—
Eleanor was attentive to Rupert’s needs, pushing aside all feelings of loss until they could not be ignored. She would miss him, she knew, but she could not wish him longer life. She wondered what the boys were feeling. They were now men, the oldest thirty-seven, the youngest almost thirty, and they no longer confided in her. Sam, the middle son, would take it hardest, but she didn’t believe Rupert’s death would be wrenching for the others, except perhaps in the feeling of what-might-have-been-and-now-never-will. But that is loss too, she thought.
Harry and Sam, the two boys living in New York, visited him at the hospital at least three times a week, usually before or after work, and Sam often stayed through dinner and read to his father, picking up where Eleanor had left off. Will, Jack, and Tom came from Los Angeles, Austin, and Chicago every few weeks. Although Eleanor had been, they would tease, an overly fond mother, she had not rejected all the lessons of her childhood, but had instilled in the boys a sense of responsibility to family and community. “We do what decency requires,” she regularly said to them. “Never less.” The boys loved Rupert—he was, after all, their father and he had always looked out for them—but he had been, for so much of their early lives, so little there, they had few childhood memories of him. They remembered their mother and grandfather. Eleanor had taught them to ride their bikes and serve a tennis ball. She had held them when they were sad and kissed their scrapes. Poppa took them to baseball games and museums. He’d let them sit on his lap at dinner. A natural Watsonian, Rupert never hugged or kissed his sons. When they were two, he patted them on the head; when they were seven, he met them with a handshake. He couldn’t help it, much as he cared for them in his buttoned-up English way. Eleanor told them not to take it personally and, except for Tom, the youngest, they didn’t.
“Did you ever change a diaper?” Sam asked his father, one evening at a family holiday dinner, everyone there, wives and partners, not long before Rupert fell ill. The question held no rancor, no accusation. Sam was curious.
Rupert turned to Eleanor. “Did I?” he asked.
“No,” Eleanor said.
“I didn’t think so,” he said. Everyone laughed.
Harry once said to his mother that he never remembered, as a young child, going anyplace with his father by himself but he did remember, as he got older: their arguments about politics, serious but never querulous; Rupert’s interest in whatever Harry was doing, even debate; and Rupert’s encouragement to take risks in life. Eleanor thought the others would say the same. Rupert believed in his sons, and his belief in them was the greatest thing he gave them. He simply couldn’t show them affection. It seemed inevitable to Eleanor that Rupert had managed in his final illness to make physical touch impossible, as if he’d been traveling toward that point his whole life. His last coherent words to her, a week before he died, were lawyers’ words: “Settle my just debts.”
—
Eleanor had not been in love with Rupert when she married him, but she was twenty-two, and there was no one else she liked better or liked being with more. She had confidence in him—in his appreciation of her and in his ability to get on—and he made her feel safe.
They met at her cousin’s wedding; he was a law school classmate of the groom. Still blond at twenty-six, he was good-looking without being too handsome. He had high cheekbones and Arctic eyes, giving him the glint of a wolf. All the girls and women at the wedding noticed him as he moved about the room with the easy gait of an athlete. Though he insisted, laughingly, that he had bought his dinner jacket secondhand from Moss Bros., he wore it with the elegant carelessness of a young Olivier. He spotted Eleanor early in the evening, the loveliest girl in the room, and, without waiting for an introduction, approached her. “Hello, you,” he said. He was a wonderful dancer, which left her breathless, and he talked easily and wittily. He seemed older than the groom and the other young men and had read everything. “He comes from nowhere,” the bride whispered in Eleanor’s ear, “but if he offered to run off with me, I’d go. Right now. He’s a man, not a boy.”
Eleanor’s expectations of marriage were by then hardheaded: So long as it is less awful than my parents’, she thought. She wanted contentedness not ardor. She had had ardor and it had set her back on her heels. The summer before her junior year, she’d fallen in love with a Jew, a Russian major at Yale, beautiful, brilliant James Cardozo. Both families were dead set against the match, his even more than hers, and the young couple couldn’t see making their way in the world on their own. Jim was planning on going to medical school; like all the young women she knew, she had no plans, other than marriage. The breakup was a watershed for Eleanor. She would marry the next man who asked her, as long as he could kiss and hold down a job.
Carlo Benedetti could do both. Three months after she broke with Jim, they started dating. He was in his last year at Columbia Law. They had known each other from childhood; his father did business with her father. Her mother pulled the plug the first time Eleanor brought him home. “Stop it now. He’s not one of us,” she said. “What do you mean,” Eleanor said. “He’s descended from Popes. He goes everywhere.” Mrs. Phipps held up her hand. “Not St. James’s,” she said. Rupert was a godsend, an Episcopalian her mother disliked more than the Catholic, as much as the Jew.
The Falkeses’ marriage looked like many marriages of their generation and class. Eleanor loved being pregnant and loved her babies; Rupert worked hard, leaving at seven, coming home at eight. By their third anniversary, they had achieved, without words, an easy, unguarded relationship, animated by a deep sexual connection. Their friends might have said they loved each other, but brought up without family warmth or affection, neither had the vocabulary of ordinary, everyday happiness. They were very good at sex, it turned out, but no good, with each other, at casual touching. It suited them both.