“I heard you telling Silas Hofritz that we’d be glad to come to his seventieth birthday party,” Bella noted in the car as they were returning from a dinner where they had met that particularly odoriferous developer. “When the invitation comes in, I suggest you tell Mrs. Olyphant to call his secretary and say you’d forgotten we were going to the country that day. That will show him we prefer a simple rural excursion to his great gala.”
Myron meekly accepted the reproach. “I thought as soon as I’d said it that I might have been going too far.”
“A man like that would at once assume that we weren’t the real Townsends. That we’d probably changed our name. He thinks his money can buy him anything, and it can, in time, but he’s got to put it up first, and plenty of it. That’s our job.”
“I’ll be more careful in future. What is lowlier than an unpaid prostitute?”
Bella ignored his question. She didn’t like him to be quite so cynical. “We may go to Mr. Hofritz’s next birthday. Or drop in for a drink and not stay for dinner. In the meanwhile why don’t you take him to a zoo lunch? Do the crocodiles ever eat each other? That might be his affair.”
“Yet he goes to Amy’s.”
“That’s different. Amy’s like royalty. She can afford to have anybody.”
Amy Bledsoe, who had become an intimate friend of the Townsends, occupied a unique position in Gotham. She had no claim to it in looks or birth. She was an elderly stout woman of middle-class Irish origin who dyed her abundant billowing hair a flaming red and wore large jewels that went oddly with her plain sensible countenance. She had been first the trained nurse, then the housekeeper and at last the wife and widow of Horace Bledsoe, the investment banker, who had left her the “big” half of his estate in a marital deduction trust, the balance going to his son and daughter by an earlier marriage. It was the opinion of those who knew her best that Amy had never been the old man’s mistress. She was shrewd, well read, big-hearted and full of sound common sense, and she gave widely and intelligently from her large income. But the peculiar veneration with which she was regarded by the New York social world sprang less from her generosity, which, after all, could easily be topped by multimillionaire friends who could give from principal as well as income, as from her robust character, from her virtuousness (to use a word they never would), from something anyway that made her a kind of saint in a desert that might have been tired of too many lizards and scorpions.
Amy gave generously to both Myron’s zoo and Bella’s gallery, but when she complained one evening, when he was seated on her right at one of her dinner parties, that her ability to support charities would cease with her death, an idea struck him, and he became for a moment quite tense with concentration.
“You mean because what you have is in trust?”
“Yes. It’s what they call a marital deduction trust. It all has to go to Horace’s children when I die.”
“Who already have millions.”
“And who are not renowned, I fear, for their philanthropy.”
“But don’t you have the power to appoint the trust principal?”
“But that’s just a technicality. The law made Horace give me that if the trust was not to be taxed in his estate. I promised him I’d never exercise it, and of course I never will.”
“Hmm.” Myron’s heart was pounding. He even found a moment to reflect that his new idea had made him the superior of his father and grandfather. “Tell me, Amy. Hasn’t the principal of your trust gone up in value since Horace’s death?”
“Oh, it’s more than doubled!”
“Then I suggest that your promise is limited to the date of death value. I can see no reason that you shouldn’t feel free to appoint the increase as you see fit. And I’ll bet Horace would have agreed.”
Amy’s mouth fell open as she stared at him. “Why, Myron Townsend, what a brilliant idea! I see what you mean. It’s as if I’d somehow earned that increase. Except of course I didn’t. The trustees are two of Horace’s most brilliant partners.”
“That makes no difference. They were working for you. You can simply add a paragraph to your will that you appoint any percentage of the trust principal that exceeds the value of the trust at your husband’s death to…”
“The Staten Island Zoological Gardens!” Amy exclaimed, clapping her hands.
Something cautioned him to restrain her. “Or in equal shares to the zoo and Bella’s gallery,” he added with a laugh, as if to make a jest of it.
“Of course, the children will howl.”
“But you won’t be there to hear them.”
“No, I’ll be in the special heaven reserved for the ultra-philanthropic!”
Was she laughing at him? It was hard to tell with Amy. But if she was serious, O gun at sea, O bells that in the steeples be, at first repeat it slow! Myron loved Emily Dickinson. He would raise a hundred million for his and Bella’s institutions! He almost regretted now having to divide with Bella. But if Amy were to consult with Bella about the plan, it would be as well to place a carrot under his wife’s more scrupulous nose.
And Amy was indeed going to discuss the matter with Bella. That was what she was now telling him, before she had to turn to the man on her left.
“I want you and Bella to stay on for a bit tonight after the others have left.”
3
Myron sat after dinner with Bella in an agony of apprehension, the last guest having left, waiting for their hostess, who had briefly excused herself.
“I think I’ve figured out the greatest common denominator of Amy’s group,” Bella observed pensively.
“Ambition perhaps? Satisfied ambition?”
“Is ambition ever satisfied? No, I think what makes them different is that they all speak so glowingly of one another.”
“Only when they’re here, though. The moment they’re out of Amy’s sight, they tear each other to bits.”
“So Amy’s is a place of suspended hostilities. That dreadful little new wife of Sam Spatz hadn’t the faintest idea who I was tonight, but she bent over backwards to be polite. If you’re at Amy’s, I guess, you can’t be nobody.”
“Isn’t it possible that they simply want to convince themselves that they really are what they only seem at Amy’s? Even the cultural crowd who are on the prowl for grants. Amy cleans them up! For a whole euphoric evening, they can almost forget the wear and tear of acquisition. Going to Amy’s for them is like going to church.”
“And what is it like for you and Bella?” Amy was standing in the doorway with a scolding smile.
“We don’t have to go to church,” Myron responded as he rose to greet her. “We’re already there. Acolytes at your altar.”
She crossed the floor slowly and slumped in the sofa by Bella, contemplating the empty chamber with a sigh of relief. “Thanks for staying on.” And she proceeded now to tell the expressionless but attentively listening Bella the details of Myron’s proposal.
Bella’s face still reflected nothing when Amy finished and sat regarding her inquisitively.
“Will you discuss this with Horace’s children?”
“No, because I know what they’d say. They’d say I had no moral right to do it. But I shouldn’t care what they thought if I was sure in my own mind that what I was doing was right. What would you do, Bella, if you found yourself in my situation?”
“If you put it that way, I have to tell you I wouldn’t exercise the power.” Bella’s tone was light, perhaps a bit self-consciously light. “Not even to deflect a penny from those already overendowed darlings. You’re perfectly clear that you wouldn’t reduce the principal going to them below its value at Horace’s death, aren’t you?”
“Oh, of course, that’s sacred!”
“And why? Because that was Horace’s clearly expressed intent. But didn’t he expect that principal to increase in value? Didn’t he spend his whole business life making money multiply itself? Didn’t he make his smartest partners your trustees? If he had meant you to gi
ve any of that anticipated growth to charities, wouldn’t he have told you so?”
“Oh, Bella, you’re wonderful!” Amy clapped her hands in evident relief. “Of course, you’re right as right can be. I have been so worried that maybe it was my duty to give some of that money to good causes. My duty to Horace himself! And now of course I see it would be a shocking breach of faith. Oh, my dear, I shall sleep so much better tonight. The whole horrid business has been taken right out of my hands.”
Myron was too shocked by the sudden slamming of shutters on so briefly glimpsed a horizon of shimmering beauty to say anything for a minute. He would need time to reflect on the matter. It was better now to make light of it.
“I guess this shows I’ve spent too much time with my animals. In the jungle one is less burdened with scruples. Everything eats everything!”
“And darling Bella, with her love of beautiful inanimate things, has the more delicate moral sense! Oh, how I see it! But I’ve kept you poor dears up long enough. You must go home now, and God bless you both!”
Their chauffeur was not separated from them by a glass, so it was natural enough that they should not speak of personal matters, but even so Myron felt sure that Bella was very conscious of the fact that they were not doing so. Even in their apartment they refrained. He simply offered her a cordial good night kiss before retreating to his own room. But then, on an impulse, he turned back.
“Bella. Are you perfectly sure that you gave Amy the right advice tonight?”
Ah, she had been waiting for that! Her eyes were fixed on his. “Perfectly.”
“You don’t think it’s better that all those millions should go to our beloved 200 and gallery than to two arrogant and selfish people, already millionaires several times over?”
“Better? Of course, it would be better. But is that our decision? Amy gave her solemn pledge to her husband. I wouldn’t urge her to break it to save our institutions from utter ruin!”
“Bella! How can you be that extreme?”
“Because, unlike you, I don’t believe that ends, however shining, justify means, however filthy. Because I’ve seen your eyes grow hard as agates in the last two years. It’s my fault, of course. I got you started in this game. But that’s just why it’s my job to pull you out.”
He gazed at her in dismay. “Amy was right. You’re as pure as a Ming vase.”
“And as hard. Go on. Say it.”
“And as hard.”
“Perhaps something was left out of my nature. I’ve always preferred beautiful things to ordinary people. But not, I hope, to beautiful people. And, oh, my dear!” She was actually appealing to him now! “I have thought of you as a beautiful person. I can’t bear to have you become an ugly one. Promise me that you won’t become an ugly one!”
He stared. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t go back to Amy and work on her to change her mind!”
“You think I was planning to?”
“Weren’t you?”
The heaviness of his sigh showed that he had given it up. “All right. I won’t.” He paused. “I’ll promise you that I won’t. And like Amy I won’t break it. Even, as you say, if our institutions should go to hell.”
And going now to his room, he decided that he had, after all, married a remarkable woman.
ATHENE
Goddess of the Brave
THE NORTHERN MIGRATION of financial business from the lower end of Manhattan had crowded at lunchtime the restaurants of midtown, and its clubs, once the seats of leisurely, drawn-out meals in quiet, dusky dining halls, were now jammed at noon with hurried, money-discussing eaters. When my law firm moved to Fifth Avenue in 1954 I found myself frequently lunching at the Yale Club and joining in the dark oak bar for a preprandial drink some old classmates whom I had not seen in years. It was on a midwinter noon of the following year that I encountered two of these, Fred Slocum, a psychiatrist, and Andy Ritter, a market analyst, gravely discussing a scandalous story about a third, Alistair Dows, which had just been revealed in a gossip column.
“You read it?” Andy asked gruffly as I joined them.
“My secretary showed it to me just before I left the office. She knows Alistair. We did a will for him.”
“Well, you’ll probably be probating it soon now. I know I’d blow my brains out if I’d done a thing like that.” Andy, small, sharp and brusque, had always been very much of a no-nonsense man.
“But would Alistair have the guts to?” Fred Slocum inquired. “Aren’t you begging the question?”
That, of course, was the point. The Amazon, a cruise ship, had caught fire in the Caribbean the month before and. gone down with considerable loss of life. Our classmate Alistair Dows and his wife had escaped in different lifeboats, but Alistair had saved himself at a heavy price. He was wearing a woman’s fur coat and hat. The story had just been broken by the writer of “Kiss and Tell” in the Evening Journal. It was such a classic example of cowardice that I could hardly believe it. It was not like Alistair to be so grotesquely banal. But it was perfectly true that, with his smallish figure and boyish face, he could have passed for a woman, and I had already learned that his wife had moved to her mother’s, though for what reason I had not known.
“I guess I was begging the question,” Andy replied, with a shrug. “I always had an idea he was rotten. Rotten to the core, we now see.”
“But, Andy, you can’t have known that,” I protested. “None of the rest of us even suspected it. Alistair was the skipper of an LST in the war. He was in the invasion of Normandy.”
“That’s like saying he couldn’t be a fag because he’s married and has kids. How do we know what went on on that LST? Don’t forget I’ve known him longer than you guys. We were at Saint Ambrose’s together.”
“And did he show a yellow streak there?”
Ritter wrinkled his nose as if I were being unduly technical. “He didn’t exactly show it, Jonathan, no. His guards were always up. But I could smell it out, as early as our first year there. He exuded a faint but unmistakable odor of decadence.”
I tried not to look as disgusted as I felt. Andy was like a bloodhound. I could well imagine that he had been one of those ruthless boys dedicated to the mission of uncovering the sore and tender spots of his classmates. I could see him padding back and forth, sniffing the ground with his wide nostrils, and then…“You must have a sharp nose. I never smelt a thing.”
“Oh, by the time he got to college, he was using a kind of moral deodorant.”
Fred, a peacemaker, moved to raise the discussion to a more general plain. “Courage is an odd thing. Is it really courage if there’s no fear? The ancients thought so. They believed true valor and fearlessness were the same. Sans peur et sans reproche. And they certainly didn’t think a pure woman was purer for having to overcome lust. But we still have a touch of the puritan. We feel there should be a struggle. I remember in the war waiting on an airstrip on an atoll with my medical crew for a damaged fighter plane to make a crash landing. The pilot who jumped out of that flaming wreck had a normal pulse! Was he a hero or a psychic curiosity?”
“Do you really suppose Dows had a struggle?” Ritter asked sneeringly. “I’ll bet it didn’t last more than a couple of seconds.”
“Well, whatever he went through, think what he’s going through now!” I exclaimed. “Can you imagine a greater hell on earth than having to face the world with that on your record? It will dog him to his dying day. His wife seems to have left him. His two daughters will grow up to be ashamed of him. His advertising firm will probably ease him out. What sort of image will he cast for them now?”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Ritter retorted sourly. “For Pete’s sake, the guy deserves anything he gets. He’s not only yellow as a banana. He’s a murderer, to boot!”
“A murderer?”
“There were women drowned in that wreck, weren’t there? And didn’t he take a woman’s place in the lifeboat?”
“You’d have to show
there was a woman on the spot who couldn’t squeeze into the boat because he was there.”
“There speaks the lawyer! I don’t have to show a damn thing. There were female corpses in the water, and he was rowed off dressed as one. That’s enough for me.”
Our doctor still wished to be objective. “If Alistair were my patient, I’d try to show him there’s no such thing as a permanent coward. There’s simply a man committing an act of cowardice at a particular time. That might liberate him from the damning label, at least in his own eyes.”
At this particular time, anyway, Alistair himself appeared in the doorway. His round pleasant face (we used to call it “cherubic” in college days) was paler than usual, which made his curly red hair seem redder, and his eyes exhibited a mood of sultry defiance. Spotting us, he came straight over and greeted us each by name in a flat tone that had none of his customary buoyancy.
Andy Ritter made no response, but simply picked up his glass and moved away. Fred Slocum responded rather too cheerfully; he gripped Alistair’s shoulder and winked at him, then glanced at his watch, announced with an assumed shock of surprise that he had to grab a bite at the buffet before hurrying back to his office, and was off. It was quite possible that in fact he was rushed and simply feared that any inquiry into Alistair’s trouble would entail too much time. I picked up my glass.
“If you’re not lunching with anyone, how about ordering your drink and taking it to the dining room with me?”
Alistair regarded me quizzically. “Are you being nice or just curious?”
“Both.”
“Good. I need to talk to someone.”
And indeed he talked right through lunch and afterwards in my office until late in the afternoon. I could justify my loss of working time on the ground that he was a client and that I might well be retained to handle a separation agreement between him and his wife, but my real reason for providing him with a needed ear was neither curiosity nor professional duty, but the simple desire to help in any way I could a friend of whom I had always been particularly fond.
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