Bread Upon the Waters by Irwin Shaw Page B

breed of animal for Strand and he was growing more and more curious about the lawyer. Strand was by nature cautious about quick impressions of people and had not yet made up his mind about what he really thought about Hazen. The circumstances under which they had met had been bizarre and with all his talking, Strand realized as he thought about it, Hazen had managed to find out a great deal about the family without telling anything much about himself except that his family had arrived in New York in 1706 and had never gone to Ohio. His absolute silence about his own immediate family, for example, was well beyond the bounds of ordinary discretion and except for confessing that he was a lawyer and went to symphony concerts, he had confined himself almost entirely to impersonal abstractions. From Who’s Who Strand knew a considerable amount about the public man; the private one was still concealed.
    While waiting for the car to come to pick them up Eleanor had said of Hazen, “That man wants something.”
    “Why do you say that?” Strand had asked.
    “A man like that always wants something,” Eleanor had said, and he had been annoyed at her cynicism. In Strand’s code you didn’t accept hospitality, especially of this lavishness, from somebody about whom you had misgivings, even if they were only as vague as his daughter’s.
    Leslie, who had a proprietary interest in the man whose wounds she had tended and admired the stoical way he had behaved when he was in pain, had snapped, uncharacteristically, at Eleanor, “If you feel like that, why don’t you just go someplace else for the weekend?”
    “Sorry,” Eleanor had said. “I thought we were in America. Freedom of speech. Guaranteed by the Constitution, and all that.”
    “Hush, everybody,” Strand had said. “This is a holiday.”
    Jimmy had just grinned, pleased that for once Eleanor and not he was on the receiving end of a rebuke. Caroline had paid no attention to what was going on, but had sat dreamily humming to herself, cradling her racquet in its new case.
    Looking out at the swiftly passing spring countryside, Strand thought about the exchange between his wife and his daughter and wondered if what Eleanor had said had some truth in it, then decided it was just idle spite, born of Eleanor’s jealousy or distaste for some of her superiors under whose orders she chafed on her job and whom, rightly or wrongly, she identified with Hazen. For himself, Strand decided that he would accept Hazen at face value. The face so far, he had to admit, was somewhat obscure, but he had detected no signs of malice or desire for advantage. Quite the opposite. If anything, after the news about the son, Strand pitied the man and sympathized with him. If Hazen was using the family to alleviate his loneliness, that hardly could be called manipulation. Strand remembered his fleeting suspicion of Hazen’s intentions about Caroline and smiled. Hazen would hardly have asked them out to his house en masse if he was plotting to satisfy his lust for the seventeen-year-old daughter of the family.
    He dozed, the steady motion of the big car lulling him, and awoke only as the car slowed down and turned into a private road leading from a stone gate through a long alley of high trees toward the sea, whose rumble could now be heard.
    Conroy stopped the car in a raked gravel courtyard and tooted the horn. “Here we are,” he said and they got out of the car. An enormous rambling white clapboard house loomed up against the clear twilight sky.
    “Man,” Jimmy said, whistling, “that’s some hunk of architecture.”
    “It was built by Mr. Hazen’s grandfather,” Conroy said. “They thought big in those days.”
    The old American doom, Strand thought, from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, obviously didn’t apply to the Hazens. The grandfather could be proud of the grandson.
    Conroy touched the horn again, and in answer to the signal a man and a woman came hurrying