The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  “Was he named after Beerbohm?”

  “Oh, I always suspected so, but my mother denied it. She said it was an old family name, but I never found it anywhere. Aunt Dorothy thought it was perfect.”

  The evening had closed in. Through the tall trees Kate could still see the sky, light against their dark branches, but day was over. “Do you remember,” she asked, “when Max was born? Remember exactly, I mean?”

  “Not a bit. Children weren’t invited to consider the facts of life, not even in the twenties. I was four and shipped off to stay with Grandmama at the sea. When I returned there he was, established in Nanny’s arms and looking as though he owned the place. Max managed to look like that even at the age of several weeks. I remember Nanny showing Max off to visitors and saying, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, it’s that fair.’ By the time my sister came along three years later, I thought the whole process a frightful bore. By then, of course, I knew where babies came from. When I asked my mother about Max, she said she’d found him under a gooseberry bush in the garden. Like most children, I managed not to make the mistakes my parents made with me when I became a father, even if I made every other one in the book; my children knew where babies came from even when they were so young they couldn’t have cared less. Life is odd, isn’t it?”

  “Very odd,” Kate said, “and you’re kind as can be to talk to me. Do you find Oxford much changed from one visit to the next?”

  “Oh, yes, Oxford changes. That’s another way Max and I are different. He doesn’t like change, while I at least admit it’s inevitable, if not always in exactly the form we would choose. But I must say, you in hall would be most welcome. I hope to see it someday.”

  They began to walk back toward the gate. “Are you staying in England long?” Kate asked.

  “Back to Chicago for me, alas, since it’s beastly hot there right now. But I do hope we can meet again. Miss Fansler. You’ve made me think of my long-lost youth, and that hasn’t happened in dog’s years.”

  “You’ve been kindness itself answering one impertinent question after another. Do you think your mother would have liked to be a scholar?”

  “Heavens, no. She was brought up bilingual, and took her degree in French. She used to read madly through everything, and take in all the ideas without getting a fact straight. She wasn’t a scholar like the other two. They might have stayed at Oxford with fellowships if they hadn’t decided to go off to London to live on nothing and write and work for the League of Nations. It was Mother’s good luck they did decide to go, because otherwise she’d have lost them sooner. Good night, Miss Fansler; better still, au revoir.”

  Kate said good night, and wandered off deep in thought.

  She was at Somerville so early the next morning that she had to loiter under the beeches waiting for the librarian to open up. She determined to seek in the papers, particularly in the letters, the evidence she was by now fairly certain would be there. It was not simple marital devotion which made her, pacing the path, think of Reed. She could hear him already warning her against leaping to a conclusion. But she wasn’t leaping; she was approaching a conclusion with all the deliberation of a dog stalking a woodchuck. “Not theorizing ahead of your data, are you, Kate, as they say in the literature?” She could hear his voice as though he stood beside her. “Certainly not,” she answered, startling the librarian, who came rushing up with a tale about a stalled bus and an impertinent bus driver. The librarian lived in North Oxford.

  Once safely hidden in a bay with the papers, Kate looked particularly at the war years. There had been a male unit of the signal corps in France. Whitmore’s letters home reported riding with a sergeant, who shared her passion for horses, on work horses borrowed from the French farms nearby. There might have been a man from before the war. But it was likely that anyone she would have met or loved at home would have been acceptable to her family, and Kate, hot in pursuit of a theory, was seeking a lower-class lover.

  The question was, where had Whitmore met him? If she had really been, as she seemed, of a leftist turn of mind, she might have met him in a socialist club somewhere. But that was the sort of thing likelier to occur in the thirties, certainly. Kate, who could have told you exactly what sort of church group would have met in what town and why in Victorian England, was uncomfortably vague about the social life in the twenties outside of London literary circles. Anything, of course, was possible, but Kate inclined toward the theory of the wartime lover. Perhaps he turned up again in London after being demobilized and taking a series of unsatisfactory jobs. He might, after all, have worked at anything. The point was, the point had to be, that he had returned to Whitmore in London and become her lover. Why didn’t they marry? Perhaps marriage didn’t suit her; perhaps the man was married already, and this was only the drunken reliving of a wartime romance. Perhaps she was one of those independent types who wanted a baby and didn’t want a husband, and took care the father shouldn’t know who he was, or that he was. Questions of paternity had an odd effect on one’s pronouns.

  The London years when the three were there together were, unfortunately, the least documented. Seeing each other regularly, they had little reason to write, and their letters to their families (at least Whitmore’s) were by now of the perfunctory rather, than the confessional sort. Wait a minute, there ought to be some dates here. Kate went to consult Who’s Who. Max had been born in 1926, his brother Herbert in 1922, the same year (though at the other end) as his parents’ marriage.

  Cecily had moved to America with Ricardo in 1925. Therefore, if there was any discussion of the whole matter between the three of them, some at least of those letters ought to have been with Cecily’s papers and ought, at this very moment, to be sitting safely in the Wallingford. Kate could not be certain, but she was willing to wager a considerable sum that they were not at the Wallingford or, perhaps, anywhere else.

  Hold on a minute, Kate said to herself; hold on. Are you going to expound this highly libelous theory to anyone? Once in anyone’s head, the idea will be very hard to get out, and there isn’t a particle of evidence. Well, wasn’t there? The whole story was so straightforward Kate, indeed, had to prevent herself trying it out on the librarian. But one must remember this was not a literary exercise of the sort that used to be undertaken, with such enthusiasm, in a search for the parentage of Shakespeare or Prince Albert, or that was still undertaken in an attempt to establish the authorship of Héloïse’s letters to Abélard. The ramifications of this particular little problem were legal, and brutish, and nasty, and Gerry Marston’s family might have something to say about it, not to mention the law and the courts. Go slow, Kate. Can you find one shred of evidence?

  She thought, as her mind dashed about after phantoms, of the letter from Leo about the soccer game, and the discussion with Phyllis and Hugh that had followed. Hugh had talked of: the lower classes. A phrase, after all, with a meaning in England it simply would not have in America. One might speak of hard-hats, or blue-collar workers, or domestic servants, but apart from snobs and fools, no one minded who one’s parents had been. But in England, where one mentioned antecedents, where the lower classes wore different hats and talked differently, whether or not you’d been to a public school changed your life. Kate recalled having read in an English paper that boys were chosen at the age of twelve as likely prospects for professional soccer, and trained for that career, frankly and openly. Professional football teams in America were not even allowed, legally, to approach a boy in college. Would someone with Max’s taste and Max’s conservative turn of mind want to trade in a father who was the younger son of the younger son of a duke for a working-class member of the armed forces and a feminist girl whose morals were no better than they should be?

  Again Kate drew herself up. What about a will? Had Whitmore made a will? Of course she had; the librarian had told Kate all about it on the first day. Those were the scholarships at Somerville Herbert Reston had referred to.
Dorothy Whitmore had left the royalties from her books toward a scholarship fund for a girl who had had to work before she came to Oxford. Here fate had played a beautiful trick, for the posthumous novel had been so successful, and sold to the films; the scholarship fund now paid the way for five or more girls every year. But surely it was important that the money was for girls who had to work. There was a sympathy for the working classes that nothing could argue away. No doubt Frederica had offered to adopt Max, had already adopted him, had said: There is no need for you to leave him any money. How much money, in any case, did Whitmore have? Could anyone have guessed that North Country Wind would be a best seller and made into a successful movie? Going to the window to look out on the tennis lawn and the flower beds beyond, Kate thought suddenly of Graves wandering around Somerville in his pajamas and dressing gown, being saluted by the man who would become his moral tutor because he, Graves, was an officer. “Social life was dislocated,” Crackthorne had written. Yes, indeed; it had to have been the war.

  She had to try this out on someone. She would lay the whole business before Phyllis. Phyllis had a sharply clear mind and a forthright manner. If Kate was pursuing chimeras, Phyllis, bless her, would be the first to say so.

  Chapter Twelve

  Phyllis said so, loudly, clearly, in no uncertain terms, when she had heard Kate through to the end of what she called the most preposterous story since Ian Fleming’s unfortunate demise. “You’re wandering, dear,” she announced, not unkindly.

  Kate found her attitude a relief, in a way. It really had been looking all too clear-cut and obvious, which nothing in life ever is.

  “Put your objections to one side a moment, nonetheless,” she said, “and listen to two more aspects of the problem. One of these is Max’s writing and public image; the other is the personality of the young woman who was Dorothy Whitmore. As to Max. I copied down out of Who’s Who a list of his publications. The titles, and the books themselves, if it comes to that—I’ve read most of them; he’s a friend, God help me—are all aimed at setting right the inevitable decline from proper standards, whether in art or daily life, usually both. About daily life he’s not quite so outspoken in print, if you’ll forgive the phrase. But at a time, I can assure you, when most faculty and administration were, if not exactly happy about student revolutions, and so on, at least aware that some dislocation of power had taken place in our society, Max was being his old authoritarian self, with an extraordinary blindness to the realities of the Vietnam war. All right, nod away, you agree and I ought to make my point, if any. My point is: here is the last man who wants to set forth into the maelstrom of rediscovered feminist writers and women’s studies the story of his birth to a woman who resembles all too closely the radicals he loathes today and, far worse, his having been fathered not by some tall, beautifully arrogant creature who resembled, from all I can gather, Lord Riddlesdale in the Sargent portrait, but a lower-class out-of-job nobody without a spot of culture or breeding.”

  “All right, I take your point, I really do, believe me, Kate. When you’re discussing Max’s horror at everything from the modern world to the discovery of this terrible secret, all set down among Cecily’s papers up in Maine for anyone to read, yes, I follow you, and even pant enthusiastically behind. But face what you’re saying. That he discovered that Marston child, that student of yours, in among the papers, enticed her out to the rocks, and murdered her. All to keep the story of his shameful birth from the world. Too nineteenth-century, dear, not to say eighteenth. And it isn’t as though some marvelous inheritance stood in the balance. If there was anything to inherit, and we don’t know that there was, you can be sure with a family like the Restons that it went, firmly entailed, to the oldest son, who was not Max. I’ve always disapproved of primogeniture, by the way, since the only possible attitude toward one’s children is share and share alike, but one does have to admit that if it’s not good for the children, it’s great for the property, which stays in one piece through the generations.”

  “And sends the younger sons out to marry with the newly rich middle classes and enrich not only their pockets but their gene bank.”

  “No doubt. But the point is that there is no question of inheritance here. I realize that Max is a snob, perhaps the original and authentic snob, after which they threw away the mold, but I can’t see him killing anyone to preserve his reputation for impeccable birth. And,” she finished up, with a certain air of having exhausted the subject, “all Max had to do was destroy the papers, or waft them out of sight. It would be his word against the girl’s, guilty of breaking and entering anyway, and who would listen to her? Will you have beer or Scotch?”

  “Beer,” Kate said. “I’ve become addicted, as you said I would. Perhaps you are right,” she added, reverting to Max. “But I don’t think you are. I shall have to consider a course of action. What do you suppose the papers consisted in?”

  “What papers? The papers that don’t exist, except in your girlish imagination?” She handed Kate a beer.

  “There must have been letters,” said Kate, accepting the beer and ignoring the comment. “Letters from Whitmore to Frederica, which were sent to Cecily at Whitmore’s death.”

  “If Whitmore was such a bloody socialist, flinging herself into the arms of a workingman, like Helen into the arms of Leonard Bast, out of sheer pity, why on earth did she call him Max? The last name on earth for a lower-class love child.”

  “Precisely. Frederica’s choice, I have no doubt. To distract attention from his origins. Phyllis, think! How many brothers do you know who resemble each other as little as Max and Herbert Reston? One short, one tall, one fat, one thin—all that is possible, but there’s always some resemblance. My brothers have each grown middle-aged in his own gruesome way, but once you know they’re brothers, there’s no discounting the resemblance. Even I can be seen to look a bit like them, in the dusk with a lamp behind me.”

  “Have you ever wondered who your father was, you late child, you? Of course, the difference is, if your father turned out to be a sheet-metal worker from Skaneateles and your mother someone who had chained herself to the White House in the Hoover administration, you’d be gladder than glad.”

  “People didn’t chain themselves to the White House in the Hoover administration; they camped along the Potomac.”

  “You haven’t even seen Max and Herbert together.”

  “They feel different, if you take my meaning.”

  “So do you and your brothers. Kate, Kate, what is to be the end of all this?”

  “You didn’t know Gerry Marston. She was a lovable child. Her parents were sheet-metal workers, or as near as makes no matter. And she would have made a name for herself—would, at any rate, have had the joy of writing a biography, which is a great joy, in its perverse way. The only person Max ought to write a biography of is Metternich. Or Talleyrand.”

  “Suggestion. From Phyllis to Kate, for the use of. Read all you can on this and shut, otherwise, up. When you get back to New York, you can tell Reed all about it or even, if absolutely necessary, Max. But do tell him in a crowded dining room somewhere, not on some rocks in Maine. And don’t drink anything that smells or tastes peculiar.”

  “I don’t believe,” Kate said, “that you’re half as skeptical as you make out. But it’s good advice, and I shall take it.”

  “That’s a wonder,” Phyllis said.

  Kate had some mail, just at the end of her visit.

  Reed wrote a note to say there had been fascinating developments in the St. Anthony’s bit; Finlay and Ricardo had finally gone to the headmaster and admitted the whole thing. The faculty insisted that the headmaster write to Harvard with the facts, or what continued to be called the alleged facts. Leo and his friends were being talked about in a way that Reed thought rather worried Leo, but that Leo would probably survive. Reed said that he thought all would be looking up from now on for Leo, and that he, Reed, would
be rather glad when she came home.

  Mr. Sparrow wrote from the library of the Wallingford about his new exhibition, and how well Max Reston was doing with the papers. He added his regret that Kate, being a woman, would miss the inside of All Souls.

  Phyllis and Hugh made plans for a continental tour, after which they would return, in the fall, to the States. It was clear that Phyllis was so eager to get back into harness that she contemplated even the wonders of Greece, which she had always longed to see, with a lackluster eye.

  At the end of her two weeks, then, Kate hired a car to drive her to Heathrow, and found herself upon a 747 headed home. She had, in the compartment above her head, a particularly beautiful sweater for Reed, an old brass hunting horn for Leo, which required much breath to blow, and notes on all the Whitmore papers.

  She also had by now a theory which no amount of caution could convince her was not, in its essence, true. Max had committed murder to hide the shame of his birth, and what in the world was she to do about it?

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the end Kate made a clean breast of the whole thing to Reed. After a bare twenty-four hours of catching up on letters and messages, Kate abandoned the lot and fled with Reed to the cabin in the Berkshires. The meadow had grown lavishly since she had seen it in the early spring, and the wind, when it blew, sent waves through the tall grass as though it were the sea. Kate had not realized how tired she had become, how constantly she had been responding to the young women of the Oxford of long ago, nor how relentlessly she had walked or bicycled the streets of Oxford, always in search of some thought or memory or the ever renewable shock of joy when one comes yet again upon a beautiful garden like that at New College. There was indescribable relief in the fact that no one had taken care of anything here in the Berkshires, that bushes and trees grew and competed, nature red in tooth and claw, if such can be said of the vegetable kingdom. “More like the jungle of New Guinea,” Reed had offered, as they moved lazily from outside to in, from one collapsed chair to another, and allowed tired metaphors to chase each other in their minds. Reed, too, had been under pressure, and it was as though, Kate remarked, someone had pulled the plug in the soles of their feet and let all the energy drain away.