by John O'Hara
• • •
The will of Joseph B. Chapin contained no surprises. It was an orderly document, meant to be read in public. Certain sums were to be paid to servants and charities, and those sums were specified in dollars, but the bulk of the estate was in stocks, bonds, and mortgages, identified by name or location.
The sum of $100,000 was to be paid to the son, Joseph Benjamin Chapin Junior, and a like sum to the daughter, Ann Chapin. The remainder was to be used to create a trust fund for the widow, Edith Chapin. Upon her death the fund was to be divided equally between the son and the daughter. Personal items such as cuff links, cigarette cases, pearl studs, watches, watch chains were to be the property of the widow, but it was suggested that they might be distributed among friends: Chapin’s law partner, his physician, the steward of the Gibbsville Club and the first, as yet unborn, grandson.
Edith Chapin, as she always had been, was a woman in comfortable circumstances. Now, in fact, in 1945, she was in more than comfortable circumstances. She was rich. But it would not be known that she was rich. The details of her wealth were known to only a few persons, who were not likely to discuss those details with others not privileged to have the information. The directors of her bank would know, her husband’s law partner would know, the county Register of Wills would know. But there was no gossip value in the size of Joe Chapin’s estate or the terms of his will. He had left more money than anyone had expected him to leave, but not so much more that the amount was sensational. If he had died poor, or enormously wealthy, the public, the public curiosity would have had to be satisfied. He had not died poor, and only a little richer (and that was to be expected of a man like Joe Chapin); consequently there would be no dislocation of the Chapin family status, and the status had always been described as in comfortable circumstances. There was a butcher on the West Side of town who had less money than Edith Chapin, who lived on the East Side of town. The butcher had a Cadillac, and so had Edith Chapin, but the butcher’s was newer. The butcher’s son was studying for the priesthood and was no great drain on his father’s income; but Joe Chapin Junior was not studying for the priesthood, and he would be no great drain on his mother’s income. The 18th Street butcher was said to be getting rich; the Frederick Street widow was said to be in comfortable circumstances.
The butcher was not in attendance at the funeral of Joseph Benjamin Chapin, which took place in Trinity Church. The butcher and Joe Chapin never had spoken a word to each other in all their lives, and yet the butcher would have been surprised to discover how much Joe Chapin knew about him. A clever man who is a lawyer and bank director, and whose family have lived in a town through three generations, acquires and usually retains a great deal of information on his fellow citizens. And it was too bad, in some ways, that the butcher and the lawyer had not been friends, or at least closer acquaintances. There was only a small difference in their ages, an inconsiderable difference; and the two men had several matters in common. Each man had a son and a daughter, disappointing children. Both men had remote wives. from whom they never had been separated. And now, with most of life gone in the one case and all of it gone in the other, it was too late for either man to realize his great ambition. The butcher had wanted to be heavyweight prize-fight champion of the world. Joe Chapin had always wanted to be President of the United States, and thought he ought to be.
One man among the imposing company of honorary pallbearers in Trinity Church knew how deep and serious Joe Chapin’s ambition had been. One man knew, and another suspected. The man who knew was Arthur McHenry, Joe’s law partner. The man who suspected was Mike Slattery, state senator and chairman of the Republican county committee. Arthur McHenry always thought Joe Chapin would have made a good President, and Mike Slattery hardly thought of it at all. Arthur McHenry knew more of the thoughts and deeds of Joseph Benjamin Chapin than any other man had known, and through all phases of Joe Chapin’s life; his boyhood, his young manhood, his middle and declining years. He knew how much Joe Chapin depended upon him, and he knew that Joe Chapin believed he depended on no one. Joe Chapin never required a pledge of secrecy before revealing a matter to Arthur McHenry. And there were few matters he did not reveal. Indeed, it was not so much that he revealed a secret as bestowed it. In the reporting of an intimate detail, the pledge of secrecy was taken for granted, as Arthur McHenry himself was taken for granted. From another man the details that Joe Chapin felt free to discuss with Arthur McHenry would have been distasteful, but there was a kind of arrogant and trusting innocence in Joe Chapin’s revelations to Arthur McHenry, and Arthur McHenry respected the innocence. Somewhere along the way he realized that Joe Chapin’s dependence on him gave him strength. Seemingly his status was secondary to Joe’s; Joe was a handsomer man, possessed of immediately effective charm in the clubhouse or the courtroom, and it had been more or less that way since kindergarten. But Arthur McHenry knew that the charm was less effective when he was not around. Whenever he returned from a trip of long duration Arthur McHenry could see that Joe Chapin’s frown had become set; a few days later, with their hours of confidings and revelations, the frown would begin to disappear. “We’ve missed you, Arthur,” Joe would say—and never understand that he was uttering more than a politeness. With realization Arthur McHenry became more comfortable in the relationship. It was quite enough for him to have the consciousness of his indispensability to the only man he loved.
The man who might have done more than he did to expedite Joe Chapin’s ambition was not a fellow to waste love on anyone who would not return it. Mike Slattery was easy to define; too easy. He was Irish, second generation, and he had the pleasant, unlined face of a well-fed, successful parish priest. He had the look of a man who spent a great deal of time with the barber, the manicurist, and the bootblack. He had small, hairless hands, and small feet that in another time and land would have been expert in step-dancing. He was exquisitely tailored, always in dark blue, and always wore a black knitted necktie with a pearl stickpin. His Irishness was a secret weapon. He was frankly and proudly Irish, but the Irishness was actually a means of allowing the non-Irish to succumb to self-deception. He could tell a funny story, and he had a quick wit, and no one would ever have mistaken him for anything but what he was, racially. He was good company, not to be ignored. But where the non-Irish made their mistake was in assuming that that was all he was; a jovial man from the Emerald Isle. He didn’t fool the Irish; they saw through him while yielding a sort of loyalty to his accomplishments. But the non-Irish had to learn through associations and battles that he was a realistic, crafty, treacherous politician. He was contemptuous of the common Irish, and they sensed it, but he was the man to go to for favors, which whenever possible he granted, and with the favors and their pride in his prestige he kept them in line. As soon as he suspected that Joe Chapin was beginning to act like a man who wanted to be President he decided that Chapin was not presidential timber, and from that moment on Joe Chapin never had a chance. And Mike Slattery liked Joe Chapin. Joe Chapin was a gentleman, generally predictable in his actions and reactions and thus not likely to be troublesome. Also, he had a boyishness about him that was attractive to Mike Slattery, the father of four girls and one of them a nun. Much of what he did for Joe Chapin he did because he used him as a son, without being responsible as Joe’s father. And some of what he did for Joe Chapin he did because he admired Edith Chapin. “If I’d been a Protestant I’d have married Edith Chapin,” he once said, leaving no room for doubt that Edith would have accepted him.
Funerals were a part of Mike Slattery’s life, and they might have been as much so even if he had not become a politician. This one was going well, predictably well. He looked over to the pew in which Edith Chapin, heavily veiled, sat impassive with her son and daughter and her own brother. At a Protestant funeral someone might faint, or have a heart attack, but there never was as much weeping, quiet or otherwise, as at a Catholic funeral. Mike Slattery did not weep at funerals or anywhere else; he had not wept twice in
his entire manhood. This one time he had wept was on the day that Margaret, his daughter, had come to him and told him quietly that her mind was made up; she had a true vocation and was joining the Sacred Heart nuns. And it was not sadness that had made him weep that day; it was for fatherly joy, that this plain girl had found a life for herself in which she would be happy. And there was pride, too. The Sacred Heart were an aristocratic order, and if a daughter of his was going to be a nun, it was nice to be able to think of her with the daughters of the best Catholic families. If Edith Chapin had been a nun, she would have been a Sacred Heart nun. The presence of her son and daughter beside her in the pew detracted not at all from Mike Slattery’s fancy of Edith Chapin as a nun, and the veil she wore gave a realistic touch to the fancy. In his life as a politician he had had to hear and make use of many intimate facts about many people, including what he called their bed life. He had used the secret homosexuality of one political opponent to advantage; he had told an associate to get out of politics long before the nymphomania of the man’s wife became common knowledge. No one had any information that could be used against Mike Slattery, but there were no peculiarities, perversions, excesses or denials that were unheard of by Mike Slattery—and nothing shocked him. But he never had been able to imagine Edith Chapin without her clothes on, nor Edith and Joe Chapin in the positions of bed life. He could not picture Edith Chapin getting out of her tub, drying herself. She was always to him a rather tall woman who was always fully dressed, who had a bosom without nipples. But along the way he had learned a thing or two about Joe Chapin, and what he had learned contradicted the notion that Edith Chapin was no more than a head on a virginal torso. Mike Slattery’s repeated inability to illustrate in his mind the thought of Edith Chapin with her legs spread, ready to receive her husband (or any other man), was, he had sense enough to know, a part of her attraction for him. And she attracted him; always had.
Not so Ann, her daughter, a young woman who had been loosely called beautiful when people would enumerate the beauties among the girls of the Gibbsville upper crust. No one ever had called Edith Chapin beautiful, but in Mike Slattery’s estimation she came closer to beauty than Ann did. His standards were his own and never stated, but Mike Slattery never had been known to call beautiful a woman who had any connection with sin. Ann Chapin Musgrove had been more or less vaguely connected with sin as far back as Miss Holton’s School. The four Slattery girls had gone to Miss Holton’s and the stories the girls brought home from Miss Holton’s had sometimes given Mike Slattery useful leads for subsequently useful information. Ann Chapin’s smoking was not extremely useful, but it had prepared Mike Slattery for the later news that Ann Chapin and one of the Stokes girls had gone for a ride down country in a butcher’s delivery truck. The girls had left the school after the eleven o’clock geometry class, wearing their school uniforms. As part of the adventure the truck had had to get stuck in the spring mud, “miles” from the main highway. It was seven o’clock in the evening before the girls got home. At eleven o’clock in the evening Mike Slattery had persuaded Joe Chapin not to have the boy fired. “Get him fired and you’ll never hear the end of it,” said Mike. “You handle the people at Miss Holton’s. I’ll take care of the boy.” There was no traceable connection between the frolic with the Chapin and Stokes girls and the boy’s departure. The boy left town and, as Mike said to his own wife, never knew what hit him.
Nineteen years ago, that was.
Not so long, at that.
Still, pretty long, when you consider that Edith Chapin was only forty when it happened. A woman forty is only a year out of her thirties, and Mike Slattery had three daughters in their thirties and he considered them young girls.
For no more than a second or two he was tempted to turn around and see if he could find his wife’s face in the congregation. He quickly conquered the temptation; it would not look well, and besides he knew she would be somewhere in the church. Peg Slattery didn’t have to be told twice which funerals to go to and which not. Her attendance at a funeral was to some extent a measure of the importance of the deceased or the survivors. She attended all politicians’ funerals, regardless of party; practically all lawyers’ funerals; all clergymen’s funerals, and nearly all funerals for doctors, bankers, merchants, officers of fraternal orders and veterans’ organizations; and popular freaks, such as old athletes, crippled newsdealers, Chinese laundrymen, canal-boat captains, aged Negro waiters, retired railroad conductors and enginemen, and children of unusually large families (ten or more). Joe Chapin came under several classifications and was in addition a personal friend, although Peg Slattery never had been inside his house. At the funeral Peg Slattery and her daughter Monica sat where they could be seen. With long practice she had mastered the impersonal bow for funerals and other state occasions: if someone looked at her, met her eye, she would nod, and if the person chose to take it as a bow, a bow it was. If the person was not someone to be bowed to, she would quickly turn away, and the person could think, because she had turned away, that no bow had been intended. In any case it was an unsmiling bow, or nod, or mere inclination of the head, quite suitable for use at funerals and other solemn occasions. The bow, or nod, was a part of her awareness of her position as the wife of Mike Slattery, a man to whom powerful people came for favors, who was powerful enough himself to grant the favors—and who discussed everything with her. No bridge was built over an obscure creek, no boy got an appointment to Annapolis, no reassessment of valuable property was put through without a discussion between Mike Slattery and Peg. It had taken some men thirty years to realize that fact, during which time they had antagonized Peg Slattery by ignoring her. She wanted no attention from the men, but she badly wanted their wives not to forget for one minute that she was the most powerful human influence upon one of the most powerful men in the Commonwealth. Edith Chapin had not forgotten; she had never known.
Peg Slattery did not know the name of the man who was conducting the funeral service. She had read it in the paper that morning, and the previous afternoon. Whoever he was, he pronounced his words like F.D.R., in whose single person were contained most of the features that Peg Slattery hated. The man in the cassock, surplice and stole did not resemble F.D.R., but because he enunciated as he did, he became a temporary symbolic representative of Mr. Roosevelt. She hated Roosevelt because he was a more successful politician than Mike Slattery; because he was a Protestant, an aristocrat, a charm-boy, a socialist, a liar, a warmonger, a double-crosser, and the husband of Eleanor Roosevelt. One of Peg Slattery’s few witty remarks of record was her widely quoted comment that the only thing she liked about the Roosevelts was that they were Democrats, and she hated Democrats. She had no pride of authorship, but the remark itself made her hate the Roosevelts a little more when, a year or so later, she heard it repeated and attributed to some Republican committeewoman from New York. New York was where this man was from, who was quoting the Bible and sounding like an actor. A classmate of Joe Chapin’s at Yale.
“The minister was a classmate of Joe Chapin’s. At Yale.” Peg Slattery whispered the information to Monica Slattery McNaughton. Peg had selected her second daughter to accompany her to the funeral because Monica was almost the same age as Ann Chapin Musgrove. Monica liked Ann well enough, but she had gone with her mother because she knew there would be almost an hour between the end of the service and lunch, and her mother might get generous and buy her a hat. The ceremonies preceding burial of the dead sometimes had that effect on her mother, Monica well knew, and Monica herself regarded a free hat as an earned fee for spending an hour in a strange church with a lot of people who did not interest her. She knew most of them, but they did not interest her. Like her sisters, Monica had been brought up to conduct herself at all times with courtesy to all comers, and politeness was drummed into the Slattery girls until it became practically instinctive. Their white gloves were maintained in spotless condition, their white teeth were under constant supervision and the paris
hioners of SS. Peter & Paul’s would have backed the Slattery girls against any family from Trinity Church, for politeness, neatness, and all-around presentability.
Monica could execute the Peg Slattery nod, in slightly different form. When Monica and the other Slattery daughters did the Peg Slattery nod they added a gentle smile, a continuation, in maturity, of the smiles they had been commanded to give throughout childhood. Because of the added smile, the Slattery girls’ nod differed from their mother’s. Monica, Marie, Michelle—each was pretty in her own way, and a pretty girl’s smile, even when given through an error of recognition, is welcome the world over. Even another woman has trouble resisting a pretty girl’s smile when it has asked nothing in return. People who really knew better, who had had experience of life, had been known to remark that the Slattery girls made you feel that your troubles would soon be over. Others, slightly less cynical, had said that it was easy to see that the Slattery girls had never known a moment’s unhappiness. Then there were others who, until Margaret took the veil, declared that the four Slattery girls were the best vote-getters Mike Slattery had. It was a not quite accurate judgment, since Mike Slattery did not get votes in the sense of persuading voters. The individual voter as such was not a concern of Mike’s; he seldom made speeches, and he had abandoned door-to-door nonsense after his second term as assemblyman. He delivered a county, not a voter; the voter was the responsibility of the captain or the ward leader. But it would be accurate to declare that the four Slattery sisters had not cost him any votes.
Monica finished her inspection of the women’s hats; women were not likely to wear anything interesting to a funeral anyway. The clergyman talked on, pronouncing his words in the same manner as some of her old schoolmates at Manhattanville; the New York ones. It was not a Boston accent, but it was not Brooklyn either. It was just the way certain of the New York girls spoke. Some of their brothers went to Fordham and some went to Yale, and they had the same accent. Just like this clergyman.
