That winter, Victor went to Florida with Mr. Hatherly to hoist his beach umbrella and play rummy with him, and while they were there he said that he wanted to get married. The old man yelled his objections. Victor stood his ground. When they returned to New York, the old man invited Victor to bring Theresa to his apartment one evening. He greeted the young woman with great cordiality and then introduced her to Mrs. Hatherly?a wasted and nervous woman who kept her hands at her mouth. The old man began to prowl around the edges of the room. Then he disappeared. “It’s all right,” Mrs. Hatherly whispered. “He’s going to give you a present.” He returned in a few minutes and hung a string of amethysts around Theresa’s beautiful neck. Once the old man had accepted her, he seemed happy about the marriage. He made all the arrangements for the wedding, of course, told them where to go for a honeymoon, and rented and furnished an apartment for them one day between a business lunch and a plane to California. Theresa seemed, like her husband, to be able to accommodate his interference. When her first child was born, she named it Violet?this was her own idea?after Mr. Hatherly’s sainted mother.
When the Mackenzies gave a party, in those years, it was usually because Mr. Hatherly had told them to give a party. He would call Victor into his office at the end of the day, tell him to entertain, and set a date. He would order the liquor and the food, and overhaul the guest list with the Mackenzies’ business and social welfare in mind. He would rudely refuse an invitation to come to the party himself, but he would appear before any of the guests, carrying a bunch of flowers that was nearly as tall as he was. He would make sure that Theresa put the flowers in the right vase. Then he would go into the nursery and let Violet listen to his watch. He would go through the apartment, moving a lamp here or an ashtray there and giving the curtains a poke. By this time the Mackenzies’ guests would have begun to arrive, but Mr. Hatherly would show no signs of going. He was a distinguished old man and everyone liked to talk with him. He would circle the room, making sure that all the glasses were filled, and if Victor told an anecdote the chances were that Mr. Hatherly had drilled him in how to tell it. When the supper was served, the old man would be anxious about the food and the way the maid looked.
He was always the last to go. When the other guests had said good night, he would settle down and all three would have a glass of milk and talk about the evening. Then the old man would seem happy?with a kind of merriment that his enemies would never have believed him capable of. He would laugh until the tears rolled down his cheeks. He sometimes took off his boots. The small room seemed to be the only room in which he was content, but it must always have been at the back of Mr. Hatherly’s mind that these young people were in substance nothing to him, and that it was because his own flesh and blood had been such a bitter disappointment that he found himself in so artificial a position. At last he would get up to go. Theresa would straighten the knot in his tie, brush the crumbs off his vest, and bend down to be kissed. Victor would help him into his fur coat. All three of them would be deep in the tenderness of a family parting. “Take good care of yourselves,” the old man would mumble. “You’re all I have.”
One night, after a party at the Mackenzies, Mr. Hatherly died in his sleep. The funeral was in Worcester, where he was born. The family seemed inclined to keep the arrangements from Victor, but he found out what they were easily enough, and went, with Theresa, to the church and the cemetery. Old Mrs. Hatherly and her unhappy children gathered at the edge of the grave. They must have watched the old man’s burial with such conflicting feelings that it would be impossible to extricate from the emotional confusion anything that could be named. “Goodbye, goodbye,” Mrs. Hatherly called, half-heartedly, across the earth, and her hands flew to her lips?a habit that she had never been able to break, although the dead man had often threatened to strike her for it. If the full taste of grief is a privilege, this was now the privilege of the Mackenzies. They were crushed. Theresa had been too young when her parents died for her to have, as a grown person, any clear memories of grieving for them, and Victor’s parents?whoever they were had died a few years back, in England or Scotland, and it seemed at Hatherly’s grave that she and Victor were in the throes of an accrual of grief and that they were burying more than the bones of one old man. The real children cut the Mackenzies.
The Mackenzies were indifferent to the fact that they were not mentioned in Mr. Hatherly’s will. A week or so after the funeral, the directors elected Junior to the presidency of the firm, and one of the first things he did was to fire Victor. He had been compared with this industrious immigrant for years, and his resentment was understandable and deep. Victor found another job, but his intimate association with Mr. Hatherly was held against him in the trade. The old man had a host of enemies, and Victor inherited them all. He lost his new job after six or eight months, and found another that he regarded as temporary?an arrangement that would enable him to meet his monthly bills while he looked around for something better. Nothing better turned up. He and Theresa gave up the apartment that Mr. Hatherly had taken for them, sold all their furniture, and moved around from place to place, but all this?the ugly rooms they lived in, the succession of jobs that Victor took?is not worth going into. To put it simply, the Mackenzies had some hard times; the Mackenzies dropped out of sight.
THE SCENE CHANGES to a fund-raising party for the Girl Scouts of America, in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It is a black-tie dance in a large house?Salisbury Hall?that has been picked by the dance committee with the hope that idle curiosity about this edifice will induce a lot of people to buy the twenty-five-dollar tickets. Mrs. Brownlee, the nominal hostess, is the widow of a pioneer steel magnate. Her house is strung for half a mile along the spine of one of the Allegheny hills. Salisbury Hall is a castle, or, rather, a collection of parts of castles and houses. There is a tower, a battlement, and a dungeon, and the postern gate is a reproduction of the gate at Chateau Gaillard. The stones and timber for the Great Hall and the armory were brought from abroad. Like most houses of its kind, Salisbury Hall presents insuperable problems of maintenance. Touch a suit of chain mail in the armory and your hand comes away black with rust. The copy of a Mantegna fresco in the ballroom is horribly stained with water. But the party is a success. A hundred couples are dancing. The band is playing a rhumba. The Mackenzies are here.
Theresa is dancing. Her hair is still fair?it may be dyed by now?and her arms and her shoulders are still beautiful. The air of sadness, of delicacy, still clings to her. Victor is not on the dance floor. He is in the orangery, where watery drinks are being sold. He pays for four drinks, walks around the edge of the crowded dance floor, and goes through the armory, where a stranger stops to ask him a question. “Why, yes,” Victor says courteously, “I do happen to know about it. It’s a suit of mail that was made for the coronation of Philip II. Mr. Brownlee had it copied…” He continues along another quarter of a mile of halls and parlors, through the Great Hall, to a small parlor, where Mrs. Brownlee is sitting with some friends. “Here’s Vic with our drinks!” she cries. Mrs. Brownlee is an old lady, plucked and painted and with her hair dyed an astonishing shade of pink. Her fingers and her forearms are loaded with rings and bracelets. Her diamond necklace is famous. So, indeed, are most of her jewels?most of them have names. There are the Taphir emeralds, the Bertolotti rubies, and the Demidoff pearls, and, feeling that a look at this miscellany should be included in the price of admission, she has loaded herself unsparingly for the benefit of the Girl Scouts. “Everybody’s having a good time, aren’t they, Vic?” she asks. “Well, they should be having a good time. My house has always been known for its atmosphere of hospitality as well as for its wealth of artistic treasures. Sit down, Vic,” she says. “Sit down. Give yourself a little rest. I don’t know what I’d do without you and Theresa.” But Victor doesn’t have time to sit down. He has to run the raffle. He goes back through the Great Hall, the Venetian Salon, and the armory, to the ballroom. He climbs onto a chair. There is a flourish of music. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he calls through a megaphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention for a few minutes…” He raffles off a case of Scotch, a case of bourbon, a Waring mixer, and a power lawn
