The Lockwood Concern (23 page)

York. That's what I heard." "You heard wrong. I may go to one or two parties in Philadelphia, but I don't enjoy them anymore. I think a man ought to be home at Christmas. It's all right to visit friends. You going to Gibbsville. But I guess Gibbsville isn't very different from Lebanon. I've never been to Lebanon." "Gibbsville is livelier. They have more parties than Lebanon. Our young people mostly go to Reading or Fort Penn for the big balls there." "I'm supposed to go to a ball in Fort Penn on the 28th or 29th." "Oh, yes. My uncle's on the committee. Did you ever hear of him? Roy Reichelderfer? He went to Yale." "No." "He's my uncle. A big fellow. Everybody likes him. The Reichelderfers are all big. My cousin Paul is over two hundred pounds and he's only fourteen." "But you're not more than a hundred and fifty." "I'm not a Reichelderfer. I'm a Fenstermacher." "Oh." "I guess I didn't tell you my name. David Fenstermacher." "Oh. We have a lot of Fenstermachers in Lantenengo County. In fact, there are some in Swedish Haven. But I don't know any Reichelderfers, at least I don't think I do... Well, at last. Are you sitting in the Pullman?" "No, only when I travel with my parents." "Well, if I don't see you during vacation - back at Princeton." "Goodbye, Mr. Lockwood. It was a pleasure to meet you." This encounter became significant on New Year's Eve, at the Gibbsville Assembly. George Lockwood's "drag," - the girl he had invited to the dance - came down with an attack of boils on Christmas Eve, and he attended the function as a stag. He thus was free to keep his card as full or as empty as he wished, to have a cigar when he felt like it, and to visit the punchbowl. He was having a glass of punch when he was accosted by Red Phillips, a Gibbsville acquaintance. "I've been looking all over for you," said Phillips. "Not in the right places." "Listen, George, there's a girl here from Lebanon says she would like to meet you. You know her brother or somebody in the family. Are you free for the second waltz after intermission?" "Let me look. Yes. What name, "Edlalie Fenstermacher." "Oh. Her brother's a freshman. Is she pretty?" "She's very pretty and a good talker." At the second waltz after intermission George Lockwood presented himself, was introduced to Miss Edlalie Fenstermacher, and swept her out onto the dance floor. "You were very nice to my brother. Thank you." "The pea-green freshman? Oh, he was a nice kid." "You sound like Methuselah. You're going to wish you hadn't some day." "Not I. It's girls that want to pretend they're younger, not men. Have you started to lie about your age, Miss Fenstermacher?" "No, and I never intend to. I just won't tell anybody." "You won't have to. You're either nineteen or twenty now, so I'll always know within one year how old you are." "You're so clever, Mr. Lockwood." "What's clever about that? It isn't hard to guess a girl's age. I can guess any woman's age, under thirty. Then it becomes more difficult, but under thirty it's pretty easy. Where do you go to school?" "I graduated last June. From Oak Hill." "Oh, that's not very far from Princeton. To think that you went to school near me - and Lebanon isn't so very far away either. Do you think it's a small world, Miss Fenstermacher?" "That depends." "On what?" "On whose world you're talking about. Your world is small. You lived in the same college with my brother for three months, but you never saw him till last week. That's because your world is tiny. Therefore you make the world itself seem infinitely larger." "I follow you so far, but I didn't know I was going to get into higher mathematics. Don't tell me you're a bluestocking, Miss Fenstermacher." "Oh, I wouldn't try to tell a Princeton man anything." "Why not? Just because it's so hard to educate your Lehigh friends? Don't give up so easily." "At least Lehigh men are willing to learn." "They'd better be. They have a lot to catch up on." "I thought Red Phillips was a friend of yours." "Well, he introduced me to you, I'll say that for the poor, unsophisticated piece of humanity. Did you go to the ball in Fort Penn the other night?" "Yes, why?" "Because now I wish I'd gone." "My uncle was on the committee." "Are you fending off a compliment? I said I wish I'd gone." "I heard you. I didn't know whether you intended it as a compliment or because you wish you'd been there to tease me." "Was Red at the ball?" "Red Phillips? Heavens, Mr. Lockwood, I have other escorts besides Red Phillips." "How many others?" "How many others?" "How-many-others? I want to know how many I have to contend with." "I didn't know you planned to contend." "Of course you didn't, but you know it now. You can put them out of their agony right away, and also make it much easier for me." "Such self-confidence, I declare." "Wouldn't it be more merciful to put them out of their agony now? When I arrive at your house I sincerely hope you will have got rid of the mandolin players, at least." "How did you?" "Oh, that's obvious. I'm sure the whole F. & M. glee club serenades you all summer." "Did my brother tell you that?" "Good Lord, no. That would be obvious too. Franklin and Marshall. Lebanon Valley. Muhlenberg. Lehigh. Lehigh. Lehigh, Gottverdamintsei." "Mr. Lockwood! I think you've been sampling the punch." "That's a good idea. Let's go over and have a glass of punch and we can stand behind the palms and then you stand your next partner up." "You're a little Dutchy, aren't you?" "My mother's name was Hoffner. Why not?" "Oh, I know Hoffners. In Richterville." "They're the ones. What do you say to my suggestion?" "I say no. If you wish to dance with me again, you have to ask Red. I think my card is filled." "Well, I gave you the opportunity of a lifetime. You can't say I didn't." "I didn't say you couldn't come and see me in Lebanon." "No, you didn't, did you? Well, when?" "Spring vacation. My brother'd be only too glad to invite you, and we have plenty of room." In August of that summer, his last college vacation, they reached an understanding. An understanding was an unofficial, unannounced engagement to be married, and had its own rules and conventions. Eulalie Fenstermacher told her mother that George Lockwood wanted to be engaged to her. "Have an understanding," said Mrs. Fenstermacher. "You can have an understanding till George graduates. That's always better." An understanding did not involve the young man's obtaining the consent of the girl's father, and the father remained out of the picture until the propitious moment. The custom of having an understanding, which in the lower classes was known as "going steady," offered most of the advantages without entailing the risk of a publicly announced and publicly broken engagement. Thus it could be said of a young couple, "They had an understanding, but they changed their minds," and neither party would be marked as jilted. During an understanding a young couple could be together a great deal, but their friends did not entertain specifically in their honor. Mainly what was implicit in an understanding was that the young man and the young woman were already forsaking all others, and only waiting for circumstances, such as time, to make the formal announcement feasible or desirable. There was something more honorable in an understanding than in an engagement. Mutual trust and confidence was deeply involved. An engagement had the status of a quasi-legal agreement, and a young man was bound by public opinion to conform to the social laws governing engagements. Strictly speaking he was not so bound in an understanding, except by honor and decency and love, and he was technically freer than in an engagement. In many cases the formal engagement came as a relief to both parties, since the restrictions of an engagement were traditionally defined, and both parties knew what they could and could not do. During an understanding, for example, a young lady could be escorted home from a picnic by a young gentleman who was not her fiancé-to-be, provided that the fiancé-to-be was not at the picnic. But after the announcement of her engagement she would not attend a picnic without her young man. At a ball an engaged young lady deferred to her fiancé's wishes as to her dancing partners, and engagements had been broken for violations of such rules, A total virginity enveloped Eulalie Fenstermacher during the months of her understanding with George Lockwood, and this was acceptable to George Lockwood. Their early kisses, which had led to the understanding, were now timed to the precise point where amorousness was about to proceed into eroticism. The young man and the young woman were now so enormously conscious of the implications of marriage that if Eulalie parted her lips, if George put his hand anywhere on the front or the lower part of her body, he or she would withdraw from the embrace. Nor could they permit themselves to have conversation that mentioned her bosom or her legs. George Lockwood was not a virgin. During his first year at Princeton his father had recommended an establishment in Philadelphia that was the present-day version of the Phoebe Adamson place. "It's where you'll be safe," Abraham Lockwood had said. "But always wash to be sure." It had not seemed strange to George that his father should know of such a place; most fathers knew of such places and many fathers made the preliminary arrangements for their sons, sometimes with the injunction that a boy of eighteen should stop "flogging the dummy" and when he felt horny to save it for a woman. Once on a visit to Ezra Davenport's house in northern New Jersey Mrs. Davenport's personal maid, a French woman, had taken off her clothes for Ezra and George and rather roughly disposed of Ezra and sent him out of the room while she gently but quickly attended to George. "This Ezra, pouf. Nothing. He only wish to see me with you," she said. But she was ugly with her clothes on, and on George's second visit to the Davenports she was no longer there. Once on a northbound train from Philadelphia a heavily perfumed woman wearing an ostrich-plumed hat sat beside George, looked him up and down several times, and put her hand on his thigh, kept it there, then slowly moved it upward and gently massaged him. "Open up honey so I can get inside." He undid his trousers and she brought him to orgasm. She said nothing more until the train was slowing down for Reading, when she handed him a calling card. "If you're in the neighborhood, honey. A high-class place, for gentlemen." With so much experience in addition to the lore and legends he had absorbed at St. Bartholomew's and Princeton, George Lockwood was not ignorant of the female body or of the excitements and pleasures to be enjoyed in intimacy with it. He was moreover conscious of an effect he had on members of the opposite sex, conscious of it when frequently they were not. Bold women - the Davenports' maid, the woman on the train - seemed to recognize his special interest in them or at least to be aware of him as a comrade in a game. The girls in his own circle, the sisters and friends of his friends, might be less forthright or generous, or more obtuse, but within the restraints of the conventions they had always seemed to like him more than they did most of his contemporaries. His success with girls could not fairly or accurately be judged by the extent of his erotic experiences with them, since everything that could be done to deny privacy was being done. Ten minutes, five minutes completely alone with a girl was a rare occasion, even after Eulalie and George had reached their understanding. Girls were constantly watched by mothers, by sisters, by brothers, by servants, and especially by other girls. A maid would enter a room carrying a feather duster, a brother would come in to look for a book, and a girl's contemporaries would not even bother to make a feeble excuse. But the closest surveillance was that of the young lovers themselves, by their sharpened vigilance over their erotic impulses. There were times when George knew that Eulalie was letting him make the next, more intimate move, anticipating the hand on her breast, the creeping fingers inside her thigh. She would sit on the sofa, enjoying the liberties he would not take, letting him enjoy them with her until he would take his lips away from hers and they would sigh together as though only a kiss had ended. He could not be sure how far the suppressed excitement had taken her, or had not taken her, but nearly always at such times she would say, "I love you," in a way that was meant to be a reward, and a reward which indeed he had earned. There was no doubt for George that he loved her. His curiosity made the familiar tests, and his feeling for her passed them all: wanting to be with her, needing to write her, looking forward to her letters, wanting to confide in her, to tell her unimportant things, using her as a standard of her sex, wanting to protect her, and imagining the riotous pleasures that awaited them, to be followed by tenderness immeasurable. Then there were manifestations that surprised him: he became fond of her brother, wanting only the best for him. He became jealous of a friend named Mildred Haynes, whom Eulalie saw every day. And always, always, he wanted to talk about her. To alleviate this compulsion he chose the least likely, most obviously wrong, confidant - the sardonic Ned O'Byrne. But O'Byrne's ironic wit was one language; he also spoke another, that of sympathy (George now recalled how quickly O'Byrne had understood Ezra Davenport) and warmth. "I'm going to have my brother Penrose as best man, but I want you to be an usher," said George Lockwood in their senior year. "Don't commit yourself, George. There'll be a lot of noses out of joint if you have me." "Fuck them." "Well, if you feel that strongly about it." "I do. I'm not going to have anybody from St. Bartholomew's. Except my brother, of course. And nobody from Philadelphia. Nobody from Ivy." "Not Ezra? He'll cry his eyes out." "He can be ring-bearer. I might ask one boy from St. Bartholomew's." "Chatsworth." "Yes. How did you know?" "I guess I was hoping you would. He got the shitty end of the stick here, some day they're all going to be God damned. I'm sorry, because Chatsworth is a better man than most of them." "Why do you think that, Ned? I agree with you, but we've never had much to say about him." "Well, I don't know. Dignity. Anson Chatsworth was more entitled to a club bid than I was. More so than at least half of those that got in the best clubs. I think it was an accident that he was passed over. You know now how those things can happen. A fellow like Chatsworth, nothing to make him outstanding, and yet eligible for every club here. So by accident no club gives him a bid, because they all think he'll be in some other club. But he wasn't a crybaby, and he didn't resign from Princeton. The opposite of Ezra. I'm sure Ezra peed his