A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne Page B

parents, brothers and sisters, and guests settled in chairs and sofas around the room to listen to him. From the inside pocket of his blazer, he removed the twenty typewritten pages that I had mailed his father weeks ago. When he started to read, I forgot that it was I who had written the words. They became his. He talked about his grandfather arriving poor from Ireland, working hard in a butchershop to make a life for his family. He talked about his parents. “I once said to my mother, ‘When you were young and first married, and the future was still uncertain, not yet defined, did you have any idea that Pa was one day going to be so successful?’ And my mother said, ‘Oh, yes, I always knew. Your father exuded power.’ ” He talked about his brothers and sisters. He talked about family, the importance of family. Like an orator, he held his family spellbound. When he finished, they broke into applause.
    “You’re going to be a politician,” said Gerald. “You are a great speaker, Constant.”
    His sisters crowded around him. His brothers patted him on the back. His mother kissed him. His father hugged him. Weegie Somerset, so quiet in the noisy crowd, smiled proudly. I had no way of knowing then that Gerald saw in me the possibility of becoming the resident hagiographer for the Bradley family, particularly for Constant. Neither Gerald nor Constant looked in my direction. Only Kitt met my eye. She knew. Later, when everyone was preparing to go to the Labor Day dance at the beach club, we walked outside to one of the connecting verandas that encircled the house and sat down side by side on wicker rockers painted white.
    “I like this house, don’t you?” she said. “It’s so old money. People in Scarborough Hill call us
nouveau
. Did you know that? Constant probably wouldn’t tell you that. Those people at the club think our house is
nouveau
, too.”
    She reached over and pulled the cigarette I was smoking out of my hand and took several puffs. Everyone still smoked then. There was no talk of fatalities, or very little.
    “If the Blessed Virgin cries when I whistle, imagine what she must be doing when I smoke,” she said.
    I laughed.
    “You don’t laugh very much, Harry. It looks nice on you. You should do it more often.”
    “You sound older than fourteen,” I replied.
    She handed me back the cigarette. “You’re going to discover something about yourself one day, Harry,” she said.
    “What’s that?”
    “You have a real talent for fiction.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “You wrote that paper for Constant, didn’t you?”
    I flicked the cigarette out over the railing. It landed in a shrub. I walked down the stairway to the lawn and retrieved it from the shrub and stamped it out on the ground. I didn’t reply. I remembered Gerald’s warning.
    Kitt remained on the veranda watching me. She understood. “But it was Constant’s delivery, though, that was the whole thing, wasn’t it?” she said, retreating from, rather than pressing forward with, her assertion of my authorship. “I mean, he was marvelous.”
    “Yes, yes, it was the delivery,” I replied, anxious to disassociate myself from my own work. “He speaks wonderfully.”
    “He’s always given the best toasts of anyone in the family. Especially after a few glasses of wine.”
    Inside the house, Constant, bored now that he was no longer the center of attention, yawned audibly and got unsteadily to his feet. “Let’s go to the club,” he said. “The music’s already started.”
    That night at the beach club dance, Constant became seriously intoxicated. I had noticed before, while drinking beer with him surreptitiously at school, that his natural charm and wit gave way to a morose side of his character with the first signs of intoxication. I have not often been drunk in my life, but that night I was, too. My purpose was to keep up with Constant, to do what he did. On my own I would not have had so many drinks. Other than my