SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE

by

Elizabeth Moulton

5/1/90

"New York, the great place of the western continent,

the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the

pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond of the New World."

-- Walt Whitman

PART ONE

Chapter One

June, 1985

The telephone rings, waking Sylvia Becker into the bright New York afternoon. It must be Andy calling, at last. She lifts the phone on to the bed. "What time is it out there?"

"It's three o'clock, Miss," says the hotel operator. "You left a call for three o'clock."

Sylvia mumbles Thank you, and inquires, as she had at noon, if there have been any messages.

There are none. After her morning appointment, Sylvia returned exhausted to her hotel room. She has slept heavily

for more than an hour. Now she feels, if possible, wearier, her face scored by jet lag, anger, grief -

words with the weight and rhythm of the childhood game of scissors, paper, stone.

Sylvia chooses a blouse the deep blue of lobelias (Helen's color) to wear with the beige linen suit.

She combs back her thick grey hair and pins it with a tortoise-shell barrette. All the resources of

her cosmetic kit are needed to restore her face. As she waits for the doorman to stop a a taxi, she

acknowledges what she had done. She has dawdled to make herself late for

(with luck, missing altogether) the memorial service for Helen at All Saints Church this Friday

afternoon in late June.

"Helen won't know if you're present," Andy said, "but I sure as hell will." By going East, Sylvia

was abandoning him in Santa Barbara with a black tie dinner for eighty on his hands. No matter

that Helen was Sylvia's best and oldest friend.

Wednesday, their first morning back from France, Andy went to his office, Sylvia to her desk. The

third piece of mail she opened had been an announcement of Helen Wadsworth's memorial service

Friday, two days hence.

Sylvia turned the stiff, engraved, white oblong over and over, looking for the source of the cruel

joke. Letters from New York friends ("We didn't know how to reach you in France") soon

disabused her. Abbott's appalling note was contradicted by Lucy's, enclosing the Times obituary;

the cause of Helen's sudden death had been a heart attack.

(At last a cab draws up. Sylvia hops in and gives the driver the address of the church.)

When she finished sorting the mail, Sylvia went out on the patio to water the hanging plants. She

climbed the stepladder. Then: splat! She lay sprawling on her back on the flagstones, with the

watering can still upright in her hand. An accident-on-purpose to shock herself into comprehending Helen's death? Sylvia felt herself over for broken bones and, as there were none,

she rose, shakily, and went to telephone Andy about Helen's service.

Sylvia's backside still hurts. Once upon a time, she compared Manhattan to an elegant verse form,

the appropriate container for the thing contained. How ridiculous! - but she had been in love with

New York. Now, as the cab bucks down Fifth Avenue, its potholes and patched pavement jar her

sore coccyx. Has the city changed, or only become more so? On each return Sylvia is appalled by

the dirt, the speed, the crazy drivers, the assault of horns and radios and jackhammers, the instant

rage of your average, thwarted New Yorker.

Traffic stalls just north of Rockefeller Center. Sylvia vibrates with impatience until the cab moves once more. Trying to get comfortable, she transfers her weight to her other buttock. She smooths down her linen skirt. though God knows who will notice wrinkles today. She begins to compile a list of mourners: Malcolm and his and Helen's large family, Sylvia's own two grown-up children;

statesmen, politicians, old friends, Malcolm's partners and the legal community, U.N. personnel,

educators, blacks, Hispanics - a good cross-section of New York. And all of them have had five

weeks to recover from the shock of Helen's death.

Sylvia had no idea that Helen was ill. In her mind she hears Helen's clear voice calling to wish the

Beckers a wonderful vacation in France. Sylvia stressed how much she would miss their weekly

telephone conversations. She promised to bring Helen a scarf from Hermes. But why hadn't she

said, just once, Helen, I love you?

The taxi turns east. Plain sailing down Lexington Avenue until 44th Street, where it is halted again.

The Graybar Building looks much the same, although both Vogue and Sylvia have been long gone

from the premises. Sylvia decides to think about her first three months there, memories that will

dry any tears.

In September, 1944, the day after her final exam, Sylvia arrived by train from Poughkeepsie and

went straight to the editorial offices of Vogue. The chic receptionist was on the phone. She waved

Sylvia to a chair. When at last the receptionist hung up, she transferred her gaze to a magazine.

Sylvia came forward. "I'm Sylvia Smith. Will you please tell Miss Cobb that I'm here."

"Do you have an appointment?"

"Yes." Sylvia began to explain but the phone rang again. She rejoined her two suitcases.

Watching editors, models, office boys, move through the reception area, Sylvia saw that she was

watched and that her raffia shoes and painted-on stockings did not do. She lit a cigarette. Now and

then her foot tapped the floor with lady-like impatience.

Twenty minutes passed. People who had arrived after her had been whisked away to their

destinations. Sylvia's stomach cramped with panic. Had Vogue's editors lured her to New York

only to humiliate her by saying: "Yes, you were a finalist in this year's Prix de Paris, but what

made you believe we promised you a job, you naive young person from Dubuque." Sylvia had

never lived in Dubuque but she suspected that San Diego was equally provincial. She ground out a

third cigarette. Her mouth tasted bitter and dry. How many boasting letters had she fired off

describing her glamorous job on the top fashion magazine in the world?

Sylvia approached the receptionist again.

The young woman glanced up with surprise. "Oh, you haven't gone up yet? Miss Cobb says for you to go up to Personnel and fill out your forms."

(A huge trailer truck blocks the cab at the intersection of 34th Street and Lexington Avenue. Sylvia refuses to glance at her watch.) Those first months at Vogue were the most difficult of Sylvia's young life. She, who had always stood first in her class, was universally ignored, as though marked by some disfiguring disease.

Yet her nail polish was without blemish, her dark hair glossy and elegantly upswept. Having no office of her own, Sylvia could be seen by all at her typewriter, radiating composure, competence, cleverness, style.

Then her copy would drop back down the editorial chain of command to be rewritten. Patiently

Sylvia would reword it, retype it, and return it to the editor next above her. Back would come her

100 or 200 or 300 words to be made livelier or cut to fit a different count. Words about her written words were the only words addressed to her: "Please end your love affair with `coruscate'. `Focus' is what one does with a camera, not a ball gown." No one invited Sylvia to have lunch. Secretaries passed her desk without a "good morning."

Sylvia was too miserable to waste much anxiety on the Pacific or European fronts, but she rejoiced in the liberation of Paris. Not long after, the first French fashions since 1940 appeared in the pages of Vogue. Not that Sylvia could afford them. She wore the narrow skirts and severe jackets dictated by the war-time regulation L-85. "Use it up, wear it out; make it do or do without," was the patriotic slogan from the War Resources Board. Sylvia splurged her first pay check and her remaining coupons on a pair of leather pumps.

Housing was tight in war-time New York. Almost half her salary went for a room in a run-down hotel on West 44th Street. The hotel had been raided for immorality a week before Sylvia came down from Vassar, news she concealed from her mother. Policemen were present in the lobby during the all the dreary months she lived there.

At the end of each working day Sylvia, freshly made-up, would rush importantly from the office, as though she were late for a dinner-date at the Colony or perhaps the 21 Club. Once west of Fifth Avenue, she stopped to buy a container of coffee at the delicatessen whose owner put aside a pack of cigarettes for her each day.

Sylvia's room contained a bed, a chair, a table, a bureau, a closet, and a closet-sized bathroom.

After she drank her coffee and stared out the one window into an air shaft, she would slide the suitcase from under the bed with its illegal hot plate and pots and pans. Sylvia lived on Franco-

American spaghetti, soups, and fruit; her refrigerator was the bathroom window sill. She ate her evening meal and listened to the man in the next room playing solitaire; the walls were that thin.

As he slapped the cards down angrily she imagined kings and queens and jacks crying out in pain.

Phones rang, but never hers. After dinner she washed her underwear, ironed tomorrow's blouse, fiddled with a poem or two, churned out letters. She wrote her high school English teacher that she was living "almost next door to the famous Algonquin Hotel." Sylvia was "performing the exciting duties of a junior copy editor," she reported home. Sylvia did not dare claim to be an editor as her mother would check the masthead.

Unlike many triflers with the truth, Sylvia always knew when she lied and when she risked being caught. She felt no compunction about lying. Without some prevarication she would not have made honors in high school or applied for a full scholarship to Vassar.

Perhaps boasting was the better word. By the time she entered high school she had come to love the activity of studying. The accomplishments listed in her application were, mostly, earned.

Sylvia's high school English teacher, an alumna of Vassar had sponsored her. While Sylvia waited to hear if she'd been accepted, she pieced together the East Coast out of Vogue's College issue,

LIFE Magazine spreads on picturesque New England villages, and The Philadelphia Story.

Sylvia's senior year in high school she wore her hair like Katharine Hepburn's, and hoped that the resemblance would be noticed. No, Sylvia didn't exactly cheat. She merely gave the impression that she'd done the research, knew the books ("You're the most alarmingly well-read young woman since Edna St. Vincent Millay was admitted," her freshman adviser told Sylvia), then if the boast succeeded, Sylvia went back and finished the work she'd claimed she'd done.

She was skilled at shading. "What does your stepfather do?' Sylvia was asked at college. "He's in the field of mining engineering." (Orville Smith had once worked as a guard at a copper mine.)

"Did your mother go to Vassar as well, Sylvia?" "I'm afraid not. It's always been one of her regrets." "Sylvia, you went to public high school?" "Nearly everyone west of the Mississippi attends public school, unless they need special help," she had replied.

(The trailer truck moves forward. The cab shakes free, rollicking on down to 22nd Street, as though riding a breaking wave, making each light as it changes. Sylvia will be on time, after all.)

The Copy Editor permitted Sylvia to add her one-week vacation to the long Christmas weekend.

Sylvia rode by coach across the country, holding Madame Bovary (in French) between her and servicemen trying to pick her up. Four days in a coach car to California, four long days back. The two and a half days in San Diego exacerbated Sylvia's nerves, already raw from sleepless nights.

Her little half-sisters bickered for her attention. Her stepfather drove her crazy singing "That Old

Master Painter from the Far Away Hills," each night as the sun descended into the Pacific. Her mother pried for information about Sylvia's "dates" as she fitted Sylvia's new black suit - her twentieth birthday present. It was a Buttrick pattern, "imitation Chanel," Sylvia imagined a Vogue fashion editor sneering; but the double seams and hand-stitched lining were acts of love.

(Nevertheless, Max, her photographer friend, remained Sylvia's secret.)

After her three-month probation, Sylvia's life improved. One by one the older copy assistants invited Sylvia to lunch. The Copy Editor took Sylvia to the Algonquin bar. She ordered dry martinis, Sylvia's first. She praised Sylvia's feeling for language and inquired if Sylvia intended to make writing her career. Sylvia hadn't thought beyond her date next Tuesday with Max Kirov, but

Yes, oh yes, she breathed, poetry and short fiction. And biography - biography, because it sounded

serious.

Sylvia was assigned to write about the sculptor Henry Moore. Her piece would accompany

reproductions of his sketches of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz in the Underground. Moore's

bundled sleepers looked more like loaves of bread than people. Months later, she struggled with

captions for photographs of the liberated Concentration Camps: the cordwood dead, the living

skeletons in their tattered striped pajamas. Their faces worn to bones and eyes got into her

nightmares, and into her poems.

Now Sylvia was given second night seats to plays (that often folded). She represented the

magazine at exhibits and publishers' receptions. Assistant editors included Sylvia in their parties

where Sylvia felt herself among "Le tout New York."

At first she confused brilliance with fashion, talent with what was merely new. She heard gossip

raised to high art: who slept, or was no longer sleeping, with whom; whose reputation was

ludicrously inflated; who served cheap Scotch in expensive decanters; whose play had died in

Boston; who had divorced his wife, got an agent, picked up an option; who opened a new gallery;

whose pearls were false, whose gowns were second hand. The subject was not as important as the

riffs, the embellishments, the surprise endings.

At the end of March, the Managing Editor commanded Sylvia, together with three other minions, to lunch. Afterward she shepherded the four girls into the presence of the Editor-in-Chief. Sylvia was grilled last. "Miss Smith, you have been with us for six months, I'm told. How have you liked it?" The question had not been put to the other three. Sylvia stood before the Editor's desk tongue-tied, for a painful length of seconds. "It has been an experience," she whispered.

"I can't imagine that what Vassar taught you has been of much help with your work here."

"No, except for French and art history. It was my mother - Mother who made me interested in fashion," Sylvia startled to hear herself say. "She's always had to work as a dressmaker, wherever we've lived."

Stupid! Idiot, to announce your poor beginnings and lower class background. But Mrs. Chase showed flattering interest in the nomadic Smiths as they moved west from Chicago, city by smaller city, her step-father perennially looking for work, a new school each year for Sylvia until the family rolled to a stop in San Diego. She chatted on about her part-time jobs, her poems published in The

Vassar Miscellany, her unbounded admiration for Colette and Proust.

Sylvia returned to her desk to die. She had committed the unforgivable crime of being boring.

Two days later, the word came down: "I believe we should keep that little Miss Smith."

The taxi stops outside All Saints Church. It is two minutes past four. As Sylvia pays the driver, she notices the newspaper on the front seat, folded in half so the banner headlines read:

ENATOR

UPTION

BRONX

Sylvia has followed for almost a year the separate investigations by the IRS and HEW into the finances of the South Bronx Community Center Union; their reports are still pending. Sylvia read about this newest probe of the anti-poverty agency on her flight East. It was inevitable that

Malcolm would be called as a witness. But why pick on the poor man this week? Though her tip has been generous, the cab still idles there. Sylvia longs to jump back in before she is recognized, before she breaks down.

She takes a deep breath. She climbs toward a blur of people standing at the top of the wide church steps. She hears someone say "....best legal minds in the city working on it. Malcolm is a babe caught in the South Bronx woods, but you do wonder where nearly seventy million dollars disappeared to." As she pushes past, she overhears: "Why there's Sylvia Underhill," as though she hadn't been married to Andrew Becker for thirteen years.

An usher leads Sylvia to a pew half way down the center aisle. On either side of Sylvia two strangers read the service sheet. Sylvia realizes that the usher had given her one. Printed on the outside, white on blue: A Service of Thanksgiving for the life of HELEN CROSS

WADSWORTH, 1924-1985.

Sylvia bows forward into a Protestant crouch. She cannot recall a single prayer. Then words entirely desert her and a vast, inarticulate howl rises up in her throat in protest against Helen's death.

James Olney Lippincott, known in his youth as Jolly, has watched Sylvia rush in, her face severe with grief. Why isn't she one of the speakers? Other old friends have been involved in arrangements for the service. James, summoned back from Maine, has agreed to police the memorial service for press and TV photographers.

James slides into a back pew with the newspaper he'd bought on the subway:

FORMER U.S.SENATOR

TIED TO CORRUPTION

IN THE SOUTH BRONX Malcolm's testimony is accompanied by a photograph. In it he faces the camera, looking erect,

statesmanlike, above the questions asked by the Inspector General's Office of the U.S. Department

of Labor.

James turns to the printed testimony following the news story: "Mr. Wadsworth, how much do you

know about book-keeping?"

"Like most lawyers, I leave book-keeping to the accountants."

"But as President of the Board of the South Bronx Community Center Union, wouldn't it be your

responsibility to review the books?"

"I resigned from the SBCCU nearly a year ago."

"It was less than three months. On March 21st."

"I serve on a great number of boards. I must have confused this resignation with another. I do

know it happened long before my wife's death in May."

"Just what were your relations with the South Bronx Community Center Union?"

"My connection with the Community Center came about through my wife's involvement with St.

Peter's Church. Its day care center and tutoring program evolved over the years into the SBCCU.

After the Center moved to its present quarters, I went on the Board. I believe that was in 1961."

"Was your role on the Board mainly to secure funds for the anti-poverty agency?"

"No. My usefulness to the Community Center was to provide introductions to sources of funding.

Only the people in Albany and Washington who distributed anti-poverty funds could decide what the SBCCU would get."

"Mr. Wadsworth?" The investigator, James notes, withheld the courtesy title of Senator. "Mr.

Wadsworth, it has been alleged that of the forty million dollars of Federal funds, some twenty two million from New York State and City, and eight or ten more from foundations and private groups that have gone into the South Bronx Community Center Union over the last fourteen years only a small fraction has been accounted for. Can you throw some light on that?"

"Certainly. It costs several million dollars a year to run the physical plant of the SBCCU. It has a remedial school (a former 600 school) aimed to turn disadvantaged children into achievers, a full- time staff of forty-seven, investments in small businesses and in firms remodelling substandard housing. The Community Center funds summer camps, provides meals for the elderly, runs vocational training programs, and arranges outings for children and shut-ins. The SBCCU also supports a library, a day care center, a vocational advisory service, tutoring programs for adults and high school students, and it supports a search program by which talented youngsters are identified as candidates for college scholarships."

Fifteen years ago, when James Lippincott was also on the Board of the South Bronx Community

Center, it did offer most of the services Malcolm described as current.

"Three separate investigations have failed to find annual reports or balance sheets for the projects you describe. Such records as were found show outlays for car leases, hotel rooms, first class air travel for the staff of the Community Center. Travel first class, Mr. Wadsworth, to service an area of a few square miles?"

"Once Federal funds became available to the SBCCU under Title Seven of the Equal Opportunity

Act of 1964, the Center could use the money as it saw fit. After CETA and then the Community

Services Administration were abolished, other sources of funding had to be found. Those travel expenses were occasioned by a search for investments to increase the endowment of the

Community Center." James wonders if Malcolm volunteered to testify yesterday so that the pity of his wife's memorial service today would wipe the slate clean. "Jolly, I hate it when you're cynical," Helen often remarked. She felt free to criticize him because he had been her best friend forever.

James became aware of Helen in 1942 at meetings of his Harvard Post War Study group, but the first time she'd been fixed forever to his memory had been - drinking coffee with her at Hayes

Bickford? - when she'd asked him in her musical voice: "Why can't boys stay friends with girls?"

The night before, an Australian Helen had met at the Anzac Club had been all over her in a taxi. "I don't think I led him on," Helen had added. James felt sure that she had not. He now saw her frequently at rehearsals of the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society. The two groups sang Brahms' German Requiem with the Boston Symphony Orchestra that fall.

Excerpts from the Requiem, the service sheet informs James, would be sung today. She would like that.

The organist ceases his preliminary meanderings. After a pause, he begins to play Bach's "Sleepers

Awake." James watches Malcolm Wadsworth and his children, their wives and husband, the grandchildren and old Mrs. Cross, file in. They are followed by more Wadsworths and Crosses and

Olney cousins. The family fills the three front pews on both sides of the center aisle.

The organ ceases with a shuddering chord. The Reverend Christopher Seabury Reid comes forward to the front of the chancel. He welcomes to All Saints the friends of Helen Cross

Wadsworth, her acquaintances who had admired her, the family who had loved her. He asks everyone there to join him in a celebration of her life.

Chris's customary pleasant expression is stern. His voice is not entirely steady.

Chapter Two

June, 1945

On impulse one Thursday, some weeks after VE Day, Helen Cross bought a flowered blouse at

Saks that made all the difference. It was cream-colored challis, patterned with small roses and green leaves. The rose red of the flowers matched the suit that Helen had bought, using the last of her ration points, before she left for her job in New York. Another grey or brown suit would be much more practical, said Helen's mother as they rummaged through Filene's Basement. But of course Helen had her own money and must do as she liked.

Helen had won about the suit, and lost over housing. Through a New York acquaintance of her mother's, Helen had been remanded to a safe Residence for Women (no men callers after ten, and never above the lobby floor) within walking distance of the British Information Service.

Her job was a compromise between Helen's desire to join the armed forces and her mother's anguished plea to stay at home in Winchester, Massachusetts. Helen had accelerated through

Radcliffe to early graduation, planning to enlist in the WAVES. Then her mother enlisted the support of the cautious family doctor and Helen was brought up short by a heart murmur she hadn't heard about since childhood.

Friday, wearing her new blouse and the matching suit, Helen stepped smartly down Lexington

Avenue to 57th Street, enjoying the syncopation of her (saved for best) high heels on the pavement.

It was surely wrong to feel happy when her brother was already half way across the Pacific, but it was such a beautiful morning! She strolled along 57th Street, and turned down Fifth Avenue, past

Tiffany's, Best & Co. and St. Patrick's Cathedral. At Saks, Helen crossed the street and turned into

Rockefeller Center.

The office was slow this morning. Helen ran the switchboard, admitted the only visitor and ushered him in to the director's outer office to wait.

Once her typing chores were finished, Helen began a letter to her mother. Helen had learned to dissemble her joy at being on her own in New York, alone. "Alone," for her mother meant rattling around in the empty house in Winchester; Helen's father was serving on the Inter-American

Defense Board in Washington, returning home every other weekend. Helen's letters lightened her mother's solitary existence, a little. They also staved off anxious phone calls.

Dear Mother,

It's been a quiet week. If I remain here

among the English much longer, I shall begin

to clip my vowels and wear my hair in a bun.

What else of a cheerful nature? Richard's latest letter, assessing the odds of his survival, did not bear repeating to their mother. Helen's thoughts about living in New York after the war would also distress her. She could tell Mother about James:

Tonight, instead of going to the Soldiers and

Sailors Club - Mrs. Delafield arranged for me to

volunteer there, as I think I told you - I'm meeting James

Lippincott.

He started that Harvard post-war study group I went to. He's a nice boy, but he's awfully opinionated and I'm not looking

forward to his lecturing me on the

U.N.O. Conference in San Francisco, or President

Truman's failure to do this or that. However, the poor boy is being shipped out, and he needs someone to talk to his last night in...."

The telephone rang. It was Mrs. Delafield. "Helen? Is there anyone you'd like to invite to lunch tomorrow? Lucy - you remember my god-daughter? - is bringing her room-mate, and I'm not sure we have enough boys to go around."

Helen said she was sorry, but everyone she knew was overseas. Ten minutes later she was allowed to hang up, having heard about Lucy Tenbroeck winning the art prize at Vassar and about her room-mate, who worked at Vogue, with a name out of Shakespeare; not Rosalind; Olivia? "It's come to me at last: Sylvia is Lucy's friend's name. (Doesn't that sound like a translated French sentence?)"

Helen finished her letter with the necessary inquiries about the progress of the victory garden in the back yard, and her mother's health. Helen did not miss her, but she loved her mother; and this she could honestly write.

Seaman First Class James Olney Lippincott paced in front of the bank of elevators Helen would eventually emerge from. He was only vaguely aware of being a moving obstacle to the streams of office workers leaving for the night.

James's face, (he had caught his reflection in Tiffany's windows just now) looked as though he were going to a funeral. Ever since his orders had arrived, he knew he'd be killed, like his brother Charlie, like so many of their Exeter and Harvard classmates. In the final assault on Japan James's ship would be (1) torpedoed (2) hit by a kamikaze (3) shelled; or, James surviving thus far, would

(4) be blown up by a grenade as the ship approached the Japanese mainland.

Had his brother sensed that this was It? Ten months ago Charlie had gone down in a Navy training plane off Pensacola. Whenever James thought about it, which was every day, he saw his brother plummeting soundlessly into the Gulf of Mexico, and the waves folded over the plane, and the gulls flew above empty waters. Until then, James had had no conception of how angry a death can leave you, a death without explanation and without finality. The plane and the bodies had never been recovered.

Convinced of his own death, James had drawn his will, dividing his possessions between his two remaining brothers. He staged long goodbyes with friends at the Biltmore and the Algonquin bar.

He toured nightclubs from Harlem to 52nd Street to the Stuyvesant Casino. He tramped alone across the worn field in Central Park where he'd played ball so long ago. From the Armor Room of the Metropolitan Museum to the Aquarium in Battery Park, James waked his younger self.

He heard Helen call his name.

As he turned, his face set and miserable, Helen was reminded of his inappropriate nickname. "I'm sorry, James, am I late?"

"No, I'm early." He gripped her right hand until it hurt. "How about a drink in the Rainbow

Grille?"

"Isn't it rather expensive?" "So what?" He glared down at her. (When you are nearly five foot ten it's nice being towered over, thought Helen.) "Hell, I have a month's pay to blow. Come on." People in the lobby stared;

Helen had forgotten how loud James's voice was.

After the little breeze of meeting, the how-are-yous, the elevator up, the table found and drinks ordered, her gloves in her purse, her purse in her lap, her hat straight on her head, Helen studied

James. At college she had considered him pleasantly homely, with an inordinate stretch from his eye sockets to his jaw. He still wore a sailor suit and the straw-stubble crew cut, but in the year since she'd seen him, he'd grown into his big features. You could almost describe him as goodlooking if his expression were not so bleak! She hastened to break the silence:

"James, you sounded different on the phone."

"I hate to telephone. I always end up saying the wrong thing." He added, "I was surprised to hear you were living in New York. Weren't you going to join the WAVES?"

Helen did not answer. From her expression, James could tell that she had gone away somewhere by herself. He remembered her fits of abstraction - odd in a person otherwise so polite.

"Yes. Yes, I was." Helen had been searching for something to say about his brother Charlie's death. "Just before I got ready to enlist, Mother stopped me. She has an idea that I'm frail - when

I'd make two of her. I gave in, because I didn't want to add to her worries. But I also longed to be on my own. I talked to my father. He wrote a lawyer he knew in New York, Mr. Porter

Delafield;, and Mr. Delafield found me this job. The Delafields have been awfully kind to me. I fact, I'm going there for lunch tomorrow." James's smile of recognition led her to ask: "Do you know them?"

"They're old friends of my parents. I was supposed to be there tomorrow, too, but my leave is up." "Well, I wish you were, and I wish it wasn't." Helen had to say it: "James, I read about your

brother in the alumni notes. I am so sorry." She reached across the table and touched his hand. "I

know how I'd feel if it - if Richard were...."

"Thank you," he said harshly.

Rebuffed, Helen withdrew her hand. She fumbled in her purse for cigarettes.

"I know you mean it, Helen." James's hand trembled as he lit her cigarette, and then his.

Just as Helen decided that their date was over, James asked: "Would you like another coke? No?

Then where shall we dine?"

"Dining is so much nicer than eating. On my salary, most of the time I eat."

Half an hour later she found herself in a small French restaurant on Third Avenue eating escargots

for the first time in her life. After she had drunk a glass of wine, Helen inquired: "I've always

wondered where the nickname Jolly came from."

"From my initials, James Olney Lippincott. I tried to be James at Harvard, but too many people had known me as Jolly in school. Malcolm had the same problem at Dartmouth with Mally."

"Is he one of your many brothers?"

"No, a friend, and some sort of cousin. We're the same age, and growing up we looked alike."

Abruptly James remembered that he'd never called Mally back to say he wouldn't join him at the

Starlight Roof tonight.

"Having a double, did you feel like Conrad's Secret Sharer?"

"Off hand, I don't recall the plot. Was it one of the assigned novels I borrowed your notes for?"

"I think so." Helen smiled. He continued, "Mally and I looked alike, but that was as far as it went. I didn't want to be a team

captain, while Mally was always a leader. A bunch of us used to meet Saturdays in Central Park.

Even when we were little and had a tutor, Mally was the one who really ran things. The older boys

went along with him; all except my brother Dwight. (Gosh, this seems a long time ago.) Then

Amazing Grace...."

"Who?"

"My mother, Grace Lippincott. I gave her the nickname. She rather enjoys it, even if she always protests, `Oh, Jolly, don't.'"

His falsetto made Helen laugh. For a moment, she considered nicknames for her own mother:

Saint Elinor? Elinor Agonistes?

After the snails came a lapin stew, and after that what looked like Floating Island. The waiter

corrected her: Mademoiselle was eating "Oeufs a la neige." Then they had coffee and James began

a monologue, as Helen had predicted.

Half asleep from the heavy meal, Helen nodded while James proved that the United Nations

Organization would succeed where the League of Nations had failed. "Where we failed at college,

for that matter. The Post War Study Group was as parochial as the courses we took. As though

Harvard had decided that only Europe was worth studying. Have you read a book called The

People on Our Side, by Edgar Snow? It's about the Indians and Chinese and Russians and

Burmese, and the Chinese Nationalists who spend most of their energy fighting the Chinese

Partisans who have been fighting the Japanese since the nineteen thirties. I mean," he concluded

(and Helen wished James would lower his voice), "we didn't know how much we didn't know back

then." James poured out the last of the wine. "When I remember my pacifist phase, how dumb stupid I

was! Probably typical of most Americans, though you don't like to think you're typical. Do you

remember the Carl Sandburg poem about the grass covering a battlefield so no one could imagine

the soldiers killed there? I decided there should be no more battlefields. At Exeter I wrote a paper

on the causes of the World War. My conclusion was that the munitions makers got us into wars

and the next time we wouldn't fight to make them rich. Were you at the Harvard Class Day in

1940?" Helen shook her head sleepily. "This ranting old f - old idiot stood up and called Charlie's

graduating class and us undergraduates there, traitors, yellow-livered, quaking cowards for signing peace petitions and taking the Oxford Pledge...Christ, Helen, I've bored you to sleep."

Helen's eyelids struggled to open. She blushed. "I'm sorry; I don't usually drink wine." She

smiled. "But I did hear most of it, and you were very eloquent."

It burst upon him, Helen's loveliness. He had known her for years, had noted her brains, her

generosity, her undeviating honesty - but never until now, her beauty. Each feature was a winner,

from her chestnut hair to her fine strong chin. How could he have been so obtuse?

James had planned to take Helen back to her women's residence after dinner. Now he asked:

"Hey, how would you like to go dancing?"

"In a suit?"

"Couldn't improve on it, particularly that nifty blouse."

James lit her cigarette. His hand shook.

Helen considered the hand. Of the young men she danced with at the Soldiers and Sailors Club,

one had his ship blown out from under him, another had survived the Battle of the Bulge, a third

had been in the landing on Iwo Jima. They had this nervousness in common, a constantly jiggling

knee, a tapping foot, an inability to stand still; like them, James needed to dance. "Well, if you don't mind how I look, yes, I'd love to."

James insisted on taking a cab to the Persian Room at the Plaza although, as Helen pointed out, they could easily have walked. After they had been seated, Helen noticed the older couple at the next table. The man and woman did not talk, did not dance, did not even look at one another. They drank, and fresh drinks arrived punctually to replace the empty glasses.

"Will we be like that some day?" Then Helen hoped that James didn't think that she meant that he and she would....Thankfully, James took it the right way:

"Good God, no. People who don't like dancing are half dead. Come on."

After two sets, Helen said, "You'll live forever, then. You're a wonderful dancer." It astonished her that gawky James should move to music with such grace. Not once had she stepped on his feet, not once had they brushed against another couple.

They stayed at the Plaza until the puerile floor show drove them away. James conveyed Helen by cab to another nightclub with zebra-striped banquettes where they jitterbugged to "String of Pearls" and mamba-ed to "Brasil" and rumbaed and tangoed and fox-trotted. They swayed to "Laura" and cut loose again with "Tuxedo Junction," and by then Helen had shed her hat and her jacket and the self-consciousness of someone from Boston. Only when the orchestra stopped playing did her feet inform her that they hurt.

Waiting for the next set to begin, James blurted out: "You're not engaged to be married, are you?"

He lit a cigarette. "It's none of my business really, but people seem to be. Engaged. Because of the war."

"No, I'm not engaged. I had a crush on Carey Fuller, but by the time he began to notice me he was sent overseas and then - he didn't - "

"Come back." From James's bleak expression Helen guessed that Carey had been a close friend.

After a pause, James said: "Returning to our conversation at dinner. You plan to stay in New York once the war is over?"

"I hope so. I've applied for a job with an organization that sends food and clothing abroad, but when the war does end I'll volunteer for work in relief and rehabilitation. After that? Well, I'm not too sure of anything, but I do see doors opening for women as well as men, and all of us building lives we hadn't even imagined before the war."

She bestowed a radiant smile on him. She's so ardent, James thought, and she's so damn beautiful!

"James, what are you planning to do?"

"I'd like to play piano in a jazz combo."

Helen was shocked. It seemed so frivolous, so un-James. "Is that all? At college you got me thinking about the world beyond Cambridge with your talks about France and Italy and One World and a new League of Nations." (Others deserved credit, as well, but it was James's last night before he went off to the Pacific.) "Couldn't you do your music on the side? You have much more to offer than just the piano!" (And I sound a little tight, Helen decided.)

Her good opinion of him, so much higher than his own, surprised him. "My future doesn't have to be decided tonight, anyway." He ordered a fresh round of drinks.

One by one the musicians returned to the band stand.

"Notice that they're all white? They were at the Persian Room, too. My group will be half

Negro....Oh, sh-shoot; they're lousing up `Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.'"

"Is that so bad?"

"As my father would say, `There's a time and a place for everything.' Did the Hampton Quartet perform at your school?" Helen shook her head. "I like "`Up on the Mountain/My Lord Spoke' and `Deep River,' but the occasion was phony: four Negro men dressed formally and singing Spirituals

to little white boys in their school blazers."

"Phony in what way?"

"When religious objects are taken out of their setting and become exhibits in a museum; something like that. Spirituals belong in a church or even a concert hall, but not as entertainment for snickering little boys."

"I see what you mean. Mother and I went to Washington one weekend to visit my father. He took us to dinner at a place with a floor show. One of the acts was a colored man who sang spirituals.

We named him `Old Man River' because he got down on his knees to sing the song. I felt that he was sort of wallowing in the songs he sang to make us white people sorry." Helen took a sip of her

coke. "But I'm probably wrong. Growing up, I didn't know any colored - Negro? - people. What's

the right word?"

"I'm not sure there is one."

"At Radcliffe there were two Negro girls. I'd take my tray and sit at the same table in the cafeteria

but I had the feeling that they were waiting for me to go away."

James couldn't sit still any longer. He grabbed Helen's hands and tugged her onto the dance floor.

It was two in the morning. Now the orchestra played languorous tunes, weighted with love and the

sorrow of parting and loss. Helen and James circled the nearly empty dance floor. His eyes bore

so fixedly into hers that she felt relieved when he leaned his cheek against her forehead and they

danced without speaking in the embrace of the music.

"Didn't you feel as though we were under water?' she asked, when the set was over. "I don't want

them ever to stop."

"Afraid we have no choice." The musicians had begun packing away their instruments. "Isn't there some place that's still open?" She had to keep moving.

"Yes, but I've run out of money."

"We'll use mine, then." She gave him the fourteen dollars she had left from her paycheck.

The headwaiter at Gogi's LaRue let them in without a cover charge because James was a serviceman and because it was so late. As soon as there was music, they went out on the dance floor.

"Night and Day," he hummed into her ear, "Night and Day, Day and Night...." James could feel

Helen's breasts pressed against him and the softness of her upper arm which he'd grasped to pull her closer, his other hand on her buttocks. She has no idea, he marveled, she has no conception of how much I - Christ! I could fall upon her this minute and come. Helen! Whose straight up-and- downness, and lovely, decorous face made her the opposite of a pin-up girl. Helen, whom he'd never even kissed! He loosened his grip on her, trusting that she hadn't noticed his hard-on. Then the band swung into "String of Pearls" for the second time that evening, and he whirled her around, whirled them around for what seemed like hours but was only minutes until things were back to normal.

The next set began with Ellington's "Decrescendo in Blue." James invented a dance to go with it, and as they were both tall and covered an immense amount of space, the two remaining couples abandoned the floor to them.

I may not be killed after all, James exulted, flinging her wide and coiling her in. I shall not perish - no, that was government for and by the people - and James broke away from Helen and made a stupendous leap. He twirled her to the full length of their arms, pulled her back, introduced some steps from the Charleston which she followed perfectly, then close, closer, one top turning: back, front, back, front, until he set her loose at the final note. Helen heard clapping. A man in civilian clothes two tables away from theirs sent champagne cocktails to "the dancing couple." Helen gulped hers down. They must keep dancing, they must be away - away to where she didn't know, but urgently must they speed there. They returned to the dance floor. The Deep Purple fell over garden walls and over James and Helen. She felt her body swelling and at the same time growing lighter, thrillingly sensitive, as she swayed within his arms; or she within swayed him, her hands meeting behind his back and holding him close.

The band leader asked what they'd like for the last number. Helen requested "The Blue Danube."

Helen no longer saw the five or six couples left at the tables, or the waiters bringing a last drink.

The walls of the nightclub vanished; she and James were alone. She turned and nodded, the whole of her moving with supple ease. She exulted in possessing, one two three, such a curved but graceful body, one, two, three, and she felt most tenderly towards James who had danced her, one two three, to this happiness.

But it was over. She and James found themselves on the empty street at 3:15 in the morning. They walked north on Fifth Avenue.

"When does your train leave?"

"Not for hours." He took her right hand in his left. "They never played `Frenesi.' Not once all evening. Or `That Old Black Magic.'" He hummed, Round and round I go, deep in a spin, and

Helen put her left hand on his right shoulder where it belonged and they made five complete turns to Madison Avenue where her hat fell off. She crumpled it recklessly into her suit pocket. They crossed Madison holding hands and danced themselves to Park Avenue. Each patch of lighted sidewalk expired before the next spot bloomed with light. as though they were climbing a staircase, and Helen could climb forever, connected to James by his hand. Outside the door of her residence James started to say: "You saved me," but that didn't contain nearly the sense of what he felt. He wanted to shout: "I've never been more in love with a girl in my life," but she knew that already, and words would spoil it. He hugged her to him, kissed her, and said, "I'll write to you." After a final hug, he dashed off with Helen's money; luckily, as it enabled him to gamble on his slow train trip across the country.

Helen tiptoed across the dark lobby and rang for the elevator. The elevator man looked at her dishevelment without interest. Well, she didn't give a damn if they threw her out for coming in at four in the morning. What a dreary room! She resolved to move as soon as possible.

As she wasn't in the least sleepy, Helen decided to shower and wash her hair. She pulled her bathrobe around her and tottered to the end of the hall.

Naked in the empty shower room, Helen studied herself in the mirror. Disappointing to see that the full breasts had become once more insignificant, her belly concave, and her behind, on which

James's large warm hands had rested, was again a miserly affair.

She stepped into the shower. The water hit her, stingingly cold. She dropped the bottle of shampoo. It shattered on the shower floor. Helen knelt to gather up the shards of glass. She didn't see the sliver of glass caught in the drain until it cut her thumb. As she staunched the copious flow of blood it came to her what the evening had been about.

"Oh, boy!" she whooped in the echoing shower stall, "Oh, my goodness!" Her body told her now what her mind had been too well-bred to recognize: she and James might as well have been in bed together, instead of on the dance floor, and now she knew how wonderful making love must make you feel.

Chapter Three

June, 1985

In the middle of the reading of the 121st Psalm, Sylvia becomes aware of Lucy Tenbroeck

clumping down the center aisle, peering into each pew. Sylvia beckons discreetly. Lucy squeezes

past the stranger in the aisle seat to sit next to Sylvia. They kiss; something recent in their long

friendship. Something to do with the age they are.

June, 1945

In the fall of 1941, Sylvia and Lucy had been paired, blind, as freshman room-mates. It was not love at first sight.

The door to her assigned room had been ajar. Sylvia shoved her luggage inside, and then entered.

Strange, and expensive, skirts and sweaters covered both beds. A milk-white-skinned girl with frizzy tan hair and a darker pubic patch, stood in front of the full length mirror. She was drawing herself on a pad propped up on a chair. And this was to be Sylvia's companion for an entire year!

The naked girl nodded, then continued sketching. The nerve of her, thought Sylvia. but the

business-like scritching of the charcoal stick restrained Sylvia from speaking. She knew enough

about drawing to realize that hands, feet, and mouths gave the most trouble. All these had the artist conquered before she closed a flap of paper over the finished drawing and tied a gold and black silk

kimono around her thin frame.

She stuck out a hand, speaking in a snobbish drawl, "Hello, I'm Lucy Tenbroeck, from New York."

(But we're in New York, Sylvia had been about to say and then, Oh, she means the City.)

"Actually, it's Lucinda."

Sylvia pointed to the sketch pad. "Why are you here, instead of art school?"

"If you have to go to college, Vassar's the only one with a decent art department."

"If you have to....?" Deflated, Sylvia sank down on a pile of skirts. "I'm Sylvia Smith, from

California. I guess you didn't have anyone else to room with, either."

For several months they weighed each other in: Lucy's art against Sylvia's poetry; her straight As

on tests versus Lucy's scholarly papers. Sylvia's figure was better; Lucy's clothes, selected by her

mother, were outstanding and Lucy loaned them carelessly around. Both girls detested team sports.

They had read many of the same books and quoted Auden and T.S. Eliot competitively at each

other.

Lucy invited Sylvia to spend the Thanksgiving holidays with her in New York. Lucy's mother, Lila

Tenbroeck, although ailing from one mysterious cause or another, was a famous New York beauty.

Edward Tenbroeck matched her good looks. "What does your father do?" Sylvia had asked Lucy

on the train trip down from Poughkeepsie. "He takes care of Mummy." If either of Lucy's parents

could be said to have an occupation it was bridge: contract, duplicate, tournament bridge.

Unlike Sylvia, Lucy had not accelerated through college. She was still at Vassar during Sylvia's

first grim winter at Vogue. From her frigid hotel room Sylvia yearned for the Tenbroecks' warm,

luxurious house. She remembered meals of vol-au-vent, artichokes, lobster mousse, lemon souffles. These dinners were accompanied by Mr. Tenbroeck's learned disquisitions on the virtues of Meursault and Cheval Blanc and fine old sauternes - the girls were given tastes of each, in turn.

Then they were packed off to the Tenbroecks' box at the opera with Abbott Chase, in his beautifully tailored uniform, as escort.

In May, Lucy came home from Vassar, not staying for graduation and the awarding of the prize she'd won. Although Mrs. Tenbroeck still kept to her bed after her recent bout of the flu, Sylvia was invited to dinner at the Tenbroecks' once again. In late June, Lucy took Sylvia to meet her godmother, Mrs. Porter Delafield. "Aunt Minna gives these Saturday lunches," Lucy had drawled.

"You might enjoy them."

Lucy and Sylvia were the first to arrive. The maid ushered "Miss Lucy" and her friend into the living room. Mrs. Delafield would be with them in a minute.

Living room, not drawing room or parlor, Sylvia noted. The view from the windows was breath- taking: west across Central Park to the Riverside Church, and south to the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.

And here was Mrs. Delafield: "Lucy, dear, guess what? We have meat for lunch today! I vamped the butcher."

Lucy introduced Sylvia to a fair, dowdy, rather breathless woman of about fifty, whose arms were raised in a futile attempt to fasten the pearls around her neck.

"I'm delighted that you both could come. And we can have a moment to chat before the others arrive."

But the doorbell rang. The maid showed in a tall girl in her early twenties. She greeted Mrs.

Delafield and Lucy.

"Sylvia Smith - Helen Cross," Lucy drawled. "Helen's from Boston." Prince Valiant, Sylvia thought with those bangs and height and splendid posture. But Helen shouldn't wear brown; it dulled the lively brown of her hair.

Mrs. Delafield's string of pearls slithered from her neck and fell on the carpet. "Thank you, Helen, dear." Helen had retrieved the beads and fastened them securely.

Another maid passed a tray of glasses: sherry or Manhattan cocktails, and then a platter of salty pinkish stuff mounded on Ritz crackers. Mrs. Delafield and Lucy discussed detective stories that might enliven Mrs. Tenbroeck's convalescence. Helen turned to greet Josef, the young music student who had just arrived.

Helen found that she was doing most of the talking; was, in fact, brimming with words. Except for her feet, she wasn't the least tired from her late night, and would be happy, if asked, to dance once more. Looked at from the outside (by Mother, perhaps), James and Helen might be said to have made a spectacle of themselves. But no - they had performed splendidly! These reflections had occurred as she spoke to Josef enthusiastically about Brahms, and now she allowed him to defend

Mozart.

Sylvia was at liberty to examine the large, cluttered room. She paid homage to the Queen Anne table and the highboy (hautboy? high daddy?) with its air of rectitude and great age. She would have replaced the worn Oriental carpets with an Aubusson and eliminated the forest of photographs on the Bechstein grand piano. She changed her mind when she discovered that they were

Toscanini, Koussevitsky, Stravinsky, and other famous musicians who'd inscribed their pictures to

"Chere Minna."

On either side of the closed velvet curtains (portieres?) that must lead to the dining room, were bookshelves and above them paintings: a charming watercolor of Central Park by Maurice Prendergast, portraits of society ladies by Sargent and Boldoni, a pastel by Mary Cassatt, and a

Corot landscape.

Sylvia had moved on to the wall opposite to study the Rembrandt etchings when her hostess summoned her to meet two young men in uniform. Malcolm Wadsworth was the taller of the two;

Thomas McCracken the higher in rank. Then came Diana Morgan (plumbing fixtures, not House of Morgan, according to editors at Vogue), the much-photographed blonde debutante; Mr. Porter

Delafield, "late from the office, as usual," said Mrs. Delafield, kissing him soundly. His bristly

eyebrows, spiky crew cut and grey mustache gave him the look of a feisty Scottie. The last guest

was a Father Cogswell, who was a Protestant clergyman, despite the Roman collar.

Malcolm Wadsworth leaned down to light Sylvia's cigarette. "I haven't seen you here before, have

I?"

Sylvia smiled demurely, and shook her head.

"I hear that you're an editor on Vogue."

Wishing to prolong his gaze of frank admiration, Sylvia said, "I've only been there for nine

months." Which could mean Yes, or No.

Lucy wandered up in search of a cigarette.

"This pretty girl was your room-mate, Lucy?"

"Pure accident. Actually, what she said to me, her very first words, mind you: `So you don't have

anyone else to room with, either.'"

"Lucky for both of you, then. Lucy is one of a kind."

Malcolm Wadsworth was almost as good-looking as Abbott Chase and, unlike Abbott, entirely

male, but Sylvia distrusted his manner. To give him credit, he seemed as unconscious of

attempting to charm as he was of his portrait nose, engaging smile and perfect teeth. (Sylvia, child of the Depression, had teeth that were far from even.) So why did it meanly please her that his eyes were set too close together for beauty?

A maid drew back the velvet curtains and announced that luncheon was served. Mrs. Delafield seated her guests, consulting a much erased and written over piece of paper. Diana was placed on one side of Mr. Delafield and Sylvia on the other. Then Thomas McCracken, Helen Cross, and

Father Cogswell on Mrs. Delafield's left. Malcolm was to sit between Diana Morgan and Lucy, with Josef next to his hostess. Father Cogswell was called upon to say grace. Then Josef pushed

Mrs. Delafield's chair in, and everyone else sat down.

Sylvia, listening to the conversation at her end of the table, added up what she had learned so far.

Josef (Potecki?) spoke Englished English, but he looked middle European in his ill-fitting dark suit.

A refugee? Malcolm Wadsworth had seen action in the ski troops in Italy, Mr. Delafield had told

Sylvia earlier, while Thomas McCracken had just been promoted to Captain; both were waiting to be reassigned to the Far East.

When the maids had cleared the soup bowls away, Mrs. Delafield told everyone to line up at the sideboard and help themselves to "real roast beef!"

When they had sat down again, Mr. Delafield asked Sylvia how she liked working for a fashion magazine.

"I enjoy writing about both the arts and fashion - only some of the people you come up against in the rag trade seem, well, pushy, loud, rather crude." The three adjectives reverberated into a sudden silence at the table.

"And the arts include everything." Sylvia hastily began describing a silly movie about George

Gershwin she'd gone to the premiere of, only to recall that he was of the same race. Changing the subject, Sylvia asked Mr. Delafield if he'd read Wars I Have Seen, by Gertrude Stein, also a Jew. Mr. Delafield declared that he wouldn't read one word by that dreadful woman. Sylvia subsided into a feverish silence. By now she felt sure that Josef was Jewish.

Without glancing at the violinist or at Sylvia, in thirty seconds Mrs. Delafield got the luncheon party moving once more. Had anyone heard Jennie Tourel sing Rosina in The Barber of Seville?

And of course Lucy had, and so had Thomas McCracken. Gradually Sylvia recovered from her embarrassment. She would never, she swore, make that kind of gaffe again.

The Reverend Mr. Cogswell again asked Helen where she lived. (Helen had been wool-gathering, trying to remember the last name of the dazzling young man across the table from her. Malcolm

Wodehouse? Woodward? Warner?) "I'm sorry. I was out until four this morning." Perhaps not quite the right thing to tell an Episcopal priest, although it wouldn't bother her Unitarian minister back home. Helen described her women's hotel: "It's dreary, but I suppose it's safe."

Father Cogswell recommended a church-sponsored residence down town, where the rent was low, the companionship lively, and the only obligation on young women who lived there was six hours of volunteer work. As Helen gave two evenings a week to the Red Cross, this rule did not dismay her. She thanked him, and jotted down the telephone number of the cooperative house.

"Mally?" Mr. Delafield asked Malcolm, "Did you see Jolly while he was home on leave?"

This quite wonderful young man was the "Mally" James had been talking about! Helen realized.

"No, I didn't. We had planned to meet at the Starlight Roof last night, but Jolly didn't show up."

"Too bad about his brother Dwight," Thomas McCracken said, "although I hear he's recovered from his nervous breakdown and is finishing his farm work."

"I have no patience with conscientious objectors," said Mr. Delafield. "But don't quote me to Grace and Gordie Lippincott." "Porter, please try to imagine what Charlie's tragic death did to Dwight," Mrs. Delafield said.

"Dwight worshipped his older brother. Charlie was supposed to be the golden boy, though I've always liked Jolly the best of the four Lippincotts. Besides his music, he's so - so funny and enthusiastic."

Mr. Delafield passed a decanter of wine to Malcolm. "Do my job for me, will you, Mally?"

Helen watched Malcolm's progress around the table. Except for his high-bridged nose, he didn't resemble James Lippincott in the least. Malcolm's clear skin, dark blond hair, and air of radiant sincerity could not be improved upon. When he sat down again, Helen mentally ran her hand down his noble forehead, nose, and mouth. The sweetness of Malcolm's mouth! The top lip was chiseled, the bottom rounded but not soft. Closed, his mouth was firm but still upcurving - a plus of approbation, not a minus of disapproval.

Stared at, Malcolm flushed. "Have I got a smut on my nose, Helen?"

"No, here." She reached across the table and removed an almost invisible fleck of soot from his cheekbone; she had taken seizen.

In answer to a nudge from Lucy, Malcolm turned toward her with "Sorry, Lucy, I didn't mean to forget you." While he refilled Lucy's glass, Helen picked at the Band-Aid on her left thumb, in agony to confirm the color of Malcolm's eyes. Then Malcolm asked Helen if she'd like more wine, and his eyes under the arched eyebrows, were grey. "Oh, yes, thank you." She would drink the whole carafe!

He reached across the table and filled Helen's out-thrust glass to the brim. For a long moment his eyes held Helen's. Still smiling, he waved the decanter toward Diana.

"Darling Mally, you know I only drink milk." Helen's heart plummeted to her knees. Of course Diana would have (as they said back in

Winchester High) first dibs on Malcolm. Diana wore a sleek navy suit that made Helen aware of her own lack of curves. The corsage on Diana's jacket exactly matched her pink silk blouse, and

Diana's corn-silk hair was the kind that men beg locks of.

"....Too bad Jolly's leave was up last night," Mr. Delafield said. "Pretty obvious he's on his way to

Japan."

All these hours later, Helen marveled, they were still talking about James.

"Terrible to think how long it's going to take."

"Take?" Helen found it almost impossible not to stare at Malcolm.

"The assault on Japan," Mr. Delafield said impatiently. "My friends in Washington predict it will

cost a million lives - most of them Japs, I trust."

Malcolm, Helen wailed to herself. And Richard, whose ship was half way to Pearl Harbor. And

James, of course, and countless others.

Mrs. Delafield rang for the dinner plates to be cleared. The dessert was a light cake with foamy sauce and fresh strawberries. "Minna squanders all our sugar rations on these luncheons," Mr.

Delafield complained humorously. "She says `The children need it more than we do.'"

When everyone had been served, Mrs. Delafield looked around the table. "Let's see now; there are

ten of us here today. Porter and I have done, for better or worse, whatever we can with our lives -

although I still dream of playing the `Waldstein' like Artur Rubinstein." She laughed. "And Father

Cogswell is well on his way up the Episcopal ladder, or do I mean Jacob's angels? but you young

people are like runners at the starting line, waiting for the gun to go off, and all the swifter in the

race ahead because the war has dammed up your talents....Oh dear, I've scrambled my metaphors

again. Now, starting on my left: Josef? Tell us where you hope to be in ten years." "Actually, Mrs. Delafield, I am on your right, but shall I speak even so? I intend to pursue my musical studies, perform with chamber groups, and possibly to teach."

"Lucy, your turn."

"I'll have my first one man show by then. And I hope that I'll like what I see on the walls of the gallery."

"Of course you will, dear. Now, Malcolm. You're headed for law school, your parents tell me, as soon as the war ends."

How calmly Mrs. Delafield assumes he will come back safely, Helen thought.

"Mally, have you given any thought to Admiralty Law?" Mr. Delafield inquired.

"Well, sir, before I choose a field I'll have to get through law school. And then," Malcolm smiled,

"my first years at a law firm I guess I'll do as I'm told."

"Damn right you will," said Mr. Delafield with a grin.

Mrs. Delafield continued around the table, sketching golden futures for her young friends. Diana would marry a duke and they could all go fishing in Scotland. "Scotland's much too cold," said

Diana, "But I'd adore to have a title."

"Sylvia will be the editor of Vogue. Thomas, you were such a serious little boy. I see you as a

Supreme Court Justice."

"Thank you, Mrs. Delafield, but, like Malcolm, at the moment my ambition is to get through law school creditably."

"Porter, we've overlooked Helen. Now dear, last, but by no means least, what do you plan to do with your life?"

Helen felt Malcolm's eyes upon her. His glance made her bolder; indeed, she felt immense with possibilities. "If they'll take me, I hope to go over with the Unitarians and help to rebuild Europe." "Not ten years from now. At least I assume the Continent will be put back together by 1955."

"By then I'll be married" (dare I hope?) "with children, working for world peace and trying to help

poor people better themselves."

And before Sylvia dismissed Helen as a goody-goody, Helen astonished her (and Helen, herself) by saying gaily: "And wouldn't it be wonderful if everybody could afford to go out dancing?" although it was now much too late to tell about her evening with James, which had inspired this remark.

"Helen, I'm so glad I recruited you for the Soldiers and Sailors Club." said Mrs. Delafield. "Now, if you're all finished, there is coffee in the living room."

As they rose from the table, Malcolm turned to Diana with a comment Helen, strain though she did, failed to overhear. Common sense told her that her chances were slim, and Helen hoped that her unguarded face at lunch had not betrayed her. Then Malcolm, once he brought Diana (his manners were perfect!) a demi tasse, went to talk to Mr. Delafield, and Helen resolved not to give up so easily.

Helen chose a safe seat across the room from Malcolm, next to Sylvia near the bookshelves which

Sylvia had been eyeing greedily. "Do you like Henry James, too?"

"It's the New York Edition," Sylvia said reverently. Had Helen, as well as Mrs. Delafield, noticed

Sylvia's gaffe at lunch? If so, how to repair the damage?

"Mrs. Delafield also owns a complete set of Edith Wharton."

"Did you major in English, Helen?"

"No, economics. But at Winchester High I...."

"You went to a public high school? I thought everyone in the East went to Miss Thisis and St.

Thats." Just then Sylvia sounded uncannily like Lucy, although before lunch Helen had placed Sylvia as a

Westerner.

Helen said, "My father believes you can get an education anywhere." She smiled. "But he made very sure that we knew how to go about it. He suggested economics as the `meat and potatoes' to go with the poetry and novels I've always loved."

After Helen and Sylvia compared 19th century novels - War and Peace, Our Mutual Friend,

Madame Bovary, and Vanity Fair, were high on both their lists - Sylvia described some of the new writing coming out of France. Helen's honest response was rarely to be met with in New York:

"My French really isn't good enough," said Helen. "But I'll give the novel by Camus you recommend a try."

They discussed Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck, rather (thought Sylvia) as you take heavy, and no doubt valuable, objects down, dust them, and replace them upon the shelf. "Actually, I like

Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf much better, although they're not supposed to write about

`real life,'" said Helen. "I love detective stories as well, and historical novels, so you can see I don't have very elevated tastes. I gulped Gone With the Wind down in four days."

"So did I!"

"Do you remember worrying about who would play Scarlet O'Hara in the movie, instead of noticing the awful things that were happening in Europe?"

"I certainly do. I saw the movie nine times!" If Sylvia had confessed this to Lucy she would have jeered.

"Sylvia, if you don't mind my asking, where did you buy that nifty dress?" It was a black, brown, tan and white print, cinched with a wide black patent-leather belt, simple but sophisticated. "It's a Claire McCardell. The one advantage of being a peon on a fashion magazine is that you can

buy your clothes wholesale."

It was more Sylvia herself, Helen decided, than the dress. Sylvia was the right size (Helen

sometimes felt ungainly), about five foot six. Her alive face with its small but definite features,

glossy black hair, and dark eyes made the word pretty seem insipid.

"I'm given reviewers' copies of new novels from time to time. Would you like to borrow a

couple?"

"I'd love to. How about lunch next week?"

So Helen, at least, had accepted her, warts and all. But, the perennial new girl on the block, Sylvia

had to make a show of consulting her pocket calendar first.

They agreed on a day and a restaurant.

Sylvia left shortly afterwards with Lucy. As the Delafields' front door closed behind them, Sylvia asked: "Do you think I'll ever be asked back?"

Lucy rang for the elevator. "Why not?"

"I made a fool of myself."

"About what, for heaven's sake?" Lucy drawled.

"Weren't you listening? I went on and on about people being so pushy in the rag trade, when it was obvious that the young violinist was a Jew."

"It didn't seem offensive to me, but of course I'm aware of your rather complicated feelings on the subject."

"Well, will I be invited?" "Sylvia, it's not like you to be bashful. Didn't you hear Aunt Minna say that she planned another

luncheon two weeks from now, and she hoped we'd both be there?....Why, hello, Chris," Lucy

greeted the ruddy, perspiring kid who got out when the elevator door opened.

"I've been playing baseball," he said unnecessarily, as he carried a mitt and a bat. "Our team beat

Collegiate. Is there any food left?"

"Aunt Minna's never let you down, has she?"

"I'm starved and I've got to finish this paper on the Civil War by Monday." Chris said, "Who's your

friend in the black straw hat?"

Lucy introduced Sylvia to Chris Reid. "He's Aunt Minna's nephew," she explained as they went

down in the elevator. "His father died before he was born, and she and Uncle Porter have been a

second set of parents for him. He's pretty good company, for a fifteen-year-old male."

"I'm more interested in Helen; she's neat," Sylvia said, with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. "She's both cosy and dignified," Sylvia ammended her jejeune description.

"She's also very bright. She graduated magna or summa, I forget which.".

Mrs. Delafield asked Helen to take her place behind the coffee service. Helen was delighted with this excuse to stay; Diana had left, and Malcolm had disappeared with Mr. Delafield into his study.

At last the two men returned to the living room. Helen poured coffee for Mr. Delafield and then for

Malcolm - no cream, one sugar. Malcolm stood near Helen, resting his coffee cup on the mantelpiece.

Thomas McCracken joined him. They discussed law schools: Harvard and Yale, where Thomas had applied; Columbia, which Malcolm was considering. Oh, please let it be Columbia, Helen prayed. When Malcolm said goodbye to her, she asked him boldly if he would still be on leave

when Mrs. Delafield had her next luncheon, and he said Yes, he'd be there, if she would!

Although she longed to be alone, Helen helped Mrs. Delafield clear away the last cups and

ashtrays. When all was neat, Helen said her fervent thank yous, and left to walk back to her hotel.

Malcolm Wadsworth, Malcolm Wadsworth; he didn't even need a middle name, although she supposed he had one. Helen stravaged along in a trance. The sun shone, and she felt that she trod on green grass, and perhaps the trees along Park Avenue did form themselves into glades. She listed Malcolm's attributes to herself, as though saying a poem by heart, from the thrilling resonance of his voice to the rich color of his hair. Did she dare ask to write to him when he went overseas?

Yes, indeed she would! She had been rescued, like the princess in the children's book. Malcolm held the thread and would lead her forth from the goblins' dark cave of her perplexities. Helen stopped short. That last thought didn't sound like her at all. Forgetting that her feet still hurt from last night, Helen grasped her hat in one hand, her purse in the other, and ran joyously downtown through the perfect afternoon.

Chapter Four

June 1985

Abbott Chase remarks Lucy's late arrival and intrusion into Sylvia's pew. Abbott is still upset. He

was sure that Sylvia would choose him for her companion during Helen's memorial service. To

that end he asked his sister to hold seats for Sylvia and himself; he lurked by the church doors to

waylay her. Then Sylvia shot up the steps and plunged right by him! One must charitably believe

that Sylvia was blinded by tears.

On his right, Abbott feels his sister Madeleine rustle and sit tall. Madeleine's husband, Thomas

McCracken, strides toward the lectern to read the Epistle.

"First Corinthians, Chapter ten, verse four: `Now there are diversities of gifts but the same spirit.

And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord....'"

Abbott's brother-in-law Thomas comes from a long line of prominent New Yorkers who retained

their lean, upright figures and their hair unto the grave. Even as a young sprig, Thomas was grave,

responsible, quick to respond in emergencies, slow to catch a joke. A birthright Republican, one

small defect has held Thomas back from the political success that he no doubt still deserves: the

wincing smile with which he punctuates his speeches, interviews and dinner party conversations

Governor Thomas E. Dewey had unbent to "Tom;" not so Thomas McCracken.

Thomas is by no means negligible. At intervals, his familiar essays appear in The Atlantic and

Harper's. The unpublished overflow, privately printed and inscribed by the author, serve as

Christmas presents for family and friends. How unfair, Abbott reflects, to deny a man of such

rectitude the charm Malcolm possesses in abundance, the charm necessary to win votes.

Unable to secure elected office, Thomas was under-this and under-that during the Eisenhower administration. Shelved during Kennedy and Johnson's reigns, Thomas served in Nixon's administration, leaving Washington well before the Watergate scandal, his reputation intact. Now he subs eagerly as a special envoy for President Reagan wherever a special envoy was required. "For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom...."

One wouldn't catch Thomas, ever, with his hand in the cookie jar. Unlike Malcolm who, it appears,

has been on the take in the South Bronx from Helen's dusky friends.

February, 1946

"Helen, had you ever considered doing something about your bangs?" Sylvia asked again.

Helen, who had been sifting for deeper meanings in her conversation with Malcolm last night, startled. "Sorry?"

"Did you hear what the receptionist said when she called me? `Your kid sister's here.'"

Helen had arrived early. As she waited in Vogue's reception area, she observed the dressy parade

of models, secretaries, young assistants carrying gowns and accessories, and older women,

presumably top editors. All of them wearing hats. Did they go to the bathroom in hats?

Then Sylvia had appeared. She led Helen down a long hall past opulent offices. Sylvia's office,

although decorated with plants and pictures, was no more than a desk, a chair, and a typewriter, off

a room of other desks, chairs and typewriters.

"I guess I should try another hair style." Helen pushed up her bangs to show Sylvia a forehead as

pure as any Victorian damsel's. "I've always worn bangs because my forehead's ugly."

"It is not."

"Well, thanks. Anyway, I'm used to them. They're like that old chestnut about Boston women

never needing to buy hats because they've always had them." Helen had used the same joke late

last night, when she had confessed to Malcolm that she had money of her own. "Of course it's tied up in trust funds, but the income is quite large." How brassy, Helen thought now. When Malcolm

called, would it be with an excuse to cancel their date tomorrow?

"I only meant," Sylvia was saying, "you'd look older if you grew your bangs out and had a

permanent....Now, where shall we lunch? Voisin?"

"I can't afford it. Not until after pay day."

"I'll put you on the magazine."

"But I'm not anybody you'd interview," Helen protested.

"You write in your new job, don't you?"

"Only press releases, and an occasional newsletter."

"Our policy is always to take press agents to lunch."

At Voisin, Sylvia was greeted by name. Someone took their coats. Helen followed Sylvia in her

elegant black suit and stunning hat to a table in the corner. The Maitre d' asked if Miss Smith were

satisfied with the table. And did she wish to order an aperitif?

"Gosh," Helen exclaimed when champagne cocktails arrived, "Did you get a big promotion?"

"Better than that. I sold my first poem to Harper's. Of course I've been publishing in little

magazines and the quarterlies for years." In Helen's polite, unsmiling face Sylvia read the opinion

that Sylvia had been showing off.

Helen glanced down unseeingly at the menu. What if Malcolm didn't telephone at all? Helen

would call him. And if Mrs. Wadsworth answered? Helen could thank her for dinner, although she

had already dashed off a note. At last Helen took in what Sylvia had said. "I'm so pleased for you,

Sylvia. What's the poem about?"

"A girl waits for her lover in a bleak hotel room. Next door someone is playing solitaire; she hears the cards being slapped down on a table as each game is laid out. The clashing sounds of cardboard kings and queens reminds her of fate, of fortune tellers, of gambling, of loss. At the end, the lover does not arrive." Sylvia made a face. "And whatever there is of poetry has been lost in my translation."

"Will you send me a copy?"

"I might." Sylvia beckoned to their waiter and ordered an elaborate meal. Showing off again, she supposed; but Helen couldn't seem to make up her mind.

After the waiter had retired, taking their menus, Helen protested: "This is the most expensive lunch

I've ever sat down to. Won't Vogue object?"

"Helen, will you stop playing the barefoot girl from Massachusetts. Lucy told me that before you entered Radcliffe, you took your senior year at one of the best private girls' schools in the country, made your debut in Boston, and your great aunt settled an enormous trust fund on you."

Helen blushed. "Well, I wish she hadn't." Then she remembered what she'd said to Malcolm last

night, and blushed again.

"I wouldn't mind being rich at all," Sylvia laughed.

"I do. It's awful to be so lucky. Wouldn't it be wonderful if every person in the world had the same

amount of money? But my economics classes proved to me that if you divided the wealth up

equally, there'd be rich and poor again in a generation."

"You and Max Kirov should debate that proposition."

After they had finished their Coquilles St. Jacques, Helen looked at her watch. "

"Gosh, I really ought to go. I've been out an hour and fifteen minutes already."

"Call in sick. Say you have cramps."

"I can't; I mean, I don't. I haven't missed a day at work since I started this new job."

"Tell your boss you were detained on business, and you'll be in first thing in the morning." "But I don't have business outside the office."

"It's time you did. Then, after lunch you can come with me to Harlem. Max is photographing and

I'm interviewing a young soprano."

"Sylvia, honestly! What does meeting a Negro singer have to do with sending relief parcels to

Europe?"

"It's all one world; isn't that what you keep telling me?"

Helen telephoned her office. No one disputed that business would keep her away for the rest of the afternoon.

"How did dinner go last night?" Sylvia asked when Helen returned. "It was the first time you met

Malcolm's parents, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Mr. Wadsworth was really charming, as you might expect from knowing Malcolm. But during cocktails Mrs. Wadsworth - she's tall and sort of tragically handsome - perched on the arm of Malcolm's chair with her hand on his shoulder. She couldn't have said it more clearly: `This is my boy, and keep off.' Can you imagine? She's always hoped Malcolm would become a clergyman! `He has such power for good,' Mrs. Wadsworth said fervently; `I doubt that the law will give it scope.' Then she quizzed me about my job; was I a dedicated `career gal?' I said I didn't know, yet; I'd only been working a year. She asked if I went regularly to church? I told her, yes, that I was a Unitarian. Mrs. Wadsworth couldn't understand how anyone could deny the divinity of Christ. Fortunately Mr. Wadsworth broke in to ask if I were related to Richard Cross who had been a year behind him at St. Marks and later married Elinor Dudley? I said yes, and once we'd researched my blood lines, Mrs. Wadsworth did warm up, a little. The best part of the evening was when Malcolm took me home. Guess what? Mr. Delafield offered him a job at

Delafield and Lambert if Malcolm graduates in the top half of his class and passes the bar exam. Malcolm hasn't even told his parents!....Sylvia, I've talked way too long. How are you getting on with Thomas?"

"Don't bring up Thomas in front of Max. Max is just back from Europe and I haven't had a chance to tell him - not that there's anything to reveal; you know how cautious Thomas is. But Max might think there was." Sylvia did not speak in her customary mocking tone. "Max and I were lovers, once upon a time. Does that shock you?"

"No." If you were in love, Helen now believed, nothing should stand in its way. "I'm looking forward to meeting Max."

While they were having coffee, the waiter told Sylvia that her cab had arrived. Sylvia called for the bill (Helen noticed that it was almost $16!), and the two young women were helped into their coats.

They emerged into the sleety February afternoon. Max Kirov huddled in one corner of the Checker

Cab, wrapped in a thick scarf and heavy overcoat. Under the fur hat he looked, Helen smiled to herself, like some small, bright-eyed forest creature.

"Why didn't you take me to lunch?" Max complained, after Helen had been introduced.

"One mustn't pad one's expense account," Sylvia said in a dulcet, phony voice, and they all laughed.

As they drove uptown, Sylvia described the young soprano Dolores Johnson. "I read about her first in Musical America last year. Then Abbott heard her in a concert at Town Hall. `Not the usual blubbery diction of a Negress,' he said. `She has a lovely coloratura and an unusual range.'"

They drove west on 96th Street, and then north into Harlem. At last the cabbie stopped at the address Sylvia had given him.

Dolores herself let them in to the apartment at the top of the stoop. A thin, stiff, polite, muted girl, thought Sylvia. Dolores asked them to leave their coats and hats on a chair in the kitchen. When they were ready, she led them through two windowless cubicles to a larger room overlooking an

areaway where Dolores shyly introduced them to her mother.

Sylvia, who had spent a large part of her childhood and youth feeling ashamed, wondered if

Dolores minded strangers seeing where she lived. In the many boarding houses, furnished

apartments, and rented rooms that her family had briefly occupied, Sylvia had never endured such

claustrophobia. The Johnsons' living room was choked with an upright piano, two club chairs, and

a sagging sofa-bed. Four straight chairs were pulled up to a scarred oak table. A wardrobe filled one corner, a bureau with a hulking Motorola radio on top, stood in another. Shelves held bric-a- brac, music scores, papers, and a few books of a religious nature. The air smelled cloyingly sweet.

While Max organized his equipment and located wall sockets for the floods, Sylvia studied Dolores

Johnson. She would be a challenge to photograph, with her flat lips and nose, and ashy, light- rejecting skin. They would have to retouch the final print, she supposed. Stalling, Sylvia lit a cigarette. She passed her Luckies to Helen.

As Mrs. Johnson made a show of finding them an ash tray, Helen apologized; they should have asked her permission to smoke. "No, no trouble. My son Raymond smoke cigars." Mrs. Johnson did not sound happy about it. She was a heavy woman, with grizzled hair and a glum expression, as though she knew things would turn out badly, like Ma Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend.

When Sylvia did an interview, she made sure that the picture-taking came first. Watching a subject preen, or squirm, under the camera's eye revealed his or her V.Q. - Vanity Quotient - and helped to suggest the direction the interview would take. What Sylvia wrote later would confirm Vogue's prescient discovery each month of the best new talent around. Puffery, of a sort, one grade above a publicist's handout. Sylvia picked up one of the floods and handed the other to Helen. Sylvia asked Dolores to pose at the piano. Hopeless! Dolores looked like a stick rammed into the earth. "Miss Johnson, will you play for us?" Sylvia asked. As Dolores rattled off "Clair de Lune," Max crouched, stretched, prowled between the massive furniture. He took off his shoes and balanced on the slippery back of the day bed. "How about giving us something from your repertory?" he suggested.

Dolores sang "The Bell Song" from Lakme. She sang "Where- `er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade." Her voice was extraordinarily rich for such a thin young woman. With the "Habanera" came power, and emotion.

"I'd love to hear you sing a Spiritual, Miss Johnson," Helen said.

"Doris don't mess with that old stuff now she sings opera."

An expression that might be considered her own passed over the girl's face. "Which one would you like to hear, Miss Cross?"

"Please, you choose."

Dolores played eight bars of introduction, then sang "Deep River" a capella. She sang slowly, with great simplicity; Helen marveled at the purity of her voice. Even Max was bemused. Then he fitted his Leica to his face, "There," he said, "that's fine," "terrific" and "great: stop right there." He caught Dolores with her head thrown back, her eyes half closed, her body at a slight angle to the piano.

To be safe, Max took fifteen or twenty more shots, and then packed up his equipment. Mrs.

Johnson went to make coffee.

Sylvia brought out a handsome, leather-bound notebook. "Just to be sure I get the dates and spelling right," she reassured Dolores, who sat tensely opposite her at the table. "Now, tell me how you came to be a singer," (was her tone patronizing, Sylvia worried?) "and about your musical training."

Sylvia learned from Dolores's colorless answers that she had been inspired by the soloists at the

Abyssinian Baptist Church, that she had gone to the High School of Music and Art and won a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music. Her sponsor had been Dorothy Maynor, the great

Negro contralto.

"You haven't," said Helen gently, "spoken yet about the challenges you face because of your color."

Would they really like to hear, Dolores asked bitterly, how she'd been rejected for parts in student productions, and how once she had been dusted with white powder to make her look like the other members of the chorus?

"What do you think can be done about it?"

"Miss Cross, if I knew, I'd do it!"

Mrs. Johnson returned carrying a tray of coffee mugs and a plate of cookies.

Sylvia asked: "Miss Johnson, which composers' works do you prefer to sing?"

"Doris - Dolores like them all, Verdi, Puccini, Mozart."

"Your mother is your greatest fan," Helen said.

"Yes, in every way. She cleans offices at night to pay for my voice lessons, after working all day."

"My mother worked as a seamstress to put me through college." Well, Sylvia amended, that's partially true. "Mother often worked twelve hours a day."

Mrs. Johnson plonked down a mug of milky coffee in front of Sylvia. "Sewing is ladies' work."

Sylvia smiled politely. She asked Dolores where she had performed and which operatic roles she aspired to. Meanwhile Mrs. Johnson searched through the shelves, lobbying answers to Sylvia's questions when Dolores faltered. "Here it is, Miss Smith." Mrs. Johnson handed Sylvia a blurred carbon with Dolores's most recent performances scribbled in pencil. "Now it's time my Doris practises; three hours a day she need to keep her voice right."

Sylvia stood up. "Miss Johnson, Mrs. Johnson, thank you for the interview and for the delicious coffee. If you have anything you'd like to add, here's my number at work...."

Before Sylvia began to speak, Helen had heard the front door open, bang shut, and the progress of someone rocketing toward them through the intermediate rooms. A young Negro man, obviously drunk, burst in upon them. He wore his overcoat like a bullfighter's cape. "Je - sus. Who have we got heah?"

"Son, be quiet. These ladies just leaving."

"Ray, this is Miss Smith, Miss Cross, and Mr. Kirov. They're going to put me in Vogue magazine."

"An' ah say," exaggerated Step'n'Fetchit accent, "mah sister don' belong in no fancy magazine for white bitches."

"Where Dolores Johnson belongs is at the Metropolitan Opera House." Max said. "She's got a stupendous set of pipes.

"Don' you be putting her down, whitey."

"Son, get ahold of yourself." Mrs. Johnson took his arm.

Ray flung her off, and advanced on Max. "You all fucking get out of heah."

Helen whispered to Sylvia to retreat to the kitchen and collect their coats. She picked up one of

Max's heavy camera cases. She motioned to him to take the other. "Go with Sylvia before the cab driver gives us up."

Helen turned back to Mrs. Johnson. "Thank you for making us welcome. Miss Johnson - Dolores - will you have lunch with me next week?" "No white broad gonna patronize Doris."

Ray Johnson's face seemed to melt and reform before Helen's eyes. How could anyone that drunk

stay upright?

"Mr. Johnson, I admire your concern for your sister." He did not take her hand. Helen shook Mrs.

Johnson's hand, and Dolores's, and ran down the front stoop to the cab.

The driver said: "I saw that nigger go in there. I knew he meant trouble."

"He was too drunk to be a nuisance," Helen said.

Max corrected her: "He was on drugs."

"I thought so," Sylvia fibbed, because she envied the calm way Helen had got them out of there. It

diminished the skill with which Sylvia had handled the interview.

Sylvia's need to pee made the drive down town interminable. There seemed no exit from these

miserable streets lined with brick tenements, fire-escapes zigzagging down their facades. Sylvia pointed to a row of houses with broken windows: "God, it's like the movie `Open City.'"

"Rome looked a hell of a lot worse than the movie."

"But Max, wasn't Paris exciting?"

"If you like no heat, no hot water, no gas, no taxis. I walked and shot and slept in my clothes.

We'd never heard of chilblains in Brooklyn when I was growing up. But I got them, and a lousy

cold, as well."

"But you saw the new spring collections."

"People can always find the bucks for necessities, can't they, Sylvia?"

Max could still get to her. He was her second voice, her clearer vision. Through Max's eyes,

Sylvia saw Thomas McCracken pushing her gingerly around the dance floor at the Stork Club. About the poet Sylvia was dating, Sylvia could imagaine Max asking, Does being drunk half the time mean you're divinely inspired?

At last the cab stopped outside Sylvia's apartment house. Max told Sylvia he would keep the cab and go on to the photo lab. Not a hint about calling her for a date! By way of goodbye, he said, "If opera is closed to her, Dolores ought to sing songs like `Strange Fruit' instead of that `Shall crowd, shall crowd in-to-oo a shade' crap.' Sorry, Helen, nice meeting you."

When they were in the elevator, Helen gasped, "I couldn't even say goodbye to Max; I have to go to the bathroom that badly."

"Me, too."

"There was a toilet at the Johnsons', but I was too embarrassed to ask to use it."

After they had "freshened up," and had a cup of tea, Sylvia asked, "Were you frightened when we were about to leave?"

"No, only later when Max told us that Ray Johnson had taken drugs."

"I was scared there. I'm sorry to say that the word rape went through my head." Sylvia, who had had always to fend off the bullying of small boys, the crude advances of high school boys and sailors on leave, did not try to explain. Helen might regret being "well-to-do", but her money distanced her from the real world and gave her the dangerous courage of innocence.

"Helen, why did you ask Dolores to have lunch?" Sylvia meant that it was not safe to know

Raymond Johnson's sister, but Helen responded with:

"Do you think that it's hypocritical to make friends with a Negro?"

"Not when you truly want to. I shouldn't have said that." Innocence is a shield, as well, thought

Sylvia. "No, no, no. I need someone to make me stop and question my motives. So often I just plunge ahead....But now I'd better rush or I'll miss supper."

Sylvia's voice went up half an octave: "Before you leave, tell me, what am I going to write about

Dolores?"

"Where she's studied, the part about Dorothy Maynor and..."

"But she still has so far to go, and it was all so depressing" - and too close to home - "those old

scarred hulks of furniture and the condensed milk in the coffee."

"Was that what made it so sweet?"

"Yes. We used it all during the Depression. I never did identify the sickening smell.?"

Helen had recognized it as a dime-store perfume her mother's cook wore on her day off.

"Please, help me. I haven't an idea of what to say."

Sylvia was not far from tears. It must mean everything to her, to find the right words.

"Sylvia, don't worry. You asked the right questions."

"Yours was the best. It got to the heart of the interview." Sylvia was surprised to discover that it cost her nothing to admit this.

"....For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink in one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many," Thomas McCracken shuts the Bible and steps away from the lectern.

The Reverend Christopher Reid comes forward to explain that there will be a slight wait while the orchestra and Choral Society of All Saints Church take their places. James Lippincott still thinks of Chris as a kid, with his stocky build and round, ruddy face. But

today Chris looks pale and stooped. When your young friends look middle-aged you know you're old. Not through, though, unlike Malcolm. These days James has someone to watch over him.

He goes outside on the church steps to smoke.

Chapter Five

April, 1946 - November, 1947

"Jolly," Lucy drawled, "didn't anyone ever tell you that it's frightfully bad manners to talk to one girl about another?"

They were sitting in the Tenbroecks' kitchen on the first evening of his first leave home in ten months.

"Sorry." James's sorry was pro forma: he had to find Helen. "Why is she going out with Mally?"

"Why not? He's been back for ages. Did you really expect her to wait for you on the strength of three postcards?"

"There was a letter, too, but I didn't send it....Why would a girl fall for Mally, just like that? Would you?" "Unun. But then, I've always known him. He used to come to the ghastly dinners Mother gave for

me before the ghastly dances. Remember them?"

"That was a long time ago," James said, with unusual tact. At sub-debutante dances the game had been to see how long you could avoid dancing with Lucy until somebody's mother made you. Lucy had been a swell little kid, but no prize as a sixteen-year-old, stiff as a board, with two left feet and an unwelcoming expression. Vassar improved Lucy, with the help of a pretty room-mate who taught her some basic female arts.

"Jolly. has it ever occurred to you to ask me for Helen's phone number and address?"

But the next day James had first to deal with his parents. They were late getting back from

Amagansett. He spent most of Sunday prowling through the familiar rooms, disapproving of the changes. His mother had had new slipcovers made. An oil portrait of Charlie hung over the mantelpiece in the living room. James hated it. It had been painted from photographs and showed a dummy in uniform with blank eyes bluer than the skies Charlie fell out of. I sure as hell didn't make it up to you by my war record, James said to Charlie's portrait.

James, his ship held up for repairs, had missed the last of the fighting. He had been at Pearl when the Atom Bomb dropped on Hiroshima and another, two days later, on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered. James's ship became part of the supply system for the Army of Occupation. James took his leaves in Hawaii drinking, playing piano, and gambling. The fourteen dollars he'd forgotten to return to Helen became over a thousand. He used most of it to buy pearls, kimonos, lacquer boxes, and bottles of Scotch for barter.

Despite the presents he'd brought home, James wondered just how pleased his parents were going to be with him. He had written, in answer to parental questions about his future, that jazz piano might figure in his postwar life. Back came his mother's letter: "Jolly, for someone who won prizes playing Bach and Scarlatti, performing in night clubs seems such a terrible waste of your talent." Because his dead brother had intended to be a lawyer, and because James loved his parents, his next letter mentioned that he might give the law a try

Once James had renounced music, his parents went to work. They forwarded transcripts from

Harvard College, advanced deposits, rounded up friends to write letters of recommendation.

Tonight James would hear if he had been accepted by the Harvard Law School.

The door to the apartment opened. Two smaller, older people rushed toward him.

"Jolly, darling, you're so thin." His mother hugged him.

His father thumped him on the shoulder, looked embarrassed, and shouted, "Welcome home!"

James saw that his frivolous behavior was forgiven him; it was enough that he was alive. And the law school would take him, once James completed his final undergraduate credits. He must go up to Cambridge tomorrow to register for summer school.

On the train back to New York, James worked out what he'd say to Helen. His first instinct was to show up on the steps of Helen's new residence. but Lucy had made some small dent on him, and he telephoned first.

"James, how nice to hear you're back." Helen's voice was as lovely as ever. "When are we going to see you?"

Who is we? James wondered. "Are you free tonight? Or tomorrow or the next day?" If he flew to the coast, he could stay the extra days.

"I'm so sorry. I'm tied up all three nights. I'm representing my boss at a conference on relief and rehabilitation."

At least it wasn't Mally who had tied her up! "Helen, didn't you get any of my postcards?" "No, I'm afraid not."

"There was one of Diamond Head and another of `The Little Grass Hut,' and a third...."

"I'm confused, what hut?"

"It was a song." James heard his voice boom with exasperation, but not at her, never at Helen.

"I guess I didn't get them because I moved soon after the night we went out on the town." She shifted into a social tone: "That evening was so much fun."

Fun? James wondered, miserably; was that all?

"And I wanted to write and thank you for such a nice time, but you didn't give me your A.P.O."

Nice! "Can't I see you now? Can't I see you at all?"

"Well, I don't have much time for lunch these next three days and then that conference starts so I'm sorry, but there doesn't seem to be a moment to get together."

James tried to be casual. "I'll be back for good in June, so save me a minute then, will you?"

"I'd love to see you," said Helen. "Please call me."

James promised that he would.

His formal discharge came through later than he had expected. James flew home from San

Francisco, collected what civilian clothes he could find, had dinner with his parents, and left the next day to register for summer school. There had been no time in New York to call Helen. He didn't telephone from his rented room in Cambridge, either. It would have been torture to talk long distance, because he couldn't see her.

Cambridge was hot and muggy, but James found himself studying with pleasure for the first time in his life. He polished off his four half courses, the tag ends of requirements for a Gov major, with four As. He stored his books and his bicycle for the fall term at the law school. Then he went back

to New York to achieve Helen.

"Lucy, it doesn't make sense. Helen told me she wanted to get together as soon as I was back in

town."

"If you had telephoned her from Cambridge, you would have known she'd be away."

Lucy's argument infuriated him. "People don't go on vacation after Labor Day. Where's she

gone?"

"She's with her parents and her brother Richard on Martha's Vineyard."

"When does she get back?"

Lucy told him that it was a week from Monday - the day he started classes.

James called Mally to see if he'd like to take in a ball game. Malcolm's mother told him that Mally

was away, visiting friends on Martha's Vineyard.

"`The Law's the true embodiment/Of all that is most excellent,'" James's father had serenaded him

the night before he left for Cambridge.

Gilbert and Sullivan notwithstanding, by the end of his first week James felt certain that he would never embody the law. After James ground through the week's assigned cases, he rewarded himself with books chosen from the "additional reading lists" he'd saved from his summer's courses.

Why worry about abstract justice, James asked himself, when three-quarters of the world's

population was weakened by hunger? Why devote one's life to the laws of property, when property

belonged only to the rich? Why trial by jury, when Negroes neither served on juries nor were defended by lawyers of their own race? James couldn't see how the present laws of his country would change that.

Over Thanksgiving James heard his mother allude to a color as "Nigger pink." James corrected her sharply, "You shouldn't use that word."

When his father referred to "Some Jew lawyer." James asked, "Dad, would you say gentile lawyer?" His father looked as though he'd like to send James to his room.

Over Thanksgiving James tried to reach Helen, but she had perversely gone home for the holiday.

He asked Lucy if Helen were still "seeing something" of Malcolm.

"She is. Do you want my advice, Jolly? Give up."

"I can't." He forbore to mention that he had written to Helen every week since law school began - mostly nostalgic descriptions of Cambridge, nothing mushy. She had answered his letters, though he couldn't move her from the "Fondly, Helen" signature to the "Love" he signed his letters with.

"What is it about Helen that's driven you daft?"

"Maybe her voice got to me. It's like an alto recorder. Oh, Christ, why does anyone like anybody?"

"Habit, usually," Lucy drawled. "You've made Helen into a goddess, but she can be quite boring when she gets going on the Improvement of Mankind."

James was too angry to speak.

"Come on, now. How well did you know her at college?"

James admitted that he saw Helen often at meetings and concerts, but he hadn't even danced with her until that one last night. "She saved me," he repeated helplessly.

"It's a lot to do in one night. Jolly, if you were so overcome that evening, why didn't you pursue her after you were discharged?" "I tried to." James couldn't seem to explain that he hadn't needed to, because the whole thing was

settled.

"Not hard enough," Lucy commented unsympathetically.

Back in Cambridge, James continued to study Marx. Marx, the historian, confirmed James's

suspicion that the laboring masses were educated to serve capitalism. As a lawyer, James would

become an exploiter. Man, wrote Karl Marx, is a laboring being. And men should be entitled to

the fruits of their physical labor, not have them siphoned off for legal fees.

James also revisited the writings of Thoreau. In the "Essay on Civil Disobedience," Thoreau put it

to you: how to live; for what to live? Not as a "Patron of Virtue" who sometimes petitions for a

cause but does "nothing in earnest and with effect" - a liberal skewered for all time. James refused

to be a patron, but he was pretty sure he would never make the grade as Thoreau's "Virtuous Man," the one among 999 patrons of virtue.

Early in 1947, James Olney Lippincott came home to New York to stay. The boy had been separated from the men, but he had quit with honor, passing all his courses. If he stayed at law school much longer, James told his brothers, the work of memorizing cases would rot his brain.

(But those hated cases from Torts, Constitutional Law and Conflict of Interests remained in his skull, weights from the art of the possible.)

He had written to Helen to tell her he was coming home. Once home, he did not seek her out: he had not earned her. On his first plunge into the maze he had emerged defeated. Until he knew his destination he had no right to ask her to share the journey. For weeks James sat in a nest of old notes and college papers. He appropriated the family living room to practise the piano. He refused to telephone or to visit friends. Outside the windows it snowed and sleeted and rained and snowed again. Inside James made notes for articles he planned to write. He used the word bourgeois often, as in finger bowls, contract bridge, cocktail parties, and dinner jackets.

Late each night James read The Meeting of East and West, The Philosophies of India, and The

Decline of the West. Late each morning James sat at the breakfast table, rereading passages he had marked the night before.

"Never seen you tackle anything more serious than Wodehouse," Dwight observed. "Do you pick your books by weight these days?" Dwight, studying architecture at his father's expense, was living at home to save money. Dwight objected to James's loud, rowdy, gut-growling jazz records. He needed to listen to Bach when he was drafting.

When James threatened to lock up "The Art of the Fugue" his mother reminded him that it had been much braver of Dwight to choose ostracism instead of enlisting like everyone else. "And Jolly, please, dear, do shave before you come to breakfast."

"Do you suppose Jolly is having a nervous breakdown?" James heard his mother ask his father one

Sunday evening. James paused in the doorway of his room.

"Honestly Gordie, I don't know what to do with him. The last straw was this morning. He told me we should call Bridget `Miss Morrissy,' because Bridget calls me `Mrs. Lippincott.'"

"What did you say to that?"

"I said that being called `Bridget,' along with her meals, own room and bath, radio, salary, and one and one half days a week off, went with the job of being a servant. Jolly's completely lost his sense of humor. He says the cleaning lady stories in The New Yorker aren't funny, they're demeaning."

Then: "I'd be so happy if he didn't argue about everything."

James was appalled to hear his mother burst into tears.

He hadn't realized that he'd been such a pain in the butt. He took the first job he found, delivering fireplace wood to apartment buildings he had formerly entered by the front door. Evenings James interrupted his compulsive reading to make a fourth at bridge. He put on a coat and tie for dinner.

He even went to cocktail parties with his parents, if they asked him to.

For more than a year Helen had pumped Minna Delafield for stories about the Wadsworths. Mrs.

Delafield illuminated, and possibly embellished, the rivalry between Malcolm's mother and Mrs.

Lippincott. As girls, both had attended Miss Chapin's, been presented to society the same year, and married toward the end of World War One. Cousins-by-marriage, neither young woman asked the other to be her bridesmaid. They produced children in the same years - Malcolm and James within three days of each other. At that time words were spoken over who should have the services of the baby nurse both had employed before.

Susan Wadsworth won; or Grace Lippincott allowed her to. When the disputed nurse pushed baby

Malcolm in his carriage over to the park bench near baby James's carriage (presided over by a real

British nanny), the other nurses exclaimed that the two blond cherubs might be twins.

The babies became boys, and less alike, though both had fair coloring and the Olney nose.

Malcolm, an only son sandwiched between two sisters, played weekends in Central Park with the four young Lippincotts and their friends. ("I doubt that Susan Wadsworth contributed one penny toward the salary of the tutor in charge of the boys," said Mrs. Delafield.) Malcolm and James also went to the Knickerbocker Greys, and the dancing classes their mothers made them frequent. They were in the same grade at private school. When James, infrequently, earned an A or B, his mother asked what mark Malcolm had been given. Malcolm was much the better student, his mother was heard to say. When James won a leading part in Julius Caesar (as had Mally), Susan

Wadsworth observed that the other boys would be quite drowned out by Jolly's loud voice.

At fourteen Malcolm went off to Andover; James to Exeter. Susan Wadsworth put it about that

Jolly had only made Exeter because the Lippincotts had contributed toward the school's new gymnasium. Grace Lippincott pondered this slander and bided her time. When Mally chose to go to Dartmouth, Mrs. Lippincott wondered aloud if Mally had been rejected by Harvard which had accepted all her boys.

The latest addition to Helen's dossier had been Minna Delafield's enigmatic remark: "Teddy

Wadsworth's proved a disappointment, but Susan does have God. Susan's father was an Episcopal clergyman who believed fervently in the Social Gospel - Helen, you heathen, I bet you don't know what that even was."

Helen answered that helping others was what Unitarians were trained to do.

"Susan tried to persuade Mally to enroll at the Seminary right after the war ended. She believed that her prayers had saved her darling boy, and Mally should repay his debt to society....Don't you hate that phrase?"

Helen agreed heartily. But, she wondered, how had Theodore Wadsworth disappointed them all?

Helen was unable to ask this question the next time she found herself at the Delafields', early for one of Minna's Sunday musicales given by Josef's newly-formed quartet. Mrs. Delafield asked

Helen to seat guests in order of their arrival, filling the front rows first. As she led Malcolm to a seat near the back, Helen felt grateful that his parents were not "musical" and seldom attended these

Sunday afternoons.

Just before the concert began, the doorbell rang one more time. Helen admitted a tall young man

wearing a brown fedora too small for his head and a tweed jacket and grey flannels with a

shrunken, disused air. It was James. She had never seen him in civvies. Helen burst out laughing.

James caught his reflection in the hall mirror. "I guess it does look funny. It's Warren's old hat, and

he has a much smaller head."

James followed Helen to where Malcolm was sitting. "Great to have you back in New York, Jolly.

I hope your mother told you I called, twice." Malcolm and James shook hands across Helen.

The guests in their folding chairs quieted down. Minna nodded. Josef nodded. The quartet attacked Schubert's Death and the Maiden.

Helen. James had forgotten the clarity of her profile, the pink of her cheeks, the shine of her hair.

(But he hadn't earned her yet.) She had filled out a little, or perhaps the fullness was in the folds of her green dress, tight at the waist and long, the way women's skirts were now. James decided that

Malcolm's grey flannel leg was entirely too close to Helen's green skirt, and it was more than possible that they held hands.

The Schubert, sad, passionate, and not terribly well played, fussed to its conclusion. James joined the polite applause. Everyone had a stretch and a cigarette. When the audience sat down again,

James found himself beside Malcolm, with Helen on Malcolm's other side.

Next came a late Beethoven quartet. At first James heard notes, not music; notes taken too fast.

Then Josef pulled the other three musicians back and, as they settled into the second movement,

James relaxed. He noticed Helen's reflection (the real Helen being obscured by Malcolm) in a mirror opposite. Helen's head was tilted back in a thoughtful, listening position, her eyes soulfully closed. Suddenly her head fell forward, jerked upright; she'd been asleep. Helen opened her eyes and caught James watching her in the mirror. They both grinned. Her smile sent him skyward, like champagne. They were back as they'd been two years ago. They would go out dancing.

James's elation lasted only until the end of the concert. Helen had a date with Malcolm. "But bring

Lucy - and let's make it a foursome," she added in that social voice he hated.

James left without saying goodbye to anyone. Walking home he concluded that he'd better find another job. As a laboring man he had learned all he needed to know about delivering fireplace wood. And it was not a job that would support a wife.

"Where did you meet Miss Katzenbaum?" his mother asked James several months later when he telephoned to ask if he could invite Rose for Sunday night supper.

"On a picket line."

"Sometimes I wonder if you're planning to write a novel and collecting jobs to put on the dust jacket. First you leave law school after one term - no, no, I mean, that was the right decision; you're much too argumentative to have made a good lawyer. Then you deliver wood from some awful place in the Bronx. And now you're pushing a garment rack in the clothing district and living in that miserable place near the Bowery."

It was a one-room apartment about the same size as the hut at Walden Pond, with about the same amenities. Like Thoreau, James went home for Sunday dinner.

"Jolly, what were you doing on the picket line?"

"I wasn't on it; I bumped into it with a rack of clothes. Rosie was leading a strike against another manufacturer for the ILGWU - the International Ladies Garment Workers Union."

"Even I know what those initials stand for." "She hollered at me, `Don't you know enough not to cross a picket line?' Then, after we straightened that out, I invited her to lunch, once her replacement arrived."

"That was nice of you, dear. What does Miss Katzenbaum look like?"

"She's quite striking." Rose had worn a red and black checked suit. She carried a huge patent- leather handbag out of which came a torrent of union pamphlets. She was unusually short, even perched on spike heels. "She's not what you'd call pretty, but you can't help noticing her." Her black hair exploded from under the red beret. Nothing about her was still, from her huge expressive eyes in their bruised sockets - she was perpetually short of sleep - to her bright red mouth, chewing, talking, twisting with scorn, opening wide in laughter.

"Yes, well, Sunday is fine, dear." Jolly would choose Bridget's day off. Dietary laws to be observed? Grace Lippincott wondered, as she hung up. Fish, she thought, would be safe, but not

German wine - nothing German.

The evening began badly. Rose had been more than half an hour late. Something wrong with the

IRT downtown express, said Rose. After dinner, where the conversation had been as dry as the fish, James's mother escaped to the kitchen to make coffee. James's father excused himself to attend a rehearsal at The Buskers, his amateur acting club. James played several of his choicest records and then, desperate for entertainment, hauled out family photograph albums.

"What are your brothers like now?" Rose sat unrestfully on the edge of the couch, an album open to a photograph of four little boys in sailor suits, going down like stair steps.

"You already know about Charlie."

Rose glanced up at the portrait. "He was the oldest?"

"Yes. Next comes Dwight. He was supposed to be here tonight, but he's on charette."

"You two guys don't get on." "How did you - well, not exactly. There's this great clarinet solo by Sidney Bechet" - which

reached to your gut with some fundamental truth. "If Dwight liked it, which he wouldn't, he'd play

it at 78rpm because it'd be too slow for him at 45."

"What's his flavor in music?"

"Classical. You've just seen my record collection. The half that's jazz, be-bop, blues, is what

Dwight considers crap."

"Jolly, please; watch your language." His mother came into the living room carrying a tray of after

dinner coffee cups.

"What about your younger brother?"

"Warren. He's in his third year at medical school."

"So that's where I saw the name Lippincott. Your brother's the one going to marry Diana Morgan."

Rose added, "I used to see her picture on the society page with another good-looking guy - Wright?

Knight?"

James saw on his mother's face his same thought: Would to God Diana had married Larry Knight!

Once Diana had accepted (trapped, to quote Grace Lippincott) Warren, her face was everywhere in the women's magazines: "She's lovely, she's engaged, she uses Ponds." No Lippincott or Olney had ever appeared in an advertisement. Rose turned over another page in the album. "Who are these guys? Cousins?"

"It's our Saturday gang in Central Park, just before Charlie went off to Exeter."

Rose pointed to a ten-year-old in the center of the front row. "You were a cute kid."

"That's Mally, Malcolm Wadsworth. I'm in the back."

"Jolly is and was very attractive," said his mother.

Rose thanked Mrs. Lippincott for dinner and announced that it was time for her to pack it in. After James had escorted Rosie to her apartment and reached his own, he telephoned his mother.

"What did you think of her?"

"Very nice, dear." Grace remarked, often, that you never know who might become an in-law.

"Rose has been on her own, working, since she was sixteen and she's read all of Dostoevski."

Maybe so, Grace Lippincott reflected, but she's one tough cookie.

Alerted by the silence, James asked: "How did Dad like her?"

"Very much, dear, although he found her rather different from your other friends."

"She's unique. You don't even notice she's not pretty."

"Jolly isn't entirely besotted," Grace commented to Gordie after she hung up.

No expense had been spared at the Morgan-Lippincott wedding reception in the ballroom of the

Colony Club. Standing in the receiving line, Helen's heart went out to Warren. Diana, whose full-

length bridal portrait appeared in the current Vogue and Town and Country, was as effervescent as

a just-crowned beauty queen. Warren, the tall, scared, very young groom perspiring in the cutaway

behind her, seemed hired for the occasion.

Each tribe talked only to its members. (At my wedding, Helen promised herself, everyone will

mix.) Morgans had flown in from as far away as Grosse Pointe and San Francisco. Only Minna

Delafield flitted between the separate groups. "Not one of Diana's relatives owns a yacht that's

under a hundred feet over all," she reported back. "Do you know why they've turned out in such

numbers? For the white sales! I can't go to sales any more; I lack the killer instinct."

Once the receiving line broke up, and James's duties as best man had ended, he found Helen talking

to Mr. and Mrs. Wadsworth. He asked her to dance, but on the brink of the dance floor she stopped

him. "James, let's get some champagne and find a quiet corner, instead." Carrying their glasses, they left the ballroom and entered a small reception room down the hall.

"Oh, Jolly, we haven't told a soul except our families - but I want you to be the first to know:

Malcolm and I are engaged!"

James raised his glass to her, sketching a toast.

"Mrs. Wadsworth insists we don't announce it until Malcolm graduates." Helen frowned. "She hopes it will go away by then." A brilliant smile: "Fat chance!"

James drained his glass.

"Please, don't tell anybody."

He shook his head: never.

James's solemn face, together with the ridiculous cutaway - a teddy bear in spats! - made it impossible not to laugh. When Helen had stopped choking, she exclaimed, "Oh, James, it's so wonderful for a girl to have a man she can tell everything to."

He hated the way she was just then, sweetly girlish in "sharing her happiness" with the poor bastard she had just demoted to be her best male friend.

James reenters the church as the organ bursts into a shuddering bulk of noise. The chorus sings

"Behold, All Flesh is as the Grass," and the words roll majestically over the congregation and out the open church doors.

Chapter Six

June, 1985

Although she hasn't smoked in years, Sylvia craves a cigarette to cut the thick, melancholy

brownness of the Brahms. Smoking was her generation's logo: we smoke, therefore we are

(perceived as grown up). Sylvia began at fifteen and as cigarettes became scarce during the war,

smoked more. Smoking was a way of marking her working day: write a paragraph (light up),

revise (another cigarette), see an editor about an assignment (relax afterwards with a Chesterfield).

Cigarettes belong in Sylvia's "Before Stories," set in the days before television or legal abortion, nuclear weapons, or jet air travel. Few Before stories had been published. As one editor put it, the modern reader barks his shins on the irony. Sylvia's protagonists (the editor wrote) seem naive in their ignorance of what we in the 1980s take for granted such as the evil effects of alcohol and nicotine....But in Sylvia's "before" life, everyone smoked; evenings on the town they chain-smoked to obscurity. Even Helen smoked, then.

Sylvia asks herself, Was the bar on Second Avenue we all frequented really called The Shamrock, or did I make that up?

October - November, 1948

James discovered The Shamrock after a barren evening canvassing for Henry Wallace. The bar

served beer from the local brewery and was two blocks from the East Side subway. He met his brothers there. George Fulton, took to dropping in and, Friday nights, Sylvia, Lucy, Thomas

McCracken, and Malcolm, often with his new friend, Frank Underhill, and always with Helen.

These days James had come around to admitting that Malcolm might possibly deserve Helen.

James vaguely supposed that a husband's qualifications included being the bread winner, fixing

backed-up toilets, buying life insurance - changing diapers! James was pretty good with plumbing

but flunked the rest. He wouldn't go so far as to say that Mally had earned Helen, but Mally did

have a job waiting at Delafield & Lambert. While James hadn't "found himself," as his mother's

generation would say.

And James had Rosie; no, he didn't have her, he wanted her, dated her, danced with her, tried to woo her by joining a union and campaigning for Wallace.

James had sense enough not to canvass the regular patrons at the Shamrock Bar and Grill, though

when he was there alone, he sat at the bar and talked to them. They were a tough lot: dour

typesetters from The Daily News, Germans from the brewery, Irish motormen off duty, an

occasional cop. The row of men hunkered down at the bar and watched boxing matches on the TV.

Except for an occasional crack about "slumming," James and his buddies sitting around a scarred

wooden table, might have been speaking another language, for all the regulars cared.

"....but if he wins, will Truman exercise power effectively?"

"`Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.' Who said that?" James asked.

Helen murmured, "Lord Acton, I think."

"Jolly, nothing gets done without power: it's the gasoline of the body politic."

"Whatever the hell that is." But James rather admired Malcolm's metaphor. "Could F.D.R. have made the New Deal without power?" Frank Underhill asked. "He knew how to

wield power: the cost in support for legislation, appointments, vetoes, and so forth."

"Not political power, but the European war saved Roosevelt's bacon," said James. "Ten million

men were still out of work at the beginning of 1941. If it hadn't been for aid to the allies, and then

our forced entry into the war, we'd never have pulled out of the Depression. Now the country's in a

slump again. But when Wallace is elected...."

"He won't be, Jolly, admit it." Malcolm added, "Anyway, the topic under discussion is power, not election returns."

"Incidentally, the dictionary doesn't take a moral stand on power. It's defined as `the ability to act.'"

"Frank Underhill, the one-man reference library," said Malcolm.

"Power becomes evil only when subverted by guns and totalitarian ideology. As with

Czechoslovakia," said Frank.

Sylvia's attention wandered from these boys playing statesmen to the familiar row of backs

hunched at the bar, the ugly tables and chairs, the faded pin-ups behind the bar, the stench of smoke

and sweat and beer. The Shamrock was a haven from everything she had grown to detest about

Vogue: its female, bitchy atmosphere, the more-knowledgable-than-thou chatter, the smell of too many perfumes. Sylvia drained her glass. She drank scotch and soda, although it was expensive because, in the crude college phrase, "you didn't drink a beer, you rented it." What passed for a

Ladies room at The Shamrock was unspeakable.

"Czechoslovakia isn't important in Wallace's campaign," James insisted in that hectoring voice

Helen remembered from the Harvard Post War Study Group. "Sure it is." Frank lit a cigarette. "You really believe that Jan Masarak fell out the window last

March? Wallace does, he's being pushed by his left-wing supporters. Which means he'll lose

liberal votes."

Malcolm hummed, "`Friendly Henry Wallace, Friendly Henry Wallace,'" the theme song of Glen

Taylor, Wallace's guitar-playing running mate.

Hoping to deflect James from going on about Wallace, Sylvia asked: "Where's Rose tonight?"

"At an ILGWU meeting....Hey, we're all dry. Time to play the game." James had introduced the

cigarette game to determine who'd pay for the next round. He spread a paper napkin across the top

of his empty beer glass, tamping it to the wet rim. He placed a dime in the center of the taut paper

and passed the glass to Malcolm, who burned a hole in the napkin with his cigarette, then Helen,

and around the circle. The paper had turned to charred lace when the glass reached Malcolm for the

third time. He touched his lighted cigarette to the paper and the coin fell into the glass. Malcolm

went to get the drinks.

James fed the jukebox. The records were never changed. They played them in rotation starting

with Bob Crosby and his Bobcats in "Big Noise from Winnetka," ending with Glen Miller's "String

of Pearls."

Sylvia asked Helen about her lunch that day with Doris Johnson. Doris had reverted to her

baptismal name. The ordeal of her brother's trial and conviction for armed robbery had forced her

to abandon a chancy career in music for a full time job. She went to college at night.

"What's she going to do when she graduates?"

"She isn't sure," said Helen, "Rodman wants to get married."

"Nothing wrong with marriage." Malcolm plunked down one coke for Helen, one scotch for

Sylvia, and returned to the bar for the beers. "In six weeks," Helen said dreamily.

"In Boston," said Sylvia, who was a bridesmaid.

"`The home of the bean and the cod/Where Lowells speak only to Cabots/And Cabots speak only to

God.'"

"Please, James. My future in-laws are addicted to Boston jokes."

But it was Helen, not Boston, who had become the target. James had heard from his mother that

Mrs. Wadsworth threatened to boycott the wedding because it would be held in a Unitarian church.

He lit a cigarette: "Back to Henry Wallace."

Sylvia rolled her eyes at Helen; Helen smiled back.

"Are we ever far away from him?"

"Shut up, Mally. Wallace, like F.D.R., believes that the Federal government has an obligation to

provide jobs...just a moment, Frank, let me finish. Wallace...."

Frank took this equably, Sylvia noticed, perhaps because he was the new boy, Malcolm's find.

(At Malcolm's bar review course, he'd sat next to a skinny young man in a prewar suit, Francis

Underhill by name, a Yankee by accent. Malcolm asked Francis where he came from. Frank repeated the dialogue that followed to Sylvia much later:

Frank allowed as how he was from Vermont. He named the town nearest to his father's farm.

"That's about ten miles from Stowe, isn't it? Ever ski at Stowe?"

"Nope."

"Or near Hanover? I went to college there, to Dartmouth."

"Heard of it." ("I was doing Titus Moody on the Fred Allen show until I saw if I liked the guy, or not.")

"Have you ever tried the skiing at Tremblant?" "Where's that?" ("Sylvia, of course I knew where Mt.Tremblant was.")

"It's in Canada. Before the war, six of us drove all night from New York to ski Tremblant. Six

inches of powder over a two-foot base." Long pause. "Best run I ever had until Mt. Washington.

Have you ever skied the Headwall?"

Frank shook his head.

"Then I went into the Ski Troops. Terrific runs in Colorado, but it's not the same with an eighty

pound pack."

"Guess so. Never been on skis.")

They played the cigarette game again, and James lost. Taking advantage of his (and Henry

Wallace's) temporary absence, Frank unfolded a hypothetical case to Malcolm:

"The future defendant saw two men fighting on the roof of the next building. He shouted, `Stop, or

I'll call the cops.' The man who had a half-nelson on his attacker involuntarily loosened his grip, and the perpetrator pushed him off the roof. The fall made the innocent man a paraplegic. He filed a suit against our defendant for yelling and causing the accident that maimed him."

Watching Frank, Sylvia thought: he doesn't boil over, like James, or smooth over, like Malcolm.

He appears to consider things as they are. There was also something extremely sexy about bones -

Frank's, anyway.

Malcolm said, "I'd decide for the defendant on the grounds of `good faith.' He read the situation as

a prudent man would."

"Why not stop the fight, instead of yelling?" James, who had been following the discussion from

the bar, plonked down the drinks.

"Because the fight took place on the next roof," Frank said. "In New York City? He could have jumped over the parapet and broken it up." James brought the

rest of the beers. "We have the Marshall plan, we're rebuilding Europe, but what are we doing about conditions at home? What about the fight on the next roof? It's our own citizens who need housing and education and jobs. Mally, haven't you read Henry Wallace's book yet? Sixty Million

Jobs? I lent it to you months ago."

"I'll get to it, sooner or later."

"The election will be over by then. What Wallace is talking about is training and opportunity, not

government handouts. `Give a man a fish, he eats for one day; teach him to fish and he eats for a

lifetime.'"

"Where did that piece of wisdom come from, Jolly?"

James grinned. "It came out of a fortune cookie."

Frank spoke quietly. "James, let me be the Devil's advocate. Wallace is proposing a gigantic, socialistic, and ultimately inefficient administration. But why ask the government support the lame, the halt, the blind and incompetent? Isn't it up to their families to care for them? Why should life's losers be supported by taxes paid by more successful citizens? Look at Rodman Stubbs...."

"Where did you meet him? He's engaged to my friend Doris Johnson."

"He was written up in the Post last night as the first Negro to be appointed principal of a New York

City school, and...."

"Frank, ask yourself how life's losers got that way? Examine how the laws of this country work to

keep them poor."

"What can you do about people who are born stupid?" Sylvia realized that she hadn't heard her

own voice for more than half an hour.

"Give them a better education," Helen said. "But supposing they can't learn?"

"They will, Sylvia, most of them anyway, if their teachers believe that they can."

Sylvia thought of her high school English teacher without whom, as the book dedications say,

Sylvia would still be trapped in San Diego.

"Frank," James's voice grew louder, although he hadn't meant his anger to show, "Frank, isn't what

you call `life's losers' a euphemism for Negroes? But Negroes will learn, Helen is right, and with

education they'll succeed like other Americans. That's what Wallace's program is all about, as I

keep trying to tell you. In the next generation you'll see many more Negroes enrolled in colleges."

"What use is a college education if a man will be rejected because of his black skin?" Frank

stubbed out his cigarette. "You can't tell a Pole or Swede or Italian by looking at him. But a Negro

is always a Negro. He has to work twice as hard and be twice as bright as a white man to succeed."

"It will change," James said confidently.

"I hope so," said Helen.

I doubt it, Sylvia thought, not on the evidence of the public schools I went to.

Frank offered James a cigarette. "It isn't any of my business, but what do you expect to get out of working for Wallace? He won't win and you may be at risk applying for a future jobs because you campaigned for him."

"Rose got me into it, but it was something I already wanted to do." Not wanting to talk about the last month when James's territory had been invaded by strident Party members who lost prospective voters as fast as James won them to Wallace's ticket, James switched to the coming election.

"Frank, it's not a sure thing that Dewey or Truman will win. The polls show Dewey ahead, but they're seldom accurate." But why wouldn't Frank talk to her? Sylvia lit her own cigarette, feeling excluded by the men.

She and Helen needed Lucy to balance out, and now Lucy came through the door and pulled up a chair to their table.

"Sorry to be late," Lucy drawled. "I had to hang a student exhibition. Have you settled the election results by now?"

"We waited for you, Lucy. Beer okay?" James went to the bar to get it.

"Do you have pictures in this exhibition?" Sylvia asked.

"Three oils. I don't care for any of them, but Teacher does; they look like his." Lucy lit a cigarette.

"I do my important work at home. How is it going with your poems?"

"I sent them out; they have come back; I send them out; they will return. The Kenyon Review did take one last month, after a long drought."

".....If Dewey wins, it'll be pinned on Wallace. He never should have...."

"No, on Strom Thurmand. He split the Democrats."

"Mally, why are you worried about the Democrats, when Dewey's your man?"

"He never has been. I'm a registered Democrat and I'll vote the ticket from Harry S. Truman on down." James polled the table: everyone planned to vote for Truman except him.

"You look as though you had a hard day at the office," Frank turned to Sylvia, as if she had just arrived.

"I have. Imagine wasting eight hours on two hundred and fifty words describing the rise and the fall of the New Look. Frank, do you have any idea what I'm talking about?"

"Something to do with the length of ladies' skirts and a man named Christian Dior?" "Go to the head of the class." Not only Frank's bones, but his mouth was sexy. Sylvia wrenched her glance from his face to the interlocking wet rings their glasses had made on the table; quite possibly her face betrayed her.

Sylvia was aware that she had also made an impression (how deep? how lasting?) on Francis

Underhill two Sundays ago, when Malcolm had brought him to the Delafields' for tea. Frank hadn't known what to do with a teacup in one hand, a plate of sandwiches in the other, until Sylvia had suggested that she hold the cup and saucer while he ate. He polished off the sandwiches, then the tea. She went to refill his cup and when she returned to the living room Frank was listening to

James: "I lasted one term at law school; unlike you and Malcolm, I couldn't take it. I hate generalizations, the least common denominator, the Procrustean Bed."

"What would you put in its place?"

"The law." James whistled the Judge's solo from Trial by Jury. "How do you define it?"

Sylvia waited for Frank's reply. Would it be Porter Delafield's "The law is a jealous mistress, and a rigorous one."? Or "The common law system in free nations is, I maintain, all that prevents us from reverting to savages." So Thomas McCracken had pontificated to Sylvia the night before during the second intermission of Aida.

Frank finished the last drop of tea. Sylvia liked the way he refused to hurry. "I'd compare the law to a corset. The old-fashioned kind with laces, keeping the worst of us in." Sylvia and James laughed, and Francis Underhill had permitted himself a dry smile.

Now Sylvia had lost Frank again; he had been drawn back into debate with James. She willed

Frank to ask to take her home. Was she getting through? Frank's bow tie bobbed up and down with his Adam's apple; . Malcolm looked above the argument and Lucy yawned and yawned.

"Time to go," said Helen, sleepily. "Mind walking, instead of taking the bus?" Francis Underhill asked Sylvia Smith when they were outside.

"I'd love to." Sylvia was wearing very high heels.

A block further on, she asked, "What were the two men fighting about?"

Frank looked baffled.

"Remember your hypothetical case?"

"Didn't realize you were listening."

"Was the fight over a girl? Or an unpaid debt? And why was the defendant looking out of his window?"

"Good Lord, Sylvia, I was only trying to discuss how the law deals with the unforeseen results of good intentions.

"But I thought it was a true story!"

"Nope, I made it up." Frank took her arm crossing 57th Street. "Do you realize that this is the fifth time we've met?"

"I guess it is," she answered demurely, playing Emily in the drugstore scene from Our Town.

"I thought that Mrs. Delafield's tea party would be the last time, for me."

"How come?"

"I struck out. Mrs. Delafield introduced me around as a rising young lawyer, and when I protested she said - lifting her hands as though she were releasing carrier pigeons - `Well, you and Malcolm will have risen as soon as you pass the bar.'

"Next Mr.Delafield asked what firm I was going to. I told him Holt, Carr, and Sommers, which isn't the top, but, hell, I was lucky to be asked. New York Law School doesn't cut the mustard compared to Columbia. While Mr. Delafield talked about his speciality, maritime law, I looked around for Sylvia in the red dress, the girl who had plied me with tea. Then I had to find the lavatory, because of the tea. How do you city folk manage? In order to wash my hands I had to lift the glass cover on the soap dish. When I put it back my hands were slippery and the cover shattered."

They walked on half a block. "I offered to pay up, in case you're wondering. Mrs. Delafield said she'd always hated the soap dish, and thanked me for breaking it! She seems to think well of you, by the way."

So much for Calvin Coolidge and taciturn New Englanders, said Sylvia to herself.

"You left the tea party with Thomas McCracken. Is he your boy friend?"

"No. I'm not `well-connected' and that bothers him."

"I don't know about connections, but Thomas bothers me. Lying on my hard bed at the Y, I concluded that stunning girls in red dresses date only men who wear Brooks Brothers suits."

"Not necessarily so."

"Well, here's your building. Will you be at The Shamrock next Friday."

"If I can persuade Thomas to drop in there after dinner." Sylvia smiled sweetly.

Thirty five years later, certain arguments would return to Sylvia smelling of cigarette smoke and burning paper. Dwight Lippincott asserting that Hiroshima and Nagaski were war crimes, and

James shouting that the two atom bombs had saved, among half a million other Americans, his and

Malcolm's lives. Dwight asked, "What about half a million Japanese, dead or maimed in three days?" "They were our enemies," Malcolm had answered calmly. "I think you're a little out of line, Dwight." Malcolm was never out of line. Around the table at The Shamrock they questioned Auden's motives for running out on England in

1939. But what if he had been killed in the Blitz, with all the poetry inside him yet to be written; so

Lucy had argued. George Fulton, the most bookish of the four young lawyers, agreed: you had to hand it to Auden; he had married Erika Mann by mail to save her from the Nazis.

George and Warren Lippincott had nearly come to blows one night over which was the greater value to society: medicine, or law. Warren, six feet four, and dizzy from twenty four hours on service at St. Luke's, and George, five foot seven, his cherubic face distorted with rage, had been separated by Malcolm before they could damage each other.

Why had they stopped meeting there? Sylvia supposed it was married life and moving to Town and Village, children, committees, careers, life. Some time in the 1950s the Shamrock had been torn down and replaced by a high rise. But the unprepossessing bar lived in memory, as the aquarium of smoke in which they swam and contended and launched preposterous bubbles of theory...until their children were born and turned them into real adults.

These children now have children of their own, thinks Sylvia, as Susanna Wadsworth climbs the steps to the chancel and takes her place behind before the lectern. Susanna is divorced, with two young sons. She works as in-house council to a large corporation; Sylvia cannot remember which one. In looks Susanna is Malcolm's daughter; she is tall, fair haired, with his classical nose and chin. She speaks with Helen's voice:

"You may remember the saying, `You are what you eat,' but in Mother's case it is, `You are what you read.' She depended on books, and her range of choice astonished her children. Mothers don't usually read the later novels of Henry James and also Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,

Science Magazine, `Doonsbury,' and most of the poetry written in the English language. Today,

I've chosen selections she particularly cherished and often quoted: A short passage from Wordsworth's poem, The Prelude, the opening paragraphs of The Wind in the Willows, and a poem

by her great friend, Sylvia Becker.

Sylvia startles to hear her name. She hopes to God it isn't the poem about Carlie.

"I shall begin with Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 116: `Let me not to the marriage of true

minds/Admit impediment....'"

Chapter Seven

1948 -1950

Each time James brought Rose to the Shamrock Bar she asked why James and his friends chose this lousy dump. His pals had money, even if James didn't, so why not meet at the St. Regis or the

Peacock Alley bars? "And I wish you guys would take turns buying rounds, instead of playing that stupid game."

Nevertheless, Rose had accompanied James to the bar the Friday after Harry S. Truman's astonishing victory. The evening began badly with Thomas McCracken pontificating: "At least we're spared that Communist Wallace and his cowboy running mate." James reminded Thomas that both Rose (in the garment district) and James (on the east side) had

campaigned for Henry Wallace. James was a theoretical socialist, and Rose had fought Communist

influence in her union all her life.

"Jolly, I can only deplore the foolish waste of your time. But I must admit that my party came out

of the election looking pret - ty silly. I belong to the Republican Club uptown, and what a

collection of fossils."

"You're interested in politics?" Malcolm asked.

"I've been testing the waters."

"What did Porter have to say about it?" Thomas had joined Delafield and Lambert a month ago;

Malcolm would start the first of the year.

"Mr. Delafield warned me not to take time away from my work but that, in the years to come, a successful run for office might bring credit to the firm."

(That guy's gotta have vests made to go with his pajamas," Rosie remarked later.)

"Then he won't mind if I enter reform Democratic politics."

"I'd wait, old man; wait at least a year until you've proved yourself at the firm. Porter's incensed

that `that haberdasher' was elected President."

"I've already joined the Young Democrats," Malcolm said pleasantly. "After all, Mr. Lambert's an

old friend of F.D.R.

George Fulton asked, "And the A.V.C.? You'll need a veterans' organization behind you."

"No. I won't join the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the Legion, either. We were lucky to come out

of the war alive, and lucky to have the G.I. Bill of rights. But it's three years later, time to work for

our country and put the war behind us."

Rose said, "I hear a campaign speech already." All conversation stopped. James knew what the others were thinking: Rose, an outsider, was presuming."

Undaunted, Rose asked: "You plan to go after Carmine de Sapio here in New York?" She pronounced it Noo Yawk.

Malcolm nodded, "You bet!"

"Great. I think we all got to pitch in."

"Thanks, Rosie." Malcolm smiled with so much warmth that Rose commented afterwards, "Your

Mally's a natural. The voters are gonna love him."

But in fact, Malcolm's decision to enter politics surprised everyone except Frank Underhill, although Malcolm had been a B.M.O.C. at Dartmouth, and a Monitor at school.

"Darling, had you thought about politics before Frank suggested you go into them? It?" Helen and

Malcolm were having one of their delightful long talks about Malcolm's future.

"Yes. I first thought I might have a knack for politics when I was in the ski troops and people who hadn't had a prep school or college education listened to me."

"Of course they do." Helen loved to get him talking. She loved his voice which was resonant and manly and you believed every last word that he said.

"It wasn't just giving orders or practical information like how to weight a pack, but people really hung on my words. Did I think Hitler was on the ropes, now. Why was I sure that F.D.R. would go down in history as one of our better presidents. Don't tell Mumma, for a brief while I considered being an actor. But when I thought it over - I'd done some acting in school and college -

I realized that I was too wooden. My voice is okay, though, and I've always had a good memory. I like meeting new people. I like making things happen. Sounds like politics, doesn't it?" "But isn't it going to take an awful lot of money to run for office?" Helen asked.

"It'll be out there."

Helen had known Malcolm more than three years now, long enough to realize that he never scrambled for place. He let things come to him - and mostly, they did.

"What will your parents say about it?" There had been lawyers and judges, ambassadors and advisors in the Wadsworth family, but nothing so vulgar as a Wadsworth, Olney, or dePeyster who ran for office.

"I'll tell them when the time comes."

(When the time came, Helen was present. Mr. Wadsworth felt it was a bully challenge for his son, and Mrs. Wadsworth was near tears. Politics! She understood Malcolm's reasons for not entering the Episcopal Ministry, but politics wasn't even respectable. Helen marshalled her own mother's reluctant support by reminding Elinor Cross of Senator Leverett Saltonstall and other New England

Congressmen of distinguished lineage.)

As the Wadsworth-Cross nuptials approached, Sylvia heard (from Minna) the collective wisdom of

New York on the subject of Helen Dudley Cross. It was felt (although not by Minna) that Helen was sweet-looking, but too bookish, and what earthly use was an honors degree in economics once she was married? It was unfortunate that Helen's money was tied up in trust funds. However, they weren't dancing in the streets in Boston, Cambridge or Winchester, Massachusetts. (Minna was told by a close friend in Boston.) Malcolm had committed the sin of not going to Harvard. He was entirely too good-looking, too "New Yorky;" and "superficial" described Malcolm's charm. Why hadn't the lovely and well-connected Helen Cross chosen among Boston's own? Sylvia felt as though Minna were paraphrasing a novel by John P. Marquand. Not counting Malcolm's sisters, Nancy and Penelope, Sylvia was Helen's only new friend asked to be a bridesmaid. Sylvia accepted, then gulped when she heard the price of the bridesmaid's dress.

Helen offered to pay for it. "One bridesmaid's dress is a drop in the bucket of what I mean to spend!"

Sylvia refused Helen's kind offer. "Such lavishness is not like you, Helen. You're far from stingy, but I can't imagine you wanting a wedding like Diana's."

"It won't be."

"Vulgar, you mean, but you're too nice to say so."

"I hope the Wadsworths won't think so, even though it's going to cost a fortune! I just couldn't expose Malcolm to one of Mother's awful parties. She believes in saving money the way Malcolm swears by regular exercise - something you do every day. My coming-out party, to pay back all the

Boston balls and dinners I'd gone to, was a dreadful tea party at home in Winchester. Because of gas rationing, our guests had to take the train out from Boston. The band was our church organist pounding out dance tunes on our piano. We served punch - champagne cost way too much - and tea. Mother really let herself go on the sandwiches.

Helen smiled. "So when Malcolm and I set the date, I told Daddy to take the reception out of my own money; but he wouldn't, the dear man, and he's paying for everything himself."

The Cross-Wadsworth wedding reception evoked admiration even from the New York contingent who had come prepared to carp. After the brief ceremony in the Unitarian Church, the wedding party and guests walked down Arlington Street to the Ritz Carlton Hotel where the rooms rented for the reception were banked with Christmas roses, smilax and evergreens. 300 guests drank

French champagne, ate a splendid four-course dinner, and danced to Ruby Newman's orchestra. Sylvia wrote to her mother, "As you must have observed, fitting them, brides are rarely equal to their finery. But my friend Helen in her white silk Renaissance gown and Juliet cap was the most beautiful bride I have ever seen. When I reached the altar, I turned to watch her come down the aisle on her father's arm. You could hear people gasp at her beauty right over the music. Even

Malcolm's mother broke down at the reception and praised both bride and occasion.'" Or as Minna

Delafield remarked on the train back to New York the next day, Cross 1 Wadsworth 0.

Malcolm and Helen had signed up for an apartment in Peter Cooper Village, part of a post war housing development on the East River. Their apartment would not be ready until March. Until then they lived with Malcolm's parents.

The Wadsworths' apartment was cold, formal, nowhere you could put your feet up, and the light for reading was awful. Mrs. Wadsworth gave "the children" the use of the guest room with its narrow twin beds; Malcolm used his old room for a study. Helen rearranged the guest room, pushing the beds together, and making a sitting area where she and Malcolm could play backgammon, or read, or talk in private.

Mrs. Wadsworth invaded their rooms when they were gone, leaving the fresh imprint of the vacuum cleaner on the broadloom carpet, and Malcolm's ivory backed brushes lined up on the dresser in order of size.

"I wish you wouldn't bother," Helen expostulated, "I'll clean on the weekend."

"Helen, dear, even if the cleaning lady does put in an appearance on on Wednesday, Malcolm isn't very tidy, I'm afraid."

Malcolm wasn't. His older sister Nan had warned Helen. "My brother is the messiest person on earth. Whenever someone scolded him for throwing his clothes on the floor, Mally would say, `Oh, some woman will hang them up,' and," looking hard at her mother, "they still do." Malcolm's

papers covered every surface available. He regularly misplaced his keys and wallet until Helen

appointed a "garage" - a former shoe box - where he could "park" them each night.

After dinner, when Helen and Malcolm tried to be alone, Mrs. Wadsworth contrived frequent

excuses to enter their room. She wanted to consult "the children" about the menu for the weekend.

Did Mally have shirts to be washed? Would "the children" care to join the others in the living room

to watch the television set Mr. Wadsworth had given his wife for Christmas, possibly to atone for

his evenings at The Buskers amateur theatrical club or bridge tournaments at one of his several

clubs.

One night, Mrs. Wadsworth walked in on Helen and Malcolm. She had knocked, but without

waiting for an answer, pushed the door open. Malcolm just managed to switch off the bedside

lamp.

"I had no idea you children retired so early," Mrs. Wadsworth spoke into the dark room. "Porter

called. He said it would keep until tomorrow, but I felt sure you wanted to know."

Malcolm muttered a convincingly sleepy, "Thank you, Mumma."

"I'm sorry I woke you, Mally, dear." She continued to stand in the doorway.

Under Malcolm's heaped-up bedclothes, Helen held her breath. Sheets and blankets do not giggle.

"Good night, Mumma."

"Oh, yes, and - well - sleep night, dear."

The door shut. Malcolm whooped with laughter. He snapped on the light and rose, naked, from the bed to hook a straight chair under the door knob. As he returned to her, Helen thought: nothing more beautiful has ever been made. Another night they'd returned very late from a party. Their love-making exceeded the dimensions of Malcolm's single bed. He tumbled onto the floor, luckily landing on top of the discarded bedclothes.

He was barely back in bed when there came a knock on the door. "Are you all right, Mally, dear?"

"We're fine, thank you," Helen called out gaily. "I dropped something, that's all, but nothing

broke."

A further irritant to these first weeks of married life was Helen's mother. "Elinor Cross telephones

Helen just as we finally sit down to a late dinner," Helen overheard her mother-in-law complain to

Minna Delafield. "Because Porter keeps my son late at the office every single night." ("A young lawyer's useless his first six months," said Porter when Minna relayed this conversation. "And

Malcolm's no exception to the rule.")

But the terrible revelation that made Helen long to move to a hotel, was that Mr. and Mrs.

Wadsworth fought! Behind the closed double doors of the drawing room, Helen could hear her in- laws bickering about money, about Mr. Wadsworth's office staff, his absences, his extravagance -

even about bridge hands. Mostly you heard Mrs. Wadsworth's penetrating old-New-York voice, with its swooping descants and piercing high notes; an upper-class keening was how Helen

described it to herself. Helen remembered Minna's remark, "Sometimes I want to say to poor,

agitated Susan, `Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.'"

Malcolm and I won't ever be like that, Helen promised herself.

Perhaps these endless wrangles accounted for Penny's stuttering, and Nan's mannish obsession with

golf. Both girls had apartments of their own, now, and tried to keep out of their mother's path. She

had raised them up and brought them out, and still they disappointingly were single. Everything pressed heavily on Mrs. Wadsworth. Home sick one day, Helen heard her mother-in- law's carrying voice on the telephone putting off the credit department at Saks, pleading with the butcher to wait another week for payment. Mrs. Wadsworth rarely failed to chastise her husband for the expensive television set, even as she turned it on. Yet she would splurge at Hattie

Carnegie's because she must have something decent to wear to a wedding in Cold Spring Harbor.

Malcolm never criticized his parents, and only commented on them obliquely: "I enjoy Mumma most at a party she is not giving, and Dad when we go off fishing in Maine."

"Frank, there are two more things about me you ought to know." Sylvia had drunk two martinis at dinner for courage, and these were the first words she spoke when they reached her apartment.

"Why not save them for when we are married?"

"The difficulty is, there's something I haven't saved." Sylvia disengaged herself from Frank's arms.

She took three steps across the room to her improvised bar and poured Frank a stiff brandy.

"You're going to need this."

He glared at her. "You're backing out."

"No. You may want to, though."

"What is it, Sylvia?"

"You - I have to tell you now because you'd find out soon enough. I'm not a virgin."

"So what?"

"You don't mind?"

"No. I'm not either, if that's what's been worrying you. And the second thing?"

"My father was a Jew."

"With a name like Smith?" "It wasn't Smith, and he died when I was a year old. Orville Smith is my step-father. I took his

name, or rather Mother took it for me when she married him two years later."

"You poor kid."

Sylvia stalked toward the bathroom. "You can break off the engagement," she threw over her

shoulder.

"Wait a minute. Why would I want to?"

"My being half Jewish might make a difference. I mean, to your position at the law firm. Mrs.

Holt told me at the firm dance that they rate fiancees and wives as well as the quality of the new associates' work."

"If Holt, Carr and Sommers grades wives, which I doubt, you'd be at the top. Mrs. Holt was jealous, that's all. She'd noticed that her husband had asked you to dance three times." Frank beckoned to Sylvia. "Don't hide in the bathroom. I want to hear more. What was your father's name? How did your mother meet him? The facts, Ma'm, nothing but the facts."

"Don't joke. I've never been able to quite...." Sylvia poured herself a brandy. "I learned when I was seven or eight, that I was Orville's step-daughter. Whatever his short-comings as a bread-winner,

Pop never made any distinction between me and my half-sisters, and I never bothered to ask

Mother who my real father was. But when I turned fourteen I needed my birth certificate for something, and there it was: Father, Jacob Bernstein. I pumped her for details. Mother had come from upstate New York right out of high school to take a job in a Manhattan department store. B.

Altman's or Macy's, I don't remember which. Jacob Bernstein was the floor manager of her section, ladies' handbags, and from the start he singled her out. He was very well read, said Mother, and he had lovely manners. They were married in January of 1924. Their families wouldn't have anything to do with them because they had married outside their religions. "How did you react to all this?"

"First off, I demanded to know what my father had died of. I guess I was scared it might be hereditary. But it was sleeping sickness; there had been an epidemic of it in the mid 1920s. Then I romanticized him. I saw a Jewish Ronald Coleman whose wealthy family had cut him off without a penny; but he had married for love and didn't care what hardships he endured. I tried to imagine that I did remember him; that this `real gentleman' (and poor ailing Orville is far from that) had held me on my lap and read me books. But I didn't, of course."

Frank sipped his brandy, his face impassive.

"I don't know anything about being Jewish, Frank. As a child, if we went to church at all, we went

to a Protestant Episcopal Church. I never entered a Synagogue or a Temple until last year. But

whenever the subject of Jews, or Israel, or the unspeakable death camps comes up I feel guilty.

Guilty, but not Jewish. Not even with Max...." but she didn't want to explain Max now. "All

cliches aside, more than half my friends are Jews. But I rarely add, `like me.'"

Frank lit a cigarette. He did not offer her one.

Sylvia slumped down at the other end of her couch. "It's terrible, I don't even have a photograph of

him. Mother has snapshots taken at the beach, but the figures are so small they might - be just

anybody...." and Sylvia's attempt at dignified resignation collapsed into tears.

Frank gathered her into his arms. He did nothing to stop her; said nothing to comfort her. He held

her, waiting, (he told her later) for her to realize that she had been a damn fool; that of course he

loved her. When she had dwindled down into sniffles and silence, he said:

"The part I don't like is your concealing your Jewish heritage."

"I didn't just now. And I'll tell anyone who asks me." Will I really? Sylvia wondered.

"Ever tried to trace your father's family?" "When I first came to New York I looked in the phone books. Have you any idea how many

Bernsteins live in the five Boroughs?"

"Ask your mother for more details, why don't you?"

Sylvia kept meaning to.

Sylvia asked, "Isn't it ghastly, not having a phone?" Helen was calling from the one pay phone in her building. "Can't the Peter Cooper Village people get you one?"

"No, it's up to the telephone company. Actually, Sylvia, it's pure bliss. Nobody can reach us unless they send a telegram." Work had started on the excavation site north of Helen's building. Helen raised her voice in order to be heard over the pile drivers. "Oh, please come. James and Rose have been invited....Yes, the bed arrived on Saturday, so we...and the rugs yesterday; a neighbor took them in for us, wasn't that nice? We're finally almost settled. Oh, I wish you and Frank would move here!"

"I do, too, but we don't have a chance at an apartment until we're married, and God knows when that will be."

"Sooner than you think," Helen said, presciently as it turned out. "Can you be here by six? I better hang up now; there's a long line waiting for the phone."

The weepy, pregnant girl who monopolized the building's telephone most mornings, was next:

"No...no, yes ...but Mama, it's no longer morning sickness, it's I'm nauseated at night....No, the doctor said, I wasn't due for an appointment until next week...."

The phone was like the village pump. You couldn't not hear as you stood in line, who had a fight with her husband, who hated her mother-in-law, who had broken a Steuben wine glass and didn't dare tell. The people waiting behind Helen would have learned that Helen was throwing her first cocktail party - not a real party, but six people anyway, counting her and Malcolm.

Four, it turned out; then three. Sylvia sent a telegram. Frank was on a case that would keep him at his office all night, and she had to work late on an article.

James Lippincott and Rose Katzenbaum were right on time.

"It's like some musical comedy chorus," said Rose looking down from the Wadsworths' bedroom window, "all those guys with identical raincoats and hats and briefcases."

What's the matter with that? Helen asked herself. She wished her own briefcase-carrier was among them. "Rose, shall we ask Jolly to make us a drink?" Rose's sharp heels scratched the brand new floor as they hastened back to the living room. Rose hadn't noticed one thing about the apartment from the new Magnavox to the handsome ship prints Malcolm had hung late last night, their wedding present from the Delafields. (Helen was a little unsure about the green of the living room curtains.)

James poured a coke for Helen and fixed Rose some peculiar concoction of orange juice and soda water. He opened a beer for himself. Helen discoursed on the amenities of the housing projects, the convenience of shops on First Avenue. James listened with interest. Rose look bored.

Still Malcolm did not arrive; James and Rose didn't leave. Helen put out a fresh slab of cheese and more crackers, then excused herself to go down and telephone.

"Darling, please come home."

"I can't. Porter wants me to check every citation in this brief - the case I told you about with that wonderful phrase, `the agony of collision.'"

"But it's supposed to be a party." "I know. Tell them I'm stuck. Jolly knows how hard Porter drives his associates."

"But with someone like Rose you have to go out of your way to be welcoming...." Helen changed the subject. "Malcolm, don't hang up. I have another nickel. The bill arrived for the Magnavox.

It's astronomical!"

"Pay it."

"With what?"

"There should be plenty in the joint account."

"Not until your next paycheck. Never mind, darling I'll pay the bill out of my check book."

Upstairs, Helen found Rose reading a book and James inspecting their record collection. Helen explained about Malcolm being tied up.

Rose's response, "It's okay; we've had the guided tour, anyway," did not sit well with Helen.

She said politely, "Well, I hope you liked what you saw."

"It seems kind of like an asylum for well people." Rose still held the book. "What's The Road to

Serfdom about? Friedrich Hayek sounds like a Fascist."

"I read it at Radcliffe. I hate to admit that I've forgotten most of it. You know how it is."

"Shit," (Helen inwardly cringed) "I wish I did know. Maybe my next incarnation I'll get to go to college."

"You can borrow the book, if you'd like."

"These days I don't even read Dr. Rose Franzblau in the Post. Last night James and I went dancing for the first time in a month. But thanks, anyway."

When at last they left, James had his arm snuggled around Rose as they waited for the elevator.

Ashamed of peeping, Helen closed the door. In Admiralty Law "the agony of collision" described the moment when two ships were about to collide and nothing could be done to prevent it. Rose might be an interesting person in her own right, but she wasn't any where near up to Helen's best male friend!

James Olney Lippincott and Rose Katzenbaum were married on the last working day of 1949 at

City Hall.

Early in the New Year, James's mother gave a cocktail party for the newlyweds to introduce Rose to the Lippincotts' cousins and friends. James added Malcolm and Helen, Frank and Sylvia, George

Fulton and several other of his friends to the guest list so Rosie wouldn't feel isolated.

One of the older women at the party asked Sylvia if Rose were in mourning; she was dressed in black from head to foot. Sylvia felt badly. She had advised Rose (who had asked) to wear basic black - you never go wrong in black. Some old goat - from Rose's description "like the little guy on the cover of Esquire" - it must have been George Fulton's uncle - had pinched Rosie's eminently pinchable behind, and Rose had come down on the toe of his shoe hard with her stileto heel.

The forced niceness of his parents' friends made James furious. "James's bride is rahther striking, but she's not rally one of us," he heard Mrs. Tenbroeck say. "Of course she's not," James almost shouted, "that's the whole point."

Only Dwight, ordinarily so critical, was a whole-hearted Rosie supporter.

The next wedding of interest was that of Rodman Stubbs and Doris Johnson. James read about it in the Amsterdam News, Sylvia and Frank sent a present, and Helen was only prevented from going by the birth of Susanna Wadsworth.

The last wedding was Sylvia's to Francis Seaver Underhill. Porter gave her away in the Delafield's living room. Minna provided the reception. She wouldn't let Frank and Sylvia pay for a thing. They had not been sentenced to wait two years, as Frank had originally decreed. Their change of plan was caused by the Korean War. Married men were not being called up.

Susanna finishes reading Sylvia's poem about a game of solitaire and cardboard kings and queens.

The congregation stands to sing a hymn with an interminable number of verses.

PART TWO

June, 1985 1948-1963

Chapter Eight

Although the hymn has ended, Sylvia notices that Malcolm remains standing. His daughter Penny plucks at his sleeve. Malcolm glances around at the pews filled almost to the back of the church, smiles grimly, and sits down. Sylvia wonders if he's distracted by the SBCCU inquiry.

Last night in her hotel room, unable to sleep, Sylvia snapped on the TV to a local news program.

Malcolm, filmed earlier, was shown leaving the room where he had been questioned by the Special

Investigator for the Federal Department of Labor. The program went on to devote five minutes to this third Federal investigation into the South Bronx Community Center Union. The anchorman listed the names of relatives of the staff and board of the South Bronx Community Center Union who'd been paid salaries for non-existent jobs. Next several Congressmen expressed indignation at the "highway robbery perpetrated" at the SBCCU. (Sylvia reflected on the shocked innocence that inevitably greets malfeasance newly exposed and Sacred Trust betrayed!) The State Attorney

General, Patrick Lanahan, promised a probe if the current investigation failed "to unmask those connected with the South Bronx Community Center Union who have wallowed in the trough of

Federal and State antipoverty funds."

The TV program switched to a satellite reporter interviewing a resident of the South Bronx: "Man, this time they gonna catch those dudes messin' with our money." Cut to the black SBCCU

Director's answer: "In an organization the size of this anti-poverty agency, a few errors in book- keeping are bound to appear."

The TV anchorman interviewed a lawyer from a previous investigation. She described, in detail, the 1984 lavish redecoration of the SBCCU offices with such items as a $2,000 desk and $500 lamps. Staff members had also charged the SBCCU for monthly parking charges and, in two cases, extended car rentals. The segment on the Center ended, as it had begun, with the footage of

Malcolm, while the anchorman's voice-over told viewers that the former United States Senator had no comment to make at this time.

Poor Malcolm, to be in the news so soon after Helen's death! If Frank was alive he'd force Malcolm to deal with the corruption in the South Bronx Community Center, not accede to it. How do you know he has acceded? Frank's voice asks her. Have you lawyer's evidence, Sylvia? Sylvia still hears what Frank would say, in any circumstance. Perhaps that is all of immortality we have. That and children.

Had Frank known what he was getting into when he married her? He appeared to love her no matter how badly she behaved, or how tiresomely she complained about her writing, as though it were Frank's fault that she wasn't getting to it, not getting it published very often, not building a reputation from it. He expected her to accomplish her work, as he did his. He respected her ambition, but never esteemed her achievements above his; or below. He was astonishingly fair, unemotional, and steadfast.

She had known that from the beginning, although Frank had been unforthcoming about himself.

Sylvia, as she often remarked, married him on very little evidence. It took her discovery of the

Bronze Star in among his cuff-links and studs to make Frank describe his war experiences in Italy.

He rarely mentioned New York Law School; he had no anecdotes from his college years; he didn't even remember his dreams. The night after Holt, Carr & Sommers passed over him for partner,

Frank had told Sylvia about the stick, his way of showing what he did with disappointment.

She and Frank had been married over ten years before Sylvia was able to reconstruct his childhood in any detail.

In January, 1961, Frank's father died. Before the farmhouse was sold, Frank's sister asked him if he wanted anything out of the house. The first weekend in August, at Helen's request, Sylvia and

Frank left their children at the Wadsworths' summer house in western Massachusetts, and continued on to Vermont.

While Frank went through trunks in the barn, Sylvia remained in the house, reconstructing his boyhood. On the drive up, Frank had described the kitchen, the radio, his high school and its basketball team. Her imagination, together with yearbooks and old photograph albums did the rest.

Frank had studied at that kitchen table. It didn't occur to him that he was deprived; his high school friends down in the valley studied - when they studied - in their kitchens. It was the only warm room in the house. Frank did his lessons to the short-wave radio his uncle had built. Radio Canada was the station that came through most clearly: "Ici Radio Canada. Voici l'ecote

maintenant," or that's what Francis concluded the announcer was saying. He had to get his French out of books; it was not offered at school. "Aujour- d'hui, on accuse le President des Etats-Unis,

Franklin Roosevelt, qui a voulu `pack' avec plus des juges le Cours Supreme." Because of his

name, Frank felt close to the President, but not even F.D.R. should tamper with the Supreme Court.

Frank wrote an essay for his Civics course on the President's attempt to pack the Court. He

intended to become a lawyer one day. His father despised lawyers.

Some nights the radio would pick up the Million Dollar Ballroom. When Frank forgot and turned it

up too loud, his mother, who was a light sleeper, would holler for Frank to turn it down; and he'd

comply. His mother worked seven days a week, in the vegetable garden that fed them, with the

chickens that provided half the family's cash crop. She also taught second grade (she had taught

her three children), and Sunday School. Thursday night at her bridge club was sacred.

Thursday was the night Frank got it from Pa.

Frank endured punishment for leaving the pasture gate open, or doing a shoddy job cleaning out

the barn. But he hotly resented being beaten for small errors, so many strokes for an unmade bed,

so many more for taking the Lord's name in vain, and a thorough hiding for being late for milking,

although the teacher had kept him after class. Francis was punished because the kerosene lamps

weren't cleaned, though the lamps had been his brother's chore that week. Frank was beaten for

looking at a trashy novel his sister had smuggled home to read. Frank concluded that his father had

so much rage that had to be vetted each week, and his brother had grown too big to beat, and his

sister was a girl.

The day before, in the car, Frank had described the last time his father attempted to punish him.

"Bring me the stick, Francis." "What for?"

"You left your bicycle out."

"I need it. I've got basketball practice after supper."

"You're to stay home."

"Pa, they'll cut me off the first team if I don't come."

"Give you more time for your studies."

"Pa, what do you want from me? I made all As last term."

"What do I want?" asked rhetorically. "It is not what I want but what is best for my children.

Nothing is achieved without discipline and hard work. A man can never work hard enough." And

then Frank had to hear for the hundredth time how the orphan boy from White River Junction

worked as a hired hand and saved for ten years to buy his own farm. (A hillside farm that lost the

sun, even in midsummer, by four in the afternoon, with stony slopes backbreaking to plough.)

"Francis, I said: fetch me the stick."

The stick was an old broom handle, kept out back with the snowshoes and winter boots. Frank broke it into pieces in front of his father. He couldn't remember if either of them spoke, only that he had scored sixteen baskets at practice that night.

His bicycle, long gone to rust, was memorialized in a photograph album, along with Frank's high school graduating class. Frank had talked about the 23 members of the class of '39 for Sylvia before he went out to the barn. Two had enlisted in the army, seven were going to Vermont State, and the rest, including two couples that "had" to get married, would remain, like Frank, stuck on the farm or in the village.

"Did you think of running away?"

"Are you kidding? My savings amounted to $17.32, money I'd earned doing chores in the valley." The night after Frank's graduation his father berated him for not winning the Latin Prize (Francis

had taken all the others), and for speaking too rapidly as he delivered the valedictory address.

Then Stephen Underhill had asked, "What are you planning to do, son?"

Frank thought he might go fishing.

His mother interpreted: "Francis, your father means, what are you going to do with your life?"

"I want to be a lawyer."

When the silence died down, his mother gave him a Bible and his father his own leather-bound copy of Plutarch's Lives. Then Frank was handed an envelope to open. It contained a check for a year's tuition at Boston University. His parents had arranged for Frank to board with his mother's widowed cousin in Milton, near the old chocolate factory, in exchange for doing her chores. And here was yet another check. His father believed, correctly, that Francis was deficient in science and math. Francis was to leave next Monday for Boston to enter summer school.

Boston! Francis had never been farther away than Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. He had never drunk anything stronger than 3.2 percent beer. He had never been with a girl. (Lack of opportunity, Frank told Sylvia; and soon corrected.) He did not even have a driver's license. But

Frank had driven tractors and he felt confident that he knew everything about cars except speed.

"I was a cocky little bastard," said Frank, showing Sylvia his freshman yearbook picture: hair shaved half up his skull, and cheeks that barely needed a razor. Not only did he know French, he also had a broad acquaintances with the leading issues of the day. He had the lyrics of all the popular songs by heart and could sing along with the best of them. Once Frank had suffered through summer school, memorizing, rather than understanding, solid geometry and calculus, he knew that he would stay. He did well at B. U. He was only in the top quarter of his class because he had also to work part time at jobs found through the student employment office. He made friends easily. He learned how much drink he could hold before making an ass of himself. He attended classes right around the year, scrambling to finish college before he was called up.

When his notice came, his mother's cousin wondered who would cut her lawn now. Who would shovel her coal and clean out the furnace and weed the garden and run to the store for her when she felt poorly? On the other hand, she'd seen less and less of him this last year. No more games of cribbage. No more listening together to Edward R. Murrow on the radio speaking from London.

Francis came home late and went straight upstairs to his books. To give the devil his due, he had kept up with the chores.

On the morning he left for the Army, Frank stood at the head of the subway train as it pulled out of

Ashmont Station. He hoped someone would ask him why he was in civvies so he could confound them with his destination. Although he had never been up in a plane, he felt airborne. It had nothing to do with patriotism or saving the world from Hitler. He was free; in charge of his own life, at last. ("Where did you get this romantic view of the Army?" Sylvia asked just now.) Frank hummed, "You're in the Army now," and watched the dark tunnel ahead rush toward him, then a lighted station, then darkness again. The subway car rocked and swayed and jolted and braked.

Frank did not deign to hold on. Years of commuting had perfected his balance.

His mother came to visit him at Fort Devens. She brought the Bible she'd given him for high school graduation and a chocolate cake. Its smell reminded him of the chocolate factory and

Milton and his elderly cousin. He supposed that he ought to write to her. She wrote back faithfully to Devens, to Fort Bragg, and to his overseas APO. Before his cousin died, in 1948, she remade her will and left her house and its contents to Frank instead of the Congregational Church. When the house became his, Frank sold it and bought life insurance with Sylvia as sole beneficiary.

Then he proposed.

Sylvia who had long planned that he would, broke down and cried. Frank was mystified. "I've never ever been so happy," Sylvia sobbed as she accepted him. She went about for weeks carrying her happiness like an invisible crystal goblet on an invisible silver tray before her, not wishing to tell a soul. She tried to write about it: "I feel both sexy and immortal. I long for him to make love to me. I savor the deliciousness of waiting. I detest the idea of telling our families and friends for then, just another engaged couple, we shall cease to be extraordinary." True Confessions, thought

Sylvia, could do better. "When we are alone together we live at the center of a perfect world."

True, but too high-flown. "Frank is everything I mean by the word love," would have to do.

Then Helen guessed that they had become engaged, and so did Sylvia's mother. The secret was out; the feet again upon the ground. Sylvia wanted, and was denied, an engagement ring. Even if he could afford one, what did a ring have to do with it? asked Frank.

Frank wasn't so much tight with the buck as peculiar about money. Frank had not yet started at

Holt, Carr & Sommers when Helen and Malcolm's wedding date was set. Sylvia offered to lend

Frank the fare to Boston. No. Absolutely not. He never borrowed money. Sylvia, who knew exactly how ravishing she would look in her yellow bridesmaid's dress, talked to Helen. Helen told

Malcolm about Frank's proud stand, and Malcolm arranged for the Lippincott boys to give Frank a ride up and back to Boston.

Once married, Frank maintained that all money should be pooled in the joint bank account. Sylvia contributed her salary from Vogue, but free lance earnings she claimed for herself. He professed to be astonished at the prodigal way she spent money. In Vermont women did their hair at home. Vermont women took up, or let down, the hems of their dresses. Ridiculous to discard an entire wardrobe merely because styles had changed.

Their biggest fight concerned the ancestral farmhouse. By 1962 Frank was earning more than

$30,000 a year at his new firm, Parsons & Row. Sylvia proposed buying back the Underhill farm in Vermont as a vacation home. Partners in Wall Street law firms owned attractive summer homes, instead of renting tacky cottages or sponging on their friends.

"We don't sponge on the Wadsworths," Frank said reasonably. "We go there weekends to plan political strategy. And we don't need another set of rooms for you to decorate. I suppose you'd put in a swimming pool with a fake blue bottom and tables with striped umbrellas."

"No, that's not what you do with an 1810 farmhouse: go suburban."

"It's what the rest of the goddamn valley has turned into in the last year." Frank had been back to

Vermont for a funeral the month before.

"Did you drive by the old place?"

"Looks the same. Never did get the afternoon sun; never will."

"Well, how about looking for a summer place in Bridgehampton? We'd be near the Lippincotts and

George's enormous nice family."

"Want to spend the summer out there alone with the kids? Until we get a campaign director, I'm it."

"Well, hire one. I know I'm not supposed to say it, but I think Malcolm's using you."

Frank ignored this as he did Sylvia's other criticisms of Malcolm.

Even Sylvia acknowledged that Frank and Malcolm made a symbiotic pair. They had met at the right moment, after the war had loosened social and geographical boundaries, and before their lives had solidified into patterns. Malcolm, deeply in love with Helen and disinclined to study, realized that Frank would boost him through the bar exams. Frank sharpened Malcolm's vague political

ambitions for him, while Malcolm smoothed Frank's jagged Yankee edges. Frank, by no means

humble, had found a man worth working for. Both young men had chosen F.D.R. as their model,

and Malcolm Wadsworth for his heir.

Thirty years ago, did Frank and Malcolm have any notion of what they were up against? Sylvia

asks herself now. We took on the Democratic Party machine with the energy that comes from

ignorance. Was there a collective confidence to draw on, then, generated by the cumulative

ambition of so many similar couples starting out together in Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant

Town? Did there exist in the despised safe l950s an agreed-upon Way and ethical Means unobtainable today?

Cleaning out a file before she went to Europe last month, Sylvia discovered edited proofs of a

"think piece" she had been commissioned to write in 1954:

"When my generation first hit New York City at the end of World War II, we were sure we take the place by storm. We would `Make it new.'" (The editor had excised Ezra Pound, source of that exhortation.) "We would make it to the top of our chosen arts or professions before we were thirty.

We married. We turned thirty. The century eased into its fifties and life turned out to be more complicated than we had suspected. We replaced single ambitions with a wider aim: we were going to improve on our elders in every way - at work, if we were men and, if women, at home raising perfect children and giving four-course dinner parties with two wines." (The wines had been deleted, in deference to the Bible Belt.) "We would make the world a better place, despite the

Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the Korean War, the hearings of the House UnAmerican Activities

Committee, or the bombastic lies" ("speeches" were substituted for "bombastic lies" in the published version) "of Senator Joseph McCarthy." When Sylvia wrote this ditsy little piece "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the

Communist Party?" had spooked the National consciousness. Because he had been on the Board of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions in the 1940s, Max

Kirov's photographic assignments had almost ceased. A script writer Sylvia had known since 1944 was blackballed by Hollywood. Writers Sylvia had once respected tattled on other writers, or took the Fifth.

"I don't approve of Senator McCarthy's methods," Porter Delafield told Sylvia, "but it's a job that must be done."

Words from a long-ago Sunday School class came from Sylvia's mouth: "`Thou shalt not bear false witness,' and that's what the Senator is doing with his `I have here the names' - sometimes it's 205, or 81 or 57 - 57 sounds plausible, doesn't it, like Heinz's 57 Varieties?"

"You don't know one thing about it, young lady." Porter's mustache bristled, and his eyebrows almost met in a frown.

"I will bet you - I will bet fifty dollars that we'll find out McCarthy crucified innocent men..."

Sylvia had shut up, because Frank had nudged her, hard, and because Porter had given her away at her wedding.

For those of her generation who were exempt from the Korean war, and did not suffer for their alleged political beliefs, life was possible in ways Sylvia's children would never know. As a young editor on Vogue, Sylvia was invited to screenings, publishing parties, openings, vernissages, and to night clubs to hear new performers. When the magazine wasn't paying she and Frank could dine out for two or three dollars apiece. After Susanna, and then Colum and Steve were born, the Underhills and the Wadsworths entertained mostly at home - those dinner parties with wine - cocktail parties on weekends, and the

U. N. Hospitality dinners. Like the English in the jungle, they often dressed for dinner.

Sylvia remembers a New Year's Eve party the Wadsworths had given in their second Peter Cooper

Village apartment. Sylvia had worn a coppery shot silk evening dress, and Frank was quite pleased with himself in a dinner jacket and stiff shirt, with studs. At midnight, Susanna had been brought out in her Dr. Denton pajamas with a red satin bow around her tummy as the Spirit of `5l. Frank had recited as much of "Jabberwocky" as he could remember, a sure sign he was squiffed, and

Malcolm had sung "A Wand'ring Minstrel I." At two in the morning of the New Year, Sylvia and

Frank had weavered through Peter Cooper, past the playgrounds, and across 20th Street into

Stuyvesant Town, floating like a pair of Chagall lovers above the windows of the housing projects still jeweled with Christmas tree lights....Like most memories, this one is false. She and Frank didn't move to Stuyvesant Town until June of 1951.

It enrages her that she can remember the dress she wore, but not Frank's face, when young....Sylvia becomes aware that the elderly man in the pulpit is about to speak. Sylvia glances at the service sheet: Judge Philip Kenneally of the Circuit Court of Appeals. The name seems vaguely familiar.

A young voice issues from the decrepit old man:

"I first met Helen Wadsworth after she had pinch-hit for me on a sound truck more than thirty years ago. I was then serving in the Congress of the United States and Malcolm Wadsworth was just commencing his political life. The name he and his supporters, youngsters still in their twenties and early thirties, had selected for their insurgent Democratic Club was LEAD, an acronym for

Lower Eastside Associated Democrats. And they would grow in strength and numbers, and go on to be leaders in the City, the Empire State, on the Bench and in Washington, as the intervening

years have proved."

Chapter Nine

19451 - 1952

The genesis of LEAD reminded Sylvia of the "Our Gang" comedies of her childhood, when some kid shouts, Hey, come on, let's build a club house. LEAD seemed just about as jerry-built. In addition to the Wadsworths and the Underhills, the club's founders included Marian Gorman, a lawyer who had worked at Delafield & Lambert during World War II, her lawyer husband Jack, and Jesse Caplan, a C.P.A.

Frank and Malcolm rented two cramped rooms above a store on First Avenue, facing the housing projects. Sylvia and Helen washed the splintery wood floors, painted the walls and the stamped metal ceilings, without any help from Marian. A big, outspoken, good-looking Irish girl, Marian still resented being let go from Delafield & Lambert to accommodate male associates returning from the war. "Now if it had been you, coming back Malcolm, I'd of felt okay." Marian's mother lived with the Gormans, allowing Marian to work in Jack's small firm part-time. Jack Gorman's cousin, a funeral director, sold LEAD second-hand funeral folding chairs. Frank and Malcolm found an abandoned desk on 18th Street and hauled it upstairs. Jesse Caplan contributed filing cabinets and a student lamp. A telephone, a huge Royal typewriter that Minna had bought in a fit of efficiency and never learned to use, typing paper, light bulbs, legal pads, pencils, a gismo for boiling water and some mugs for coffee completed the furnishings.

Even before LEAD had a name and a clubhouse, Frank began building Malcolm's political future.

He helped Malcolm write an article called, "A Veteran Looks at the Korean Crisis," and the local weekly for the two housing projects, also called Town & Village, published it. With the outbreak of the Korean War, air raid shelters were designated, and safety drills in the schools began. Frank pushed Malcolm to volunteer as director of civilian defense for the Lower East Side.

Frank's name for Malcolm's fledgling political career was "The Record," or sometimes, "The

Agenda." It would not help "The Record" to address the local branch of the Veterans of Foreign

Wars ("Leave them to the Leo Cafanio Regular Democratic Organization.") But for Malcolm to be on a panel at a meeting of the Bar of the City of New York was very much on "The Agenda."

Which prominent politicians should Malcolm cultivate: Robert Wagner, Rudolph Halley? Might an introduction to Governor Herbert Lehmann, through Fletcher Lambert, be of help?

"The Record," said Frank, also needed a grounding in statistics, in bills before the Congress, in

foreign policy and trade deficits. Frank fed Malcolm excerpts from The Congressional Record,

United Nations reports, Foreign Affairs. Clippings from six or eight national newspapers, foreign

publications in English, and the weekly news magazines were marked for useful passages. "Mining

for nuggets," Frank named this activity, a much more seductive pursuit than homework, which is

what it was. Later these nuggets were embedded in Malcolm's campaign speeches, given in his clear, masculine voice that retained the ardor of youth. Malcolm Wadsworth, more than one

newspaper editorial was to say, was the voice of a new generation.

Frank maintained that "The Agenda" needed supporters throughout Manhattan. These supporters

should be women as well as men; and women should run for political office as frequently as men.

(Frank agreed with Mrs. Roosevelt, who had spoken at a New York County Democratic workshop

soon after LEAD was formed. It was splendid of the Party to nominate women as candidates for

office, said she, but she did wish that they were not chosen to run only in districts where Democrats

traditionally lost.)

Despite open houses, local newspaper coverage and recruiting by telephone, it took many months

for voters in Town and Village to notice the bright new political alternative to the tired hacks in the

Leo Cafanio Club. LEAD's ambitious plans did not impress its uptown friends, either. Despite the

donation of the typewriter, Minna was apt to break into the hymn "Lead, Kindly Light" when her

young friends' political activities were mentioned. And where, Porter Delafield inquired, were the

other Democrats the Lower Eastside Democrats had associated with if the total membership of the

club was only thirty one?

Frank recruited George Fulton, now living on Irving Place, and six other boyhood friends of

Malcolm. But James Lippincott turned Frank down: "I'm through with politics, after the Wallace

campaign. Sorry, Frank. You really believe you can train these guys to take on the Tammany

tiger?" James gestured toward Malcolm, surrounded by their friends after the usual Sunday

morning touch football game. "They're the same bunch of half-assed kids I used to play ball with in Central Park twenty years ago. They're just bigger is all."

"Union organizing won't change the country, James," Frank said. James had joined the carpenters' union last month. "It sure as hell will result in better wages."

"Won't bring social justice to the Negroes. Unions are some of the most discriminatory outfits in the land."

"We're going to change that," said James.

"This is the third night we've stayed up past one working on your damn file cards," Sylvia complained. LEAD was challenging the Leo Cafanio Democratic Organization in the June primary.

Frank patted the four metal boxes. "Doesn't it give you a sense of power to have every Democrat in the district in here?"

"No. Last night we missed a screening of a new French film and tonight a Town Hall recital. I won't be at Vogue forever."

"Don't suppose you will."

Nothing sympathetic, such as: Will you miss it, Sylvia? She had tendered her resignation as of the end of September when the baby was due, almost eight years to the day since she started. Several editors suggested that she hire a nurse and stay on; a full editorship would be hers, in time. But for a variety of conflicting reasons, Sylvia chose to stay home with the baby. Her mother been forced always to work, often outside the home, leaving Sylvia with strangers, while everybody else's mother was there with milk and cookies when they got home from school. Or so she had decided to believe at the time.

Sylvia suspected that Frank was all on the side of housewife and motherhood, but was too smart to say so and push her in the opposite decision. She hoped to have more time for her poetry. Didn't newborns sleep twenty two hours a day? Sylvia asked: "What are you and Malcolm going to do if you lose the election?"

"Work hard for Adlai Stevenson, if he gets the nomination which I'm sure he will."

"And working for Stevenson leads to more file cards."

"Cheer up, Sylvia. Next week we start circulating the designating petitions, and that'll be more fun."

It wasn't. In the last three years too many people had been asked questions by polite young men in dark raincoats about their neighbors or acquaintances. Male LEADers had difficulty persuading tenants in the housing projects to open their doors to strangers, let alone listen to a well-reasoned argument and sign the petition that would put LEAD's slate on the primary ballot.

Frank's solution was to send along a pregnant woman. Who ever heard of the FBI sending out expectant moms to ask incriminating questions? Ever hear of a pregnant Commie trying to get you to sign something you might go to jail for? Now unlikely pairs of canvassers carried the petitions around the housing projects. Sylvia and Jack Gorman took on part of Stuyvesant Town while

Helen and Chris Reid canvassed six buildings in Peter Cooper Village. Other LEADers were also accompanied by women members. Each canvasser carried duplicate file cards on which to indicate a voter's response:

DA meant Doesn't Answer door or telephone

CV: Can't Vote - new to the district

RD: Regular Democrat, that is, supporter of the Leo Cafanio Club

S: Signed petition

NA: Not interested. Sunday nights the canvassers sat around the Wadsworths' dining room table bringing the master file

up to date. Frank's code did not cover all contingencies, so Sylvia and Helen often clipped

pencilled remarks to the duplicate card.

"Helen," Frank asked, "what does `Can't vote, going through the change' mean?"

"This middle-aged woman in Four Peter Cooper Road wouldn't let Chris through the door, but she beckoned me in. `You'll understand, dear, I'm going through the Change,' she said which somehow

prevented her from signing our petition."

"Going through what?"

"Menopause." Helen blushed. "I'm afraid I answered that I was seven months pregnant and not

only circulating petitions but running for office as an alternate to the State Convention. She said

nervously that she hoped it wouldn't hurt the baby."

"Every door opens to Helen," said Chris Reid. Chris and Helen made an odd team. Chris, who

looked about seventeen although he would start at General Theological Seminary in the fall, was a

small, compact speedboat; Helen, enormously pregnant, was a stately Spanish galleon.

Frank turned up another voter card. "Chris, what does `nyet' translate to?"

"`Get the hell out, you sonuva bitch before I call the cops.' This amiable citizen was watching TV

and swigging beer. I had an idea he'd hurl an empty bottle at us, so I hustled Helen out of there."

"What were you doing at First and 26th Street, anyway?"

Helen said, "It was my fault. We'd been twice through every building assigned to us in Peter

Cooper, so I borrowed some of Jesse's cards. He can't cover all the buildings to the north of us, and

we haven't any other members there."

The Wadsworths' phone rang. A pair of canvassers in the buildings by the East River had twenty

three new signatures. They'd bring the voter cards and petitions around to Helen in the morning. "Don't we have enough now?" Helen asked, after she had reported the good news.

"No. You gotta get twice as many signatures on the petitions you need by law."

"Why's that, Jesse?"

"The regular Dems will challenge them - wrong ink, illegible address; they'll try anything to get

them thrown out. You gotta understand, sweetheart," Jesse growled like Humphrey Bogart in a

gangster movie, "this bunch plays for keeps."

Three weeks before the primary election took place, the flyer, on which Frank and Sylvia had worked so hard, came from the printer's. The flyer included biographies of Malcolm and Marion

Gorman, the candidates for District Leader and Co-Leader, and set forth LEAD's lofty political goals. The flyer explained that the candidates themselves did not appear on the primary ballot; they were represented by slates of County Committeemen pledged to them. Separate slates on the ballot listed delegates and alternates to the Judicial, State, and National Conventions. (Almost every member of LEAD was a candidate.)

"Say, where did you get the dough-re-me for this thing?" A short, carrot-haired man at the farther

end of the fourth floor hall gestured with one of the LEAD flyers that Helen had just, with

difficulty, shoved half under an apartment door.

She was not frightened, only surprised. "Put it back, please."

"O.K., lady. And one of ours with it."

"You're not supposed to canvass in Peter Cooper buildings unless you are a resident."

"Yeah, I know. So whattaya doing here?"

"I live in the next building."

"I wish I had the bucks." Helen, whose back ached, whose feet hurt, and who had three more floors to leaflet, said in the pleasant but firm voice she used with Susanna: "Put it back."

The man folded a single piece of paper inside the LEAD flyer and slid it under the door. "Now, am

I a good boy?"

"Only if you don't come back." Helen decided he was harmless enough, even good-looking in an

Irish sort of way.

"Okay, I'm going. Patrick Lanahan at your service. You people have really made us sweat for the first time since I joined the Cafanio Club.... and you are?" He walked the length of the hall and stuck out his hand.

"I'm Helen Wadsworth," Helen said, shaking hands.

"So you're the Missis. Shit - pardon - I wouldn't make my wife do this." He gestured toward the flyers half-protruding from under the apartment doors. "Not in your condition." He rang for the elevator. "See you around, Helen."

"Hi, Helen." Patrick Lanahan came up to her at LEAD's street rally on 20th Street, between the two housing projects. He smiled down at Susanna in her stroller. "You people really spend, doncha? This rally must of cost a bundle, not to mention your sound truck every night for weeks."

Helen had gone out on the sound truck with Henry Moses, when there was no more accomplished

LEADer available. As she listened to her amplified voice bounce off the brick housing projects and the run-down buildings that surrounded them, she had wondered if anyone could disentangle her enormous blurred words.

Patrick flicked Helen's large campaign button VOTE WADSWORTH AND GORMAN with a manicured forefinger. "Who's staking you?" Startled at being touched, Helen drew back. "Oh, you mean money. We've all chipped in and our

parents made us a loan." (Helen's father, to be precise.)

"How swell to have a daddy and a mommy who can help out." Then, noticing that Susanna was

fussing, he went off to the Good Humor truck LEAD had rented for the rally and came back with

an ice cream stick. "Vanilla O.K.?"

Helen had to say, "Yes, that's very kind of you."

"She's a darlin' child, pretty like her mommy."

Helen, who felt 180 degrees away from pretty, said, "Thank you."

Frank Underhill ran up to them. "Hi, Pat." Frank turned to Helen: "Helen, Congressman

Kenneally's late. Malcolm has gone to telephone Washington and will you fill in for five minutes?"

"What on earth shall I say?"

Frank pulled out some file cards. "Give the same speech you made on the sound truck. I'll watch

Suse for you."

Frank and Jesse hauled her up onto the sound truck and adjusted the mike to her height. Helen saw upturned faces, among them Chris Reid's. She called down, "Here, Chris, catch," and tossed her encumbering pocketbook to him. Unfortunately, it contained the notes that Frank had just given her.

Helen took a deep breath, grasped the microphone, and began with a joke about her condition: a race between baby and LEAD's success at the polls next Tuesday. Now that the sound truck was stationary, her words rang out clearly and people laughed! She began to enjoy herself as she outlined LEAD's fight to wrest the Democratic Party from the control of the bosses and return it to the voters where it belonged; end patronage; support rent control; work for better schools and low- cost housing. "But I don't need to defend motherhood," she ended - more laughter - "and thank you all for listening."

Dismounting from the sound truck proved more difficult than getting on. Helen's legs felt shaky when she reached the pavement. Frank took her arm and, pushing the stroller with his left hand, led her to a bench inside Peter Cooper. It was hot and way past time for Susanna's nap, but Helen could not move. She stretched out her legs, leaned her head back against the bench, and dozed.

Police sirens on the street woke her and Susanna, as smudged with ice cream and soot as any slum child, asleep in her stroller. The Congressman must have finally arrived. The baby inside Helen began its afternoon calisthenics. Looking down at her ballooning maternity dress, Helen saw bumps thrust and disappear.

Patrick Lanahan sat down beside her. He offered her a cigarette.

"Thank you, but I don't smoke around children."

He put his pack of Luckies away. "Your club is going to lose."

"No, we're not," she said firmly.

"Helen that was a grand speech for the League of Lady Voters. It don't go over in this district.

Where were you people last winter when we couldn't get the city to plow out below Fourteenth

Street? Did you send help when Antonio Rafal's family lost their relief check? Didn't see any of your people at Seamus Looney's wake last month...."

"Mr. Lanahan, I want you to know that before we even started to circulate the designating petitions,

LEAD made a study of the entire Assembly District. We called it Three Kinds of Poverty" - and now it reminded Helen of her Freshman English textbook, Five Kinds of Writing, and seemed about as applicable. "Forget poverty. Jesse knows politics is good for business. And Marian's looking for court guardianships. but when Malcolm talks this `wonderful future for all New Yorkers' crap, pardon my language, what does he expect to get out of it?"

"How do you know what Malcolm says."

"Sh shoot, Helen, he and that jigaboo - did you rent him with the sound truck?"

"Henry Moses is a graduate student at Columbia University," Helen began indignantly.

"Malcolm and that jigaboo go by every evening when the wife finally gets the baby down. He's teething, and then blah blah BLAH yells good government outside the window."

"And I suppose the Cafanio Club's sound truck lulls your baby to sleep." Pretty childish, thought

Helen, but he deserved it! Then she felt a contraction and she lost the beginning of his next sentence.

"....gives the other kids something to watch while Mary makes their supper."

"How many children do you and your wife have?"

"Four and another coming. A big family's a help in politics."

"With that many children, I should think your wife would resent the time you put into politics."

"Nah. It took me seven years to get through Fordham Law School nights, and pass the bar. I got to make a living and politics means friends where it matters." He stood up. "Helen, here's the picture: next Tuesday LEAD's gonna lose. Leo will come around to your clubhouse after the polls close and make a deal. Then your people will tell reporters from the local papers how they and the victorious Leo Cafanio Regular Democratic Organization will fight shoulder to shoulder for

Stevenson and a Democratic victory in November. Fat chance Adlai's got against Ike, but that's another story. See you around." Through the spindly young trees of the housing project came Congressman Kenneally's booming

voice, "and I say Victory now, and Victory in November. All the Way With Adlai."

"It's going to be a disaster," Sylvia said. "They're fifteen minutes late already." They being

Rodman and Doris Stubbs, and Rodman's young cousin, Henry Moses, who was using LEAD's

campaign as research for a master's degree in government. "They don't look forward to lunch any

more than we do."

"It's Malcolm's way of thanking them," Frank said. "Rodman has helped to make LEAD known

throughout the Negro community."

"This luncheon is going to be as artificial as The Bridge Party in A Passage To India."

"No more so than the U. N. Hospitality nights you and Helen put on."

"And it must be awkward for Doris and Rodman to come here."

"Don't see why. A number of Negro families live in Stuyvesant Town."

But not in Peter Cooper, which was why Sylvia, rather than Helen, was stuck with the luncheon.

Sylvia said, "I'm embarrassed to have Doris see this apartment. But it's equally phony for us not to use the silver and good china even if they're things she can't afford."

"We can't either." Frank grinned, to take the sting out of a prickly topic.

"But what will we talk about? It's so much easier if it's a meeting."

"For God's sake, Sylvia! You've done dozens of interviews for Vogue. You know how to wring people dry."

"Will you stop riding me. I don't feel absolutely splendid just now and the rally yesterday was exhausting. For two cents I'd go to bed and let you cope with them!"

"Helen's pregnant and so is Doris. And may I remind you that you agreed to do this weeks ago?" Hearing voices outside in the hall, Sylvia lowered her voice. "Well, I was railroaded into it."

The door bell rang. It was Helen and Malcolm, with Helen's homemade cheese cake for dessert

and cold beer to go with the salad and cold cuts.

Henry Moses arrived next, with flowers for Sylvia.

Twenty minutes later, the Stubbses appeared. They had been kept late at St. Peter's Church by one

of Amos Depuy's lengthy sermons. Then they'd lost their way in Stuyvesant Town. "Don't you

find all that institutional brick somewhat depressing?" Rodman asked.

Everyone sat down to lunch. Doris seemed unimpressed by silver forks and knives, Waterford

vases, or the Royal Worcester dinner plates. She talked non-stop about her fourteen hour days,

working full time, going to graduate school nights, plus the endless meetings she and Rodman had

to attend at their church, his school, Hunter college, and various Harlem fraternal organizations.

How she was ever going to manage once the baby was born, she said laughing, she did not know.

Doris is full of herself, isn't she? Sylvia's mother spoke inside her head. Perhaps she has to be,

Sylvia argued. Instead of the shy, skinny maleable young mezzo-soprano, Doris had filled out, and

not just from pregnancy. She had become definite, almost commanding - as though by banishing

the person she had once been she need not feel the loss of her musical career. She did not defer,

even to her husband. Rodman Stubbs was in his early forties, bulky, well-dressed, and light- skinned; unlike Doris, he could have passed for white. No news article about Rodman ever failed to mention that he had been summa cum laude at Cornell and had won a Rhodes Scholarship.

Malcolm asked Doris about the possibility of her going on to get a doctorate. He quizzed Henry

Moses about his research paper. "Send us a carbon, if it's not too much trouble. It would be fun to find out just how rinky-dink LEAD looks to an impartial observer." Sylvia cleared the table, served the cheesecake and coffee, and tried not to yawn. How did Helen

manage to keep going? She was due in less than a week!

Frank asked Rodman about his new position as "the only Negro Principal of a high school in the

five Boroughs," after some years as the principal of an elementary school in the Bronx.

"Well, Frank, here's what `only' works out to. Every reporter in town calls me when they need a

quote about race relations from `a leading Negro educator.' I usually manage to say something

harmless....Malcolm, I'm curious. It's unusual for someone of your class to stoop to politics. What

do you hope to accomplish?"

"Let's get me elected to office, first." Malcolm smiled. "But, to answer your question, my goals

are the same as yours: better educational opportunities for everyone; more jobs; adequate housing;

and a more equable system of law in fact as well as theory." Malcolm beamed: "And along the

way I'll depend upon you and Doris and Henry to set me straight about what is actually happening."

He spread his hands, palms out, in welcome. "It'll be a grand alliance."

Henry Moses said quietly, "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours?"

Malcolm laughed. "That's politics in a nutshell, Henry. It's like Frank's definition of power - the wherewithal to get things done."

Then the men began discussing the Dodgers' chances for the pennant this year.

"Did you put Malcolm up to that `grand alliance' bit?" Sylvia asked, as she and Frank did the dishes.

"Nope. Once he's pointed in the right direction you don't have to tell him what to say."

"But you provided the opportunity: it was your idea, not Malcolm's, to have them to lunch."

Frank admitted that it was.

"We lost by 184 votes." Malcolm smelled strongly of scotch as he bent down to kiss Helen. "The

nurses weren't going to let me in this late, but I said that I'd just lost an election."

"184. That's better than Frank's estimated figure."

"Jesse carried his election district and so did Frank. We'll get a better sense of Cafanio's organization when we go to the County Committee meeting. Leo turned up at our club house after the polls closed; said we should go to the meeting together....How are you, darling?"

"Groggy. He weighed nine pounds."

"Malcolm Carey Wadsworth, Junior." Malcolm Senior reverently touched the blossom of the baby's right fist. "Colum" was what they had decided to call the baby, if it was a boy, to avoid the tiresome "junior" business.

Boys Are Best, it seemed. Since Colum's birth, shortlypo before noon, flowers and telegrams had flooded in. "You're going to have to explain to Susanna. She wanted a sister."

"She'll get one, sooner or later."

Who had said, A large family is good for one's political future? Helen felt too exhausted to make the effort to remember.

Chapter Ten

June, 1985

James has been out of town, and out of touch with New York politics, but he wonders why a

political has-been like retired Judge Kenneally was selected to speak at Helen's service.

Kenneally has only reached 1952: "The Republicans carried the national election, as we all

remember, but on the local level Malcolm and Helen, together with the rest of the stalwart Lower

Eastside Associated Democrats, licked their wounds and came back to capture the leadership of

their District from the regular Tammany club a year later...."

No speech should last more than five minutes, Rose used to say. Why put your audience to sleep?

Make them wish you'd said more. Rose at the microphone was a thing of pyrotechnical delight; the

pinwheels of her pungent speech burst in your mind's ear long after she had finished. In another era

she would have been a Congresswoman. Rose wielded power superbly. She persuaded people to

do what they didn't want to do and like, as well as accept it. Malcolm has the knack, like breathing.

Not James. Too often he's played the righteous bully, or had waffled where he should have led.

"James, you're too goddamn didactive, if that's the fancy word for getting people's backs up," said

Rose.

James still misses her.

1953

The first years of their marriage James and Rose avoided stuffy, Upper East Side cocktail-parties and dinners. The younger Wadsworths, the Underhills, George Fulton and the rest regularly issued invitations to James and Rose which they regularly declined. They did go to dinner once or twice a month at James's parents. Occasionally James coaxed Rosie into attending one of Minna's

musicales.

Each morning James brought Rose her coffee in bed ("hot as hell and sweet as sin," as Emma

Goldman described the coffee she brewed for Big Bill Haywood.) James and Rose, after work,

would go out to eat, to the movies or go dancing. Weekends they visited one or another of Rosie's

many friends. James discovered himself in the third person as "Rosie's goy." He was a puzzlement

- this Harvard graduate who looked like a hick from upstate. But James's politics were copacetic,

he played jazz piano, washed dishes for the wives, and taught the sons to catch a soft ball. The few

nights they stayed home, James had another go at Dostoyevsky while he waited for Rose to do

whatever women did in the bathroom before they allowed you to make love to them.

Then Rose, a chronic insomniac, switched to tea, and James switched jobs once again. He was fed

to the gills with the conservative, discriminatory union hierarchy he had to deal with. A friend

loaned him Saul Alinsky's Reveille for Radicals. James wrote to the author in Chicago asking for

the name of an Alinsky disciple in New York who would train James in the techniques of

community organizing. Community organizing, as invented by Alinsky, meant working with

people who had believed themselves powerless to combat companies, bosses, banks, and the

indifference of the local government. The organizer showed the people how to fight and win their

battles. Alinsky's tactics, clever, confrontational, and sometimes crude - like dropping garbage on the steps of the Chicago City Hall - had helped the poor and hopeless achieve a place in the sun.

The third and fourth years of James's marriage were dominated by Rose's involvement in the

Rosenberg Case, fund-raising for the defense. Rose also continued to work at the ILGWU full

time. She had never read Alice in Wonderland, but James took to calling Rosie the Red Queen who

had to run harder and harder just to stay in place. Now it was James who took his shirts and underwear and her blouses and wash dresses to the local Chinese laundry; James who batted clean-

up on the neglected contents of the "icebox," as Rose still called the refrigerator.

She couldn't comprehend James's bouts of compulsive cleaning. (His mother would have been

flabbergasted). "James, the bathroom looks like a goddamn operating room - I can't find my diaphragm." "James, where's the cream cheese?" "It went moldy." "So cut the green stuff out."

Once when James was vacuuming Rose remarked: "You add up the hours you don't make with the vacuum cleaner and you get a second whole life."

These harried days, James tried to make life sweeter for her. But when he brought roses home for the fourth or fifth time, Rosie told him not to bother.

"I thought all women loved flowers."

"I'm not `all women.'"

"You are to me. Besides, I like giving you presents."

"Anything I need, I can buy."

"Not for your own birthday and" - Christmas, he was going to add; but Christmas could not be smuggled in, even as a recent invention of Santa Claus. "Rosie, nobody buys himself birthday gifts."

"Well, pardon me." She grinned. She did not need to remind him that she earned more money than he did.

James persevered. He gave Rose a round gold bracelet for their first wedding anniversary. She said she loved it. The next year he gave her another gold bracelet. "You think I'm a gypsy, or something?" Back went the bracelet; back went the lingerie from Saks, back went the Chanel #5 perfume: "It's what your lady friends on the East Side smell of." (She meant Helen.) James bought Rose a pressure cooker and a Waring Blender, but most nights she was too tired to cook, and he served up hamburger or franks.

"James, you want to do something for me, give me a back rub." Or type a letter to the Times and

Rose's latest speech. James was a quick, accurate typist but typing, unlike back rubs, rarely led to anything cosier.

James's maternal grandmother died, leaving each of the Lippincott boys a legacy. James wanted to use part of it to take Rosie to Florida. She was still coughing from a cold she'd caught weeks before.

"Palm Beach hotels don't take Jews and I won't use your name to get in. Miami Beach? I'll run into old geezers in the rag trade I've fought for years." Never mind vacations. James should send his legacy to the Rosenberg Defense Fund. "You shot your wad over Alger Hiss? One injustice enough for you? Jamie, these two people are going to die."

James contributed to the Rosenberg Defense Fund, twice. Then, acting like the head of a family he hoped, Rose willing, some day to be, he entrusted the rest of his legacy to a Harvard classmate now working on Wall Street. James's friend put the remaining $5,000 into IBM.

In March of 1953, Rose surprised James by consenting to attend one of the Wadsworths' U.N. dinner parties.

Minna Delafield had put Helen and Sylvia in touch with the U.N. Hospitality Committee, which arranged parties for the junior members of the permanent delegations to the United Nations. On an agreed-upon night, the volunteer hostess was sent three or four foreign couples to meet an equal number of their American contemporaries. Minna, who had servants, couldn't understand why everyone in New York didn't leap at the chance to broaden their knowledge of other countries. The night James and Rose were expected, Helen was working out the seating plan when her mother telephoned. Helen explained that it was U.N. night and she couldn't talk very long...

"What are you giving them for dinner?"

"A chicken recipe Sylvia invented." Helen had assembled the casseroles last night after the children had been put to bed: a base of diced cooked chicken with spaghetti, water chestnuts, and mushrooms (the mushrooms had turned the sauce a disappointing grey). "What makes it new are the toasted almonds on top. We're also having French bread, salad, dessert and coffee. And drinks first, of course."

"Sounds dreadfully complicated. You must be exhausted, dear."

"No, just a little rushed. I have to get dressed and Malcolm isn't home yet to help with the children."

"Who's coming tonight?"

"Turks, French, Italians - she's in the Italian House of Deputies and is here on a visit. Sylvia and

Frank, James Lippincott and his wife...Mother, I have to run. I'll write you all about it tomorrow."

Helen changed Colum and put him down for the night. Susanna watched television in the bedroom while Helen got dressed. Helen felt guiltily that she should be reading to Suse instead of entertaining strangers who were far from entertaining, with their statements about Who They Were and What Their Countries Stood For. The wives stood about silently. No doubt they were exhausted, poor things: their husbands came home each day for lunch as well as dinner!

Frank insisted that these U. N. dinner parties were worth the trouble. It was another way, besides reading Le Monde and The Manchester Guardian, to mine nuggets from abroad. From these guests

Malcolm learned about the war-time factions in each country, the courage of the Partisans, the recovery of each shattered nation once peace was declared. (The most interesting conversations took place after dinner in the living room among the men; the ladies having retired to Helen's - or

Sylvia's - bedroom for coffee.)

As Helen slipped on a long, wine-colored skirt, a pale grey blouse and the garnet jewelry her father had given her for her 18th birthday, she tried to work up topics for the solemn evening ahead. She brushed her hair and squirted herself with Chanel #5 toilet water for courage.

The the door bell rang, fifteen minutes early. Helen ran to answer it. Outside stood the first foreign couple.

"Good evening, Mrs. Wadsworth," said the dark young man, brushing Helen's startled right hand with his mustache. He announced himself as the Turkish under-something and then asked Helen's permission to allow him to present his wife."

Helen entreated them, without success, to move from the front door into the living room, away from the open kitchen door and a view of the usual chaos.

The door bell chimed. Frank and Sylvia arrived to rescue her. Sylvia carried the coats back to

Helen and Malcolm's bedroom. Frank made drinks for the Turks (orange juice), and then the

French couple, who brand-named the most expensive Scotch the Wadsworths' had on hand. The

Italians were not so lucky; they politely sipped Helen's cooking vermouth. Helen nodded to Sylvia to hold the fort, and excused herself to finish up in the kitchen.

Sylvia spoke in French to the French couple; the Turkish wife sulked. Was French preferable to dead silence, Sylvia wondered as she turned to the Italian woman to ask about her country's political parties, leaving the French woman glowering because attention was no longer being paid to her. In the kitchen Helen sliced little loaves of Pepperidge Farm French bread, smearing each one in

turn with garlic butter. She sliced her forefinger on the last loaf, and rushed to answer the door bell

with her hand muffled in a dish towel.

It was James; Rosie would be along as soon as she could. Helen sent him for Band-Aides, and he returned to bandage the cut just as Malcolm opened the front door.

Malcolm, who had come straight from his office, appeared far cleaner, shined, pressed, and on top of the evening than did James who had stopped home to shower and shave. (Rosie would say he had done it for Helen.) Mally's glowing and easeful manner was highlighted by the dark, unsmiling, and much shorter guests surrounding him. Was it ingrained noblesse oblige that empowered Malcolm effortlessly to remember the names of the six strangers, tags of their biographies, and facts about the cities they came from? Why hadn't James, gifted with the same background and education, remembered the contents of the list from the U.N. Hospitality

Committee that Helen had copied and sent to him?. Did James begrudge Mally his faultless memory and princely ease? Oddly enough, no; not even Helen. For James had Rosie.

When Malcolm had exhausted his information an awkward pause occurred. The eleven of them stood on Helen's oriental rug, almost close enough to make a football huddle. No, the party had become more like basketball practise, James decided, as Malcolm waved his guests into seats, and each in turn spoke, a verbal free throw.

The Frenchwoman mentioned that she had seen Greta Garbo shopping in Bloomingdale's department store. The Turkish mission complained about the high cost of food in the "States" - but it turned out it was their food that was costly, because it had to be imported. But, the Turkish lady added, the children liked eating at the Automat because of the sandwiches one reached for behind glass drawers. "What else do you like about New York?" Malcolm asked.

The Frenchwoman mentioned the shopping - but the dirt, the rudeness one encountered as one went about the city!

"Is it worse than Paris?" James asked combatively.

"You 'ave been to Paris?"

"Several times before the war."

"So few Americans 'ave been to Europe; one is always surprised."

That topic drained, Helen asked if anyone had seen the Arthur Miller play. Play? Ah - theatre.

No one had visited The Crucible, it seemed, or any of the musicals on Broadway. Music? The

Frenchman had been taken to hear jazz on 52nd Street and at Cafe Society downtown. Jazz was better in Paris, he added, where it was taken seriously.

Twice Malcolm refilled the glasses. At last Helen went to heat up the bread and toss the salad.

Where was Rose? Would it be rude to start dinner without her? Helen asked Sylvia, who had followed her in to the kitchen to help. "Not at all," said Sylvia, dreading the wrath of her baby sitter if she were late.

Helen had just seated her guests when the doorbell rang. It was Rose: "I had to leave in the middle of the meeting," said Rose, taking her place at the table in her coat. "I'm frozen. At eight o'clock, who can get a cab? I had to walk to Second Avenue and grab a bus."

Malcolm made the introductions. Helen passed plates of food which cooled as the guests waited politely for everyone to be served. Frank poured the wine, and with wine conversation broke out, here and there.

The Frenchman pounded Sylvia with questions, more, she surmised, to keep her from talking than from any intrinsic thirst for knowledge. What was handball? How did Wall Street get its name? And would she explain, please, about the word egg; Americans employed it in such extraordinary

ways. For example, Mr. Stevenson with his "Eggheads of the world unite, you have nothing to lose

but your yolks." It was meant as praise to call a man a good egg, was it not? But "egg on the

face," implied that a faux pas had been committed. And what was this drink called egg cream?

"It's a soda, a beverage," Rose, who sat on his left, butted in. "It'll fool you. It doesn't have egg and

it doesn't have cream."

While the Frenchman pondered this in silence, Sylvia listened to Malcolm discuss with the

Frenchwoman books Sylvia could swear Malcolm had not read by authors she was amazed he had heard of. Was Jean Paul Sartre as highly regarded in Paris as the American press reported? What did Madame think of Camus?

Unable to supply the name of a reliable nurse to the Turkish wife, James had turned to ask the

Italian woman about Italian trade unions when he heard Rosie's voice rise above all others:

"....so how can you, a Frenchman, condemn the Rosenbergs?"

The Frenchman spoke as though to the press: "The American legal process is an internal matter,

and not a subject for comment by the French Delegation to the United Nations."

"But the French House of Deputies asked our government for clemency for the Rosenbergs." Rose

shucked off her coat. "Listen, if the Congress and the President won't do a f- a damn thing, maybe

the force of world opinion will change their minds."

Helen noted that the Frenchman declined the bread with a shudder, whether for Rose's strident

voice or the loaf's strange pinkish tinge. "I don't know what anyone can do at this point," Helen

said, hoping to deflect Rose to other subjects.

"I agree. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg will be put to death because they're Jews, because he

belonged to the Communist Party, because her lousy brother and sister-in-law fingered them, and because Americans got to have someone to hate now Hitler's dead. Never mind it was Jews the

Nazis murdered. Never mind Ethel was held eight months in the Women's House of Detention

before charges were made against her; or they keep her in solitary at Sing Sing. Never mind

Eisenhower denied our Petition for Clemency...."

"Hold on, Rose. No need to give up yet." Malcolm spoke (Helen was proud of him) with his usual

seamless good humor. "Once the Court of Appeals stayed execution in February, the Rosenbergs

stand a chance. Let's wait while the Supreme Court considers the Defense's Petition for Review

before we...."

"We wait around; they'll die. Harry Gold got prison. Morton Sobell sentenced to prison. But for

the Rosenbergs: execution."

"Rose, I'm sure everyone here feels badly, but...."

"Feel badly? What about a good hate against the Justice Department? Give it a try, Helen. Try

hating Judge Kaufman who passed sentence on them to prove his own loyalty; or Ike, who should

of stopped his golf game and listened to the facts."

The heads of the six foreign guests turned back and forth, as if at a tennis match between Rose and

the Wadsworths.

"Malcolm and I have sent money - more money than we can afford - to the National Committee to

Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs."

"Money!" Rose made a thumbs-down gesture. "Made you feel swell, didn't it? Sure we need it but it's gonna take more than money. We need letters, thousands of letters to the Congress and the

President, we need full-page newspaper ads, we need people to picket and action by unions and statements from professional associations like the A.B.A. and from prominent citizens. People in other countries beside France have protested the death sentence. What's wrong with Americans?" Helen nodded towards Sylvia to start clearing and went to deal with the dessert. As she squirted

whipped cream over the chocolate pudding and herself, she heard Malcolm say: "Whatever

happens, the Rosenbergs have found their Joan of Arc. Rose, you're wonderful." And then Helen

heard him ask the foreigners how much they knew about baseball, now the season was about to

start. No question in Helen's mind about just who was wonderful.

After dinner the women followed Helen into the Wadsworths' bedroom "to drink cold coffee out of

thimbles," Rose described it to James, later. "They talked about giving birth in the different

countries and whether to breast feed or use the bottle. The Italian woman noticed I was silent and

asked if I had any children." "What did you say?" James felt a sudden rush of hope. "I said I

didn't want to bring a child into this lousy world. Then the French bitch sneered to Sylvia in French

that one would suppose `Les Juifs' would set about breeding like rabbits to replicate their kind.

`That kind of remark proves my point,' said I....James, how come you didn't put in your two cents

about the Rosenbergs?" James grinned, "I didn't need to."

Walking back to Stuyvesant Town after they had helped with the dishes, Sylvia asked Frank why

he hadn't intervened.

"Two reasons. I knew Malcolm would, and I had nothing to say. We thrashed out the issue in

Executive Meeting last week. Jesse insisted that LEAD publicly call for a change of venue and a

different judge to retry the Rosenberg case."

"That's why you didn't get home until 1:20."

"My point was that LEAD's immediate objective was to win the District Leadership. It's ridiculous

for a green group like ours to make statements on large issues, yet. As individual members, by all

means let's speak out, sign letters to the Times, or join the Rosenbergs' Defense Committee. "Malcolm agreed with me and he calmed Jesse down, as well. He said,`We're all lawyers here, except Jesse, who knows more law than the rest of us put together. Let's prepare a statement, citing the cases used to send Harry Gold and Morton Sobell to jail, and questioning the death penalty for the Rosenbergs for the same crime. Then when we become the elected Democratic Party organization in this district, we'll release it to more effect.'"

"All the same, didn't you think Rose exceeded the limits of hospitality?"

"No. Time `them furriners' heard from a different sort of American than our officials at the U. N."

"Her tactics weren't successful." Sylvia repeated the Frenchwoman's callous remark. "I wanted to ask, `I'm half Jewish, so should I have half that number of children?" But I only thought of it when we were in the elevator."

The Frenchwoman's slur reminded Helen unpleasantly of boys at Harvard who referred to Kirkland

House as "Kikeland House," because most of the few Jews at Harvard were residents there. She telephoned Rose the next day to apologize. Helen mentioned it again to James at a Lippincott family funeral. Months later at Minna's annual Christmas party Helen was still worrying the incident: "And not only did the Frenchwoman seem puzzled when I explained that in America we don't speak disparagingly of other races and religions - or, at least, we try not to - the other two women didn't grasp why it was so, well, demeaning, either."

"It hurt you more than it did Rosie. It was the lack of compassion shown for the Rosenbergs that infuriated her." James waited for Helen to say something regretful about the Rosenbergs' execution last June. Helen disappointed him by switching into her hostessy mode: "Don't you love the wonderful fuss

Minna makes over Christmas?" She makes everyone happy." Helen pointed to little Colum sitting

on the floor demolishing red tissue paper.

About Minna's Christmases no one could disagree. She put up her decorations on St. Nicholas

Day, and they remained through Twelfth Night. Minna surrounded the doors and windows and

even the mirrors with ropes of pine. Huge vases held balsam boughs and red carnations. Minna's

carved German creche ("A grown woman playing dolls," Rosie remarked last week, at one of

Minna's musicales) was surrounded by a menagerie of wooden sheep and cattle and camels. The

ten-foot tree was trimmed with elaborate glass and horsehair Bohemian birds, angels' hair, candy

canes, and real candles. Beneath it a pile of presents wrapped in green and red spilled out onto the

rug.

"Where is Rose this afternoon?" Helen asked, perhaps to make amends.

"Sundays she always spends with her mother."

"Jolly, while I have you...."

(Odd expression: did she have him? Rose believed that Helen did to the extent of always exacting his cooperation.)

"Did you get my letter about the tutoring program at St. Peter's Church, in the Bronx?"

James had; and had no intention of volunteering. He sidestepped with: "How did you get mixed up in it?"

"Through the Protestant Episcopal Church. I became a communicant so the - mostly to please

Mrs. Wadsworth but also so our children would have parents of the same faith. (Dad understands

perfectly, but my mother - well, that's another story.) Once I had been confirmed, I was asked to take a church- women's training course given by the diocese. It was about the most exciting thing

I've ever done."

"Exciting?" As a boy of fourteen, James had been confirmed. Decorous, formal, or possibly consoling were the adjectives that described the Episcopal Church he'd been forced to frequent.

Colum began to whine. Helen scooped him off the floor and held him in her arms as she talked. "I don't mean the actual course. It was quite silly. What Episcopal churchwomen mostly do is pick up after the clergy." Helen smiled fondly. "Thank goodness Malcolm didn't realize his mother's ambition for him, or I'd be picking up after him professionally, as well as at home. The course instructed us how to take care of vestments and how to lay out the Communion vessels for the officiating minister. We were given little cardboard boxes to fill with coins in gratitude for answered prayers. But what about the poor? I kept asking. There are committees for that, I was told, and missions.

"During the course we were also taken to visit churches. The last one was St. Peter's - the one I wrote you about. The minister there, the Rev. Amos Depuy, is a Negro and so are his two assistants, and poor children are ministered to with this all day tutoring program. I have no business taking on another project what with LEAD, and the Radcliffe Club, and Cancer Care, and the League of Women Voters, but somehow I've begun to recruit tutors. You know you're in a different world up there. One of the women told me, "Helen, you sure do have a funny accent. I didn't think I still sounded as though I came from Boston."

James smiled, think how lovely she was in her enthusiasm, and how the comment about accent was related to class, not city of origin. Perhaps the many things Helen didn't know made her more invincible.

"So Jolly, please consider it. Men are so much more effective with boys. James was saved from answering by Minna calling out: "It's time to light the candles. Jolly, we need you at the piano."

Minna lit the wax candles one by one (Porter standing by, as he did every year, scowling, armed with a bucket of water and a box of sand). James played "Good King Wenceslaus." Abbott Chase sang the role of the king and a young Fulton was the page. James played all the verses of "The

Holly and the Ivy," "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," and "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella" -

Minna's voice very strong here. Then "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and "Minuit Chretien," as

Minna snuffed out the dangerously guttering candles and the lamps were turned back on.

James looked at his watch. He had been due at his mother-in-law's half an hour ago. He said goodbye to his parents and to Porter and Minna. "Too bad Rose couldn't be here," Minna said, as she said every Christmas party. "Please send her our best."

James wished the Lippincotts and their small son, a replica of Frank, Merry Christmas. Wouldn't it be something, (the holiday atmosphere was making him sentimental) thought James, to look at your young self in a child? Near the door to the hall Malcolm and Helen were inserting Susanna and

Colum into boots and snowsuits. "Merry Christmas, Jolly," Malcolm said. Helen added, "and do give our very best to Rose."

What did best mean, for Christ's sake? What was the matter with love? James remembered their faces when Rose had risen, guns blazing, to defend the Rosenbergs. Malcolm and Helen's expressions had conveyed: not at a dinner party, not in good taste, at all.

Not my kind of people, James decided (as he usually did when he left one of these parties).

Outside it was snowing. James did not own a hat. His shoes had holes; he remembered the shoe- sole emblem Stevenson supporters had worn in their lapels last year. Having a hole in his shoe was meant to transform the intellectual candidate into just folks. Didn't work. James's two worlds didn't work. (Where was the train?) James groaned; the next hours looked bleak. Mrs.

Katzenbaum would greet his propitiatory offering, a huge Whitman Sampler, with "I've never cared

for candy." Rose would be in a foul mood, having had her weekly fight with her mother. "Why

don't you quit work, Rose; let him support you for a change? Why don't you give me a

grandchild?" And here Mrs. K. and her son-in-law thought as one.

James reflected on Mrs. K.'s heroic life as he waited for the Uptown Express. (Christ, it was cold down here!) Left a widow at the age of twenty four with a child to support, Mrs. Katzenbaum went to work as a book-keeper for a clothing store in the Bronx. The store had moved three times since then but she worked there still part-time, so as not to be a burden on Rose; so as not to be bored, said Rosie.

Leaving the Grand Concourse several hours later with the wife of his choice, James speculated on the cause of the metamorphosis of Mrs. K. She had pulled out all stops, beginning with gefulte fish

and ending with knishes stuffed with apples and raisins. She ate three chocolates from the

Whitman's Sampler. Noticing the holes in his shoes, she told Rose to take better care of him.

James didn't want to push it, but it appeared that Mrs. K., four years late, had finally bestowed her

blessing.

When they came in from the bleak midwinter night to their own apartment on West 106th Street,

Rosie said with her customary directness: "Let's start a baby tonight. But if it's a girl, we're not

calling her Helen, okay?"

Philip Kenneally delivers his last cliche and slowly descends from the pulpit. The All Saints

Choral Society rises to sing two more excerpts from the Brahms Requiem.

Chapter Eleven

May, 1954

"....and sorry to you, too, you little toad." Sylvia slammed down the phone; she'd been ranting to dead air, anyway. Rather than release Stevie from his crib or clean up the kitchen - though Abbott was due for cocktails the end of the afternoon - she rushed to enter this latest indignity in her journal. These days Sylvia's journals were black with diatribes. On Monday: "Something's got to give. I feel in pieces, sick and apprehensive." Steve, who could dismantle a room in five minutes when he wasn't scarring the furniture with his tricycle, had boosted himself up on a sill of an open window sill with a six floor drop below. Sylvia had immediately ordered bars installed, "But you cannot erect bars everywhere."

One day off a week was all she had, when she and Helen pooled their children under the aegis of

Helen's sitter. These Wednesdays were organized to cover as much ground as possible in eight sitter hours without going to the expense of a taxi. Sylvia and Helen did the art galleries (free admittance), took in a half-price matinee or movie; they tried never to talk about their children.

Owing to a recent purchase of an antique mirror, Sylvia could not afford more day time help, although Frank made her hire sitters for LEAD meetings and other political chores. "When press agents refuse to remember you," Sylvia wrote in her journal, "you know you're washed up, dead at twenty nine." Thirty next year. Thirty lay beyond the range of the Yale

Younger Poets, not that they'd shown interest in her at twenty eight. Eighteen publishers had returned her collection of poems. "Sensitive," "Wry wit," and "Polished," were the most frequent flowers in the skimpy bouquets of praise accompanying rejection. But the publishers "could not afford to take a chance on an untried poet." Untried? She'd been writing poetry for fifteen years!

Sylvia's agent no longer handled verse, although she found Sylvia assignments for boring service articles in the women's magazines.

"Not dead, invisible is what I've become. When I told Frank how I felt he asked unhelpfully how I planned to make myself visible once more. I said I had to have something to look forward to.

Helen and Malcolm are going abroad, once the Primary is over - their third trip in four years! And

I have never been out of this country!" Exclamation marks like little daggers increased with each page, but did nothing to slay the dragon.

Sylvia shut the journal and went to dress for Abbott's visit. She detested the way she'd aged: dry, not dewy; anxious, not poised. Her clothes were last year's if not the year before that. Despite the

1810 mirror, the apartment's furnishings depressed her, particularly the huge club chair. It had been bought because husbands must have chairs in which to read the evening paper, smoke their pipes, and give their wives the benefit of their thoughts.

The damn chair choked the living room, its expensive upholstery slipcovered in expensive green and white English chintz to match the second-hand couch's slipcover and the curtains. In front of the couch stood a mahogany, drop leaf, brass-hinged coffee table. On it were displayed the current issues of Vogue, Fortune, and The New Yorker, a silver Ronson table lighter and a silver cigarette box, a wedding present from Vogue editors. Sylvia enveloped herself in a huge apron and went into Stevie who'd been rattling the bars of his

crib for half an hour. She fed him, bathed him, dressed him in his Doctor Denton pajamas, and was

about to tackle the mess in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. She almost tripped over Stephen,

who came riding out on his tricycle to see who it was.

"Sorry to be so late, my dear, but I had the devil's own time escaping from Gramercy Park." Abbott

presented Sylvia with a wrapped triangle of anemones, her favorite flowers, and an expensive bottle

of gin.

"Loverly, darling, thank you - as in `Gin was mother's milk to `er.' Oh, Stevie, don't." Steve was preparing another assault on their legs. "He won't run you down, if you're sitting." She waved

Abbott into Frank's club chair. "Do you trust me to make the martinis?"

"Yes, straight up, with an olive. And, please, dear, don't do six other things first. I badly need restoring." Abbott was relieved to see Steve follow his mother into the kitchen.

Abbott's client, a faded old queen, had perversely decided to postpone a decision on the Piranesis; had, indeed, questioned Abbott's credentials as an art dealer. Abbott had managed to leave without erupting, but exerting so much self control had been tiresome to the extreme. Pausing beside

George Bellows' house two blocks to the south had restored Abbott's equanimity. As a child, and possible model, Abbott had been taken to call on the artist. Every room of the house and studio remained in Abbott's retentive visual memory, although the sketches Bellows had made of him that day had long since disappeared.

On First Avenue Abbott shopped for Beefeater gin and Sylvia's flowers. He tormented the owner of the flower shop by picking one by one the white blossoms, the bright reds and deep purples while rejecting the insipid lavender blooms. Abbott became lost, as always, in the brick maze of Stuyvesant Town, its prison-like atmosphere not dispelled by the single-jet fountains. Abbott imagined gigantic little boys pissing into the sky.

Sylvia came back with his drink. Gratefully Abbott took a sip and then another. Steve had followed, on foot, and was demanding something in an unknown language.

"Abbott, would you read to him so I can arrange your flowers?" Before he could answer, she'd dumped the child and a pile of children's books into his lap.

Of the genus tot, Abbott preferred the female variety. This small male thrashed restlessly, growling

"Down, down, down."

Hastily Abbott opened a book and began reading aloud:

"`James James, Morrison Morrison, Wetherby, George, Dupree/ Took great care of his mother, though he was only three.'"

Stephen ceased his bucking, lulled perhaps by Abbott's bass-baritone voice. Abbott had taken

Stephen down to the Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace, and Half Way up the Stairs, when Sylvia returned with a Waterford vase filled with the anemones, and her own martini.

Just as she sat down, the telephone rang. "Excuse me." Sylvia picked up her drink and went to take it on the bedroom extension. Abbott continued reading until, scenting disaster, he plucked the sleepy child off his lap. Tucking Stephen awkwardly under his left arm, Abbott spread cocktail napkins on the couch with his right hand and laid the tot down to sleep.

The kitchen was in its usual state of frowst. Abbott fixed himself another drink, refilled the ice cube trays, emptied a jar of salted peanuts into a Waterford dish that matched the vase (his wedding presents to Sylvia), and returned to the living room. Sylvia was still on the telephone. One of the importunate half-sisters calling from San Diego? Francis Underhill kept late at his office? The child burrowed toward the back of the couch, releasing an ammonitic smell. At last Sylvia returned, looking put-upon.

"Who kept you from me so long?" he asked. "Not that it is any of my business."

"Marian Gorman about Tuesday's LEAD meeting....Oh, God! Steve didn't pee on your beautiful trousers, did he?"

"No, dear; and I trust I saved your couch from such a fate."

"Thank you." Mortified, Sylvia lifted the child into her arms and took him off for a diaper change and bed.

Febrile, our Sylvia, thought Abbott, disposing of the damp cocktail napkins. Needs a little spoiling.

He didn't care for the deep line between her eyebrows or the new severe butch haircut. Her dark hair should be soft around that bewitching small face."

"God, how you'd hate LEAD meetings; not that you'd be caught dead at one," Sylvia commented when she came back. "How I wish an American Tory Party existed for you to join." Sylvia sank down on the couch; grown-ups time, at last. "Tuesday's meeting dragged on past one. Malcolm's a candidate for State Assembly. Every single member of our club except me knows best how to run his campaign. Jesse Caplan talked twenty-seven minutes straight - I timed him. The others were nearly as windy. And after that, Frank still had to give his report on the Fair Housing Clinic LEAD runs on 14th Street."

"Is that where Francis is tonight?"

"Oh, God, let me think. It's not LEAD, and he's not at his office. I suppose so, and Malcolm with him. Did I say...."

The telephone could no longer be ignored. Ten minutes later Sylvia emerged from the bedroom with an empty glass. "That was George

Fulton. He couldn't get through to the Housing Clinic. I had to take down a long, complicated message. Please, Abbott, a refill before I fade away?"

"Are you sure, dear? I don't want a weeping woman on my hands."

"That must refer to the earful I gave you last week. Don't worry. There won't be any more

interruptions. I took the phone in the hall off the hook."

Sylvia settled herself on the couch and attempted to appear graciously at home. Abbott brought her

fresh drink, placed it on a glass and silver coaster, and passed her the bowl of nuts.

He raised his glass: "Cheers."

"Cheers. Abbott? Do you ever wonder how kings feel after they abdicate? To be a commoner is

so boring. This afternoon a press agent, that low form of life, made a point of not remembering my

name when I called him to buy house seats. Can you believe that once upon a time I took success

for granted? I knew that I'd arrive; and when I did, I'd be on balance, respected, listened-to,

complete."

"You could always go back to work, Sylvia. Hire a nanny or whatever Vogue editors who make

the mistake of having babies do."

Tears started out of her eyes. "No, I don't want - it's much too late. Anyway, I've lost the feel for

fashion copy." She blew her nose, took a drink. "It's my whole life I'm talking about, Abbott, not

magazines. I still believe that some day there will be red roses in perfect bloom and squabs and

strawberries out of season and sixth row seats at the ballet."

"Every day?" Abbott asked playfully. "I'm afraid I don't quite follow you."

"How could you when it's a personal metaphor for happiness, based on a rich child's birthday party

I went to twenty years ago." Sylvia blew her nose. "No, I don't long to be back at Vogue, but I miss the buzz of attention and the lunches and being seen with quite famous people. A year ago - two years ago - I was young enough and vain enough to believe I was liked for myself, not merely as the magazine's representative. Maybe I was; I'll never know. I don't call the friends I made, the writers and actors, musicians and artists, because I'm too damn depressed. Yet I still read three newspapers a day, trying to stay on top of New York - a sexual metaphor that doesn't quite work in this context....Where are you going? You're leaving! I don't blame you; I've bored you beyond endurance."

"I'm going to the bathroom, you young idiot. Replenish the drinks, will you? I did the last ones."

As she made the drinks, she heard him telephone: "No, Robyn, not tonight. I have a sick friend.

Yes, of course, dinner tomorrow." Abbott was giving up his evening for her! She ducked into the bathroom to fix her face. The diaper she'd left soaking in the toilet bowl now lay beside it, neatly wrung out.

She carried in their drinks on a silver tray. In her absence Abbott had drawn the curtains, straightened the pictures, moved the vase of anemones to where the flowers caught the light. How serene he looked, this dear detached visitor into married peoples' lives, as he sat in the club chair, one creased trouser leg crossed over the other, smoking, chuckling, reading The Tale of Peter

Rabbit!

Sylvia couldn't quite bring herself to mention the diaper. She tossed off a casual, "So sorry about the mess back there." She sat down once again. "It's almost as though we keep rehearsing the idea of a civilized evening. Did you remember to leave the phone off the hook?"

"Yes, in self-protection. Dear, I'm afraid you put too much vermouth in my drink."

"Fix your own martini, then. Oh, Abbott, forgive me!" She leapt up and kissed his cheek. "I've been like this for months. Twice this week I've had to call Frank at work and apologize for being a bitch at breakfast." She leaned back gracefully, her glass in her hand. "However, my drink is

perfection."

Abbott went out to the kitchen and topped off his martini with a capful of gin. When he sat down

again, he said, "I'm jealous. You never show your poetry to me."

"I didn't suspect you'd be interested. Anyway, you've read some of the published verse."

"Not for several years."

"There hasn't been any for several years."

"But you've been writing poetry, all the same?"

"I'm off on a - I have a new set of circus animals. They're obsessed with falling; they're slaves of gravity. Even my words feel the pull to the ground, to the dirt that will cover us all one day, the

earth that we'll join in death. I sometimes think that I'm going out of my mind."

Sylvia stopped. She had heard her voice, high-pitched, full of laughter, full of tears, an eighth of an

inch from hysteria.

Abbott stood up. He bent over her ceremoniously, offering her a cigarette out of his flat gold case,

lighting it with his gold cigarette lighter.

He's trying to make me feel like a successful editor once again, Sylvia thought - or had she spoken

aloud? The meniscus between what she thought and what she uttered had thinned to transparency.

"Go on, dear."

"`Work it through' as a shrink would say? Even if I could afford analysis I wouldn't submit to it.

I'd be leached of the infuriating quirks that help me - that push me to write. I can spend an entire

day on the first draft of an eight-line verse and not call the time wasted." She saw that he was

interested (only with Helen had she had the courage to discuss her poems). She continued: "Poetry's the consequence of a mind-breaking search for words. Words, so blunted, faded and misused, are such a poor exchange medium for the piercing messages of the senses.

"First you see and hear and taste and touch and smell and then grope about for words. But are they the coinage of the country? By which I mean the right words for this poem. An example: Fifth

Avenue, flags flying for thirty blocks, spring sunshine, blue sky, girls in bright blowy dresses - how to avoid what's been said about this scene before? You must pretend that what you feel about Fifth

Avenue has never been expressed before; no, not pretend, believe, or the game will fail. Abbott, thank you. Now I will shut up and let you tell me about the outside world." She sank back, in not altogether mock exhaustion.

"Tuesday night I saw The Solid Gold Cadillac. I shan't spoil it for you, except to retell one scene.

Josephine Hull begins to empty the file drawers in her office. Out comes a multitude of ill-assorted junk: a corset with laces, a sandwich - I feel sure there was a sandwich - and ending with one overshoe. One." Adam, who played leads in an amateur acting group called The Buskers, mimed the stout little actress with her fussy, purposeful movements, and Sylvia had to laugh; and laughing barely stopped short of tears.

"Wednesday," Abbott continued, "I went to The Threepenny Opera. The translation's ersatz

Brecht, some of the scenes have been tatted up, but Lenya's quite marvelous. Last night I made the mistake of taking a client to hear Maggie Teyte. Never subject clients from Hollywood to art songs."

"I promise," Sylvia giggled.

"A worse choice would have been the T. S. Eliot play, but I believe that it has, mercifully, closed.

My client made his pile in a grocery store chain. His approach to art is turnover; he speaks of loss leaders and inventory. He'll buy a Marie Laurencin as enthusiastically as a Poussin drawing, the

Action painters or a landscape from the Hudson River School."

"Abbott, both our glasses are empty."

Warned by Sylvia's beatific, unfocussed expression, he rose. "Time to eat, dear," he said in the nannyish voice he used on Robyn when Robyn was peckish. "I'll make you one of my omelets."

Sylvia floated after him. She draped him in an apron, set out eggs, butter, herbs, bowls, and a wire whisk. Abbott reached for her new copper skillet from the Bazar Francais.

"I haven't used it yet," Sylvia said.

"Find me some good olive oil and I'll season it."

Several minutes later Sylvia turned from the counter where she was setting two trays with the sterling flatware: "Abbott, do you smell something burning?"

"I must have the pan too hot." He turned off the flame, poured the smoking oil down the sink, then wiped the skillet dry. While butter melted in it over a low flame, Abbott broke the eggs into the two bowls, deftly separating whites from yolks.

"I still smell smoke." Sylvia ran into the living room. A thick pillar of smoke rose from the club chair. She screamed, "My God, Abbott, the house is on fire!"

They could never explain how they managed it. Coughing, panting, unable to see, together they lugged the burning chair into the bathroom, toppled it into the tub, and turned on the shower full strength. To clear the rancid smoke from the living room, Sylvia opened the windows wide and had just time to appreciate how pleasantly spacious the room looked without the chair when the front door opened and Frank shouted:

"Sylvia, where are you? What the hell happened?"

"Darling, everything's fine." She embraced him. "Have you had dinner? We're just about to...." Frank shook her off. He opened the bathroom door. Sylvia heard the silence (as though Niagara

Falls had been halted) after the water was turned off. "Fire and flood," Frank yelled, going for a

mop and bucket. "Tub's overflowed."

Abbott (as he told Sylvia over the telephone the next morning) had no wish to stay upon the order of his going. Collecting his cigarette case and lighter, he said "Goodbye, Sylvia, thank you for a most unusual evening." And to Frank, swabbing the bathroom floor, "Francis, you're looking

well."

The front door closed behind Abbott.

Frank squeezed out the mop. He emptied the bucket down the toilet. He went into the bedroom to

remove his jacket and tie. From the hall, he called to Sylvia, who'd remained immobilized in the

bathroom, "Why's the phone off the hook?"

"Because we couldn't finish one sentence without the damn thing ringing."

"You bolixed everyone up. I tried this line three times. Malcolm was going to leave a message

here for me.

"Wasn't he at the rent clinic?"

"You're so pie-eyed I'm surprised you can talk. He's only at the Clinic on Thursdays." Frank bit

down on each word: "Malcolm and I had to decide on the text of the leaflet tonight."

Sylvia thought of a propitiation: "George called and left a long message for you."

"Thank you for bringing it to my attention."

"Oh, don't be so - goddamn righteous! The leaflet and Malcolm, could have waited until tomorrow.

Was it too much to ask to have," she hiccoughed childishly, "to have just once a quiet evening with

an old friend without...." "An evening that's wrecked the apartment and destroyed the only comfortable chair. Now the baby's bawling his head off. I'll change him. Maybe you can sober up enough to attack the mess in the kitchen."

"I'll attack it; yes, indeedy, will I attack it." Sylvia grabbed two shopping bags into which she stuffed garbage, flatware, food, bowls, gin bottles and the copper skillet, all the time singing,

"You'd be so nice to come home to; you'd be so nice by the fire." She did not hurl, but rather placed, the dirty glasses on the top of the contents of the second bag. She wiped down the counters and, still singing, moved toward the front door, headed for the hall and the incinerator chute.

"Where are you going?" Frank barred her way, although she hadn't been conscious of his return from the baby's room.

"You told me to clean up the kitchen, darling, and I did."

"Not even I do dishes that quickly."

"My little white hands just flew about their task," she said, sweetly Southern.

"No family of three has this much trash in one day. I emptied the waste baskets and garbage pail this morning." He reached for the bags.

She backed away. "Darling, I wouldn't dream of making you perform this menial chore twice in one day."

Frank wrestled the shopping bags out of her hands. He peered inside them. "Yup. Thought so."

Sylvia found herself back in the kitchen washing dishes, now foul with cigarette ashes and raw egg.

Frank dried. Now and then he sent a fork or glass back to be washed again.

Unfair, unfair, unfair. Sylvia burst out: "Our whole life revolves around Malcolm's political career. I didn't marry him, but I sometimes wonder if you took him instead of me in sickness and in health. Frank's back was to her. She realized that he was brewing coffee.

"I'm not the only one who doesn't think he's Mr. Wonderful. Abbott told me years ago that Mr.

Cross didn't want Helen to marry Malcolm. He made sure Malcolm knew that Helen's money was tied up in trust funds for generations. Mr. Cross even came down to New York to talk to Porter about Malcolm's character and qualifications; so Minna told Abbott."

She should have remembered that Frank despised gossip. She had only made him angrier. He banged the dishes as he put them away. How could she sting him into speech?

"These days I never see you alone, except when we're in bed and even then Malcolm often telephones."

Frank put a mug of black coffee in front of her. "Drink."

"Please, don't explain it once again in that patient voice of yours that drives me up the wall. How we're going to save the world by running Malcolm for State Assembly, meanwhile winning votes for LEAD by operating a rent clinic that takes more time away from Steve and me. I can't - I can't bear it any more!" Her tears, for effect this time, went unnoticed. "Your devotion to Malcolm's future is high-minded beyond belief, but...."

"Take a breath, Sylvia; you're turning red."

Sylvia wrung out the dishcloth. "I'm through." The divine fire of wrath fading, her wings folded, she plummeted earthward, kitchenward. Mutely she held out her mug for more coffee.

While she finished it Frank shut the windows and locked the front door. He insisted that they check on the chair together. Whistling "You'd be so nice to come home to," he propelled her into the bathroom. The chair's seat was barely warm.

"You'd better hire a maintenance man to get it out. I'm leaving for my Albany appointment on an early train." Sylvia said that she would. She refused to add that she was sorry.

"Since I can't take a shower I'm going to bed. How about you?"

"I think I'll read."

"Sylvia?" She found himself enveloped in her arms. "Let's call it quits."

She cried, a little, but she did not struggle to be free.

After several minutes, "Will you join me?"

"Do I have any choice?"

"You always do. You must never lie about this."

"I don't. And I don't lie."

"Oh, yes, you do, my love." He kissed her again, hard, somewhere between punishment and passion. "I call your lies `Sylvia's versions.'"

"Thanks a bunch."

"They make quite a bunch....How does this thing undo?"

"Careful, this is my only good dress. Oh, Frank, I'm going to have a hideous hangover tomorrow

and I'll be just as bitchy to you at breakfast as I was yesterday."

"Sylvia, will you kindly shut up and come to bed."

"If you insist." Her tongue went into his mouth and her leg across his, and if Stephen cried out

neither of them heard him.

Afterwards, Frank fell instantly into sleep. He didn't exactly snore; his breath came out of his

mouth in regular puffs like tiny balloons ascending. Asleep, he looked no older than the day they

were married. How he must regret that day! She turned her back to him and wept because she loved him and he had forgiven her although she was a bad wife, a neglectful mother, a mediocre poet, and she owed more than four hundred dollars to three department stores - debts about which Frank, as yet, knew nothing.

Writing in her journal the following week she described it as "The Night Frank's Chair Burned Up," after a James Thurber short story. "And, as I predicted, Frank returned Abbott's check to replace the club chair."

Sylvia began a new paragraph: "Yesterday Helen and the children came over for tea. Helen asked what had happened to Frank's chair. I told her about my drunken evening, trying to make it funnier than it was, and laughed myself into floods of tears. Helen said in her dear plain way, Something is the matter, and my grievances burst out of me in gobbets of hurt and bile. (I was sane enough not to complain of Malcolm's usurpation of Frank's time.) Where Mother would instruct me to count my blessings, Helen was blessedly silent. Instead, she advised me to hire a regular sitter. In the long run, said Helen, her salary would be far cheaper than a stay in Payne Whitney."

In September, Sylvia wrote: "Thank God I followed Helen's advice, as I've been in and out of bed for three months. Better now. Can't imagine how it happened, but into the daily Jabberwock will come another baby."

Chapter Twelve

May - June, 1956

More than a year after Laura's protracted and difficult birth, Sylvia sat in the LEAD clubhouse

minding the phone. She'd finished the copy for a campaign brochure and was pummeling a sonnet,

praying that the poetry editor of The New Yorker would fall in love with it on its second

submission.

The phone rang.

Sylvia answered: "LEAD Headquarters. Wadsworth for State Senator; Stevenson for President.

Hello?"

"It's only Helen," said Helen. "Sylvia, we got the apartment! The one you liked best. They

accepted our bid because we're `desirable owners' - isn't it lovely to be desirable? You're the first to

know."

Although she had expected this news, Sylvia couldn't think of anything gracious to say about it.

"You aren't excited for us?"

"Helen, of course I am."

"We couldn't have done it, except that Dad is helping us." Not quite true: seven years' accumulated income from Helen's trust funds would pay for the apartment and its renovations, but Helen did need her father's signature as co-trustee. "Oh, and I asked: the fireplace in the study does work, as well as the one in the living room." When Sylvia failed to reply, Helen asked: "Are you feeling all right? You don't have a touch of

what ailed you?" Thus Helen tactfully described Sylvia's two years of depression, repeated bouts

of flu, bleeding during pregnancy, post-partem blues, and scary moments of ebullience.

"I'm about back together." Sylvia listened to herself natter on, like some insipid Pollyanna

Sunshine. "I went to the baby factory" - so they described the medical group they both used - "and

while I'm still anemic, the rest of the machinery is fine. I've even stopped the tranquilizers because

I've realized that I'll never get my life organized. For some reason, that cheers me up."

"Not today, it doesn't. Something's wrong, dear girl."

Sylvia burst out childishly: "It's your being so far away. You'll join the Junior League and some

stuffy Ladies' Club and I'll never see you again."

"Oh, Sylvia, 79th Street is not Alaska." Helen paused to think what might cheer Sylvia up. "You must be my decorator."

"That will be fun," Sylvia said without much conviction.

"You can practise on my apartment for the one you and Frank will buy next year."

"Fat chance. Frank would never take out a loan."

"I wish Malcolm were more like Frank. Last week not one but two suits arrived from Brooks

Brothers and yesterday a color TV."

"I hate it when you pretend to be poor," Sylvia said tartly. "No, seriously, I am pleased about your

apartment. As Malcolm would say, `This is wonderful news.' I'm just jealous....Helen, I've been

thinking about your new living room curtains. Would you consider another color besides green?"

Helen would. They spent ten delicious minutes discussing possible color schemes for the ten-room

(eleven, if you counted the maid's room?) apartment, deciding how to display Helen's pewter

collection, where to put bookcases, and debating which carpets might do in the study and halls. As soon as Sylvia had hung up, the phone rang again.

"LEAD Headquarters," said Sylvia, "Wadsworth for..."

"Is Mrs. Underhill there?"

"Yes, speaking."

It was a man, but Sylvia couldn't make out the next words whispered into the phone. Just as she decided that it must be an obscene phone call, the words became audible: "They're fakes. Mrs.

Kirov said to call you."

Max Kirov's wife referred him to Sylvia? "What are you talking about?"

"They din't use real photographs." It was a boy's voice, shoved an octave deeper. "You still there, lady?"

"Yes."

"We took pictures outta the morgue but we made the rest up."

"Photographs of what?"

"Aren't you listening? I'm telling you the interviews that endorsed Lanahan were fakes."

Only now did Sylvia recall that Max's wife worked for the weekly East River Gazette, whose

"Inquiring Reporter" talked each week with "a cross section of our neighborhood." The neighborhood had been unanimous in endorsing Patrick Lanahan. "But if they are fakes, why print them?"

"The pictures were real people. We made up names and addresses and quotes to go with them."

Sanctimoniously: "I din't need Mrs. Kirov to tell me it's wrong."

Sylvia paused to control her elation. If it turned out that Patrick Lanahan himself had planted the fakes, LEAD - and Malcolm - would win the primary election. "Have you any proof?" Sylvia asked sternly. "Meet me at 52nd Street and Second Avenue in half an hour, okay?"

"Which corner?"

"Northeast side." The kid hung up.

Before she went uptown, Sylvia picked up a copy of the latest East River Gazette from the drug

store below the clubhouse. Why had the paper in these last weeks suddenly concerned itself with

Democratic Party infighting?

She opened the Gazette in the uptown local. The answer to her question was advertising. A

throwaway, the Gazette was distributed in A & Ps, delis, drug stores, apartment buildings,

wherever it found houseroom. And who advertised? The Leo Cafanio Hardware store, the Reilly

Funeral Home, Moskowitz' Cut Rate Liquors and fine Wines, Michael (father of Patrick) Lanahan's

meat market.

The subway train halted between the 33rd Street station and Grand Central long enough for Sylvia to read the paper's "Inquiring Reporter" column twice over:

First interview. Mousy woman in her late forties, judging by the photograph. Name: Adele Lewis.

Address: 329 East 39th Street. Occupation: waitress. "I'm going to vote for Patrick Lanahan for

State Senator because, unlike his opponent, he really knows this neighborhood where he grew up,

and he will better represent our community in Albany."

Next interview: Grim man wearing glasses. Albert Ross. Address: 465 East 58th Street.

Profession: advertising. "Patrick Lanahan's outstanding service in the State Assembly makes him

uniquely qualified to be our next State Senator." (The quotes were beginning to sound familiar.)

The third person was a fat young woman, Roberta Dye of 111 East 72nd Street. Profession: dancer.

(Really? asked Sylvia.) "I know Pat Lanahan understands the problems of this great city of ours. As a father of six, he is uniquely interested in increasing funding for the services that our children need in the areas of education, health, and recreation."

The last interviewee was given the name of Charles Green. Address: 81 East 90th Street.

Profession: retired. "Mr. Lanahan is a lawyer who stands by the death penalty, the loyalty oath, and who supports an end to the inequitable tax privilege given the United Nations."

The four interviews parroted, almost word for word, the Lanahan flyer Sylvia had been studying earlier that afternoon as she worked on Malcolm's brochure.

Patrick Lanahan had risen in the world since he left the Cafanio organization. Moving his family ten blocks north, he soon won the Democratic Party leadership in his new Assembly District. His law practise (glorified ambulance-chasing, said Frank) had become hugely prosperous - The Daily

News and The New York Post reported awards bestowed by juries to Lanahan clients in the tens of thousands. Like Malcolm, Patrick had been elected to the State Assembly in 1954. The bets were even (so Frank heard around town) on which man would win the nomination for State Senator.

At the designated street corner Sylvia saw a spotty kid holding a manilla envelope in both hands as though it might go off. More Nancy Drew than Dorothy Thompson, Sylvia tried not to giggle as she flashed her WADSWORTH campaign button as identification, then dropped it back in her purse.

The boy suggested they talk at the counter of a drug store nearby. Over coffee he told Sylvia that he had quit the Gazette. "It wasn't like I newspaper work oughta be. I just graduated City College and it would be my luck to make up phony interviews insteada chasing real stories." He handed the envelope to Sylvia. "I brought the pictures."

Sylvia turned over the glossies of twenty four very ordinary faces. "Not one is identified. Even so, wasn't anybody on the newspaper afraid these people might sue?" "Nah. The photos aren't that clear."

"But the faces have real names."

"We changed them, I told you already; and the addresses."

"Even if they're terrible pictures, they can't be used without the owners' consent. When I worked

for a magazine we always got releases from the people we photographed."

When the kid replied, "Well, so what?" Sylvia decided that he had, in fact, been fired, and telling

LEAD about the interview hoax was his revenge.

While they waited for Malcolm and George Fulton, Jesse and Marian studied back "Inquiring

Reporter" columns in the East River Gazette. Sylvia studied the stamped metal ceiling of the clubhouse which needed painting again. Frank smoked and read aloud the copy for the brochure that Sylvia had worked up that afternoon. (It always made her squirm to hear her words read aloud, even these utilitarian sentences.)

"`Malcolm Wadsworth has made a conspicuous debut in the State Assembly' - debut is too fancy.

How about: `Played a conspicuous role as the junior member of the Assembly's newly formed

Committee on Elementary School Education?'"

Sylvia nodded Yes.

"`Mr. Wadsworth sponsored legislation to end all de facto segregation in the State's schools within

months of the Supreme Court's ruling on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The ADA gives

Wadsworth's voting record their highest rating.'"

"Will citing the ADA lose us the conservative Democratic vote?" Marian Gorman asked.

"Hasn't yet....`Instead of deserting the city for the suburbs, Malcolm Wadsworth and his wife Helen

have chosen to remain in Manhattan and raise their three children among all our city has to offer.' Not sure about that sentence, but we'll get back to it. `In turn, the Wadsworths have much to offer

New York City. Mr. Wadsworth serves on the boards of the All Day Neighborhood Schools, the

Third Street Music School, St. Peter's Education Center in the Bronx, and the Vestry of All Saints

Protestant Episcopal Church. A junior partner of the respected law firm of Delafield and Lambert,

he volunteers time at the LEAD landlord-tenant housing clinic on East 14th Street. Mrs.

Wadsworth is well-known in Town and Village. She serves on the boards of the United Fund, the

American Cancer Society, the League of Women Voters, and is currently the volunteer director of

St. Peter's Educational Center in the South Bronx. In addition, Helen Wadsworth...."

The door was opened by George Fulton, who announced, "and I give you: The Candidate."

Malcolm entered, took the seat behind the desk, facing the others in their folding chairs. If she'd

been directing a photo assignment for Vogue Sylvia couldn't have arranged a better pose. Malcolm

sat with one leg over the arm of his chair, a perfect specimen of a young, patrician lawyer and

legislator, easy in his skin among rich and proles alike. How many women must have longed to run

their fingers through his thick hair and down his faultless profile! Malcolm did not appear vain,

but he must be cheered by what he saw each morning in the mirror as he shaved.

"Sylvia, this is a wonderful break for us." Malcolm tilted back in his chair and locked his hands

behind his head. "Let's not throw it away. Marian, how can we best use it?"

"Bring a suit against the Gazette for deliberate falsehood."

"Afraid we don't have enough time before the election. George, what would you recommend?"

"In my new profession," - George had recently renounced the law for publishing - "I'd say print the

fake interviews side-by-side with interviews with the real-life subjects and distribute them to every voter in the District. "Time-consuming and too expensive," said Frank, who was treasurer of LEAD as well as its

present District Leader.

"Let's hear from Sylvia, our heroine. What would you propose?"

Sylvia felt used up by the day's excitements. No longer Nancy Drew, she only wanted to go home

to Steve and Laura. "Sorry, Malcolm; right now I'm too tired to think."

Jesse then outlined, at length, his plan to picket the offices of the Gazette, and so get coverage in

the daily papers.

"That's an idea." Malcolm sat up. "But I suggest we go for the jugular: take out full-page ads in the Times, Tribune, Daily News and New York Post, reproducing the interviews, with this headline: `Wanted: these twenty four men and women whose photographs were kidnapped to endorse Patrick Lanahan without their knowledge or consent.'"

"Malcolm, we can't spend money we don't have," Frank said. "Instead, let's follow Jesse and make the newspapers work for us. But we'd better check every one of the twenty four interviews first to be sure that none of them is real. You girls going uptown tomorrow?"

"It's our day off," Sylvia began indignantly.

"Terrific." Malcolm caught Frank's suggestion and ran with it. "Sylvia, you and Helen can match the names and addresses in the interviews to the actual buildings. Once that's done I'll ask Jolly to pass the story along to his Harvard room-mate who's now at the Times. Marian, you still have a high school friend at the Daily News? Good. Jesse has an in at the Post and I know several people at the Tribune. As soon as the girls do their stuff we'll be ready to roll."

Walking back through Stuyvesant Town, Sylvia asked, "Frank, doesn't it bother you that Malcolm ran the meeting? After all, you're the District Leader now."

"Only because he's the candidate." "Sometimes you make me sick. Aren't you ever jealous?"

"Of what?"

"Malcolm and Helen's new apartment on 79th Street - only it's a secret, so don't tell a soul."

"I know about it," Frank said calmly.

"Doesn't it depress you that Malcolm made junior partner last year and you were passed over?"

"For God's sake, Sylvia! You haven't told anyone about that, have you?"

She had told Helen, but Helen was as safe as a bank vault. "No. No, I haven't."

"Please, don't. It's possible that I'll switch to another law firm soon."

Sylvia wailed, "But what if it doesn't work out? How will we...we have heavy responsibilities, now." Responsibilities was a word Sylvia's mother had used often during the Depression, although it had never helped her stepfather find jobs.

"Doesn't it make you furious to be robbed of your one cup of free time?" Sylvia asked Helen as they began their research with the Manhattan telephone directory.

"No, well, not this time. Not when we're accomplishing something."

"Why are the boring jobs at LEAD always fobbed off on us?"

"I suppose it's because we don't work," Helen said mildly. She frowned. "But it does make me mad when someone begins a sentence with, `You, as a lady of leisure...' Lord, I haven't even begun the William Styron novel you leant me last month."

"You're like Malcolm. You're never angry."

"Of course I am."

"It doesn't show."

"Well, I - didn't I tell you my incantation?" Sylvia shook her head.

"It goes: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford. I don't know why, but saying them through a couple of times calms me down."

"Are they cities in England?"

"Probably, but for me they're Boston streets. When Mother finally let me go into Boston without her she made me memorize the streets so I wouldn't get lost." Helen pointed to the open telephone directory. "Look, there is an Adele Lewis."

"But it's a West Side address, so we can cross her off." Five other names used in the faked interviews were also listed in the directory but none lived in the State Senatorial District.

It took Helen and Sylvia all of their sacred Wednesday, Friday, and half of Saturday to trace the other names and addresses. The last six names involved repeated visits, arguments with surly superintendents, or tenants who did not speak any known language. Doors were slammed in Sylvia and Helen's faces because it was safer not to answer the questions of strangers, even two harmless housewives.

By Saturday noon, all twenty four interviews were proven to be faked. Members of LEAD telephoned their newspaper contacts. Sylvia remembered an acquaintance from Vogue, now at

NBC in the news department. George Fulton pursued friends at Station WQXR and WINS radio.

The week before the primary election, the Times led off with an editorial headed:

CHICANERY ON THE EAST SIDE

Other newspapers followed with stories and editorial comment under such rubrics as: contempt for the average voter

The Costs of Winning at All Cost

FOOLING NONE OF THE PEOPLE THIS TIME Local radio and TV programs editorialized about the Gazette's hoax. Even the East River Gazette admitted that the odds were on LEAD.

The telephone woke Helen before six on Primary Day. She was needed to fill in for a poll watcher who had been taken ill. Leaving Malcolm to cope with the three children until the sitter came at ten, Helen pulled on a clean yellow cotton dress, grabbed her purse, and rushed to the polling place assigned to her in the basement of the building next to hers.

In addition to the usual baby carriages and bicycles stored there, the basement contained two voting booths, one sleepy young policeman, an American flag, and a long table on saw horses set about with folding chairs. At the table were three elderly women, paid Inspectors of the Board of

Elections of New York. Helen took a seat across from Joe Reilly, the poll watcher for the Lanahan campaign. The Republicans, who had no primary contest, were not represented.

The election officials discussed their corns, their children, their in-laws, the record heat, and bargains at Ohrbach's department store. They stopped yakking only to sign in the men who had arrived to vote at this early hour. Joe Reilly checked 21 voters off his list; only three known LEAD supporters had voted.

Around 9 a.m. Joe Reilly went out to fetch coffee and Danish for the inspectors and himself. After five years of party politics Helen had learned not to expect mercy from the opposition, but still, she would gladly have accepted half a danish, and even black coffee. She told herself to smell her breakfast, a command about as satisfactory as Bronson Alcott's to his four daughters to breakfast on

"bowls of brimming sunshine."

The basement heated up by ten. Helen's dress grew damp with perspiration. What she would have given for a glass of water! At 10:37 Frank stopped by. "Helen, I am sorry to have to ask you to stay until two. I don't have any reserves left. Jesse will bring you some lunch."

"How's it going at the other polling places?"

"Not so bad. We still have the edge, I think. And Helen - thank you."

Frank had the nicest smile, and for five minutes Helen felt engaged in the nation's future as well as

Malcolm's candidacy for State Senate.

Waiting for LEAD supporters to vote she felt like a child waiting for her birthday party guests to arrive with presents. Six housewives voted, four of them sympathetic to LEAD. Then it was quiet again. Joe told the Inspectors of Election little moron jokes. Helen stared at the cinder block walls.

The policeman gave in to the heat and slumped down on a folding chair between the two booths.

By noon more LEAD than Lanahan supporters had voted. Helen was also revived by the ham sandwich Jesse Caplan dropped off (hold the mustard; he'd remembered from last year!), together with a coke, and a greasy cruller, as yet uneaten.

By the time George Fulton relieved Helen, seventeen persons she had personally canvassed, as well as 38 more LEAD supporters had voted. Helen left George her list thick with check-marks, and the cruller for strength.

George had been late. Dreading the fury of her sitter, Helen rushed up the ramp from the basement.

Just beyond the sign: POLLING PLACE NO ELECTIONEERING BEYOND THIS POINT Helen saw, unavoidably advancing, Patrick Lanahan. He wore a crisp summer suit and his cheeks looked professionally shaved. In his lapel he sported not his own gaudy campaign button but the chaste

Stevenson emblem. Trying to capture the middle class vote in Peter Cooper? Well, why not, thought Helen, none of us is in this game to lose. His eyes had a bright cold twinkle as he greeted her: "Hi, Helen." "Hello."

"So you and Malcolm have bought a house on 79th Street. Going high society on us, are you?"

"Apartment, not house. It's in the center of this Senatorial District."

"Hear you entered your oldest kid in private school. What about that crap in your flyers saying you

and Malcolm are `staying with the problems of the city?'"

"Don't you send your children to Parochial School?"

Patrick stopped grinning. "Listen, Helen, you should know I had nothing to do with those

interviews in the East River Gazette. Of course if the newspaper's reporters had done the job for

real, they'd of got the same answers they went and made up. Honest, I wasn't informed."

"I'd like to believe that."

"You'd hate to believe it, Helen, but it's true. Why didn't you people check with my office before

your pals at the Times - where do you people not have friends? - started preaching?"

"Once the interviews were revealed to be fakes why didn't you and your supporters join in

condemning the newspaper?"

"Get down off your high horse, Helen. I'll make a better State Senator than your handsome hubby.

If Dewey was the groom on a wedding cake, Malcolm's a tailor's dummy. He don't even have

Stevenson's gift of gab. Frank Underhill writes all Malcolm's stuff. I like Frank. He came up from

poverty like I did. Frank doesn't shareshay la famme, unlike some I know."

"My husband," her voice trembled with fury, "my husband has never done a discreditable thing in

his whole life!"

"What do you know when the legislature's in session? He don't have a wife in Albany..."

"You're lying. Malcolm would never....That's your fake interviews all over again." "No one calls me a liar and gets away with it. Not even you and you get real pretty when you're mad."

"I'd say you were a liar under oath in a court of law!"

Ignoring Patrick's easy laugh, and Patrick's extended hand with his "let's make up and be friends," she turned and ran from him. She wanted to scream: You shyster lawyer, you'd do anything to get elected. In the hall outside her apartment door she said her litany of Boston streets, but this time they did nothing to bring her peace of mind. Helen felt queasy with rage at Patrick's implication; and afraid.

Unlike the Dodgers, who won the pennant but lost the World Series, Malcolm won both the

Primary and the General Election. But his margin in the Primary, too wide for a recount, had been slim enough so that Patrick Lanahan, quoted in Town & Village, boasted that he would defeat

Wadsworth in their next encounter.

Helen kept her exchange with Patrick to herself. She realized that she had made an enemy, but no one could tell lies about Malcolm and expect to go unchallenged

Chapter Thirteen

June, 1985

Lucy studies the high, brown, barn-like church. The exposed rafters of the ceiling resemble the

hull of a ship half-built. Aside from them and the intense blue and red stained glass windows

behind the chancel, there is little to enchant the eye. The interior of All Saints provides

unencumbered space in which to reflect, rather than an enclosure of holy mysteries - which accords nicely with Helen's Unitarian beginnings.

But after forty minutes hasn't the assembled congregation reflected quite enough on Helen and upon their own mortality? "I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die!" Lucy hears in her mind's ear Lotte Lenya singing, the voice of a musical raven.

Lucy opens the service sheet. She counts the hymns, prayers and testimonials remaining to be endured. Why is she here? Why must she stay until the end? Because Sylvia telephoned her from

Santa Barbara - her voice flattened with shock - to "hope" that Lucy would be at Helen's service.

"Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead thou me on..." Lucy stands, but refuses to

sing along...."The night is dark and I am far from home; Lead thou me on..." She suspects that

Sylvia is crying.

Lucy cannot cry, but she will miss Helen in her own way. Helen long ago passed Lucy's test of

friendship: does this person bring light with her when she comes in the door? Helen understood

Lucy's work far better than Sylvia did. Helen loved books, the theater, music and movies. Yet she

turned her back on these delights, using such scraps of time left her from family duties and

Malcolm's campaigns to labor for the good of of the world. Even when she was the recipient, Lucy

found this perverse. When she taxed Helen with "do-goodism" Helen would answer mildly, "It's

what I do. The equivalent of your painting, only not as successful."

"Good heavens! Minna Delafield exclaimed, "what's that appalling sound?"

Helen had given Minna and Lucy tea and then a tour of the new apartment. The three women had

reached the last of the string of small bedrooms off the back hall.

"Oh, Lord," said Helen, "it's the madwoman next door."

The screams coagulated into a piercing ululation which reverberated off the brick walls of the area-

way and faded when Helen shut the window.

Then the noise started up again, nearly as loud as before, despite the closed window. There was a

pattern to it: two unintelligible syllables repeated again and again, followed by a long vibrato

scream, abruptly choked off.

"God, how do you stand it?" Lucy asked.

"I don't. But every time I go around to the doorman of that building and ask, he swears he's heard

nothing."

Nevertheless, Helen persisted, as she told Lucy, "poking my nose in where I'm not wanted." She

discovered the woman's name and the cause of her madness. Mrs. Klein was a survivor of

Auschwitz. She had been brought to this country by American relatives. Neighbors distressed by

her screaming - and if she was outdoors you could hear her over New York traffic at several blocks'

distance - were of the opinion that Mrs. Klein should be shut away. Helen believed otherwise. She

made herself unpopular with Mrs. Klein's relatives by going around in person and recommending

the poor woman be given therapy. Helen even volunteered (so Sylvia told Lucy) to pay for

psychiatric help. Her offer was refused.

A year later Lucy read a short item in the Daily News: Mrs. Golda Klein, of East 78th Street, had

jumped or fallen to her death in the area-way behind the building where she lived.

"Was that the woman?" Lucy asked Helen when next they met. "Yes, I felt terrible about it. If I'd just - well, I didn't, so I have to accept it. It was hard explaining her death to the children. They didn't see anything, thank the Lord, but they'd heard the screaming; and our doorman told the au pair girl all about it, in the children's presence. What was suicide, they wanted to know; and when I explained, they couldn't understand why anyone would want to do away with herself. I reminded them that Mrs. Klein had been imprisoned by the Nazis for three years - but how can you describe the death camps to American children?"

Helen repeated, "I tried to help her, but not intelligently."

Helen wanted to help Lucy. She knew that Lucy was often strapped for money. One day she telephoned Lucy to ask her if she'd have time to make sketches of the four Wadsworth children.

"Like Portraits, Inc., in pastel, with sweet smiles, and smocked dresses for the little girls?"

Lucy's sarcasm rolled harmlessly off Helen. "No, I'd like you to draw them because you'll see something in their faces no one else does."

"Thanks, but it would be a waste of my time," Lucy had replied ungraciously.

Undeterred, Helen bought two small pictures from Lucy's first one-man show.

September, 1957

"Lucinda, dear, I beg of you, try to respond to Miss Stokes's questions. I sent her into the back room to look at your drawings and watercolors until you felt more like yourself." Robyn's long

English face lengthened dolefully.

"How can I? That little twit took one term of art appreciation at Sweetbriar and now she misquotes

Clement Greenberg. Why don't you answer for me?"

"I'm merely the owner of the gallery." "I know, I know. And we're both here to sell pictures."

Again Lucy wished she'd had her exhibit at the 10th Street gallery she was part owner of. It had

been Abbott Chase, attempting to do both her and Robyn a favor, who had suggested that she show

at the Thornton Gallery.

"I'll try to be nice," Lucy said. "Just let me piss, first." Lucy had gone to the bathroom every hour

since this interminable day began.

But when Lucy came back, the girl reporter infuriated her by asking, "Miss Tenbroeck, don't you

ever use color?"

Lucy gestured to the fourteen large oil paintings - what she would later call "White-on-White:

Series One." "Can't you see how many shades of white there are?"

Evidently, Miss Stokes couldn't.

Hoping, quite literally, to bring light to the subject, Lucy pulled up the venetian blinds. She flung open the gallery's casement windows to the afternoon breeze and admitted diffused sunlight.

Turning back to her tormenter, Lucy was startled by six pots of azaleas, blooms of whining pink, ranged along the floor. They must have been delivered when she was in the john.

Miss Stokes consulted her notes. She looked barely twenty two, despite her pert hat and blue eye shadow. Which magazine did she work for? Not Vogue - Lucy would remember Vogue because of Sylvia.

"When did you start to paint, Miss Tenbroeck?"

"Before I could talk. On the walls of my nursery.

"After Vassar you studied under Kuniyoshi and Raphael Soyer at the Art Students' League. Would you say that they had influenced your style in any way?" "No." Lucy glared at the young idiot in front of her. "No, they didn't influence me. Directly.

They taught me to be a professional, and to draw every day, the way a dancer exercises at the bar."

"Dancing? Drawing? I don't see the connection. I mean, there aren't many linear elements in your

paintings." Miss Stokes referred again to her list of questions.

Lucy heard someone coming up the stairs. It was too early for the invited guests. A critic? Would

she be charged with monotony, using such narrow means? Would the critics dismiss her as yet

another young artist grabbing belatedly onto the coattails of the New York School? Would she be

reviewed at all?

Malcolm opened the gallery door. "I'm early, I realize, but I'm just in from Albany, and rather than

go back uptown" he smiled, "I came straight here."

"I had no idea you'd - I thought you'd be too busy. You're the first good omen I've had today."

"Introductions, please, Lucinda," Robyn said.

"Malcolm Wadsworth - Gillian Stokes and Robyn Thornton of the Thornton Gallery. Robyn's

English," she added unnecessarily. "Malcolm's our State Senator."

"Now I recognize the name. I voted for you!" Gillian said.

"Please do feel free to wander, Senator, while Miss Stokes completes her interview with Lucinda. I must get on with the refreshments."

Lucy watched Robyn spread a linen cloth over a folding table, now unfolded. There was something priestly in the way he set out rows of paper cups and concocted a punch, pouring from various bottles into a large crystal bowl.

"What does white - what is the significance of white to you, Miss Tenbroeck?" Gillian Stokes persisted in asking. "If I needed to explain white I'd write an essay on the subject." Lucy saw Robyn's eyebrows soar.

"I've learned white from painters like Twachtman and Sargent, and from Raphael Peal's `Venus

Rising from the Sea.'"

"Oh, like Botticelli's Venus?" the girl asked brightly.

"No. The figure is partially obscured by a white sheet." Lucy tried again to "pleasant" her voice, as her old governess used to urge. "Do you know Frederick Edwin Church's painting of icebergs?"

"But your work is abstract," the girl wailed. "I thought you were called an Action Painter?"

"No. I don't call myself anything."

"My impression is that Lucy makes her own rules," Malcolm intervened smoothly. "When my wife and I were in Venice last year we saw the Biennale. I'd say that Lucy is in the modern European tradition; although, good Lord, what do I know about it?" He glanced at Lucy, at Gillian Stokes, at

Robyn Thornton, with self-deprecatory good humor. "Tell me, Miss Stokes, what kind of article do you plan to write?"

Lucy relinquished the interview to Malcolm, and returned to worrying that her parents would come to the "Vernissage," as Robyn's announcements had pretentiously put it. Would Mother have her hair done for the second time this week, take her pearls out of the safe and, dressed, summon Dad to summon Norman? Surely the gallery's lack of an elevator would stop them.

"Do you have glossies of Lucy's paintings that Harper's Bazaar can use?" Malcolm asked Robyn.

"Yes. I hope the magazine chooses the painting Lucinda calls `Snow Beach' with its extraordinary brush work, now suave, now turbulent, now allowing a peep of naked canvas. To me it best conveys her intentions." He smiled, exposing two sorry rows of yellow teeth.

Hadn't Robyn learned by now that a painter doesn't begin with intentions? Yesterday, when they hung the show, he'd asked her: "If you had to put it into words, how would you summarize your paintings? `White Number One,' `White Number Two' etc. are not very sexy labels." To mollify

him, Lucy had invented ridiculous titles like `Declensions,' and `Climate to the North,' which

Robyn lettered beautifully beneath the `White' titles.

Lucy's first memory was in white. She grasped Edward Bear with one hand; her nurse held the

other. "Lucinda, say `Good morning, Mummy. I hope you feel better.'" Light, muted by white net

curtains, fell on a white-canopied high bed. On it reclined a fairy princess dressed in white.

"Come here, Lucinda."

"Shall I lift her up to you, Madam?"

"No, not right away. She's forgotten me, poor little thing. I've been in the hospital so long." The fairy princess waved her hand. "Leave Lucinda here with me. She can play with her teddy on the chaise longue." Lucy was lifted onto a slippery white couch. Everything was white except for

Edward Bear's brown fur, and the shiny black of her party shoes. Then Lucy noticed the crimson

flush in the center of the white flowers on a table behind her. She stood up to touch them.

A voice said, "What on earth are you doing?"

Lucy, startled, peed on the chaise longue. The nurse was summoned to take her away. Lucy would not kiss her mother; she would not say she was sorry, for which she was punished.

For many years she recoiled from the horror of that room, as though her mother was something decayed, wrapped in white bandages. Yet Lucy had seen her mother's slender body in her silk slip

and, in rare times of health, wearing a bathing suit. Why did the dread persist? Was it because

Lucy smelled bitter medicines and alcohol when she came in to bid her mother good morning?

Often Lucy met the doctor coming down the stairs as she returned from school. "What is the matter

with Mummy?" Lucy asked her governess once. "Female trouble," was the answer. Lucy wondered if to be female was to have troubles, like the "time of the month" that hit her the next year.

What was the horror that this immaculate whiteness concealed? Lucy saw sores caked with blood, suppurating, stinking of rot; emblematic of the unspeakable beneath the surface of daily life. Much later she supposed that her father's experiences in the trenches during World War One had informed her imagery. Because how could a bedroom which has been photographed in House and Garden convey such a sense of evil?

Lucy realized that she was alone with her paintings. Robyn had taken Malcolm and the little twit into the back room. Lucy engaged her paintings, one by one. It seemed to her that they withdrew and clouded over. The grey burlap walls did not offer enough of a contrast, although the brown of the window seat and the floorboards helped. Not so the flowers: those hideous azaleas must go!

Before hurling them out the open windows, Lucy looked down to see who they might hit.

And there was Sylvia, dismounting from a taxi, with a box under her arm, containing, presumably, the black dress she was lending to Lucy for her opening. My God, thought Lucy, as they retired to the lavatory, Sylvia's brought a whole case of cosmetics, as well.

"Just stand still, and you're not to smoke until I finish," said Sylvia. She helped Lucy dress, calmed her frizzy hair with two handsome gold clips, dusted her freckled skin with rouge and power, applied mascara to the pale lashes. Sylvia insisted that Lucy wear her pumps. Lucy had on a pair of penny loafers that Sylvia swore dated back to Vassar.

Still half an hour to go. Dressed, feeling stiff and most unlike herself, Lucy gestured toward her paintings. "Well, what do you think?"

"Lucy, I am so excited for you." Lucy mumbled something about, well, did Sylvia like them.

Sylvia had liked Lucy's previous phase: elegant still lifes and collages - "presumably because they remind you of Braque," Lucy had sneered. Now Sylvia pondered as long as she dared. "They're overwhelming." The fourteen paintings reminded Sylvia of whitewashed boards through which knots and gnarls and grain showed faintly. "I've never seen anything at all like them."

"I would hope not," Lucy drawled.

"Is it crass to ask your prices?"

"Two hundred to five hundred. Robyn thinks they're too low. I'm sure you do, too. To quote you:

`If there is one thing I learned at the magazine, an artist must not undervalue himself.'"

"I agree with Robyn. Even if you don't need the money...."

"But I do....Christ, I better go to the bathroom again."

Sylvia helped herself to punch. Malcolm introduced her to Gillian Stokes, whose unblemished skin and uninformed questions made Sylvia feel middle-aged. People began to arrive in ones, in twos, in droves, in "herds of independent minds," Sylvia remarked to Gillian, who did not catch the reference. The girl asked: "Who is everybody? Miss Tenbroeck calls people by the first names or

Bud, or something, but I think that was Barnett Newman, and somebody said deKooning's here."

"Which one?" Sylvia asked meanly. She turned to greet an actress she had interviewed when they were both twenty one. Now Sylvia was "resting" and the other received top billing on Broadway.

Sylvia introduced her to Malcolm. The actress was astounded to hear he was her State Senator, "I was sure I knew you from summer stock!"

Behind her, Sylvia heard Lucy moan, "Christ, there's Mother and Dad!"

Sylvia knelt beside Lucy on the window seat. On the sidewalk below stood Mr. Tenbroeck and

Norman, the chauffeur, helping Mrs. Tenbroeck out of the Chrysler Imperial. Mrs. Tenbroeck wore a sable coat, although the afternoon was warm. Her smooth, platinum bob gleamed like a

helmet.

Lucy gripped the window sill as if in danger of falling. "How can I stop them now? They'll have

to walk up the stairs, and stairs are so bad for her."

Lucy hung there, beached. The door to the gallery swung open. As Sylvia went forward to

welcome Lucy's parents, she heard someone say, "Who's that apparition from the 1920s?"

Mrs. Tenbroeck paused in the doorway, shrugging off her sable coat to reveal a jade-green cocktail

dress and two long strings of very real pearls. She tit-tupped forward on high-heeled green silk shoes.

"Sylvia, will you be so kind as to find my daughter?" Mrs. Tenbroeck drawled.

Before Sylvia could answer, Lucy came forward. She was so pale her freckled skin had a greenish cast under the rouge.

"Lucinda, aren't you going to thank me for the azaleas?"

"I didn't know they were from you. There wasn't any card."

Sylvia asked if she could take Mr. and Mrs. Tenbroeck's coats.

"No, thank you, Sylvia," said Mrs. Tenbroeck. "We'll be leaving in a few minutes. We don't want to keep Norman waiting."

Robyn introduced himself. He begged to hold the floor-length sable and Mr. Tenbroeck's unnecessary British raincoat. (Did he anticipate rain within the art gallery, as in some exhibit designed by Dali? Sylvia wondered.)

When the Tenbroecks, trailed by Lucy, had completed a slow royal progress around the room, Mrs.

Tenbroeck moved toward the gallery door.

"Don't go, yet. There's a whole lot more," Lucy cried. Mr. Tenbroeck took his wife's arm firmly. They followed Lucy to the back room. As they passed,

Sylvia heard Mrs. Tenbroeck ask: "Really, Lucinda, don't you own a pair of stockings?"

Abbott greeted her parents, then began to praise Lucy: "Perhaps white paint on white paper or

unsized canvas is not your ultimate destination, Lucinda, but you have enormous talent. I've told

Robyn to reserve that drawing for my private collection. If I handled contemporary art, I'd most

certainly take you on."

Of this Mrs. Tenbroeck appeared to take no notice.

Gillian Stokes approached them. "Senator Wadsworth was such a help. I wanted to thank him, but

I guess he's already left."

Lucy saw that she must make introductions. Which person to mention first? Her mother would

correct Lucy in front of the little twit if Lucy got it wrong way round. "My parents, Mr. and Mrs.

Edward Tenbroeck: Miss Gillian Stokes of" - it came back to Lucy - "Harper's Bazaar." The

agony of the interview might bring Lucy credit, after all. Her mother turned the pages of the

fashion magazines when she had her hair done.

Lucy seated her mother behind Robyn's desk. One by one she displayed her works on

paper. She had brushed white gouache over translucent washes of pale neutrals, with leafy holes of

dry white paper here and there. Even subject to her parents' scrutiny, these notes on a new direction

held their own. Her father said, "I'm not sure what they're supposed to be, but I like `em anyway."

Minna Delafield, followed by Porter, came rushing in. "Lila, you did come, after all. You'd promised, I know" (not to me, Lucy thought sourly; Minna must have worked on Mother last night)

"but your health is always so precarious. And Edward, dear. Aren't you both thrilled with what

Lucy has accomplished?"

"Indeed, we are," Lucy's father said. "What a wonderful turnout! Helen's just arrived, Warren and James, Madeleine and so many others

who..."

"Porter, darling," Mrs. Tenbroeck stood up. "And Minna. I'm dying to discuss the bridge hand last

night - the one where Porter and I almost made six no trump."

Lucy bolted to the front room, tears of rage startling out of her eyes. She threw herself on the

window seat, twisting away from the crowded gallery, and stared unseeingly out the window.

Someone sat down on either side of her. Lucy turned to find Helen with a glass of punch, Sylvia

with cigarettes and Kleenex. She told them what her mother had said. "I could kill her. She's

doing her damndest to pretend that I'm not here and my show doesn't exist."

"She's a sick woman, Lucy."

"She's a devil, a witch, a meanspirited bad fairy - no, no, you're right, of course. She's the way she

is, and I stupidly go on hoping that she'll change." Lucy handed her cup to Helen. "Would you get

me another? I think Robyn put more gin in this batch. Oh, Christ, Sylvia. Why won't Dad shut her

up?"

Both knew the bald answer: Lucy's mother had the money.

A third cup of punch restored Lucy to coherence. Childhood friends, artist friends, not one but two

ex-lovers, showered her with praise. People actually were buying her works! - her godmother

among them.

Minna said, "We're late for a dinner party, dear, but I can't leave without telling you I want to buy the one you call `White: Number Eleven. Declensions.' I think you said it was your favorite, and

it's mine, too."

"Thank you, Aunt Minna. I wish it weren't the most expensive one of the lot." Lucy accompanied

Minna and Porter down the stairs, so she missed the drama in the gallery's back room: an unearthly scream, the hands clutched to the green silk bodice (why the strings of pearls didn't break Sylvia never understood), two thumps as Mrs. Tenbroeck slipped sideways onto the desk, then subsided onto the floor.

Dr. Warren Lippincott asked his brother James to call an ambulance. Warren knelt by Mrs.

Tenbroeck, checking her breathing, taking her pulse. He motioned to Robyn to cover her with the fur coat. Summoned by her father, Lucy ran back upstairs. She sat on the floor and held her mother's hand. Just before the ambulance arrived, Mrs. Tenbroeck opened her famous green eyes and whispered, "They sent the wrong color."

"Don't try to talk," Warren said.

"No, it's important. The florist sent the wrong color." Mrs. Tenbroeck took a breath, exhaled. "I ordered white." Another breath, another long exhalation. "White to match - Lucy's paintings."

Helen insisted that Lucy spend the night after her disastrous opening. Lucy, who was between live- in lovers, accepted. Once Mrs. Tenbroeck was pronounced out of danger, Lucy left the hospital for the Wadsworths' and beneath Helen's wings, so to speak, that night Lucy actually slept.

Helen drove Lucy back to the hospital the next morning. In the car Lucy cried, the first tears since childhood: "I said, I'd like to kill her, remember? Oh, why did she come? There were twenty six stairs to climb to the gallery; I counted them." "She was there because, in her own way, she loves you." ("Damn queer way," said Lucy.) Helen added, "You have to remember that she meant to send white azaleas." Lucy admitted the truth of that.

And Helen had been of great assistance to Lucy in subduing her godmother. Helen or Sylvia were more often chosen to be "Minna's daughter of the month," but Lucy, and Diana between marriages, also found themselves nominated for that distinction. Several months after Lucy's exhibition, she telephoned Helen for advice. "Minna interrupts me

when I'm working," Lucy said without preamble. "She's had me to three dinner parties in a row.

Minna thinks she owns me because she bought one painting. No, that's not fair, but she asks too

damn much."

"What does she want you to do that's so awful?"

"Get married, for God's sake." Lucy drawled. "Once she wanted me to marry James. Can you

imagine what a disaster that would have been? Then she begged me to accept one of Sylvia's

discards; not that he'd asked me. Now Minna is trying to make-believe a romance with Josef.

Twice she sat me next to him at dinner, and I'm given free tickets every time he plays. He's a fine

violinist, but no more interested in me than I am in him. I've told Minna I shall never marry, but

that doesn't discourage her in the least. Any suggestions?"

"I don't believe that Minna quite understands about sex."

Lucy would have said the same about Helen.

"What I mean is, Lucy, I do know that there is a - a counterpart to the - to Abbott and Robyn."

Lucy could feel Helen blushing over the phone. "But you wouldn't need to explain that to Minna.

Couldn't you tell her that she's wonderful to be so concerned about you, but you're already married to painting?"

Chapter Fourteen

June, l985

Sitting in his pew, James imagines Rose beside him, complaining of these cold, goyish rites. Is this

all? Rosie asks. Hymns, words, hymns, words, and then everybody splits for the weekend in the

Hamptons? Who's to sit Shivah? Or provide an old fashioned Irish wake?

Spring, 1959

It had been an axiom with them (or with James) that since he and Rose were two strong-willed characters they'd engage in splendid fights and then splendidly make up and make children. But after Rose's third miscarriage the doctors ordered her to quit trying. James suggested adoption.

Rose said no adoption agency would place a child in a mixed marriage - and guess whose religion soured the mix? "What about Jewish agencies?" James asked. "Same thing, only ass-backwards."

"Why not let them decide, Rosie?" Rose had a face - she had many faces - of granite rejection

which made a spoken No unnecessary.

They argued over James's job. "You should move on," said Rose. James liked it where he was.

"No, you don't. You don't get feedback, only a fee sometimes if the project succeeds. But you'd

make a swell teacher, Jamie. You love to impart wisdom." She drew on her droll, high-and-mighty

expression as she imparted hers. "You like kids, and they like you."

James quoted, "`Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.'"

"What cat dragged that in? It stinks." They bickered about Dwight's expanding architectural firm. James was pleased for Dwight's success; Rose distrusted Dwight's new partner. "That schnorrer," she called him. "Dwight puts in talent and the dough - what's Aram, or whatever he changed his name to, got to offer?"

"He was top of his class at the Harvard School of Design."

"So he says."

"Rosie, do you suspect everyone you meet?"

"Why not? Everyone cheats if they think they can get away with it. Look at the Kennedys. Jack

cheats on his wife, as his Poppa did before him."

"How do you know?"

"I know people who know. The Kennedys got the morals of - I won't slander a cat. But on the

surface the family comes off great. I was in Boston once for a union meeting, and there outside of

Bachrach's on Newbury Street was this pretty photograph of the Kennedy children lined up, one big

happy American family. Poppa Joe must have bribed Bachrach's to put it there, like he did the hack

that wrote JFK's books."

Rose attacked James for his willingness to pitch in at crucial points in Malcolm's political

campaigns. "I know you do it for Helen - but why support him? You're twice the guy he is."

"You want me to run for office? Christ, I'd strike out first thing."

"You would," Rose agreed. "You don't have the dough or the chutzpa. You'd go on television and

tell the voters that you're not sure you're worthy of the office, but you would like to try. Not even

Stevenson got away with that. Your problem is, you got imaginary limits."

James bristled. "Give me one example."

"Just what I said, limits. As in what limits would you go beyond. Did I ever tell you about my first

boyfriend? After Pearl Harbor, he applied to language school. He knew Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, and some French. So the Army shipped him off to learn Japanese. At language

school the students also had to learn to climb telephone poles. My boy friend said each person had

a different limit he froze at. It had nothing to do with his weight or physical condition.

"Jamie, I'd say your limit is under twelve feet. You're scared shitless to leave one job unless you

got the next. Look how long it took you to quit union work. Now you hire out to community

groups like a free lance bartender, work ten hours a day, when you're working, and make half what

tending bar would bring. Your friend Malcolm's got no problem with heights. But you, you

shlemiel, you obey limits that aren't there. You could climb the...."

"What happened to him?"

"Happened to who?"

"Your boy friend."

"He was killed at Okinawa."

"It must have been terrible for you."

"James, that was fifteen years ago. I got over it. You got over your brother's death." Rose lit a cigarette from the one she'd just smoked down. "You'll only go beyond limits when it's for your friends - like buying Lucy's painting. You couldn't afford it, you didn't even like it much, but

you're so goddamn loyal you bought it anyway."

"Jesus Christ on a bicycle," James roared, "What do you want me to do?"

"Like the old Greek said, Know Yourself - since you sure as hell don't know me. Then go find a

wife who can have live kids."

"You're my wife." James weakened it with: "It wasn't your fault we couldn't have a baby."

"Who's talking fault? It's like your being sorry for my dead boy friend." Their arguments grew into bigger fights, ending in exhausted, bitter silences. These nights James slept on the sofa, Rose in their bedroom on the balcony. One evening she didn't come home. The next day she said she'd been staying with her mother. James confronted her with a postcard delivered that morning from Mrs. Katzenbaum vacationing in Miami Beach.

The invitation to the theater benefit for St. Peter's Church Educational Center arrived at a time when they were speaking. James asked Rose to go.

"Did your mother put you up to bringing me?"James denied that she had. "Don't you remember what she said when Warren and Diana got divorced: `We've never had a divorce in our family.'

Like it was an abortion or a jail sentence. Why did you have to tell her we're separating?"

"We're not, as far as I'm concerned."

"James, you want to spend the rest of your life on that couch?"

He couldn't think of one damn thing to say.

"We're finished. You didn't marry - what did Malcolm call me? - Joan of Arc; or `Labor's Heroine' as some jerk writer put it. You married a loud-mouth union organizer with a smoker's hack who - who can't bring a baby to term, and won't give dinner parties. I still like you, James. That's why I yell at you. But I can't play house any more."

"Just until after the benefit?"

"No thanks. Shakespeare by amateurs is an embarrassment."

"Rosie, will you take a little more time to think about - this separating business? When my project in Queens is wrapped up I'm going away for a week - and maybe you'll have changed your mind when I get back."

"I won't, but okay; I'll wait to see my lawyer until then."

The week before The Buskers were to perform As You Like It, James's father asked him to lunch.

Had his mother told Dad the bad news? If not, James would have to, and either way it was going to

be a grim lunch. Nevertheless, James, in his best suit, made an effort to be on time at the

Downtown Association.

After lunch had been ordered, Gordon Lippincott cleared his throat portentously (he's rusty in the

role of Father, James noted with amusement) and spoke: "Jolly, my text for today is that old saw

about how a man is a radical at twenty-one, a liberal at thirty-one, and a conservative at forty."

"And I'm nearly thirty seven and suffering from arrested development?"

"No, your politics are your own business. My question is: how long are you going to live outside" -

James expected his father to say "your own class" - but he finished the sentence with "outside or

beyond what I'd call rewarding work. I'm not criticizing you. Lord knows, you don't take a penny

from your mother or me. But is your present job really what you'd like to be doing for the rest of

your life?"

"Community organizing?" He would not concede defeat to Rose, but looking at his father's

concerned face, James let down. "Dad, I don't know. Each assignment is short term. You're hired.

You try to solve the problem. It's over. The pay off is when a group does pull together and you've

stopped a real-estate developer, or got the city to bring services to an area that's been without them.

What's frustrating is when you've developed a program, persuaded the community to back it,

agreed on a time-table, and then the damn thing falls apart because the group runs out of steam, or some neighborhood crank wants to do it his way. At times it gets so - frustrating that I blow my

stack and my tenuous claim to leadership goes up in smoke."

"It seems to be taking a great deal out of you. Your mother says you've lost weight. Doesn't

Rose..." James's father broke off: Never Criticize Rose was, James knew, a Lippincott rule. "Don't you guys," Gordie Lippincott reached for the slangy phrase, "Don't you guys ever stop and put on

the feed bag?"

"We're - most nights we don't get home for dinner."

"When you and Rose have a family that will change, but I didn't ask you to come all this way to discuss Rose's - to dwell on your disappointments in that department. Jolly, I'm going to retire one of these days, and I'd like to see you boys settled before my income's reduced. Warren makes more than I do, even after his divorce settlement, so I've created a trust fund for his children. I'm contributing to the expansion of Dwight's firm. How can I help you out?"

"Mother hasn't said anything?"

"About what? Are you thinking of buying an apartment?"

"No. Not now." James lit a cigarette, although his father was still eating. "Dad, there is one thing you can do for me. I need a lawyer. Maybe an associate in your firm can take me on - can work out a - Rose wants a divorce."

"What?" His father's knife and fork dropped with a clatter on to his plate. "Rose should be damn grateful you married her. You'd make any girl happy. You're the best of the whole lot." A flat- handed gesture swept sons, nephews, and male cousins off the table together with a full glass of water.

Their waiter rushed over and mopped up the mess. Were they ready for dessert now? No, just coffee and the luncheon check to sign, said Gordon Lippincott.

"Dad, you don't need to do anything about a lawyer, quite yet. There's an outside chance I can talk

Rose out of it."

"Jolly, I don't have time for a damn thing until the benefit the Buskers are doing for my other ex- daughter-in-law is over!"

Since Gordon Lippincott was acting the part of the banished Duke, James had the use of his father's dinner jacket. He offered to escort his mother to As You Like It. It was being performed at the large college auditorium the Buskers rented each year for their productions. Through sales of a souvenir program swollen with advertisements; by raffles, dinners, and a reception afterwards, the board of St. Peter's Church Educational Center hoped to raise enough for a down payment on an abandoned school in the South Bronx that would contain its expanded programs.

James and his mother found their seats. To avoid discussing his marriage - he dreaded the moment fast approaching when his mother would confess her real opinion of Rosie - James read the program through twice before the house lights went down.

About amateur actors Rose had been harsh, but accurate. Orlando uttered his lines as though reading off American League batting averages. Rosalind spoke with more poetry but didn't know what to do with her hands. Porter Delafield overacted shamelessly the part of Old Adam.

James heard his mother draw in her breath. Holding an unloaded rifle, a Maine guide's red and black checked shirt slung over one shoulder, Gordon Lippincott strode to the center of the stage so vigorously that the painted trees in the Forest of Arden seemed to pick up their roots and dance:

"Now my co-mates and brothers in exile...."

James felt his mother relax. His father, as always, would do them proud.

"And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything:

I would not change it."

Sylvia was distracted from Mr. Lippincott's fine delivery by her own glum thoughts. She had chosen seats for herself, Frank and Lucy in the balcony, as far as possible from Diana and her entourage. Sylvia had labored for months to assemble the souvenir program for As You Like It.

She had extorted ads from the Upper East Side neighborhood where most of the Buskers lived, and shopped, and into which Sylvia and Frank had recently moved. Sylvia conned Max Kirov into photographing, gratis, the cast in costume for the program's cover. She had written the copy, done the layout, hounded the printers; and Diana, the chairman of the benefit, had not even said thank you! Sylvia would not have come to the performance at all, except for Abbott, who was playing the Melancholy Jaques.

And there he was, dressed in a brown felt hat trimmed with fishing flies, a flannel shirt, blue jeans

(Abbott in jeans!), and waders. He was the first, and possibly last, man ever to move elegantly in waders:

"A fool - a fool I met a fool i' th' forest."

Lucy whispered, "Where did Abbott get that hat?" Sylvia whispered back: "It's Malcolm's. He's loaned most of the props."

On Sylvia's other side, Frank began coughing. Sylvia passed him a box of cough drops. It wasn't quite beneath him to cough through Abbott's next speech:

"All the world's a state

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts...." And one woman, also, Sylvia reflected, sometimes in the course of one long day. And which parts

put on, and which are real, she herself can scarcely tell....Sylvia smelled smoke. Had Frank forgot

to empty his pipe before he put it in his pocket?

"....then a soldier

full of strange oaths...."

"Frank, something's burning!"

As Sylvia spoke, a man and a woman in the front row stood up and went quickly up the aisle to an exit.

"Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth...."

Three more people rose, then five. Whispers became voices, voices were raised; more people, coughing, stumbled up the aisle. Sylvia saw James Lippincott take his mother up the side aisle.

Smoke billowed out from the left wing of the stage. Any minute some fool will shout FIRE, was

Sylvia's detached reflection, and the rest of the audience will stampede for the exits.

"Turn on the house lights." Malcolm called out. He vaulted onto the stage. "Stay calm. There's no danger. Walk out of the theater by rows, starting at the front. Frank - can you hear me?" Frank shouted back that he could. "Evacuate the balcony. Walk quickly, but do not run."

Sylvia followed Lucy up the balcony stairs. When she reached the top, Sylvia turned, saw Porter emerge on stage through dirty brown smoke to tell Malcolm something.

"Splendid work. The fire's under control. The fire department is on its way. Now, everyone, keep moving." You could always hear Malcolm's resonant voice.

On the stairs leading down from the balcony to the sidewalk, Sylvia began to shake. Her body had belatedly recognized the danger. She gripped the balustrade to prevent herself from pushing through a tangle of older, slower people. Then she had to get out! By worming her way down the

wall side, she reached the pavement well ahead of Lucy.

As Sylvia stood, somewhat ashamed, breathing in the mild evening air, she heard Diana say:

"What a disaster!"

Diana was got up as Mme. la Comtesse; although she and J.J. insisted that they preferred to be

plain Mr. and Mrs. Valliers this side of the Atlantic. She wore a bouffant lavender Dior, with

enough cleavage to start a revolution, and a teeny tiara in her blonde hair. Her face glowed an

unbecoming red:

"....Not with the April in Paris Ball, or the Legal Aid Benefit, or the United Nations thing, has

anything like this happened to me," Diana was telling anyone who would listen. "I'll have to grovel

all over town. J.J. made the French Delegation buy tickets, and the Consul-General took an entire row of seats."

"Whew!" Lucy was still coughing. "That's enough smoke to make me quit cigarettes forever."

Sylvia asked, "Is Frank behind you?"

"I think so. Most of the balcony's clear except..." She was drowned out by the screeching of sirens.

Two fire trucks and a hook and ladder pulled up. Firemen swarmed inside the lobby with hoses

and up the balcony stairs.

"Porter, have you seen Frank?" The actors in their costumes and make-up had exited from the stage door and were mingling with the audience on the sidewalk.

"Who? Oh, yes, Frank. Afraid not. We were rather busy with buckets and fire extinguishers just now. Malcolm's still back there."

"I saw you," said Minna. "And then you came through the smoke like one of the witches in

Macbeth." "The fire started in a rolled-up rug; one of ours, I'm sorry to say; but Jolly put it out."

Half-listening to Porter, Sylvia watched for Frank.

"Comes from carrying realism too damn far. We were going to fry real chops on a Coleman stove

for the Duke's feast. Apparently, setting up, someone spilled propane gas on the rug and later a

stage hand must have dropped a match...."

"It's not your fault, Diana, dear," said a small old lady wearing a sable tippet over a beaded gown.

"Ah, here's a taxi. Bertha and I feel we've had enough excitement for one night."

Diana attempted to smile: "If you'd like a refund, please give me a call."

"Oh, no, dear. It's all in a good cause, I feel sure."

Diana helped the woman and her equally decrepit friend into the cab, although there should have been a man around to do it. Would everyone desert and run home? The fire chief insisted that an inspection be made, once the smoke was aired out. Diana poked her head into the lobby. Nothing appeared to be happening.

She stood by the box office, fuming. More disasters, Diana felt sure, were brewing. The

Wadsworths' supper-reception afterwards would be a flop, done on the cheap. Helen was forever talking about saving money, though she had masses of it earning interest in Boston. Of course

Malcolm's father had squandered three inheritances on his Flossies and his Mabels; so Diana had learned from the older women with whom she worked on benefits. No adultery, no abortion (even hers?), no lesbian niece (Lucy), or drunken husband escaped these old hags' intelligence net. The failure of this benefit would live forever in the annals of New York society, along with J.J.'s disgraceful entrance tonight, stewed to the gills and wearing a business suit - claiming he'd come straight from lunch with two old friends. Resistance fighters, he said, as though he expected Diana to believe that! She'd sent him home as soon as the house lights went down. How to save the evening from disaster? As Diana began to circulate among her audience to reassure them that the play would resume shortly. Sylvia intercepted her, hysterically demanding to know if Diana had seen Frank.

"No, I have not." Diana hadn't meant to snap at Sylvia, who had worked so hard on her benefit, but the entire evening was such a colossal mess.

Sylvia flung herself toward the entrance to the balcony. A fireman blocked her way. "No one's allowed upstairs, Miss."

"My husband's trapped up there!"

"We got men all over the place. They'll bring him out."

Bring him out! Powered by anger - against the firemen, against Malcolm for ordering Frank to evacuate the balcony, against Diana's heartlessness - Sylvia dodged around the fireman and dashed up the balcony stairs.

On the landing another fireman barred her way. Behind him someone lay moaning. Oh God! He was burned, he was injured, he was dying!

Her sight cleared. Frank bent over a pregnant woman who appeared to be in hard labor, screaming, moaning, panting. Frank and a fireman were struggling to pull her upright.

"Sylvia, find a cab. It'll be quicker than calling an ambulance."

Sylvia dashed down the stairs. She ran the half block to Lexington Avenue. She stopped a cab, and rode in it back to the balcony entrance. Frank and the fireman appeared, carrying the woman on a chair made of their hands. They eased her feet-first into the back of the taxi. Frank got in front. He yelled back at Sylvia: "I'll catch up with you at the Wadsworths' party."

"Who was that woman?" Diana asked Helen. "I hope to God she doesn't sue the benefit committee." Malcolm and James emerged from the theater, followed shortly by the firemen, bundling up their

hoses. One by one the huge red trucks wailed off into the distance.

A bell rang for the audience to return. When everyone was seated, Gordon Lippincott came to the

front of the stage. He asked if they should start the scene again with Abbott's speech.

The audience clapped. The actors took their places.

The Buskers benefit performance for St. Peter's Educational Center received extensive coverage in

the Times. After the reporter listed the socially prominent members of the audience, she added, "It

was an unusually polished production. The exiled courtiers in their L. L. Bean outfits almost made

this reporter wish to take to the woods."

Additional stories in the general news sections of the Times and the Tribune lauded

"State Senator Malcolm Wadsworth, who has been mentioned as a candidate for Congress, calmed the panic-stricken audience and directed the row-by-row evacuation of the smoke-filled auditorium." And in the Herald Tribune: "One member of the audience, Mrs. Ian Campbell, was rescued from the flames ("What flames?" asked Sylvia) and escorted by State Senator Wadsworth to nearby New York Hospital, where she gave birth to an eight-pound girl named Rosalind."

"But, Frank, you took Mrs. Campbell to the hospital, not Malcolm."

"It doesn't matter, Sylvia. It's the same thing."

A week later, James returned from his parents' summer cottage in Amagansett. It had rained part of every day. He had crouched in front of a fire of wet wood to keep warm. He wrote on the shirt cardboards his mother saved for family messages: ROSE ROSE ROSE ROSE ROSE ROSE ROSE

ROSE more than a thousand times, as though he could write her back into his possession. He returned Dwight's car, stopped at his parents' apartment to assure his mother he was alive, and

then headed toward home.

On the way James bought pastrami, bagels, lox, and all possible trimmings. Once home, he

vacuumed, washed the dishes piled in the sink, showered and shaved. He iced a bottle of

champagne - the only alcohol Rosie liked.

He was upstairs changing the sheets on the bed, when Rose came home from work.

"I thought about it." She cast her coat and bag on the couch. "But I haven't changed my mind."

James took the staircase from the balcony two steps at a time. "Don't say anything, yet. I've got..."

he pointed to the feast laid out on the dining room table, the champagne icing in a scrub bucket.

He'd even remembered napkins.

"Thanks, Jamie. I didn't have any lunch."

She jerked off her hat, and flung it next to her coat. She sat down on one of their sling chairs. She looked smaller even than she had last week, and very tired. James poured her a glass of champagne. He fixed a plate of food for her, slicing a bagel, covering it with cream cheese, then

lox, a slice of onion; half a Kosher dill pickle lay on the side.

James slathered mustard on his pastrami and rye. He put his plate down; he couldn't eat. He

refilled her glass and poured himself a glass to keep her company.

"What did you do all week?" James asked in what he hoped was a normal voice.

"Every night there was a meeting. I volunteered for a committee on political contributions. Some

asshole wants to give to Jack Kennedy, but I say wait. How was the seashore?" Rose sat, shoes

kicked off, curled up in the chair like a cat. Food had brought back color to her cheeks.

"Let me fill your plate, first." He took care of her empty glass, while he was at it. "Nothing much happened. I walked on the beach when it wasn't raining. I found a dead herring gull down by the tidal inlet and gave it a decent burial."

"You always were a kid at heart."

James disliked her use of the past tense. "I didn't build sand castles, if that's what you mean. I bashed some music out of our old upright piano. I tried to read, but I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't think..." James had been pacing back in forth in front of her. Now he stood still and delivered his heart: "I love you. Don't go, I'll do...whatever you...." he heard his voice crack, like a boy's. "But don't ask for a divorce. Please."

She looked at him while he was speaking, gravely, without irony; it was a face he had never seen.

James poured out the last of the champagne. He knelt beside her chair. "Please?"

Rose smiled. "You've gone and got me drunk, you jerk."

He put his arm around the back of the chair. It was allowed to stay there. He kissed her.

"You want to take advantage of a girl?"

James kissed her again. "What does the girl say?"

"Okay. Why not?

Half an hour later, James said, "Your body loves me, still." He stretched luxuriously. "Bodies don't lie."

"A body has its own rules." Rose turned over.

"And your soul, or whatever is inside there," he caressed her smooth back, "went along with it. But for some dumb reason you won't admit you...."

"I don't." "Then why were you so damn sweet? You made me hope you loved - you liked me as much as ever."

Rose rolled over to face him: "I did it for myself. Why kid yourself that everything nice has gotta be done for other people?" Her eyes, in their bruised sockets, glared at him: "What's the matter with just doing it?"

"You're telling me you'd fuck anybody who asks you?"

"I told you, everyone cheats if they think they can get away with it."

James struck out at her, but she had rolled to her edge of the bed and his fist barely grazed her shoulder.

"Oh, Christ, Rosie, did I hurt you?" He must have been insane!

She shook her head. "Surprised, maybe, that you'd let yourself descend to being human."

James grabbed up his clothes from the floor. He locked the bathroom door. He ran the hot water until the mirror steamed over and he could no longer see the long homely face he hated.

When he came out, dressed, she was still lying on the bed, her arms folded behind her head, as splendidly nude as Goya's portrait of the Naked Maya.

"I didn't cheat on you, James. Last month I slept over at a girl friend's, if you want to know. I couldn't stand your eyes. So don't go all tragic on me. You're not a wronged husband."

James didn't know what he was.

"You got those eyes, now, Jamie. You're going to make me bawl if you don't go."

He stood beside the bed, unable to speak, unable to move.

"James, the place is half yours. You want I should go and you stay here?"

"No," his voice was hoarse. "No, thanks." "You're a prince. You're a ...oh, shit!" She pulled the sheet up over her head. He heard a wet muffled voice say, "That's what I get for hanging around people named Jolly and Mally."

James slammed the door behind him. He clattered down the stairs to the street. You can walk thirty blocks bawling your head off in New York and no one notices.

June, 1985

The last notes of the Brahms Requiem reverberate then fade. Still locked in the music (he has sung the tenor part under his breath), James stares out of focus at the rack of Hymnals and Prayer Books in front of him.

He continues an ongoing debate with himself: is it accurate to say that there are fewer good people around? Does the law governing conservation of matter apply to moral qualities as well? Or are honesty, altruism, moral courage in short supply? It seems to James, with Frank's death, then

Rose's, now Helen's, he knows few people who attempt to live up to their beliefs. This decade is not a time of heroes.

A flash goes off near the center aisle. James remembers what he is there for. He slides out of his pew. He finds the photographer, takes him firmly by the arm and escorts him out of the church.

The photographer is from The New York Post. He demands to know who the fuck James was.

James identifies himself as a friend of the family. The photographer grumbles; he plans to wait on the steps of the church until after the service.

"No you don't. Mrs. Wadsworth's memorial service is a private occasion not a photo opportunity."

James stops a passing taxi. "In you go."

As the cab drives off, the photographer gives James the finger.

PART THREE

Chapter Fifteen

1959 - 1961

For months James waited, suspended between his former happiness and some unimagined future, for the divorce to become final. These days he could not stand himself. Alone, he brooded over the stupid flaws and wrong-headed judgments that had wrecked his marriage. He drank too much, then slammed his hand against the wall to distract himself with pain. He turned up the sound on his record player until his ears rang (and was threatened with eviction if it happened again).

When work was offered, he grabbed it greedily. He went home to eat as often as his parents asked him, and sometimes oftener. He kvetched endlessly to Helen and to Lucy about his Rose, who refused to take his name and would not take his money; who never loved him with all her heart, and had never lied that she did. And James, like an idiot, would not accept her as she was.

Helen was appalled by the palpable cold breath of loneliness that James exuded. She urged him to drop by any time, if he could stand the domestic confusion. Helen also invited James to dinner with girls in their late thirties, ready to be remaindered. When James seemed impervious to Helen's college classmates, she tried another remedy. She drove him up to the South Bronx Community Center Union - formerly St. Peter's Church Educational Center - where the evening remedial classes for high school kids were mobbed, and there weren't nearly enough tutors.

The new Center, a former public school, was some blocks south and east of its parent church. It sat on a little hill in a wasteland of used car lots, body shops, convenience stores, and abandoned buildings. But the block surrounding the Center had been restored: the sidewalks repaved and edged with spindly plane trees, the playground fenced, resurfaced, and new basketball hoops had been installed.

Within the red brick building, the first two floors and basement cafeteria had been painted, broken windows replaced, plumbing restored, floors sanded and stained, new lighting fixtures installed.

The auditorium, which doubled as a gym, had a new curtain and new lights for its stage. Friends, neighbors and white volunteers from downtown were still refinishing furniture and working on the cafetria, in preparation for the Center's formal opening in March.

As James had nothing better to do at night, he agreed to tutor math and English twice a week.

That still left him many hours to fill. Whenever she was free, he went out drinking with Lucy.

Lucy tried to comfort him with a theory which absolved both James and Rose of blame. Simply, the break-up of their marriage was based on color. Most people were either green or blue in temperament, said Lucy. James was a blue person, someone who liked the sea and open air and dogs. Rose was green, just as necessary a color but one at war with blue. Green people liked cats and indoor life, and tended, like cats, to go their own way. Momentarily distracted from his own tragedy, James asked: "Do you have colors for everybody?"

Lucy did. Helen was silver, sterling silver; Frank was grey-blue; Abbott a beautiful moss green.

Sylvia was a puzzle of blue and red. Malcolm, however, was white. Why white? "Jolly, do you remember my white-on-white watercolors? I used gouache to cover the mistakes, so that nothing was not some kind of white."

James didn't get it. He'd color Malcolm red, white and blue to go with his political life. But Lucy was right about one thing: he, James, was very blue. His life was a lousy nothing.

"You're becoming a bore, Jolly," Lucy drawled. "Either find a shrink or take up music again. You need to make something."

Instead, to fill up the weekends, in February James volunteered for Malcolm's Congressional campaign. He worked out of the store-front headquarters Frank rented at Lexington Avenue and

80th Street.

Frank made it clear that this campaign was not his idea. "Malcolm got a dandy press after the fire at the benefit performance and good coverage on the bills he's sponsored in Albany. But it's downright frivolous, to my way of thinking, to serve a single term as State Representative, a single term as State Senator, and then grab the next rung up. Malcolm's young. Ten more years in Albany wouldn't harm him."

"Did you tell him that?"

"Sure thing."

"What did Mally say?"

"He quoted an article I'd given him to read, about `time for the next generation to take over from the tired old men of the New Deal.' I said the article was about John Kennedy, not an obscure State legislator. I reminded him about the State Convention. The folks upstate will have something to say about his candidacy."

"Then why are you running his campaign?" "Since he was going to do this damn fool thing, anyway, I'd be more use to him than a hired hand."

Frank lit his pipe and resumed: "Wanted to scare him, a little. It's doubtful that the State Party will

bother to back anyone else for the Primary. This has been a safe Republican District for fifty

years."

(Frank did not assume that Malcolm's nomination would automatically happen, however. As

Malcolm later told James: "That son-of-a-gun, Frank Underhill, took the upstate contingent, one by one, to lunch, or dinner, and softened them up. He's a born salesman. Then he hit possible contributors with a great line. He compared them to backers of a successful Broadway show.

Instead of earning dividends, they'd reap the satisfaction of better government. And he's made things harder on himself by accepting only small donations. `We don't want to be beholden,' says

Frank; `got to keep each contribution under $2,000 so when you vote against the donors, they can't kick.'")

Frank put James and Henry Moses in charge of voter registration. More than half the Negroes in the District were not eligible to vote, Frank had discovered. Voting information had to be circulated by house-to-house canvassing, because many Negroes did not have phones. James welcomed the time-consuming task. He and Henry (and six recruits from Columbia Law School) persuaded several thousand Negroes to register to vote in time for the fall election.

In March, the South Bronx Community Center Union's formal opening gave Frank a swell opportunity to present the Congressional candidate..

Although the ceremony was more than an hour late in starting, everyone stuck around. The choir of St. Peter's Church, dressed in white robes, sang Spirituals; children from the pre-school program, shivering in their brightly colored best clothes, pranced about to a scratchy recording of "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands," Teenagers from James's math class played the steel drums.

At last the main speakers arrived.

The Reverend Amos Depuy, the pastor of St. Peter's Church, described, at length, the genesis of the

Community Center: "It all began in one small room with a day care center for the leetle cheeldren of our church ten or more long years ago." (James wondered where the Rev., as tall as God and twice as handsome, learned his flowery, unctuous diction.)

Carmilla Depuy, the Reverend's sister-in-law, led the St. Peter's children's choir in "Precious Lord."

The Borough President introduced Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Powell spoke, "a spell- binding orator even now that his star has dimmed," as one white reporter wrote.

While Rodman Stubbs, the chairman of the newly formed board of the SBCCU, Frank and Sylvia,

Helen and James, and several hundred others watched, Malcolm Wadsworth, the candidate for

Congress, cut the tape across the main entrance to the South Bronx Community Center Union.

Malcolm's speech was very short. He concluded by saying that nothing he had ever done in his life had given him so much pleasure. Malcolm then turned to the Borough President and asked him if he didn't agree, while maneuvering him next to Congressman Powell for the official photograph;

Malcolm positioning himself on the edge of the group.

"Malcolm's going to win," Rodman observed to James at the reception in the cafeteria. "Leaders of our people who once dismissed Wadsworth as a rich white dilettante, are turning to him now."

That spring and summer Helen played an active role in Malcolm's campaign. She organized teas and evening receptions throughout the Congressional District to meet the candidate. Once their schools were out, Helen sent the children to the farm in Massachusetts with the au pair girl and a housekeeper. (The children were bribed with a puppy, a golden retriever, the first of a long line.)

She and Malcolm tried to spend at least part of every weekend with them.

Helen was now free to type Malcolm's speeches, listen to him practise them, watch devotedly while he gave them; she never tired of his voice. If Malcolm were running late, Helen would speak a few words into the microphone. She referred the more difficult questions, such as the status of Puerto

Rico, or police patrols on foot, to Malcolm, as a good wife should.

Helen had never imagined that a political campaign could be a second honeymoon. She and

Malcolm ate out all the time! They rarely went to bed before one. They made love frequently, as they had before Susanna was born.

Then, without warning, the Sunday before Labor Day Helen's father died of a heart attack while weeding his garden. My father died, Helen explained, as she made the complicated arrangements for the children at the farm, Malcolm's meals and laundry in town, and her own campaign obligations. My father died. She did not yet believe it. Richard Cross had died, a leading Boston lawyer, member of the St. Botolphe and Somerset Clubs, trustee of the Boston Athenaeum, board member of the Home for Little Wanderers, the Florence Crittendon League, the Old Seaman's

Home, Chairman of the Winchester (Mass.) United Fund, golfer, passionate gardener, sailor. He leaves his wife, the former Elinor Dudley Emerson, a son and daughter, and seven grandchildren.

He was not quite 62.

It simply wasn't true! Helen and her father talked at least twice a week on the telephone. (Calls made early in the business day before his law partners came in, conversations uninterrupted by

Helen's mother on the upstairs telephone.) Small things that she didn't like to bother Malcolm with

Helen discussed with her father. These long cosy converstions took her back to her childhood when she used to accompany him on his Saturday golf games, first as caddy, and then as indifferent player.

Lately they had discussed guilt. Helen told her father how she resented books and magazine articles that chided women for not being home with their children. According to the experts Helen should give up her volunteer activies and this summer devoted to Malcolm's run for Congress.

Her father absolved her. "Didn't that book on Momism argue that it was maternal `smother love' that ruined children? Seems to me that your absences cut down on the `smother.' Guilt is to the mind as pain is to the body. Pain sends us to a doctor; guilt asks us to examine our motives. Once having done that" - Helen could feel him smile over the phone, see his office with a view of the

Custom House Tower out the window - "you either amend your course of action, or proceed."

The Friday before Labor Day, during their telephone conversation, Helen's father teased her,

"Which of your guilts is twinging today?"

"I have a new one. If Malcolm's elected, we'll have to move to Washington. I'm terribly concerned about the children. Suse and Colum will be yanked out of school just as they've begun to make friends.

"I can see that it's going to be hard on the children if you do move; hard on you and Malcolm, if you don't. My dear, I'm afraid that I cannot advise you."

And then he died.

Mrs. Cross managed to endure the funeral, at which both Richard and Malcolm gave eulogies.

Then she took to her bed. For three long weeks Helen went back and forth between Winchester and New York. She thought hard about her father's reflections on guilt. It was cruel, but it had to be done. Helen hired a full-time housekeeper from the Women's Educational and Industrial Union,

and fled to New York.

Their first night alone, Helen spread her doubts before Malcolm. "I don't feel it's right to snatch the children away from their schools and friends. I..."

"Darling girl, I haven't won the election yet. When I do, I'm sure we can work something out for the children."

"And another thing. I'm going to hate every day apart from you, but I won't have the children growing up like the Roosevelt children in the limelight, written about and spoiled."

Malcolm roared with laughter. "I wouldn't worry. The press - even Town & Village - won't waste space on the kids of a freshman Congressman."

Helen said seriously, "Of course, when there's something a Congressman's wife is supposed to do,

I'll zip right down."

"But I'm going to need you, all the time. This past summer it was wonderful having you to myself."

"It was for me, too." Helen sat up in bed. "This isn't a snap decision. I won't bore you with - all

my reasons. I thought about it even before Father died. And since - then, I realize I can't face

everything that would have to be done to move us all to Washington. Also, I'm closer to Mother,

here. My father would want me to be...." She swallowed tears. "I'm just beginning to realize that

he, that he won't answer the phone when I call." She attempted to sound cheerful. "I've thought of

ways to keep you and the children in touch, so that when you're home for the weekends it will be as

though we haven't been separated."

"Helen, darling. I'm not going off to war, just Washington, D. C., if I'm elected. You sound like

Greer Garson in `Mrs. Minniver.'" She had to laughed. "But you do understand what I mean?"

"Completely. You've had a very rough time, and you're not going anywhere, right now." Malcolm pulled her to him. "Lord, have I missed you!"

James, juggling six empty grocery cartons, let himself in to the apartment with the key he'd refused to relinquish. He turned on all the lights against the November darkness. He made himself a cup of coffee before he started to sort the books.

Underneath Rosie's usual mess - overflowing ashtrays, a pile of WWD, the latest Variety, Union flyers, crumpled tissues, last night's clothes wherever they had fallen - the place looked much the same. An underfurnished marriage: bookcases, two canvas butterfly chairs, two Aalto stacking stools, a glass coffee table, chipped where he or Rosie had hit it with the wand of the vacuum cleaner, a couch that pulled out for guests. The carved mahogany table and four throne-like matching chairs were on loan from Rose's mother.

James mounted the spiral stairs to the bedroom. An interloper of a quilt covered their - Rosie's - bed. He opened a closet door and let out a breeze of her perfume. Was it a pathetic fallacy to think that her clothes looked lonely.

He returned to his cold coffee and their books. James left hers on the shelves to be boxed later, his he dropped into a carton. The set of Dostoevsky was hers and Emma Goldman's Living my Life.

The scorned (by Rosie) Profiles in Courage, by our bran' new President, belonged to James.

He lit a cigarette. While he waited for the water to boil for another cup of coffee, he smoked a second cigarette. Okay, said James to Jolly, stop dragging your big feet.

Into the carton went The New Yorker Album of Cartoons, Reveille for Radicals, its pages scarred with underlining, Man and his Gods. His The Meeting of East and West. The Maltese Falcon and Black Boy belonged to Rose. Lucy had given James Four Quartets. Where had Living the Good

Life come from? Her Metamorphosis, his Trial; make of that what you will. Ethel Rosenberg's

Death House Letters was a first edition. James wondered if there had ever been another.

He had filled two boxes when he came upon Thomas McCracken's little monograph on World

Peace, the pages still uncut. Whose La Chute? The Salingers were his. The Crisis of the Old

Order and The Decline of the West stood cheek by jowl. Nights when she couldn't sleep, did Rosie rearrange the books? On the fly leaf of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James had written, "For

Rosie, who puts a ring around my heart." Her grounds for divorce had been incompatibility, but

"mawkish sentimentality" might also have been cited.

He'd forgotten he owned so many volumes of P.G. Wodehouse. James grabbed one at random and plunged into events concerning the Empress of Blandings, a prize pig.

The door opened. Rose entered, divesting herself of purse, hat, gloves and coat. "So Prince

Charming won."

"Did you end up voting for Kennedy, after all?"

"No. I couldn't. I meant your buddy Malcolm on Kennedy's coattails. Maybe it was my vote put him in....Shit, I thought you'd of finished the books by now."

James dropped the Wodehouse into the carton with its mates. "A fundamentally unserious person," he'd heard one of Rose's friends describe Rose's (now ex-) husband.

"I've got to be downtown in an hour. Let's get the rest of it over with, James."

Lamps, pictures, china, glasses, linens, pots; their possessions halved as neatly as an apple: one stool his, one hers; chairs ditto; her bedroom furniture back to her mother's apartment in the Bronx, along with the dining room suite; couch, desk, lamp and his half of the bookcases to the apartment he had recently rented on 102nd Street. In silence they wrapped, boxed, tied and labeled. All the while James worried how to get himself out of there. (Could he kiss her? shake hands?

Once more express regrets?)

She grinned at him. "James, I told you to throw those sneakers away a year ago."

He looked at them. The soles were held to the canvas uppers with Band-aides.

"Buy yourself some new ones, okay? You got to set an example now you're teaching high school kids." (Was she still interested in what he did?) "Call me some time."

As he left James gave a jaunty wave and an imitation of a smile. Feel sorry for yourself? Work so hard you drop. Lesson thirteen from the Collected Wisdom of Rose Katzenbaum.

In the next months James more than doubled the number of classes he taught at the South Bronx

Community Center Union.

The Center's new director, William Norris, was an energetic Negro in his thirties with two graduate degrees in education. Helped by Rodman Stubbs, Norris obtained funding from the city to expand the Center's staff. Meanwhile Helen wrote, and rewrote painstakingly, proposals aimed at private donors. One of her appeals moved the Frehmont Foundation to pledge half a million dollars to the

SBCCU to combat adult illiteracy and to develop a college-bound program for teenagers.

The SBCCU offered James a small stipend. He cut back his work as a community organizer, lengthened the hours he tutored high school students, and took on classes of older men and women five afternoons a week. He had no syllabus, few text books, and conflicting advice as to how to go about the thing. It mystified him that his new students had managed to pay the rent, shop, hold down jobs, and get around the city all these years. James tried to imagine a life without books, periodicals, letters, even newspapers. If James remembered Aristotle's observation correctly, all human actions spring from seven

sources: chance, nature, compulsion, reason, passion, desire, and habit. And the greatest of these

must be habit. If you had mispronounced "ask" for fifty years as "ax" it was unlikely you'd stop. If

you had counted on your fingers since you were a kid, why learn multiplication? And if you had

reached fifty years of age you were too proud to make an ass of yourself in class. James had no

such qualms. He clowned, sang, joked, danced, drew stick figures - anything to take the fear out of the printed word.

He tried teaching numbers and words together. James distributed flyers from an A & P in the East

70s and flyers from supermarkets and grocery stores near the SBCCU. As his students painfully decoded the week's specials, and compared prices of the same brand goods, they realized that the local merchants charged more than rich people paid down town. Numbers were involved in the recipes James had his women students read aloud. After a fruitless discussion of fractions, one dignified old woman remarked, "But teacher, mostly I cooks in my head. Comes out just fine that way." James added the sports pages, comic strips, and daily astrology columns to the curriculum.

In April James introduced his students to the writings of Langston Hughes. They couldn't get enough of the poems or the stories about Simple! For James, it was the morning of the world. He knew himself well enough to distrust his euphoria. Each job he'd started, even law school, even canvassing for Henry Wallace, he'd tackled with brimming enthusiasm. Then in a week, a month, or a year, the work that once made him spring out of bed in the morning had become a grinding chore. Not this time! Naturally, he had to go around and tell Helen about it.

It was a little after six. James knew he had picked a lousy time. Malcolm usually telephoned from

Washington Wednesday evenings around 6:30 and talked to the children gathered about the supper table. She opened the door to the apartment herself. "I'm getting better, at last," he blurted out: "I've

decided to go back to school and train as a teacher."

"That's wonderful, Jolly!"

"I might even take the advice a bar fly gave me and cherchez la femme."

"That's wonderful, Jolly," she repeated faintly; she hated that vulgar expression. "You mean, you

feel like dating again?" She led him back to the kitchen. "I want to hear all about it. Sit down

while I serve the children's dinner, first; the au pair girl is off tonight."

Helen's hospitable kitchen was a community center in itself. In addition to the usual appliances, there was space for a large wooden table and eight chairs. There was a hooked rug, rocking chairs, a play corner, a desk, books, a small typewriter. The children's art works were pinned to a

corkboard mounted on the pantry door. The telephone had a room-length cord, and sometimes

people got tangled in it.

James watched Helen set plates of hamburger, green beans and baked potatoes before each child,

starting with Penny, the youngest. Helen poured milk, found the catsup and pickles, and came to

rest in the other rocking chair.

"I'm quitting as a community organizer. I'm going to enroll at Teacher's College. Actually, I only

decided this after class this afternoon."

James was beaming, and Helen almost burst out singing, "If you're happy, and you know it, clap

your hands." when, luckily, the telephone rang. It was Malcolm. After a few words, Helen handed

the phone to Susanna.

James saw that he had her attention again. "Helen, I've made an amazing discovery."

"With your college-bound classes?" "No, the adults. Most of my older students didn't know that Negroes wrote books. I've read them

excerpts from Langston Hughes, and from Black Boy and The Invisible Man. Next class I'm going

to introduce...."

"Wait a minute, Jolly," Helen said. "Penny's spilled her milk."

James couldn't stop. "I'm also turning them into writers. I've asked them to write down where they came from, what they do for a living, their children, their pets, and any stories they remember their

parents telling them.

"Suse, it's Colum's turn to talk to Daddy."

"One old man worked as night watchman at a brewery. He claimed he had nothin' to write about.

Then the man next to him

asked what about the hold-up at the Brewery in 1952. He wrote one page, two, five - he..."

"Mum, Dad wants to talk to you." Colum handed the telephone to Helen.

"Excuse me, James....Yes, Jolly's here again. He's decided to get a Masters in Education. Isn't that

wonderful he's ....No, darling, I didn't, yet. Don't worry, by Friday I'll...."

That "darling" sent James into the living room. He sat down at the piano. He played "The

Golliwogs' Cake-walk," followed by half a Chopin Nocturne, some Fats Waller, "Ah, Je Vous

Dirais Maman," and still he heard the lilt in Helen's voice as she talked to Malcolm in Washington.

James was too far away to make out her actual words.

He shut the piano lid. He stood in the door of the kitchen. He mouthed, I'll come by soon, waved

to Helen who was still on the phone, and let himself out the front door.

Chapter Sixteen

May, 1961 - November, 1963

Helen had successfully persuaded herself that she had solved her and Malcolm's weekday separations until May, when she was in Washington, attending a luncheon for Congressmen's wives.

As they took their seats, Helen's neighbor, the wife of a Congressman from Maryland, peered at

Helen's place card and said,

"You must be Malcolm Wadsworth's wife. I've run into him at several of Nancy's dinners."

"Malcolm's sister, in New York?" Nan rarely entertained.

"No, here in Georgetown. Nancy Musgrove. I was sure you knew her." (Between "knew" and

"her" had been space to insert "about.") "Nancy gives marvelous parties."

"So I've heard," Helen was surprised to hear herself lie. "I'm sorry to miss them. I'm stuck in New

York with the children until their schools are over for the year."

In June, a college friend now living in Washington, telephoned Helen. The friend hated to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Nancy Musgrove's name had been coupled with Malcolm's in the local gossip columns. "Nancy dresses like a dumb blonde, but she has her doctorate in education and a large house in Georgetown. Isn't life unfair, Helen?"

Helen thanked her and hung up, wondering what injury she had done this "friend" at Radcliffe. Like an illness you had previously never heard of, Nancy Musgrove's name kept turning up. There was a long entry in the Brearley School magazine's alumnae notes about her recent government appointment. Leafing through Mademoiselle in the dentist's office, Helen discovered that Nancy

Musgrove had won a merit award from that magazine for her pioneering work in elementary school curricula and, yes, she was a striking blonde, quite the loveliest of the ten winners.

During July the Berlin Crisis kept Congress in session. Malcolm did not fly up on the weekends.

He discouraged Helen from coming down to Washington, as he was tied up eighteen hours a day.

The first of August, as planned, Helen took the children to the farm in Lee, along with two Fresh

Air kids, the au pair girl, and an extra sitter.

The next weekend Sylvia and Frank spent the night on their way to Vermont, leaving Stephen and

Laura with Helen as planned. Malcolm had hoped to drive up with them, but he was stuck in New

York finishing a report for the House Committee on Education.

Monday morning, Helen read in the Boston Herald that among the guests that past weekend at the

Kennedy compound in Hyannisport were Miss Nancy Musgrove, a consultant on education, and

New York Congressman Malcolm Wadsworth.

Helen hid the newspaper. She made sandwiches and fruit punch. She mobilized the au pair girl, the sitter and the eight children for a picnic by the lake. When they had gone, she took the phone off the hook, and retreated to her bedroom.

Quite simply, she couldn't believe it. In the last months of their engagement, it had been Helen who suggested that they sleep together. Those nights of heavy necking were driving them both crazy! No, Malcolm had said; he wanted them to wait until they were married. Not that he was a virgin, but. Of course, Helen answered wisely, war time had forced young men to live each leave as though it were the last. But if Malcolm had enjoyed `amorous escapades' back then, might they have become a habit?

Even before Helen was officially engaged, her father had warned her: "I'm sorry, my dear, to point this out and I won't refer to it again. Malcolm is very personable. I don't doubt for a minute that he loves you, but he may prove to be somewhat unreliable." What Dad had meant was, Like father, like son.

But Malcolm wasn't like Mr. Wadsworth! Malcolm and Helen never fought. They agreed about everything. Malcolm never complained about Helen's unreadiness some nights to make love; or her turning to wood when she heard a child crying. And a man required more sex than a woman, didn't he? It was simply overflow - and now she was being crude - a bodily need that anyone could fulfill. NO. It was a sacred part of marriage, and if Malcolm had committed adultery it meant he didn't love her!

But the rumors about Nancy Musgrove were false. She felt sure of it. Malcolm would explain how the silly story got about once she talked to him. Calmer now, Helen put the phone back on the hook. She paced twice around the room, gazing blankly at the unmade bed, piles of wash to be sorted, books bent back to mark her place, a photograph of Malcolm and her at the Inaugural Ball.

She put a call through to Delafield and Lambert. Malcolm's secretary was on vacation. Helen asked to speak to Miss Partridge, "The Partridge," who had been with the firm since it started.

"Please don't bother Malcolm. Just glance at his calendar and tell me what he has scheduled for tomorrow."

Miss Partridge ascertained that he had appointments at 9:30, 3 p.m. and 4:30. "Oh, Helen, now that

I have you...." (She knows about Malcolm, thought Helen, sinking fast.) "Has Mrs. Delafield spoken with you lately? She's every bit as worried as I am about Mr. D. He forgets names five minutes after I remind him. He misplaces briefs and then blames his poor secretary. He hasn't been himself since Mr. Lambert died...."

Half an hour later Helen hung up with, "I'll discuss it with Malcolm, I promise. Now I'm afraid I must go." She could hear the children streaming into the farmhouse through all the doors, calling to her to tell her about their picnic. They had been absent less than two hours and she felt ten years older.

Throughout the afternoon she directed her impromptu summer camp, letting the sitters rest up for tomorrow when Helen would be in New York. She settled a quarrel between Colum and the elder

Fresh Air kid, helped Susanna with a batch of cookies, read aloud to Penny and Laura, threw balls for Ricky and Stephen, prepared dinner. All the while her thoughts droned and fretted like flies trapped between a screen and a closed window.

Who could she discuss these rumors with before she challenged Malcolm tomorrow? Frank and

Sylvia were the logical victims, but the Underhill farmhouse had no telephone. Her brother

Richard was too in awe of Malcolm to be helpful. Wasn't it customary to consult one's clergyman at times like these? Helen blushed to think of mentioning something so personal to Father

Cogswell or young Chris Reid.

Who probably had heard "about" Miss Nancy Musgrove, like everyone else. Helen thought bitterly of all New York waiting with impatience and curiosity and pleasure ("Helen's so pure," they would say) to learn how Helen would handle Malcolm's infidelity. If it was infidelity. She had often heard him say he preferred the company of an intelligent women who listened, to a man who was waiting to score points.

At ten thirty that night, when the last child was asleep, Helen telephoned James Lippincott. James sounded unsurprised to hear her voice. (He must know!) He'd be delighted to discuss a problem with her tomorrow, but he had a tennis game first thing. Helen could meet him at the courts around nine, or stop by his parents' apartment where he went to shower afterwards.

The sun was coming up as Helen drove across the Connecticut State line at something over the legal speed limit. The traffic remained light until she reached the outskirts of the city. She violently regretted her impulsive call to James last night. She had chosen to telephone him because

(and this was so unworthy) James had once appeared to be in love with her, and could still be depended upon for sympathy. She wouldn't take much of his time, she told herself now, only a few minutes to rehearse her speech to Malcolm. At all costs she must avoid sounding like a prig. Yet it was so very wrong of Malcolm to - do what he'd done. Always supposing that he had done it.

Helen wasn't much given to reviewing the rules and beliefs she lived by. They were as near to her as the spoons and spatulas that stood in a pottery mug beside her stove, at hand when needed. You gave your word and it was good for life. You trusted people because the alternative was unthinkable. Now as she came down the Henry Hudson Parkway, she drew comfort from another one of her precepts: If you work hard enough, you achieve your goal. She hadn't worked hard enough at being Malcolm's good companion. Four children, her volunteer jobs, the SBCCU, social obligations, her grieving mother, had robbed Malcolm of her attention..

All that would change. Helen would move to Washington, even if the children were miserable.

Whenever Malcolm he spoke, she would be in the gallery of the House of Representatives, clapping. Malcolm would have no cause (and no opportunity) to look elsewhere. And it seemed to

Helen that she would triumph when she found a parking space near Central Park first try.

As James was half a head taller than anyone else on the public courts, Helen spotted him right off.

She sat on a bench in the shade waiting until he finished. It seemed almost too hot to play, but James charged, stroked, volleyed and, yes, danced all over the court, taking shots that belonged to

his partner and retrieving impossible lobs. He and his partner, an older woman with orange hair, were playing a black-skinned, bearded man and a strapping brunette about Helen's age. Did James

have a girl friend these days? Helen sincerely hoped so.

When the game ended, James introduced her to his companions not as Congressman Wadsworth's

wife, for which she felt grateful, but as "Helen, an old college friend." (But James's solicitous look

told her he knew.) Then he and Helen walked toward Fifth Avenue. James was careful to keep to

leeward of her.

"You look terrific in lavender, Helen. What a nifty dress."

"Thanks." She could not return the compliment. James wore a stained undershirt, ragged shorts

and basketball sneakers. For a while they discussed the courses he planned to take this fall. "But

you didn't drive down from Lee merely to talk about my courses. What's up, Helen?"

She couldn't tell him, she realized now.

"You want to talk about the education bill before Congress?" James asked cautiously. A rumor

about Mally's young woman in Washington had reached James via his mother.

"Not exactly. It's too, well, public to go into here."

James said he understood. He held open the door to his parents' apartment house. The elevator

man greeted James and Helen was introduced. James unlocked the door, and excused himself to

shower.

Helen moved restlessly around the living room. She glanced up at the portrait of young Charlie

Lippincott. It always reminded her of how young Malcolm had looked when she first met him.

Helen tried out various sentences on the portrait. Have you heard a rumor that might ruin your chances for re-election next year? Malcolm, I know it's silly gossip, she might begin, but there's a

story going around. She needed to have her words ready, and in order. She had a horror of crying.

"Helen, did you have breakfast?" James, wearing a towel, carried a tray set with coffee cups, milk, sugar, a coffee pot, toast and jam.

She shook her head. He poured her a cup of coffee.

James whisked a sheet off the couch. "Come on, sit down. I don't have to be anywhere until this afternoon." James was, in fact, due at the SBCCU in half an hour. "So what's your problem? as we say here in the big city."

She couldn't unburden herself, not even if someone put a gun to her back! "It's nothing any one can....Last night I thought I should talk to someone, first." She gave him a wan smile. "But now

I...." she looked at her watch. "If I stay, I'm going to be late for my appointment." She put down her cup. "Thank you for the coffee."

Watching the conflicting expressions on Helen's face, James surmised that this was the first time she had found Malcolm out. He wouldn't pass judgment on Mally, until he knew the facts, but

James did not, at that moment, like his friend very much. At the same time, he hoped desperately that Helen wouldn't cry. The only towel he could find was around his waist. He asked cautiously:

"Are you sure I can't help?"

"No." She felt herself flushing with anger. It was none of James's business that she and Malcolm were having - difficulties; then she felt close to tears. She had thrust herself on Jolly, and now she had almost been rude to him!

"No, thank you. It's something I have to decide for myself." She kissed his cheek and almost ran to the door. Helen did not need a Freudian exegesis to explain why she gave the new receptionist at Delafield and Lambert her maiden name. The receptionist checked his office. Mr. Wadsworth was out.

When he returned the receptionist very much doubted that Helen could be worked in, since she didn't have an appointment.

"He'll see me," Helen said wearily. She sat down. She took out her pocket notebook. Under the hostile gaze of the receptionist, she worked on her endless lists: clothes or uniforms each child would need for school; their dental appointments and medical check-ups; repairs to the farm house; names of people they owed and who must be entertained back. Another part of her mind continued to hunt for words to wring the truth from Malcolm.

Off and on the receptionist's phone rang. Once Helen heard her answer, "There's this Miss. Crosby here. She doesn't have an appointment. No, she didn't say what it's about."

Helen turned a page in her notebook. Under the heading SBCCU she wrote: advertise for a

Spanish-speaking assistant. Funding? She listed several small foundations to approach. (What can

I say, Malcolm, except that I'm jealous, fearful, hurt, and furious.) Helen flipped to a blank page.

She drafted a letter, politely refusing to serve on one of Diana's benefit committees, "but do try me next time." (What if Malcolm says he wants a divorce? How could she prepare the children for such a lethal blow?) Her head ached. She shut her eyes, feeling what remained of her energy drain out of her like sawdust from an antique doll.

"Helen?" Malcolm asked, "What in God's name are you doing here?" His voice was hoarse with anxiety.

Helen opened her eyes. Malcolm was deeply tanned (she named it, disparagingly, a Kennedy tan); the tan set off his grey eyes and light summer suit. He carried a festive tennis bag. Because he was suffering, she waited before speaking. "Don't worry, none of the children has been in an accident." "But something's very wrong?"

Helen nodded.

Malcolm turned to the receptionist: "Why didn't you show my wife into my office, where it's

cooler?"

"She didn't say she was your wife. She gave another name" - the girl looked down at the pad on her

desk, "Helen Cross."

"You told me Crosby." He took Helen's arm. "Come on in, darling."

The "darling" no doubt for the receptionist's benefit. Helen suffered herself to be seated.

Malcolm shut the door to his office. "Sorry about her, Helen. She's an office temp....I'd have been

here sooner; but after I called in, I played an extra set. Now, what's on your mind, Miss Crosby."

She could not smile.

His buzzer rang, a long distance call which, glancing pleadingly at Helen, he had to take. She

strained to determine the sex of the caller. She decided it was a man. Helen glanced through the

current Newsweek. She had no idea what she was reading.

When Malcolm hung up, Helen spoke too loudly: "Tell me about Nancy Musgrove."

They both stood, Newsweek slithering off her lap to the floor. Malcolm's face wore a courteous

blankness, as though they had just met.

"Are you hungry?" Malcolm asked. Without waiting for her answer, he buzzed The Partridge.

"I'm taking Helen to lunch. Please cancel the three o'clock. I'll let you know about the other

meeting later."

They walked north through the heat and lunch-time crowds, smelling the exhaust fumes of cars.

Helen pointed to the Brooklyn Bridge. "Could we talk up there, please." "Of course, darling." Malcolm took her arm, but Helen twitched away from him. They climbed the stairs to the walkway on the bridge. It was blessedly quiet, and deserted except for an occasional bicycle whizzing past on the splintered boards.

Half way across, Helen stopped. She gazed at the splendid stretch of the harbor to her right, and to her left the East River, speckled with tugs and small motor boats. She had always loved this bridge with its towers and cables that formed an airy Gothic church. Couldn't she and Malcolm continue on, stroll to Brooklyn Heights, find a small restaurant, hold hands, and forget the reason why she was there? Helen drew in her breath:

"Why did you lie about staying in New York this past weekend?"

"No lie: I had to work."

She wished he'd bluster, make excuses, betray guilt, provide some crack through which she could penetrate.

Helen swallowed. "The Boston papers reported that you and Miss Nancy Musgrove visited the

Kennedy compound this weekend."

"I was asked unexpectedly to attend a conference on education. I flew up on Sunday for the day."

"Was the meeting held on a boat so you all could get nice and tan?" Helen directed her next sentence to the water below. "This isn't the first time I've heard Nancy Musgrove's name."

"Why didn't you ask me about her before?

Feeling Malcolm's hand on her shoulder, Helen moved away.

"There's very little to report. Nancy gives good Washington parties. Just like you." (Nothing about her is like me, Helen raged.) "Now and then she invites temporarily single fellers like myself to balance out her dinner table..."

"I bet she does." "I accept her invitations because I meet influential people there who might give a leg up on the bills

I'm sponsoring. That's all there is to it."

Smelling smoke, she turned to face him. He was debonairly smoking a cigarette! Beside herself,

Helen shouted:

"Can't you try to put yourself in my place, reading about - finding your husband's name linked...I

suppose you'd say: What could I expect after I refused to move to Washington? But don't you

remember why I couldn't pull up stakes and go?"

The detached manner in which he drew on his cigarette, his godlike pose against the cables of the

bridge, his bland complacency in the face of her anguish made Helen almost mad with rage. "Do

you have any idea how I feel knowing you'd been seeing this woman? I feel, I feel like - a victim,

an Aztec sacrifice, having my heart torn out of my living body! As though I were covered with my

own hot blood!"

Malcolm looked appalled. "Good God, Helen, how horrible." He chucked his cigarette over the

rail.

"I don't want to know if you slept with her. I don't care as long as you - you don't go to any more dinner parties and...conferences with her. But if this ever happens again, I swear I'll - I'll..." Helen swallowed, tasting bile.

"Hush, darling. Nothing happened, and nothing will." He moved closer.

"Will you give me your word?"

Malcolm stretched out his hand and lifted her chin. "Look at me." His face was grave. His eyes

were steady, and full of light. "You come first, Helen. You'll always be my first thought. Good

Lord, darling, you're my wife."

Wife means duty, wife's mere habit, Helen thought angrily. But Malcolm hadn't finished: "You're the only girl I've ever loved. You're my once and future love." He sang the first bars of

"How to handle a woman."

"Oh, Malcolm, don't; please, be serious."

"I am. I love you. I probably don't tell you near enough how much I do. I've built my life on you."

He continued to gaze at her, as though trying to hypnotise her into belief. "I'm bad at praising you,

but it's hard to praise perfection."

To her horror, she began to cry. Weak tears leaked down her cheeks and were snatched away by

the wind. I truly can't bear this, she said to herself.

She must have spoken aloud. He pulled her to him, and she wept into his neck. He murmured,

"Helen, Helen, my dear, don't cry. We're all right. We're together, thank God."

When at last she had ceased shaking, he placed his hands on either side of her face and kissed her

gently on the forehead, eyelids, nose, mouth and chin. He pulled her arms around him, and with his

arms pressed her to him and kissed her hard and long on the lips, a kiss that meant bed and to which

Helen, to her astonishment, immediately responded, could not wait, would burst if they did not act

upon it soon.

"Darling, I do believe you," she murmured. "I'm sorry I threw such a tantrum...."

"Spare some change?"

They had been accosted by a small ragged man with his hand out. "You oughtta look at this beautiful bridge instead of smooching," he said primly. "Built in 1883, and one of the wonders of the world."

Malcom held on to Helen with one hand. The other fumbled in his pocket for money. "Betcha don't know how they built it? They wound thin little wires around each other, hunderts of

them. They braided those wires like a young girl's hair into thicker wires and then wound them into

cables. Go to the libary some time. Look up the Roeblings, father and son..."

"We will." Malcolm handed the man a bill to get rid of him.

"You gave him five dollars!" Helen exclaimed, after the tramp had muttered his thanks and

disappeared.

"He looked as though he needed it."

Helen said, "I need you. Now."

"I was waiting for you to say that."

When they were in a taxi headed uptown, arms braided together, she asked: "But what about your

last appointment?" And her diaphragm, which was in Lee, Massachusetts, along with eight

children and nothing planned for their dinner.

"I'll call in when we get home."

As the cab careened up the East Side Drive, Malcolm asked: "One last question. It's a wonderful

surprise to have you here, but why didn't you telephone and save yourself the trip?"

"I had to see you face to face; this wasn't something that could be taken care of on the phone."

"Not yet, despite the miracles of modern science." Malcolm kissed her. "I'm never sure if you're

incredibly naive or terrifically sophisticated."

She could joke, now. "`I refuse to answer on the grounds that it will incriminate me.'"

The cab drew up at their building. Malcolm untangled himself to get at his wallet. "Good Lord,

have you got a fiver, Helen? I used my last one on the bridge."

Long before Caroline's birth, in May of 1962, Frank and Malcolm realized that this was going to be

a tough campaign. It was an off-year election in which the party in power traditionally loses seats;

but that was not the worst of it. Interpreting the 1960 census imaginatively, downstate Republicans

(by a trade-off Frank and Malcolm had been unaware of until too late) managed to have Malcolm's

Congressional District redrawn to include new pockets of Republicans and eliminate two strongly

Democratic areas. And this time the Republicans put up a candidate worth voting for, a young,

personable lawyer, not unlike Malcolm himself, who provided new meat for the press.

Not that the Congressional campaign received much coverage. The Cuban Missile Crisis

dominated the newspapers, radio and television. As Jesse Caplan put it, even if Jesus Christ had

been the Democratic candidate that year, he'd have lost.

Two days after the election, Francis Underhill walked around to Delafield & Lambert to tell

Malcolm, in person, that he was quitting as Malcolm's political manager. Frank had threatened to

do this once before. This time he meant it. He had brought Malcolm bad luck. He was resigning

like a football coach whose team has had a losing season.

After Frank had finished, Malcolm said, "If that's the way you feel, your resignation is accepted."

Frank, chilled by this, had muttered something about, well, that's settled, and left.

The following day Frank tried to reach Malcolm by phone. Frank's call was not returned. The next

week Frank telephoned to set up a lunch date. Malcolm's secretary said that Malcolm was booked

all week. Frank scrawled off a note: "What the hell is going on?" His note was not acknowledged.

Sylvia called Helen to discuss Malcolm's odd behavior.

"Sylvia, I think Frank hurt Malcolm's feelings by quitting."

"Why didn't Malcolm say so?" "Malcolm isn't the one who defected." Then Helen heard herself. "Oh, Lord, Sylvia, don't let us fight."

"We have more sense than that."

"But the awful thing is, there hasn't really been a fight! How can we make them yell at each other and clear the air?" Helen had already suggested it to Malcolm. Malcolm answered that he hadn't done a damn thing; it was Frank who had chosen to quit. Male pride!

In late November Frank argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and won. Malcolm had been indirectly involved in the case, as well. But another partner at Delafield & Lambert called to congratulate Francis Underhill.

When Sylvia heard this, she said: "It's so stupid. You've worked thousands of hours on Malcolm's campaigns; haven't taken a cent for them; and want nothing from him." Sylvia paused to admire her sentence. "You were perfectly entitled to resign. But why can't you remain friends, for God's sake?"

"I am under the impression that we were friends. It seems that I was just an office temporary. The hell with it."

The Wadsworths had seats for a benefit Minna was running, a performance of the Broadway musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, to raise money for the Third Street

Music School. As Helen and Malcolm took their seats, Helen saw the Underhills three rows behind them. Helen waved to Sylvia. The two men seemed engrossed in their programs.

During the intermission, the Wadsworths encountered Minna in the lobby. "The money we raise is for music scholarships for slum children," Minna told them. "Only you're not allowed to say `slum' or `lower classes.' Mally, you should know. How do Congressmen describe poor people these days?" Before he could answer, Helen trapped Frank and Sylvia as they slid by, and anchored them to her group with each hand. "Frank," Helen asked, "what is the current jargon for clients at the SBCCU's housing clinic?"

Unable to break away, Frank grinned at Malcolm. "What euphemism do you suggest, Mally?"

Frank's grin contained equal parts of rue and parody, Sylvia observed, and Frank never addressed

Malcolm as Mally. Sylvia caught a glance from Helen ordering her and Minna to keep quiet. For a stopped minute the five of them seemed stranded there in the lobby among a sea of friends and acquaintances.

At last Malcolm spoke. "Minna, you're asking me to compress into one word `people in need who have no support other than welfare and private charity.'" He continued, using phrases from a leaflet

Sylvia had written for his last campaign. "`People without bank bank accounts, credit cards, education, or the right connections - everything that the middle class takes for granted.' Would

`disadvantaged' be a useful umbrella word?....Hey, Frank, isn't Zero Mostel great?"

Frank agreed that Mostel was extraordinary.

The Wadsworths and the Lippincotts gave a New Year's party together. They spent the Easter holidays at the Wadsworth's farm in Lee. In June, when the ice was out of the lake, Malcolm invited Frank to go fishing.

"What was Malcolm like in the wilds?" Sylvia asked Frank when he returned.

"Very popular. He'd brought the guides pipe tobacco and good whiskey, and their wives enough provisions for an army; it was the Buskers Forest of Arden."

"What did you talk about all day?"

"We weren't together. We each had a guide and a canoe and only met up at meals." "A guide to do the paddling? People to cook lunches and dinners, and no doubt refill your drinks."

Sylvia meant Frank to hear the deprived note in her voice. She had been alone for ten days with the

children. "Malcolm's law practise must be booming."

"I paid half the expenses." Frank ended the conversation.

Sylvia tried again some days later. "But weren't you bored fishing all day long?"

"There are birds and trees and skies to look at when the fish aren't biting. Now and then we saw a

deer."

"I mean, in the evenings. If two women were off alone there'd be moments of confession, sharing

of memories, an argument or two, little dramas of precedence and self-sacrifice - `No, go on, you

take the last muffin.' That sort of thing."

"The guides' wives baked more muffins than we could eat...No, we weren't bored. Malcolm taught me how to tie flies. We played cribbage. We talked about his come-back campaign. Must say, I

didn't get much reading in." Frank grinned. "Not after Malcolm dropped my copy of the tax codes

into the lake."

"Why did he do that?"

"No work allowed, he said."

"He was absolutely right." Frank had returned looking almost sleek after ten days away from the

office.

"Malcolm also meant his joke as a prelude to a proposal. He asked me to join Delafield &

Lambert. Said Porter wanted me `aboard,' as did Thomas and a number of the other partners.

"My God, what a compliment!" But Sylvia had already guessed the outcome when she asked:

"What did you say?" "I was honored by the invitation but my present firm had made me full partner when I joined them and I owed it to them to stay on."

"Did Malcolm go cold and silent on you again?"

"No. Malcolm usually accepts things as they are. That other time was an aberration. I suspect he felt, wrongly, that I was disloyal." Frank added, "I'd would like to know if Porter and Thomas and the others were behind Malcolm's offer."

"Porter wouldn't be consulted. He's terribly muddled these days. Malcolm devoutly wishes he'd retire."

"I agree. Poor old man....I don't have lawyer's evidence, but I'd guess inviting me to join Delafield

& Lambert was Malcolm's idea. His way of making sure of my allegiance. But Malcolm doesn't need any more followers. He needs independent critics, like me."