Either Side of Winter (6 page)

Amy’s heart went out to him. She imagined saying to Charles afterwards when they were alone, or perhaps whispering to him over the phone that night, when she took the receiver into the bathroom with her, that last nights were always long and dull, no matter how you tried to cheer them up, and she couldn’t say how grateful she felt to him for doing his best. Jack ate hungrily though without much sign of pleasure – out of pure appetite it seemed. He complained of
one of their playing partners, a little Jewish guy, Reuben Kranz. ‘A real piece of work. Kept telling me how much money he gives to your school – like I owed him. I told him, I don’t give a damn. My daughter earns twice what she’s getting paid.’ This, nodding at Amy. ‘He says you’ve got his girl in your class. Name of Rachel.’ Amy had an image of the child: very pretty, rather conscious of the fact, rather quiet. Everyone knew how rich Daddy was, but she carried her inheritance lightly, like a scent. All the boys were scared of her; Amy was too, actually. She had the porcelain air of something carefully, terribly protected. The money around her was soft, invisible, inviolable.

‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Jack went on, having his say at last, ‘I don’t envy the kid her father.’ Amy tried to hush him; the man after all was Mr Conway’s partner. But Jack had found his tongue; and Charles shook his head lightly, as if to say, it doesn’t matter, let the old man stretch his rope. Reuben had an expensive little game, Jack’d give him that: a swing best described as ‘well paid for’, short and strict. No length off the tee, but dead safe with his iron play. Always two-putted, played to win. A real piece of work, Jack repeated, though he made nice to begin: ‘When I was a boy, I took these pleasures for granted. These pleasures of male kinship. An innocent age.’ Jack aped the old guy’s voice. It rather startled Amy to hear her father play the mimic, it suggested the sourness of a younger man. And for the first time it struck her that he must have known this city well once, in his youth. He carried the accent off; the manner – dry, heavily staccato – of a Jewish old-timer. A real bigot, Jack added in his own voice; something of a gossip, too.

‘I’ve got nothing against homos but they shouldn’t be teaching,’ Jack continued, adopting a slight whine. ‘Thank God, I tell myself, I have daughters. A daughter. A gay man himself confessed to me. A trustworthy man, a business partner. Strictly between us, he said, keep me away from the
bambinos.
That’s how they start out. From an early age; it’s how
they learn themselves. You can’t expect them to behave, given the opportunities of the classroom. I’ve tried to put this across the school board. I don’t give my money for these men.’

Even repeating such nonsense seemed indecent, offensive. Amy thought of her colleague Howard Peasbody, his heavy-headed pock-marked face, his teasing gallantry – and bridled in sympathy. Never had anyone struck her as so free from temptations.
She
was more likely to fondle one of the boys. But her father was right, as always; you shouldn’t let these remarks go unpunished. ‘Well,’ Jack added, running out of steam, ‘I had a crack at him. I’ll give myself that.’ He was too old to play all day with boys – that was Joanne’s response. He grunted and adjusted his teeth. ‘You’re missing the point,’ he said. ‘You haven’t been listening. This guy was older than me. It’s the way they act: like money buys you everything.’ It seemed a not so subtle dig at Charles; and Amy’s heart fell again.

Something in the mood of the company had put Andy off his wine; but he already had a slight hangover from his earlier drinking by the end of the meal. Everybody seemed happy enough when the bill came. When Charles reached for his wallet and took out a card, Joanne stayed his hand, lightly, laying her own over his wrist. ‘This one’s on us, for a change.’

‘Let him pay.’ Jack looked up suddenly. ‘He’s good for it.’

‘I’ll do no such thing,’ Joanne began; but Amy cut in, blushing, ‘Let him, it’s all right, I’ll make it up to him.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ Jack said.

‘Please –’ Charles stood up and had a word with the waiter by the bar. He didn’t come back till the bill was settled.

Jack left his seat, found his coat, and pushed through the door into the cold. When nobody else came out he began striding away. ‘Wait up –’ Amy called. ‘I’m only going,’ he said, and left the rest unexplained, the words trailing in the chill air behind him. He stared up at a street sign, muttered ‘to get my bearings’ unhappily and came back, pushing his
hands into the pockets of his light Burberry. Conscious of a weakness in him no brusqueness could dispel; his voice had lost its edge over the years. He was easily deflected; even when he took a stand, he had a beseeching or a peevish air. ‘We’ll be getting the train then,’ he said, as they stood under a street light, waiting for farewells.

‘I’ll walk you to the subway.’

‘No need, Charles. You’ve done more than enough.’

Amy was almost frantic by this point, sure there was some conspiracy in her thoughts the least word of comfort from anyone around her could unravel. ‘Charles,’ she said, twining her arm around his, ‘why don’t you come back with us for a drink? You can get a car home.’

‘To tell you the truth, I’m a little beat.’ He stopped a cab with a nod of his head; he’d always had that gift. ‘Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.’ And with an air of gallantry she thought had deserted him, he lifted his lips into a half-smile and said, ‘goodnight all. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.’

Amy sobbed quietly behind the others on their brisk walk across town. They caught the red line at 24th Street, a packed subway, the early nighters on their way home after dinner, and the four of them only just got seats when the train pulled in. Her father had suddenly taken the lead again; as if he was the one with a home to go to, as if it was his town and he had never left it thirty years ago. As if everyone else was visiting. They sat silently in a row till the standing crowds thinned out after Columbia. Somewhere around 168th Street he turned to her abruptly and said, ‘What is it exactly your Charles does for a living?’

‘I don’t know exactly. He has a lot of things on the go: business ventures, connections to keep up with. He’s always lending a hand here or there. I don’t think they’re short of money.’

‘I expect not. I expect money is one of those words that changes meaning depending on who uses it.’

Joanne cut in. ‘What happened between you two today?’

‘Nothing much. We lost a little money out there, that’s all.’

‘How much?’

‘About twenty thousand dollars. Not much, split two ways.’

Nobody said anything for a minute. The car had mostly emptied by that point, except for a couple of kids horsing round with a balloon at the far end of the carriage. Occasionally, you could hear it squeak; an awful sound, like a thin knife, followed by giggles. ‘Jack,’ her mother sighed, ‘Jack. I suppose this is another conversation we have to have.’

He was sobbing now himself, all bluster gone, his head against his chest, and his shoulders shaking ever so slightly in a terrible way. ‘What’s happening to you?’ she said. ‘What’s happening to you these days?’

‘I didn’t want to say I couldn’t play. They pushed me into it. What you have to understand about these people is that they’re bullies. What you have to understand is they’re better than you because they’ve got more money, and they know it. They know we don’t belong with them. I had my shot at them, I’ll say that much. I had my shot.’

‘Did he offer to pay your half? Jack, did he offer to pay?’

Amy had never felt so cold towards them in her life, these people, for whom money was a moral duty, pleasure was a duty, everything reduced to what was good and responsible and nothing left over. Her mother, prim-faced, purse-lipped, sniffing at bad luck like a dirty word; her father, weak-chested with sobs, giving into her, again and again, her version of events: the sin of the game, the weakness of his will, all that foolish showing off that never proved anything about any man worth his salt, worth his family obligations, worth the name of man; all that winning, that blood-lust for winning, and the high life; where had it ever gotten them? where had it got Amy? when the best any of them could do was quit when they were behind. Now they could see for once who was right; now they could see for once who kept the family
together. All those years.

In the end, she was glad when they left her – to clean up after them and prepare for school in the morning. A desultory breakfast, that awful waiting around for cabs, half-speeches begun, interrupted, neglected. Jack had an air of muted apology Amy hated to see in him. As if he’d been caught out at last and the game was up and there was nowhere left for him to go. Joanne, prudent, prudish, kept him busy, almost out of kindness. Andy had long ago retreated into those reserves he’d always possessed. When the car came – Joanne, looking out over the futon, saw it first – and buzzed, the relief was palpable. They had a minute again in which to breathe and speak freely of things that mattered; it was OK, the end was in sight. Jack took his daughter in his arms, and in spite of everything, she felt the muscle busy under his shirt, smelt his new-found animal health; he wouldn’t let go of her, and then, detaching himself, said, ‘I won’t let go of you. I won’t let go.’

Joanne, on tiptoes, hugged Amy briefly, and whispered, ‘I think you know what we think of your young man.’

Andy ushered her out and kissed his sister on the brow. Goodbye, goodbye. Amy waited a minute till the echo of their steps had faded down the stairs, then walked to the window and watched them load the car up. Watched it pull out. Nobody looked up or waved.

She spent the next hour walking down to and up from the laundry room, carrying baskets of sheets and towels, underpants and socks for the week ahead. She began to sob with her face in an armful of wet cotton as she prepared to heave a bundle into the open door of the drier. At the relief of it all, to be on her own again, and realize that what she had put her faith in had failed her – and she was free to live by lesser lights. A minute with her face held in the sweet cleanness of washed sheets.

Charles rang that afternoon, just when she had begun to get
bored. In fact, the sound of the phone reminded her she was sitting in the half-light of a grey day, and had been sitting like that for about ten minutes, and the spell was broken. She needed something to do. She needed to get back to work. Neither mentioned the night before, or ever mentioned it, except obliquely. He said, ‘I’d like to see you. I’d very much like to see you, if I can.’

‘Yes, of course.’ The phrase came out of her, unplanned, unironic. Of course, he
would
like to see her. ‘Maybe I could come to you tonight. And get the subway up in the morning. Maybe that would be all right.’

She hadn’t felt so settled in years, so sure of herself. So sure of a boy. Charles took her out to a nice meal, and she accepted a glass of wine, only one, she didn’t want a headache in the morning. They went to bed about ten, ten thirty. If he didn’t want to wake her up every night, he’d have to get used to her hours. Very comfortable; she could just make out a corner of Central Park, the heavy hand of a tree, under the blinds, from where she lay. Only Charles said, before she drifted off in his arms, ‘Sometimes I think I’m losing it. When the money doesn’t mean anything to me any more, it scares me how quick everything else follows.’ It was an apology, perhaps. She thought of the little figure Andy had given her, propped still against her kitchen window, those weightless limbs, their exaggerated gestures. She pictured her father, she pictured Charles, in its poses. If she nudged them at all, they fell down, again, again.

He had never been a coward with respect to habits, and could break them when he chose. Even so, Howard Peasbody had his routines. On Tuesday mornings, his first class began late, at ten thirty, but he woke up at seven anyway and went for a run through Riverside Park. He did not enjoy it, but suffered it rather in grudging concession to the demands of his ego, which was unwilling to live without a certain modest level of creature vanities. His stippled face, scarred by acne, had been somewhat smoothed over by age; his thin hair looked least bad loose on his head: a comb seemed to take twenty thousand dollars a year from his social status. Still, he was tall enough and ran to fat only around the hips. There was something of the gentleman in his manner; he had the kind of natural wit and fine feeling that turned every imperfection into an expression of subtler character – a refusal to join in. When he came back, consciously virtuous and sweating vaguely into the neck of his Harvard sweatshirt, he woke his lover for breakfast. This was the single morning of the working week Tomas sat up for him – still sweet with sleep, stretched out yawning in his loosely girdled bathrobe. He picked at the newspaper Howard brought up after his run; sniffed a cup of coffee. It was too early for him, almost a quarter to eight; but he endured the desultory chat for the sake of Howard’s company, for the plain fact of his presence: a something extra given once a week before the day drew them apart again and set them among strangers.

Tomas flattered himself that it was mostly for his sake the ‘old guy’ did his bit to keep in shape. But Howard liked to feel the muscle in his limbs aching into growth – enjoyed the pleasant sense of something difficult done with. A cup of
black tea with a half-spoon of sugar; a toasted bagel, buttered. He had a sweet tooth and usually starved it; the tea struck him as a guilty treat. That five-mile run exhausted, among other things, his power to be dissatisfied. And he never found the company of his lover more comfortable than on these late breakfasts. Our bodies, he thought, are easier to please than anything else. And they didn’t have to talk much. Tomas was usually fond of chatter, in which Howard occasionally heard the undertone of reproach: why aren’t
we
happy when I am or could be, but for you. But these early mornings kept him quiet. And Howard could peacefully enjoy the warm gravity of the younger man’s body; which seemed at times the only thing preventing something loose in him from drifting free.

On Tuesdays Howard left late enough to check the mail on his way out; another habit that reinforced his sense of a leisured breakfast. He stooped in the lobby to peer down the brass-walled slot, took out a sheaf of envelopes and magazines, and sorted them quickly into the pleasurable and the professional. Returned the latter, and jammed the rest into the inside pocket of his teaching jacket: sometimes a letter from his widower father, a retired schoolmaster himself, living in Connecticut; maybe a note from a college friend (Howard had remained unseduced by the Internet and continued to correspond by the mail); occasionally, the boon of an early
New Yorker
. Then he bought a cup of coffee from the newsagent and walked to the subway at 86th street; settled onto the relatively empty uptown train and spread whatever he had across his lap and began to read, keeping his coffee between his knees. Most of the time of course there was nothing at all in the post and then he only drank his coffee and tried not to consider the upcoming day.

On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving – a steadily miserable drizzly morning whose only chance at better things was to give way to a light fat snowfall in the evening – Howard got both a letter and the magazine. The letter surprised him: the return address in the top-left corner read ‘A. Rosenblum’, and
offered a phone number beneath the street reference, tacked on in a different pen at a different angle, as if she had forgotten to include it in the letter itself, or had suddenly
worried
that she had forgotten, after sealing the envelope. Or
he
had forgotten. But Howard, with a swiftness in reaching conclusions that surprised him, assumed ‘A.’ was Anne, a woman he had been friendly with in the first few terms of his graduate course in Biology at NYU. They had parted awkwardly enough at the time, and had not seen each other for the better part of two decades – that is, for almost half their lives. Still, something about the writing must have suggested her to him; for they had exchanged more than a few letters in their day. He had plenty of time to sort through his memories of her, as he bought his coffee and made his wet way along 83rd street eastwards and uptown towards the subway.

Anne Rosenblum was one of those Vermont Jews he used to know plenty of in college, arty and conventional both, well read, and handsome enough in a broad-shouldered way, unless it was only the shawls and cardigan collars banked around her neck. A countrified complexion, good-natured brown eyes, dry curly hair mostly twisted into a bun. He had always liked her: a straightforward girl underneath the rather self-conscious Bohemian wrappings, with a sharp mind and an affable gossipy manner that required none of the delicate insinuating condescension with which Howard habitually addressed most women. (And, he had to admit, most men as well as he got older.) Indeed, something about her struck him as manly – a certain bluntness, or intellectual vigour – and he remembered a phrase he used at the time (to her, in fact) to describe the effect of her company: ‘You always take me firmly by the hand.’ The analogy upset her, perhaps he intended it to: it suggested the rather hail-fellow-well-met manner of a woman unsure of her sexual charms. He suspected she was cleverer than he (a painful admission), but consoled himself with the thought that she lacked his reserves of discipline, of disinterest, of abstemiousness. Qualities by which he had
hoped to prune himself over time into a simpler, more functional shape.

And in fact she dropped out of the Ph.D. programme in her second year to become a writer; a betrayal of her parents’ expectations she had spent much of their brief acquaintance worrying over and planning. But she never told him when she packed her bags – he remembered being surprised at the time. Occasionally, and more and more recently, he came across her name in the Science section of the
New York Times
. She wrote mostly about matters relating to genetic engineering (the subject of her aborted dissertation). And though these articles signalled success after a fashion, he remembered her well enough, he supposed, to know that such work fell short of her ambitions. She wanted to write plays – and to spend her literary life trading off neglected studies must have effected a painful coming down in her own estimation. The phrase pleased Howard as he thought of it, suggested to him the careful way we back down an unsteady ladder.

By the time, however, he found his seat in the train, it occurred to him that he must have taught any number of Rosenblums in the past ten years, even an Aaron, an Amy. A few Hasids at Columbia stepped on with their dirty locks and ashy black coats, heading for Washington Heights. It was far more likely that some student, lately gone to college, or indeed the mother of some student, had written to thank him; or rather, to mention some recent success. A number of his kids had gone on to become doctors or professors, and liked to credit him for inspiring them, etc., to go one better than he had. The week after Thanksgiving was just the time you might expect to get such letters: two months into freshman year, or med school, after the first decent holiday, the first chance to reflect. It rarely pleased him, to be honest, such self-promoting gratitude; and it wouldn’t, to be blunt, surprise him to hear it coming from a Rosenblum.
They
tended to possess a rather odious sense of the honour of the teaching profession – not uninfluenced by the fact that teachers stood at
the gateway of their parental heaven, an Ivy League education for their children. Besides, he knew he was an excellent teacher,
that
wasn’t one of his self-doubts. He did not trick anyone into his subject; he didn’t set out to charm. (These phrases often ran through his head, word for word, at the end of a bad class perhaps, or at some slight from the administration; and sometimes spilt over into unrelated dissatisfactions, as he sat on the pot in his lunch hour and remembered a spat with Tomas: ‘I don’t trick anyone, I don’t set out to charm…’ Not quite true, of course: charm was the one attraction he could command. His air of patient irony often seduced others into climbing up to share his view, the thin cold atmosphere of his perch.)

He trusted his own passion for his subject; dry but steady and sustaining. The view opened out at Dyckman Street, as the train ran up the elevated tracks. Broadway looked grim at the top, nothing but discount stores and bad cafés; truant and jobless boys hanging around outside the doughnut shop. Then he rattled past the warehouses – watched a couple of late students slouch on – and over the concrete flat of the river. You need a few people to drum into kids that curiosity is the hardest and not the easiest instinct to satisfy. You need a teacher who doesn’t play to the gallery for laughs, who lets the kids come to him and not the other way around. A familiar litany that brought out his least ironic inner voice, the voice of his father’s son. ‘Honest enough to fail them, to make them win their praise so they know what praise is, the kind of thing you can only earn when you reach the point it doesn’t matter any more, it doesn’t please you.’

The letter lay in his lap unopened as the train scraped in to 242nd Street. He looked at his watch, just gone nine, and let the kids get off first – he didn’t like to hurry in front of his students. The envelope had caught the wet of his walk; the ink had run a little and dried again, and the paper bubbled slightly and crackled under his thumb. He slipped it inside his jacket pocket, surprised that he had already registered its
opening as a pleasure deferred. A value assigned without conscious intent. It could only reflect some dormant curiosity about his former friend, who belonged to a very different phase in his life – when he had other prospects, and spent his privacy on other thoughts. The thing would happily trouble him in the course of the day, until he opened it on the subway downtown, when it would surely disappoint. Either way, that is, even if it
was
from Anne Rosenblum. Only when a woman in an orange plastic jersey pushed open the door with a mop and bucket, did he press himself up on his knees and walk out. ‘Last stop,’ she said, ‘we’re cleaning up.’ Something he had to watch in himself: he had begun to let his reluctance to do certain things express itself in his manner and his actions.

Most of the teachers were teaching, as he strolled into the biology office, took off his jacket, and spread it over the back of his chair. Another minute’s relative peace. The letter caught slightly against the seat, so he lifted it from the inside pocket and dropped it on his desk. Amy Bostick, one of those kids they had started hiring fresh from college, said to him – another administrative decision he didn’t see eye to eye with, by the way, a poke in the eye is what it was and other teachers felt the same, part of that misguided tilting of the scales towards youth, always towards youth – sidled up to him and said, ‘What you got there, Mr Peasbody?’, laying a childish hand against his shoulder.

It left him rather queasy, those hands, long-fingered, given to little sweats. She was always rubbing them dry against each other – a terrible sound, like corduroy between hurrying thighs. Miss Bostick was a nervy creature, a real girl, dependent and plaintive. She picked at him steadily all day, to remove a piece of lint from his tweed, adjust a loose button, straighten his tie. Once, giggling softly, she even tucked in his shirt behind. Out of loneliness, of course; that much was plain to him; he had been the object of a girl’s father-fancy before,
and didn’t much like it. This one was rather breathless and inarticulate on the whole; he had determined from the first elaborately to patronize her. Mostly they couldn’t tell the difference between charm and kindness: few people could.

‘Good thanksgiving?’ he said, to put her off. Her hand rubbed the bristle of his neck, absent-mindedly, against the grain of shaving. ‘Ach, families,’ she said, in a new voice, mimicking. ‘Who needs them.’

‘Not all of us have the luxury of choosing.’ That was a little cruel, perhaps. So that when she persisted, ‘What is it?’, he answered rather stupidly, ‘A letter, my dear,’ and added, to make amends, ‘from an old lover, as it happens.’ Surprised at himself, at his willingness to titillate curiosity with a piece of his own flesh.

‘Who was he, Mr Peasbody?’ She called him Mr Peasbody, pretending to be one of his ‘adoring girls’ – ‘You have all these adoring girls, Mr Peasbody, mooning over you because they know they can’t have you, they can’t even dream of having you’ – but the name had become a habit with her, and she used it even when she had forgotten to flirt.

‘She, as a matter of fact.’

Amy withdrew her hand from his neck, and looked at him squarely. ‘Well, well,’ she said at last, ‘aren’t you a bit of a dark horse.’ It was a tone she hadn’t used with him before; it had the slightly colder air of appraisal.

That phrase ran through his head the rest of the day. Dark horse, dark horse – it didn’t seem a very happy thing to be. Yet the image captured something he had always suspected, not without pride, about himself: a sense of veiled powers, of force restrained, obscured. Yes, he withheld a great deal. By necessity, it seemed, in his youth, when he was still unsure of his place in the world, of his rank within it. A hesitation, a slowness to judge which soon turned into an unwillingness to admire, and hardened into habit. His father, George, had always puzzled over that quality in his son: that refusal to
mix in. Not that Howard was ever shy. Even in his somewhat spotty adolescence, he wore his looks well, carried himself comfortably, had the wit in reserve to nudge himself a head above his friends. There were always friends, only they seemed to see more of each other than they saw of Howard, and for some reason Howard never minded. Partly, George wondered why the kid never brought girls home: he could have had plenty of girls. He had that way with him, an amiable, insinuating manner, that nevertheless demanded nothing, needed nothing, indeed seemed to want nothing from anyone – which always charmed the girls, George knew. And then it became clear why Howard never brought the girls home, after his freshman year at Harvard, when he brought a boy. An unimportant boy, as it happens, insisted on mostly for the show of it, for the point to prove, and never seen from or heard of again. A flesh-and-blood instantiation of the ‘confidential chat’ they never had, which spared the need for it. Not that George minded much, after the initial shock, in spite of a constitutional repulsion from the fact of it, from the acts, no sea of love could wash away. At least his mother would never know: she had died of cancer when her son was still a fair-faced, blond-haired, plump-cheeked boy. George was rather relieved, all in all. It seemed a sensible, a specific explanation for a more general failing that had begun to worry him about his son, an otherwise charming and accomplished young man, and particularly pleasant companionship for an old-fashioned and, through force of occupation if nothing else, rather pedantic father. And George began to suspect that his son had always had a much busier private life than he let on, thank God. Though he never saw any further evidence of it.