“AH right, skip Vogue,” Frances continued impatiently. “Skip fashion. You could have been a teacher or a writer. You used to write very good things at school.”
“Frances, pooh to you.”
“But it’s true! You have deliberately held yourself back, for Ted’s sake. Or for what you thought was Ted’s sake.”
“I’ve had a very happy life, dear. Is that wrong? Is that selfish?” Alice paused. Frances knew that she was trying now to consider, although not very hard perhaps, that she might have been wrong. “Perhaps it is selfish to be as happy as I’ve been.”
Frances knew that she should stop right there, but that she wasn’t going to. “It’s not only the career you’ve given up. I suppose you never really wanted one. It’s the personality. You’ve never allowed yourself to be a woman who might make Ted the least bit uncomfortable.”
“I should hope not!” Alice exclaimed proudly.
“Oh, I don’t mean a scold or a crosspatch. You could never have been anything but lovely. I mean you’ve never let yourself become … well, an intellectual.”
“If you mean I haven’t turned myself into a bluestocking—thank you!”
At this Frances did pull herself together and dropped the subject. Just because she was beginning to have new doubts and misgivings was no reason to intrude on Alice’s serenity. Alice might be as lost as she was if Ted should die, but then mightn’t Alice have the luck to die first? She had always been lucky.
***
Frances found that one did not have to be a widow very-long before opportunities presented themselves for a change in one’s social group. People who had not been particularly congenial with, or who had been awed by, her husband, would turn up to see if she might “do” in the next lap of life. Such a person was Josephine Stagg. She and Frances had been at Miss Dixon’s Classes together, and she had had rather a crush on Frances, which had struck the latter at the time as something ominous and to be avoided. After school Josephine had married too often, usually in Europe, and had had a bout with morphine. Once, after a gap of several years, when Frances had run into her, rather too made-up, in the Carlisle Club, she had murmured in a husky voice: “Hi, Franny! Don’t you recognize your old adorer? I’ve been to the dogs, but I’m back now.” She was, too. She had proceeded to establish herself as one of New York’s leading decorators.
Stagg had been her maiden name; she resumed it as the door slammed on minor German and Italian titles. Single, fat, loud and gorgeous she entertained the world of fashion in an old brownstone that she had made a blaze of color and flowers. When she and Frances met again at the Carlisle after Stuart’s death, she asked her to dinner, and Frances murmured something about mourning. Josephine said there would be only three or four friends, and Frances accepted. When she arrived she found twenty. Josephine offered no apology, and Frances made no comment.
At dinner Frances found herself next to Manners Mabon, a very odd but very ebullient person. He told her that he was a bachelor, aged fifty-seven, and that he didn’t have a job or a worry in the world. He was very stout and short, with a round, reddish face, white hair parted in the middle and a high, affected voice that could be surprisingly authoritative when he was not screeching with laughter at his own jokes. People called him “Manny” and obviously regarded him as an authority on parties and gossip. Frances couldn’t help reflecting that Stuart would not have liked him. But then he wouldn’t have liked Josephine, either.
“And what do you do?” Frances asked him, when conversation at the table had fallen into pairs.
“Do, my dear lady? Why, bless you, I don’t do anything. I live.”
“But don’t you have to do something besides live?”
“Why? I have eight thousand a year. It’s not much, I grant you. In fact, I believe it’s near poverty in your circles, but I have a darling old aunt who allows me to curl up like a cat in a corner of her apartment. And then I eke out the rest at the bridge table. I’m like the duchess in The Gondoliers: ‘At middle class party I play at écarté—and I’m by no means a beginner.’” He arched his eyebrows to underline his proficiency.
Frances was rather shocked by his financial candor, but she was impressed, in spite of herself, that anyone could be so confident on so little. She thought of all the guards that she and Stuart had placed between themselves and this man’s impecunious state: the trusts, the insurance, the pension, the tax-free bonds. It would take a world disaster to put them in Mr. Mabon’s shoes.
“Have you never worked?”
“Oh, yes, from time to time. Actually, I had a job at St. Christopher’s School a couple of years back. One of the teachers died, poor fellow, and the headmaster begged me to fill out his term.”
“But you didn’t want to go on after that?”
“No.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“I didn’t like the headmaster. He was intense, sincere, perhaps well meaning. But…” He paused, with an air of put-on gravity.
“But what?”
“He used the adverb ‘hopefully’ in sentences where it failed to qualify a verb, an adjective, or even another adverb.”
Frances stared. “Was that all?”
“No. Worse is to come. Where you and I might have employed the expression ‘best estimate,’ he would say ‘best guesstimate’! I am sorry to pain you, Mrs. Hamill, but he really did.”
Frances was beginning to enjoy herself. “I hope there’s no more to come.”
“But there is. Once, just before I tendered my resignation, he suggested a joint session of the eighth and ninth grades for a discussion of the drug problem.”
“And you disapproved?”
“Not of the idea. But of his proposition that we might thus obtain a ‘cross-fertilization of ideas.’”
Frances nodded. “My husband hated that sort of thing, too. He used to call it jargon. He said it was a disguise for mental apathy.”
Mr. Mabon accepted her switch of emphasis. He had not become a regular diner-out without learning his business. “Of course, he did. Your husband was a great man. But it must be depressing for you to be told that all the time. It must make you feel like a monument.”
“Oh, you see that?”
“Everyone pushes you back in the past. Which doesn’t exist, really. I mean for living. We have only the present. And a little future.”
“When you have four grandchildren, as I do, Mr. Mabon, you have to live a lot in the future. You want to make sure, anyway, that they have one. There are schools to think about, and colleges, and graduate schools—”
“But you must have plenty of money for all that!”
Frances made a little face at this. Her world was almost superstitious in its dread of ever suggesting there might be enough money for the future. “If I can keep ahead of inflation.”
“Anyway, you can’t live for grandchildren. Has it never struck you that a grandchild is actually a rather distant relation? He has only a quarter of your blood, like a second cousin.”
Frances decided not to be irritated. He was too ridiculous. “It’s easy to see you’re not a family man. Why, I adore my grandchildren. Of course I can live for them. What do you live for?”
“Myself.”
“But that sounds so selfish.”
“It is selfish. I cultivate each minute. I am enjoying this soufflé. This fine white wine. I train myself not to think ahead even as far as dessert. Most people waste their lives anticipating the pleasures of the immediate future. But I am determined not to waste any present pleasure. I am determined, for example, not to waste the pleasure right now of talking with you.”
“Thank you! It’s a pleasure for me, too. But can we really live just like that? Mustn’t we be doing things for other people?”
“Heaven forbid!”
“I mean in order to be happy. You can’t be happy just living for yourself.”
“Is there any other way? And I’m not at all sure it’s not the only thing you can do for other
people.”
After dinner, in the drawing room, before the gentlemen joined the ladies, Frances asked Josephine about him. She replied that he was a darling and that she adored him.
“He tells me that he lives only for pleasure,” Frances observed.
“That’s all right if he gets it. So few people do.”
“But doesn’t it make him a terrible egotist?”
“It makes him a saint! Because the things that give him pleasure are the kindest, goodest things. Manny is always at some hospital or nursing home visiting some poor derelict whom everyone else has forgotten about. Why, he goes to see Mary Landon twice a week, and she’s nothing but a vegetable. I doubt she even knows he’s been there.”
“Why does he go then?”
“Because he says it’s just possible she might.”
The men appeared now, and Manny smiled at Frances across the room.
“I suppose he’s a…” She paused.
“A fag? Presumably. Unless he’s too fat. Do you care?”
“Oh, no.” And for a moment Frances persuaded herself that she actually didn’t. The atmosphere at Josephine’s was contagious.
Her new friend was too polite a guest to talk after dinner to his table companion, but when Frances left he insisted on walking her back to the Carlisle Club, where she was spending the night, though it was only a block away. He suggested that they visit an art gallery the next day to see the work of a young painter whom he admired, and she found herself agreeing without the slightest hesitation. And so her new relationship began.
He was nothing if not companionable. He seemed to have a genius for amusing himself and others. He talked a great deal, he almost bubbled, and showed a wide knowledge of art, literature and music, a shrewd eye and a keen ear. And yet Frances never had to interrupt him. He seemed to sense exactly when she wanted to speak, and he would listen as intently as he talked. Furthermore, he never seemed to be in a bad humor; he was always smiling, when he was not shouting with laughter. Occasionally he lost his temper, at a rude taxi driver or waiter, and then he could become quite commanding in this manner, but the mood quickly passed, and he would often apologize.
“Aren’t you ever in the dumps?” she asked him once.
“Oh, my, yes. I have abysses. But then I hide. I won’t be seen.”
What did he see in her? Of course, she paid, at restaurants, at theatres, at exhibitions, but there must have been plenty of rich, lonely widows who would have been glad to pay for his company. And then, too, she was a bad bridge player and knew little about pictures and sculpture. Yet she had a strange sense that she was special to him. Was she a kind of older sister? A surrogate mother?
She found that she was spending more nights at the Carlisle Club instead of driving back to Bedford. She had given up the apartment in town when Stuart died as a needless expense; now she began to think of taking another small one. But in some ways she preferred the club. The anonymity of a rented bedroom pleased her. It committed her to nothing. When she closed her door, she closed out the world, even the consoling buzz of female chatter from the common rooms below. She had never sympathized with the point of view that condemns the even occasional segregation of the sexes. What she loved now about the Carlisle Club was that so much of life was suspended within its chaste Georgian walls: there was no sex, no home, no work, no duties. Was she getting as irresponsible as Manny himself?
“I think I begin to see what interests you in me,” she suggested to him at last. “I’m a kind of tabula rasa. You see in me the perfect specimen of the philistine who denies her philistinism. Who defiantly affirms she’s modern once she’s paid her tribute to the accepted bourgeois ultima Thules. Picasso in art. Eliot and Pound in literature. Stravinsky in music.”
“Let’s put it that you interest me less because you are that, than because you see it. And seeing it, you can’t really be it.”
There seemed no limit to his eclecticism. If people incurred his scorn, no art did. He took her to a minimalist show at the Whitney and to an exhibit of Bouguereaus; he wept through La Traviata and listened with rapture to concerts in which she could detect nothing but dissonance and cacaphony; he urged her to read Henry Esmond and Nathalie Sarraute.
“But mightn’t I lose all discrimination this way?” she asked him after they had attended a show of nineteenth-century sculptors of the Roman school. “Do I want to reach the point where I equate that nude Christian slave girl with the Venus de Milo?”
“Must we always be comparing things? There’s only one great dividing line that we must never forget: between art that is serious and art that is not. But forgive me. There can be no such thing as art that is not serious. Between art and … well, what is not art.”
“You judge, then, solely by the intention of the artist?”
“Not at all. I simply respect his intention. If it be serious.”
She began to find it exhilarating to live in a world where no doors were banged shut. And she began as well to develop a pleasant and warming confidence that she was more to him than a promising pupil. She was coming to understand that he was a person incapable of subterfuge. The frank and open friendship that he offered meant as much to him as to her.
“I felt from the beginning that we might be friends,” he told her. “I had a funny sense that your barriers were like those Indian bead curtains, easily thrust aside. And perhaps only put there to be thrust aside. You and I have both lived in worlds where communication is not much trusted. Yours has been one of reticences where clichés take the place of confidences. Mine has been one of garrulousness where too much candor creates the same blockage.”
“Oh, it’s true, Manny! I feel so easy with you.”
“That’s because we’re learning to love each other. Oh, if you could see your eyes right now! My dear, you’re horrified. But of course, I’m using that dirty old word in its Christian sense. Is that better? Can you relax now?”
“Isn’t it funny?” she responded with a nervous titter. “Even in its Christian sense it still seems dirty to me. Or at least in poor taste, which is worse.”
“Ah, but the fact you can say that shows how far you’ve come!”
“But how far am I going?”
“You see? You’re still apprehensive. Love, you suspect, may land you in some very odd places. But don’t worry, my dear. It commits you to nothing. You don’t have to go anywhere. You’re already there!”
“Where?”
“Having a little fun with poor old Manny. Is that so wicked?”
“I wonder if it isn’t.”
She was very nervous when he came out for his first weekend at Bedford. Leslie and Polly both had houses on the estate and would expect to be asked for a meal to meet any house guest of their mother’s. And then there was Alice Nicholas, who had still not met him. Frances was not at all sure that it was wise to mix her new life with her old, but she had to do something about it. Leslie had already questioned her rather archly about Manny, and Alice’s total silence had perhaps been more ominous.
He came out from the city by train on Saturday morning and was very enthusiastic about everything. Frances tried to imagine Crossways as it must strike him. It was a large, square, white old frame house, built more than a hundred years ago, to which had been added a modern wing with a living room, greenhouse and a pavilion over a swimming pool. It was a blend of the genteel old Westchester County with the prosperous new one; it was comfortable and homey and occasionally unexpected. It had oddly small rooms between the big ones and narrow corridors that led one to a proliferation of small stairways and different landings. It was decorated with good, but not the best, early American, and with Stuart’s rather cautious collection of prints and watercolors: Audubon’s birds and animals, English hunting scenes, Georgian political cartoons, and, here and there, a fine oil. Frances noted that Manny at once picked out the Martin Heade with the hummingbird and orchid. It was a man’s house, she thought, a bit ruefully. One felt the touch of the late Stuart
Hamill, the large-minded lawyer who was not going to allow any corner of his life to lack some grace.
“How do you run it all?” Manny wanted to know. “Can you get help out here?”
“I have a couple. And a part-time gardener.”
“A couple!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “That’s the height of sybaritism today.”
Leslie had invited herself to lunch. It was warm enough to sit outside and the three had drinks on the terrace. Leslie was at her worst: bright-eyed, fidgety, insinuating, determined to be daring.
“Mummy tells me that you and she have been living the life of Riley, Mr. Mabon! I must say, I’m very envious.”
Frances could feel that Manny was never going to like Leslie. She saw her daughter now through his eyes. Leslie too evidently considered herself the one sound member of a giddy clan. Her auburn hair had been rigidly set, probably just for this lunch; her puffy lips were ruby red. She had a way of tilting her head back as she talked, so that her gray-green, rather staring eyes could take in her interlocutor as someone to smile at, perhaps to condescend to. There was an air of self-obsession in her frozen combination of grin and grimace. It was as if she were constantly thinking: how do I look, how do I sound?
“I should have thought the term ‘Riley’ a bit florid to describe a respectable widow’s existence,” Manny retorted mildly.
“Oh, I think there’s a great deal to be said for a widow’s life these days. Ma can travel and go to the theatre and tour the art galleries. In fact, she can do anything she jolly well wants to do. Unlike me, she doesn’t have three great gangling girls at home, and a hungry husband to feed at night.”
Frances reflected how little this description seemed to fit Leslie’s ordered life in the small, perfect French house built on the best corner of the family property.
“But I don’t suppose you’d change with her,” Manny observed.
“I wouldn’t change, no, Mr. Mabon,” Leslie replied in a faintly reproving tone. “I adore my family, of course. All things in due time. What I mean is that it’s good to be a wife and good to be a mother and—who knows?—it may be good to be a widow.”
Skinny Island Page 13
