The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  They can tell you, being dead: the communication

  Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

  Here certainly the reverberations owed something to the fact that the woman writing was now dead. Kate, finishing the fragment, went back to the beginning to account for the sense of vividness left with her. The stages of Cecily’s life were clear enough.

  She had been born in 1900, the child of a middle-aged lecturer at a Welsh university who had, after the death of his first wife, married a student, brilliant and with that peculiar grace people seem unable to describe without allusions to wild and frightened colts. The sons of Hutchins’ first marriage had grown and departed, grateful to the young wife for removing, from their consciences and lives, the aching loneliness of their father. Cecily was her parents’ only child, and both of them treated her as though she were a magic being who might, if roughly treated, dematerialize. She was, as she was to remain, frail, slender to the point of spindliness, but with a vigor, a love of movement, particularly walking and swimming, which she was to keep till the last. Her childhood companions, when she was not with adults, as is the inevitable lot of the only child, were two neighbor boys whose lack of masculine exclusiveness neatly met what was considered, in her case, excessive wildness in female form. She learned early to keep her adventures to herself, and a spare set of old clothes in the garden shed. Whatever ladylike attitudes she may have assumed for the sake of her parents and their circle, she never doubted that to be a boy was to have won the better part. When it was borne in upon her, well and truly, with the departure of her neighbors for their public school, that no amount of disguise or persuasion could make her eligible for a life in the Navy—clearly, were one free to choose, the ideal existence—she became nervous, a great reader, and a grudging figure at her mother’s tea parties.

  Fortunately at this time she came to the notice of her Aunt Mary—her mother’s sister—who had worked with Harriet Weaver and Rebecca West on The New Free-woman, soon to become The Egoist. Aunt Mary had known Ezra Pound, and Richard Aldington and H.D. and their group, and had earlier decided to devote her life to service in the general hospital staffed entirely by women doctors and serving women patients only, which had opened in the early years of the century. Aunt Mary offered to send Cecily to Oxford. There Cecily flourished, having made that delightful discovery which Forster was later to claim as the special provenance of Cambridge—that there are people in the world with interests like one’s own, people who do not care what “they” think. The Oxford years, just after the war, were the watershed for her; after them, companionships and intellectual excitement were possible. Cecily, scarcely down from Oxford, established herself as a fashionable and erudite novelist. Her sparkling novels—“brittle” to those of a sentimental or conventional turn of mind—were notable for featuring as protagonist a woman of enormous dispassion whose experiences seemed to arise from her physical vigor and vigorous rationality, which between them neatly, and of course wittily, encompassed the passionate. Cecily herself, presented by her doctor aunt with a minuscule flat, began to live, in the midst of London, a life filled with parties, clever conversation, and much scintillating accomplishment. She was the valued companion of everyone in England’s family life of literature and was marvelously, preposterously happy. Her dispassion protected her from doctrinaire Communism, her rationality from Fascism, and her wit from the religious conversion which seemed inevitable for all the most humanist and Bloomsburyish of her acquaintances. She shared this life, and the minuscule flat, with Dorothy Whitmore.

  Then, late in the 1920s, she met, fell passionately in love with, and, like a woman in a dream, married Ferdinand Ricardo, an already famous painter whose past was somewhere in Europe and whose future was to be in America. Somehow, soon after their marriage, his name became simply Ricardo, as Colette’s had become Colette. Their adventures after the move to America were not told, perhaps because Cecily’s spirit had not partaken of them. Eventually, in search of solitude, Cecily built the house by the sea and lived there with Ricardo, who was now old and settled. Somewhere in those late years, the spirit returned.

  After Ricardo died, she wrote A Lonely Place. It had been solitude Cecily sought, but she had learned that one must woo solitude under its harsher name of loneliness. With an irony typical of the United States, Cecily Hutchins, in revealing her own daily wrestle with loneliness, as a widow and writer, touched so mightily upon the loneliness of others that the loneliness and its sister, solitude, became imperiled. A Lonely Place brought her fame, of the sort she did not want (though, Kate thought, it would help sell Max’s biography), and money, which she did not especially need. She resisted easily enough the television offers, the huge sums for columns in the women’s magazines. She also resisted, less easily, Kate surmised, the temptation to look for encouragement in one’s new work to critics, friends, editors. Alone, she wrote at the age of seventy-three her best novel, and lived to see it acclaimed, a privilege denied, Kate thought, to Dorothy Whitmore.

  The whole was a success story, and no doubt would itself achieve success. The form was almost classic—the move from early to late solitude, both imposed, both welcome. It occurred to Kate, leaning back in her wooden chair with the high back, the manuscript might be a success these days for another reason. Cecily had achieved a portrait of a women’s life that was not, for all its domesticity, essentially domestic. Her children did not seem to invite much discussion or comment. Her passion for Ricardo, her marriage, became the center of her life only as these could be transformed into a relationship able to thrive on separation and independence. Altogether, quite a modern document.

  Kate carefully returned the manuscript to its folder, gathered up her belongings, and went in search of Sparrow. She found him in his office grappling with proofs for programs and plans for an exhibition.

  “I did glance through the Whitmore letters, since you seemed so fascinated,” he said to Kate. “They’re not especially interesting. It seems to have been one of those relationships where the two said a great deal to each other, and wrote only perfunctory notes when apart. It’s quite common.”

  “Or the reverse,” Kate said. “I have a friend—we were at college together—with whom I maintain a really exciting correspondence. But whenever we meet we discuss her children and my teaching schedule. Thank you, Mr. Sparrow, for a fine day.”

  “Thank you for a fine lunch. We will meet again soon, I hope.” He walked Kate to the elevator, as though a lady might not be counted upon to muster the strength to press the button or because—and Kate had noticed this at other men’s clubs—the members seemed vaguely to feel that an unaccompanied woman might get loose and not be found for days, only to reappear suddenly and frighten the inmates. Here at least Sparrow trusted her to reach the ground floor in safety, where another ancient black man of the same age and vintage as the first bowed her out the door.

  It is good for the soul, Kate thought to herself, hailing a taxi, to make an occasional foray into a statelier era.

  PART THREE

  May

  Chapter Eight

  The first week of May, and the last week of classes at the university; Kate had written Phyllis to expect her on the eighth of May. Meanwhile, life in May, as was its yearly habit for those connected with the academic world, intensified perceptively over life in April—or March, or February. At the university, there were papers: course papers, master’s essays, chapters of doctoral dissertations, all flowering as though they were daffodils, or did she mean tulips? Kate was always vague about botanic allusions. All Kate really knew about daffodils, apart from Wordsworth’s rather hysterical admiration of them, was that they came before the swallow dared. Just when the swallow dared was another unknown . . . like everything else in my life, Kate gloomily thought.

  “The one advantage to my existence,” Kate had recently remarked to Reed, “is that there are so many different problems I n
ever spend long enough on one to become quite catatonic.” The trouble with successful businessmen, for example, she thought now, was that they never really concentrated on anything else, never actually focused all their attention elsewhere. They liked recreation and dalliance to be sure, but this was to relieve the tension of business worries, not to substitute one serious matter for another. Can that be what I’ve always disliked about businessmen? Kate asked herself. Or is the prejudice just a grumbling response to my impossible family.

  This thought brought her, of course, to Leo. In one moment, she would have to go down the hall to a committee meeting; ten minutes ago she had come from a class. Now she sat in her office and, guiltily removed the phone from the hook. She wanted a moment to think. Of Leo, of Gerry Marston. Of England.

  “The trouble with him,” Leo had once remarked to her of someone, “is that he hasn’t got his act together.” Leo was full of these phrases, clichés of his generation, most of them indicating a lack of integration. Small wonder. Kate remembered that Leo had once responded, when asked his opinion of a dinner guest: “I don’t know where he’s coming from.” Kate thought that both phrases described her rather well at the moment, or at least various puzzles in her life. Yet she had to admit, to herself at least, that since Max’s appearance in her cabin, and Leo’s wrestle with dishonor, she felt more alive, better: quite simply, less in despair. Was one so dependent on outer stimulation as that?

  The point, shorn of its niceties, was that we all want to feel a part of something ongoing. Could the death of poor Gerry, or the cheating of Ricardo, be called ongoing? Some of us, she thought, spend our lives in preparation for what will probably never happen; others, like me, only live in a state of alarmed, but vital, unpreparedness. What with Leo, the Wallingford, university work, and the hours of end-of-semester student conferences, she had not been to the cabin in weeks. I must go there, she thought, after England, and work all this out. I’m in a muddle.

  Whenever she sat in the office, which was rarely, quiet and barricaded (door shut, light out, phone off the hook), she thought of Gerry Marston, gentle, helpful, twenty-three—a girl who knew what she wanted from life, knew, at least, in what center of herself resided the possibilities of work and love (which Freud, with that rare simplicity achieved by the great, had called the important things in life). She was dead, and Kate longed, with a fervor as potent as it was irrational, to discover, somehow, why she had died, and how. But what else was there to do? In detective novels, which Kate had found herself reading less and less with the passing years, the detective would set out to discover. All sorts of other things would then happen, leading to one suspected criminal after another, not to mention other murders, attempted or achieved. (Kate thought particularly of Dick Francis, whose books she still did read, because she liked him and to discover how he would work the horses in this time.) In life, they simply removed a body from the rocks, and one’s nephew became closely involved in the modern world of violence, vandalism, cheating, and success which had nothing to do with accomplishment. One, meanwhile, remembering always the body in the pool between the rocks, went off to England to see if Somerville College had changed in fifty years.

  There was a knock on the door. Kate opened it, to find Evergreen. “Coming to the meeting?” he said. His office was next to hers. “I’ll be right along,” Kate answered, smiling and closing the door so that he would not see the phone off the hook, about which she felt idiotically guilty. The lack of light, so that none could be seen through the glass top of the door, revealing one’s presence within, was a trick practiced by all who could think, or write, in the dark. One of the Renaissance professors, who could not, had put up a shade on the inside of his door, so that no one could tell if the light was on or not: ingenious.

  Kate replaced the phone on the hook, and immediately it rang. The caller was Max.

  “Ah. I had about concluded that you were engaged in the reorganization of the university with the president himself.”

  “Not bloody likely; though I do admit, if he asked me for suggestions I could go on for days. How are you. Max?”

  “Fine, except that my struggles with Cecily’s family over her papers having finally resolved themselves, I now appear to be caught up in some crisis with a Ricardo son; something to do with cheating, or accusations thereof. Do I remember your mentioning, at our lovely luncheon at the Cos Club, that your nephew and the Ricardo boy were buddies? Or is the word chums? Friends I could scarcely hope for.”

  “None of those things. Enemies would probably be closer to it.” Kate did not remember Max as having been so skittish before, and she found she didn’t care for it.

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear. Do you know what the trouble is all about? I’m afraid the Ricardo version is a bit vague.”

  “Ricardo got someone to take the SAT for him,” Kate said. “You were, I now remember, surprised at his having got into Harvard.”

  “But surely that’s impossible. Don’t they police those exams?”

  “Only in a totally inadequate way. Incidentally”—Kate thought suddenly, for reasons not far to seek, of taped telephone conversations—“I should have said that it is alleged—I believe that is the legal term—that someone else took the exam for him.”

  Max was clearly shaken. “I find it difficult to believe anyone would do such a thing. Still, these days . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Did you want something from me?” Kate asked, in what she hoped were not too abrupt tones. She was already five minutes late to the committee meeting.

  “Just to have you hold my hand, as always. I do seem to throw myself upon your mercies at every crisis. Or perhaps only at the Ricardo-connected ones. The family, that is Cecily’s children, thought that I might do something since I have what they are fond of referring to as academic connections.”

  “What could you do?”

  “Obviously nothing. A most disturbing business. The boy, of course, denies the whole thing. You will let me know if you hear any more, won’t you? Having just got myself set straight with these people, I hate to plunge immediately into another muddle, particularly one I can’t seem to do anything about.”

  “It’s just a mark of the times,” Kate said. “Everyone cheats these days. When were there paper-writing agencies? One can’t even be sure one’s master’s essays are written by the student any more.”

  “I can be sure. It’s all because of a lack of discipline, student rioting, a loss of all values. Dear me.”

  That’s just what Nixon would have said, Kate thought. “I must go now, Max. I’m off to England in a few days, but I’ll be in touch when I get back.”

  “Thank God you didn’t say you’d contact me. I look forward to your return, Kate. Goodbye.”

  I’m sure Nixon used “contact” as a verb all the time, Kate thought, walking down the corridor to her meeting. And that knowledge gave her, for no reason she could discern, much relief.

  *

  “Did everybody always suppose his or her world to be crumbling to pieces?” Kate asked that night, lying on the couch in the living room. Reed sat at the piano, picking out tunes from the twenties, in an idle, un-distracting way.

  “I’m sure they did,” he answered. “They were just more grandiloquent about it; think of Euripides and the Trojan women. Besides, we’re getting near the end of the century. Fin de siècle, and all that.”

  “ ‘Fin de globe,’ Wilde said.”

  “There you are, then.”

  “I remember,” Kate said, “Clarence Day, or perhaps it was J. P. Marquand, writing about his father’s coming out of his house to see the man next door on the stoop of his house in his shirtsleeves. He immediately concluded the neighborhood was deteriorating, and put his house on the market. Clarence Day’s father did, I mean, or J. P. Marquand’s. The signals were subtler in those days, and less devastating.”

  Reed modulated nicely from “Smoke
Gets in Your Eyes” to Coward’s “A Room with a View.” “What do you make of that Finlay boy?” he asked, neatly achieving a diminished seventh as accompaniment; Reed’s chords were apt to be sparse and dubiously chosen.

  “As a studier of the young, I would say right off that he was a clear case of someone longing to be caught and relieved of burdens of guilt. After all, why tell everyone in your class else? All he had to do was shut up, and nothing in the world would have happened. Even Leo and his righteous friends would have let it go without a murmur, I’m sure, if it hadn’t been a question of the school knowing.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Reed said, finishing with a series of chords and swinging around to face the other way on the piano bench. “At least as far as you go. Why in the world he wanted to do any such thing to have burdens of guilt about is another matter. He had it made. Not only rich, and blond, and tall, and a champion wrestler, and generally charming, but a genius into the bargain—or, to modulate Leo’s term, a damn gifted boy able to use all he had. And with a family reaching back through generations of social accomplishment.”

  “The way you put it, it all does sound rather awful, in the true sense of the word. Maybe he just had to make something go wrong, before something went wrong from the outside, if you see what I mean?”

  “I see, but that’s to make him sound rather like you, if you don’t mind my mentioning it. Leo’s version is that he had the idea he could control anything, including getting his friend into college. Why should my friend not go to Harvard because of those tests?—that sort of thing.”

  “And in Ricardo he found, of course, the perfect lad to take exams on behalf of. Leo says Ricardo drives without a license, not seeing why he should bother with such mundane matters if he wants to get somewhere. All that occasionally restrains him, one gathers, is the knowledge that if caught he won’t be allowed to get a license for five years. He’s like that manager who told his pitcher to hit the fellow on the other team with a bean ball, or is my mind wandering? Everything is all right for me to do, because my side is the right side.”