We never quarreled about it; we did not even talk about it. We had many friends, and we went out and about socially, at least on weekends, for he worked too hard to do so on weekdays, and we both loved and fussed over our only child, Gwendolyn. We were considered a well-matched, happy, and attractive couple, and to some extent we were. But now I think I can see that the reason he worked so hard was not only that he loved the practice of law, which he did, but that he wished to bring me the worldly success he knew I wanted. At least, he may have generously thought, he could do that much for me.
And he did. He became a partner in the firm at twenty-nine, and it was evident to all that he was destined to be one of the leading lights of the New York bar and no doubt, when his fortune was made, a judge on a high court.
Oh no, I had nothing to complain about, but that never stops one from complaining. I fretted constantly at the notion that I was not the woman he had dreamed of, and tended more and more to resent the fact that he had presumed to have such a dream. I offer this memory of the kind of thing that used to exasperate me. It was on a night when Pa and Mother were dining at our place—just the four of us—and Sumner and Pa were discussing John Gielgud's performance as Hamlet, over which they were both lyrically enthusiastic. Mother had preferred John Barrymore's earlier interpretation of the vengeful Dane, but they had almost violently disagreed with her.
"Nobody," Pa murmured in his most velvet tone, "has a voice as musical as Gielgud's. The poet Alfred de Musset is supposed to have fainted dead away when he heard the divine Sarah utter that exquisite line in Phèdre with the two accents circonflexes: "Ariane, ma'sœur, de quel amour blessée / Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée." I felt almost that way in the final scene, where the dying Hamlet addresses the staring onlookers: 'You that look pale and tremble at this chance / That are but mutes or audience to this act.'"
"Yes, what glorious lines those are!" Sumner exclaimed. "It is as if Hamlet is suddenly breaking out of the play and addressing not only the gaping Danish court but the audience at the Globe Theatre. We have been sitting on the edge of our chairs for two hours, and now, at last, at the end, we are with him!"
That was one of the times that I spoke up. "How can you both go on so about a simple sentence? One that anyone might have written. 'You that look pale.' What's so great about that? 'And tremble at this chance.' Oh, come off it, Sumner! And you too, Pa! It's really too silly to make so much of that."
Sumner said nothing, but Pa turned on me. "Aren't you exposing something of a tin ear, Kate? Though perhaps your reaction would have been shared by some of the great ladies of the Tudor court. I seem to see you as one of Holbein's pale, grave beauties playing the deadly game of power because it's the only game to play, even if you end with your head on the block. Isn't Lady Macbeth one of them? Resolute, realistic, eager to shake her husband out of his inhibitions and fantasies? Of course, my sweet, I don't accuse you of murder."
"Lady Macbeth had no imagination," Mother commented. Mother would. "She could not foresee what guilt would do to either of them."
Of course, it was a crack at me. But Mother was wrong. I had quite enough imagination to see the flaw in my marriage.
The great grief of my life—at least as I have always tried to see it and make others see it—was Sumner's death as an officer in the British army in the evacuation of Dunkirk, in that grim spring of 1940. But what I can now privately inscribe is that the blow to my pride was as heavy as that to my heart when I learned that Sumner had confided to my father but not to me all the tumult and agony of his decision to leave his wife and child and country to enlist in what was still a foreign war. To his "beloved Kate" he had presented only the "kinder and quicker" last-minute announcement of a fait accompli. Quicker it certainly was; kinder it was not.
Of course I had known that Sumner was following with the most intense interest every item of European news, from the Munich Pact to the invasion of Poland, and that he passionately believed that we should have been in the war from its start. And of course I was aware of his keenness for military training; he belonged not only to the Seventh Regiment but to the National Guard. But it never crossed my mind that he would do anything so rash as to desert his family and the great firm of which he was so valued a young partner to rush abroad and join a fight in which his nation was still neutral. He simply came home from the office one night, grim and tense, poured each of us a stiff drink, and told me he was leaving for Montreal on the morrow. He had already assigned all his work in the office to Dicky Phelps.
"I knew, dearest," he told me in a thick voice, "how violently you would have opposed me. I just couldn't face the argument. I can't now. For God's sake, try to accept this. Tell yourself that you married a madman and let it go at that."
Well, for some time I did take it that way. After the first shock of his departure had worn off, I even began to take pride in what he had done. I was unique among my friends in actually having a soldier in the war. In the riotous discussions that soon broke out between the interventionists and the sponsors of America First, I noisily joined the former and found myself seated proudly on the dais at pro-war rallies. Like Teddy Roosevelt, I took "my stand at Armageddon to do battle for the Lord."
The elation so evoked helped me to endure the bleak news of Sumner's death from a strafing plane on a beach in northern France. I even gained a wide reputation for nobly accepting grief from a letter that I wrote to the Times: "In a day when many young men on this still unassaulted side of the Atlantic are asking why they should be concerned with ancient European animosities, it may be illuminating to cite the example of one who, without a word of reproach to those who felt otherwise, silently shouldered a gun and joined an alien army to fight for the patch of civilization we have left on the globe." Oh, yes, as the widow of one of the great war's first American victims, I had a fine role to play.
What changed all this for me was an article that Pa wrote for The Atlantic Monthly as a memorial tribute to Sumner. That it was a beautiful piece, nobly expressed, can be taken for granted. But the article revealed something that had, no doubt, been deliberately concealed from me: the long heart-to-heart talks that Pa had had with Sumner before he had given his blessing to his son-in-law's proposed enlistment in the British army.
Could anything have told me more clearly that I was not of the intellectual or spiritual stature to share those Olympian conferences?
I had not been a widow for long before Dicky Phelps began to show me a marked attention. Dicky was not only Sumner's partner; he had been a law school classmate and a deeply admiring friend. Yet I had always been aware that, however loyal a pal Sumner was of Dicky—and Dicky's openly demonstrative nature inspired affection—he did not return Dicky's admiration to anything like the same degree. The circumstances of Dicky's divorce from his dull little first wife were probably responsible for this. Dicky had explained to Sumner, at the time both had been made partners at Harris & Eyer, that the improvement of his legal position called for a corresponding improvement in his social one, and that his wife had failed to understand this. She had clung stubbornly to the old bunch from which he now sought to detach them, which had led ultimately to their separation and a bitter divorce.
It is certainly at times embarrassingly true that Dicky has always been absolutely shameless in admitting his social ambitions and the steps he is willing to take to effectuate them. But he honestly believes that they are shared by everyone and that it is perfectly proper to make no bones about them. And it's quite possible that he may be more often right than wrong in this assumption, but it nonetheless startles and sometimes shocks people. Pa used to say that Dicky was like a character in O'Neill's Strange Interlude who uttered the thoughts on his mind when he stood motionless on the stage and the thoughts that were socially acceptable when he moved.
Some people, like Dicky's first wife, deeply resented this trait in him, but more found it amusing. It seemed so natural from this big, stalwart, black-haired, bushy-eyebrowe
d, impressive male who embraced all the world with the same hearty candor. And, of course, Dicky, to boot, was a great corporation lawyer whose astute handling of the most complicated mergers and reorganizations was to carry him to leadership at the bar and the presidency of the New York State Bar Association.
Dicky virtually took charge of my widowhood. He telephoned me several times a week; he took me to plays and concerts; he sent me flowers and the newest books; he insisted that Sumner would have wanted me to enjoy a full and entertaining life. He showered with expensive gifts my eleven-year-old daughter, whose dislike of him he blandly ignored, and worshipfully cultivated the favor of my father, who made ribald fun of him. When he proposed that we should become lovers, and I at length agreed, it was as if he were paying the ultimate tribute to Sumner. But he proved himself as good a lover as he was a lawyer, and what could I better do than marry him? Which of course I did.
Mother, who was already ailing with the breast cancer that was to kill her, dealt me her final blow in her cheerful recognition that Dicky was just the man for me. Pa had his doubts, but he was fascinated by this new son-in-law. When Dicky told him frankly that he was postponing the wedding for two weeks so that his richest client, who was abroad, would be back in town to attend the small reception (small because of my widowhood), Pa said to me, "Imagine his telling me that reason! When he could have invented a dozen more innocuous ones! But that's Dicky all over; he puts things just as they are. Your man's unique, Kate. We should keep him in a jar!"
Yet Dicky seemed sublimely unconscious of the fact that Pa was laughing at him. When he heard Pa at a dinner party hilariously describe his first visit to the newly decorated offices of Harris & Eyer, Dicky laughed as hard as the others. Yet Pa had said, "As I stepped into the reception hall where my son-in-law's handsome likeness hung in all its painted glory, I tottered and gasped. I had sunk knee-deep in carpet!"
But in the years that followed my marriage, Pa and Dicky's joshing relationship began to develop into something like a real friendship. Pa must have found some kind of consolation for the doubts that his frequent melancholy cast over even his fame in the fulsome compliments of this big, bluff son-in-law, who professed to deem his own accomplishments and wealth as only trivial in contrast to the golden law opinions of this great but meagerly salaried judge. Indeed, Dicky appeared to regard his greatest claim to notice his connection with my sire. And Pa, who was beginning to show his age and to repeat himself, who was, if the truth be told, already something of a garrulous bore at dinner parties, was depending more and more on the uncritical and vociferous support that he received from my spouse.
But did Dicky ever aspire to emulate or even comprehend Pa's never-ending search for beauty in words, in art, in music, in history, in philosophy? Never. He wished to be crowned by the muses without imbibing their products. He wanted success, but success in all its manifestations. The world might admire power and money, but it also esteemed the arts. By associating himself with Pa, might he not borrow a few rays of Pa's aura? To Dicky, appearance and reality were the same. If he looked as if he had everything, why, then, he had everything. It was why he was perfectly happy. I had again been married for my father.
Dicky irritated me by taking on over Pa's death as if he had lost his own father. He wore a long face for weeks and insisted on sporting the black tie and black armband that had gone out of fashion years before. I was just able to refrain from sarcastic comment until he stipulated that we should turn down an invitation to what promised to be a stimulating dinner party and to which I had particularly looked forward.
"Really, Dicky, aren't you carrying things a bit far? It isn't as if we were being asked to a dance or some sort of jubilee. It's just a small circle of interesting friends sharing a few drinks and a meal. We'll be called hypocrites if we stay home on the excuse of mourning."
"Kate, I don't think you realize how broad a shadow your father's demise has cast over his family. Our friends, even our closest friends, tend to see us in relation to him. Therefore more in the way of mourning is expected of us."
"Do you think I don't know about that shadow? Haven't I spent my life in it?"
"Then you should know how to act."
"Acting is just the word for what you want me to do! Well, I'm going to that dinner party! With you or without you!"
"It may be acting for you, my dear. But it won't be for me. I feel as if some of the light had gone out of my life with your father's passing."
"Don't be more of an ass than God made you!"
Dicky at this rose from the breakfast table without a word and departed for his office. He will think things over, as he always does, and when he comes home tonight he will utter no word on the subject. He has always been a great one at putting unpleasant things behind him. But I shall have a job to do in learning to live with his absurd faith that he enjoyed a unique accord with a father-in-law who actually found him an amiable fool. He is the second husband that my greedy parent has taken from me. Pa has done me two evil turns: he has made me feel unworthy of Sumner and worthy of Dicky. Why did he have to take out on me his bitterness over Mother's infidelity? Just because he was mortally afraid of her and I was the nearest available vulnerable woman?
Due Process
I CAN LAUGH at myself at eighty but not too hard. One's own conceit can be a kind of fortress; take care how one batters down the walls. I even have to remind myself that I am no longer eighty; today, Labor Day, appropriately named, is my birthday. The day was not so denominated in 1874, before the triumph of unions over individuals, when I first saw the light in Blue Hill, Virginia, in the westernmost part of that great state, an area that tempered the high civility of the old planters with some of the roughness and vigor of the American frontier. To be eighty is a kind of victory; to be eighty-one is simply senescent. Like Akela, the aging leader of the wolf pack in The Jungle Book, I have to snarl at my cautiously circling partners. But I am still the chief, more so anyway than any other senior of the great downtown law firms of Manhattan. Everyone on Wall or Broad Street in this year, 1955, knows that Rives, Bank and Tobin is essentially Langdon Rives. But how much longer that will last, no one can fathom. It will not, however, end tomorrow. Or even the day after. I still have some time, and I hope only death will terminate it.
The double doors to my large office remain firmly closed. No one opens them until my faithful old hound of a secretary, the big, blocky Mrs. Turnbull, has buzzed me from her outer chamber to seek my approval. I am content to be alone with my bleak dark prints of old English judges, my framed newspaper accounts of Confederate victories, my father's copy of a portrait of General Lee, and the black, now deemed ugly, mahogany chairs and settees taken from the family mansion in Blue Hill, currently on loan to a great-nephew I have to support. The image I have of myself fits into this rather awesome chamber, which is, somewhat contradictorily, flooded with light from the french windows on three sides opening onto a terrace, for my firm occupies the penthouse of an edifice beetling over New York Harbor. I say that my image fits it, for though in my youth I favored my mother's plain, bland features, with age I have come to share my father's craggy and stalwart grayness, together with his thick hair, high brow, and prominent nose. Oh, yes, I can look the part all right of the grand old lawyer, the despot whom the clerks try to see as benevolent, and sometimes almost succeed.
For there is a hammy side of my nature; I have to face it. I could have been an actor in a repertory company, playing Othello one night and Iago the next. But there's a difference. When I play the kindly old boss who will fill his old green Minerva limo with young associates if he spies them walking to the subway after work, or the tolerant leader who with a smile and the rapid scribbling of his pen can turn the bumbling brief of a junior partner into a work of art, I am acting a part—and with some relish, too—but when I shout at a stupid clerk to grab his hat and go home to his mother (knowing that he will be stopped by the experienced receptionist at the door and told to wait till my fi
t has passed), I am being genuine. If my benevolence is put on like stage makeup, my wrath is true.
Which is why I have picked up my pen to indite this memo. I am disgusted with the young professor at New York University Law School who has undertaken—with the financial backing, I have no doubt, of my partners—to write up the story of my litigating career. These silly coworkers of mine, who know nothing of books or their authors outside of law reports and whodunits, have the naivete to suppose that a biography by a reputedly serious scholar cannot help but add to my glory and the firm's, no matter how fiercely the author may repudiate my political views. And it is true that the draft of the chapter that this indurated liberal has submitted to me on my constitutional battle in the 1930s with the New Deal legislation is not too unfair. But now that he has come to the desegregation case, he has dropped all pretense of neutrality. Indeed, he and I have had a near shouting match, and I have sent him packing. Lord knows what he will write now, even if he has to give back the sums my misguided juniors have given him!
Why, he wanted to know, did I have to drag into the pool of defendants in Brown v. Board of Education my old school district in Virginia? What need was there to add my brief to the already quite adequate one of John W. Davis? What had induced me, by entering a case where my point of view was already perfectly represented, to tarnish my own reputation and that of the firm I had created by backing a cruel discrimination against a much wronged race?
To answer these questions I have to go back, way back, to the unspoiled rusticity of western Virginia. Blue Hill in 1874, only nine years after Appomattox—the small shabby town, the rather tumbledown farms, the barren fields—was still desolate in defeat and near despair. There wasn't much to see or to live on, but what there was belonged largely to my father. Not that that made us rich. Far from it. We lived in a now shabby red-brick cube of a "mansion," whose inevitable portico of chipped white columns seemed grimly intent on maintaining its once lofty eminence over the neighboring village, and were waited on by two old Negroes who had once been family slaves but who had elected to remain with us for little more than their board and keep. Yet we sat down for dinner at night, dressed in what faded finery we could find, at a table bearing the old silver which had been buried in the garden during the war, just as if we were still waited on by a dozen in help. It was all Father's doing. I revered him, but as a boy I sometimes hated him.
The Young Apollo and Other Stories Page 18
