A Prologue To Love (51 page)

John relaxed. He was grateful to his sister; she had done a very good job, it seemed, of softening up the old lady. But he moved carefully. He gave his mother a wide and confiding smile.

“I thought you’d like to know how I’m getting along at Harvard,” he said. “This is my second semester, you know, Ma.”

“Yes,” said Caroline. Color had come into her big lips. “Tell me, John. I do have your reports, as you know, but I’d like to hear from you, yourself.”

John was quite amazed. Caroline had given him only personal indifference all his life, though she had been interested in his scholarly progress and had warned him to excel. “I want to do the best I can, Ma,” he said, still moving carefully. “And I’m going to like law, so I can take my place in Tandy, Harkness and Swift, as you planned. I’m only sorry I never saw the old boys, but only their sons and nephews.”

“They’re ‘old boys’ too,” said Caroline, waiting for the words of deliverance. “The youngest is in his forties. I’m glad you like law, John. Ames doesn’t. It is a big disappointment to me.”

John had no intention of helping his brother, so he made his expression serious. “He doesn’t care for anything but his collection,” he said. “Well, everyone to his taste.”

“The ‘boutique’,” murmured Caroline, thinking of her aunt and Ames simultaneously. Her warm expression darkened.

“What did you say, Ma?” asked John.

“Nothing, John. Just a thought of mine. It will be a great satisfaction to me to have you in that law firm; they were my father’s lawyers and are mine, and I want them to be my children’s.”

She was still looking at John eagerly and expectantly, and this disturbed him a little. What did she want him to say?

“I’ll do my very best,” he said, watching her.

She nodded and she still waited. She waited for him to say, “I want to do my best so I can help you and be really a son to you, because I love you and you are my mother.”

“I’ll do my very best,” the young man repeated. He paused. “But there’s something else. As you know, times are different. Even in Boston. People respect money and want it. They know it’s good to have it behind you and to save part of your income. But they also know that money was made to be spent in the enjoyment of life and not only in the getting of it.”

Caroline’s expression changed, and John was alarmed. What had gone wrong?

“Go on,” said Caroline.

“I need a lot more money, Ma. A much bigger allowance. After all, things are expected of the men at Harvard. It’s expected that you entertain in your turn and not do it niggardly. I’m the son of a rich lady and so more is expected of me even than of the others. I want to live, Ma, to spend money, to have a fine time doing it, and to make many friends. You have to buy friends, you know. What else is money for, after a decent part of it is saved, but to spend and travel and have fun and a lot of enjoyment?”

Caroline was silent. She looked at him piercingly. She thought: He cares nothing for the trust that was given me and which was to be his trust also. He is selfish and coarse and wants to indulge himself at my expense and throw away Papa’s money.

She said coldly, “When I am dead, John, you’ll have a lot of money. What will you do with it?”

John was cautious and a little frightened now. But he remembered what Elizabeth had told him. He put some enthusiasm in his voice. “Ma, you never lived, yourself. I know how horribly you existed when you were a girl — the poverty and all that. You never had a rich, full life. You were deprived. You once told me your father had a very hard time accumulating money. But when he did have all that money he should have loosened up and spent a lot on you, to make you happy as a young girl. If there is anything to the theory of retribution, I hope he is having some of it now.” He smiled sympathetically at his mother.

“Go on,” said Caroline bitterly.

Things were not going as expected. But John blundered on. “You’ve asked me what I’ll do with all that money which will be my share. Of course I’ll keep some part of it as insurance and security. But I’ll spend the greater part of it, enjoying myself as you should have enjoyed yourself. I want to live, Ma, as you never lived. As my grandfather never lived. What else is money for?”

She had met men like John before in her travels, beefy men, ruddy men, extravagant, selfish men, full of wine, glittering with jewelry, carrying with them the odor of lavish living and the scent of bought women. Many of them became bankrupt. They had inherited money and had spent it heedlessly, the money so painfully and laboriously gathered by fathers and grandfathers, the money which had been a sacred trust and a fortress against the world. Her father had said, “Worthless wretches, with no sense of responsibility. They are only appetites, gaudy and gross, ripe for picking.”

“What do you know of my father, John?” she asked her son.

John was fumbling around in his mind. The pale glare of the cold sun suddenly came out and he could not see his mother’s face clearly, as her back was to the windows. He said, “From all I hear, he was a miser and he made your life wretched.”

Caroline felt weak and sick, and she was also filled with a cold and violent anger. Her son was attacking his grandfather as her Aunt Cynthia had often attacked him, and in almost the same accusing words. What did these superficial, wasteful people know of men like John Ames, these parasites, these appetites, these heedless spenders of what worthier people had earned?

She made a quick and merciless resolution. She would change her will at once; she would leave John not more than five thousand dollars a year from a trust. Many cautious parents in Boston did this to prevent the wasting of their money by children.

She said abruptly, “You’ve asked me for a larger allowance in order that you can spend as other young men spend. I don’t approve of such spending. No, John.”

“No?” he said.

“No. When you are a member of my law firm you will have your regular salary, very modest to begin with, for at first you’ll only be a clerk. Later you will be a junior member with a little larger salary. Perhaps later you will be a full member. That is up to you and your diligence and thrift. I can promise nothing more.”

She was so full of bitterness and wild disappointment that she went on ruthlessly, “Don’t expect much more from me. I intend to leave you five thousand a year for life, and nothing more. You may go now.”

He stumbled to his feet. His eyes glittered at her with hatred. “Is that your last word?” he said.

“My very last word. And don’t expect me to change it.”

He knew his mother. She would never relent.

“Miser,” he said. “You were never anything else but a stupid miser who never knew how to live and who doesn’t want anyone else to live. But I’ll tell you this: I’ll get around things someway. By God, I will!”

“I don’t think you will,” said Caroline. (She was terribly frightened, though she sat stolidly in her chair. Her son was looking at her with the eyes of old Fern. He was looking at her with the eyes of the doctor in Switzerland. ) “Go away!” she cried.

She sat at her desk, her hands pressed hard over her face. Her pain and suffering were too terrible for tears. No one cared for her or understood her, with the possible exception of Elizabeth, who had shyly confided to her earlier that she understood about money and that she carefully read all her mother’s discarded financial journals and the stock-market reports. There was only Elizabeth, Caroline thought distractedly, Elizabeth who knew that money was a trust, Elizabeth who appreciated the paintings of her great-grandfather.

A knock on the door had to be repeated before she heard it. She said dully, “Who is it?”

“Ames, Mama.”

She did not reply at once. Then her incredible hope returned and she said, “Come in.” She dropped her hands to her desk with a feeling of intense prostration. She looked in silence as her son entered the room gracefully, his long body moving in one fluid line. He touched the seat John had sat in and said politely, “May I?”

“Of course.” What was that terrible sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, that sense of draining away, of rapidly diminishing vitality? She put the sensation from her and studied Ames, who sat so precisely and neatly, and he reminded her, not of Timothy Winslow, but of Elizabeth. Again her hope stirred, and she could smile a little with a great effort.

“I wanted to have a talk with you, Mama,” said Ames. “A special talk.”

Caroline winced. “You want to have your allowance increased. Is that it?”

He raised his eyebrows and considered her. Her color was practically livid, and her lips had a purplish overcast, and she appeared tired beyond endurance. So John hadn’t got what he wanted. Well, he was a silly brute and had probably riled the old lady with his first words; he had no finesse.

“It’s considered inelegant to talk about money, except in Boston,” he said.

“So it is.” Caroline smiled again. “Am I right, then, that you didn’t come here to talk about money?”

All her children had been shadowy to her, but Ames had been more so than the others. They had been bred for a purpose. Never until today had they actually impinged strongly on her consciousness as human beings with thoughts of their own, desires and ideas of their own, and dreams of their own. She had treated them as her father had treated her; she considered that she had been an excellent mother, instilling respect in them for money, insisting upon frugality, giving them the best education possible, providing for them, saving for them, clothing them. As she had been given, so she gave. It had once bewildered her that they had never extended to her the devotion she had extended to her father. When she saw that they would not, she had lost the last measure of personal interest in them as human beings. They were ungrateful; they did not understand. She did not blame herself for their awful corruption, nor even wonder why they were so different from other children.

Ames said, “I have the greatest respect and admiration for you, Mama.”

Caroline was startled from her apathy. She looked with sudden earnestness at her son. “Why,” she said slowly, “thank you, Ames. I’m glad.” She paused. “Why have you?”

“Because you are a genius,” he said, and as he more than partly believed this, his light voice carried sincerity and conviction. “There are many kinds of genius, though most people don’t understand that. There are the artist, the musician, the composer, the architect, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, the great statesman or teacher. There is also the genius for making money, and without that genius possessed by a few none of the other arts could exist. Michelangelo, da Vinci, Voltaire, Wagner, to name just a few, had to have patrons. Directly or indirectly, all geniuses benefit from the person who has the genius to make money. To despise the money-making genius is to despise all the others and make it impossible for them to be.”

This was an aspect of money-making which had never occurred to Caroline before. She considered it, then suddenly reveled in it. Certainly! “You are a brilliant boy, Ames,” she said in a stronger voice, and the starved girl that lived in her rushed into her eyes so that they shone and became warmly beautiful. Seeing this, Ames was startled, himself, at his success.

“You were never interested in law, as John is,” said Caroline. “But, as I have already told you, it is my intention that all of you, including Elizabeth, must have a thorough education in finance, in world conditions as they affect finance, after your formal education is completed. I do not intend” — and she looked down at her tightly clasped big hands — “that my father’s money, which was a trust to me and my heirs, shall be given into the hands of those who know nothing about it.”

“That would be ridiculous,” said Ames, inclining his head respectfully.

Caroline gave him a timid and searching glance, and he was intrigued by its unsophistication.

“When John has been graduated from Harvard and studied law and business administration, then I intend for him to go abroad. Elizabeth will also go abroad, and eventually you too.”

“I understand,” said Ames.

Caroline could not let herself hope again, but again she searched her son’s face. “This is all I have to live for,” she said.

“Yes, Mama, I understand,” he repeated. Now was the time. “But that’s very sad, isn’t it? I’ve seen the old wreck of the house near Lyme where you spent your summers; I’ve heard rumors of the disgusting house in Lyndon too. Yet you were entitled to some of the graciousness of living, weren’t you? And beauty, and the kind of nice times other girls had. What was wrong with my grandfather that he deprived you like that and made you live like a beggar when he had all that money?”

Caroline’s face closed darkly; the light went from her eyes. Ames saw this and wondered where he had blundered, and was dismayed. He went on hurriedly, “Money is very, very important, but not as a thing in itself. Is it?”

Caroline said very quietly, “What would you do with a lot of money, Ames?”

“I’d spend it on beautiful things,” he said. “I’d have a solid background of it, of course, to protect myself. But I’d buy the handsomest small house possible, either in Boston or New York. Probably in both places. I’d buy a villa on the C
ô
te d’Azure and one in London and another in Rome. I’d search the whole world for their furnishings, so that everything would be perfect and in the best of taste. Not large, gaudy things, or pieces, or pictures. The delicate, the fine. You know, Mama.”

“Yes,” said Caroline. “I know.” She thought of her Aunt Cynthia. “The ‘boutique’.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Ames.

“Never mind. You were saying?”

“I wouldn’t spare any expense to get treasures I wanted. And I’d surround myself with them.”

Caroline remembered some of the effete men she had met in her youth who would talk for hours in lyrical voices of a piece of Dresden they had recently acquired, or a small sketch of El Greco’s they had found in Spain, or a rug they had come upon in Afghanistan, or a crusted jeweled cup attributed to at least a pupil of Cellini’s, or a statuette exhumed from the ruins of Pompeii, or a Shakespearean folio, or a first edition of Shelley, or a Grueze figurine, or a Van Gogh bought at an enormous price, or a ‘little necklace’ alleged to have been worn by a princess of the Second Dynasty, or a Chippendale chair, or a Chinese printed silk or scroll. These men apparently lived for useless beauty, for the gathering of scraps and debris. They had a fragile language of their own which had nothing to do with hard reality’s tongue. They often went bankrupt and had to sell their treasures for a tenth or less of what they had paid for them, or their heirs sold them ruthlessly for the money which should never have been spent in the first place, the money so painfully acquired by other men.

“So that would be what you would do with money,” said Caroline.

“Yes, Mama, that is what I would do. You never had beauty in your life, but I want it as you must have wanted it. What else is money for but to decorate life? And to make it pleasant and gracious?”

Caroline smiled grimly. “I know it is inelegant to talk about money.” A kind of ugly exultation came to her, as if she were confronting Cynthia without fear for the first time and throwing the words of hate and anger in her face, words which had been burning in her since she was a child.