“Very well,” I said meekly.
He turned to walk on ahead of me. “We are all dealt different hands to play. If we are to be judged, it must be on how we play them. Surely it is no great thing to make a grand slam if you hold all the high honors. Now you have probably been thinking that your hand is too poor even to bid on. But you’re wrong. There have been times in my life when I have wondered if the mating urge was not more of a liability than an asset.”
This was a bit too much, even for me. “I suppose one could always remedy that. Eunuchs in the East were made, not born.”
“Eunuchs in China occupied great positions,” Felix said seriously. “Had I belonged to the court of the dowager empress I might have considered an operation. But that was not what I was thinking of. I was thinking of the tranquility one might gain. You have always been interested in writing. Is it not possible that you may secure a detachment that will ultimately serve you?”
“But shouldn’t a literary artist, a novelist, a poet, say, be subject to the great passions he writes about?”
“But you have felt them, my dear boy! I am sure you must have. Passion is at its keenest in the early teens. How old was Juliet? Or Romeo? Everything that follows is simply variation on an early theme. You have your eyes and ears to watch the rest of us. You have your memory. Didn’t Wordsworth define poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility?’
“But have I accumulated a sufficient capital?”
“You have your childhood. What else did Proust spend his life recapturing? Do you think for a moment he didn’t have more joy in writing “Un Amour de Swann” than in all of his clandestine affairs with chauffeurs and waiters? Of course, he did! There is no ecstasy like that of creation.” Felix paused to turn back to me as he warmed to this theme. “There are idiotic professors who will tell you that Shakespeare must have been in a depressed and misanthropic mood when he wrote Hamlet and Lear. I’ll wager those were the happiest moments in his life! I’ll bet he joined Ben Jonson at the Mermaid after finishing the scene on the heath and ordered a tankard of ale and sang a bawdy song. God, he must have been hilarious!”
“If he knew how good he was.”
“They always know! Even if it spoils things a bit for them to think they might have been better.”
“Well, perhaps. But I’ve always envied you.” I wanted to get away from Shakespeare. How could I relate to Shakespeare? “And you strike me as being... so complete. You’re strong and handsome. You play wonderful tennis. You’re a happy husband and father. All that in addition to the finest brain of our time.”
It was always easy to compliment Felix, because he took no notice of it. There were no smirks, no false denials. He knew very well how good his brain was.
“Shall I tell you something?” he asked. “Something I’ve never told anyone else?”
His back was to me, but I was so surprised that I stopped. “Why should you tell me?”
He paused, but did not turn. “Because I want to help you. Now listen to me, Roger. I am going to tell you an important truth. Of course, it’s confidential. I trust you entirely.”
“Oh, Felix, you know I’d never...”
“Very well,” he interrupted quickly. “Enough of that. Here it is. I love my wife. I love my children. I enjoy my health. I like to exercise. But if I had to choose between the use of my intellect as I now use it, and everything else: health, love, vigor, family, friends... well, it would be an easy choice. I’d take my intellect.”
A sad little yellow thought flickered for a second in my brain. Was it the strength of his passion for thought or the weakness of his passion for the rest? But almost at once, I rejected the idea. I even frowned at myself! Felix’s love of his family was quite as strong as anyone else’s. It was simply that his love of his genius was stronger than anything. And that was just as it should be.
“Well, if I had your talent,” I pointed out, “I shouldn’t so much mind being impotent. Perhaps I shouldn’t mind anything. But I haven’t your talent.”
“How do you know you haven’t?”
“Oh, Felix.”
He turned now to slap me hard on the shoulder. “God, man, you have to have faith! You have to try! There are two kinds of intellectual life. There is mine, where the whole aim is to see life steadily and see it whole. And there is yours, to turn away from life and create a better one. The critic and the artist. Their joys are equal.”
“Ah, but what makes you think I am an artist?”
“You can try, man. You can try.”
It should not be difficult for my reader to understand that after this conversation I loved Felix Leitner more than anyone in the whole world. Before I had simply admired him; now I worshiped him. I even ceased to be frightened by the idea that I should surely disappoint him as a writer; it might be enough of a function for me in one lifetime that I had excited his compassion and elicited his deepest confidence. As I looked back and considered the things that I had been privileged to observe, there was nothing to approach this.
Encouraged by Felix, I began to take more interest in things around me. I had graduated from Columbia, and I had no particular plans for a career, other than vague notions of writing, but I decided that I could now at least widen my circumference of observation, and I began to accept invitations. By this I do not mean the social gatherings at Seal Cove, where because of my parents I was always welcome, but to the grander affairs of Butterfield Bay.
Butterfield Bay, ten miles south of Seal Cove, was generally considered its diametric opposite. Butterfield, to Seal Covites, was Philistia, a place that one visited only under boring obligation, but a source of temptation to the young and giddy, a community that served to remind one, if reminder were necessary, that money and fashion do not have to offer charm or wit or even food or drink in any unusual profusion to corrupt.
Butterfield Bay had been founded, as a summer community, by the same sort of people who had later gone to Seal Cove—professors, writers and artists—but it had been taken over by the worldly, who are always quick to recognize that the academics have a sharp nose for the loveliest country spots. The original settlers had been driven north by these richer invaders who had made the prices of everything, from beaches to turnips, impossible, and now, where cabins and primitive boat houses had once existed, the coast was lined with Tudor mansions and French chateaux and dark piles of Romanesque shingle. The center of this community was the swimming club, with its huge pool by the ocean, where the salt sea water was warmed by the sun and then pumped up, under green lawns and tennis courts, and delivered, filtered and crystal blue, to a shining rectangular basin surrounded by a flagged terrace with umbrella tables where elderly ladies in large hats sipped cocktails and watched the young swim and listened to the red-coated Hungarian orchestra, which played Victor Herbert from the porch of the clubhouse. It was all quite unreal. As Frances Leitner once observed, one could not even read a newspaper in Butterfield Bay.
Felix, as might have been expected, was as much in demand in Butterfield as in Seal, and he liked to go there. As he once put it to me: “Who would not occasionally prefer a well-served dinner party, where beautiful ladies with diamonds hang on one’s words, to a picnic with pine needles in the salad and mosquitoes in one’s ear?” Frances, on the other hand, had a total contempt for Butterfield, which she took little enough pains to conceal, and after some heated disputes on the subject, they had agreed on a compromise: Felix was allowed one dinner party a week in Butterfield, and Frances was exempted from going there altogether. This seemed to please all parties for a while. The Butterfield hostesses were enchanted to have Felix without his critical, dowdy wife, and Frances was perfectly content to have an evening alone with her books. This lasted until the advent of Gladys Satterlee.
An additional inducement, and even an excuse for Felix’s visits to Butterfield, was the presence there of Mark Truro in The Mount—the great, craggy stone mansion, huddled on top of the hill overlooking the village, that he had inhe
rited from his railroad pioneer grandfather. Mark had founded the liberal New York paper The New Dealer, to which Felix had been a frequent, and was still an occasional, contributor. Mark was between marriages in 1938, and as he hated to be alone, he kept his house filled with people. He was a strikingly handsome and well-proportioned man of fifty, with thick long gray hair, a firm Roman nose, and large, hazy, sexy, smiling blue eyes. Felix used to say that even stripped of his vast wealth and fine figure, those eyes alone would have accounted for Truro’s prodigious success with women. I suppose that Truro liked Felix as much as he liked anyone, but I wondered how much that was. He was convinced, I believe, that everyone was after his money, and he had accepted this, but only at the price of disdaining mankind. Mark Truro seemed almost to feel that his money cheapened not only the regard of others for himself but in some curious way his own native good qualities. If people looked past his charm, his quick wit and his vivid imagination to the gold that lay behind, was it not because the gold was worth more?
Felix brought me to one of the Truro parties, where any friend of his was welcome, and because I was lucky enough to amuse my rather languid host with what I fear was a rather unkind description of Seal Cove (I was quick to toss my cradle on the fiery altar of social success), I was invited to come again on my own.
“Any time you hear of anyone coming here to a ‘do’ at The Mount, don’t hesitate to join them. We can always add a place for an amusing young man.”
I took to going to The Mount a good deal—far more, certainly, than my parents approved. Daddy was inclined to inveigh against my new friend as a political dilettante, a parlor pink, a jaded epicure who, tired of wine and women, now played with politics. Mother, of course, deplored what she assumed to be the moral looseness of the Truro atmosphere. When I pointed out to them that Felix went there, they retorted that Felix had to go everywhere, that he was a kind of roving reporter, but Mother always added that he did wrong to dine out without his wife.
“But she lets him!”
“That’s just as wrong of her.”
It was at The Mount that I became friendly with Mrs. Heyward Satterlee, who, if not the “leading hostess” of Butterfield Bay, as the village social rag would have put it, was certainly the liveliest and by far the most enchanting of them. She was in her early forties at this time, thin, mannered, much made up, husky voiced, with a rather violent laugh and a habit of twitching her shoulders and jangling heavy gold bracelets. She was perhaps what the French call une belle laide. Her face was oval and very pale, her chin round, her lips a small thick crimson blurb, her nose small and turned up, her eyes a luminous, speculating black. She affected long sashes and very high heels, and she smoked Turkish cigarettes in a long ebony holder. Yet at the same time she seemed sensible and down to earth. She had a keen sense of humor, which she used devastatingly against the very society that she dominated. I was captivated.
“Felix tells me we’re fellow Switzers,” she observed to me at Sunday lunch. “That we’re neutrals in the hundred years’ war between Seal and Butterfield.”
“You astound me. I thought I had the honor of sitting next to the commander-in-chief of the enemy.”
“Oh, no. I’m more of a fifth column.”
“You mean you bore from within? How is that neutral?”
“I hope I don’t bore. But I do observe.” She included the table in her quick gesture. “I watch the world. Like Felix. What do you do?”
“Oh, I watch Felix.”
“Isn’t he the most wonderful man in the world?”
“Well, I think that. But do you? Really?”
“I cross my heart.” Which she did, with two long strokes and much rattling of jewelry.
I did not know what to make of her. But as we talked I credited her with a virtue that I had found as rare in Butterfield Bay as in Seal Cove. She gave me her total, undivided attention. There was nobody, it seemed, in the room but myself, and she spoke with a frankness that gave me the oddest feeling that we were alone. Later I discovered that she was this way with everybody—but that only made this virtue the more remarkable. It was certainly the secret of her charm. When she talked about herself she seemed to be talking about you. And, in a way, she was.
Heyward Satterlee had been a Yale classmate of Felix’s and, oddly enough—for they could not have been more different men—an early friend and admirer. It was one of those youthful intimacies that had survived every vicissitude. The two, perhaps sensibly, did not try to bridge the gap in their lives: they met in New York only to lunch and in Maine only to fish. Their wives hardly knew each other. Heyward had the kind of square, florid good looks that cause you, in a man nearing fifty, to say: “How handsome he must have been!” His well-brushed thinning hair was a light brown; his features were a bit too small for his countenance. He was brisk and tweedy and addicted to loud, emphatic throat clearings. So far as I could make out, he had very little imagination; he seemed to be trying to take in everything that was said, urging people to refute or explain before he gave vent to his cheerful but humorless laugh. In New York he was a stockbroker, a partner in a small, odd-lots firm. He and Gladys were reputed to live over their income, but she had expectancies from a rich old mother. Their house in Maine was not large—a conventional shingle “cottage”—but Gladys made up in entertaining for what she saved in décor, and maintained similarly modest establishments in New York, Long Island and Florida. She seemed, indeed, to be economizing when she was actually at her most extravagant.
They had one child, a daughter, Fiona, a rather somber girl of eighteen who had a withered leg supported in a steel brace as a result of infantile paralysis. When I was invited to the Satterlees’, it occurred to me that Gladys might have heard of my misfortune and thought me an appropriate companion for her child. But, of course, there was no allusion to this.
“Do look at Fiona’s water colors,” Gladys urged me, in the presence of her sullenly frowning daughter. “I’m sure you’ll think them as good as I do. But, of course, a mother’s opinion goes for nothing. A mother’s simply dirt. I know. I understand. I’m just that way with my own.”
“Mummie, please. Mr. Cutter is quite capable of making up his own mind.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t! But how is he even to know you paint if I don’t tell him? I’ll leave you now, and you can both chew me up. What else is a parent for but to sharpen a child’s teeth? Don’t take me too seriously, Roger. Fiona and I are really quite devoted to each other—in our own peculiar way.”
Gladys was right about one thing. Fiona’s water colors were startlingly good. She would draw tiny houses or villages with a meticulous skill and then subordinate them to painted atmospheres of Turneresque violence. Her pictures conveyed a sense of the microscopic neatness of man pitifully, yet perhaps not uncourageously, out of tune with a swirling, pointless universe. But Gladys was not right in her assumption that Fiona was critical of her. Fiona, it was true, watched her parents and their mild domestic bickering with a steady eye, but it was not so much critical as judicial. She liked to discuss them, but as if with an objective of discovering some important truth. Heyward and Gladys seemed to constitute the total theater of her practical experience.
“People are inclined to feel sorry for Pa,” she told me seriously, “because Mummie lives in too many places and spends too much money. But what they don’t see is that he basically adores parties and has a much better social position with Mummie than he could possibly have without her. Mummie would object to my speaking of ‘social position.’ She would find the term vulgar. I find it precise. Pa could perfectly well control her extravagance if he really wanted to. On the other hand, people give Mummie much too much sympathy for being married to a man so much less intellectual than she is. She may put up a better show at dinner—indeed, a considerably better show—but fundamentally she’s not much smarter than he is. I’m sure he’d get the better grade in a general intelligence test. But, of course, she’d never be so dumb as to take one.”
Gladys Satterlee professed a great interest in the social life of Seal Cove, which she described as “forbidden fruit” to her. Her husband went there to fish with Felix, but he and she had never been invited to the Leitners’ or to the Troys’. Felix, she said, had warned her, only half humorously, that she might be fatal to the northern community.
“He says that women like me operate as a chemical. That the whole place would be dipped in Gladys Satterlee and dyed a different color. I don’t think that’s very polite, do you? What does he mean by ‘women like me’? There aren’t any women like me, are there?”
“Of course not. But I see what he means. Your charm might be fatal. Would you care to come over and lunch with my parents? They’re expendable. We could use them as guinea pigs. If they survive the experiment, we could try you on the Troys.”
“I’d love it!” She clapped her hands. “Heyward has to go to New York next week. Suppose we say Tuesday? And could we climb one of your mountains first? Felix tells me that’s the only proper indoctrination for Seal Cove.”
Mother had asked the Aleck Nickersons, old Troy’s daughter and son-in-law, for lunch that Tuesday, but she was perfectly willing to have Mrs. Satterlee as well. For all her Boston austerity, she had her share of female curiosity and was perhaps a bit proud that her son should have so famous a hostess as a friend. Daddy never cared much whom I asked, but he rumbled a bit about Mrs. Satterlee’s “condescension” in coming to our “humble board.” However, I was accustomed to that.
I selected the smallest of our “mountains” for the climb, Beehive, which was hardly six hundred feet, but Gladys arrived in boots and a corduroy suit that might have been designed for the Matterhorn. She wore a red hat, a red scarf and red socks, and I assumed she was thinking more of her appearance at lunch than in the woods. But she seemed genuinely excited by what she termed her “adventure” and was disposed to be confidential.
The House of the Prophet Page 15