The Friend of Women and Other Stories (17 page)

When she matriculated at Barnard College in 1910, she spent much of her freshman year composing a novel about a spoiled debutante who flees the dull and conventional husband her snooty family has picked for her with a seemingly romantic lover who turns out to be duller and much more malevolent than the spouse she has abandoned. The ending was too preachy, as her mother gently pointed out, when Kate gave it to her to read.

“But your tale has its moments, my dear,” she added. “It's far from contemptible.”

Far from contemptible! Her
Madame Bovary!
“You think I could never be a real writer!” Kate cried in bitter disappointment.

“Never, as they say, is a long word. I think you may always be able to contribute pieces to be read and enjoyed by your friends. And you might well become a first-class letter writer, an art that is sadly neglected today. But never forget, dear girl, that the world we live in has need of all kinds of doctors and lawyers and businessmen, both first-class and second, and maybe even third, but it has no need of any but the first-class in writers and artists.”

“And you think I'd be a third-class writer!”

“Darling, I can't tell at this point. Do you want me to say I see another Edith Wharton in you?”

“No. But you don't seem to want me to be a writer at all.”

“I don't think it's the happiest life for a woman, no. If you look at the famous woman authors, you'll find them a rather barren lot. Mrs. Wharton has no children. Neither did Jane Austen or George Eliot or Sappho—so far as we know—or the Brontës—”

“Charlotte was pregnant when she died!” Kate interrupted.

“But she died, didn't she?” At least Emma smiled when she said this.

“And Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a son!”

“Who turned out badly. But let's not get too serious about this. Writing is a dangerous thing because everyone thinks he can do it, and lives can be wasted in the effort. Write what you want, but don't get stuck in it. Remember that life is just opening up for you. Don't let it pass you by!”

Kate's spirits were dashed for a time, but she recovered them. Her mother, after all, was her idea of a great woman, and it should not be altogether impossible for a daughter to become something not too unlike her.

Emma and her widespread Laidlaw connections had their worldly side, but they kept it in reasonable check. A studious girl like Kate should certainly have been given full rein to take advantage of her courses at Barnard and spend some of her evenings scribbling, but the social side of life was not to be ignored, and she had to submit to a small dinner dance given her by one of Mama's well-endowed cousins and to attend a certain minimum of balls. After all, a girl was not likely to find a husband in the Barnard library.

Kate submitted to all this with a good enough grace, and even enjoyed some part of it. Her looks were only modestly pretty, but she danced well—Emma had seen to that—and she talked less idly than some of her contemporaries, who thought young men liked that, which, alas, some did. But she had one row with her mother. She had been taken into a sorority at Barnard, and her initiation had fallen on a day she had accepted a dinner invitation. Her mother refused to let her out of it, and, reluctantly attending it, Kate had met her future husband, Howard Rand.

Emma always maintained afterward that this proved the value of putting first things first. “In our society,” she firmly declared, “when you accept an invitation to dinner, you go or send your coffin.”

He was a modest, appealing, attractively shy (at least in female company), and good-looking youth who came from a family that was in every way, except socially, the opposite of the Laidlaws. The Rands were dull, stuffy, and ultra-religious; they had brought over from the Scotland of their remote origin as much Calvinism as their little storm-tossed vessel could carry. Poor Howard fell below their standards as effectively as Kate before those of the Laidlaws, though in a very different fashion. His total lack of interest in church or Bible, his early habit of hanging out with boys of ungodly thoughts and doings, his frank distaste for the dark orderly life of his clan had caused him to be actually disliked by the prudish little valetudinarian, self-obsessed mother who ruled the home and received the gawking worship of his silly, temperamental sisters. His initial self-confidence had been undermined more than he knew by the loveless disapproval of his widowed mother, and he found himself much at a loss in the mirthful company of the more sophisticated Laidlaw crowd. It was to the quiet Kate that he turned.

“It must be great to live in a family where everyone enjoys themselves,” he confided in her once. “My sisters go to parties, but they have to be home by midnight on Saturdays, and that's just when the real fun starts.”

“You mean they mustn't dance on the Sabbath?”

“Or do anything else but look gloomy and pray.”

“What about you?” They were eating supper in a free corner of the Plaza ballroom at a debutante party, and it was ten minutes after twelve.

“Oh, me too, but I stay up. Mother has threatened to lock me out, but she's afraid I'll get into worse trouble. Though I don't know why she cares, as she thinks I'm bound to hell in any case. But what can she do? I'm over twenty-one.”

“She could cut off your allowance.”

“I have a small trust that Dad left me. It's not much, but I could eat. It would get me through law school, anyway. I've only another year to go.”

“So you're going to be a lawyer.”

“If I can land a job.”

“Is that such a problem?”

“Not if Uncle Jules Anthon kicks in. He's Mother's brother. Has a big firm downtown.”

“Why do you need him?”

“Because my grades aren't much. And they weren't at Yale, either. I have to admit it, Kate. I'm no shining light. Mother says I wrecked my chances at college by coming down to New York every weekend to see girls.”

“And did you?”

“No! I came down to see one girl. Julia Shelburne. Did you ever know her?” He suddenly seemed eager to be confidential, obviously unaware of the tactlessness of holding forth on a girl other than the one he was with. But she found that she didn't mind it. She didn't mind it at all.

“Julia Shelburne,” she repeated, bringing to mind a tall plain girl of supposed wealth. “Didn't I read that she was engaged to some prince or other?”

“You did,” he responded sourly. “Some slimy, mediatized German semiroyalty who's after her chips.”

“Why do you assume that he's mercenary?”

“Oh, they all are. Everyone knows that. But I didn't give a hoot about her money! I even hated it! In my dreams she had lost it all! I used to tell her that if we ever married, we'd give it all away. Oh, I was crazy. Can you believe it?”

She nodded. “I can.” And she did.

“She didn't seem to mind. She liked me. I know she did. We used to write each other long letters. And then her father took her off to Europe where he was an ambassador, and I wrote her that she'd meet all kinds of dukes and earls and never think of Howard Rand again. And do you know what? She never did!”

Kate was so surprised that she laughed. It was the right note, however, for after a moment he laughed too, and then added sheepishly, “I shouldn't be boring a pretty girl with my silly problems.”

“You don't bore me, Howard.”

“Well, you're not like your cousin Millicent Laidlaw then.
She
gets bored quickly enough.”

“Yes, when the subject changes from Millicent Laidlaw being the belle of the ball. I'm glad you don't find me like her.”

“You don't care about being the belle of the ball?”

“Not in the least.”

He glanced at the dance floor, where some couples had returned from their supper tables. It was certainly a pretty sight. “You're an unusual member of your family, Kate. But I like that.”

“Oh, I'm the black sheep! I frown on them. Yet all those dear cousins, they're harmless enough, really. They want only to have a good time. It's my fault that I can't help seeing them as having something in common with all those amiable French aristocrats who gambled and gossiped and made love in the revolutionary prisons while awaiting their turn at the guillotine.”

“Kate, what an image! Do you think we're in for a reign of terror?”

“Well, maybe not quite that, but life always has some sort of comeuppance. The Laidlaws have guts, I admit. They would greet disaster with a shrug and a quip. Style to them is everything. But to me life needs something more than style.”

“Such as?”

“I'm not sure yet. But I know I'm going to take things more seriously and more literally than my family does.”

“Maybe you'll be a lawyer or doctor. Many girls want to try that these days.”

“And I applaud them. But I don't think they ought to marry. I still think a mother's first duty is to her children. Marriage in the old sense seems to be going out of fashion, and I wonder if it's not a great mistake.”

“What do you mean by marriage in the old sense?”

“Something that every member of the family it produced treasured and tried to preserve. A bond that held parents and children together in love and mutual respect. Fathers who didn't spend their weekends on the golf course but devoted the bulk of their spare time to being with their sons and daughters. Mothers who weren't always playing cards or dining out. Children need a mother at home, despite what the modernists say.”

“It doesn't sound much like my family,” he said with a wistful shrug. “When I was a boy we hardly ever saw Dad except when he took us to church. And Mother was always resting. I can't remember a time when our nurse, with a finger on her lips, wasn't warning us that Mother was resting.”

“Was she ill?”

“She certainly thought she was. But I guess it was more that she found the world too noisy for her nerves. She surely found me too noisy. I think her attitude toward men—of whom I'm afraid she saw me as the worst example—was that they owed it to women to be constantly apologizing for their crudeness.”

Kate reflected on this. “I wonder if you ever had what I call a real family.”

She was soon to meet his mother, for in the following weeks Howard became a steady beau, and Emma Laidlaw was vocally enthusiastic (to Kate, rather humiliatingly so) about her having caught an admirer. Even caustic old Grandma Laidlaw, though she hankered for in-laws far richer than the Rands, was heard to concede that catching Howard Rand might be better than being the last leaf on the tree. To her, who had been wed at seventeen, Kate at twenty was already an old maid.

Her first dinner at the Rands was a family affair. Mrs. Rand, a small, tight-lipped lady, with unwelcoming pale eyes, presided stiffly over a table where her three daughters sat mostly silent, except for their half-smothered giggles over something whispered to one another, which elicited the maternal stare of disapproval. Mrs. Rand asked Kate some perfunctory questions about the Laidlaws that seemed to indicate that the speaker's acquaintance with them was not likely to be further cultivated. The black paneled walls, the heavy Victorian silver, and the portraits of grim, humorless forebears made for a depressing interior. Kate suspected that her hostess may-have regarded Howard's bringing a girl into their midst as an invasion of her privacy by a difficult and untrainable son. The difference in Mrs. Rand's tone when she addressed her son was in marked contrast to the one she used for her daughters. They might be silly sheep but they were
her
silly sheep. They hadn't gotten away from her. Yet. Howard had. Or had he?

“Mother's not quite as bad as she seems,” he suggested rather desperately afterward to her.

“Isn't she? I wonder if she's not worse.” For already she had begun to see that someone needed to take this young man in hand, and she wondered if it might not be she.

At home with her own mother, she reflected on how utterly different the latter was from Mrs. Rand.

“Did Mrs. Rand say anything about your family?” Emma asked Kate. “I suppose she thinks we're a pagan lot who dance and drink and should all be burned alive in Times Square in some Presbyterian auto-da-fe.”

“No, I think she'd let us off with a whipping.”

“I'm glad you don't feel you have to stand up for your boyfriend's family. You've kept your head, child. Good. I suppose the Rands have held on to some of that old shipping fortune, though they say Howard's father was dumb as dirt and that you could sell him the Brooklyn Bridge. And his wife goes on as if she wasn't the only person left to remember what her family used to be. That's always a sign that people are poorer than you think.”

“Howard will make his own way, Ma.”

“We can hope so, anyway.”

“The Rands seem to live well enough.”

“In a brownstone, like everyone else, except a few Astors and Vanderbilts. You can't tell until you see how they live in summer. But if you and Howard ever make a match of it, you'll have to free him from his family. I daresay it can be done.”

Kate had to admit that her mother had a point. Howard had not received at home anything like the approbation that so amiable a youth should have expected. Everything natural about him as a boy—his high spirits, his pranks, his slang that he picked up from his school friends, his yanking the hair of his shrieking sisters, his muddy shoes on the carpet—had genuinely repelled his orderly and bitterly conventional mother. The poor boy had been made to feel a disgusting creature for the very features that might have endeared him to another parent. A father might have adjusted all this, but his was dead.

At last Kate came to recognize that this seemingly independent and strikingly attractive young man, whom even her Laidlaw cousins didn't disdain, was actually turning to her for some apparently needed support in his daily life. When he was not with her, he was even writing to her.