Memories of a Marriage Read Online Free

pitcher. She was there—he smiled in the direction of Lucy—and right away he introduced me. I’llsay it again. He’s a really great guy. I don’t mean just the war-hero stuff. You know he has a Silver Star with three clusters and two Purple Hearts. I mean, he’s never treated me like an employee, nothing remotely like it. He taught me sailing, talked to me for hours about the First World War, which was then my big subject. He reads a lot of history.
    That was nice to hear. The decorations were news to me. They showed a modesty that Alex in fact had shared with some of the other returning veterans I got to know at college. You never heard about the Iwo Jima horrors or the Battle of the Bulge or whatever else they had lived through. The generosity toward this young man was mildly surprising; perhaps Alex had turned over a new leaf. But as Thomas talked on about the van Burens’ estate and his wide-eyed astonishment at the tennis court, the near-Olympic-length swimming pool, the boathouse with its sculls and sailing paraphernalia, the kids’ dinghies swinging at their moorings, and the yawl belonging to Alex’s father on which he and Mrs. van Buren would take him and his charges for day sails, I wondered whether he had already seen the De Bourgh establishment or realized that it was in all likelihood no less grand. He wasn’t telling, but he surely knew he was not the sort of young beau Lucy’s friends would expect her to be taking around and introducing to them. In fact, I was willing to bet that his stream of true confessions was intended to make clear he understood such surprise as I felt and had no intention of fooling anyone about his background. He needn’t have worried about that. You couldn’t pull the wool over the eyes of people who were of Lucy’s world and cared aboutsuch matters. Yes, he was trim—I learned later that he had been on his high school track team and had specialized in the one-hundred- and two-hundred-meter dash—and respectably taller than she, he had brown hair parted on the side and a nice face with regular features, and he wore a gray-flannel Brooks Brothers suit that was neither too big nor too small for him and a blue button-down shirt just like everybody else’s. If Norman Rockwell had wanted to put on a
Saturday Evening Post
cover a bright-eyed GI on leave, out on a first date with his future boss’s daughter, he might have used this kid—jazzed up a bit of course. And yes, he spoke correctly and without a trace of a regional accent. That was fine and should go down well with his prospective white-shoe Wall Street employers. But in the De Bourgh context, it was no use. He was a townie. The son of a garage owner and a bookkeeper! That might not have mattered much if the garage—the best in town!—had been, say, in Casper, Wyoming. But the indignity of its being next door, in Newport, of all places, was hilarious and bound to give the De Bourgh parents and Lucy’s brother, and I didn’t know how many uncles, aunts, and cousins, a lasting heartburn. That last aspect of the matter, incidentally, turned out to be something I got mostly wrong. Beyond such divagations about class and caste on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, which were part of my writer’s métier, there was another oddity: there were many bankers and lawyers in Lucy’s milieu in Paris, most of them, to be sure, safely married, but I hadn’t noticed that Lucy was particularly interested in any of them. She played tennis doubles with them and their wives; she went to theirparties and dinners; she seemed drawn, however, to the other group of Americans in Paris: writers, painters, and occasional journalists. So why this embryo banker? It wasn’t any of my business. If Lucy had a thing going with this nice boy,
tant mieux!
He was likely to have a good time and learn a thing or two. I liked him instinctively, and I liked the conceit I’d come up with, that in fine, to use one of the Master’s