Styx & Stone (8 page)

Janey’s father had an umbrella shop on Fourteenth Street, where, as teenagers, we would meet to change our clothes and paint our faces before jumping on the El for an errant evening cruising the lounges on the Upper East Side. We were barely sixteen, but the men didn’t care. We had lots to drink, always offered by junior executives with plenty of cash but no scruples.

It was great fun for Janey and me, and we had a few close calls, like the time her mother smelled the cigarettes and alcohol on our breaths. Janey froze, but I was always quick with an alibi, and I explained it away as smokers on the subway and a new perfume we’d sampled at Stern’s on Forty-Second Street. She bought it, and Janey and I learned to cover our tracks. Another time, we got ourselves invited to a mixer at a Columbia fraternity. Janey and I were a hit; alcohol was my personality in a bottle. We were basking in the attention of a couple of upper classmen, who seemed to have designs on us despite our age, when I spotted Elijah entering the crowded room. I whisked Janey off to the powder room and we slipped out a side door. My brother remained unaware of his wayward sister’s mischief. There was more he never knew about, and more that even Janey never knew.

I phoned her from my father’s apartment. Just three years earlier, right out of college, she had married an electrical engineer and moved to Sea Cliff, Long Island. She now had a one-year-old baby boy, who howled in the background as I spoke to her.

“I’m so happy for you, Janey,” I said, but she snickered.

“You’re the one with the life,” she said. “You were always the popular one.”

“Are you kidding? You were the pretty one that all the boys courted. Remember that Nelson from that Columbia fraternity?”

“He tried to rape me! Nearly did.”

“I know. Good thing I was there to discourage him.”

“Discourage him?” she laughed. “You told him I had the clap!”

“Sure, but it worked. He left you alone after that.”

“And so did everyone else.”

We laughed until her baby, Russell, began screaming again. Janey put the phone down and fetched him a pacifier. I could hear her speaking to someone—her husband, I think—and they bickered about the baby. Finally Janey came back on the line, and I felt I was putting her out.

“Do you ever hear from the old crowd?” she asked. “Bonnie or Jackie?”

“Afraid not,” I said. “Bonnie’s probably still in med school, and Jackie? Well, after what happened with Stitch . . .”

“Oh, right, I’d forgotten about that. Sorry, Ellie.”

I didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. Old boyfriends and former friends were of little interest to me. The memory of Stitch was particularly painful, for I had lost a love and a friend to him.

We’d known each other casually through Jackie Rennart, a close friend from my days at Riverdale Country School. After high school, Jackie and Stitch had gone steady for about a year, then broken up on friendly terms. It was the summer after my junior year at Barnard, August 1956, when we ran into each other at the Warner Cinerama in Times Square. I found out later on that Stitch had planned the chance meeting carefully. I was suffering through a hellish blind date with the son of a friend of my aunt’s. Stu Benson was as dull as an old safety razor, unless you considered his bizarre tics and antisocial habits interesting from a clinical point of view. His routine included the rhythmic constant pursing of his lips, the odd tracing of figure eights on the side of his face with his left forefinger; and the unabashed contemplation of my chest whenever food was unavailable.

Stitch had taken a seat behind us and tapped on my shoulder halfway through
Cinerama Holiday,
just after Stu got up to fetch himself more popcorn.

“Ellie, I thought that was you,” he said, and he was roundly shushed for his trouble. “It’s me, Stitch Ferguson.”

He whispered into my ear for a few minutes, drawing more censure from our neighbors, until I finally pulled him out into the corridor. As we left the auditorium, I looked back to my seat to see Stu returning with his bag of popcorn.

“Let’s get out of here, Stitch,” I said. “Do you know a place where I can get a drink of something?”

He did: his room in the Penn View Hotel near Herald Square. It was the beginning of a secretive affair that we carried on for nearly six months. I didn’t feel right going public, given his past with my friend Jackie, and I was sure my parents would not approve. So I would meet him in his room, dreary though it was, and we camped out in the Murphy bed for drinks, meals, and sex; the rest of the room was too small and foul to make any use of. We had nowhere else to go for our trysting, which, in retrospect, was really just a lot of booze and balling. That’s what Stitch used to call it: balling. Sometimes, we would spend an entire weekend in that bed, not even bothering to dress for two days. I didn’t like the place; it was depressing, but I was crazy for Stitch. He was twenty-six, I was twenty, and he was tall and handsome in a prep school way, like a letterman from Princeton. Truth be told, he’d studied at Rutgers, but something about him really lit a spark in me. I couldn’t resist him, and he got me to do things most girls would be ashamed of.

It ended suddenly one Friday evening. I called on him in his room, and he announced that he was getting married. To Jackie. They had started dating again about two months earlier. He had continued to meet me secretly in his room, all the while he was courting Jackie. I was floored, felt the wind knocked out of me. I ran from his place and wept in the subway, wandered around for hours, then got terribly drunk in a lounge in Murray Hill and was sick in a trash can on Madison Avenue.

They got married six months later. The last time I saw him, he apologized for the way things had played out. He hadn’t intended for me to fall for him. He had just wanted some fun, and had heard I was a good time.

He taught me the hardest lesson in love I’ve ever had, and I have the scars to prove it.

“Listen, Janey,” I said, “something’s happened to my father. He was attacked in his apartment.”

“Russell, leave the cat alone!” shrieked Janey from her end. “Kenny, can’t you watch him for two minutes while I’m on the phone?”

She covered the receiver, and all I could hear was muffled exchanges. Then she came back on and apologized.

“Sorry, Ellie, what was that you said about your father?”

“Oh, just that I’m in town to visit him for a few days or so. Thought we might get together if you were free sometime.”

“Of course! Call me next week, and we’ll make a plan.”

She hung up, and I knew I wouldn’t call her again. I was on my selfish, intemperate path, not ready for adult responsibilities, while she had them crashing down about her.

The morning was brisk and sunny. I walked up Fifth Avenue, then over Thirteenth to Saint Vincent’s, arriving at my father’s bedside at ten thirty. The day nurse shrugged dolefully at me when I asked if there was any change in his condition. I took up the vigil, staring at the walls, examining the state of my manicure—disgraceful—and counting the tiles in the floor. After an hour, I broke down and fetched a copy of the
New York Times
from the newsstand near the elevator.

At twelve thirty, Dr. Mortonson made his rounds and asked me how my father was doing.

“He hasn’t moved since I got here. That was at ten thirty,” I said. “How long can he go on like this without a change?”

The doctor consulted a chart, pursing his lips as he read. “No change,” he said. “I wish he were making some progress. This has me worried.”

Great bedside manner. “Could you be more specific?” I asked.

“If there’s no improvement soon, it could mean he’s in for a prolonged coma, perhaps even irreversible. Impossible to say at this point. We don’t know the nature or extent of the damage, and until we do, it wouldn’t be fair to make a prognosis.”

Mortonson picked up his charm and plodded off to cheer some other patient’s family. I left the hospital at three, planning to return after Ercolano’s memorial service.

The pews creaked under the weight of Columbia’s luminaries, from renowned scholars to administrative bigwigs, including Grayson Kirk, president of the university, who could scarcely avoid the service without loss of face. I arrived somewhere near the end of Chalmers’s eulogy (
Alas, poor Ruggero, I knew him . . .
) and took up a position in the back of the nave. The dean of Columbia College made some brief laudatory remarks about a colleague he’d obviously never met. At the close of the service, Chalmers took to the pulpit again to offer some final words.

“We, the faculty and administration of this university, like to think of ourselves as a family. We have come together today to say goodbye to our colleague, our friend, and, yes, our brother. For Ruggero was part of our extended family. And, since his biological family could not be here today, I think it proper that we act as proxy and see the funereal ritual through to its conclusion. I invite you all, therefore, back to Hamilton Hall for a gathering to celebrate Ruggero’s life. A buffet will be served.” Then came the expected: “Ruggero would have wanted it this way.”

I watched the mourners file out of the chapel. Joan Little dabbed her swollen eyes; Bernie Sanger walked on the balls of his feet, his eyes roaming the congregation, self-conscious as if he was being watched; Gualtieri Bruchner, appearing more charcoal than pale-gray this day, left the church with stony, impassive, dull eyes. Students and professors filed by on their way out. Chalmers headed up the aisle with his wife, Helen, on one arm, and an attractive girl of about twenty on the other. Her hazel eyes, numbed by grief or boredom (it’s hard to tell sometimes) caught mine, and I thought I knew her. Her pallid cheeks cracked the tiniest polite smile of recognition, she looked down as if embarrassed, and the three passed. I watched them recede, wondering if the girl could really be Ruth Chalmers, Victor’s precocious young daughter. A shapely figure, dressed in black, swept past, leaving a perfumed breeze in her wake: Hildy Jaspers. Then the young man seated in front of me turned and smiled. It was Gigi Lucchesi. His beauty was as extraordinary and unexpected the second time around as it had been the first. He stepped into the aisle and waited to cede me the right of way. I nodded and started for the exit. That’s when I noticed Hildy Jaspers stopped at the chapel door. She was gazing back in our direction, surely unaware of me. She smiled with her eyes. It wasn’t the aching, self-conscious smile Ruth Chalmers had displayed moments earlier. Even without moving her lips, Hildy managed to flash a naughty, I-know-you-find-me-sexy grin, just with a sparkle of her eyes. I turned to see Gigi’s stare fixed on her, and he was smiling. I made my way alone to Hamilton Hall.

Two long tables draped in white linen presented a banquet of modest proportions in the lounge where I’d met Hildy Jaspers and Gigi Lucchesi the day before. The centerpiece of the spread was an overcooked roast, sitting dry on a stainless steel platter. There were Italian macaroni casseroles, some with red sauce, some white, and one green. Heaps of lettuce, tomatoes, and croutons had been tossed in three glass salad bowls. There was poached salmon, bread, and wedges of Parmesan cheese. Someone’s desk had been pressed into service as a full bar, complete with red and white wine and a variety of spirits.