"I tell you frankly, Mrs. Ames, that you baffle me. I haven't been able to decide how to get the essential you in your likeness. You tell me that you see stories in some of my portraits. What story would you like to see in yours?"
She seemed to be thinking this over for a long moment. He had the notion that she was not going to dodge the point. Yet when she answered, with a sudden bright smile, he was not sure that she hadn't. "How about that of a perfectly happy woman?"
"Isn't that a conclusion rather than a story? It's like that last line: 'They lived happily ever after.' After what?"
"Do you have to know? Is it that important?"
"I don't have to, no. But let's put it that it might help."
Again she was silent for a time. "Is a painter like a priestly confessor? Are your lips sealed by professional discretion?"
"No, but they are by my word of honor. Which I freely offer you."
She nodded now with sudden decision. "That should be enough. Particularly as I shall be telling you nothing that my husband doesn't already know. And who else's business is it?"
"I can hardly be the judge of that."
"Hardly. Anyway, leave your easel and pull up a chair. I'm going to tell you my story."
He did as she suggested, turning away from her, at her further request, so that she could address his impassive back.
"My family, Mr. Eppes, was what you call old New York, but we were fearfully impoverished by my poor father's lamentable investments. He was one of those dear idealistic, impractical men who didn't realize that he could not afford to work. Had he sat back and simply cut his inherited coupons, we would have happily prospered. But no. He succumbed to the old American rule that a man must do something. So he did—disastrously. My mother spent her life trying desperately to claw her way back to the top. There is no one more ravenously ambitious than a woman who has had it and lost it. Mother was a woman of powerful personality. Her rages were terrifying. Had I not accepted Harold Ames when he emerged from the clouds, like the deus ex machina of Greek drama, to offer me his golden chariot, I think she might have murdered me. At any rate I was simply glad to be able to pull my father out of the creek in which he was drowning. And Harold was so kind and nice, and he always wanted to give me everything under the sun. What did I care that he was constantly off on hunting and fishing expeditions and that his heart belonged to whatever was at the end of his rifle or rod? There was plenty to amuse me at home. I had one child, my son, now fourteen, but others didn't come, and I had nurses to look after him day and night, and all New York and Newport in which to amuse myself with money and dogs and horses and new young friends in handfuls as rich and idle as myself.
"Harold had a cousin, younger and handsome and dashing, with a share of the family fortune as large as Harold's, who seemed more than willing to act as my escort to parties during my husband's frequent and prolonged absences. He was married to a dreadful woman who cared only for his money and refused adamantly to give him a divorce—besides, the Ameses were all devout Catholics, including Harold—and for a long time I thought his attentions were innocent and that I was simply a diversion for his loneliness and he for mine. It is the old story, Mr. Eppes. By the time he revealed his true feelings for me, I was already caught, violently in love for the first time in my life, which can be a terribly strong thing when it happens as late as at twenty-five."
She paused here for a moment, but Eppes knew better than to utter a word.
"We were soul mates," she resumed, "or so I assumed. He wanted me to leave home and child and flee with him to Venice, where he would buy a palazzo on the Grand Canal and we would live on love and beauty. There was no way, we both knew, that our spouses would ever free us or that Harold would give up his son and heir. We would be ostracized, of course, by New York society, but abroad we would associate with people of larger views. I was enraptured. I agonized at the idea of giving up my darling child, but I tried to persuade myself that when he was older he would understand and forgive me. I had to break my golden chains! We were not yet lovers, but we were obviously on the brink. I told my admirer that I had to think it over, but he was clearly convinced that he had already prevailed and that I would go."
The pause that now followed was so long that Eppes ventured to break it. "But you didn't go."
"I didn't go. Harold came home at just this time from a trip to the Arctic Circle. He summoned me to his study, very grim and stern. His old mother had written him about my goings-on. His cousin and I were causing a public scandal. He told me solemnly that he had no alternative but to insist that I give up seeing his cousin altogether. He turned quite black when I told him that I was in love with his cousin. I said I would give him his answer in the morning, fully intending that I would decamp that night. He left the room without a word.
"The miracle that saved me was that my cynical brother, Tim, a Harvard sophomore in love with himself and what he assumed was his wit, was staying with me at the time. I loved him dearly despite his airs and nursed the idea that if he cared for anybody, he cared a little bit for me. In my sudden desperation I went to his room, where he was dressing for a dinner party, and told him what I was going to do. You'll never believe what he said and what an extraordinary effect it had on me."
"Well?"
"It was like him to quote Oscar Wilde, even though Wilde's name at the time had been blackened by his trial and conviction. Tim obviously cared nothing about this. He quoted a line from A Woman of No Importance. 'To be in society is simply a bore; to be out of it is simply a tragedy.' And it changed my life!"
"That glib quip? How, in God's name?"
"I repeated it over and over to myself in that long night, when I didn't sleep a wink. I came to see that it contained the moral essence of our time. Isn't it Anna Karenina all over? When being out of society ceases to be a tragedy, our whole class system must fall. Not that that would necessarily be such a bad thing. But it hadn't happened yet. Or at least it certainly hadn't happened ten years ago, when we were still in the nineteenth century. I saw in a blinding flash what my life would be like without my dear little boy, surrounded by the Venetian riffraff that illicit lovers attract. Was it too late? Would I ever be able to make it up to the decent husband who was giving me one more chance?"
"So he wasn't so bad, after all, the great hunter and fisherman?" Eppes saw that the moment had come when he could be facetious.
"Well, he was pretty bad for a while. How could he not have been after my confession? When I went to him the following morning and told him that I would never see his cousin again, he assumed I was up to some kind of trick. But in the days that ensued, I took him the desperate letters that my frustrated lover sent me, and he had to concede that I was serious. We took up our old life together, but it was a cold and formal one. Harold spoke to me only when he had to, about some detail of our daily schedule, and then as briefly and curdy as possible. I ignored this completely. I was wild with relief and passionately resolute to win him back. It was a task that took every minute of my days and nights and obliterated my love for his cousin—it became an obsession, but a happy one. I had to win! I knew I would win! I never missed one of his mean old mother's 'days' or protested at going to his sister's boring evenings. I insisted on going to his Canadian camp with him, even though I had to spend long days in our cabin alone, reading novels while he shot moose or wolves with his pals."
"But he came around at last?"
"After six months, yes. What a time! One day, when his old cat of a mother snapped at me with some only half-veiled crack about flirts in the family, he suddenly turned on the old girl and shouted, 'If you're referring to my wife, you should have your mouth wiped out with soap!' Never had anyone heard him use such violent language before, and to her, of all people! Our real marriage began that very night."
"You must have always loved him. Deep down."
"That's romantic twaddle, Mr. Eppes. I hadn't at all. I simply saw where my true happiness lay and grabbed it—literall
y only hours before I should have lost it forever. I have been a very lucky woman, that is all."
But that was not what Eppes finally put in his famous canvas. He couldn't bear it. It would never have redounded to his fame. It made mock of every great love drama of his time. The interior behind the figure of Mrs. Ames glimmered with gold and scarlet, but it hemmed her in. She was beautiful; she was loved—one saw that—but she was also confined. In her radiant eyes, in the near ecstasy of her expression one might have made out her vision of the life she had missed, the passion that could have enveloped her. It was not the portrait of an unhappy woman; it was the representation of a dreamer.
It was thus that the critic Shea interpreted it when Eppes first permitted the picture to be seen. The artist could not resist the temptation to temper his friend's admiration with the true story of the sitter. But Shea had the last word.
"So that's it, is it? Well then, Mrs. Ames is not unlike one of those Renaissance madonnas. The model need not resemble the conception. A saintly virgin of Raphael may have a streetwalker for her model. Is that the trick of great art? To make us worship a lie?"
Pandora's Box
aMOS HERRICK HAD NOT thought as a boy, or even as a Harvard undergraduate, that he would ever become a lawyer. He had once eminently respected the distinguished old Wall Street firm that took care of his family's much dwindled but still good income-producing Manhattan real estate, but he had tended to regard legal counsel as he did doctors and business managers: as necessary supporters of the managerial class, which in a well-regulated republic should watch over and guide the multitude. What a young heir of such a class should do with his life ought to be something more important. Just what that was in his own case he had still not decided on his graduation at Cambridge. But he was able to take his time and, in the meanwhile, to look around. How he came in the end to choose law will be the subject of what follows.
At twenty-two Amos was a highly reserved and very sober young man, with a personality that some found serene and others merely impassive. Nobody denied his evident intelligence or the tenacity of his memory; he had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key in college and was deemed by his family and friends to be a near genius in the higher mathematics, which had been his undergraduate major. There might, however, have been more of a question as to the scope of his imagination or even the very existence of his sense of humor. In person he was slight and trim, very straight in posture, with slick dark hair parted in the middle over a round pale countenance and calmly gazing, faintly quizzical gray eyes. It may be hardly necessary to add that he was always impeccably clad, in black or somber gray, and that his only concession to brighter colors was in his silk Laotian ties. He lived harmoniously with his parents and two sisters in a large brownstone in the Murray Hill district and in a rather formidable stone pile by the sea in Bar Harbor, Maine. He saw no need, despite his ample means, to seek bachelor diggings. The Herricks were a closely united clan.
They were also old Knickerbocker New Yorkers. They had been Tories in the Revolution until the surrender of Cornwallis and Confederate sympathizers in the Civil War until General Grant had turned the tide in favor of the North, but ever since they had been staunchly patriotic and prided themselves on their public spirit. Herrick men had always sat on the boards of worthy civic institutions—Trinity Church, Columbia College, the public library—and their wives, selected without exception from their husbands' social milieu, were admirable examples of feminine decorum. Unlike many in their group, they never succumbed to the temptation of supplementing their diminishing funds by alliances with the new money that threatened to inundate their island. Had any of them aspired to draw a Thomas Nast cartoon of Christ cleansing the temple of money changers, he would have shown the lash falling on the backs of Vanderbilt and Gould.
Amos, as far back as his schoolboy days at Groton, in the early nineteen thirties, had taken in not only what his family was but what it was in relation to the rest of the world. He totally sympathized with their ideals and their feeling of responsibility to a community in which they still regarded themselves as leaders. He shared their belief that the nation should be governed by what John Adams had called "the rich, the wise and the good" and that by "rich" was meant the old rich. But Amos differed from the other Herricks in one important respect: he saw that their influence, social, moral, and political, had largely passed, and that whether it could be brought back or even preserved in its diminished state was gravely in question. What, however, he never questioned was that it would be his duty in life, no matter what the odds, to fight for it. Even in an ultimate defeat he would be like a Stuart devotee in Scotland and continue to raise his glass regretfully to the king across the water.
More intelligent, however, than conservatives who indulged in angry and idle vituperation, Amos saw that opposition to a superior foe required an icy calm and careful research. He had to be ready to rebut socialistic argument with cutting, deadly, and accurate replies, and always to maintain the appearance of goodwill with a bland gaze and even a faintly sarcastic small smile. Emotion was not to be shown, and appeals to emotion, in all fields, were to be regarded with suspicion.
Much of this attitude was hardened at Harvard, but it had been born as early as Groton. At the age of fifteen, when he was attending an Episcopalian confirmation class, a young priest who was assisting the headmaster, and who was passionately and enthusiastically devout, had taken a particular interest in this seriously attentive but never questioning boy who sat so quietly through every session without joining in any of the discussions of the creed or its implications. Perhaps sensing in Amos a future cleric—or even a future atheist, for who could tell with a thoughtful adolescent?—he took him aside for a private chat.
"You seem to have no questions, Amos. That's all right, of course, if you're satisfied with the creed. Is that it? Because if you're not, I'm here to help you. And you don't have to be confirmed, you know. Maybe you'd like to put it off for a year. And have a chance to think it over."
"No, sir. I'm ready now."
"You have no trouble with any parts of the creed?"
"No, sir. Do you imply that I should?"
"Oh, not at all. Though it's perfectly natural to wonder about some of its assertions. The descent into hell, for example. That bothers many people."
"It doesn't bother me, sir."
The minister seemed faintly shocked. "One way to mitigate the horror of the idea is to believe, as some do, that if there's a hell, there still may be nobody in it."
"It seems to me, sir, that if there's a hell, there must be people in it. What else would it be for?"
"The unimaginable sinner, I suppose. I confess that the idea of hell troubles me. Could one ever be really happy in heaven, knowing there were people in hell?"
"Perhaps one wouldn't think about it."
"Heaven would be oblivion?"
The boy faintly smiled. "Perhaps that's all one would need."
The minister soon saw that he was going to get nowhere with Amos, and he sorrowfully abandoned the quest. He could not penetrate a mind where two opposite points of view could exist tranquilly side by side. Amos was perfectly ready to accept the Nicene Creed as true for everyone but himself. And he was already learning that if one could keep one's thoughts strictly to oneself, one had taken a long step toward impregnability.
This meant, of course, that he had no truly intimate friends, persons, that is, with whom he wished to share his motivating ideas. Even his devotion to his parents did not induce him to do this. His mother was a small, gentle, graying lady, always perfectly neat and simple, who was happy to believe the best of everyone, especially of her "darling boy," as she always called him. Amos felt little need of words to supplement the deep sympathy that existed between them; he was satisfied to recognize that she lacked, and was quite content to lack, the clarity of vision that would enable her to comprehend him more fully.
His father, though equally loved, was a very different affair. His stout, rathe
r formidable looks and the heavy gold objects attached to his watch chain seemed to deny the devotion and benevolence that he manifested to his wife and offspring and especially to his only son and heir. Disobedience to the rigid rules that he laid down for the government of his household might well have brought violence out of hidden places in his heart, but this he never encountered, as his family subscribed in all sincerity to his conservative moral and philosophical creed.
And to his political one. Mr. Herrick, like all his relatives and the bulk of his acquaintances, regarded the advent of the New Deal as an ancient Roman might have regarded the onslaught of Attila. "A traitor to his class" was the mildest of the terms that greeted any mention of President Roosevelt's name in the halls of his clubs. When the Supreme Court took to overturning what he denounced as "Bolshevik legislation," he wrote his friend Justice Van Devanter, "You are guarding the pass at Thermopylae with all the heroism of Leonidas." Amos, of course, was in entire agreement.
But the storm that now burst on the Herricks might have been the revenge of an outraged liberal god. In the fall of 1936 Mr. Herrick died of an apoplectic stroke, and Amos, as his executor, found himself in a desperate struggle to mitigate the impact of what threatened to be almost confiscatory estate taxes. The distinguished old firm that had for so many decades represented the Herricks proved to have been woefully deficient in preparing for what to them had evidently been the new and unfamiliar thrust of federal levies. Trusts that had been deemed immune from inheritance duties were found to contain powers that swept them into Mr. Herrick's taxable estate; gifts to Amos and his sisters were held to have been made in contemplation of death, and the final assessment of what was due Uncle Sam had to be raised by the sale of securities at an all-time market low. In the end, the widow and her offspring might still have been considered by some to be well-to-do, but the bloom was certainly off their rose. The house in Maine, with its gardens, pier, and small steam yacht, had to be sold, the staff in the townhouse slashed to a mere three, the charities drastically reduced, and the list of poor relatives to be helped stricken to almost nothing.
The Young Apollo and Other Stories Page 11
