That night in the restaurant Miles was very solicitous of me. He wanted me to take him skiing the next day, before he left Montreal. My father had an appointment he could not break, though he left the table twice to telephone, hoping things could be rearranged so he could come along. Did he really want to come along? I’m not saying he could see the future, only that he deferred to Miles, respected him greatly and quite simply deferred to him, as so many people did. He might have guessed that Miles would prefer to be on the ski slopes with me, alone. There is no reason to imagine that my father, in the restaurant bathroom, smoking a cigar, pacing back and forth to allow time to elapse, only pretended he was trying to rearrange the next day’s business. Yet I do have that feeling. It’s because he told me when I was a little girl that he did that, sometimes: had the men’s room attendant light a good cigar for him, so he could have a few puffs and allow whatever was happening at the table to reach a certain crucial point before he returned. Then, later, he’d go back to the men’s room and have the attendant relight the cigar, so he could have a few last puffs. Miles, himself, did not smoke cigars, but he did enjoy brandy. He and my father ordered two brandies before the night ended. My mother would have hated being there. The brandy was always her cue to leave the table, and she hated to be sent away just when things were getting interesting, she said. Yet my father did not give me a cue that I should leave, so I sat there, not quite understanding what they were saying about Haile Selassie, I think it was. A name almost forgotten now. “It is us today,” I remember my father intoning, shaking his head and raising his brandy snifter in a toast. I sat there in my mother’s dress with its dropped waist that no one could see once I was sitting down, but I knew it was lovely, with a drooping bow at my left hip, and I felt so grown-up.
She would be proud of me, I thought. I had graciously and immediately agreed to take Miles skiing le jour prochain. I had not been asked to leave the table when the conversation turned serious. Neither my father nor Miles felt sympathy toward Haile Selassie, as I recall. Noses buried in their brandy snifters, they snorted instead of inhaling. “You understand that the man is asking the age-old question, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ ” my father said to me. I had not been fidgeting. I had been trying to follow what they said, though they spoke so elliptically, or at other times so softly, that it would have been difficult, even if I had known the exact subject being discussed. I had assured my father I understood entirely. What I must have looked like, sitting there in my grown-up dress, speaking so seriously. The next day, on the ski slopes, Miles asked me: “Don’t you smile?” A strange question, I came to think when I knew him a bit better, because he so rarely smiled himself. At any rate, he was not smiling when he took the call in the hotel room that evening when he stepped out of his shoes, loosened his bow tie. When he stood there, saving his life, saving mine, though he had no idea that was what he was doing. I felt bad enough about being there, about going to Boston behind Alice’s back, on the day she had gone to Rhode Island to visit her friend Amelia. I mean, there I was in my peach silk, and she had a slight cold, herself, and of course she also had Gordon and baby Martin. Still, there the two of us were, sitting peacefully in the Ritz sipping champagne, to say nothing of the fact we were about to go to a lavish wedding reception with oysters Rockefeller and other wonderful food and enjoy a night of dancing. We were all preoccupied with the war, tired out by the children, exhausted, frustrated and exhausted, yet she’d dressed Gordon in a new outfit and put the baby in the stroller and insisted upon setting off by train to visit Amelia at her parents’ house in Rhode Island, refusing to listen to Miles’s suggestion that she wait until the weekend, when he could take us all by car. She could have been in Rhode Island when she got the news — if such news had been forthcoming. It wasn’t, though. We did not burn in the fire. Having missed too much of the festivities, we made love in the big bed inside our room at the Ritz — only the second time since I’d given birth to Martin — and it was not until much later that we heard the news, shouted by someone in the hotel corridor, that a terrible fire was raging. This came to mind because tonight a folk-singer — a long-haired folksinger, a perfectly nice young man with long hair and daydreams in his eyes — came to the nursing home and entertained us after dinner by playing the guitar and singing. He sang songs by James Taylor and by Carole King. I recognized most of them. One of the women, feeling mischievous, asked for “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” He had a nice way about him, and he tried to play it, but none of the old fogeys, myself among them, could remember the name of the woman who’d put a lantern in her shed. So it was: “Old Mrs. Something put a lantern in her shed / Cow kicked it over, and this is what she said / ‘There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.’ ” The man’s voice announcing the fire at the Cocoanut Grove seems like yesterday. It was almost unprecedented to hear anyone speak above a whisper in 1942 in a hotel corridor.