Theophilus North

by Thornton Wilder

  “Didn’t you know?” He named his birthplace. “In 1921, in my city three large companies and five prominent families went bankrupt.”

  “Did you have any inkling of that when I saw you in Paris?”

  He pointed to his head. “Oh, more than an inkling. But fortunately I was engaged to a girl with considerable means. I told her that I had nothing but my severance pay. She laughed and said, ‘Darling, of course, you have money. You’re engaged to look after my property and you’ll be very well paid for that.’ . . . I spent my last hundred dollars getting to the church.”

  In 1919 and 1920 and in the years immediately following I came to know a large number of combat veterans—to say nothing, for the present, of those whom it was my duty to interrogate in a later war. (My part in “Rip’s war,” as has been said, had been safely passed among the defenders of Narragansett Bay.) As could be expected the marks left by that experience on the veteran varied from man to man; but in one group the aftereffects were particularly striking—the airmen. The fighting men on land and sea in early youth experienced what journalists called their “glorious hour”—the sense of weighty responsibility bound up with belonging to a “unit,” exposure to extreme fatigue, to danger, and to death; many carried the inner burden of having killed human beings. But the “hour” of the first generation of combat aviators comprised all this and something in addition. Air combat was new; its rules and practice were improvised daily. The acquisition of technical accomplishment above the earth filled them with a particular kind of pride and elation. There were no gray-haired officers above them. They were pioneers and frontiersmen. Their relations with their fellow-fliers and even with their enemies partook of a high camaraderie. Unrebuked, they invented a code of chivalry with the German airmen. None would have stooped to attack a disabled enemy plane trying to return to its home base. Both sides recognized enemies with whom they had had encounters earlier, signaled to them in laughing challenge.

  They lived “Homerically”; that was what the Iliad was largely about—young, brilliant, threatened lives. (Goethe said, “The Iliad teaches us that it is our task here on earth to enact hell daily.”) Many survivors were broken by it and their later lives were a misery to themselves and to others. (“We didn’t have the good fortune to die,” as one of them said to me.) Others continued to live long and stoic lives. In some cases, if one looked closely, it was evident that a “spring had broken down” in them, a source of courage and gaiety had been depleted, had been spent. Such was Rip.

  There was some discussion as to where Rip and I could meet for an eight o’clock class. “I’d like you to come over to my place, but the children would be having their breakfast and my wife would be running in and out to remind me of things I should do.”

  “I think Bill Wentworth would let us use one of those social rooms behind the gallery at the Casino. We might have to move from room to room while they’re cleaning up. I’ve never seen you in the Casino, but I assume Your Honor is a member there.”

  He grinned and held his hand beside his mouth as though it were an unholy secret. “I’m a life-member. They don’t let me pay any dues,” and he poked me as though he’d stolen the cookie jar.

  So the lessons began: an hour of vocabulary and grammar followed by an hour of conversation, in which I played the role of a German officer. Rip owned a collection of books in both languages describing those great days. No session passed without his being called to the telephone from which he returned with an enlarged list of the day’s agenda, but he had a notable gift for immediately resuming his concentration. There was no doubt that he derived great enjoyment from the work; it touched some deep layer of self-recovery within him. He studied intensively between sessions; and so did I. (“Did his homework,” as he called it.) My daily program permitted little time for desultory conversation at the close of the lesson, nor did his. When he rose he consulted the list of errands he must do: register certain letters at the Post Office; take the dog to the vet’s; call for Miss So-and-so, his wife’s part-time secretary; take Eileen to Mrs. Brandon’s dancing class at eleven and call for her at twelve. . . . Apparently Mrs. Vanwinkle needed her car and chauffeur the greater part of the day. His appearance began to improve; he laughed more frequently, with some of the buoyancy of our first meeting on Bellevue Avenue. But there was no word that he had received permission to go to Germany.

  One evening I paid my respects at Mrs. Cranston’s.

  “Good evening, Mr. North,” Mrs. Cranston said graciously, eyeing a straw box I was carrying. It was lined with moss and contained some jack-in-the-pulpits, trilliums, and other flowers whose names I did not know. “Wild flowers! Oh, Mr. North, how could you know that I value wild flowers above all others!”

  “I believe, ma’am, that it’s against the law to dig some of these up, but at least I rode outside the city limits to gather them. I’ve also borrowed a trowel and a flashlight and am ready to replant them around your house at any point you indicate to me.”

  Henry Simmons happened at that moment to enter from the street.

  “Henry, look at what Mr. North has brought me. Henry, help him replant them under Edweena’s window where she will find them when she returns. A gift like that is a gift to us all and I thank you heartily for my share in it.” She tapped her table bell. “Jerry will bring you a pitcher of water. That will make the flowers feel at home at once.”

  Neither Henry nor I was an experienced horticulturist, but we did our best. Then we washed our hands and returned to the parlor where some illicit refreshment was waiting for us.

  “We have missed you lately,” said Mrs. Cranston.

  “We thought you had shifted your affections to Narragansett Pier, Teddie, I swear we did.”

  “And I missed you, ma’am, and you, Henry. I have some late-evening students now; and on some days my schedule is so crowded that I fall into bed at ten o’clock.”

  “Now you’re not going to overwork and make a dull dog of yourself, are you, cully?”

  “Money! Money!” I sighed. “I’m still hunting for that little apartment. I’ve looked at a dozen, but the rent is more than I’m ready to pay. A number of my older students have offered to make me a present of a very acceptable apartment in their former stable or an empty gardener’s house, but I have learned the rule that the relations between landlord and tenant should be as impersonal as possible.”

  “It’s a very good rule, but admits of an occasional exception,” replied Mrs. Cranston, tacitly alluding to Edweena’s possession of the “garden apartment” and probably to a number of her other lodgers.

  “I think I’ve found the real right thing. It’s not in an elegant neighborhood. The furnishings are modest but neat and clean; and it’s within my means, after I’ve done a bit more haggling. I am not of a spendthrift nature, Mrs. Cranston, being wholly New England on my father’s side and almost wholly Scottish on my mother’s. In fact, I am what New Englanders call ‘near.’ Schoolboys say ‘chinchy.’ ”

  Mrs. Cranston laughed. “In Rhode Island we often say ‘close.’ I am not ashamed to say that I am fairly ‘close’ in my dealings.”

  Henry was indignant. “Why, Mrs. Cranston, you are the most generous person I’ve ever known. You have a heart of gold!”

  “I never liked that expression, Henry. I would not have been able to run this house and keep my head above water, if I had not been ‘careful.’ There’s another word for you, Mr. North. I hate close-fisted stinginess, of course; but I certainly recommend a firm grasp on what money should and should not do.” She sat back in her chair, warming up to the subject. “Now twenty and thirty years ago Newport was famous for reckless spending. You wouldn’t believe the amount of money that could be thrown away in a single night—to say nothing of a single season. But also you wouldn’t believe the stories of miserliness, penny-pinching, meannesses—what’s the word that’s the opposite of extravagance, Mr. North?”

  “Parsimony?”

  “That’s it!”


  “Avarice?”

  “Listen to that, Henry: That’s what comes of a college education; hitting the nail on the head. Edweena’s fond of saying that extravagance—give me another word, Mr. North.”

  “Conspicuous waste.”

  “Oh, what a beauty!—that conspicuous waste and avarice are related; they’re two sides of the same desperateness. ‘Newport avarice,’ she used to say, ‘was of a special kind. They all had millions, but their behavior was like a fever-chart: it would go up and down.’ There was one hostess who would send out invitations for a big party—two hundred on gold plate; catering and additional staff from Delmonico’s or Sherry’s. But four days before the party she’d come down with an attack of some kind and cancel the whole thing. When this had happened a number of times her dearest friends made plans for an ‘emergency dinner’ in case of another cancellation. She was the same lady who went through two seasons in two evening gowns; she appeared in the black or the purple one. She’d write orders for dresses to be sent up from New York, but she’d forget to mail the letter. These people think that no one notices! There’s some demon inside them that robs them of the ability to look an expenditure in the face. It’s a sickness, really.”

  Here followed some staggering examples of penuriousness and “trimming.”

  “Why,” said Henry, “there’s a woman in town now—a very young woman, too. She’s married to a man as famous as General Pershing—”

  “Almost, Henry.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. ‘Almost as famous’ as General Pershing.”

  “No names, remember! A rule of the house.”

  “She has one all-absorbing interest: cruelty to animals. She’s given half a dozen shelters to communities around here and pays their upkeep. She’s on the National Anti-carve-’em-up Society. She gets hysterical about feathers on hats. But the stories—”

  Mrs. Cranston broke in: “Mr. North, she does much of her own shopping. She puts on a thick brown veil, gets in her car, and goes down to those shipping supply shops; sends her chauffeur inside to tell the butcher that ‘Mrs. Edom’ would like to speak to him outside. Mrs. Edom was the woman who used to be her housekeeper. She buys a whole side of beef from the salt-barrel. Takes two weeks to soak the salt out of it—half-soak the salt out. That’s what the national hero and his children eat. She drives out to the Portuguese market and buys great milk cans of their kale soup with their linguiça sausages in it. When her servants protest and resign she scarcely gives them a civil letter of recommendation. She replaces them from those immigrant employment agencies in Boston and Providence. But she comes of an old Bellevue Avenue family and she must keep up her social position. About every ten days she gives a dinner party—catering from Providence; spends all the money she skimped for. Oh, it makes me boil—to think of that wonderful husband of hers and her children living on corned beef and kale soup while she spends thousands on dogs and cats!”

  “Well, Mrs. Cranston, we have a saying in the Old Country: kind to animals, cruel to humans.”

  “It’s a kind of sickness. Mr. North, let’s talk about something pleasant.”

  I came to know the limits to which Mrs. Cranston could go in discussing any unfavorable aspect of the Newport she loved.

  The lessons went on in fine shape, but the sweeping and dusting and the telephone calls from Rip’s home were no small inconvenience. One day Rip asked me: “Do you ever take pupils on Sunday morning?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Could you manage one of my sessions every Sunday morning about eleven? My wife goes to church then; I don’t. . . . Would that be all right? . . . So I’ll pick you up at the ‘Y’ next Sunday at a quarter before eleven. I’ll take you to a classroom where we won’t be disturbed. I belong to a club called the ‘Monks’ Club’; it’s a sort of shooting, fishing, drinking, and dining club, with a little dice-rattling on the side now and then. It’s just over the line in Massachusetts, beyond Tiverton. It belongs to a little group of the lively set. No ladies allowed, but every now and then you see some girls there—from New Bedford or Fall River. No one ever shows up before sunset, especially not on Sunday. The Monks have pretty much given up hunting.” He added with his confidential grin, “Very expensive membership, but they made me an honorary member—no dues! . . . A great place for our work.”

  The thought of a quarter of an hour’s drive disturbed me a little. I’d come to like and admire Rip more and more, but I didn’t want to hear his “story”—how Gulliver came to be bound supine by a thousand small silk threads. It was a woeful situation, but there was nothing I could do about it. I felt in my bones that he was burning to tell me the story—the whole sorry business. So far I had never met Mrs. Vanwinkle and had no wish to. I have a ready interest in eccentrics and my Journal was filled with their “portraits,” but I shrank from those borderline cases that approach madness—raging jealousy, despotic possessiveness, neurotic avarice. Rip’s wife appeared to me to be stark staring mad. This view had been confirmed by a strange event that happened to intrude itself into my daily routine.

  I had a pupil whom I was preparing for the college entrance examination in French, a girl of seventeen. Penelope Temple and I were working in the library when Mrs. Temple entered hurriedly:

  “Mr. North, please forgive me, but the upstairs telephone is in use and I want to answer a call here. I think it will be very brief.”

  I rose. “Shall we go into another room, Mrs. Temple?”

  “It’s not necessary. . . . It’s a woman I never met. . . . Yes, Mrs. Vanwinkle? This is Mrs. Temple speaking. I’m sorry to have made you wait, but Mr. Temple is expecting an urgent call on the other telephone. . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . It is true, those were egret feathers I was wearing at the ball when that photograph was taken. . . . Excuse me, let me interrupt. . . . Those feathers belonged to my mother. They are at least thirty years old. We have preserved them with great care. . . . Excuse me interrupting you: the feathers are now falling to pieces and I shall destroy them, as you request. . . . No, kindly do not send Mr. Vanwinkle to this house. Any home in America would be proud to receive Mr. Vanwinkle, but he is too distinguished a man to go about town picking up dilapidated feathers. . . . No, Mrs. Vanwinkle, I wish you to do me the credit of believing me when I tell you that I will destroy the wretched feathers at once. Good morning, Mrs. Vanwinkle, thank you for your call. . . . Excuse me again, Mr. North. Penelope, I think the woman’s insane.”

  Twenty minutes later the front door bell rang and down the hall I heard Rip’s voice in conversation with Mrs. Temple.

  Naturally, I did not mention this episode to Rip.

  Our first Sunday morning drive into Massachusetts was on a beautiful day in early July. Rip drove like Jehu, as all retired aviators do. Even in that aging car he exceeded the speed limits in city and country. The police never interfered; they were proud to receive a wave of his hand. In order to forefend any confidential communications about the enslaved Gulliver, I plunged into my overworked theory about the nine cities of Troy and of Newport. I made a considerable digression about the great Bishop Berkeley as we passed near his house (“I lived in Berkeley Oval in my freshman year at college,” he said). I had just about come to the end of my exposition when we drove up to the door of the Monks’ Club. He brought the car to a standstill but remained at the wheel gazing before him.

  “Ted?”

  “Yes, Rip?”

  “You remember that you asked me what I’d like to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to be a historian. . . . Is it too late?”

  “Why, Rip, you’ve got your niche in history. It isn’t too late to pour out all you know about that—begin there and then broaden out.”

  His face clouded over. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to write anything about that. It’s what you were saying about the eighteenth century in Newport—Rochambeau and Washington and Berkeley—that reminded me that I’d always wanted to be a historian. . . . Besides, a historian works in a stud
y where he can close the door, doesn’t he? Or he can go to some library where there’s a silence sign on every table.”

  “Rip,” I ventured, “in New York is your life much like this—a lot of errands during the day and dinners out every night?”

  He lowered his voice. “Worse, worse. In New York I do most of the shopping.”

  “But you have a housekeeper!”

  “We had a housekeeper—Mrs. Edom. Oh, I wish she were back. Capable, you know—quiet and capable. No arguments.”

  The Monks’ Club had been an important roadside tavern before the Revolution. Many alterations had been made since. It had served as a storehouse, as a home, and as a school, but much of the original structure remained, built of hewn stone with high chimneys and a vast kitchen. The front room must have been originally designed for dancing; there was a fiddlers’ gallery opposite the great fireplace. The “Monks” had furnished and adorned it as a luxurious hunting lodge, complete with some masterpieces of taxidermy. We worked upstairs in the library surrounded by maps, files of sporting magazines, law manuals of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts relative to shipping and game-hunting. The room overlooked the front entrance and was large enough for us to stride up and down in during our mock international dialogues. It was ideal for us. At one o’clock we used to collect our textbooks and reluctantly return to Rhode Island.

  During our second Sunday morning session the telephone rang at the bottom of the stairs.

  “I know who that is! Come along, Ted, I want you to hear this.”

  “I don’t want to hear your private conversations, Rip.”

  “I want you to. You’re a part of this—you’re a part of my campaign.—Anyway, leave the door open. I swear to you, I need you to back me up! . . . Hello? Yes, this is the Monks’ Club. . . . Oh, is that you, Pam? I thought you were at church. . . . I told you: I’m having a German lesson. . . . I know it’s a sunny day. . . . We went over that before. The children are perfectly safe at Bailey’s Beach. There are three lifeguards there—one on a scaffold and two in rowboats; and on the beach there are at least thirty nurses, nannies, governesses, Fräulein, mademoiselles, and gouvernantes. I cannot and will not sit there for three hours amid a hundred women. . . . Rogers can bring them back, can’t he? . . .