Theophilus North

by Thornton Wilder

  She drove slowly. “I thought we’d go and sit on the sea wall by the Budlong place,” she said.

  “At the end of the day I’m usually too tired to drive anywhere. But I don’t need much sleep. I get up early and ride out there to see the sun rise. It’s still quite dark, of course. At first the police used to think I was on some nefarious business and would follow me. Gradually they came to see that I was merely eccentric and now we wave our hands at one another.”

  “I often take a late drive at this hour and the same thing happens to me. The police still feel they must keep an eye on me. But I’ve never been out at dawn. What’s it like?”

  “It’s overwhelming.”

  She repeated the word softly and reflectively.

  “Mr. North, what magic did you use to bring about such a change in my grandfather’s health?”

  “No magic at all, ma’am. I saw that Dr. Bosworth was under some kind of pressure. I’ve been under pressure too. Gradually we discovered that we shared a number of enthusiasms. Enthusiasms lift a man out of himself. We both grew younger. That’s all.”

  She murmured, “I think there must have been more to it than that. . . . We feel deeply indebted to you. My grandfather and I would like to give you a present. We have been wondering what you would like. We wondered if you would like a car?” I did not answer. “Or the copy of Alciphron that Bishop Berkeley presented to Jonathan Swift? It was written at ‘Whitehall.’ ”

  I was disappointed. I concealed my bitter disappointment under a show of effusive thanks and some friendly laughter. “Many thanks to you both for your kind intention,” et cetera, et cetera. “I try to live with as few possessions as possible. Like the Chinese a bowl of rice . . . like the ancient Greeks a few figs and olives.” I laughed at the absurdity of it, but I had also indicated a firmness in my refusal.

  “But, surely, some token of our gratitude?”

  The privileged of this world are not accustomed to take no for an answer.

  “Mrs. Tennyson, you did not invite me to join you on this ride to talk about presents but to give me an urgent message. I think I know what that is: There are some persons in and near ‘Nine Gables’ who wish me out.”

  “Yes. Yes. And I am sorry to say that there is something more than that. They are working on a plan to do you harm. There are some very rare first editions on the shelves behind my grandfather’s chair. I overheard a plan to remove them gradually and replace them with later editions of the same works. These last years you are the only person who has come into the house who would realize their value. Their idea is that the suspicion will fall on you.”

  I laughed. “Thrilling!” I said.

  “I anticipated their project and substituted the volumes. The originals are in my jewel safe. If some unpleasant talk starts up about you I shall produce them.—Why did you say ‘thrilling’?”

  “Because they are coming into the open. They are beginning to make mistakes. I thank you for removing those volumes, but even if you hadn’t, I’d have enjoyed the showdown. I’m not a fighting man, Mrs. Tennyson, but I hate slander and malicious gossip—don’t you?”

  “Oh, I do. How I do! People talk—people talk hatefully. Oh, dear Mr. North, tell me how a person can defend himself.”

  “Here we are at the Budlong place.—Let’s get out and sit on the sea wall.”

  “Don’t forget what you were about to tell me.”

  “No.”

  “You will find a lap robe in the back seat to throw over the stone parapet.”

  An untended field of wild roses was at our back. The flowers were entering their decline and the perfume was heady. Our faces were swept by the beams of the lighthouses; our ears were lulled by the dull booming and wailing and tinkling of the buoys. Above us the sky was like a jeweled navigators’ chart. It was here that a few afternoons before Bodo had brought Agnese and Mino and me to his picnic.

  As usual there were a number of cars in which were couples younger than ourselves.

  “You advise me to resign from the work at ‘Nine Gables’?”

  “You have brought us that great benefit. All that is left for you is the danger of certain persons’ ill will.”

  “You inherit it—conspicuously.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter about me. I can bear it.”

  “With that spitefulness? You have your small boy to think of. Excuse my question, but why have you continued to live in that house?”

  How calm she was! “Two reasons: I love my grandfather and he loves me—insofar as he can love anyone. And—where would I go? I hate New York. Europe? I have no wish to go to Europe for a while. My mother left my father long ago—before his death—and has been living in Paris and at Capri with a man to whom she is not married. She seldom writes letters to any of us. Mr. North, I often think that a large part of my life is over. I am an old widow-lady living only for my son and grandfather. The humiliations I am sometimes subjected to and the boredom of the social life do not touch me. They merely age me. . . . You were going to tell me how to get the better of malicious tongues. Did you mean it?”

  “Yes . . . Since we are talking about matters that concern you closely, may I—just for this hour—call you Persis?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  I took a deep breath. “Have you reason to believe that in some quarters you have been the object of slander?”

  She lowered her head then abruptly raised it. “Yes, I know I am.”

  “I have no idea what these people are saying. I have never heard any reference to you that was not in terms of admiration and respect. I was told that your husband took his own life, alone, on the top deck of a ship at sea. I assume that malicious interpretations were circulated about that tragic event. I am convinced that nothing discreditable could ever be attributed to you. You asked me how one would go about defending oneself against slander. My first principle would be to state all the facts—the truth. If there is someone involved whom you feel you must shield, then one must resort to other measures. Is there such a person involved in this case?”

  “No. No.”

  “Persis, do you wish to drop the whole subject and talk of other things?”

  “No, Theophilus. I have no one to talk to. Please let me tell you the story.”

  I looked up at the stars for a moment. “I don’t like secrets—unhappy family secrets. If you place me under an oath not to repeat a word of this, I must ask you not to tell it to me.”

  She lowered her voice. “But, Theophilus, I want all those talkers and letter-writers and . . . to know the simple truth. I loved my husband, but in a moment of utter thoughtlessness—of madness really—he left me under a cloud of suspicion. You can tell the story to anyone, if you thought it would do any good.”

  I folded my hands on my lap. In the diffused starlight she could see the welcoming smile on my face. “Begin,” I said.

  “When I left school I was, as they say, ‘presented to society.’ Dances, balls, tea-dances, debutante parties. I fell deeply and truly in love with a young man, Archer Tennyson. He had not been in the War because he had had tuberculosis as a boy and the doctors wouldn’t pass him. I think that was at the bottom of it all. We were married. We were happy. Only one thing disturbed me; he was reckless and at first I admired him for it. He drove his car at great speeds. On shipboard once he waited until after midnight to climb the masts. The captain rebuked him for it in the ship’s bulletin. I gradually came to see that he was a compulsive gambler—not only for money; that, too, but that did not matter—for life itself. He gambled with his life—skiing, motor-boat racing, mountain-climbing. When we were in the Swiss Alps he would descend only the most dangerous pistes. He took up lugeing which was fairly new then: toboggan descents between walls of packed ice. One day when my attention was distracted he picked up our one-year-old baby, placed him between his knees, and started off. I saw then for the first time what was in his mind: he wanted to raise the stake in his duel with death; he wanted to place what was nearest and
dearest to him in the balance. First he had always wanted me beside him in the car or in the boat; now he wanted the baby too. I used to dread the approach of summer because each year he tried to break his record driving from New York to Newport. He broke everyone’s record driving to Palm Beach, but I wouldn’t go in the car with him. And all the time he betted on everything—horses, football games, Presidential elections. He’d sit in his club window on Fifth Avenue and bet on the types of automobiles that happened to pass. All his friends begged him to take a position in his father’s brokerage office, but he couldn’t sit still that long. Finally he began taking flying lessons. I don’t know if wives go down on their knees to their husbands any more, but I did. I did more than that—I told him that if he went up in the air alone, I would never give him another child. He was so astonished that he did give up flying.”

  She paused and showed uncertainty. I said, “Continue, please.”

  “He was not seriously a drinking man, but he spent a great deal of time in bars where he could play the role of daredevil and—I’m sorry to say—could swagger. The story is almost over.”

  “May I interrupt a moment? I don’t want the story hurried. I want to know what was going on in your mind during those years.”

  “In me? I knew that in a way he was a sick man. I loved him still, but I pitied him. But I was afraid. Do you see that he needed an audience for all this show of daring and risk? I had the front seat at the show; a large part of it—but not all of it—was to impress me. A wife can’t scold all the time. I did not want to put a gulf between us. . . . He thought of it as courage; I thought of it as foolishness and . . . cruelty to me. One night we were standing on the deck of a ship going to Europe and we saw another ship approaching us in the opposite direction. We had been told that we would pass close to our sister-ship. He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be glorious if I dived in and swam over to her?’ He kicked off his dancing pumps and started to undress. I slapped him hard—very hard—on one cheek and then on the other. He was so shocked that he froze. I said, ‘Archer, I did not slap you. Your son did. Learn to be a father.’ He slowly pulled up his trousers. He picked up his jacket from the deck. Those were not words that came to me at that moment. They were words I had said over and over to myself on sleepless nights. There were more: ‘I have loved you more than you love me. You love defying death more than you love me. You are killing my love for you.’ I shouldn’t have been weeping but I was, terribly. He put his arms around me and said, ‘It’s just games, Persis. It’s fun. I’ll stop whatever I’m doing any time you say.’ . . . Now I’ll finish my story. It was bound to happen that he’d meet someone with the same madness, someone even madder. It was two days later. Of course, he met him in the bar. It was a War veteran with a wild look in his eye. I sat with them for an hour or two while that man crushed my husband with the narrow escapes he’d been through in combat. What fun it had been, and all that! A storm was rising. The barman announced that the bar was closing, but they gave him money to keep it open. I kept trying to persuade Archer to come to bed, but he had to keep up with this man, drink for drink. This other man’s wife had gone to bed and finally, in despair, I went to bed, too. Archer was found on the top deck with a revolver in his hand and a bullet through his head. . . . There was an inquiry and an inquest. . . . I testified that on several evenings my husband and this Major Michaelis had talked about Russian roulette, as though it were a joke. But nothing of that came out in the serious newspapers and very little, as far as I know, even in ‘sensational’ papers. My grandfather was greatly respected. He knew personally the publishers of the better papers. The incident was briefly reported in the inside pages. Even then I begged my grandfather to see that my testimony was published; but the Michaelises also belong to those old families that move heaven and earth to keep their names out of the papers. And it was that silence that’s done me so much harm. It was closed with the verdict that my husband had committed suicide in a state of depression. I had no one to advise me or help me—least of all the Bosworth family. Mrs. Venable has been a dear and close friend to me since I was a child. She joined the family in soothing me: ‘If we don’t say anything it will soon be forgotten.’ She knows the Michaelises. She stays with cousins near them in Maryland. She knows the stories about him down there—that the neighborhood complains of his carrying on revolver practice at three in the morning and bullying the men at his country club about Russian roulette. . . .”

  “Mrs. Venable knows this? Really knows it?”

  “She confided it to my grandfather and to my Aunt Sally—to comfort them, I suppose.”

  I strode up and down before her. “Why didn’t she confide it to everybody—to her famous Tuesday ‘at homes’? . . . Oh, I hate the cliquishness and the timidity of your so-called privileged class. She hates unpleasantness. She hates to be associated with anything unpleasant, is that it?”

  “Theophilus, I’m sorry I told you the whole story. Let’s forget it. I’m under a cloud. There’s nothing that can be done about it now. It’s too late.”

  “Oh, no, it’s not. Where are the Michaelises now?”

  “The Major’s in a sanatorium in Chevy Chase. I suppose Mrs. Michaelis is in their home nearby in Maryland.”

  “Persis, Mrs. Venable is a kind woman at heart, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, very.”

  “Heaven knows she’s influential and likes being influential. Can you explain to me why she hasn’t used her kindness and her knowledge and her sense of justice to clear up this fog about you long ago?”

  Persis did not answer at once. “You don’t know Newport, Theophilus. You don’t know what they call the ‘Old Guard’ here. In those houses nothing disturbing, nothing unpleasant, may ever be mentioned. Even the grave illness or death of old friends can be alluded to only in a whisper and a pressure of the hand when saying goodbye.”

  “Cotton wool. Cotton wool.—Someone told me that she invites the heart of the ‘Old Guard’ to luncheon every Thursday. Some people call it ‘The Sanhedrin’ or ‘The Druids’ Circle’—is that so?—Are you in it?”

  “Oh, I’m not old enough.”

  I hurled an empty beer bottle into the sea. “Persis!”

  “Yes?”

  “We need an ambassador to persuade Mrs. Venable and ‘The Sanhedrin’ that it’s their responsibility and their Christian duty to tell everybody what undoubtedly happened on that ship. . . . They should do it for your son’s sake.” She must often have thought of that for she clasped her hands tightly to conceal their trembling. “I think our ambassador should be a man—one for whom Mrs. Venable has a particular regard and who has the authority of an acknowledged social position. I have come to know the Baron Stams much better. He is a man of far solider character than you and your grandfather first believed, and let me assure you he hates injustice like the devil. For parts of two summers he has been Mrs. Venable’s house guest. Have you observed that she has a real esteem and affection for him?”

  She murmured, “Yes.”

  “Moreover, he has a very real and deep admiration for you. Do you give me permission to tell him the whole story and to urge him to be this ambassador?—But you don’t like him.”

  “Don’t . . . don’t say that! Now you understand why I had to be so cold and impersonal. I was under a cloud. Don’t talk about it. . . . Do—do what you think best.”

  “He was leaving Newport today. He is staying over. He will have half an hour talk with Mrs. Venable tomorrow morning. You should hear him talk when he’s on fire with a subject. It’s late. I must ask you to drive me home. I’ll drive as far as my door.”

  I picked up the lap robe and held open the right front door of the car for her. The starlight fell on the face she turned toward me. She was smiling. She murmured, “I am not accustomed to the agitations of hope.” I drove slowly, taking neither the longest nor the shortest way home. A police car discreetly followed the great heiress into the town, then turned off.

  Her shoulder rested against
mine. She said, “Theophilus, I made you cross earlier this evening when I suggested a choice of presents from Grandfather and from myself as an expression of our appreciation. Will you explain that to me?”

  “You mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, as this is to be a soothing little lecture I shall address you as Mrs. Tennyson. Let me explain, Mrs. Tennyson, that each of us is conditioned by our upbringing. I am a member of the middle class—in fact, of the middle of the middle classes—from the middle of the country. We are doctors, parsons, teachers, small-town newspaper editors, two-room lawyers. When I was a boy each house had a horse and buggy and our mothers were assisted in running the house by a ‘hired girl.’ All the sons and many of the daughters went to college. In that world no one ever received—and, of course, never gave—elaborate presents. Such presents were obscurely felt to be humiliating—perhaps I should say, ridiculous. If a boy wanted a bicycle or a typewriter he earned the money for it by delivering the Saturday Evening Post from door to door or by cutting his neighbors’ lawns. Our fathers paid for our education, but for those incidentals so necessary at college—such as a ‘tuxedo’ or trips to dances at the girls’ colleges—we worked during the summer on farms or waited on table at summer hotels.”

  “Did nothing unpleasant ever happen in the middle classes?”

  “Oh, yes. People are the same everywhere. But some environments are more stabilizing than others.”

  “Are you telling me all this to explain to me why you were displeased about the present we wished to make you?”

  “No.” I turned to her with a smile. “No. I’m thinking about your son Frederick.”

  “Frederick?”

  “In 1918 a woman who worked on Bellevue Avenue—and whom I think you know well—said to me, ‘Rich boys never really grow up—or seldom.’ ”

  “Oh, that’s . . . superficial. That’s not true.”

  “Have you heard Bodo describe his home—his father and mother and sisters? Provincial nobility. Where the castle is part farmhouse—where the servants have stayed with them generation after generation. Now they take in paying guests. Everybody is busy all day. Austrian music and laughter in the evening. Mrs. Tennyson, what an environment for a fatherless boy!”