The Institute

by James M. Cain

  That got a friendly laugh. I was about to sit down, but Mr. Nash stopped me with another question. Searching the room with his eyes and addressing a man in one corner, he said: “Jack Albaugh, as a mystery, your handwriting makes Bailey’s comb seem like nothing. Suppose you step up and ask this question yourself?”

  Albaugh stood up and came to the podium. There was something cocky about him, and I could feel an expectant stir in the room. He was small, gray-haired, and dapper, and he bowed to the applause before facing me.

  “Dr. Palmer, at a press conference some time back, you claimed to have identified the Dark Woman in Shakespeare’s sonnets. But you refused to go any further with your analysis, to say whom you were talking about. May I ask you to name her now, if indeed you can?”

  I knew I was in for it. “I made no such claim,” I said. “A girl in my employ at the time made it for me, quoting a book of mine, a doctoral dissertation and causing quite a stir. The press devoted more space to her backside, as well as the patches on it, than to our Institute. Of course, she did have a pretty backside which photographed well, but—”

  In other words, I was trying to sidestep the question. Albaugh let me finish and then insisted: “I asked you to name the Dark Woman.”

  For a moment I paused. Then I said: “I think she was Ann Hathaway.”

  “The wife?”

  “That’s right.”

  He was astonished, and there were gasps from all over the room, because, of course, in the group were many who knew the sonnets and a few who had studied them. In a moment he went on: “May I ask you your grounds for this remarkable pronouncement?”

  “It’s not a pronouncement; it’s one man’s opinion. But since no one knows who this woman was, one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. I didn’t start out to identify her. It fell into my lap as a corollary to some other things I stumbled on, other aspects of the sonnets. I started out with them as a doctoral assignment, one I picked with university approval. Then I began reading them carefully, over and over, for sense and anything else I could detect. Soon something struck me as odd: the first few, perhaps the first dozen, touch on a curious theme: should the writer play with himself or find himself a playmate? But this, I suddenly realized, is not something a grown man worries about, least of all this grown man who, don’t forget, fathered a child at the age of eighteen. The next thing I noticed was that all of these early sonnets were obviously addressed to Shakespeare himself. Well, if some, why not all? At what point is this mysterious ‘Mr. W.H.’—the object of Thorpe’s dedication as the ‘true author of these sonnets’—supposed to have entered the picture? I couldn’t find any such point. To my ear, the writer was talking to himself all the way through, and ‘Mr. W.H.’ could well have been Will Himself—to make a stab at naming him. The next thing I noticed was the paucity of the background in the sonnets. The richness of Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, and Julius Caesar is simply not in them. I counted the classical allusions and found exactly seven: one to Dian, as he calls her, and one each to Mars, Venus, Adonis, Cupid, Saturn, and Philomel. But seven allusions to classical figures, out of 2,166 lines of poetry, isn’t very much. I was forced to the conclusion that these magical things were the work of a youth, an adolescent caught up in a narcissism that was hipped on his own beauty, with the vast reading of his adult years still to come and his delight in his own virtuosity just beginning to unfold.

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

  Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

  And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

  And every hair from fair sometime declines,

  By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

  But thy eternal summer shall not fade.

  Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

  Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

  “When I got that far with it, there was a simple deduction. In Sonnet 104 we get a fix on time, on how long these sonnets have taken:

  To me, fair friend, you never can be old.

  For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold

  Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride.

  Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d

  In process of the seasons have I seen,

  Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,

  Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.

  “If we assumed that that curious phrase, ‘when first your eye I eyed,’ meant an eye eyeing an eye in a mirror and that this memorable moment when he first saw his own beauty came when he was fourteen, then he would now be seventeen, with a great event due in his life. At the age of eighteen he would court a woman, presently get her with child, and marry her. Sure enough, in Sonnet 127 we get it:

  In the old age black was not counted fair,

  Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;

  But now is black beauty’s successive heir,

  And beauty slander’d with a bastard shame:

  For since each hand hath put on nature’s power,

  Fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face,

  Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,

  But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.

  Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,

  Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem

  At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,

  Slandering creation with a false esteem:

  Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,

  That every tongue says beauty should look so.

  “And so,” I wound up, “for my money, Ann Hathaway was the girl—and there’s another check on it: in Sonnet 129, two numbers past the one I just quoted, is voiced bitter disappointment in ‘lust,’ as he calls it, but disappointment that has meaning only if we assume that it’s the disappointment of first flight—sex wasn’t quite what he thought it would be—and once more we come back to Ann. There’s another point to be borne in mind. ‘Venus and Adonis’ was published in 1593 when Shakespeare was twenty-nine, but perhaps it was written before that. It’s about a woman in her twenties who is satiated with sex, is hungry for a new experience, and who falls for a boy in his teens. Ann Hathaway was twenty-six when she fell for Shakespeare, so this poem could well be a memoir of personal experience. The fact that no sonnet mentions the marriage might be explained by the gory finish that befell Adonis. The poem proves nothing, yet it is in harmony with the theory that ‘Venus and Adonis,’ far from being a fresh effort, was actually a continuation of these sonnets in another poetical form.”

  I stopped, and a murmur of incredulity went through the room. Albaugh, as though addressing a not-so-bright child, said: “Dr. Palmer, surely you’re not serious in contending that these deathless poems are the work of a youth. At that time, a butcher’s apprentice. And—”

  “Mr. Albaugh,” I said, “there’s not one shred of real evidence that Shakespeare was ever a butcher’s apprentice. It is assumed that he was on the basis of local heresay, as it was assumed that Mary Fitton was the Dark Woman until a window was found, one made in her honor, that proved she was a blonde. In my theory, I must confess, the precocity involved has bothered me, until a couple of years ago when the Maryland Arts Council sponsored a literary competition for high school students in the state and made me one of the judges. The compositions included poetry, even some sonnets, which astonished me. The best of them weren’t just pretty good; they were damned good—fit to be published, of true professional grade. Poetry, like music, is an art that blossoms young. If Maryland kids can write it, couldn’
t Shakespeare have? Let me quote a statistic: in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the King James Bible gets twenty-eight pages; John Milton, fourteen; John Dryden, seven; Longfellow, six; Edgar Allan Poe, three; and Tennyson, eleven. But William Shakespeare gets seventy-seven. It gives you some idea how great this genius was. Remember, all the others I mentioned were celebrities in their teens. Poe, for example, got out a published volume of verse before he was twenty, and Longfellow paid part of his Harvard expenses by writing verse for the papers. I say, for God’s sake, let’s stop thinking of this man as just an average boy a glover’s son from Stratford who went down to London for some reason, held horses in front of the Globe Theatre, got stagestruck inhaling the effluvia of grease paint, and then started writing plays, with sonnets in between. Genius isn’t acquired, like a case of rickets. It’s born. If Shakespeare was a genius at thirty-five, he’d have been a genius all his life.”

  “But Dr. Palmer, after all, fourteen—!”

  “Mr. Albaugh,” I shot back, “I’ve been waiting for you to say it—I staked you out. It just so happens that America’s outstanding poet, at least most successful poet, was a success in life, a local Detroit celebrity, on the basis of paid contributions of poetry to the Free Press at fourteen. I ask you, if Edgar A. Guest could do it, couldn’t William Shakespeare?”

  It caught them by surprise and got a tremendous roar, first laughter and then hand-clapping. With that, I stalked back to my table. When I bowed and sat down, Hortense patted my hand. Sam Dent thumped me on the back, and I had to stand up again as the applause kept on.

  That night she phoned to say she would be late. “Richard has something he wants to show me. He’s asked me to dinner first.” So I undressed, put on my pajamas and a robe, and waited. I waited for a long time. It wasn’t until after eleven that the elevator stopped at my floor and I heard her putting her key in the lock. After kissing me, she said: “Darling, I have to ask you to get dressed and come out with me. There’s something I have to show you, something Richard took me to see so I could see it first with him. But, of course, I want to see it with you.”

  “What is it?”

  “He surprised me with it, and I want to surprise you.”

  So she helped me dress, and we went downstairs to her car, which she insisted we take because she wanted to drive. She followed Rhode Island Avenue in as far as Sixteenth, where she turned and entered an all-night parking garage. As soon as she had her ticket she took me by the hand and led me down to K Street. She turned into it, and then suddenly we were standing across the street from our building, the new one I had had Garrett buy. But I hardly recognized it. All the scaffolding, canvas, and boards were gone, so that the front was clear, with its new black granite facing covering the entire front. And there in big bright, brass letters was:

  THE

  HORTENSE GARRETT INSTITUTE

  OF BIOGRAPHY

  It was lit by soft golden floodlamps, and a shiver went through me.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said softly.

  “I have to say it is.”

  “I love to look at it. I wanted to ... with you.”

  “You’re consecrated to fame.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that—it’s so beautiful!”

  “It is, it certainly is. The lettering is art in itself, and that stone—its color and the way it’s polished—is simply staggering.”

  “It comes from Minnesota. They polish it out there and then ship it in slabs by flatcar, all cut to size and ready to install. Richard had to pay all kinds of bonuses to get it done so quick, but, of course, he has a magic wand.”

  “Where’s that light coming from?”

  “From the building behind us, the one across the street. More of the magic wand; but when it waves for you, it’s something.”

  “Something to see—it certainly is.”

  “Well, you might show some enthusiasm—a little, anyway.”

  “I have shown enthusiasm. You want me to jump up and down?”

  “That’s what I want to do.”

  “Then—”

  I started jumping up and down, but she stopped me in horror after glancing around to see whether any police were there. Then, very sulky, she said: “You looked like a fish flopping—and that’s how cold you are.”

  “O.K., but what did I have to do with it?”

  “It was your idea, Lloyd.”

  “It was his magic wand.”

  “And I helped a little, didn’t I?”

  “Hortense, without you, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “I do. At least we know I love you.”

  “I opened my mouth to say, ‘Then act like it,’ but the trouble is, you might—right here on K Street.”

  “I’d be tempted, I certainly would be.”

  “Let’s go home. ... But first, let’s walk up to the Hilton and see what the paper says about the brawl you got into this afternoon. Then we can come back for one last look.”

  At the Hilton, which was just a block away, the stack of papers was out front on the sidewalk. The rope was being cut off as we got there, and when they were brought inside, we bought two. Then we sat down with them in the lobby. I was covered in the section devoted to goings-on around town, in two separate stories, one devoted to what I had said about biography and the other to my verbal brawl with Albaugh on the subject of Shakespeare. It was that one that gave me concern. Instead of kissing me off as someone in over his depth, however, the article was respectful. The reporter knew his Shakespeare. For the benefit of those who didn’t he explained the sonnets a bit, especially the mystery of “Mr. W.H.” and the Dark Woman and went on to report word for word what I had said. At the end he commented: “It is a novel theory, and it has one point to commend it: it rests on the incontrovertible fact, as he insisted to his listeners, that his was the greatest genius in the history of language—ours or any other.”

  “Well,” Hortense said, “aren’t you pleased?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “I am. I’m proud of you.”

  “Okay, I love to be prouded of.”

  “I want to go home now.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “But let’s look one more time.”

  We looked at the building once more and then got in her car and started home. She made me drive. “I’m too proud to drive,” she said; “my mind wouldn’t be on it.”

  We were just falling asleep when it popped into my mind to ask: “Any word from your gumshoe?”

  “Now why do you bring that up? Why, on this night of nights, do you have to ask that?”

  “You’re five months gone, that’s why.”

  “And why do you have to say that?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  She cracked up, crying and refusing to let me touch her. In every way, she made a production of it. Then at last, she said: “She hasn’t started yet. The one Mr. Hayes wants to put on it is Finnish but speaks Swedish, too. He thinks she could start by asking Inga for a job and then when Inga says no, to sit down for a minute or two to pass the time of day. It seems she’s good at that kind of thing, and Mr. Hayes thinks Inga could be of considerable help. The house keeper always knows, he says, what the master is up to, and she might pass out stuff to a visitor she liked. The girl, Mr. Hayes says, has made an art of sociability.”

  “Sociability helps.”

  “Does that answer your question?”

  “It’s what I wanted to know.” “Kiss me.” And then: “Lloyd, I’m getting terribly nervous.”

  19

  OF COURSE, ONCE WE moved into the building, Hortense wouldn’t have been Hortense without giving a party, a big stinkaroo in celebration thereof, although she called it an “opening” and acted as though it was something anyone would do under the circumstances, or, as she put it, “the least we can do, in all decency.” But I was beginning to find out that all she knew to do or that rich people like her knew
to do about anything—from the birth of an heir to the shotgun wedding preceding it—was a little party for three hundred people or so. What such parties accomplish I haven’t yet found out except to make Hortense take a deep breath and say, ‘Thank God that’s over’—and then begin planning the next one.

  But if it would make her happy—and, especially, ease her mind—it was all right with me, and I pitched in to help to the extent that I could. My help consisted mainly of moving the Institute in so we would have something to celebrate. It was quite a job, and I called on secretaries, Dr. Lin, our Chinese librarian, Carter and Johnson, and, of course, Davis. Our quarters took up three floors of the new building, including the first floor. There, through a heavy glass door was the big room I’ve already mentioned, now finished in oak paneling and furnished with bookshelves, desks, leather chairs, and thick carpeting. It was to be our reception room, with secretary, phone, and the usual intercom hookup. Beyond was my private office and beyond that, Hortense’s and beyond that, a small dining room with bar, kitchen, and pantry. Her mind, though she apparently didn’t realize it, ran to the entertainment and facilities it required more than to the conference rooms upstairs.

  But not Davis’s mind. He had ideas about our library. The minute he started to talk, I knew they were good. His point was that fifty percent of our subjects would figure in one of America’s wars but that a lot of references to them would be found in standard works which weren’t too expensive to buy—for example, for the Civil War, the Official Record; for Battles and Leaders, the Southern Historical Society Papers, the Photographic History, and the Bassler collection on Lincoln. He thought if we stocked these books, it would save all kinds of work for our scholars, and they wouldn’t have to go to the Library of Congress or the National Archives or wherever, but would have them right at hand there in our own building. I agreed and authorized him to buy sets wherever he could. All that summer he had been making his deals, which was how he came to have all those books in storage. They had to be moved in now by truck and then hauled up to the second floor and shelved. In front of the shelves we put rolling ladders, index cabinets, and desks. I copied the room from what I had heard of a scholar’s room—Rupert Hughes—in Los Angeles, which was a model of efficiency, I had heard. On the third floor were the “study rooms” for our “fellows.” The other seven floors we rented out, and this led to a small brouhaha just before the big bash. Donald Klein, our rental agent, had his desk inside the front door where he took it for granted that he could buttonhole guests as they came in regard to rental space. Of course Hortense hit the roof when I told her and went boiling downstairs to see him. I went along, unhappily, not believing in brawls and hoping she wouldn’t start one. But count on her: “Don,” she said, “of all the people I wanted to come, I think I wanted you the most, and here I find out you’re going to sit at this desk and sell! Don, how could you? Oh, how could you!?” It turned out that he couldn’t.