False Gods (4 page)

"I trust, anyway, not to a Miss Gould or a Miss Fisk."

"Oh, no, Father. To someone you will really approve of."

"Heavens! Do you mean a Virginia girl? I didn't know you knew any."

"Well, no, but perhaps the next best thing. She's the daughter of one of your partners."

Roger was on his feet before he was even aware he had moved. "Good God, not to one of Gleason's girls!"

Osgood looked bewildered by such violence. "Oh, no, sir, I don't even know them. It's Felicia Pratt."

Roger stared. He seemed to recollect a large placid goose of a maiden. "Charles Pratt's daughter?"

"Of course. Isn't that all right?"

"What does
he
say?"

"I don't know. I haven't spoken to him yet. I wanted to get your approval first."

Roger rubbed his brow, wondering how much more there was that he didn't know about this young man he had found so dull. He turned away now from Osgood's anxious expression. He could hardly face the idea of the vexation that a belated regret for his paternal indifference might cost him. It was simply too late, much too late, to establish any real relationship. "Well, if Charles doesn't mind, why should I? You must bring Felicia to the house so that your mother and I may meet her."

"Oh, Mummie knows her and likes her ever so much!"

"Then there you are." Roger contrived a smile. "She must be all right."

Kitty Carstairs on a dark snowy evening in the winter of 1882 was seated before the dressing table in her pink-and-yellow Louis XV boudoir on Murray Hill, dressed already, as she liked to put it,
en grand gala du soir
and attaching to her lobes the ruby earrings that went with her scarlet crêpe de chine. On a chaise longue by the window lounged her brother Lemuel, languid and splendid in white tie and tails, whom her maid had just summoned up from the parlor.

"Charles and Jane Pratt will be at the Mortimers' tonight. I've asked Clara Mortimer to seat you next to Jane."

Lemuel threw up his arms in disgust. "Just because I couldn't take you to the Sykeses' on Friday? Really, Kitty, how vindictive can a sister be?"

"Bore Insurance should pay you three hundred for her."

Kitty and her brother paid dues to a small private group which listed the biggest bores in Gotham and paid off at so much a head to any member who found himself stuck beside one at a dinner party.

"But it's cheating if you arrange it with the hostess! I'm surprised at you, Kitty."

"
I'll
pay you the three hundred then."

"Happily, I have no prejudice against taking money from a woman."

"It's a comfort that I can always depend on your being devoid of senseless male inhibitions."

"I'm not such an ass, anyway, as to take
that
for a compliment. But tell me what you want me to do with the sublime Jane Pratt. Not make love to her, I trust?"

"Could one? No, I simply want you to convince her that Osgood is in no way like his father. Charles Pratt is actually objecting to the match. He doesn't fancy his beloved Felicia as Roger's daughter-in-law."

Osgood sat up. "His own law partner?"

Kitty shrugged as if the vagaries of the male sex were beyond her. "It seems he objects to Roger's ethics."

"Well, I certainly can't blame him for
that\
But what about his own?"

"That's what Osgood asked. The poor boy is in a terrible state. He had no idea that Roger wasn't like any other lawyer."

"That's the trouble with New York. He is."

"Now, Lem, don't be pompous. I haven't asked you to hold forth on the evils of modern society. Pratt apparently told Osgood that he had stayed with the firm after Roger became a partner only to counteract his 'bad influence.'"

"And to make a very good living as he did so!" Lemuel clapped his hands and hooted. "I'm only sorry the great Dickens is not alive to put Pratt in a novel. He would excel Mr. Pecksniff as the archetype of hypocrisy. Has Roger heard of this yet?"

"No! And he mustn't or he'll blow us all to Kingdom Come! That's where you come in. I have almost persuaded Jane Pratt to talk her husband out of his silly attitude. I count on you to put in the finishing touches."

"Is it really worth it? I'm not at all sure that Osgood couldn't do better than the Pratts. I was hoping he might catch a real heiress from one of the families that are still climbing. A Vanderbilt, for example."

"No, no, I know where we are socially, my dear. The Pratts are just right for us. It's all very well for you, a bachelor, to talk about our doing better. It's easy enough for you to go anywhere you like. But for a woman it's different. There are plenty of dowagers in this town who are ready to do me in if given half a chance. My success has aroused envy, and don't fool yourself that that war has been forgotten yet. And even if it had been, Roger's snooty attitude about Yankees would revive it. If we had a real showdown with a couple as respected as the Pratts, it might upset my applecart!"

Lemuel appeared to be weighing this. "Well, I suppose there may be something in what you say. Jane Pratt
is
a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, though I doubt if half the new families even know who he was. How do you want me to approach her?"

"What I really need is to get her to make Charles drop his condition."

"A condition to his consent to the wedding?"

"Yes. It's a very stiff one, I'm afraid."

"What
is
Charles's condition?" came a voice from the doorway, and they both turned to face Roger. Kitty's self-possession rarely deserted her. "Oh, a silly condition," she replied casually, as if relieved that his arrival had saved her the trouble of sending for him. "You know what a stickler Jane is in matters of etiquette. Apparently they're in mourning and don't want to have a wedding reception."

Roger's expression was dangerously impassive as he advanced into the room. "For whom are the Pratts in mourning?"

"Oh, I don't know. Some old cousin three or four times removed. I told Jane that we didn't care about a reception. That we'd give a party for the bride and groom after the honeymoon."

"Just a minute, Kitty. One doesn't forgo a wedding reception for one's only daughter because of the death of a distant cousin. Even for a close relation, one would simply postpone the wedding for a month or so."

"Oh, Roger, you know these old New Yorkers. They mourn for years for the remotest kin!"

"Do they? I saw Charles in the office this morning, and he was certainly not wearing a black tie or even a mourning band. In fact, I particularly noticed his very red cravat." And then his features suddenly hardened. "They're not in mourning at all, are they, Kitty? Not even for a cousin twice removed?"

"Well, maybe they just don't like wedding receptions!" Kitty exclaimed with finely affected exasperation. "
You
should be glad anyway. You hate the damn things and probably wouldn't even go to it. And as for me, the only thing I'd like about it is it would probably bust our Bore Insurance Society!"

But Roger was inexorable. "The reason Charles doesn't want to give a reception is that he doesn't wish to introduce his friends and relations to me. Isn't that it?"

"Oh, Roger, what if it is? What do we care? We don't have to marry
him,
do we?"

"But I care very much. And I shall look forward to having a general clarification with Charles Pratt no later than tomorrow. It will be my pleasure to inform him that if he feels ashamed of this alliance,
I
feel degraded. I shall further inform him that he has been paid by his partners through the years, not for his legal aptitude or his roster of clients, both of which are, to say the least, exiguous, but for his constituting the formal façade of piety which all good Yankee enterprises require."

"Oh, that's just fine!" Kitty rose and faced him with clenched fists. "What fun you're going to have! You'll smash poor Osgood's wedding and maybe even break up your law firm. You'll have all New York society shouting for your head. And best of all, you'll bring me down in the general wreck! That's what you've always wanted, isn't it? Well, go ahead and try! I dissociate myself from you. Osgood and I will make it alone."

"I shall always support you, Kitty."

"I don't want your Yankee money!" she almost shrieked.

But this was too much for Lemuel, who now rose and glanced at his watch. "If you don't mind my interrupting this little scene, Roger, Kitty and I must be off to the Mortimers'. I believe we shall meet the Pratts there."

"Tell Charles I shall come to his office in the morning" was all that his brother-in-law grimly replied.

The two years following Roger's rupture with his firm, which resulted from the irate Pratt's demand that their partners choose between the two of them, he spent alone in Castledale. Kitty remained in the New York house, which he supposed she would be able to maintain for a few years on the half of his savings that he had turned over to her. After that he had little interest in what happened. He no longer had any earned income, and the remainder of his capital was destined for the endowment of his museum. It was not a great sum, at least by the standards of the new rich, but costs in Virginia were still low, and, his foundation once legally established, he could move into the old overseer's lodge with Ned. But for the time being he was occupying the big house, a moody hermit amid the splendors of his continued restorations.

He saw almost nobody but his ever-sympathetic brother. The local gentry would have been glad enough to welcome him had he taken the trouble to ingratiate himself, but his aloofness was repelling, and in time the rumors of the bad reputation that he enjoyed even in a city as wicked as New York began to tarnish his image. When, in addition, the respectable neighbors learned that he had deserted a blameless wife and was planning to disinherit a dutiful son, they dug up the old legend of his duel with Drayton and converted it to something more like a cold-blooded murder. It was even claimed that he had known ahead of time that his victim intended to fire into the air.

Roger cared little for their prattle, some of which the more troubled Ned related to him in the vain hope that an ameliorated attitude might appease the countryside.

"But don't you see, Ned, that what they're saying about me is basically fact? Oh, they've added a lot of nasty and false details, it's true. People wouldn't be people if they didn't do that. But I can't quarrel with the main outline of their image of me. I
am
a bit of a monster, you know."

The only criticism that he did mind came from within the walls of Castledale, not from humans, for nobody lived there at night but himself and only the cook and parlor maid by day. It came from ghosts. The pale wooden faces of the Colonial Carstairses over coats and dresses as unwrinkled as planks, looked not at him but past him. The Revolutionary general, whose big nose and alarming sabre dominated the dining room, saw him but did not recognize him. And his mother, looking sad and subdued even as a debutante in the day of Andrew Jackson, seemed to be conveying the timid message that she couldn't talk to him now, before the others, but could she have a word with him later, alone? Yet the note the family appeared to be striking was not one of hostility, or even, really, of disapproval. It was more that he didn't belong there. He had called at a house where he wasn't expected. What did he hope to gain by prolonging the error?

"They want me out of Castledale," he told Ned one day at lunchtime, waving towards the portraits on the wall. "They treat me like a stranger. Even an intruder."

"How ungrateful of them! After all you've done."

"Oh, they don't care about that. They'd rather be shabby. They feel about me the way the Stewarts down the road feel about the rich Yankee who bought High Farm."

"But Castledale is
yours,
Roger!"

"Not in their opinion. I've forfeited my rights."

Ned's finger rested on the base of his wineglass as he pondered something. "There's one way you might bring them around."

"I know. By willing the place to Osgood. You're a stuck whistle on that subject. But he couldn't keep it up, even if he wanted it."

"He could if you left him the money."

"There's not enough. He'd use it for his family, and it'll be needed to maintain the house. Osgood hasn't a penny over his wretched salary. Pratt cut off Felicia when she married without his consent."

"He'll forgive. They always do in the end."

"But he's damn near bust himself! Osgood wrote me about it. Pratt was always the world's worst investor, and he got his ears pinned back in that Montana mine fraud."

"Oh, so Osgood writes you?"

"When he's desperate. Felicia had twins, you know. Oh, I sent him a check, of course. I'm not quite the ogre people say. But the real money has to go to the museum. You know that, Ned."

"I don't know it. You may. I have no use for museums, at least in the country. Castledale should be owned by a Carstairs."

One night, after a solitary dinner, Roger had risen and strolled to the fireplace to take his usual leave of the portrait over it of General Carstairs. He would offer his great-grandfather a miltary salute, but he never went so far as to imagine that it would be returned. But that evening he had a curious feeling that it had been, that the hero of the Battle of Chesnut Hill, in view of some special and perhaps ominous occasion, was offering him a recognition that might never have to be repeated.

And then the blankness returned to those authoritative features, and Roger felt, in a swirling, diving emptiness, that he himself was no longer there.

When he regained consciousness he was in his bed, and Ned, standing by it, was telling him that he had suffered a heart attack.

Roger eyed him curiously. Certainly Ned was very sombre.

"What is the prognosis, Ned?" He heard his own voice, but faint and far away. "Facts, please, Ned."

"Not good, I'm afraid."

"How long?"

"There's no time given, Roger."

"But time enough to make a new will, is that it?"

Ned looked pained but still resolute. "I think you'd be more at peace with yourself."