The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Chapter Twelve

  An extraordinary thing had happened to Marquand in Peking, during that same 1935 trip when he met Adelaide. He had been staying at a hostelry called Mrs. Calhoun’s Boarding House, which had a sunny courtyard and a number-one boy to do the guests’ bidding, and one night, dining with a Chinese acquaintance, his companion suddenly clapped his hands for the number-one boy and commanded, “Send in the fortuneteller!” Instantly, out of the twilight shadows of the house an ancient Chinese with a long Mandarin mustache appeared, in a kimono, and stood with folded hands, gazing intently at Marquand. For several long minutes he riveted John with his penetrating stare, and then he began to speak in a soft, high, musical voice. John’s Chinese friend translated. “In China, there is no social classification for this man,” the fortuneteller said with his eyes still fixed on Marquand. “He is not a student, but he is almost a student. He is quick-tempered and successful. Should he gain knowledge of the complexity of social relationships, he will live to be seventy.” Suddenly the soothsayer stepped backward several paces, and a terrified look came across his face. “Please,” he said to Marquand’s friend, “I implore this man to wear a mustache, even if it is a small one.” When questioned about the importance of a mustache, the fortuneteller was vague but still almost desperately insistent. It had something to do with restoring the proportions of Marquand’s face, of bringing out its true character and quality, of giving the face balance. It had something to do with the Chinese concept of fêng-shui, which is the particular domain of soothsayers. Fêng-shui, literally translated, means “wind and water,” but philosophically it is usually interpreted as “the balance of things.” In China, the soothsayers have the final say on matters of fêng-shui, and their advice must always be taken because, though its effects may be small and subtle and in ways almost unnoticeable, this advice is inevitably helpful. Sometimes, Marquand’s companion explained, the soothsayer must study a man’s face for hours before coming to a prediction and recognizing an individual’s fêng-shui. It was highly unusual that this man, the friend said, had been able to make such a quick and positive appraisal. For Marquand, the episode was a thoroughly unsettling experience, and he immediately began to grow a mustache—the short-clipped, British-style mustache that did indeed give him the appearance of an Englishman. He also never forgot the soothsayer’s remark about learning “the complexity of social relationships.” It encouraged him to write novels along the lines of The Late George Apley.

  Everything about the Orient fascinated Marquand. He loved this land of soothsayers and evil spirits, of household gods and goddesses who had to be consulted and whose whims and wishes had to be respected. There was, he had decided on that first China trip, something of the Oriental in his own cast of mind, something that admired and understood the Chinese love of solitude and mystery and order—of balance. Balance, in fact, became his guiding artistic principle. But there was more to his love of China than this. He had journeyed out onto the Gobi Desert and watched the tribes of nomadic Mongols with their camels, seen them pitching their tents and cooking their meals over dung fires, and had been stirred by the solitude and wandering of these people of the vast plains. In his somewhat romantic self-appraisal, he had begun to see himself as a lonely wanderer, a man passing through life who could see and touch but never really reach other people. Aloneness was becoming one of his favorite themes. In response to the considerable amount of fan mail he was receiving about The Late George Apley, he had set up what was practically a form letter of reply. “Writing is a lonely occupation …” it began.

  He also continued to say, “A writer should never marry.” And yet he himself had wanted marriage—twice. He had not enjoyed his bachelorhood and had spent much of it visiting friends such as the Brandts and the Fiskes. For a while he had courted the monologist and writer, Helen Howe, but then one day at Adelaide’s insistence he had brought Adelaide around to see her—uninvited, for which Helen Howe never quite forgave him. (Later, she satirized him unpleasantly in a novel, We Happy Few.) He demanded solitude but was restless with it the moment he achieved it. He talked of needing peace and quiet and yet, in any situation that was remotely peaceful, he was quickly bored. And so, married to Adelaide and an established success, with no real money problems to worry about, he entered upon a way of life that was like that of the nomadic Mongols—moving from place to place, never satisfied for long in a new encampment, always restless to get on to the next. In New York he would want to get back to Boston, and once in Boston he would begin making plans to go back to New York. So it went. And, just as it had gone with Christina, he was quickly finding himself dissatisfied with Adelaide as a wife.

  She didn’t understand, he claimed, his need for solitude. She was forever barging in on him with noisy suggestions or changes of plans. She wouldn’t leave him alone. Furthermore, Adelaide, unlike Christina, was no shrinking violet and for all her supposed good nature was showing herself to be a singularly stubborn person. Like so many children of the rich, Adelaide Hooker Marquand was used to giving orders and having them obeyed; she had done this all her life. She not only disliked—she could simply not comprehend—not getting her own way.

  From the beginning there were disagreements over seemingly trivial matters. Traveling in the Southwest on their honeymoon, John and Adelaide stopped for the night at a small-town motor inn. Adelaide explained that if they left their shoes outside their door before retiring, they would be picked up by a minion during the night and shined. John was quite sure that this would not happen, but Adelaide assured him that it would, just as in any respectable hotel in Europe. Seeing the shoes outside the Marquands’ door the next morning, the chambermaid hurried back to the front desk and said, “Who are those people, and what do they want?” “It’s all right,” the manager assured the mystified girl; “it’s the American novelist Mr. Mark Twain and his wife.”

  Adelaide had a definite talent for interior decorating, and it wasn’t long before 1 Beekman Place was, under her hand, transformed into one of the handsomest apartments in the city; it was the sort of apartment which one entered on the second floor, then descended to other rooms below, and it made excellent use of the sweeping East River view. She had also gone to work on the country house he was building at Kent’s Island, adding a room here, an ell there. But there were inevitable divergences between John’s and Adelaide’s tastes. Adelaide had always wanted to own a Grant Wood painting. John not only had no interest in Grant Wood, he actively disliked Wood’s mannered and sentimental realism. Wood’s prices were also high, and John argued that they could not afford one of his pictures. Breezily—and characteristically—Adelaide said, “Then I’ll pay for it.” The painting Adelaide had set her heart on was called “Parson Weems’ Fable,” Mr. Wood’s depiction of the legend of young George Washington, the cherry tree, and his inability to tell a lie. Adelaide loved the picture. John hated it. It seemed to him actually disrespectful to George Washington’s memory—perhaps even unpatriotic—since Wood had painted Washington as a small boy in knee breeches, holding a hatchet beside the felled tree, but as a humorous touch had given the youth the old man’s face (hard-jawed from the ill-fitting teeth) of the celebrated Gilbert Stuart portrait. Adding to the effect of parody, or travesty, was the fact that Wood had painted in the figure of Parson Weems, who stood at one side of the painting, slyly holding aside a curtain to reveal the scene. It struck John as though Weems were offering the viewer a kind of peep show. But Adelaide bought it and hung it on the wall. Once it was there, John refused to look at it.

  Then there were certain difficulties with John’s new in-laws, the John D. Rockefellers. He found them a somewhat perplexing couple. With the publication of The Late George Apley, John Marquand had become a kind of expert on New England, particularly the Boston area. The Rockefellers, who had been fascinated by Apley, decided that it would be a pleasant change from Seal Harbor, Maine, where Rockefellers generally summered, to take a summer house on Boston’s North Shore. Qui
te naturally, they turned to John for advice, giving him their personal specification of the sort of summer place they were looking for. The trouble was, as John explained it to Conney Fiske, that the Rockefellers had never ventured anywhere without knowing exactly what to expect. They regarded New England as some exotic uncharted place, and their requirements for a holiday retreat struck John as baffling. They wanted, they explained, simplicity, and yet at the same time they wanted a place where there would be attractive people, a good country club with good tennis, and beaches and boating. They wanted to entertain and be entertained, and yet they did not want to go where there were cocktail parties. It seemed to John as though the Rockefellers were looking for a place that didn’t exist. John turned over the problem to Conney, who suggested that the Rockefellers journey northward for a visit. For years afterward John would relish the story of how, when Conney Fiske mentioned to her Irish maid that the Rockefellers were coming, the maid dropped the tea tray on the floor.

  The Rockefellers arrived, and one of the first aspects of New England they commented on was the multitude of fine old houses. John remarked that it was traditional in Boston to leave things as they are, that old houses were carefully kept up but not moved around or subject to elaborate restoration. There was a somewhat awkward moment when John D. Rockefeller chose to take this remark personally. Quietly, almost apologetically, Mr. Rockefeller said, “Of course we had no idea that Williamsburg would be so successful.”

  John took the Rockefellers on a tour of North Shore towns, but it was a fruitless journey. The Rockefellers, he reported to Conney, seemed to find Ipswich too much like their home-town Tarrytown, and the whole North Shore they decided was too social to be to their liking. They looked at a lot of places on the Cape, so many that they could not distinguish one from another, and the place that they liked best, whose name they couldn’t remember, had been washed away in a hurricane. John had a wonderful time mimicking—and exaggerating—the plight of his vacation-starved in-laws.

  Then there was Adelaide’s mother, Mrs. Hooker. John liked Mrs. Hooker but felt that at times she took herself and her good works a trifle too seriously, and he added Blanche Hooker to the list of people of whom he did his merciless parodies. He ridiculed the way she made a fetish of her health, telling the story of how, when Mrs. Hooker had joined John and Adelaide in Jamaica in 1938, where they had stopped on a West Indies cruise, the good lady had been bitten by a mosquito, thereby contracting something John labeled “Double Tertiary Malignant Malaria.” In John’s version of Mrs. Hooker’s illness, teams of specialists and round-the-clock nurses were required, along with elaborate medications, injections, serums, and transfusions.

  Then there was the problem of John’s aging father. John’s mother had died suddenly in 1932, and the one emotional strut supporting the old man’s life disappeared completely. When John married Adelaide, his father was seventy-one, completely retired from engineering and his son’s full responsibility. He had become increasingly a burden. John had arranged for his father to go and live in the Red Brick House at Curzon’s Mill. For a while he spent winters in the South with the younger Marquands, but he was happier at the Mill—where all Marquands and their Hale cousins came at the end. Only the Mill was home to him. But one of the attractions of the Mill to Phil Marquand was quite clearly its proximity to Rockingham Park race track, and John was forever having to step in and bail out his father or cover his losses.

  Senility was overtaking him. He drove an automobile so erratically that his driver’s license was finally taken away. To give him something to do, John bought him a motorboat, but his father kept running the boat up on rocks and ledges. In 1929, John’s mother had inherited a small amount of money from a Fuller relative. John had immediately convinced her to put the money in a trust, so that his father would not squander it. John’s father had considered that an act of terrible filial treachery and never forgave him for it. Phil Marquand had been certain that that money, wisely invested as he knew best how to do, could have been nourished into a vast fortune. At times he would come upon John and stare at him balefully a moment, then say, “If only you hadn’t put that money of your mother’s in trust!” and turn away.

  For a while, John had tried to set his father up in the chicken business at Newburyport, raising Rhode Island Reds. It almost seemed as though the old man might finally be successful, for Marquand’s eggs were considered the finest in Eastern Massachusetts, and the business was showing a tidy profit. Then one day a check arrived for $1,500 for a shipment of baby chicks. Quietly Phil Marquand got dressed in his best suit, put on his best coat and hat, picked up his walking stick, and—looking every bit like the country gentleman from the good old days in Rye—announced that he was going to Boston on urgent business. A strange smile was on his face. For two days nothing was heard of him. Then he returned, the smile gone and the money gone too. John asked him what had happened. “I blew it in, and it’s none of your damned business,” Phil Marquand said.

  From his house on Kent’s Island, John would drive over to see his father at the Mill. One winter day Phil Marquand suddenly seized his son’s arm and said, “John, it’s time for spring planting. Let’s get out of here.” John took his father to the window and pointed out to him the falling snow that was gathering in drifts outside the house. “It’s winter, Papa,” he said. The old man stared at the snow for a long time and at last said, “By God, John, you’re right.” When the couple whom John had hired to take care of his father left for a two-week vacation, Phil Marquand came to stay with John at Kent’s Island. For John it was a painful ordeal because, with his father underfoot, he was made more aware than ever of his father’s mental deterioration. John’s father would follow him around the house, asking John to take him home, and when John would patiently explain that he could not go home for a while the old man would say that, in that case, he would walk. Minutes later, forgetting the conversation that had just taken place, he would begin it again. John knew that his father should be placed somewhere where he could get better care, but John could not bring himself to place his father in a nursing home. And every now and again Phil Marquand would turn to his son and say in a bewildered way, “Where is the money, John? Where is the money?”

  But perhaps the greatest difficulty that pervaded John’s marriage to Adelaide from the beginning was Adelaide’s feeling that she could be some sort of assistant to her husband in his work. She saw how Carol Brandt—or any other crack secretary—could help John by taking down the novels, how Carl Brandt could help him cut and edit them, and how Conney Fiske could serve him as a consultant in subtler matters of taste and themes. It wasn’t that Adelaide was jealous of these other people’s positions in her husband’s creative life, exactly, but she could not see why she herself couldn’t also be given some sort of supporting role. She was, after all, artistic, and had done some writing. And so she saw no reason why she should not be permitted to go into his manuscripts, read them, and then come forth with proposed changes and revisions, substitutions and deletions. These efforts of Adelaide’s to improve her husband’s output were particularly galling to the man whose bailiwick this had long been, Mr. Alfred McIntyre, John’s editor at Little, Brown. McIntyre, a shy and timid-seeming little man until he had consumed his customary six martinis for lunch—at which point he became brilliant and quite extroverted, to say the least—had worked successfully with John for a number of years. John had the highest respect for McIntyre, and for his wife, Helen, who worked with him as sort of a team. (McIntyre’s literary assessments were highly personal and typically idiosyncratic. “If a story can make me cry after four Scotches,” he used to declare, “it’s good.”) McIntyre complained bitterly to John about Adelaide’s interfering efforts, but when John tried to dissuade her from them she protested, “But I want to feel a part of your work, John!” At last a solution was proposed to Adelaide: She could be useful as a sort of copy editor—in other words, she would be in charge of correcting spelling errors, punctuation
, syntax, and the like. Adelaide agreed to this. But it was next to impossible for Adelaide Hooker Marquand—a woman not accustomed to confinement—to restrict herself to these areas alone.

  In the meantime, two of John’s best and oldest friends, Gardi Fiske and Charley Codman, from the days in Battery A, had been planning something for him that would mean more to him, perhaps, than anything that had thus far happened to him in his life—more than his financial and critical and popular success, more than the Pulitzer Prize, more than being married to John D. Rockefeller III’s sister-in-law. Quietly but firmly the two men had been promoting John’s membership in the Somerset Club, Gardi as proposer, Charley as seconder. In the spring of 1938 they were successful, and John received a notice that he had been accepted into the most exclusive club in the most exclusive city in the country. He had made it. Upper-class Boston had accepted him at last. He had made it, furthermore, in spite of having written The Late George Apley, which many of the Boston Old Guard would always resent. He could now go to the elegant old club on Beacon Hill, sit in its deeply buttoned black leather chairs, sip its famous sweet martinis, nibble on its special muffins called corn dodgers—not as a guest, but as a member.

  He was overwhelmed with the news. Surely, he said, the club’s and Boston’s standards must be slipping badly. “However,” he wrote to Gardi Fiske, “this in no way dims my gratitude for the trouble you have taken in accomplishing a feat which was almost gargantuan.” John Marquand, at the time, was forty-four years old.

  On one of his early visits to his new club, John Marquand commented to an elderly member that he had heard that old Mr. Sears—whose town residence the gray brick mansion that houses the club had originally been—had required his daughters, when he received them in the drawing room, to walk backward from Mr. Sears’ presence when it was time for them to depart. The older member’s comment was, “Times have changed since then.”