Ann Beattie - Secrets & Surprises

She stayed for three days, and once each day — as much as she thought he would tolerate — she tried to talk him into taking the pills. When, at the end of the third day, he still would not, she resented his iron will, his thundering “I will not!” which made her back off, so far that she backed over the threshold to the living room, where she found her mother weeping. “He’s so damn stubborn,” her mother said, brushing away the tears. And it was not like her mother ever to disagree with her father; when her mother disagreed, you knew it by her blank face.

That night, when she left, a neighbor drove her to the airport. His name was Peter Jenkins — everyone called him Jenkins — and he could afford to live in the Village because of the money he got when his parents were killed in a plane crash. She could not remember how she got that information, but from the time she was small she had known it, and because people in the neighborhood talked about it often, she was able now to understand that they liked Jenkins, but they also looked down on him. Even calling him by his last name indicated that he was a little apart from them.

All Peter Jenkins wanted to talk about was her father (a great man, he always said — talented and also kind) and his difficulties, and what difficulties she might be having adjusting to life in Boston. She felt hypocritical presenting her life as interesting and peaceful. She knew that he would want to hear the truth, and she did not mean to be condescending to him — it was just that she did not want to think about the truth herself. She was doing badly in school and the man she lived with might have deliberately smashed up his car, and she had found her father remote, obstinate, wanting sympathy rather than help. She had felt sorry for her mother.

“Ever go rowing on the Charles?” he asked, weaving through traffic.

She told him she hadn’t.

“You jog?” he said. “Last time I was there it looked like a marathon was going on, there were so many people running.”

She said that she didn’t run.

“If you ran, you might make it to the airport faster than I’m getting you there.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “If I miss one flight I can get another.”

When they got to the airport he smiled at her and got out to lift her bag to the sidewalk.

“You take care,” he said. “Everything’s going to work out all right.”

“Thank you very much for bringing me,” she said.

To fill an awkward moment of silence he said, “You know, your father is really a fine man. I don’t understand every word of what he writes, but God — the tone of those poems — the mood he can create. And he never has his head in the clouds. The week before he got sick he came around to see if he couldn’t steady the ladder for me so I could fix the shutter on the second floor that had blown loose in the storm.”

She thanked him again and walked into the airport. She was sad to leave with nothing resolved. She was depressed because she knew Griffin was going to be waiting with some sarcastic comment, or something to be said in the guise of enlightening her. She was going back to Griffin, and everything in that world seemed so complicated, yet so vague, and the man who had just brought her to the airport was so nice and sensible. But neither did it cross her mind to get something going with Peter Jenkins. Griffin was, as Louise had said, obsessed with his own demons, and that did not make it easy to live with him, but she respected that intensity. In the long run, someone like Griffin was important, in spite of his faults. Peter Jenkins was even a little dull, although he was a very kind and caring man. If she had had to talk to him longer than the car ride, what would she have said?

Getting onto the plane, she thought she might have asked him for help — or made some move toward him, to break his exterior. Then she settled into her seat, convinced her thoughts were crazy — she was imagining a whole situation in her mind that did not, and would not, exist. She was like Griffin.

No one, including Horace Cragen, imagined he would die. When they operated they found a malignant tumor, and the cancer had already spread through his lymphatic system. Diana had not even gone to New York for the operation. She had talked to him the day before he was hospitalized, and tried to cheer him by promising to go with him to Paris in the spring, to a conference he wanted to attend. Before the operation he had started to care again about poetry, and an old friend — another famous poet who was the subject of a week-long conference in Paris in June — had invited Horace to attend with him. And Horace Cragen did go to the conference, taking along his medicine and checking in with an American doctor. When Diana and her mother showed delight with his progress and told him they would both go with him to Paris, he said — and not even nicely — that he would go with William, alone.

William, besieged by reporters and having had enough of listening to himself talked about, having shaken enough hands, left Paris for the States two days before Horace was to leave. Horace waited two days, did not cancel his flight, talked in the morning to a reporter and gave him information about his youth with William at Princeton, ordered dinner to be sent to his room, ate it, then shot himself in the head, the radio playing music he did not understand because he had adamantly refused to learn French.

“Oh, parley-voo and fuck these Frogs,” Horace had said to William as they stood in the lobby of the big hotel, William having checked out and lingering for a final cigarette before he left for Charles de Gaulle Airport. William had laughed at that; Horace had been profane in his youth, but he had become — both of them had become — so dignified, so cultured. William himself did not even use bad language, with the exception of a “goddamn it.” Or, as Horace told the interviewer who came two days later, on the morning of the day he was to kill himself, “He became a gentleman.” The interviewer, wondering if Cragen’s phrasing was not perhaps a subtle way to indicate something about the other poet’s character, and used to interviewing writers who knifed other writers in the back, wrote simply that Horace Cragan considered William Duvall a true gentleman. He took the last photograph of Horace Cragen alive. Cragen was pictured, thin from his recent medical treatments but still strikingly handsome, sitting in a tufted chair in the hotel lobby, an uncharacteristic cigarette in his hand. (The pack was given to him by William, who said that now that he was leaving the tension behind, he was leaving the cigarettes too — Horace Cragen reached out and took them and, to William’s surprise, lit one. Then they embraced for a slap on the back, shook hands, and William left for the airport.)

Back in the States, William did not even hear the news the day it happened. He heard it days later and flew to New York. The apartment was full of mourners, including Diana and Griffin, and the only order was kept by Peter Jenkins, who, after a little time had passed in which the mourners expressed their sorrow to the family, would walk up to them and thank them kindly for coming, and slowly edge them toward the door. Peter Jenkins did not do that to William Duvall, or to a couple of other old friends. They sat with Diana and Griffin, in silence mostly, and stared about the room as if the ceiling might go at any second, or the floor. Most of them seemed to be betting on the floor.

Griffin took Diana for a walk when Peter Jenkins suggested it. Peter took Diana’s mother for a walk, too, putting her sweater around her and leading her, unprotesting, out the door. They locked the apartment and went outside, Peter indicating to Griffin that he was walking left and that he and Diana should go right. Griffin, shocked by the death and still remembering Diana’s first cry of pain, was very glad that Peter Jenkins was there to manage instead of him. He did everything the man said, and hoped that Diana would stay as calm as she had become. He meant to do nothing wrong — he had left town with her, even though he thought it meant he would lose his job. He intended only kindness, but walking down the street and seeing her sorrow, and thinking that he understood its peculiar quality, he said to her that one time when his own father had been ill with hepatitis and he had seen him losing strength, he had been amazed that as his father lost weight, as he got slighter in the hospital bed, he had nevertheless grown larger in proportion. “It was as though even in death — and although nobody else thought it, at least I thought he was dying — he was becoming larger than life, rather than shrinking. He was a famous man, and that was getting more intense, he was …”