The Late John Marquand (38 page)

Orville Prescott, retired daily book reviewer of the
New York Times
and a Marquand admirer, has said that he considers the book “an embarrassing potboiler.” But Mr. Prescott missed the point.
Stopover: Tokyo
was written partly for fun and partly out of a sense of nostalgia, to find out if perhaps you
can
go home again, back to the old days with Christina and pounding out those precision-smooth spy stories for the
Saturday Evening Post
, days when life was simpler, people were kinder, and editors knew what they wanted—or seemed to. John had plenty to keep his pot boiling, and the pot was made of gold.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

During one of the bad periods of Carl Brandt's drinking, a number of their friends, including Carl's psychiatrist, had urged Carol to divorce her husband. She had told him this. Because he always felt that he expressed himself better on paper than orally, he wrote to her one of his characteristic letters, in pencil, on sheets of yellow legal paper:

The important thing is what you said tonight—that it's almost all worthwhile just to find out that what we have kept of our closeness is not synthetic but an inviolate welding. I have felt it all along but, being so woefully in the wrong, I could not call the piper's tune. I had to trust in the end result. I did and have.

I shall not—in fact I cannot—do anything to try and crack that weld. The weld, like the scar of a wound, is always stronger than the adjacent uncut surfaces. I may be a giddy goat, having a hell of a time hopping from crag to crag, trying to believe you are still with me. It may be change of life. I dunno, but I do know I love you most, have more fun with you, trust you utterly (no matter what crags
you
leap lightly and gracefully between), admire you beyond all women (with
good cause) and am proud of you beyond the power of words to say and tongue to tell.…

I fear for myself should you, in fate's hands, become Blithe Spirit. Not for you—you'd reorganize and dust out all the corners of hell (I trust you'd have no interest in heaven?) And you'd find a reason to justify and dignify bad luck. I, very simply, would not know how to envision life without you. That I fear, of that I'm so truly terrified that it physically hurts—it's the whole truth, lady.…

Make up your mind what you want most. You are the arch priestess of that religion. I'll help you get it when you're sure. I love you that much, no matter what it does to me. Count me out of your figuring—that is, what it'll
do
to me. I'll be strong enough, I reckon.

But remember there's this to be said, that few people could love you as I do or want you as consistently. I know you better than anyone else. We've had more together than can be jettisoned with a “skip it.” There's a hell of a lot no one can ever touch, particularly what you have suffered for and from me.

But I love you—and want and need you—now and always.

Carl

Think hard, lady!

And she did think hard, and in the end she decided that too much had been spent and invested in her marriage in terms of time and caring to let it all go. She could not let it go.

The last decade of Carl Brandt's life were years of triumph. Not only did he prosper in a business sense but he also conquered the alcoholism that at one point had threatened to undo him altogether. He did this with the help of a psychiatrist who suggested a new approach. Always before, after one of his prolonged drinking bouts, Carl had been placed in the luxury of Doctors' Hospital or Connecticut's Silver Hill, an expensive sanitarium that seems not to be one and is run along the lines of a comfortable country inn. The New York doctor proposed that Carl be placed, just once, under lock and key in a West Side “snake pit” for alcoholics. After his last bout he was committed to such a place, and during three days there he saw many aspects of himself that he had never seen before. He never had another drink and was sober for the last eight years of his life. But the drinking years had taken their toll on his health, and, like Gardi Fiske, he developed that most frightening of diseases—one must struggle for every breath—emphysema.

Then it was discovered that he had cancer. Early in October, 1957, Carl Brandt was taken to Roosevelt Hospital where, from pain and from the drugs prescribed to control the pain, he soon became delirious. John Marquand came down from Newburyport to join Carol for the ordeal of waiting for the end, which came at last on October 13. He was sixty-eight years old.

Carl's and Carol's had been a strong marriage, though not without its share of anguish. Not a perfect marriage, and never a conventional one, it nonetheless had represented two people bound together by powerful ties of respect and love, a respect and love shared by their two children, Carl and Vicki. Perhaps because John Marquand had come into that marriage at an early stage he had, in joining it, in a sense strengthened it. It was as though each point in the triangular relationship had served to strengthen the other two. As John's relative Buckminster Fuller has often pointed out, the triangle is the strongest geometric form in nature.

As for John and Adelaide, there were long separations and reconciliations of sorts, vituperative letters and telephone calls followed by extended silences, pleas for the freedom of a divorce, but still the marriage dragged on, bearing with it the heavy burden of two unhappy people, with Adelaide stubbornly refusing to quit her role as Mrs. John P. Marquand. At one point, Adelaide announced that she was taking her children on an extended trip to Egypt, and John's lawyers had to threaten her with a restraining order to keep her from taking the children out of school. To their friends, watching them together had become an experience that was ghastly—John, with his skill at sarcasm and ability to make his wife look foolish, and Adelaide, who had let herself become fat and yet who still insisted on bedecking her heavy body in bizarre costumes. There were repeated meetings between Adelaide's and John's lawyers in which they attempted to get her to sign the separation agreement necessary to proceed to the divorce, and after one of these sessions, Brooks Potter's secretary put in a memo to John: “If anyone wants my opinion of Mrs. M, I think she is a candidate for McLean.… She seems to have an aversion to telling the truth.”

But at last, in 1957, not long after Carl Brandt's death, John's
lawyers did seem to be wearing down Adelaide's resistance, and it looked as though she would sign the necessary documents. John was advised that he could go to Reno to wait out the customary residence requirement. He checked in at the Riverside Hotel, using an assumed name so that Adelaide could not reach him. But Adelaide, in the process of going over the papers John's lawyers wanted her to sign, discovered his whereabouts and alias and flew to Reno, where she appeared in the lobby of the Riverside, demanding to see him. He refused to let her come up to his room but did go down to the lobby and told her, “If it takes me a divorce in every state of the Union to do this, and if it takes me the whole year to live out the period of time necessary in Nevada, I will do all of these things, and this divorce is going through.”

Adelaide's trip to Nevada was ill-advised for another reason. By physically setting foot within the boundary of the state where John was pressing his divorce action, she made herself subject to being served. Discovering that she could be served, she submitted to the jurisdiction of the Nevada courts, and it was then possible for the divorce proceedings to go ahead, and for John's residence to be limited to just six weeks. “The minute she came to Reno, we nailed her,” Brooks Potter says.

She flew back to Boston and telephoned Carol. “She asked me if I would intercede with John,” Carol remembers. “She asked me to say, ‘Please don't do this, it's not good for anybody.' But as far as I could see, at that point, it could do nobody any good to live in this atmosphere of terrible hate and bitterness—not for the children, certainly not for John's work, not for anything. John hated her so much at that point—I've never witnessed such hatred in a man.”

John also hated Reno. Topographically it reminded him of Aspen, which he had also grown to hate. He hated, he advised Carol, the entire West—hated it, in all probability, simply because Adelaide liked it. His letters from Reno grew increasingly irascible, the longer he was required to stay. He referred to Reno as “this Sodom and Gomorrah” and complained bitterly that nobody but Carol gave him any news of home. He fidgeted during the days, drank too much in the evenings, and tried to busy himself with Book-of-the-Month Club reading. He moved from the Riverside Hotel to a guest
ranch near Carson City whose letterhead depicted a bucking bronco, and he amused himself by doodling generally vulgar details in pencil here and there about the horse's body. He complained that he couldn't understand what his lawyers were telling him. At one point, they told him he could probably leave Nevada in ten days to two weeks, and at another he was told that he might have to take up permanent residence in the state—a thought that appalled him. The whole proceedings, he told Carol, seemed to him humiliating in the extreme and was destroying his faith in American jurisprudence, his manhood, and the human race.

He could not sleep at night without a Nembutal, but his doctor, Dana Atchley in New York, would not prescribe them for him, and so Carol was required to bootleg them to him in Nevada. Also, Carol had heard that some of John's neighbors in Newburyport had been critical of her occasional presence at his house there, and she told him that she felt she ought not to go to Newburyport again. John begged her to reconsider, blaming the trouble on small-town gossips. He complained that he felt exhausted, sick, and old. His hair seemed to be falling out faster than ever. In the mirror he was shocked by the face he saw. A photograph of himself in the
Herald-Tribune
made him look terrible. He felt, he said, ready for a wheel chair. Meanwhile, the divorce inched its way through the courts.

There were few bright moments in Reno. One divorce-bound lady to whom John had taken a particular dislike had been taking riding lessons at a nearby guest ranch, and one afternoon John had the pleasure of seeing her horse throw her and land her very softly in a large pile of horse manure. He told Conney Fiske that another woman had said to him, “Do you know you look quite a lot like John Marquand, the novelist?” He had replied, “It's curious you should mention it because several people have told me that and you're right, there is a resemblance.” He bought some boots called Wadis and “frontier pants—made in the West, for the West, and worn proudly by Westerners” in order to identify himself a little more with his environment. But dark thoughts continued to assail him. He worried that Reno's altitude might give him another coronary, and of his three children by Adelaide he said, “I feel that in a week or so all the kids will be so brainwashed that it will be kinder to them if I see little or nothing of any of them in the future.”

In a few more weeks' time, however, Adelaide had made the necessary legal moves, John's case had come to court, and his divorce was granted. The marriage had lasted just over twenty-one years. John was free to leave Nevada and flew to San Francisco, where he was met by Carol. It was autumn, San Francisco's best time, and the two spent several days celebrating John's release from matrimony. They flew home together to New York.

Meanwhile, John had asked young Carl Brandt—who was finishing up his studies at Harvard—to go down to the house at Kent's Island and be there when Adelaide arrived to pack up her personal possessions. It was John's lawyer's suggestion, to be sure that Adelaide took away from the house only those articles that had been agreed upon under the separation agreement. Young Carl arrived with books to study and a paper to write and settled himself at a table in the living room. Presently Adelaide Marquand appeared, waved distantly to him, and proceeded with her packing, moving in and out of rooms, up and down stairs. In the years since John had bought his first tiny place, Kent's Island had grown to a house of considerable size with a big wing added on either end.

Presently, Adelaide strode into the living room, stared hard at Carl Brandt, and said, “You do know, don't you, that you are presiding over the dissolution of an empire?” She turned and strode out again.

As soon as his divorce was final, John asked Carol to marry him. Before his death Carl had said to her, “When I die, and if you should want to marry John, I think I should tell you that I think you will find him a very cruel and selfish man.” But this was not why Carol said no—and kept saying no, repeatedly, in the months that followed. With Carl's death, Carol, assisted by her son, had taken over the management of Brandt & Brandt and its many clients, an occupation she thoroughly enjoyed and wanted to continue to enjoy. It was lifeblood to her. Once, at John's house in Pinehurst—it was during the closing of the movie sale of
Stopover: Tokyo
, and calls were going back and forth between Carol and the West Coast as details of the deal were being settled—John's housekeeper, Julia, had asked, bemused, “Mrs. Brandt—who
are
you?” Carol had smiled and said,
“Just a woman who has always worked for a living.” She was and still is that.

Carol treasured her work, and John did not want a wife who worked. He wanted a wife who would keep house and entertain for him in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Carol knew that she could not endure the role John wanted to cast her in, in either of the places he had in mind. He said he would not marry her unless she gave up the agency. She said she would not marry him unless she could be permitted to keep it. And that was that.

“I could tolerate the kind of life he liked to lead for short periods,” Carol Brandt says. “But if I'd had to live it with him—the Somerset Club, the Myopia Hunt, Pinehurst and the golf—I'd have been climbing up the walls in two weeks. And John didn't really approve of the kind of life
I
liked. I like writers, and working with them and talking to them. But John didn't like many other writers. After Carl died, John and I began giving little dinner parties together at my apartment, and there would always be writers there—either clients or friends. And after the guests had left, John would turn to me and say, ‘My
God!
How can you stand those people?' Those people were my life.