The Devil Tree (16 page)

I feigned nonchalance. “I like Louise, and I like to see her once in a while,” I said. “She knows a lot about theater.”

“She certainly knows how to get herself written about,” said Karen with a tone of professional jealousy.

“She is a talented actress,” I said, “and she deserves her popularity. She has worked very hard to gain it.”

“I’ll bet she has,” said Karen. “Harder than she has at her marriage.”

“What do you mean? The last time I saw them, Frank and Louise seemed quite close,” I bluffed.

“The last time is right. They’ve split!” Karen exclaimed. “Yesterday Frank filed for divorce. He is naming you as ‘the other man’ in Louise’s life. His lawyers must love all those pictures of you, Mr. Financier himself, hugging Mrs. Frank Hunter!”

Stunned, I asked, “Where did you hear this?”

“For one thing, it’s in the papers. For another, I have friends who know them.” She paused. “Louise’s agent is also furious. The play’s producers have told him that because of her conduct, Louise has blown any chance she had to star in the film version of the play. By the way,” she added, “when you and I went to see
The Financier
, why didn’t you tell me you had fucked Louise Hunter?”

“What for?” I asked. “We all have our Rawleighs. Like Gloucester in
King Lear
, ‘Better I were distract: so should my thoughts be sever’d from my griefs.’ Besides,” I added, “though you may be everything to Rawleigh, Louise is not my whole world—just another bridge to distraction.”

Karen told me with bitterness that I think she is in command of her life, but that whenever she attempts to convey to me who she is, she feels like the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands, the only one still speaking her tribe’s language, who knows that when she dies, the tribe’s language will die with her. Then, still angry about the incident with Louise Hunter, Karen turned on me. “For most of us, to become free, we would have only to cast off our responsibilities, but you, Jonathan, you are responsible to no one; your pocket money alone could buy the entire stage my life revolves on: the model agency, the photographers’ studios, the fashion magazines, the cosmetics companies. You could produce a play, a movie, or a TV series, own a newspaper, or entertain the world’s most exciting people. You could travel or live anywhere in the world. You could finance a new church, start a revolution, become a missionary or an anarchist. You could give in to the senses, discover new pleasures, delay aging. You could be what Ophelia imagined Hamlet to be: ‘the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eyes, tongue, sword. The glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observ’d of all observers.’ Each day you live could be the equivalent of a decade in
anyone else’s life, Jonathan, because by speeding up experience you could in effect slow down the passage of time. Instead, you live your life as if a decade meant less to you than a single day, and you waste even that on the Louise Hunters of this world. Why?”

•   •   •

Karen has obviously scrutinized all the diaries I kept and the notes I wrote during my life abroad. If I ever had any doubts about whether I had made myself too accessible in them, or not accessible enough, she dispelled them by sending me as a gift a silver wall plaque with the following quote engraved on it:

Total Depravity

The free gifts, which belong to health, were taken away from man after his fall; the natural gifts, which cannot lead him to health, have been corrupted and polluted. . . Man’s understanding is so entirely alienated from the justice of God, that he cannot imagine, conceive, or understand anything but wickedness, iniquity, and corruption. Seemingly his heart is so poisoned with sin, that he can produce only perversity.

Our nature is not only void and destitute of all good; but it is also so fertile in all types of evil, that it cannot be idle. It is that all the parts of man, from his understanding to his will, from his soul to the flesh, are soiled and entirely full of this concupiscence, or rather, to make it short, that man is nothing more than corruption.

Waiting, then, we see flesh desiring all loopholes through which it thinks of transferring elsewhere the guilt of its vices.

—John Calvin, of Geneva

On an enclosed card, she had written, “To Jonathan, whose roots are branches now, from Karen.”

•   •   •

“We’ve never met, Mr. Whalen, but I had the good fortune to meet your mother about two years after your father’s death. Shortly before we met, several of my articles on the Byzantine period had been published in popular magazines, and I was beginning to earn a reputation as an archaeologist. Through my work I had met a Turkish antique dealer who sold your mother a large collection of art objects, among them many she had sought to acquire for some time. In gratitude, that spring your mother invited the dealer to stay for a week as her guest in New York. One day he invited me to lunch, to meet Mrs. Whalen, and soon after she invited me to dine with her. After dinner she proudly showed me her newly acquired objects. On the following day I sent her some of my books, having first underlined certain passages that might interest her.

“The moment I met her, I found your mother very attractive, Mr. Whalen. The truth is, I became enraptured by her. You might ask, had Mrs. Whalen been an ordinary office girl, would I have been so captivated? But you see, she was not ordinary. She was Katherine Whalen, widow of Horace Whalen. Just as an office girl is inseparable from her uneventful existence, your mother was inseparable from
her past, as well as from the Byzantine splendor of her environment—her home, her wardrobe, her jewelry, her collections.

“That’s how it began. From then on I saw her twice, perhaps three times a week. We went to the theater, to galleries and lectures, and we talked about everything: the miniature mosaics of Saint John Chrysostom, the icons of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, your mother’s collections of Byzantine seals and Coptic tapestries, my writing projects, her marriage to Horace Whalen, even your mysterious whereabouts. We would meet each other only when your mother felt at her best, free to enjoy my company as much as I enjoyed hers.

“I might as well tell you, Mr. Whalen, that for a long time there was no physical intimacy between your mother and me, and regardless of whether we met at her invitation or mine, I always paid the check.

“Keep in mind that I am not a rich man, Mr. Whalen. My father was an insurance broker who left no estate. I support my mother, who lives in Florida. When I met Mrs. Whalen, I had about seventy-five thousand dollars invested in various stocks and about fifteen thousand in a savings account. In the fifteen most productive years of my life, that’s all I had managed to save from the royalties of my books. I had always lived a carefully planned life, but whenever Mrs. Whalen and I went out for the evening, I spent more in one night than I normally would have spent on entertainment in a month. Finally I was forced to decide which was more important: my financial security or my enjoyment of the company of a woman unlike any I had ever known or would ever meet again. I chose your mother.

“When we became lovers, your mother insisted that we should be discreet. She didn’t want to cause gossip that could hurt you or embarrass her, her friends, or your family’s company. As you know, out of faithfulness to the
memory of her husband, your mother did not plan to marry again. To make our relationship less apparent, whenever we visited places where she was well known, your mother would invite one of her older lady friends to go with us.

“Because of our mutual interests, we decided that we would travel together to places neither of us had ever seen. At that time your mother was not suffering from the illness that later affected her. She loved to travel, she enjoyed good food, and she was a marvelous companion.

“As your mother felt obliged to travel only first-class, she took it upon herself to pay our transportation and hotels. She would request the largest suites, one for herself and, out of discretion, another reserved in my name; the hotel management was always asked to put additional staff at her disposal, and the charge for all these people was included in the hotel bill, which was paid directly by the local branch of your family bank.

“Not that your mother didn’t pay attention to her money; she was quite concerned with the stock market. Once, for instance, when we were in Venice, she heard from her brokers that the market was very bearish. During lunch on the terrace overlooking the Grand Canal, she told me that the recession had gotten worse, and that the previous day her estate had lost, on paper at least, close to sixty-two million dollars. In the afternoon she asked for the latest American newspapers, and when one of the hotel managers delivered them, she joked that, given the dismal state of America’s economy, the Soviet Union’s
Pravda
would probably be more accurate than
The Wall Street Journal
at predicting what would happen on the Street. Immediately the hotel manager offered to bring your mother the latest edition of
Pravda.

“When she asked him where, in Venice, he could get
Pravda
, he replied that he had a subscription to it, and that he would be glad to translate any articles that particularly
interested her. Surprised, your mother asked him how he came to subscribe to such a newspaper. He admitted to being a Communist, to having studied in the Soviet Union, even to being a secretary of the local party cell. Taken aback—for the hotel, which catered only to the finest clientele, was among her favorites—Mrs. Whalen asked the man what he thought about America. ‘It has become a warmongering country, madam,’ he answered. ‘And one that bode no good for the future of mankind.’ ‘How could you possibly say that?’ said Mrs. Whalen. ‘And who has given you such an idea?’ The manager bowed politely. ‘Among others, I learned this from a man you yourself have known quite well.’ ‘I can’t believe that,’ said your mother. ‘Who was it?’ ‘Mr. Horace Sumner Whalen, madam. Mr. Whalen said this in the speech he delivered while visiting the Soviet Union, and its entire text was carried by
Pravda
, even though, apparently,. only small fragments of it appeared in American newspapers.’

“But getting back to what I was saying, because your mother’s expenses during our travels were paid by the bank, she seldom carried any cash, and whenever she needed extra money, the hotel’s concierge would lend it to her, then include it on her bill. I took it upon myself to do the tipping, the only financial responsibility that I thought I could afford to assume in our travels, and when the need for gratuities arose, it was I who handed them out. Eventually, in order to be always prepared, I began to carry an attaché case filled with ones, fives, tens, and twenties for use in restaurants, nightclubs, taxis, garages, ships, trains, airports, inns, spas, clinics—wherever.

“As I recall, I gave about ten dollars to each hall porter, ten to a headwaiter, five to a wine steward, twenty-five each to ship stewards and pursers, five to a bell captain, five to each maid and valet, forty or fifty to each private museum or archaeological site guide, one hundred to a hotel
manager, and twenty-five to a desk clerk in charge of theater tickets; every hired seamstress got forty, and hotel telephone operators, secretaries, chauffeurs, masseuses, beauticians, and hairdressers got twenty-five each. Naturally, knowing who your mother was and seeing how comfortably she liked to live and travel, most people who were of assistance to us—whether Swiss sleeping car attendants or Iranian mule drivers—expected to be handsomely tipped. Even though I tipped them, they believed the money came from Mrs. Whalen, and I can assure you none of them was ever disappointed. I was generous to a fault: by the end of the second year of my relationship with your mother, out of all of my savings I had only two thousand dollars left, and I was nowhere near finishing my book about the historical consequences of the baptism of Theodosius, son of Emperor Maurice, in the year 584.

“I never mentioned to your mother the dilemma that tipping had created for me. How could I? In my relationship with her, it was the only financial obligation that I had assumed, and it was the least that I, a mature and professional man, could do for her. You see, I loved Katherine more than I had ever loved anyone, and to explain that I had run out of money tipping waiters would have meant admitting a total financial dependence on her from then on, which would have brutally distorted my real need of her. If I couldn’t afford it, too bad for me. But I resolved never to speak of it.

“I wrote her instead that I had to finish my book quickly and wouldn’t be able to see her until it was completed. Your mother took my letter as proof of my not wanting her anymore, and within a week she was gone.”

•   •   •

Another contribution has been made to my family’s oral history. After attending a service at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, once my mother’s favorite, I was politely accosted by an elegantly dressed older gentleman. “Are you, sir, by chance, Jonathan Whalen, the son of the late Mrs. Katherine Whalen?” he asked in a heavily accented staccato English. When I told him I was, he introduced himself as Mr. Vladimir Borys, shoemaker and owner of a small East Side custom-made shoe manufacturing establishment. As we walked toward my hotel, he told me that for over a decade he had hand-made and occasionally repaired the shoes of my parents.

According to Mr. Borys, although my father was content with a couple of pairs of new shoes every two or three years, my mother habitually ordered a pair or two every month.

“Mrs. Whalen’s feet troubled her,” said Mr. Borys. “The foot surgery she underwent several times did not seem to help, and she sought relief from her pain in the well-fitting shoes I made for her.” Mr. Borys reflected, then continued. “I was heartbroken when I found that transmitter in the heel of one of her shoes. You see, I thought I might have contributed, inadvertently, to her depression.”

Feigning familiarity with the incident, I asked, “How did you happen to come across the transmitter?”