The Young Apollo and Other Stories (18 page)

"In
The Portrait of a Lady ?
Do you predict that I will fall victim to a shady fortune hunter?"

"Never! You'll be an Isabel Archer who has the sense to go home. You won't be taken in by wicked old Europe."

"You think yourself very perceptive, don't you, Mr. Warwick?"

"But anyone can see that in you. And call me Thad, please. And you'll be Lina. Or rather Evalina. It's a prettier name unabbreviated. Unlike mine."

"What about yourself, Thad? Will you be taken in by wicked old Europe? Or has it already happened?"

"Not on your life! This is only a tour of duty. Next year I'll be back in 14 Wall Street."

"And that will be it? Forever and ever?"

"Ah, don't rob my life of all interest. I've always played with the idea of one day doing something in politics."

Her heart gave a little jump. Like her father! "Oh, that
would
be interesting."

He was tall and well made, with a high broad brow, a fine prominent nose, a determined chin, thick raven-black hair, and yellow-gray smiling eyes. Or at least they seemed to be smiling, perhaps to mitigate some of his handsome straightness. She guessed that he could be quick, definite, incisive, but then, as if to warn the observer that he was not to be taken too seriously, that maybe nothing should really be taken too seriously, he would say something wonderfully witty. Evalina was put in mind of Talleyrand's
point de zèle, surtout point de zele.
Did he not need someone to supply the zeal?

Her mental image of Thaddeus, adjusted to a vision of a silver-toned orator in the halls of Congress, became tinged with the faint pink hue of romance. And she was now more critically observant of his relations with her mother. He was halfway between Eliane's age and her own. Was Eliane the "older woman" in his life that she had read about in Henry James's
The Ambassadors}
But no, he was strictly her mother's
homme d'affaires,
and indeed the latter made no secret of finding his restrictions on her spending irksome. For the Lane properties in France—Magny, the Normandy chateau with its extensive farms and stables, the vineyard in Bordeaux, the villa in Cannes, the game park in Fontainebleau—were all under his direct supervision. Eliane took no interest in the business side of life, and Evalina, on the excuse of learning about her heritage, accompanied him on his tours of inspection. In Normandy they roamed together over the ancestral acres, visiting barns and dairies.

Thaddeus made learning the business side of wealth as easy and pleasant as novel reading—indeed, quite like it. He made her think of how Lord Melbourne made parliamentary debates amusing to the young Victoria, as described in Lytton Strachey's new biography of the queen, which everyone was reading. "But will your expertise in French agricultural problems do you much good when you're back in New York?" she wanted to know.

"Finance is pretty much the same the world over. The man who likes to get to the bottom of things rarely wastes his time. You'll find that most of what you've observed in France will stand you in good stead one day. Of course you have to apply the rule of
mutatis mutandis.
But something tells me you'll be able to do just that."

"How can you tell?"

"By the fact that you've remembered everything I've taught you. I haven't had to repeat anything."

"That's because you're such a good teacher."

"What good is a teacher, even the best, without an apt pupil? And you're the kind whose way a teacher has to get out of."

"I do try, it's true."

"Well, we're a pair."

Her heart swelled with pleasure. But her elation was diminished by her suspicion that she was a pupil to him and only that. Oh, yes, perhaps a bit of a pal as well, but never a girlfriend. No, she could tell. He was older, maybe thirty, and had been in the war. He would need a woman more mature, more sophisticated, one to dazzle the great world. And of course there were plenty of such. One was sure to grab him.

At length she felt sufficiently secure in their own special kind of intimacy to ask him a more personal question. What, at any, rate did she have to lose? "Why haven't you married? There must have been ladies who wouldn't have turned a deaf ear to such a proposition."

"Oh, that's a long story. It would bore you."

"Try me."

He told her, quite willingly and at some length, of his drawn-out and futile pursuit of a woman who was "simply the most beautiful creature God ever made." Obviously, he enjoyed airing something long in his innermost heart. Had he made a fetish of it? Her name was Pauline, and she had always professed to be his dear friend but nothing more. He had fallen in love with her at the age of sixteen, while a student at Groton School, at a Washington's Birthday dance to which she had been invited by his roommate, and he had adored her hopelessly until her marriage to that same roommate eight years later.

"I guess she was drawn to ugly men," he ended sadly. "Old Tom was always mortally plain."

"You mean it was a case of Beauty and the Beast?"

"Oh, hardly that. He's a good enough fellow. I hear they're happy as clams."

"Are clams so happy?"

"Maybe they don't know enough not to be."

It didn't occur to Eliane that her daughter could be much drawn to Thaddeus Warwick, because she wasn't herself. She preferred men who made a fuss over her, and the young banker had too skeptical an eye to do much of that. Her current beau was a fastidious, literary, and highly cultivated English bachelor and epicure, Peter Everett, who took at face value all her complaints and seeming ailments and enveloped her in a mist of uncritical devotion. For Evalina it soon became clear that her mother had greater matrimonial projects for her: she had in mind no less than a duke.

Raymond, due d'lvry, was a very gentle, very mild, very kindly, neat little man, possessed of a famous chateau and a glorious ancestry. He was also witty and companiable. He perfectly understood that it was essential for his family and himself that he should marry an heiress, and nobody could doubt that he would be a very proper and well-behaved husband.

Evalina liked him but was not romantically aroused. Besides, she had no intention of living in France. The time soon came when it behooved her to let the duke know he was wasting his time. This was when her mother informed her that she had invited him for a weekend at Magny.

"And I'm asking no one else but Peter Everett," Eliane added. "I thought we'd be just a cozy foursome for once." Here she gave Evalina one of her sidelong glances. "I'm sure Raymond will have no objection to that."

Evalina drew in her breath. The moment, the great moment that had always been to come, had come. She found herself thinking, with an odd inner smile, of her grandmother Lane's favorite hymn: "Once to ev-e-ry man and nation comes the mo-ment to decide." Was courage so difficult, after all? Mightn't it even be fun?

"What are you thinking about, my dear?"

"I was just thinking, Maman, of how impossible it will be for me to spend a lovely idle weekend at Magny. I have a pile of reading to do for my philosophy class. I simply have to stay in town with my nose to the grindstone."

"But, my child, that's impossible! How can I offer an excuse like that to Raymond? Why, it would be practically an insult."

"He needn't take it that way. But if he does, he does."

"You mean you don't care?"

"I don't care at all."

Eliane became grave. "What is behind all this, Evalina? There is something behind it, isn't there?"

"There is." Evalina straightened herself to deliver the blow. "If I go up to Magny with just you and Peter, it will look to Raymond as if I were not averse to something more serious."

Eliane's features hardened as she stared at her daughter. "Are you telling me that you
are
averse?"

"Certainly."

"It's nothing to you to be admired by the greatest catch in Paris?"

"Nothing at all."

"You don't wish to be a duchess?"

"I don't even wish to be the wife of a Frenchman. If I marry at all, I shall marry an American. As you did."

Eliane gasped. "But I wasn't an heiress! Look, child, let's not be rash. There's no need for resolutions at this time. Come to Magny and treat Raymond as you would any other guest. He will see at once that this is not the moment for anything further. He has perfect tact. Trust him. And trust your mother."

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Maman. If I continue to see Raymond on this basis, he will be justified in thinking that I am at least considering him as a husband. And a girl who considers it is generally taken as more than half won. If she backs out, she will be said to have led him on. The only way to make it crystal-clear to Raymond that I will never be his bride is to stop seeing him except on public occasions."

"That is nonsense, Evalina. You will be thought to be the kind of giddy girl who thinks that every man who so much as kisses her hand is about to propose. But I see there's no point arguing with you. You're too set in your ways. Very well. You force me to use my parental authority. For your own good, I insist that you accompany me to Magny this weekend."

"You
order
me?"

"If you want to put it that way."

"Then I must disobey you. You'll have to get a gendarme to get me there."

"Oh, Evalina!" Eliane's eyes filled with tears as she bowed her head and struck her fist on the table beside her. "How can you hurt me so? A mother who only wants what's best for her only child! It's not enough to have lost a beloved husband in the war and to be despised and scorned by his biased old mother! And to be railed at by her money man here for trying to keep up a half-decent appearance in the life her son wanted me to lead! And to be doomed with a weak heart that may go back on me any day! No, no, all that is not enough. I have to have a daughter who flings my love and devotion back in my teeth!"

Evalina gazed at her without flinching. "Don't you know, Mother, that all that won't work with me? Can't you tell?"

Eliane regained her control. The stare with which she fixed her daughter for several long moments glittered with something new. Was it hate?

"Yes, I
can
tell. You're a monster."

From this point on, Evalina's relationship with her mother underwent a drastic change. Eliane became cool and distant; she treated her daughter with the proud reserve she might have shown to a German officer in wartime occupying her chateau. But Evalina found this preferable to the exaggerated enthusiasm that had preceded it. She could attend her courses, visit museums, and spend her evenings reading, while her mother resumed, alone now, her frenetically active social life. Her twenty-first birthday was approaching, and then she would be free.

When Thaddeus tried to assure her that her mother's resentment was bound in time to thaw, she firmly shook her head.

"I don't think, Thad, that you fully comprehend what's wrong with her. My grandmother told me all about it. Mother knows, with a kind of instinct, just on whom her charm will work and just on whom it won't. She wasn't sure of me at first, because I was young and possibly unformed. But now she knows and hates me. I must face that."

"Oh, Evalina, you're taking it much too hard. Remember that she's a mother. A mother will always forgive."

"There's nothing to forgive."

"Well, forget then. She's basically too warm-hearted not to."

"You may be one on whom her charm will work. Most men are. Watch out!"

"Anyway, I have you to guard me," he retorted with a smile. "And of course you're quite right about Ivry. He's not the man for you at all."

"I'm glad you see that." She gave him an earnest look, but he continued in his humorous vein.

"No, you need a stalwart puritan, Evalina, as American as yourself. I wonder if Boston isn't the place for you to look."

"I'm not looking," she replied, endeavoring to hide the hurt she felt. "And now I want you to go over with me the steps I'm to take when I reach my majority next month."

"I've made a little memo, and I have it here. But let me first point out that although all the changes you're going to be making in your mother's way of life are essential to save her from ruin and although she will still be better off than all but a very few women in Paris, she is nonetheless going to scream that you are reducing her to pauperdom."

"You see it exactly," was Evalina's grim comment.

"So let me be the one to tell her. Let her wrath fall on my head. She will kick me out of the house and never see me again, but that's all right. I'm due to leave the Paris office anyway, and the bank knows and approves of the whole plan, so I have nothing to lose. You must stay away and let it appear that you had nothing to do with the matter."

"But she is entitled to know that she is not being just pushed around by a cold and indifferent bank. She is entitled to know that her daughter, representing her late husband, has given deep and conscientious consideration to every aspect of the reorganization of her financial life."

Thaddeus pursed his lips to emit a faint whistle. "Very well. But it's going to be quite a scene."

"Which you will witness. For I want you there."

The meeting turned out to be quite as bad as Thaddeus had predicted. They met, the three of them, on a cold, gray December morning in the parlor of the
hôtel
on the Rue de Grenelle. Eliane, who had some inkling of what was in store for her, listened in ominous silence while Thaddeus summarized the list of the Lane properties in France and gave their assessed valuations. Then Evalina delivered her carefully rehearsed speech.

"I am setting up a trust for your benefit, Maman, the trustees of which will be the Morgan Bank and the senior partner of the Lane family law firm in New York. It will be funded sufficiently to give you an income equal to what you had before you depleted the legacy that my father left you."

"Ah, you throw that in my face!"

"Only to assure you that you will be just as well-off as he intended you to be."

"But your father didn't subject me to the indignity of being controlled by trustees!"