There was a booming of bells and Crawford said, “There it is. The dining room is just behind the desk where you signed in, William. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wash up. And remember—anything you need.” Upright and gentlemanly in his blazer and scuffed white shoes, a credit to the three years of schooling behind him, he went into the corridor, still resounding with the clashing melodies from three different phonographs, Elvis Presley’s wail, frantic and forlorn, dominating.
“Well,” Gretchen said, “he does seem like an awfully nice boy, doesn’t he?”
“I’ll wait and see what he’s like when you’re not around,” Billy said, “and tell you.”
“I guess you’d better get over for your lunch,” Willie said. Gretchen could tell he was panting for the first drink of the day. He had been very good about not suggesting stopping at any of the roadhouses they had passed on the way up and he had been a proper father all morning. He had earned his martini.
“We’ll walk you over to the dining room,” Gretchen said. She wanted to cry, but of course she couldn’t, in front of Billy. She looked erratically around the room. “When you and your roommate do a little decorating here,” she said, “this place ought to be very cosy. And you do have a pretty view.” Abruptly, she led the way into the hall.
They crossed the campus, along with other small groups converging on the main building. Gretchen stopped some distance from the steps. The moment had come to say good-bye and she didn’t want to have to do it in the middle of the herd of boys and parents at the foot of the steps.
“Well,” she said, “we might as well do it here.”
Billy put his arms around her and kissed her brusquely. She managed a smile. Billy shook his father’s hand. “Thanks for driving me up,” he said evenly, to both of them. Then, dry-eyed, he turned and walked, not hurrying, toward the steps, joining in the stream of students, lost, gone, a thin, gangling, childish figure departed irrevocably for that budding company of men where mothers’ voices which had comforted and lullabyed and admonished were now and forever heard only from afar.
Through a haze of tears she watched him vanish through the white pillars, the open doors, out of sunlight into shadow. Willie put his arm around her and, grateful for the touch of each other’s body, they walked toward the car. They drove down the winding drive, along a tree-shaded street that bordered the school’s playing fields, deserted now of athletes, goals undefended, base paths clear of runners.
She sat in the seat beside Willie staring straight ahead. She heard a curious sound from Willie’s side of the car and he stopped the car under a tree. Willie was sobbing uncontrollably and now she couldn’t hold it back any more and she clutched him and, their arms around each other, they wept and wept, for Billy, and the life ahead of him, for Robert Sillitoe, Jr., for themselves, for love, for Mrs. Abbott, for Mrs. Burke, for all the whiskey, for all their mistakes, for the flawed life behind them.
“Just don’t pay any attention to me,” the girl with the cameras was saying to Rudolph as Gretchen and Johnny Heath got out of the car and walked across the parking lot to where Rudolph was standing under the huge sign that traced the name of Calderwood against the blue September sky. It was the opening day of the new shopping center on the northern outskirts of Port Philip, a neighborhood that Gretchen knew well, because it was on the road that led, a few miles farther on, to the Boylan estate.
Gretchen and Johnny had missed the opening ceremony because Johnny couldn’t break loose from his office until lunchtime. Johnny had been apologetic about that, as he had been apologetic about his conversation at dinner two nights before, and the drive up had been a friendly one. Johnny had done most of the talking, but not about himself or Gretchen. He had spent the time explaining, admiringly, the mechanics of Rudolph’s rise as an entrepreneur and manager. According to Johnny, Rudolph understood the complexities of modern business better than any man his age Johnny had ever come across. When Johnny tried to explain what a brilliant coup Rudolph had pulled off last year in getting Calderwood to agree to buy a firm that had shown a two-million-dollar loss in the last three years, she had to admit to him that he had finally taken her beyond her intellectual depth, but that she would accept his opinion of the deal on faith.
When Gretchen came to where Rudolph was standing, making notes on a pad on a clipboard he was carrying, the photographer was crouched a few feet in front of him, shooting upward, to get the Calderwood sign in behind him. Rudolph smiled widely when he saw her and Johnny and moved toward them to greet them. Dealer in millions, juggler with stock options, disposer of risk capital, he merely looked like her brother to Gretchen, a well-tanned, handsome young man in a nicely tailored, unremarkable suit. She was struck once again by the difference between her brother and her husband. From what Johnny had told her she knew that Rudolph was many times wealthier than Colin and wielded infinitely more real power over a much greater number of people, but nobody, not even his own mother, would ever accuse Colin of being modest. In any group, Colin stood out, arrogant and commanding, ready to make enemies. Rudolph blended into groups, affable and pliant, certain to make friends.
“That’s good,” the crouching girl said, taking one picture after another. “That’s very good.”
“Let me introduce you,” Rudolph said. “My sister, Mrs. Burke, my associate, Mr. Heath. Miss … uh … Miss … I’m terribly sorry.”
“Prescott,” the girl said. “Jean will do. Please don’t pay any attention to me.” She stood up and smiled, rather shyly. She was a small girl, with straight, long, brown hair, caught in a bow at the nape of her neck. She was freckled and unmade-up and she moved easily, even with the three cameras hanging from her, and the heavy film case slung from her shoulder.
“Come on,” Rudolph said, “I’ll show you around. If you see old man Calderwood, make admiring noises.”
Wherever they went, Rudolph was stopped by men and women who shook his hand and said what a wonderful thing he had done for the town. While Miss Prescott clicked away, Rudolph smiled his modest smile, said he was glad they were enjoying themselves, remembered an amazing number of names.
Among the well-wishers, Gretchen didn’t recognize any of the girls she had gone to school with or had worked with at Boylan’s. But all of Rudolph’s schoolmates seemed to have turned out to see for themselves what their old friend had done and to congratulate him, some sincerely, some with all too obvious envy. By a curious trick of time, the men who came up to Rudolph with their wives and children, and said, “Remember me? We graduated in the same class?” seemed older, grosser, slower, than her unmarried, unimpeded brother. Success had put him in another generation, a slimmer, quicker, more elegant generation. Colin, too, she realized, seemed much younger than he was. The youth of winners.
“You seem to have the whole town here today,” Gretchen said.
“Just about,” Rudolph said. “I even heard that Teddy Boylan put in an appearance. We’ll probably bump into him.” Rudolph looked over at her carefully.
“Teddy Boylan,” she said flatly. “Is he still alive?”
“So the rumor goes,” Rudolph said. “I haven’t seen him for a long time, either.”
They walked on, a small, momentary chill between them. “Wait a minute for me here,” Rudolph said. “I want to talk to the band leader. They’re not playing enough of the old standards.”
“He sure likes to keep everything under control, doesn’t he?” Gretchen said to Johnny, as she watched Rudolph hurry toward the bandstand, followed, as ever, by Miss Prescott.
When Rudolph came back to them, the band was playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and he had a couple in tow, a slender, very pretty blonde girl in a crisp, white-linen dress, and a balding, sweating man somewhat older than Rudolph, wearing a wrinkled seersucker suit. Gretchen was sure she had seen the man somewhere before, but for the moment she couldn’t place him.