Indiscretion

Unlike many of the modern houses in the area, the interior is dark, its dimensions modest for a house of this size. There is no media room. No family-style kitchen. Real estate agents out here would call it a teardown because the new crop of home buyers would find it too old-fashioned. The design is Italianate; cream-colored plaster on the outside, something that would not have looked out of place in Lake Como or Antibes. In old black-and-white photographs, there are striped awnings over the windows. Inside you walk into a high-ceilinged center hallway covered in the dark stucco that was once so fashionable. The stucco keeps it cool. The walls have family portraits and a large, faded Gobelins tapestry my grandfather brought back from the First World War. Straight ahead and out a large door is a wide brick patio, where my parents held their wedding reception. It runs the entire length of the house and overlooks a lawn that slopes down to the large brackish pond that leads to the ocean. Flanking the door are matching life-size portraits of my great-grandparents. My grandfather, a little boy in a sailor suit, stands next to his father, bespectacled and stern. Opposite, my great-aunt, dressed in crinolines, her hair long, leans on her mother’s lap.

A long table takes up most of the left side of the hallway, and on it sits an old leather-bound visiting book. The book is almost full. The first entry is nearly as old as I am. The older books are in the library, full of spidery script and long-dead names.

“Please sign your name if you want to,” I say.

She does. I have never seen her handwriting before and am not surprised that it’s clear and elegant. My handwriting, like most lawyers’, is appalling. She writes her name and date, and then “You have a lovely home.”

To the right of the table is the door to a large formal dining room, the site of many endless dinners I was forced to endure as a child when my parents were present, spooning soup and eating heavy meals prepared by Genevieve and served by Robert. The walls are covered in Zuber wallpaper depicting El Dorado. I love that paper. It is a gateway to a different dimension, and on the rare occasions when I throw a formal dinner party I am still capable of losing myself in its magical jungles, canoeing down the Amazon or fighting off Indians with my trusty revolver.

There are eight bedrooms on the second floor. The largest was my great-grandparents’. It is known as the Victorian Room. I think I will have Claire sleep here. The canopied bed is too short for me, but it is where I always put first-time guests. The ones whom I like, at any rate. I still sleep in the same room I occupied as a child, over the kitchen in what had been the nursery wing.

Finally, there is the playroom on the third floor. The biggest in the house, it contains an old pool table, bookshelves crammed with popular novels of my parents’ youth—Kipling and Buchan, Ouida, Tom Swift and Robert Louis Stevenson—and chests of drawers filled with exotic costumes brought back over the years by relatives and friends that we used to wear for fancy-dress parties. Along the wall is my great-uncle’s oar from Henley and window seats where I would curl up with a book on rainy days.

“We should do a costume ball,” says Claire. She is rummaging through the drawers. She pulls out a Pierrot costume I had worn as a child. It would just fit her. Then a burnoose my father used to wear that made him look like Rudolph Valentino. I had always admired it most because it had a real dagger. “That would be such fun.” It has been a long time since our last costume party.

For a second I almost make another pass at her but think better of it. Maybe she would have said yes this time. Expensive real estate can be a powerful aphrodisiac.

We go back downstairs, and I lead her to her room. It is large, with windows facing over the pond. I imagine it is probably bigger than her entire apartment. The bed is just to the right as you enter, the French linen part of my great-grandmother’s trousseau. Matching bureaus, a dressing table with my great-grandmother’s silver-backed Tiffany hairbrushes still on it, a fireplace, an escritoire, a pair of Louis XV armchairs. Silvered family photographs. My grandfather in his uniform. My grandmother’s three brothers. Heavy, pale damask curtains. A wide stretch of carpet, a chaise longue, and a table with an old-fashioned upright telephone and an equally ancient radio, neither of which has worked in years but which remain in place because that’s where they’ve always been.

“What a wonderful room.”

“It was my great-grandmother’s. It’s something, isn’t it? You know, back then husbands and wives rarely shared a room. My great-grandfather slept next door.” The room as spare as a Trappist’s cell.

“And where do you sleep?”

“On the other side of the house. In the nursery. Now don’t look at me like that. It’s not like it has Donald Duck posters on the wall. I’ve updated it somewhat over the years. It’s just where I feel most comfortable.”

“But you could sleep in any room in the house.”

“Exactly. And I could eat in the dining room every night and throw costume parties. But I don’t. I come here to relax and sleep and work.”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

“Never. And besides, Madeleine and Harry are right next door.”

We say our good-nights, and I pad off down the familiar carpet past my parents’ former bedroom and the “good” guest room to my old lair. As I lie in bed that night, I fantasize that Claire comes into my room. Once or twice I even venture to the hallway, thinking I may have heard the sound of her feet, but when I finally fall asleep around dawn, I am still alone.

7

AFTER GRADUATION HARRY WAS COMMISSIONED IN THE Marine Corps. As a college graduate he was automatically entitled to become an officer, and he entered flight training school. Madeleine followed him. They had been married the day after graduation. It was a small ceremony held in Battell Chapel, followed by lunch at the Yale Club. Ned was best man. Madeleine’s father and brother, Johnny, came, as well as her stepmother at that time. Mister and Mrs. Winslow. I had never met them before. His father was a prep school English teacher. Tweedy, articulate, wry, the same broad shoulders. Harry had grown up a faculty brat in Connecticut, living on borrowed privilege. A pet of the upperclassmen as a child, and a guest on classmates’ ski trips and holidays while a student. Unlike most of them, he worked during the summer, one year as a roustabout on the Oklahoma oil fields, another on an Alaskan fishing boat.

Why the Marines? It struck me as an odd decision at the time. No one we knew was joining the military. Our fathers had been raised when there was a still a draft, but most of them were of an age that fell between the Korean and Vietnam wars. Maddy’s father had actually left Princeton to enlist to fight in Korea, an act that had always been difficult for me to square with the debauchee I knew in later life. Or maybe it partly explained it. I wouldn’t know, having never been a soldier or even heard a shot fired in anger.

We never heard Harry discuss going into the military in those waning school days. Most of us had been obsessed with softening the impact of graduation by lining up jobs at investment banks, newspapers, or earnest nonprofit institutions, or obtaining postgraduate degrees. I had known for months that I would be entering law school in the fall, so I simply let the days of May spool out without any particular anxiety.

I had been aware that Harry echoed my outward calm, but he rarely spoke about the future. When he had revealed his intentions over one of those endless farewell dinners to a table consisting of Maddy, myself, Ned, and few other confidants, I could tell I was not the only one surprised. Even Ned, who had landed a job in Merrill Lynch’s training program and was Harry’s best friend, goggled.

“You’re joking, right?” he had asked.

“Not at all,” Harry had responded. “I wouldn’t joke about something like that. I’ve always wanted to learn how to fly. Anyway, I’m not good enough to become a pro hockey player, and I have zero interest in working on Wall Street. I really have no idea what I want to do, so I figured while I am making up my mind the least I can do is serve my country.”

Maddy, of course, knew. What’s more, she obviously approved. If he had told her he was going to become a lion tamer or a salvage diver, she would have followed along just as happily.

As a married couple, they lived off base at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola for the first year. Harry flew fighters. They had a dog then, a brown mutt named Dexter. Maddy drove the same red MG she had at Yale. They cut a glamorous path wherever they went. Senior officers would be found at their frequent cocktail parties. Their new friends had been football legends at Ole Miss and Georgia Tech, now married to former cheerleaders.

This is when Maddy discovered her talent for cooking. Inspired by the local cuisine and with plenty of time on her hands, she tackled shrimp étouffée, rémoulade, fried chicken, pecan pie. Then she began working her way through Julia Child, Paul Bocuse, James Beard. Soon she was making béchamel sauces, coq au vin, salmon terrines, beef bourguignon, cheese soufflés. Invitations to her dinner parties were as sought after as presidential citations.

During the day, Harry flew endless training missions and sorties, and attended ground school. But luckily there was no war. On weekends, they traveled, driving all night to visit friends on Jupiter Island or to go bonefishing in the Keys. I visited a few times from my first year at Yale Law. They also got moved around by the Corps. Bogue Field, North Carolina. Twentynine Palms in California. A year in Japan. Maddy says this is when Harry began to write. His first efforts went unread by anyone other than her, but she encouraged him. There were numerous short stories and even a novel. All now destroyed.

Once she told me, “When I fell in love with Harry, I never thought of him as being a writer. He was simply the most confident person I had ever met. He’s always determined to be the best. He was the best hockey player, then he was the best pilot, and I guess it just makes sense that he would be the best writer. If he wanted to be the best jewel thief, he could probably do that too.”

He kept at it. At some point he began submitting short stories to magazines and literary journals, most of them obscure. Finally he had one published, then another. When his six years were up, he resigned his commission to write full-time. A few years later his first book, a roman à clef about an Air Force officer, met with modest praise and milder sales. Critics recognized him, though, as someone who needed more time in the bottle.

He and Maddy moved to New York, then outside of Bozeman for a year, and after that Paris, where they lived above a Senegalese restaurant in the distinctly unchic 18th Arrondissement. Maddy’s trust fund subsidized them, allowing them to get by but not live extravagantly. Johnny was born, and then Harry’s second book, which took seven years to write, won the National Book Award. There is even talk of a movie.

But he still loved flying. When his second book was published, he fulfilled a promise to himself and bought a used plane that he fixed up and now kept at the airport near their cottage. On fine-weather days, he would take the plane up. Sometimes he’d invite others to come with him. They’d fly over to Nantucket, circle Sankaty Head and return. Or up to Westerly. Sometimes he’d touch down for lunch, but he preferred to remain aloft. I flew with him many times. It is very peaceful. Madeleine rarely went. Small planes make her nervous.

FRIDAY MORNING. THE AIRFIELD SITS BEFORE THEM, TANKER trucks idle in the background, the planes of the local elite parked, waiting like ball boys to spring into action. It is just Harry and Claire. She and I had gone over early to the Winslows’.

“I’m going flying,” he announced as we walked in. “Anyone want to come?”

I declined. “I’d love to,” said Claire. “Do you have your own plane?”

“Yep. A single-engine Cessna 182. She’s a little beauty. She’s been in for repairs. This is the first time I’ve been able to fly her all summer.”

“Do I need to change?”

“Nope, you’re good to go.”

At the airport he files his flight plan and does the preflight inspection. Today they will fly over Block Island. The plane is old, but he loves it anyway. The sky is a cloudless blue. It’s already warm, a late-summer heat. The little cockpit is stuffy. Harry opens the windows. “It’ll cool off when we get higher,” he says. He is wearing an old khaki shirt and a faded Yale cap. Around his neck hangs a gold chain. He tells her it is a Saint Christopher he wears for luck. Maddy bought it for him when he was in the Marines. They taxi to the runway. Only one other plane is ahead of them.

Claire is excited. She feels like a child, practically pressing her nose against the plastic of the window. The engine starts to rev, and they begin to taxi down the runway for takeoff. Harry pushes the throttle and they race forward. One second their landing gear is on the ground, and the next they are in the air, climbing, climbing. The earth falls away beneath them, and when they bank, Claire can see they are already hundreds of feet in the air, the people on the ground, houses, trees rapidly diminishing below her.

At cruising altitude, Harry says, “Some view, eh?” He has to yell now above the engine.

She nods her head, leaning forward in her seat. She can see the curve of the earth and beyond, stretching to the end of the horizon, the blue of the Atlantic. She is amazed by how fast they are moving. What would have taken an hour in a car now takes seconds.

“I’ve never done this before,” she says. “I mean, fly in a small plane. It’s incredible.”

He points to his right ear. “You’ll have to speak up,” he yells.

“Okay,” she yells back, smiling.

He smiles and gives her a thumbs-up, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses. As they fly he points out landmarks. They have now left the mainland behind, soaring godlike over the ocean. A fishing boat, white against the dark blue water, bobs like a toy. Block Island looms in the distance, and then suddenly they are almost over it. She sees the waves crash on the rocks.

“That’s Bluffs Beach,” he shouts. “Over there is Mohegan Bluffs and Southeast Lighthouse. In between is Black Rock Beach. It’s a nude beach, but I don’t think you can see much from up here.” He smiles.

She looks at him. He is wearing shorts and moccasins, his legs strong and tanned, covered with golden hairs. She wants to touch them. This is the first time they have been alone together. It is hard to speak. She had no idea it would be so loud.