“That doesn’t seem to be generally felt.”
“It’s certainly not generally said. But I had the distinct feeling, when my husband’s father died, that my mother-in-law, deep down—oh, ever so far down, quite unconsciously, of course—may have had the tiniest feeling that she was now free to catch up with her friends on their garden tours and world cruises. They had been romping, so to speak, while she’d been tied to an invalid’s wheelchair!”
“Your father was never an invalid, Leslie,” Frances pointed out.
“Oh, Mummy darling, don’t take things so personally. I wasn’t suggesting that you’re like my mother-in-law.” She turned back to Manny. “But, still, the worst of it is over now, and Mummy’s hardly an old woman. She can see whom she likes. She can go out with attractive men like you. Nobody could have a more trusting husband than my Felix, but I assure you that I would have quite a scene on my hands if I went gadding about the town like Ma!”
“‘Gadding,’” Manny mused. “It seems to me that the term rather deprecates your mother’s activities.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Mabon. You do take one up on things. I simply meant that Mummy can now live for pleasure.”
“It intrigues me how often wives seem to equate pleasure with the unmarried state.”
“Evidently you do, Mr. Mabon.”
“You mean because I’ve kept the best years of my life for myself?”
“Precisely.”
Manny had a somewhat easier time with Polly, who came for tea in the afternoon, but even this was tense. If Polly believed, as Frances surmised (in what Polly would surely have deemed her mother’s old-fashioned way) that women ought to have men’s jobs, would Polly not also hold that at least some men should have women’s, and did Manny justify his existence even as a children’s nurse or housekeeper?
“I was hoping, Mr. Mabon, that you could get Mummy interested in some kind of work.”
“Such as?”
“Well, would it really matter? Something where she’d be using her undoubted talents for a benefit to her fellow mortals.”
“Do you think she should become a lawyer, like her brilliant daughter?”
Polly looked startled, though whether at his familiarity or at the oddness of his suggestion, Frances could not be sure. “But Mummy hasn’t even a college degree. I’m afraid that particular form of social utility is out of the question.”
“Has it ever occurred to you, my dear Polly, that your mother may be at least as useful to the profession of law as yourself?”
“No. How?”
“By being a client. Isn’t she a client of yours?”
“Indeed she is. But how does that make her useful to the law?”
“By being useful to the lawyers. And isn’t it true that the more mixed up a client’s affairs are, the more the lawyer has to do? So that your mother can help you simply by creating problems for you to solve? The client and attorney—aren’t they one and the same? Of equal merit?”
“But that’s ridiculous! You might as well say that a great dentist is no more to be esteemed than his patient’s sore tooth!”
“And so I do.”
Polly was frankly exasperated. “Is there anyone you do admire, Mr. Mabon?”
“Certainly. The man or woman who creates beautiful things.”
“And what of the people who admire those beautiful things?” Polly demanded with a note of triumph. “Aren’t they as necessary to the artist as the sore tooth to the dentist? Shouldn’t they be rated as highly?”
“But I’d never dream of denying it!”
Frances took Manny to church on Sunday morning. St. John’s Chapel seemed the very definition of the term “Wasp.” It was a clean, crisp, light, vaguely Palladian structure of yellow brick with big oblong windows showing, instead of biblical scenes in stained glass, the glory of the Westchester autumn woods. The congregation, in white pews enclosed by little doors, seemed of a spotless gray and white, in hair, in skin, in clothing; they raised mild voices to sing familiar hymns, holding hymnals at which they glanced only for the fourth or fifth stanza.
If there was something a bit dry in the air, a hint of the faded, of bygone fashion, of the survival of form and the evanescence of matter, Frances liked to believe that she could also make out something sweet, something fine and rare, as some old pressed leaf discovered in a gilded tome might suggest the deep, rich green of a primeval forest without the darkness, the danger, the lurking bandits, the sudden death. She liked to imagine that she was breathing the sanctified air of what was finest in a dead tradition: the simplicity, the probity, the reverence of Puritan forebears. Or was it just a congregation of ghosts?
She saw Alice Nicholas in the front of the church turn her head, but only for a second. Alice smiled and nodded at her, but no doubt her purpose had been to observe Manny. What would she make of him? What would any of them? Would a sociologist today find her friendship with Manny the symptom of a sterility that marked the last stages of a Wasp ruling class?
She liked the way Manny sang “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,” which preceded the sermon. He did not sing too heartily loud or too self-deprecatingly low; he did it as naturally as he talked and turned to her with a sly little smile of affected self-congratulation to point up the smugness of the lines:
“There’ll be welcome for the sinner,
And more graces for the good.”
The sermon was about death, how we must not refuse to think about it and talk about it. Manny seemed to take it all in, his eyes politely and sympathetically fixed on the minister as if the discourse were addressed exclusively to him. Frances was afraid of death; the prospects of extinction or eternity were equally appalling to her. She would try to tell herself that if there were an afterlife, there might be no time, but this was inconceivable. She shuddered now and tried to think of the words of a prayer. Then she turned to read the memorial plaque beside the pew. Then she murmured to herself: “O God, O God, O God.” She looked out the window at the sunlight on the grass and felt a bit better. It was a beautiful church, after all, and there were good and kind people in it. Even if life in half the world was vile and miserable, this was still true. It was still part of the rest.
“And then you can’t get away from death,” the minister was saying. “We all think about it a good deal more than we care to admit—even to ourselves.”
It occurred to Frances that her attitude towards religion was the rankest heresy, that she treated the hymns, the liturgy, the sermons, the flowers on the altar and the anthems of the choir, the very church itself, so fresh and varnished and white, so pure, as parts of an anesthetic to keep her free from the panic of the interstellar darkness. It wasn’t that the Christian doctrine had to be true; it had simply to get her through. She wanted to live in distraction and die in her sleep.
She made herself think now of Stuart. She always felt guilty when she had not been thinking about him. It was as if, in living without considering him, she was depriving him of a portion of his afterlife. She thought of the great brow, the bushy eyebrows, the piercing eyes lit up with a constant laugh that denied the seeming total seriousness, the slow, soft, emphatic, lawyerlike tone, the constant little throat-clearings, the broad, round, continually shrugging shoulders, the heavy tweeded frame, the big arms and long, thin legs down to the old, well-polished shoes of finest leather. Was he laughing at her? Or frowning? Did he love her still? Or did he just pity her? Hadn’t most of his love been an engulfing pity?
“Oh, Stuart, I miss you so!” she whispered.
It was a relief to think that if he were seeing her now, he must be seeing all of her. He would understand Manny; he would see him as a kind of friendly priest. A “priest,” yes, that was the word! Was it? Almost at once she seemed to hear Stuart’s braying laugh and see him joyously flinging an arm over Manny’s shoulder, overwhelming him with benignity, playing with him, a big, genial cat, until the poor staring mouse was torn between gratitude at not being eaten and co
ncern that he had been.
“Leave me Manny, Stuart,” she silently prayed. “You had everything else.”
After the service she drove Manny to Alice Nicholas’s for Sunday lunch. Although she was not at all easy in her mind as to what they would make of each other, she knew what he would think of the house. It was a jewel, a long, low, pink Jacobean structure, partially ivy-covered, surrounded by a rich green lawn with elms and plots of rosebushes planted right by the walls. The interior was surprisingly light; there was more glass than in the usual Jacobean house. In the living room a huge bay window rose two stories, and sunshine was dazzling on the heavy silver on the black mahogany tables and on the crimson covering of the chairs and sofa. Alice had chosen her period because it evoked a man’s world, a huntsman’s world, yet at the same time it offered the opportunity for an exquisite taste to operate, so to speak, under cover. In this way Alice would not “intrude” upon her husband.
There were some dozen guests at Alice’s, including Frances’s daughter Leslie. Ted Nicholas, big and bronze and handsome, a miracle at seventy, tweeded and broadly smiling, the kindest man in the world, immediately took Manny by the arm and introduced him around. Alice seemed unusually benevolent; they had obviously agreed to feature the new guest. Frances stood with Leslie a bit to the side.
“He seems so at home, your friend,” Leslie observed.
Frances knew when Leslie was preparing to make a disagreeable remark. She had an air of suspended animation; her half-smiling, half-frightened eyes looked one up and down as if assessing one’s probabilities of defense. She would probably be actually suffering, like a cow with distended udders, in her need to be relieved of whatever it was that she had in mind.
But Frances was not going to help Leslie. She simply looked at her.
“You know what they’re saying, don’t you?” Leslie continued.
“How can I, dear? Till you tell me.”
Leslie’s laugh was forced, hollow. “That you’re the last person they ever expected to turn into a fag hag!”
Frances was so shocked that she almost showed it. “Really? I never dreamed I could become anything so fashionable.”
“Oh, Ma, you’re angry. Can’t you take a joke?”
“No, Leslie, I can’t. If I could, you wouldn’t joke.”
And she walked away. Of course, now there would be tears and telephone calls, and in the end it would be Frances who would have to apologize, but for the moment she didn’t care.
She talked to Ted Nicholas, but she did not hear what he was saying. Fortunately, that rarely mattered with Ted. He was a kind of Parsifal, absurdly brave, absurdly good, absurdly naive. Stuart had once said that he was the only man he had ever known who was popular with other men and yet whose presence even in a locker room forestalled the dirty joke. His masculinity was too pure. But when he began to talk about Manny, she did listen.
“I like your little friend, Frances. Seems like a most cheerful guy. Nice to have around, I should think. Does he play golf, do you think? No? Would he like a lesson? I’d be very happy to give him one. Alice says he doesn’t work. Well, neither do I! I never did, except once. Did I ever tell you? When I got out of Harvard my old man said I ought to do something, so I went to work for a bank. Well, I discovered my salary was exactly what I gave my chauffeur! They paid me on Friday, and I paid him on Saturday, so all I had to do was endorse the check. And then it dawned on me that if I didn’t want to work, all I had to do was give up a chauffeur. So I’ve driven myself ever since!”
Frances had heard the story a dozen times before, but she usually liked it. Now, however, it was spoiled by his reference to Alice’s remark about Manny’s not working. Were they all against him? She shivered with sudden resentment. Could she not have one friend?
After lunch Alice, with her usual good manners, arranged for Manny to have a rubber of bridge. When two tables had been made up, and Ted had taken a friend on a tour of the kennels, she and Frances were free to stroll in the garden. Frances went straight to the point.
“You don’t like Manny.”
‘“Certainly I like Manny. I think he’s entirely amiable.”
“Then you don’t like my friendship with him.”
“You don’t think it’s a bit intense … a bit sudden?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s how it looks, Frances.”
“Looks? Why should I care about looks?”
“I thought we both did. I thought it was important how we appeared to the world. As our husbands’ wives. As our children’s mothers. It’s not that what’s inside isn’t more important. Of course it is. But I thought you and I believed that our outward selves should reflect, as far as possible, the things we stand for.”
“And how does Manny’s being my house guest affect that?”
“It’s not just his being your house guest. It’s your being with him so constantly. Being seen giggling together in art galleries—”
“Giggling? We may have been laughing.”
“Giggling was the way it was put to me.”
“Really, Alice, are you taking to gossip?”
“I have compelled myself to listen. For your sake. Do you want to know what people are saying about you?”
They were in the greenhouse now, before the glory of Alice’s begonias. Alice used to say that the begonia was the ultimate flower. Frances trembled with dismay as she forced herself to admit that her friend’s sincerity and good will were beyond dispute. She was as fine as her favorite flower. She had made a beautiful thing of Ted’s life. Frances glanced at the bracelet of gold golf clubs.
“What do they say?” she asked miserably.
“Well, I don’t have to be told that he calls you ‘darling.’ He must have done so a dozen times at lunch.”
“But that just means ‘you’ in his world!”
“It’s not a world that I admire.”
“Are people going to say that he’s my lover?”
“That would be flattering him. I doubt they wish to.”
“Then what is the harm, really?”
“The harm, my dear, is what you do to yourself. The harm is in the picture of Stuart Hamill’s widow giggling about New York, hand in hand with a silly, shabby, fat man who needs a free meal every time he’s had an unlucky evening at the bridge table.”
“Oh, Alice!”
“There, dear. I’ve said it. I shall not say it again. That Mr. Mabon is amiable and trustworthy I am happy to concede. But that’s how it looks. Let me show you my black iris. It’s the prize.”
That evening, before supper at Crossways, Frances sat alone with Manny in the living room. She felt uncomfortable and constrained; it disturbed her that he should have picked that very moment to discuss his theory of friendship. There were friends, he told her, and “real” friends. Real friends had to have absolute trust in each other. Communication had to be always truthful, though reticence was permissible. He had had only two “real” friends in his life. She was the third. He was very grave about it, quite unlike his usual bubbling self. Perhaps this was why it took him so long to observe her distraction.
“Something has happened,” he noted at last, after watching her fumble in her pocketbook for a cigarette. “Something has upset you.”
“Oh, it’s all too ridiculous.”
“Not too ridiculous to have agitated you, darling.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”
“Very well.” She had expected that his eyes would show anger, but they didn’t. He could be angry at people—oh, she had seen that!—but he wasn’t now. “I’ll try not to.”
“Oh, Manny, I’m sorry.” She reached for his hand and squeezed it. The only way she could bring up the subject was to pretend not to know. “What is a fag hag exactly?”
“Ah, that’s it.” He laughed in a hard, would-be cheerful manner. “A fag hag is an older woman, a society type, who surrounds herself with younger homosexuals. The typical fag hag would be a
jeweled harridan with some blond kid in tow. Have people been calling you a fag hag?”
“Leslie says so.”
“Leslie is spiteful, but she may be right. People will say anything. And how they hate friendship! Friendship somehow seems to threaten them. When they see any two human beings form such a relationship, they’ll break their necks to give it some kind of a sexual slant. Does it bother you terribly to be called a fag hag? Because of me?”
“I suppose it does. And, anyway, you’re not a—”
“A fag? No. I should be, but I’m not. It’s ridiculous. I suppose I put on my weight to make myself unattractive. And protect me from it. My gay friends call me an honorary queer.”
“I’m sorry, Manny. I know I started it but I find I hate this kind of talk.”
“Well, let’s put it on the table, once and for all, and then we can leave it. You can decide whether or not you want to go on being my friend. Truth is everything, darling—I mean Frances. You see? You should have told me you objected the very first time I used that term. Be frank. Shall I tell you now just how I came to be what I am? Whatever that is?”
She agreed, but she was still glad when the cocktails arrived. Manny told his story succinctly and well. It was a Boston boyhood, a Boston background, brave, frugal, high-minded, laden with disaster. There was the father, killed in the Ardennes in 1917, and the two older brothers, both athletes, drowned off Manchester in a sailing race. Manny, a posthumous child, had been left alone to comfort an old mother, who had borne him at forty and who had supported her family as headmistress of a fashionable girls’ school.
“Mother was simply everything to me,” he explained. “You can’t imagine her kindness and courage, her simple greatness. I knew that I was all she had left, and we simply clung to each other. There was us, and there was the world. Even the girls at her school, even the teachers, were ‘world.’ Mother cared for them—she was a cracker jack of a headmistress, efficient, strong—but they had nothing to do with ‘us,’ the inner citadel. To me they were dangerous, and Ma protected me. The school was hung with big, dark prints of academic paintings of historical scenes. One had a particular fascination for me. It showed Catherine de’ Medici, followed by her ladies, emerging from the Louvre to inspect the corpses of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. The foreground was littered with male bodies, some partially stripped. Only partially, mind you. It was an academic picture. The Queen Mother’s ladies exhibited a variety of expressions: fright, horror, scorn, elation. Only Catherine was cold, contained, impassive.”
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