Man Who Was Late Read online

  “SUBLIME ART.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Lives up to expectation, for it details exactly how someone recreates himself to go on living, and what the price is for that recreation.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “If Begley explores territory much traveled in the last half-century, he has nonetheless brought to that history a powerful and tender understanding, and renders it devastating all over again.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Louis Begley has drawn an uncommon and affecting portrait of a man.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A subtle, urban, and worldly novel about the most secret matters of the heart.”

  —James Atlas

  “A surprising work of control and assurance, elegance and eloquence, and the sheer pleasure of language and the finer arts of writing … A splendid display of the author’s mastery of his art … Rich and moving … Begley is a true storyteller.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “POWERFUL … LYRICAL.”

  —People

  “Begley’s great theme remains (as in his earlier Wartime Lies) imposture, the idea of the impersonator.”

  —Cynthia Ozick

  “Fastidiously crafted … Often compelling … [An] American saga of an immigrant’s rise to the outward trappings of patrician elegance, confidence, and wealth, while the empty winds of hollowness and despair visit the heart inside.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The author demonstrates once again that he can write a compelling story in disarmingly lucid prose.”

  —Library Journal

  “A shrewd and magnetic drama of thwarted emotions.”

  —Booklist

  “Urbane and elegant.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by Louis Begley

  WARTIME LIES

  SHIPWRECK

  SCHMIDT DELIVERED

  ABOUT SCHMIDT

  AS MAX SAW IT

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  About the Author

  Copyright

  for Anka

  I

  IT WAS A PARADOX, of which Ben over the years became fond, that he, ostensibly the most punctual and reliable of men, should have been late in the major matters of existence, that he always somehow missed his train. For all that the world could see, his comings and goings were meticulously planned and executed; he could be counted on to leave and arrive unfailingly, and precisely at the appointed hour—whatever his destination. But he knew better. Having studied to death his own version of the universal timetable, he discovered that somehow everything had been timed wrong, had been botched. Ben elaborated on his theory over countless lunches with me. Provided he was in New York, and the peripeties of some financial combination of the decade he just happened to be bringing to the desired ending did not interfere—the pages of my desk calendar were most often blank—we met for lunch at least once a month. Sometimes, if the conversation seemed unfinished—because what we had meant to say could not be contained in the conventional space of two hours, or because we were interrupted by an intruder determined to catch up with one or the other of us, insensitive to the bored or disparaging banter with which, in our mood of conniving solidarity, we deflected his questions—we would agree to lunch again the very first day he was free, to make sure the thing was finally talked out. This was our habit during almost fifteen years. For Ben, after completing the rites of passage proposed to the nation’s best during the Eisenhower era—Harvard College, followed by service in the marines, travel in Europe on a famed scholarship—moved to New York.

  By then, I had been living here for several years, ever since my own graduation three classes ahead of Ben, enjoying a precocious celebrity due to a short novel I had published at the midpoint between the appearance of The Old Man and the Sea and Goodbye, Columbus. It was based loosely on a shipwreck off Point Judith in which my older brother, the war hero, had drowned. The accident happened on a Thanksgiving weekend while I was still at school—in fact on restriction. Neither his body nor that of the friend who had come along as crew was found. After a week’s search by the Coast Guard, and planes chartered by my parents, someone retrieved objects from their boat: a couple of life preservers, my brother’s Bible in a pink rubber sack, miscellaneous navigation gadgets. Father paid our school to accept the gift of Sam’s books and keep them, together with a watercolor portrait of him as a Navy flyer, in a corner of the library. Then he and my mother carried on as though nothing had changed in their lives. My book was a success with critics and the public. Many heard in it echoes of Melville and Crane; a reviewer’s concluding line, that I had “set down the postwar generation’s theodicy,” was taken seriously and repeated in interviews and profiles, although nothing of the sort had crossed my mind. Until I decided that I must write this story, I did not undertake any other work of imagination. There was no subject that engaged me sufficiently.

  Whether Ben and I had met in Cambridge was a question we never resolved. If, as Ben claimed, some encounter had occurred—this was the sort of detail about which my otherwise precise friend was sometimes vague or wrong—it left no mark on my memory. So far as I know, our friendship began at the New York dinner table of a classmate of Ben’s who worked for the same magazine as I. Ben was then married to Rachel. They gave parties at their Park Avenue spread with a frequency and nonchalance the rest of us gaped at with more than a tinge of envy. All the while, as Ben later told me, they were inside their marriage like birds caught in some high-ceilinged room: confused, crashing into walls and closed windows, searching for an opening, for a long time unable to get out. Because my own wife and I came to dislike Rachel’s knack for putting Ben down before their guests—she was unendingly talkative and witty—our relationship changed from a friendship of two couples into a friendship of two men who lunch together. The wives, tacitly excluded, assumed the role of that sort of former friend one greets at large gatherings with five minutes of concentrated flattery and then abandons, hands raised in a gesture of ambiguous benediction.

  Paradoxes and other conceits invented by Ben lent a thematic continuity to our conversations. Without Rachel there to contradict him, he talked well, listening to his own words with just enough satisfaction to amuse me when I caught him at it. Like Conrad’s Marlow, that exemplary auteur manqué. he preferred that the shape of his meaning emerge slowly, as though from concentric circles of a metaphor. Speaking too well, seeking to impose order on casual noontime chatter, were in fact among the defects and virtues that Ben and I shared. I would occasionally point out to Ben these ways in which we might be thought to be alike, whereupon he at once referred enthusiastically to other similarities, not all of which I was glad he had perceived. Physically, we did not resemble each other at all. Ben looked to me Hungarian (which he was not): by the standards of his Harvard friends, on the small side, nimble and compact, with thick brown hair of great vivacity. His ears, paper thin, stuck out. I was almost a head taller, blond at that time, with features and heft bequeathed by my Yorkshire and German ancestors. And I liked Ben, had liked him from the start, and had watched my affection for him grow with a mixture of self-approval and amusement. That his oddness and the touch of the exotic about him didn’t put me off, that instead these qualities drew me to him like a magnet, proved some theories I held and had been heard to espouse about
my people’s traditions.

  To return to Ben’s sense of irremediable existential tardiness, the truth is that, until shortly before the events that brought his life to a tragic close, I did not take it seriously; in fact, I used to think that the only time Ben had missed his boat or train was when he did not make an effort to become a writer. Instead, flabbergasting and disappointing the intellectuals among his classmates, the teachers long accustomed to write recommendations for him, and perhaps even Rachel, although she claimed credit for Ben’s decision, he went to work for a Wall Street investment bank that was both powerful and impeccably elegant.

  According to Ben, only his mother and father were not astonished, in part because they did not fully measure the droll uniqueness of finding a postwar refugee from Central Europe within those precincts, and in part because they had come to assume that Ben would always get what he wanted and that he would naturally want whatever put the greatest distance between them and him. As to Ben’s real motives, he agreed with my assessment: he had as usual been, at least on the surface, unbeatably punctual in taking care that his obligations were met. He had promised to have a career that corresponded to Rachel’s notion of living in the great world; such a career was now open to him. He badly needed money of his own; he would earn it. Without money, he foresaw a bleak future of dependence on Rachel’s income to lift him and her above quotidian mediocrity and the sting of not being able to supplement the income of those spurned and confused parents. But, if he succeeded, if he came to have money in abundance, those oppressive problems would disappear. What’s more, he would have arranged things so that his tasks would henceforth be set for him by others—first by the bank’s partners, those wonderfully tailored men crossing and uncrossing their long legs under photographs of their sailboats, and, later, by clients. Then it would not be necessary, in order to win his bread and whatever he wanted to spread on it, to do much rummaging in the rag-and-bone shop of the heart. According to Ben, he wished to avoid that activity at almost any cost; he didn’t like what he found there.

  It was therefore only logical, he would explain, that he should become his grand bank’s house Jew—but whenever it was that he formed this view of his employment, he did not express it until some years later, after they had made him a partner, once again exactly on time according to the schedule governing such matters. This happened in the year that man first floated free in space, a coincidence that Ben alluded to as both suitable and pleasant. But in other respects, for Ben, his orderly ascension was just an additional illustration of how he would arrive on the platform, panting, beginnings of sweat breaking on his brow, after the train had left: for by that time, his parents had died without seeing how well he had done, how amply he intended to include them in his prosperity, and Rachel’s views no longer mattered in any positive sense. She had thrown him over. The thought that his manifest success might add to the sum of her regrets was sweet; it was also unworthy.

  Ben rarely mentioned these grimmer aspects of not being on time. He had a store of other illustrations that permitted him to spin out the theory and have others join in tolerant laughter at his expense without unduly obscuring the more satisfactory aspects of his career. Indeed, each anecdote of supposed failure could also be taken for a milestone of his progress.

  Take Ben’s clothes. God only knows what he wore before Rachel took him in hand: judging from a photograph or two I have seen of him at Harvard, it was boxy, pseudo-tweed creations “of good quality,” draped self-consciously, as though the wearer suffered from an intermittent itch, over white shirts, and the wrong sort of old-man neckties. The photographs do not reveal his legs or feet, but one can imagine brown trousers and laced shoes acquired at Florsheim’s. At a time when The Catcher in the Rye was becoming a manual of approved conduct, and the minutiae of preppy costume made or unmade a man with some finality, such attire would have sufficed—even without Ben’s browner-than-usual hair combed back unparted and shaved high over the neck and ears—to mark him as a turkey: the Widmerpool of Harvard Yard. Much of this was, of course, more or less repaired by the time the Park Avenue dinners started. From foot to crown, Ben was accoutred in Brooks Brothers standard issue, except for certain details implying an even higher level. These included striking Florentine neckties procured by Rachel (until she decided that the attention she paid to Ben’s appearance was demeaning to her and inconveniently likely to add to his growing self-esteem), brown English shoes that he wore to the office, against Wall Street rules, and also in the evening—homage to Rachel’s unproved Bostonian theory that American gentlemen avoid black footwear—and perhaps the first Tyrolean loden coat to appear on the back of a Park Avenue resident.

  As Ben began to take modest steps toward prosperity, his continuing and acute observation of the world, and of his own image in every available mirror, revealed the imperfections of the Brooks style: trousers too long in the crotch and dismally flapping about the ankles when they should have gracefully broken over the shoe; the middle button in a suit coat placed less than an inch below the sternum; the disgrace of a vent that, resisting all home remedies—safety pins, stitches secretly added at the top by his own hand to fasten the damn thing in place—refused to remain closed and instead spread revealingly over the wearer’s buttocks. The litany of these small tragedies was long. They brought him to search for a tailor, a search he conducted in Paris, where his work increasingly took him, in preference to London.

  He confessed to me that the inconvenience of having fittings in a city he visited rarely was only a part of the reason: he was not quite ready for a Savile Row silhouette; Rachel would have teased him mercilessly; according to her dictum, he was not “white” enough to be stylish. He could justify a Paris suit on the grounds of wanting clothes that fit him specifically, and not each and every white-collar operative of roughly similar dimensions, and that, if he found the right maker, would look mystifyingly American, although of finer quality and fabrication. At least, that’s how he imagined it and that is how, after much study of guidebooks and gossip, he stumbled into the establishment of Monsieur Jeanne, an improbably named, French-speaking English tailor established in a shop on the avenue de l’Opéra.

  There, the books were kept and the advance, before credit could be established, was demanded by Monsieur Jeanne’s equally English wife; bolts of the heaviest English woolens lay on mahogany tables; on the walls were pictures of General de Gaulle and Guy de Rothschild, and also of lesser luminaries, with affectionate dedications to the man with a golden thimble. The General, according to Monsieur Jeanne, had used him for everything before he came to power, the Baron only for corduroy britches of a quality so superb that they could not be worn out. Indeed, the orders eventually stopped; the Baron would never need another pair. It hardly mattered: Monsieur Jeanne was liquidating his stock. There was a gentilhommière near Poitiers where he and “la Mrs.,” as he called her, were spending more and more time, and where they would retire.

  Monsieur Jeanne recognized Ben for the opportunity he was—unnaturally polite, seemingly indifferent to prices but terrified inside by the expense, ripe for trousers with “kidney warmers” climbing up the back, voluminous and admirably sewn—more unattributable and unrecognizable than Ben could have imagined. The only sore point was that, if they were totally different from their Brooks Brothers predecessors, they were also even more misshapen, requiring repeat visits to Monsieur Jeanne, which took most of Ben’s free time in Paris, prevented him from traveling light, put him in danger of missing airplane connections while he waited for his luggage to appear. Inside the suitcases were Monsieur Jeanne’s “patients”: on the way to Paris, this meant garments in need of surgery; their cousins traveled to New York for a test of the extent of their recovery. According to Ben, the operations Monsieur Jeanne undertook were like Peter Lorre’s work on Boris Karloff in Arsenic and Old Lace: the monstrousness of his creations increased with each session. All of this, Ben assured me—failure, waste of time, and expense—could be expla
ined by bad timing. He had gone to a great tailor but had arrived late, after the tailor’s illustrious clients had left him for some other faiseur unknown to Ben. The bloom was off the rose.

  Ben’s repertory of misadventures of this sort at times seemed inexhaustible; fortunately, it was also eclectic. Item: A great comic playwright, recently transformed into a French academician, vacationing for the first time in Maine, befriended Ben. Together, they filled long and intimate evenings with gossip about Oriane and Baron de Charlus. The master’s praise of Ben’s memory and penetration were unstinting—even Rachel was momentarily silenced—but the master had decided he would never write again and was drinking as heavily and methodically as when he was at the height of his powers. How preponderant then were loneliness, and the wine and scotch that Ben dispensed, in the scales of friendship, even assuming, as Ben must, that the old man was somewhat glad to talk about Proust in his own language in the Protestant wilderness of a Penobscot Bay island—why else would he have trudged, day after day, across the wide, overgrown meadow to be, as he said, du côté de chez Ben? And why make a pretense of friendship when his power to terrorize hosts and guests and to dominate conversation seemed intact? How urgent, on the other hand, was the need to provide those regular feasts of lobster and corn, consumed in the company of the local gentry, for the wife who looked and talked like a pastry-shop cashier and for the spinster daughter who talked like the Communist high school teacher she really was?

  It was too bad to ask these questions, Ben complained. Had Rachel’s friends only lent the master their summerhouse five years sooner, when he was writing his last play, there would have been no room for such debasing ambiguity and, besides, might not at least one of the endless discourses he had listened to been redeemed by an epiphany? But who could say that the master would have chosen him as a vacation friend in those earlier times? Ben thought it was far from clear. When the playwright was still writing, he might not have had the time to spend with the young banker and his rich and elegant wife and his stepchildren (or the inclination to do so), whatever they put on the table or poured into a glass. He would have been instead conversing—in baby French and broken English or, as a last resort, through the pedant daughter—with those same producers, actors, and directors who later abandoned him when his star set, going off to lionize other men of genius as yet unknown to Ben, about money and professional subjects to which Ben and Rachel could contribute nothing. After the summer ended, Ben wrote several letters to the master, only the first of which was answered. And, having told once or twice too often the story of this encounter with greatness that had come too late, Ben never dialed the playwright’s unlisted telephone number when he was in Paris and never knocked on the door of the apartment on the boulevard Raspail, although the temptation came upon him each time he passed under its oval balcony.