Skinny Island (15 page)

Nobody, including myself, knew just why the Stairs left the school the following week. The headmaster's version—that Mrs. Stair was faced with a serious illness in her family—was believed by no one. It was obviously most unusual for a master and his wife, both apparently in perfect health, to quit before the end of the academic year, with all the trouble to the school of replacing him in his courses, and the enigma was deepened by the fact that the Stairs said goodbye to nobody. They simply disappeared.

Years later I learned that Mr. Widdell had informed Eric that he and his wife were to be moved immediately to a hotel in the village until a new apartment off campus could be found for them. When Eric had, quite naturally, insisted on a reason, the headmaster had simply replied that Mrs. Stair had been seen by boys in a state of undress at her window. When Eric had demanded indignantly if the headmaster was suggesting that his wife had intentionally exposed herself, and had received no answer, he did the only thing a gentleman could do: he resigned his post after threatening to punch his superior in the nose.

What I did, I suppose, was to suppress, in the psychiatric sense, the whole matter. I simply decided, in the panic that threatened to overwhelm me, that I had to dismiss the subject as far as possible from my mind. I affirmed to myself that there was no necessary connection with what I had wanted to accomplish, that is, the opening up of Eric Stair's eyes to the kind of women he had married and his sudden detachment from the world in which I lived. I was confident that the headmaster had not disclosed the fact of my artifact; he had, in fact, destroyed it before my eyes. And he never thereafter alluded to the topic. I banished the Stairs from my conversation even at home, responding curtly to Mother's inquiries, and in time I almost came to believe that the episode had not occurred, though I would sometimes wake up in the night with the memory of a nightmare and then, while I was waiting for that soft reassuring feeling that it was all a dream, the horrid notion would steal into my consciousness that it was all too true, and I would jump out of bed and walk briskly to and fro, desperately trying to convince myself that I had blown up the whole matter monstrously out of proportion.

In time I learned to live with myself, and as the years at school and then college passed, it became almost a quaint recollection, like some childish prank that one could tell people about with a smile, even when it was a fairly nasty one. Only I didn't.

Eric had begun to make a name for himself. He had a studio in SoHo, and some of his paintings had been shown at the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. I started gradually to allow myself to think about him again, and I would inquire about him, when I was with art enthusiasts who had no reason to suspect that I had known him. I was very excited when I learned that he and Janice had split up and that she had married an active member of the Communist party. Perhaps my now ancient crime had been for the best!

After my graduation from Harvard in the spring of 1939 I came to New York to study at the Art Students League. I determined to call on Eric at his studio, and when I did so, I was cordially received. He occupied a large loft filled with his huge abstracts and seemed contented and cheerful. He acted as if we had parted the day before and did not show the smallest surprise that since our last meeting I had become a man.

After several drinks and much talk of his painting and of mine—he charmingly treated me as an equal—he made a startling suggestion.

"How would you like to take over this studio while I'm gone?"

I looked around me. "But where are you going?"

"I'm going home to sign up. I'll be leaving in a day or so."

I was astonished. Of course, he was a Canadian and of course the war in Europe had started, but somehow I had thought he had joined his destiny with ours.

"You look surprised. I suppose you're recalling that I had it in for the empire." His chuckle seemed quite devoid of partisan feeling. "Well, this war should finish it, anyway, whoever wins. And no matter how I feel about the stately homes and the British Raj, I have to back them against the bad boy in Berlin."

"But your art, Eric!"

"Who gives a blow about art, dear fellow, when the world's on fire? You'll find you'll be coming in yourself. And the beautiful portraits of Jamie Abercrombie will have to wait!"

At that point, a terrible thought struck me. If he and Janice had still been married, they might have had a child or children! He might have had to stay and support them. I leaped to my feet, clapping a hand over my mouth.

"What is it, Jamie? Have you seen a ghost?"

"Yes! Oh, my God!" In that moment I was absolutely convinced that he would be killed. And whose fault would that be? "Eric, I've got to tell you something. I've got to make a confession."

My sorry tale erupted from the mental storage closet where it had been so long and securely kept like a short story read aloud by a proud author, without an "er" or an "ah," in finished sentences. But the author was far from proud. What would Eric do? Would he strangle me? He was strong enough. That craggy face was absolutely expressionless, but I thought there was a glimmer at last of something like amusement in his small blue eyes. When I finished there was a moment's silence. Then he whistled.

"My God, it's like something out of Kraft-Ebing! Those schools should be suppressed."

I stared in disbelief. "Then you don't resent me? You don't think I'm a fiend?"

Eric looked at me with faint surprise. "No, I don't resent you, Jamie. I've made my own life, such as it is, and I've left St. Lawrence's a good way behind me, just as I've left Janice. So none of it matters to me any more, except that it's amusing. But for you, yes, I guess I can see it's another kettle of fish. Because you have to face the fact that you behaved like a real shit. And there may be some of that shittiness still in you."

How he said that! As pleasantly and with as much detachment as if we'd been discussing a character in fiction. Of course, that made it all the worse. To my own astonishment and shame the tears that I had not shed five years before and that may have been waiting for just this summoning flowed forth, and I found that I was sobbing.

"Jamie, Jamie, my poor fellow," he said, putting an arm around my shoulder, "let it come out—it will do you good. I'll write you from time to time. Just to show you that I'm all right. And that just because you were a shit once doesn't mean that you always have to be one."

I pulled myself together at last, and we went out to dinner and talked of St. Lawrence's until the small hours. He was very funny and mercilessly observant. It seemed there was nothing on that little campus that had escaped his painter's eye. I drank far too much, and he very kindly took me home in a cab. But the next day when I called to thank him he was gone.

He did write me, every few months, during the war, and I received his letters at the Pacific base where I was stationed. Without the mercy of this correspondence I think I might have been emotionally crippled when the news of his death reached me in the summer of 1944. As it is, I have never since been able to draw or paint a nude figure of either sex.

W
HEN STUART DIED—
in part, Frances Hamill always believed, owing to the exhaustion of arguing no less than three major cases in the 1960 winter term of the U.S. Supreme Court—it seemed to her that her life also was over. What remained would be as gray as the ashes of an Indian widow who has committed suttee, a dignified passivity, a kind of subdued suspension of any real living. She was perfectly aware, if with a certain complacency, that she was hopelessly out of date and fashion, that she lived in an age of wedding feasts supplied with funeral baked meats, that the relict was supposed to prove that her marriage had been happy by contracting another in a year's time or less. But she cared nothing for any of this. She had been Mrs. Stuart Hamill from the age of twenty-three to that of sixty; her two daughters were married and settled; she had her memories, her dogs and her books. It should be enough.

It might even have been greedy to want more. How many individuals among the starved and tortured millions who had populated the planet since our cave ancestors, had enjoyed a fraction of what she had enjoyed? How many had her health, her love, her amusements? How many women had been happily married to a husband who had been a great lawyer, a great banker, an adviser to presidents?

But it was one thing for Frances to consider that her real life was over; it was quite a different matter when others came to the same conclusion. Her daughter Leslie had the tactlessness of many women married to tactful husbands. The pretty dark neatness of her perhaps outdated femininity tended to harden in mother-daughter "chats" where her self-interest was not always successfully concealed.

"You know, Mummy, one thing that you'll have more time for now, and that may act as therapy for you, too, is really getting to know your grandchildren. Oh, I admit you've been a marvelous gran, of course, but I mean something deeper. You could take Alison abroad, for example, for her spring vacation. It would be a great treat for her. And for you, too. She's a brilliant girl; doesn't miss a trick."

"But I don't think I want to travel just yet. I know that widows are expected to be in orbit half the year. I'll get there, but give me time, dear."

"Well, of course, you don't have to go anywhere. You could have the grandchildren with you in Bedford. You could let them have their friends out, too. House parties of young people! Oh, I don't mean yet, naturally. But in time. After all, you'll be rattling about in this big house. You'll be glad to have people to fill it up."

"I shan't rattle, Leslie. Your father was not such a large person that his absence will make that much difference. Though I suppose it may be difficult to justify the expense of so big a place for one old woman." Frances waited in vain for Leslie to deny this. "I suppose you think I should sell it and make gifts to you all."

"Well, isn't it foolish to let the estate taxes eat everything up? Have you talked to Polly about it?"

Frances thought, with a sudden rip in her heart, of Stuart's smile and the gentle whine of his "Ah, now, Leslie." He always said that Leslie was unchangeable, and never tried to change her; he would simply register the mildest notification that he had noted. He was before Frances now in one of those moments of striking vividness that happen in the first weeks after a death, that almost induce a belief in ghosts. She reached out a hand as if to touch him; Leslie did not even notice. Yet there he stood, tall and stocky, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked to one side, his lips fixed in that noncommittal grin, his small, twinkling, piercing blue-gray eyes full of that constant attention, that benevolent, all-taking-in attention, that sometimes terrible attention. How was it, Frances found herself suddenly wondering, that his tonsure of curly gray hair made one forget that his scalp was bald? Perhaps that was part of his greatness, she thought. Or was that sarcastic? Could Stuart read her mind? But if he could, if he knew what she was thinking, then he had to know everything, and if he knew everything, it was all right.

"Stuart, I love you," she whispered to herself. "You know I love you. You've been my whole life."

Leslie still did not notice.

Polly was almost the opposite of her sister Leslie. Polly was a partner in Stuart's law firm. They had a policy against nepotism, but they had broken it in her favor because they had decided the time was coming when they would have to have a woman partner, and they wanted one whom they could "trust." Polly was in charge of Stuart's estate, and she handled Frances's matters, too, and, perhaps because she was a lawyer with a good income of her own, perhaps because her nature was more generous than Leslie's, she was less concerned with how much Uncle Sam would get when her mother died. Yet Polly in her own way could be quite as irritating as her older sister. The bright yellow eyes behind the wide, gold-rimmed glasses snapped at Frances as she tapped the end of her thin gold pencil against her large, fine, front teeth. There was something faintly defiant about her smallness, her neatness and her prettiness that seemed to say: "Oh, yes, I can beat you at any game. You name it. We'll play it."

"Jim and I think you ought to do more things with your hands," she told Frances. "He's taken up basket weaving on weekends. You should see what he's done. It's really remarkable."

"But I've never been able to do anything with my hands. As a child I couldn't even draw a moon face."

"You could learn. There are all kinds of classes. Pick a craft. I'm serious, Ma. We're all too eye-oriented. If you suddenly found you couldn't read, your life would be empty."

"What would yours be?"

"There are blind lawyers. I could learn braille."

"And couldn't I?"

"It's harder when you're older."

"I think I'm going to take my chances the way things are. Without basket weaving."

"I'm only trying to help, you know."

"I know, dear."

Even Alice Nicholas began to rub Frances the wrong way. Alice was the dearest friend she'd ever had. She used to say to her children: "There are all my friends, and then there's Alice." People thought of her and Alice together, and it was said that they even looked alike. Both were tall, and on the skinny side, and both had premature gray hair and large eyes, Alice's a greenish yellow, Frances's pale blue. But whereas Frances tended to move a bit jerkily, Alice had the grace of the natural athlete. Frances thought she had never seen anything more charming than Alice and Ted Nicholas waltzing together on the ice. But the greater contrast was in their husbands. They had married polar opposites: Frances, a self-made and compulsively hard-working man; Alice, a charming idler, a president of mens' clubs. Yet Ted and Stuart had always been the greatest friends, perhaps for the very reason that they had never competed.

Alice was an indefatigable shopper, and she would work as hard helping Frances as when seeking an item for herself. She decided that now was a good time for Frances to get new curtains for the library in Bedford, and they went into New York for the day. By noon they had been to six shops, and Frances was exhausted. She slapped a hand on a maroon material.