A Season in Purgatory (2 page)

“We’ll put him in Agnes’s room,” said Grace, about me, figuring out the logistics of the bedrooms of her house on her fingers. “Tell Bridey to make up Agnes’s room for Constant’s friend.” I had never heard of Agnes, and no one explained who she was. I felt I shouldn’t ask, and didn’t.

Later, I became a friend of some of Constant’s brothers and sisters, but not all. Gerald Junior, who was called Jerry, never liked me much, nor did Maureen; but Sandro did, and Desmond, when he appeared, and Mary Pat, and Kitt, the youngest of the girls, although, until it happened—the thing that happened with Winifred Utley—most of the older ones remained shadow figures to me.

“He writes,” said Constant, by way of explaining me to his siblings at dinner on my first night in the house.

“I hope to,” I corrected Constant.

Gerald Junior snorted, a sneering sort of snort, as if the admission of such a future vocation suggested a maimed masculinity. He was maimed himself, a cripple, the result of an early car accident that had left him partially paralyzed from the waist down, the cause of which being one of the many things that went undiscussed in the family.

Then, surprisingly, the old man, who had more or less ignored me, came to my rescue. “Books? Are you going to write books?” he asked me in a loud voice from the head of the table.

I, scarlet with embarrassment at being the focus of attention, replied, somewhat incoherently, “I hope to. Yes, sir. In time.”

“Hmmm. Interesting,” he said, as if filing away some information for future use. Then he turned to Gerald Junior. “People respect people who write books.”

“I just love to read,” said Kitt, then only fourteen, looking over at me with approval.

Actually, I had been to the Bradley house once before, six months prior to Constant’s expulsion, on an unannounced visit, accompanying Constant, while his parents were away, his mother in Paris ordering clothes, and his father in California on business. Or so he thought. We had slipped away from Milford School on a holiday afternoon,
when we were presumed to be hiking, and hitchhiked the sixty-eight miles from the school to his family’s home. He said that it was something important, but it turned out to be the sort of thing that was important to Constant, though hardly worth the risk that was involved with the adventure, especially as it was, months later, the cause of his expulsion.

The purpose of the trip was to retrieve some magazines he had ordered, of naked women, which were sent to the recipient in plain brown wrappers. He had not dared to have them sent to the school, where, under the prying eye of Miss Feeley, the headmaster’s secretary, who sorted the mail and had an instinct for the prurient, he risked detention and expulsion. Instead, he had had them sent to his home, alerting Bridey, the Bradleys’ housekeeper, who doted on him, to keep an eye out for the envelope and put it away for him. It never occurred to poor Bridey, a daily communicant, that she was secreting pictures of naked ladies, in sexual frolic with each other, beneath her darning basket in the sewing room on the second floor of the Bradley house. It was Bridey’s secret hope, never voiced, that Constant might one day become a priest.

We were picked up by a nice woman in a blue Buick who spotted us for the prep school boys we were by our tweed jackets and gray flannel trousers. She was going in the direction of the city where the Bradleys lived and offered to drop us off at a junction where it would be easy to get another ride into the city. Constant, of course, charmed her during the drive, as he always charmed ladies of all ages, and she ended up taking us directly to the gates of the Bradley house, twenty miles and twenty-five minutes out of her way, where she gaped openly at the huge Tudor edifice beyond. She had a daughter, she told him, whom she hoped he could meet one day. Her daughter’s name was Winifred Utley, and
she went to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, she said. If he had asked her to come in, she would have.

Constant had an uncanny ability to readjust the features of his face for an instant and assume the expression of another person. This minor talent, combined with the further ability to assume another’s voice and gestures, sent people into gales of laughter, which was not always kind laughter. While waving farewell to her, he became our just-departed driver. We laughed all the way up the driveway to the house, as he enacted an imaginary scene in which he begged Mrs. Utley to let him marry her daughter.

“This is some house,” I said, as the Tudor mansion loomed in front of us. “My God!”

“They’re all away,” he replied. “Ma’s in Paris with Maureen. My father’s somewhere on business. I never know where. Kitt and Mary Pat are at Sacred Heart. Jerry’s usually with Pa. Sandro’s in graduate school at Yale. Desmond is a doctor, practicing at St. Monica’s Hospital downtown. That about sums it up.”

“No slaves?”

“Yeah. Lots of Irish girls, but I don’t think any are here. Probably only Bridey. She runs the place.”

At the front door, he took out a key and inserted it. We walked into the hallway. Ahead was an impressive winding stairway with a wrought-iron railing. To the left was a large living room, extravagantly decorated in dark-red velvet damask and Chippendale-looking furniture. I stared.

“Ma’s always having the place done up,” said Constant. “I never know what to expect. That room was green last time I was here.”

It was not a room in which they sat much. It was, according to Constant, “for show,” used only for parties, or when Cardinal Sullivan came to dine, or on the magnificent occasion when the Pope was received. Was there anyone who
did not know that the Pope had visited the Bradley house in Scarborough Hill on his last trip to the United States? Oh, of course there was, but there weren’t many Catholics who did not know, and all of us, every single one, at Milford knew. It set Constant apart from the rest of us. “The Pope visited his family,” the masters always said when they talked about him, and they said it with awe.

Alone, as family, they used the room they called the family room until Sally Steers, their decorator, convinced Grace to begin calling it the library. In the place of honor over the fireplace was a large color photograph of His Holiness. Elsewhere, on every table, were family photographs, including the annual Bradford Bacharach Christmas-card portrait of Gerald and Grace and all the children, except Agnes, posed in great formality in front of the fireplace in the living room, which was sent to an ever-increasing list of more than a thousand people. There were pictures of Gerald with political figures: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Eugene McCarthy, all of whom had dined at Scarborough Hill. There were pictures of the girls in riding habits and velvet hats, and of the boys in various athletic uniforms, including Jerry, before the accident, erect and handsome, in ski clothes on the slopes of Aspen. There were cups and trophies on the mantelpiece and on the shelves of the bookcases, and red and blue ribbons from horse shows framed on the walls. Here also was the piano that Grace liked to play after dinner, when she gathered her children around her to sing Irish songs.

On a bench in the curve of the stairway Constant noticed two coats, tossed there casually, as if the owners were in a hurry. One was a man’s coat and the other a fur coat, either mink or sable. I did not know the difference then. Constant picked up the fur coat and looked at the satin lining. There was a label from Revillon Frères, and the initials
STS
intertwined.
A strange, distant look came into his face as he dropped it back on the bench.

“Did your parents come back?” I asked.

He signaled me first not to talk and then to follow him. We went through a doorway into a back hallway. He peered into the kitchen to check on Bridey, but she wasn’t there. I followed him up a back stairway. Opening a door to the second-floor hallway, he peered out and then walked down to the sewing room, where he found the envelope beneath Bridey’s darning basket. Then we retraced our steps to the first floor.

“I don’t think we should leave by the front door,” he said. He spoke quietly, as if he were afraid of being overheard upstairs. “We’ll go out through the kitchen.”

“I actually was never in a house this large before. I would be keen to see something more than the back halls and the maids’ stairway,” I said.

“Some other time,” he replied. While the older siblings were still a bit in awe of the enormous house in which they lived, Constant and Kitt, the youngest two, accepted it completely. It was a casual thing for them, all they had ever known.

Later, back at school, when I asked him what had happened at his house, he said, “That mink coat wasn’t my mother’s.”

“Was the other coat your father’s?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“But—?” I wanted it to be spelled out to me, what I thought he meant.

A slight scowl appeared on his face, clouding the clearness of his forehead. I had seen that look before. It appeared whenever there was what he perceived to be a criticism of anyone in his family. It meant, I knew, not to pursue the subject at hand. I didn’t.

* * *

The next morning on the tennis court, Constant and I waited for Kitt and Mary Pat to finish their match with the tennis teacher before we played. “Hi, kid,” said Kitt, when she walked off the court. Kitt called everyone kid. They all called everyone kid, but mostly Kitt. When she said it to you, you knew that you had been accepted, that you were not exactly one of them, but one of the people who orbited around their magnificence.

Constant was everyone’s favorite in the family. He was flattered out of his senses from earliest childhood. Kitt was Constant’s favorite. She had the puzzling kind of good looks that are unconnected with beauty yet are more arresting, and a flippant outspoken manner that delighted her siblings but disturbed her mother.

“Where is she?” asked Kitt, walking past a new maid with a frightened expression who opened the door of her mother’s house. Kitt often referred to her mother as she and her.

“In the pantry.”

“
Mother
in the
pantry
? Doing what? Firing the cook?”

“Doing the flowers.”

“Oh, yes, the flowers.”

She was then, when I first met her, a student at the Sacred Heart Convent in another small Connecticut town. No Farmington, no Foxcroft, for the Bradley ladies. They went to the Madams, as the Sacred Heart sisters were called. The Madams were the aristocrats of nuns, from good families themselves, and rich ones. Agnes Bradley, the eldest sister in the family, I later discovered, was said to have longed for the veil, longed to have become a Madam herself, but madness intervened. Her madness. The thing the family never talked about. She might have been dead, as dead as the dead brother whose plane went down in Vietnam. She was away,
in an institution in Maine, tended by hardworking nuns, not Madams, who might have been nurses or social workers had they not received a vocation. No one ever spoke about Agnes, except Kitt, who went to visit her before Christmas each year and on her birthday. Once she took me with her. Agnes thought that I was Constant, whom she had never seen other than as a baby, and Kitt nodded for me to pretend I was. It would have been too complicated, she said later, to explain who I was and what my relationship was to her. Agnes, except for her vacant look, had the appearance and voice of her father. But her mind was that of a ten-year-old. Kitt brought her silver rosary beads, blessed by the Holy Father in Rome, because Agnes claimed someone always stole her beads. Kitt was infinitely patient with her. Agnes, with her unpainted lips, talked incessantly of the Virgin Mary and the power of prayer. “I’ll call you on Sunday,” Kitt said to Agnes on leaving. “Oh, goody, goody, Trinity Sunday,” replied Agnes, clapping her hands.

Dear sweet Kitt. I believe that she loved me, as I certainly loved her, but that all happened later and is no more than a subplot to the story that I have to tell. Only my own participation in that emotional turmoil brings me to mention it so early in this account. My knowledge of the events that follow is mostly firsthand, the rest comes from conversations with Constant and Kitt, and, occasionally, their far less well off cousins, Fatty and Sis Malloy. “I’m the one who talks too much,” Kitt once said. “They’re all down on me. Even Pa, and let’s face it, I’m the apple of Pa’s eye.”

For reasons pertaining to their moment in time, Gerald and Grace Bradley were neither accepted nor received by the society of their city, for the Irish—even the rich Irish, and the Bradleys were very rich—were considered in those days to be not altogether correct. “They’re not the kind of people
you invite to dinner,” said Leverett Somerset, in his snubbing way of speaking. He loathed the Irish, particularly the Bradleys. The Bradley money had not been fashionably come by. It was not from insurance, or banking, or stocks and bonds. Gerald’s father, Malachy, who amassed the nucleus that Gerald later turned into the Bradley fortune, had been a butcher who prospered in the grocery business and, before he died, became the president of a small bank in the Irish section of the city. In later years, Gerald always referred to his father as a banker, but those who remembered, especially people like the Somersets, always referred to him as a butcher. Gerald attended the Catholic schools of the city, Catholic University in Washington, and law school at Harvard. His early financial circumstances were further enhanced by his marriage to Grace Malloy, the daughter of a plumber who had prospered in the plumbing supply business. By the standards of the day, the combined incomes of the two newlyweds made them well-to-do. In a relatively short time, Gerald was thought to be the finest Catholic lawyer in the city and was personally responsible for the legal affairs of the bishop and the Church. Already a genius in money matters, particularly in the acquisition of real estate, Gerald doubled, trebled, quadrupled, et cetera, into the stratospheric level, the original butcher and plumber money, at the same time that Grace was giving birth to Bradley child after Bradley child.

The Bradleys were inordinately admired by the Irish community from which they sprang but were shunned by the Protestant community who controlled the business, politics, and society of the city. In those days, the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, and the Jews resided on the east side of the city, while the Protestants lived more graciously on the west side. It was a surprise to all when Gerald Bradley bought the old Scarborough house, once lived in by Governor Scarborough, in the fashionable section known as Scarborough
Hill. It was doubly surprising when Gerald Bradley then tore down the venerable house and built in its place an even larger mansion of gray and brown stone in the Tudor style. If it was not the handsomest house in the city, it was certainly the largest, and its construction caused much comment at the time, not all of it favorable, as well as a steady stream of cars filled with sightseers hanging out the windows to stare at the vast structure. By then the Bradley name was on every tongue.