It was hard for me, at my age, to see his Leopoldine in quite the dazzling light in which he enshrined her. It was not that she was not interesting; she was interesting, even at times fascinating. She was hardly a beauty, but she may have been something of one when she was young; that is, younger than her present age of fifty. We knew she must be that old, for she had been in Mother’s class in Miss Chapin’s School. She was tall and thin and a bit boney, but her movements were graceful, and she was always elegantly attired with large, rather jangling jewelry. Her dark hair was drawn straight back over a noble pale brow; her features were large and handsome, and her big, roving, gray-blue eyes seemed, somehow intelligently, to be seeking something more amusing than what she was presently offered. At social gatherings, where I observed her, usually at my parents’, she was animated and perhaps a bit grabby with the conversation, but she could be very funny, and when she wasn’t, her loud, rather raucous laugh tried to make up for it. Mother, who was inclined to be catty about her, said she drank too much.
It interested me to watch her with Arthur. I’ve said that her eyes were roving, but they always came back to him. She seemed intent on bringing him out, calling attention to his remarks and laughing loudly at his jokes, which she must have heard before, yet also correcting him, reproving him, almost at times shutting him up. It struck me that she treated him like a precocious favorite child who, from time to time, needed to be disciplined. And yet I must not overdo the maternal note, for it was obvious from the loving way she touched his arm, his hand, any available portion of him, that she was a doting spouse. Perhaps too doting.
Their relationship was the subject of much discussion in my family. Father’s interpretation of it was crude but insightful: “Polly makes him feel like a man; she gives him balls. Arthur has always felt inferior to muscular types, like her first two husbands, who were both great college jocks. When she was finally free of the second, he jumped almost hysterically at his chance at achieving big muscles by becoming the mate of his antiquated Venus. Of course, she had what I call ‘mileage’; she’d been all over the lot in addition to her two spouses, and even with her dough she was lucky to get anyone as respectable as Arthur for Number Three.”
“I think you’re right about her being desperate,” Mother conceded. “But not about getting a third husband. You underestimate the lure of her fortune, which quite makes up for her age and other things. I suggest that what drew her to Arthur was that he fell head over heels in love with her at first sight and didn’t give a damn about her age or money or previous affairs and marriages. He was like Alfredo in Traviata, bursting into rapturous song over an ailing prostitute, happy to throw away his future and career for her.”
“I didn’t call Polly a prostitute,” Father objected. “If anyone had to pay, I’m sure it was she.”
“Don’t be so literal. What I mean is that Polly, middle-aged and battered, suddenly finds a glowing younger man who worships her for just what he sees in front of him—nothing else. I don’t think anything like that had ever happened to her before. Don’t forget that I’ve known her from way back. There’s always been something essentially unlovable about Polly. Wherever you tap her, she rings a bit false. She’s used her wealth to buy everything she thought she wanted in life, and what’s she got? Nothing, or at least nothing that she now values. And suddenly here is love, steaming love, from what to her is almost a youth, handed her on a silver platter, something that at her age she can never expect to duplicate! Why of course she grabs it! And of course she’s going to hang on to it, if she has to kill to do it. She’ll eat him alive!”
I had an uncomfortable vision of the female insect that devours the smaller male after copulation. “But of course she can never be his intellectual equal,” I muttered.
“Then she’ll smother his intellect!” Mother exclaimed. “All I can say is, he’d better watch his step.”
If Mrs. Slocum watched her husband as closely as Mother implied, then it was inevitable that she would take an interest in his marsh excursions even with someone as insignificant as myself, and indeed I got notice of this at a buffet Sunday lunch at my parents’ when she chose me as her meal companion at a little table for two.
“My husband tells me, Tony, that you’re an expert on the flora and fauna of our neighboring marshlands. Would you be kind enough to take me on a guided tour some afternoon?”
Well, of course, that was easily arranged, and the very next day at three she met me at the foot of our driveway on Breezy Way, smartly attired in red leather boots, tan slacks and a mauve sweater. She listened to me, as we walked, with polite but distant attention while I discoursed on birds and amphibians, and it wasn’t until we had paused to rest, sitting on my favorite log, that I learned, without surprise, that she had other than Mother Nature’s creatures in mind.
With a sweeping gesture she encompassed the marsh. “Tell me, my friend, just what my dear spouse sees in all this.”
“Well, I guess you’ve got to feel it. If you don’t, you don’t.”
“Meaning I’m hopeless?”
“Oh, no. Meaning you probably respond to other kinds of beauty.”
“Thank you, Tony. You’re a gentleman. It’s true that I respond to art. To lovely paintings and drawings and sculpture and all the beautiful things that make up a handsome interior.”
“So there you are. You’re an interior person. Perhaps Arthur is an exterior one.”
“An interior person.” She sniffed. “It sounds like an odalisque.”
I blushed, for that was exactly what I’d meant. “Oh, please, Mrs. Slocum…”
“Don’t mind me,” she interrupted. “I’m laughing at you. But seriously, don’t you think that Arthur likes beautiful manmade things as well as natural things? His taste is not confined, is it, to crabs and muskrats and God knows what that teem in this—if you’ll forgive me—somewhat smelly spot?”
“Oh, no!” I exclaimed in all earnestness. “He loves poetry more than anything. He loves all beautiful things, whether manmade or godmade. But he has this idea that there may be something vulgar in communicating one’s sense of the beautiful. He likes to keep it to himself.”
“Isn’t that like a monk praying for his own salvation, locked away in a monastery?”
“I suppose you could say that.”
“And doesn’t he share it with you?”
Was it my morbid imagination, or did I detect something like jealousy in her tone?
“You know,” she went on, in a more bantering way, “what some people may say about a middle-aged man who habitually disappears into the solitude of the marshes with a boy young enough to be his son?”
In my horror and disgust, I could only shake my head, and Mrs. Slocum uttered one of her loudest laughs. But what really appalled me was my curious impression that she might have actually preferred that her husband’s relations with me should be sexual rather than intellectual. She could have coped with buggery!
“Well, you give me hope,” she continued, in an almost businesslike tone. “If Arthur can share his love of beautiful things with you, perhaps he can share them with me. I’m sure that you agree he could do more with his life than sell stocks and bonds for a salary that we are far from needing.”
“Oh yes! He should write.”
“Well, maybe he’ll come to that. But I have another plan, one to start with. He’s just inherited that old abbey in Normandy where he grew up. His father gave his stepmother a life estate in it, and she recently died. Arthur supposes that we should sell it, but I have a better idea. Why not keep it, move over there, and fix it up with fine things? Make it into a monument historique? We could shop together, comb the Paris art galleries and antiquaires together and be partners in a work of art!”
“I think it’s a wonderful idea!”
“It is, isn’t it? Unless you happen to be wedded to Cedarhurst.” She threw me a sly wink and rose to make her way back from a marsh that she would obviously never revisit. “And unless yo
u can’t live without crabs.”
I thought her idea had merit and that Arthur might indeed find diversion in embellishing the old family abbey, but I was nonetheless uneasy. Remembering what Mother had said, I couldn’t but speculate on the effect on him of the constant close attention of his daily and nightly partner in the enterprise, binding more and more tightly to him in the bonds of gratitude by what I was sure would be the reckless expenditure of her wealth.
***
On our last walk on the marshes before his move to France, Arthur was in a contemplative, almost melancholy mood.
“I’m going to miss all this, Tony.”
“Even in beautiful Normandy?”
“Even there.”
“But I’m told that when you and Mrs. Slocum are through with the abbey, it will burn on the water—of its moat, presumably—like Cleopatra’s barge!”
“Oh, we’ll do that, of course. And it will be amusing, I suppose. The abbey will be fixed up, all right. As fixed up as possible. Within an inch of its life! When Polly decides to spend, get out of her way! But never forget, my boy, the marshes are just as good. The marshes may even be better. It comes pretty much to the same thing, though—the beauty of nature and the beauty of art. What is art doing but trying to excel nature?”
***
I didn’t see the abbey until I graduated from Yale four years later and went abroad to spend the summer in Europe before starting at graduate school. It was the summer of 1939, and I had to scurry home when the war broke out, but I had time for a weekend visit to the Slocums’. The abbey was indeed gorgeous. The gray walls sloping over a richly kept lawn to a shimmering moat and formal French gardens; the long succession of lavishly appointed chambers, Venetian, Baroque, French eighteenth century, English Regency; the tapestries, bronzes, ceramics and paintings of every school, made it a choice museum that was open to the public three days a week.
Arthur was my grave and courteous guide who lost his gently mocking tone only when he spoke of the imminence of hostilities.
“I ended up in the last war hoping for peace at any price. I was like Siegfried Sassoon, only I didn’t have his courage to speak out. But the irony of our situation is that now we are faced with the war that we thought the first one was: a crusade against the devil himself. The poor old Kaiser—think how warmly we’d welcome him as the German leader today!”
We ended our tour in the main parlor, and his wife caught his last remark.
“There may still be time for another Munich, Arthur!” she exclaimed.
“God forbid,” he murmured.
But she heard him. “Do you want another war?” she cried, in a suddenly harsh tone. When he didn’t answer, she turned to me, or perhaps I should say she turned on me. “As if one wasn’t enough for him! One that cost Britain and France the flower of their youth and from which they’ve never recovered! Another war will finish them. Don’t you agree with me, Tony?”
I stammered something about a man’s not always having the choice, but she hardly heard me. If I wasn’t an instant ally, I was an instant foe. She was older looking and more strident. The years had not improved her. She turned back to her principal target.
“So you don’t care whether this house, with its priceless things, is blown to smithereens? Is that it, Arthur? Is that what it means to you, after all our work together?”
His tone was cautious. “I suppose there are things in life, my dear, that are more important than bric-à-brac.”
“Bric-à-brac!”
“Well, art then, even the greatest art. Even Leonardo. Even the View of Delft, assuming we had it. Could you weigh it against liberty? Against freedom from a bloody despot?”
“Of course I could! Our job is not to fight for abstract ideas. It is to see that the beauty of the world is not destroyed. What is the liberty of one generation compared to the great monuments of art? Chartres has stood there for seven hundred years under despotism and democracies and is still there to inspire people with the reassurance of beauty!”
I supposed that the years Leopoldine had spent putting together a great collection had generated a certain passion for her creation—that was understandable, particularly in a woman of her capability and intelligence—but I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that her animation was in fact caused by her husband’s deviation from the tight union of spirits she had hoped to foster with her abbey plan.
“Darling,” he said placatingly, “a war, if it comes, is not going to destroy all the chateaux in France. If, even at the worst, the Germans should overrun this part of the country, their army would probably take over the abbey for officers’ quarters and treat it very well. And if America stays out of the war, they probably wouldn’t occupy it at all.”
I did not much admire this speech, but I could certainly see that the poor man was hard pressed. Leopoldine did appear somewhat mollified.
“Well, if you can promise me that,” she said.
“Oh, my dear one, I can promise you nothing.”
“But can you promise me you’ll do everything in your power to save the abbey?”
“I can certainly promise you that,” I’m afraid he said.
The war came, and devastated Europe, and in due course pulled America in. I did not have to experience my childhood nightmare of the trenches; I served more comfortably in the navy, where, if you were not sunk—and I had the good fortune not to be—you at least escaped mud and rats. I had no news from Arthur except that he and his wife had elected to remain in France even after the German occupation. When the Axis declared war on us, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, I had to assume that they had either been interned as enemy aliens or placed under house arrest in their beloved abbey. But on a leave to New York in the winter of 1943,I heard a different and distressing tale from Mother.
“I know how much you admired Arthur and how bad you will feel at what I have to tell you, but you’re bound to hear it sooner or later, and you may as well get it from me. Henri de Villac, whose mother, you will remember, was an American and a great friend of my mother’s, is over here, representing the Free French. He told me that the Slocums have been shockingly cozy with the German military from the very start of the occupation, entertaining high officers at the abbey and getting all kinds of dispensations. And that after we entered the war, a number of German officers were quartered at the abbey, not as conquerors but as welcome houseguests. The Slocums’ new Boche pals saw to it that they got all the supplies they needed to make a jolly house party.”
I felt too sick to make any comment, but at last I offered one. “I’m sure it was all her doing and just Arthur’s weakness. She’s a hard one to get around, once she’s made her mind up. I suppose he couldn’t bear to see her uncomfortable. To him she was always perfect.”
“Oh, I don’t in the least question her bitchiness. But you can’t let Arthur off the hook quite that easily. You must remember that he always felt the first war had been a mistake. If we shouldn’t have fought the Huns then, why fight them now? Let us at least save our bric-à-brac and pictures by kissing their asses!”
The war seemed to have brought out an unseemly coarseness in Mother, but what was I to say to it? I couldn’t but remember what Arthur had told me about the folly of the first war.
I heard no more about the Slocums until the end of the war in Europe, which occurred while I was on temporary shore duty in London. A new British friend in my Grosvenor Square office, a liaison officer from their Intelligence, hearing me one day at lunch speak of my prewar visit to the abbey in Normandy, volunteered an interesting item.
“I’m afraid your friends were the worst kind of Nazi sympathizers. They got out of France, you know, right before the liberation of Paris. Just as well for them, too.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“With the help of some grateful German high-ups, no doubt. They went to Málaga.”
“Where they still are?”
“Presumably. There are no charges against them. At
least from us. Having been friendly to the Boches is not a crime so long as you didn’t actively help them. But Mrs. Slocum had better stay out of France for a while. If she doesn’t want to have her lovely head shaved. Or is it a wig?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“And there’s another interesting side to the story. While they were wining and dining the Boches, their butler, one Gaston Robert, picked up some clues from the convivial chatter at the groaning board which he relayed to the Resistance and helped us to get a jump on the Jerries at the tussle at Bligny-sur-Oise.”
I could have hugged him. For then I knew, but I thought it better to bide my time.
I was not able to go to Málaga until the end of the war in the Pacific. Discharged from the navy, I arranged for a short holiday in Spain before coming home, and I had no time to lose if I was to see Arthur, as word had reached me from Mother that he was dying of pancreatic cancer.
“It’s probably as well,” she wrote me, “because they could never again show their faces in France or America.”
The villa in Málaga, on a hilltop with a fine view of the sea, large and white and airy, was evidence that Polly’s dividends were still flowing in. She received me coolly, looking older and careworn, and asked no questions about my family or Cedarhurst.
“Arthur will be glad to see you,” she said, in a noncommittal tone. “He spends his time in bed looking out the window. He hardly talks to me. We all have to meet our end in our own way, I suppose. He’s not in much pain, fortunately. But that may come.”
I found him pale and haggard, seeming resigned, almost indifferent to illness, to Spain and to me. On this first visit I chatted about my career in the navy, and he listened, politely but with little concern. When I left to go back to my hotel, I asked whether I could call again the next day, and he nodded.
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