“That isn’t what I want.”
“It’s the best you’ll get if you pursue this line. If I were you, I’d stay exactly where I was. Recognize the myriad advantages of your position and enjoy them. Trying to change the position midstream is likely to mean losing those advantages without gaining any new ones.”
The wisdom of Arthur’s words was manifest, irrefutable, yet Dexter already knew he couldn’t heed them. Something had shifted inside him. “I’ve paid too much for my advantages,” he said, surprising himself with this disclosure. He was speaking of the blood on his hands.
His father-in-law seized Dexter’s shoulders in his delicate grasp. His very compactness seemed a source of authority, Dexter’s comparative bulk a feature of blundering youth. “We all pay for our advantages,” the old man said, with meaning. “There’s not a man in this world who hasn’t, and I include the priests. Every man has his secrets, his costs of doing business. It’s no different in my line. Don’t be fooled by the marble columns—the Romans had those, too, and they fed their prisoners to lions. There’s a good deal of brutality behind institutions like mine, leavened by an equal measure of hypocrisy.”
Dexter’s eyes smarted, not from the wind. How he loved Arthur Berringer for believing they were alike! The old man’s “brutality” was not the same as Dexter’s, of course, whatever he might think. Still, there was an intensity behind the words that made him wish he could see his father-in-law’s face. But darkness was the essential feature of their exchange.
By tacit agreement, they began following the orchestra sounds back toward the clubhouse. At last it came into sight: an unearthly colonnade leaking festivity into the icy lunar landscape.
“Not enough has been written about the treachery of middle life,” the old man mused, his voice carrying over the wind. “Dante went to hell to escape it, and I’ve seen plenty of other men do the same, metaphorically speaking. Be patient, Dexter. Wars have a way of shifting the terrain into configurations we can’t foresee, hard as we might try. This is no time for bold moves.”
Dexter liked that word, “configuration.” The tide had turned in the war, unmistakably—what the old man had foreseen last fall was already coming to pass. But a dissatisfaction of weeks—months—had accumulated in Dexter’s limbs, and he needed to act. Even the wrong move was more appealing than none at all.
George Porter hovered just inside the blackout curtains, anxiously grooming his mustache. “I was wondering where you’d gone off to,” he greeted them searchingly. Dexter was too distracted to reassure him.
Every Berringer except the boys away at school was present tonight, filling four tables in the crowded dining room. Dexter had been seated next to Bitsy. With poor Henry casting baleful looks at them from across the table, he’d questioned her over dinner. Yes, the baby was crying less. No, she was not as unhappy as before. Her calm made Dexter suspect that she and George had found an available nook during cocktail hour. There were plenty of those at the hunt club, as Dexter well knew from the days when Harriet had brought him here as an act of insurrection. Charm and a heavy bankroll could secure one’s entrée to many places in this world, but not the Rockaway Hunting Club. Dexter’s frigid reception by the old stoves and their prissy progeny had amused him back then—what did he care? They could cold-shoulder him, refuse to host his nuptials (a thing that had made the old man very angry), but he’d snagged one of their own and was swinging her hand as they walked beside the swimming pool at night, looking for a place to fuck. The fillip of collective opprobrium had summoned their lust like a knife chiming crystal; its ringing emanations filled the trees and shook in the moonlight until they could think of nothing else. Conjugal bliss had been achieved in a sand trap, behind a garden shed, under a case containing photographs and trophies from the famed steeplechase races. Eight months pregnant, Harriet had serviced him under a tablecloth during a presentation of awards for lawn tennis.
Now, however, the configuration had shifted. Tabby and the twins had been embraced from the start, and Harriet was a prodigal returned—welcomed the more warmly for the distance she’d traveled. Only Dexter remained outside. His own generation was friendly enough; the wives flirted with him rashly when they were tight. But the old guard treated him with a weary revile whose foremost ingredient was boredom. He was far too familiar to be shocking, but they hated him still.
Grady and the other departing boys began waltzing with their proud, frightened mothers. The boys blazed in their fine uniforms, already heroes. Dexter decided to look for Mr. Bonaventura, who ran the kitchen (even Puritans knew that when it came to food and drink, you needed a Brazilian), to discuss the source of his black-market beef. The roast had been tough; Dexter knew he could do better and liked the notion of transacting this bit of business while the Puritans danced. But even as he strode toward the padded swinging door to the kitchen, a part of him shrank from this course. It was more of the same—the same, the same—and within the span of an instant, the idea of haggling with Mr. Bonaventura over beef went from vaguely promising to wretchedly bad. He was as sick of himself as the stoves were of him.
Rooted mid-ballroom, Dexter recognized his bind: any action he’d the power to take would push him further in the direction he wished to withdraw from. There was, quite literally, nothing he could do.
Yet in that discovery, he felt a stirring of possibility. Suppose doing was the wrong idea. Perhaps there was something he could undo.
He spotted his wife leaving the ladies’ lounge and caught her hand. She looked startled and pleased as he pulled her onto the crowded dance floor. A stiffness had arisen between them since the night he’d spent with Kerrigan’s daughter. That interlude had been difficult to shake: the shock of learning who she was, above all, but also the smell and feel and taste of her. He’d returned to the boathouse two days later to investigate those empty bottles and determine who the interlopers had been. But no sooner was he surrounded by the props of that night—table, stove, a stocking crumpled on the floor—than he’d found himself leaning against a wall with a hand in his trousers. He’d not returned to the boathouse since. Nor had he made love to Harriet—an aberration she had accepted with surprising equanimity. Now, having watched her in the arms of the newly bereaved Boo Boo, Dexter was determined to resume their normal relations. He held her close, breathing the musky smell of her hair and feeling, in her sinuous hips, the memory of childhood horseback riding she’d long since recanted.
“Remember how we used to be in this place?” he asked.
“Oh yes.”
“Let’s hope it isn’t like that with Tabby and Grady.”
He’d meant to be funny, but she tensed in his arms. “She’s sixteen.”