A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  Luke got up to go, but O’Leary waved him back. “I’m not through yet, and you may as well listen to me. That’s what you came to do. The point is, which one of them do you want to save?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do. You see, you don’t have many people to draw on, really, and I gather you don’t have much time, either. And it must have struck you that of the people you do know, Lily Barnes is the only one who could have known anything about Charles at all.”

  “She’ll scarcely speak to me.”

  “You might think it over, all the same.”

  Luke was put out. He didn’t like to have the tables turned on him, particularly when he didn’t know what the tables were. He rose again, and O’Leary examined him candidly, placidly aware of his irritation.

  “I wish you luck,” he said.

  Luke said good-bye and left. Outside there was no cab in sight and he did not want to wait while somebody phoned for one, so he decided to walk. It was not a section of town he knew very well. For one reason it was recent. Formerly it had been the burial district of the city. Now it was jammed with cheap houses which bore an unpleasant likeness to the anonymous white marble jumble of a derelict campo santo. Nothing lived there. He came to a corner and saw that he was on the edge of an old cemetery, so he decided to take a short cut across it. It had been demolished to make way for new housing. Headstones had been flung down on their faces; and here and there a corroded coffin had been cast aside under a bush. The roof of the columbarium had fallen in and the empty chamber was crowded with nettles. He hurried on. O’Leary had upset him very much indeed. O’Leary had reminded him of Lily, and Lily reminded him of his own past, and he did not find that agreeable.

  *

  He found it even less agreeable by the time he had taken the one and a half hour trip to Palo Alto on a slow and smelly commutors’ train. The only person he could look up in Palo Alto was Senator Ford, and he did not want to see Senator Ford right now. He read the evening paper, had a tasteless dinner, could settle nowhere, and went for a walk in the campus grounds.

  The Stanford campus was large, pretentious, and at night rather eerie. The blue moonlight lent it a hostile glamour, and there was almost no other light. In front of him stretched the Mall, bordered by dishevelled palm trees that rattled in the night air, and by a wood with an underbrush of needles and aromatic leaves. It was a lonely road. Far ahead of him he could see the mosaic façade of the college chapel, glittering in the moonlight. He struck off into the trees and came to the family tombs of the Stanford family, the one a miniature pyramid, the other a small temple guarded by lipsticked lions. He walked out across the fields and past the stables towards the golf course. Even from a distance he heard that long forgotten but familiar whirring sound. Because the climate was so mercilessly arid there, the golf links were watered only at night. The sprinklers turned in the moonlight, perhaps ten of them, casting sprays of silent water twenty feet into the air, where the moon mirrored the individual drops. Slowly the sprinklers circled on their pivots, their double wings of water like enormous moths, stately, slightly unreal, and silent except for that incessant metallic grinding of bearings that imitated, but did not reproduce, the song of absent cicadas.

  Luke sat down on a ragged stump, watching the sprinklers, and lit a cigarette. He had been here, but it wasn’t really his Alma Mater, and he did not want to cry. At the same time it was wrong to come full circle, and that was what he had now done. Lily and Maggie had got him back into the same old trap again by a woman’s trick that had nothing to recommend it.

  X

  HE HAD BEEN ONE OF SENATOR Ford’s boys and Senator Ford had pull. That was what had got Luke in, for Stanford, like most small private universities, ran on the quota system. The college was co-educational, but by maintaining a ratio of three men to each woman they had managed to keep the money in the family. They also encouraged intellect. That is, they would admit almost anybody of sufficient intelligence, so long as the intelligent did not take up more than 10 per cent of the student body. This system may not have made the intelligent particularly happy while they were there, but as long as they became distinguished afterwards and developed a fine alumnal glow the university really didn’t care about that. What it did care about was that the intelligent had an unfortunate tendency, purely apart from lacking gymnastic skill, to be of mixed descent. Hence the quota. South Americans, if well-to-do and of a neutral tint, were always welcome, particularly if they had Scots or Irish blood and were not Catholics.

  Luke was not South American nor, for that matter, was he strictly Catholic. He was a Spanish-Mexican from Los Angeles and looked it.

  He was not unhappy, but he was not happy there either, for he had self-knowledge, and those who have that can never be happy. He was impelled by impersonal ambition and he knew it. Of all the forms of ambition that is the worst, for it is inexorable. For himself he had no ambitions at all. He would have been happier playing pool. He liked the swagger and the jazz of the marginal life he came from. But he knew it lived under a shadow. He knew the importance of a social role and of comfort and a reputation. He knew this and it made him sad. He did not want to better himself. He did not need bettering. But if you belong to a minority you have to put yourself beyond the range of insult. Minorities should be both transient and rich.

  His one real ally was, of course, Senator Ford, but Ford was not much actual help. He could be sympathetic when he chose, but he seldom chose. He was old; he was fickle; he was sexless; and he was primarily concerned about himself and his own reputation. He was indulgent, but he was neither understanding nor kind. He saw his protégés once a week and was agreeable to them. The rest of the time he was busy with his autobiography. It would never be finished. It would never be published. And Senator Ford knew that.

  One evening, not having anything else to do, Luke was in one of the libraries, slightly sullen with boredom, when Maggie came up to him. He remembered now that she had been wearing a white sweater and a tweed skirt. He could also remember how he had felt about her at that moment, a curious mixture of wariness and curiosity, wondering who she was, what she wanted, and how much sting there might be in either; together with the acute, angry discomfort of not knowing quite what to do which was always the by-product of his having wandered into a world that did not quite belong to him.

  But they saw a lot of each other. She was neither so simple nor so naïve as she appeared. She already had that hard naïveté that American women do have, with the difference that in her it was not grasping.

  Because they were young he had said that he was in love with her. Sometimes he was. Now, when he thought it over, it was a scrambled memory. What he had liked best about it was the sense of belonging. It had been some time before he had realized that, in a different way than he, she too was in between the frontiers of society. In her case they were other frontiers. Unlike an army, a society sees no bad strategy, and often exists only because it fights itself simultaneously on a hundred varying fronts.

  He remembered many things about her. Once, in a sudden rainstorm, they had hidden under the canvas of a haystack. There was an adolescent perfume then well advertised called New Mown Hay and he had thought that the stack would smell like that and be somehow pink. It didn’t and wasn’t. It smelled damp. The hay was corded with bailing wire. They rearranged the bails to make a sort of house and laughed in the rain until the campus patrol car stopped to investigate. That was funny too.

  And once, after a party, late at night, they had driven home on a steam-roller. She had the assurance to do something whimsical like that. It was not until he had been to bed with her that he learned that that lopsided decorum which was her usual mask, and which he thought she had been bred to, was actually the personal disguise of some puzzled terror underneath. She was always acting. And she persisted, blandly, in being so much more adult than he was that she often hurt him.

  Nor was the sexual side of their relationship satisfacto
ry. She kept the two sides of herself always disparate, and each was more vehement, the one violently, the other with decorum, than it should have been. He could never make her two selves match up, and both were evasive. That such nocturnal episodes took place, as was customary with the college students, at the ring of auto courts and motels in the outlying districts did not help matters much. The one they usually went to was a featureless blank in his mind, except that its garden contained painted lead statues of dwarfs in yellow caps and that the fountain was topped with a boy in a smock, carrying an umbrella whose iron shaft had been bent almost double, so that the water, spraying out over the umbrella top, fell chiefly into a bed of dirty asters. And in bed he lost identity for her. She did not seem to care who he was, and that disquieted him.

  One night, and for him the night existed in his memory as something inexplicably hideous, they had walked back to the campus, a distance of perhaps two miles, through the suburbs. There was a moon and the air was clogged with haze. They passed a vacant lot thick with candytuft and wild mustard. “Do you love me?” she had asked.

  “Of course I do.”

  “No, you don’t. Nobody does,” she cried. She clenched her hands and ran into the vacant lot. He stood for a moment, startled, and then went after her. She was sitting crumpled up on the grass. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “I shouldn’t. Now you know.”

  “Now I know what?”

  “You do,” she said, and began to cry. The only thing to do was to sit down beside her, which he did. Through the tall weeds he could see the empty sidewalk and hoped nobody, particularly a policeman, would come by. She didn’t want to be touched. She went right on crying. He finally had to push her down on the grass and shut her up, and he was shaking himself. Her skirt was smeared with the wet yellow mustard. She stared at him. She had lost her composure and never again with him did she regain it.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” she said.

  “Why should I tell anybody? Tell them what?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. He could not decide whether she was acting or not. She got up and the rest of the walk was uncomfortable. He did not see her for several days. He did not, somehow, want to. He had his own reasons for wanting the whole relationship to float in limbo, for he knew how circumscribed it was. He preferred to keep it that way. He did not put much faith in it, but not seeing her did make him realize how important seeing her had become, as a sort of daily anchor to keep him from drifting. It manufactured memories: long sun-drenched afternoons on that lake above the post office where every year someone always drowned. Now it was winter and the lake had run away into the ground, as it always did, leaving only a shapeless puddle in a bowl of cracked mud.

  He began to miss her. Then, quite suddenly, he bumped into her outside the university post office. He did not think it was entirely by chance. He had learned that Maggie’s nature was such that one seldom saw her unless she felt like being seen. He was upset to find what pleasure it gave him to see her. She had become something familiar in an unfamiliar world. She smiled at him confidently, but it was not an open smile.

  “Come on, I want you to meet Mother,” she said. He could not tell if she was being deliberately provocative. She must know perfectly well that he didn’t want to meet Mother and she must know why. He did not want to be tested and found wanting.

  “Oh, do,” she urged, while he thought it over. “She doesn’t bite.”

  So he went. The car was parked several blocks away. It was the big black Cadillac Lily still had. The car glittered with a special insolence. Lily leaned out of the window. She was, of course, driving. He was taken aback by that big, confident, heavily powdered face and the eyes that looked out of it, cold, cursory, polite and evasive. He tried to regard her as an older, bigger Maggie, but that was not quite true. Lily insisted upon taking the two of them to lunch.

  He got uncomfortably into the back of the car, sure he was not dressed properly for wherever it was that Lily would choose to take them. The car was big and he was slight, and he sat alone in the back seat. Maggie talked incessantly. Lily, he noticed, was watching him in the rear view mirror, and he wanted desperately to comb his hair. He did not know how he knew that the two women were having a quarrel. Perhaps it was because Maggie was talking much more intimately to him, emphatically so, than she ever did when they were alone. She was parading him in front of her mother, to make her mother mad. It made him feel important and inferior. He knew perfectly well that to a woman like Lily he was not the right kind of young man at all.

  All the strip of highway south of the university was lined with over-decorated restaurants to which the local matrons went for lunch. They had the same kind of massive simplicity as had Lily’s car. They were geared to transient power. It was difficult to keep talking and his voice had not the right sophomoric drawl.

  The restaurant was chic, a series of interconnecting ranch-house rooms, painted white and turkey red, with awnings, fowling pieces, napoleon ivy, a good deal of white-painted wire, and bird-cages with flower arrangements in them. The bar was mannish, for the fraternity trade. The place smelled faintly of patchouli. It was a recent habit of the management to put all small change in an acid bath, so that it came out sparkling and new. Anyone who pulled out a handful of change showed instantly where he had been. It was a canny piece of advertising. The two women left him to go to the powder-room and he stood watching the half-deserted bar. It was one of many recent lessons in the applied techniques of glamour.

  He watched them returning and had a minute to look at Lily before she saw him. There was certainly something going on between the two of them, and Maggie looked both defiant and squashed. Lily, he saw, was younger than she looked and more attractive. Seen from his distance, unobserved, she was a different kind of woman, with a personal swagger and pathos to her that he had been too embarrassed at first to notice. There was something hopeful in the way she looked at people round her.

  But once she saw she was being watched the mask slid down again. He wondered what it was that she felt she had to be careful about. She had that habit of swimming through a room which he envied in people, and of course she made a point of knowing the waiters, whether she knew them or not. Lily reduced Luke and Maggie to the kindergarten level. She moved her judicious way through lunch.

  “We’d better begin with grapefruit,” she said. “It’s hot today. And then curried shrimps, I think.” She leaned forward. “Is that all right, Luke?” She made a conscious effort to make the “Luke” sound friendly.

  “Yes,” he said uncomfortably. “That would be fine.”

  Lily continued with the menu. She seemed then to ignore both of them. When she was finished, and not before, she went on talking.

  “Maggie says you’re from Los Angeles,” she said. “Do you know the Petersons?”

  He did not know the Petersons and he knew that she knew it. “Los Angeles is a big place.”

  Lily ran her thumb down the side of the menu. “I suppose so,” she said doubtfully. “But no city is big once you get to know who’s in it. Then it always suddenly gets so small. What part of Los Angeles?”

  “Central,” he said. “Figuaroa.”

  She blinked and looked at the grapefruit. The crushed ice was too coarse and the grapefruit slid around in its cradle. He jabbed at it miserably, wanting very much to leave. Maggie said nothing. The whole meal was like that.

  “This place has fallen off,” said Lily, when they got up to go.

  Catching her eye by accident he was startled by her expression. It wasn’t what he had expected at all. It was erotic, speculative and personal. Or was it only that they all had had too much too drink? After all, she was Maggie’s mother.

  But Lily looked several different ages at once, and none of them suited her. Seeing she had been caught out she made a point of ignoring him, even as they walked out of the restaurant, through the flunkeyism of the owners, bowing her out. Did she come there, he wondered, just for the pleasure of bein
g bowed out? Besides, though there are many kinds of sexual attractiveness, it did not seem to him that he possessed any of them. Lily had embarrassed him.

  She also seemed to have embarrassed herself. She talked too volubly to Maggie all the way back to the campus, and seemed pleased when they both got out of the car. She drove away immediately.

  Maggie looked after the car and frowned. She seemed discouraged. He felt discouraged himself. It was all very well to pretend with her that they were equals, but he had been slapped up against the world she came from. He looked down the allée of the campus. Though not more than fifty years old, it seemed ancient, not in the sense of venerable, but in a primitive sense that was even more depressing. It was inimical to him.

  Maggie pretended ease. “Did you like her?” she asked.

  He said yes.

  She looked at the now empty road from which the car had passed. “Oh, you were horrible,” she said. “How could you be so horrible? Why couldn’t you talk to her?”

  He was angry with himself. “Nobody could talk to her.”

  “But you don’t understand,” she said. She turned and walked up the row, in the impatient sunlight, under the well-bred trees and he did not follow her. He did not try to follow her, for he quite suddenly realized that as a couple they were noticeable.

  On that social campus everybody watched everybody else: it was part of their training for suburban life. The buildings, with their monotonous arcades, seemed suddenly too complicated for him, and he struck away from them and went to the outdoor pool. There only, with his compact little body cleaving the green water, he felt more at ease, for in childhood to swim was something he had learned how to do and it had shaped him.

  For several weeks she avoided him. He had known that she would. And apart from missing the company he was not sure whether he cared or not. There is a difficulty with mothers: they show other people what their daughters are apt to become. Perhaps she was nervous about that.