Testimony and Demeanor

by John D. Casey

  Some of these carolers were good at their jobs. Some of them were intelligent. They were all comfortable in their style, which accommodated a good deal of knowledge. But it was accommodated only; knowledge now seemed to come to them as a guest who might behave well or badly, but who would leave and could be assessed: “Well, I rather liked him.”

  “Well, I did too, but I don’t think we ought to have him back.”

  “But he’ll do very well for the institute.”

  “Oh, Lord, yes. Just what they’re looking for down there.”

  Many of them—men and women—were trustees. Trustees of hospitals, colleges, museums, schools, nurseries, gardening clubs, cotillions, charities, think tanks. My own mother dealt with unwed mothers. The whole group was like a shadow government for Health, Education, and Welfare. Their trusteeship kept them in touch with life beyond the boxwood.

  Shortly after that I went to a party with old schoolmates of mine, many of whom were stretched taut by their first five-year grind as young lawyers. Several of them said they envied my situation. I think one or two of them meant it. As I told one of them about my life in Iowa I could feel it echo back to me: a serene and mysteriously gathered Japanese painting, the reeds of my daily life in the foreground, the almost invisible flat lake of my unmeasured time in the middle distance, and the far-off mountain peak suggesting not challenge or grappling but inevitable extension and completion.

  But even the friendliest of these young lawyers wasn’t free to be friends with me yet. It wasn’t that they only talked shop. It was that they relaxed, after their long hours, by reverting to the schoolboy types they’d been. There was a lot of fast wisecracking—they mocked each other’s firms as though they were making old-fashioned Harvard-Yale jokes. They told tales of how severe and bizarre their senior partners were, as though they were comparing Latin masters at St. Mark’s and Groton. They treated me better than they had in school, and even inquired politely and literately about my life. But their energy still came from their own wild ride toward success. Talking to them at this party was like talking to them the day before the big game, or the day before college acceptances were mailed. There was a lot of starting-gate humor.

  Some of the more reflective admitted that the first several years in a law firm were a period of emotional regression, even though the work occasionally required a high level of competence. Indeed, they knew a great deal more than they had in school, which could in time give them the material for a reflective survey of the world, but at the moment, offering them information was like feeding wild dogs by hand. I heard one lawyer cross-examine a young doctor, a boy who’d been a year behind us at school. The doctor answered fully, only to be torn apart. “Didn’t you just say …” the lawyer would say, and then make points: The A.M.A. worse than the worst union. A.M.A. worse than worst oil company. Doctors cover up malpractice. Most diseases of unknown origin, cures mostly spontaneous, and yet for this sorry state of affairs doctors have highest per capita income, etc. The lawyer was quite cheerful; he was just practicing. But it was the milk teeth of schoolboy razzing grown into fangs.

  These were the brightest of the gang I’d gone through school with. They had come out on top, as I’d hoped they would. Their values, if not their demeanor, were no longer the values of the class bullies and louts, the 1955 cultural commissars. Those unworthies, former seventeen-year-old connivers and hotshots, now developed resorts in Central America or were gynecologists to the suburban rich. This party of lawyers wasn’t that old towel-snapping, Coke-squirting, know-nothing clique, the ones who had the power to make me feel that my answers in class were ridiculously pretentious, the ones who left me in such confusion that when I overheard one of my heroes (now at this party) say to one of them, “You know, Hendricks isn’t a total wimp,” I was pleased.

  This wasn’t the locker room or the sixth form common room. It was Latin V taken seriously, but the bell was about to ring for sports. What I now hoped was that between this stage and the Riverdale gentry-and-trustee stage, there would be a stage where we might be joined.

  So it was my third social occasion of the holidays that turned out to be the one that comforted me. It was a familiar form of retreat.

  Bobby Morse, my old roommate from school, had been, along with me, a not quite total wimp. He’d ended up being saved from wimpiness by two graces. One grace was that he was a slender jock. In fact, he won a prize for being the school’s “best non-varsity athlete.” A dubious prize, I’d thought, but then, no one is harder on a near-wimp than a fellow near-wimp. Bobby was a passable recreational tennis player and skier, but he was a very good figure skater. Imagine being a figure skater at a New England boarding school in the 1950s. But one day early in the winter of our fifth form year, the hockey coach invited Bobby to join the hockey players in a race the length of the rink. The coach was cannier than I was—I foresaw only humiliation for Bobby. Bobby beat them all three times in a row—in a straight end-to-end race; around a tight circle; and in a figure eight that looped around both goal cages. The coach thanked Bobby calmly, and posted Bobby’s times in the locker room. By midseason several of the hockey players were up to his times, but Bobby wasn’t interested.

  Bobby’s other saving grace was his sister, Antoinette.

  During his fourth form year she was a senior at a nearby girls’ school. Bobby and Antoinette entered amateur figure-skating contests in the pairs competition. Sometimes they practiced on the pond at her school, but when the pond ice wasn’t good, then the hockey coach let them use the rink at our school. The older boys who contrived to hang around were goggle-eyed. In those days one didn’t see a girl’s legs above the calf except in summer, and the sight of Antoinette speeding backward, her apparent wind flipping her skating tutu up from her rear-jutting rump tight-clothed in the underpart of her scarlet costume, was enough to dazzle the boys hanging over the rails. The hockey coach would clear them out periodically, but they’d drift back. I think the coach had a sly crush on her too, though he genuinely fancied figure skating. Antoinette thought the boys absurd, which was a comfort to me, but her caustic attitude to these raw males also made her very much an older sister to me.

  Being with Antoinette and Bobby then, and off and on during the year between, and now in New York, was all one piece. Even though we had separate stories to tell, the controlling tone of our sheltered intimacy was fixed. My attitudes toward my parents, toward boarding school, college, and graduate school, toward almost any figure in my life, had changed. When we three were together, however, I felt that our association contained both those moments of adolescence when one is suddenly the person one will be at thirty, and also those moments of the present and future when one is most like the person one has always been.

  Bobby and Antoinette now shared an apartment almost as big as my parents’. I’d been there once before, a year earlier. It was due west of my parents’ place, across the park. If we’d still been in school, Bobby and I would have signaled each other by flashing mirrors.

  Although Bobby and I had been outsiders together, he had a happier nature than mine. It was he who offered to make friends with me. I put him off at first because once we became friends our fate would be doubly sealed; neither of us would be promoted. But he had no interest in promotion, neither his nor mine. After we became friends, I found out he had trumps he hadn’t played. Even in fourth form—that is, in 1953—he’d been to the Folies Bergère. He could have regaled the regular gang with even the simplest anatomical information. And I suspect he had more experiences in France (where his father lived) than he told even me. He regarded—rightly, it turned out—the then American teen-age attitudes toward women as competitive, unfeeling, spiteful, and irredeemably uninformed. He was—wrongly, it turned out—completely baffled by American girls.

  He was almost as thin as I was, though, of course, physically more skillful. But he lost some of the prestige his minor sports might have won for him by his lack of vehemence. When he played tennis, it didn’t s
eem like an athletic event. And when he practiced figure skating by himself during the winter, even I thought it looked more absurd than graceful, especially because he would walk down to the ice rink in sealskin boots with little tassels which seemed to me alarmingly froufrou.

  He was a good friend to me, and a wonderfully pleasant roommate—spontaneously neat, but not fussy; generous with chocolate, books, and information. He was entirely candid with me about his family. I’d at first imagined his mother as an elegant Frenchwoman—a countess at least. He casually disabused me. He liked his father but saw quite plainly that his father had run out of energy. Bobby’s great-grandfather had made a lot of money in farm machinery in Iowa. His grandfather had moved to Chicago and enlarged the business—he’d bought a patent on an early version of the ready-made gas-fired corn-drying silo. Bobby and Antoinette’s father had gone to France in the thirties, got married, had Antoinette and Bobby. The war started. Bobby’s mother moved to London, the father ended up interned in Paris. The mother took up with another American. Antoinette and Bobby lived in Devonshire. The mother stayed in London. The father got the children back after the war. He was now an art dealer who lived in Paris and New York, but, as Bobby readily admitted, his father didn’t really understand painting. He provided some capital, and he had a smart French partner. He liked living in Paris, spoke French fluently with a happily American accent, made friends there. He put his children in American boarding schools when they were young, but picked them up for every vacation. He spoke to them more openly than any other parent I knew. The effect on them was that they thought every other parent they met was more mysterious and powerful than their father.

  My mother adored Bobby. One time when he was fourteen he spent the night with us. His father dropped him off and stayed for a drink. Later that evening my mother said to Bobby, “What a nice man your father is!” Bobby was thrilled. It was the first time an American grownup from the group with whom he was being educated took a visible interest in his father.

  His father struck me as remarkably placid. He was older than my parents but appeared younger. He wore well-shined loafers and a very soft sports jacket. I thought it was his calm my mother liked. A couple of years later I figured out she had meant to please Bobby.

  On the other side of this equation, Antoinette was equally affectionate toward me. When Bobby and I had gone to different colleges, it was she who made the administrative effort to keep Bobby and me friends. She would send me postcards telling me when Bobby and she would be in New York on their way to Paris—the hotel, the room number. After she graduated from college and moved to New York, she would invite us to supper at her apartment. This was when she was just starting out, before her accident.

  I had been smitten by her, but no more so than by any glamorous woman. She did a little modeling, but was already in the business end when she went through the windshield in a car crash. Her face was repaired in a series of operations and wirings.

  The first time I saw her after she was fixed up and healed, I thought she was still pretty. She had a slight depression in her right temple, beyond the end of her eyebrow. Her right masseter was now marginally smaller than the left. Whether because of the reduced masseter or some reduction in supporting bone, there was also a hollow in her jaw and chin which gave the impression that her face curved very slightly to the right. She openly referred to her face as being crescent-shaped. This was an exaggeration, but her joking about it in this way misled me. I was then a senior in college, but it seemed only a short while before that Antoinette had been my comforter in the matter of cousin Josie. Antoinette had said, “She’s too dumb for you, Oliver. I’m pretty mean, but if you’d written poems to me I would have been nicer than that log-brain.” So (seven years later) I wrote out a bit of doggerel on the subject of Antoinette’s altered beauty, referring to her new-moon face (which was her idea, after all), and ending up with the admittedly unoriginal thought that the allure of flawed beauty was better than austere perfection.

  I presented this in person. She unfolded it and read it without expression. She refolded the sheet, put it back in the envelope, and handed it to me. I said, with puzzled brightness, “No, it’s for you.”

  She said, “I’m afraid not.”

  She may have meant to be gentler, but I fled.

  When I reread it in the light of her displeasure, I couldn’t figure out how I could have been so inept.

  Bobby and Antoinette and I had a long-standing engagement the next day. Antoinette and I were embarrassed to see each other.

  She said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I’ve been depressed in some dumb way, and I seem to have misplaced my sense of humor.”

  And I—like the fairy-tale princess under a spell who when she opens her mouth to speak emits a toad—said, “Oh. But it wasn’t meant to be funny.”

  But in some way Antoinette felt herself to blame, and so finally this short embarrassment of which she and I each held an end turned into an odd sort of intimacy. The outlaw bond (outlaw because Bobby had no vanity—neither my pretension to art nor Antoinette’s prickly reflex about her looks) was only part of it. We found we had several subjects in common. Antoinette was a great one not only for keeping up with contemporary goings on but also for classical self-improvement. Having gone to Wellesley (she spent her junior year in France) and worked hard, she was already literate. She practiced no art and pursued no single scholarly discipline, but she would take up small subjects with cranky zest that might last several months. The history of the papacy, Turkish rugs, the Gulf Stream, Yeats, Vikings, Elizabethan lyrics, New York real estate. All these in addition to a steady interest in fashion (her job), fine arts (her college major), and French literature (her college minor).

  I was her literary consultant. We went to whatever was playing in New York—there was always something—but the field on which we met with equality was Molière, a playwright to whom she was temperamentally sympathetic. It was also to Antoinette that I owed my instruction in La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort.

  But our main subject was always Bobby. I was her consultant in that case too. She continued to make sure that Bobby and I got together at least twice a year. I once suspected that this was one of her hobbies—a kind of gardening of two sympathetic crops. But as well as her cool assessment and administration, there was also a feverish tenderness. Sometimes when Antoinette and I first saw each other, she would seize my hands and speak in a rapid monotone, saying how glad she was I’d come, how worried she’d been about Bobby, about her father. As she spoke, her fingers would move over my knuckles and wrist bones, as though my joints were the knobs of an instrument transmitting her real message.

  When I first went to their apartment this Christmas break, she went through this nervous telegraphy at the door. Then, soothed by her transmission, she took me into the living room and relaxed into an armchair by the window. She gave a little laugh and started talking about Bobby as though we’d all seen each other the day before and an amusing addition to our conversation had just occurred to her.

  She said, “I’ve just figured out how it works with Bobby and his girl friends.”

  The pattern she mapped out was this: Every so often Bobby would meet a young woman who’d recently arrived in Manhattan and was overwhelmed by small difficulties. For a month or two he would spend his spare time solving her problems—perhaps helping her find an apartment, explaining the subway, recommending a doctor. After that he might let himself into her place with his spare key to leave a house plant, to install an extra lock, or thumbtack a useful magazine article to her bulletin board.

  Bobby and his ingénue (Antoinette’s term) would go out twice a week. Once in a while he would spend the night. Antoinette was sure that they weren’t in love because she could see nothing but amiable good moods in either of them, and only slight wistfulness toward the end. The end began when Bobby introduced the ingénue to men and women who he thought would be likely friends for her. Since almost all the past heroines of th
ese interludes remained friendly with Bobby, the latest ingénue usually met one of her predecessors. This introduction marked the very end.

  They were not desperate women. They all had jobs or plausible competences or enough money to go back home. What bothered Antoinette wasn’t that this was a vice—at least not in the sense that it did any harm to the woman. But she didn’t like the fact that Bobby was so expert at the little problems that inevitably repeated themselves each time. She said that it gave the whole operation the aura of a hobby. I thought it an indication of how close we were that “having a hobby” struck us both as a phrase for an unworthiness in someone we cared about.

  Antoinette said, “I wish it wasn’t so boring for him to make money. Or maybe I wish he’d take one of these women seriously. He’s just taken up with the best one ever, but he’s not even trying as hard as usual. If he’s not going to fall in love, I wish he had some other devotion. I sometimes wish he’d worked things out the way you have—what you do all day and what you like are one thing.”

  I said that there was still a lot missing from my life.

  She said, “But you’re getting somewhere. You’re adding to what you know, not doing the same thing over and over. Bobby repeats everything. His books, his making money, his girl friends.”

  I asked how Bobby’s life was different from her own. She chose not to hear this as a rude question.

  She said, “I may not be doing any better, but I keep planning to do better. Bobby seems half-heartedly content.”

  I agreed that it was certainly true that Bobby lacked the divine discontent.

  But when we went out to dinner, Bobby showed up with his friend. It turned out I knew her—not an ingénue at all in my view. She’d been one of the stars of graduate school in comparative literature when I’d been working on my Ph.D. in English. Elizabeth Mary Chetty. She’d come from India in the first place, but after much traveling had passed through Europe and ended up at Harvard. She surprised me now by recognizing me. I thought she’d been too hard at work to notice anyone, though she herself was well known as the darling of the most difficult seminars.