The atmosphere pervaded even the infirmary. Mrs. Gardner, the matron, and her assistant watched from the dispensary window. The infirmary cook gave Billy and me an extra helping of ice cream. I moved my bed over to the window and listened to the distant throb of the band. When it stopped we would know that the headmaster was speaking and a moment later would come the roar of the school cheer. Glancing at Billy, after one of these roars, I noticed that he looked pale and tense.
“Listen to that damn bell,” he complained, when he saw me looking at him. “It gets on my nerves. It’s like Saint Bartholomew’s Day, with everyone coming after the Huguenots.”
I said nothing to this, but there was something contagious about his tensity. As the shouts grew louder and more distinct, as we finally made out the stamp of feet, I got out of my bed and pushed it away from the window.
“What are you doing?” Billy asked me sharply. “Are you ashamed of being in the infirmary?”
He sat up suddenly and got out of bed. He walked to the open window and stood before it, his hands on his hips. From behind him, looking into the courtyard below, I could see the first boys arriving, waving school banners and blowing horns.
“Billy, get back,” I begged him. “They’ll see you! Please, Billy!”
Then I spotted the headmaster’s chair coming around the corner of the adjacent building and ducked out of sight. Billy ignored me completely. From below, through the open windows, almost unbelievably close now, came the din of the assembling school. The drums kept beating, and laughter and jokes, often from recognizable voices, came to our ears. It seemed to me, as I shrank against the wall near the window, pressing my spinal cord against its white coldness, as though every shout and drumbeat, every retort, detaching itself from the general roar and suddenly coherent, every laugh and cheer, each sound of feet on gravel, was part of some huge reptilian figure surrounding the infirmary and our very room with the cold, muscular coils of its body. Fear pounded in me, sharp and irrational.
“Billy!” I called again at him. “Billy!”
There was a sudden silence outside, and we heard the rich, assured tones of the headmaster’s voice, starting his classic interrogatory to the crowd.
“What is this building that I see before me?”
“The infirmary!” thundered the school.
“And who is the good lady who runs the infirmary?”
“Mrs. Gardner!”
“And does Mrs. Gardner have an assistant?”
“Mrs. Jones,” roared the crowd.
This would have been followed immediately, in normal procedure, by the headmaster’s request for cheers for the infirmary and for the good women who ran it. Instead there was an unexpected pause, a silence, and then, as my blood froze I heard the headmaster’s other voice, his disciplinary voice, directed up and into the very window at which Billy was standing.
“Who is that boy in the window? Go away from that window, boy, and get to bed.” It then added, with a chuckle for the benefit of the crowd: “Good gracious me, anyone might think he wasn’t sick.” There was a roar of laughter.
Billy, however, continued to stand there as if he hadn’t heard, and the momentary hush that followed was broken by the sharp, clear tones of George Neale.
“Go back to bed, Angela! Can’t you hear? Take the wax out of your ears!”
Once again there was a startled quiet. The amazement must have been as much at George’s impudence as at Billy’s immobility; it was unheard of for a boy to second the headmaster’s order. The old struggle between George and Billy hung like a lantern in the darkening air before the upturned eyes of three hundred boys. It may have been the use of his nickname, the bold, casual, unconventional use of it before the boys and the faculty, before Mrs. Gardner and Mrs. Jones watching from the window of the dispensary, before the townspeople from Shirley who had come to watch the celebration, that broke Billy down. It was as if he had been stamped “Angela” unredeemably and for the ages. The future, in spite of all his protest, would be a Shirley future. He suddenly waved his arms in a frenzied, circular fashion at the mob.
“Three cheers for Pollock!” he screamed in a harsh voice that did not sound like him at all. “Three cheers for Pollock School!” he screamed. “I wish they’d licked us! I wish they had!”
What I remember feeling at this unbelievable outburst, as I pressed my back harder against the wall, was its inadequacy to express the outrage with which Billy was throbbing. It was too hopelessly disloyal, too hurt, too puerile to do more than dismay or shock. Yet he had said it. He had actually said it! Then the door opened and Mrs. Gardner came in, followed by Mr. O’Neil. I was moved at once to another room, and Billy at last was left alone.
He was taken out of school for good a few days later. His parents drove up from New York and had a long conference with the headmaster. Immediately afterwards his things were packed. I was out of the infirmary by then and went to see his mother at the parents’ house. She wept a good deal and talked to me as though I were grown up, which flattered me. She said that Billy had had a little “nervous trouble” and would be going home. She added that he was tired and would not be able to see anyone before he left. Then she kissed me and tucked a five-dollar bill in my pocket. I’m afraid that I rather enjoyed my sadness over the whole catastrophe.
At school, after Billy had gone, I did much better. In the ensuing years I rose to be manager of the school press, head librarian and even achieved the dignified status of rober to the headmaster in chapel. Billy diminished in retrospect to a thin, shrill figure lost in the past darkness of lower-school years. But it was only a part of me that felt this way. There was another part that was always uneasy about my disloyalty to the desperate logic of his isolation. It was as though I owed the warmth and friendliness that I later found at Shirley to a compromise that he had not been able to make. Whether or not I was justified in any such reservation can only be determined for himself by each individual who has passed as a boy through that semi-eternity which begins with homesickness and hazing and snowballs and ends, such seeming ages afterwards, with the white flannels and blue coats of commencement in the full glory of a New England spring.
THE GEMLIKE FLAME
1953
WHEN I LOOKED UP Clarence McClintock that summer in Venice it was partly out of curiosity and partly out of affection. He had long ceased to be anything but a legend to the rest of our family, the butt of mild jokes and the object of perfunctory sympathy, a lonely, wandering, expatriate figure, personally dignified and prematurely bizarre, rigid in his demeanor and impossibly choosy in his acquaintance. It was universally agreed among our aunts and uncles that he had been an early casualty in the terrible battle that his mother, my ex-aunt Maud, a violent, pleasure-loving woman with a fortune as large as her appetites, had waged over his custody with my sober, Presbyterian uncle John. Yet I had remembered the Clarence of those early years and how, for all the sobriety of demeanor that had so amused our older relatives, there had also been a persistent gentleness of manner that had gone hand in hand with kindness, particularly to younger cousins. Clarence as a boy had been scrupulously fair, invariably just, in his personal dealings with me. The fact that I choose such words may imply that he set himself up as a judge, and there may have been a certain arrogance or at least fatuity in this, but it is the impression of his integrity and not his pretentiousness that lingers. If Clarence was magisterial to my childish eyes, he was also loyal.
When we met at the appointed café on St. Mark’s Square I felt more like a nephew than a cousin. Clarence, tall and bonily thin, with small dry lips and a small hooked nose, with thin receding hair and dark, expensive clothes, did not seem a man of only thirty-seven. I did feel, however, that he was glad to see me.
“So at last one of the family comes to Europe!” he exclaimed with a small, shy, yet hospitable smile of surprise. “And is writing a novel, too! Let us hope that Venice will do for your fiction what it did for Wagner’s music. You’re very good to lo
ok me up, Peter. No one does anymore, you know. No one, that is, but Mother. She cannot, in all decency, quite neglect the sole fruit of her many unions.” He smiled bleakly at this. “But give me the news,” he continued in a brisker tone. “About all the good aunts and uncles and all the cousins like yourself.”
News, however, was the last thing that he seemed to wish to hear. He interrupted me when I started on Aunt Clara’s stroke with a sudden rush of reminiscence about the secret gift drawer that she had kept for us as children. When I tried to tell him about Uncle Warren’s lawsuit, he broke in with apostrophes about the nursery rhymes which the old man used to write for us. What obviously intrigued him about me was the fact of our cousinship; it provided him with a needed link to the past which still seemed to occupy so many of his thoughts. His memory was extraordinary. It was almost as if he had spent his early years carefully collecting this series of vivid images which he somehow knew even then were to be his only companions in the self-imposed loneliness which the future held for him. My turning up after so many years must have given him a sense of reassurance, a proof of the facts on which these images were based, whose very existence he may have come to doubt.
We dined together the following night and the one after. He helped to get me settled in a hotel that he recommended and which turned out to be just right for my needs. He attached himself to me with all the pertinacity of the very shy when they do not feel rebuffed, and I began, perhaps ungraciously, to see that he might become a problem. For, as far as I could make out, despite the fact that he spent every summer in Venice and had an apartment there, he not only had no friends in the city but no inclination to make any. He was too stiff and too reserved, and his Italian, although accurate, was too halting for native circles. He loved Italy and its monuments, but he would have preferred it unpopulated. Americans abroad, on the other hand, he had even less use for. He divided them into four categories, all equally detestable. There were the diplomats, who alarmed him with their polish; the strident tourists, who reminded him of the business world in New York that he had found too competitive; the women who had married titles, whom he thought pretentious, and finally the artists and writers, whom he regarded with a chaste suspicion as people of unorthodox sexual appetite who had come to the sunny land of love in search of a tolerance that was not to be found in the justly censorious places of their origin. And he himself? Clarence McClintock? Why, he had simply come to Italy to admire it and be left alone. The noisiest Italians could be noisy without making demands on him. That was their great virtue. It was as if they had a self-assurance that his fellow Americans lacked, which enabled them to pass by the lone observer from across the seas without the compulsion to turn and make him part of them.
On the third night after our meeting I dined out with Italian friends and was a bit discouraged, I confess, on returning to my hotel, to find Clarence waiting for me in the lobby. He seemed upset about something and wanted to talk, so we went over to St. Mark’s Square for a cinzano. There he told me that he had had a letter from his mother. She was coming to Venice at the end of the following month to attend the fancy-dress ball at the Palazzo Lorisan.
“You mean she’ll fly all the way from New York to go to a ball?” I asked in mild surprise. “All those expensive miles for one party?”
Clarence nodded grimly. “She’s even proud of it,” he affirmed. “Mother’s not afraid to face the absurdity of her own motivations. I’ll say that for her.”
“But I rather admire that, don’t you? I hope I have that kind of spirit when I’m seventy.”
There was a disapproving pause while Clarence sipped his cinzano.
“Sixty-eight,” he corrected me dryly. “You forget, Peter,” he continued more severely, “that someone always pays for a woman like Mother. I don’t mean financially because, obviously, my grandfather left her very well off. But emotionally. She is quite remorseless in the pursuit of pleasure.”
“Oh, come, Clarence, I’m sure you’re being hard on her,” I protested. “How do you know she isn’t really coming over to see you?”
He smiled sourly.
“The Lorisan ball is far more important than I,” he replied. “Though I won’t deny,” he conceded, “that seeing me may provide a subsidiary motive for her coming. She knows how I feel about Olympia Lorisan and that set of international riffraff.”
“You mean she’s coming here to annoy you? Don’t you think that’s going rather far?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Not altogether to annoy me, of course not. But it adds the icing to the cake. Oh, she’s up to no good. You can be sure of that.”
I had to laugh at this.
“Do you honestly think she cares that much?”
Clarence had to pause to think this over.
“We are the two most different people in the world,” he said more reflectively, “and we know it. We each know in our heart that the other will never change. Yet we go on as if there was a way, or as if the other must be made to see the way even if he won’t take it. In any event,” he continued, changing to a brisker, more deliberate tone, as if embarrassed by his reverie, “she will not find me this time. I shall be safely in Rome while the Princess Lorisan’s friends are debauching the bride of the Adriatic.”
“You won’t even stay to see your mother?”
“She can meet me, if she cares, in the eternal city. Will you go with me?”
I told him I had to stay in Venice and work, ball or no ball.
“I suppose you might even go to it?” he speculated.
“I might. If I’m asked.”
“I see, Peter, that I must not overestimate you,” he said regretfully, shaking his head. “You are essentially of that world, aren’t you? Yet I wonder how any artist could really prefer to dance and drink with those shallow people than walk in Hadrian’s Villa or in the moonlit Colosseum. Mind how you reject me, Peter. Haven’t I told you that I burn with a ‘hard, gemlike flame’?”
As a matter of fact, he had. He had told me the first night that we had dined together and in that same mocking tone. He had said that most people saw only the “brownstone front” side of his nature, the austere, stiff, conservative side, but that there was another, a truer side, a romantic, loyal, idealistic one. This was what he meant when he quoted Walter Pater, but the disdainful smile that accompanied his phrase made me wonder if any gemlike flame within him had not been smothered or at least isolated so that it burned on invisibly, a candle in a crypt.
“Well, some of us have to do more than burn for a living,” I was saying, rather crudely, when looking up I saw Neddy Bane crossing the square alone.
“Why, it’s Neddy Bane!” I exclaimed.
Clarence looked up too, immediately alarmed at the prospect of a stranger.
“And who, pray, is Neddy Bane?”
“And old friend of mine,” I said promptly, feeling for the first time that he was. “We went to school and college together. Let me ask him over, Clarence. You’ll like him.”
“Yes, why don’t you do that?” he said in a dry, suddenly hostile tone. “But if you’ll excuse me,” he continued, glancing down at his watch, “I think it’s time that I was on my way.”
“Now, Clarence, wait. Don’t be rude.” I put my hand firmly on his arm. “It’s not that late.”
I turned and waved at Neddy, who stared for a moment and then smiled and started toward our table. It was suddenly important to me that Clarence should make this concession. The sight, as he approached us, of Neddy’s friendly smile made me feel that the last three evenings had been a lifetime. It was as if I had been locked in a small dark library with the windows closed and Neddy Bane, of all unlikely people, was life beating against the panes.
“Neddy!” I called to him. “How are you, boy? Come on over and drink with us.” And as he came up to the table I put my hand on Clarence’s shoulder. “Do you remember my cousin, Neddy? Clarence McClintock?”
***
Neddy was my
age, about thirty-three, but he was not as tall as Clarence or myself, and this, together with his gay sport coat and thick, brown, curly hair, made him seem like a smiling and respectful boy at our table. He had large blue eyes that peered at one with a hesitant, almost timid friendliness, but when they widened with surprise, as they were apt to if one said anything in the least interesting, their blue faded almost into gray, the puffiness above his cheekbones became more evident and he seemed less boyish. He was weak, and he was supposed to be charming, but I have often wondered if his charm was not rather assumed by people who had been told that it was a quality that went with weakness. He had been a stockbroker in New York with an adequate future, married to a perfectly adequate wife, the kind of nice girl of whom it was said that she would bloom with marriage, that even her rather pinched features would separate into better proportions and glow when love had touched her. Conceivably something like this could have happened had another husband been her lot. She wanted only what so many girls wanted, a house in the suburbs in which to bring up her children and a country club whose male members were all doing as well or better than her husband. But Neddy was constitutionally unable to find content in any regular life. He could not even commute. He would get to Grand Central and drink in a bar until he had missed his train and every other reasonable one and had to spend the night with his widowed mother in the city. He was fond of rather dramatic collapses, of simply lying back and doing nothing when he felt pressure, refusing to answer questions or to give explanations, and his poor wife, lacking the maturity or the understanding to be able to cope with him, gave vent to her deep sense of injustice that he was not as other husbands and nagged him until he walked out on her and the children and fled to Europe.
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 17