A Season in Purgatory Read Online Free PDF Page B

you’re drinking? I think you’re too young to drink, Harrison.”
    “Mr. Bradley thinks young people should learn to drink at home. They serve wine at meals. Even Kitt, the youngest, is allowed a glass. That way, he says, young people will know how to drink when they go out in the world.”
    “Mr. Bradley, Mr. Bradley! That’s all I hear anymore. You are bewitched by those people, Harrison.”
    “I like them. I like their life.”
    I returned to Milford to finish the fifth-form year and then in June went to visit with Constant again, after receiving a letter from his mother inviting me. Kitt and Mary Pat were home from their convent school. The Bradley life seemed to be an endless summer of tennis and swimmingand golf at the club. There were always tennis pros and golf pros to give the children lessons, and often they stayed to lunch. There were spring dances at The Country Club. The family liked having me around because I could be counted on to dance with Constant’s sisters, whom no one else danced with, while Constant was off dancing with Weegie Somerset. Constant was invited to parties that his sisters weren’t invited to.
    “Why do they all have such wonderful names, like Polly and Jiggsie and Gussie and Weegie, when we’re all Mary Pat and Maureen and Agnes?” asked Kitt, looking out at the popular girls on the dance floor.
    “Well, the Minskoff girls don’t get invited either, and they’re driven to school by a chauffeur,” said Grace.
    “Is that supposed to be a comfort, Mother?” asked Kitt.
    Although Constant was still in disgrace because of his expulsion from school, the opulence of his life was in no way diminished. For his seventeenth birthday, his father gave him a new car, a Porsche convertible, and we went for long drives. One day we drove to New Haven to have sport coats made at J. Press. I had no money for such extravagances, but Constant, with his patrician disregard of money, insisted on paying.
    His brothers and sisters treated the expulsion as a joke. Gerald minded only that he had been caught with the dirty pictures, not that he possessed them. He would have minded only if they had been pictures of men, not women, he said, and the family, except Grace, roared with laughter. His anger was directed at the headmaster who had expelled his son. “After all, I have done quite a few things for that school,” he said over and over. Grace was more troubled. She insisted that Constant confess to Cardinal during one of his visits, and he did.
    “What kind of pictures were they?” Gerald asked Constant.
    Constant, embarrassed, reddened and did not answer.
    “Beaver shots, showing pink,” interjected Jerry.
    Gerald chuckled.
    Much of the dinner-table conversation in the Bradley family that summer had to do with the reinstatement of Constant into Milford. If Constant had had more than one year to go before graduation, Gerald would have applied to any number of other schools for his son, but he felt that Constant would not be able to distinguish himself in a single year with boys who had already been together for three years. At Milford Constant had managed to become a popular figure, captain of the tennis team, and a reasonably good student, and Gerald was loath to toss all that aside, because it would figure in getting him into Yale the following year. The problem was that the headmaster of Milford, Dr. Shugrue, showed no inclination to have Constant return. He had been particularly offended by the nature of the dirty pictures that had been discovered on the top shelf of Constant’s closet, and he looked upon him as a poor moral guide to the younger students, all of whom knew the reason for his expulsion.
    One night at dinner Grace suggested giving a building to the school.
    “What do you mean, give a building? I already gave the goddamn chapel, and the carillon in the steeple,” replied Gerald from his end of the table. “And they still kicked my kid out.”
    “Don’t take the name of