Max and Sid set up their camp on a nearby hill, on the bare ground baked into hardness by the sun, where they spread their blankets and read Byron until it got too dark. Early in the morning they woke again, their makeshift beds soaked by the California mist. They took a bath in a pond, among frogs, after removing a dead mouse. Sid, whose arm hurt, threw in the towel before Max, who lasted for two more days before it became clear to everyone he was not a “chain man,” and he was demoted to pick-and-shovel work, the lowest job in the camp. A Mexican, a genuine one, took Max’s place at the chain.
Back home, Crystal was deeply worried. She fired off another “Max letter” of the kind that had become her specialty. Continuing her semierotic game with Max, she mentioned her intention to go on a date with Willie Linn, a strapping fifteen-year-old. “When I get back to Glenora to-night I am going out on the lake with Willie Linn. Isn’t that killing? He is six feet two and quite grown up in spite of his fifteen years.” And Crystal impishly likened her dealings with Willie to Max’s dalliances with one of his would-be girlfriends in Elmira: “My going with him reminds me of your little love affairs with Ethel Cooke. I believe the ages are about the same aren’t they?” There was plenty of innuendo in those sentences. While it was socially acceptable for Max to date Ethel, Crystal’s going out with a much younger boy would be considered scandalous, as she very well knew. But she wanted to provoke Max. In the same letter Crystal admitted she was fond of other men, too, among them, again, the persistent Mr. Rawlings and their mutual friend Fritz Updegraff, with his penchant for salty language like “By Gad” and “The Devil knows.”31
The problem became apparent rather quickly, and what Crystal went on to say served as a reaffirmation of her bond with Max: all these men were terribly unoriginal. Fritz, she said, “would have been altogether refreshing if he had not said the same things that he has said so many times before over again.” The implication was clear: the Eastmans were something special, more original, unfailingly brighter than the rest. Here is Crystal’s account of an outing with Fritz: “In the afternoon we went canoeing, finally landed on Pulpit Rock at about seven. We stayed there till about nine. It was beautiful—all the changing from daylight to moonlight. Fritz told two or three long stories—very interesting and one of them rather disgusting, and then we talked some.” Crystal then switched to the real business of the letter, reasserting her bond with Max: “Have you ever thought how few people are original thinkers, even in a small way? I have decided that very few people do any independent thinking. Now Mr. R[awlings] is a bright, rather interesting fellow and likes to talk seriously, but his ideas are perfectly conventional. He is perfectly happy in them, but actually, he can’t even take in or grasp an original or out of the way thought. For instance Mamma and he and I were talking once, Mamma said in some connection, ‘Why, people can be so self-sacrificing as to make perfect beasts of selfishness of everyone around them.’” Obviously, this is a typical Eastman thought, unconventional, against the grain, smart, funny. Predictably, Mr. Rawlings failed the test: “Then up pipes brother—says he knows a fine example of that—tells us about a cousin of his who was always doing things for people—she died—then they appreciated her—final sentiment—‘You never appreciate what people are until they are taken away from you.’”
One can virtually sense Crystal’s merriment rising, along with her wonder that anyone could actually be that stupid: “Doesn’t that seem to you a remarkable lack of thoughtful grasp,” she asks Max (and the beautifully tense way the sentence is constructed is revelatory), “a strong tendency to wander from the point in hand?” Mr. Rawlings was history: “He never lacks something to say and he thinks it is pat, but it seldom is, and no matter what interesting line of speculation or theory (those aren’t the words I want) you may suggest, he brings it back to the common place, to well worn platitudes, in his first remark.” Rawlings had wasted no time displaying his mediocrity. Since Crystal was on a roll now, poor Fritz became her next target: “Fritz is no independent thinker either.” The conclusion was inevitable: there really was no other man but the “boy I love best and like best in all the world.” Concluded Crystal: “Oh, it’s positively abject, the way I am fond of you!” The future belonged to the Eastman children, and Max’s prospective line of business seemed clear to her: “Real literature if you’ll only get at it and stick to it. That is exactly what I think. No exaggeration. You must feel it and know it yourself. I wish you would acknowledge it and glory in it, with some real purpose. Yours with great love and longing, Crystal.”32
But Crystal’s longing for Max was nothing compared to Annis’s, who was upset to no end about Max’s western adventure. Max himself regretted the escapade, which ended ingloriously with a night spent in prison in San Francisco for disturbing the peace, and he was embarrassed by how selfish he had been. His not coming straight home had created a barrier between him and Mamsey—only the shadow of a barrier but one that was real enough to linger in his mind, a reminder of the basic guilt he, the son of two ministers, would carry for the rest of his life.33
Things were soon back to normal again. In the fall of 1902 Max returned to Williams. He was taking courses in political science, government in the fall, economics in the spring, and he was enjoying “German 5,” basically a course devoted to the study of Goethe’s Faust. He was also reading Dante, with the help of an Italian grammar—this on top of French assignments and “a few chapters of Tacitus every week.”34 College had become exciting again, even for a slacker like Max. He was all in favor of Rousseau, he informed Crystal, as long as this didn’t involve having to get the book from the library: “If I had that book here I would be wildly enthusiastic over reading it, reading more than is assigned, but someway the process of getting over into the library and searching it out and getting settled down to read it seems a task vague and vast enough to overbalance any possible pleasure in reading it. I know it isn’t but I can’t persuade myself of it.”35 In a preview of his future interests, he tended to get more excited about the heroes themselves than about the heroic work they had done. When the writer and liberal Unitarian Edward Everett Hale came to preach at Williams, Max went to church and worshiped him instead of God: “I always do when they have a great man.” To Max, literature, too, was form rather than substance. It required not sincerity but talent. Not everything needed to be expressed: “If I could put it in a letter that I love you and think of you always, without quite saying it, I would be happy.”36 From that point of view, adhering to Mamsey’s expectations for the good life was not particularly difficult: a matter of “just simply up and plunging into the Rubicon—or rather swimming out—and then you are out once [and] for all, and dry right off.”37 Max had never felt closer to Annis than he was feeling now: “I believe Mamma and I would be almost exactly alike if we had lived the same life.”38
But Crystal’s very different way of approaching life increasingly caused him problems: “You give me a new eagerness to be perfectly honest, and open, and straight, with people,” wrote Max. “Your clear way of saying a thing is weighing on your conscience, and wanting to take it up and remove it, and never thinking that you can bend a little and let it slide off—O, it really makes me want to stand straight too!” Crystal was Max’s “angel of light,” the model of perfection he could dream of but not emulate: “You have never built up a mist around yourself, and that is why you always see right and wrong, and the rest of us can’t—even Mamma and Papa.”39
A model of perfection she might have been, but she wasn’t a perfect model. Max didn’t drink and had never done so, except once or twice, when he wanted to prove to himself that he could do without it and “that there is no battle.”40 Crystal, by contrast, liked to party. She danced and drank and stayed up all night, and when her younger brother criticized her for her behavior, encouraging her to open up to “the Divine Spirit, if you can believe in it,” Crystal gave him a taste of that honesty he normally valued so much in her.41 Even as she assured Max that he was “e
verything I could ask from a friend and lover” and that she loved him (“I can’t really tell you what I mean, but I mean much”), she made no apologies for her wilder side. The appeal of dancing to Crystal, apart from the intoxicating lights, the lateness, the strange conversations and, yes, the alcohol, was “really the attraction of the other sex,” the sheer sensation that came from being near men, “with the added delight of rhythm in motion and music.” The rhythm of dance music was a way of keeping the animal instincts in us at bay, of making sex civilized, “or fine or uplifting.” She knew that dear old terminally repressed Max wouldn’t like her for being so explicit, “because you don’t like people to talk of anything except beautiful things.” The fatal Eastman code of conduct, well known to her, too, was “perfect self control.”42
Crystal’s rebellion against that code had at least some effect on Max. Unleashing his wild side, in a manner of speaking, he purposely flunked an exam at Williams, taking pleasure in not knowing the answers: “I just enjoyed going to pieces on that exam, the wind was blowing in the back of my head, and I was coughing and sneezing and didn’t care and I didn’t put down lots of things I knew just on purpose.”43 Deep down, he agreed with Crystal that there was too much emphasis on the intellect in education and not enough on the body: “We are working against nature all the time with our ‘mind over matter.’” How could anyone be unhappy in a world that had Crystal in it, a “beautiful girl” to stir him up?44 Max even tried to jump-start his dormant love life by considering the prospect of falling in love with a girl he had met at an alumni dinner, where he had “managed to shine a little.” The girl did all the right things: she picked a bunch of violets for him and gave him a pin, which Max wore dutifully next to his heart for a bit. Yet there was something missing: “It doesn’t all work out as it might, I must confess.” What was wrong with him? It was quite upsetting that he felt nothing, as if he were observing his own life from a distance: “A girl sits down and talks to you on the steps for two hours and then gives you a bunch of violets, and it doesn’t fit on to Political Science and Logic at all, yet there is something wanting. I feel that I’m not quite up to the standard.” The girl left him cold. Everyone at college thought he had a “sunny disposition,” but in reality he was just covering up his feelings really well: “I’ve learned to let the storms rage underneath instead of on top.”45 Even when she partied, Crystal remained the embodiment of perfection for Max, a woman better than any he was likely to meet. That sentiment, incidentally, was shared also by the much less complexly wired Anstice, now an English instructor in the Philippines, from where he was sending passionate tributes to his “rabbit-girl” or “Bunny,” a girl he loved more than anyone else.46
While Max was procrastinating in college, spending money as if there were money to spend, and Crystal was dancing the nights away, Annis and Sam were living in virtual poverty, scrimping on food and wearing threadbare clothes.47 But Annis never complained. They had been too worried about Max this spring to find fault with him, she told Anstice. “He is more and more subject to those awful glooms which paralyse all effort and make him just ‘sit still’ as he says.” She wanted Max to work, but not for her sake: “I wanted him to give up college for a year and go to work, partly because of his debts, and partly for an entire change of thought and interest.” But Max easily persuaded her otherwise. “He did not want it, and it was encouraging to see him interested enough in anything—to argue for it. His eyes were so pathetic and beautiful.” If Max was too preoccupied with himself to even notice his parents, Annis didn’t mind. Crystal seemed forever ready to step in: “She is more and more an angel of light for us all. She takes such tender care of me that I’m sadly tempted to become a complainer, just because her sympathy is so sweet. I’m sure there never were such children as mine!” Note that Annis used the same phrase about Crystal that Max had used.48
Crystal, Max, and Annis Eastman had, it seems, wrapped themselves in a cocoon of need—with the mother needing her children, the children needing the mother as well as each other—that protected them from the outside world, whose main fault was that it wasn’t related to the Eastmans. Their letters became the medium by which these bonds could be reaffirmed. Anstice was at best an infrequent participant in their conversations, while Sam had long since removed himself from that tangle of needs and demands, burying his own desires deep inside himself, lavishing affection on his fields and garden instead. “He cannot dash off a letter as quickly as I can,” Annis had told Max early on.49 In the triangular relationship of mother, daughter, and son, Crystal, the flawed “angel of light,” seemed to model a way in which it was possible to be an Eastman and yet have fun, too. To Max, that was a dangerous prospect, not only but at least partly due to the fact that Crystal was his sister.
By the fall of 1903 Crystal was studying sociology at Columbia, surrounded by desirable men but also uncomfortably conscious of the fact that she was the only female in the classroom. She found reassurance in her continuing love for Max. Thank God for letters: “It seems to me that it is often possible to say the ‘real’ things in a letter, when it is perfectly impossible in conversation.” And she put her theory into practice, adding a postscript that was for Max’s eyes only: “I am sending you a note I wrote you about a week before I came home for Christmas. I sealed it and addressed it and then decided not to send it. I kept it, hoping for a time when I could. You see, I was afraid you would feel it too intimate a thing to say even in a letter . . . It is true what I said in the note, and I want you to know it and feel it. You needn’t mention it ever.” And here was Crystal’s note: “Boy, I have just picked out your letters from the pile of received and answered ones, and read them one after another in the order that they came in. I am so filled with the joy of loving you and the sweet happiness of knowing that you love me, that I must tell you. I could give a hundred reasons why I like you. But my love for you is too big and overwhelming to explain. I think it is a glad mystery, connected with God and infinite love. I hope we can both be better and stronger for the power of it.” Crystal added, “Don’t let anyone see this, will you?” She must have felt that attaching divine meaning and purpose to her feelings for Max, as her mother once did when writing to Sam, would render them respectable, and yet she also knew they weren’t—hence the sealed, never-to-be-spoken-of note.50
For Max, though, the pressure coming from his family finally proved too much. Plagued by mysterious nerve pains, a modern version of Henry James’s “obscure hurt,” he took a break from college and stayed home. The family would not have been able to pay for both Crystal’s and Max’s college expenses anyway. Wrapped in a steel brace prescribed by the orthopedist Dr. Gold-thwaite, Max helped out by tutoring a reluctant Elmira boy. He also participated in an amateur production of Charles Dickens’s Cricket on the Hearth, where he confused the emotions of his character with his own lustful longing for his costar, Gretchen Fassett.51
Max returned to college the following year, his mind restored but his body still hurting for reasons not clear to him or his doctors. Much to the dismay of Ralph Erskine, who had always consoled himself with the thought that at least his musical skills were superior to those of his dazzling classmate, Max had meanwhile learned to play the piano and surprised everyone with a beautiful rendition of a piece by Edvard Grieg.52 Crystal now took her turn at living in Elmira. She had accepted a teaching appointment at the Elmira Free Academy, though she kept her independent ways: dating men, taking singing lessons, smoking cigarettes, and leaving for weekends in New York City, where she had “a man at hand all the time.” And she developed a taste for Greenwich House, a place full of “cranks and reformers,” a haven for all self-respecting radicals new to the country. She was also dreaming about living jointly in New York City with Max: “I doubt if I should care to ever see another man.”53 As Max settled into a state of semi-invalidity, Crystal never ceased to encourage him: “Persist in thinking of yourself perfectly well only a few years ahead.” In her eyes, Max was de
stined to be a preacher or a writer: “You have beautiful true thoughts, you can write and speak, you are good and yet a struggler—and above all you understand. Don’t you see that all those things should make a great preacher and minister of you?” It will be, she concludes, “something to work for,” even if the road to success was paved with disappointments.54
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