Skinny Island (9 page)

Horace eyed Regner now with a half-fascinated disgust. "What exactly are you proposing?"

"That you give Douglas a million dollars. This very morning!"

Horace decided that the only thing to do now was to treat the whole matter as a joke, so he purported to chuckle and then noisily opened up his
Herald Tribune
between himself and his importunate acquaintance.

He was not, however, able to make sense out of a single sentence. He could not even read the captions under the photographs! At Grand Central he left the car without another word to Regner and hurried through the crowd to Vanderbilt Avenue and the now yearned-for security of his small office.

"Good morning, Mr. Devoe." Mrs. Sprit, gray, bland, plump, clad in reassuring black, beamed at him.

"Morning," he grunted as he passed her and almost fell into the big chair by his desk. He knew she would not disturb him till he had read his mail.

The reason, he was well aware, that he was so deeply disturbed was not that he had never considered Regner's idea, but that his determination to make Douglas earn his own living was part and parcel of a code that he had accepted as gospel from his earliest years. Indeed, the code had always seemed to him the only thing between himself and chaos. He had put his life together, piece by piece, like a mosaic. He had built a routine slowly but surely, blocking out anxiety with the water-tight compartments of his day- and night-filling schedule. He rose at the same hour, ate the same breakfast, greeted Amelia, who had hers in bed; spent the morning with Mrs. Sprit, the afternoon at one of his boards, the evening at the opera or a small dinner party. When it all worked in close sequence he was sometimes almost happy, particularly in the back of the opera box imagining himself as the tenor belting out "Celeste Aida." His life was like one of those palaces in Florence, all rusticated rocks and steel gates on the façade and ail safety within. But when someone without a ticket barged in, someone like the wretched Regner, the whole place was turned to rubble, and in a flash!

His father, of course, had been just the opposite. The most hated trader in Wall Street had not given a damn for anyone's opinion; he had called the world a hypocrite and told it to go hang. Horace had not disapproved of his father or even resented him; he had simply envied him. But he had always known that he lacked the smallest spark of his father's fire and genius.

How else but by convention could he have faced the hate that his terrible sire had scorned? Hadn't he always known that he lacked the paternal armor, the paternal shell, and that to avoid the shrilled obscenities, the hurled brickbats, he had to conform himself to just what the world thought was an acceptable rich man, a dutiful trustee, an admirer of the best things, a faithful husband (though that was easy, with the lovely Amelia) and a father who did not spoil a child?

Had he ever really thought of Douglas?

Had he ever really thought of Douglas as a person, not a son?

Hell's bells, it was too much!

"Mrs. Sprit!" he cried.

"Sir?" The pale face loomed in the doorway.

"Get me Mr. Curtis." He leaned over his desk and clenched his fists until he heard his buzzer. "Oh, Albert? Good morning. There's a matter I'd like you to take care of today. Yes, today. I want to settle a million dollars on Douglas."

A year later Horace was seated once again with the great investment banker in the club car. He had not seen Simon Regner in the interim because the latter, to Horace's considerable relief, had taken his wife and a large family party on a grand tour in a yacht around the globe. But now, alas, he was back, and just as big and glossy and brassy as ever.

"Well,
well
, my dear Horace, how are things with you? And how in particular is our budding playwright? I heard he's gone to Paris. Is that so?"

"That's where people go to write, I'm told."

"They do other things there, too,
I'm
told!"

Horace averted his eyes from the other's grinning countenance. "Douglas's wife and children are with him," he retorted dryly.

"Of course I didn't mean a thing by that remark. Not a thing. I'm sure we'll soon be reading of a new Eugene O'Neill. And how is your lovely wife? You should take her on a cruise such as the one we've been on."

Horace could hardly repress a shudder at the prospect of further expenses. "Amelia and I are quite happy at home, thank you."

"Are you? May I be so bold as to remind you that I had a hand in the rehabilitation of Douglas Devoe? Why should I confine myself to the young? Should my benefactions not be showered alike on the older generation?"

It seemed to Horace that there was something almost Mephistophelean in the large confident figure in the adjacent Pullman chair. He could almost imagine the ho-ho-hos and ha-ha-has of the devil in Gounod's opera.

"I don't know that Amelia and I are in particular need of your benefactions. Of course, it's very kind of you—"

"You? I wasn't thinking of you, my friend. You seem as snug as that carpeted insect. No, it's Mrs. Devoe to whom I have the presumption to raise my sights. Has it never occurred to you that you're a bit of an ogre? To keep the reigning beauty of Park Avenue and Westchester County so immured? Oh, you may immure her in palaces, but may palaces not be prisons?"

Horace, once again transfixed by this monster, found himself unable to be silent. "Prisons?"

"Everyone knows that you and Mrs. Devoe limit yourselves to a small, select circle. I am sure it is very agreeable. Certainly for you. It contains the friends you have known all your life. But your wife, my dear Horace, was born to reign! Both town and country yearn for her. She should be the chairman of the Westchester Ball for the disabled; she should be the one to greet the governor when he comes to the music festival; she should open the new arts center at—"

"Amelia doesn't want any of that!" Horace interrupted sharply.

"My dear fellow, how do you know? How can any of us read a woman's heart?"

When Horace reached for his paper and tremblingly opened it, it was as if he were shutting out the rays of a malignant force.

All that day his thoughts were in a tumult. He had never doubted that Amelia was the idol of his life. She had been so beautiful, in spirit as in flesh, that there had been no idea in his mind of his money acting as any sort of attraction to her; she was so far above him and above it that her love had been a miracle. No fortune, no kingdom would have been too great to lay at her feet. It was true, of course, that he had rescued her father, a poor but dishonest broker, from disaster; it was true that she had been twenty-eight when they married and that foolish persons had spoken of his being a great match. But all that he had been able to give her—the Palladian houses that so well set off her tall, cool, American beauty, the great garden in which she so tirelessly worked, the opera box from which, in intermissions, she was the cynosure of all eyes—was as nothing to the joy and pride that it had given him to devote his major energy to being an acolyte at the altar he was fortunate enough to have been able to build for her.

And it was almost more wonderful that Amelia, who had never seemed conscious of her beauty, who never gave herself any airs or sought to attract the attention of other men, should have been so serenely content with just what he offered: the unvarying routine of their households, the small dinner parties of old acquaintances, the opera and symphony. Amelia had a nature of remarkable equanimity; she never seemed to tire of her gardening, of her poodles, of her light romantic novels or of her husband. Sometimes Horace thought that she was like a wife in a dream. On the rare occasions in their married life when she had been subjected to the too emphatic admiration of some perhaps intoxicated male friend, her reaction had been first disgust and then pity. "I think Bill should really see a doctor," she would conclude.

The day of his talk with Regner was a Monday, and the Devoes were to be in town that week. Amelia came in in the afternoon in time for the opera, and Horace was plunged again in his nervous thoughts as he sat in the back of their box at
Norma,
his eyes on the straight back and beautiful shoulders of Amelia, erect and still in her corner seat in the front row.

"Casta Diva," he murmured to himself as Rosa Ponselle, before the altar on stage, delivered herself of the great aria. Had he kept the chaste goddess too greedily to himself?

When they came back to the house on Park Avenue, and the butler had taken their wraps, Horace told him to go to bed.

"I'll lock up, Johnson," he said. Amelia already had one foot on the staircase. "Oh, darling," he said, "don't go up quite yet. Could we chat for a minute?"

"Certainly, dear. What's on your mind?"

"Nothing much. I'd just like to talk."

She was already walking to the little reception hall on the ground floor where they never sat. Perhaps she was tired and did not want him to be too long. "How is this?"

They were both seated on stiff chairs that they had probably not sat on in twenty years, if ever. It seemed very odd.

"Amelia, do you ever think that our social life is too restricted?"

"No. How?"

"Well, we live in such a big city and see so few people."

"We can always add to the list. Whom would you like?"

"Oh, no one in particular. I was thinking more in terms of groups. Wouldn't you like to see some politicians? Or musicians? Or writers?"

Those serene gray eyes gazed at him the least bit more critically. "You mean
you
would?"

"No, no, I've been quite content, really."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure."

"Then that's all I care about." She made a motion to rise. "Can we go up now?"

"No, no, just another minute, please, dearest. I've been wondering about something. Haven't I perhaps been keeping you too much to myself all these years? It seems almost oriental, when you stop to think of it, your being walled away like this, except for one dull little group."

"So you
do
find them dull?"

"No, no, no. How could the likes of Horace Devoe have the gall to find anyone dull? But
you,
Amelia. You were born to be a queen. To shine! And I'm beginning to wonder if I haven't committed a great wrong in keeping you so back."

"And does having committed this great wrong, as you call it, make you unhappy?"

"Well, shouldn't it?"

"Has it in the past?"

"I suppose it couldn't have, if I wasn't aware of it." He paused, perplexed, and then took another tack. "But maybe yes, it has. Maybe what I've all along been basically suffering from is a hidden sense of the injustice I've done you. It could be a kind of subconscious thing."

He was thinking so hard of this that in the silence that followed he did not at first notice that what was brightening her eyes was tears.

"Darling, what is it?" he cried in alarm. "I didn't deserve to be happy, did I?"

"I thought you did." Her voice was very sad and low. She had turned her head away from him. "You saved my father from suicide."

"But, Amelia, angel, that was all done with a check! And I got my money back, anyway. What man wouldn't have done that for the girl he wanted to marry?"

"I vowed I would make you happy," she went on in the same tone, shaking her head slowly. "I was determined, beyond everything, that I was going to make you happy. And I thought I'd had some success, too. That we'd had a good life. But now you tell me I've wasted all those years! That I should have been a society queen. That
that
was what you wanted all along!"

"Not what
I
wanted," he interrupted, horrified. "What I wanted for
you.
Or should have wanted for you."

"What's the difference? I didn't do what you wanted. I haven't been the woman you wanted. I've wasted my life. I've been ridiculous!"

Suddenly she began to sob, but when he hurried to her side she pushed him roughly away. He felt in that moment what it was actually to want to be dead.

"Whatever my life has been, dearest, it's been you!" he almost shouted.

"But what have I made of it, if that's true? No, Horace, let's not talk about it any more. It's too painful." She rose, putting a handkerchief to her lips. "I'm going to bed."

"Damn Simon Regner!" he shouted.

Amelia paused at the door. Then she turned back in surprise. "Why do you damn Mr. Regner?"

"Because he started me on all this. I was perfectly happy until he persuaded me that I wasn't. That I had wronged Douglas and was wronging you. Well, he was right about Douglas, so I—"

"Right about Douglas?" Amelia seemed now to lose all sight of her own discouragement. "You mean it was
he
who gave you that ridiculous idea of settling money on him?"

"Why ridiculous? Didn't it work?"

"Work? It has made him miserable! It has made him discover he has no talent for writing." And then, abruptly, another thought seemed to strike her. "But how did Mr. Regner know about Douglas? Did Douglas complain to him about money?"

"He told him he couldn't afford to be a writer."

"Then, Douglas deserves what he got!" she exclaimed indignantly. "Imagine whining to Regner!" And as she took in at last Horace's stricken countenance, it was as if the rehearsal of a dramatic scene had been interrupted, and the performer was herself again. Amelia took a step towards Horace, paused and then impulsively stretched out her arms. "Oh, you poor darling! I never meant to tell you that about Douglas. It was Elly who wrote me about it. I replied that of course he ought to go back to his old job, but she said it would look too silly now that he doesn't need the salary. Ah, now I
have
made you unhappy! Oh, Horace, can you ever forgive me?"

Six months later, when Simon Regner and Horace were again rolling towards the city in the club car, Regner asked, "What is this I hear about Douglas taking the chairmanship of the Turtle Bay Settlement House? Is he giving up Paris? I hope he's not giving up his writing."

"Let's put it that he wants to do something useful at the same time. Frankly, Simon, I'm not sure that Douglas needs that much time to write."