The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (2 page)

But why did they always think that they had to draw
her
in, make
her
part of it? Why did they all turn to her on those ghastly Christmas Eves, when they gathered around the piano to bray out their carols, and cry: “Maud, sing this,” and “Maud, isn't it lovely?” And why, when, with the devil in her soul, she raised her uncertain voice to sing the page's part in “Good King Wenceslaus,” did they say: “That was
really
nice, Maud. You do like Christmas, don't you, after all?” It was the “after all” that gave them away. They smelled her out, spotted her for what she was, a rank intruder in their midst; but at the same time, with inexhaustible generosity, they held open the gate and continued to shout their welcome.

“Damn you! Goddamn all of you!”

There. She had said it, and she had said it, too, on Christmas Eve, one week after her thirteenth birthday. Not as long as she lived would she forget the shocked hush that fell over the family group, the stem amazement of her father, the delighted animosity of the boys. It was out at last.

“Maud!” her father exclaimed. “Where did you ever pick up language like that?”

“From Nannie,” she answered.

“From Nannie!”

“Darling!” cried her mother, enveloping her with arms of steel. “Darling child, what's wrong? Aren't you happy? Tell Mummie, dearest.”

“Maud's wicked,” said brother Sam.

“Shut up, Sam,” his father snapped.

Pressed to the lacy warmness of her mother's bosom, Maud felt welling up within herself the almost irresistible tide of surrender, but when she closed her eyes and clenched her fists, her own little granite integrity was able, after all, to have its day. She tore herself out of her mother's arms.

“I hate you all!” she screamed.

This time there was no sternness or hostility in the eyes around her. There was only concern, deep concern.

“I'll take her up to her room,” she heard her mother tell her father. “You stay here. Tell Nannie, if she hasn't already gone out, to stay.”

Her mother took her upstairs and tried to reason with her. She talked to her very gently and told her how much they all loved her and how much they would do for her, and didn't she love them back just a little, tiny, tiny bit? Didn't she really, darling? But Maud was able to shake her head. It was difficult; it cost her much. Everything that was in her was yearning to have things the way they had always been, to be approved and smiled at, even critically, but she knew how base it would be to give in to the yearning, even if everything that stood for resistance was baser yet. She was a bad girl, a very bad one, but to go back now, to retrace her steps, after the passionately desired and unbelievably actual stand of defiance, to merge once more with that foolish sea of smiles and kisses, to lose forever her own little ego in the consuming fire of family admiration—no, this she would not do.

Alone in the dark she flung herself upon her pillow and made it damp with her tears, tears that for the first time in her life came from her own causing. Why she was taking this dark and lonely course, why she should have to persist in setting herself apart from all that was warm and beckoning, she could only wonder, but that she
was
doing it and would continue to do it and would live by it was now her dusky faith. “I will. I will. I
will!
” she repeated over and over, until she had worked herself into a sort of frenzy and was banging her head against the bedpost. Then the door opened, swiftly, as though they had been standing just outside, and her mother and father and Nannie came in and looked at her in dismay.

Mrs. Spreddon had certainly no idea what had possessed her daughter. She was not without intelligence or sympathy, and responsibility sat easily with the furs on her ample shoulders, but there was little imagination and no humor in her make-up, and she could not comprehend any refusal of others to participate in that portion of the good of the universe which had been so generously allotted to herself. The disappointments that resulted from a failure to achieve an aim, any aim, were well within her comprehension, and when her son Sammy had failed to be elected head monitor of his school she and Mr. Spreddon had journeyed to New England to be at his side; but misery without a cause or misery with bitterness was to her unfathomable. She discussed it with her husband's sister, Mrs. Lane, who was in New York on a visit from Paris. Lila Lane was pretty, diminutive, and very chatty. She laughed at herself and the world and pretended to worship politics when she really worshiped good food. She dressed perfectly, always in black, with many small diamonds.

“It isn't as if the child didn't have everything she wanted,” Mrs. Spreddon pointed out. “All she has to do is ask, and she gets it. Within limits, of course. I'm not one to spoil a child. What could it be that she's dissatisfied with?”

Mrs. Lane, taking in the detail of her sister-in-law's redecorated parlor, heavily Georgian, all gleaming mahogany and bright new needlework, reflected that Maud might, after all, have something to be dissatisfied with.

“Is she ever alone?” she asked.

“Why should she be alone?” Mrs. Spreddon demanded. “She's far too shy as it is. She hates playing with other children. She hasn't a single friend at school that I know of.”

“Neither did I. At that age.”

Mrs. Spreddon was not surprised to hear this, but then she had no intention of having her Maud grow up like Lila and perhaps live in Paris and buy a Monet every fifth year with the money that she saved by not having children.

“But Maud doesn't like
anybody
,” she protested. “Not even me.”

“Why should she?”

“Oh, Lila. You've been abroad too long. Whoever heard of a child not liking her own family when they've been good to her?”

“I have. Just now.”

Mrs. Spreddon frowned at her. “You seem to think it's my fault,” she said.

“It isn't anyone's fault, Mary,” Mrs. Lane assured her. “Maud didn't choose you for a mother. There's no reason she should like you.”

“And what should I do about it?”

Mrs. Lane shrugged her shoulders. “Is there anything to be done?” she asked. “Isn't the milk pretty well spilled by now?”

“That's all very well for you to say,” Mrs. Spreddon retorted. “But a parent can't take that point of view. A parent has to believe.”

“I don't mean that she's hopeless,” Mrs. Lane said quickly. “I just mean that she's different. There's nothing so terrible about that, Mary. Maud's more like her grandfather.”

“The Judge? But he was such an old dear, Lila!”

Mrs. Lane placed a cigarette carefully in her ivory holder and held it for several seconds before lighting it. She hated disputes, but the refusal of her sister-in-law to face any facts at all in the personalities around her other than the cheerful ones that she attributed to them, a refusal that Mrs. Lane felt to be indigenous to the stratum of American life that she had abandoned for Paris, irritated her almost beyond endurance.

“My father was not an ‘old dear,' Mary,” she said in a rather metallic tone. “He was a very intellectual and a very strange man. He was never really happy until they made him a judge, and he could sit on a bench, huddled in his black robes, and look out at the world.”

“You have such a peculiar way of looking at things, Lila,” Mrs. Spreddon retorted. “Judge Spreddon was a great man. Certainly, I never knew a man who was more loved.”

Mrs. Lane inhaled deeply. “Maybe Maud's daughters-in-law will say the same about her.”

“Maybe they will,” Mrs. Spreddon agreed. “If she ever has any.”

Mr. Spreddon worried even more than his wife, but he knew better than to expose himself to the chilly wind of his sister's skepticism. When he sought consolation it was in the sympathetic male atmosphere of his downtown world where he could always be sure of a friendly indifference and an easy optimism to reassure his troubled mind. Mr. Spreddon at fifty-five showed no outward symptoms of any inner insecurity. He was a big man of magnificent health, with gray hair and red cheeks, who had succeeded to his father's position in the great law firm that bore his name. Not that this had been an easy or automatic step, or that it could have been accomplished without the distinct ability that Mr. Spreddon possessed. He was an affable and practical-minded man whose advice was listened to with respect at directors' meetings and by the widows and daughters of the rich. But it was true, nevertheless, that beneath the joviality of his exterior he carried a variegated sense of guilt: guilt at having succeeded a father whose name was so famous in the annals of law, guilt at having leisure in an office where people worked so hard, guilt at being a successful lawyer without having ever argued a case, guilt at suspecting that the sound practical judgment for which he was reputed was, in the last analysis, nothing but a miscellany of easy generalities. It may have been for this reason that he took so paternal an interest in the younger lawyers in his office, particularly in Halsted Nicholas, the prodigy from Yonkers who had started as an office boy and had been Judge Spreddon's law clerk when the old man died.

“I tell you she's all right, Bill,” Halsted said with his usual familiarity when Mr. Spreddon came into the little office where he was working surrounded by piles of photostatic exhibits, both feet on is desk. “You ought to be proud of her. She's got spunk, that girl.”

“You'll admit it's an unusual way to show it.”

“All the better. Originality should be watered.” Halsted swung around in his chair to face the large ascetic features of the late Judge Spreddon in the photograph over his bookcase. “The old boy would have approved,” he added irreverently. “He always said it was hate that made the world go round.”

Mr. Spreddon never quite knew what to make of Halsted's remarks. “But I don't want her to be abnormal,” he said. “If she goes on hating everybody, how is she ever going to grow up and get married?”

“Oh, she'll get married,” Halsted said.

“Well, sure. If she changes.”

“Even if she doesn't.”

Mr. Spreddon stared. “Now, what makes you say that?” he demanded.

“Take me. I'll marry her.”

Mr. Spreddon laughed. “You'll have to wait quite a bit, my boy,” he said. “She's only thirteen.”

Mr. and Mrs. Spreddon were not content with the passive view recommended by Mrs. Lane and Halsted Nicholas. Conscientious and loving parents as they were, they recognized that what ailed Maud was certainly something beyond their own limited control, and they turned, accordingly, in full humility and with open purses, to the psychiatrist, the special school, the tutor, the traveling companion. In fact, the whole paraphernalia of our modern effort to adjust the unadjusted was brought to bear on their sulking daughter. Nobody ever spoke to Maud now except with predetermined cheerfulness. She was taken out of the home that she had so disliked and sent to different schools in different climates, always in the smiling company of a competent woman beneath whose comfortable old-maid exterior was hidden a wealth of expensive psychological experience, and whose well-paid task it was to see if somehow it was not possible to pry open poor tightened Maud and permit the entry of at least a trickle of spontaneity. Maud spent a year in Switzerland under the care of one of the greatest of doctors, who regularly devoted one morning a week to walking with her in a Geneva park; she spent a year in Austria under equally famous auspices, and she passed two long years in Arizona in a small private school where she rode and walked with her companion and enjoyed something like peace. During visits home she was treated with a very special consideration, and her brothers were instructed always to be nice to her.

Maud saw through it all, however, from the very first and resented it with a continuing intensity. It was the old battle that had always raged between herself and her family; of this she never lost sight, and to give in because the struggle had changed its form would have been to lose the only fierce little logic that existed in her drab life. To this she clung with the dedication of a vestal virgin, wrapping herself each year more securely in the coating of her own isolation. Maud learned a certain adjustment to life, but she lost none of the bitterness of her conflict in the process. At nineteen she still faced the world with defiance in her eyes.

When she returned from the last of her many schools and excursions and came home to live with her family in New York, it was just six years from the ugly Christmas Eve of her original explosion. She had grown up into a girl whose appearance might have been handsome had one not been vaguely conscious of a presence somehow behind her holding her back—a person, so to speak, to whom one could imagine her referring questions over her shoulder and whose answer always seemed to be no. She had lovely, long, dark hair which she wore, smooth and uncurled, almost to her shoulders; she was very thin, and her skin was a clear white. Her eyes, large and brown, had a steady, uncompromising stare. She gave all the appearance of great shyness and reserve, for she hardly spoke at all, but the settled quality of her stare made it evident that any reluctance on her part to join in general conversation did not have its origin in timidity. Maud had established her individuality and her prejudices, and it was felt that this time she had come home to stay. Her parents still made spasmodic efforts to induce her to do this thing or that, but essentially her objectives had been attained. Nobody expected anything of her. Nobody was surprised when she did not kiss them.

She adopted for herself an unvarying routine. Three days a week she worked at a hospital; she rode in Central Park; she read and played the piano and occasionally visited the Metropolitan Museum. Mrs. Spreddon continued the busy whirl of her life and reserved teatime every evening as her time for Maud. What more could she do? It was difficult to work up any sort of social life for a daughter so reluctant, but she did make occasional efforts and managed once in a while to assemble a stiff little dinner for Maud where the guests would be taken on, immediately upon rising from table, to the best musical comedy of the season, the only bait that could have lured them there. Maud endured it without comment. She was willing to pay an occasional tax for her otherwise unruffled existence.