The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  “If you are going to sound like a superannuated rock star, I refuse to continue the conversation,” Kate said, “or let you continue it. Obscenity I shall agree to ignore, but certain argots are forbidden. Absolutely.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Leo said. “It just shits.”

  “Is there something you think you should do about it?” Reed asked.

  “I know you think I shouldn’t,” Leo said. “Everyone thinks no one should. One of them said it’s a code in all the prep schools. But it’s not just that Finlay lied to me.”

  “Finlay?”

  “The guy who took the test; he’s a genius.”

  “If he’s such a genius, couldn’t he have figured this out as being goddamned stupid?” There was no question about it. Reed was upset. Kate thought she was beginning to guess why.

  “I shouldn’t have told you the names.”

  “We’ve settled that already. The relief is enormous; I was beginning to get those two guys who did this and that as confused as two ballplayers. How did Finlay lie to you?”

  “Ricardo told me Finlay’d taken the test for him. He bragged about it. I asked Finlay, and Finlay said he hadn’t. He lied.”

  “Funny thing, but according to Jimmy Breslin, that’s why the good guys won over Watergate. They minded being lied to,” Kate observed.

  Leo, though an admirer of Jimmy Breslin, ignored this.

  “Of course,” he said, “most of the guys say you don’t interfere. But Ricardo and Finlay interfered themselves, didn’t they? Guys I like didn’t get into Harvard. And then they’ve been bragging about it. But the real fucker is, the school knows and isn’t doing a damn thing.” Leo leaned back with some relief; he had brought out the main point.

  “How do you know the school knows?”

  “ ’Cause someone told the headmaster. I know that.” It was clear there were ranges of confidences Leo was not prepared to scale. “So he called in Finlay and Ricardo, and they told him it wasn’t true. But he knows it’s true. Only he’s scared Finlay’s father, who owns Wyoming or something, will sue the hell out of them. And he’d rather not rock the boat. This sort of mess is not good for the school’s image.”

  “But the fact that the whole senior class knows this, and that the Watergate code is being adhered to, doesn’t worry him, is that it?” Kate asked.

  “Could we stop talking about Watergate,” Reed said. “I know, you’re right; this is what Watergate is all about. I withdraw the request. Leo, you know, I assume, what damn near every parent in America would say to you now if you came to them with this story; they’d say it was awful, but they’d advise you as their child not to get involved. Because in the end, you always get it in the neck. Righteousness is a very unpopular stand. We like people to do our dirty work for us, but we reserve the right to call them moralistic bastards when they do. That’s why it was only Nixon’s insane folly that forced politicians against him. I know, I know, we’re not discussing Watergate.”

  “I don’t know what to do anyway,” Leo said, grumbling. “I’m just pissed, like lots of others. Well, some others.”

  Reed looked at him. “Something has occurred to you. What?”

  “It’s not my idea, really. It’s a few of the other guys. They said we ought at least to mention it to the faculty. Give them a chance to know. And talk about it a little, around. Just don’t let it die. Finlay and Ricardo will probably kill us,” he added. “That, or they’ll plant heroin on me and call the cops.”

  Reed and Kate stared at him. He would be eighteen in a few months. Part of him was adult, already knowing the risk, estimating the cost, deciding what the truth and the law were worth. Another part of him was a child, scared, as he would have said, shitless.

  Kate spoke first. “The biggest mistake would be to be arrogant about it, or righteous, or anything like that.”

  Reed said, “I take it most of the others want to let it alone.”

  “Yeah. They say you can’t interfere in someone’s life. But when does that stop? I mean we all cheat, I admit that, but you gotta draw the line.”

  “Why in hell can’t they police those tests properly?” Kate asked.

  “Might we return to this bugging idea a minute, Leo?” Reed asked. “Does that fit in here somewhere?”

  “I could go to jail,” he said darkly.

  “You and the other boys with the electronics. Meanwhile, what were you after?”

  “Those two, they’re such smooth liars. They brag about what they do, but they can deny it so convincingly. Finlay lied to me, one of his closest friends.”

  “Not to mention the headmaster.”

  “Yeah. So . . .”

  “So you wanted it recorded. I take it the point was to get them to brag about it in the locker room. An excellent place for bragging, I’ll give you that.”

  “That’s what the others think. Reed,” Leo said. “Their idea was, even if we couldn’t tell about the bugging, at least we’d know. I’m against it; we know anyway. That’s not the point. It’s whether to do anything about it at school.”

  “Can you remember”—Reed turned to Kate—“the last time we had three martinis?”

  “I can; the circumstances are in no way appropriate to this occasion.”

  “So you mean,” Leo said, “that unlike all those other parents, you think I ought to do what I want to do, if I want to do it?”

  Reed mixed the drinks before answering. “I will never be a parent, Leo, except in so far as I have been one to you, and I haven’t a right in the world to propound the duties of parenthood. Nonetheless, I will. Parents are either (in the minds of their children) the voice for law and reason and covenants kept, or they are nothing. Acting as a parent, I shall therefore be such a voice. But don’t expect glory. Most people who fight for law start out with the idea that they’re going to be thanked. All they are is spit at. You can only fight for law because you think it so important you’re unable to do anything else. Would anybody like to hire me as a commencement speaker? My fees are low, and my style rambling.”

  “I wonder what Cecily Hutchins would have thought of all this,” Kate said. But what she really wondered was what Gerry Marston would have thought of it all. Or, if it came to that, Max.

  Later that evening, after a dinner devoted to the rehashing of the whole St. Anthony’s business—for only after people have asked questions, and explored many approaches, have they begun to reach the point of decision—and after Leo had retired. Reed’s thoughts also turned to Max.

  “Did you learn anything earth-shaking, or at least consoling, in your lunch today? You never had a chance to tell me, after all.”

  “I’m as easy as Max can make me, and inclined to attribute other feelings to my overheated imagination, a diagnosis with which I know you agree, on principle if not otherwise. I still don’t know what that girl was doing there, excepting being brave and adventuresome. But why go out on the rocks? Still, I answer myself, I—I, a middle-aged and supposedly sensible person—went out on the rocks. So there I am, in circles, dear Reed, as is my wont. Would you care to join the dance?”

  “England will be a rest for you. When does your term end?”

  “The first week in May, if I’m very wicked and dash off at the end of classes without waiting to be hauled onto some committee or examination or other. But do you think I ought to go? And leave Leo in the midst of all this, I mean?”

  “Kate, really. You’re coming all over female guilt. You’re not his mother, and in any case, what can you do? By early May the whole matter will be in a different phase, if not utterly transformed. Maternal women are always sacrificing themselves to their children, only to find their children have no need of them at that point. In any case, Leo is almost eighteen.”

  “Reed, you are a perceptive man, though I forget to mention it as a rule. I’ve noticed just what you mean. Female guilt. A wo
man professor I know, very important, too, canceled all her courses for the rest of the semester because her husband had a heart attack. Well, it was damn worrying, and I sympathized. But one little part of me kept asking: would he have canceled his courses if she had had a heart attack? And the answer, of course, was no; he would have worried, and used old notes, and spent all the time he could with her, but he would have figured out that canceling his classes didn’t accomplish a thing. But the woman professor was worried about how heartless she would look if she went about business as usual. Quite unwomanly.”

  “Exactly. Go to England. And do remember, you can be back within ten hours, if need be. Would you hesitate about going to St. Louis?”

  “Indefinitely. Why would anyone want to go to St. Louis?”

  “Ah. You sound more like yourself. Tell me about Max.” And when Kate had told him, he said there was no better place for anyone’s papers than the Wallingford, if it was somewhat backward in its manners, and why didn’t Kate call up the chap in charge of Cecily’s papers and chat about one thing and another?

  Chapter Seven

  Mr. Sparrow, librarian of the Wallingford, turned out, when Kate had lunch with him two days later, to be elegant, which was expected, and young, which was not; to have wit and manners, which was expected, and rather liberal ideas, which was not; in short, a phenomenon, all things considered, and a pleasant surprise.

  “You have no idea,” he said to Kate, whose invitation to luncheon he had accepted with a graciousness sufficiently bordering upon eagerness to be flattering but not daunting, “what an admirer I have been all these years of Cecily Hutchins. I was so desperately hoping we could meet the other library’s offer, I can’t tell you. Not that it ever came down to anything as crass as bidding for the papers—such does not happen in the more rarefied regions of New York’s bibliographic world. But the heirs wanted money, and Mr. Reston wanted us, and it was clear that if we could find the money it would be us. I dream, needless to say, of an unpublished novel, which, it’s pretty certain, we won’t find. What I think I have found, and will soon show you, is an autobiographical fragment. Delicious. It’s sketchy and yet it marvelously reverberates. I think it will have to be one of the first items published. Even Mr. Reston’s agreed to that.”

  “Hasn’t he asked you to call him Max?”

  “No, he hasn’t, and quite properly, too. Name-dropping and first-name-calling on short acquaintance are equally frowned upon at Wallingford, I’m glad to say. I detest being called Anthony, or worse, Tony, by people I scarcely know, particularly since no one who knows me ever calls me either. I’m called Tate, because of a youthful fascination with that museum when the family visited London one summer.”

  “That settles it; we will definitely stick to the formal address. The Kate, Tate exchange sounds too much like a first reader for comfort.”

  “My mind rather ran to limericks.”

  “Yet I do think of her as Cecily,” Kate said, “and she old, famous, and dead.”

  “So do I. One must, when one’s thought of a person intimately for over twenty years. I first read her when I was eleven. It was the novel about a family who go to spend the summer in France with friends. All girls, except for one eleven-year-old boy, who was, of course, me. But before I was through I was all of them. The great thing about Cecily was that the last novel was the best—not that usual, when one is seventy-three. No wonder her reputation picked up.”

  “Helped a bit by the new interest in women writers.”

  “Well, we could scarcely go on in America worshiping forever manly types on the hunt for animal flesh. Have pity.”

  “I had a student,” Kate said, referring no more closely to the dead girl, “who had developed an interest in that generation at Oxford, particularly at Somerville. What I had hoped Max would allow was a search through Cecily’s papers for some account of those years. Put together with the others we have, by Vera Brittain and so forth, it would make a fascinating study. Don’t you agree?”

  “I do, but I’m not sure Mr. Reston does. No doubt he’s shying off because his mother was one of that Oxford generation. Or perhaps he thinks the emphasis should be on her fiction; I’m inclined to agree there.”

  “Well,” Kate said, “as director of dissertations, I must be allowed a certain crass, businesslike interest in literary history. An account of that war generation of women at Oxford would certainly be more welcome than another analysis of the society of Middlemarch. Do you know anything about Dorothy Whitmore?”

  “Funny you should ask that. I read about her picture going to the Tate, and I called the people over at the Gotham Book Mart to see if they had any of her books. They said that every now and then they sell the only one of her books they can get, North Country Wind, the popular one that was published after her death and was made into a movie.”

  “Mr. Sparrow, what if I were to follow you back to your lair right now? Might I have a peek?”

  “I’d be pleased and honored. Professor Fansler, all considerations of graduate students and Oxford generations aside, Reston will do a stunning biography. He’s one of those scholars and writers—how shall I put this delicately and with decorum—who sound opinionated in conversation, but who become translucent to the ideas and life of the subject whose life he is writing. If it’s the right subject—and I think Cecily is; I think he is really attracted to her and her life—with his English upbringing and American experience, he’ll be able to understand her more than we could. Do you know why she came to America?”

  “Ricardo came to America, and where Ricardo went, Cecily went. Do you know anything about Ricardo?” Kate asked, as she followed Sparrow into the street.

  “A little. He was a painter, and hired over here by the museums and rich collectors, rather like Roger Fry except that he lasted. They didn’t retire to the Maine coast until later years, when he resumed painting. He was considerably older than Cecily and died first, though he lived to a grand old age. Cecily, I suppose, could write anywhere; certainly they revisited England often enough. What is odd is that none of their children is the least artistic; I don’t believe the daughter even does watercolors.”

  “Perhaps that’s why Cecily felt close to Max. It’s odd about parents and children, I’ve often noticed. Particularly when both parents are dynamic beings and richly gifted, the children seem to aspire to ordinariness. Or anyway to achieve it.”

  They had by this time reached the front door of the Wallingford, a building donated to the organization that bore his name by its builder and owner. It had been designated a landmark, inside and out. “Which means,” Sparrow said, after greeting a white-haired black man at the door who looked as though he had been sent from Central Casting for a Southern film in the late thirties and hadn’t aged a minute since, “that we can’t change a thing, not so much as the color of the paint, without a by-your-leave. A damnable nuisance, and expensive in one way, but at least it protects us from any wild schemer who might seize power at the Wallingford, not,” he added, bowing Kate from the elevator on the third and library floor, “that that’s very likely. It’s a mixed blessing, in short, like most things, being a landmark, but we rather expect to make a trifle more on the swings than we lose on the roundabouts. The boxes wait, exciting and unpacked, in here.”

  The library at the Wallingford, modeled after the Duke of Humphrey’s room in the Bodleian, looked marvelously inviting. But they passed through it without so much as a glance, to a small room beyond. Here, neatly piled, were an amazing number of cardboard boxes. “All well ordered, too,” Sparrow said. “Correspondence, more or less alphabetical, manuscripts, and working journals. All going back to early days; apparently when she came to America she brought all the early stuff with her, heaven knows why. Still, we’re glad she did. The appraiser, between ourselves, was beside himself with admiration.”

  “If this is all so organized,” Kate said, “the letters to and f
rom Dorothy Whitmore ought to be in the last box. I assume she didn’t have scads of correspondents clustered at the end of the alphabet, their names beginning with y or z.”

  “All this harping on Whitmore; what can it be in aid of? And here I thought you were panting to see my autobiographical fragment.”

  “I am,” Kate said. “Panting. In fact, I want to sit down, pretend I’m at the Bodleian, and read right through it now, if you’ll allow me. Might I glance at the letters to you-know-who?”

  “The answer is actually no. Since it’s you, I’ll give you a peek, so you can see how organized everyone has been—from Cecily, through dear careful Max, the appraiser, the packers, and, of course, wonderful us. Here are the Whitmore letters—there are not that many of them—but then they were together much of their youth and didn’t write.”

  “What about after Cecily came to America?”

  “Poor Whitmore died not too long after; she was only thirty-eight or so when she died. Hodgkin’s disease. They seem to have written when they were apart, but one gathers that wasn’t often. We also have Cecily’s letters, which were returned to her at Whitmore’s death. Perhaps a dozen each way.”

  “Soon I’ll throw myself upon your mercies and ask to look at them, just to see what they would have been for the student I mentioned. But now I’ll cuddle up with the autobiography, if I may?”

  “Certainly. Perhaps you can confirm me in my opinion that it’s a rare piece, and worthy of publication. I leave you to it.”

  Kate found herself alone, in the silent room, with what was clearly the sketch for an autobiography. Yet as Sparrow had said, through the bare facts there seemed to escape the sense of what life must have been to Cecily, from the earliest days to the last. One could not put one’s finger upon a single startling statement, yet one had the sense of enormous passion moving beneath the clear-cut words. Kate thought of Eliot’s lines:

  And what the dead had no speech for, when living,