The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  Kate chuckled. Either Crackthorne had not heard of Leo’s imbroglio, or he had decided to ignore it. Perhaps he did not think Kate knew about it yet; an overseas letter was scarcely the best medium for approaching so delicate a topic. Kate left the hotel and walked round to the back to fetch her bicycle, a form of transportation not usually employed by residents of Oxford’s most expensive hotel, and looked upon by the employees thereof with a certain disdain, which was replaced by confusion at the size of her tips. It seemed to her pleasant to bicycle from her letters to Whitmore’s, and she looked forward to tea that afternoon with Phyllis and Hugh.

  “We can actually have tea, if you insist, as Hugh usually does,” Phyllis had said, “but I’ll have something with a bit more firmament on hand, should Hugh not appear.” But Hugh did appear; this was the first time Kate had seen him in Oxford. He had not been there when they returned that night from Binsey. He greeted Kate with what for Hugh probably counted as effusion. (Kate thought instantly of Watson’s description of his reunion with Holmes: “His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me.”)

  “You must forgive me, Kate,” Hugh said, “and prove your forgiveness by letting me do something for you. Take you and Phyllis punting, to a cricket match, a boat race—what will it be?”

  “Since you are so kind, sir,” Kate answered, remembering Leo’s letter, “I would like to see a professional soccer game.”

  “A what?” Phyllis asked.

  “Oh, good heavens, Phyllis,” Hugh said, “where have you been? It’s all anybody talks about in a general way, but I didn’t know people actually went to them. I thought they were dangerous and ended in riots and people beating each other over the head with the goal posts.”

  “Good,” said Phyllis. “It sounds noisy and frightfully un-English. Let’s go.”

  “Phyllis, my dear,” Hugh said, helping himself to a muffin, “I don’t know what’s come over you this year. You never used to want to do something for the wholly insufficient reason that I would rather you didn’t.”

  “I know, poor Hugh, I know. I will abandon the soccer game,” Phyllis said, sinking so far back upon the collapsible couch that her shoulders were on a level with her knees. “It’s the hideously masculine quality of life here that’s undoing me. Perhaps if a man lived at Oxford, unconnected with the university in any way, and married to a woman don, he, too, would suffer, and yet I doubt it, even if such a situation could be imagined. He’d be a writer, or a potterer in laboratories, or a bus driver, or something. You can’t imagine how content the woman in England are to be slaves if they aren’t actually professionals themselves.”

  Hugh chuckled, and as he spoke Kate realized with a great surge of affection why this marriage had so triumphantly lasted for twenty-five years. “I hate to grant a principle for the other side,” he said, “but you know I do find it amazing, helpful and affectionate American husband as I am, who married a woman because, among other attractions, she had brains and a mind of her own. I’ve been to tea—my dear, you’ve no idea how often I’ve been to tea; the poor chaps feel they should ask me home at least once, and no doubt dinner is an expense and horror—and, Kate, it is just as though these men have a perfectly behaved servant. We arrive, are greeted charmingly, the wife acting as if she were a geisha girl who’d outgrown the fascination originally required for the job, and then we are served tea. I mean actually served it, all sorts of cakes and sandwiches and whatnot she’s spent hours concocting, and after we’ve stuffed ourselves and told her what a good tea it was, we simply leave, I saying thank you politely, and her husband, my colleague, giving her a peck and saying, in effect, expect me when you see me. I don’t deny that when the women’s movement was getting under way in the States, I used to dream about a docile little wife the center of whose life I was, but you know, I’ve discovered it’s not only embarrassing, it’s bad for the character. There’s a woman who works in our laboratory, and I asked her about it; she’s a very important and competent woman. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, as though I’d asked her why some Oxford men don’t get involved with boats during Eights Week, ‘most English women aren’t interested in liberation.’ She made it sound like backgammon, or higher thought—some new fad. And yet she’s far more liberated herself, to use that frightful word, than any American woman I’ve met professionally. Does her job, glad to have it, and no nonsense.”

  “Hugh,” Phyllis said, staring at him, “that’s the longest speech you have ever made in my presence since the first fine, careless rapture; what’s more, its the greatest tribute to the women’s movement in America yet enunciated. I apologize for even considering the soccer game.”

  “I couldn’t have helped you at a soccer game anyway, my dear. I’m not much at watching the lower classes cavort. My offer included only elegant Oxford events. I had in mind something like a pleasant afternoon on the Balliol cricket grounds. That offer is still open. Farewell, my dear ladies. I am glad, Kate, to have seen you at last.”

  “He always vanishes like that,” Phyllis said when Hugh was gone.

  “Well, this is how he described tea. Maybe every woman should spend one year as the little wife at home. Be thankful you’re lucky enough to have done it when it isn’t a lifetime commitment. But I have to admit”—Kate laughed—“he did slip back into that sleek masculine world with indecent haste. Still, it has made him a feminist, let us not forget.”

  “Let us not. Tell me about Whitmore—the best soap opera ever.”

  “I hope her life wasn’t that,” Kate said.

  “I only meant soap opera in the sense of being presented in daily installments. But I don’t know why all this prejudice against soap opera anyway. It’s only the feminine version of melodrama, and frequently much better. Anyway, the sense I’ve been getting from your Whitmore and friend Cecily and Frederica Tupe—fabulous name—is that, in the beginning anyway, before Tupe became Reston and Cecily became Ricardo, life was clearer for them than it would be now. Is that only an illusion of time?”

  “I don’t think it was so different then from now,” Kate said. “I’m sure when Whitmore and Hutchins and Tupe went to live in London and support themselves on freelancing and a little help from their families, there were as many raised eyebrows then as now. It seems clearer because they were unusual in knowing what they wanted. People who know what they want are always unusual, particularly if what they want isn’t to be found along one of the well-worn paths furnished by society for the use of the young. Whitmore’s school was bombarded during the war—shot at, I mean, by guns from ships. She not only discovered the excitement of all that, of being one of those left behind when fearful parents had removed their, in Whitmore’s opinion, less fortunate daughters from the school on the coast; she learned that courage is not an exclusively male virtue. I mean courage under fire. Some young man from the nearby town, when the bombardment started, grabbed a horse and nearly ran over a lot of children getting away from the place, while the women at the school were calmly helping everyone. Later she had a brother killed in the war and knew that she had to meet his courage with hers, offer her life, really, to prove that his hadn’t been offered in vain. That’s why she joined the army, of course.”

  “What did Whitmore actually do in the war? Nursing?”

  “No, she was really in the army—Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps was its proper name. It was all very daring and new at that time, and she was a sergeant. Used to march the girls around, snapping out orders. ‘Left march, eyes right;—great fun, I should think, for someone who’d never cared for being lady-like and who was built like a Valkyrie and looked like Athena.”

  “She didn’t have a commission, and her from Somerville?”

  “No. I don’t think many women had commissions, except the nurses, who were terribly isolated, poor things; they weren’t allowed to hobnob with the enlisted men and were forbidden to associate with the officers. When Wh
itmore finally ended up in France and in a signal unit, there was only one woman officer. They were telegraphists, repaired telephone lines, did clerking—that sort of thing. There was a male signal unit there with them. It was a heavily bombed area, so the two signal units—maybe they were really one; I’m very weak on military matters—were hidden in the countryside and Whitmore used to ride about on horseback with some of the soldiers. Her letters are remarkable. Frankly, if I could imagine a male army corps of Americans, I’d assume they’d be raping any women they could get hold of, the way they always do in plays and movies, but there seems to have been an innocence about all this. The French, with their usual opinion of the English, suspected the worst, but, at least from Whitmore’s accounts, they were wrong, everyone was just WAAC’s and Tommies together. It was the end of a world, of course.”

  “And then she came back to Somerville?”

  “Michaelmas term, 1919. And shared a railway coach with Tupe or Hutchins or maybe both. Anyway, they met. The next year they lived together in lodgings, not far from where you are now, I expect. Then they went down to London together and started to write and meet interesting people and enjoy the optimistic twenties. Tupe dwindled into wife, but the other two kept at it for a number of years. Then Hutchins married her Ricardo and came to America; she found the secret of solitude and art, but Whitmore? Whitmore just kept struggling with the two ideas that wouldn’t let hold of her: women must cease thinking they were ordained by God to be servants, and she must increase her sense of her opportunity to live life. All her novels and poems were attempts to catch life, behind the everyday reality. The critics haven’t noticed them, except the last, and that they ignored because it was popular. She made herself live to finish North Country Wind, there’s lots of evidence of that. Well,” Kate finished up lamely, “they’re all dead now.”

  “But you know,” Phyllis said, “the same class thing goes on. Hugh wasn’t just trying to be funny with his new Oxford manner when he talked about the lower classes at soccer. He told me he asked in the SCR about one of the younger dons, and was told that his antecedents weren’t especially refined.”

  “It’s only just occurred to me,” Kate said, “but I dare say most of the professional athletes in America don’t exactly come from the upper reaches of society, but nobody bothers to mention it. Is England still as madly class conscious as ever, or is it just crustier dons Hugh meets in his line of work?”

  “Not a bit. Some quiet young man in Hugh’s laboratory came up to Oxford originally on a scholarship from a state school, and soon after he came up he attended a meeting of a socialist club; the first question someone standing about asked him was what public school he’d been at. He hasn’t let off being angry yet, Hugh says, and he’s had one academic success after another ever since.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Kate could not prolong her stay beyond the original two weeks, and May 22 was at hand. What with reading the letters at Somerville, interspersed with the Whitmore novels, all of which Somerville had, and on alternate days reading the Hutchins novels in the Bodleian—not to mention the talks and strolls with Phyllis—Kate would barely manage to finish up on schedule. She had to return in time for the last of Leo’s baseball games. The St. Anthony crisis appeared to have achieved a quietus, at least for the present. Meanwhile, in Oxford, Kate found herself coming to alarming conclusions about Max. One evening she would argue them away as idiotic fancies, the next they would appear to her the height of rationality. She might have continued alternating between these two possibilities indefinitely had she not returned to the hotel one evening about nine-thirty to find a message asking her to call Mr. Reston.

  Kate dialed the number provided, and found herself speaking to Merton College. “Mr. Reston, please,” she asked, uncertain what, or how, or why Max was there. But when Mr. Reston came on the phone, it was not Max, but Herbert Reston.

  “I hope I’m not calling back too late,” Kate said.

  “Not at all. I just arrived this morning and had a word with Hugh; he suggested we might like to meet. He suggested, further, that you seemed most entranced with the college gardens, so I thought perhaps you would like to meet with me in the garden here. I shall come by and pick you up.”

  “Quite unnecessary,” Kate said. “I’ll meet you at the lodge in a few minutes, if you aren’t too tired for so late a conversation.”

  “Not a bit. I’m only sorry there isn’t time to arrange something more civilized, but alas, I must be in London again tomorrow. I’m only here for the night. In a few minutes, then.”

  In England, of course, in what they call the summer term, it remains light until ten at night. One forgets, Kate thought, walking toward Carfax, how far north England is, kept temperate by that marvelous phenomenon the Gulf Stream. Herbert Reston was there before her, waiting at the lodge, and the first thing Kate noticed about him was how little he resembled Max.

  They walked together toward the garden, which overlooked Christ Church Meadow, and seemed to Kate everything lovely she had ever thought of in connection with England. “I haven’t been invited to dine in hall,” she said to Herbert Reston, “which is a minor ambition of mine, but I’m not sure this isn’t lovelier, particularly since the college is closed to visitors.”

  “The garden is lovely, but I know what you are thinking, all the same: that I look nothing like Max. I’m friendly, bald, and roly-poly, while Max is tall, slim, and debonair. It has always been a trial to me.”

  “Max said you live in America.”

  “I spend much time in America, and much time here. Medical science, these days, is an international pursuit, I’m glad to say. Shall we sit down?”

  “Forgive me,” Kate said, dropping into a seat in her best ladylike manner so that he, too, might sit. “My thoughts have been wandering. You are kind to find a moment for me.”

  “You are a woman who has managed over the years to make a most marvelous impression on Hugh, which is singular indeed. He’s not given to being impressed, one way or the other, as a rule. A failing, I fear, of the scientific mind when confronted with a personality rather than a theorem. Max has complained of it often.”

  “Were you good friends when you were boys?”

  If Reston found the question odd, he did not show it. “Oh, yes, before we went off to school, naturally, and even at our prep school, where we were Reston major and minor, though from the first, major was so much smaller than minor, a fact I, major, had long since learned to live with. Max resembles our father, who was tall and thin, I our mother, who was small and, in later years, on the tubby side. Perhaps she would always have been plump, but doubtless young ladies know how to control these tendencies. Now that I think of it, my sister resembles me rather than Max, but she isn’t nearly as tubby even today. One of my early memories of Max, actually, is when we were moved out of the night nursery to make room for my sister, and Max said, ‘I don’t so much mind sharing a room with Bertie, so long as I’m allowed to read after he’s snoring.’ Max was an infant at the time and couldn’t read at all; we all thought he was frightfully stuck up, and from what people tell me, he still is. Not that I wasn’t fond of him then as now.”

  “Max probably wouldn’t be noticed at Oxford, but he does rather stand out in America. Haven’t you seen him lately?”

  “Since I do the major part of my work in Chicago, and Max didn’t come to our nephew’s wedding, I haven’t seen him all that recently. Max dislikes weddings. He always sends a lavish gift and is thus not only forgiven but encouraged in his bad manners.”

  “So he explained to me. Mr. Reston, I’m afraid this will seem to you to be a very odd conversation, but as, you say you leave tomorrow . . . I’ve become fascinated with your mother’s two friends from Somerville, Dorothy Whitmore and Cecily Hutchins. Perhaps Hugh has told you. Would you tell me something about your mother? She’s rather vague, somehow, compared to the other two. Oh, dear, I do hope tha
t doesn’t sound rude. Of course, I’ve never met any of them, and the letters of the other two are only at Somerville because of her kindness.”

  “Don’t apologize. I think the years at Oxford and those few years in London were the happiest of my mother’s life. It was not long after the war, you know, and my father swept her off her feet. I don’t think it occurred to her to wonder what she would be doing twenty years hence. By then, Aunt Dorothy was dead—we always called her that—and Cecily Hutchins was in America writing novels. Oh, she enjoyed us children when we were young, I think, and she and my father lived a very gay life; one did, it seems, in the twenties. I remember in 1938 or so Aunt Dorothy’s posthumous novel being made into a film, and Max and I were given leave from school to come down to London to see the opening. Mother arranged about the scholarships left to Somerville by Dorothy’s will.” Reston sighed. “When one’s an adolescent one doesn’t really talk to one’s parents, though I think Max talked a bit more, but I did have the sense that she came alive rather just, after Dorothy’s death, when there was the literary estate to be administered. Dorothy left Max first editions of all her novels, and she left me money toward a motorbike. I remember being faintly offended, though of course, I was pining for a motorbike. I also knew I ought to have been sorrier about her death than I was. Adolescents are such egocentric beasts. Now I wish I’d got to know her better.”

  “Did she visit you often?”

  “She did. We saw her rather a lot after Cecily Hutchins left for America. But somehow it was always Max she talked to. Also, the two of them liked horses, which I never did. I used to bounce about in the saddle, and the first chance the horse had it would always bounce me off. Max, you know, was born grown up, like his namesake, Beerbohm.”