Seating Arrangements (12 page)

WINN WAS STRIPPING
the kernels from the ears of corn. He would give them a quick boil and then toss them with the tomatoes and a simple vinaigrette. Two batches, of which this was the first. Ten ears per batch. His favorite striped apron was cinched firmly around his waist, and he was humming to himself. He stood a cob on end and ran his very sharp German knife down its side, watching the satisfying curtain of yellow crumble after the blade. Turning the cob, he repeated the exercise until he was left with a reticulated peg. The mindless repetition was soothing, even delicious. He descended into the rhythm of falling knife and sweeping hand, pushing the sweet-smelling kernels into a red metal bowl while a pot of water steamed on the stove.

Piper appeared in a bathrobe. “Oh!” she said. “Hi.” Her wet hair hung down her back in uncombed clumps, and her face, robbed of its shaggy headdress and devoid of makeup, looked gaunt and beaky. She hesitated, drawing her hands up against her chest and twisting her bony fingers together.

“Looking for something?”

“Daphne wanted a cucumber.”

“A cucumber?”

“We’re putting slices on our eyes. To make them less puffy.”

“Does that work?”

“We don’t know.” She emitted the high, tickled
hee hee hee
laugh of a cartoon mouse. The bathrobe—an old one of Daphne’s, pink
terry cloth—dwarfed her. Something about her thin neck and angular face made her look strangely old, like an aged monk, pale from living in a cave. “That’s part of why we’re doing it. Daphne says it’s an old wives’ tale, and Agatha swears by it. We’re taking before and after pictures.” Again the squeaking giggle.

“There’s one in the crisper, but I was going to use it in the salad.”

“Oh. Okay.” She pulled her damp hair around her head and picked at the tangles. He turned back to the corn, and when he next glanced over his shoulder, she was gone. Resuming his humming, he tipped the cutting board over the red bowl, adding more kernels to his tall heap of corn, a perfect cone like sand from an hourglass.

Agatha said, “I hear you’re withholding our cucumber.”

Winn whipped around. She was standing where Piper had been, her hair also damp but combed away from her face, and she was back in the gauzy white dress from earlier. “I’m what?” he said.

“We just need to borrow a little bit.”

She dug in the refrigerator and emerged with a green, warty phallus, neatly edging him aside so that she could take over his cutting board and his knife and lop three inches off the unfortunate vegetable. Then she pared the stub into eight thin slices. “Voila! Instant beauty.” She waved the maimed cucumber at him. “Should I leave this out for you?”

“I’ll take it.” When he went to take it from her hand, she held on to it, making him pull. He snorted.

“Your ears must have been burning earlier,” she said.

He set the cucumber aside and ran his knife down the last corncob. “Why is that?”

“I can’t remember how it came up—we were out on the grass with Celeste, and somehow we got speculating about what you were like in college. And Celeste said you were exactly the same.”

“Hmm,” he said, unnerved.

“So were you?”

“Celeste would know better than I would.”

“Do you want to know what Daphne said?”

“I don’t know. Do I?”

“She said Biddy told her you had a bad rep.” She waited. He was silent, and she went on, “Supposedly, you were a bit of a player.”

Winn picked up the bowl of corn and dumped it into the boiling water. He set a massive colander in the sink, then wiped his hands on his apron and turned to face her, folding his arms over his chest. “A player?”

She aligned the cucumber slices into a neat stack, holding them loosely in her fingers like poker chips. “We were just curious because you’re one of those people who seems to have been born an adult, with a house and a marriage and everything. I can imagine Biddy when she was young but not you.”

“Hmm,” he said again.

“Well?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t think I was dramatically different. I had girlfriends, but nothing out of the ordinary. I wasn’t some kind of Casanova.” He turned, pulled the pot from the stove, and poured its contents into the colander. His glasses steamed up.

“That’s what Celeste said. She said you were a born monogamist.”

He pushed his glasses to the end of his nose and looked at her over them. “I’m sorry you girls don’t have anything more interesting to talk about.”

She reached up and grasped his glasses by the earpieces, tugging them from his face. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, she was wiping the steam away on the hem of her dress.

ON THE DAY
in 1966 when Winn left for Harvard, his father presented him with a gold wristwatch and an absolution. “Youth is the best excuse you’ll ever have,” Tipton Van Meter said, giving his son’s hand a valedictory shake on the sidewalk of a leafy Boston avenue, not far from the Public Garden, in the shadow of their white stone house. He spoke slowly, with deliberate weight. That he had been planning this moment for some time was clear. Winn opted for manful silence. No response would measure up to whatever line had already been scripted for him in his father’s imagination, and so he returned the
handshake with a fervor he hoped would express strength, vigor, and gratitude. Tony the driver sat waiting behind the wheel to convey him the not quite four miles to the gates of the Yard.

“Well, good-bye, Dad. See you for dinner Sunday.”

Tipton only nodded.

Until Tony turned a corner, Winn looked out the back window, at his father standing in the street in his gray suit, hands behind his back.

Winn had crossed the Charles countless times before, but he could not help feeling that the splendor of this particular September afternoon was a benediction meant just for him and that the familiar green water, gilded by the same sun that skipped dazzling prisms off his new wristwatch, was an important threshold. He was crossing into a new era, and his father’s parting words were carved above the gates. Tipton Van Meter was a great believer in youth, and Winn believed in Tipton. Most fathers would have asked their sons to do the family proud or to stay out of trouble or to find their place in the world. That his own father had given him permission to do none of those things was a tremendous relief to Winn. He resolved to allow himself a great deal of freedom on the condition that someday he would take up the right kind of adulthood. For now he would be carefree, unencumbered, full of mischief and frivolity, and then, later, he would be an honorable man, a true citizen, a man whose portrait might hang on a wall: someone like his grandfather Frederick, whose countenance supervised the billiards room of the Vespasian Club, or like his father, whose painted image regarded its living twin from across the dining room in the white stone house.

As a child, Winn’s favorite spot was the carpet beside Tipton’s chair, where he sat and watched his sire drink gin from a cut crystal glass and listen to the radio. Now that Winn had entered into what Tipton predicted would be the most glorious years of his life, he perceived the dawning of a perfect symbiosis of father-son esteem. Tipton was a Harvard man himself, and in the years since his graduation, he had fashioned in his own mind and that of his son a tanned and tousled vision of the ideal collegian. This young man was a dedicated
sportsman, an unostentatious student, a giver of witty toasts, and a debonair wanderer through the candyland of female companionship. While some boys dreamt of being the president or an astronaut, Winn passed through boyhood aspiring only to grow into the broad shoulders and brass buttons of his father’s half-remembered, half-imagined Harvard man. In the stories Tipton chose for the after-dinner hour, he himself was that man, the cocksure ringleader of a band of high-spirited rascals. Always he recounted every detail, projecting the glimmering past onto the soiled tablecloth, the faces of his listeners, and his own portrait in its elaborate, gilded frame high on the wall. A few weeks before Winn left for Harvard, his fifth-form English master and his wife had come to dinner, and Tipton told a classic.

“We had the cook at the club pack us a cold lunch,” Tipton said, “and we climbed out a window of Sever to have a picnic on the roof. Cort Wilder, Moody, Kreegs, Tom Patten, and myself—they were the fellows I was running with at the time. You know Cort Wilder, don’t you?” This was directed at the English master. “Oh, I thought you might have crossed paths. He was a classics man, too. Anyhow, it was the first nice day of spring, which is always a marvelous day, isn’t it? Everyone comes out of hibernation. We wanted to get the bird’s-eye view, so we had a picnic basket that belonged to Kreegs’s girlfriend and sandwiches from the club, and we were drinking champagne straight from the bottle, which is always such fun, isn’t it? I doubt anyone would have noticed us, except the wind picked up Kreegs’s sandwich wrapper and whooshed it around for a minute before dropping it right down on the head of Professor Fieldston, who was on his way to lecture. You know Fieldston, don’t you?”

“The name rings a bell,” the English master said, dropping a cube of sugar into his coffee with silver tongs.

“Anyhow, it turned out that Kreegs, the goose, had been using that wrapper to wipe the mayonnaise off his sandwich, and so it stuck rather wetly to the side of Fieldston’s face. He looks up, and there we all are, lined up on the roof like pigeons. So, of course, he goes charging into Sever, and I’ll tell you, we panicked. We thought we
were done for; Kreegs started whining about how he was on probation and would get kicked out, and Moody said his dad was already talking about cutting off his allowance and this would be last straw and so on and so forth. But fortunately I knew Sever inside and out, and so I led the bunch of us over to the other side of the roof where I scrambled around and found an open window. I’ll tell you, there’s never been a more surprised French class, you can bet on that, seeing the five of us drop in one after the other. Cort was a wit and managed to turn around and say something about
la fenêtre
before I brought us out and down a back stairway. Fieldston was probably still craning his head around out the window and wondering where in hell we’d gone when we were already back at the club. We had to leave the picnic basket behind, and someone told me Fieldston kept it on a shelf in his office for a whole year. If anyone happened to glance at it, he’d get a suspicious look on his face and say, ‘Look familiar?’ He held out hope, the old coot. Kreegs did get kicked out, though, a few weeks later. I can’t remember for what. Something silly. He went back to Baltimore.”

Leaving it at that, he began forking up his
tarte tatin
while the others sat marooned in a silence broken only by the clinking of silver on china. It was typical of Winn’s father to append his story with a sad and vague fact, oblivious that his listeners were still waiting for a punch line. The English master raised an eyebrow at Winn from across the table. “Coffee spoons,” he said, tapping the air with one such implement. “Van Meter, I have measured my life in what?”

“Sorry, sir?”

“Finish the line, Van Meter. ‘I have measured my life in …’ what?”

“Coffee spoons?”

“Yes, who’s it by?”

“Sir?”

“What is the poem and who is it by?”

As the silence stretched out, student and teacher recognized in each other’s eyes the same growing alarm, the student because his father would think he had not learned and the teacher because the father would think he had not taught. The coffee spoon wavered
between them. Just before Winn was going to take a guess and say Eliot, the master’s wife stepped in and said, “James, you are
merciless
. Quizzing the boy at dinner. He’s going off to Harvard in a week; he’s too excited to remember all the this-and-that you taught him.”

The master, pipe clenched in his teeth, began patting his pockets. “Fortunately for you, Van Meter, I learned long ago to listen to my wife.” Tipton flicked a book of matches from the head of the table, which the master missed and swatted to the floor. “Looks like you’re off the hook,” he said to Winn, straining to reach under the table.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I never had much of a mind for poetry myself,” Tipton said.

When dinner was cleared away and guests gone home, Tipton told the stories that Winn would have preferred he keep to himself.

“Probably one of the fellows in the Ophidian had a grudge against me. I overheard one of them maligning my father once, passing on trash he’d heard from his own father, no doubt. I would have liked to have joined, though. I made it to the final dinner. Willy Abernathy was president at the time, although they have some odd word for it in the Ophidian. Oro-something. Can’t remember. But what a stand-up fellow Willy was. Always dated the most beautiful girls, and they loved him even after he broke their hearts because he did it with such perfect manners and so much kindness. He had a straw hat that I admired, kind of a boater. I got one just like it. But it never looked right on me, and I tossed it in the river as a joke.”

IN HIS UNDERGRADUATE YEARS
, Winn was everything he had been raised to believe a Harvard man should be. He belonged to many clubs, appeared in farcical plays, sang tenor in an all-male ensemble. The top of his bureau was obscured by a masculine still life of half-forgotten objects: a cigar cutter, a flask in a leather sleeve, a pile of coins, a large plaster duck stolen as a joke from someone’s garden. In his mirror was a young man who wore a tennis sweater with confidence and about whom blew the salt breeze of youth and promise.

The gold wristwatch turned out to be not quite right. The boys who
seemed most aristocratic wore watches with straps of plain leather. The more Winn observed those boys, the more evidence he found to support certain suspicions that had sprouted at Deerfield: his father, not always but from time to time, behaved like a member of the nouveau riche, a glitzy echelon much less desirable than the dusty shelf that held the old money and where he, Winn, had eked out a rickety perch. By junior year he had perfected a certain calculated shabbiness and showed it off with the scuffed toes of his cracked and flattened loafers and the tiny rip that he made and then mended on the lapel of his favorite sport coat. Though he enjoyed squash and the occasional game of touch football, his brief association with freshman crew ended when an older boy, a boy in the Ophidian, remarked that a sunrise should only be seen from the sidewalk outside a girl’s room or on the opening day of deer season. He bought a new watch with a plain brown strap at a store in Boston. The gold one was brought out only when he went home for Sunday dinner. Certain boys in the Ophidian got away with wearing dandyish clothes or pursuing sport or school with unabashed striving, but Winn was given neither to idiosyncrasy nor ambition and was never tempted to risk deviating from the Ophidian way of doing things, an unspoken code that prioritized irony, insouciance, and drunken mischief above all else.