The Lockwood Concern (32 page)

father-" "Exactly! I couldn't in a hundred years imagine my father having that effect on a girl. And as for the other! What shocks me is that I can't think of any of that in connection with fathers, mine or yours. And I've gotten to know your father, the past year. He's old, and not very well, and dignified. And it's so undignified to sit in a rocking chair and enjoy a woman fondling your private parts. You must admit that." "Undignified, but I give the old boy credit for having some spark left. I hope I do at his age." "How old is he?" "He's about sixty, I guess. They never tell you their age, parents." "Well, when I'm sixty I hope I can keep my hands to myself. It doesn't really matter what men do." "It does to men. And your father-" "I'd rather we didn't talk about my father." "I don't mind talking about mine." "Because you're proud of him, gloating over it. And you do want to be like him when you're old. Well, you probably will be, if that's what you want. And you can find some woman to entertain you." "Why shouldn't that woman be you?" "That wasn't your mother with your father in the summer house. That was some woman out of his past." "I have no women in my past." "Don't lie to me, George. That's such a foolish lie, too." "Well, they're all forgotten, Agnes. All forgotten, all in the dim distant past." "I sincerely hope they are." Agnes Lockwood had not protested when she found that Abraham Lockwood was to continue to live in the house. It was a big house, with servants and a big yard. On the second story there were five bedrooms and a sitting-sewing room, and a bathroom at one end of the hall. On his own initiative Abraham Lockwood had the bedroom adjoining his converted into a second bathroom, thus giving him - and them - as much privacy as they needed. The old man (as he referred to himself and as he was referred to behind his back) had his breakfast tea in his bedroom every morning at seven o'clock, but it took him a long while to shave and dress, and now George Lockwood went to the office without him. On some days Abraham Lockwood did not arrive at the office until shortly before noon; on some days he did not go to the office at all. He had no diagnosed illness, he had not been to see a physician, and he did not complain of any localized pain. But he was tired, physically tired, and he informed George that it was going to be up to him to instruct Penrose in the complexities of the business when the young brother graduated from Princeton. "I have to rest," he would say after noon dinner, having rested all morning. George Lockwood had full power of attorney, and in a few months after his marriage he was recognized by the business community as the de facto head of Lockwood & Company. Older men in the business community saw in George an unpredictable combination of the characteristics of Moses Lockwood's secretiveness and Abraham Lockwood's ostensible approachability. In the latter case they had been deceived by the contrast between Moses Lockwood's methods and those of his son, but the deception - or self-deception - had become a fixed belief and as good as a fact. They never knew that Moses Lockwood was candor itself compared to the intricate secretiveness of his son; that Moses Lockwood was forced by his record of violent antisocial acts into a life of unsociability, or that Abraham, with his dedication to the Lockwood Concern, calculated the efficacy of all his human contacts in the perspective of the Concern. Agnes Lockwood became accustomed to the presence of her father-in-law in the morning hours, when she would be busy with her household duties but never so busy that she could not take the time to exchange small talk with him. Her fear of him, which was self-consciousness on her part, vanished and with the growth of self-confidence she found that curiosity had taken the place of fear. He was tired, undoubtedly; his physical resources had diminished, but his mind was fully active and even in brief exchanges his conversation was entertaining, as though he were deliberately setting out to be good company for her. Here she saw a similarity to her husband's strange charm, which initially had attracted her more than it repelled her and that consisted - when she thought of it - of making his personality felt and remembered. Primarily it did not matter if the personality of the charm created hostility; the basic motive was to be felt and remembered, and this, of course, was a highly complementary strategy. Thus Agnes Lockwood progressed in her relationship with her father-in-law, so that in the second year of her marriage and once again pregnant, she got closer not only to him but to the secret of the Lockwood Concern. Abraham Lockwood could say to her, as he did one morning, "Agnes, are you expecting again?" "Why - yes. Does it show?" "Not in your tummy, but in your eyes." "MY eyes?" "Yes. Your color eyes change a lot more than brown do. Brown stay the same, but blue change to grey, or deeper blue. All depending on how the person feels. You show anger and pleasure by the color of your eyes, from one minute to another, sometimes. You can't keep any secrets, Agnes, and this one is one I don't want you to keep from me. George knows, of course." "Of course. George, and Dr. Schwab. That's all for the time being. I haven't written to my parents yet. They'd want to come home from their trip and I wouldn't want that. They'll be home in plenty of time." "This means a lot to me, this baby. To you and George, of course, and your father and mother. But if possible more to me than to anyone else." "You said that before I lost my first." "This one means just that much more. I'm getting on, and it isn't only wanting to see a grandchild. I look far beyond that, Agnes. To a time I'll never see, when this grandchild has grandchildren." "I guess everybody does, don't they?" "I doubt if they give as much thought to it as I do. All my life I've looked ahead to four generations beyond my own." "Four generations! Why four?" "That would be my grandchildren's grandchildren." "But you'll never see them. Why do you care so much? You don't have to worry about a royal family." "Don't I? I guess not." "And why stop at four generations? Why not six?" "Because four generations from now, plus my generation and my father's, that'll be six generations. A span of two centuries of our family in this town." "I wouldn't count on their wanting to live here fifty years from now. Penrose doesn't want to live here now, and heaven knows what my children will want to do." "Make them stay here. If you promise me that I'll leave you a million dollars, Agnes." "I couldn't promise that, Mr. Lockwood." "You're going to have a strong influence on your children, Agnes, and if you can persuade one son to stay here, it's worth it to me." "I couldn't promise that. I couldn't even promise to influence them. My father wanted to be a missionary, and instead of that he spent his whole life in the coal-mining business." "And he's been very happy." "No. You're not happy going through life never doing the one thing you wanted to do. That's what kept my father back from higher promotion in the Wynne Company. He didn't care enough. He did his work, a full day's work for a full day's pay, but that was to support his family." "He might not have enjoyed the life of a missionary." "But he never had a chance to find out, one way or the other. You've been happy here, George is happy here, but if I have a son how do I know he'll be happy here? Swedish Haven is a pretty little town, especially after some of the places I've lived in, but the Lockwoods weren't even the founders of the town." "Quite true, but it's where our branch started to amount to something, beginning with my father. And it's our town now, Agnes. We own it, to all intents and purposes." "Then it is a sort of royal family you have in mind." "We don't believe in royalty in this country." "No, but -an aristocracy. Is that what you want, Mr. Lockwood?" "Everything you say about it, every time you give it a name, you make it sound an unworthy ambition. But believe me, it isn't. The Wynne family were headed in the same direction, but your cousin didn't look beyond. You mustn't take this personally, Agnes, but you know as well as I do that Tom Wynne got rich by taking coal out of the ground and making the countryside ugly. Forests laid bare. That's not what we want to do. Make money, yes, and we have. But some day, maybe in your own husband's time, we may own the whole stretch between here and Richterville. Nice clean little towns, prosperous farmers getting their fair share, and us at the head of it. You and George, or your children. Lockwoods, living right here in town, not J. P. Morgans living in New York City, or Drexels in Philadelphia." "Then after Richterville? Why not Gibbsville, for instance? That could stand some improvement." "It's too late to do anything about Gibbsville. The Morgans and the Drexels have the control up there. Richterville is where my wife came from, so your husband has some rights there. It sounds like a great deal, to own eleven miles of farmland and two little villages on the way, but we could do it now if we didn't have our money at work on more profitable enterprises. One of these days George will get hold of the Richterville bank, and with it most of the farms to the east of Richterville for a distance of five miles. Since we already own the bank here, we hold the paper from here west." "Gracious! A principality." "Nothing wrong about it, Agnes. There are ranches out West that take in forty or fifty miles in one direction. And some of the old Spanish families owned whole states. Nobody can do that in the East. It's too built up, and the railroads are too big. And I wouldn't want to do it. All I hope for is this town and the town my wife came from and the land in between." "And what about to the east and the south of here?" "We have a few properties to the south, but the rest I never took any interest in. The Coal & Iron owns the timberland and the big dams. J. P. Morgan. And the farm land to the south is too hilly to cultivate. You have to go twenty miles to the south before you get good farm land, and that's Reading and Lebanon Dutchmen's territory. I'm Lutheran, and half Pennsylvania Dutch, but I'll never be one of those people and I don't want to be." The will to live, to see his first grandson, was not as strong in Abraham Lockwood as Agnes Lockwood's will to give birth to the child. Abraham Lockwood died of double pneumonia in the seventh month of Agnes Lockwood's pregnancy. The town, and the southern part of the county, gave Abraham Lockwood a nice send-off; formal and large, with every funeral cab in Gibbsville and Swedish Haven spoken for, and the streets of the town, the railroad stations, some private residences and the Exchange Hotel crowded with very respectable-looking strangers. Agnes Lockwood, big with child, was somewhat surprised by the size of the crowds, but the occasion would be noteworthy in her recollection for two things: on the night of Abraham Lockwood's death she saw her husband weep for the first and only time; and, secondly, on the afternoon of the funeral, upon returning home after the interment, they encountered a woman in the downstairs hall. She came up to George Lockwood and held out her hand. "You don't remember me, George, but I knew you when you were a boy. I'm Sterling Downs's mother." "Of course I remember you, Mrs. Downs. You were very nice to come." "It isn't Mrs. Downs anymore. It's Mrs. Wickersham." "I beg your pardon," said George Lockwood. "I'd like you to meet my wife. Agnes, this is Mrs. Wickersham. I went to school with her son, and do you remember the summer you spent at the Run, Mrs. Wickersham?" "I'll never forget it. That's where I really got to know your father and mother. I just had to wait and see you, George, but now I must catch the train." She released George Lockwood's hand, smiled at him and at Agnes, and hurried out. "All the way from Philadelphia," said George Lockwood. "And was in love with your father." "I don't know." "I do," said Agnes Lockwood. She was the woman that day in the summer house. She's prettier, close to." "Good Lord, I wonder how long that had been going on, said George Lockwood. "Now get some rest, Agnes. Don't try to see any more people. You've done your part." She smiled. "I'll do my part in about six more weeks." George Lockwood's gratitude to Martha Downs Wickersham was of a special kind, having nothing to do with her last respects to his father, and actually having little to do with her. She had revealed, inadvertently and unawares, that his father had had at least one mistress during the life of Adelaide Lockwood, and George Lockwood needed that fact to justify his own affair with Lalie Fenstermacher Brauer. Lalie's marriage to Karl Brauer, a Reading lawyer, was quick and ostentatious, to make everyone forget about George Lockwood. The Fenstermachers did not even send George Lockwood a post-nuptial announcement of the marriage, but he read about it in the Reading Eagle and two Philadelphia newspapers. The Eagle provided the Karl Brauers' home address on North Fifth Street, and George Lockwood paid a call one morning when he returned from his wedding trip. "I wish to see Mrs. Brauer," he told the maid. "Mrs. Brauer, or Mr. Brauer? If you want him, he's at the office down Penn Street." "No, this is a matter that concerns Mrs. Brauer." "I'll tell her. Just step inside." In a few minutes Lalie came downstairs. "Good morning, Mrs. Brauer," he said quickly, for the benefit of the maid. "I'm from Wanamakers." She was startled, but the maid, hovering in the hall, could not see her face. "Oh, from Wanamakers. Well, come in here and we can talk." He followed her into the front parlor, a long narrow room that had only one entrance. "Did you bring the samples?" she said. "I have them here in my pocket," he said. She lowered her voice. "Are you out of your head? Make it quick, whatever you want to say, and don't ever come here again." "I won't stay long." "You got married," she said. "Yes, just the same as you. I got married. And I wish I hadn't. Not only for my sake, but for hers." "Why tell me your troubles?" "You're part of my troubles. I want you." "You're too late for that, George. I'm a married woman now and with a good husband." "I have a good wife, but I still want you. And I've found out what I want to know. You still want me." "No." "Yes." "Go away," she said. "It's too soon to go away. I'm supposed to be showing you some samples." "You must be out of your head." "In certain ways I am. The blue will cost a little more than the green, Mrs. Brauer." "The blue is more expensive? I didn't know that. She's on her way to the basement now, but you go, hear?" "I'll go, but I'll be back." "I won't let you in. I'll leave word, you're not to be let in." "Stop this talk, Lalie! We're not children, and I'm
serious. I'm leaving now, but I'm not giving up. When you're ready to meet me, send me a note to the Gibbsville Club." "Meet you? Meet you where?" "Anywhere. Here, when Brauer goes away. He has to go away sometime." "Here? In this house? That woman has a room here, she never goes out." "Discharge her and hire somebody that goes home at night." "Go away, George. You've gone clean out of your mind. Karl wold kill the two of us. He loves me." "Don't you think I love you?" "No! No! If you did you'd leave me alone." "If I don't hear from you in two weeks I'm coming back." "Please, George. Don't ever come back." He left her and walked quickly down Fifth Street to the Square, exulting in her weakness and the restoration of his confidence. In eight days there was a note from her: "Nine o'clock Thursday night. Alley gate back of house. Do not come by 5th Street. -L." There was still some daylight at nine o'clock, and he thought as he made his way to her house that it would have been wiser to enter the house from the tree-darkened street than from an alley where there would be no trees. But he obeyed her instructions, such as they were, and boldly opened the gate in the alley fence, walked up the 'brick path toward the back porch, and, not to his surprise, as he put a foot on the porch step the door swung open. Now, however, he was in for a surprise: the timid, nervously excited girl he expected on this first rendezvous was all in his imagination. Lalie closed the door and embraced him, held her mouth up to be kissed, and clung to him for a moment in a way that guaranteed that this would not be one of their frustrate raptures of the past. Once she had made up her mind to meet him in these circumstances, she had committed herself to the full. "We go upstairs," she said, her first words, and she led him by the hand. The bed was turned down, there was light from a gas fixture on the wall. She pulled open his cravat and undid the top buttons of his white linen waistcoat. "I can do that much more quickly than you can," he said. "Do it, then," she said. She sat in a straight chair and watched him. "Almost as much clothes as a woman. I'm nearer ready than you are." "I kind of guessed that," he said. "Now me," she said, and stood up and unbuttoned her gingham dress, all she was wearing. They embraced again, and he was made frantic by her directness, the pressures of her fingers. "I think we better get in," she said. She lay in the bed and cupped her breasts in her hands, as though she were aiming them at him. "Be like a baby," she said. "I was going to," he said. She put her hands on the top of his head for a little while, and then some thought, some limit of nervous control, made her abandon tender sensuality. "You. Give it to me. Get in, get in," she said. He moved quickly, but he was barely inside her when she screeched. The words were not words, unless they were German, and his own orgasm was not much later than hers, but he had a distant thought and it was how lucky they had been not to attempt complete lovemaking in the Fenstermacher parlor in Lebanon. Climax did not end it for her. She now kissed him, his mouth, his eyes, his hands, his body, with loving tenderness. "Oh, I love you so, I love you so much," she said. "I love you, Lalie," he said, and it was true. They lay in peace for a while. "I've never seen you with your hair down," he said. "It's very pretty." "It covers my boobies. You don't have any hair. Karl is like he was wearing a coat." She smiled. "What are you thinking?" "You got me ready for Karl, but then Karl got me ready for you." "Yes, I suppose so." "You don't want to talk about Karl so you don't have to talk about her." "Why do we have to talk about them?" "She isn't enough for you, say?" "Don't talk about them, Lalie." "You're jealous of Karl." "Yes." "Me too, of her," she said. "All over him is black hair, even his back. But he isn't enough for me, either, George. He loves me, but he hates me." "Why does he hate you? Someone else besides me?" "No, no, no, no. Never. Only you. I tell him, have patience. Have patience. Downstairs he wants to do it and I go upstairs with him, but if I'm not ready right away, he can't." "Well, he seems to have." "Oh, we do it. But I have to be in bed first. If I'm in bed, he comes home from work and sometimes he'll do it with his clothes on. Just take it out and put it in me. I tell him have patience, everybody's different. It's because he's like a bull, and he wants to be a bull. The men ask him when he's going to have a baby, and he comes home angry. He wants to blame me, but he knows he can't blame me, and that's why he hates me often. If the men would shut up." "Yes." "Why did you come to me, George?" "I missed you." "Yes, I missed you, too. But maybe you better have some patience, too, George." "With her?" "Yes." "It won't keep me from loving you, Lalie." "She's cold?" "No, it isn't that. She just isn't right for me." "Is she afraid of you? Of a man?" "No, it isn't that, either." "Well, tell me. I told you." "I don't want to say it, Lalie. Don't make me." "Could anybody make you do something you didn't want to do? I doubt that." "I'm selfish? Yes, I guess I am." "I don't have any right to call anybody selfish. I was selfish to tell you to come tonight." "You're not selfish, Lalie. Nobody could ever say that about you." "I sacked a hired girl because I wanted to go with you. I had to tell a big lie to Karl. I told him the woman was lazy, and she wasn't lazy. She was a good worker, and jobs like this are scarce. But it was the only way I could meet you. Karl don't like for me to be alone at night, George." "Meaning that you're going to hire another woman to live in?" "Karl has money. He says I can have two women live in." "How will we meet?" "Maybe we don't. Reading isn't so big. If they saw me come out of a hotel." "Why didn't you marry a poor man? Then I could have taken a room here, a boarder." "Jokes don't help. Karl would kill a man, you know. Me, also. His friends make jokes with him, but he comes home and tells me, and I wouldn't be some of those men if he ever loses his temper." "What if I gave Karl some law business? Would he invite me to stay here when I came to Reading?" "You're crazy in the head." "Crazy ideas work sometimes, but I guess that one's too crazy. Are there any rooms for rent near here?" "To board? Around the corner I see signs in the windows, but that's crazy too." "I know! An office. I'll rent an office. I have business in Reading every now and then." "An office with a bed in it?" "A sofa. I'll put in a desk and chairs, and a sofa. We have a sofa in our office for my father to take a nap. I'll look around, shall I?" "Not in this neighborhood, though. And I could never go there at night, wherever you picked. We have the phone now, and Karl can always ring up if he's out for the evening." "One friend. If you had one friend you could trust." "I have friends I can trust, but not for this kind of a business, George. They wouldn't like me anymore. They'd turn against me sooner or later, and even if it was ten years from now Karl mustn't know. You can come here this summer, then rent your office." "I'll rent it now and they can get used to me coming and going at odd times, and by autumn they won't notice." "Is that the way we're going to go on the rest of our lives, George?" "No, Lalie. This won't last forever. One of these days you'll send me away for good. I know that, don't you?" "Yes, but it's a good thing you said it. I didn't want you to tell me a lie. Sure, I know it." "But when you send me away it won't be for someone else?" "No. Only Karl. I married Karl." She was his mistress for three years and they met in many places. Hazardously in second-rate hotels in Gibbsville and Philadelphia, more safely at the office George Lockwood rented, for quick erotic exchanges in the front parlor of her house, and once by accident when George and Agnes Lockwood and Karl and Lalie Brauer were stopping at the same hotel in Atlantic City. The two couples did not meet, but George went to Lalie's room while Karl was at a Turkish bath. "You're out of your head," said Lalie to George Lockwood. "Don't ever say no to me, Lalie." But for Lalie it was the beginning of the end. His selfishness had become arrogant recklessness, and though she went through with the assignation, her parting words that afternoon prepared him for the final break. "I like your wife," she said. "She's head and shoulders above you, just by looking at her." "I never expected you to dislike her, Lalie. But I was sure I wouldn't like Brauer, and I don't." In a year of haphazard infidelity George Lockwood made no mistake that Agnes Lockwood could fix upon, and the events of that first year, of changing from the protective affection of her virginal life with her parents to that of wifehood with George Lockwood, filled her thoughts to the exclusion of suspicion. It was a radically new way of life, which nothing she had been told or read could prepare her for. It had to be experienced by her before it became of any value or before she was truly the better or the worse for it. At night, she would submit to George's ways of making love and she learned to take pleasure in them - or she would sometimes lie untouched and expectant for nights on end, but that too was part of learning. In the daytime hours she had the household duties, her own servants, menus and accounts, storekeepers and clerks, the restricted social life that was largely with Gibbsville families. She had her father-in-law, to learn about and to adjust to. And she had her abortive pregnancy all to herself. She had her home, that she was encouraged to regard as her own home, but that for most of that year was not her home but a place out in the cold, cold world. Her loneliness was relieved during her pregnancy by a desire to protect the pitiable life within her, that was hers and not hers and then was nothing but a shapeless mess on her bedsheet. Now home could never again be the place she had known with Theron and Bessie Wynne. There was no going back to that refuge or even to that way of life or to that earlier person. She had made a failure of her function, but it was a failure that established her maturity just as irrevocably as though it had been a success. Indeed, in some respects the miscarriage had advanced her maturity in that her function had achieved both of the terminal truths of life and death. It was a year for learning and some of it was harsh, but at least for that year there was so much that was new that for the present it could only qualify as information. Sagacity, good judgment, wisdom, prejudice, a philosophy, would have to wait their turns. Agnes Lockwood was going by a phrase she had heard the phrase, a good wife - and all the information she collected in that year was in some way related to the phrase and to her eagerness to qualify for the designation. Milk turned sour in a thunderstorm; Krafft's was the best grocery store in Swedish Haven; the best morning train for Philadelphia left Swedish Haven at 8:45; all Lockwoods gave a dollar bill to the plate collection on Sunday; Abraham Lockwood liked unsalted butter on his breakfast toast; George Lockwood would not make love unless the room was pitch dark; there had once been a high brick wall around the Lockwood property; Protestant farmers did not work on the Catholic feast of the Ascension; scrapple was more edible if fried to a crisp; Miss Nellie Shoop was the best dressmaker in Gibbsville; Yock Miller was the same as Jacob Miller, but Ock Mueller was Oscar Mueller, and they both worked at the bank; no one laundered lace curtains as beautifully as the nuns in Gibbsville, but they certainly knew how to charge for their work; Moses Lockwood lost the lower half of his ear at the battle of Bull Run; Mr. Heimbach, the clockmaker who also tuned pianos, was allowed in the front door but other tradesmen had to come in through the kitchen; Penrose Lockwood was nice but not very bright in his studies. Emotional experience, family lore, household chores, the familiarization of faces that a year ago had not existed for her - and then she was in the second year of her marriage. The second year was more of the same, but more of other things as well. She could, for instance, go to Krafft's in the morning and the people on the street would not point her out or stare at her; she was conscious of the difference between the earlier half-hostile politeness and the casual respect she was given as Abraham Lockwood's daughter-in-law. They were getting used to her, and she to them. It had been a crowded year, never again would a year seem so crowded, and she began to do many things by habit and thus have more time to notice things, but more than things she noticed people, persons, individual human beings with individual characteristics. Notably and inevitably she began to observe George Lockwood, and quite undramatically, without reason, in her mind she convicted him of infidelity. In the first year he was all men in one man, and what he did and did not do was all she knew of the ways of men. Whatever he did was what men did, and it took that first year of marriage to separate George Lockwood from the mass of Man and to disperse other men from the vicinity of George Lockwood. As an only child she had wished for but learned to do without a confidante and to work things out for herself, and if the method did not make life easier, it had the virtue of accustoming her to introspection and inner debate. Likewise, in her case, it had sharpened if not quickened her judgment and her self-reliance. It gave her confidence in her judgment and her own resources. Something was wrong in George Lockwood's behavior, and since it was she who was suspecting that something was wrong, the something surely had to do with other women. But as the months went by, he continued to give her no reason to be suspicious. It became not so much a question of catching him in a slip as in catching herself in a false silent accusation. With nothing to go on, she had to give him the benefit of a doubt that she did not honestly feel. Then as time passed and she accepted the fact that he was too clever for her, she found that she was becoming reconciled to an offense that she had not been able to charge him with. And at that point she began to be afraid of him because she admitted to herself that fear of him - and of being in error; the two were interchangeable - had kept her from giving utterance to her suspicions. She had always been afraid of him, always from the very beginning, and yet as soon as she acknowledged this truth her fear of him was less distressing. Her loneliness, for example, had been caused by her fear of him. She wondered if fear of him had not caused her to lose her first child. But fear of him, why? Other women might have reason to fear a husband's beatings, drunkenness, stinginess, or whatever, but from