Last Night - James Salter [23]
Brule was one of those men about whom more is rumored than known. He was in his fifties and successful. He had defended some notorious clients and, less publicized, was said to have done unpaid work for those with no resources or hope. Details were vague. He had a soft voice that nevertheless carried authority and iron beneath a calm smile. He walked to work, perhaps a mile down the avenue, in a cashmere overcoat and scarf during the winter, and the doormen, who murmured good morning, received five hundred dollars apiece at Christmas. He was a figure of decency and honor, and like the old men described by Cicero who planted orchards they would not live to see the fruit from, but who did it out of a sense of responsibility and respect for the gods, he had a desire to bequeath the best of what he had known to his descendants.
His wife, Pascale, who was French, was warm and understanding. She was his second wife and had herself been married before, to a famous Parisian jeweler. She had no children of her own and her only fault, Brule felt, was she didn’t like to cook. She couldn’t cook and talk at the same time, she said. She was not beautiful but had an intelligent, faintly Asiatic face. Her generosity and good instincts were inborn.
— Look, she had said to his daughters when she and Brule were married, I’m not your mother and I can never be, but I hope that we’ll be friends. If we are, good, and if not, you can still count on me for anything.
The daughters were young girls at the time. As it turned out, they loved her. The three of them and their husbands and children came on all the holidays and often, though not all at once, of course, for dinner. They were an intimate and devoted family, a matter of great pride to Brule, the more so since his first marriage had failed.
You belonged to the family, not as someone who happened to be married to a daughter, but entirely. You were one of them, one for all and all for one. The oldest daughter, Grace, had told her husband,
— You have to really get used to the plural of things now.
Brian Woodra had married Sally, the youngest, on a glorious summer day on a lawn set with countless white chairs, the women in clinging dresses. Sally was in a gown of white, stiffened silk, sleeveless, with wide shoulder straps and her dark hair gleaming on her slender back. Her ears had fluted, silvery earrings and her face was filled with joy and the occasional concern that things go right, a lovely face with only the barest hint of smallness behind it and you instantly saw the expense of her upbringing. A New York girl, smart and assured. She’d gone to Skidmore, where she roomed with two nymphomaniacs, she liked to say, wanting to shock.
The groom was no taller than she was and slightly bow-legged with a wide jaw and winning smile. He was lively and well liked. His friends from college and even prep school came to the wedding and rose to give their fond recollections of him and predict the worst. At the moment of vows he found himself overcome by his wife-to-be’s purity and beauty, as if it were for the first time fully revealed.
The great tent in which the wedding dinner was held had long tables with large arrangements of flowers. As evening came, the tent slowly bloomed with light from within like an immense, ethereal ship, destined for voyage on the sea or in the heavens, one could not tell. Brule told his new son-in-law that he, Brian, was now to know the greatest happiness that one could experience on earth, referring to matrimony, of course.
For a wedding present they were given a cruise in the wake of Odysseus along the Anatolian coast, and in not much more than a year their first child came, a little girl they named Lily, loving and good-natured. Sally was a mother who, though completely involved in her child, still found time for all the rest, entertaining, seeing films, dinners with her husband, equality, friends. The apartment was a little on the dark side, but she did not expect to be in it forever. Grace