Honorable Men (3 page)

Much later he told me how he had done it. He called on Granny on an afternoon when he knew that Aunt Fanny was at her exercise class, and the conversation went something like this:

G
US
: I hope you will forgive me, Mrs. Struthers, if I talk rather personally about your granddaughter. You might say it's none of my business, but didn't the ghost of Jacob Marley learn too late that mankind was his business?

G
RANNY
: Is womankind yours, Augustus? Are you a candidate for Alida's hand? If so, it's her father you should be addressing yourself to. Not that I mean to discourage you, dear boy.

G
US
: Boy of almost forty! You needn't be that anxious to get rid of her. The poor child's going to do a lot better than a jaded old creature like me.

G
RANNY
: She's not a
parti,
you know.

G
US
: How could she be, in these dark days, when we're all put to it to make ends meet? I sometimes think you must be a bit of a genius to maintain the style of living that you do maintain.

G
RANNY
: Well, of course, it's not easy. One has to keep a sharp lookout.

G
US
: Just that? I know so many people who nibble on their capital.

G
RANNY
: But we were brought up not to do that!

G
US
: We're not all saints, are we? Oh, come, Mrs. Struthers, don't tell me you've never sneaked a bond out of the tin box and sold it when no one was looking? Have you never been naughty? Never once?

G
RANNY
: Well, maybe just once in a blue moon. Things are so very dear!

G
US
: Exactly! And I'm sure your son and daughter-in-law have, too.

G
RANNY
: Oh, them—for sure!

G
US
: And between you all, I wonder whether poor Alida won't have to learn a trade.

G
RANNY
: I don't think I quite follow that, Augustus.

G
US
: It's simple. How is a young woman brought up to believe that meals and bathrooms cook and clean themselves supposed to support herself when her immediate progenitors have gone to their reward—if reward, indeed, it be?

G
RANNY
: That's her progenitors' lookout.

G
US
: But if they don't look? Isn't a grandmother a kind of surety on the bond?

G
RANNY
: What are you driving at? Why can't Alida marry some sensible young fellow and be a good wife to him?

G
US
: Because she's been brought up to be perfectly useless. And to fall in love with youths who will either be after the money she hasn't got or afraid she's after theirs!

G
RANNY
: Am I responsible for the low moral tone of my daughter-in-law's house?

G
US
: No! But you're responsible for not saving Alida if you can.

G
RANNY
: Can I? How?

Gus proceeded to tell her. And he actually got the party out of the old girl. She did the bare minimum, but that proved enough. We rented the Aquamarine Room at the Hotel Stafford, not the best place by a good deal but adequate, and Gus secured a number of concessions in the way of music and liquor when the merchants discovered what the press coverage was to be. It was an April party, late in the season, and it constituted its climax. Alida Struthers the next week was on the cover of
Life\

When Gus came to our house one morning with an advance copy, he kissed me and murmured, “Now I can chant my Nunc Dimittis.”

“Well, you've had
your
fun.” I gazed at the large photograph almost with incredulity. “When does
mine
start?”

I did not mean to be ungrateful. But in sober truth, what had I really got out of the whole thing? I had learned nothing that had not confirmed my low opinion of the games played by New York society; I had exhausted my body with late hours, smoking and drinking; I had made mincemeat of my self-respect; I had added nothing to my knowledge of the arts and literature; and I had not even fallen in love! When I looked back over those months of futile activity, I had only a sense of hundreds of bland young faces, of lips forming inane compliments or feeble jokes, and of laughs, smiles, giggles, an endless bray of pointless jocosity. Where was the heart of fools? Of course, in the House of Mirth!

Once, after a long lunch at the Chenonceaux with Gus, reluctant to go out to the rainy street, I gazed glumly over the emptying tables and sipped a second cognac.

“What are you doing it for, Augustus? Are you like the guardian in
The School for Wives
rearing an innocent ward to be the perfect spouse? If so, you're taking rather a new tack, aren't you? For instead of walling me up to preserve my purity, you've exposed me to every contamination on earth! But maybe that's just your perversity. Maybe you're the ultimate decadent. To want a spouse like Salome, a virgin who is totally corrupt!”

“No, I don't fly so high.” Gus always took in his stride one's extremest flights of fancy. Did I attract him at all? It was hard to tell what lurked behind those dark, damp eyes, sometimes so scornful, sometimes so sad, sometimes simply so bored, so horribly bored. When he shut out the world, was he shutting out clamorous, intrusive females? Or perhaps grinning, leering boys who knew what he really wanted? Or did he simply want to be alone with his intensely intelligent self? “No, I don't aspire to the hand of my Galatea. She is too fine a property for the likes of me. But that needn't mean I can't have a candidate.”

“Oh, you have one?”

“I think I may have.”

“Whom I've met?”

“No.”

“And when shall I meet this paragon?”

“Ah, but of course I'm not going to tell you. That would put your back up.”

“Will you tell me after I've met him?”

“Only if I think you like him.”

I admit that Gus was wise to make a mystery of his project. I found myself wondering now, every time I met someone at all attractive, whether this one might be he. And in a surprisingly short time it became an amusing game. I was constantly asking men I met: “By any chance, do you know Gus Leighton? Why? Oh, no reason. I was just wondering.” But then, of course, it was always possible that Gus did not know his candidate personally. He might have made his selection merely by title: a duke or a maharajah. At any rate, as the fateful season ended and I faced the long, familiar summer of Bar Harbor with my parents and Deborah, I began to wonder if Gus's ambition for me might not be the only thing I had salvaged from a year of folly.

H
ENRY
A
DAMS
, who was always concerned with the dichotomy of the one and the many, not only in the twelfth and twentieth centuries, but in the eras of his own life, professed to see unity in the sober, disciplined Boston of his childhood and multiplicity in the careless freedom of the countryside at Quincy. One represented winter and school; the other, summer and license.

With me it was just the reverse. Manhattan, with its bustle of traffic and much-touted pace of living, with its ruthless competition in social and business life, struck me as the licentious “many,” while Bar Harbor, serene between its green mountains and the sapphire blue of Frenchman's Bay, seemed a unit that existed only for itself. Bar Harbor made sense, or nonsense if you preferred, which in the silver air of its few peerless Maine days (one ignored the fog that shrouded the island for half the summer) was all that seemed to matter. For there was no world outside Bar Harbor, or really much of a one in it besides the summer community and the shops and servants and boats and glittering old limousines that made up the crazy round of its idyllic days.

When I close my eyes I see the Swimming Club on West Street, with its terrace and lawn descending to the huge pool whose cement walls extended down the stony beach that was covered at high tide, as was the long sandy dike that connected Bar Island to Mount Desert. The club was the undoubted center of the “one,” and here at noon the leading ladies of the colony foregathered at umbrella tables while boys in scarlet jackets brought on silver trays the first cocktail of the day. I used to think of those half-dozen tables under their brightly colored shelters as a kind of senate, for surely here, by these broad-hatted, silk-gowned women, with their pearls and high heels and low throaty chuckles, all the decisions of the community were made. If their men had some voice in the distant cities, they had none here—nor did they seek any, except in the management of the golf club, carved out by them as a small, independent principality.

My mother lived for that noon hour at the Swimming Club. Sitting with her needlework, a cigarette dangling from her always moving lips, she listened and chattered at once, missing nothing. She was the admitted historiographer of the island, even of the outlying and sometimes rebellious settlements at Northeast and Seal Harbors. I see myself coming up to her chair when it was time to go home for lunch (my generation never sat at the umbrella tables) and hovering there while she answered some such final question as “Did the John Stewart Kennedy fortune really all go to cats and dogs?” or “Florence, what was the true story about Ann Archbold's kidnapping her children?”

Life radiated out from the club to the “cottages” on West and Eden Streets, large shapeless shingle structures, sometimes brightly painted, with well-mowed emerald lawns, to the cozy shops on Main Street with windows invitingly full of imported luxuries, to the woods and the long blue driveways of the more distant villas concealed by spruce and pine, yet all familiar to us, including stone castles, Italian palazzos, Georgian red brick villas, but still for the most part shingle habitations, with dark proliferating turrets and porches. And then there were the “mountains,” hills really, that one could climb on trails for breathtaking views of the ocean and mainland, or, in the case of Green Mountain, drive all the way to the peak behind the limousine of some little neat old lady in black or white who spoke to her chauffeur through a voice tube and had a glass vase with an orchid attached to the wall by her seat.

Politics and war were shut out of Bar Harbor. It was difficult even to read the newspaper. Yet it was saved from being too hopelessly silly or artificial by being only itself. When the husbands and fathers from New York talked of distant disasters after dinner over brandy and cigars, the ladies in the drawing room, resuming the discussion of the umbrella tables, knew that they were coping with the “real” problems.

I think that one of my principal reasons for loving Bar Harbor was that my parents seemed less ridiculous there. It was hard to take the values of New York too seriously, and the social game, the gossip, the endless mirth, seemed to fit in with the squawking of the gulls that awoke one on misty mornings and the reflection of the midday sun on the vivid shutters of the shops on Main Street. And so, in the long summer that followed my hectic debutante season, although my heart was filled with a sense of anticlimax, I could at least hope that it might be dulled by the euphoria of a Maine July.

Gus Leighton had taken his usual rooms at the Malvern, and he told me firmly that he was “off duty.”

“But suppose Mr. Right comes along?” I protested. “Will he give us a second chance? Won't we have to pounce?”

“You know nothing ever happens in Bar Harbor. It's a Garden of Eden where everybody's allowed to eat the apples.” “And the poor snake is out of a job.”

“Precisely. Which is why I have cast off my shiny green skin and intend to doze. Go thou and do likewise.”

Of course, Gus was not serious about relaxing his social life. He dined out nightly. But although no one expected so elegant a bachelor to return their hospitality, Gus was meticulous about his obligations and would give a monthly dinner party at the Swimming Club that he called a “massacre” (“kill-off,” he insisted, being too mild a term) to satisfy them. But as he would think over each boring hostess to whom he was indebted, and picture to himself what havoc she might create in an otherwise congenial gathering, he would end by striking her name, until finally his “massacre” had evolved into a delightful party of only those persons (always the most amusing) who had
not
invited Gus Leighton to dine in the preceding four weeks. When I asked him why he accepted so many bids from hostesses who simply wearied him, he wailed, “Because I have no one to answer my telephone, and I haven't time to think up an excuse!” He once showed me a notebook in which he had rated (or berated) the different entertainers of Bar Harbor, and I recall such brief jottings as: “Mrs. Hale. Fish house punch! Never again.” or “Mrs. Twining. Took me out of a business double. Nevermore!” But he always did go again; a good Bar Harborite never kept a good resolution.

At Gus's first dinner party that summer I found myself seated next to Jonathan Askew, a tall, baggy bachelor of twenty-seven, whose mother, Lady Lennox, had recently (for tax reasons, according to my all-knowing ma) abandoned the United Kingdom for her native land and had repurchased her parents' old place, Arcadia, on a peninsula that gave her a double view of Frenchman's Bay. Askew, the sole issue of her earlier American match, was making his first visit to Mount Desert.

“What do young ladies like to talk about in Bar Harbor?” he asked me in a loud hollow tone, as if he were offering me a tray of goodies.

I knew right away that this had to be Gus's candidate. Askew, thanks to an ancestor who had invested first in the China trade and then in railroads, bore a famous name. He looked the part, too; he had a large aquiline nose, a high sloping forehead, curly auburn hair and watery gray eyes that stared at one blankly, haughtily, suspiciously. His voice was high and affected, and he moved his large body with a kind of arrogant clumsiness. He would have been perfectly cast in a Cecil B. DeMille film about a Roman emperor.