Hazel heard these sputtered and increasingly incoherent words through a steadily mounting ringing in her ears. Mixed with the mad cries of cicadas.
He knows. Knows who I am.
But-how can he?
At last Gallagher roused himself from his stupor.
“Is that so, Thaddeus? All Jews? They don’t disagree with one another, about anything? Ever?”
“To their enemies, Jews present a unified front. The ”chosen people‘-“
“Enemies? Who are the enemies of Jews? Nazis? Anti-Semites? You?”
With a look of indignation Thaddeus drew back in his wheelchair. The subtlety of his argument was being misunderstood! His disinterested philosophical position was being crudely personalized!
“I meant to say, non-Jews. They call us goyim, son. Not enemies per se except as Jews perceive us. You know perfectly well what I mean, son, it’s a matter of historic fact.”
Thaddeus was speaking solemnly now. As if his earlier baiting had been a pose.
But Gallagher rose abruptly to his feet. Mumbling he had to go inside for a few minutes.
Gallagher stumbled away. Hazel worried he was having one of his gastric attacks, that sometimes led to spasms of vomiting. His face had gone sickly white. Gallagher had begun to experience these attacks when he’d first been heckled at anti-war rallies several years ago, in Buffalo. Sometimes he suffered milder attacks before one of Zack’s public performances.
Damn him: Hazel couldn’t help resenting it, being left behind with Gallagher’s father. This grotesque old man in his wheelchair glaring at her.
Saying, in Hazel Jones’s way that was both breathless and apologetic, and her widened eyes fixed upon the glaring eyes in a look of utter distress, “Chet doesn’t mean to be rude, Mr. Gallagher. This is an emotional-”
“Oh yes, is it, for ”Chet‘? And for me, too.“
“He hasn’t been in this house, he said, since-”
“I know exactly how long, Miss Jones. You needn’t inform me of facts regarding my own God-damned family.”
Hazel, shocked, knew herself rebuffed. As if Thaddeus had leaned over and spat on her yellow organdy dress.
God damn your soul to hell, you bastard.
Sick dying old bastard I will have your heart.
The gravedigger’s daughter, Hazel Jones was. There was never a time when Hazel Jones was not. Saying, in an embarrassed murmur to placate the enemy, “Mr. Gallagher, I’m sorry. Oh.”
The white-jacketed servant hovered at the edge of the terrace, perhaps overhearing. Thaddeus noisily finished his drink, a vile-looking scarlet concoction laced with vodka. He too might have been embarrassed, speaking so sharply to a guest. And to so clearly innocent and guileless a guest. His glassy eyes brooded upon the swimming pool, its lurid artificial aqua. In the ripply surface, filaments of cloud were reflected like strands of gut. Thaddeus panted, grunted, scratched viciously at his crotch. He then rubbed his hefty bosom up inside the T-shirt, with a sensuous abandon. Hazel lowered her eyes, the gesture was so intimate.
The photographs she’d seen of Thaddeus Gallagher in the lodge at Grindstone Island were of a stout man, heavy but not obese, with a large head and a self-possessed manner. Now his body appeared swollen, bloated. His jaws had the look of jaws accustomed to ferocious grinding. Hazel wondered what cruel whimsy had inspired him to dress that day in such clothes, exposing and parodying his bulk.
“Bullshit he’s ”emotional.“ He’s a cold-hearted’s.o.b. You will learn, Hazel Jones. Chester Gallagher is not a man to be trusted. I am the one to apologize, Miss Jones, for him. His idiotic ”politics‘! His Ne-gro jazz! Failed at serious piano, so he takes up Ne-gro jazz! Mongrel music. Failed at his marriage so he takes up women he can feel sorry for. He’s shameless. He’s a mythomaniac. He told me, bratty kid of fifteen, “Capitalism is doomed.” The little pisspot! These newspaper columns of his, he invents, he distorts, he exaggerates in the name of “moral truth.” As if there could be a “moral truth’ that refutes historical truth. When he was a drunk-and Chester was a drunk, Miss Jones, for many more years than you’ve known him-he inhabited a kind of bathosphere of mythomania. He has invented such tales of me, my ”business ethics,“ I’ve given up hoping to set them straight. I’m an old newspaper man, I believe in facts. Facts, and more facts! There’s never been an editorial in any Gallagher newspaper not based upon facts! Not liberal crap, sentimental bullshit about ”world peace‘-the “United Nations’-”global disarmament‘-but facts. The bedrock of journalism. Chester Gallagher never respected facts sufficiently. Trying to make himself out some kind of white Ne-gro, playing their music and taking up their causes.“
Hazel was gripping a sweating glass in her hand. She spoke evenly, just slightly coquettishly. “Your son is a mythomaniac, Mr. Gallagher, and you are not?”
Thaddeus squinted at her. His chins jiggled. As if Hazel had reached over to touch his knee, he brightened.
“You must call me ”Thaddeus,“ Hazel Jones. Better yet, ”Thad.“ ”Mr. Gallagher‘ is for servants and other hirelings.“
When Hazel made no reply, Thaddeus leaned toward her, suggestively. “Will you call me ”Thad‘? It’s very like “Chet’-eh? Almost no one calls me ”Thad‘ any longer, my old friends are falling away-every season, like dying leaves.“
Hazel’s lips moved numbly. “”Thad.“”
“Very good! I certainly intend to call you ”Hazel.“ Now and forever.”
Thaddeus moved the wheelchair closer to Hazel. She smelled his old-man odor, the airless interior of the old stone cottage. Yet there was something sweetly sharp beneath, Thaddeus Gallagher’s cologne. A monster-man, crammed into a wheelchair, yet he’d shaved carefully that morning, he’d dabbed on cologne.
Unnerving how, close up, you could see the younger Thaddeus inside the elder’s face, exultant.
“”Hazel Jones.“ A lovely name with something nostalgic about it. Who gave you that name, my dear?”
“I-don’t know.”
“Don’t know? How is that possible, Hazel?”
“I never knew my parents. They died when I was a little girl.”
“Did they! And where was this, Hazel?”
Gallagher had warned, his father would interrogate her. Yet Hazel could not seem to prevent it.
“I don’t know, Mr. Gallagher. It happened so long ago…”
“Not that long ago, surely? You’re a young woman.”
Hazel shook her head slowly. Young?
“”Hazel Jones’ The name is known to me, but not why. Can you explain why, my dear?“
Hazel said lightly, “There are probably ”Hazel Joneses‘-Mr. Gallagher. More than one.“
“Well! Don’t let me upset you, my dear. I’m feeling guilty, I suppose. I seem to have upset my overly sensitive radical son, who has run off and left us.”
Briskly then Thaddeus pressed one of the buttons on the wheelchair. Hazel heard no sound but within seconds a male attendant appeared, in T-shirt, swim trunks, carrying terry cloth robes and towels. This young man called Thaddeus “Mr. G.” and was called by the older man what sounded like “Peppy.” He was about twenty-five, darkly tanned, with a blandly affable boy’s face; he had a swimmer’s physique, long-waisted, with broad wing-like shoulders. Hazel saw his eyes slide onto her, swiftly assessing yet vacant. He was one who knew his place: a wealthy invalid’s physical therapist.