Below a tree Beth had told him the second day he was there was named a flamboyant tree, a drunk lay on his side, a broken pint bottle still clasped in his hand, blood speckling the ground where he had cut himself as he passed out. Marshall took a deep breath, needing air to avert a swarming dizziness. The place had sent him into a near panic. He was looking for reference points, landmarks, familiar things that would provide a buoy on which he could affix his attention. In another flamboyant tree he saw two balloons. In a store window, a gargoyle draped with shiny necklaces. Trash in the gutter. People still rushing toward the dock grabbed for flyers flicked in their direction — flyers advertising discount videos, massages, two-for-one drinks, trips to the same reef Beth had told him the first day he arrived was all but dead. His life had been sharply proscribed, he realized, and he was the one who had done it; he had been the one who’d chosen to circle on the slow donkey, going round and round but going nowhere, and then what had happened but someone had galloped into his life on a high-spirited horse, and he had found himself on the road, a most unwitting and highly unlikely Sancho Panza. Okay: Cheryl had been right about that — following after … what? Whatever unarticulated quest McCallum had decided must be enacted.
Suddenly, a man, in a parody of an effete conductor, raised his hand and poked a burning stick of incense toward his nose, which he tried to ward off. Still, the musky smell seemed to clash unpleasantly with the sunset, the near-fetid smell making him squint at the sky’s harsh brilliance. Behind them, people continued to crowd toward Mallory Dock: excited tourists; indifferent day-trippers who’d been told this was the place to go; the homeless, who might as well drift in that direction as another. The dock was by now punctuated with fire: jugglers tossing torches, animal trainers raising burning hoops, people holding sparklers that fizzed with silver fire, the cacophonous music as loud as sirens in the night. Whistles and shrieks continued, along with balloons released to float upward and intermingle with the coming stars, until that time when they would inevitably explode or deflate, to become a deadly food for fish. If McCallum had made it this far, Marshall thought, he would have loved this lurid spectacle. With an increasing feeling of claustrophobia and an adrenaline rush that made his heartbeat echo in his ears, the noise of the after-sunset revellers became white noise, just as — in a place that seemed across the universe — drifted snow disguised the landscape of New Hampshire in his absence. He thought of New Hampshire. The snowy woods. The icy hoarfrost on his own front lawn. Every man’s house his castle. New Hampshire, blanketed in white. Returning, he would have to drive carefully. Gingerly, back to the gingerbread house, real icicles its white frosting.
Cocoanut Grove
WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN there that night, the night of the great fire that burned the Cocoanut Grove, except that Miles received a business call at the Ritz, and when Miles received a business call, you could always gauge its importance by whether or not he untied his shoes. That night, not two minutes into the call, he stepped right out of them: soft black leather lace-up evening shoes he’d had mailed to him from Lobb’s in England, just before the war broke out. He always ordered shoes in duplicate, so although he couldn’t get the shoes anymore, he still had a brand-new pair he’d never taken from the box that he’d just taken out of the suitcase a few minutes before. Lobb’s shoes: how he loved them. He wanted to look dashing at his friend’s wedding. It was winter, 1942. Holy Cross had just beat Boston in college football, and he was in a very bad mood before he answered the phone, because he’d made a rather large bet that Boston would win. At first he thought the phone call was from his friend, wanting to collect. Then he realized it was something that would take a while and he waved me away, as if he were dispersing cigarette smoke — as he so often did when he took a business call. I think he was convinced women could die of boredom. I think he thought his standing there, holding the phone, was as dangerous to a woman’s well-being as her being on a battlefield. It was not that usual that a lady visiting Boston would be sitting alone in the lobby of the Ritz, but I wasn’t silly about things like that. I knew I’d be perfectly safe, and who cared if an eyebrow or two was raised? I had on a peach silk dress and nylon stockings and a pair of black high heels he’d bought me. It was a coincidence that I wore the same size, exactly, that she wore. It’s very hard to find a AA shoe these days, but then it was a common size. Women’s feet were narrower. So I had on shoes not terribly dissimilar from shoes she’d picked out for herself, though mine had higher heels. My hair was auburn, and I knew the peach silk set off the highlights in my hair. I was so excited to be going to the Cocoanut Grove. You’d think the party was for me — though many years would elapse between that night and the night of my marriage. I was never sure I’d be married at all, to tell the truth, and it certainly never would have crossed my mind I’d be married to Miles. I thought about our relationship the way he had presented it to my parents long past the time I should have; I realized I wasn’t there in Maine to help take care of Gordon and to teach Alice French. She had no interest at all in learning French, and I felt so silly, bringing it up, as if it were my own obsession. “
Bonjour, Alice!” I would say, and she would sigh, or tell me, “Bonjour, chérie. Ça suffit,” which was her little joke about not intending to converse in any language but English. But in spite of the way things were, I kept thinking about the way my parents had been told things would be, and I tried to pretend that was the reality. They would have been stunned, of course, if they’d ever known my real position in the house. And certainly they would have been shocked to think that from the winter of 1937 until 1941, when his courtship resulted in my pregnancy, and I finally realized I would have to go with him, to do whatever he said … they would have been stunned to know I’d been courted by letter and in person by Miles, for years. That I’d gone to a hotel with Miles would have been inconceivable. I was no different than a whore in that hotel room, though nobody but the two of us knew that. She knew it too, of course, but she didn’t know at that very moment where we were, didn’t care to know, is what I think now, because she liked me. After all, if it hadn’t been me, he would have had some other indiscretion. She had no idea she might have lost both of us in the horrendous fire that was to kill 492 people that night. A busboy stood on a stool and lit a match to replace a lightbulb. The headlines the next day blamed the busboy, but really: he was working in unsafe circumstances; he’d made a simple mistake and suddenly one of the artificial palm trees caught fire, went up like a torch. There were luxurious silk draperies that caught fire, and before anyone could react, the entire nightclub was aflame. When it was over, the firemen would find the partygoers, Miles’s good friends, the bride and the groom, dead inside. Some people said they were lying six deep, scattered like garbage dumped from a trash can, piled one on top of the other so the firemen found it all but impossible to enter the nightclub through the revolving doors. The bar was downstairs, the restaurant and dance floor up above. There was no sprinkler system, there were no marked fire exits. It became an inferno, the palm trees burned, the drapes sizzled into sheets of flame, the tables went up as if they’d been doused with gasoline, they burned so fast, everything contributing to the explosive heat that was to kill more than half the people who had gone there with so many pleasant expectations. If not for that call, we might have been among them. Maybe we would have been among the lucky — the ones who crawled out a bathroom window, or who found some other way out. But we never went to the Cocoanut Grove. I sat in the lobby for a while, then returned to the room. Ten or fifteen minutes into his call, he wasn’t happy to see me, but what could he do? I was slightly relieved, after all. People at the party knew his wife. However he introduced me, they would suspect. Deceptions of that sort just did not bother him; he only felt obliged to say something perfunctory — not necessarily to state the truth. He was so charming; you could see it in people’s eyes that they didn’t believe him, but neither did they contradict him. “If they say nothing to my face, they’ll surely say nothing to yours,” he said, and that was one of the truest things he ever said. I only saw it in their eyes, or in their exaggerated politeness. Alice was another matter — as well she might have been. Imagine any married woman finding out her husband had a twenty-three-year-old lover — being presented with this person as a fait accompli, and then being told later the same day that the twenty-three-year-old girl, the daughter of her husband’s Canadian friends, who’d come to help them set up a summerhouse on the coast of Maine, was pregnant. I wasn’t sitting in any lobby in a silk dress with my hands folded neatly in my lap during those two encounters with Alice several hours apart, you can well believe that. She threw a glass of orange juice in my face and stomped her foot on the empty glass, cutting her hand as she picked up a big shard to throw at him, screaming words I never heard her use again. I was terrified. Simply terrified. She was only three years older than I was, but she was so sophisticated. She had been so nice to me when my parents and I had first joined them in New York. She’d brushed my hair for me in the ladies’ room, told me she’d heard I was very skillful on skis. That was in 1936, in the Plaza Hotel. It was snowing outside, just as it had been when I left Montreal by train with my family. Miles and my father were business acquaintances. It never so much as crossed my mind that he had his eye on me. It never crossed my mind any more than it did Alice’s. The only love talked about that day was the love of the Duke of Windsor for Wallace Simpson, the divorcée he could not marry and still ascend to the throne. George V had died, and his son was supposed to be the next King of England, but he had already fallen in love with Wallis Warfield Simpson. Some said he wasn’t fit to be King, and that it was all for the best, but there was much concern between Miles and my father about what would happen to the English economy if Edward VIII abdicated. My mother thought it was all wonderfully romantic. I don’t remember that Alice had much to say — only that England was so far away, a truly foreign country. It was a place her husband brought her sweaters from. Sweaters and tea, fine English teas that were not imported in those days. This was December of 1936. Early December. In February Miles came to Montreal, and he and my father took me to an elegant French restaurant, where I sat quietly at the table as they discussed business. Until the last minute, my mother had also been expected to come, but suddenly she was taken with a chill. I made her hot tea with lemon and took it to her in bed, but she said she felt cold all over — that there was no way she could attend the dinner. I must go in her place, she said. And she let me wear her beautiful lace dress, the tawny-colored dress I’d always admired, but which she’d said made me look too mature. Surely she couldn’t have known what was going on — though why do I think that? She might have known. She might not have thought it would have such disastrous consequences. A flirtation, a little titillation — what was that? Indiscreet, on the part of a married man, but hardly calamitous. In truth, she did whatever my father told her to do.