It was like Neddy that he had made no arrangements for divorce or separation or for his own or anyone else’s support. All this he left to his mother, who, far from rich, sent him a check when she could, at great sacrifice. He professed to be an artist, but he did condescend to take various jobs. He worked for a travel agency, for the French edition of a New York women’s magazine, as secretary and guide to a Pittsburgh industrialist. Now, he told Clarence and me, his money had really given out and he was going back to New York.
“Well, it’s been fun while it lasted,” he said with his disarming smile, raising the drink I had ordered for him, “and I’m never one to regret things, as you, Peter, ought to know. Peter has never really approved of me, Mr. McClintock,” he continued turning his attention suddenly to Clarence. “Peter is the greatest bourgeois I know. Despite his writing and despite his being over here. Fundamentally, his heart has never left Wall Street.”
I glanced at Clarence and noticed to my surprise that he no longer seemed bored.
“But you’re quite right, Mr. Bane,” he said seriously. “Peter isn’t really willing to give himself to the European experience. I’m interested that you see that.”
I could hardly help laughing at this unexpected alliance.
“Perhaps it’s because I don’t burn with a hard, gemlike flame,” I retorted. “Do you, Neddy?”
Neddy glanced from me to Clarence and saw from the latter’s quick flush whom my reference was aimed at.
“Do I? Of course I do!” he exclaimed. “And I’ll bet your cousin here does too. Every true artist or art lover burns with a hard, gemlike flame.” He turned back to Clarence. “Naturally Peter doesn’t understand. What would a novelist of manners, bad manners at that, know of the true flame? I can see, Mr. McClintock, that you’re a person who cuts deep into things. You have no time for surfaces. It’s the only way to be. Oh, I’ve batted around a lot myself, as Peter here knows; I’ve wasted time and energy, but none of that’s the real me. The real me is a painter, first and last!”
“Is it really?” Clarence asked. “But how sad then that you have to go back. People who can paint Italy should stay here. It’s the only way we can contribute.”
“Do you paint yourself, Mr. McClintock?”
“Alas, no. I’m a bit of a scholar, that’s all. I hang my head before a real artist.”
“But why!” Neddy cried. “The artist and the scholar, weren’t they the team of the Renaissance?”
They continued to talk in this vein, Neddy putting himself out more and more to please Clarence. I knew his habit in the past of trying to placate the kind of disapproving figure that Clarence initially must have seemed to him at the expense of familiar and hence less awesome figures like myself. I had never, however, seen him carry it so far. When he talked about painting he deferred with humility to Clarence’s amateur yet aggressively old-fashioned judgment and sought his opinion on recent exhibits. When he elicited the fact that Clarence’s last monograph, on the art collection of Pius VII, was to be published in Via Appia, he praised the discrimination of Princess Vinitelli, its publisher. I knew that he must have heard me describe Clarence in the past as my “rich” cousin, and decided that he was simply after a loan. What really surprised me, though, was Clarence’s reaction. At first he glanced at me from time to time while Neddy was talking to see if I shared his interest, but after a couple of rounds of drinks he forgot me entirely and kept his eyes riveted on Neddy. I had noticed on our previous evenings that he had drunk almost nothing, which was evidently because of a light head, for now under the influence of the mild cinzanos he became almost as loquacious as Neddy.
“It’s wonderful to find someone who really feels Italy,” he said, looking around at me again, but with a reproachful look. “I had begun to be afraid that the whole world was a Lorisan ball.”
When I glanced at my watch and saw how late it was and got up to go, Clarence only squinted up at me, his usually sallow features softened with what struck me as an air of rather smug satisfaction, and said that he and “Neddy” would sit on a bit and have “one for the road.” I left them together, amused at their congeniality, but slightly irritated at being made to feel like an elderly tutor after whose retiring hour the young wards, released, may frisk in the dark of a forbidden city. Really, I said to myself, with a sneer that surprised me, what an ass Clarence can be.
I didn’t see either of them again until I ran into Neddy a week later when I was getting my mail at the American Express.
“I thought you were going home,” I said.
“Well, no,” he said, looking, I thought, slightly embarrassed. “I’m not exactly. Not for a while anyway.”
“Where are you staying?”
He hesitated a moment and then stuck his chin forward in a sudden gesture of defiance.
“I’m staying with Clarence.”
“With Clarence!” I exclaimed. “In his apartment? Why, I thought nobody ever stayed with Clarence.”
“Maybe he never found anyone he wanted to ask,” Neddy said in a superior tone.
“But how did it happen?” I asked. “How did you ever pull it off?”
Neddy was like a child in his obvious pleasure at my interest. All his pores opened happily under the reassuring sunshine of curiosity.
“Well, after you left us the other night,” he said eagerly, “Clarence and I sat on and had a few more drinks. He became very reminiscent and told me about his mother and how dreadfully she had treated him when he was little. She must have been awful, don’t you think, Peter? Except rather wonderful at the same time.” He looked at me questioningly, afraid that his speculation was bold. I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, anyway, when I finally got up to go, just when I thought I was saying goodbye to him for good, he suddenly seized my arm and blurted out: ‘If you really want to stay here and paint, you can, you know. You can set yourself up in my apartment. I’m quite alone.’ Don’t you think that was marvelous, Peter? From someone who looks just as cold as ice?”
“Marvelous,” I agreed dryly. “And you accepted, of course?”
“I moved in the very next day! Wouldn’t you have?”
“What does that matter?”
I thought over what Neddy had told me, and two days later I called on Clarence at his small, chaste, perfect apartment. He received me alone, as Neddy was out sketching. I noted that the somber living room with its carved-wood medieval statues and red damask curtains had already been turned into a studio.
“I suppose you’ve been wondering,” he told me in his cool formal tone, “whether or not I’ve taken leave of my senses.”
“No, Clarence. I’m just interested, that’s all.”
“As a cousin or as a novelist?”
“As a friend.”
He looked at me suspiciously for a moment and then, nodding his head as if satisfied, proceeded in his own slow, measured pace to give me the story of what had happened. I had the feeling as he went along that his formality concealed a sort of defiance, a smug, rather cocky little satisfaction that he should have captured Neddy. It didn’t matter what I thought; I was simply a person to whom an accounting had to be rendered, a visiting parent at the school where Clarence was headmaster. He admitted, to begin with, that he had been terrified at what his unprecedented impulsiveness might have led him into. Never before, he assured me, had he assumed so much responsibility for a fellow human being. But Neddy, it appeared, had soon set his mind at rest. He had proved as docile and pliable as a well-brought-up child, not only applauding the quiet and orderly routine of Clarence’s life, but earnestly adapting it to his own. Clarence had found himself the preceptor of a serious and dedicated art student.
“What Neddy needs,” he told me gravely, “happens to be exactly what I can offer: order and discipline. I get him up every morning at eight and send him off with his sketchbook. In the afternoons he paints in here.” He pointed proudly to an easel in the corner of the living room on which stood an unfinished painting of a canal
after the manner of Ziem, colorful and dull. “In the evenings we relax, but in a tempered way. We dine out in a restaurant and drink a bottle of wine. But that’s all. Bed by eleven is the rule.”
“I see that it’s wonderful for Neddy,” I said at last. “But what, Clarence, is there in it for you?”
He stared at me for a moment and then shook his head thoughtfully.
“Well, if you don’t see that, Peter, what do you see? It’s what I have always waited for.”
When I walked back to my hotel I reflected with some concern on these words of his. I couldn’t help feeling a certain responsibility at having been the agent who had brought him and Neddy together. Yet who was I to say that it was a bad thing? I had seen Clarence before he had met Neddy and I had seen him after, and I wondered if I could honestly say that the irritation which I felt at his blind enthusiasm for so fallible a young man was anything more than the irritation that we are apt to feel when an outsider helps one of our family for whom we have given up hope. If such was the case my doubts were the doubts of a dog in the manger.
***
Having established myself on a friendly basis in Clarence’s new ménage, I was asked there from time to time, but by no means constantly, during the rest of the summer. It was apparent that both Clarence and Neddy were slightly on the defensive with me. The mere fact that I had previously known both of them without losing my head over either may have seemed an implied reproach to the extravagance of their mutual admiration. When two weeks passed in August without my hearing from either of them, I assumed that Clarence had carried Neddy off to Rome to avoid the pollution of the city by the influx of guests for the Lorisan ball. It was with surprise, therefore, that I received a card one morning from Aunt Maud, Clarence’s mother, telling me that she had arrived at the Grand Hotel and asking me to come in that afternoon for a drink with her and Clarence and “Clarence’s friend.”
Aunt Maud Dash, as she now called herself, having resumed her maiden name after the last of her marriages, had done me the dubious honor of singling me out from the other members of her first husband’s family on the theory that I was not “stuffy,” or at least, as she sometimes qualified it, not quite as stuffy as the rest. There was also, of course, the fact that I was comparatively young, male, unattached, and last but not least, a writer. When I came into her sitting room at the hotel I found her on a chaise longue, her large round figure loosely covered by a blue silk negligee, examining with a careful, almost professional interest a wide ruff collar that was obviously a part of her ball costume. Her hair was pink, a different shade than when I had last seen her, and her skin, dark and freckled, was heavily powdered. Propped up in her seat she looked as neat and brushed and clean as a big doll sitting in the window of an expensive toy store. There was nothing, however, in the least doll-like about her eyes. They were small and black and roving; they seemed to make fan, in an only half goodhearted fashion, of everything about her, even of her own weight and of the stiff little legs that stuck out before her on the chaise longue and the wheezing, asthmatic note of her breathing.
“Why, Peter,” she called to me, “you’ve got a corduroy coat! We’ll make a bohemian out of you yet.”
“Maybe it’s time I went home.”
She turned away now from the ruff collar and examined me more critically.
“Not yet, dear. Wait a bit. You’re almost presentable now. I always said there was a chance for you.”
“It’s what has given me hope.”
She snorted.
“Tell me about Clarence,” she said abruptly. “I know I can count on you. They say he has a boyfriend.”
“Neddy Bane is not exactly a boy,” I replied with dignity. “He’s my age. As a matter of fact I introduced them. Neddy’s wife used to be a friend of mine.” I hoped by this to change the direction of her thinking. It was a vain hope.
“Now look here, Peter Westcott, if you think you can put me off with some old wives’ tale at my time of life and after all I’ve seen—” She stopped as we heard steps in the corridor and then a light, authoritative knock on the door.
“Mother?” I heard Clarence’s voice.
“Come in, darling, come in,” she called, and the door opened to admit Clarence followed by a rather sheepish-looking Neddy. “How are you, my baby,” she continued in a husky voice that seemed to be making fun of him. “Give your old ma a kiss.”
Clarence bent down gingerly and touched his cheek to hers, emerging from her embrace with a white powder spot on his face that he immediately, without the slightest effort at concealment, proceeded to rub off with a handkerchief.
“And is this your Mr. Bane?” Aunt Maud continued in the same voice. “What sort of man are you, Mr. Bane? Are you as severe and sober as my Clarry?”
“No, but I try,” Neddy answered shyly. “Clarence is my guide and mentor.”
Aunt Maud looked shrewdly from one to the other and grunted.
“Are you going to the ball, Mother,” Clarence put in quickly, with a bleak glance at the ruff collar, “as the Virgin Queen?”
“Clarry, dear, your tone,” she reproached him. “But since you ask, child, I am. I’ve always liked the old girl.” She turned suddenly back to Neddy. “Do you believe in the theory that she was really a man, Mr. Bane? Nobody ever saw her, you know, with her clothes off.”
Neddy was fingering the red velvet hoop skirts of the costume spread out on the chair beside him.
“Oh, never!” he protested with unexpected animation. “You don’t think so, do you?” Then he appealed to her suddenly, with a rather sly little smile that I had not seen before. “You mean she was really a queen?”
Aunt Maud put her head back and roared with laughter.
“But I like your friend, Clarry!” she exclaimed. “Can I call him Neddy? I shall anyway,” she continued, turning glowingly from Clarence to his friend. “And you, Neddy, must call me Maud.” She nodded in satisfaction. “Perhaps you will be my Essex? I have a man’s costume, too. It’s over there in that box on the chest.”
Neddy glanced questioningly at Clarence and then hurried over to the box and took out the red pants and doublet. He stood before the long mirror and held them up in front of him.
“But they fit perfectly!” he exclaimed, and went back again to the box. “Oh, and just look at that sword! Gosh, Mrs. Dash, I mean Maud! Don’t you love it, Clarry? Do you think we could go?” He looked anxiously at Clarence.
I didn’t have to look at Clarence to know that he would resent Neddy’s calling him “Clarry,” aping his mother so immediately. He stood there primly, his lips twitching, like a governess who has been overruled by an indulgent parent. Then he turned on Aunt Maud.
“Why must you have an Essex?” he asked sharply. “Would you not do better to search among your own contemporaries for a Leicester? Or even a Burleigh?”
But she simply laughed, this time a high, rather fluty laugh that was just redeemed from silliness by its mockery.
“Because I want an Essex!” she said defiantly. “A young attractive Essex.” She winked at me. “Clarence is so absurdly conventional,” she continued, more maliciously. “He thinks one should only see people one’s own age. As if life were a perennial boarding school. But Neddy doesn’t have to be Essex, does he, Peter? He could be one of those pretty pages whom the old queen used to favor, tweaking their ears and pinching their thighs.” She threw back her head and gave herself up once more to that laugh. “Or even,” she added, gasping, “stifling them half to death in her musky old bosom!”
I could see that Clarence was beside himself. I could only hope that he would not interpret her laugh as I did, as a challenge to compare the relative improprieties of Neddy as an escort for her or Neddy as a companion for him. She picked up the ruff collar now and put it almost coyly around her neck.
“Don’t you think it’s a good idea, Clarence?” Neddy asked hopefully. “You don’t really mind, do you?”
“Mind?” Clarence snapped at hi
m. “Why on earth should I mind? You don’t expect me to decide every time you go to a party, do you?”
He got up and walked across the room to the little balcony and, going out, stood by the railing and stared down into the canal. Neddy was at first abashed by his sudden exit, but after I, at Aunt Maud’s bidding, had mixed a shaker of martinis from the ample ingredients with which she always traveled, he cheered up again. In a very short time he and Aunt Maud had discovered a series of mutual acquaintances and become positively noisy. I had to leave early and went out on the balcony to say goodbye to Clarence. He was still standing there, gloomily watching the line of gondolas arriving at the hotel bringing more and more guests to the hated ball. He hardly turned when I spoke to him, but simply pointed to the scene below.
“I warned Neddy about this, but he wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “All hell is breaking loose here.”
The very next morning he came alone to see me at my hotel. He looked tired and worn.
“I want to ask a favor of you, Peter,” he said gravely.
“A favor, Clarence? How unlike you. But go ahead, I’m delighted.”
“It is unlike me,” he agreed, frowning. “I am not in the habit of asking favors. I am sure you will be sympathetic when I tell you that I do not find it an easy experience.”
I hastened to cut short his embarrassment.
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 18