What Binds Us (4 page)

“What are you gonna do about med school?” He’d planned to attend Thomas Jefferson while Calvin went for his Master’s at Wharton.

“Harvard,” he said. “I’m going to Harvard.” A trace of pride lit his face.

***

I left school after my last final, leaving Dondi a terse note telling him I would see him in September. When it was time to make our housing selections for the coming term of fall 1979, our junior year, I’d asked Dondi if he was sure he wanted us to continue rooming together. He’d looked at me as if I were an idiot but said nothing. The next morning I found his completed housing application on my desk. In the space for roommate’s name he had neatly printed mine.

At home I was miserable. I was depressed, humbled by love’s demise. I hated myself when I remembered how full of myself I had been the previous summer, how arrogant being loved had made me.

By early June the temperature soared to the upper nineties and settled there. Every time the phone rang, my heart jumped. It was never him. Over time my heart stopped responding to every metallic cry, and hope died a quiet death.

Our estrangement exhausted me and I slept a great deal during those first hot weeks of the summer. When my mother called me to the phone, sleep still held me in its warm embrace so that I didn’t wonder who was calling me, didn’t hope that it was him.

“Hello,” I said.

“T?”

“Dondi?”

“Darling!”

“What’s up?” I asked with feigned casualness.

“Nothing,” he said with uncharacteristic reticence. “I was just thinking about you…and, well, I realized I probably owe you an apology for being such an ass all year.”

I realized with a start that he was nervous.

“Anyway,” he continued. “I was wondering if you’d let me make it up to you.”

“Dondi, that’s not necessary.”

“I know, but…I was wondering if you’d like to spend the summer with me. I mean, you must be bored witless in Smallville by now.”

“Willingboro. And as a matter of fact, I am.”

“Good! Then you’ll come?”

“I have to ask my mother—”

“I already did. She said it was up to you. C’mon, say yes. It’ll be great. My brothers are here and so are my parents. Our house is right on the beach. New York’s only about an hour away.”

“Okay. Okay, I’ll come.”

“Great,” he enthused. I could tell he was relieved. “I’ll send a car for you. Tomorrow. Around noon.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow.”

***

“My God!” my mother gasped, catching sight of the Cadillac that pulled into our driveway at exactly noon the next day. “People will think somebody died!”

I swung open the door and there towered a liveried chauffeur fully six and a half feet tall. His head was cleanly shaved and so perfectly round, I thought at first he wore a helmet of some kind. Beneath his naked head, his face was brown and creased as a walnut. Thick-necked, broad-shouldered, he seemed as powerful as a tree or a genie out of a bottle. Behind him, the limousine, swollen and very black, lay in our driveway like a dry-docked yacht.

“Mr. Lawrence?”

“Yes, but please call me Thomas.” I was just twenty and did not yet feel like an adult; whenever someone said “Mr. Lawrence” I looked around to see if my father was standing behind me.

“Very well, sir. I’m Phipps. I’ll be your driver. Are you ready to leave?”

“Ahh, no.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

“Are you sure? You can come in if you’d like.”

“The car will be fine, thank you.”

When I finally stepped out the door, having beaten off my mother’s worries, Phipps was standing beside the car, its big engine purring like a contented cat in the noonday sun. He took my bags and opened the rear door of the car. A finger of cool air beckoned from within. Across the street, Mrs. Chang hustled her not-inconsiderable bulk across her brown lawn. The speed at which she traveled was astonishing. She bore in her hands a foil-wrapped casserole dish.

I ducked into the cool dark of the car.

They lived on the outermost section of the island, a five-mile projection into Long Island Sound shaped like a lobster’s claw. The west and east sides of this projection were joined by a wide avenue that forked as it stretched toward the bay. Approaching from the North, Phipps drove us through a stretch of dusty middle-class suburbia—neatly laid out streets that terminated in cul-de-sacs and carefully planned tract houses that were once the dream of the future, the hope of an entire generation. The dream had shattered, but the failure remained: vacant overgrown parcels of land, devoid of all but the hardiest of weeds, ramshackle ranch houses, their pastel colors faded and peeling, some thatched with aluminum. Now and then, in a curtained window the glimpse of a lost dream. I came to think of the boulevard as the anteroom to the enclave of wealth—the East and West claws—and nicknamed it the boulevard of broken dreams. The boulevard was lined on both sides with gas stations and convenience stores, providing places for a Pepsi and a piss by the side of the road.

West Claw was hilly and rose from the sea in verdant planes. Here were the houses of the newly rich and unjustly famous. Enormous steel and glass houses hung from the tiered hillside as if after having scrabbled up the hill, they’d dug in their heels, intent on staying. Across the bay, East claw danced, just out of reach, like a gilt-edged dream.

In East Claw were the houses of the older established money. Here, the houses tended to be closer to the water, without pools, with more ground. They were more elaborate—Beaux Arts mansions built by architects like McKim, Mead and White in the late 1800s—modeled after ancient Greek temples, with sweeping graveled drives skirting majestic hundred-year-old trees. Attending these properties were vast manicured lawns, the offspring of minions of gardeners made up of Japanese, Mexicans, Harvard-educated white boys eschewing their birthright. It was here that Dondi and his family lived in the summer.

Phipps parked the car, opened my door, grabbed my bags from the trunk and led me to a small motorboat. He explained that we would take the boat across the sound and approach the house from the back.

“We could have taken the car and driven around the front, through the main gate,” Phipps shouted over the roar of the small but powerful outboard motor. “But I always like to approach this way—especially when someone is coming out for the first time.” He fell silent for a few seconds while the engine continued to scream as we curved toward the shore. He let out a low whistle. “No matter how many times I make this trip, it never fails to impress me.” He pointed straight ahead. “That’s it. That’s Aurora.”

My gaze followed his long, crooked brown finger. In the distance a redwood pier that had been allowed to weather naturally shone silver in the gold afternoon light. At the end of the pier a green light flashed seductively. It was, I knew, the allure of great wealth.

“Don’t be seduced by that boy’s money,” my mother had warned me. How could I have told her that it wasn’t the boy’s money, but the boy himself who had captivated me?

Just beyond the pier was the house. A huge limestone leviathan, it seemed to have heaved itself up out of the sea and now sprawled on the yellow sand in exhausted abandon. Its copper roofs flashed in the sun. A sea-green awning was cranked out over a brick terrace overlooking the beach. An army of Greco-Roman statuary, limbless, sightless, corroded with the ages, stood sentry along the balcony.

A Range Rover was parked on the dock. Phipps heaped my stuff in the back and we bounced over an unpaved road toward the house that rose fantastically, like Oz, against the sky.

Phipps dropped me at the front door. “I’ll see to your things, sir.”

I was shocked to be addressed in such a manner and already regretted the loss of our former camaraderie. Halfway into our journey, I had climbed over the front seat and sat beside him. He told me about Dondi as a child. “My name isn’t Phipps,” he told me. It was Otis Phillips, but his employer, Mr. Whyte, couldn’t see addressing his driver as Otis. His middle name, Ulysses was even worse, so he called him Phillips. Dondi was three at the time and had trouble pronouncing the letter “L.” Thus, Phillips became Phipps. The name stuck.

I mounted the front steps and found the entrance guarded by elaborate wrought iron gates and a brace of ferocious stone lions.

The gate swung open and a young man, impossibly lean and long-limbed, stepped out of the shadows. And revealed a beauty like the parting of clouds. His lips, a scarlet invitation, formed words of welcome, inviting me in: “Welcome to Castle Rackrent.”

He offered me his hand as he stepped onto the verandah. The ceiling was of brick and a rose-colored light fell around us. He was very pale, save for his rather bruised-looking mouth. The smooth alabaster expanse of his forehead was interrupted by the sudden downward thrust of a widow’s peak from which his silky hair, black as a raven’s wing, swept back toward the nape of his neck. “Hi, I’m Matthew. Dondi’s brother.”

I could see a resemblance although Matthew was so perfect, so delicately drawn that he made Dondi, for all his brilliance and sophistication, seem coarse by comparison. I stared at my hand in his. “Hi, I’m Thomas—Dondi’s roommate from school.”

“Phipps! Wait,” he yelled over my shoulder. “I need a ride into town.” He turned his attention back to me. “Well, Thomas, nice to meet you. I have to go.”

I nodded then looked down, embarrassed I still had his hand in mine. “Oh! Sorry.”

He ran down the steps. His shoulder blades, like an angel’s folded wings, jutted sharply through the knit fabric of his red pullover; I thought I had never seen such a tender sight.

“I’ll see you at dinner,” he called over his shoulder without turning around. “Go on in. Someone will be down in a minute.” He climbed into the Jeep, waved.

With a spray of white gravel, Phipps turned the Jeep around and shot down the drive. I could see Matthew twisted around in his seat until they reached the gatehouse. I waved again and turned toward the front door. I took a step forward and like Alice, stepped into a looking-glass world in which everything was familiar yet larger, more exquisite, more precious than anything I’d ever known.

There was, a maid confided later, an Aubusson carpet in an upstairs hallway said to weigh two thousand pounds. And when tea was served at four o’clock, it employed a silver service that had crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. In a guest room hung a small DaVinci drawing, above a round 18th-century fireplace by the French architect Ledoux.

I felt a moment’s retroactive embarrassment, for Dondi had visited over Easter break freshman year. The visit had gone well. He charmed my mother and made my father laugh.

“He’s a fool,” Daddy said.

“Hush,” my mother scolded. I’d been the only uncomfortable one. The house seemed too small for him and everything looked shabby in his dazzling light.

He gave my mother a bouquet of roses on arrival.

“Oh, I just
love
roses,” my mother gushed. “I’ve been trying to get my husband to plant a rose bush for years.”

The day after we returned to school, my mother called to say that several rosebushes and a gardener had arrived that morning. “The front of the house looks gorgeous. They even put a trellis up on the side of the house.” She lowered her voice. “Your dad was grumbling, but he shut up when a case of Glenfiddich arrived for
him
.” She giggled like a girl. “But how do we thank him?”

Knowing that buying him a gift would only escalate to a volley of increasingly extravagant gifts, I said, “Don’t even try.”

“Don’t be silly. I know, I’ll
bake
him something. What’s his favorite?” My mother was forever baking and sending us care packages; everyone in our dorm loved her.

“Zucchini bread.”

“Fine. I’ll bake this weekend. And it’s just for him. Don’t you dare eat any!”

I told Dondi when he came in from class, “My mother called to thank you for the rosebushes.”

He nodded.

“You really are something. You know, you didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. Your mom’s sweet. I wanted to do it.”

“Uh-huh. She loves you. I think Dad’s a fan now, too.”

“The scotch?”

“Uh-huh. The scotch… Dondi?”

“I have to go to the library,” he said. “You coming?”

***

I stood trying to adjust to my new surroundings. So this was the house where Dondi spent his summers. From the second-floor landing, a woman called down to me, “Hello! You must be Thomas-Edward. I’m Mrs. Whyte, Dondi’s mother. Please excuse me. I’ll be down in a minute.” She turned to speak to a woman beside her.

I took a moment to study her. She was a laminated beauty with steel-gray eyes and a cast-iron spine. Tall, whip-thin with the smallest waist I’d ever seen, all sharp angles and deep shadow, she was a chiaroscuro study in style. I knew she’d been a model in the 50s, yet nearly thirty years had not diminished her poise or glamour. She was easily the most elegant woman I’d ever seen.

As I watched her coming down the sweep of marble staircase I realized she was less a woman or a mother than grandeur descending a staircase. At the bottom she stopped, smiled, offered me her hand. “Thomas-Edward. I’m delighted you could join us.” Her voice was well modulated; she spoke with practiced authority. She wore Opium. Its opulent scent wafted over me. “Dondi is out. He had an appointment with the orthodontist.” My face must have registered surprise for she said, “Oh, yes, Dondi wore braces. For three years he refused to smile and wouldn’t allow his picture to be taken.”

I was surprised to learn both of his orthodontia and of his vanity, for Dondi had always seemed to exist outside the realm of human frailty. If he had not seemed
super
-human, then he had at least seemed
extra
-human—exempt from the thousand natural shocks to which the flesh is heir. It would be many years again before I realized that Dondi the blessed was not Dondi the immortal.

“Come,” Mrs. Whyte said, “I’ll introduce you to the staff and then we’ll get you settled in your rooms.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

She led me past many high-ceilinged rooms painted rich dark colors: gold, terra cotta, olive-green.