The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  It was at this point that Kate and Crackthorne, their eyes upon the game, customarily began a discussion of literature, or gossip of the school or university. Kate had once attended a game without Mr. Crackthorne and had found it almost dull. She did not, of course, tell this to Leo. Crackthorne had been a student of Kate’s some years back, having completed all the work for his Ph.D. save the dissertation, which, in a fashion all too familiar to Kate, seemed to be dragging on over the years. To support himself he had come to St. Anthony’s to teach English. This year, however, he had begun to speak as though, with a certain amount of application in the coming summer, he might actually hope for the completion of what Kate believed would be a first-rate piece of work on those writers of the World War I generation in English who had survived.

  She said as much to him, watching, out of the corner of her eye, the team’s ball handler dribble down the court with one hand while signaling plays with the other. One of Kate’s special delights in basketball arose from the analogy, for her, of the ball handler on the team and her own work in seminars, an analogy which earned only a snort from Leo, who considered Kate too prone to analogies anyhow.

  “I am plunged in gloom,” Crackthorne said. “It is like trying to stuff a pillow into a case too small for it. Everything keeps lapping over. Of course, these English types all knew one another, so that one is forever following some trail which leads to new wonders. Meanwhile, what I have written seems tedious beyond words.”

  “Inevitable,” Kate said. “That’s because you are so familiar with what you have that you assume it must he boringly familiar to everyone else. But it isn’t. Snip off the edge of the pillow, cram the feathers into what’s left of the case, sew up the edge as neatly as you can, and then think about other delightful paths down which you might be led. Beautiful shot! Hooray for Leo! You take my point, I trust, although basketball has a distinctly deleterious effect on my syntax and similes.”

  Kate, with an eye on the electric scoreboard, realized that the quarter was ending and that the chances of St. Anthony’s having an undefeated season were good. As the end-of-the-quarter whistle blew, Crackthorne turned to Kate and began a discussion of Aldous Huxley, who, now he came to think of it, would have been in his youth an interesting prospect to an American coach, had he had decent eyesight and the misfortune to be born in the U.S. For a moment Kate tried to picture Huxley torn between basketball and the creation of Crome Yellow. She said as much to Crackthorne.

  “Any of those English,” he said, with one eye on the court as the second quarter began. “In my wilder moments, I try to imagine the coach inducing coordination in Lytton Strachey. There’s someone who would have managed to puncture all this nonsense. The coach, as you might guess, dismisses all modern English writers of my period as pansies. I told him the word was buggers, but he thinks buggers were those employed by the Nixon administration. Speaking of Huxley, have you heard about the time . . .”

  During the half, when the rock music resumed and the team disappeared, Kate and Crackthorne went downstairs to have a smoke and a little relative quiet. St. Anthony’s was leading by 34 points, which seemed to shed upon the rest of the evening a certain air of anticlimax; but Leo had warned her how often the Knicks had come back to win in the fourth quarter. Desertion was not, therefore, to be thought of.

  As Crackthorne and Kate prepared to ascend to the inferno they were intercepted by Mr. Kunstler, the assistant coach, who was in charge of the junior varsity and remedial reading. With the ebullience inevitable in one able to follow such a career, he greeted Crackthorne with excited praise about how well his eggheads were doing on the basketball court and, upon being introduced to Kate, broke into little spurts of delight at the mention of her name.

  “How proud you must be of your son, Mrs. Fansler. Leo gives some of the coaches a hard time, but I say he’s a good boy and shows the results of a mother’s loving care. One can always—”

  “Kunstler, old boy—” Crackthorne began.

  “I know it is no longer fashionable to praise motherhood,” Kunstler continued, raising an admonishing hand, “but one can always spot the boys who have had a true mother’s devotion. Some of our boys—?”

  “Kunstler, old chap, shut up. This is Miss Fansler, Leo’s aunt, and she has never been a mother. If I were you, I would take my theories of motherhood and—”

  “Well, well,” Kunstler responded with marvelous sangfroid, “a fine boy, even if his mother is dead. You have nobly stepped into her place.” Since there seemed no sane response to this but a formal bow, Kate bowed formally and allowed Crackthorne to lead her rather suddenly into the elevator, leaving Kunstler several paces behind as the door closed; doubtless he was still rapt in thoughts of devotion to motherhood.

  But just as the elevator door was about to close, an arm, interfering, caused it to reopen. Six extremely large noisy boys occupied the elevator, as an invading army occupies a country, diminishing, belittling all other people and occupations and ways of life. There welled up in Kate a feeling of resentment against the young, already initiated male that nothing in years of sophistication or accomplishment had managed to still. They strutted; their self-absorption was absolute, their arrogance of status palpable. Crackthorne, if he did not share Kate’s visceral response, deplored the dissipation within the elevator’s enclosed atmosphere of a machismo indifference to all who were neither young nor masculine.

  “Ricardo,” Crackthorne snapped. “Might we at least mimic, if we cannot experience, some consideration for others. This is an elevator, not a beer hall.” The door at that moment opened again upon the gymnasium, upon noise, rock music, and male sweat. But Kate moved gratefully from, as it were, condensed to diluted adolescence. Crackthorne caught up with her after a few more words to the invaders. Suddenly, the name he had snapped out in the elevator registered in her mind. “Ricardo?” she asked.

  Crackthorne led the way up the grandstand, finding, and reserving for her use, footholds in the rows of boys.

  “Chet Ricardo,” he said when they were seated. “One of the cool set. You know, women, drugs, and a general air of smoothness at age fifteen. By senior year they’re revealed as not terribly bright, having peaked too early. Leo, I am pleased to say, is not among them.”

  “Any relation to the painter Ricardo?”

  “But of course, I should have realized why you wondered. Yes indeed, grandson, and of the famous Cecily Hutchins, which is more to the point for you and me. Papa is, alas, a rather uninteresting businessman: the genes are lying low until at least the fourth generation, or so it would seem.”

  “Funny Leo never mentioned him.”

  “My dear madam, no class graduates but the parents say, ‘I was so astonished when sonny boy brought home his yearbook: there were at least ten boys I’d never heard of.’ ”

  Not for the first time Kate pondered the strange habits of the young. In adolescence, the search for identity took many forms, most of them hideous. “Do you know,” she bellowed into Crackthorne’s ear, “I think we may safely consider this game won and our duty to the athletic young performed. I see they are taking out Leo and friends and putting in the second team. May I buy you a drink in the relative quiet of a singles bar, that being all the neighborhood affords?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll see it through and have some encouraging words for those on the second team who will now trip all over their feet, miss the great chance of which they have been dreaming, and need to be comforted in their discovery of the distance between hope of performance and performance.”

  “I suspect you of being a born schoolteacher,” Kate said, “something apparently rarer in our day than a fine glass blower, and infinitely more desirable. Until our next victory, then.”

  Later that evening Kate knocked on the door of her husband’s study and, on being commanded to enter, stuck in her head. “Busy?” she asked.

  “Longing to be dis
tracted. It is the end of March, and my thoughts turn inevitably taxward. Yet, I say to myself, I may be run over tomorrow, and what a pity to have started so soon.”

  “If you are run over, how much easier for me to have all your financial affairs neatly in shape.”

  “Unfeeling woman. What is it, Kate? I thought you were writing a speech which had to be at least forty minutes long, even allowing for a generous question period.”

  “I was thinking of a classmate of Leo’s I encountered today. It was a one-way meeting; he did not encounter me, unless a tank can be said to encounter the weed in its path. May I lounge in that Swedish leather thing with the machinery?”

  “Lounge away.” Reed leaned back in his swivel desk chair, and rested his feet on an open desk drawer. Kate noticed that no flesh appeared between trouser and sock.

  “I keep being reminded of that day with Max,” Kate said.

  “The tank reminded you? Kate, I’ve been meaning to ask, have you ever thought of coaching a female basketball team? You must be damned well qualified by now, ready to tell them they should be able to dribble with either hand without watching the ball. Not so different from teaching English, really.”

  “Reed, I do love you. When is one of us going to start feeling tied up and run for life?”

  “Never, is my plan. I not, because tied up is exactly what I want to feel. You not, because I mean to give you so much space to move about in you’ll begin to miss me and seek me out.”

  “As I do now. Admirable man—and the house in the woods has helped. Reed, I’m the most fortunate person alive, and every now and then I’ve the feeling it’s all a charade, and if I stop, there will be the pain.”

  “It’s hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world. What was it about the boy in the elevator?”

  “He seemed like nemesis, or destiny, or just my troubled conscience. Oh, I don’t mean the boy himself, frightful male adolescent, than which, of course, when it is bad there is nothing worse. I just mean Cecily Hutchins, and Dorothy Whitmore, and Gerry Marston. I wonder where her portrait is now, and whether Max did sell the papers to the Wallingford.”

  “Why not have him to lunch at the Cos Club and ask him?”

  “Reed, did I say I loved you?”

  “Twice,” Reed said, leaning over the desk and reaching out his hand.

  PART TWO

  April

  Chapter Five

  It was, however, near the end of April before Max and Kate could arrange for a luncheon. Max was supposedly deep into the affairs of Cecily. As for Kate, commitments, speeches she had (in the calmer autumn months) agreed to make, were almost upon her; uncorrected proofs, unread manuscripts, unanswered letters piled up on her desk. At the university, all the crises, as inevitable in April as daffodils and forsythia, bloomed: next year’s budget, catalogue, staff, this year’s dissertations, exams, collapses. In the midst of all this. Reed and Kate were caught up, in loco parentis as they were to Leo, in the great college climax, the end of all the schools’ endeavors for success of the kind that matters: letters were received from colleges, saying who had been accepted where. Kate and Reed, not especially astonished to learn that Leo had got into Harvard, where his male relatives had ever gone, were somewhat more so to be told that he intended to go, not to Harvard, but to Swarthmore. Leo’s father was heard from. Kate went off, grumbling, to a luncheon at Fraunces Tavern with her brother, who refused to accept the news that his son had to be left to make his own decisions without at least berating his sister, whose fault, obviously, all this was. Kate, drowning her distaste in cool white wine, of which she had ordered a large bottle, thought he had better rave at her than at Leo.

  That behind her, Kate returned to her cluttered desk. But Leo, it soon developed, was involved not only in his own college choice, but in that of all his classmates (save the ten unheard-of ones mentioned by Crackthorne), among whom, it soon transpired, Ricardo no longer was.

  “He got into Harvard,” Leo reported in disgust.

  “He has very famous grandparents.”

  Leo’s answer to this was a one-syllable expletive, the repetition of which, Kate promised, would end the conversation for a week. But Leo was truly disturbed.

  “The guy’s a creep. Everyone knows that. Frank told him he couldn’t possibly get into Harvard. He’s never worked in his life.”

  Frank was the college counselor at the school, a man so adept at dealing with admissions offices at colleges that he knew where each boy would be accepted weeks before the April 15 date. Indeed, Kate, watching the process, felt his talents to be wasted on this: surely a foundation or government bureau could have better used them. But for such a school, college acceptance stood at the very peak of its values, and however weak the members of the faculty, or the administration, the strength of personality was here, where it was needed. Kate, who had met Frank more than once, admired him, as she admired anyone who did his job well. She understood, furthermore, that Frank, however committed to Madison Avenue techniques, did not lie. He knew a lie to a college would only backfire in years to come. When he said, this year, to Yale: “You must take ten boys because they are all first-rate,” they trusted him because the year before, placing a class of unique ineptitude, he had told Yale they ought not to take anyone at all. His views on Ricardo’s chances at Harvard were not to be scorned. Kate, however, thought Leo’s annoyance exaggerated.

  “Who knows how Harvard decides anything?” she said. “Why concern yourself?”

  So Leo did not discuss it any further. Kate wondered if she ought not to have truncated the conversation, her views on speaking to the young consisting almost entirely in the necessity to give them opportunities to communicate should they choose. She ought not to have put Leo down. The fact was, she was tired of the whole college business, and she realized, laying down her pen and giving herself over from work to consideration of Leo’s school, sick to death of that institution.

  For most of the year, attending basketball games and receiving from Leo what she only now began to realize were clear signals, she had failed, deliberately failed, to bring her distaste for St. Anthony’s into focus. St. Anthony’s was as different from the Theban, which Kate had attended and where she had lately taught a seminar, as—the proper simile eluded her, but seemed in the air—as the jet set from Back Bay.

  The jet set, of course, was the point. The beautiful people. Money and media coverage. The wealth of Leo’s friends, the lives they led, had already left Kate gasping. At the Theban, to spend money ostentatiously was as unacceptable as to admit to racial prejudice. One of Leo’s friends had flown out to Indianapolis for the races; another had been given, in anticipation of graduation, a slick and expensive automobile. Was it the difference between boys’ and girls’ schools?

  Kate thought not. St. Anthony’s, after its period of high and quiet reputation, had, a decade ago, hired a headmaster whose job, as he clearly understood it, was to attract the right people with money, to swell the endowment fund, and build a new building adjoining the old. This he had done; St. Anthony’s began attracting not only the children of prominent political figures and actors’ children, but rich and generous new rich who would pay to have their children go to school with the children of the powerful and actors’ children. But this headmaster, while good at social and financial matters, had never taught; his only skills were money and contacts, and his ego required that the men in administrative positions be inferior to himself. It was borne in upon Kate that one of the facts which made Leo and his friends insufferable was their knowledge that they were smarter, and with better values, than the men who ran the school.

  “Well,” Kate comforted herself, “I didn’t choose the school, and in six weeks Leo will be through with it. What else, after all, can happen?” She wondered if Max knew the Ricardo boy. His view might be slightly more reasoned than Leo’s. She added this point to her mental agenda f
or lunch with Max. Her thoughts returned, as they so often did, to Gerry Marston, who had died, now that she thought of it, on the rocks near the house of Ricardo’s grandmother. An odd coincidence.

  A further connection between what Kate thought of as the Max and the Leo questions was established on the day of Kate’s luncheon with Max: she was to go from the lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club to watch Leo pitch at a baseball game in Central Park. Reed had been scornful.

  “I am put in mind,” he said, “of Lord Randolph Churchill, who once, getting into the clutches of a bore at his club, rang the bell and said to the waiter, ‘Would you mind listening to the end of this story?’ and left the room.”

  “Meaning?” Kate had asked.

  “Meaning if Leo needs an audience, ring for a middle-aged lady with nothing else to do, and ask her, ‘Would you mind watching this game?’ and get back to work.”

  “You might try coming yourself,” Kate answered. “You like baseball better than basketball.”

  “Only marginally, as I would rather be shot than hanged. To think you would develop such an enthusiasm for manly sports.”

  “I despise football,” Kate said.

  “But if Leo had chosen to play it, you would have gone anyway, now wouldn’t you?”

  “Probably,” Kate said. “Thank heaven for small favors. By the way, Ricardo plays shortstop.”

  “Who is Ricardo?”

  “Remind me to tell you sometime,” Kate said, departing for the Cos Club.

  She and Max had a drink first in the comfortable lounge. Max settled down with the happy air he always assumed when surrounded by what he called civilization. The pleasant uniformed maid took their order. I expect I like the Cos Club, Kate thought to herself, because I am often one of the youngest people here, whereas I am one of the oldest people everywhere else.