But we made progress. He managed to crawl out from under the thick, stifling blanket of his depression, to look around at the world again, to purchase a brownstone for his residence, and to adjust himself, more or less, to a prosperous bachelor's life in New York. He couldn't return to Italy while he was undergoing my treatment, and he spent some of his copious supply of spare time putting together quite a fine art collection, mostly of French eighteenth-century paintings: Lancret, Pater, van Loo, and Hubert Robert. They probably suggested to him, particularly the last named, some of the grace, the ease, the delightfulness that he associated with his idealized memory of Meadowview.
Nor did he feel required to live a chaste life, however sinful the alternative might be. I had at least liberated him from that. Through a friend of Silly's, he found himself invited to some all-male parties in Greenwich Village, and he engaged in a couple of discreet affairs. He could even be almost light-hearted about them. "You got the St. Luke's out of me, doctor," he told me laughingly once. "But after an operation as drastic as that, there was no question of my resuming a normal life. The best you could do was to sew me up and make me as comfortable as possible."
In the dozen years that elapsed between his release from my care and his premature demise, I saw him only infrequently, when he suffered sharp returns of agitation. I really believe that had he gone back to Italy and taken up permanent residence there he might have had a happier and certainly a more productive life. There his past would have been absent and his present peopled with a friendly acquaintance to whom the sexual habits of a rich American were a matter of total indifference. But in New York he found himself increasingly adopting a hermit's life rather than mingling with the world of his family and old school friends, who were occupied with businesses and children and clubs and sports in which he had no real part or interest, and from whom he felt compelled to hide tastes that at the very least would have invited their pitying disapproval. And it only made things worse that whenever he did run into one of them, he would be greeted enthusiastically with cries of "Marvin, where have you been? Why do we never see you? Come to dinner! Yes, anytime, do!"
What kept him there, when his analysis was finished, was the Korean youth he met at a Village party and with whom he became deeply involved. It was indeed the love affair of his life. He finally induced Hai Kwan to move into his brownstone, though he took care to set him up in a separate garden apartment so he would look like an ordinary tenant. He would gladly have taken him to Italy and lodged them both in a Venetian palazzo, but Kwan loved New York, where all his friends were, and Marvin at last gave him a gallery of his own, where he sold, with some success, Korean art.
Marvin had always dreaded Cynthia's finding out about his love life, but when she did—and it didn't take long before the peculiar position of Kwan in his household became known to her—it was almost worse than he had thought. Her easy handling of the situation showed the amused scorn beneath her seeming tolerance. "Put him in a white coat," she advised her brother. "And then nobody'll mind."
Even so, his life might have worked out had Kwan remained faithful to him. Marvin might have been able to give their relationship, even in his censorious heart, some of the dignity of a marriage, might even have seen it achieve a kind of acceptance in his old world. But Kwan liked boys, and as Marvin visibly aged, he had no idea of confining his nights to his patron. I should make it clear that Kwan was not a bad fellow at all—I met him a couple of times when Marvin asked me to his house. But however devoted he was to Marvin—and he never left him—he made it clear that both of them were free to form other intimacies. Their relationship became a platonic one; Kwan became Marvin's "family."
Which left Marvin to seek sexual gratification elsewhere, and he took eventually to the streets. The partners whom he found were not like their Italian counterparts; they were tougher and more mercenary and often didn't even pretend to enjoy what they were doing. As Marvin's life became more sordid, his compulsion to shield it from his old connections became even more obsessive. He was soon almost a complete recluse, and except when he appeared in art galleries or auction houses to add to his collection, he virtually disappeared from the world. His sexual preoccupation had come to encase his entire existence, as a skin cancer can cover a whole face.
The sense he must have felt of being mercilessly encircled by quixotically hostile gods who had picked him as their victim for no explicable reason may have been like the one expressed by Racine's tragic heroine in Phèdre:
Wretch that I am, how can I live, how face
The sacred sun, great elder of my race?
My grandsire was, of all the gods, most high:
My forebears fill the world and all the sky.
Where can I hide? For Hades' night I yearn.
No, there my father holds the dreadful urn.
He died in his fifties, an early victim of AIDS. His sister Cynthia, who was with him at the end, told me of his last grimly humorous mood. "Plenty of people regard this terrible disease as God's punishment of the wicked," he murmured to her. "Of course, it's no such thing. It's his judgment of me."
He finally recognized that his was a very special case. He was too intelligent not to. He saw that he had seen himself as the victim of a Calvinist god. Perhaps that was all that a Calvinist god was good for.
Lady Kate
I DON'T KNOW whether or not it's a national mood of nostalgia, brought on by this seemingly endless economic depression that started on that fatal October day of 1929—now four years back—but my friend at the corner bookstore on Madison Avenue, who claims to know the literary tastes of old dowager ladies like myself, keeps sending me memoirs of the Mauve Decade, often written by persons I actually knew in that bygone era. Are readers today really interested in the idle doings of those obsessed hostesses, with their big pearls and big hats, their bigger villas and bigger parties? Oh, I know, I'm hardly one to talk. It's all very well for me to scoff at them now, but the glaring fact that I was an integral part of the whole silly game is flung in my face by the frequent appearance of my name in these very memoirs and the repeated likeness of myself in that celebrated photograph, crossing a lawn at a garden party in Newport, a thin maypole swathed in Irish lace with a long, plain face and a huge wide-brimmed black hat, "in full sail" as the phrase was, and accompanied by the short, dumpy figure of Mrs. Astor herself.
Yet can't I make out—or is it part of a desperate self-delusion?—that there is something in that tall figure which in part redeems it from the pomposity of that gaudy age? Isn't there a hint that the woman it represents is turning herself into a deliberate caricature of the opulent grande dame who constituted the logo of the era? Isn't my hat too grotesquely large, my laciness overdone, my hauteur too pronounced? Isn't the mocking laughter that I liked to think of as always bubbling out of me showing a bit of its froth? After all, no one who knew those times can deny that I was known and even feared for my sharp tongue and dry oral portraits and that I was even dubbed the enfant terrible of Newport. Or was that, too, an act? Was my whole life an act, and perhaps, after all, not a very good one?
I was certainly born for better things. My family was not nouveau riche, like the Vanderbilts and Goulds, but of old colonial stock. Our tree boasted eight passengers on the Mayflower and a signer, and my late lamented husband, Bayard Rives, was the son of a Rhode Island governor and the heir to a large textile fortune that had its respectable origin in New England mills long before the rise of the robber barons in railroads and steel. And before we inherited from his mother the grim old Rives "castle" that beetled over the sea in Newport by Fort Adams, we lived a more civilized life in Washington, where my husband occupied a minor but responsible position in the State Department and where we entertained at our lovely Greek Revival house in Georgetown such luminaries as the Henry Cabot Lodges, the John Hays, and Henry Adams himself. My portrait of those days, in which I am clad in a luscious gold evening gown, standing tall and haughty, presumably ready to receive distin
guished guests, a fan clasped in one hand as if ready to strike the countenance of some unwarranted intruder, was considered one of the finest of Sargent's finest period and is now in the National Gallery.
And yet. Must I not admit that if I try to glean an interesting insight from my photograph on the Newport lawn, I can also spot a hint of the future dowager in the hostess of an intellectual salon depicted by Sargent? And I have to concede that Henry Adams, on first viewing the oil, exclaimed with a hoot of laughter, "Sargent has done it at last! He has immortalized the wife of the goldbug!" The goldbug, of course, was his term for the species of male who, in his constantly reiterated opinion, had begrimed American culture.
But I'm certainly not going to let the old cynic have the last word. He always professed to believe that women were the superior sex—in sensitivity and perceptiveness, anyway—and maintained that any astute observer would rather be ruled by Edith Roosevelt than Theodore and by Nanny Lodge than Cabot. He even went so far as to argue that the dullness of American history was accounted for by the scanty role it accorded to women, of which his own history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison is dry proof. But what I should have asked him is, how could the American woman play any important part in the American dream if the American man slammed every important door in her face? In a country where the male devoted all his energy to business, from which the female was excluded except in degrading factory tasks or secretarial functions, what could the latter—at least the upper-class ones—do but grab hold of the one thing allowed them, which was, quite simply, the money? For the American male, unlike his sex the world over, was unique in caring more for the game than for its prize, more for the toil than for its profit. So long as he was allowed to spend his life in the office, his spouse could pretty well spend his dollars as she chose.
Which, of course, explains the phenomenon of Newport, not only the watering place in Rhode Island but its lesser counterparts across the nation. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a recreated Catherine de Médici, was only the most conspicuous of the lavish female builders who covered our seaboard with derivative European palaces, packed closely together so each could envy the glories of the others. Even I, on a more modest scale, when my husband's health forced his retirement from government and we moved to New York, erected a gray French Renaissance chateau on a long narrow plot running down East Seventy-ninth Street, pushing its slender front onto proud Fifth Avenue. Ignorant souls criticized me for employing in the city a style supposedly designed for large domains of landscaped fields and forests. Had they never seen the urban mansion that the bourgeois Jacques Coeur placed in the very heart of fifteenth-century Bourges?
"Society," as it then existed, was entirely the creation of women, and they clung to it, their one fief, with an understandable possessiveness, which is why they guarded it so fiercely from climbers, at least until those climbers had accepted their disciplines and code. The etiquette, the moral standards, the dress, the styles of living and entertaining were their exclusive prerogative, under rules rigidly enforced. The role of the husband and father was simply to pay. With Washington behind me and middle age reluctantly accepted, I looked about me for a new occupation and found only the social game sufficiently challenging. I didn't have anything like the fortune of the principal players, but I had enough to make a goodly show, and a show was all it was. My family offered no obstruction.
My only daughter, Ethel, who prided herself on the modernity of her views and was always quoting Veblen, scorned such ambitions and had married a Stanford economics professor and moved to California, and my only son, Tim, a scholar, had become a dedicated archeologist and spent his share of the Rives fortune in distant digs. My husband, a quiet, gentle, intellectual man who tolerated most things and admired few, and who enjoyed frail health, simply smiled at my new project and told me, "Go to it, Kate! You have to work off some of that excess energy of yours. I'll pay the bills as long as I can and watch from the sidelines. But don't make me go to your parties."
And indeed, after I had occupied and renovated the old Rives castle in Newport, he spent most of our summers on his yacht, resting his eyes on the eternal bobbing blue-gray of the ocean and no doubt considering me a silly ass.
Newport, obviously, was my chosen battleground. Few observers have understood it as did the French novelist Paul Bourget, who in Outre-Mer, the account of his American travels, pointed out that it was entirely dominated by formidably respectable middle-aged or elderly females, the wives or widows of largely absent husbands, who had rid the summer colony not only of bohemian artists and writers but of anything remotely resembling a demimonde. The extra men at their parties were a dressy bunch, more or less epicene, and any husband who kept a secret mistress to entertain him on his rare visits to Aquidneck Island dared not lodge her any closer than Narragansett.
Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, in her memoirs Roman Spring, related that the so-called four hundred would have fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman, and she described well its organizer and acknowledged leader, Mrs. Astor: "She always sat on the right of the host when she went out to dinner parties; she wore a black wig and a great many jewels; she had pleasant cordial manners and unaffectedly enjoyed her undisputed position."
Yet it was from the side of this great matron that I seduced the young or youngish man who became what he himself liked to term my major-domo and court jester. Beverly Dean, despite his long and rather messy blond hair, his mocking blue eyes, and his screeching laugh, might have struck an observer as a regular and even almost sturdy American youth had not his habit of overgesticulating and nervously twisting his shoulders and torso seemed to indicate that he was warning one against any overestimate of his masculinity and strength. He had wit and impudence and a species of charm, no known occupation or source of income or even family, and he was a fixture at every party. He was generally supposed to be trying to occupy in Mrs. Astor's court the place of her late guide and mentor, Ward McAllister.
The conversation that led to his brief reign over my equally brief social endeavors occurred after a dinner party at Alice Vanderbilt's Genovese palazzo, The Breakers, when he and I were sitting in a far corner of the vast marble hall to which we had retreated so that we might chat without disturbing those guests who were listening to a rather mediocre string quartet.
"Our hosts have certainly made the grade," I commented drily, glancing toward the crowded and respectfully listening audience in the parlor. "But then there is really no resisting the Vanderbilts. Such a numerous clan, and each member richer than the one before. And actually quite amiable, too. And handsome, unlike the Astors, who are so plain. Yesterday there was no knowing them, and today you can hardly tell a Vanderbilt from a Van Rensselaer. But where, after all, have they got to? Now they're as dull as the rest of us."
"Nobody had called you dull, dear lady."
"Not to my face, anyway, and God knows, you're all welcome to my back. But what in the name of Lars Porsena and his nine gods have we or the Vanderbilts gained, my dear Beverly, by housing ourselves in the borrowed glory of the Italian Renaissance? Think of what the marble walls of a palazzo like this would have witnessed in the days of the Borgias! Murder and poison, no doubt, but also passion and great art! And what do they see today but a bunch of overdressed old women lost in a snowstorm of cards, both playing and calling?"
"Write up that onslaught, will you please? It should make your name in belles lettres." And he crushed my incipient retort with his high cackle of a laugh.
"But seriously, Bev, what is it that gives Newport its peculiar deadness? For some of the architecture is not so bad, really, and the air and sea are delightful. Not to mention the matchless gardens. Why do I want to scream?"
Beverly resorted to his favorite nickname for me. "It's just your good taste, Lady Kate. You see the summer colony as a farce. It has nothing to do with what is really going on in America. Tiaras and porte-cocheres. Emblems of royalty. It's a court without a sovereign, a r
eligion without a deity, a ritual without a cause. At fancy dress balls how do the guests dress up? As kings and queens! As Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette!"
"You mean they lose their heads?"
"But not their headdresses."
"Yet isn't that the way with fancy dress the world over? You remember all those pictures of the British peerage at the famous Devonshire Ball? They all came that way."
"True. For the Brits suffer from the same disease. Their lords and ladies try to kid themselves into believing they have some of their old power left by strutting about a ballroom in the glad rags of the glorious dead. Except they still have a monarch and an upper house to give them a kind of sham glitter."
I was struck by the comparison. "But if you see it so clearly, my friend, why do you spend your life in it?"
"A good question. But I didn't always see it so clearly. It's only recently that I have become bright-eyed. And that is why I have cultivated you, dear lady. You thought it was you who found the apple in Eden. But it was I who put it there, right under your keen and curious nose."
As a matter of fact, I had half suspected this. His many crossings of my social path could not have been entirely accidental. "And what was your purpose in attaching yourself to a woman almost old enough to be your mother?"
"Oh, quite old enough to be my mother!" he retorted with another outrageous laugh. "I was looking for a woman who had the brains, the imagination, the genealogy, the wit, and the coin to turn Newport on its heel. And if she could turn Newport, wouldn't she turn the hundred lesser Newports across the nation that devour our social doings in the evening press?"
"And you found such a woman in me?"
"I did. And you had another virtue as well. You were a rebel. I gleaned that from the famous photograph showing you and Mrs. Astor at a garden party. The great Caroline is plodding ahead with the placid conviction of a dedicated princess performing her function at some idle ceremony, while you, with that tall lean lacey figure, are bending down, probably to murmur some heresy in an ear that will never understand it."
The Young Apollo and Other Stories Page 6
