Burning the Days by James Salter Read Free Book Online Page B

mother and I, crushed by finality while he lay in bed in the city he had meant to triumph in, in the afternoon, traffic blaring in the street, the tall buildings shining their dead windows, gulls sitting on the water.
    I remember that during those days he said two things in sad summation: “They’ll never forget me” and “I’m dead.” Both were true.
    Soon he was in the hospital. As a final blow, two days before he died the buyer of an apartment complex the sale of which he had negotiated was killed flying in to New York to sign the contract.
    This happened at La Guardia Airport. The icy waters—it was January—covered everything.
    ——
    Decades, ages, later I wake at night with a strange feeling in my chest on the fateful side—can it be my heart? It is a feeling I have had before, a commonplace feeling, like a cramped muscle, which will probably go away as it always has, except this is four in the morning and my thoughts somehow turn to my father. We could not encourage him, we could not make him go on. It was cruel to keep trying. He wanted it to end. “In this world there are few enough people who ever care what becomes of you,” he said. My mother long after said that the marriage had been wrong, that she had known it early but had been without the courage to act. She remained loyal to the end.
    I think of the hopeless visits to psychiatrists, the shock treatments and aimless drives in the country to somehow get away. I think of him walking along the street, preoccupied, the pale wake of cigar smoke following, the blind strolls while his mind sorted through impossibilities, over and over.
    ——
    Ethel Reiner, in her forties, decided upon the theater. She had a brief, exciting apprenticeship under a veteran producer named Saint Subber and then set out to produce on her own. After a few voyages in shallow water, as it were, she boldly took command of a ship of the line in the form of a huge musical production of Candide with Leonard Bernstein as its composer and the book, as it is curiously called, by another formidable figure, Lillian Hellman, with whom it was inevitable she would clash.
    Candide was a triumph and a catastrophe, in that order. Its out-of-town tryouts, before it came to New York, were dazzling. To bring it to perfection there were final little changes, and somethingunidentifiable went wrong. The spring had been wound one turn too many. There was the party at Sardi’s, a transistor radio pressed to someone’s ear to hear the eleven-thirty flash report. It was disastrous, and the millions that had been invested were lost.
    In her apartment that night the distraught producer had hysterics and some months later—the humiliation was too great—she retreated to England, temporarily, until the time was right to return.
    She had lost confidence and whatever reputation she had built up, but not her style. At the crowded reception following her son’s second marriage she was regal in black and as eye-catching as the seductive Dutch girl, an airline stewardess, who was the bride. “My dear,” Ethel said to her, not unkindly, “I’ll probably see very little of you during this life, but tell me”—she was holding a small velvet box that contained a pair of diamond earrings, each one a single brilliant stone the size of a tooth—“are your ears pierced?” The earrings were her gift. To her credit, the untested daughter-in-law the following day wrote a note of appreciation which read, in its entirety, Dear Ethel, Thank you for the earrings. Barbara.
    As it happened, I saw more of her afterwards in Europe. She had found a man, English, divorced, who shared her tastes. He had no money but was knowledgeable and even-tempered. He helped her to begin again, or at least pick up the pieces.
    He looked sturdy in his trunks at Eze-sur-Mer, well-knit. He had three bullet wounds from the war but they had almost disappeared. I remember the day because of its great calmness, the horizon as if rubbed