*
Against his better judgment, Nate ordered a whiskey at the bar in The Drake. He was looking for evidence of a past, of some sense of a presence. He knew the outline of his father’s history. He was telling it to a ghost, Ursula beside him in a small booth.
It began over drinks, his father’s courtship. Teddy is what his mother called his father when recalling the good times. She had been dining with a gentleman at The Drake.
His father described having been captivated by her advancing and then dismissive stare, watching her eyes follow him. There had been a brazen charge to the occasion, his father, drunk in the mediating company of fellow recruits in a carousel of what the war years then allowed — a fraternity of men in a trawl of bars, in advance of the hell that awaited them.
Nate looked to the sepia light of the bar. It was there if he looked closely. The afterlife of what happened was left, its essence. All he had to do was see it. As the story went, his father, struck by the loss of so much in life and determined that each opportunity must be seized, had begun walking back and forth against a great paned window, affecting a Nazi goose-step. Then he waited round front.
Shelby Pettigrew showed with a haughty independence, smelling of mint julep and tobacco. She wore mink stoles and pumps. His father learned that the man she was dining with was her distant relation and that she was from the South, the latter fact betrayed by her accent.
At the time, Shelby was in the countdown of a dwindling allowance. She had been sent North to secure a Yankee Republican husband passable to a Confederate father looking to hold onto the past. Yet, for all the apparent deceit behind it, his mother carried his father through the war, or, more exactly, he carried her.
Before he shipped out, she gave his father a picture of her taken on a tobacco plantation, her hands on her hips in riding jodhpurs that accentuated thighs that had held him in a gallop of a lust experienced just twice before his deployment because he felt compelled to know what awaited his return.
He kept her image against the shrapnel of Dear Johns, those letters that found their way into the Pacific before the assault on unnamed beaches, responses written within the hull of a ship, or a bunker, letters reaching home long after events had passed and, in many instances, taken the lives of those who had penned them.
Shelby Pettigrew was pregnant. She had informed his father soon after he shipped out. She lost the child eventually, but it made a great difference to his father’s survival.
Across the great distance that separated them, it was enough to know she loved him, but, regrettably, in reconvening in a time of peace, when there was less at stake, what they could not bear to lose — at one point, one another — seemed less important, less necessary to their mutual survival.
*
Nate looked up in the stream of light from the world emerging beyond. Day had broken into dense clouds threatening snow. He pinched at tiredness between his eyes, the day not yet begun, and there was so much yet to accomplish.
Nate drank again. He felt the burn in his throat. Drinking was ill advised in his condition. He caught up again with the story for Ursula’s sake. There was a part left out, the intervening years of his parents’ life. It was not explained fully. He had the story in his head.
Ursula said it didn’t matter, though it mattered greatly to Nate. He was agitated.
The barman came over and asked if Nate was okay. He was apparently talking aloud. He apologized. It mattered little. There was nobody in the bar, yet Nate set his drink away as a measure of contrition. He announced that he had arrived in from Canada.
The barman stared at him, vacant as a spoon, then left.
Nate was then suddenly quiet. He felt Ursula awaiting him in the way she must have navigated the petulance of Frank Grey Eyes.
Nate closed his eyes to catch up with the story, at the point where it had gone wrong.
There was the cofounding influence from the very beginning of Harper Delacroix, the Southern gentleman Shelby had dined with the night she had met Nate’s father. Delacroix had harbored designs on Shelby that had always lurked in the shadowy murk of a sexual longing that most probably could never have been quite fulfilled. Delacroix was portly and dandified and twenty years beyond Shelby’s age, and yet he confused the hell out of Nate’s father.
Delacroix became a perennial presence at the house, or he arrived to take Shelby to tea at a club in the city. He was known simply as ‘Dear Cousin’, his stout figure centered over the knob of a cane. He carried a pocket watch. He maintained an interest in the Kentucky Derby. He advised Shelby on what hats and dresses to wear. He had certain affectations and standards when it came to women. He was not beyond reminding her of the innate beauty of her shape.
He used his cane to poke her calves and mid-thigh, lifting her hemline with a sanctioned impropriety because he had an eye for style and he paid for everything. He plied her with sherry and other aperitifs served in small crystal glasses, so she gained a measure of how a day of ease might have been so enjoyed before the shifting influence of change and a spurious democracy. They were decided between them that they were living in terrible times.
The truth was that if Delacroix had been anything but what he was, maybe Nate’s father could have intervened. Nate’s father stayed at the golf club, recused from any definitive judgment. Shelby was lost to him anyways, with or without Delacroix.
This entrenchment of Delacroix in their lives continued and with greater frequency during the legal suits against the tobacco industry. There were by then, hearings at the state level, and then eventually at the Supreme Court. Delacroix’s practice was center stage in the Southern defense, and, though it was a losing proposition to be on the side of tobacco, it paid handsomely nonetheless. It mattered little which side you were on when you were at the top. There was money to go round for all involved.
Delacroix represented not so much a legal presence, as a fast-disappearing world of genteel manners. He puffed a redolent, sweet tobacco, so the scent of his presence lingered long after he was gone. He took Shelby to Washington DC for a series of congressional hearings, maintained decorum by calling her ‘Dear Cousin’ to the great interest of hotel and congressional staff alike. Shelby took a five-minute egg, wholegrain toast, orange juice and black coffee. The waiters knew her by name. Theirs was a life in great ruin, yet between them, they maintained the allure of something grand and dignified.
Nate’s father suffered the indignity. Shelby had all but left him. They had separate bedrooms, separate lives. He had been the future once, young and handsome, then, suddenly a silver-haired alcoholic with a great mistrust of everything he had once held close.
He had money. That was never the issue. It was just that he didn’t spend it with the lavish excess Delacroix spent it. It took a special talent, when, to Nate’s father, much of what was purchased was unessential. That was it, eventually, a profoundly different worldview, no better, no worse.
*
Nate ended with the impartiality that nothing could ever be charged against another, and that there were ways of seeing around all sides of a life in the equanimity of how Ursula would have seen it. She influenced him still.
He might have had another drink in advance of going to the offices of Weatherly, Sutherland, and Saunders to steel his nerves. There was time yet, but he thought better of it. The barman was not a friend.