Ex-wifePart 14
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Part 14
His older brother had died in an automobile smash-up to which the chorus girl with him contributed a flavour of champagne and scandal, when Nat was twenty.
The father turned white-haired over night, blamed himself for having allowed the boy too much money to spend, and thereupon brought Nat home from college, put him in the business, allowed him fifty dollars a week and a charge account at a tailor’s, and administered lectures to him at intervals on the evils of drink and women.
Infrequently the old man went on Gargantuan benders of his own, locking himself and a half case of Scotch in the library his dead wife had acquired, and telephoning for meals to be left outside on trays. He was discovered usually, when Nat and the family physician forced their way in on the second or third day, sullen, silent, holding in shaking gnarled hands a silver cup his dead son had won at tennis, or some casual letter about football and the necessity for an increased allowance that the boy had written him.
When Nat was summoned home from college, at the time of his brother’s much-publicized passing, his father’s physician had told him that his father was likely to die suddenly of heart disease, at any moment, or perhaps not for twenty years, depending principally on whether he had any further shocks. He was not to be irritated or opposed in anything.
So Nathaniel grinned at the fifty dollar salary that never was increased, charged clothes nonchalantly at the tailor provided for him, and threw overboard ideas of studying architecture in Paris. He wanted to travel, to see paintings in Florence, hear Wagner in Bayreuth, feel the sun blaze down on the pyramids. He never went farther from New York than his father’s country place on Long Island.
He took me to art exhibits, concerts and concerts and concerts, beer-gardens where the Kapellmeister alternated the hilarity of “Ei, du Schöne Schnitzelbank” with the poignancy of “Nur eine Nacht.” He took me to the only Chinese restaurant on Pell Street where the chef had been trained to cook for a Mandarin. He took me ten blocks out of our way to dinner to show me the design on the wrought-iron doors of a new building on Madison Avenue. And to the Lido and Montmartre to dance, and to Pierre’s to lunch, and to speakeasies where he who had never seen France, moistened the labels of cognac bottles, hopefully, to see if the Hennessey water-mark showed through.
Once he talked to me about women. Like this. “Patricia, I’m conscious of possessing a very unfashionable virtue.”
“What do you mean ‘a very unfashionable virtue?’”
“I’m lightly sexed or something. Women don’t bother me a bit. I should rather go to bed alone at ten o’clock on Saturday night, so that I can get up at six Sunday and go riding in Westchester, than spend the night in the arms of any women I ever saw. Do you suppose there’s something wrong with me? Should I try to set up a coat model on Central Park West, with my fifty a week spending money, to prove I’m virile?”
“No, what for, unless you feel like it. . . . But why do you spend so much time with me, if you don’t like women?”
“I don’t think about you as female. You’re decorative, like a well bred young collie pup . . . and besides you laugh at things and like to look at pictures.”
“You’re a comfort, Nathaniel.”
He was; he made me feel peaceful, usually. Rarely, he irritated me, with his habit of averting his gaze from the emotions and desires and struggles of people. He was always overlooking the ugliness of passersby, to get a better view of some tower looming black against a background of scudding clouds.
Yet he was the only practising Christian I knew. I discovered accidentally, after I had known him a very long time, that, most weeks, half of the fifty dollars which was almost all his father’s fortune that he was permitted to handle, went to an old chauffeur of theirs, who had gone half blind from drinking wood alcohol.
Nat thought it was very funny, to be the poverty-stricken heir to a million or two.
I said that fifty dollars a week was almost all he had. Besides that, the family doctor gave him a hundred dollars occasionally, adding the amount to his bill to Nat’s father. The doctor suggested that method to Nat, as preferable to endangering his father’s heart by making scenes about money. So, when Nat ached for an Anders Zorn etching or something of the sort, he got the money for it from the doctor.
Nat worked quite faithfully at the skyscraper-building business from nine to five, disposing of steel and masonry by the ton, while dreaming of skyscrapers all of glass and coloured tile, with terraces to make New York look like a taller version of the hanging gardens of Babylon.
He never asked what I did with my evenings when I was not with him. I suspected him of preferring not to know.
There was also Kenneth.
One day, lunching at the Algonquin with Lucia, I stared at the back of the head of the man at the next table, and wondered why it should remind me of Boston, and my half-forgotten cousin Roger who had gone to war and death with the Twenty-Sixth Division. The man at the next table had the most completely golden hair I ever saw. Roger’s hair had been very dark.
Roger was the first man I ever loved, I suppose. He was at Harvard Law School when I was a freshman at Radcliffe. He wanted to be a lawyer en route to being a statesman; because, he said, America needed more statesmen and fewer politicians. I was sure he would be a statesman or anything he wanted, because he was so good-looking.
When he went to Plattsburg, I took a course in the Principles of Government, so that I could be a help to him when he became a statesman. He had said, gaily, that he would marry me after the war, if I would promise to grow up nicely for him while he was gone.
The Twenty-Sixth left from Framingham, and I drove up alone through a dripping August dawn, wearing my best rose-coloured organdie dress under a raincoat, to say good-bye to him.
I was sixteen.
He kissed me in front of a whole battalion. I had never been kissed before, and was so proud, and so worried lest the organdie dress would be completely rain-soaked (I had left the raincoat in the car, of course) and I would not look pretty. He kissed me again, as he went past with his company to the train, and after that I could not see any of the soldiers marching by because the rain splashed on my face and was mixed with tears.
He was killed at Château-Thierry. I had not thought of him in years; except for an instant, if, unexpectedly, I smelt the fragrance of tea-roses. That made me remember him because I was opening a box of tea-roses, sent me to wear to a Saturday night officers’ dance at Ayer, when the telephone message came that he was dead.
“What are you remembering?” said Lucia, and I came back to the Algonquin and the eggs Benedict on my plate, and the view of the Round Table that had already seen its best days, and the golden-haired man who sat between me and it.
I told Lucia about Roger, and then we talked about Boston and Portland, Maine, where she was born, and agreed that one could not go back to either place to live, at least while one was young, although they both were pleasant cities. And Lucia said that New York’s a jail to which, once committed, the sentence is for life; but that it is such a well furnished jail, one does not mind much.
Intermittently, I continued to stare at the golden-haired man. When he stood up, I remembered him. Roger brought him for a week-end’s swimming on Cape Cod, on one of Roger’s last leaves. His name was Kenneth, and he lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. My aunt had known his step-mother and so she had liked him.
That week-end I had thought his golden hair was very wonderful with the sun shining on it, but thought also that dark hair the shade of Roger’s was really more distinguished, and that Roger was handsomer on the whole, and I had wished this man would go away, so that Roger would have more time to talk to me.
At the next table, Kenneth glanced at me, and then he stood talking to someone for a minute.
I had heard things about him since the war. My aunt had said something—story of his marrying a dancer in vaudeville, and then going out to Hollywood to be an art director, much to the disgust of his family who wanted him to be a lawyer in his father’s firm in Springfield. They had been quite formal about disowning him.
He turned to leave, and looked at me again. He was very tall indeed, and extraordinarily thin. He had forget-me-not blue eyes like a little boy’s that looked strange in a face so dissipated. He would not remember me, of course.
But he did.
He came over, and said, “You used to be a child in a scarlet bathing suit; and besides, Roger carried half a dozen snapshots of you through the war.” I had never known that.
“You’re Kenneth,” I said, and introduced him to Lucia. He sat down. . . .
Once he read me three sentences of Galsworthy’s, from the Forsyte Saga. They were, “All are under sentence of death: Jolyon, whose sentence was but a little more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he thought habitually, like other people, of other things.”
Kenneth had travelled a little too swiftly and too far from the tranquil sort of life to which he had been born. Had the Love of his Life been a serene-eyed New England débutante with a cool voice, as she might well have been, Kenneth would be practising law in Boston, with the proper connexions to do well at it, the next forty years, and satisfying his interest in art by the purchase of a Sargent, occasionally.
But the Love of his Life turned out to be a little Hungarian dancer, compounded of passion and beauty and viciousness in equal proportions. She fled to him from the beatings of her dancing partner, and Kenneth married her because she thought she was with child. In Paris, she left him for an Argentine; and came back, because she had pneumonia (and a more lasting illness, as it developed). She recovered from the pneumonia. They went to Algiers. She had a relapse, and coughed out her life against Kenneth’s shoulder, protesting bitterly to the end against the necessity of dying—with no apologies for having sentenced him also to death.
Whatever she was, he had endowed her with all the illusions of a romantic young man. She was to him pure high romance. He said he would not have missed it. When he spoke of her, as one speaks of a dead child, gently, things young and ardent stirred behind his tired face, and I remembered how alive he had looked that summer week-end nearly ten years past.
He was to die, in two or three years, because to his illness was added the complication of an old lung trouble caused by gas in the Argonne. They told him that if he went West to live, that if he stopped drinking, the two or three years might be prolonged to six or seven.
“But I should be so bored and lonely,” he said. And he stayed in New York.
He knew no women, except me. He spoke to me that day only because I had made him remember Roger, whom he had loved, too (“in another life,” he said).
He asked me to dinner, because he had a sudden desire to talk to someone once more about Roger and cool New England summers, and the sedate streets of little Massachusetts towns.
But something in his unhappy face, that first night we dined, stirred me to talk, not of Roger, dim figure on the far shore of youth, but of Peter. I never spoke of Peter to any men I met, nowadays, usually.
Kenneth looked as if he would understand about Peter, and the men one kissed to cure one of the memory of Peter, and the little hope one cherished about Peter, in spite of judgment and the commonsense and the well-meant advice of one’s friends. He looked as if he understood that one did not love a man because he was worth loving, or because one felt worthy of his love in return, or for any reason that one’s acquaintances would think was sound.
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