The Man Who Was Late

by Louis Begley

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

"Begley writes with a contemplative wisdom that permeates his work....[He] has captured some of the wispy melancholy of midcentury fiction, and this feat in itself is mellifluous to both ear and spirit."
THE BOSTON GLOBE
A man without a country or family, a Holocaust survivor, Ben long ago left the wreckage of Europe and recreated himself as a brilliant financier. He rejects the comforts of love and is shocked to discover Veronique--beautiful, unwisely married, and all that Ben suddenly knows he has always needed. In their stolen hours and weekends, their deep commitment to one another fills their lives as nothing ever has. But the question remains: Can Ben finally take what he has always denied himself...?
From the author of WARTIME LIES.

Release date: March 2, 2011

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

I
 
IT WAS A PARADOX, of which Ben over the years became fond, that he, ostensibly the most punctual and reliable of men, should have been late in the major matters of existence, that he always somehow missed his train. For all that the world could see, his comings and goings were meticulously planned and executed; he could be counted on to leave and arrive unfailingly, and precisely at the appointed hour—whatever his destination. But he knew better. Having studied to death his own version of the universal timetable, he discovered that somehow everything had been timed wrong, had been botched. Ben elaborated on his theory over countless lunches with me. Provided he was in New York, and the peripeties of some financial combination of the decade he just happened to be bringing to the desired ending did not interfere—the pages of my desk calendar were most often blank—we met for lunch at least once a month. Sometimes, if the conversation seemed unfinished—because what we had meant to say could not be contained in the conventional space of two hours, or because we were interrupted by an intruder determined to catch up with one or the other of us, insensitive to the bored or disparaging banter with which, in our mood of conniving solidarity, we deflected his questions—we would agree to lunch again the very first day he was free, to make sure the thing was finally talked out. This was our habit during almost fifteen years. For Ben, after completing the rites of passage proposed to the nation’s best during the Eisenhower era—Harvard College, followed by service in the marines, travel in Europe on a famed scholarship—moved to New York.
 
By then, I had been living here for several years, ever since my own graduation three classes ahead of Ben, enjoying a precocious celebrity due to a short novel I had published at the midpoint between the appearance of The Old Man and the Sea and Goodbye, Columbus. It was based loosely on a shipwreck off Point Judith in which my older brother, the war hero, had drowned. The accident happened on a Thanksgiving weekend while I was still at school—in fact on restriction. Neither his body nor that of the friend who had come along as crew was found. After a week’s search by the Coast Guard, and planes chartered by my parents, someone retrieved objects from their boat: a couple of life preservers, my brother’s Bible in a pink rubber sack, miscellaneous navigation gadgets. Father paid our school to accept the gift of Sam’s books and keep them, together with a watercolor portrait of him as a Navy flyer, in a corner of the library. Then he and my mother carried on as though nothing had changed in their lives. My book was a success with critics and the public. Many heard in it echoes of Melville and Crane; a reviewer’s concluding line, that I had “set down the postwar generation’s theodicy,” was taken seriously and repeated in interviews and profiles, although nothing of the sort had crossed my mind. Until I decided that I must write this story, I did not undertake any other work of imagination. There was no subject that engaged me sufficiently.
 
Whether Ben and I had met in Cambridge was a question we never resolved. If, as Ben claimed, some encounter had occurred—this was the sort of detail about which my otherwise precise friend was sometimes vague or wrong—it left no mark on my memory. So far as I know, our friendship began at the New York dinner table of a classmate of Ben’s who worked for the same magazine as I. Ben was then married to Rachel. They gave parties at their Park Avenue spread with a frequency and nonchalance the rest of us gaped at with more than a tinge of envy. All the while, as Ben later told me, they were inside their marriage like birds caught in some high-ceilinged room: confused, crashing into walls and closed windows, searching for an opening, for a long time unable to get out. Because my own wife and I came to dislike Rachel’s knack for putting Ben down before their guests—she was unendingly talkative and witty—our relationship changed from a friendship of two couples into a friendship of two men who lunch together. The wives, tacitly excluded, assumed the role of that sort of former friend one greets at large gatherings with five minutes of concentrated flattery and then abandons, hands raised in a gesture of ambiguous benediction.
 
Paradoxes and other conceits invented by Ben lent a thematic continuity to our conversations. Without Rachel there to contradict him, he talked well, listening to his own words with just enough satisfaction to amuse me when I caught him at it. Like Conrad’s Marlow, that exemplary auteur manqué. he preferred that the shape of his meaning emerge slowly, as though from concentric circles of a metaphor. Speaking too well, seeking to impose order on casual noontime chatter, were in fact among the defects and virtues that Ben and I shared. I would occasionally point out to Ben these ways in which we might be thought to be alike, whereupon he at once referred enthusiastically to other similarities, not all of which I was glad he had perceived. Physically, we did not resemble each other at all. Ben looked to me Hungarian (which he was not): by the standards of his Harvard friends, on the small side, nimble and compact, with thick brown hair of great vivacity. His ears, paper thin, stuck out. I was almost a head taller, blond at that time, with features and heft bequeathed by my Yorkshire and German ancestors. And I liked Ben, had liked him from the start, and had watched my affection for him grow with a mixture of self-approval and amusement. That his oddness and the touch of the exotic about him didn’t put me off, that instead these qualities drew me to him like a magnet, proved some theories I held and had been heard to espouse about my people’s traditions.
 
To return to Ben’s sense of irremediable existential tardiness, the truth is that, until shortly before the events that brought his life to a tragic close, I did not take it seriously; in fact, I used to think that the only time Ben had missed his boat or train was when he did not make an effort to become a writer. Instead, flabbergasting and disappointing the intellectuals among his classmates, the teachers long accustomed to write recommendations for him, and perhaps even Rachel, although she claimed credit for Ben’s decision, he went to work for a Wall Street investment bank that was both powerful and impeccably elegant.
 
According to Ben, only his mother and father were not astonished, in part because they did not fully measure the droll uniqueness of finding a postwar refugee from Central Europe within those precincts, and in part because they had come to assume that Ben would always get what he wanted and that he would naturally want whatever put the greatest distance between them and him. As to Ben’s real motives, he agreed with my assessment: he had as usual been, at least on the surface, unbeatably punctual in taking care that his obligations were met. He had promised to have a career that corresponded to Rachel’s notion of living in the great world; such a career was now open to him. He badly needed money of his own; he would earn it. Without money, he foresaw a bleak future of dependence on Rachel’s income to lift him and her above quotidian mediocrity and the sting of not being able to supplement the income of those spurned and confused parents. But, if he succeeded, if he came to have money in abundance, those oppressive problems would disappear. What’s more, he would have arranged things so that his tasks would henceforth be set for him by others—first by the bank’s partners, those wonderfully tailored men crossing and uncrossing their long legs under photographs of their sailboats, and, later, by clients. Then it would not be necessary, in order to win his bread and whatever he wanted to spread on it, to do much rummaging in the rag-and-bone shop of the heart. According to Ben, he wished to avoid that activity at almost any cost; he didn’t like what he found there.
 
It was therefore only logical, he would explain, that he should become his grand bank’s house Jew—but whenever it was that he formed this view of his employment, he did not express it until some years later, after they had made him a partner, once again exactly on time according to the schedule governing such matters. This happened in the year that man first floated free in space, a coincidence that Ben alluded to as both suitable and pleasant. But in other respects, for Ben, his orderly ascension was just an additional illustration of how he would arrive on the platform, panting, beginnings of sweat breaking on his brow, after the train had left: for by that time, his parents had died without seeing how well he had done, how amply he intended to include them in his prosperity, and Rachel’s views no longer mattered in any positive sense. She had thrown him over. The thought that his manifest success might add to the sum of her regrets was sweet; it was also unworthy.
 
Ben rarely mentioned these grimmer aspects of not being on time. He had a store of other illustrations that permitted him to spin out the theory and have others join in tolerant laughter at his expense without unduly obscuring the more satisfactory aspects of his career. Indeed, each anecdote of supposed failure could also be taken for a milestone of his progress.