“I’ve a daughter, too. They can play together. Will Saturday do?”
A light rain was falling when Eddie left the Nightlight, but in his elevated state he barely noticed. He strode down Fifth Avenue, empty of everyone but the gutter snipes searching for discarded smokes. Soon he was passing the encampments at Madison Square. Fires hissed and smoked in the damp. He smelled coffee and condensed milk boiling in cans—a sweet, metallic odor that always set his teeth on edge. Normally, that smell made him cringe with awareness that John Dunellen alone—that bloated, capricious monster—stood between Eddie and the men boiling coffee outdoors.
He’d found an opening, a way out. Lydia would have her chair. And maybe, Eddie thought, dazzled by the tiny globes of rain sparkling in the trees, maybe it would help her in ways he hadn’t foreseen in his gloom. Perhaps, after all, Lydia would begin to right herself.
To his original goal—granting men an honest audience with Lady Luck—Eddie gave not a thought during his wet, dark, ecstatic walk. What he felt was the sheer relief of having saved himself.
?PART SIX
The Dive
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
Dexter had tried in vain, in the month since his disappointment with Mr. Q., to maneuver a private conversation with his father-in-law at one of their Sunday lunches. The difficulty of doing so had turned out to be an advantage; with each week, Dexter became more certain of what he wished to propose. At last, at a hunt club dinner dance, the old man caught his eye across a table strewn with half-eaten slices of baked Alaska and said, “I could do with some fresh air. Yourself?”
Dexter rose in the smoky candlelight. The orchestra had sidled into “White Christmas,” wearing dangerously thin by mid-February, and he was more than willing to suspend his patrol of the fox-trotting faithful. He’d been watching for Tabatha and Grady, but what he kept seeing instead was his wife in the arms of Booth Kimball (known, in seriousness, as Boo Boo), a polo champion she’d been in love with as a girl. Boo Boo had married Lady Something-or-other and moved to London shortly after Dexter and Harriet married. Now, not having seen the man in over a decade, Dexter hardly recognized him—Boo Boo’s hair had gone snow-white. “You dodged a bullet, sweets,” he’d whispered to Harriet during cocktails, nudging his chin in Boo Boo’s direction. To which she’d intoned sepulchrally, “Pippa died of cancer last year.”
The old man led the way through the velvet blackout curtains into an arctic gale. “Fresh air,” he said fondly over a lacerating wind. “Feels good.” He wore a thin silk scarf—little more than a cravat—and a bowler, but he was famously, almost comically hardy. Dexter had never seen him sweat even wearing a dinner suit in dead summer. He’d a quick knifelike walk that required Dexter to stride in earnest to keep up, although he was several inches taller.
A lunar sheath of old snow encrusted the fairways, but the paths where the caddies walked were mostly clear. They followed one of these to the shore, remarking during lulls of wind on how fine Grady looked in his uniform, the terrors his departure was giving his poor mother. This weekend was his final leave before shipping out. With three other native sons in similar straits—two army, one Coast Guard—this dinner dance had become a farewell party. Cooper was queasy with fear for his son, but Dexter felt confident that not even a world war could extinguish Grady’s promise.
They reached Crooked Creek, a tendril of frozen greenish sea neutered by its slog around Long Beach, through the Broad Channel, and over various marshy hassocks. Dexter would have liked to keep walking—he preferred to move as he talked—but the old man came to a halt.
“I like to be near water whenever possible, don’t you?” he said, gazing into the dark. “Melville put it best: ‘Nothing will content men but the extremest limit of the land’—but that’s not it, I can’t recall the quote. It’s in our nature to seek out the edge. Even on a golf course.”
“Especially then,” Dexter said, and they both laughed. Among their shared irreverences was a disdain for golf—Dexter because he hadn’t the patience to learn a game whose experts had imbibed it with mother’s milk; the old man because he saw it as sloth masquerading as sport.
Dexter recognized this spot: it was the very one where he’d asked for Harriet’s hand so long ago. That had been summer, trees buckling under loads of leaves, the freshly mowed fairways huffing up a smell that always reminded him of fresh money. Now, as he looked toward the blacked-out horizon, he found himself recalling some version of that earlier conversation.
“Your friends and my friends, Mr. Styles,” his future father-in-law had remarked over gibbering cicadas, “I think it’s fair to say they wouldn’t like each other much.”
This dire understatement seemed to flirt with humor, but Dexter took it straight. “I suppose they wouldn’t have much in common, sir,” he said.
“Oh, I think they’d have a great deal in common, although they might not like to admit it. Or possess a shared language with which to do so.”
This extraordinary statement had silenced Dexter.
“You might think it strange, Mr. Styles, how little I care who your friends are.”
“I’m . . . glad to hear it, sir.”
“Harriet is nuts about you, that’s what matters to me. And now you must consider very carefully how nuts you are about Harriet. She will be your one and only. That is where I draw the line, Mr. Styles. Not at your friends, not at your line of work, your reputation, your history. Fidelity. That will be your promise to me.”
“I promise,” Dexter said with all the careful reflection of a young man eager to keep fucking the banker’s daughter he’d been fucking and have it be legal.
“I want my daughter to be happy,” Mr. Berringer said, watching him with calm appraisal. “And I will be monitoring her happiness with vigor and care.”
“I understand, sir.”