Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (4 page)

 
          
“No,
you never do; that’s the trouble!” Mrs. Brown shot an arch glance at me. “With
her looks, oughtn’t she to think? But perhaps it’s lucky for the rest of us
poor women she don’t—eh, Stevie?”

 
          
The
colour rushed to Mrs. Glenn’s face; she was going to retort; to snub the
dreadful woman. But the new softness had returned, and she merely lifted a
warning finger. “Oh, don’t, please … speak to him. Can’t you see that he’s
fallen asleep?”

 
          
O
great King Solomon, I thought—and bowed my soul before the mystery.

 
          
I
spent a fortnight at Les Calanques, and every day my perplexity deepened. The
most conversable member of the little group was undoubtedly Stephen. Mrs. Glenn
was as she had always been: beautiful, benevolent and inarticulate. When she
sat on the beach beside the dozing Stephen, in her flowing white dress, her
large white umbrella tilted to shelter him, she reminded me of a carven angel
spreading broad wings above a tomb (I could never look at her without being
reminded of statuary); and to converse with a marble angel so engaged can never
have been easy. But I was perhaps not wrong in suspecting that her smiling
silence concealed a reluctance to talk about the Browns. Like many perfectly
unegoistical women Catherine Glenn had no subject of conversation except her
own affairs; and these at present so visibly hinged on the Browns that it was
easy to see why silence was simpler.

 
          
Mrs.
Brown, I may as well confess, bored me acutely. She was a perfect specimen of
the middle-aged flapper, with layers and layers of hard-headed feminine craft
under her romping ways.
All this I suffered from chiefly
because I knew it was making Mrs. Glenn suffer.
But after all it was
thanks to Mrs. Brown that she had found her son; Mrs. Brown had brought up
Stephen, had made him (one was obliged to suppose) the whimsical dreamy
charming creature he was; and again and again, when Mrs. Brown outdid herself
in girlish archness or middle-aged craft, Mrs. Glenn’s wounded eyes said to
mine: “Look at Stephen; isn’t that enough?”

 
          
Certainly
it was enough; enough even to excuse Mr. Brown’s jocular allusions and arid
anecdotes, his boredom at Les Calanques, and the too-liberal potations in which
he drowned it. Mr. Brown, I may add, was not half as trying as his wife. For
the first two or three days I was mildly diverted by his contempt for the quiet
watering-place in which his women had confined him, and his lordly conception
of the life of pleasure, as exemplified by intimacy with the head-waiters of
gilt-edged restaurants and the lavishing of large sums on horse-racing and
cards. “Damn it, Norcutt, I’m not used to being mewed up in this kind of place.
Perhaps it’s different with you—all depends on a man’s standards,
don’t
it?
Now before I lost my money—” and
so on.
The odd thing was that, though this loss of fortune played a
large part in the conversation of both husband and wife, I never somehow
believed in it—I mean in the existence of the fortune. I hinted as much one day
to Mrs. Glenn, but she only opened her noble eyes reproachfully, as if I had
implied that it discredited the Browns to dream of a fortune they had never
had. “They tell me Stephen was brought up with every luxury. And besides—their
own tastes seem rather expensive, don’t they?” she argued gently.

 
          
“That’s
the very reason.”

 
          
“The reason—?”

 
          
“The
only people I know who are totally without expensive tastes are the
overwhelmingly wealthy. You see it when you visit palaces. They sleep on
camp-beds and live on boiled potatoes.”

 
          
Mrs.
Glenn smiled. “Stevie wouldn’t have liked that.”

 
          
Stephen
smiled also when I alluded to these past splendours. “It must have been before
I cut my first teeth. I know Boy’s always talking about it; but I’ve got to
take it on faith, just as you have.”

 
          
“Boy—?”

 
          
“Didn’t
you know? He’s always called ‘Boy.’
Boydon Brown—abbreviated
by friends and family to ‘Boy.’
The Boy Browns.
Suits them, doesn’t it?”

 
          
It
did; but I was not sure that it suited him to say so.

 
          
“And
you’ve always addressed your adopted father in that informal style?”

 
          
“Lord,
yes; nobody’s formal with Boy except head-waiters. They bow down to him; I
don’t know why. He’s got the manner. I haven’t. When I go to a restaurant they
always give me the worst table and the stupidest waiter.” He leaned back
against the sand-bank and blinked contentedly seaward. “Got a cigarette?”

 
          
“You
know you oughtn’t to smoke,” I protested.

 
          
“I
know; but I do.” He held out a lean hand with prominent knuckles.
“As long as Kit’s not about.”
He called the marble angel,
his mother, “Kit”! And yet I was not offended—I let him do it, just as I let
him have one of my cigarettes. If “Boy” had a way with head-waiters his adopted
son undoubtedly had one with lesser beings; his smile, his faint hoarse laugh
would have made me do his will even if his talk had not conquered me. We sat
for hours on the sands, discussing and dreaming; not always undisturbed, for
Mrs. Brown had a tiresome way of hovering and “listening in,” as she archly
called it-—(“I don’t want Stevie to depreciate his poor ex-mamma to you,” she
explained one day); and whenever Mrs. Brown (who, even at Les Calanques, had
contrived to create a social round for herself) was bathing, dancing, playing
bridge, or being waved, massaged or manicured, the other mother, assuring
herself from an upper window that the coast was clear, would descend in her
gentle majesty and turn our sand-bank into a throne by sitting on it. But now
and then Stephen and I had a half-hour to ourselves; and then I tried to lead
his talk to the past.

 
          
He
seemed willing enough that I should, but uninterested, and unable to recover
many details. “I never can remember things that don’t matter—and so far nothing
about me has mattered,” he said with a humorous melancholy. “I mean, not till I
struck mother Kit.”

 
          
He
had vague recollections of continental travels as a little boy; had afterward
been at a private school in Switzerland; had tried to pass himself off as a
Canadian volunteer in 1915, and in 1917 to enlist in the American army, but had
failed in each case—one had only to look at him to see why. The war over, he
had worked for a time at Julian’s, and then broken down; and after that it had
been a hard row to hoe till mother Kit came along. By George, but he’d never
forget what she’d done for him—never!

 
          
“Well,
it’s a way mothers have with their sons,” I remarked.

 
          
He
flushed under his bronze tanning, and said simply: “Yes—only you see I didn’t
know.”

 
          
His
view of the Browns, while not unkindly, was so detached that I suspected him of
regarding his own mother with the same objectivity; but when we spoke of her
there was a different note in his voice. “I didn’t know”—it was a new
experience to him to be really mothered. As a type, however, she clearly
puzzled him. He was too sensitive to class her (as the Browns obviously did) as
a simple-minded woman to whom nothing had ever happened; but he could not
conceive what sort of things could happen to a woman of her kind. I gathered
that she had explained the strange episode of his adoption by telling him that
at the time of his birth she had been “secretly married”—poor Catherine!—to his
father, but that “family circumstances” had made it needful to conceal his
existence till the marriage could be announced; by which time he had vanished
with his adopted parents. I guessed how it must have puzzled Stephen to adapt
his interpretation of this ingenuous tale to what, in the light of Mrs. Glenn’s
character, he could make out of her past. Of obvious explanations there were
plenty; but evidently none fitted into his vision of her. For a moment (I could
see) he had suspected a sentimental tie, a tender past, between Mrs. Glenn and
myself; but this his quick perceptions soon discarded, and he apparently
resigned himself to regarding her as inscrutably proud and incorrigibly
perfect. “I’d like to paint her some day—if ever I’m fit to,” he said; and I
wondered whether his scruples applied to his moral or artistic inadequacy.

 
          
At
the doctor’s orders he had dropped his painting altogether since his last
breakdown; but it was manifestly the one thing he cared for, and perhaps the
only reason he had for wanting to get well. “When you’ve dropped to a certain
level, it’s so damnably easy to keep on till you’re altogether down and out. So
much easier than dragging up hill again. But I do want to get well enough to
paint mother Kit. She’s a subject.”

 
          
One
day it rained, and he was confined to the house. I went up to sit with him, and
he got out some of his sketches and studies. Instantly he was transformed from
an amiably mocking dilettante into an absorbed and passionate professional.
“This is the only life I’ve ever had.
All the rest—!”
He made a grimace that turned his thin face into a death’s-head.
“Cinders!”

 
          
The
studies were brilliant—there was no doubt of that. The question was—the eternal
question—what would they turn into when he was well enough to finish them? For
the moment the problem did not present itself, and I could praise and encourage
him in all sincerity. My words brought a glow into his face, but also, as it
turned out, sent up his temperature. Mrs. Glenn reproached me mildly; she
begged me not to let him get excited about his pictures. I promised not to, and
reassured on that point she asked if I didn’t think he had talent—real talent?
“Very great talent, yes,” I assured her; and she burst into tears—not of grief
or agitation, but of a deep upwelling joy. “Oh, what have I done to deserve it
all—to deserve such happiness? Yet I always knew if I could find him he’d make
me happy!” She caught both my hands, and pressed her wet cheek on mine. That
was one of her unclouded hours.

 
          
There
were others not so radiant. I could see that the Browns were straining at the
leash. With the seductions of Juan-les-Pins and Antibes in the offing, why,
their frequent allusions implied, must they remain marooned at Les Calanques?
Of course, for one thing, Mrs. Brown admitted, she hadn’t the clothes to show
herself on a smart
plage.
Though so
few were worn they had to come from the big dressmakers; and the latter’s
charges, everybody knew, were in inverse rado to the amount of material used.
“So that to be really naked is ruinous,” she concluded, laughing; and I saw the
narrowing of Catherine’s lips. As for Mr. Brown, he added morosely that if a
man couldn’t take a hand at baccarat, or offer his friends something decent to
eat and drink, it was better to vegetate at Les Calanques, and be done with it.
Only, when a fellow’d been used to having plenty of money …

 
          
I
saw at once what had happened. Mrs. Glenn, whose material wants did not extend
beyond the best plumbing and expensive clothes (and the latter were made to do
for three seasons), did not fully understand the Browns’ aspirations. Her
fortune, though adequate, was not large, and she had settled on Stephen’s
adoptive parents an allowance which, converted into francs, made a generous
showing. It was
obvious,
however, that what they hoped
was to get more money. There had been debts in the background, perhaps; who
knew but the handsome Stephen had had his share in them? One day I suggested
discreetly to Mrs. Glenn that if she wished to be alone with her son she might
offer the Browns a trip to Juan-les-Pins, or some such centre of gaiety. But I
pointed out that the precedent might be dangerous, and advised her first to
consult Stephen. “I suspect he’s as anxious to have them go as you are,” I said
recklessly; and her flush of pleasure rewarded me. “Oh, you mustn’t say that,”
she reproved me, laughing; and added that she would think over my advice. I am
not sure if she did consult Stephen; but she offered the Browns a holiday, and
they accepted it without false pride.

 
          
  

 
          
After
my departure from Les Calanques I had no news of Mrs. Glenn till she returned
to Paris in October. Then she begged me to call at the hotel where I had
previously seen her, and where she was now staying with Stephen—and the Browns.