False Gods (8 page)

The elation that Horace felt with Dorothy's warmer answers to his letters was, in my opinion, an exaggerated reaction even to the affection that he read into them. But it showed how repressed he had been. He put me in mind of a handsome painted puppet released from his strings and cavorting about the stage on his own. It may have seemed to him that he had spent his life adjusting himself to the role in which he deemed his family to have cast him: the freckled kid in knickers, with hair either too slickly brushed or hopelessly messy, whom his elders liked smilingly to call "incorrigible," but whose harmless mischievousness and sound healthy appetites could be counted on to guard him from the vices that peculiarly infected an American Eden.

He may even have apprehended that only by preserving such an image could he be forgiven the good looks and boyish charm that his mother seemed almost to deprecate, as if he had manifested a kind of hubris in offering so unflattering a contrast to his fatuous older brother and his squealing sisters. For if his family depended on him, so to speak, to reconcile them with the brownstone community of Manhattan, if without him to dress up the background his father might have seemed a pompous nincompoop and his mother a complaining valetudinarian, it was in no way to Horace's credit, but simply the evidence of a duty imposed on him by an arcane power which would promptly expose him as the lowest of frauds should he forget for a minute the lines of his given part.

I can go even further, now that I am launched in Freudian reminiscence. I venture to perceive in the very arrangement of the floors of the Aspinwalls' brownstone the scaffold that upheld and supported Horace's neurosis. Such small distinction as this edifice could boast diminished as you rose on the high straight stairs, and when you reached the fourth floor with Horace's and his sisters' rooms (the five maids huddled in cubicles above), you were faced with the plainest of brown wood factory-made furniture and walls adorned with cheap prints of academic paintings. What, however, particularly marked the junior status of this level was that whereas on the floor below each of Horace's parents and their older son enjoyed a separate bathroom, the fourth story was equipped with but a single water closet, though its availability for all of the younger Aspinwalls seemed curiously indicated by its possession of three doors. It was the modest, even the prudish habit of Horace's sisters to lock all three portals when they were using the plumbing, but when they exited they would invariably unlatch only one. Horace therefore might have to try two doors unsuccessfully before gaining access, and when either Chattie or Lizzie was actually within she would never give him warning by singing out "Someone's in here!" but wait until he had assailed the locked third and then shout a triumphant, "Yenh, yenh!"

It may sound fanciful, but I suggest that Horace's association of himself with the two female co-tenants of the water closet had some relation to his earlier sense of unworthiness in respect to Dorothy. He may have come to regard that mocking cry from behind the trio of locked doors, followed soon by a vulgar cascade, as a brutal association of sex with excretion in which he and his silly sisters were irretrievably caught, whereas his father and brother below, real men, performing their natural functions in dignified and unintruded-upon silence, reserved their genital energy for females whom it could only awe.

Anyway, that family must have done
something
to him!

***

I speak with some inevitable hindsight when I describe the
dramatis personae
of my life, but I think it is true to say that from my first serious conversation with Frank Stonor I had spotted him as a man dominated by a single passion: the need to impress a world that he despised. Seated in a black carved Elizabethan armchair before a blazing fire in the immense log-walled hall of his Adirondacks "cabin," under the severed heads of bear, moose, and elk, the highest hanging thirty feet above him, his affectation of formal attire in the wilderness, even to a high collar and scarlet tie (though there might have been a small concession in the dark tweeds), seemed to proclaim that a white-haired gentleman of such opaquely gazing eyes, of so high and brown a brow, with a gnarled hand so firmly grasping the gold head of a rarely relinquished cane, had needed nothing but his presence to smite fatally the beasts whose horns and tusks now harmlessly threatened him.

That he should spend his money in a forest where none but carefully selected guests, conveyed thither by a private railway, could see the results, rather than on a villa in Newport visible to other villas, was typical of his inverted snobbishness. I doubt that he feared anything on earth except that he might be taken as a fair representative of any group or class. In a Republican society, he was a politically active Democrat who delighted in alienating fellow tycoons by supporting (at least at the dinner table) government regulation of business. In a new plutocracy concerned with draping its genealogical nudity in purchased pedigrees, he liked to boast that the Stonors descended from sheep stealers in Norfolk and had bought their crest at Tiffany's. And confronted with the showy collections of old masters by means of which the financial leaders of the day hoped to hitch a ride to immortality, he would shrug and say that the souls of ancient commercial societies were best expressed in the beautiful gold coins that he displayed in glass cases in his office.

There was to be a house party of young people at his camp a couple of weeks after he and his daughter returned from Europe, and it was even rumored that it might be the occasion of the announcement of Dorothy's engagement to Guy Thorp. Horace was invited, and so, surprisingly, was I.

"I told you she liked you," Horace explained.

"Maybe she wants someone to catch you if you faint dead away at the news."

"Oh, Maury, is it possible? Can she really be going to marry that man? Why have you been urging me on so?"

But I was more irritated than touched by his woebegone look. How could a man care so much and have so little fight in him? I took from his hand the letter in which my invitation was included and read it.

"Well, at least she tells you just who's coming and when. Thorp isn't getting there until Monday, and we're asked for the preceding Friday. That gives you the whole weekend to make your play."

"Oh, she's just giving herself time to reconcile me to the news before the hero arrives."

"Fight, man, will you! Fight!"

And fight he actually did. For one whole day. When we arrived in the Adirondacks we were greeted by a Dorothy who was friendly but reserved. On Saturday morning she took Horace off on an all-day ride in the woods, leaving me behind with the other guests, none of whom I knew and none of whom showed the least interest in getting to know me. Mr. Stonor, however, proved unexpectedly cordial. It appeared that he had read and enjoyed my father's books, and he invited me to go fishing with him on the lake that afternoon in a large rowboat oared by a guide who sat near the bow. Mr. Stonor paid scant attention to the sport, letting the guide, as we drifted, do the casting for him and hand him the rod only on the rare occasions when a fish was hooked. I did my own casting, of course, but I paused whenever it looked as if Mr. Stonor wanted to talk. After all, I was there to be of assistance to Horace. When he embarked at last on a topic that seemed to interest him, I dropped my rod, lit a pipe and listened.

"You may have made the right decision to go into law, young man. Dorothy has described you as ambitious. When I was your age the future was all in business and banking. But now the railways are laid down, the frontier's gone and the oil wells are pumping. The captains and the kings have departed, and it's time for the little men to litigate over the spoils."

"I gather you don't think much of lawyers. Dorothy hinted as much."

"I don't think much of anybody, Leonard. I take the world as it comes. I was watching you at lunch, because of what Dorothy told me about you. You obviously didn't know any of her silly friends, but you held your own well enough. You strike me as a man who wants to run things rather than be run. In my day we old capitalists pretty much took the law into our own hands. But that day is over. In the future it's the lawyer who will tell us how to do what we want to do."

"How to get around the law, you mean, sir?"

Mr. Stonor shrugged. "If you want to put it that way. I look to acts, not definitions. Anyway, it's going to be a world that a clever lawyer should be able to dominate. Tell me, young man: Who in your opinion has been the most powerful American of the past decade?"

"Wouldn't that be President Roosevelt?"

"Well, he'd certainly like to think so. He told me once, as if it were something to the last degree presumptuous, that Pierpont Morgan, conferring with him in the White House, appeared to treat him as an equal. But I have no doubt that Morgan considered him an inferior. If you had seen as I did, last year in the panic, our financial leaders waiting respectfully outside the door of Morgan's great art-studded library to be admitted, one by one, each to submit his plan of how to save the nation to the silent figure bent over his game of solitaire, you would have witnessed a demonstration of real power. The great Theodore, for all his trumpeting, couldn't have done it. But it was nonetheless the end of an era."

"Horace's mother told me that her father had spotted you as a man who would make his mark in life when you were only my age. Is that what you are doing to me, sir? If so, I certainly appreciate it."

"Mrs. Aspinwall's father didn't have much else to choose from in the Newport of that day. Still, it was nice of her to say so. Little Lydia Beekman—I remember her well. Pretty as a picture. She was a friend of my younger sister's. But she threw herself away on John Aspinwall."

"They seemed compatible enough to me."

"Then he must have brought her down to his level. Men like that do."

And then we returned to our fishing. That evening before dinner Horace came to my room, where I was reading. There were actual tears in his eyes. "It's all over. The engagement will be announced on Thursday night."

"Can't you get her at least to put it off? A day's ride is hardly giving you a fair chance."

"Why should she give me any sort of chance?"

"Why has she been writing to you? Why has she been stringing you along? Why did her father have to take her abroad to get her away from you? Hell's bells, man, you don't know your own power."

"But, Maury, it's just what I do know. And I suspect you do, too. It isn't decent for a man to hang on after he's been definitely rejected. I'm leaving the camp tonight. The little train is taking me out at six. Are you coming with me?"

I eyed him defiantly. "No!"

"What do you expect to accomplish here?"

"I don't know!"

He sighed. "There are times, Maury, when I can't help wondering if it was a good idea we ever met."

He left by the train as planned, and Dorothy seemed surprised, but not wholly displeased, that I did not accompany him.

Gurdon, I had later to admit, had been right about his cousin's nervous state of mind. Horace underwent a severe depression and had to leave Yale for six months while he retreated to a sanatorium, postponing his graduation by a year. His family always believed that I had been the cause of his breakdown and that I had sacrificed him to my own social advantage in cultivating the Stonors. They, of course, never blamed the pressures they had put on him, however unconsciously, to remain a charming boy, protected from the menacing world of adulthood. Dorothy's rejection had left him feeling less a boy than a failed man.

But at the time, left by myself in the Stonor camp, I gave little thought to the emotional consequences to my friend of the amorous course I had induced him to pursue. I was concentrating my attentions on Guy Thorp.

He was certainly a handsome man. Even I had to admit that. His nose was large and strong and aquiline, and his wavy blond hair came down in a triangle over a noble forehead as if to point proudly to the beauty below. His large blue eyes had a welcoming twinkle, and the robustness of his cheerful laugh seemed purposed to put an end to any suggestion that he was too polished, too smooth, to be quite sincere. It did not, however, put an end to it for me. As I watched the way, at dinner on the night he arrived, he deferred to his host and then, just at the point when the table might begin to infer that he was a toady, the way he would suddenly and effectively rebut Mr. Stonor's thesis (albeit courteously noting the latter's "well-known openness to all sides of any question"), I was put in mind of Decius Brutus's comment on Caesar: "But when I tell him he hates flatterers, he says he does, being then most flattered."

The discussion fell naturally on the subject of England, where Thorp was stationed, and this led to a debate on the continued expansion of the British Empire. Thorp stoutly defended it, maintaining that Britain with her dominions and colonies constituted the greatest force for peace in the world.

"I suppose then," Mr. Stonor observed dryly, "that if the British should extend their empire over the entire globe, our peace would be assured forever."

"I was only speaking for myself, sir. Actually, I think the British are more than satisfied with what they already rule. I get the distinct impression from my friends in Whitehall that the addition of even one more colony, the very smallest isle or isthmus, would be regarded as too much of a good thing. Their whole magnificent administrative system is overworked as it is."

"That may well be so," his host replied. "But I'm afraid the growth or shrinkage of empires is a difficult thing to control. The moment they cease to expand, they start to decline. It's strange, but there doesn't seem to be any alternative."

I decided it was now my time, if ever, to barge in. What had I to lose? "If the British would like to start shrinking, there's one little emerald isle they might do well to cast off."

The table looked at me in some surprise. My tone, I suppose, had been sufficiently antagonistic.

"Unhappily, it's too close to their shore," Guy responded coolly. "An independent Ireland, able to offer naval bases to Kaiser Wilhelm, would be an unacceptable risk."