The Lockwood Concern (22 page)

"I went upstairs to use the toilet and she was just coming out. I didn't bother to say anything to her because I said good morning to her a couple of hours before, and I don't get any pleasure out of wasting words on her. The slut. But she took umbrage because I didn't speak to her, and she made a remark, an unladylike remark. Maybe I wasn't supposed to hear it, but I did. If you want to know what the remark was, all right, I'll tell you. She said she was glad she could use the toilet before me instead of after me. I let it pass. I didn't let on I heard it. I just went in, and when I came out she was still there in the room, waiting. I started to walk past her, but she stood in my way. 'Please let me pass,' I said to her. 'Not before I give you a piece of my mind,' she said. Maybe those weren't her exact words, but something like that. 'Not before I give you a piece of my mind. Not before I say what I have to say.' It was something to that effect. I wasn't listening to her very carefully. I just wanted to get out of the same room with her. I wanted to get a hundred miles away from her. And from everybody else here, for that matter. This is no place for me. I'm a Pennsylvania Dutchwoman from Richterville, Pennsylvania, where people like me and respect me, and treat me with politeness. Where I was born my folks are respected. Just let any of these New England Yankees or Philadelphia Quakers come and see us in Richterville, what people think of us. They'd soon find out that there's one part of the world where Adelaide Hoftner counts. That's how I was raised. I wasn't raised to think myself anyone's inferior, and no matter what's happened to me since I was a young girl, I never learned to think myself as anyone's inferior. You go to Philadelphia, or come here to St. Bartholomew's, and anyone can tell that you feel their inferior. You pretend as if they were your chums, and some of them pretend it too, but you're not chums with them. They have their own chums, and you're not one of them. I had all these years to think about you, and I could have told you something about yourself a long, long time ago, but I thought you'd get over it. But you never have. The first time I ever knew you, at my sister's wedding, you were so handsome and such a conceited person. But I should have asked myself, "Who were you?" Abraham Lockwood from Swedish Haven was all you were, no better than the younger fellows at Barbara Shellenberger's. Just older... Anyway, she stood in my road, this Martha Downs. "What do you mean, walking in here and ignoring me?" she said. "I spoke to you once, that's enough," I said. 'I don't wish to speak to you anymore, so please get out of my road," I said. "You talk like a bumpkin and you are," she said. "I'd rather be a respectable bumpkin than what you are," I said. "How do you know what I am - unless your husband told you?" she said. "Nobody had to tell me what you are," I said. "My husband didn't tell me anything. He didn't have to," I said. "Any wife knows when her husband's been with one of your kind." Oh, we said more than that, back and forth, till finally she said, "I think I'll take him away from you again." "Again?" I said. "I never took him back. What's been in you I don't want in me." Then this Mrs. Haddon came in and said, "Ladies, ladies," and I said, "Singular number. Don't put me in the plural with her," and then I came down here. I want to leave this place right away. You can stay for the lunch, if that's what you want to do. But I'm going to hire a carriage and take the next train to Boston. Suit yourself, what you want to do. But George is coming with me. I asked him if he would, and he wants to. Stay if you want to, but you'll only be making a spectacle of yourself if you do. And I know this much about people, Abraham Lockwood. Your friends won't think any the more of you if you let your wife and son leave and you stay. For my part, I don't care if you stay for good. I only know you're a fool."

The reader will do well to remind himself that the Lockwood Concern existed throughout the better part of a hundred years without ever being given a name. It was for that reason that George Bingham Lockwood always had difficulty in establishing the point at which his awareness of the Concern began. At first vaguely and then clearly he saw that his father had plans for him, that there was some sort of governing theme to his father's direction of his life; but where other boys were being influenced and urged and ordered to study this for the law, that for medicine, to train certain muscles for use in certain games, to cultivate alliances with some contemporaries but not others, George Bingham Lockwood could find in his father's counsel only the recurring wish that George - and the younger brother Penrose - would always remember that home was Swedish Haven, Swedish Haven was home. Repetition of this wish, expressed in various forms, eventually resulted in George's recognition of Swedish Haven residence as his father's rather modest hope for his family's future, and this was not difficult to understand, since at St. Bartholomew's nearly every boy accepted - or was already rebelling against the eventual return to some place; a city, a town, an estate, a plantation, from which he had come, and which was more than the middle-class idea of home. The place, whether it was a populous one or an isolated establishment in the country, had implications of family continuity and prestige, and even those boys who were already rebelling against returning showed by their rebelliousness an awareness of the formidable opposition they must encounter. This was as true of the city boys - New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore - as of those who were listed in the school roster as coming from Prides Crossing, Massachusetts; Towson, Maryland; Purchase, New York. The city boys invariably referred to some rural post office or estate name in a tone that was more meaningful than the manner in which they spoke of their town residences. It was never strange to them that George Lockwood should come from a place called Swedish Haven; the names of their own places were just as strange. (The boys from Chicago and Buffalo had a worse time of it in that respect; the Chicago boy was nick-named Chicago, and the Buffalo boy, Buffalo - both nouns being considered sufficiently disparaging for prep school nicknames.) His father's one wish seemed moderate enough and happened to conform with George's own intentions as of his final years at St. Bartholomew's and the beginning of his career at Princeton. He was still young enough to want very much to be home at Christmas; to visit his grandfather in Richterville, to collect the presents from his Richterville relatives, to go to the young people's dance in Gibbsville (his social stock in Gibbsville had jumped immediately upon his admittance to St. Bartholomew's, to which no Gibbsville parent had ever applied in behalf of a son), to eat the rich, heavy Pennsylvania Dutch sweetmeats, to go on sleighing parties for chicken-and-waffle suppers. The Philadelphia parties were fun, but less fun than the festivities closer to home. The Philadelphia parties were fun because George Lockwood knew that girls liked him; the Lantenengo County parties were fun because girls liked him and he did not have to be so careful about being too attentive to them; in Gibbsville everyone, without exception, knew who he was. The knowledge did not make for universal cordiality; some of the boys and some of their fathers were hostile or indifferent; but they knew who he was, and though he was young, he was old enough to like being recognized. Life in Swedish Haven was pleasant quite apart from the festive occasions. At St. Bartholomew's the boys and their parents were discouraged by Arthur Francis Ferris from all ostentation. George Lockwood and everyone else could name the boys whose families actually owned ocean-going yachts and racing stables, but there were other boys whose families could afford yachts and great stables and chose not to. Consequently, in among the inconspicuous non-spenders who possessed great wealth were mixed the sons of those who could not be called wealthy. There was so much wealth at St. Bartholomew's that it was not fashionable, and any display of it was considered gauche. It was hardly a democratic school in its attitude toward candidates for admittance; social prestige, which was usually accompanied by more than adequate means, was the first requirement for entrance, and a George Lockwood never could have got in the school without the support of Morris Homestead and Harry Penn Downs, who vouched for Abraham Lockwood as an acceptable if not quite accepted man. No Jew, even of the Sephardic aristocracy, and no Roman Catholic, even of Maryland or Louisiana line, was admitted to the school during the Nineteenth Century. No native of the vast area between Charleston and New Orleans was able to satisfy Arthur Francis Ferris's social standards, nor would he let in any son of a brewer (distillers' sons were acceptable if they belonged to the landed gentry), a meat packer, a Baptist, a dentist, an Italian, a South American, or a grand opera singer male or female. A clergyman who wore gaiters had a better chance of getting his son into St. Bartholomew's than a minister of the gospel who wore a business suit, and a surgeon's son had a better chance than the boy whose father was a pill-doctor. The president of a country bank got his son on the St. Bartholomew's list a full generation ahead of the cashier of a large city bank. (None of this deterred Jews, Catholics, Alabamans, brewers, meat packers, Baptists, dentists, Italians, South Americans, tenors, Presbyterians, general practitioners or bank cashiers from trying to have exceptions made.) Nevertheless, Arthur Francis Ferris, having assembled a student body of the elite, thereupon made a conscientious effort to treat them all alike. He was a despot, but one who insisted on democratic practice among the boys. They dressed alike in a non-military uniform that was similar to the Etonians'; they made their own beds and washed out of tin basins; they formed ranks to march from classroom to classroom. Ferris's strictness in regard to the possession of cash made money illegal tender, and the richest boy in school at any given moment was the one who had earned the most privileges, which consisted of intangibles such as a boy's being allowed to study in his room instead of going to study-hall; leaving his light on after nine-thirty. Sometimes that boy had been George Lockwood, although he had never been elected Head Boy of his class or of the school, and the democratizing process had left him eagerly receptive toward the admiration, friendliness, obsequiousness, and adulation that awaited him in Swedish Haven, Richterville, and Gibbsville. The growing conviction that he was brighter, cleverer than his schoolmates, and the sense of his attractiveness to girls and older women, had together created an egotism that needed that which St. Bartholomew's had denied and which on his home ground was freely given. In such a state of mind he entered the freshman class at Princeton, already committed to one condition of the Lockwood Concern. He would never live anywhere but Swedish Haven.

At Princeton the slightly spurious democracy of St. Bartholomew's vanished immediately. Only one other boy - Chicago - had come down from St. Bartholomew's to Princeton; all their classmates had gone to Harvard, Yale, and - the Philadelphians - to Penn. But there were eight St. Bartholomew's boys in the sophomore, junior, and senior classes, and they had taken their proper place in the Princeton social hierarchy, thus easing the way for G. B. Lockwood and Anson "Chicago" Chatsworth. The formidable front presented by boys from Lawrenceville and The Hill made for a defensive unity among St. Bartholomew's boys that was not necessarily the case at Harvard or Yale. Old boys from St. Bartholomew's who had not been especially fond of Lockwood or Chatsworth in prep school now called on them and made a point of being seen publicly with them. These old boys had already made friends among the few graduates of Groton and St. Paul's at Princeton, and Lockwood and Chatsworth were tentatively absorbed into this smallish group. This cabal bypassed the boys from the New Jersey and Pennsylvania high schools and the lesser prep schools, and since their existence as an informal homogeneous unit always contained the threat of formal organization, they were always able to get themselves elected to one or two of the more fashionable eating-clubs. A club composed of their own number would automatically have become as prestigious as any in the university, with an inevitable loss of some prestige for the clubs already in being. In his first week at Princeton George Bingham Lockwood discarded the notions of democracy that had been superimposed at St. Bartholomew's. It was ridiculously easy summarily to dismiss one-third of the freshman class on account of their clothes; but by the same token it was easy to be deceived by elegance: there were freshmen who dressed well whose good taste in clothes would never be enough to overcome handicaps that were not so readily apparent. In his first few days George Lockwood became friendly with a well dressed classmate about whom he knew nothing except that he came from New York, obviously had money, and in spite of his blue eyes was of French extraction. The classmate's name was Edmund Auberne. It came as a jolting surprise to learn that the man's name was O'Byrne, that he was an Irish Catholic and a graduate of Fordham. Prep. George Lockwood never had heard or seen the name O'Byrne, never had heard of Fordharn Prep, and felt slightly tricked that he had not immediately recognized an Irish Catholic. As he saw more of O'Byrne and heard his quite deadly comments on undergraduates and faculty George Lockwood recovered his confidence in his judgments; if he could have heard the Irish name at the start of their friendship he would have known that such sardonic humor did not belong in the makeup of the kind of man O'Byrne had seemed to be. O'Byrne was sophisticated, witty, disrespectful, and apparently friendless. A second jolting surprise came with the early discovery that O'Byrne had an older brother who was a guard on the football team. (Football was not then played at St. Bartholomew's, and George Lockwood had never seen an inter collegiate game.) O'Byrne therefore was not quite so lonesome as George Lockwood had guessed him to be. O'Byrne, in fact, constantly upset George Lockwood's notions of him; he was an entirely new experience for George Lockwood, whose personal knowledge of the American Irish was limited to the laboring men who lived in Irishtown, on the mud flats of Swedish Haven, and to a few others who worked around horses as coachmen and hostlers. O'Byrne's father was a Dublin-educated doctor, presumably a successful one. Edmund, or Ned, had been abroad twice, and he spoke of Bourke Cockran, Chauncey Olcott and Agnes Repplier as visitors to the O'Byrne house in New York in an impressed way that prevented George Lockwood from confessing that he had never heard of them. Ned O'Byrne's whole attitude toward Princeton and the social system irritated George Lockwood, who did not believe his friend was in any position to be critical of a system that would automatically reject him. But when O'Byrne mentioned one day that his father was on a special train, touring the West with one of the Vanderbilts, George Lockwood once again was confused by this fellow who would not stay in a pigeon hole. O'Byrne was also a good card player, who quite frankly expected to supplement his allowance while at Princeton with his winnings from the undergraduate body. (In the first semester of freshman year O'Byrne won more than five hundred dollars from Anson Chatsworth alone. "We must do everything we can to help him pass his examinations," O'Byrne told George Lockwood. "You help him with his math and I'll help him with his Latin. That chap is going to make up for my old man's stinginess, these next three years.") George Lockwood was prepared to terminate his friendship with O'Byrne whenever it was expedient to do so, but he found that as he began to know the class as individuals and not merely as a group of young men with only the common tie of a hope to graduate in 1895, he would seek out the company of O'Byrne and two others. Those three were his choice, and finally O'Byrne was his choice of the three for two apparently contradictory reasons: he could relax with O'Byrne, and O'Byrne stimulated him. The other two of the three were Ezra Davenport and Jack Harbord. Davenport was having a second try at freshman year, having flunked out on his first try, with the distinction of having failed his examinations in every subject. His indignant parents, unable to expend their wrath on Princeton University, put Davenport in a cramming school from February to August, and he was readmitted to college as a freshman. At nineteen he already had the look of a voluptuary, and he would grow into the look as time went on. He was a cigarette fiend and affected the habit of speaking with a cigarette stuck on his lower lip, which bounced up and down as he spoke. He was constantly pushing back his forelocks, which constantly fell over his forehead. He cocked his head at an angle, to keep the cigarette smoke out of his eyes, and this habit made him appear to be attentive to conversations in a worldly-wise way. It took George Lockwood the better part of four years to realize that Ezra Davenport had attached himself to him, that Ezra had a weak stomach for alcoholic beverages and that his conquests of the female sex were largely, although not entirely, imaginary. Merely by flunking out of college in his first freshman year Ezra Davenport had established himself among the hellers of the campus, and his prematurely dissolute appearance gave credibility to the role he had assumed. He was actually a meek little fellow, an only son of two good-sized fortunes, who was unequal to the demands put upon him by his father and mother. In other circumstances he might have become a hotel clerk or an ineffectual member of the clergy, but he too was a victim of a Concern. Jack Harbord was as correct as Ezra Davenport was wrong. It was hard to believe that anyone could become so upright in the first nineteen years of his life, a little harder to believe than that Davenport had become so worldly in the same time. Harbord was a rich boy, well dressed, gentlemanly manners and all, but in his case the accouterments of wealth and upbringing were reassuring; Jack Harbord would never use his money or his personality for sinister purpose. He was a tall blond with a magnificent physique, and he was elected class president without opposition, almost entirely on a fixed smile and a seemingly inexhaustible willingness to be helpful and good. "A very good man, Harbord," said O'Byrne. "All good. No evil at all, not a bit. Doesn't need an ass-hole like you and me. I understand he was born with his second teeth all in place. A good, good man, our Jack." "But that's what he is. Why are you sarcastic about him? You prefer him to Davenport, don't you?" "He's not as trustworthy." "As Davenport? You're crazy in the head." "How can you trust a man that's so good? I can trust Davenport because you know what a bounder's going to do. A pious son of a bitch like Harbord, watch out for his kind. He'd hang me, given the chance, but you wouldn't understand that." "Then explain it." "Wait, and I won't have to explain it. He won't put a rope around my neck, but I'm not counting on his vote. I voted for him, by the way." "Because I wanted to make it unanimous. Harbord knows how many are in the class, and one vote against him would have caused him loss of sleep. He'll be a strong class president, very good with the faculty. But he wouldn't have been quite as good if everybody didn't love him. At heart a despicable, cruel coward. The infant Jesus protect me from the like of him." In due course Harbord cautioned George Lockwood against O'Byrne. "Just don't be seen with him too often, George. The clubs get the impression that you're not going to be a good club member if you have a close friend that's not going to make a club." "Isn't O'Byrne going to make a club?" "His brother's club, probably. But not any that you or I want to be in. Your father was a Zeta Psi. Well, that's what Ivy used to be. A word to the wise, George. After you're in, see as much of him as you feel like, but take my advice." George Lockwood said nothing to O'Byrne, not so much from a desire to spare O'Byrne's feelings as from a reluctance to concede that O'Byrne had been right about Harbord. O'Byrne's sardonic accuracy was not an endearing quality, and the friendship very nearly was terminated a few weeks after Harbord's conversation. George Lockwood managed to see O'Byrne frequently, but he contrived to have their meetings less public. "Which is it going to be, George? Have you decided?" "Decided what?" "Just about the only thing we decide for ourselves here. Is it going to be Ivy, or one of the others?" "That's something it's not good policy to talk about." "I know, I keep hearing that. Everybody I've talked to says the same thing." "If you go around talking about it, you're going to be left out in the cold." "Oh, it's no problem for me. Either I ride in on my brother Kevin's broad shoulders or I don't ride in at all. Kevin's a wild man, you know. If I don't get invited to join his club he'll resign, not that he has a strong feeling of brotherly affection, mind you, No. But we have a younger brother that Kevin wants to go to Princeton, but Jerry thinks he'd like to go to Yale, and if Kevin's club spurns me, Jerry won't come here. So you might say I'm in the middle, with nothing to worry about. It's all up to Kevin. You have a different kind of a problem." "Have I?" "Oh, yes, but if you don't want to talk about it... thought it would do you good to get it off your chest." "I have a younger brother, too. At St. Bartholomew's." "How old?" "Four years younger." "But four years at St. Bartholomew's, he may want to go to Yale or Harvard. Or Penn." "No, he's coming here." "Ivy or no Ivy?" "No matter what." "Hmm. You won't even mention the name. That's good form, George. You must have been taking lessons from Jack Harbord." "Oh, go to hell." "Very good form. It'll be Ivy for you, George. I think you can safely count on it. There's a poker game tonight. Chatsworth's room. Will you be playing?" "No." "Be glad to take your I. O. U." "I'd be glad to take yours, but I have to study. Don't you ever study?" "In the mornings, sometimes. I was a day scholar, so I'm used to getting up early. I'll never like it, but I'm used to it... Oh, I have a bit of friendly advice for you, chum." "What?" "Don't get too chummy with Davenport, at least till after the club elections. He doesn't pay his gambling debts. At least he doesn't pay me, and I've been given to understand that he still owes some from last year. That's going to come up during the club elections, and you don't want them thinking he's your bosom companion. As far as that goes, I'm no help to you either, George, but they'll never be able to say I renege on gambling debts." To the eternal confusion of the undergraduate body, at club elections Ezra Davenport and Jack Harbord were taken into Ivy, George Lockwood and Ned O'Byrne into Orchard, and inoffensive Anson Chatsworth got nothing. George Lockwood did not receive an Ivy bid; Ned O'Byrne did not receive a bid from his brother's club. Lockwood and O'Byrne each had three other bids besides Orchard's. Davenport's only bid was from Ivy; Harbord had a bid from every club in the university. "I haven't seen Kevin," said O'Byrne. "But I hope he's holding his temper." In George Lockwood's junior year the contingent of Eastern Pennsylvanians at Princeton were joined by a freshman named David Fenstermacher, from the town and county of Lebanon, and from Mercersburg Academy. George Lockwood did not notice Fenstermacher until they took the same northbound train from Philadelphia during the Christmas holidays. Fenstermacher was very young (but all freshmen looked young) and George Lockwood would not have noticed him even then had it not been for the Princeton-pennant sticker on Fenstermacher's valise, a bit of ostentation that had never appeared on George Lockwood's luggage. The freshman and the junior were standing near each other, waiting for the train platform gate to be opened. Ordinarily George Lockwood would have ignored the younger man, but in the spirit of Christmas he opened the conversation: "I see you go to Princeton." David Fenstermacher smiled. "Yes I do, Mr. Lockwood. I'm from Lebanon." "I see. Then you change trains at Reading." "Yes sir." "Take the Fort Penn train there, I guess." "Yes sir. I get off at the Outer Station and take the Fort Penn train and I'm home inside of an hour. I'll be glad to get home." "Why? Don't you like Princeton?" "Oh, I like it all right but I like home better. I haven't had a square meal since September." "Well, we all have to go through that freshman year. You are a freshman, aren't you?" "Yes sir." "Where did you go before Princeton?" "Mercersburg for two years, before that, Lebanon High." "Oh, then you have a lot of friends at college. Mercersburg sends a lot of boys to Princeton." "Yes. You're from Swedish Haven, aren't you?" "Yes. How did you know?" "You were pointed out to me by a friend of mine, a boy from Gibbsville. Alden Stokes. He was in my class at Mercersburg and I'm going to visit him during the holidays." "You going to the Assembly?" "We're going to some dance but I don't think it's called the Assembly." "Oh, yes. The Young Peoples'. Alden Stokes is a cousin of a cousin of mine." "I know." "How did you know that?" "He told me." "Good Lord, you must have discussed me pretty thoroughly." "Well, I guess we did." "Good grief!" "It was mostly very flattering. I guess you won't be in Swedish Haven much." "Why do you guess that?" "Oh, you're supposed to spend most of your vacation in Philly and New