you knock around. That becomes their place in your life. I, myself, find it hard to recognize people when they’re not where they belong, and Mack Bolger belonged in St. Louis. Of course, he was an exception.

  Mack’s gaze fixed on me, then left me, scanned the crowd uncomfortably, then found me again as I approached. His large tanned face took on an expression of stony unsurprise, as if he’d known I was somewhere in the terminal and a form of communication had already begun between us. Though, if anything, really, his face looked resigned—resigned to me, resigned to the situations the world foists onto you unwilling; resigned to himself. Resignation was actually what we had in common, even if neither of us had a language which could express that. So as I came into his presence, what I felt for him, unexpectedly, was sympathy—for having to see me now. And if I could’ve, I would have turned and walked straight away and left him alone. But I didn’t.

  “I just saw you,” I said from the crowd, ten feet before I ever expected to speak. My voice isn’t loud, so that the theatrically nasal male voice announcing the arrival from Poughkeepsie on track 34 seemed to have blotted it out.

  “Did you have something special in mind to tell me?” Mack Bolger said. His eyes cast out again across the vaulted hall, where Christmas shoppers and overbundled passengers were moving in all directions. It occurred to me at that instant—and shockingly—that he was waiting for Beth, and that in a moment’s time I would be standing here facing her and Mack together, almost as we had in St. Louis. My heart struck two abrupt beats deep in my chest, then seemed for a second to stop altogether. “How’s your face?” Mack said with no emotion, still scanning the crowd. “I didn’t hurt you too bad, did I?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’ve grown a moustache.” His eyes did not flicker toward me.

  “Yes,” I said, though I’d completely forgotten about it, and for some reason felt ashamed, as if it made me look ridiculous.

  “Well,” Mack Bolger said. “Good.” His voice was the one you would use to speak to someone in line beside you at the post office, someone you’d never see again. Though there wa
s also, just barely noticeable, a hint of what we used to call juiciness in his speech, some minor, undispersable moisture in his cheek that one heard in his s’s and f’s. It was unfortunate, since it robbed him of a small measure of gravity. I hadn’t noticed it before in the few overheated moments we’d had to exchange words.

  Mack looked at me again, hands in his expensive Italian coat pockets, a coat that had heavy, dark, bone buttons and long, wide lapels. Too stylish for him, I thought, for the solid man he was. Mack and I were nearly the same height, but he was in every way larger and seemed to look down to me— something in the way he held his chin up. It was almost the opposite of the way Beth looked at me.

  “I live here now,” Mack said, without really addressing me. I noticed he had long, dark almost feminine eyelashes, and small, perfectly shaped ears, which his new haircut put on nice display. He might’ve been forty—younger than I am—and looked more than anything like an army officer. A major. I thought of a letter Beth had shown me, written by Mack to her, containing the phrase, “I want to kiss you all over. Yes I do. Love, Macklin.” Beth had rolled her eyes when she showed it to me. At another time she had talked to Mack on the telephone while we were in bed together naked. On that occasion, too, she’d kept rolling her eyes at whatever he was saying—something, I gathered, about difficulties he was having at work. Once we even engaged in a sexual act while she talked to him. I could hear his tiny, buzzing, fretful-sounding voice inside the receiver. But that was now gone. Everything Beth and I had done was gone. All that remained was this—a series of moments in the great train terminal, moments which, in spite of all, seemed correct, sturdy, almost classical in character, as if this later time was all that really mattered, whereas the previous, briefly passionate, linked but now-distant moments were merely preliminary.

  “Did you buy a place?” I said, and all at once felt a widely spreading vacancy open all around inside me. It was such a preposterous thing to say.