by Amanda Cross
“No chance of that, unless he decides discussions of murder and his bastardy are worth it. Since his motives are, you conclude, to prevent the truth from coming out while he is still alive to face up to it, he will not want you there to spread it abroad together with accusations of homicide.”
“Reed. You’re not suggesting he’s going to kill himself?”
“I doubt it. But in this game you’re playing, my love, isn’t the culprit always left alone in the library with someone’s old army revolver?”
“Reed, you don’t like Max. I never realized that.”
“Neither did I. No, I don’t like him at all, now that you mention it. Look, it’s no good suggesting we don’t think of him, but let’s at least not talk of him. Can we manage that?”
“We just might,” Kate said.
PART FOUR
June
Chapter Fourteen
Almost eight days had passed since the meeting in the cabin, and Kate began to think that Max had funked it. Oddly enough, though she knew him to be capable of some of the highest crimes in the book, she did not think he would break his word or renege on an agreement, any more than he would have been capable of destroying papers of historical value. Honor among thieves, I suppose, she thought, but nonetheless, she searched the obituary section of the paper and answered the telephone a bit more readily, more anxiously than had been her wont.
And then on the first night of June he telephoned to ask if he might come for a brandy. Kate, receiving a nod across the room from Reed, said they would be glad to see him.
When he turned up, as mannered, as dapper, as in control of himself as ever, Kate realized she had been battling chimeras.
“My apologies for having been so long. I was detained by service to another and hope, therefore, to be forgiven. One ought not to offer one’s services and then use that as an excuse for failing in one’s other obligations, but—the fact is, I have been helping Randolph Brazen with his book. He is old and needs some intelligent help, but the book will be important; I’m sure of that. I told him I was to be late for an appointment, and he insisted on writing you a note.”
Randolph Brazen had been the most famous columnist of his day, in a day when political columnists were the pundits of the earth. Kate could remember his name being uttered by her elders much as the name of the Delphic oracle must have been spoken earlier. “I didn’t know he was still living,” she admitted, accepting the note from Max. She read it aloud. “ ‘To those who have a proper claim upon Max’s time, forgive me for having kept him beyond his allotted stay. His usefulness to me, and his kindness, have been great indeed; I would consider it a personal favor if you would forgive him his tardiness, for which I am wholly responsible.’ Where does he live?” Kate asked.
“In Wilton, Connecticut, in a lovely old house. All his papers are there. Reading over some of his columns of forty years ago, one realizes what a loss the lack of such a man is to us today. He had that now downgraded quality common sense.” Max let this remark drop into the silence. Then he went to the hall to fetch a cardboard envelope—it was like Max not to carry anything so middle class as a briefcase—and removed a file folder from it. “The letters,” he said. “All that Cecily had from Whitmore at the time. There were none from my mother, from Frederica, which means that either Cecily destroyed them or that she returned them to Frederica. From several things she said, I think that is most likely. My mother in her turn must have destroyed them, for they have never turned up. But the ones from Whitmore are evidence enough, if you want it.”
“May I look at them?” Kate asked.
“I hope you will read them with care,” Max said. “I should like your statement, to me at least, that the file seems sufficiently complete. No, don’t take my word for it, though you have that. Read them.”
“Later,” Kate said. She opened the file and immediately recognized Whitmore’s handwriting, of which she had seen so much at Somerville. It was an oddly childish hand, leaning sometimes one way, sometimes another, as though she had given up any attempt to be distinctive and was just getting her thoughts down. Kate had learned that the dons had complained about Whitmore’s bad syntax and worse spelling, but by this date the illegibility of her writing had gone, perhaps because she was surer of what she was saying, and why. Kate placed the folder on the table.
“How about that brandy?” Reed asked.
“Thank you,” Max said. He sat near Kate in silence, until the snifter was handed to him. “How nice; the proper way to drink fine brandy. One has the pleasure of the aroma first. To you, my dear.”
“To Whitmore,” Kate said; she drank Scotch and did not, at this moment, bother with the aroma. In fact, now she had permission, she desperately wanted to read the letters and could only with difficulty contain herself. It took all her social resources (which Reed might have pointed out, were never extensive) to keep from glaring at Max as he nursed his brandy, swirling it lovingly in the large snifter and taking occasional tiny sips. She had the sense that Max knew what she was feeling, and that the knowledge in no way decreased his slow pleasure in his drink. He had actually taken to beginning a conversation on some political issue while warming the glass in his hands, and Kate had decided she would simply rise and plead the need of work, leaving Reed (who had, after all, brought him the brandy in that ridiculous glass) to cope, when Max suddenly drank off the rest and arose. He bowed slightly to Kate.
“Thank you, my dear, for your trust and your patience. I need hardly tell you how sad I am, and shall always be, about the accident to your student. Do believe, now that you know all the truth about me, that that fact also is the truth. May we meet again soon as though none of this had happened?”
“Soon, perhaps,” Kate said. “Not right away.”
“There is the whole summer to get through. But I look forward to inviting you to lunch in the fall. Please give me some reason to hope you will accept my invitation.”
“Max, I hope to. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Good night, my dear. Good night, Reed.”
Kate heard Reed walk with Max to the door, heard his good night and the door close.
“Do you want to read them?” Kate asked.
“No. Not unless there is something especially noteworthy. Somehow, the whole business makes me a trifle sick.”
“I know. And yet I do so want to read them, Reed. Am I a beast? Yes, I am. But I feel Gerry Marston will not have died quite so idiotically if these will, at least, be read one day.”
“If he saved them after her death, he would have saved them in any case, and they would have been read one day. Never have I heard of a more stupid death.”
Kate replaced the letters on the table. “You’re right, of course.”
“But not right to rob you of what is after all a perfectly legitimate pleasure, under the circumstances. I never can be less than frank with you, but not for a moment did I mean you ought not to read the letters.” He left the room and Kate picked up the folder once again.
“The question is,” Kate read in the middle of one of the letters in Whitmore’s rather childish hand, “to what can one, should one, dedicate oneself? The dangers of self-pity and self-indulgence haunt me; yet I have a sense of destiny and, what is more, anger and defiance. I sometimes think men know nothing of life and have kept women shut up for so many centuries lest women discover this. Cecily, Cecily, I am ranting, but what an angel you are. I shall have the baby—that is determined, and please God, let it be a boy, with his destiny clear and sharp before him. Isn’t it odd that none of us longs for daughters. You want to replace the neighbor boys murdered in the war, I expect, as I want to replace a brother. Frederica simply prefers males of any age. Except perhaps if women could be like us, you will quickly say. But how many like us are there? Frederica, at least, has given her husband a son already. Should he have loathed a daughter, do you think? I read somewhere
that all parents, if they could choose the sex of their children, would want the first child to be a boy.”
Kate suddenly felt herself back at Somerville. How like Whitmore to be going on about the sex of one’s children, rather than, as one would have expected, their legitimacy. But turning several sheets, Kate came upon a letter dealing, she gathered, with this question. “No, Cecily, I shall not tell the father. Why ever should I? The choice was mine, the risk was mine, and the birth will be mine. He hasn’t even troubled to enquire, and why should he? I scarcely encouraged him in a wild personal interest in me, or into thinking I had any great passion for him. It’s all nonsense anyway, thinking you can make up to one man what you’ve robbed from another, or what the world has robbed him of. Because I cheated Gerald out of loving me, being too young and stupid to understand his passion, I try, like a fool, to make it up to this poor beast. Rosalind was right: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”
No, Kate thought, not for love, hardly ever for love. Always for hate, or pride, or vanity, or self-protection.
Whitmore’s letters told Cecily, finally, of Frederica’s offer to take over the baby as her own, “even if it is a girl.” It was astonishing, really, with what bitterness Whitmore harped on this point. Frederica had pointed out that her freedom would not be imperiled as Whitmore’s would, nor had she the possibility for a life of high accomplishment as Whitmore had. How could they know that Whitmore would be dead in ten years? Yet they had not been wrong. North Country Wind was one of those rare books, like Middlemarch and Persuasion, for which only a lifetime is adequate preparation. Within it—and this had played no small part in Kate’s reconstruction of Max’s parents—the heroine has a love affair with the town’s most prominent male, a widower. This was profoundly shocking behavior in the village life pictured in the novel, but the reality of the passion had been evoked with skill: skill and knowledge.
Whitmore had died young. Frederica had found the most conventional and time-honored of fulfillments. Cecily had lived on to achieve what was clearly going to be great fame. Who knew? Perhaps Max’s biography would bring Whitmore back into fame also, as Gerry Marston’s study might have done.
There was nothing more for it but to deliver the letters, sealed, to the Wallingford. She must really put the story out of her mind. Once, in a lighter moment, Kate had remarked to Reed that her advice to Max had been similar to that of Lady Bracknell to Jack Worthing: “I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over.” With some persuasion. Max had produced the parent.
And thinking of parents, Kate reminded herself, if Max has found one real parent, Leo has adopted two substitutes. She had heard the door slam as Leo entered, never a silent process. Well, she thought, as he faced her, the letters in a packet at her side, however we have mucked it up, we have certainly done better than his real parents would have—not, alas, that that is saying much.
“What are you doing?” Leo asked. “You’re usually bent over your desk at this hour.”
“Whistling in the dark, that’s what I’m doing. How are you?”
“It’s all over,” Leo said. “Anyhow, the main part. Harvard has said they can’t come this year, they’ll think about next, you know, consider them all over again then. Parents rushing around the school. Most of the faculty think the whole thing wasn’t handled right, but I’m following Reed’s advice and just smiling pleasantly and keeping a low profile. I only go in for classes.”
“I know how you feel, or I think I do. You decide to do something, perform one small action, and suddenly it’s a tide, the momentum is going, and there’s no possibility of turning back. Somehow, even though you thought you foresaw all that would happen, you didn’t know the pace would pick up so.”
“You sound like you had the same experience.”
“Not the same circumstances, but the same experience, I guess.”
“The headmaster says now—not to me, of course, but everything gets around—that he would have acted immediately except that all the boys lied to him. Finlay and Ricardo, of course, they lied like I breathe, but also the ones he called in to ask if they’d seen Finlay at the exam. He says he acted properly—anyhow, that’s what they say he says.”
“I wouldn’t think about that, if I were in your shoes. All he can feel, in that case, is grateful that it did get talked about, so that he wasn’t compounding a felony, or countenancing a misdemeanor—Reed would know the phrase. And between you and me, Leo, phooey. He shouldn’t be running the sort of school where any of these things happen, where students he, where—oh, the hell with it. But don’t expect him to be grateful; he won’t be.”
“Did you really say ‘phooey’ when you were young?”
“Leo, someday I’ll tell you how old I was before I knew that damn wasn’t the worst four-letter word available.”
“Well, there’s other news. We’re playing an exhibition game against the next-best team on Sunday, June fourteenth. Money goes to the scholarship funds; in Central Park. Think you might come, or will you be up at the cabin?”
“Of course I’ll come; I can leave early, if I’m there. What time is it?”
“Three. But don’t feel you have to come. I just mentioned it because it’s the last game of the season. The last game for St. Anthony’s.”
“And what a season it’s been, athletically speaking, of course. I’ll be there.”
Leo ambled out to the kitchen in search of nourishment, and Kate thought that, oddly enough, both the problems were over together; the puzzles were solved. They were both very modern solutions, inconclusive and unsatisfactory, though in both her case and Leo’s, to have done nothing would have been worse: satisfactory to the wrong people, and conclusive as to effect. Yet it was enough to make one long for the days of Victoria, when Tennyson would withhold his poem “Tithonus” from publication because, as one critic put it, “its world-weary pessimism was insufficiently tonic for the temper of the time.” What could possibly be sufficiently tonic for the temper of this time?
Chapter Fifteen
Alone in the cabin, Kate discovered that the solitude and the country had once again enabled her to collect herself. She had enjoyed what Mollie Panter-Downes, an English writer on whom Kate rather doted, called “the ultimate luxury of the well-off—the ability to avoid one’s nearest and dearest at will.”
Last night had been particularly clear, with the stars brilliant in the sky. Kate had known those who took comfort from the stars, as though the possible existence of other worlds minimized the sufferings of this one. Kate did not agree. Awed by spectacle, she nonetheless paid, with Whitman, her whole devotion to this world:
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
Trips to the moon, which Kate had watched on television, left her unmoved. The hoisting of the American flag on the moon she considered easily the worst example of bad taste since the Albert Memorial.
Three months ago Max had walked up the dirt road and paused at the edge of her meadow, searching for a path. “Drive with me to Maine,” he had said. Of course, Kate thought bitterly, I naturally took it for granted that my presence was desired for its own sake, that I was as ever the one to whom all thoughts turn. Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it? But self-flagellation was not in order. Gerry Marston’s death could not in any case have been prevented; no one else had suffered since. However monumental her own misconceptions, they had done harm to no one.
At least here, alone, she had been able to determine on a course of action, and must now think of returning. Her eyes moved from the now overcast sky, past the trees now completely in
foliage, to the road where Max had stood that day. For one ghastly moment Kate thought she was having a genuine hallucination. Then, with a tremor, she realized, whatever her problems, they were not chimerical.
Max stood in the dirt road surveying her meadow.
Their eyes could not, at that distance, meet; yet Kate felt them meet. No worry this time about changing my clothes, she thought. Her pants were grubby as ever, and her shirt, a discarded one of Reed’s, was tied up, leaving her middle bare. This she untied and tugged down around her hips in an act, she supposed, with some vestigial traces of the girding of one’s loins. Max began to walk toward the cabin.
“Where to this time?” Kate asked as she opened the door to him. The thought of locking it occurred momentarily, only to be abandoned. He could always get in if he wanted to. And sooner or later she would have to talk to Max. How like him to have adopted the ritual of talking here.
“I’ll sit at the table again,” he said. “You sit where you like, of course. Do you think we might have some tea?”
“All right.” Kate filled the kettle and put it on to boil. Waiting for it, she collapsed into her overstuffed chair and watched Max’s inevitable lighting of his cigarette, the crossing of his legs. Like Noel Coward, she had thought, all that time ago.
He waited until the cups of tea were prepared, his in front of him, hers clutched in both hands as she sat, her feet beneath her, in the large chair.
“When had you planned your little exposure?” he asked.
“Any time would have done,” Kate answered. “This as well as another, though it is hardly your style. Max.”
“What made you take it up again, Kate, in your maddening female way?”
“How did you know I had taken it up? I’ve mentioned it to no one.”
“No. I’m counting on the fact that you haven’t. Not even to Reed, I’ll dare say. Two fantastic tales are too many to spin inside one month, even to one’s beloved and, if I may say so, ridiculously indulgent husband. I knew because Herbert told me, indirectly, of course. A very small piece of information will reveal a good deal to the person who knows how to use it.