“You’re not forgetting that I’m a working man, are you?”
“My beautiful boy, isn’t it precisely the thing that I am remembering? In the great world, you must learn, there’s no difference between work and play.”
I had few moments those days to think of myself and where I was going. If I worked three nights a week, I was in a black tie others, and when I took Sylvia home after a stop-off at my flat I was so tired as to sleep a dreamless sleep. Yet there was a kind of narcotic in my busy-ness. I liked my work; I liked meeting important people in gilded dining rooms; I liked making love to Sylvia. Was I falling in love? I do not think in that period I often asked myself the question. Perhaps a man is not so apt to ask it if the woman doesn’t.
The office was much amused when a photograph of me dancing with Sylvia appeared in Women’s Wear Daily. But if my reputation soared with the stenographic staff it did not do so with the sardonic Douglas Hyde, who spent such evenings as he could spare from his law labors with his wife and six young children in their house in Scarsdale.
“I see we’re moving in the highest society,” he observed caustically.
“We can’t all stay in Dullsville. Some of us have to get around.”
“And I note there’s a big do at the St. Regis Roof tonight. No doubt you’ll be there.”
“As a matter of fact, I shall.”
“Why not? I can take over the closing dinner for Ace Investors.”
I saw that Douglas was not being wholly humorous. He believed that I should be at that dinner. In a sudden fit of compunction, and feeling, too, that Sylvia and her friends were beginning to take me a bit for granted, I decided to change my plans. I called Sylvia’s office and told her secretary that I had to give out of the St. Regis party. It was ominous that she did not call back.
When I rang her the next morning she refused to pick up the telephone, and her secretary gently chided me.
“I’m afraid we’re mad at you, Mr. Service. Where were you last night?”
“I had an emergency at the office.”
There was a pause while she consulted Sylvia.
“Mrs. Sands says you may be forgiven if you meet her for lunch at twelve-thirty at the Amboise.”
“But she knows we have a firm lunch today … Wait! Okay. Tell her I’ll be there.”
At lunch Sylvia was benign but firm.
“There’s one thing, my dear, you must get straight. This evening life I’m arranging for you is a serious thing. I grant that the people whose parties we go to would not hesitate to throw you over if business or even pleasure interfered. But they do not expect to be thrown over themselves. For any reason. That’s the difference. The day will come when you can do as they do, but that day is not yet. And in the meanwhile you must stop telling people how hard you work. They don’t care. Besides, it’s the mark of an underling. A big man is master of his time.”
“Sylvia, darling, I appreciate what you’re doing for me, believe me. But sometimes I think you don’t understand that what really builds up a law practice is expertise and hard work.”
“Of course I know that. Do you take me for a complete ass? But just look in Martindale’s at the number of lawyers swarming up and down this skinny island. Do you think I can’t find a dozen experts ready and willing to take on any job that Robert Service can handle?”
“I’m afraid you can.”
“Very well, then, face it. Getting the business is half the job. Unless you’re such a wizard the whole world flocks to your door. You’d be surprised if you knew how many queries I’ve already had about you.”
“Really? And what do you say?”
“That you’re the best—but very expensive.”
“With all due respect, I haven’t noticed that any have come calling.”
“Give them time, honey. You remember Alva, the cosmetician? She’s thinking of coming to you for a will. And she’ll probably put you in it if you’ll only slide your hand up her leg under the table—well above the knee!”
“That old fortress! You wouldn’t have me do that, would you, Sylvia? Seriously?”
“No.” She laughed at my worried eyes. “But it’s important for you to know the effect you have on people. Otherwise you can’t use it. Admit I’ve been reasonable, Bob. I haven’t overworked you, have I? You have plenty of nights for the law. Probably too many. And look at you. Fresh as a daisy!”
As I looked at her, so smoothly smiling, so relaxed, perhaps so happy—how did I know?—and yet still so aware of where she was and who else might be at what table, so eager to look after my wants, my needs, my soul—why not?—I felt I was a churl not to meet her terms.
“I’ll be good,” I promised. “Only let’s order. I have to be back in the office.”
“Leave it to me,” she said, catching the eye of the headwaiter. “You’ll be out of here in exactly thirty-five minutes.”
13
IN THE SHORT TIME that these things take in our culture, Sylvia’s and my lives began to blend into domesticity. On weekends we would take our children to walk in Central Park. I was not at all sure that Audrey and Sally liked Sylvia, but they were certainly intrigued by her. She seemed to make no effort to gain their affection; she treated them with the same calm, mildly amiable objectivity that was her manner with adults. But I thought I could glean the secret of her success in that she never asked them a perfunctory question. When she sought an answer to something she gave every appearance not only of wanting it but of insisting on getting it. Children do not like to feel their time is being wasted. My daughters respected Sylvia; they may even have been afraid of her. She showed none of the vulnerability of needing to be loved by children that children can smell as sharks smell blood. I was actually proud of her, noting that when we walked in the park, Audrey and Sally held themselves as straight as she did.
Sylvia’s son, Tommy Sands, was a beautiful, delicate and enchanting child of ten, very blond and pale, who seemed to have no Hamlet complex. On the contrary, he was inclined to take my hand on our strolls instead of his mother’s. Obviously the poor child was dying to have a daddy like his friends, and he saw no reason that I should not do. I was charmed, of course. In some ways I felt closer to the gravely confiding Tommy than to his sometimes impenetrable mother.
One Saturday afternoon when I took the girls back to Alice’s apartment, she sent them to their room and invited me to have a drink. Alice was wearing an unfamiliar air; she seemed determined to be bright, cheerful and, well, I guess polite.
“There’s something I don’t quite know how to say, Bob.”
“About some man you’re seeing?” I was startled at the instant grating of jealousy in my tone.
“Why no, not at all,” she retorted, surprised. “It’s quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. Of course, I’ve heard that you were going about with Mrs. Sands. Naturally, the girls have told me, and—”
“I hope they were polite about her.”
“Very polite, Bob. Don’t be so on the defensive. Nobody’s objecting to your seeing Mrs. Sands. After all, when I walked out, I could hardly expect you to live like a monk. No, what I’m trying to tell you is that if you and Mrs. Sands find me an obstacle, I’m perfectly willing to get out of your way.”
I looked darkly at those candid eyes. For a minute I did not know what to do with the anger that I felt jumping about inside me. It was as if I had risen to make a public address and found that somebody was trying to pull my pants off. At last I arose and walked to the window. When I felt in control of myself again I asked, “You’re trying to tell me you’ll give me a divorce?”
“If you want one.”
“And if I don’t want one?”
“You mean if I’m a convenience and not an obstacle? Perhaps even a protection to you? Poor Mrs. Sands! And I thought she seemed so nice.”
“You know her?”
“She came to see me. Didn’t she tell you? She thought we should have a talk because of Audrey and Sally. I considered that
very sympathetic of her.”
“Well, I’ll be damned! Is that how a man’s disposed of behind his back?”
“Don’t be absurd. She simply wanted to know if I had any pointers on how to handle the girls. If there were any particular topics to avoid, or good ones to bring up. She’s obviously a very intelligent woman.”
“Maybe you’re the one who wants the divorce,” I went on wrathfully, ignoring what she had said. “Maybe you’ve found a man you want to marry. I don’t suppose it’s one of your poets, anyway. Their tastes are not for your sex, are they? Or would they put up with a woman to share in the settlement they hope you’ll get out of me?”
Alice looked away, embarrassed by my crudeness. “I guess you’d better go, Bob. I was only trying to be helpful.”
I looked miserably around the little room where I had once been so happy. Or at least where I had thought myself happy. The chintz on the sofa looked faded, and the clock on the mantel had stopped. Alice was poor! She was poor and wouldn’t take anything from me. The stained old lithograph of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Winterhalter was evidence of her absence of taste, her total indifference to decoration. Sylvia wouldn’t have lived with it, even for a night. But it broke my heart.
“I wish I was dead,” I muttered.
“Bob, Bob, don’t talk like that!”
“I still love you! In spite of everything.”
“Please! You have a fixation about me. It’s because you can’t bear to fail in anything. You’ve got to develop some objectivity.”
“If you send me back to Sylvia now, it may be forever.”
“I’m not sending you back to Sylvia. I’m not sending you back to anyone. I want to find out what you are and what I am.”
“You want to find out why the hell you married me! That’s the long and short of it, isn’t it?”
Alice folded her arms across her breast with a sigh. “All right, let it go at that. I want to find out why the hell I married you.”
When I taxed Sylvia that night with her visit to Alice, she took a high stand.
“That’s the kind of thing women do, my dear, and you had better learn to leave it to us. One way or another we have to put your house in order.”
When I took Sylvia out to Keswick for a Sunday lunch with Mother and Dad, they behaved politely, but the occasion was still a chilly one. It was certainly not Sylvia’s fault. She showed an irreproachable interest in my parents’ lives and what they did, and never betrayed by a single reference the fact that she moved in more exalted social spheres. It was manifest to me that my progenitors disapproved of her, and it finally made me indignant. How could they be so absurd as to view her, a hard-working widow who supported her child, as a kind of whore of Babylon? Nor did I make things any better by touting, despite Sylvia’s veiled pucker of a frown, her professional accomplishments.
“In my opinion, Dad, Sylvia’s most remarkable work has been with institutions that had developed a pinkish look in the McCarthy era. She gives them a new look by getting their officers to build up a record of anti-communist statements made at periodic intervals over a span of time. When she’s through with them they might look to a grant from the John Birch Society!”
Dad was determined to be pleasant, but there was nonetheless a jibe in his response. “I guess she’s like the duchess in The Gondoliers who cleans up the lady of doubtful propriety. Is that it, Mrs. Sands?” And he proceeded to intone:
“Where virtue would quash her,
I take and whitewash her,
And launch her in first-rate society!”
“I wonder if it’s ever really worthwhile,” Mother observed bleakly, “to cajole or fool people into giving away their money.”
“Most of the cultural institutions of this country would turn their faces to the wall under that theory!” I retorted.
“Maybe Mrs. Service thinks that would be a good thing,” Sylvia observed in a tone that implied that she might agree with Mother.
I suppose there was an irony in my seeking to persuade Mother that Sylvia was a “nice” woman. As a boy I had violently resisted her and Father’s constant inclusion of their friends and neighbors under the porous umbrella of that loose and sentimental term. I remember how cynically I used to react to the rushing together of their windy feelings in their obvious desire to inculcate a cynical son with some iota of virtue, as when one would say to the other across the dining room table, with a meaningful glance in my direction, “Well, I don’t care what people say. I think the Ameses are nice people,” or, “Isn’t Mr. Cox the nicest man you’ve ever known?” or perhaps more simply and explosively and even more absurdly, “Aren’t people nice!” And I would huddle lower in my chair, a retracting turtle, and blink from one to the other of them balefully, defiantly, until Mother would say to Dad in a tone of deep concern: “I’m afraid what Bob needs is a simple lesson in Christian principles!”
It was never, of course, that I thought they were not nice or even that they were not sincere in deeming others possessed of this nebulous quality. What made me gnash my teeth was the way they insisted on seeing their oppressors as benevolent guardians: the partners of Dad’s firm who had extracted the last ounce of work out of him for a miserable stipend, my demanding maternal grandmother, who had lived with us until her dying day, making Dad feel a guest in his own home, and some of the richer Westchester neighbors who used Mother like a slave on their charity drives and never once asked the Services to break bread in their mansions.
And yet here I was, twisting my cap, so to speak, into a rag between my knees, like some tense sixteen-year-old bringing his first date to Ma and Pa in the hope of some dim expression of approval! I should have been enchanted to settle for a single “nice.” But did I get one?
“Mrs. Sands, I’m sure, is a brilliant woman,” was Mother’s ultimate concession, imparted to me after lunch while Dad was showing Sylvia his tiny rose garden.
Of course, she filled me with angry doubts. What mother cannot do that? Who was Sylvia, as the bard asked? Did she even exist? I had read the Canadian, McLuhan, who, so far as I could make out, maintained that truth was only what most people believed at a particular time. Thus, Alger Hiss could be guilty or innocent at different periods. Perhaps what McLuhan meant was that people’s ideas of what constituted a crime varied at different times, so that what wasn’t a crime in the 1940s became one under Joe McCarthy. Or did he actually mean that a particular act, say, the copying of an official document, happened or failed to happen depending on what people thought?
Sylvia, like one playing an instrument in an orchestra, seemed to be taking her cue from a conductor. But who was he? She seemed to have no opinions herself on how the piece should be played, or even to consider that some conductors might be better than others. Yet she never appeared weak or faltering; her very refusal to be involved gave her a certain force of character. In her heart she seemed to stand aside, even when her mind was most active. But do not hearts atrophy if they are left indefinitely in the wings?
And who was I to blame her? Was I not committing adultery, at least twice a week, as casually as playing squash at the University Club? Would I not be more interesting, at least to myself, if I underwent some throes of guilt? When I turned to an author whom I admire almost as much as I do Pater—Hawthorne—I could see that the incomparable beauty of The Scarlet Letter lies in Hester’s brooding sense of guilt, which permeates her vision of the town, the forest and the grim faces of her persecutors. Guilt over what? At having made love to a beautiful minister of God at a time when she was poor and abandoned, and believed her husband dead? No. Hester accepted the harsh judgment of her peers not so much as a judgment as a fact. It was hers; it was she; she had to live with it, for it had made her. And I was living without guilt, like Sylvia. Was that what made us both at times seem a bit dry?
14
I FOUND that I was becoming as close to Ethelinda as Sylvia, if not closer. The old lady wanted us both to be with her as much as possible,
and she asked us for weekends at the great white glistening villa on the dunes in Southampton, transporting us painlessly thither in her little jet, but she also wanted me to lunch with her alone, and she took to telephoning me at the office to relay bits of gossip she had just heard or funny stories that were often quite unclean. Sylvia showed not the slightest jealousy; on the contrary she encouraged our intimacy. She put me in mind of Kate Croy, in James’s Wings of the Dove, nurturing Merton Densher’s romantic friendship with the dying heiress, Milly Theale, in order that he might inherit her fortune and share it with Kate. But surely Sylvia was not planning to marry me to Mrs. Low! Ethelinda was splendidly preserved, but, judging from the few biographical facts I had gleaned, she had to be eighty.
I was getting to know her pretty well. She had great qualities, but she had weaknesses, too. If she ran her establishments as tautly as naval vessels, with ashtrays emptied almost as the first cinder fell, with cushions plumped up the moment a sitter rose, if she remembered the favorite dish and conversational topic of every guest of honor, if she studied her city politics and contributed to every honest candidate, if she toured slums and hospitals to check the effects of her bounty, she had also an avid ear for scandal and a near terror of loneliness. She would do anything to avoid a solitary evening. Although she was supposed to be a difficult target for a social climber, she made herself shamelessly available to anyone who offered to fill a stubborn vacancy in her calendar. “Oh, we mustn’t be stuffy; we must meet the new people,” she would retort if Sylvia protested that she was dining with thugs. And I also began to note that Ethelinda’s concern with maintenance was verging on the obsessive. She would redecorate new and shining chambers on the ground that they were “shabby.” It was as if she wanted to scrub and clean the gilded shells with which she covered her old bones until she could crawl into heaven itself.
“Think what her childhood must have been like,” was Sylvia’s comment when I mentioned this. “She can never have enough beauty around her to shut out the memory of all that dirt and squalor.”
Diary of a Yuppie Page 10