Skinny Island (16 page)

"This will do. I have to choose something."

Alice's lips were closed in a willful line. She was repressing a criticism, out of respect for her friend's loss, but her long gaze at the material, her slow head shake, were firmly rejecting.

"Lunch," she said. "It's time for lunch."

"I want the maroon."

"Because you're tired and hungry, dear, is no reason to take it out on your poor library."

They went to the Carlisle Club. Alice and Frances must have lunched there a thousand times in the past three decades. Alice, as usual, ordered dry sherry for both.

"Of course, I know you don't give a damn about curtains," she said mildly. "You don't give a damn about anything yet. How could you?"

"But I do give a damn about lots of things. Perhaps not about curtains. I never did, really."

"Then you certainly put on a very good show."

"It was all for Stuart. And the girls. Now I live alone. I don't have to any more. Don't you see?"

When Alice's voice was soft, it could be very soft. "Of course I see."

Frances found herself staring almost sullenly at Alice's bracelet. It was heavy and jangling, made up of small gold golf clubs with rubies and diamonds at the ends. Ted had given her one for each of his championships. Alice wore no other jewelry, as if to balance this one seeming excess.

"Do you ever think perhaps we've given up too much for our husbands?" Frances asked. She took in how well her friend knew her from the latter's failure to register surprise.

"Perhaps. But we've enjoyed it."

"That may be just the trouble. Certainly neither your Ted nor my Stuart demanded it. I'm not blaming them. Women who turn themselves into carpets must expect to be trod on."

"I don't consider myself a carpet." There was the faintest note of pique in Alice's tone.

"Oh, I know you're an exquisite Aubusson! Or a Turkish masterpiece. Not like me, a poor old bath mat. But my principle is still there. You could have been a great decorator ... or maybe the editor of
Vogue.
" Alice laughed, with a touch of condescension. Were such things, colors and clothes and cosmetics, "real" things, like guns and sports and fishing prints and the sound of men's laughter from locker rooms?

"AH right, skip
Vogue,
" Frances continued impatiently. "Skip fashion. You could have been a teacher or a writer. You used to write very good things at school."

"Frances, pooh to you."

"But it's true! You have deliberately held yourself back, for Ted's sake. Or for what you thought was Ted's sake."

"I've had a very happy life, dear. Is that wrong? Is that selfish?" Alice paused. Frances knew that she was trying now to consider, although not very hard perhaps, that she might have been wrong. "Perhaps it
is
selfish to be as happy as I've been."

Frances knew that she should stop right there, but that she wasn't going to. "It's not only the career you've given up. I suppose you never really wanted one. It's the personality. You've never allowed yourself to be a woman who might make Ted the least bit uncomfortable."

"I should hope not!" Alice exclaimed proudly.

"Oh, I don't mean a scold or a crosspatch. You could never have been anything but lovely. I mean you've never let yourself become ... well, an intellectual."

"If you mean I haven't turned myself into a bluestocking—thank you!"

At this Frances did pull herself together and dropped the subject. Just because she was beginning to have new doubts and misgivings was no reason to intrude on Alice's serenity. Alice might be as lost as she was if Ted should die, but then mightn't Alice have the luck to die first? She had always been lucky.

***

Frances found that one did not have to be a widow very-long before opportunities presented themselves for a change in one's social group. People who had not been particularly congenial with, or who had been awed by, her husband, would turn up to see if she might "do" in the next lap of life. Such a person was Josephine Stagg. She and Frances had been at Miss Dixon's Classes together, and she had had rather a crush on Frances, which had struck the latter at the time as something ominous and to be avoided. After school Josephine had married too often, usually in Europe, and had had a bout with morphine. Once, after a gap of several years, when Frances had run into her, rather too made-up, in the Carlisle Club, she had murmured in a husky voice: "Hi, Franny! Don't you recognize your old adorer? I've been to the dogs, but I'm back now." She was, too. She had proceeded to establish herself as one of New York's leading decorators.

Stagg had been her maiden name; she resumed it as the door slammed on minor German and Italian titles. Single, fat, loud and gorgeous she entertained the world of fashion in an old brownstone that she had made a blaze of color and flowers. When she and Frances met again at the Carlisle after Stuart's death, she asked her to dinner, and Frances murmured something about mourning. Josephine said there would be only three or four friends, and Frances accepted. When she arrived she found twenty. Josephine offered no apology, and Frances made no comment.

At dinner Frances found herself next to Manners Mabon, a very odd but very ebullient person. He told her that he was a bachelor, aged fifty-seven, and that he didn't have a job or a worry in the world. He was very stout and short, with a round, reddish face, white hair parted in the middle and a high, affected voice that could be surprisingly authoritative when he was not screeching with laughter at his own jokes. People called him "Manny" and obviously regarded him as an authority on parties and gossip. Frances couldn't help reflecting that Stuart would not have liked him. But then he wouldn't have liked Josephine, either.

"And what do you do?" Frances asked him, when conversation at the table had fallen into pairs.

"Do, my dear lady? Why, bless you, I don't
do
anything. I live."

"But don't you have to do something besides live?"

"Why? I have eight thousand a year. It's not much, I grant you. In fact, I believe it's near poverty in your circles, but I have a darling old aunt who allows me to curl up like a cat in a corner of her apartment. And then I eke out the rest at the bridge table. I'm like the duchess in
The Gondoliers:
'At middle class party I play at écarté—and I'm by no means a beginner.'" He arched his eyebrows to underline his proficiency.

Frances was rather shocked by his financial candor, but she was impressed, in spite of herself, that anyone could be so confident on so little. She thought of all the guards that she and Stuart had placed between themselves and this man's impecunious state: the trusts, the insurance, the pension, the tax-free bonds. It would take a world disaster to put them in Mr. Mabon's shoes.

"Have you never worked?"

"Oh, yes, from time to time. Actually, I had a job at St. Christopher's School a couple of years back. One of the teachers died, poor fellow, and the headmaster begged me to fill out his term."

"But you didn't want to go on after that?"

"No."

"You didn't like it?"

"I didn't like the headmaster. He was intense, sincere, perhaps well meaning. But..." He paused, with an air of put-on gravity.

"But what?"

"He used the adverb 'hopefully' in sentences where it failed to qualify a verb, an adjective, or even another adverb."

Frances stared. "Was that all?"

"No. Worse is to come. Where you and I might have employed the expression 'best estimate,' he would say 'best guesstimate'! I am sorry to pain you, Mrs. Hamill, but he really did."

Frances was beginning to enjoy herself. "I hope there's no more to come."

"But there is. Once, just before I tendered my resignation, he suggested a joint session of the eighth and ninth grades for a discussion of the drug problem."

"And you disapproved?"

"Not of the idea. But of his proposition that we might thus obtain a 'cross-fertilization of ideas.'"

Frances nodded. "My husband hated that sort of thing, too. He used to call it jargon. He said it was a disguise for mental apathy."

Mr. Mabon accepted her switch of emphasis. He had not become a regular diner-out without learning his business. "Of course, he did. Your husband was a great man. But it must be depressing for you to be told that all the time. It must make you feel like a monument."

"Oh, you see that?"

"Everyone pushes you back in the past. Which doesn't exist, really. I mean for living. We have only the present. And a little future."

"When you have four grandchildren, as I do, Mr. Mabon, you have to live a lot in the future. You want to make sure, anyway, that they have one. There are schools to think about, and colleges, and graduate schools—"

"But you must have plenty of money for all that!"

Frances made a little face at this. Her world was almost superstitious in its dread of ever suggesting there might be enough money for the future. "If I can keep ahead of inflation."

"Anyway, you can't live for grandchildren. Has it never struck you that a grandchild is actually a rather distant relation? He has only a quarter of your blood, like a second cousin."

Frances decided not to be irritated. He was too ridiculous. "It's easy to see you're not a family man. Why, I adore my grandchildren. Of course I can live for them. What do
you
live for?"

"Myself."

"But that sounds so selfish."

"It
is
selfish. I cultivate each minute. I am enjoying this soufflé. This fine white wine. I train myself not to think ahead even as far as dessert. Most people waste their lives anticipating the pleasures of the immediate future. But I am determined not to waste any present pleasure. I am determined, for example, not to waste the pleasure right now of talking with you."

"Thank you! It's a pleasure for me, too. But can we really live just like that? Mustn't we be doing things for other people?"

"Heaven forbid!"

"I mean in order to be happy. You can't be happy just living for yourself."

"Is there any other way? And I'm not at all sure it's not the only thing you
can
do for other people."

After dinner, in the drawing room, before the gentlemen joined the ladies, Frances asked Josephine about him. She replied that he was a darling and that she adored him.

"He tells me that he lives only for pleasure," Frances observed.

"That's all right if he gets it. So few people do."

"But doesn't it make him a terrible egotist?"

"It makes him a saint! Because the things that give him pleasure are the kindest, goodest things. Manny is always at some hospital or nursing home visiting some poor derelict whom everyone else has forgotten about. Why, he goes to see Mary Landon twice a week, and she's nothing but a vegetable. I doubt she even knows he's been there."

"Why does he go then?"

"Because he says it's just possible she might."

The men appeared now, and Manny smiled at Frances across the room.

"I suppose he's a..." She paused.

"A fag? Presumably. Unless he's too fat. Do you care?"

"Oh, no." And for a moment Frances persuaded herself that she actually didn't. The atmosphere at Josephine's was contagious.

Her new friend was too polite a guest to talk after dinner to his table companion, but when Frances left he insisted on walking her back to the Carlisle Club, where she was spending the night, though it was only a block away. He suggested that they visit an art gallery the next day to see the work of a young painter whom he admired, and she found herself agreeing without the slightest hesitation. And so her new relationship began.

He was nothing if not companionable. He seemed to have a genius for amusing himself and others. He talked a great deal, he almost bubbled, and showed a wide knowledge of art, literature and music, a shrewd eye and a keen ear. And yet Frances never had to interrupt him. He seemed to sense exactly when she wanted to speak, and he would listen as intently as he talked. Furthermore, he never seemed to be in a bad humor; he was always smiling, when he was not shouting with laughter. Occasionally he lost his temper, at a rude taxi driver or waiter, and then he could become quite commanding in this manner, but the mood quickly passed, and he would often apologize.

"Aren't you ever in the dumps?" she asked him once.

"Oh, my, yes. I have
abysses.
But then I hide. I won't be seen."

What did he see in
her
? Of course, she paid, at restaurants, at theatres, at exhibitions, but there must have been plenty of rich, lonely widows who would have been glad to pay for his company. And then, too, she was a bad bridge player and knew little about pictures and sculpture. Yet she had a strange sense that she was special to him. Was she a kind of older sister? A surrogate mother?

She found that she was spending more nights at the Carlisle Club instead of driving back to Bedford. She had given up the apartment in town when Stuart died as a needless expense; now she began to think of taking another small one. But in some ways she preferred the club. The anonymity of a rented bedroom pleased her. It committed her to nothing. When she closed her door, she closed out the world, even the consoling buzz of female chatter from the common rooms below. She had never sympathized with the point of view that condemns the even occasional segregation of the sexes. What she loved now about the Carlisle Club was that so much of life was suspended within its chaste Georgian walls: there was no sex, no home, no work, no duties. Was she getting as irresponsible as Manny himself?

"I think I begin to see what interests you in me," she suggested to him at last. "I'm a kind of tabula rasa. You see in me the perfect specimen of the philistine who denies her philistinism. Who defiantly affirms she's modern once she's paid her tribute to the accepted bourgeois ultima Thules. Picasso in art. Eliot and Pound in literature. Stravinsky in music."

"Let's put it that you interest me less because you are that, than because you see it. And seeing it, you can't really be it."

There seemed no limit to his eclecticism. If people incurred his scorn, no art did. He took her to a minimalist show at the Whitney and to an exhibit of Bouguereaus; he wept through
La Traviata
and listened with rapture to concerts in which she could detect nothing but dissonance and cacaphony; he urged her to read
Henry Esmond
and Nathalie Sarraute.