Yes, he remembered he had felt a kind of wild exhilaration. His heart beat faster merely in retrospect. They had certainly made him feel … vigorous. But then the stuff she used to bring him “down” had really fogged his brain.
And he had forgotten to ask her what they were.
ANDREW ELIOT’S DIARY
December 20, 1960
I’m getting married tomorrow. It should be very interesting.
Newall’s stuck in Hawaii with the navy and can’t make it. But otherwise all my buddies will be there — including Ted and Sara Lambros, and even that nutcase, George Keller.
Kind of because I admire him so, I’ve asked Jason Gilbert to be my best man. He agreed, but refused to wear his marine uniform, even though it would add flash to the occasion.
Our church ceremony will be followed by a cham pagne reception at the Beacon Hill Club. After which we’ll fly to Barbados for our honeymoon, and then return to New York, where I’ll be starting as a trainee with Downs, Winship, Investment Bankers.
I’m sure it will be a joyous experience — especially if I can figure out how this all happened to me so quickly.
From one standpoint, I could say it was parental pressure. Although in our family that doesn’t exist. My father merely suggests things.
When I was mustered from the navy last summer in time to join everybody up in Maine, he casually remarked that he supposed I’d be getting married one of these days.
To which I dutifully replied that I supposed so. And that sort of concluded the conversation, except for his observation that, “After all, a man shouldn’t wait until he’s over the hill.”
Seeing as there were no more decks to swab or naval reports to file, I was, to tell the truth, at a loss for things to do. Also, spending so much time at sea had only sharpened my desire to get more involved with the female sex. And I suppose marriage is as involved as you can get.
Up until this year I had the romantic notion that getting married had something to do with love. But then, of course, having been isolated — first by Harvard and then by the vast ocean — I had no real idea what life was all about.
Matter of fact, love is one of the few subjects on which my father had such strong feelings that he actually expressed them in a four-letter word. We were out fishing on the lake a few days later and I mentioned how touched I had been at Ted and Sara’s wedding. And how they were my ideal of what a loving couple should be.
Dad looked at me with eyebrow raised and said, “Andrew, don’t you know love is … bosh?”
I can’t pretend that I didn’t hear stronger language in the navy, but never from my father’s lips. He then patiently explained that when he was a boy the best marriages were not made in heaven, but over lunch at the club. Pity that sort of thing was going out of style.
For example, his classmate, Lyman Pierce, chairman of Boston Metropolitan, had “an absolutely smashing daughter,” to whom, in the good old days, he would have arranged a splendid betrothal for me.
I allowed that I was in no way averse to meeting smashing women and would be glad to call this lady up as long as it was on a friendly basis — and without obligation.
To which my father replied that I wouldn’t regret it. And returned to his fishing.
I had no great expectations when I dialed Faith Pierce at the Wildlife Preservation Fund, where she was a full-time volunteer. I assumed she would be a vapid, overprivileged, snobbish Brahmin. Well, she may have been a lot of those things, but she wasn’t vapid. And what absolutely amazed me when we met was that she was so good-looking.
I mean, she was one of — the prettiest girls I’d ever seen. I thought she gave Marilyn Monroe a fair run for her money (except that she had more money).
What’s more, I liked her. She was that rare creature among the so-called bluebloods — a real enthusiast. Every activity to her was “a fun thing.” Whether it was tossing a football on the banks of the Charles, having a gourmet meal at Maître Jacques, or sex before marriage. Moreover, all her previous life could be subsumed under that same description.
Her mummy and daddy hadn’t gotten along too well. But when they divorced and she was sent to boarding school at the age of six, it turned out to be “a fun thing.” Likewise the finishing school in Switzerland, where she picked up a terrific French accent — and one or two words to say with it.
Skiing, sailing, riding, and sex (previously mentioned, I guess) also came under that category.
And she’s a terrific gardener.
I would describe our courtship as whirlwind — and I have no doubt how she would term it. In any case, we seemed to know so many people in common that I feared the only thing that would keep us from marrying would be some kind of incest by association.
For the record, I’m not marrying Faith simply because our mutual fathers and mothers are fairly berserk about the whole idea.
Knowing his deeply held views, I would never admit it to my dad, but secretly — I’m still a romantic.
And I’m marrying Faith Pierce because she said something that no one has ever said to me in my entire life.
Just before I proposed, she whispered, “I think I love you, Andrew.”
One morning in late spring of ’62, Danny Rossi woke up alone. Not merely alone in bed, but feeling a pervasive emptiness in his entire life.
How could this be? he asked himself. Here I am in my new Fifth Avenue duplex overlooking Central Park. In a minute a butler is going to walk through that door with my breakfast on a silver tray. He’ll also be bringing this morning’s mail, which will contain invitations to at least a dozen parties all over the world. And I suddenly feel unhappy.
Unhappy? What a ridiculous thought. I’m the critics’ darling. I think if I sneezed during a concert they’d write it up as an exciting new interpretation of whatever I was playing. I can’t even walk from here to Hurok’s office without people calling out friendly greetings or asking for autographs.
Unhappy? There isn’t an orchestra in the world that wouldn’t die to have me as a soloist. And now the commissions for symphonic compositions are starting to come in. Everybody seems to want me for my talent, as well as my personality — not to mention the innumerable lovelies who want me for my body.
So why, with the platinum winter sun streaming brightly through the windows of my fantastic apartment, do I feel worse than I ever did when I was stuck in that lousy little practice room in my parents’ cellar?
This was not, in fact, the first time he had had such thoughts. But now they seemed to be coming more frequently.
What made matters worse, he had no official engagements for the day. No concerts, no rehearsals, not even an appointment with his hair stylist.
This, of course, had been on his own insistence. Because he wanted to devote the day to composing the orchestral suite commissioned by the St. Louis Symphony. And yet now the prospect of being alone with sheafs of empty music paper depressed him.
What could possibly be causing this melancholy?
After breakfast he put on jeans and a Beethoven sweatshirt (the gift of an adoring fan) and climbed to his studio on the upper floor. There on his piano, where he had left it late the previous night, was his unfinished composition. And on an easy chair nearby, a magazine he had leafed through to relax and let his sleeping pill take effect.
Perhaps just to avoid sitting down to work, he ambled over and picked it up again. It was the Harvard Alumni Bulletin that he had left open the previous evening at the Class Notes section.