The Last Days of Night(28)

Erastus didn’t know why his son’s apartment still hadn’t been properly decorated after two years of habitation. He was reticent to ask at which church Paul spent his Sundays, because he knew what the answer would be.

He found Central Park overly manicured, like the fussy gardens of some ancient English lord. He hadn’t a taste for lobster, but if Paul wanted to spend the money gorging on shellfish, he wasn’t going to tell a twenty-seven-year-old how to feed himself.

Paul had been informed by letter of his father’s intention to visit. It would be his first trip to the city since Paul had lived there. He had business in the city. A meeting with some of the Fisk College donors—the few men in New York who possessed both strong moral convictions and the bank accounts necessary to support them. The old man had not even said that he was looking forward to seeing his son.

Paul in turn wrote Erastus that while he’d be happy to host him, the case was keeping him exceedingly busy of late. He wouldn’t have much time for entertaining. Erastus responded that he wasn’t sure what New York had to offer in the way of entertainment, but he didn’t think it would be much that he’d like anyhow.

When Erastus arrived, he lugged his baggage up the four flights to Paul’s apartment, huffing up the stairs while refusing help along the way. He was almost as tall as Paul, but he carried considerably more weight around the middle. His white beard, Paul noted, had grown so long that the fraying tips touched his shirtfront three buttons down.

Paul had cleared his afternoon of work, but Erastus said the journey had been exhausting and he’d be grateful for a few hours on Paul’s daybed. Paul did not have a daybed, he told his father, but the elder Cravath was welcome to Paul’s own bed for both the afternoon and the duration of his stay. So Erastus took to the mattress at two o’clock, while Paul puttered around the apartment idly. He pined for his office.

When Erastus awoke, Paul offered to take him out for a decent meal. But Erastus pointed out that that was a waste of money. He’d be more than content to make a stew. Where was the local butcher, so that he could get a good cut of flank steak?

Paul made the stupid mistake of admitting that he didn’t know. This allowed Erastus the invitation he required to comment that if only Paul had a wife, he might have some help with his shopping. The topic of Paul’s ceaseless bachelorhood had thus been broached.

Paul assured his father that he wanted a wife, that marriage wouldn’t be far off, but that at the present moment work had been rather consuming. Wouldn’t it be best to make a name for himself before he married?

“But you cannot,” his father said as he boiled onions in the kitchen, “be after the love of a woman who loves you for your name. You want one who loves you for the man behind it.”

Paul’s goal in this conversation was to see it ended as swiftly as possible. Receiving romantic advice from his father was like receiving financial advice from a junior Rockefeller: If one has never suffered for want of a thing, one has no conception of the trade-offs required in getting it.

Paul’s parents had a beautiful marriage. Of this he was convinced, although it confounded him. They’d met young and married instantly. His father could be irascible, his mother had a tendency to be even more judgmental than her husband, but together they were happy. And they excused each other’s faults. Their rigid moralism stopped at the foot of their Tennessee two-story. They granted each other a forgiving kindness they granted few others. It was only as he’d grown older, as he’d seen his friends fall into their own uninhabitable and desolate unions, that he’d realized that his parents enjoyed a rare privilege. It was a privilege that Paul had not yet been afforded.

In twenty-seven years, Paul had kissed four girls. He never spoke of this, of course. But he thought about it sometimes, and the memories gave him pleasure to recall. Since his passing encounter with Agnes Huntington two weeks earlier, he found these memories both more insistent and more bygone.

The first girl he’d kissed was Evelyn Atkinson, back in Nashville. Her papa ran a shipping company down by the docks. Paul took his schooling at home, but every afternoon he’d run to the riverside to meet up with teenagers his own age. He had kissed Evelyn late one night, as the wispy light from the cloud-shrouded Tennessee moon illuminated the dimples on her smiling cheeks. She was always smiling, that’s what he remembered most about her. Even while they kissed, the corners of her mouth remained raised.

By the time he’d kissed Gloria Robinson at the autumn tobacco festival, his taste for kissing was undeniable. He told no one. Other boys teased him out of jealousy, but only for what they imagined he’d done. For what they imagined girls had let him do.

Gloria’s younger sister Emily he’d kissed three times. Which he’d felt bad about, but as he was sure Gloria hadn’t told Emily, and Emily hadn’t told Gloria, and he’d told no one, there had been no harm committed. Still, it had probably not been his finest hour.

He met Molly Thompson at Oberlin. She was quiet and redheaded, prone to fits of ticklishness in the Ohio grass. They’d kissed regularly. His classmates were certain that more than kissing had gone on—rumors spread quickly in a school that small—but Paul and Molly knew the truth. They’d taken walks along Plum Creek, danced to the fiddlers in Allencroft Hall, and whispered the whole histories of their brief lives behind the sandstone houses along Lorain Street. She’d asked him to return with her to her family in Cincinnati after they’d graduated. Paul had informed Molly that he was going to New York. And that was that.