—
It is the evenings one remembers, the end of the day, dinners in the Fifties, dinners downtown.
Dinners with Fox, beyond counting. He lived on the south side of the park in a luxurious building that had originally been painters’ studios. His apartment was lofty with a curved, white balcony above the main room and bookcases everywhere. He was the ultimate New Yorker. In the city he invariably wore a suit. He had worked first for Alfred Knopf, the legendary publisher, and was related by marriage to the Canfields and Burdens. His best friends, in all likelihood, were women, to whom he attached himself with little difficulty.
Dinners with him at Caravelle, Remi, Petite Marmite, smoked salmon in slender coral sheets, lamb, expensive Pauillac. Dinners at a hotel in the country, a table in the bar. Winter night, black as ice. The warmth of the room, a fire burning. The Japanese woman hostess, the bartender in vest and white shirtsleeves. Mussels à la barque. Bacala. Women taking off their coats at the door and being shown with their escorts to tables.
The fragrant smoke rose from his after-dinner cigarette. He told of famous parties, the one of George Weidenfeld’s in London. The invitation in beautiful calligraphy said Exotic dress. Weidenfeld himself came as a pasha. There were three orchestras, one of them on the stairs, and the most beautiful women Fox had ever seen. Couples would disappear into the garden or splendid upper floors and return after long intervals. There was that English phenomenon, an upper-class wanton who, though dropped from the guest list, came anyway. As an act of disdain she pleasured nine of the guests, one after another, in a bedroom. Marie Antoinettes and Japanese samurai lay collapsed on the sofas at dawn.
Through him one met many writers. He was like an old courtier who understood and could arrange almost anything. His nostrils were large, sometimes with hair in them. He hadn’t gone to his twenty-fifth reunion at Harvard, he told me. He’d looked over the list very carefully. There were fifteen hundred names, only forty he knew, twenty-five of whom he didn’t want to see again, ten, for a few minutes, and only five he liked. The figures were probably inaccurate but they were stamped with his self-confidence; his ancestors preceded Benjamin Franklin. One of them contemptuously shook Andrew Jackson’s hand with his own wrapped in his coattail. At Random House his position was secure. He was not one of the razors. He was protected by his ability and by not having an ambition to run things.
Dinners on Park Avenue, the Schwartzes’ apartment, comfortable and serene. Their two children, sons, coming in and out of the room, the younger one in various costumes. He is handsome. There can only be envy of him, his intelligence and future. His father, Alan, is a lawyer who married the most beautiful girl at Bryn Mawr; people would talk about it for a generation.
In the kitchen everything is laid out, thick ribs of beef, fresh loaves. There are cookbooks, stacks of china. Pinned to a cork-board: notes, cards, addresses, the order and complexity of this life. A scene that never fails to draw one in, the heaped green of the salad, the dark bottles of fine Bordeaux, the abundance and preparation. Halberstam is coming, Alan tells me, Hope Lange, Helen Frankenthaler. Drinks in the living room. The women are well dressed, at ease. They have traveled, been admired; one longs to hear their confessions. I do not know that Hope Lange, blonde and clear-faced in the audience, once caught the eye of a man on the stage reading — it was John Cheever, a fateful glance — or that she had been Sinatra’s; her allure I could see was powerful. In the dining room, filled with books, I sit next to her; Halberstam is across the table. In Vietnam — his name was inextricably linked with it — the war is finally over.
“Did you know John Vann?” I ask.
“How do you know him?” Halberstam replies.
“I don’t.”
“The most extraordinary figure of the war.”
Halberstam then summons him up, the military adviser of the early days, a lieutenant colonel who was an idealist, educated, spoke Vietnamese. The extensive writing about him had not yet appeared, I had only come across “John Vann” and a few telling lines of description. I was like a woman who fixes on a horse because of its name.
In the beginning, Halberstam says, the correspondents all sat at his feet, they could talk to him and he spoke frankly to them. “He knew more than anybody. The war could never be won by weapons, he continually said.” He had incredible energy and instinct. At the time of the Tet offensive he smelled something funny, and it was he who was responsible for pulling back certain units before the enemy struck and avoiding complete disaster. “He never had anything to do with Vietnamese women.” I feel an odd mixture of elation and disappointment. “It was beneath his image and belief, and it was taking advantage of them.” Halberstam himself had a beautiful girlfriend in Saigon. “Everybody did.”
The lone and perhaps foolish figure whose fate it was to believe in something with all his being — something stirs in me as I listen, something dusty and forgotten, struggling to its feet. Halberstam is manly-looking with big hands and a strong, resonant voice. I feel I know him and also Vann.
“But he was killed, wasn’t he?” I say.
“He died in a helicopter crash.”
We leave the table. Cognac and coffee in the living room. A fire of small, city logs is burning in the fireplace. The hostess and Helen Frankenthaler are lying together on the sofa, feline and content, beneath a quilt. My mind is still on the conversation at dinner, which has somehow removed me from the present. It has opened a gap like the narrow band of water that appears, in the first moments of departure, between the ship and the dock, designating two worlds. The uniform of the dead lieutenant colonel seems to lie there, ghostly, on the floor, my own size.
Dinners on Shelter Island at Max Wilkinson’s, first at his house and later, when it was sold, in the little house that belonged to his new wife. She was repetitive and scolding. “Oh, Max,” she said at the table, “you are so stupid! You talk and talk and talk and talk.”
There was silence. He had been summoning up the image of his old partner’s wife, in Arizona in the thirties when he first saw her, Helen Doughty, in a white linen dress. She was so beautiful, he said.
Finally he answered his wife. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I suppose so.”
Dinners in Europe. A small restaurant, perfect, well lit. The feeling of attentive service, fresh white cloth. The face before me, Buddha-like and wide, is an older woman’s. She is the widow of a man who was still older. He was her second husband, she was in her late thirties when she met him, he had already broken up with his wife. “I didn’t steal him from her but she hated me.”
There were two children. “I didn’t want to be their mother, after all. They were always welcome, but she was the mother. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘come. If we are friends, good. If not, then we are not.’ ”