—
My first duck I tasted in the dining room of a silvery apartment off Fifth Avenue. Across from me, aware of nothing remarkable, sat my friend. At the head of the table was his stepfather, Jonas Reiner, a large, humorous man who owned underwear factories, and at the far end my friend’s blonde mother, Ethel.
Of the mothers of friends, she was the most glamorous. She had the most aplomb and style. She was the daughter of a doctor who, when October 1929 came, called and asked, “Are you broke?”—she was twenty-five years old, married to her first husband, with two small children. She had five thousand dollars to her name and her bill at Bergdorf’s was four thousand eight hundred. “Yes,” she said, “are you?”
“Um, but I’ve been broke before and I hope to be broke again,” her father told her.
She was a regal figure to me, affected but smiling, her ash-blonde hair heaped on her head, the silk of her dresses whispering. I never saw her in the kitchen — there was a cook — or with a vacuum cleaner in her hand or even changing a shoe, legs crossed, slipping it off and putting on another. Perhaps there were weekend mornings when, in a peignoir with fur cuffs she might scramble eggs to put on a breakfast tray and carry down the hallway to her husband. She suggested the sumptuous.
Her son, Wink, was my friend. As young boys, groups of us used to gamble in his room, playing cards. He sometimes brought out five- or ten-dollar gold pieces to prove that he was good for any run of bad luck. I had never seen a gold piece or known they existed. They were prophetic. In time, he became a stockbroker and had a seat on the exchange. Money rolled in. He had a beautiful, extravagant wife and a house in Westchester. That was after the war. We were, strengthened by roots that reached far back, close friends. I was at his wedding and later, godfather to his first child. The money I had in the 1950s he doubled and tripled for me, and I felt myself rising with him, though in a smaller way.
In years that followed there came the life of men, evenings in uptown bars, confiding everything. I knew about his wife, his brother-in-law, his partners. We went to football games and to Mexico together. The welterweight championship of Mexico was being fought in a huge, ramshackle arena somewhere on the outskirts of Mexico City. We were in the second row with a woman we had met, a blonde who said she was the girlfriend of an ex — Chicago Bears football player. Had he lost a leg or been stricken with cancer? I don’t seem to recall. I do see the vast, surrounding sea of blackest hair, all of it male. There was not another woman in the place and, a little drunk, the one we were with shone like a beacon. The naked calves of the fighters danced level with our eyes and blood flew from cut faces in what seemed to be sheets. From the balcony, beer was being thrown and lighted newspapers. It was round five or six. The chaos was mounting.
“I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. We were packed close. The empty aisle rose towards the rear between banks of men. “I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said again. “Who’ll come with me?”
Neither of us stirred. I watched as she made her way alone up the aisle, on high heels, her hips speaking clearly, it seemed, beneath the dress. She was the emblem of it all. Row by row every face turned to watch. I was sure we were not going to see her again.
We walked the dark streets afterwards, however, looking for a cab with her, few lights anywhere and unseen dogs barking.
At the cockfights we were drinking tequila and licking salt from the back of our hands. Wink had given up looking at the roosters as they were carried proudly around. He read the odds instead, written on pieces of board men bore through the darkness. He held out bunches of money, which they took nodding. It was pesos, it didn’t matter. The cabs were in pesos, the hotel, the wide boulevards skimming past. We were breathing the Latin air, drunk on altitude. The city was a galaxy. The girls came into the room and lined up, smiling. Their teeth were mostly bad. One was Cuban. I had never been to Cuba. We went there, the palms, her bare room with shutters, the pale streets at dawn.
Perhaps it all still exists. I have never been back. We drove to Cuernavaca, then to the sea. The beach was shadowed by the first great hotels. White-legged we walked along it. There was a slender brown woman in a black bikini; she could have been Mexican but was not. We sat and talked. She was a friend of the English playwright John Osborne and had a gold cigarette case with a persuasive inscription engraved in his own hand.
She may have had some of his money, as well, or perhaps someone else’s. She had bought a motorboat for the Mexican boy with whom she was living, so he could have a water-skiing business. We went to remote inlets in it and ate in beach shacks where there were only three or four plates but from somewhere were produced icy bottles of beer. We met in the evenings as well. The Mexican boy was always silent.
I caught sight of her several times afterwards in New York, once in the Veau d’Or with the cigarette case on the table near her plate. She appeared very urban and expensive, a long way from barefoot life. That period was ended. I wanted to know more about her, about Osborne and the past, but all of that she declined to reveal.
My friendship with Wink seemed indestructible and my attachment to his mother grew. It became love, not the love felt for my own mother but something grown-up and apart. It would be truer to say I returned her love, the warmth had first come from her.
During the war she lived in New York, where I often saw her while my own family was in Washington. Later she moved to an estate in Ossining. I forget the sequence of divorce from her husband and his becoming ill, but he grew gaunt and died. In Ossining she came in from the sunlight with a garden trowel in one gloved hand. There was a swimming pool, a sunken living room, a dog. Had I read Tales of the South Pacific, which had just been published, she asked? I must, she said. The war was over. We’d driven up to Ossining in a new car, perhaps Wink’s. His mother had had difficulty in forming his tastes and was turning her efforts towards me.
She also had a nephew, her admired sister’s son, Peter, who grew up more or less alongside us, plump and deceivable. His mother hoped he would go into medicine, but he had another ambition. After college he confessed it to Etheclass="underline" he wanted to have a gallery, he dreamed of art. She took him to dinner at the house of a famous dealer she knew, where Peter sat silently as the impossibilities of his choice were explained to him in detail, the near certainty of his not succeeding, and the sure disappointment of his mother. At the end he summoned his courage to say, “I’m not Dorothy’s son, I’m Ethel’s. I have the right to fail,” he added.
There was a moment’s silence and the dealer said, “I’ll sponsor you.”
I had two prints, a yellow Chagall marked hors commerce, and a Picasso bought from Peter when his gallery, in a town house off Fifth, with pure white walls, was thriving. I longed for a Matisse but hadn’t the money.
—
In the summer of 1941 my father, who had been a lieutenant more than twenty years before, was called back into the army as a major. He was stationed in Atlanta in the Office of Engineers. I forget from which field we took off but I had my first airplane flight in a great silver ship with a tailwheel, going down to visit him. We toured munitions factories along the Tennessee River, near Huntsville, and the Coosa River, in Alabama. On a narrow wooden bridge in the country somewhere, a mule lay on its side — it had been pulling a wagon that was hit by an army truck and had a broken leg. It lay there patiently, as patiently as it had lived its life, a worn, gray animal waiting for the lean-faced man who had gone to fetch a gun.