Very Old Money

by Stanley Ellin

  “Oh, yeah, Just slow on the uptake, that’s all. Still I can’t feel too dumb about it, considering that this Amy person—we’ll discount those big brown eyes—is a long way from the usual Michael Lloyd cuddly little kitten type.”

  “Hey, don’t rush me. I haven’t even dated her yet.”

  “I have an idea it isn’t long coming,” said Rose.

  It came next afternoon. Classes had been dismissed when he went upstairs to Kindergarten-B; the room looked as if a cyclone had hit it, and teacher was clearing up the wreckage. When with a minimum of preliminary he proposed a friendly chat over drinks at Dicey’s she said, “That would be nice,” and so after they put the room back into shape there were drinks at Dicey’s—Coke on the rocks for her—and a long talk, both holding their own, starting with the shared experience of Gerald Mortenson, and then they adjourned to the deli down the block for sandwiches and more talk, and finally there was a directionless ramble, which somehow wound up at the door of her apartment. Where, disconcertingly, she suddenly went inarticulate, barely managing to get out a murmured good-night and thank you before closing the door behind her.

  Halfway down the staircase Mike stopped to think it over. Then he reversed course and went back up to knock at the door. When she opened it he said, “You didn’t give me any chance to sign off properly. I just want you know how much I enjoyed the evening. And if there’s nothing special on your calendar, how about a repeat tomorrow?”

  She looked doubtful. “Do you mean that? Really?”

  “Amy, you heard me say it. Why wouldn’t I mean it?”

  “Oh, God,” she said woefully, “because I talked so much. I never do that. I don’t know what got into me. And you were so quiet after we came into the building I knew I must have bored you to death.”

  “Not for an instant. Matter of fact, I thought I was coming on a little too intense.”

  “Responding. That’s different.”

  “It is not,” Mike said. “Besides, what led to my silence when we came in was contemplation of an age-old question. Do you kiss the girl on the first date?”

  That was the comic truth. He couldn’t recall having given thought to that innocent question since he first laid razor to some barely perceptible fuzz on his chin, but as he had followed her up that staircase the question had popped right up out of fuzzy-chinned adolescence. Kind of a time machine, this girl. Make contact, and next thing you’re back there getting ready for the junior prom.

  From her expression he couldn’t judge whether she was contemplating him or the age-old question. Finally she said, “Were you really wondering about that? And me?”

  “Yes. Yearning but insecure.”

  “Don’t be,” she said, and leaned forward to rather bumpily press her lips to his. Her kiss was at first tentative, then enthusiastic, and ultimately—by now they were tightly locked together with arms around each other—abandoned. Even exploratory, as were Mike’s hands, although carefully kept in bounds between those bony shoulderblades and that slim, hard-muscled waist.

  When they broke it up they kept their arms around each other. Amy drew back her face to focus on him. “Now I can tell you,” she whispered. “If you hadn’t come back, I would have had a dreadful night.”

  “So would I.”

  “Mine would have been worse.”

  “Look, darling, if you want to be competitive about it—”

  “No, truly. I have kind of a deep self-esteem. That makes it all the more painful when you think you’ve made a fool of yourself. But I didn’t, did I?”

  “Far from it. Meet me at Dicey’s tomorrow after school, and I’ll reveal just how far.”

  So it was at Dicey’s, lately geared to Upper West Side chic, that she had her first daiquiri. And her second, when Mike, having ordered a follow-up bourbon for himself, pointed out to her that he had found solitary drinking, especially in company, made him instantly melancholy.

  Then with joints well oiled they settled down in a Chinese restaurant where they alternated between gluttony and fond argumentation and, at unpredictable intervals, spells of moonstruck silence. During one of those spells it struck Mike that this whole thing was wildly improbable. Wildly. Consider that he had shared this stranger’s company for about ten hours of his entire life. And consider his hitherto rich contentment with his lot—a nice job, a gem of an apartment in the Village, a couple of devoted friends, attractive females to move in on occasion and provide all necessary gratification and sometimes even light housekeeping, the dandy little BMW he had virtually rebuilt with his own hands, a story published and a novel in the making—because contentment was the word for it. But now fixed on that happily flushed and slightly glassy-eyed face across the table, feeling the pressure of those long, bony, stockinged feet resting on his shoes, he knew that the contentment, however rich, had been watery stuff compared to its intoxicating replacement.

  Blissfulness, for God’s sake. An unnerving, gut-twisting blissfulness. For the first time in his adult life.

  But then, there had to be a first time for everything, no?

  Oh, yes. In fact a whole series of first times.

  They spent that weekend in his apartment on Thompson Street—three neat little rooms including eat-in kitchen and backyard view—and here he was given the evidence that she had indeed spoken the truth when she had earlier confided that she had never before been to bed with a man.

  Mike managed to take this without blinking.

  “Aren’t you even a little surprised?” Amy asked.

  “Why? I imagine there’s a considerable number of women who refuse to settle for whatever casual roll in the hay they’re offered.”

  “That is so true.” Amy regarded him meltingly. “But how many men know it? Not that I regard my virginity—or any other woman’s—as sacred, that kind of nonsense. Funny thing in college, any time I did get an offer, even if the boy and I had gotten along so well previously, I suddenly found myself judging him very harshly. Seeing how callow he was, for all his fine airs. College boy self-assurance is very hollow really. Harvard and MIT self-assurance especially.”

  “Good thinking,” Mike said.

  As it turned out, when she settled down in bed it all went very much like that initial kiss in the hallway—a tentative warm-up, then enthusiasm, finally abandonment—although both days of the weekend were needed to obtain the desired results.

  Sunday at midafternoon—clearly satiation time—he raised himself on an elbow, brushing aside a couple of copper-colored hairpins to get elbow room, and studied her as she lay there, eyes closed, hair in disorder over her breasts. After a little of this pleasure he yielded to temptation. “One question,” he said.

  “Mmm?”

  “Was it good for you, too?”

  Her expression became all wide-eyed wonderment, an obvious put-on. “How can I tell,” she asked plaintively, “when I have no basis for comparison at all?”

  “Touché,” said Mike. “One more question. No fooling this time. How do you feel about giving up the nunnery and moving in here?”

  “Fine.”

  “Just like that? No doubts? No fears?”

  “None. No, wait. I’m paying rent in advance, and I’ve still got two weeks to go this month. I doubt very much they’ll—”

  “I’ll stand treat,” said Mike.

  She moved in next evening, and one month later—Thanksgiving Day—they were married. Afterward, they found that neither could clearly recall which one had first broached that idea. They finally agreed that since either might have been the prime mover, it was obviously an idea whose time had come. Maybe ESP. Whatever.

  The wedding took place in the home of Amy’s widowed mother—the longtime family home—in not quite Back Bay Boston. As the time had approached, Mike found that if he was supposed to feel pangs at the surrender of a free and easy past, well, he was sure as hell marching to a different drummer. The fact was that he had so far thoroughly enjoyed keeping house with this woman who made these n
ow close quarters just the right size. What did sometimes make him uneasy was the flickering concern that living this way was a little too much like living with their front door always open wide and her belongings stacked beside it, ready for instant pickup.

  That uneasiness was most acute after their occasional flare-ups. Of course, as they acknowledged each time peace was made, these battles were always brought on by the damndest, silliest kind of nonsense. They acknowledged it, made resolutions, clung together all the more closely now that good sense had prevailed. But, thought Mike, there was really nothing to keep her, during one of those bouts, from simply walking out of his life. True, she might agonize about it afterward, but that would be afterward. So never mind all those tales of woe told by divorced acquaintances, a marriage license did make a difference. Might not lock that front door but would at least push it shut and store the female luggage away in a harder-to-reach place.

  He saw the paradox in this, too. Not only did he, once the laid-back loner, cherish her because, like someone going off a ten-meter board without even a test bounce, she had confidently delivered herself to him, as the song goes, body and soul. Had provided him with what turned out to be the sweetest ego trip of them all. Thus he loved her all the more because she loved him, and she loved him all the more because he loved her and so on and so on, and that took care of all the classical versifying about unrequited love. Mark it unrequited self-pity and shove it.

  Therefore, Mike asked himself, why this worry about her breaking up the menage, that unlikeliest of events the way things were going? Well, call it a case of semantics, but maybe it was that word menage. It had an unpleasantly temporary sound to it.

  When it came out that she shared this line of thought that settled it, though neither was ever clear about who first came up with the word marriage. But of course that was the word.

  They drove to Boston that Thanksgiving morning with Rose DelVecchio as guest and passenger, and an hour before the ceremony first met each other’s parents. They had talked endlessly about their parentage and childhoods, so Mike was not surprised to find Mrs. Belknap barely camouflaging an innate biliousness of spirit with a too-sweet manner and at least as wary of him as he was of her. The two older brothers also lived down to advance notice, prosperous, unimaginative, and condescending clods, both yet unmarried, both with a fund of merry tales about the kid sister’s infinite gaucheries.

  Still, there was no mystery about how anything like Amy had come to flower in this arid soil. She had early provided the answer to it by her worshipful descriptions of her father, now six years in the grave. A merchant mariner—a ship’s captain, no less—a towering redhead, chillingly sullen and uncommunicative in the company of a verjuiced wife and loutish sons, he had given himself only to his daughter, his one tall, redhead progeny. Home for a few weeks at a time between voyages, he’d silently apply himself to home repairs, waiting each day for Amy to return from school, and would then become doting father, best friend, Olympian deity.

  “Books,” said Amy. “He was mad about them. Evenings, starting when I was about seven or eight, he’d come up to my room and read to me. Oh, God, that beautiful deep voice. And no baby books either. Moby Dick was the very first one.”

  “You couldn’t have understood much of it at that age,” Mike commented. Foolish of him, he knew, to be jealous of the late Captain Eli Belknap, but willy-nilly he was.

  “I understood enough,” Amy said. “At the very least I got the music. And then when I was like about ten or eleven he turned me on to Dickens and Thackeray and—”

  “Thackeray? Even at eleven, sweetheart, even at a terribly mature eleven—”

  “Vanity Fair. I loved it. I went around being Becky Sharpe for months. My role model.”

  “Oh, boy, did you miss the mark,” Mike said.

  Anyhow, there it was. His Amy had been molded for him by a father who not only cherished her but respected her and let her know it. Just the father. Once you met the mother and brothers, there was no question about that.

  And for the first time Amy met his folks and, after sizing them up, decided there would be no problem here. In turn, his folks, no doubt fearing that what their Greenwich Village son would offer them was a vampire in black leotard and with opium pipe in hand, were patently relieved to find that the reality was this lanky, nicely mannered schoolgirl.

  Thomas Lloyd got his son aside to give him the consensus. “Mom and I think you’re a lucky man, Mike.”

  “That I am.”

  “How old is she anyhow? She can’t be as young as she looks, can she?”

  “Almost twenty-two.”

  “Oh. Nice age. Just about right. This was all pretty sudden, wasn’t it? You know, Mom wishes you’d keep in touch more.”

  Meaning that both wished it, but Dad, as usual, was laying it on Mom. And the reason for their only child not getting in touch more—it was the same reason for this kind of talk making that child so uncomfortable—was, Mike knew, his own sense of guilt.

  Unnecessary guilt at that.

  In his youth Thomas Lloyd had inherited the dairy farm outside the town of Spruce Pond. Eight hundred acres free and clear, three dozen high-production Holsteins, a few thousand high-production Leghorn hens, a going concern. What was left of it in Mike’s youth were eighty mortgaged acres, a dozen Holsteins, a few hundred hens, a losing proposition all the way.

  So Mike had cut out and headed for college in Boston and a career in New York, feeling a lump of guilt in the Adam’s apple whenever he was moved to drop a line to the folks or phone them, or, most acutely, when he was in their presence. Crazy to feel the guilt when, after all, the folks had backed his decision all the way, but there seemed no antidote to it.

  None. Not even the realization that they now stood in awe of him. When his story had been published in Harper’s—it was about a farm boy who in sorrow knows he must remove himself from a dying yesterday to a promising tomorrow—when the story was published, so his mother confided, Dad had ordered two dozen copies of the magazine to hand out to their circle. Didn’t just hand it out either; insisted it be read to the last word, it was that good.

  Heartwarming, touching, whatever, it made the guilt even worse.

  Now he looked at his father knowing that the shadow of the old farm hung over them both. Six generations in the family, and that would be the end of it. Continuity fractured, the past wiped out. He tried to see his father and mother nested in some shiny, superefficient little Florida apartment, and it made a depressing picture. He said, “Solve the hired-man problem yet?” because that problem unsolved certainly put Florida right up front in the picture.

  “Solve it how?” his father asked. “With them useless high school dropouts? You saw it coming, Mike. Small farm’s got to be either a rich man’s hobby or a bad joke. Anyhow, the house is kept up nice, so I’ve been wondering—”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re off Christmas week. Any chance of you and Amy coming up for that week?”

  “We’ll be there,” Mike said. It had been two years since his last visit to the old homestead. “Amy’ll like it.”

  “Looks like the kind of girl who might,” said his father.

  There was a wedding lunch and Thanksgiving dinner combined, and immediately after it, stopping only to see a teary Rose DelVecchio onto the New York shuttle at Logan Airport, the bride and groom drove up to the Laurentians for a honeymoon weekend of skiing where, it turned out, the bride proved more adept on the slopes than the groom. What portended a bright future for the marriage, as the groom pointed out, was that, unlike every other male on the premises, he didn’t in the least resent her superior talent, and so convincing did he make this that he almost believed it himself.

  And they did go up to Spruce Pond for Christmas week, and Amy did like it, including the Christmas morning service at the old Congregational church followed by a sweaty stint in the church kitchen along with the rest of the ladies making ready the big Christmas Day dinner.

/>   “I think I shocked them,” she confided to Mike that night. “I asked about getting some of the men in to help, and they said very kindly, well, they’d just as soon not have any men cluttering up the kitchen.”

  “Menfolk,” Mike corrected. “They must have said menfolk.”

  “That’s right, they did. But you share our housework without either of us mentioning it. What I wonder is, if you were raised in this Spruce Pond atmosphere, why aren’t you a male chauvinist pig?”

  “You know, I never thought of the possibilities. Now that you mention it—”

  “Forget I mentioned it,” said Amy.

  Euphoria time.

  Until that week before the Scoville-Lang Easter holiday break when the roof fell in. Four kids caught pushing Quaaludes of all goddam poisonous stuff, the proper penalties exacted, and then the double-cross by headmaster George Oliphant. No suspensions, said George, no penalties. A stern lecture, a gentle Christian forgiveness, that was the medicine in this case.

  “No good, George. We can’t let a set of success-happy, coke-sniffing parents make up our rules.”

  “Michael, in running an institution like this there are practical considerations which—”

  “Parental clout? And you don’t think all our kids won’t understand you’re making a joke out of me and the rules? In that case—”

  “Yes, Michael?”

  “Then this isn’t the place for me anymore. It can’t be.”

  That was it. Almost ten years at Scoville-Lang, then suddenly no more Scoville-Lang.

  Rose DelVecchio was furious at him. “You idiot, you hand him an ultimatum like that when he’s looking to trim the faculty budget? Now he can replace you cut-rate and be a real hero to the board.”

  “I wish him the best, Rosie.”

  “He won’t wish you the same. And what do you think’ll happen to Amy now? That he’ll keep her around to remind him what a son of a bitch he was?”

  Still, there was a heroic quality to the deed those first few days. An angry outcry from some of the students and even a few of the parents. A petition—though eight of its thirty words were misspelled—presented by the students to their headmaster. Who, Amy reported, received it graciously, remarking that while some of the school community were not clear on the situation he was pleased it knew how to exercise its rights of petition.