The Huge Season Read online

  Everything in Foley’s life dated from something—his father’s watch, his mother’s death, the characters and events of his first two years in college—but his real life dated from J. Lasky Proctor, and they both dated from Lawrence. Charles Gans Lawrence, heir to the barbed-wire empire, once well known for his tennis game without ground strokes, his bullfighting without sword strokes, and now remembered, if at all, for his early death in the afternoon. Known to the world as Lawrence; to Proctor as the man in whom the sun rose and set. They had all risen with it, perhaps, but they dated, like fashions, from the moment it set. The 5th of May, 1929. Other suns had set that particular year, few of them in a blaze of glory, but with the passing of Lawrence a constellation had blacked out. Gone. One seldom, if ever, heard from such bright suns as Proctor and Lou Baker, such satellites as Lundgren, Livingston, and Peter Foley himself. Snuffed out, leaving no trace, casting no light, emitting no radiation, no blaze of worlds in collision, but still circling in their orbits, in their appointed places, after twenty-three years.

  On the 3rd of May—the date was certain in his mind as he had kept the stubs of two lottery tickets—on the 3rd he had spent his first night in Paris, kissed his first girl, and all but had his tongue bitten out or his mouth. Near the Etoile. In the shelter of a bus stop on the avenue Hoche. Girl known as Montana—Montana Lou Baker—and the morning of the 5th she woke him up to tell him that Charles Lawrence, the man in whom the sun rose, had shot himself.

  That had been the end—but not officially. Officially, the survivors had gone on to die off piecemeal, as playboys or professors, or reappear as fossils, taken alive, on the nationwide patriotic TV programs featuring the good, as well as the bad, Americans. The good brought forward, like a painless extraction, to smile at the world through all-American bridgework and speak with the filtered, uncontaminated voice of America.

  That had made it official. That made it clear the jig was up. What had taken more than twenty years to die was now dead. The Lone Eagles were now a covey of Sitting Ducks. Dead, or good as dead, like the striking resemblance that Peter Nielson Foley once bore to Charles A. Lindbergh, another fossil from the great Age of Flight. The lemming like un-American drive of young Americans to be somewhere else.

  “Foley,” Proctor had once said, “you self-effacing bastard, who the hell are you?”

  Well, who the hell was he?

  From the mirror that he faced, twenty-five years later, there came no reply. The blue eyes were now gray, the cleft chin was now double, the sandy hair had receded, the nose and ears protruded, but the self, that fossil-haunted self, was still effaced. Name being withheld until kith and kin had been notified. Remains bore close resemblance to Nordic (maternal) side of the family, strongly given to notion that the Vikings found, then lost, America. Bachelor, professor of languages of no practical value, well known on quiet calcified campus for lifelike impersonations of Buster Keaton and a record of Hoagy Carmichael singing “Hong Kong Blues.”

  “A penny,” his mother used to say, “a penny for your thoughts.”

  God knows why. He really never had thoughts. But that was how his mother had faced the problem of silence, and when Lou Baker had been snuggled in his lap, before she had bitten him, such a silence had to be faced.

  So he had said to Montana Lou Baker, “A penny for your thoughts.”

  A mistake. One of the turning points in his life. For Montana Lou Baker, Bryn Mawr ’27, had thoughts—but not her own.

  “Give me the penny,” she had said, and he had fished out a small French coin. She grabbed it, raised her head, and intoned, “There’s more crap talked about this town than any other goddam place in the world.”

  “Is that your thought?” he asked knowing that it wasn’t.

  “It’s his,” she said, “but I agree with it.”

  “ ‘Crap’ doesn’t sound much like him,” he said.

  “He didn’t say crap,” she said, “he said bullshit,” and when the word came out, although he had been prepared, he recoiled.

  “Didums nasty word hurtums?” Lou Baker said.

  “I guess I don’t like to hear a woman swear,” he replied.

  “You know the three ages of man?” she asked, and he neither did, nor did he want to, but she sat up straight, her fingers spread, to count them off. “There’s the age of stone, when you throw rocks at each other; then there’s the age of steel, when you throw that at each other; then there’s the age of bullshit, when you throw—” and he clamped his hand over her mouth. He held it there till she squirmed, then he removed it, and she said, “My mother used to wash my mouth out with Fels-Naptha. She made me bite it. You want to wash my mouth out?” and then she turned and stuck her red tongue right in his face. He almost got it, but she was too quick for him. She slipped off his lap, where she had been curled up in the ankle-length camel’s hair coat she was wearing, and ran down the street to the pension where she lived. But her coat was heavy, and he soon caught up with her. He grabbed the belt across the back, swung her around, took a grip on her short hair as they did in the movies, and with her head tipped back he kissed her on the mouth. She returned it—then clamped down on his tongue. The pain was so bad his eyes filled with tears, and he covered his mouth. She ran down the street, laughing and hooting, the flat-soled huaraches slapping on the pavement, and before he could catch her she had got the door open, then closed again. From an upper-floor window she pelted him with pennies, as if he were an organ grinder.

  He had walked three or four miles, through the Paris night. Above the trees along the Champs Elysées the morning sky was reflected in the curtained windows, and the gray stone buildings had a bluish cast, as if dipped in the sky. When a taxi driver hailed him he would signal that he wanted to walk. He was ashamed to try to speak any French with his swollen tongue. From the corner of the Tuileries, looking back, he watched the sun rise on the Eiffel Tower, come down the tower, that is, like a lift making all the stops.

  Foley’s life—such life as he possessed—seemed to have begun with one Jesse Proctor and to have ended when that Proctor had given up. The Laureate of the Age of Bullshit, as Proctor had prophesied himself, had survived the stone and steel, but the manure had been too much for him. The single shot that killed Lawrence had crippled all of them. That shot had been fired on a warm spring morning, like the one Foley could see from his bathroom window, a mist over the pond as there had been over the Seine. When Foley had crossed the Pont des Arts a bum of some sort had been seated right beneath it, rubbing a thick, soapy lather into the curls of a high-bred dog. The dog’s fine collar and leash, with a clean towel for drying, lay at his side. Twenty-four hours later Lawrence was dead, and almost twenty-three years later, to the day, one J. Lasky Proctor was burning at the stake. One manuscript, ready for burning, lay in the grate.

  On his lidded eyes Foley rested a forefinger, a thumb. Like a bouncing ball, or the glowworm hopping from word to word, he saw the legendary headlines, exploding like fireworks:

  LINDBERGH LANDS IN PARIS

  EDERLE SWIMS CHANNEL

  LOEB & LEOPOLD CONVICTED

  RUTH MAKES IT SIXTY

  And larger still, like a backdrop against which the fireworks were displayed, the mural-size photograph of a tennis player serving the ball. This photograph was printed on the cover of a book, with the player’s signature at the bottom, and across the top the Spanish word

  QUERENCIA

  Querencia? That part of the ring, the bullring, where the bull felt at home. The book was a novel about a tennis player who, when injured, had made himself a great bullfighter. The author’s name appeared on neither the cover nor the title page. It was in the book, rather than on it, turning up in the dedication, which read:

  For

  JESSE PROCTOR

  Without whom this book

  would not have been

  written

  A hoax, the neatest trick of the decade; published without its concluding chapter, the author’s name unmentioned exc
ept on the dedication page. The morning it was published, May 5th, Peter Foley was awakened by Montana Lou Baker, who told him that Charles Lawrence, the subject of the book, had shot himself.

  Only one man knew whether Lawrence had ever set eyes on the book. Richard Livingston the III, the practical joker, the man who had published the book in ten copies, knew that, of course, but nobody knew Richard Livingston. Not that well. Not after Lawrence had shot himself. But whether Lawrence had seen it or not he was dead; Jesse Proctor, the novelist, had been blighted; and Peter Foley, the witness, still had an unfinished book on his hands. Not to mention Lou Baker, the haunted siren, with a blighted masterpiece of her own that filled to overflowing two Campbell-soup cartons. It was Foley who had kept her at work on it. Knowing all the time it would never be finished—no more than his own. Unfinished, these books gave purpose and direction to their lives. There was always a page, a scene, or a chapter to be modified. New material, or new light on old material, was always turning up. Now there was more of it. A chapter on J. Lasky Proctor, ex-novelist, salvage expert, and importer of Jews.

  Montana Lou Baker had been a little haggard, a bony, legend-haunted Garbo, the last time Foley had seen her in New York. They had gone over to Chumley’s, where the walls were lined with the jackets of books other people had written, a few people had read, and everybody had forgotten—except Lou Baker. She knew the authors. She had read and remembered the books. She lived a life as bygone, and as dated, as the characters. In the Chumley museum of jackets and blurbs she was at home. La Grande Baker, in her turtleneck sweater, a few stringy wisps of hair stuck to her forehead, forever picking the crumbs of badly rolled cigarettes from her lips.

  “Oh, Christ, Foley,” she had said, and after a while he had put in, “A penny for your thoughts.” He would. He had blurted it right out.

  And Lou Baker, naturally, had said, “There’s the age of stone, when you throw rocks at each other; then the age of steel, when you throw that at each other; and then—”

  Then came the age they were living in now. The age of—the blighted Laureate. Jesse Proctor become J. Lasky, the suspect Voice of America. In twenty-three years Foley had spoken to him just once.

  Year of the Fair—the World’s Fair out in Flushing. Foley had gone into town, taken a room at Sloane House for the night. Slept late, and had the barracks-size bathroom almost to himself. He stropped his razor, lathered his face, then noticed—reflected in the mirror—the legs of the man at the toothbrush bowl at his back. Had a towel around his waist, head bent over the bowl, and very fine legs. Foley knew them, both legs and feet, in particular the foot with the bruise on it, about the size and color of a smoky Concord grape. That was where Jesse L. Proctor had shot himself. Shot himself with a Colt, 38 or whatever, while crossing the Mojave in the seat of Lawrence’s sports coupe. It had put him on crutches for at least eight months. Up until that moment he had been a quarter-miler, and not much else. But after shooting himself it had been necessary for him to take stock, as the saying goes, and while his foot had healed he had begun to write stuff that was pretty good. He had never run again. From that point on he had done nothing but write.

  So Foley turned, his face lathered, and said—no, he didn’t say it, it was not necessary, for Proctor turned from the toothbrush bowl and said, “How are you, old man?”

  Just the same? Almost, but not quite. The blue-edged barbed-wire scar was still like a bone in Proctor’s face. And the face was more—well, it was more Jewish, whatever that was. Head thrust forward, cocked a bit to the right. Foley finished shaving, and Proctor led him back to the room he shared with two other fellows, but they were gone all day, so it was like an office, he said, all to himself. There he showed Foley letters, at least five of them, on the letterheads of important business houses, giving him large orders for a new, patented World’s Fair cane. It was not at all new, and not yet patented, but it was designed to wholesale for three cents, and was stained and grooved to resemble a piece of rustic wood. With a banner and a tin-plate tip on the point, it would cost five. The cane would retail at the Fair for fifteen or a quarter, and in the letters on hand Proctor said he had requests for two hundred fifty to around three hundred twenty thousand canes. His cut, per cane, would run about one-half cent, but if he could place orders for two hundred thousand with a firm he knew in South Carolina the cost would be reduced and his profit would run a good full cent. When you figured in the hundred thousands, that added up.

  Then Foley took him to Childs for breakfast, since Proctor was a little short of cash at the moment, although his credit, not to mention his prospects, was extremely good.

  “I’ll give you a blast, old man!” he said, rushing off to a sales appointment, and Foley noticed that he still had his limp.

  Hearing the cries of the birds, hearing them coming nearer, Foley closed the slats of the venetian blinds, stood with his back to the window as the cat, with his escort, passed. Routine maneuver. No crisis, as yet. Peace did not reign, but it was being observed in the northeast corner of God’s half acre. Mrs. Hermann Schurz, in bed over Foley’s head, would have her ear to it.

  He left the bathroom, took a seat on the bed, put on his socks. He put a shoe on, then slipped it off, thinking now was the time for his narrow-cuff flannels. French seat, English flannel, dating from the spring that Ivar Kreuger, the match king, shot himself in Paris, and Bruno Richard Hauptmann, paroled ex-convict, kidnaped Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. No one would ever believe he wore a pair of pants that old. Or that his gabardine jacket, trimmed with chamois, dated from the contract negotiations, successfully concluded, for a prospective Foley book. Book now lying in grate of fireplace, jacket now hanging on imported hanger. Would have looked good on Lawrence, man from whom Foley took his cues. Lawrence had been the model, but it had taken Foley, on what was described as his salary, all of twenty years to assemble the parts. And in those twenty years the world had gone on to other things. Leaving Foley with a style, an air of distinction, that he otherwise might not have had. He seemed to represent the finer things of a better day. In the twenties the rich spent their money on feathers and established standards that were hard to follow, but in the forties the rich made the old cars do and wore the old clothes. Foley was not rich, but he had something of the patina. In the lobby of a building on Fifty-seventh Street, on his way to somebody’s water-color show, he had been stopped by a woman, a woman of breeding, with the well-preserved sheen of good saddle leather, and she had wanted to know, she simply had to know, where he had got his shoes. The shoes on Foley’s feet that day were more than twelve years old. They might well have been the last pair of such shoes in the world. Foley couldn’t tell her that, or that he had bought the shoes back when she might have been in college, but he could tell her that he had bought them in Vienna, he had forgotten just where. He didn’t tell her this was back before Herr Dollfuss was Chancellor. The style had come back, in the last few years, but not the men who patented it. In such shoes there were feet, but not those of Proctor, and in such jackets there were arms, but not those of Lawrence. With the exception of Foley. He still wore the same shoes, the same pants, the same coat. But he was not, of course, the same man himself. Not after twenty-two years, three hundred and sixty-four days. The night Montana Lou Baker had bit him a waiter at the Café des Deux Magots had congratulated her on being with such a handsome young man. Foley made him think of Le Grand Charles Lindbergh, he had said. Lou Baker had smiled. She had resembled La Grande Garbo that night herself.

  A dull thud, characteristic and familiar, communicated to Foley through the boards in the floor, announced that the cat had come in the pantry window. In with a bird, that is. If he had no bird he was willing to use the door. With bird, however, he used the pantry window, dropping from the high shelf with a thud, then depositing the bird either in, or on, the sack of Bermuda onions in the vegetable bin. If in, it might not be discovered for some time.

  That made it three birds in five days, and Foley sat quiet
, his eyes lidded, listening for the telltale scrunch of the onion bag. It came. It seemed to come with the draft from the fireplace. Foley opened one eye—closed it when he saw the pages of the manuscript. Relief. Almost sickening sense of relief. What would he do, in God’s name what would he do, without his own captivity? As if it mattered if these captive ducks were dead. His ducks. Dead or alive, what mattered was that they were his. Foley’s lifelike decoys. He would make them look so real nobody would know it—not even the ducks.

  He crossed the room to take the sheets from the grate, but as he kneeled on the hearth something splattered on the top sheet. Bird dung. Asterisk indicating the chapter left out. “Always let it dry, old man,” Proctor had said, “then chip it off.”

  He left it there to dry, finished dressing, checked his pockets for money, keys, and Lou Baker’s phone numbers, leaped the gap in the hallway the rug did not coyer, and let the door slam behind him, rattling the bottles with the note that said “No milk until tomorrow,” and under a cloud of cat-yawping birds he began to run. Across God’s half acre, around the edge of the pond to where the two strange birds, unidentified, were napping, but suddenly arose, water dripping from their feet, and flapped away. There he turned and looked back, glanced rather, for in the window directly over his study he could see the figure, massive and yet suspended, of Mrs. Schurz in a cloud of gray flannel, made by herself when she learned that ladies’ nightwear, in her size, came only in pink.

  He walked on, across the empty pike as strange as the vacant morning aisles of Macy’s, then cut around the supermarket, the entranceway full of bucking broncos, jet-propelled rockets, and cans of Miracle-Gro plant food, across the acre or more of blacktop staked out with posts, and diagramed for parking, then up the flight of steps to the local platform and down the tracks to the east. As he went along the platform he passed an old man stretched out on a bench. A hat was tipped on his face, and his head rested on an overcoat tied up with a rope. A man of fifty-five, maybe sixty, an old-style tramp rather than a bum. Foley had seen him around the neighborhood for five or six years. The old man often used the gents’ facilities in the college dormitories. He attended the spring track meets, the home ballgames, lolled at his ease on the slopes around the pond, and was sometimes observed listening to the long Field Day speeches with a critical air. Foley had seen him as far as Paoli down the line. Always walking. He never hailed anybody for a ride. In the summer he was often seated on the big sandboxes of the Highway Department, swinging his feet like a kid and whistling softly as he watched the Main Line traffic flow by. He recognized Foley, for they exchanged greetings from time to time. The old man puzzled Foley because he hardly seemed aware that he was a bum. He might have passed as any local character, somewhat seedy, who pushed a mop in the diners or swept out the drugstores, if he had just given up carrying his winter coat tied up in a rope. That troubled Foley. The man seemed to have no pride. Otherwise he seemed to have what he needed—enough money for the food he ate out of paper bags, and paper cartons of milk that, when empty, he carefully deposited in the bins for trash. He did not smoke, was not known to drink, and chewed on nothing more offensive than the row of toothpicks he kept in the band of his hat.