Eagle Eye (3 page)

She had a triangular jaw like a cat’s, a heart probably of cat-size also, and a set of thin coin-silver spoons, much valued, and often described by his mother. He had tried to steal a spoon for her. “What are you doing, Jew-brat?” After the visit, the three of them had driven straight north, through the blue gap in the mountains, to a Treadway Inn where they stopped for the night, and he saw his parents drunk for the only time. They were drunk at each other. “Don’t you dare send her money, Buddy,” Maeve had said. “To have it thrown back to you. That I’m living like she wanted me to, with
you.
Don’t you ever dare.”

Sometimes he had a fantasy of summer there, the blackberry brambles fruited now, and the warm, consoling flanks of cows.

“You could send her the calamari,” he said now. “Your whole gormay shelf.” Which Maeve catalogued carefully, studying the labels, then left.

Maeve choked. Buddy’s face, never too small for affection, smiled lopsided. Like the cow, against whose side Bunty had put his own shamed head, he had consoled.

Though Buddy’s parents were dead, and a successful brother and sister lived in California—visits mutually planned but never yet made—he still scattered money constantly through remnant Brooklyn cousins, and was always invited to all weddings and bar mitzvahs, buying Bunty a yarmulka for the first of those, and touting the warm family life they would find there. Now and then a cousin dropped by apologetically; Manhattan did not appeal to them. “‘With a store like A&S,’” Buddy quoted, “‘who needs a Korvette’s? Waddya need all the push?’ They must be the last hold-outs in Flatbush. And now maybe they have the Korvette’s.”

In Charles’s that afternoon, a woman standing near smiled at Maeve. “Scrimshaw. Your bag.” She had short white hair, blue-chip eyes, and a tweedy air of well-being. “Nantucket?”

Maeve nodded down at the small straw bag with the bone plaque on its lid, scratched with a picture of a whale. Easter before last, when they had been up there for a couple of weeks, Maeve had spied certain women carrying them like badges—permanent residents, she said, not tourists like them. When the shop-owner, pleading a long waiting list, had refused them, Buddy had ferreted out the carver, who had some old work—not for sale. There had been correspondence. The carver’s name became a household one. “Eighteen months and three hundred smackers,” Buddy had said, opening the package. “But here you are, Maeve, here’s your fishingcreel.”

“I have one, of course, but nothing so fine … Wherever? … Excuse me, I’m Elinor Reeves, we live in the old Berry house … Don’t think we’ve met up there.”

“No, we haven’t been for some years,” Maeve said. “We go to Italy now.”

They had gone to an Italian spa for Buddy’s relaxation—“Wuddya know, I have a liver now,” his father said joking—for three weeks last spring.

“I wanted to order one for mother. Hers fell overboard. Our sloop. But the ones the shop gets are nothing like hers was. Or like this.”

“If you know the carver,” Maeve said. “Sometimes he’ll do a little better for you. I’m afraid I can’t think of the name just now. But I have it at home.”

Buddy gave a snuffle, covered by the handkerchief he took without hurry from his breastpocket. He got away with a lot of such hamming, Bunty now observed, because of his gestures being in a small radius.

“Oh, would you? May I call? Or my secretary. I’m just catching a plane.”

“I’ll phone you, Mrs. Reeves.” Maeve had on the mick charm-smile Bunty formally denied himself if he thought of it. “I know who you are.”

“Oh … thank you very much.”

“I heard you at the club. Quite a few of our friends are your wellwishers.” She introduced Buddy. “Maybe you’d like to join us to meet them some Wednesday afternoon at our home. Maybe a week from next.”

“Wednesday … now let’s see—”

“Any Wednesday,” Maeve said. “It’s my afternoon.”

When the woman left, Buddy said, “Since when?”

“Since now.” Maeve giggled.

“
What
club?”

“The precinct one. A girl I met at the PTA goes to it. I meant to.”

“Aha. That Mrs. Reeves. Maeve I have to hand it to you. She’ll have to come.”

“Why?” Bunty said.

“She’s running for Assembly,” his father said. “But why Wednesday?”

“They have a house in Delaware. They fly down every weekend, I hear. In a private plane. She often stops in here before.”

“Why,
Maeve.
”

“Then they must use the stuff she buys,” he said.

“Shut up, Bunt,” his father said. On the way out, he added “I won’t be sore though, giving up those Sundays. Looking forward to enjoying my posture chair.”

“Not giving them up.” Maeve pushed forward into the wind like a masthead.

Buddy groaned. “That ragtail and bobtail.”

“It’ll get better. You’ll see.”

“Cocktails. When Bunty and I are practically the only males.”

“Bring some from the office.”

These days, at any mention of the office, where his mother never went now even with him, his father turned vague. “Changes are being made. Maybe later on, Maeve. Not just now.” He turned full at her though, so she could see his smile. “Anyhow, you sure learn quick.”

“People have to go somewhere on Sunday. Even
wanted
people. I came from a small town. I know.”

“Maeve …” Buddy said. “Want to go to a show tonight? I’ve got an in with that ticket broker at the Waldorf. We could.”

When his mother’s face broke open like that he could see why Witty had called her a sparkle-plenty dame, and had approved her legs. She shifted her head then, slightly toward himself.

“Bunty, you’re old enough to stay alone,” his father said. “Aren’t you?”

“Sure.” He straightened up and made his heels ring. We can’t embarrass him much longer with a sitter, Buddy had said to her in the bathroom sometime back. The two bathrooms, his and theirs, were end to end, and the old building not as soundproof as Maeve made out; what he heard there would have been useful found goods, except that the Bunty discussed there seemed not himself but a kind of mule-stupid dollbaby he scarcely recognized.

“Maybe I’ll call Witkower.” He would never. He would hanker to, but never trust himself near the phone, to cross the weekend barrier. Four times a night, some schooldays, but tonight, what Witty would think? Foreigners—they probably had a huge family intimacy going.

Home came quickly. The street was never that mysterious, going back. He stood in the foyer his mother had set up with a mirror, chest and chair, though not the same ones, and tried to remember the last foyer. He already knew what it was like to be alone here—they’d forgotten they had already left him, once. Now and then it was a little scary, if you had one of those moments when you looked at your hands, saw your feet, shifted awareness with a jolt, realizing for an eerie minute that you were—yourself. And the place was not consoling.

Maeve was marking the calendar by the phone. “Wednesday,” she muttered.

Buddy smiled at him. “Your mother’s the smartest little secretary a man ever had.” He seemed dimmer, Quentin again.

“I’m not sure I don’t think Witty is too old for you,” Maeve said, turning suddenly. He had a feeling she might grab him, the bathroom Bunty, and whip him off to a department store. She was always Maeve. Buddy was Quentin also; he would never make Bunt his pawn. He had said Bunt was old enough. Funny though, how they never saw the real things were where you had to have your alternatives. It was possible to think them shabby. But he would never be ashamed of them.

“That Mrs. Reeves,” he said. “Her mother must be a million years old.”

He could always break them up. That cheered him.

Already he had begun to feel himself the guardian of the real things—though he didn’t yet know what these were.

M
RS. REEVES WAS UNABLE
after all to come to them on the Wednesday arranged for her—on what he heard the gathered women tell one another was a perfectly good excuse. But one Sunday weeks later, met by the Bronsteins, who were laden with last-minute cocktail items, she had surprisingly come back with them. It was a dark day, perhaps no planes were flying, her unsuccessful campaign was over, and as Bunty was helping fix the hors d’oeuvre, he heard his parents say there were rumors her husband had asked for a divorce. Certainly she had appeared alternately gay and distracted in a halting way, and wanting to be near any transient warmth, even theirs—as if she might be having one of those moments when she knew she was herself. In the intervening weeks he himself had grown used to these; his parents went out many weekend nights now, and he never called Wit.

As their lone guest at first, Mrs. Reeves had been calmed by their devoted cocktail attentions, later greeting civilly each of the “the week’s pickups,” as Buddy called them—the man from the Arthur Murray dance studio—in whose group Maeve had once been, the Bronsteins’ dentist’s assistant and her new fiancé, also one of Bunt’s teachers and the reedy vocal coach who lived with his spaniel-faced friend on the ground-floor.

“Oh yes,” Bunt heard Buddy say later that night, on the other side of the bathroom wall. “She treated us all with the consideration of a candidate.”

“Buddy—” Maeve said. “She lost.”

“It was the house that got all her impertinence, Maeve—didn’t you see?”

Reeves’d been angry for sure to find herself here, and went for the house instead of them. “Boy—” she’d said to him as he passed her the first plate of his own hors d’oeuvre—(out of boredom, and some interest in the company, any company on the long Sunday, he’d become adept at getting tins open and their contents into praisedly weird combos)—“boy, what is that awful thing over there—a girandole?”

He knew she shouldn’t speak that way to him, and stared at her until she dropped her eyes and asked him, in her Nantucket voice, where he was at school. “Ah yes, that’s the one people move in for.” But she seemed to calm herself again, now that he had made her realize he was a child, and asked him if he played that nice old upright piano.

“No, my father used to. It’s the only thing here that’s really ours.” Which since all this lot had been acquired at Bloomingdale’s, was what he felt. He’d made her one more polite offer of his tray, pretending meanwhile that he was at diplomatic reception—at school his class was doing careers and he had chosen as his project Ambassador—and had moved on. He’d just been considering whether the tray wasn’t a flaw in his role, when the coach and his friend came up. “How’d you get the name Bunty?” they said in chorus. Rehearsed it maybe, the way Buddy could sometimes be heard in low-voiced shaving monologue, speaking to the trade. Did his mother’s guests all look so uneasy because they were here, or because they were themselves?

“It’s a Little League connosh … connotation,” Bunt said, in character, then ambled into the kitchen, where he dumped tray and responsibility, walked on down the hall as a third secretary of the legation, and landed on his bed, kicking up his heels in a high mystic glee which had to be shared. His wealth of gathering experience dazzled him, but at the same time he had to confirm the world with his own kind, even if all he said when Witty came to the phone was “How’s tricks?” Lately, though they were still close, Witkower had taken to girls, advising “Get onto it, Bronstein,” and Bunty, since his thirteenth birthday, had taken one to the Modern several times. Tonight, Wit had said “Jesus, what a weekend!” the minute he picked up, giving Bunt scarcely time to recall the barrier which had been crossed. “Jesus, am I glad you called.”

They were deep in Wit’s story when his parents, showing Mrs. Reeves the house, had knocked at his open door. “Hold it Wit—” he’d said. “Here’s folks.”

With what had happened to Witkower, this bathroom corner to which he’d retreated once the party was over, was likely to be his closest crony for sometime. It had a chair whose marine-blue fur—matched to the Anchors Aweigh bedroom pattern his father called “Macy’s-by-the-sea”—had worn off comfortably under his bottom, and the paint above the tiles was solid with the pinups of a lifetime; he even studied here. Until now he’d also valued it for the voices on the other side of the wall. Though he felt guilty when they talked about him, the natural opacity of parents was such that without this extra he would never have understood them. Tonight, hearing them really fight for the first time, even then raising issues more than voices, he caught onto why they spent so much time together in there. Though they must have heard him wash and flush his toilet when he remembered to, since he had no one to talk with it was the one place in the house where they felt soundproof from him.

“Yes, the house got it. But it won’t always, Buddy. You’ll see.”

He knew that voice, excited with its own despair. Nothing in the stores, for tonight.

“You’ll see. By next year.”

“Not next year, Maeve.”

“You moved the office,” his mother said.

He began to study a break in the tiles near his right foot. With his left eye closed, it looked like a lion’s head. With his right, the rhomboid pattern itself pushed forward. With both eyes open, it was only a floor. Pretty soon he could expect to forget Wit’s face. The features, that is. Now and then—as had happened for a while with Ike, who was now only a name and a feeling—he could also expect the whole face to flash back.

“Moved the—is that all it means to you? I changed my whole—life. Papa, he would’ve done handsprings all the way from Maiden Lane to the docks. And you don’t even come downtown to see.”

“Because I’m your wife, not your father. Where I live is here.”

“Where you live—” Quentin said. “Who knows? When you can let that woman say that to you. And let it pass.”

Entering his room talking, Mrs. Reeves had posed there, once again herself as when she had first met them. He’d hung up the phone, whispering Wit a quick goodbye. Maybe they’d see each other again, probably not.

“Good grief,” Mrs. Reeves had said, surveying his blue cork bunk with the hawsered bedspread—real rope—and himself, miserably back of the foc’sle wheel where the phone was. “Good grief, what do people imagine children
think
!”

He hadn’t ever considered. What people could think, had thought about Witkower, was what interested him. What they thought about everything.