The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  “Suppose these jeans and this large, male, ill-fitting shirt were all I had to wear?”

  “You shall not escape that easily,” Max said. “Besides, you forget that I know your breeding. You will have, at the very least, an elegant pantsuit in that closet. Kate dear, you are about to earn my eternal gratitude. I shall send you a magnificent present from Cartier’s, and wait all my life for the chance to do you an equally gallant service.”

  “You’d better begin,” Kate said, “if I am to spare your blushes, by smoking outside. I do not intend to don my elegant pantsuit in the bathroom. Can you drive?”

  “Alas, no,” Max said, bowing his way out, as though he were leaving an Edwardian drawing room in Belgravia. “But as you drive, I shall divert you on the way with tales about Cecily.”

  “Cecily Hutchins, too, famous writer though she was, wanted to be alone,” Max said, when they were under way, heading for the Mass. Turnpike. “I suppose, by an extension of the imagination, I can understand that. Solitude is comprehensible, though it has devastating effects upon one’s conversation: have you ever noticed that the solitary, when they do see you, positively bubble over with talk, the pressure, no doubt, of all the ideas which have for so long gone unuttered?”

  “That,” Kate said, “is the disadvantage of truly rural solitude, which mine, you will have noticed, is not. That is, not constantly. I lose myself among the long grass and thickets only on occasional weekends, or on holidays from the university. But I know what you mean. Of course, those who work all day with many people can, if they have any gift for loneliness, use the evenings and weekends for periods of silence, the reordering, the rediscovery of experience. Such, I hope, is my way. But for those who are alone all day—as Cecily apparently was—see there might be a problem.”

  “There are neighbors, of course, but they are mostly at some distance and, as is the way with this automobile culture, reachable only by car.”

  “You sound like me; but this automobile culture, as you call it, is taking you to where you want to be at this very moment.”

  “Only because there are no trains. Imagine, we might have taken a compartment, had tea served, or champagne, and watched the countryside flashing by to the reassuring click-clack of the wheels. No doubt about it, I was born a hundred years too late, in time to see all I might have treasured destroyed.”

  “Did Cecily feel that way, too? Odd, in that case, that she should have come to America at all.”

  “Cecily had two passions in her life: for Ricardo, her husband—one of her wilder eccentricities was always to call him by his last name—and for the sea. Once Ricardo died, there was only the sea. Her house is not, you know, quite on the sea, as are most in that part of the world. Hers is set back, across a meadow, so that the sea is visible from her windows, but the rocky coast is not; one must walk across the meadow in order to watch the waves crashing, in their implacable way, against the rocks. Her meadow,” Max added with a certain stringency, “always had a neat path from her door to the sea mowed right through it. She couldn’t live without the sea, but she said that, as in a good marriage, there must be both space and accessibility.”

  “Hooray for Cecily. Why have you only told me you knew her now she’s dead?”

  “Why, indeed. I saw little enough of her myself. She was a bit of a recluse in these last years, likely as not to forget one was coming, and give one a stale piece of cheese and a glass of wine for a meal. The wine, of course,” Max added, with the air of one determined to be wholly reasonable, “was always excellent. She may have been miles from anywhere, up there in Maine, but in those elegant coastal parts there is money, and in so far as civilization can be bought, it is available.”

  With the sort of courtesy Kate always appreciated in Max, he fell silent as she executed the tricky by-pass of Boston, Revere, and several rotaries which seemed specifically designed to enable cars going in opposite directions to meet head-on. She was pleased to note, however, that she was almost alone in heading north: the other traffic was clearly looking for something more populated. Once safely on Route 1 leading to 95, she fell to thinking about Cecily Hutchins. Her death had come as a shock, partly because one had had no warning, no notice of disease or deterioration of spirit, but mostly because such a loss shook Kate’s universe, which trembled in its furthest reaches. Cecily Hutchins had been one of those English authors who seem to escape, or avoid, the notice of reviewers or academic critics. She was too readable, perhaps; in the years before the seventies, too “feminine.” One of those to whom the first crocus would always be a miracle. Fame, the sort that is marked by requests to appear on television talk shows and be photographed for the slicker magazines, had come to her late, when she had written a book about solitude, about her life alone on the rocky coast of Maine. But so firmly had she set herself against both the intrusive scholars and the blandishments of the media world that, eventually, these institutions had had to content themselves with tales of her marvelous, her mysterious privacy.

  “Why do you think she went home to England to die?” Kate asked.

  “I think death overtook her there,” Max said. “She didn’t go in search of it in England’s green and pleasant land. What a romantic you are, Kate.”

  “She was well into her seventies. The possibility must have occurred to her. Why not wait for death on the rocky coast you have loved?”

  “I hope you are not considering taking up the authorship of Gothic novels. Could you have sought that primitive cabin for so nefarious a purpose?”

  “Oh, rot. She continued to live on the coast of Maine full-time when Ricardo died, and could hardly bear to leave it even for a day; at least, that’s what all the articles said. If suddenly she decided to visit England once again, there must have been a reason.”

  “None that was overpowering. Of course, her old dog had died, and she could go with an easier mind. Cecily, I regret to say, was one of those who willingly indenture themselves to representatives of the animal world, a regrettable but common English flaw. Also, if you want the most superficial excuse, she went to attend my nephew’s wedding. But I don’t for a moment think that was more than an excuse. She wanted to see England again, and happened to die there.”

  “You didn’t attend your nephew’s wedding?”

  “Certainly not. I sent a gift erring only slightly on the side of extravagance, and went on about my business. After all, one cannot desert one’s university post for transatlantic weddings, however familial. Besides, I would have had to fly madly back and forth, and I fly only when absolutely necessary. I was forgiven, my reputation for eccentricity and self-centeredness having by now established itself quite satisfactorily. Most people, dear Kate, err by trying to be thought generous, an ill-considered aim. Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years. Human beings must be carefully trained in what they can expect from you.”

  “I can’t decide whether you’re a quite sinister cynic, or merely Hal in Henry the Fourth, Part One.”

  “A distinction without a difference, my dear. ‘Cynic’ is the sentimentalist’s name for the realist.”

  “Cecily seemed content to choose a realist for her literary executor, then. I should have thought an optimist would have been likelier to work to enhance her reputation.”

  “Cecily was an intelligent woman, and therefore a fatalist in these matters. Those who manufacture reputations are battling against the clock. Others, with faith in the eventual judgment of the ages, are content to be the foster child of silence and slow time. More to the point, I was the son of her best friend, and more suited than her own children in these literary matters. She gave them most of her money before she died anyway, and they’ll get most
of what’s left now. I struggle alone with the papers and eventually a biography.”

  “Did she want a biography?”

  “Not especially, but what good does that do one, with all the hungry academics and publishers buzzing around corpses these days? I, however, shall protect her. She knew she could count on me for that. And I’ll do the biography she deserves.”

  “And what’s in it for you, besides a lot of work?”

  “Really, Kate, I’m not as wholly devoid of the ordinary human virtues as you might like to think. I simply don’t prate on about them. I was fond of Cecily, as was my mother. You need not make me out an ogre.”

  “Apologies. But you have said yourself the avoidance of personal burdens is one of your rules of life.”

  “Avoidance, not, as those horrible tax people say, evasion. I accept the duties that are properly mine. You are now saying to yourself, ‘How unfeeling he is!’ But I’m not, you know. I simply refuse to gush on in the accepted mindless way. Have you ever found me unresponsive to the claims of a friend and colleague?”

  “No,” Kate said, “I haven’t. But then, having a pretty clear notion of your personality, I didn’t make the claims excessive.”

  “My point exactly. Yet if, as might happen, I were the single person who could help you, would you not call upon me as I have called upon you, and would you not expect my compliance—my willing and gracious compliance?”

  Kate stared at Max so long that, when her eyes returned to the road, she had to swerve the car rather wildly to get back in her lane. “Yes,” she said. “You are right. Max. You are one of the people I trust and honor, and, what’s more, have affection for, though I would not dream of coming to you if I merely required a shoulder on which to pour out my self-pity. I see your point; quite right, too.”

  They drove in silence for a certain time. “Of course,” Kate said, after some miles, “I don’t altogether understand what we hope to find on the rocky coast of Maine, or, at any rate, within the house.”

  “We hope to find everything in place, nothing out of the ordinary. I shall have to affirm that all her papers are in order, and ready to be moved out to whichever famous library I decide to sell them to. But a visit was clearly necessary. Neighbors report prowlers, though not, I trust, accurately. Her children are just back from England and busy with their own affairs, having attended the wedding (and sent, I wager, a less extravagant present than I), and her lawyer began to make encouraging noises over the telephone. I thought of you to go with me, even before I knew I had to hunt you down in your mysterious retreat. You’re not only a good driver, which I had hoped, you’re a good conversationalist and good company, which I could count on. I envision a speedy but thorough examination of the house, a good dinner, a pleasant evening at the inn, and a pleasant ride back tomorrow to report that all is well. Whom do you think, by the way, I should approach about the papers? The Morgan, the Berg, Yale, Harvard, or the Wallingford? I lean toward the Wallingford myself, but on this subject, as on all others, I am open-minded. It is the Wallingford’s reputation for intense discretion that inspires me.”

  “Hold on,” Kate said. “We exit here. After this we will have to ask directions, I suppose.”

  “We shall. I have only been here a few times, and that not recently. I never could follow the dirt roads, complete with gates that have to be opened. Let’s ask at the first service station.”

  Chapter Two

  The dirt roads were indeed complicated, dodging in and out of the woods, crossing one another, and affording occasional tantalizing glimpses of the sea. Max and Kate had been fortunate in finding an informed repairman refilling his gas tank at the service station where they had stopped to inquire, and Max, in his efficient way, made rapid notes as the complicated instructions were given. “You’ll know when you’ve found the right road,” the repairman said, “because there’s a metal gate she’s had put up. Not that it protected her from death,” he philosophically added. “You have to get out, open it, get out again, close it, and after that . . . just keep going till the house is there.”

  Max opened the gate when, following the directions in his neat hand, they had reached it, waited for Kate to pull the car through, closed the gates again, and climbed back in for the final bit. “The gates, as I understand it, were to keep out casual sightseers, particularly in the summer, looking for the sea. Ah, there it is.”

  The house was certainly startling, perhaps, Kate asked herself, because something had led her to expect a turn-of-the-century mansion, surrounded by English roses? This house suggested that its architect might have submitted it for some contest in forward-looking design. Built of that sort of bleached wood that looks as though it had been deposited by the sea, the house had evidently been envisioned as standing upon the sea’s edge looking as though it had been washed up there. When, Kate surmised, the architect had learned that his mad client wanted it set back across a meadow, he had not altered his design. Kate had never admired modern architecture as fervently as she had felt appropriate to someone of her advanced ideas, yet this house was exactly right to stand by the sea. Why had she supposed Cecily would want something with three floors and a central staircase?

  Inside, the house was even more impressive, its large central room lit by the light from the sea, having in itself an aquatic quality as though it were part of an ocean kingdom. Only part of the house contained a second story, and here Cecily had reproduced the sort of room one might have found in an English manor house. The desk, the books, the carpet, the fireplace, the clutter of the room contrasted sharply with the clean lines of the central room below. So she had liked contrasts in her life. This room did not face the sea, as though one had to turn one’s face from that vision while writing. Above the fireplace—it was the first thing to catch one’s eye as one entered the room—was the portrait of a woman: young, blond, marvelously agreeable looking, and just not beautiful. Whoever she was, her chief characteristic had clearly been vitality—she looked like some sort of Scandinavian queen or female warrior, yet with laughter about it, as though she had appreciated the incongruity between her looks and herself. She was not laughing in the picture, but laughter was not far away, and when it came it would be at herself. I wonder who painted it, Kate thought first, and only after, I wonder who she is.

  She asked Max, who had followed her slowly up the stairs, gazing about apprehensively. “No sign of prowlers,” he said. “A mare’s nest, no doubt. But I had better secure all the papers, while we are here. That?” he asked, remembering Kate’s question. “The artist is more famous than the subject, which makes it a rather valuable portrait these days.” He named the painter. “He was quite unknown, of course, when he painted it. The subject? She was named Whitmore. Dorothy Whitmore. Not a particularly impressive writer, who died young. She and Cecily were at Oxford together.”

  “But I’ve heard of her,” Kate said. “In fact, one of my—”

  “One does forget”—Max smiled—“that British literature of the last century and a half is your specialty.”

  “One of her novels was a great success; they even made a movie of it.”

  “Posthumously, alas, poor dear. Her will left all the receipts from her works to her Oxford college for scholarships, and the painting to my mother, who in turn left it to Cecily.”

  “Was your mother at Oxford, too?”

  “Oh, yes. You see before you the son of one of the first Oxford women to get a degree. Not that my mother came all over academic, thank the Lord. One could only forgive one’s mother for being a bluestocking in her youth if she also had the intelligence to marry the younger son of the younger son of a duke. Which, I am pleased to say, she did.”

  “Max, you are a snob—how enchanting of you in this day and age.”

  “Not a snob, dear, just selective, and no more so than some unwashed revolutionary who will associate only with his smelly kind. She kept her papers in here
.”

  “In here” was a strictly utilitarian room, lined with fireproof cabinets. Max flung open one of these to, reveal ordered files which contained, he explained to Kate, the correspondence of a long life as well as original drafts and manuscripts. All of these Cecily had retained believing, accurately, that they comprised a rare picture of her time.

  “Odd,” Kate said, “that she should have preserved everything so carefully, considering her love of privacy—the gate, the lonely house, all that. One would think a bonfire on the lawn, in the manner of Henry James and Dickens, would have been more in her line.”

  “I agree,” Max said. “In fact, I have in the past done my best to persuade her of this. Her answer was oddly characteristic. ‘Had I known,’ she said to me, sitting downstairs in the main room, ‘that this fetish for other people’s mail would grow so widespread, I should have begun by destroying every letter after I had answered it. But to destroy them now would be to guarantee the preservation only of my side of every correspondence. I do not wish to impute any sinister motives to Dickens, or to James, whom I so much admire, but there must have been some satisfaction in removing forever from human sight that uncomfortable epistolary accusation, particularly since you know it to have been absolutely untrue.’ I can remember her staring from the window out at the sea. ‘You know. Max,’ she said, ‘I have lived in times of great change. The First World War, the early days of women’s degrees at Oxford, the years between the wars when I knew, in various degrees of intimacy, the Bloomsbury group, writers like Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth Bowen, not to mention the whole peace movement. Lowes Dickinson and the hopes for the League. I have to recognize that this is an historical record, quite apart from any importance I may have had, and I am by no means ready to claim that I am of no importance. So the architect built me a file room, and I have preserved it all. You may want to burn it when I am dead. Max, but don’t. Sell it for the best price you can get, and let the children spend the proceeds on installing an extra telephone to forestall the need to write letters and create all this evidence of a past age.’ ”