A Season in Purgatory Read online

  On a bench in the curve of the stairway Constant noticed two coats, tossed there casually, as if the owners were in a hurry. One was a man’s coat and the other a fur coat, either mink or sable. I did not know the difference then. Constant picked up the fur coat and looked at the satin lining. There was a label from Revillon Frères, and the initials STS intertwined. A strange, distant look came into his face as he dropped it back on the bench.

  “Did your parents come back?” I asked.

  He signaled me first not to talk and then to follow him. We went through a doorway into a back hallway. He peered into the kitchen to check on Bridey, but she wasn’t there. I followed him up a back stairway. Opening a door to the second-floor hallway, he peered out and then walked down to the sewing room, where he found the envelope beneath Bridey’s darning basket. Then we retraced our steps to the first floor.

  “I don’t think we should leave by the front door,” he said. He spoke quietly, as if he were afraid of being overheard upstairs. “We’ll go out through the kitchen.”

  “I actually was never in a house this large before. I would be keen to see something more than the back halls and the maids’ stairway,” I said.

  “Some other time,” he replied. While the older siblings were still a bit in awe of the enormous house in which they lived, Constant and Kitt, the youngest two, accepted it completely. It was a casual thing for them, all they had ever known.

  Later, back at school, when I asked him what had happened at his house, he said, “That mink coat wasn’t my mother’s.”

  “Was the other coat your father’s?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “But—?” I wanted it to be spelled out to me, what I thought he meant.

  A slight scowl appeared on his face, clouding the clearness of his forehead. I had seen that look before. It appeared whenever there was what he perceived to be a criticism of anyone in his family. It meant, I knew, not to pursue the subject at hand. I didn’t.

  * * *

  The next morning on the tennis court, Constant and I waited for Kitt and Mary Pat to finish their match with the tennis teacher before we played. “Hi, kid,” said Kitt, when she walked off the court. Kitt called everyone kid. They all called everyone kid, but mostly Kitt. When she said it to you, you knew that you had been accepted, that you were not exactly one of them, but one of the people who orbited around their magnificence.

  Constant was everyone’s favorite in the family. He was flattered out of his senses from earliest childhood. Kitt was Constant’s favorite. She had the puzzling kind of good looks that are unconnected with beauty yet are more arresting, and a flippant outspoken manner that delighted her siblings but disturbed her mother.

  “Where is she?” asked Kitt, walking past a new maid with a frightened expression who opened the door of her mother’s house. Kitt often referred to her mother as she and her.

  “In the pantry.”

  “Mother in the pantry? Doing what? Firing the cook?”

  “Doing the flowers.”

  “Oh, yes, the flowers.”

  She was then, when I first met her, a student at the Sacred Heart Convent in another small Connecticut town. No Farmington, no Foxcroft, for the Bradley ladies. They went to the Madams, as the Sacred Heart sisters were called. The Madams were the aristocrats of nuns, from good families themselves, and rich ones. Agnes Bradley, the eldest sister in the family, I later discovered, was said to have longed for the veil, longed to have become a Madam herself, but madness intervened. Her madness. The thing the family never talked about. She might have been dead, as dead as the dead brother whose plane went down in Vietnam. She was away, in an institution in Maine, tended by hardworking nuns, not Madams, who might have been nurses or social workers had they not received a vocation. No one ever spoke about Agnes, except Kitt, who went to visit her before Christmas each year and on her birthday. Once she took me with her. Agnes thought that I was Constant, whom she had never seen other than as a baby, and Kitt nodded for me to pretend I was. It would have been too complicated, she said later, to explain who I was and what my relationship was to her. Agnes, except for her vacant look, had the appearance and voice of her father. But her mind was that of a ten-year-old. Kitt brought her silver rosary beads, blessed by the Holy Father in Rome, because Agnes claimed someone always stole her beads. Kitt was infinitely patient with her. Agnes, with her unpainted lips, talked incessantly of the Virgin Mary and the power of prayer. “I’ll call you on Sunday,” Kitt said to Agnes on leaving. “Oh, goody, goody, Trinity Sunday,” replied Agnes, clapping her hands.

  Dear sweet Kitt. I believe that she loved me, as I certainly loved her, but that all happened later and is no more than a subplot to the story that I have to tell. Only my own participation in that emotional turmoil brings me to mention it so early in this account. My knowledge of the events that follow is mostly firsthand, the rest comes from conversations with Constant and Kitt, and, occasionally, their far less well off cousins, Fatty and Sis Malloy. “I’m the one who talks too much,” Kitt once said. “They’re all down on me. Even Pa, and let’s face it, I’m the apple of Pa’s eye.”

  For reasons pertaining to their moment in time, Gerald and Grace Bradley were neither accepted nor received by the society of their city, for the Irish—even the rich Irish, and the Bradleys were very rich—were considered in those days to be not altogether correct. “They’re not the kind of people you invite to dinner,” said Leverett Somerset, in his snubbing way of speaking. He loathed the Irish, particularly the Bradleys. The Bradley money had not been fashionably come by. It was not from insurance, or banking, or stocks and bonds. Gerald’s father, Malachy, who amassed the nucleus that Gerald later turned into the Bradley fortune, had been a butcher who prospered in the grocery business and, before he died, became the president of a small bank in the Irish section of the city. In later years, Gerald always referred to his father as a banker, but those who remembered, especially people like the Somersets, always referred to him as a butcher. Gerald attended the Catholic schools of the city, Catholic University in Washington, and law school at Harvard. His early financial circumstances were further enhanced by his marriage to Grace Malloy, the daughter of a plumber who had prospered in the plumbing supply business. By the standards of the day, the combined incomes of the two newlyweds made them well-to-do. In a relatively short time, Gerald was thought to be the finest Catholic lawyer in the city and was personally responsible for the legal affairs of the bishop and the Church. Already a genius in money matters, particularly in the acquisition of real estate, Gerald doubled, trebled, quadrupled, et cetera, into the stratospheric level, the original butcher and plumber money, at the same time that Grace was giving birth to Bradley child after Bradley child.

  The Bradleys were inordinately admired by the Irish community from which they sprang but were shunned by the Protestant community who controlled the business, politics, and society of the city. In those days, the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, and the Jews resided on the east side of the city, while the Protestants lived more graciously on the west side. It was a surprise to all when Gerald Bradley bought the old Scarborough house, once lived in by Governor Scarborough, in the fashionable section known as Scarborough Hill. It was doubly surprising when Gerald Bradley then tore down the venerable house and built in its place an even larger mansion of gray and brown stone in the Tudor style. If it was not the handsomest house in the city, it was certainly the largest, and its construction caused much comment at the time, not all of it favorable, as well as a steady stream of cars filled with sightseers hanging out the windows to stare at the vast structure. By then the Bradley name was on every tongue.

  “Who do these people think they are?” asked Piggy French, one of their new neighbors.

  “I now live next door to the butcher’s son,” said Leverett Somerset, a remark that was repeated over and over again at the country club, a club so exclusive that it had no other name than The Country Club. “There’s a capital T on
the The,” Leverett Somerset always said when he discussed the club.

  Understanding the restrictions of the day, the Bradleys made no attempt at social intercourse with their polished neighbors. Nor did they mingle much with their own kind, having become separated from them by their immense wealth. But they found great pleasure in one another’s company. Loud screams of laughter and playful rivalry emanating from the Bradley swimming pool and the Bradley tennis court could be heard ringing through the air of the sedate neighborhood. “My word, don’t they make a lot of noise, those Bradleys,” Louise Somerset, Leverett’s wife, said on more than one occasion. The two families were never to understand each other. Louise Somerset was not sure whether it was an impertinence or an act of kindness when she received a Mass card from Grace Bradley following the death of her mother.

  Gerald was a stern disciplinarian to his children, demanding of them that they always be a credit to their Catholic background even while he prepared them for their infiltration into the Protestant world of private schools, dancing classes, seaside summers, country clubs, and Ivy League colleges. Grace, doing her part in the infiltration, contributed importantly to the symphony orchestra and attended every winter concert with one or more of her daughters, wearing a mink coat that Mrs. Somerset, her neighbor, told everyone was much, much too long. “She’s perfectly nice, Mrs. Bradley,” said Mrs. Somerset, after a symphony board meeting, “but I wish she wouldn’t wear gloves when she pours tea.”

  There was amazement in all quarters when Gerald Bradley was proposed for membership in The Country Club, the only Irish Catholic until then ever to be proposed. The Prindevilles, longtime members, were Catholic, too, but Helen Prindeville would be the first to tell you that they were French Catholic, which was, in her eyes, quite a different matter altogether. Piggy French, Buzzy Thrall, and Neddie Pawson, speaking for the majority of the membership, were prepared to blackball the proposal of Gerald Bradley. None of them took notice of Corky, the bartender, who overheard the contretemps while serving them drinks in the men’s locker room, and later repeated it word by word to the other employees, most of whom had grown up in Bog Meadow. Piggy French went so far as to call Gerald Bradley unclubbable.

  “He lacks the social graces,” agreed Buzzy Thrall.

  “Where do you suppose all that money comes from?” asked Neddie Pawson. “Are we sure it’s aboveboard? I mean, how can you make that much money in that short a time and have it all be legal? I mean, there won’t be fraud stories at some time in the future, will there, Leverett?”

  “No, no, no,” said Leverett Somerset impatiently. “Like him or not, and I don’t, thank you very much, the man is a financial genius. He should be in government. He should be dealing with the deficit, not trying to get into society.”

  “The only society he’s ever going to be in is the Holy Name Society,” said Buzzy Thrall, and they all laughed.

  “He keeps a mistress, I hear. Sally Steers, their interior decorator,” said Piggy French.

  “How do you know that?” demanded Leverett Somerset.

  “She went to Farmington with Eve Soby,” replied Piggy French. “He gave her a mink coat.”

  “So do you,” said Leverett.

  “So do I what?”

  “Keep a mistress.”

  “But I don’t have priests to dinner and popes to tea. And, besides, I don’t keep her. I see her. It’s quite a different thing altogether.”

  The behind-closed-doors session became stormy. Bitter things were said. Finally, however, all acquiesced, reluctantly. It was, people said, a payoff, a silent deal arrived at by Gerald Bradley and his neighbor, Leverett Somerset, having to do with a business venture in which Somerset, in financial distress, allowed himself to be bailed out by the butcher’s son. Gerald Bradley also agreed to undertake the costs of damages, not covered by insurance, caused by a recent hurricane to the clubhouse porte cochere.

  One of the most outraged members of the club was old Bishop Fiddle, the Episcopal prelate lately returned from a long and fashionable ecclesiastical tenure in Paris to spend his retirement years in Scarborough Hill. His mother was a Scarborough by birth, the sister of the late governor, and he was the uncle of Louise Somerset. He found the Bradley membership in the club appalling and voiced his opinion to anyone who would listen, despite the objections of his wife.

  One Thursday night, as the Bradleys entered the dining room en masse, the bishop signaled Gerald to his table with a wave of his spoon. He was eating vanilla ice cream. His patient and long-suffering wife had tied a large napkin around his neck so that the ice cream would not spill on the purplish red rabat beneath his black suit. On a gold chain around his neck he wore a cross which he tucked into his left breast pocket. When he spoke, the stentorian tones of his clipped tight Yankee voice carried throughout the large dining room.

  “I find it fascinating that the club has liberalized its bylaws to allow such a notorious person as yourself to join,” said the bishop. Vanilla ice cream dripped down his chin.

  Gerald, who despised the tone of that sort of voice, leaned low toward the bishop. “Fuck you, Bishop,” he said in the prelate’s ear.

  The old man turned red with rage. “What did he say?” he asked his wife.

  “He said, ‘Fuck you, Bishop,’ ” replied his wife.

  That night there was much laughter and gaiety at the Bradley table. Only Grace, who longed to be accepted, did not join in the fun. After all, she complained, she was the one who would have to meet Mrs. Fiddle at the next meeting of the symphony board.

  “I always thought the Somersets were so damn rich,” I said to Constant when he told me the story of how his family came to be members of The Country Club.

  “Well, they are, or were, but they just let their money sit, in that WASP way of theirs, while the smart people, like my father, who understand that money has to move, has to be invested, pull out at the right time, reinvest in something else, whether it’s real estate or the market or whatever, get richer and richer. And, after seven or ten years, the once-rich Somersets look poor by comparison.”

  Every Thursday, which was known in the community as cook’s night out, most of the members and their families dined at the club, and the Bradleys took up the habit, arriving promptly at seven-thirty with their great brood of growing children. They occupied a long table with Gerald at one end and Grace at the other, and for the seventeen years of their membership, until they moved away from the city, after Winifred Utley’s death, they did not take it amiss that they were never more than nodded to by the Protestant membership, or ever addressed, even once, by their first names. They felt they were special, the most successful of their own kind.

  My family, too, were of that persuasion and heritage. We, too, were children and grandchildren of immigrants who had prospered in New England; but our prosperity, although heralded in our city, was mild compared to the prosperity of the Bradleys, who, even then, fifty or sixty years ago, according to my grandfather, who admired them excessively, were known as having accumulated wealth comparable to the Rockefellers’. My father, however, was less admiring, specifically of Gerald Bradley. He said the Bradley money was tainted. He said Gerald Bradley consorted with undesirable people for financial gain. He said Gerald Bradley had a reputation in the business community for shady dealings. More and more, the older I get, I think of things my father told me, although, when he was alive, I did everything I could to avoid his presence after becoming aware, at a very early age, that I was a disappointment to him, not at all the sort of person he would have picked for an only son, had such an option been open to him. Had he lived, I would have disappointed him more, probably. I was a frequent source of displeasure, unlike all the Bradley children, who, for the most part, delighted their parents. But then, we were very different from the Bradleys. Not so rich. Not nearly so rich. We were merely well-to-do. Although highly thought of, successful even, my father had never risen above the vice-presidential level in the Derby branch of a great insurance
company in Hartford. We had Oldsmobiles, not Cadillacs. We had a maid who doubled as a cook. I was sent to good schools, but on partial scholarships. Even our sort of Catholicism was different. Our sort was underplayed. Never denied, but underplayed. Theirs was flamboyant, flaunted even. They attended Mass at St. Martin of Tours Cathedral, to which Gerald had given the rose window and the carillon, and they sat in two pews, one behind the other, always the same two front pews, as if they were reserved for the family, like opera seats on Monday nights. Grace, ostentatiously pious, regularly checked her brood and whispered instructions. “Look at the altar, Constant,” or, “Sing louder, Mary Pat.” Everyone carried rosary beads, always silver, always blessed by the Holy Father in Rome, and missals. Everyone received Communion, father, mother, and all eight children. They knew they were watched. They enjoyed being watched. “What a wonderful family,” the other parishioners said, as they stared at the ladies with their necks arched in devotion beneath their black lace mantillas, and listened to the resonant voices of the men loudly calling out the responses. Afterwards, on the church steps, they mingled a bit, speaking affably to the people they knew, or to the people they were introduced to, or to the priest who had just said the Mass. Grace, who even then shopped in Paris, always took great pains to dress in a manner that brought admiring glances from the women of the parish. Then they returned home for their Sunday breakfast, heaping platters of bacon and eggs, served by Irish maids in black uniforms and cooked by Bridey Gafferty, a large pudding of a woman who had been with the family for years and years and knew without being told how each person liked his eggs. There were cousins they rarely saw who lived in the part of the city known as Bog Meadow, where both Grace’s and Gerald’s families had themselves once lived. The cousins, who were called Fatty and Sis Malloy, were the children of Grace’s brother, Vinny, who had never done well. Fatty, with his red brick of an Irish face, might have become a cop or a fireman if his father’s sister had not married a man who prospered so magnificently and who didn’t want a nephew in a dark-blue uniform who might one day prove to be an embarrassment to his Bradley sons. The Malloys didn’t fit in, but sometimes they were asked to breakfast on Sunday after Mass. It was a great treat for Fatty and Sis, but a chore for the rest of them, even Grace, whose niece and nephew they were. Afterwards, Constant, who could imitate Fatty to perfection, even the way he held his fork and drooled his soft-boiled eggs on his double chin, would bring the family to tears of laughter as he reenacted something his cousin had done at the breakfast table. Only Grace did not laugh.