Indiscretion (36 page)
After graduation, Johnny didn’t join the Marines, as his father had, but he did spend a year in Cambodia teaching in a remote village. He wrote me e-mails from there, describing the people, their customs, their gentleness. He also sent photographs of him helping build a well, leading a water buffalo, astride a motorcycle. Then he returned and entered law school. He joined my firm, at my encouragement, of course. He was well-liked and was soon on the fast track for partner. But I knew he was too spirited to remain for long. Guided by nobler instincts, he moved to Washington, where he went to work for the Department of Justice. It was there that he met Caroline, who would become his wife. She was English and worked at the British embassy.
Her parents flew over to meet Maddy and Harry, and spent a weekend on Long Island. Everyone got along famously. Her father, Gerald, was in the City. Caro’s mother, Jilly, was a homemaker and somehow related to E. M. Forster and had literary interests. She had read Harry’s books—there were four now—and was very excited to meet him. Caro had two brothers, one an officer in the Blues and Royals, the other still at Cambridge. Their flat was near Eaton Square. They had a weekend place in Gloucestershire. It was a typical Cotswolds house, the golden limestone, with views sweeping down a green valley. Every August they went to Tuscany for their summer holiday. In the winter, they rode to hounds.
Johnny and Caro were married in the Cotswolds. Several hundred guests came. Many of Johnny’s friends flew over. So did some of Maddy and Harry’s friends. Ned and Cissy. Me. There was a big marquee on the lawn. Champagne flowed. The men wore morning coats, the women wore hats. Maddy looked beautiful in a soft green dress that brought out the blue in her eyes. It was a charming village. The reception was only a short walk from the church, which predated the Norman Conquest. There were swans in the river. Harry was best man.
We saw less of Johnny, but that was to be expected. In their second year of marriage, Caro announced at Thanksgiving that she was pregnant. Harry, grinning enormously, patted his son on the back. Maddy kissed Caro. The baby was born in May. He was christened Walter Wakefield Winslow. There followed two more soon after, Madeleine and Gerry. I gave them all gold spoons with their names on them. They were all beautiful and healthy children.
One year Johnny and Caro lived in Shanghai, another year in London. He had left Justice and rejoined the firm (where, by now, I was of counsel) as a partner. They returned to New York. I bought them a town house. I know, it was absurdly lavish, but what else am I going to do with my money? Besides, as I pointed out to Johnny, it was all going to him one day anyway. The children entered school. I dutifully attended school plays, concerts, and games, just as I had done with him.
Maddy and Harry were always there as well. They still moved like lovers, hardly ever standing out of reach of each other. Harry’s hair, still thick, was white, and he still carried himself with the slight, shifting gait of an aging athlete. He had an operation to repair one of his knees. Maddy’s hair was white too. She had cut it shorter, so it no longer ran down her back, but her eyes were just as bright. She had that delicate, parchment-like beauty that only a few older women possess. She and Harry traveled from time to time. Harry was asked to teach a seminar at Yale, to be a fellow in Rotterdam. He gave graduation speeches. They never spent a night apart.
For the first few years, Johnny and Caro would come out on the weekends and would stay in Maddy and Harry’s house, but as they had more children and the children got bigger, it was plain that they had outgrown the house. I should have thought of this sooner, but, after talking it over with Harry and Maddy, I told Johnny and Caro I was giving them my house too, along with a small trust to be used for its upkeep. Once again, they protested, but I pointed out the fruitlessness of any argument and that it made no sense for one man to ramble around in a big old house by himself when what it really needed was a family with children to live in it.
So I went to live with Maddy and Harry, using Johnny’s old room as my own. I was very comfortable and, frankly, felt safer. If I had fallen down the stairs in my house, it might have been a day or so before anyone found me.
I am old now. Nearly bald. I need to keep wiping my shoulders to brush away dandruff. I don’t hear as well as I once did, nor do many other things work as well as they once did. I have become one of those elderly men who fill their days with trips to the doctor. I stop in at my office every morning, but there is less and less for me to do. I mainly act in an advisory capacity. I still sit on a few boards. I am on the library committee at one of my clubs. I still have one martini every night, even though I have been told it is bad for me. Maddy and I go for long walks. Not as long as we once did, but it is enough. She uses a cane now, an elegant gold-handled one that belonged to her great-grandfather, the land baron. Whether in the country or the city, at night I go to sleep in my bed with a light heart. I have no regrets. I have known love, it has blessed me nearly every day of my life. I couldn’t be happier.
Except none of this is true.
T
hey find the plane’s wreckage late that afternoon. Only the mangled landing gear is visible above the waterline. It is a clear day, wind blowing from the southwest. Almost no turbulence. The tower had received a distress call from Harry around two o’clock, reporting that he was losing altitude and asking for clearance. That was followed by some static that the air traffic controller couldn’t make out, and then silence.
An eyewitness who had been surf casting on the beach says he saw a single-engine plane come in low and attempt a water landing. On contact with the surface, it flipped over several times and broke apart. Divers locate the body of a young boy first. He had been decapitated. The water is cold, the current strong, and visibility is limited. The divers can only stay down for fifteen minutes at a time. They don’t find Harry’s body until the next morning.
I learn of the crash the way most people do. I read about it online. It is a Saturday, and I am spending a quiet afternoon at home in New York.
AUTHOR AND SON FEARED DEAD IN CRASH
runs one of the headlines. I did not know that Harry and Johnny had flown that day. I click on the headline absentmindedly, and, with mounting horror, I read the story, stunned and disbelieving until the phone calls start. Friends, acquaintances want to know if it is true. I don’t know, but I fear the worst.
Then I receive an official call from the local chief of police, a man I have known for many years. His father had been our butcher. I remember the son working in the shop when he was a teenager, a few years younger than I, his apron smeared with dried blood. His thick hands, short blond hair. I had been listed as an emergency contact.
“Mister Gervais, I’m sorry to tell you this . . .”
It is all I need to hear. Maddy is still away, her flight due in the next day. I have to notify her. I try information to get the number for her hotel and finally find it online. There is no answer. I call the Mexican consulate in Manhattan but am told by the answering service to call back Monday morning. I don’t even know what flight she will be on. I then place a call to the home of the man who heads up our firm’s Mexico City office and tell him what happened. I tell him Maddy is staying in a hotel in the Yucatán, and, after much grumbling, he eventually arranges to have the police locate and inform her.
It is the only way. I can’t risk her arriving at the airport and finding out what happened by glancing through the newsstand. That would be too cruel.
Late that night Maddy calls from Mexico. I have been expecting it, dreading it. I pick up the phone before the end of the first ring. She is hysterical.
“What the hell is going on, Walter? Is this some kind of crazy joke? I just had two Mexican policemen wake me up and tell me to call you.”
I tell her what happened. The cry that emanates from the other end of the phone is otherworldly. It is a mixture of anger and pain I have never heard before. “I’m so sorry,” I repeat. “I’m so sorry.” There is nothing else for me to say, so I stand listening to her sob, wishing I could be there to comfort her. After a quarter of an hour, I ask her what time her flight gets in. I have to ask several times because each time she tries to answer, she begins to cry again. Eventually she manages to stutter out the time.
“Don’t . . . hang . . . up,” she pleads, drawing in breaths, fighting now for control.
“I won’t.”
We stay on the phone for another hour. Occasionally we speak, but mostly we are silent or Maddy is crying.
In the morning she has to fly early to Mexico City and then to JFK. She won’t arrive until the evening. When she does, I am waiting. She is in a wheelchair. Despite a tan, she looks waxen, her cheeks hollow. I walk up to her but can’t even tell if she recognizes me. Her eyelids flutter. She is being escorted by an airline representative and a porter, who carries her luggage.
I nod as the pretty, dark-haired girl asks, “Are you here to meet Mrs. Winslow? She has been given a sedative. She slept the whole way from Mexico. Do you have a car waiting?”
This time there is no stretch limousine. I take Maddy to my apartment and put her in my bed and let her sleep.
For a few days, it is in all the papers. They all use the same photograph of Harry, the one from the dust jacket of his book. One of the tabloids even found a class portrait of Johnny standing with a bunch of other boys in jackets and ties; they run it with a circle around him. Another has a diagram that shows what happens to a plane when it hits the water. I can’t look at it.
There is speculation over the cause of the crash. Was it pilot error? A technical malfunction? Did Harry have a stroke? Was Johnny flying, attempting a landing under his father’s supervision? Had a depressed Harry driven his plane into the water on purpose? The National Transportation Safety Board moves the pieces of the plane to the Air National Guard base in Westhampton Beach to determine what happened. Autopsies are performed on both bodies.
Maddy wants them cremated. She is a little better now but still walking around my apartment like a somnambulist. It is up to me to make the arrangements. I speak with the funeral home on Pantigo Road. I fill out the necessary forms. The
New York Times
calls about the obituary, so do the
East Hampton Star
and
Southampton Press
. I have a lot to do and hate leaving Maddy alone. I am seriously concerned she might just walk to the window and throw herself out. I come home and find her still at the breakfast table, staring at a cold cup of coffee, smoking, fingering Harry’s Saint Christopher medal. The heap of stubbed-out cigarette butts is the only indication that time has passed.
I drive us out to my house. That is where the reception will be. She told me she can’t return to her own house. I put her in the Victorian Room, and, instead of using my own room, I sleep next door, in my great-grandfather’s monk-like chamber. In all the years I have known her, she has never spent the night in my house. I make dinner, but she doesn’t have an appetite. She has barely eaten a thing in days. All she seems to consume is vodka and nicotine. I urge her to eat something, tell her that there’s no point in starving herself. I carve her meat as though for a child. I even put it on the fork. She just stares at me.
In the morning, the caterers arrive. I am not sure how many guests are coming back to my house afterward. I can count on Cissy and Ned, Harry’s agent, his publisher, other friends. Maddy’s brother, Johnny, is coming from Oregon, where he works as some kind of addiction counselor and teaches yoga. These were the ones I knew to invite. I knew she wouldn’t want too many. Only the closest family and friends. Some of them I hadn’t seen in years, but I suppose they had kept in touch with Harry and Maddy.
Shortly before eleven, I drive us to the church, St. Luke’s, the same one where we had my father’s memorial. I still regularly attend services, whether out here or at St. James’s in the city, but I know that Harry and Maddy were mainly Christmas and Easter only. The new rector is a woman who has been there for the past few years. She greets me warmly and with great sensitivity, then lets me slip past as I have my arm around a sedated Maddy. I had to help her get dressed.
A few guests have already arrived, but I ignore them, escorting Maddy to the front of the church. There are many flowers surrounding the altar, and two large photographs of Harry and Johnny. I feel myself tearing up, and I can only imagine how Maddy must be feeling, if she is aware of anything, and I hold her tightly. A few people come up to Maddy, but I politely try to shoo most of them away.
I look around and see Harry’s father sitting by himself in a pew opposite. A widower now, he has come down from New Hampshire, where he lives in retirement. I am once again struck by their physical resemblance. It is like looking at Harry in thirty years’ time. His father is staring at the photographs of his son and grandson. His whole legacy wiped out in a single instant. I would have gone over and greeted him, but didn’t want to leave Maddy.
Ned and Cissy appear. Cissy slides in next to Maddy, not saying a word, chin up, clutching Maddy’s hand. Ned looks shrunken. A few more people file in, but I keep my attention focused on Maddy. The service begins, the familiar words: “I am the resurrection and the life.” There are no speeches, no remembrances. Maddy would not have been able to bear it. It is over quickly.
I move Maddy back outside to my car, which is parked in front of the church. I barely notice the guests as I walk out but catch glimpses of a few familiar faces. There are more people than I had expected. Funerals always attract the curious, especially if the deceased is a celebrity of sorts. Only about ten cars follow us back though.
I had brought boots for Maddy and myself, and help put hers on. We walk slowly through the mud toward the pond, followed by the others. Ned takes one of the canoes and carries it down the dock. I follow behind with Maddy. Ned and I help her into the bow, where she sits facing aft. Then I get in, sitting in the stern, as ever. Cissy hands me the tin. No one says a word.