Young Mr. Keefe Read online

  He remembered the wedding and the reception afterwards in the Warrens’ house. He remembered his mother inspecting the wedding present that Mrs. Warren had displayed in her dining room. “I suppose you’ll need lots of things like this,” his mother had said, looking at a set of copper-bottomed pans that a cousin of Helen’s had sent. And, a few moments later, “Goodness, what will you ever do with this?” she had asked, pointing to an enormous silver epergne which had been sent by Jimmy’s Great-aunt Kathleen. “Oh!” Melise had said, accepting a glass. “I don’t believe I’ve ever tasted California champagne.” She sipped it. “It’s delicious!” she had said. But Jimmy had noticed that she never took another sip throughout the whole reception, but carried the full glass with her, lifting it to her lips without drinking whenever toasts were proposed. And Helen noticed it, too.

  Just before they were to leave, Helen had come to him and whispered, “Please—I don’t want to go to New York! I don’t want to take that trip. Couldn’t we sneak away for a trip by ourselves?”

  “Oh, I’m afraid it’s too late to change plans now,” he had said. And that night they had boarded the plane for New York—for a week at the Plaza while the senior Keefes motored to Santa Barbara for a week of golf.

  Remembering it now, Jimmy wondered if it had been the conflict between his mother and Helen that had been responsible for the unhappiness that came later. Certainly there had been a conflict; he had been aware of it, and yet, at the time, he had tried to push it far back in his mind. In New York, they had found theatre tickets waiting for them, paid for by Melise. Melise had paid for the hotel, including a substantial deposit for room service. When his mother and father returned from California, Melise had spent two days with Helen, shopping in the city, buying Helen dresses, charging them to her account. He remembered Helen, in their room, unwrapping a box that had arrived from Bergdorf-Goodman containing a short black evening-dress. Helen had thrown the dress across the bed. “I hate it!” she had cried.

  “Why didn’t you tell her you didn’t like it?” Jimmy asked.

  “How could I? She made me try it on. She said, ‘It looks pretty on you’—and told the girl to wrap it up! Jimmy, I can’t take much more of this!”

  “She’s only trying to be kind,” Jimmy said.

  “She’s not! She’s not at all. Do you know what she’s doing? She’s trying to embarrass me. She’s trying to prove that I’m a gold digger!”

  “That’s not true—”

  “It is! Jimmy, please let’s go back to California. Don’t make me go through Somerville with her!”

  “Helen, we’ve got to. I told you we’d have to go through this sort of thing, didn’t I? Can’t you put up with it for a few more days? In a few more days we’ll be on our own—off to the West Indies—”

  “We’ll never be on our own—not as long as she’s around!”

  “Helen,” he said softly, “I know she has faults. But she’s still my mother!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.

  They had gone to Somerville, and Melise had given a huge party for them. Although it was winter, dozens of Chinese lanterns had been strung from the branches of the trees in front of the big white house. Inside, an orchestra had been hired for dancing, and extra servants. And friends and relatives had begun arriving from all over the East. Jimmy remembered standing in the doorway with Helen, watching as cars appeared in the drive, passed slowly under the porte-cochère, and stopped. Coloured chauffeurs hopped out, opening doors for new arrivals. In the winter night, under the great globes of light that glowed beneath the porte-cochère, the long black cars from Detroit seemed to have a special sparkle and a special shine. And the couples, too, seemed glittery as they emerged from the cars, the jewelled wrists of ladies catching the garish lights of the paper lanterns in the trees. The whole effect of Melise’s party was queerly exotic, and, to Jimmy, moving trance-like through it with Helen at his side, wearing the black dress Melise had bought for her at Bergdorf’s, the party, and the people, and the things that happened seemed unreal. And yet he felt he should make it seem real to Helen. He wanted to say to her, “See, this is what our life will be like, this is what my life has been like, this is what we must some day return to. See how everything is? See my grandmother’s crystal—there are twenty dozen of those champagne glasses, bought in France. See that painting of my mother and father? It was painted, after they were married, in the summer-house of my Grandmother Kimball’s place in Sachem’s Head.” He had wanted to explain to Helen that, somehow, the scene, the graceful people moving in it, had a certain significance to him, and a meaning, since it was part of his past, a part of the tradition and the pattern that had shaped him, good or bad, for what he was. He wanted her to understand it, to feel it as he felt it. But every time he looked at her, and began to tell her, her face seemed closed to him, her eyes to withdraw from his. “Everything is very pretty,” she said.

  And his mother had been very little help. He remembered her airy remarks, floating out over the room. “This is French champagne,” she had said to Helen once. “Do you like it as well as your California kind?” And then, to a group of guests, she had said, “Isn’t she pretty? It was such fun shopping with her. She came totally unprepared for our New England winters.” And, when someone remarked to Helen that she was wearing a pretty dress, Melise had interjected, “Yes, isn’t it? It was a little present from me!”

  At one point, one of his Hartford cousins had cornered Helen. “Did you see any shows while you were in New York?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” Helen answered.

  “What ones, dear?”

  “The ones that Mrs. Keefe picked out,” Helen said quietly.

  The cousin hesitated. “Well,” she said, “you must have enjoyed them. Mellie has excellent taste.”

  But the last scene that evening had been the worst. It had happened after the last guests had left, and the four of them—Jimmy, Helen, and his mother and father—were standing at the foot of the stairs, saying good night.

  Melise took Helen’s hand. “I hope you won’t mind making your bed to-morrow morning,” Melise said. “It’s Sunday, and I have no maid until six o’clock. But then,” she said, smiling, “I imagine you’re used to making your own bed, aren’t you?”

  “I’m used to it,” Helen said. And then she said, “I’m surprised you have no maid on Sundays, Mrs. Keefe. I should think, with four million dollars, you could afford one!” She turned and ran up the stairs.

  “Well!” Melise gasped. “Well!”

  “Why don’t you leave her alone, Mother?” Jimmy asked angrily. “Do you have to keep picking on her?”

  “She’s got a lot to learn, that’s all I can say!”

  “Come to bed, Mellie,” Jimmy’s father said.

  Jimmy turned and followed Helen up the stairs. In the darkness of their bedroom, he found her huddled on top of the covers, still in the black dress. “Helen,” he whispered. “Helen, don’t pay any attention to her! It will be all right when we get away by ourselves—”

  “No, no—” she cried.

  “Please, Helen—” He tried to lift her shoulders.

  “Don’t touch me!” she sobbed. “Don’t! Don’t touch me!”

  He had gone downstairs again, to the library, and, as the last servant cleared the after-party disarray of heaping ash-trays and empty glasses, he sat with the whisky decanter, splashing the brown liquor over dissolving ice-cubes in a glass, and drinking it down. Much later, he became conscious of a shape in the doorway and looked up. His mother stood there, in a green satin robe, her hair in curlers. She came and knelt on the floor beside him, resting her cheek on his black-trousered knee. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “I’m a bitch, I know. It’s just that I had dreamed of so much more for you, Jimmy! So much more! Forgive me!”

  They had talked for a while. But he had been very drunk. He could not remember now whether he had forgiven her or not. He could only think of Helen saying, “Don’
t touch me!” and pushing him away.

  He had promised her that when they got to Nassau, the first stop on their Caribbean trip, things would be better. But they had not been. In Nassau, he tried to recapture the slim dark-haired girl who had said, “Hallelujah!” and who had fallen, laughing, with him into the snow at Yosemite, but she eluded him. He remembered watching her coming across the palm-fringed terrace of their hotel towards him, a small figure in a red cotton dress, a white lace mantilla about her shoulders, her short hair combed smoothly back, her chin lifted, her face and arms brown from the sun. An immense, aching longing had filled him; it was as though her very inaccessibility made him love her more. What was it that made him love her? he wondered. At first, he had thought it was a freshness, a simplicity, an ingenuous niceness about her—so different from the brittle girls, the somewhat haggard girls, the house-party girls he had always known. But now it seemed to be more than that. There was something child-like and woundable in her face, in the tilt of her chin. Loving her, he wanted to hold her and shield her, and yet, at the same time, he felt he needed her to shield and protect him from something in himself.

  She sat down beside him on the terrace and said, “Shall we go inside for dinner?”

  “So early? Oh, no, it’s much too much fun out here.”

  He had ordered another drink.

  Then, a little later: “Jimmy—shall we go in now?”

  “Oh, no—not yet. I think I’d like another drink.”

  When, at last, they had gone in, they had had a swift, terrible quarrel in the dining-room.

  In the morning, they lay on the beach. “Why don’t you ever say anything?” he asked her. “Why do you look at me that way? Don’t you realize that I’m your husband?”

  Resistlessly, she let him stroke her toe with his finger.

  “We talked last night,” she said. “You said a great deal.”

  He withdrew his hand. “What’s the matter with us?” he asked.

  “I’m married to a man who’s becoming an alcoholic at twenty-three!” she said. “It’s true. You are!”

  He stood up abruptly, picking up his towel. “Do you realize why?” he said softly and coldly. “Do you?”

  “I know you blame it on me!”

  “Because I’m married to a woman who gives me nothing—or next to nothing! Who makes me feel dirty and ashamed. Can you understand how I might feel? You say I’m becoming an alcoholic. Instead of admitting that there’s something wrong with you, you say there’s something wrong with me.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  He looked at her. She was crying. “And now what?” she asked. “You must know that this can’t last. We’ll end up like pieces of kelp or rockweed, drifting—to and fro. Drifting in your family’s money! Drifting in drink! I wish I’d died in California! I wish I could die now, in the sea! I wrote your name in the sand to-day. The tide came in and washed it away … and I wrote it again, wondering how I would feel, and the tide came again. And I couldn’t feel anything! Not anything!” She stood up, pressing her bare arms tight against her sides, her fists clenched, her head bowed.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Just sit down, Helen, please.”

  She was sobbing uncontrollably. “Is there something wrong with me? Is there?”

  Faces were turned towards them now, from beneath several umbrellas.

  “Please, Helen,” he whispered. “Please sit down. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, I can’t! I can’t!”

  But she did sit down, and, gradually, her sobs stopped. He sat down beside her and tried talking to her; they talked, in little spurts, for a while—a series of apologies followed by accusations and accusations followed by apologies. That afternoon they had flown to Montego Bay.

  So many hotels. So many long, carpeted corridors. So many islands. It was hard for him, now, to remember them all in their proper sequence. St. Thomas, St. Croix, Martinique, Antigua—the islands clouded into one. With a strange, purposeful malice, he drank too much in every one of them. Love, when it came, was brief and terrible; it was almost better when it was blurred with alcohol, and the remorse afterwards could die in swirling sleep. He remembered one evening, at one of the hotels, he had walked out in fury and left her in their room. He had stood for a while, smoking, looking around the deserted lobby of the hotel. He remembered seeing a chameleon scurrying across the white stone floor—the chameleon, pale as death, the colour of his thoughts. On a blue floor—he remembered thinking—the chameleon would turn blue. On green, green. He wondered, idly, what it would do on varicoloured tile. Would it die trying to match its background?

  He went out on to the terrace and down the walk to the pool. It was very late, and there was a moon, reflecting on the still surface of the water. The hotel and the music from the dance floor were far away, and, after looking around, he suddenly stripped off his clothes and stood naked in the moonlight. When he dived in, silently, and the dark cold water was all around him, there was a kind of release from everything. It was as though the water, pressing all around him, kept all the other things out, pressed him into one burning, living entity that swam one length, then back, then half another length without coming up for air, the way he had swum at college. He swam slowly back to the edge of the pool then, and resting one of his forearms, looking into the blackness of the hibiscus and bougainvillaea, he saw her emerge suddenly from the shrubbery and stand. She had changed her clothes. She wore Bermuda shorts and a suède jacket, and she stood there with her hands in her pockets, a slim, lonely figure, looking at the ground. He was struck with the thought that somehow she had known where to find him. She had come straight to the pool. Happy or not, their minds were wedded. One could not move without the other knowing or caring. He leaped out of the water and ran to her, naked and shivering. “Helen!” he said. “Helen, for God’s sake, I love you. I love you. Let’s begin again.”

  “Let’s go inside,” she whispered. “Hurry! Take me inside. Let me try!”

  Later, in the room, she had whispered, “Darling! Oh, my darling!”

  “Was it me then?” he asked her. “Was it me?”

  “Oh, it’s you now—”

  “What do you mean? Was it him again—even for a minute?”

  “Yes,” she said, and she began to cry softly. “But it’s you now! That’s all that matters now—it’s you now!”

  Then, angrily, he had said, “What are you trying to do? Turn me into him?”

  “Oh, no, no, no—”

  “Into a damn’ rapist? For Christ’s sake, are you?”

  “Oh, Jimmy—please! No! Please!”

  When he woke in the morning, she had already gone down to the beach. Looking around the room, he had seen a slip of paper propped against his hairbrushes on the dresser. It was a note, written on hotel stationery:

  DEAREST DARLING,

  Is it because I am such a naughty girl, I wonder, or is it because you are such a naughty boy that somehow we can never seem to cope with things like Somerville or last night—and I cry, or one of us says an unkind thing, and both of us are hurt immeasurably? I thought when I left college I had been hurt by a boy for the last time, but now sometimes the boy is my husband, whom I love of course. It is so hard to explain. And yet writing a letter is easier than talking somehow. Do you understand? I want us to live with dignity and grace. I know what you think—that I am a frigid woman—but all I can say is that I am a woman and all women are different. You are different from that other boy, I must believe this … if I stop believing this, it will be both of our faults!

  So will you be kind and tolerant of me when I digress (sp?) and will you try to think of me sometimes as a person who needs to be helped a little? Just once in a blue moon?

  Once in a blue moon you do …

  Remember that morning before we were married for that silly second time when we sat pasting newspaper clippings of the wedding in our scrapbook, that morning in Rio Linda? You read them aloud in a funny voice and we laughed? Or Yosemite. I am glad
we are going home soon. When we get home, I will buy another scrapbook and we will sit and paste in it all day and not even have one tiny drink! I will try to be better, I promise. But you must promise too

  I love you,

  HELEN

  Claire and Blazer came out of the water. Blazer was in his trunks, but Claire was in blue jeans, sweater, and sneakers, all of which clung to her wetly. Her hair was plastered back across her head, and she looked more like a little boy than anything else. “Are you still drinking those martinis?” she asked gaily. “Really, I think you’d be ashamed of yourself. Remember, we have to climb back to the lift this afternoon.”

  “Look at this mountain,” he said. “Look how far we’ve come to get up here.” He gestured vastly around him. “Do you realize—a hundred years or so ago—Indians roamed all over these hills with bows and arrows? The Indians probably called this place Laughing Water. The young braves brought their maidens here in the moonlight and courted them with feathers and stone beads, and performed fantastic leaping feats here on the rocks, to show off. Can’t you see them? Standing on that farthest rock? Shaking their headdresses?” He paused. “Do you realize that as we sit here, civilization is pushing on—that some day this lake will be drained, and the last arrowhead will be extracted, and the mountains will be flattened to make the earth turn faster?” He looked up and his eyes fogged. The outer branches of the fir trees caught the sun and glittered. “Some day, all these trees will be trimmed with Christmas ornaments,” he said.

  She looked up. “Oh, yes!” she said. “Blazer, did you hear that? Why can’t you say things like that, darling?” She smiled at Jimmy. “Ah, Jimmy, you’re wonderful!” she said. “Though loaded, you’re wonderful.”

  “I wish it could be for ever.”

  “Here? For ever? Oh, no, I’d get bored. So would you. We couldn’t stand anything as peaceful as this for ever.”

  He looked at her. Blazer had gone back into the water. “I want to apologize for last night,” he said. “For whatever part of it was my fault, I want to apologize.”