The Friend of Women and Other Stories (18 page)

“A talk with you works wonders in clearing my mind,” one letter confessed. “After a hard week of torts and contracts and corporate reorganizations, my head is spinning, and I begin to doubt if I'll ever make a lawyer. But then you tell me about your courses at Barnard and all the books you've been reading and the people you've seen and all the funny things about them you've so wittily noticed, and then everything comes back into focus for me. You're so sensible, Kate, so sane and measured, and I'm so mixed up about what I want and where I'm going. I really need you to be my friend.”

A crisis now arose that drastically altered Kate's relationship with her admirer. For three weeks there was a sudden silence between them—he neither wrote nor called. She was concerned; indeed, she was surprised at how much she was. But she didn't feel that their friendship had reached a point where she could reproach him for this. She knew her mother to be the last word on such matters as how far a girl could go without appearing too bold or pushy, and she was driven to consult her.

Emma listened with a mild but definite interest. It was quite clear to Kate that her mother deemed Howard no great catch but perhaps as good as her daughter would do. It might be just as well to hang on to him.

“Why not write him a short note, simply saying you hope he hasn't caught this nasty spring cold that's going around. When I go calling this afternoon in Aunt Amy's car that she's lent me for the day, I can drop it at the Rands'.”

“You don't think it would look too forward? It isn't as if we were engaged or anything.”

Her mother laughed. “Well, I hardly thought you'd have engaged yourself without telling me. And as for ‘anything,' I've no doubt you're a virtuous young lady. But I'm sure there's no harm in showing him a bit of friendly concern. We can carry artificial manners too far, you know. That's how your cousin Millie lost that Morgan boy.”

“Well then, I guess I'll write him.”

“And don't use the best notepaper. I feel that letter is going to be drafted several times.”

In the end the letter was never sent, for a totally unexpected thing occurred. Howard's mother called on Kate.

“I know you may think this odd of me, Miss Laidlaw, but my daughters have persuaded me that you're the only person who might be able to bring Howard to his senses. I'm sorry to have to tell you that he's been acting most peculiarly. He's saying he won't go back to law school or take his exams, and he spends his days roaming sullenly around Central Park. And I'm afraid I detected liquor on his breath. Would you talk to him, Miss Laidlaw? I should be grateful.”

Kate knew that only a very serious crisis would have brought a woman as stiff as Mrs. Rand to this appeal. It was agreed between them that Howard be told that she would meet him outside the boathouse in the park at noon the next day. And of course he was there ahead of time, waiting for her, his face drawn and haggard.

They strolled together for an hour while she did most of the talking. She had learned from her new friends at Barnard that depression could be a real disorder and not just what the Laidlaws called “dumps,” something to be cured by a sharp bid to “pull up your socks.” A better instinct impelled her to tell him, at the cost of any old-fashioned maidenliness, how much she needed him and how little she minded his giving up the law so long as he didn't give up their friendship.

And as his face lightened she began to realize that she had won. He would give up neither.

He graduated respectably in the middle of his class at Columbia Law School, and Uncle Jules Anthon proved good on his promise to take him on as a clerk in his Wall Street firm. His salary, plus his modest trust and Kate's allowance from Grandma Laidlaw, enabled them to marry and maintain a small but comfortable apartment until better pay and infants should come.

Kate was never entirely sure whether she had fallen in love with her charming but vulnerable spouse or with her mission to save him. Did it matter? He was always in love with her, and they were soon enjoying the family life she had so long extolled.

In a later time Kate would be given to imagine that her lifetime would be limited to three score years. The extra biblical ten might be eliminated or given her in some form of senile incapacity—she didn't care. But the sixty her mind would divide into thirds: her youth, her marriage, and her discovery of herself.

The second score had been happy enough, certainly as happy as she had ever expected it to be. She and Howard had had little money at first, but they had made out, and when the magnificent Uncle Jules Anthon, he of the haughty stare and drooping moustache and upward tilted chin as depicted in the austere portrait in the Downtown Association, died suddenly of a stroke, Howard had been swept in as a partner in the reconstruction and large expansion of the old firm by its new chief, the renowned New York ex-governor Clarence Cook, who had been convinced that Anthon's nephew was a part of his legacy. Howard at any rate had worked out his own specialty in the new and grander firm: he headed a small real estate department, largely a personal service for clients and partners who had residential purchases or sales to make, and hardly a big moneymaker in a great corporate law factory. Still, it was useful for the partners not to have to go to outside counsel—often potential client stealers—for deeds and mortgages, and Howard did his work with painstaking care. Besides, he was greatly liked in the firm, which he tenderly regarded as his club or fraternity as well as his office.

Kate was busy enough with her household, her five children, her settlement house, her book class, and her occasional small dinners for clients and friends. Above all, she had the satisfaction of a contented and devoted husband who asked for nothing better in his free time than to be with her and their offspring and who showed no signs of a return of the nervous malady that had almost wrecked his law school career.

But there were moments—how could there not have been?—when she caught herself wondering, Is this all there is to life? To
my
life anyway? And then she would sternly remind herself how much more sensible and decent and even civilized was the world in which she now lived than the one where so many only played and laughed. The lawyers and clients in Howard's firm were good and serious citizens conscientiously engaged in keeping the wheels of finance and business on which the nation depended smoothly turning. They were mostly good family men, too. And the members of the great banking establishment that was the principal client were revered in Wall Street like the twelve apostles!

Yes, of course women—and God bless them—were invading fields long monopolized by men, but that did not have to mean that those who occupied themselves with home affairs were wasting their lives. The great majority of the consorts of Howard's partners and clients were still housewives like herself.

Yet one incident, seemingly trivial and totally unrelated to these speculations, aroused an unexpected anxiety when she found it persistently returning to mind. During a summer vacation in the Hamptons, the Rands had accepted an invitation to a large dinner party to be given by Mrs. Lars Samson, an imposing elderly widow, described in society columns as “the reigning dowager of the dunes.” On the morning of the party, the sun arose on a day of halcyon weather, a cloudless blue sky and an even bluer sea. The young tutor Kate had hired to help her keep the children amused and happy informed her that he had organized a beach picnic that night for the children and their friends, and Kate was suddenly appalled at the prospect of missing it. To have to give it up on such a day for a stuffy dinner of old bores? Surely Mrs. Samson, a fundamentally nice woman with children and grandchildren of her own, would understand if she gave out and told her honestly why. Had she consulted her mother, her mother would have warned her—her mother, alas, was dead. She gave out on her hostess.

But all she got when she did so on the telephone was the great lady's crisp “I see. I shan't expect you then.”

Two weeks later, when she encountered her disappointed hostess at the Beach Club and ventured to tell her how sorry she had been to have to miss what she was sure had been a wonderful party, Mrs. Samson had said simply, before walking on, “I had been going to ask you and your husband to another gathering when my daughter comes to visit, but then I thought, no, you'll be doing something with the children.”

That night at dinner Kate realized that she could not tell her husband about this incident. It might have upset him, as Mrs. Samson was a client of the firm. Not that he would imagine that she could be so petty as to change counsel over so small a matter, but still... What really bothered Kate was her sense of the image of herself in the old lady's mind. It must have been of a fussy, nervous, pea-brained mother who couldn't leave her progeny even when she had a staff to help her. Was it for this that she had so restricted her life?

She had no friend with whom she cared to discuss so deep and intimate a question, but she had one whose company she more often sought now that such a question had arisen to trouble her. Rosina Hudson was a person who differed widely in her tastes and preferences from other women in the world in which she and Kate both lived. She was old New York; indeed, none were older—she descended from the hardy captain of the
Half Moon
—but she was not only unmarried, she was perversely content not to be. Yet she was certainly not one to affect masculine airs: she arrayed her slender torso in floating silks that went well with her long dark hair, her high pale brow, and the thickly rouged lips from which she emitted her languid drawl. Miss Hudson was much smiled at in Kate's world, but everyone knew her—had always known her—and a grudging tribute was paid to the fine taste that marked her jewel of a duplex in town and the perfect little Palladian villa in East Hampton that was a veritable museum of old master drawings and bronzes. Rosina was not as wealthy as her grander neighbors, but she had a sharp eye that could single out the one peerless print in the art gallery, and her long tapering index finger was the first to point out the priceless porcelain in the back of the crowded cabinet.

What Rosina lived for was beauty, which may have explained why she was so much more discriminating in her selection of objets d'art than in her selection of friends. She was perfectly willing to confine herself to the restricted society in which she had been raised, and had no objection to philistines at her small, elegant dinner parties or in her box at the symphony so long as they were sober, punctual, and appropriately clad. Perhaps she even enjoyed feeling superior to them. But when, as with Kate, she spied something in the nature of a similar intellectual bent, she could even exhibit excitement. When Kate was elected to the ladies' literary reading group, of which Rosina had long been the unchallenged but hard to follow leader, and had eagerly seconded Rosina's unpopular motion to devote three meetings to the great trio of Henry James's late style, the two had almost embraced.

Nor had it taken Rosina long to discover that her new friend was hoarding critical talents that should be cultivated at whatever cost to the domestic routine in which she seemed so deeply enmeshed. Might it not be the duty of the descendant of a great discoverer to discover a talent long smothered in the clutter of homely tasks? But Rosina was no fool. She saw that she would have to go slowly with one as committed as Kate to the supposedly here and now.

Arguing that they needed deeper and fuller discussions of literature than those provided by their fellow members of the book class, who were mainly concerned with which characters in a novel they “liked” or “disliked,” Rosina persuaded Kate to a weekly lunch of just the two of them. Their specialty was soon French literature. They reveled in Balzac, in Stendhal and Proust, and later in Gide and Sartre. But they developed a particular interest in the shorter pieces of Gallic literature such as the letters of Madame de Sevigne, of Madame du Deffand, and of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, and the precepts of Pascal. Intrigued by the brief penned portraits that Mademoiselle de Scudéry did of her contemporaries, they decided at Rosina's suggestion to try their hand at some written sketches of their own, and Kate produced one of the Misses Rhinelander, elderly sister members of the Colony Club to which Kate and Rosina both belonged. In Rosina's opinion it might have been written by Madame de Sevigne herself.

When Rosina read Kate's piece, she knew that she had embarked on a project that was going to take her friend further than Rosina had planned. She had discovered the writer in Kate, and it was very possibly going to prove the most important event of her own lifetime. After all, it had so far been a life of receiving, of appreciating, and even if such an existence was as necessary to art as creation itself, it was still not creation. It might be the ultimate satisfaction of the human state to be both.

Rosina had not decided at what point she should seriously go to work in altering her friend's way of life, but something she observed one August morning at the Southampton Beach Club made her conclude that there was no more time to be lost. Walking down the flagstone terrace that separated the clubhouse from the beach, she stopped at the sight of a small boy in bathing trunks playing in the sand. The boy was Willy Rand, one of Kate's twins.

This was hardly unusual. What was more so was that he was wearing a pair of long green rubber gloves, much too large for his hands and arms, and huge sunglasses with no glass in them, and he was playing with a snakelike red tube.

Kate came up behind her. “It's rather a quaint sight, isn't it?” she admitted.

“What is that thing he's got?” Rosina wanted to know. “It looks like an enema tube.”

“I'm afraid it
is
an enema tube.”

“Kate, what will the stylish members of this club think when they see
that?
”