It is not, however unbecoming it may be in a guest to say so, that the “things” are good. Mr. Griscam himself is under no illusions about them. The mural of shepherds and shepherdesses in the yellow and pink “Louis XVI” parlor, he tells me, are copies of Hubert Robert, and the refectory table in the medieval dining room was manufactured to his measurements. Indeed, the oldest things in the house (outside of the folios in the library) are the big academic paintings of mountainous landscapes and rather fierce animals collected by Mrs. Griscam’s late father. But what makes it all different, what makes it unique, is the “mint condition” (to borrow one of Mr. Griscam’s bibliophilic terms) in which everything is kept, which ends by giving to the mansion a kind of museum glow that awes and dominates.
It is also noteworthy that Mr. Griscam does everything himself. It is to him that the servants look, and it is his eye that they fear if an ashtray goes more than five minutes unemptied. Mrs. Griscam seems to be above such matters. She is a “saint” who gives her time and energies to the Army of the Holy Word, an evangelical organization devoted to the intenser religious life. Some of the benignity of her cause seems to have washed over her person. She is tall, pale, lovely, with a high brow, soft grey hair and mild, undistinguishing blue eyes. I cannot help feeling that her love for the masses must have somewhat diluted her feeling for individuals and that her family may find her a bit impersonal as a wife and mother. But one’s heart goes out to her when she walks. Nature meant her to be regal, and she limps awkwardly on a leg withered by childhood polio.
She was slightly put off the first night at dinner when Mr. Griscam told her of my abortive clerical career. Evidently she regards the church as inclined to be critical of evangelical movements. But when I turned the conversation to what I thought would be the more congenial subject of Dr. Prescott, I was surprised to discover that I would have done better to stay with her “army.” Indeed, she was almost crisp.
“Frankly, Mr. Aspinwall, I have never entirely approved of Dr. Prescott’s influence on my husband. It has always seemed to me that a private church school is a contradiction in terms. How can religion be packaged for the privileged and sold to the select?”
I was taken aback that she, in such “private” surroundings and the mother of two Justin boys, should take so sharp an attitude, but I reflected that the family as well as the household decisions were probably left to her husband. Mrs. Griscam seems to live as a kind of guest, however critical a one, in her own home.
“I suppose Dr. Prescott might answer that he would gladly build enough Justins to educate all America. He does what he can.”
“Which I’m afraid is not enough,” Mrs. Griscam rejoined with a touch of asperity. “I’m prepared to admit that Frank Prescott believes in God, but he’s very fussy about how God is retailed. In my organization we believe in distributing God wholesale.”
I sighed. “I wonder if that’s not easier.”
“Perhaps you would like to come to one of our meetings,” she suggested with a flicker of interest, and when I told her that I would be glad to and when she saw that I meant it, we achieved a mild friendliness.
Yet if Dr. Prescott was not always a name enthusiastically received in Sixty-eighth Street, I discovered that it invariably hit some kind of nerve, in the children as well as the parents. There had been three of the former, two of whom, Sylvester and Amy, survive and live at home. I knew from Mr. Ives that the other son, Jules, had committed suicide after a disastrous career at Justin and Harvard. Sylvester, a long, gangling man with yellow-grey hair and Mrs. Griscam’s blue eyes (except that his are watery) has recently been estranged from his second wife and has moved home, as he tells me frankly, because it’s cheaper than his club. He professes a devotion to Dr. Prescott, but I wonder if the latter might not prefer his mother’s more caustic attitude.
“I’m sorry my little son Davey won’t have the old man when he goes to Justin,” he told me one morning at breakfast. “You can say what you want about his being too rigid and behind the times, but you can’t get away from the fact that he’s a magnificent example.”
“Of what?” I asked, in sincere curiosity.
“Why of anything!” Sylvester exclaimed in surprise. “Of the Christian ethic, if you like. I remember Sam Lovell at his Fly Club initiation getting up on a table and shouting: ‘Dr. Prescott is the nearest man to God on earth!’ and Jim Copperly shouting back: ‘God damn it, man, he is God!’ No, you can’t get away from it, Brian, it was a great thing to have been exposed to him.”
I noted the repetition of the idea that I couldn’t “get away” from such an allowance. It is one that I have heard before from Justin graduates, the concept that it is somehow desirable to be “exposed” to Dr. Prescott, as if he were a childhood malady like measles. Few of the old Justinians seem to have any feeling that his principles should have a continuing validity in their lives. I find it upsetting.
I could listen to Amy on the subject with less apprehension, for Amy did not represent any possible failure on Dr. Prescott’s part. Amy lives for horses and horse shows. Thirty-seven and unwed, she is fair and bulky, with big, handsome features and a voice that carries to the furthest corners of the large stone house. She sets herself up to be her father’s champion, but the bluntness of her partisanship must at times embarrass him.
“How do you feel about Dr. Prescott, Miss Griscam?” I made bold to ask her that same morning when Sylvester had left the table. “Do you like him, as your brother does, or do you feel, like your mother, that his influence on the Griscams is not altogether for the good?”
“It’s never been a question of my liking him. I didn’t have to like or dislike him. I wasn’t a boy. But I certainly resented him.”
“Because your father admired him?”
“No. Because he dwarfed Daddy. You know what they used to say of Teddy Roosevelt? That he was like a magnificent plane tree. That nothing grew in his shade. Well, Dr. Prescott is that way. Like a great Broadway star whom the people out front applaud. But as a child I was always in the wings. I could see the other people: the director, the stage manager, the electricians.” Here she paused significantly. “I could even see the author of the play.”
“But surely Dr. Prescott is the author of Justin Martyr,” I protested.
“Only in the beginning. He had the initial idea, I grant. But who raised the endowment fund? Who doubled the enrollment? Who instituted the exchange masterships and brought the finest minds to the school? Who established the pension plan? Who bought the big neighboring estate and saved the school from finding itself in the center of a housing development? And, finally, who discovered Duncan Moore?”
“Your father, of course. Yet I imagine most people think of Justin as Dr. Prescott’s school. The two names are almost synonymous.”
“And who made them so?” she exclaimed triumphantly. “Whose idea was it that the school needed a prophet? Why, the legend of Frank Prescott is simply the pinnacle of Daddy’s masterwork!”
I decided that it would be idle to press the point further and asked about her hunters in Westbury.
Mr. Griscam himself dwelt continually on the subject of the biography which he had now persuaded himself that I was actually writing. It was in vain that I kept telling him that I was not even positive that I would ever do so. He was determined that if he was not going to write the book himself, he would at least have a hand in its preparation. In similar fashion, as I knew from his notebooks, when he had seen that he would never teach at Justin, he had concentrated on being a trustee. Now he wanted me to interview graduates, and he was quite prepared to make all the necessary appointments. In desperation, I finally had to refuse point-blank.
“I must do things my own way, Mr. Griscam,” I pleaded. “Please try to understand that.”
“I would try to understand it if I could see that you were doing anything,” he said in his patient, remorseless tone. “If you’re too shy to talk to the Justin men, what about the women? Cordelia Turnb
ull lives right around the corner. She’d adore to see you any time. She loves to talk about her father!”
“If I’m going to talk to Dr. Prescott’s daughters,” I said evasively, “shouldn’t I start with the oldest?”
“With Harriet Kidder?” He shook his head firmly. “You wouldn’t get anywhere. I’ve tried. Harriet is that executive type of Manhattan matron to whom ‘sweet charity’ is synonymous with the speakers’ dais at the Waldorf Astoria. Of course, she’s very much admired—that sort of woman always is. ‘Isn’t Harriet wonderful?’ people keep asking me. But when you’ve sat on as many committees with as many Harriets as I have, you know that their real genius lies in passing the buck.”
“She wasn’t interested in the book?”
“Oh, she was interested, all right. She considers herself ‘Pa’s favorite.’ But every time she condescended to open the purse of her reminiscences out would tumble some tired old bit of folklore that any first former at Justin might know. You’ll find that’s apt to be so with the children of famous persons. Marie Antoinette’s daughter will always tell you how her mother let the poor eat cake.”
“What about the second daughter?” All that I knew about her was that she wasn’t in New York, but that made me prefer her to Mrs. Turnbull.
“Evelyn Homans? She’s worse. She married back into old Boston and believes that a man belongs exclusively to his descendants. She presumed to dictate to me what facts I could and could not use, even when they were facts that I knew at first hand and she didn’t. She doesn’t want a life of her father. She wants a floral tribute.”
“But Mrs. Turnbull is different?”
“Oh, Cordelia is different from everyone. Cordelia is a ‘character.’ After she divorced Guy Turnbull and got her big settlement, she had the sense to convert herself from a bad artist to a good collector. You should go just to see the paintings in that duplex. Room after room full of Picassos, Braques and Kandinskys!”
“I’m sure she’d scare me to death.”
“No, no. I tell you, there’s nothing she likes so much as talking about herself and her family. I’ll call and find out when she can see you.”
Protest was futile, and I had to sit wretchedly by while he made the call. Of course he was right. Mrs. Turnbull was only too delighted to see me.
That afternoon, when I was ushered into the great white room, high above Park Avenue, I found her, dark-haired, pale-skinned, with square, stubborn face and luminous brown eyes, reclining in brilliant pink, with an amber necklace and ruby earrings, on a low, backless couch. It was as if Theda Bara were playing Madame Butterfly, or as if Dr. Prescott, in some fantastic masquerade, were playing Theda Bara. “I like your coming straight to me,” she said with a half-mocking smile, not unlike her father’s. “I like your not going first to Harriet or Evelyn. But, of course, that was David’s tip.”
I decided in my nervousness that the only way to cope with her tone was to be utterly serious. “You mean they wouldn’t be able to help me?”
She shrugged. “I mean that their childhood resentments are too shallow a stream for a biographer to splash about in.”
I took a breath. After all, what was I really afraid of? “But yours are deeper?”
“Well, let’s put it this way, Mr. Aspinwall. I know they’re resentments.”
“And what do Mrs. Kidder and Mrs. Homans think that theirs are?”
“Why, true pictures of Pa, of course! They seethe with hate. They spend their lives trying to reconcile it with the love that ‘nice’ daughters are supposed to feel for their fathers.”
“And to what do you owe your special insight?”
“Psychoanalysis. What else? Four long years of it. It’s the only way left to grow up. Weren’t you ever analyzed, Mr. Aspinwall?”
“No.”
“A pity. You might have learned some interesting things. Why you’re so obsessed with Pa, for example. Perhaps you have what Dr. Klaus calls ‘Peter Panic’ You want to be a schoolboy again.” As she exhaled blue smoke from her cigarette, she studied me carefully. “And why you fiddle with the Phi Beta Kappa key on your watch chain. Isn’t that a form of psychic masturbation?”
I flushed crimson as I moved my hands to the black steel arms of the chair. Seeing she had now thoroughly shocked me, she was ready to turn to business. “What do you want to know about Pa?”
What indeed? After a few bewildered moments I found that my mind was empty of all subjects but her own terrible ones. “Would he have profited by analysis?” I asked.
“Not in the least.” Her headshake seemed to dispose of this and of me. “If a man’s lucky enough to be born a great artist, why should he seek to find out what made him that? The duds, like myself, have to, because otherwise they’d never have the sense to stop. But let the Leonardos just go on painting! No, if you want to learn about Pa, you can expect no help from analysts. You have to do the job yourself.”
“Well, that lets me out,” I said in relief. “I lack the equipment.”
“Can’t you even make a stab at it?” she demanded indignantly. “It shouldn’t be that hard. Let’s begin at the beginning. You’re writing about a schoolmaster. Does he teach boys or girls? Boys. Very well, there’s your first question. When did he begin to be attracted to his own sex?”
I hesitated. “I wonder if I’d put it quite that way.”
“How else?”
“Surely you don’t mean to imply . . . !”
“Oh, you non-analyzed,” she interrupted impatiently. “You’re so afraid of words. You’re shocked to death for fear I’m going to call Pa a homosexual. I tell you, we’re all homosexual! To one degree or another.”
“I should think your father’s degree was a very small one indeed,” I protested, appalled.
“But still a degree,” she insisted. “And if you want to understand human beings, you must jettison all that middle-class squeamishness about technical terms. There are certain very striking facts about Pa. As a handsome, popular young man, he married an exceedingly plain woman.”
“But there were ladies before your mother,” I pointed out, beginning, despite my agonized embarrassment, to wax hot. “Very beautiful ladies, too.”
“Oh, yes. Before and after. That’s still another story. But he married the plain one. Another striking fact is his horror of the very subject we’re talking about. He was always suspicious of any more than casual friendship between two boys.”
“But a headmaster, Mrs. Turnbull,. . .”
“Let me finish, dearie. Everyone knows that Pa had a bee in his bonnet about perversion. And naturally, we all know that a completely normal man does not fear that sort of thing. We only fear what threatens.”
“I thought there were no normal men. I thought we were all homosexuals.”
Seeing she had at last made me angry, she smiled and proceeded to wax philosophic. “I’ll tell you my theory about Pa. Actually, it’s not Freudian, it’s Jungian. I believe that Pa is an archaic type. A throwback to the ancient Greeks. He has always looked down on women. You have to have been his daughter to know how much. They don’t really exist for him, except to satisfy a man’s physical needs, bear his children and keep his house. Hence beauty in women is not essential, any more than it is essential to animals. Sex is divorced from love. Only men are worthy of love, platonic love, and this love among men is stimulated by beauty of mind, beauty of soul, even beauty of body. Do you see?”
I was dangerously close now to calling her a silly ass. It was too irritating to hear this cocksure woman, who had made a mess of two marriages, sneer at her parents’, which had lasted half a century. But Mrs. Turnbull, if an ass, was no fool, and she was obviously dying to talk. I began to understand that Mr. Griscam might be right and that perhaps it was my duty to take it down. “Would you be willing to tell me more about it?” I asked. “I mean about you and your father?”
“Right now? On the couch? By free association?”
“Any way you want to.”
; “Let’s have a drink and start!”
Actually, it took us only two sessions. Or rather two was all I could take. I have a suspicion that she would have been glad to prolong them indefinitely. I took no notes while she was talking, but each evening I confided my recollections to the typewriter as soon as I got back to Sixty-eighth Street. What follows is thus not a transcript of Cordelia’s actual words, but my memory of them. Yet I venture to think that I have caught some of her flavor.
12
Cordelia’s Story
I WAS born in 1895, the baby of the family, the third of three girls, and because of complications attending my Caesarian birth it was decided that Mother should not be allowed to try again for the son whom she and Pa had so desperately wanted. Poor little fellow, I may have cost him his life, but when I think of the problems that any son of Pa would have had to face, it occurs to me that a wise providence may have known what it was about. Pa took his revenge on me by a gleeful exercise of his sardonic sense of humor in the choice of my name. Imagine the lifetime of bad jokes that I have had to endure, as a third daughter, with the name Cordelia!
But Shakespeare was a game that two could play, and there have been times, I’m sure, when poor Pa would have carried me across the stage, hanged and dead, with only mirth in his heart as he cried: “Howl, howl.” I cannot imagine why Mother ever put up with such nonsense except that she had a rich aunt who was also named Cordelia. The aunt, incidentally, left me nothing.
Mother was acutely aware from the beginning of the difficulties of bringing up her daughters in the center of a boys’ school. She was determined that we should not be petted and spoiled and grow up with silly notions of standing, like musical comedy princesses, on balconies while choruses of hussars sang our praises, and saw to it instead that we received instruction even tougher than that meted out to the boys. But however well she was able to teach me to read Greek at twelve and to understand Darwin at fourteen, she was less successful in coping with the strong strain of romantic melancholy that I inherited from Pa.
The Rector of Justin Page 17