The Wars of Love Page 7

  This drawing room was huge without being spacious, two floors in height but with great, heavy beams on its ceiling that oppressively reduced that height; walls covered in walnut paneling on which hung, with a cold and somehow cluttered air, eighteenth-century British portraits of bland dignitaries and dim, damask beauties; the whole full of walnut furniture, especially, it seemed, sidepieces, and doorways full of heavy draperies, and a towering fireplace that was all carving, and floors covered with oriental ostentation, and here and there, great stuffed ottomans squatting like the plump potentates that they must once have been made for. Then immediately it occurred to me: of course, the elder Fords. The little pharaoh and his sister-consort. I stood in the ambience not of Milly Moore but of Bianca Ford, and it was not only easy but really inevitable to imagine this room peopled with those small, important, comically regal beings—Bianca in her robes and large jewels holding court from one of those ottomans, he, in a maroon shirt under a navy blue jacket, leaning against one of those sidepieces and lecturing cryptically on a Raeburn opposite, his Edwardian beard moving precisely with his mouth. It truly was the past in which we stood.

  We? There stood Freddie. There stood Freddie looking at me with fond suspicion in his flicking, hazel eyes. He was both heavier and taller than I should have expected him to be. His broad-boned face had filled out, and its skin gleamed with a kind of polish. He wore a dark blue suit with considerably padded shoulders, expensively tailored but rather theatrical, a little ineptly vain, I could not help thinking, in the attention that had gone to its lines and what they were to imply about the body that it clothed. His brown hair was lighter than I remembered and wavier, but perhaps that latter effect arose from its meticulous grooming. There was nothing gentle about his face, yet it was soft, almost pampered, certainly sleek; and as, in that moment, I looked at him, certain kinds of work leapt to my mind: he might have been the manager of a fashionable small hotel, or he might have been a man who sold boats behind a great plate glass window on Park Avenue.

  “The beginning,” he was saying. “How far back is that?”

  “Grant, sit down,” Milly urged, and took my arm again. We sat side by side on an enormous sofa.

  “Christmas, 1929,” I said.

  “Most of the fill-in can wait for Dan,” Freddie said with crisp authority, “but we have to tell you about him before he comes.”

  “Where is Dan?”

  “He’ll be down soon,” Freddie went on. “He came in late. He had a fracas at the gallery today—someone questioning his judgment on the authenticity of a certain picture. He was all torn up. Milly made him lie down.”

  All the time I had felt Milly’s eyes upon me, and I was aware of the gentle rise and fall of her breasts with her breathing. I turned to her and was startled by the happiness in her face, so that I laughed. “Gallery, Milly?” I asked. “Do you mean The Ford Gallery?”

  “It’s his now,” she said. “After his parents’ death, it went to him.”

  “They’re dead?”

  “The accident I spoke of. It happened almost four years ago. On the day of Dan’s graduation. It nearly killed him, too.”

  Freddie said, “Milly saved him.”

  “How?” I asked stupidly.

  Milly spoke again. “Remember what Dan was like as a boy, Grant. You do remember, don’t you? How sensitive? Different from the rest of us? Don’t you remember?”

  “Ye-es,” I allowed her, but thinking that there seemed now to be two Millies, this one who had just spoken, the urgent, distraught, intense Milly whose hands were clasped tight, and the calm, easy one who had embraced me five minutes before and carelessly called me darling half the time.

  “You remember—he couldn’t ever bear to see anything hurt. How he shot. Only at targets. I used to have to bait his hook for him when we used live bait. Minnows. Really, he didn’t ever like to fish. Just as he hated it when everything between us was not at peace?”

  “Yes,” I allowed again, and as I glanced up at Freddie I had a sense of him as the custodian of an experimental process.

  “Sensitive beyond the norm, perhaps, to cruelty and pain. No curiosity in that direction—”

  It was a portrait not without its truth, yet surely the truth was partial. I remembered that both Milly and Freddie had had an almost coldly scientific interest in cruelty and pain in which Dan did not share. When birds were struck with stones, he did wince and sigh while they moved closer; there was that butterfly and beetle collection, for which he did only the printing; there were certain messy experiments in vivisection on frogs, conducted when he was not present, and that business of blowing a frog up with a straw stuck into him that every country boy enjoys. The strong wish for peace and the naïve maneuvers toward it—yes certainly; but minnows, and the whole implied excess of tenderness?

  “And then, to him! That dreadful accident. Well. Don’t you see? Darling?” It was as if she had been struggling for her point, and then, having made it, allowed herself to relax in that last word. Everything softened in it and she was looking at me with kind, candid eyes.

  “You haven’t told me,” I said. “Except that, I gather, his parents were killed? I don’t mean to be stupid.”

  She laughed. It was again the clear, welcoming laugh, absolutely open, and she said, “You’re not stupid!” with the bluntness of a child. It might have been the girl, Milly, who had spoken, and I said something like that, and she laughed again with her peculiar note of happiness, careless laughter.

  But Freddie was solemn as he still stood there, above us, outside our sudden pleasure. He wished to take us out of it, it seemed, for he said, “Yes, Grant, you have to think of it as happening to him. To Dan, mind you. Not to you, not to me. We’d have taken it differently. But to him.” The whispered pronoun lingered on the air.

  Milly was looking up at him and permitted herself to say, “Yes,” as though this were indeed a permission, and with that, Freddie went on. “Let me tell you quickly now. He’ll be down.”

  “Yes. Please do.”

  “You see, his mother and father had driven up to New Haven early that morning for the ceremonies, and then they were going to drive on to Silverton with Dan for the summer. Mr. Ford knew some short cuts. Country roads. He was driving an open car. Too fast. In the twilight he missed a turn. Dan was thrown clear of the car and, by some miracle, wasn’t even scratched. Stunned, but not hurt. He picked himself up and heard moans—and then, screams. The motor was still running. He reached in there, over their trapped bodies, and turned off the ignition. They were pinned in, mangled and pinned in and completely conscious. It was a lonely road. No cars. In his frenzy, he tried to lift the car. Hopeless, of course. Then he started to run for help. In one direction, then back and in the other direction, then back again. This went on—for twenty minutes, thirty minutes. Finally, by the time someone came, they had died. But only after these most awful agonies—vocal, you understand. Conscious. And something died in Dan. To have to watch that, to have to listen to that—if you were Dan!”

  “Do you see, Grant?” Milly asked softly.

  “Oh, I do see,” I said, and I did, in the fullest horror, but not only because Dan was that particularly sensitive person they had drawn for me—even more because of the particular relation, that accepted equality, that he enjoyed with those people, his parents. It was the shock of his grief, his lonely sense of loss, that I could most easily grasp rather than that other shock that seemed most to concern them, and of which, I felt, they were determined to persuade me. That persuasion I resisted, perhaps, in determining that now I would be cool, and so I asked only, “When did that happen? You said—?”

  “June, 1934.”

  “And then you were married?”

  “Oh, not then!” Milly said quickly. “After the accident, Dan was in a sanitarium for a long time, you know, Grant, and—”

  “A sanitarium?”

  Freddie broke in. “But of course. He was a ruin, I tell you, Grant, a ruin.”


  “Ah, yes.”

  “A complete breakdown,” said Milly.

  “And then?”

  “Then the sanitarium released him to me only on condition—”

  “To you? But why?”

  She looked at me for a long sad moment. “Who else did he have but Freddie and me?”

  I looked back at her and said, “You see, I am stupid,” and she shook her head impatiently and said, “No, no. Of course, you couldn’t understand, having been away from it all. You see, he had the bodies brought to Silverton and they were buried there, but my father persuaded him not to live in his parents’ house, to come to ours instead. He did. But it was only for a few weeks. He was—”

  “He was ruined,” Freddie said, “he was just ruined.”

  But Milly took up again, that second, urgent Milly. “My father persuaded him that he should go to the sanitarium. He was there for—”

  I wanted them to go more slowly, and I said, “What sanitarium?”

  “An excellent place called Windhaven.” From firm Freddie.

  “Near Silverton?”

  “No, no. Long Island.”

  “Oh, yes. And then?”

  “Milly started to tell you, Grant.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “His doctor released him with the understanding that he be sheltered from shock. Especially from any needless experience of suffering. Or violence. That was to be expected. Of course. That is what we have been trying to say, Grant. From the moment you came in. So, darling, do mind what you say, won’t you?” In that single speech, she had changed again, from the coldly intense to the calm and warm. Her skin was very white, with an almost ivory pallor and glow, and her gray-blue eyes looked at me with a perfectly friendly plea.

  Again I stiffened to reject that persuasion, which one would have found it so easy to accede to. I said, “And then you were married?”

  “Quite soon. He came back here. Reopened this apartment. His parents’, of course—”

  I interrupted her again. “But doesn’t this remind him all the time?” and I indicated the crowded, heavily archaic room we were in.

  “He needs some mooring,” Freddie said.

  “It’s the apartment he’s always known,” said Milly. “And we didn’t really think much of this, when he was—out, again.”

  “Perhaps this place is bad for him,” Freddie said.

  “He seemed so well by then, and Freddie did need him—”

  “Freddie?”

  “At the gallery,” Freddie said.

  “The gallery,” said I.

  “But, of course, he doesn’t know that either, Freddie. How could he? Dan’s father sent Freddie to college, Grant, and Freddie studied the fine arts, too—like Dan. Then, when he finished, which was a year before Dan, Mr. Ford took him into the gallery as an assistant, a runner; and as it worked out, you see, when the Fords were dead, and Dan was ill, there was, naturally, only Freddie to manage.”

  “Oh, yes. Naturally. And now?”

  “Now Freddie works with Dan.”

  I laughed. “How really nice for you, Freddie!”

  He harrumphed a bit and said, “It works out well,” and I smiled at him.

  Milly cried, “And for Dan! Freddie’s marvelous at it!”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “Here’s Dan, here he is now, and now we’ll talk about you, Grant.”

  A door was closing on the claustral balcony that stretched across one end of that huge room, and Dan came quickly down the shadowy flight of stairs that brought him to our level, and then, with his arms out, quickly down the length of the room, saying, “Grant.” He seized my shoulders and we looked at one another. Whatever I had felt until now, even for Milly, had been tentative, but in Dan’s presence, all my earliest affections spilled warmly through me, and, holding his arms as he held my shoulders, I said, “Ah, Dan!” in a shaken voice.

  “Grant, how good, how good!” he exclaimed.

  Then again there was a kind of babble, as there had been in the foyer, and the four of us stood close together, and then Dan stepped back a little and Freddie laid his arm over Dan’s shoulders in a brotherly fashion, and Milly, too, had moved with them, and stood on Dan’s other side, so that what had been our momentary, exclaiming intermixture had suddenly become an arrangement, even a formation, the three of them standing together, I before them and apart, and Milly saying. “How do we look to you, Grant?”

  In such apparent accidents lie our premonitions, were we but sensible enough to read them, as, certainly, there I was not. I simply said, surveying them, “Freddie’s put on weight, but it gives him a prosperous air.”

  “Don’t remind me,” he said.

  “Milly’s the most beautiful woman I’ve seen in this town.”

  “Darling!”

  “And Dan”—I let my eyes rest affectionately on his beautiful face—“Dan—”

  “Yes?”

  “Why, you look fine, simply fine!”

  “I’ll light the fire,” Freddie said. “It’s not really warm in here, is it?” He turned away and struck a match to the logs that lay on the enormous hearth.

  “And a drink,” Milly said. “Many drinks. Because we’re all together again.” She stepped to a recess beside the chimney and pulled at a bell rope, and in a moment a servant appeared with a cocktail tray. This was deposited on a table that, oddly enough, was moved before Freddie’s chair, and my surprise must have shown itself, for Dan, who stood looking on, said, “Freddie’s our bartender, Grant—when we can get him.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Martinis?” Freddie asked, and then, with an air of executive authority that was proper, I should have thought, to the master of the household alone, he began mixing them.

  “You people see a good deal of each other,” I said.

  “Of course!” Milly cried. “After all, darling, only you were unfaithful.”

  I started. “That’s a strong word.”

  “Is there any other that’s better?”

  “Well—”

  “Darling, what did become of that girl?”

  “Girl?”

  “That Margaret.”

  “Margaret.”

  “Your cousin!”

  “Oh. Why—Good heavens, Milly, do you remember her? That ended in the summer that it began.”

  “Did it?” Milly asked without laughter, and there was no word from the others.

  I found myself stumbling through an explanation. “It was the next summer, I think, that she married. She married a middle-aged Swede. She’s lived in Stockholm ever since.”

  “Has she?” Milly had gone miles away from me.

  “Can’t we sit down?” Dan asked.

  Of the three of them, Dan had changed least. He looked exactly as he should have looked: like a young and successful dealer in fine things. I watched him as he crossed to that sofa where Milly had seated herself again, and now the two of them sat as, a little while before, Milly and I had sat. If the accident in which his parents had been killed had had any terrible effects, they were not visible in his walk, his carriage, or his face. He still looked like the youngest of us, with dark, bright, expectant eyes, and an air, generally, that suggested anticipation. His hair was cut as it had been for as far back as I could remember—short, like a thick cap of clipped fur, the hairline rounded over his forehead, dipping in a little at his temples. His complexion was dark and he had that deep color in his cheekbones, and the mole was still beside his nose. He was a man now, of course, not a boy, but I could hardly have believed it if, in the lamplight that shone on his head, I had not seen a fragmentary glint of silver here and there among the dark bristle on the side of his head. Later, too, I was to notice the difference in his voice, but now I could only say again, “Dan, you look fine, really fine.”

  “We want to hear about you now, Grant,” Freddie said, as he began to serve us his Martinis. And he said this abruptly, as though he suspected some intention in my remark that he was determ
ined to deflect.

  “Me?” I asked. “It’s the most common story. I am Depression’s Child.” Although I said that flippantly, I felt an inward shudder. They had been brutalizing years, I knew, in which more had been lost than gained, but I could not count the toll, only register it in such a shock as this, for example, with which I felt my difference now from these other three. In the overstuffed and overpaneled and overheated room in which we sat, with firelight dancing on their expensive and expectant faces, I let myself imagine that what they held were not cocktails but great orbs of palest topaz cut for crystal chalices, some fantasy of treasure and of fortune that had the effect, in turn, of making me feel slightly seedy, even of reminding me that I was well overdue for a haircut. I drank quickly from what, in my hands, was indubitably a Martini, the finest.

  “We knew that your mother went west, and that you were there, in college,” Milly said. “But tell about it.”

  I started to tell about my mother’s death, but Freddie, with some sharp intuition of the disaster that I was about to recount, perhaps simply from the tenses of my verbs, deflected me again. It was about the newspaper job that he wished to know, and I allowed the deflection, but when I came to my union work, and began to tell them an anecdote about police violence in a water-front lockout, he steered me away again and asked abruptly how long I had been in New York. It was all very expertly done, and although it was made moderately easy for him by the fact that he was constantly moving among us, in and out of the conversation with his Martini pitcher, his new cocktails and his pourings that would seem to draw him out of the talk for a moment and allow him to enter it abruptly at a tangent when he came back in, I could not help admiring his skill and I was never deceived into thinking that he had, at any point, withdrawn. But what a nerve-wracking task he had taken upon himself! I could feel his presence, its sharp, collected awareness, ready to spring at any point whenever I was talking, and I could feel him relax when I turned the questioning back to Milly or to Dan.