Wherever There Is Light (40 page)

“How's your mom?”

“Napping.”

“No, I—”

“Doc Franklin says a day, a week, or a month.”

They strolled past the chapel, looking at the kids walking with books under their arms.

“How'd you and Abe do with the Kefauver Committee?” For over a year, Senator Estes Kefauver had investigated organized crime. The hearings were televised, and if you didn't own a TV, you could watch them for free in movie theaters. Abe had been asked about bootlegging and his reputation as the “Al Capone of New Jersey.” He'd been polite and charming and lied about his current gambling interests, and after he was excused, Julian knew that the government wouldn't stop hunting Abe.

“They covered the hearings in Paris?”

“In the
Trib
.”

“Jesus.”

“Bad?”

“They say over thirty million people watched. My name kept coming up—if I ever have kids, my name'll be a curse to them—but the committee has nothing on me or I would've had to testify.”

“Give Abe my regards.”

“I will.” Julian had been wondering why Kendall had phoned him. He doubted she wanted to renew their relationship, and even if she did, he wasn't eager for her to hurt him again. Julian had come to Lovewood in a taxi, which he was paying to wait by the front gate, and if Kendall wasn't going to tell him why he was here, he was content to chitchat until he had to leave for the airport. He said, “
Paris in the Dark
was great.”

“Thanks. With all the Americans coming over, it's outsold my other three books combined.”

“The photos of Dans le Vent were terrific. So it worked out for Isabella?”

“It has. And Marcel. Otis plays the club once in a while, but he's a big deal now. His quartet was part of a show at the Salle Pleyel. Three thousand people were there, and after Otis did two encores, the audience shouted for more.”

They were going up a path through scrub brush toward the sand dunes and the ocean. Julian felt older than he had standing with Ezekiel. Kendall had taken him up here to this private spot after he'd bought her the Leica. Before Greenwich Village and Paris. Before the war. Before everything. When Julian and Kendall were young.

“I sold some photographs to
Life
,” Kendall said. “Of families around Saigon. I went to see how they're coping with the fighting.”

“Congratulations.” What about our family, Julian thought angrily, the family we'll never have? He became even angrier at the top of the path. Off to their right was the whitewashed shed, the darkroom that Simon had built. Julian had no interest in seeing it again and decided that he was done with chitchat. “Kendall, why'd you call me?”

She stood with her back against a palm tree, looking past him. “I told myself I wanted to say I was sorry. Except I did that already. It was selfish dragging you up here. Maybe I called because I've been disappointing my mother forever and now that I'm going to lose her, I'll never be the daughter she wanted. I've been thinking that's what I was meant to do. Disappoint people and lose them. And maybe I called because . . . I don't know why. I just needed to see you.”

She met his eyes, and there was such an agonized look on her face that he was frightened for her. It was an agony beyond sadness, more terrible, like flaws in a diamond, deep and irreparable. She whispered to him, and Julian couldn't believe what he heard.

“Please,” she said.

Her agony was the last thing Julian saw before she kissed him and he closed his eyes. Had either of them spoken as they sank to the sand, they would've asked themselves what the hell they were doing. But they were too eager for a reprieve from the present, too willing to believe that eros unbound was a curative for regret and loss, all the while knowing as they labored that it was a temporary journey, illogical and insufficient, which didn't stop either of them, and when Julian heard Kendall cry out, he let himself go, feeling so empty, he wondered if anything could ever fill him again.

They opened their eyes, their breathing slowed, and Julian stood and helped her up. They straightened their clothes without looking at each other. Kendall took his hand, and they walked to campus. Two students, a couple also holding hands, were startled by the sight of them and performed a comical double take.

“Hi,” Kendall said, and giggled as the couple hurried on toward the library.

“They're gonna tell on us.”

“We're too old to care.”

They went up Garland's driveway to the steps of the wraparound porch.

“What did we do?” Kendall asked.

“Nothing smart.”

“I love you and feel like I should apologize to you for that.”

“Apology accepted.”

“It was kind of you to come.”

“You gonna be okay?”

“We both will, won't we?”

“We will.”

They hugged and Julian watched her climb the steps. At the door, she smiled at him, a smile both heartrending and strangely hopeful, then she entered the house and the door closed.

It was dark and cold when Julian retrieved his Chrysler from the lot at Newark Airport. His visit with Kendall had kept him company on the flight, yet by the time he reached South Orange Village, Julian couldn't face being alone in his apartment and continued past his building and along Meadowland Park. In the moonlight, a skater was spinning in circles on the duck pond, and Julian turned and drove up and down the streets, enjoying the glimmer of the gas lamps on the snow and the lights glowing in the houses. He remembered his father confessing that he hadn't been designed for marriage. Perhaps this also applied to Kendall, but Julian rejected this view of himself, even though he was nearing forty and the only woman he'd ever wanted to marry didn't want to marry anyone. He pulled up to a stop sign. Through a living room window to his left was a cabinet television, and on-screen Lucille Ball was slow dancing with Desi Arnaz. A man in a shirt and tie was behind the window with a little boy in his arms. The boy was wearing Dr. Denton pajamas. The man tossed him up and caught him. They were both laughing. When they disappeared from the window, Julian promised himself that he would never be lonely again.

J
ulian met Clare Coddington while she was perched on a striped banquette at El Morocco, a green-eyed brunette with an aristocratic face, long, lovely legs, and an insouciant manner that had been refined over the centuries since her ancestors had sailed to the New World on the
Mayflower
. Clare, who resided with her parents in Westport, Connecticut, was in New York with two girlfriends for a night on the town. Julian bought the ladies a round of whiskey sours before inviting them to the Colony for dinner and a peek at high society, and after the soft-shell crabs, chicken hash, and pie à la mode, he took them over to Toots's saloon for a nightcap. Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra were drinking each other under a table in back, and they greeted Julian as if he had just come home from the war.

“Interesting friends you have there,” Clare commented, with more irony than amusement.

Even in the stodgy circles of Westport, the connection between erstwhile bootleggers and entertainers was well-known, and frankly, Clare preferred the Colony with its flannel-and-taffeta covey of Biddles, Vanderbilts, and Whitneys, but she was smitten with Julian: his immaculate manners and tailoring, his blue eyes and free way with a buck. The Coddington clan, after producing generations of shipping magnates and investment bankers, had started churning out archeologists and museum docents at an alarming rate, presenting Clare with the challenge of satisfying her impeccable taste in clothing, vacations, and real estate with an anemic financial legacy.

They had been dating for months before Julian introduced her to Fiona and Eddie at Peter Luger's in Brooklyn. The steaks were rare, the wine robust, and the most interesting interchange went as follows:

Clare said to Fiona, “Julian tells me you go to Mass every day.”

“I like the exercise.”

“At Mass?”

“I walk to church.”

The next afternoon, when Julian went to the O'Rourkes to watch a Yankees–Indians game, Eddie commented, “Cute girl.”

Fiona brought a tray of frankfurters, potato chips, and beer into the den, and Julian asked her, “Do you have an opinion?”

Eddie started laughing. “Does the pope got a rosary?”

Fiona, more noted for her unvarnished judgments than her sensitivity, outdid herself by replying, “I liked Kendall better.”

So did Julian, who still pined for her in a private chamber of his heart. “But what do you think of Clare?”

“I think when a man decides to get married, the first woman who wants him, gets him.”

“Worked for me,” Eddie said, and to reward her husband for that revelation, Fiona gave Julian his food and beer and took Eddie's back to the kitchen.

Julian married Clare on the lawn of the Coddingtons' ramshackle waterfront Victorian. The one surprise was that the ceremony was conducted by a Reform rabbi who dressed like a golf pro, Clare revealing to Julian the day before their wedding that she had studied with the rabbi for months to convert. Julian was touched by her effort and didn't tell her that he could've cared less about her religion. Her parents appeared to care, their shock visible in their tight-lipped smiles. Generations of rigorous Yankee breeding demanded that they remain silent, and for their sake Julian was glad that the rabbi kept the Hebrew to a minimum, preferring to quote most of the lyrics from the hit song “Some Enchanted Evening.”

Clare and Julian honeymooned in the Cayman Islands, and the placid rhythms of that sun-soaked fortnight carried over into their marriage. They were tender toward each other, if not passionate and Clare fussed over him, making sure that he ate balanced meals and went to bed at a decent hour. Julian appreciated her solicitousness and got a kick out of watching her spend his money, which hadn't brought him any pleasure in years. Clare would wake up in the morning and say, “Let's get a sable coat and take it out for a walk,” and off they'd go. Her greatest joy was the construction of their home in Newstead, and though Julian was skeptical about the frenzied architect from Harvard she'd hired, Clare assured him, “With the redwood-and-glass walls we'll feel like we're living outdoors.”

Paying over a hundred grand to go camping didn't seem worth it to Julian. Yet Clare was ecstatic, and six weeks after they moved in, their daughter, Holly, was born via caesarean and with the news that Clare wouldn't be able to have more children. Their disappointment was outweighed by their delight in Holly, who had Julian's cleft chin and blue eyes. Every morning Julian fed and bathed his daughter and, in the afternoons, while Clare made the rounds at Saks and Lord & Taylor, he wheeled Holly's carriage through the village, introducing her early and often to Gruning's ice cream. As she grew older, Julian took her to Yankee Stadium for baseball and football games, and to his business meetings. Holly was seated beside him in a booth at Ann's Clam Bar when he arranged to buy a tract in Short Hills that would become the site of an office park; she sat on his lap in the great room while politicos begged for campaign cash; and because Holly loved the ocean, Julian brought her when he visited Abe at his place in Deal, which amused Clare, who joked that Holly would be the only first grader with an FBI file.

Julian also taught Holly to play Monopoly, viewing it as a chance to introduce her to the real-estate market. His reason for transforming a board game into a seminar was that Julian wanted Holly to be capable of overseeing her inheritance without relying on some schmuck of a son-in-law he might not live to meet. So as father and daughter rolled the dice and moved their pieces—the top hat for Julian, the Scottish terrier for Holly—Julian held forth on the importance of harboring your capital while understanding that you had to invest to win.

“Your real job,” he said, “is to calculate risk versus reward.”