Bread Upon the Waters by Irwin Shaw Page A

Mozart.”
    “What?” Leslie sounded puzzled.
    “That’s what Mr. Crowell said was wrong with Mozart, don’t you remember?”
    “And I said Mozart came to a tragic end.”
    “Eleanor has always known how to take care of herself.”
    “I’m not so sure. She’s had everything pretty much her own way so far. If something suddenly went wrong—I don’t know—she might not be as strong as she thinks she is. Then there’d be no telling how she’d react. Maybe I ought to investigate the young man a little.”
    “I wouldn’t do that.”
    “Why not?”
    “You might find out things that will disturb you—unnecessarily.”
    Leslie sighed. “I guess you’re right. We can’t be armor for our children. We can only be supporting troops.”
    Strand laughed. “You sound as though you’ve been browsing in my library.”
    “Oh, I do a lot of things I don’t make reports about,” Leslie said lightly. “Sleepy?”
    “More or less.”
    “Good night, dear.” She snuggled closer to him. But after a few seconds she spoke again. “She didn’t seem to cotton to our visitor, did she?”
    “Not particularly.”
    “Nor did Jimmy. Did you notice?”
    “Yes.”
    “He seemed most gentlemanly.”
    “Maybe that’s why the kids were standoffish,” Strand said. “Gentlemanliness is suspect these days with the kids. They equate it with hypocrisy. Hazen said he thought he’d seen me before.”
    “Did he say where?”
    “He couldn’t remember.”
    “Do you?”
    “Not a clue,” said Strand.
    “You know what Jimmy said about him when you were downstairs getting a cab?”
    “What?”
    “That he sounded exactly like the men they kept putting into jail after Watergate. He says Mr. Hazen has a porous vocabulary, whatever that means.”
    “Half the time these days,” Strand said, “I don’t know what Jimmy means when he talks to me, either.”
    “He’s a good boy,” Leslie said defensively.
    “I didn’t say he wasn’t a good boy. He’s just using another dictionary from the one I’m used to.”
    “Don’t you think our fathers felt very much the same thing about us when we were Jimmy’s age?”
    “Tell me about the generations, mother,” Strand said, teasing her, “about how they come and they go.”
    “You can make fun of me if you like. Still…” Leslie left the thought unspoken. “All in all, I thought it was an interesting evening.”
    “Downstairs,” Strand said, “Hazen said he enjoyed it, every minute of it.”
    “Poor man,” Leslie said. She kissed Strand’s throat. “Now let’s really go to sleep.”

3
    “I ENVY YOU YOUR family, sir,” a voice had said, sometime in the past. Years ago? Last night? “Beyond all measure.” Who had said it? To whom had it been addressed? What family?
    Strand was reading in the bedroom. Saturday morning was a busy time for Leslie, with children coming in for lessons every half hour from eight to one, and Strand locked himself away, so he wouldn’t hear the artless matinal tinkling. He read idly. He kept two books on his bedside table that he liked to dip into at odd moments—Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru. Himself an armchair historian, whose farthest trips afield for material were occasional visits to the reading room of the 42nd Street public library, he especially treasured the eloquent accounts written by the blind scholar immured in Cambridge, of desperate deeds performed in far-off places by indomitable men who had changed the face of the planet with a handful of swords and a meager troop of horse, with never a thought of the verdict of history that would be brought in centuries later by the inhabitants of the continent of guilt they left behind them.
    For other reasons he also admired the works of Samuel Eliot Morison, who had fought in naval wars, sailed the ocean routes of Columbus and Magellan and written about primitive voyages and bloody battles in such vigorous, manly prose. If he had been ambitious he might have