Seducer

by Flora, Fletcher

  5

  MADELAINE CANNON had lain down early in the afternoon for a nap, but she had lain for quite a while without sleeping. Her eyes open in the darkened room, she had considered the condition of her marriage and the value of her husband. The marriage, she knew, was superficially pacific and inwardly disturbed. Her husband, she decided, was worth keeping.

  This latter decision, which may have been surprising under the circumstances, was based on a strange mixture of motives indicative of the person who made it.

  Compounded of pride and possessiveness and a kind of passionless love, it was directed to the preservation of a certain kind of life that suited Madelaine Cannon perfectly. Rich enough to live where and however she might choose, she chose deliberately to live where and how she did. She liked the academic life associated with Peermont College. She liked the kind of people this life included. She liked being a quiet and subtle power in college politics — a power she had inherited from her father through his money, and which she exercised firmly if not blatantly. And she liked being married to Bradley Cannon, who was handsome enough to excite her pride and brilliant enough to merit a measure of distinction even without the shadowy support of her money.

  She wanted, in brief, to live and die precisely as she was now living and dying, and she was fully prepared to sacrifice lesser prides and pretensions to the preservation of the process.

  She was certainly no fool. She knew Brad very well, the good and the bad in him, and she knew more of his affairs than he ever dreamed she knew.

  Sometimes her knowledge gave her a sense of shame and anger, and she was tempted to destroy the life she had made and go away alone to make another in another place. In the end she did nothing. She accepted the truth that Brad was not a man that any woman could hold to strict fidelity. Still more remarkably, she accepted the further truth that she was not the woman who could have held him — even if he could have been held.

  She was a good wife, and might have been a good mother, but she was not a good mistress. Her attachments were strong, but they were almost passionless. She did not, therefore, value highly what she could not feel. And she was too realistic to pretend to any enormous loss or betrayal when what she did not want was expended elsewhere on another.

  What she did value highly was her position, with all it involved of pride and immunity to public shame. And what she would never accept without reprisal, if it came to that, was any threat to it through reckless aberrations.

  Having reached without much stress the same decision she had reached before, she closed her eyes and went to sleep. She slept lightly and quietly until she was awakened later by the sound of Brad moving around in his own room beyond the intervening bath. She lay a while awake, listening, and then she got up and pulled a brush a few times through her hair and went into the bathroom and knocked on Braid’s door. In response to his invitation, she opened the door and walked into his room.

  He was, as she had expected, putting a few things into an overnight bag. Crossing to his bed, she sat down on the edge and folded her hands between her knees.

  “Hello, Maddy,” he said. “You were asleep when I came in, so I didn’t bother you.”

  “That was considerate of you,” she said, “but I’m sorry I wasn’t awake. Are you going somewhere?”

  “Yes. As usual. It’s Friday, you know.”

  “So it is. I’d forgotten for the moment. Do you really think it’s necessary to spend every Friday night in Kansas City?”

  “I suppose not, but it’s convenient. Haven’t we discussed this before?”

  “Several times, I believe.”

  “Well, the conditions are no different. It makes it much easier to reach the studio on time in the morning.”

  “I can see that. Perhaps I should go with you for company.”

  “I wouldn’t hear of it. You’d be bored to death in the hotel room. Besides I wouldn’t be able to take you out. I always review my lecture for an hour or so and go immediately to bed. You wouldn’t believe how demanding that damn half hour on television can be.”

  “Is it actually such a trial? I’ve always had the feeling that you rather look forward to Friday evenings.”

  “Nothing of the sort. I’ll be immensely relieved when the course is over. Believe me, they’ll have to look for someone else to conduct the next one.”

  “Will you stay at home for dinner?”

  “Yes, if it’s early.”

  “We can eat at six-thirty, if you like.”

  “That will be fine.”

  “All right. I’ll dress and go down and give the instructions.”

  She went back into her own room, but she did not immediately dress and go downstairs. Instead, she began automatically to brush her hair again, and she thought, while brushing, that Brad was a most accomplished liar. Oddly enough, she was not shocked or shamed by this, for her father had also been an accomplished liar when occasion demanded it, and she herself could lie readily enough when it suited her. Neither her training nor her nature had been calculated to make her excessively sensitive to moral or ethical niceties.

  The only daughter of an only son, the granddaughter of a wheat farmer whose land had later produced oil, she had come in due time into a comfortable fortune which she had handled competently and preserved intact. Her mind was strong but not subtle. It saw a problem whole and approached it directly with no self-deception or devious nonsense.

  This was precisely the way she had first seen Brad and still saw him, and precisely the way she had approached him and now held him. No nonsense then or now.

  She had first decided that she was in love with him, or at least wanted him, and then she had tried to decide deliberately upon the surest method of acquiring him. Characteristically, the method was direct. In essence, almost crude.

  He would not have considered her judgment of him flattering in all respects, if he had ever known exactly what it was. Fortunately, he never knew. To her it was merely a realistic appraisal that she would have applied, in a more or less the same way, to a piece of property. Indeed, in her mind, that was pretty much what Brad amounted to. A piece of property with certain inalienable human rights.

  He was handsome, which she liked. He was brilliant, which she admired. He was single, which was necessary. He was palpably vain, which would make him vulnerable. He was driven by ambition, if not cupidity, which would make him susceptible to material seductions. He was available and worth owning, and she wanted to own him.

  She met him in the fall of his first year on the Peermont faculty. She had been a graduate student then, not because she had any desire or need for an advanced degree, but simply because there was nothing at the time that she preferred to do. She was getting pretty bored with her superficial studies, though, and she had nearly decided to drop classes and go home to stay when the Thanksgiving holiday came round.

  It was then, three days before the holiday was to begin, that she met Brad at an afternoon party, a deadly dull affair of tea and chamber music, and it was a fact, which she recognized later with some astonishment, that she began almost at once to feel possessive about him, and to consider the best means of giving her feeling, after a while, a legal status.

  She was wearing black that day, and she always looked her best in black. The dress was, moreover, a slim sheath that presented her fine figure as boldly as seemed appropriate to tea and chamber music. She was, in short, pleasantly conscious of looking more attractive than she ordinarily looked, and she had the additional pleasure of understanding that her place beside him on a small uncomfortable love-seat was as much his contrivance as hers.

  Since she was a genuine realist with a hard head, she accepted without bitterness the possibility that he may have been partly motivated by the oil in her background and the knowledge that her father was a person to be reckoned with on the Peermont campus.

  After suffering through part of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, a lovely string quartet that she did not have the ear to appreciate,
she looked sidewise from under lashes at Brad’s face, deducing instantly from its stiff expression of artificial attention that she had already discovered one thing — a bad ear — that they had in common. On impulse, she leaned toward him so that her shoulder brushed his and her breath stirred on his cheek.

  “I’m looking for a man to take me out of this,” she whispered.

  His face swung round, flashing a smile in brackets of dimples, and she had a notion suddenly that he was going to kiss her, which was a ridiculous notion in such a place among such people, but which left her, nevertheless, with a sense of disappointment when he didn’t.

  He did, however, reach over and lay his hand on hers, which was lying in her lap, and she felt for just a second or two the tips of his fingers brush lightly the inside of her thigh.

  “You’ve found him,” he whispered back. “Just follow me.”

  They were at the rear of the group, luckily, quite near a doorway into a hall, and they were able to slip away almost unnoticed.

  Outside the house, they breathed deeply and laughed with a kind of childish exultation, as if they had shared and survived a somewhat shady adventure.

  “I’m sorry if you wanted to stay for the music,” she said.

  “I didn’t. I much preferred leaving with you.”

  “To tell the truth, music bores me. On top of tea, I find it intolerable.”

  “I share your intolerance, and I feel indebted to you for luring me away,” he assured her, his eyes furtively appraising her figure.

  “Truly?”

  “Yes, truly.”

  “In that case, perhaps you’d like to pay your debt by taking me somewhere for a cocktail and dinner,” she suggested.

  “I’d like it very much, but I’m not sure that it would be discreet.”

  “Oh, nonsense. Why not?”

  “You’re a student, aren’t you?” he queried.

  “Sort of one. I’m doing graduate work.”

  “Well, perhaps a teacher may be allowed a little more freedom with a graduate student than with an undergraduate.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about it, if I were you. Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Of course. We were introduced inside. Your name is Madelaine Jorgensen.”

  “Haven’t you heard of my father?” she asked, a little impatient.

  “No less than Daniel Jorgensen. And I get your point. I am, in a sense, in protective custody. Where would you like to go for your cocktail and dinner?”

  “My car’s there at the curb. I’d like to go to Kansas City, if you don’t mind.”

  He didn’t, and they went. Three days later, when Madelaine went home, it was not, after all, to stay. She went to tell her father, Dan Jorgensen, that she had found the man she wanted and meant to have. Home was in the western part of the state on the site of the old wheat farm that Grandfather Jorgensen had once cultivated, but there was no wheat now on what remained of the land.

  The old frame house had been torn down long ago and replaced by a brick colonial, painted white, on the crest of a long rise. Dan Jorgensen, who had married late and buried his wife soon, was well into his sixties at this time. He had a strong sense of his own importance, an irascible temper and a bad heart. He didn’t know it, of course, but he was not destined to survive his last well, which was almost dry. The others already were.

  He was somewhat ambivalent about Madelaine’s pronouncement.

  He felt on the one hand that the man, whoever he was, was probably motivated by cupidity and ought to be exposed and somehow punished. On the other hand, he decided that the chap had damn well better be reasonable and available if Maddy wanted him.

  “Who is this fellow?” he said.

  “His name is Bradley Cannon.”

  “Bradley Cannon? Never heard of him.”

  “He teaches mathematics at Peermont. It’s his first year there.”

  “One of those professor fellows? Seems to me, with your advantages, you could do considerably better for yourself,” the old man gruntled irritably.

  “I don’t want to do better. I want Brad.”

  “Are you sure he’s all right? These intellectual fellows go off the deep end sometimes. They have no common sense or judgment.”

  “He’s no left-winger or anything like that, if that’s what you mean. As a matter of fact, I doubt if he has any very deep convictions about anything.”

  “Well, at least I’m glad to hear he teaches mathematics. There’s some sense to mathematics. Can’t say I’d relish having a son-in-law who taught poetry or philosophy or any of those fancy things that don’t do anything but get a man confused.”

  “He’s a very good teacher of mathematics, I understand. He’ll probably go up at Peermont pretty fast.”

  “If you marry him, he’ll go up faster than that. I’ll see to it myself.

  “I thought you might be willing to help.”

  “If you’re sure you want this fellow, you bring him out here so I can talk with him. He’ll marry you, all right, if he knows the difference between a good time and a bad one.”

  “Oh, he’ll marry me, all right. You needn’t concern yourself with that in the least. I’m sure I can manage it without difficulty.”

  “I’ll bet you can. Same as you manage me and everyone else when it serves your purpose.” He stared at her with sudden suspicion. “You got yourself into a condition? You been sleeping with this fellow?”

  “If I had been, I wouldn’t tell you, but I haven’t. Not yet.”

  “You’ll do as you please. I know that. When do you plan to get married?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Possibly in the spring. What I’d like to do is invite him out here for a week at Christmas.”

  “Sure. Bring him out. Right now, though, I’m going out to shoot some quail. You want to come?”

  “Is quail season open?”

  “If it is or isn’t, I’ll shoot quail on my own property if I want to.”

  “You go ahead, then. I don’t feel like hunting today.”

  When he was gone, she went up to her room on the second floor and began to read, but she was not interested in the book that day, or very much in any book any day. After a while she simply sat quietly by a window and stared out and down a long poplar-lined drive to a road at its end.

  For some time she thought of her past, of her life in this house with a strong and possessive father who had made her, in her turn, as strong and possessive as he. Then, tiring of this, she began to think of Bradley Cannon, whom she wished to possess.

  She became aware after a long while that the light was fading outside the window, the poplars along the drive slim and wavering shadows in descending dusk. She had not heard her father in the house since his departure, and this was odd, she thought, for he was not a quiet man, and the light had surely been too weak for shooting for some time.

  Going into the hall, she walked down to her father’s room and knocked. There was no response, so she went on downstairs to the kitchen, where she was told by the cook and the maid that her father had not returned!

  She left the kitchen by the back door and walked across a wide yard to a barn that had little purpose except to house the cars. She was standing at a corner of the barn peering across fading fields when she saw two men approaching along a fence with a burden between them. The men were hunters, as it turned out, and the burden was Daniel Jorgensen, who was dead.

  At first she thought that he had been shot accidentally, but this was not true. He had simply dropped dead in a field and had lain entangled in a thicket until the pair of hunters had come along to find him.

  Later in his room, where she had him carried, she stood beside his bed and tried to summon grief and a feeling of definitive loss, but she was curiously empty and inept, as if she had been caught unprepared for a performance. She had difficulty, now that his eyes were closed and his face set, in convincing herself that he had ever been alive to her in any real sense.

  She buried her father three da
ys later, and two days after that returned to Peermont and withdrew as a student. She called Brad in the evening and asked him to come and see her, which he did. They walked that evening across the campus of Peermont and sat in chill darkness for almost an hour on the stone steps of the library.

  “What are you going to do now?” he said.

  “First,” she said, “I’m going home and arrange for the sale of all the property there. I don’t want to keep it, now that father’s dead.”

  “Are you sure that’s the wise thing to do?”

  “Yes. You can be assured I’ll get everything out of it that it’s worth, and probably more. There won’t be as much money for me as most people think, but there will be plenty. About a million, I’d guess.”

  “Where are you going afterward?” he asked with real interest.

  “I’m coming back here and buy a house near the campus. I like it here. It’s the most pleasant place I know to live. I may live here the rest of my life. I don’t know. I’ll see how it works out.”

  “I’m terribly sorry this has happened, Maddy.”

  “Are you? I’m not sure that I am. I’ve tried to analyze my feelings, and I’m not sure. I don’t seem to feel any particular sorrow.”

  “You’ve had a shock, that’s all. You’re alone now, aren’t you? Will you be living alone in the house you buy?”

  “I don’t know.” She turned on the stone step and looked at him levelly in the darkness. “That depends on you.”

  He was never certain afterward if she had made a solicitation or laid down an ultimatum. It didn’t really matter.

  They both knew, now that her father was dead, that she was offering him a kind of contract in which the terms were, in practically every way, more favorable to him than to her.

  Although he was reluctant to qualify his freedom, he had been considering the advantages of marriage, and it didn’t take a college professor to see which side of his bread the butter was on in this instance.

  They were married in June after a proper and passionless engagement, and only rarely thereafter, during their honeymoon that summer in Bermuda, did their relationship achieve brief flashes of carnal heat and intensity.