Memories of a Marriage (2 page)

Lucy was apparently special in other ways as well—at least in the context of the early 1950s. A man I played squash with twice a week, at the Harvard Club when I invited and at his grand Park Avenue club when it was his turn, had remained a regular on the debutante party circuit. He had been at the ball the De Bourghs gave for Lucy at their mansion the summer before she started at Radcliffe and had kept up with her during the New York season that followed, at the Junior Assemblies and every other conceivable venue, apparently including some he didn’t care to specify. She was ravishing, a knockout, he told me, she electrified every stag line and would have easily been the debutante of the year if it hadn’t been for rumors about the unfortunate business at Miss Porter’s just as she was due to graduate. She’d gone AWOL—according to the account he’d heard she’d shimmied down a rope from her dormitory window—and was discovered sleeping off a bender at a Howard Johnson’s outside Farmington. Her swain had already departed, and she refused to reveal his name to the police or the headmistress
or even her parents. Mr. De Bourgh pulled strings and wrote a big check so that she was allowed to graduate, and he and Mrs. De Bourgh went ahead with the party. Whether they held their noses was an open question, since the invitations had been sent out and it would have been a bigger embarrassment to cancel. My squash partner made these revelations as we rested in his club’s locker room after an arduous match. In keeping with the atmosphere of the place, he added a personal testimonial: She fucks like a maenad. A snooty maenad!

Paris was where I got to know her well. At first we’d only run into each other at American embassy functions. Ambassador Dillon and his successor, Amory Houghton, had been at school with her father; they made a point of looking after her. Later she began to invite me to the elegant little dinner parties she gave at her apartment on rue Casimir-Perier, a short walk from place du Palais Bourbon, where
Vogue
had its office at the time. Then one thing led to another. There were many young American students and expats in Paris at the time. The strong dollar made luxuries affordable. Lunch for two at Lapérouse, with a decent bottle of wine, set one back, after a generous tip, perhaps twelve dollars. The war in Algeria had not yet heated up, and the lure of the intellectual and literary life in Paris was at a zenith, stoked by the reputations and powerful personalities of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Camus, as well as the vogue for existentialism and French cinema. Lucy stood out among the Americans of her age. As is well known, the very rich are different from the rest of us: they possess and enjoy early and are convinced that they are better than we. Lucy wasn’t very rich herself,
but the aura of historical importance and wealth that surrounded her was unmistakable. Her forebears, the eighteenth-century De Bourghs, had been well-to-do ship owners in Bristol, Rhode Island. The one who was her direct ancestor, James De Bourgh, had commanded a ship before he was twenty; during the War of 1812 he was a dreaded privateer on the American side; after a career in Rhode Island state politics he became a U.S. senator. His huge fortune, consolidated through cotton manufacturing, had been earned in the slave trade; when he died in the late 1830s he was said to be the richest man in Rhode Island and possibly the second-richest man in the country. I suppose it was John Jacob Astor who beat him out for the first place, but I’ve never taken the trouble to confirm my hunch. Although by the time I met Lucy, the De Bourgh saga was hardly known to anyone who wasn’t an American history buff, and even I, who qualified as such, had initially had only a sketchy recollection that there had once existed an important De Bourgh, I had perforce become familiar with it. One simply couldn’t spend much time with Lucy and not hear about James De Bourgh and his Rhode Island contemporaries and rivals, the far-better-known brothers John and Moses Brown. She inveighed against the gradual frittering away of the De Bourgh fortune under the stewardship of James’s descendants, among the more feckless of whom she counted her own father, and American trade policies she blamed for the collapse of New England textile mills in the 1920s, which her grandfather and his brothers had failed to anticipate, but so far as she was concerned her family’s glow had not been diminished.
Besides, as she used to say, losing your shirt is a relative concept. Everything depends on how many shirts you have left. We’ve still got many to go.

She astonished me by turning down the junior editor’s job in New York that the magazine offered her at the end of the internship. Living in New York, she said, wasn’t for her. Instead, she went home for the summer in order to get in some good tennis, she said, and in the fall returned to Paris, her apartment, and her dinner parties. After one of them, while we were having a nightcap, I asked what she planned to do now that she was back.

To live! she answered breezily. To dare to live!

She expatiated on that concept in the course of subsequent conversations. Wasn’t she an heiress of all the ages, duty bound to take full advantage of her education—she had a comically high opinion of her Radcliffe degree in Romance languages and literature—and above all her freedom? Family trusts, though hardly as ample as they might once have been, allowed her to carry on the way she did. Why take a job she didn’t need or particularly want and, coincidentally, deprive someone to whom it might make a real difference?

I had no ready answer other than “of course,” although I wondered how well she had pondered the fate of nineteenth-century expatriated ladies on whom consciously or not she might be modeling herself. Besides, it wasn’t any of my business. Lucy and I got along well, and having her in Paris organizing her dinners and occasionally more ambitious entertainments was pleasant. A case in point was an expedition to Chartres with her and a married couple from Providence
on their honeymoon in France. Talking nonstop about the architecture of the cathedral and Henry Adams’s take on it, she barreled down the three-lane
route nationale
, which the shadows cast by plane trees lining it on both sides had turned into the semblance of a shimmering stream, her four-door Mercedes convertible leaving in the dust the
deux chevaux
carrying the humbler French and the big sleek Citroëns beloved of French bourgeoisie and government officials, until the gendarmes stopped us at a speed trap about thirty kilometers from our destination. They were polite, and so was she, but, as she said when we resumed our journey, some of the squeak had gone out of her. But only for that morning. By the afternoon we had her in fighting trim again, and the trip back to Paris was even more hair-raising. Her theory was that cops never stop you twice on the same road. Besides, she had a dinner date, and she didn’t want to be late.

As the intermission approached, it occurred to me that I had enough stored-up memories and enough living ghosts—former persons, I called them—encircling me, school and college classmates, people I had worked with at one journal or another, and my literary agent to whom I had remained faithful, and had no need to add Lucy to the crowd. The thing to do might be to stay in my seat during the intermission. Alternatively, I could skip the third piece on the program, a Balanchine ballet I had seen too often to care about missing it, leave the theater, and go directly to dinner. The conscience of a balletomane prevailed. There was no good reason to avoid Lucy, and certainly none to let her drive me away.

Lucy must have turned to see which way I was going when we parted after the first intermission. She was waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

Well, she said, that was fine dancing. Did you enjoy it?

I nodded.

There may be better dancers in Europe, she continued, I wouldn’t know. I don’t go to Europe anymore. But to my mind this company is still wonderful.

I assured her that I agreed, whereupon she asked, Aren’t you going to offer me a glass of champagne?

It turned out she wanted mixed nuts as well. I paid and followed her out to the balcony. There she told me with scarcely a pause between sentences that she had been sorry to read about Bella and should have written, but she hadn’t known her very well, and that she supposed losing her had made me very lonely.

Shocked by the callousness of her remarks, I turned toward the fountain and remained silent.

After a pause she said she remembered that I, on the other hand, had written after Thomas died, which she thought then and continued to think had been a gesture of misguided politeness. Not expecting condolences, she hadn’t answered.

I may have shrugged before replying that I had liked Thomas and had regretted their divorce when I heard about it, as well as, of course, the ghastly accident.

She turned on me.

What do you mean! I couldn’t have gone on living with that monster. You went on seeing him, of course, just like all the rest of my friends. Yup, everything he wanted fell into
his lap, including that celebrity second wife, and he never acknowledged that he owed it all to me. Perhaps he didn’t remember. Perhaps he never got it.

I didn’t bother to reply.

My son, Jamie, is a failure, she added inconsequentially. He tries to write screenplays but doesn’t know how. No wonder he can’t sell them. His wife is a Chicana. Naturally they live in a creepy suburb of L.A. When I go out there, he doesn’t even let me stay in his house. I have to go to a motel!

That’s hard, I said.

This time she agreed. Their story is that Thomas never asked to stay with them. Naturally! Why would he have? He stayed in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and had himself driven out and back! You know that he had absolutely no sense of direction.

I couldn’t help laughing. He may have well chosen the better solution, I told her.

Certainly, she replied, he could afford it.

She must have realized that I was about to say goodbye and changed the subject: I suppose you’re meeting people for dinner. You can tell the truth. I’ve already eaten, so you don’t have to worry about whether I’ll fit in. I eat early these days. Some other evening, though, I’d like to have you over for dinner. What’s your telephone number?

I gave it to her, together with my e-mail address.

She wrote both down in a dog-eared address book and said, I’ll be in touch.

T
HOMAS
S
NOW:
the brilliant investment banker who made a pile of money, gave much of it away, and turned into a Wall Street pundit! We had enjoyed getting together wherever I lived, in New York or Paris, and beginning in the late seventies he came through Paris often. Of course I had followed him on various op-ed pages in U.S. newspapers and occasionally in the
Financial Times
. Lucy’s speaking of him with such hostility and resentment, which apparently time had done nothing to assuage, brought back before my eyes the young man she introduced to me one afternoon in Paris, some fifty years ago. I was in my study, working on the first chapter of a novel, which in my case meant that I was revising perhaps for the third or fourth time whatever I had written the day before. The telephone rang; I picked up the receiver and heard Lucy speaking very loudly: Hello, I’m practically downstairs from you, at the café on the
corner of Vaugirard and Madame. I’ve got someone with me I want you to meet. May we come up? We won’t stay long.

She was one of those people, convinced that you cannot fail to recognize their voice, who don’t give their name when they call. In the event I had realized it was she and repressed my annoyance. Since saying no and feeling badly about it would have been more disruptive, I said, Yes, I’ll be glad to see you.

I lived on the third floor, French style, which is really the fourth floor. There was no elevator. A few long minutes passed before the doorbell rang. I opened the door. The look on Lucy’s face was that of a cat bringing you a mouse. She pushed forward a boyish American and said: This is Thomas Snow. Thomas, here is the great novelist I’ve been telling you about.

We shook hands. It was after six, and he was so obviously embarrassed by her introduction that, contrary to my original intention to get rid of them quickly, I showed them into the living room and asked whether they would like a drink. The whiskey relaxed the young man. A casual question about what had brought him to Paris in January, not a month favored by tourists, opened the sluice gate to a flood of information. He was a GI on leave. Having gotten his master’s from the London School of Economics, where he had gone on a Harvard College fellowship, he volunteered for the draft and was serving as a corporal with the Seventh Army headquarters in Heidelberg. His tour of duty would be over in the summer. In the fall, he’d start at the Harvard Business School.

And afterward?

He had it all mapped out: he wanted to work on Wall Street and had his eye on Morgan Stanley and, if that didn’t work out, Kidder. Beyond that, he had dreams, some more nebulous than others.

That’s quite a program, I said, and turning to Lucy asked where she had met this remarkable future banker.

But I was going to tell you about it, I was just getting to that, Thomas protested. We met at the beginning of the second semester of my senior year, at a party given by your good friend Alex van Buren. I know that you and he are friends because Lucy has told me. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. She and I hit it off right away. I can’t imagine how we would have met otherwise.

Lucy nodded vigorously and held out her glass, which I refilled.

How interesting, I said. What was Alex doing in Cambridge? He graduated years ago. Ahead of me.

He’d been working at the family brokerage firm, Thomas explained, and the decision was made that he should go to the business school. His father pushed for it.

Actually, Lucy had gotten it slightly wrong. I had known Alex, we had been on good terms, he’d always been very nice to me, but we had never been close. A few years older than I, he had been in the marines and managed to survive Iwo Jima. We had overlapped briefly at the
Lampoon;
in fact he’d helped me get in, but that was all. I supposed he went to
Lampoon
dinners. I didn’t. Remembering the conspicuously rich
and snobby New Yorkers he’d hung out with, I had to wonder what on earth this young man had been doing at one of Alex’s parties. There was no need to probe: the explanation was forthcoming. It looked as though Thomas had decided to tell me his life story, and Lucy seemed content to let him talk, maternally proud of his polite self-assurance.