"Oh, Evalina, you're taking it much too hard. Remember that she's a mother. A mother will always forgive."
"There's nothing to forgive."
"Well, forget then. She's basically too warm-hearted not to."
"You may be one on whom her charm will work. Most men are. Watch out!"
"Anyway, I have you to guard me," he retorted with a smile. "And of course you're quite right about Ivry. He's not the man for you at all."
"I'm glad you see that." She gave him an earnest look, but he continued in his humorous vein.
"No, you need a stalwart puritan, Evalina, as American as yourself. I wonder if Boston isn't the place for you to look."
"I'm not looking," she replied, endeavoring to hide the hurt she felt. "And now I want you to go over with me the steps I'm to take when I reach my majority next month."
"I've made a little memo, and I have it here. But let me first point out that although all the changes you're going to be making in your mother's way of life are essential to save her from ruin and although she will still be better off than all but a very few women in Paris, she is nonetheless going to scream that you are reducing her to pauperdom."
"You see it exactly," was Evalina's grim comment.
"So let me be the one to tell her. Let her wrath fall on my head. She will kick me out of the house and never see me again, but that's all right. I'm due to leave the Paris office anyway, and the bank knows and approves of the whole plan, so I have nothing to lose. You must stay away and let it appear that you had nothing to do with the matter."
"But she is entitled to know that she is not being just pushed around by a cold and indifferent bank. She is entitled to know that her daughter, representing her late husband, has given deep and conscientious consideration to every aspect of the reorganization of her financial life."
Thaddeus pursed his lips to emit a faint whistle. "Very well. But it's going to be quite a scene."
"Which you will witness. For I want you there."
The meeting turned out to be quite as bad as Thaddeus had predicted. They met, the three of them, on a cold, gray December morning in the parlor of the hôtel on the Rue de Grenelle. Eliane, who had some inkling of what was in store for her, listened in ominous silence while Thaddeus summarized the list of the Lane properties in France and gave their assessed valuations. Then Evalina delivered her carefully rehearsed speech.
"I am setting up a trust for your benefit, Maman, the trustees of which will be the Morgan Bank and the senior partner of the Lane family law firm in New York. It will be funded sufficiently to give you an income equal to what you had before you depleted the legacy that my father left you."
"Ah, you throw that in my face!"
"Only to assure you that you will be just as well-off as he intended you to be."
"But your father didn't subject me to the indignity of being controlled by trustees!"
"And you see what the result has been. I am not reproaching you, Maman. I am simply guaranteeing that it will not happen again."
"And what if I run into some emergency? What if the income is insufficient in the event of some disaster?"
"Your fiduciaries will have the power to invade principal in their discretion."
"So you've bound me hand and foot! What about Magny? Will I be able to keep it up?"
"I'm afraid not. Magny is, as you know, in my name. The high expense of maintaining the chateau and all the farms is out of all proportion to your use of it. Last year you were there for exactly three weekends. I feel compelled to sell it."
"The family chateau! You'll sell the family chateau! Which has been ours since the Dark Ages!"
"Actually, it was acquired by the Bourbon-Brassards only when they returned from emigration with Louis XVIII in 1816. But I shall endeavor to find a purchaser who will respect its historic value. If not, I may give it to the nation. The villa in Cannes where you now spend a good part of the winter, which is in our joint names, will be placed in yours alone."
"Very generous, I'm sure! And this house we're now in?"
"That is yours already. And I'm setting up a separate trust to maintain it. So your life should continue very much as it has been. And of course, if things should go really wrong, you will always have me to count on."
"Do you think I'd ever take a sou from you after the way you've treated me? Stripped me of my beloved chateau and tied me up to foreign trustees!"
"I shan't look to you as my judge, Maman. I must do as I think right."
"Oh, leave me, leave me alone, both of you! You say this house is mine. Then will you please go to some other part of it?"
"I thought you might be feeling that way, so I have already reserved a room at the Crillon."
Thaddeus at this intervened. "Please, Eliane, try to see things more reasonably. Evalina is only seeking to ensure your security. She—"
"And you too, Thaddeus Warwick!" Eliane almost screamed. "You've aided this crazy girl in every wicked scheme she's been plotting ever since I was naive enough to take her in. You and her mean old grandmother in New York."
In the front hall, while a footman placed Evalina's bags in the car that would take her to her new residence, she and Thaddeus exchanged a few half-whispered remarks.
"Was I all right, Thad?" she demanded, with a tremor in her tone. "Do you think I was really all right?"
"You were more than all right. You were Olympian!"
"You mean it? Honestly and truly?"
"My dear, you were like a heroine in a tragedy by Corneille!"
But that night, that sleepless night, in her splendid but lonely suite in the Crillon, Evalina was haunted by the memory of his eyes. Their aspect might have been admiring, even a bit awe-stricken, but it could never have been called anything like loving. A heroine of Corneille! Had she not read those plays? Had he and she not discussed them? Did she not know just what he thought of those so-called heroines? Sophonisbe, who loved her fatherland more than she loved either of her husbands; Rodelinde, who bade the usurper of her crown slay her infant son in order to mark him as a beast in the eyes of his new subjects; Pulcherie, who preserved her virginity even in marriage so that she might not share her sovereign power with a man. Who would want to marry such women? Were they not monsters all? Had her own mother not called her that?
She had several meetings with Thaddeus in the days that followed, for all her new arrangements had to be effected in legal documents and discussed with counsel, Thaddeus, of course, presiding at the conferences. But after the final signing of deeds and trust instruments, he invited her to celebrate the occasion at a lunch at the Tour d'Argent, and she took quick advantage of their isolation to show herself to him in a softer and kindlier light than that shed by the heroines of the seventeenth-century stage.
"I've been worried about Maman," she began. "She really needs someone to look after her. I wonder if Peter Everett isn't just the man. He adores her and finds her faultless. And he takes every symptom of her malaise with a reverent faith. What's more, he's always available. He can write those lovely laquered essays of his wherever she chooses to take him."
"You're thinking of him, of course, as a husband. But do you think she would ever agree? He's not precisely my idea of a great lover."
"Maman doesn't really need a lover. She loves to flirt, but I have an idea it's not apt to go much farther. She likes the sound and flutter of romance. She likes to be fussed over. Peter suits her to perfection, and he's been around her for years. I think she might marry him if she had any real fear of losing him. The question is, would he marry her?"
"Why not, if he's such a lap dog? And then there's always the money."
"That's just it. That's what worries him. Will there always be the money? He's seen her blowing it. And to be left poor with Maman on his hands is not a fate any man would want."
"He doesn't know, then, about your arrangements?"
"How would he? You don't think she'd ever tell him, do you? Never! She's too ashamed of it. No, you
must tell him, Thad."
"Me? Why me? Can't you do it?"
"Think of it! It would humiliate the poor man to take it from a mere girl."
He thought it over for a minute and then nodded. "Very well. I'll do it. And let me add that I think it's very good of you to give so much thought to your mother's welfare after the way she's treated you."
She could have clapped her hands. "Then you don't think I'm like one of those terrible Corneille heroines?"
"Dear me, is that what they are? But of course I don't think you're really like that. What an idea, Evalina! What do you take me for?"
"I don't know!" she almost cried out. "I don't know what I take you for." And then, in a kind of despair, she threw restraint away. "I only know what I want to take you for. I'm not like a Corneille heroine. I'm like one out of Racine. Like Hermione in Andromaque! Watch out, Thaddeus! I may kill you yet."
"Why, Evalina! I really haven't known you, have I?"
"You know me now."
He gave her a long, serious look before answering. "And I think I may like what I'm getting to know."
Immediately she picked up her menu. "Let's say nothing more for now. Let's order."
That evening she dined in her suite at the Crillon with Ella Pratt, who was visiting an aunt who lived in Paris. Evalina, very untypically, drank two strong cocktails.
"I think I'm going to marry Thaddeus Warwick," she announced.
"What!" Ella was agape. "The man at Morgan! I thought you told me he was in love with someone else."
"He was. It was the love of his life. The kind that doesn't come twice. But she's married now. I'll be perfectly safe with what he has left to offer. It'll be quite enough. For me, anyway."
"Heavens! And he's proposed?"
"Not yet. But something tells me he will."
"Lina, go slow. I mean it, dear. How can you marry a man if you don't even think you're his great love? How can you be sure he won't have another?"
"Because he won't have time."
"Does it take so much time?"
"More than he's going to have. Because I'm going to keep him very busy. I'm going to see that he becomes a great man. The man my father should have been."
Ella shook her head. "Mightn't it be better to make yourself a great woman?"
"The time hasn't come for that. We still have to marry greatness. It's the only sure way to achieve it."
Ella dubiously raised a glass. "Well, I'll drink to it, anyway. I can do that much."
2
The first dozen years of Evalina's married life brought her everything she had hoped they would bring. Thaddeus proved an agreeable, affectionate, and articulately admiring husband. If there was a mildly jesting tone in some of his compliments, if he joked a little too much among their friends about her "whim of iron" and referred to her as "the driving little angel of his conscience," she knew that he knew that she was just what he had always needed and that he loved the part of himself that she had striven to become. Had she not always known that his feelings for her were a good deal less intense than hers for him? Very well. She was certainly not going to be one of those silly women who try to console themselves with the illusion that marriage will create a deeper love than may have existed before it. She might deem herself lucky that the reverse had not occurred. And after all, she had been able to accomplish what she had set out to do: to dedicate her brain, willpower, and fortune to the goal of making him a great man.
Indeed, she seemed well on her way. After their return to New York he had continued his steady rise to the leadership of the Morgan Bank, interrupted only when he ran successfully on the Democratic ticket for a seat in the House of Representatives. After guaranteeing him financial independence from everyone, including herself, by establishing a large trust fund for his benefit, Evalina persuaded him to devote his full time to politics and writing on domestic and foreign affairs. "I want you to be free," she told him. "I don't want you to waste any of your talents earning a living." He had shaken his head, smiling. "Free? Don't you know, my dear girl, that you have shackled me to you by a hoop of gold? But don't worry. I think I'm going to like my shackles."
She was disappointed that she was able to give him only one child, a daughter, Wendy, but he adored the little girl to the point of not seeming to need any more. As a congressman he soon became well known for his outspoken and liberal views, and with the advent of the Roosevelt administration he came to play a significant role in the president's Brain Trust, drafting the legislation that was to be called the New Deal. The beautiful red brick Federal mansion that Evalina purchased in Georgetown became a principal political salon for the architects of a new economic future, and it was thrilling for her to feel a part of what was almost a social revolution. By 1937 she was beginning to wonder if there was any limit to what her husband might aspire to.
She had only to fear what to her were the potentially dangerous times when he relaxed into moods of cheerful but cynical self-deprecation. He was always too ready to mock himself and belittle what he and his fellow workers had accomplished.
"This whole business of economic reform is like making a clearing in the Brazilian rain forest. You trundle in cartloads of brilliant new ideas to act as bulldozers to tear up the trees and brambles, drag away the rocks, and level the hills. And at last there it is, your beautiful bare space, wide and flat and unencumbered, ready for all the great new things you will construct on it. But just wait. The jungle is patient. It knows in how brief a time it will creep back, like a remorseless glacier, and reoccupy all its stolen finery. And no one will know we've even been there."
Evalina at first had protested these predictions, but she had learned that it was wiser to smile, shrug, and appear to ignore them. At any rate, they always seemed to pass and not to interfere with his devotion to the Roosevelt programs. Some of his confreres seemed actually to believe that his underlying sense of the eternal comedy of things added to the charm of a personality that won him such a following among thinking people. But would that be true for the voters in a larger electoral area than the "silk stocking" district of New York City which had returned him? Didn't the great American public cling to gravity and windy oratory?
She found herself coming near to discussing this, at one of her larger cocktail parties, with Mary Appleton, who happened, most untypically, to be sitting alone in a corner. Mary was a fresh young thing, bright and sparkling, whom everyone cultivated because she worked at the White House.
"How gratifying to catch you alone, Mary. I rarely have a word with you."
"Oh, I'm just resting a moment. Thad said he was coming to join me. I suppose he wants to pump me."
"That doesn't sound like him."
"How do you mean?"
"Thad never pumps people. He says, Just wait. They'll tell you."
Mary laughed. "Well, I didn't think he was coming over for my beaux yeux. Everyone in Washington has a reason for anything he does. Even at a party. Or should I say, particularly at a party."
"Not Thad. Sometimes I wish he had a reason. Don't those who do get places?"
"Get where?"
"Oh, into the Senate, say. Or even the White House."
"Only that? But Thad will never be president. Or even a senator."
"Why not?" Evalina felt suddenly that she was facing an unexpected crisis. She didn't like it. "Why will he never be either of those things?"
"Because he doesn't believe in himself. And the public will always smell that out, even if they can't smell anything else. They want a man who's in love with himself. A man who thinks he's God."
"Does Mr. Roosevelt think that?"
"No, but he's the exception that proves the rule. Take my word for it, Evalina. A man with a sense of humor has two strikes against him in politics."
"What, then, should I do to make Thad conceal his?"
"Don't do anything. Leave him just as he is." There was something now almost proprietary in the young woman's tone. "Thad's greatest contribution is always
going to be made more or less behind the scene. That's where his wonderful brain and imagination can operate most successfully. Thad, I can assure you, Evalina, is appreciated on the highest level. And the highest level is not the dumb voter. Let Thad be what he wants to be."
"What else could I possibly want?" Evalina rose now to leave her interlocutor before she should forget herself and say something rude. Then she spied her husband crossing the room toward them. She turned briefly back to Mary. "Well, here he is now. Maybe he is coming for your beaux yeux, after all."
Going to the bar for the drink that she suddenly felt she needed, she encountered her old friend Ella Pratt, now Ella Simkins, who had married a very political Washington lawyer and knew much of what was going on in government circles.
"Come sit with me a moment," she urged her. "I want to ask you something."
She led Ella into the library, which was deserted, and they sat in two chairs.
"Thad always likes to talk of the novelist George Meredith's fondness for what he calls the imps of comedy," Evalina began. "They look down on us poor mortals and smirk. And when they spot a particularly pompous ass, they skip down to play tricks on him."
"And who is the ass you have in mind?"
"Evalina Lane Warwick."
"Well, I can think of words to describe you, my dear friend, but that is the last that would have occurred to me. Of what do you imagine your assaninity to consist?"
"In my perhaps willful failure to recognize that Thad is having an affair with Mary Appleton."
Ella's features congealed. That she uttered no immediate denial was sufficient evidence that she already knew. "What makes you think so?"
"Ella, you're my best friend. You wouldn't lie to me."
"But I don't have to say anything."
"But you might tell me what I should do about it."
"Nothing." Ella was very definite.
"I should simply look the other way?"
"It shouldn't matter where you look, so long as you don't do anything. Look, Lina. You and Thad have a great life. Don't wreck it."
The Young Apollo and Other Stories Page 15
