City on Fire (21 page)

Your father

SCENES FROM PRIVATE LIFE

[ 1961–1976 ]

We tried to run the city,

but the city ran away;

and now, Peter Minuit,

we can’t continue it …

—LORENZ HART

“Give It Back to the Indians”

That Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston are not experiencing the same trouble suggests a special madness here.… Americans do not much like, admire, respect, trust or believe in this city.

—ROWLAND EVANS AND ROBERT NOVAK

Inside Report

16

KEITH HAD ALWAYS TENDED to see the great events of his life not as things he made happen, but as things that happened to him, like weather. And, believing there was nothing he could do to change them, he took them in stride. When his junior-high gym teacher put a football in his hand, for example, he ran with it. When football earned him a scholarship to the state university, he went. When his knee blew out senior year, he continued to turn out for games, wearing his jersey under his blazer, to show the sophomore who’d replaced him in the backfield there were no hard feelings. Regan, then, from the very beginning, had been a kind of departure: She was something to which he had no natural right. Something he had chosen for himself, freely.

Not that he would have been constitutionally capable of framing things this way in the spring of 1961. Instead, there was mostly an oblique thrill in his chest when, masturbating himself to sleep in Mansfield, he thought of her in her sorority house in Poughkeepsie. He’d never seen her room there—suitors were required to wait in the front parlor of the rambling Victorian until their dates were ready—but he pictured it as Spartan, self-denying, its only luxury a mirror like the one that had hung in the hallway back home. Having the attractive person’s indifference to his own attractiveness, he’d barely noticed that mirror himself, growing up, but it was for some reason the one that came to mind when he imagined Regan standing nude before a glass, her body almost touching it as she stared into it at something he couldn’t yet see.

Perhaps she’d spent a long time standing like this the night she was to drive him down to New York to meet her family for the first time. At any rate, he’d been stranded for upwards of half an hour on the davenport downstairs. Every time he’d said something, the sorority sister perched on its arm, the quote-unquote chaperone, had absentmindedly touched her face, her collar, the pale bare knee she pretended not to notice her skirt riding up. Keith had been all-conference the previous year, and could easily have had her phone number, but he found himself less and less interested these days in what came easy.

Finally, Regan appeared on the house’s center staircase, in a long blue cardigan that almost swallowed her. Her red hair, loose, hid the sides of her face. When the sister told her she looked great, she seemed to wince a little, as if that hadn’t been her intention. And in fact hadn’t there been a certain anxiousness in the invitation to come with her to the City? Hadn’t her voice sped up, as if she were trying to get the question out before she could second-guess herself? Keith kissed her on the mouth in full view of the chaperone. “You do look great,” he said. “As usual.” Then he helped her into her raincoat and opened his umbrella over her and followed her down the damp lawn to her cute white Karmann Ghia.

Rain drummed the ragtop like fingers on a desk. It seemed to mute not only Regan, behind the wheel, but also the lights of other cars along the Thruway. Somewhere north of the Bronx, he found the signal of an AM station he liked, Saturday night pop, the seraphic harmonies of the Everly Brothers. The City should by now have been staining the horizon purple, but it stayed dark out there. The cupped flame of the radio dial lit only Regan’s chin and nose, the teeth worrying her soft lower lip. “Nervous?”

“I hate to be a wet blanket,” she said, “but is it okay if I just sit here and think?”

It struck him as a loaded question, one of her little tests of his devotion. He turned the music down. “I’m not going to embarrass you, Regan. I promise.”

She felt for his arm in the dark, which meant he must have done something right. She wasn’t usually physically demonstrative; you might even have called her a little skittish. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

“How bad could they be?”

“It’s not just William, or even Daddy. His fiancée will be there, too, which means the Demon Brother, and I … I just don’t want you to feel ambushed, is all.”

Hell of a strange way to talk about your own family, he thought, but “ambushed” turned out to capture certain aspects of the experience pretty neatly. The house, for one thing: an actual freestanding brick mansion on Sutton Place, smack in the middle of the east side of Manhattan, aloof to the high-rises that had seemed so impressive on previous visits. He’d known she was rich, obviously—she shared a name with a holding company whose headquarters was one of the tallest buildings in New York—but he had to struggle not to gawk while Regan fumbled with her keys at the side door. Before she could get it open, a severe woman in a nurse-like uniform pulled it inward. “Your father is in the drawing room.” Keith had always wondered about this term, about people who could afford a room just to draw in, and it made the bouquet of flowers in his hand seem flaccid, minuscule, even as the woman snatched them from him. “I’ll put these in water,” she said, in the same tone with which she might have offered to toss them in the trash.

In the flickery, wood-paneled space to which Regan led him, people were already standing like statuary. One of the men was quite tall. The other man and the woman couldn’t have been over five foot two. The window casings were lead, the rugs Persian, the fire in the fireplace dying … this was all there was time to register before the woman was crossing the room, her hands thrust before her as if she were being tugged along helplessly behind. “You must be Keith. We’ve heard so awfully much about you.” Then Felicia Gould’s hands were passing him on to the gray, trim, bland little man she introduced as her brother, Amory. The third man, presumably Regan’s father, hung back, as though awaiting permission. He’d started to ask if Keith needed a drink when the fiancée interrupted. “Patience, darling. Lizaveta will be out with the martinis any minute. You look fabulous, by the way, Regan. Have you lost weight?”

Regan was still hovering near the door. “Where’s William?”

“Ooh, we can fetch him later. You kids have a seat.” Felicia hurled herself onto the end of a long divan and patted the cushion beside her while the father tinkered with the fire and the small man looked on inscrutably. Fortunately, it was in Keith’s nature to be charming—particularly after one of the bone-dry martinis had vanished down his gullet and another had materialized in his hand. To answer Felicia Gould’s questions, though (about his family and football and wasn’t Hartford lovely in the spring), he had to turn toward the fire and away from Regan, seated to his right. He almost had the feeling that Regan had planned it this way, that it was part of the same disappearing act as the cardigan and the drooping bangs. What was it she was afraid of? The stepmother seemed perfectly harmless. Stepmother-to-be, rather; she and Bill were to be married that June, she explained, noticing him noticing her ring.

But by then, a slight, black-haired boy in a logging shirt and dungarees had paused in the doorway. “William!” This time it was Regan who was up and crossing the room. The kid blushed as she embraced him. And though no one else rose, Keith felt he should go introduce himself.

Regan had talked a lot about her brother, usually with concern over his delinquent tendencies. He’d been only seven when their mother died, she said, and had taken it hard (as though there were some more noble way to take a fatal car crash; as though she, at eleven, had been the picture of maturity—which he supposed, comparatively, she was). Last year, while she’d spent a semester in Italy, William had managed to get himself expelled from three consecutive prep schools, a personal best. “I don’t know what he’s going to do if I don’t move back to New York after graduation,” she’d said. Keith had told her he was sure William would be fine. It was the only time she’d ever gotten mad at him, so far, and it was like she didn’t know how to do it. Her voice just got quiet and choked, the sound of a marble caught in the throat. He’d sensed for a second that perhaps underneath was where she’d been keeping her feelings about her mom.

“No, you don’t understand. My brother is … sensitive. Maybe even a genius.”

Keith found sensitive geniuses annoying on principle. In person, though, he couldn’t help liking the kid, both because Keith liked people generally and because William didn’t seem to give a fig whether he did or not. “Ghouls behaving themselves?” he asked Regan, pouring himself a martini from the shaker the maid had left on the sideboard. Then the siblings were off, murmuring to each other in their own private language. Keith was starting to get a glimmer of exactly what Regan had meant by “sensitive”—there was something bristling, even feline, in William’s self-presentation—when Felicia approached. “William, dear, let’s not monopolize our guest. He must be famished, with these muscles of his. Keith, shall we adjourn to the dining room?”

“What do you say, Keith? Shall we?” the kid said. It was impossible to put your finger on just what made this mocking, or even who was being mocked. But Regan, as if fortified by her brother’s presence, spoke up—“Yes, let’s”—and took Keith’s arm.

The dining room was long and narrow, presided over by oil paintings of two whiskery men who could have been twins. Previous iterations of the Hamilton-Sweeney line, apparently; beneath the accessories that dated them—a pith helmet on one, a pince-nez on the other—they had the same egg-shaped skull and prominent forehead as Regan’s father. Who, incidentally, seemed emboldened now, as if the absurdly long table in front of him and the gloom in which he sat offered a measure of security. Here he was, practically shouting to make himself heard by Keith.

“Beg pardon?”

“I said, how did you and my daughter meet?”

A furlong away, at the foot of the table, William groaned. Keith wasn’t sure how to respond, but neither Felicia nor the future step-uncle, seated opposite him, gave any sign of having heard, and he couldn’t turn to Regan without appearing to conspire. “Regan was in that play before Christmas, Twelfth Night, I’m sure you saw it.”

There was a throat-clearing, oddly nasal. Possibly a shake of the head. “You’re in the theater, then?”

“No, no, just a theater-goer. I had to introduce myself to her afterward.” Every word of this was true, though Keith omitted the fact that he’d been dragged to the play’s very last performance by another Vassar girl, whom he’d deserted at the wrap party. “She’s quite a performer, your daughter.”

The woman who’d earlier taken his flowers now deposited in front of him a bowl of tawny liquid. He wasn’t sure whether you were supposed to wash your hands in it or what. Regan must have noticed, because she touched his leg under the table. A series of muted nods and glances indicated that he should do what she did. He guessed which spoon he was to take from among the three on offer and politely slurped from it the salty broth he would later learn to call consommé.

There followed a course of salad, and a course of fish, and between the questions issuing from the head of the table and the bright ribbon of chatter kept up by the fiancée, awkward silences were mostly avoided. During the meat course, Felicia explained to him in a confidential tone that her cook had trained at the Cordon Bleu, and was on loan to the Hamilton-Sweeneys. All part of a slow process of preparing for the move across the park, away from this house and its ghosts. She turned to look at the oil painting hanging above her future husband, or maybe at the ancient elephant gun mounted on brass hooks on the wall below. Yes, it certainly had been a long engagement, she agreed, but they hadn’t wanted to uproot young William before he graduated. Down there at the table’s far end, the object of her solicitude looked profoundly unhappy. He hadn’t spoken in half an hour.

As for the other brother, Amory Gould, he might have been a doll stuffed with sawdust, at least until the pie-plates were empty and the coffee appeared. Then he picked up his silver and raised it quizzically toward the light. The gesture was so odd—so conspicuous—that even Felicia stopped talking. “Now, Keith,” he said, when he had the table’s full attention. The spoon remained aloft; his eyes stayed on it, as if checking retroactively for spots. “It is Keith, isn’t it? Did you ever consider finance, I wonder?”

Keith had just been telling Regan’s father how he was having to double up on science courses, preparing for medical school. Yes, he would have liked to have gone somewhere like Yale, but frankly hadn’t really applied himself in the way he could have, prior to the injury. “Finance?”

“Banking, my boy. Investing. The family business, as it were.” The voice was soft, insinuating, as if you were eavesdropping on it talking to itself. Involuntarily, Keith leaned forward to hear. “The business of trust, is what it really comes down to. Now me, I’m afraid I lack what you’d call the charisma to be a public face. I remain in the background, I put people together. But a good-looking kid like you, always ready with a smile, I can’t help thinking you could sell unicycles to a paraplegic. Which is of course where fortunes are to be made. Figuratively speaking. No background necessary, no special training, just an ability to think on your feet.” Down came the silverware. “Our world is expanding, Keith. If you’d like to have a conversation about your place in it, I could make that happen.” A mild, blue, unblinking gaze held Keith’s across the table. Next to him, Regan’s silence was deep, but he couldn’t see her; it was as if she’d been pushed into shadow by the glacial pallor of the man’s face, the patent reasonableness of his voice.

Then a chair shrieked across the floorboards. “May I be excused?” William asked, already halfway up. Just before exiting the room, he shot Keith a significant look, though signifying what? And Keith could have sworn William lingered in the corridor for a minute afterward, waiting to hear his response. He cleared his throat. “That’s incredibly generous of you, Mr. Gould,” he said, “but I’m already on a path now. I might as well keep on it.”