The Friend of Women and Other Stories (6 page)

At any rate, she gave birth to a fine healthy boy. Everyone knew the supposed circumstances of his birth, and nobody cared, except his wise old grandmother, Mrs. Belknap, who observed to me, in her dry way, “They don't care so long as the child turns out well. But if he doesn't, they moan, ‘Why the dickens did I have to get into this?' It's easier when you can lay the blame on your own inheritance. After all, there is nothing you can do about that!”

I did my best to smother my unpleasant suspicions, but two years later they received an unexpected gloss from Letty Bernard, who, to my distress, had been having some rather sharp differences with her husband over their joint management of some of the interests bequeathed to her by her father.

“Eliot seems never to tire of surprising one,” she told me on one of our Central Park walks that, lacking her father, she now sometimes took with me. “Who do you think his new best friend is? Tommy Newbold!”

“Well, what's wrong with Tommy?”

“Nothing! He has a heart of gold, and we all love him. But you know as well as I, Hubert, that outside of the law, the dear man has very little to offer. Face it, he's a bore about his cases. And Eliot flees bores as he would the plague. He may be a genius, but he's a brutally intolerant one.”

“But, as you say, he likes to surprise people. Eliot can't bear being taken for granted. He'll always contradict you. Tell him someone's a bore, and he'll call him a wit. A wit whom only someone as perceptive as Eliot can see. Tell him someone's a genius, and he'll call him an ass!”

“To prove you an ass. Yes, I see that. But this thing with Tommy seems a bit of a muchness.”

“Hasn't Eliot been using Tommy to help him on some legal problem?”

“True. But since when did Eliot choose his friends from among his hirelings?”

Well, that was it. I wouldn't admit it to Letty for the world, but I was troubled. I had never made it a secret to myself that I disliked Eliot Amory. He simply possessed too many assets. His blond good looks, his straight, slim, sturdy build, the amiable charm of his glowing good manners, the small, intimate smile that seemed to initiate you into the inner circle of those who really knew what it was all about, the seeming effordessness of his brilliant solution to every offered problem, all enhanced the portrait of a man with spectacular gifts. Why did I smell an arch ego behind his masterful manipulation of his wife's enterprises? Wasn't it rather mean of me to feel that only condescension lay behind his genial acceptance of his wife's old English teacher? But there you are. I did.

I now began to track the developing intimacy between Eliot and Tommy. It was true, of course, that Eliot had retained Tommy as counsel to the
New Orange Review,
which certainly necessitated a number of meetings, but why did they have to take place at the Newbolds' apartment?

The Newbolds' baby, Stephen, of whom Eliot seemed inordinately fond, was naturally his godson and the brightest and most beautiful child anyone had ever seen, but Eliot had never been a noticeably paternal type with his own two children, both daughters, and had seemed quite content with the somewhat perfunctory colloquy that he accorded the girls when the nurse brought them in for a short visit on his evening return from the office. Indeed, Letty had once confessed to me that she feared her failure to produce a son had deeply disappointed him and that she bitterly deplored the ovarian disorder that had caused her doctor to prohibit any try for a third child. Of course, she had quickly added that Eliot had never expressed a word of his regret. Like his recurrent fits of depression, he kept it to himself. The Eliot the world saw was always a cheerful one.

The crisis, as it was for me, anyway, came after a dinner at Alfreda's—just the two of us, Tommy being in Albany arguing a case—when she brought me a cognac and closed the door to the library to which we had withdrawn.

“You and I know each other so well, Hubert, that I can skip the prologue,” she began. “I know what you have guessed, and I've known it for some time.”

“What have I guessed?” I asked with a sinking heart.

“That my Stephen is Eliot's son.”

I gasped as if I had been thrown into churning waters.

“If that is so,” I finally was able to retort, “what business is it of mine? Isn't it a matter between you and Tommy and Eliot alone? If Tommy consented to such an arrangement, mustn't it be kept the darkest of secrets? For I can't imagine that Letty knew! Mind you, I'm not criticizing you or Tommy. It may even have been, on his part, an example of his magnanimous love for you. But it must never be spoken of!”

“But Tommy would never have consented to such a thing.” Alfreda's small smile seemed directed at my naivete. “He may be brought to accept it after the fact—he might even be glad to have a distinguished father for the boy he has come to love—but he would never have consented in advance.”

“Would it have made that much difference to him whose sperm was used in that tube? So long as he had to know it wasn't his?”

Alfreda rose, in a movement that suggested outrage, and strode across the room and back. “There was no question of a tube! Can you imagine Siegfried bringing a tube to Brunhild on her flaming mount? I wanted my baby to be born of a beautiful act. And he was!”

“And Tommy never knew? All right, let's keep it that way.”

“But I want Tommy to know! That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I want Stephen to grow up knowing that his father and mother produced him in an act of love! I want the whole wretched subterfuge to be blown away. I want truth! And we're living in a world where these things are increasingly accepted. Eliot wants to recognize and be recognized by his son. And I'm betting that Tommy, in the last analysis, will be big enough to accept the situation which was created by his fault. No, don't look at me that way, Hubert. I know it was only a biological fault. But there you are. He will continue to be daddy to Stephen. Eliot will be simply father.”

“And Letty? What will she be?”

“Letty will have all the important things. She will continue to have an important husband to share with her the important enterprises they have undertaken together. Besides, everyone knows that all has not been idyllic in the Amory household. You don't think this was Eliot's first affair, do you? He married her for her money—face it. And she knows it. She's too shrewd to upset her whole applecart by a fit of manufactured jealousy.”

“It would not be manufactured. And you would not be only an unfaithful wife, Alfreda. You would have been an unfaithful friend. Never could I have believed that our old trio would end like this.”

Alfreda's sudden change of expression made her whole face a gape. “Why should it end, Hubert?”

“Because I could never see you again if you go through with this.”

“Oh, my god! I had no idea you'd take it this way!”

“Didn't you?”

She covered her face with her hands. She was weeping. “Oh, of course I did. You've always been our conscience, Hubert. I knew you'd never go along. And that I was wicked, wicked, wicked. All right, what do we do now?”

“Nothing. There's nothing to do. Little Stephen will do much better as people think he is than as Eliot's known bastard.”

“And Eliot? Who adores the boy?”

“Can't a man adore his godson? Particularly when he has no son of his own? Never mind about Eliot. I'll keep an eye on him. Eliot is not a man, as you put it, to upset applecarts.”

“And what do I do, Hubert, if in the days to come, I find myself hating you?”

“When you really love someone, my dear, as I love you three girls, you do not hesitate to incur their hate if it's for their own good.”

With which I kissed her and took my discreet departure. My good deed had certainly been done for that day.

Cora's marriage to Larkin started smoothly enough, or so it seemed to the casual onlooker. I assumed that Ralph, a heavy and lustful man, found adequately agreeable the couplings of their early period together. I am certainly no expert in such matters, but among my male contemporaries, I have one or two who knew Ralph moderately well and who have freely opined to me, in view of what later happened, that he might have been the kind of rough and rapid lover who derived satisfaction from coition even when his partner was only passively cooperative. But what boded really ill for the future was his too articulate chagrin at the two miscarriages that Cora suffered in the first three years of their union. Instead of the sympathy that such a disappointed mother needs, it was made very clear to her that she was expected to continue the unvarying schedule of dinner parties and sporting weekends that Ralph's Racket Club friends and their fashionable wives arranged as their refuge from any lives differing from their own. He also had a demanding and domineering old mother who expected a daughter-in-law to be constantly at her beck and call. Ralph must have been looking for an Oriental bride of complete submissiveness and thought he had found her in that lonely corner of her mother's salon. He should have foreseen that even the most passive have their moments.

I was present at an early tiff between the Larkins. I had been asked to dinner—just the three of us, in the third year of their union, during the brief period when Ralph had approved of me as a possible restraining influence on his spouse. This period did not last after he discovered that not only could I not play that role, but neither could anyone else. Cora, at the table, had asked me to support her in her expressed wish to spend the approaching summer in a villa that she proposed to rent in the south of France rather than in Southampton. Ralph had countered with his reasons for opposing her project. His tone was measured and gravelly, but not condemnatory. He evidently expected to prevail.

“Why should I wish to abandon my comfortable cottage with its well-trained staff, my sailboat, and my golf, to traipse about Europe and see palaces and cathedrals I've seen a dozen times before? Cora had a honeymoon there of two whole months. That should last any sensible woman for a few years at least.”

“But we spent all last summer on Long Island,” Cora protested. “And saw all the same people week after week. You've seen what it's like there, Hubert. We give a dinner of twenty one night, and the following night we meet the same twenty people at our next-door neighbors'. And they always talk about the same things! They never get tired of it, never can have too much of it. But, oh, I can!”

“I am sorry my friends don't meet your lofty intellectual standards,” Ralph retorted coldly. “And that you will have to postpone your plans to scale Mount Olympus, at least for this summer. The house is being readied for us now, and I plan that we be there by June fifteenth.”

“Oh, Hubert, do speak to him,” Cora cried. “Tell him what
you
think of all those ghastly cocktail parties you had to go to when Alfreda had you down for that weekend.”

“Why couldn't you do both?” I asked cautiously, turning to my host. “Why not take a jaunt to France in late June and then spend the balance of the summer on Long Island?”

“Because my plans have already been made, thank you” was his short rejoinder. My suggestion had not been relished.

“Well, I'll go anyway!” Cora declared. “You can have the house to yourself and entertain your head off!”

“I'll be interested to know how you plan to pay for your trip and rental in Provence.”

With this he rose and left the dining room. Cora, in a rush of harsh words now explained what his last remark entailed. Ralph maintained a stiff control over their exchequer. He paid all her bills that he approved and gave her a moderate allowance for daily cash expenses, but whenever he disapproved of an item, she had to pay for it out of her own exiguous income, and that was already used up for the year. Summer travel, for that summer anyway, was out of the question.

“You could borrow, I suppose,” I suggested weakly.

“He's quite capable of publishing a statement that he will not be responsible for my debts.”

“Oh, Cora, surely you exaggerate!”

“You don't know him, Hubert!”

That spat, alas, was the opening gunfire of a war that would last for some three years. I hardly saw Cora more than a half dozen times in all that period, and then only at Letty's or Alfreda's, as Ralph now distrusted my influence and as Cora herself remembered too bitterly my premarital warnings and was probably afraid that I would stoop to saying “I told you so.” Though I never would have.

As I put together the sorry tale of that time in her life, it appeared that the marriage was a constant struggle and Cora the constant loser. Ralph, so far as I could make out, was absolutely unyielding; he rarely even bothered to lose his temper. He simply laid down the law of where they should live and whom they should see, and refused her any funds which might have been used to introduce the least variety to their schedule. No child came to unite their interests; I suspected that separate bedrooms had been their rule. I could conclude only that Ralph was the kind of despot who was capable of deriving a grisly satisfaction in contemplating the plight of his victim. He did not, like Nero, play a lyre at the burning of Rome; he simply watched it.

It was Letty Bernard Amory who, in her practical, realistic way, proposed a solution to Cora's problem.

“I want you to help me persuade Cora to take a job, Hubert,” she told me. “I've offered her a position on the
New Orange Review,
and Eliot has agreed to use her as a file clerk with the chance of rising to be a copy editor. Of course, she has no training, but she can learn. She's plenty bright enough. And we've got to get her out of that apartment where she broods all day and fights with Ralph all night.”

“Won't she take the job?”

“She thinks Ralph will have a fit.”