“Your position as a lawyer, as a father, as a member of society obliges you to do everything you can to avoid a scandal,” he continued sententiously. “You can’t shirk this one, Charley.”
“What do I do then?” Charley asked sulkily.
“Leave the next step to me. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll go to Annie’s uncle and ask him to keep her at Yonkers for a week. And not to allow Bleecher in the house.”
“How can he do that? He can’t use force, can he?”
“I don’t have to tell Lewis Andros how to do anything. My confidence in him is complete. If all New York were as he, there would be no Bleechers invading the sanctity of our homes. Will you be guided by me, Charley?” There was a pause, as Winthrop stared impassively at his cousin. “Don’t you think I am entitled to ask that of you?”
Charley turned away, his face puckered as if he were going to weep. “Have it your way, Winthrop. You always do. I’m going out for a drink. For several drinks.”
Fifteen minutes later Winthrop entered the central hall of the Bank of Commerce and walked briskly down the aisle of yellow marble, past standing clerks at counters making entries, to the rear, where the president sat at a vast roll-top desk under a gas light in a green bowl suspended directly over his head. But Lewis Andros’s apparent availability to the public was an illusion. There was an unseen wall that protected the desk and its occupant, and if a stranger dared to intrude, or even to address the silent magnate without authority, he would receive for all his answer a slow raising of the great head and a vision of the whites of eyeballs before which he could only beat a stuttering retreat. Very different, however, was Winthrop’s reception.
“Ah, my dear boy, we see too little of you these days, far too little. I was asking Carrie only yesterday: when shall we have the Winthrop Wards for dinner? We cannot afford to neglect the parents of three strapping boys, can we? Certainly I cannot, with granddaughters their age, as well as daughters.”
As the great man rose and gripped his shoulder, Winthrop reflected that Lewis Andros managed to give a sexual flavor to every topic. It was always perfectly proper, if rather heavily connubial, but there it was. The great tan eyes may have been limpid, the splendid nose arched, the lips thin and intellectual, the gray curly hair venerable, the voice rich and cultivated, but all of these aspects seemed to merge in the likeness of a velvet cloak flung over an old bull. Mr. Andros had children in their thirties and in their teens; twice a widower, he was now, at sixty, the husband of a woman of twenty-five who already looked tired. He was a man, Winthrop conceded with a rueful admiration, who managed to pack the pleasures of the Renaissance into the permissible limits of brownstone New York. Nowhere did one drink finer Madeira or hear wittier talk than at stag dinners in his Fifth Avenue mansion, when his wife and brood were packed off to Yonkers.
“Could I sit down with you for a minute, Mr. Andros? I’m afraid I have a bit of rather nasty news. It concerns your niece Annie and my cousin.”
Andros’s banker’s countenance betrayed nothing during the dreary recital, but at the conclusion he permitted himself a windy sigh and a rueful shake of the great head.
“My dear Winthrop, you and I are men of the world. We know that Annie and Charley were mismated from the start. She is too much of a mouthful for those pearly teeth of his. Would it not be for the best if we arranged a dignified separation? Followed, in due course, by a divorce or even an annulment?”
“An annulment? With a six-year-old child?”
“Such things have been heard of, where there was a basic lack of consent at the outset. But of course I need not point out such things to a lawyer.”
“I arranged all the settlements at the time!” Winthrop exclaimed in some heat. “I should regard myself as gravely deficient if the marriage legalities were not entirely in order.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that, dear fellow. I mean: was Annie’s true and free consent given at the altar? I am speaking, mind you, of a woman’s psyche. The greatest lawyer in the world need not be ashamed to have failed to plumb those murky depths.”
Winthrop was shocked that so respected a member of the community should not devote even a passing glance to the moral aspects of what confronted them. “Even assuming that there was a chance for some respectable separation,” he countered, “surely it is jeopardized by the presence of such a cad as Bleecher.”
“Oh, come now, Bleecher’s not as bad as all that. He’s not the first man in our society to make up to a flirtatious wife. Carrie and I have found him an agreeable extra man for dinner parties, and even you will admit that he has an eye for a picture. Did you see his Toilette of the Odalisque at the Beaux Arts show last winter? Many people preferred it to The Abbess Detected, which took first prize.”
Winthrop stifled the impulse to parade his opinion of the immorality of last winter’s Beaux Arts show. He recollected that Andros’s own Halt of Cavaliers had been the runner-up. “Bleecher’s taste in art is not going to help matters if he runs off with Annie. He has already implicated Jane King in their friendship. If you and Mrs. Andros receive him in Yonkers, he will not hesitate to tell the world you have taken his side.”
“His side? How can a man in his position have a side?”
“You will forgive me, sir, if I am totally frank. To me the facts are too grave for parlor manners. It is my conviction that Bleecher is not even the decent simulacrum of a gentleman. He hopes to become your nephew-in-law and to force you to champion him in society.”
Andros was suddenly very still. “Force me, you say? How?”
“By implicating you and Mrs. Andros as accomplices in his adultery.”
How was it that Andros managed to quicken the air about him? He did not so much as twitch an eyeball or stir a muscle, yet Winthrop felt a throb in the atmosphere, as if, deep within the older man, some heavy cylinder had started to revolve.
“Mr. Bleecher will find that he has mistaken his party,” Andros said dryly. “What steps do you propose?”
“I propose that you keep Annie at Yonkers this week and see that Bleecher is not allowed on the grounds.”
Andros’s shaggy head went up and down several times. “The latter is simple enough. But my niece is a grown woman and married. I can’t force her, Winthrop.”
“We all know how Annie looks up to you. You’ve been a father and mother to her, as well as an uncle. She’ll do as you say.”
“You have more confidence in my power over young ladies than I do.”
“I have utter confidence in your powers!” Winthrop exclaimed, feeling that it was the opportune time for a show of emotion that was only half feigned. “And the day we New Yorkers lose faith in Lewis Andros, we’ll have faith in nobody!”
This was a bit strong, and Winthrop feared that he might have gone too far. But no. Andros rose, and Winthrop rose with him. Once again the big hand gripped his shoulder.
“Winthrop, my friend, you may count on me. I shall lie before Annie’s door like an Indian servant and guard her with my life. As for Mr. Bleecher, I shall not soil my hands with the likes of him. But I have some strong young men on the place—not to speak of two Russian wolfhounds—who may be less fastidious. You had better warn him to stay in the city!”
“I knew I could count on you. With your permission I shall drive out to see Annie in the morning. And in the meantime I guarantee Charley’s good conduct. The matter may yet be contained.”
2
At breakfast the next day in Union Square, Rosalie lingered at the table after the boys had gone off to school.
“Don’t you think it might be better if I went to see Annie with you? Or even if I went in your place?”
“I’d rather not have you mixed up in this, my dear.”
“Oh, Winthrop, I know all your theories about sparing the gentler sex. But you and I must occasionally deal with particulars and not always with generalities. I know as much about this situation as you do. That is, if you’ve told me the whole story.”
&
nbsp; “I’ve told you all I know. A man, of course, may have his own insights.”
“And a woman hers. In such a case a couple would be better than one.”
“Listen to me, Rosalie. I am not claiming any masculine superiority. I recognize that you might handle Annie quite as competently as I. It is not you, Rosalie Ward, whom I wish to keep clear of this sordid affair. It is you, Mrs. Winthrop Ward, the mother of my sons.”
Rosalie raised her hands in mock surprise. “Men make such interesting distinctions. A woman would never have thought of that!”
Winthrop looked down at his newspaper and tried to read about President Buchanan’s diplomatic reception. It proved impossible. Would Rosalie never give up? His tense fingers crumpled the journal.
“If you only didn’t enjoy it so much,” Rosalie continued, “I think I might mind the whole thing less.”
“Enjoy it! Charley’s humiliation?” As Winthrop stared across the table at his impassive tormentor, he felt his eyelids suddenly smart with angry tears.
“I didn’t mean to imply that you enjoy Charley’s humiliation. I meant that you enjoy the prospect of correcting Annie.”
“I have always been devoted to Annie!”
“Oh, I know that.” Rosalie’s face hardened as she moved to a more direct offensive. “Where do you think I’ve been for the last seven years not to know that? You’re obviously jealous of Jules Bleecher.”
Winthrop felt the sudden drop of anger in his heart. So that was it. So like a woman. So rather touching, really. He should have anticipated that Rosalie, like any good, loving wife—and who was a better, a more loving one?—was quite incapable of the smallest objectivity with respect to any member of his family. She was jealous, quite naturally, of anything that presented a potential wedge between her and him. She had always resented his love of Charley, always despised Annie . . . wasn’t it really better that way? How else could he be sure that she loved him?
“I am certainly not going to try to rebut your last statement,” he said with what he intended to be an air of amiable dignity. “At the risk of appearing stuffy and self-complacent—if that be not giving myself the benefit of your doubt—I should say it would be beneath my dignity. I confine my defense to this: if I get any pleasure, as you aver, out of this whole sorry affair, it is the pleasure—and a very mild one, I assure you—that every man is entided to derive from the sense that he is doing his duty.”
“Oh, go to see Annie, for heaven’s sakes,” his wife retorted brusquely. “I don’t even want to come with you after that.”
Winthrop had been looking forward to the drive up to Yonkers, well muffled, on that cold but pleasant December day in his new runabout with two fast trotters. There might have been in it some of the excitement of an unexpected holiday. But now all was made as bleak as the winter sky by Rosalie’s relendess denigrations. Why was it so necessary to her contentment—or to at least the lessening of her perennial discontent—to pull him down so? She was always quick to flare the egotistical motive under the seemingly generous actions in him. But when it came to some ranting, bushy-bearded abolitionist who wanted to blow up the world to cover his own failures—did she flare any ego? Oh, no! Then Mr. Bushy-beard was a saint, a prophet!
The sight of “Oaklawn,” one of the last summer residences in Yonkers, always made him sit up. To Winthrop it was a thing of peerless beauty, Richard Upjohn’s masterpiece, and he would have liked nothing better than to recreate it in Newport. The approach was down a long straight avenue, soft even in winter, under two brown Gothic archways, at the end of which was the glazed brown multi-turreted, castellated structure with tiny windows in the turrets and painted tin awnings over the larger windows of the main floor. A groom waiting at the front door took his carriage, and Winthrop was ushered at once into a small study with wicker furniture, lamps with beaded shades and several small dark examples of the seventeenth-century Italian school.
“Mrs. Ward will be with you in a moment, sir.”
And indeed Winthrop already heard the rusde of her skirts. Annie came hurrying in and threw her arms around his neck.
“Oh, Winthrop, sweety, at last! I’ve been dying to see you!”
She was dressed in black, as if in mourning. It perfectly suited the pallor of her complexion and served as a sepulchral setting for her long raven hair and thick eyebrows, her thin long figure, her flat chest. Yet for all of this Annie was the antithesis—and herein, as Winthrop well knew, lay the secret of her immense charm—of the death look in her garb and complexion. For she was all movement, all life, all gaiety. Even now, as she took in his effort to assemble his features into a becoming sternness, she burst into a peal of high laughter, too infectious to be as mocking as she may have meant it to be.
“Oh, Winthrop, that look. Please, not that look. You’re going to make me die of giggles when I want to be so serious. When, really, I’ve got to be serious. This is no time to play the Puritan ancestor. We have things to discuss. Things to decide.”
“I don’t know what we can have to discuss but your promise never again to see or communicate with Mr. Bleecher.”
“Not to see Jules!” Annie stepped back and stared at him as if he had said something ridiculous. “But, of course, I can’t give up Jules. He’s the only man who’s made life tolerable for me in the past year. Jules amuses me, Winthrop!”
“Will he amuse you enough to make it up to you if Charley repudiates you?”
Annie uttered another high peal of laughter. “Oh, quite enough! Would Charley really do that? Repudiate me. What a beautiful word!”
“I doubt that you’d find it so beautiful if it happened. What would become of you, Annie?”
“I suppose I’d have to go to Paris. Isn’t that what fallen women do?”
“And what would you live on?”
“What would I live on? Why, what do I live on now? My own income, thank you very much. Or would the law —your law—give that to Charley?”
“No, that would not go to Charley. But may I remind you that your money’s all in trust, and that your trustees have a certain discretion about the payment of income. If you were living in Paris with a man not your husband . . .”
“With a paramour!”
“With a paramour, then. Your trustees might see fit to accumulate the income until you came to your senses.”
Again that laugh! Winthrop reflected that his ancestor, Wait Winthrop, would probably have hanged this girl in Salem.
“Confess you’re bluffing!” Annie challenged him. “Trustees may be afraid of sin, but they’re much more afraid of lawsuits. And I’d sue them. Believe me, I’d sue!”
“Well, even with your income,” Winthrop retorted, with a touch of impatience, “what sort of future would you have in Paris? No respectable people would receive you.”
“How terrible!”
“And Bleecher, cad that he is, would desert you the moment he felt like it.”
“Ah, that he wouldn’t.” Annie did not laugh now, and her eyes had a sudden gleam. “I might leave Jules, for I am a bit of a cad, but he would not leave me. You underestimate my charms.”
“I have never underestimated your charms. But what I think you have underestimated is the difference it would make to Bleecher if he found you a social liability instead of a social asset.”
Annie paced the length of the little room. She stood for a moment, her back to him, before turning. “You’re playing a role, the family friend, the family lawyer, the guardian of morals. I wish you’d stop. I want to talk to you seriously.”
“What about?”
“Well, in the first place, Jules is not what you think him at all. He loves me dearly, faithfully. I should trust him implicitly, even in Paris. I know when a man is not to be trusted. Charley is not to be trusted. Besides, he hates me.”
“He’s your husband. He’s the father of your child.”
“Oh, Winthrop, be reasonable. Are you trying to tell me that Charley gives a hoot about me?”
“Deep down, yes.”
Annie laughed again. “Angels save us from that ‘deep down’!”
“But you can’t give up your marriage just because you and Charley have a misunderstanding!”
“A misunderstanding or an understanding?”
“Either.” Winthrop tried to look his most earnest. “A marriage must be worked on. Even if you don’t believe it’s a sacrament, you should recognize that our society is based on it. And your child—how can you abandon her? A court, you know, would give her to Charley.”
“Then I’d hardly be abandoning her.”
“Tell her that when she’s grown up!”
Annie at this looked grave. “Ah, yes, I can imagine what you Wards would have done to her. Even you, Winthrop.” She sat down on a plush stool and folded her hands soberly in her lap. Winthrop remained standing. “Yet you were my best friend after my marriage,” she continued wistfully. “You were all kindness and sympathy and understanding. At first I thought you were too stiff, too moral, too much older, and, of course, I knew that Rosalie disliked me. She hates feminine women. But then, gradually, I came to recognize that you loved Charley and, through him, me. I loved Charley, too, in those days, but as I began to understand his weaker side, I became frightened. And then I saw that you understood it, too, and were trying to help me. I accepted your help, perhaps too greedily. It was naughty of me, but Rosalie’s anger made it such fun.”
Winthrop had turned away, pained by what she had said about Rosalie hating feminine women. It was true, of course. “Go on,” he muttered. “But leave Rosalie out of it, please.”
“She was never really in it. What kind of idiot says there can’t be a friendship between a man and woman? We had such a friendship. Now don’t say I’m being unladylike!” Again her laugh pealed out. “You know it was true—on both sides. And you helped me, that’s the point. But all those books we discussed together, all those poems and plays—what were they really about? Jane Eyre and The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary? They were about passion! Do you remember when we went to see Rachel in Phèdre?”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 31
