The Humphrey Kanes went to Palm Beach every winter, but this year they had gone early, and Gilbert’s mother with them. Had she badgered Heloise into advancing the date on some plea that Humphrey should escape the unusually low temperatures of the season? And could Olive have known of that? At last he ventured a reference.
“There’s someone I’d love to have you meet when she gets back to town.”
“I know. Your aunt. I’ve heard of her fabulous charm. I’m terrified she’ll find me a hayseed.”
“You? How ridiculous! She’ll delight in you.”
“I doubt that.” And now, for the first time, she gave him an appraising glance, a look that seemed to be asking just how far, after all, they had come. “I rather fancy she may tell me that she wants her nephew back.”
“Has he been away?”
“I hope so.”
“Far away?”
“I’m hoping that too.”
He smiled, took her hand, which was resting on the table, and held it a moment. “Heloise can have him back only if you come with him.”
She didn’t return his smile. “Do you mean a package deal?”
“Maybe something like that.”
“Oh, no.” Her headshake was firm. “I wouldn’t share you.”
“What a funny girl you are! I have no idea what you feel about me. Am I just the suave older man with whom it’s fun to talk about art and such things over a good meal, or am I—”
Her interruption was sharp and definite. “Don’t ask me that, Gilbert. Don’t ask me anything like that. Wait until you’re very sure about your own feelings. I don’t talk about mine because if I let them out of the bag, I might not be able to put them back. I warn you: I can be a violent woman. When I care, I care a lot. But I don’t throw myself at anyone. No one gets what he hasn’t asked for.”
He winced. “Couldn’t you put it just a wee bit more romantically?”
“No, Gilbert, I play fair.”
He was a good deal put off by this and didn’t call her for two days. But then in the middle of a snowy afternoon, as he was sitting over his drafting board, the idea suddenly and shockingly presented itself, as if in huge black capital letters—right there between his staring eyes and his drawing of a wing to a bathing pavilion—that if he let this girl go, he might never, never find anyone to match her. For where in the name of matrimony was he going to encounter the combination of so fine a mind and so fine a body with such extraordinary sympathy and so unprecedented an interest in his own silly self? True, she had warned him she could be violent, but what did that mean except that she was capable of jealousy, and why should he ever have to give her cause for that?
He telephoned her at her office. “I want to marry you,” he heard himself blurt out.
A long silence ensued. “I’ll tell you what, Gil. I’m going to Palm Beach tonight on a big job. The house is vast, and I’ll be there at least two weeks. That should give you time to think this over. In the meantime I shan’t regard you as in the least committed. We can talk when I get back.”
Why was it, he wondered afterwards, that he was suddenly grateful for the delay? Was it anything more than the last desperate reassertion of the doomed bachelor within him, the squeaking prayer for one more chance?
***
Two days after Olive’s departure Heloise telephoned to say that she and his uncle were back. When he called on her that afternoon at his usual time, she startled him with her exclamation.
“I admired her!”
“Do you mean Olive?”
“Of course I mean Olive. She came to see me in Florida, the day before we left. Very good of her, I’m sure, considering how busy she must be with that ghastly pile of Mrs. Slade’s. She told me what wonderful friends you and she had become.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Oh, she didn’t have to tell me anything else. I’m not blind, you know. But I do think, in view of our poor old friendship, that you might have given me a hint of this grand amour of yours. I shouldn’t have felt quite such an antiquated slipper.”
“I’m sure Olive didn’t make you feel that.”
“But it’s just what she did do, in her own wonderful way!” He saw now that Heloise, the always equable, was actually shivering with anger. “It was really quite marvellous how many things she had going for her: youth and purity and promise. I could only clutch a rag around the nudity of my years. But, as I said, I had to admire her. All she had to do was stand there, like the Statue of Liberty—and I fear in time even her lovely figure will take on some of that solidity—holding up the lamp of the future to scan my poor features!”
“I can’t believe she said anything rude.”
“She didn’t. On the contrary, she was most polite. I am to be always welcome in the home of the new Gilbert Kanes.”
“She said that!”
“Not in so many words, of course not. We women understand each other. What she conveyed very clearly was the message that if I will be so good as to resume my role of venerable aunt, I may expect to be treated with respect and even affection, and be visited on family occasions.”
Gilbert was silent as he contemplated the bleakness of the prospect. Why were women supposed to provide the color in life? “And what if I don’t choose to go along with what you inferred were Olive’s terms?”
“Oh, but you must! She’s what is best for you. She’s quite right about that. And so is your mother. Everyone is quite right. You and I must bow to the inevitable. To the goddesses of the harvest and fecundity. To all that replenishes this poor old earth!” Her laugh jangled bitterly. “I must be like the man in the Browning poem. I can only plead for one more last ride together.”
But with this she rose and came swiftly over to him to stoop down and kiss him, for the first time, passionately on the lips.
The “last ride” was certainly a unique experience. It lasted ten days, during which Heloise came three times to his apartment at noon, which she called “the Manhattan businessman’s adultery hour.” She drew the curtains in the bedroom, preferring the semidarkness, as she was careful to explain, not because of her age but because she associated romance with twilight. She amazed him with her voluptuousness, with the ease and grace of her performance. Was it a performance, which she had for years been rehearsing in her imagination, so that, stepping suddenly on the stage of reality, she was an accomplished actor? Or was it some inheritance from her mother, locked away in safe storage through the years of a cold marriage and preserved intact for the day it was needed? She even managed to make their lovemaking seem the normal and always anticipated consequence of their long amitié amoureuse.
And yet. There was not only the guilt of his betrayal of Olive, in no way assuaged by her refusal to commit herself. There was his uneasy sense of being enmeshed in something a bit sickly sweet, something like a nineteenth-century French academic painting of a Roman banquet, with white robes slipping off the alabaster limbs of languidly reclining ladies. And there were moments in his office, leaning over his drafting board, his mind far from his work, when his cheeks would burn as he imagined in what language his young assistants might be discussing him: “They say the old coot can’t find anyone to fuck but his aunt.” And then he pictured his mother, as she had been when he was twelve, stalking majestically into his bedroom to catch him in the act of masturbation.
And the house he was working on. The rose-pink, colorwashed Baroque villa for the seaside in Boca Grande, a glowing echo of the Portuguese palace of Queluz, the future jewel of his Florida collection. Was it really beginning to strike him as something musty and faded, like a desiccated petal preserved between the leaves of an old quarto?
Olive called him at his office the day before her scheduled return. He was so startled by the sudden sound of her voice that he couldn’t imagine where she might be.
“Where are you? In Palm Beach?”
“No, I’m back. I came home a day early. I decided that I wanted you to take me to dinn
er.”
All he could think of was that he wasn’t ready to see her. Not at all ready. It was simply too soon, he thought with something like panic, much too soon.
“I’m afraid I’m not free tonight.”
“What are you doing?”
His mind was a cipher. “I … I have to work.”
“Then your mother was right!” Her voice was pebbly. “She telephoned me to come back.”
“Come back for what?”
“Come back to see what your old slut of an aunt was up to. I don’t believe for a minute you have to work tonight. You’re meeting her, aren’t you?”
“I am not!” he replied, in all honesty, but with a guilty emphasis.
“Then I’ll give you one more chance. Will you take me to dinner tonight?”
“I … I … well…”
She hung up.
He was distraught. There was no question of any more work that day. He went home; he went out again; he roamed the streets. The image of Olive had now become a Diana, bold, beautiful, flashing-eyed, fleet of foot, with tight firm flesh and a bow and arrow, ready to seek a noble prey. Had he lost her forever, this wonderful creature, through his own weakness and folly? In his desperation he called on his mother.
“Why did you tell Olive to come back? Do you realize you may have destroyed my one chance for a happy marriage? What devil in you makes you frustrate your own plans?”
“I knew exactly what I was doing. And I’ll try to make things right for you if you’ll give me your word never to see Heloise again.”
“Never?”
“Except of course as an aunt. And only when your uncle is with her.”
He stared in astonishment at those snapping black eyes. How could she possibly have learned what was going on? Did she and Heloise discuss such things? Did he know what women talked about?
“I’ll have to see her once more. To tell her what I’ve promised you.”
“Just once? Your word of honor?”
“My word of honor.”
“Very well. I’ll see what I can do with Olive. But it isn’t going to be easy.” She cast her eyes to the ceiling in mute appeal. “Men can be such asses.”
Gilbert found his uncle alone when he called the next day, in the room where he was always received by Heloise, and there was no evidence of tea things.
“Sit down, Gilbert. You will agree that I have been a most tolerant uncle. I have at all times taken into consideration how much younger Heloise is than myself, and I have made allowances for her fancies, including her friendship with you. But enough is enough. You are no longer welcome in this house except at my express invitation. You will surely not wish to say anything more in this matter?”
Gilbert bowed his head in silence. Never had he so respected this gaunt, austere old man.
“Very good. We are both gentlemen. And men of the world. The rest, as Hamlet says, if under rather different circumstances, is silence.”
He went back to his mother’s house, not to reproach her for whatever she might have told his uncle, but to thank her. She brushed this aside.
“I think, if you call Olive, she just might agree to have dinner with you. Though one can never be sure with a girl of her quality and high standards. But if she does agree, I advise you to waste no time in proposing. And if she will have you, and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll offer to build her a modern house.”
3
A little more than a year after the weekend in Tuxedo Park, when Gilbert had taken the resolution to return to his old muse, he was walking around the still-unfinished structure of the Palladian villa on Round Hill Road in Greenwich which he had hoped would be his masterpiece. He had picked a cold Sunday morning in early spring, when neither owners nor builders would be present, to drive out from the city for a solitary inspection and assessment of his work. Yet he had invited someone to join him later that morning. He was hoping that his mother, who was weekending in the neighborhood, would dispel, after one dazzled glance, the murky doubts that had been gathering in a mind depressed since his recent sixtieth birthday.
A black limousine turned off the road and moved slowly, even a bit distrustfully, up the bumpy dirt drive and paused doubtfully before the house. When the chauffeur, evidently not sure that his elderly passenger wished to emerge, did not get out, Gilbert sprang to open the door and lend a hand to his mother. Mrs. Kane, even larger and more splendid in her mid-eighties, grabbed his arm firmly and descended slowly from the car.
“I shan’t be long, Fred,” she said to her weekend hostess’s man. “Just time for a look around.” She turned now to face her son’s work, straightening herself up for a good look.
The façade seemed to be aware it was under inspection. Gilbert fancied that it, too, was pulling itself to attention. The portico over the front door, supported by two Doric central columns and a pilaster on each end, was the only decoration in the simple red brick front with four green-shuttered windows, two squares on the second story and two oblongs below.
“The Villa Emo,” she said at last. “Well, you picked one of my favorites.”
“Would you like to go in?”
“I think I’d rather not clamber around, if you don’t mind. Let me just sit here and take it in.” She settled herself on one of the two marble benches that were waiting to be placed in the garden. “It does rather miss the great plains of northern Italy. But I suppose you must make do with what you have.”
Gilbert was faintly irritated. “I thought I’d compensated for that by eliminating the wings. Emo spreads them like a bird, as if to cover the countryside. Instead, I put up the separate guest pavilion over there.” He nodded toward the oblong one-story bungalow nearer the road. “I thought the main house by itself would go better with the more consolidated estate planning of Greenwich.”
“Well, it looks very well,” she conceded. “Any part of Emo, I suppose, would look that.”
“It isn’t Emo,” he retorted, frankly testy now. “Emo just gave me my starting point. You might say it’s a dialogue with Emo. A dialogue between my humble self and the great Palladio.”
“That’s just an architect’s fancy talk, my dear. It’s Emo to the life.”
“You mean it’s a copy!”
“Well, let’s call it a very fine copy.”
“Oh, Mother, that’s a terrible thing to say!” His heart seemed suddenly to be burning up inside, a quick spurting flame, as if from paper. In another minute it would be only ashes in a black grate. “And you always used to say that my greatest gift was knowing how to make an original statement out of an old idea!”
“I did. And it was. But that’s still just Emo. Why go on about it? I’m sure your client is delighted.”
“He is. But I’m not. If this house isn’t what I thought it was, after all the labor of the last year, it means I’ve lost my touch. Touch, hell! It means I’ve lost my genius!”
“You use such big words, my dear. Can’t you be satisfied with a handsome house and a contented client?”
“Must you damn me with quite such faint praise?”
“Well, did you ask me over to give you my opinion or to echo yours?”
He groaned aloud. Of course he had wanted her to confirm his own, or rather to convince him that his doubts were baseless. “Can’t you try to be a little more sympathetic when your only son discovers that he has fatally betrayed his truest inspiration? That he has wasted the best years of his life on what he could do with his left and not his right hand?”
“Those old villas were really everything to you?” she asked. There was at last a flicker of sympathy in her tone. “All the wonderful things you’ve done since, things that have given comfort and pleasure to thousands of people, they all go for nothing now?”
“No, they count. For something, anyway. But I used to have a theory that the god of art gave to a very few favored souls the chance to do something perfect. And if they were faithful to his trust, absolutely faithful, if they sacrificed everything to
it, he would reward them with a special ecstasy, an ecstasy unlike any mere mortal happiness, that made up for any failure in the eyes of the world, any poverty or degradation or loneliness.”
“You mean they had to be monks?”
“No, no, they could do anything they liked with their lives, so long as the art always came first. But if they betrayed the trust … well, woe to them. And^ now I want you to tell me something, Mother, and I want you, please, to be absolutely truthful with me. Don’t you sometimes regret that you didn’t go on the stage? No matter how small a career you’d have had? And no matter what it might have cost you in the way of family?”
Mrs. Kane seemed now to enter into his mood. She stared blankly ahead of her, as if she were seeking to recall something. “Do you mean,” she asked in a different tone, “that if I could see the young Thésée approaching me across the boards, his mind bent only on putting behind him as fast as possible a vexatious interview with an importunate stepmother, and if I could raise my arm to greet him, to delay him, to make him stay some little while if possible…?”
“Yes, yes!” he exclaimed eagerly. “That’s it!”
“And, rising from my seat…?” Here she slowly heaved her large body up and stood majestically straight. Raising her arm toward the door of his house, she intoned, in a voice richer and more musical than he had ever heard from her:
On dit qu’un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous, Seigneur. A vos douleurs je vais joindre mes larmes; Je vous viens pour un fils expliquer mes alarmes. Mon fils n’a plus de père, et le jour n’est pas loin Qui de ma mort encore doit le rendre témoin.
She stopped, shook her head sadly and sat down.
“Yes,” she admitted ruefully. “It would have been worth anything.”
“Then all you’ve had since hasn’t compensated!” he exclaimed, almost in a tone of triumph.
“It’s true. It hasn’t.”
“Which means that even I, your son, haven’t made up for it.”
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