—
Eleanor and Jim met at Columbia summer school the summer before their junior year. He was taking organic chemistry, she was taking the Russian novel. He saw her having lunch in John Jay, bent over Anna Karenina. She’s beautiful, he thought self-consciously, the same way I am. When he was younger he’d been embarrassed by his looks and the attention they attracted. He had worried that people thought he was a girl. Strangers stopped his mother on the street to tell her what a beautiful child he was. One woman said he looked “just like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.” He growled at her. Adolescent gawkiness took the edge off his prettiness, and by the time he was twenty, no one would take him for a girl. Women often still said he was beautiful, but not like Elizabeth Taylor, like Tyrone Power. When he approached Eleanor, he expected a smile, interest. Girls liked him.
“It’s better in Russian,” he said.
She looked up at him. “Oh, those Russians,” she said, unsmiling, “they think Shakespeare is better in Russian.” She went back to her book.
He persevered. She was smart as well as beautiful, plainly worth pursuing.
“Do you like it? Do you like Anna?” he said.
She looked up again, her good manners kicking in. “I like it. I don’t know if I like Anna. I can’t see dying for love. I liked War and Peace more. I like Natasha more.”
“Do men ever die for love that way, or only women?” he asked. He slid into a chair across the table from her.
Eleanor thought for a moment. It was a more interesting question than she had expected. “Not in novels, only in life.”
“I think I might die for love,” he said.
She finally smiled at him. “Heroically? Sacrificially?” she said.
“I’d like to think so, but that’s not what I meant. I meant dying from loss,” he said.
“How can you know that about yourself?” she asked. “Have you ever been in love?”
He shook his head. “Emotions are treacherous. I like to keep things cool.”
“I don’t know any other way,” she said.
They spent every day together that summer. She took him to movies at the Thalia: Bergman, Rossellini, Fellini, Renoir. He read her Chekhov plays and stories. They didn’t fall into bed heedlessly, carelessly, drunkenly, like so many young lovers. They planned their first time, with Lancers rosé wine, candles, and, on the bedside tables, a box of condoms. He undressed her slowly. They looked at each other naked. They started at four thirty p.m., after her class, and went on until midnight when she caught sight of the clock, threw on her dress, and caught a cab home. In the fall, she visited him every weekend at Yale. They didn’t introduce each other to their parents until the spring and then it all fell apart. They cried. “I’ll never get over you,” he said. “You must,” she said. “You will.”
—
Jim went to Rupert’s funeral at St. Thomas. He had ended his Episcopal surveillance of Eleanor’s boys after Nathan was born but he remained too curious about them. He took his old seat on the far edge of the far aisle. The boys looked less alike than they had as children but they were all still dark and lean, plainly Eleanor’s children, plainly brothers. There were four wives or girlfriends, all blondes, like Rupert; a sixth dark young man; and two small, white-haired granddaughters, who sat quietly in a front pew, reading books. There was a young woman sitting with the family who looked like the boys; he didn’t recognize her. Was she a sister? Had he missed her in his census? Eleanor looked tired and pale. Like a grieving widow, he thought with a start. It had been a mistake to come. The organist started playing. Half listening to the music, Jim plotted. For the last forty years, the boys and Rupert had stood in the way. With the boys grown and Rupert dead, those roadblocks were gone, Eleanor was free. I’ll get divorced, he thought, with a stab of pain. He would have to give up Anne.
The eulogies began. The two boys spoke well. Jim found himself wishing Nathan was with him, to hear them speak about their father. He missed his son, off in college, planning a separate life. He wondered what Nathan would say at his funeral. He hoped he would tell a life-with-old-Dad story, poignant and affectionate. Nathan was the gift of his life. He had never loved, could never love anyone else as much as he loved Nathan. The thought that he might have missed him by marrying Eleanor gave him a thump.
The penultimate speaker, John Earlham, made little impression on Jim. He spoke with a kind of lisp and talked about cricket in New York in the ’50s. Rupert was very good at cricket; his swing was deadly. “He held the bat at an odd angle,” Earlham said. “When it connected with the ball, the ball flew. When it connected with anything else, call an ambulance. Kidding, sort of.” The last speaker was Dominic Byrne. His eulogy made Jim sit up. He sensed a rival, another man with an engaging accent. Byrne spoke about Rupert but also about Eleanor and the way he saw his friends as husband and wife. “I’ve never married,” he said, “and Rupert and Eleanor’s marriage was the closest I came to seeing one close up. Eleanor, well we all know Eleanor, she would say, ‘Oh, Rupert,’ to him or about him, as if she were speaking about a limb or other part of her body. There was in her voice at those times an unembarrassed and unembarrassing intimacy that seemed akin to breathing. Rupert, to me, perhaps not to her, was more explicit and, not surprisingly, less expressive. He called her ‘my great good luck.’ He would look past me when he said it, as if eye contact might move him to tears.”