The House of the Prophet
Page 18
Heyward and I were now invited to every event at The Mount; we went out on the great sailing yacht; we played in the desperately serious croquet matches on Mark’s lawn, every square inch of which had been tested by a leveler. When Heyward went down to New York—as he did (quite unnecessarily, I thought) every other week to preside conscientiously over market operations, which his subordinates could have done as well or better than he—Mark would place me at the end of his table as his hostess. He did so as calmly as a feudal seigneur helping himself to the services of an underlord. Did not the latter’s very wife and children belong to him?
I waited with carefully suppressed excitement for Mark to make the first serious move. We had talked intimately of ourselves and of our lives but never of our feelings toward each other. I shall not relate that I had said nothing to Mark that I could not have said to Heyward, because I had said a great many harsh things to Mark about my poor husband and how he bored me, but I had said nothing to him about my own heart that Heyward could not have heard. Mark told me about his children’s troubles and his own dissatisfaction with his role in political life. He wanted something more, something larger, something more challenging. I thought I knew what form this something would take.
I knew that Mark would not fumble, that when he was ready, he would move with absolute assurance. I imagined his fixing those blue eyes on me gravely, taking my hand gently in his and saying: “Now, Gladys, don’t you think the time has come when you and I can express what we really feel?” But when our relationship at last developed to its crisis, it did so in a very different way.
On an afternoon’s sail as far north as Mount Desert Island, Mark and I were sitting on the divan on the fantail, contemplating the gray and green shoreline. The children and other guests were up forward; it was already their discreet habit to leave us alone when the occasion seemed to invite personal communication. Mark had just left the tiller to his skipper; he had on his commodore’s cap and was smoking a pipe.
“Let me tell you something, Gladys,” he began, with what struck me as a look of constraint, rare indeed for him. “Something that is not easy to say.”
“Then I must assume it is not romantic, for you have always found those things very easy to say. Poor Gladys! She shouldn’t have got her hopes up.”
“It is not romantic, and yet it is.”
“A conundrum? Take it to Seal Cove. I’m told Mrs. Troy adores them.”
“A plague on Mrs. Troy! Listen to me, Gladys. You and I understand each other only too well. We are two tired worldlings. There isn’t really much that we could give each other.”
“You mean you’ve been trifling with me? Trifling with an innocent girl’s affections?”
“We could perhaps amuse each other for a season. We could even fancy that we were hurt, bereft...”
“You won’t marry me! Say it! You wouldn’t have dared to treat me so had my old father lived! But I see it all. We are only the playthings of you men.”
“Gladys, if you will only be serious...”
“Don’t flatter yourself that nothing can make up for your withdrawn love. A diamond necklace might make all the difference.”
“What would Heyward say?”
“I’d tell him it was paste. Haven’t you read any French novels?”
“I insist on saying what I sat down here to say. Despite your wall of brittle persiflage. I know perfectly well what you’re up to, Gladys Satterlee. You’re bored. You have a sense of waste, of futility. You and I together would simply compound each other’s faults. But there is a man, in my opinion one of the most remarkable men of our time, who admires you deeply. He is someone who could do as much for you as you for him.”
I stared, too astonished to be indignant. “Are you by any chance speaking of Felix Leitner?”
“I am.”
“Has he told you this?”
“We have not spoken of you. Except as a charming friend.”
“Thanks!”
“Now don’t go middle class on me, Gladys. Be large of spirit. I know Felix very well. I can imagine what you represent to him.”
“What? Society? Parties? Champagne?”
“No. Charm in living. Beauty in living. Life as an art. Life as something to wonder at. Felix has toiled and struggled, surrounded by people of high thinking and high ideals. He has existed in a kind of intellectual monastery. Look at that drab little wife of his. All she can think of is her poor and needy. Felix must rescue the downtrodden multitudes! The poor guy’s almost forgotten that a man has to love as well as think.”
I found myself rapidly, almost frenetically, reviewing the recent evenings when I had sat next to Felix. They had given me, certainly, considerable pleasure, but the pleasure had been qualified by the fear of making a fool of myself. What could I say to a man with a brain like that? Yet I had also to admit he had been cheerful, attentive, seemingly appreciative. Had he not been the great Felix Leitner, I might have preferred him to Mark. Had he not been the great Felix Leitner, I might have noticed that he was interested!
“So,” I replied, in the same bantering tone, “I am to fill the emotional gap in the great man’s life? You have it all worked out. But what is he to do for me? Or doesn’t that matter? I suppose I should consider myself lucky if he even deigns to notice me.”
“Of course I have it all worked out. One has no business interfering in other peoples’ lives unless one has it all worked out. What Felix can give you is something you’ve been pining for: the life of the mind. You’ve spent all of your existence with your intellectual inferiors: your mother, Hey ward, this whole vapid crowd up here. Fiona, I suspect, may be as bright as they come, but you can’t make a life out of a daughter. You need Felix. He needs you. It’s a union made in heaven.”
“In heaven! I should rather have thought it was the other place. What about Heyward? What about poor Mrs. Leitner?”
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn about Heyward. Or about Frances Leitner. I’m not saying that you and Felix should run off together. I’m not even suggesting you should have an affair, though I can’t imagine that any friendship between two such electric personalities would end any other way. If so, your spouses should try to be understanding.”
“Mark Truro, I think you must be the most immoral man I’ve ever known.”
“Amoral, call it. I’ve never believed that marriage passes title to another human being. Felix has outgrown Frances. You started off too tall for Heyward. They should allow you both a degree of latitude. If not... tant pis. I have no patience with possessive spouses. Live and let live, I say.”
A steward now came up with a tray, and I was very glad indeed to have a drink. My mind was a tumult, but what kept bobbing to the surface, like a piece of Ivory soap in a frothy bath, was the fine, fresh white, clean, brand new idea that I might be seriously attractive to such a man as Felix Leitner. Was he “gone” on me, as we used to say? Had he confessed as much to Mark? Certainly he had spent more time in Butterfield Bay that summer than ever before. Everyone had noticed it.
“Admit the idea intrigues you, Gladys.”
Mark should not have said this. It threw too hard in my face the crude fact that in ten minutes’ time I had switched an errant fancy from him to Felix. Who the hell did Mark Truro think he was to play God with the rest of us?
“And what does our Mark need?” I demanded, in a sweet sarcastic tone. “He knows what we need, but what of him? Or is he above needs? No, not quite. He has a little secret. He has grown tired of people who want things from him. First they wanted his money. Then they wanted his parties and good times. Then they wanted his beautiful body. And finally they grew greedier yet. They wanted his love! Poor Mark! Even in his great castle he is not safe. Even in his white yacht breasting the billows. So now he dreams of a little girl who will give him all and ask for nothing.”
“And where will he find her?” Mark’s rather quivering smile showed that I had hit a sore spot. I hastened to drive the point home.
Mark flushed, which was as near as he ever came to showing anger. Then he rose without comment to go back to the tiller. I had certainly not made myself agreeable, but I had predicted, as it turned out, very much what actually happened when he married the little Murphy girl. Of course, she didn’t get his last red cent, but a “usually reliable source” has since informed me that he paid three million to be rid of her.
***
When I lunched the following week at The Mount (Mark never harbored resentment) I was hardly surprised to find myself seated by Felix. We were both in the highest spirits. I wondered if Mark had had a similar talk with him, and if he, like myself, was covering his embarrassment with exhilaration. Never had he seemed better looking to me. The long, thin, bony face under the high wide brow was extraordinarily rejuvenated by the large, blue-green eyes; and the curly, reddish blond hair was almost boyish. What was particularly attractive to me was the way he seemed to vary between an almost delicate, romantic, poetic figure of the deepest sensitivity, and one rather cruder. If his eyes were soulful, his chuckle was certainly earthy. Beside him, even Mark seemed almost haggard.
I was too wise to ask him about the absent Frances, but when he brought her into the conversation, I tried to be frank.
“I’m surprised she lets you loose among the beauties of Butterfield Bay. Is it really quite complimentary to a husband to trust him so?”
“I could ask the same thing about Heyward and you.”
“But that’s altogether different. Heyward can hardly expect me to sit home while he makes perfectly unnecessary trips to New York.”
“Why do you call them unnecessary?”
“Because they are. Heyward’s like my father. He thinks he’s doing something in his office just by being there. Men are different from women that way.”
“Is that your idea of Wall Street? That it’s only a formality?”
“Only half of Wall Street. The half made up of people trying to look like tycoons. Of course, there’s another half: that of the real tycoon. But Heyward doesn’t know the difference.”
“Aren’t you being a bit hard on him?”
I turned to face him squarely at this. “I know that a woman’s considered a fool to run down her husband to another man. But I’m not going to treat you as another man. You’re supposed to be a paragon. Very well. Heyward’s an ass. You know that as well as I.”
Felix became inscrutable. “Heyward’s my friend.”
“In picking you as a friend he showed that he didn’t have to be an ass. But he’s lived on that friendship too long.”
He sighed. “We certainly have different spouses, then. Nobody has ever called Frances an ass.”
“Ah, but you’re begging my original question. Why, if she’s not an ass, does she unleash you to roam so freely in Butterfield Bay? Surely she doesn’t think you’re playing bridge right now at one of my mother’s sedate afternoons?”
“No. She knows just where I am. And she probably has a good idea of whom I’m sitting by. Which may have something to do with a favor she asked of me today.”
“Oh?”
He closed his lips the least bit grimly now. “She asked me not to go so often to Butterfield Bay. She suggested that I give it up altogether until next summer. You see, I’m right. She’s hardly an ass.”
I think the minutes that followed were the most wonderful in all my life. There was a strange completeness in our silent communication. I turned from Felix’s steady stare to gaze down the long table and out the big window to the blue bay and the sailboats. I felt the sudden tears in my eyes. I noted the black and blue geometrical bridge by Joseph Stella on the whitewashed wall, and the big, ominous, evil heads of a Ben Shahn propaganda painting. I observed the rounded, pretty faces of the Truro sons and daughters, all so good, so idealistic, so naive, and fated, as I even then suspected, for such tragic lives. It had come, my moment. A great man was going to love me.
When, after lunch, our host gave me a knowing look, I did not return it. It angered me that Mark should think, cynical creature that he was, that he had been the architect of what was happening. He had had a whiff of it, that was all. He was not capable of envisioning the love of which Felix and I were going to be capable.
***
If Seal Cove would not come to Butterfield Bay, then I would come to Seal. When Heyward returned from the city, I told him that I was tired of the mundanity of our resort, that I yearned for the purer intellectual air that our neighbors to the north breathed. As I knew would be the case, I had no trouble with him. He agreed that it was a good idea, and that he had always wanted to see more of his friend Felix. But would he not bore Frances, he asked? I assured him that he underestimated himself and overestimated her. I promised that I would make everything all right. Then I turned my attention to you, Roger Cutter.
Yes, even that far back, when you couldn’t have been much more than twenty-two, I knew that you played a role in Felix’s life, though I didn’t know quite what it was. Some people have said it was filial, that Felix was disappointed in the stupidity of his own son and, after the divorce, in the hostility of his daughter. But I doubt that he ever saw you with a father’s eyes. Today, I suppose, people would seek a homosexual clue, but if Felix had any tendency in that direction, it certainly escaped me. No, I suspect that he felt about you the way a man feels about a faithful dog (you see, I am being just as frank as I threatened!), a rather surly dog that dislikes all the world but him. A man will always cherish something that he can own entirely. It makes him feel a bit like a god.
Anyway, I used you as my entree into Seal Harbor. Once I had made a conquest of your wonderful old curmudgeon of a father—and that took but a day, as he was a pushover for women—it was only a step before Heyward and I were accepted as regulars at those ghastly evenings at the Troys’ and on those tiresome mountain climbs that you were all so keen about. The things we do for love! But those mountains were indispensable to me: Frances’s asthma kept her from climbing.
On one of those crowded walks—there must have been ten of us—Felix bounded ahead as usual, and I managed to keep up with him. It almost killed me, but I was rewarded with an hour alone in his company on the summit. We sat with our backs against a fine flat rock and gazed over an infinite sea. As always by now, in my brief times alone with Felix, I was possessed with a sense of intense happiness, part of which was the conviction that it was shared. It seemed a happiness curiously distinct from desire. I had no need to do anything, or even to say anything, in particular. Just being there was enough, and any chitchat would do. But that day he had something important to tell me.
“I’ve been offered a seat on the National Labor Relations Board. The call came in from the White House last night.”
I did not quite know what this board was, but obviously it was something federal and very important, which was all that had to matter. “Oh, Felix! How very fine. Will you have to move to Washington?” I was already calculating what this would mean to me.
“If I took it. But I haven’t. I turned it down.”
“Because you thought it wouldn’t lead to anything?”
“No. It might lead to the federal bench. I was told that.”
“And wouldn’t you like to be a judge? I think you’d look lovely in black robes.”
“I have often thought that I should like to be a judge. An appellate judge. It is perhaps
the nearest one can come to combining the philosopher with the man of action. Oh, yes, it has tempted me. It has even seemed the solution of a lifelong dilemma. Can a man swim and still comment on the swimmers? But there was something else in this offer. It was my chance to make peace with the New Deal. It was to be my forgiveness for voting for Alfred Landon. As a member of the NLRB I would be implementing the Labor Act.”
“But you helped draft the Labor Act! I’ve heard you say so.”
“And so I did. But I don’t want to implement anything. I don’t want to be on anyone’s team. Frances says I’ll end up a monk. But she’s wrong. I won’t fight God’s battles, either.”
“How has Frances taken this?”
“Oh, she’s in a state! She says it’s my last chance for redemption. She weeps. She tears her hair. Figuratively speaking, of course.”
“How can she be so sure it’s right for you?”
“Because she believes that those who are not for us are against us.”
“Us?”
“The underdog. The great unwashed. Frances has always conceived it her function to keep me from wavering. When we married, you see, I was something of a socialist. She regards the least move to the right as motivated by evil things, whereas any move to the left, even too far, even beyond where she would go, she attributes to high ideals. Misguided ideals, maybe, when it comes to something like communism, but still high.”
“How can she presume to dictate to you?”
“Because she conceives herself to be my guardian angel. And who knows? Perhaps she is.”
“I know!” I sprang to my feet in a sudden ecstasy of release. “She has a bloody nerve! Instead of blessing her lucky stars that she’s married to a genius, she hollers like a Bolshevik. Have you no guts? Are you going to put up with that?”