What could I do? What could anyone do? Of course George surrendered, and the name of Kraft was not even submitted to the Senate. The alliance with O'Shaugnessy tottered, but it survived.
The beautiful Bella, Lion's brave and stalwart widow, who had been married to him for only a year when he died, was not enthusiastic about the proposed volume, but she muted her objections because her father-in-law cared so strongly. She came to me privately.
"The senator insists," she told me, "that the book contain a goodly number of Lion's poems. Indeed, I think he sees your text primarily as an introduction to them. Of course, as he is printing the volume and paying for everything, he can do as he pleases. But, Ralph, I'm sure you feel as Ella and Elihu and I do about the poems. We're hoping you can limit the number and not include any part of the unfinished epic. Need I say more?"
No, she needn't. Lion's odes and sonnets and elegies and even the famous epic are dead, dead, dead. You couldn't exactly call them bad, or even embarrassing; they are filled with noble thoughts and grave ideals. But they are lapidary. They are dull. Lion was one who could inspire genius without being one. Maybe his life was genius. But it had to be lived, not printed.
But yes, I will write the little book. Even if it bodes to be a work of contrived hagiography. After all, it will be read only by a few relatives and friends; it will be soon forgotten. I can feel Lion's eye on me. "Do it for Dad," he seems to be saying. "It may help him to remember me, as he passionately wants to."
Other Times, Other Ways
CAMILLA HUNTER HAD NOT thought that lightning could strike twice at the same family, nor that at age eighty she would be forced to relive in 1981 the same kind of Wall Street scandal that had disgraced her husband in 1937. Back then, David Hunter had been implicated in the embezzlements of his mighty boss, Jonathan Stiles. It was true that their lawyer had argued that David, as the most junior partner in the brokerage house of Stiles & Son, might not have been fully aware of the criminal aspects of the jobs he was carrying out for his boss, but the jury had thought otherwise, and Camilla had had to admit reluctantly to herself that her husband's raiding of her own little fiduciary fund, entrusted to his firm, could hardly have been at the instigation of the great Stiles. Both men, at any rate, had been sentenced to stiff terms in Sing Sing, and the presses of the nation had rung with denunciations of the guilty brokerage house. Stiles had been held up to the scorn of the society in which Camilla had been raised as a "traitor to his class," and backs had been turned on her husband even after he had served his sentence.
And now here it was upon her again, almost half a century later, as if the windows of the neat little parlor of her modest Madison Avenue apartment had been blown open by a black storm and her small trove of lares and penates scattered over the floor. Could a white-haired but impeccably trim and still unwrinkled widow, who had managed to survive everything with her dignity intact, not be allowed to relish the seeming serenity that she had so precariously achieved? Evidently not. Bronson Newton, the husband of her favorite niece, Genevieve, considered the star of the family for the vast fortune he had made on the stock market in a scant five years' time, had been indicted for using inside information in his trading and sentenced to two years in jail.
"I can only thank God that my poor mother didn't live to see this second disgrace in her family," Camilla moaned to herself as she contemplated the headlines of the evening paper.
But of course she couldn't just sit and sigh. She would now have to help steer her poor niece through this crisis, drawing from her own experience to teach her how to handle the falling away of friends, and even relatives, and how to maintain the oasis of a cherished home when the condemned man was released from incarceration. She wrote to Genevieve to ask when it would be best for her to come and received an answer suggesting a wait of some days. Bronson was planning an appeal, of course, but as a reversal of the conviction was believed by his lawyers to be unlikely, he had opted to start his jail term at once to get it over as soon as possible.
It was a week, therefore, before Camilla presented herself at her niece's splendid Park Avenue duplex. She found the beautiful blond Genevieve, radiantly clad as usual, in the front hall taking what seemed to be a lively leave of some ladies who had been calling on her. As they departed she turned to her aunt with a cheerfully welcoming smile.
"Darling Aunt Millie, how sweet of you to fly to my side! Come in, come in."
Camilla followed her into the great drawing room, done entirely in gleaming white except for the ebony arms of the chairs and table legs and the black jade of the lamps. On the walls hung canvases of Picasso, Miro, Pollock, and Jasper Johns. She declined all offers of tea or a cocktail and sat quietly for a moment in an armchair, gazing sadly at her hostess.
"I had to come," she said at last. "I was waiting until the first rude shock was over. I knew you had to face that with Bronson and the children."
"And that was typically tactful of you, you old darling. But as it happens you've come just at the right time to hear some wonderful news."
"Really? Is it the appeal? They think it will work?"
"No, no, no. That's quite hopeless, I'm afraid. But what our able lawyers have achieved is to get Bronson into a minimum-security prison. One that's almost like a country club. He can see me quite freely. He can even run his business from there. And I know he'll be on his best behavior, so he should be sprung in only eighteen months. And if there are any nasty types among the jailmates—you know, you never can tell—I'm told we can easily arrange to pay them off when they come out, so they'll leave Bronson strictly alone."
"I see you're being very practical about this."
"Doesn't one have to be? Didn't you? And then, of course, we have a couple of friends who've suffered through the same rigmarole. They've given us some very helpful advice."
"And the fines? The ones I've read about? They seemed so huge to me. Will you have to make changes in your life-style?"
"Not a bit. It sounds rather lordly to say it, auntie, but sixty million doesn't make that fatal a dent in Bronson's fortune. We may have to give up the place in Arizona, but we'll certainly keep Southampton, Jamaica, and this old flat. And to tell the truth, I was getting a bit sick anyway of all that sand and cactus."
"I guess not having to cut down may help assuage public opinion," Camilla commented, now in a drier tone. "People seem to have a great respect for money these days."
"These days? When didn't they? But what do you mean, auntie, by assuaging public opinion?"
"Well, when something like this happened to your uncle, we had a lot of trouble even with some of our oldest friends."
"You mean they were ashamed of him?"
"Well, yes. They seemed to feel he had betrayed them."
"You mean the ones who had lost money because of what he had done?"
"No, no." Camilla was beginning to feel frustrated and even a bit vexed. "I mean the ones who thought he had been dishonorable. That he had let down the system in which he had been raised." She paused, and then finally brought it out. "They thought he had given the New Dealers in Washington the chance they had been waiting for to destroy Wall Street in the public eye! Your friends don't feel anything like that, I take it?"
"Good lord, no!" Genevieve's laugh was perfectly good-natured. "You're talking about another era, auntie. Let's call it the Iron Age. No, the attitude of our friends might be described as 'There but for the grace of God go I!'"
"I see." What more was there for Camilla to say? She listened and let Genevieve rattle on about how best and how often to arrange for the children to visit their father, and took her leave as soon as seemed decent.
But she didn't go straight home. She was too upset. She had to talk to someone about the shock of this new experience, and who was there better than her oldest and dearest friend of the heart, Marielle Blagden, fellow widow, whose apartment hotel was only a few blocks south of Genevieve's dwelling? She turned her steps thither.
Marielle, after her husband's
death, ignoring the concerned protests of her family and friends, had divided the bulk of his large estate, bequeathed to her outright, among their two sons, reserving just enough to maintain herself comfortably in two rooms. But the building she had chosen was a first-class one, and the two rooms were handsome and properly furnished with fine things from the big Blagden Georgian house in Long Island, so Marielle was not, as she had wisely planned not to be, to any degree an object of pity. "I am doing exactly what I want," she had answered all objections firmly, "and living exactly as I choose. Call it selfish, if you like. Indeed, I'd rather have you call it selfish."
But Camilla knew that her friend had always lived for Pedro, as Peter Blagden was affectionately known, and had adapted herself totally to the hunting and polo-playing tastes of that kindly, charming, but unimaginative sportsman, and had, losing him, adapted herself in turn to the needs of their two kindly, charming, but unimaginative sons, whose wives needed the money that their husbands were too busy hunting and polo-playing to earn.
Camilla thought, as Marielle opened the door, how marvelously preserved she was—tall, slim, elegant, with large, smiling brown eyes under a fine pale brow and sleek undyed black hair still only faintly lined with gray. And she seemed to sense at once that Camilla was troubled. She listened in grave silence as the latter described her interview with Genevieve and then rose to mix her a cocktail at a small bar table.
"I think you may need this," she said, handing Camilla a glass. "Let us drink to the new age we're living in."
"Must we like it?"
"Of course not. We must only accept it. For as long as it lasts. Ages don't last forever. This one, however, can be counted on to last our time. Yours and mine, I mean."
"What have I just told you that makes you think I don't accept it?"
"Your clinging to a bygone moral code."
"You mean that all these stock market shenanigans are no longer crimes?"
"No, they're still crimes. What has changed is the public attitude toward them."
"People approve of them now, you mean?"
"That's putting it rather strongly. But they recognize how widespread they are. How many others are involved who never get caught. So they don't judge too harshly. It might be them tomorrow."
"Yet people still go to jail for these crimes."
"Oh, yes. There have to be rules in any game. For that's what the stock market has become: a game. If you're caught inside trading or gambling with other people's money or making illegal investments, you're docked so many points, so to speak. But nobody thinks any the worse of you."
"So when you get out of prison, you take back your old place in society? Nobody snubs you anymore."
"Just so."
"And you approve of all that, Marielle?"
"Did I say that? You and I were brought up in a different school, Millie. There was a code that applied to everyone. The men downtown were supposed to be strictly honorable in their financial affairs. And their wives were supposed to give them moral support. Mr. Coolidge said that the business of America was business, and we were meant to uphold high standards. Wall Street was to set an example to the nation."
"Exactly! I remember that Mr. Morgan said he would never do business except with men on whose word he could entirely rely."
"Of course, the men on whom he relied may not have dared to give him one on which he couldn't."
Camilla began to sense that her friend might not be quite with her. It irritated her, because Marielle's Pedro, the heir to a considerable fortune, had never so much as poked his nose south of Canal Street. He and Marielle had lived isolated and protected lives. "Are you implying, my dear, that our parents' generation were hypocrites?" she asked.
"Well, there's always some of that quality around, is there not?"
"If it existed among us women, I never ran into it. We believed in our men, you and I! We lived for them. We thought it was our role in life to do so. Of course, you were not challenged. I was. I believed in a man who was weak. But I still had to live for him. As you did for Pedro."
"What do you mean, had to? Wasn't it a choice? I didn't have to do anything."
"Of course you did! It was the way we were brought up." Camilla knew that her rising exasperation was liable to take her too far, but she went on. There is nothing as sharp as the irritation that one's nearest and dearest arouse when they do arouse it. "You deliberately squashed every artistic and literary taste you had in order not to embarrass in the smallest degree Pedro and his philistine friends!"
Marielle only smiled. "That's perfectly true."
"You even used to say, when you stole away to a concert or lecture, that you'd been 'naughty.'"
"I plead guilty."
"You mutilated yourself for a man! As I did!"
"And do you know something? Pedro didn't give a damn. I mean about whether or not I shared his obsession with sport. He was perfectly happy doing his own thing. His confidence in himself was unbounded. If I'd gone in for poetry or painting, no matter how extreme, he wouldn't have minded in the least. If I'd become as famous as Edna St. Vincent Millay, he'd have boasted about it in the locker room of the Racquet Club. 'You know, fellas, my Marielle has just won a Pulitzer. Isn't that great? How many of you are married to geniuses?' And then he'd have gone happily up to his court tennis game."
"So it was all for nothing."
"Not quite. For it made me happy. Doing what I thought would make him happy."
"And all the work I did to rehabilitate David was unnecessary? Does that follow? That he never needed rehabilitation?"
"Perhaps not as much as you thought. But what difference does that make? You were happy doing it."
"No, Marielle, I wasn't." Camilla shook her head somberly. "I wasn't at all. Perhaps it was all in the men we chose. You chose well. I less so. We were victims of our time."
"We were victims of ourselves."
"I don't think I can bear that. Anyway, I'm going home."
***
Camilla did a lot of thinking that night. It seemed to her that from childhood she had seen the world about her through two very different eyes. One saw the myriad chocolate streets where a large clan of parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins dwelled in rather noisy conformity, where husbands ruled from a moneyed "downtown" and wives ruled the uptown expenditure, where marriages were either happy or never spoken of, and where children were granted considerable liberty so long as they seemed headed ultimately to a repetition of the parental careers. But the other eye embraced a world of fantasy where one grew up to be Geraldine Farrar singing Tosca, or Maud Adams playing Peter Pan, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning composing a sonnet to the Portuguese. The second vision was the one that she shared with Marielle Loomis, who lived just across East Forty-ninth Street in a house with a Beaux Arts facade that marked her family as richer, though not unbridgeably so, than Camilla's family, the Townsends, in their brownstone residence somewhat "gussied up" with supposedly Egyptian trimmings.
Camilla and Marielle always sat together, at least whenever it was allowed, in classes at Miss Chapin's School for Girls and reveled in the English poets of the recently ended Victorian era, in Tennyson and Browning, and, more adventurously, in Byron and Shelley. They loved the haunting music of Debussy and Saint-Saens, and they particularly delighted in the new operas of Puccini when they went to matinees at the Metropolitan in Marielle's grandmother's box. They were daring enough to tell their parents that they favored votes for women and might even have joined a suffragette parade had not Camilla's mother, Eva Townsend, suddenly frowned, shook her head sternly, and told them, "Of course, you must realize that is quite out of the question."
But Camilla still liked to think that her Christian name was derived from the Camille of Corneille's tragedy Horace, though in fact it stemmed from a sweet and saintly grandmother who had had little enough in common with the fiery Roman virgin who paid with her life for cursing her fatherland over the war in which her betrothed had been killed. Camilla, in ce
rtain moments, had liked to imagine herself as endowed with the guts to stand up against a family united in defense of all the old ways and proclaim her independence. She and Marielle even had the nerve, once, at least, to discuss the possibility of a future in which they wouldn't marry at all but would share a little house full of lovely things and live for the arts, calling themselves a couple of exquises.
But whatever fantasies they allowed themselves, they could never get away from the nagging suspicion that what Camilla had called her first vision of their world was the true one and that there would be no way of escaping their destiny to become wives and mothers. That there were such things as old maids in society was sufficiently obvious to them, but these fell into two categories, both unthinkable, one beyond their material means, even Marielle's, and the other too low to be borne. The first category contained the rich old virgins of New York and Newport, a strictly American phenomenon, as in Europe they would have been married off no matter what their disqualifications or reluctance. These included Miss Anne Morgan, Miss Annie Jennings, Miss Julia Berwind, Miss Ruth Twombly, and the Misses Wetmore, grandes dames who commanded wide reverence and respect. The second was the sorry residue of those too poor or too plain to catch a spouse, who were left to struggle for a living as teachers or paid companions or to haunt the upper stories of the houses of aged parents and dine on trays in their bedrooms whenever an extra man had dropped out of a dinner party below upsetting his hostess's placement.
That the ultimate power rested with men was the donnée of a woman's existence. It was dogma, having little to do with any innate superiority. Eva Townsend, in her daughter's eyes, was an abler, stronger, more practical, and more decisive person than her gentle, easygoing father, and nor had Eva herself ever been in the least unaware of this. She and her sisters and sisters-in-law had taken firm control of the areas of life allowed them by the other sex: the household, the costs, the schools, the summer resorts, and the makeup of society itself—who was in it, who out. But in the final court of appeal, where life or death was at stake, the male alone voted.
The Young Apollo and Other Stories Page 2