Skinny Island (18 page)

There were some dozen guests at Alice's, including Frances's daughter Leslie. Ted Nicholas, big and bronze and handsome, a miracle at seventy, tweeded and broadly smiling, the kindest man in the world, immediately took Manny by the arm and introduced him around. Alice seemed unusually benevolent; they had obviously agreed to feature the new guest. Frances stood with Leslie a bit to the side.

"He seems so at home, your friend," Leslie observed.

Frances knew when Leslie was preparing to make a disagreeable remark. She had an air of suspended animation; her half-smiling, half-frightened eyes looked one up and down as if assessing one's probabilities of defense. She would probably be actually suffering, like a cow with distended udders, in her need to be relieved of whatever it was that she had in mind.

But Frances was not going to help Leslie. She simply looked at her.

"You know what they're saying, don't you?" Leslie continued.

"How can I, dear? Till you tell me."

Leslie's laugh was forced, hollow. "That you're the last person they ever expected to turn into a fag hag!"

Frances was so shocked that she almost showed it. "Really? I never dreamed I could become anything so fashionable."

"Oh, Ma, you're angry. Can't you take a joke?"

"No, Leslie, I can't. If I could, you wouldn't joke."

And she walked away. Of course, now there would be tears and telephone calls, and in the end it would be Frances who would have to apologize, but for the moment she didn't care.

She talked to Ted Nicholas, but she did not hear what he was saying. Fortunately, that rarely mattered with Ted. He was a kind of Parsifal, absurdly brave, absurdly good, absurdly naive. Stuart had once said that he was the only man he had ever known who was popular with other men and yet whose presence even in a locker room forestalled the dirty joke. His masculinity was too pure. But when he began to talk about Manny, she did listen.

"I like your little friend, Frances. Seems like a most cheerful guy. Nice to have around, I should think. Does he play golf, do you think? No? Would he like a lesson? I'd be very happy to give him one. Alice says he doesn't work. Well, neither do I! I never did, except once. Did I ever tell you? When I got out of Harvard my old man said I ought to do something, so I went to work for a bank. Well, I discovered my salary was exactly what I gave my chauffeur! They paid me on Friday, and I paid him on Saturday, so all I had to do was endorse the check. And then it dawned on me that if I didn't want to work, all I had to do was give up a chauffeur. So I've driven myself ever since!"

Frances had heard the story a dozen times before, but she usually liked it. Now, however, it was spoiled by his reference to Alice's remark about Manny's not working. Were they
all
against him? She shivered with sudden resentment. Could she not have
one
friend?

After lunch Alice, with her usual good manners, arranged for Manny to have a rubber of bridge. When two tables had been made up, and Ted had taken a friend on a tour of the kennels, she and Frances were free to stroll in the garden. Frances went straight to the point.

"You don't like Manny."

'"Certainly I like Manny. I think he's entirely amiable."

"Then you don't like my friendship with him."

"You don't think it's a bit intense ... a bit sudden?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"It's how it looks, Frances."

"Looks? Why should I care about looks?"

"I thought we both did. I thought it was important how we appeared to the world. As our husbands' wives. As our children's mothers. It's not that what's inside isn't more important. Of course it is. But I thought you and I believed that our outward selves should reflect, as far as possible, the things we stand for."

"And how does Manny's being my house guest affect that?"

"It's not just his being your house guest. It's your being with him so constantly. Being seen giggling together in art galleries—"

"Giggling? We may have been laughing."

"Giggling was the way it was put to me."

"Really, Alice, are you taking to gossip?"

"I have compelled myself to listen. For your sake. Do you want to know what people are saying about you?"

They were in the greenhouse now, before the glory of Alice's begonias. Alice used to say that the begonia was the ultimate flower. Frances trembled with dismay as she forced herself to admit that her friend's sincerity and good will were beyond dispute. She was as fine as her favorite flower. She had made a beautiful thing of Ted's life. Frances glanced at the bracelet of gold golf clubs.

"What do they say?" she asked miserably.

"Well, I don't have to be told that he calls you 'darling.' He must have done so a dozen times at lunch."

"But that just means 'you' in his world!"

"It's not a world that I admire."

"Are people going to say that he's my lover?"

"That would be flattering him. I doubt they wish to."

"Then what is the harm, really?"

"The harm, my dear, is what you do to yourself. The harm is in the picture of Stuart Hamill's widow giggling about New York, hand in hand with a silly, shabby, fat man who needs a free meal every time he's had an unlucky evening at the bridge table."

"Oh, Alice!"

"There, dear. I've said it. I shall not say it again. That Mr. Mabon is amiable and trustworthy I am happy to concede. But that's how it looks. Let me show you my black iris. It's the prize."

That evening, before supper at Crossways, Frances sat alone with Manny in the living room. She felt uncomfortable and constrained; it disturbed her that he should have picked that very moment to discuss his theory of friendship. There were friends, he told her, and "real" friends. Real friends had to have absolute trust in each other. Communication had to be always truthful, though reticence was permissible. He had had only two "real" friends in his life. She was the third. He was very grave about it, quite unlike his usual bubbling self. Perhaps this was why it took him so long to observe her distraction.

"Something has happened," he noted at last, after watching her fumble in her pocketbook for a cigarette. "Something has upset you."

"Oh, it's all too ridiculous."

"Not too ridiculous to have agitated you, darling."

"I wish you wouldn't call me that."

"Very well." She had expected that his eyes would show anger, but they didn't. He could be angry at people—oh, she had seen that!—but he wasn't now. "I'll try not to."

"Oh, Manny, I'm sorry." She reached for his hand and squeezed it. The only way she could bring up the subject was to pretend not to know. "What is a fag hag exactly?"

"Ah, that's it." He laughed in a hard, would-be cheerful manner. "A fag hag is an older woman, a society type, who surrounds herself with younger homosexuals. The typical fag hag would be a jeweled harridan with some blond kid in tow. Have people been calling you a fag hag?"

"Leslie says so."

"Leslie is spiteful, but she may be right. People will say anything. And how they hate friendship! Friendship somehow seems to threaten them. When they see any two human beings form such a relationship, they'll break their necks to give it some kind of a sexual slant. Does it bother you terribly to be called a fag hag? Because of me?"

"I suppose it does. And, anyway, you're not a—"

"A fag? No. I should be, but I'm not. It's ridiculous. I suppose I put on my weight to make myself unattractive. And protect me from it. My gay friends call me an honorary queer."

"I'm sorry, Manny. I know I started it but I find I hate this kind of talk."

"Well, let's put it on the table, once and for all, and then we can leave it. You can decide whether or not you want to go on being my friend. Truth is everything, darling—I mean Frances. You see? You should have told me you objected the very first time I used that term. Be frank. Shall I tell you now just how I came to be what I am? Whatever that is?"

She agreed, but she was still glad when the cocktails arrived. Manny told his story succinctly and well. It was a Boston boyhood, a Boston background, brave, frugal, high-minded, laden with disaster. There was the father, killed in the Ardennes in 1917, and the two older brothers, both athletes, drowned off Manchester in a sailing race. Manny, a posthumous child, had been left alone to comfort an old mother, who had borne him at forty and who had supported her family as headmistress of a fashionable girls' school.

"Mother was simply everything to me," he explained. "You can't imagine her kindness and courage, her simple greatness. I knew that I was all she had left, and we simply clung to each other. There was us, and there was the world. Even the girls at her school, even the teachers, were 'world.' Mother cared for them—she was a cracker jack of a headmistress, efficient, strong—but they had nothing to do with 'us,' the inner citadel. To me they were dangerous, and Ma protected me. The school was hung with big, dark prints of academic paintings of historical scenes. One had a particular fascination for me. It showed Catherine de' Medici, followed by her ladies, emerging from the Louvre to inspect the corpses of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. The foreground was littered with male bodies, some partially stripped. Only partially, mind you. It was an academic picture. The Queen Mother's ladies exhibited a variety of expressions: fright, horror, scorn, elation. Only Catherine was cold, contained, impassive."

"And how did you interpret that?"

"Well, the men were dead, and the women survived; that I must have noted. It was dangerous to be a man and perhaps an unholy thing to be a woman. There was safety only in the erect, black-garbed figure of the Queen Mother."

"But wasn't she responsible for the massacre? Wasn't she a fiend? Surely you didn't accuse your poor mother of
that
?"

"Who knows what my subconscious may have accused the poor creature of? All I knew, deep down, was that she was on my side. That with her was safety. That is how I feel about you, too. And so it was that when I went to boarding school and was tempted to do those things with other boys, the image of Mother always kept me from it. Fear kept me from the girls; fear, or respect of Mother kept me from the boys. At this point, ten years after Mother's death, I am not sure which had the greater, or the less, attraction. All I know is that I have always been a monk and will now remain one."

"But, Manny, what a tragic story!"

"It's not tragic at all. I've been a jolly monk. Millions of men and women have been celibates by choice. I have lived as fully as most of the people we know. As Alice Nicholas, for example."

For the first time she caught the note of antagonism in his tone. Manny was not quite as dispassionate as he liked to think. He despised Leslie, but he hated Alice. Frances sighed and closed her eyes. She was going to have to choose between her two friends. And it was bitter evidence of how frail a creature Stuart Hamill's God had made her that she was going to find that choice so hard a one.

"Pray for me, Manny," she said with a wry smile. "Pray for me..." She closed her eyes as she made the ultimate effort to bring out the detested word. "Darling."

R
OSA KINGSLAND
was the same age as the century; she had just passed her sixtieth birthday when she received the final verdict from the Dunstan Sanatorium about her son.

"We are sorry to inform you that not only is there no immediate prospect of Meredith's being able to resume a normal life, but, in the opinion of at least one of our medical staff, it may be years before it will be advisable to release him from the institution. And we are afraid that we cannot advise your further visits while his resentment against his family and home is still so intense."

Rosa stared at the letter, wondering stonily if she were inhuman to see only a bill in its terms. But thirty thousand a year, that was what it added up to, not to mention the other fifteen just to keep her husband in his wheelchair on the floor above. At last slowly, ineluctably, the tears began to bubble up in her resisting eyes. Did tears matter? Did they make her any more absurd than she always had been: a stout Chinese Buddha with a round face and short gray curled hair? But a weeping Buddha—how ridiculous.

Calm again now—as calm and stolid as she usually managed to be—she rose and went to the wall to take down
The Betrothal
, one of Gorky's earlier versions. What should she put in its place? Why, what but what
had
been there, forty-odd years before, in her grandmother's day, and which was still presumably in the attic with the others of the old lady's collection, its face to the wall, the very dearest of dear little Tuscan peasant girls, a pitcher balanced on one shoulder, painted in Florence by Luther Terry in 1876. God.

She turned her reading lamp full on the Gorky and sadly studied it. She knew about the "biomorphic" images drawn from sexual organs, but she had suppressed them. It didn't make any difference what she thought so long as she kept it to herself.

What
she
saw in her Arshile Gorky ... ah, that was what made the difference. It was simply the most beautiful picture in the world—except for the
Resurrection
of Piero della Francesca that she and Amory had seen at Borgo San Sepolcro and which Aldous Huxley had called the greatest painting ever painted, so that was that. But the Gorky, a symphonic poem of light gray, dark gray and black, with flashes of yellow and red and soothing traces of pale green, evoked for her a fashionable ladies' store on Madison Avenue with round glass-topped tables, lamps on tall steel poles, elegant high-heeled slippers and the suggestion of beautiful women, soft-skinned Circes, worldly-wise, corrupt, stonyhearted. Yet broken up as they were into bits and pieces, their menace was muted and their loveliness intensified. It was always so in a world that concealed beauty behind every horror if you could only pull it out. Her imagined ladies made Rosa think of the answer of the Abbé Mugnier to a leering anticleric who had surprised him admiring a painting of nudes bathing: "
C'est un état d'âme, monsieur!
"