Her Infinite Variety (2 page)

She didn't have to look at Clara. She knew that she was wincing.

Violet was very well aware that she was engaged in a struggle that she might lose, but that didn't matter to her. She wanted to be sure that she had done all she could to keep her daughter from making
her
mistake, or rather from making a much graver one. For Bobbie Lester was never going to have a career that approached the success of Irving Longcope's. Indeed, most of Violet's friends and relatives considered that she had done very well for herself. Irving was a college master and a popular teacher; he cut a sufficient figure on the Yale campus. That was all very well, and Violet was not a woman to undervalue her few blessings as she took them out, one by one, from the tight little chest of her memories and reappraisals, counted them and put them carefully back. It was all very well, truly, but Irving Longcope had not become half the man she had expected him to be.

Her family, the Edeys, had been the kind of old New Yorkers who had been somehow able to subsist, with moderate but unquestioned respectability, for generations on the fringe of Knickerbocker society, supported by the exiguous rentals of some tightly retained strips of lower Manhattan real estate. Her father had attained an obscure fame by writing a popular book of opera plots with photographs of the great divas of the golden age—Calvé, Eames, Ternina—and some moderately witty
vers de société.
He had been a fussy old dandy, a perennially white-tied figure seated in the back of the boxes of the parterre, in one of which he actually managed to die. His wife was the constantly ailing
malade imaginaire
of the era, mild, sweet and uncomplaining, who didn't mind that her spouse was so often asked to dine out
en garçon.
Violet had been sent to Miss Chapin's School; she had grown up with all the "right" people; in fact she had grown up with none others. But she had always known that her family lived on the edge, that the morning mail contained bills that her father would crumple with a grunt of outrage and that, as a debutante, she had come out only on the coattails, as it were, of a rich second cousin, the honor of whose ball she was allowed to share. And in the New York of the century's first decade everyone knew everything about everyone else.

Irving Longcope had seemed the perfect and hardly hoped for answer to the problem of a young woman of no fortune and no very striking looks in a milieu of rather garish prosperity. In 1911 he was a handsome, stalwart figure of a man, some dozen years older than herself, with a military stature and the reputation of a hero—he had fought in Cuba and written a best seller about the charge up San Juan Hill—and he was looking for a wife, it was rumored, because he was running for Congress and the party wanted a married man. Violet's father had for once proved useful; he had met him in an opera box and taken the delighted Rough Rider backstage to introduce him to Jean de Reszke, who had sung Siegfried that night, after which it had been in order to invite him to dinner, and Violet had done the rest.

She had seen at once that for all Irving's rather intimidating bluster he was essentially shy, particularly with women, and dreaded falling into the clutches of a bossy one. He wanted a quiet and admiring spouse, and it took her only a few weeks of what he was later to describe too often as "a whirling courtship" in which he "swept her off her feet" to convince him that she would be the Mrs. Longcope of his fondest dreams.

But it was not long after their union that Violet began to realize that she had misconceived her man. He handled his campaign for Congress with every ineptitude, disregarding the advice of the bosses and speaking out on issues as if party lines didn't exist. He lost and lost badly, and it was evident that his political career was over before it had begun, and Violet's dream of the gubernatorial mansion in Albany or a high position in Washington as the wife of an Empire State senator vanished forever. Irving had some money but not enough for a family; he studied for a master's degree in English and got a job teaching at Yale. It seemed the best he could do.

He was never a deep or even an illuminating scholar or critic—Violet saw that clearly enough—but he had an enthusiasm for the manly verse of Browning, the realistic vigor of Fielding, the adventurous sagas of Conrad, the rollicking satires of Byron, that was contagious, particularly with young men more addicted to sports and parties than to academic studies, and his reputation spread. It was Violet who kept her ear to the ground, and when the college system was established, it was she who, having quietly cultivated the friendship of President Angell and others in authority, managed to keep Irving's name in the running for a mastership.

It was not easy, for many of the faculty were against the appointment of a professor who appeared to be too lazy (Irving claimed he was busy with his
real
job: teaching) to publish scholarly works. And even after his appointment to Pierpont, the opposition became so acerbic that Irving's rowdier enthusiasts in the undergraduate body broke into the offices of the leading anti-Longcope professors to cover their desks with garbage. In the end Irving compromised with his critics, not very satisfactorily to either side, by publishing a handbook of Browning, largely a reworking of his master's dissertation.

There had been no further excitement. Indeed, there had been little further change. Irving through the years had seemed to dwindle into a voice, a large sonorous voice to be sure, delivering the identical lectures on Victorian poets and novelists to gradually less admiring undergraduates and in some cases to hostile ones converted to Eliot and Pound and Scott Fitzgerald. All of them knew they could cut his classes at will and read his well-known discourses in a trot. But he was still something of a Yale institution; everyone knew who he was. And Violet had given up asking herself what had gone wrong. Nothing had gone wrong. Irving was what he had been from the beginning: a golden windbag. The error had been hers and hers alone.

Clara did not come home again for three weeks. She telephoned that she was studying for exams. Bobbie protested to her parents that she wouldn't let him visit her at Vassar, and Violet, who had never shown him her hand and had let him suppose that her strange conduct at the engagement announcement was mere shock, urged him not to interfere with her studies and assured him that all was well. She was even beginning to hope that it might be.

But Clara had another arrow to her bow. She appeared suddenly one Saturday morning and sought a long, private conference with her father, presumably to enlist his aid. Violet waited for them to finish, seated rather grimly in her little garden, protected from the college quadrangle by a low brick wall, her needlepoint in hand. Was it possible, she wondered, that Clara could really expect substantial help from her father?

When they came out of the house at last, they seemed girded for battle. They sat together, rather absurdly, on a bench not quite large enough to hold two.

"Our daughter tells me that you have some objections to the young man of her choice."

"You might put it that way, yes."

"And you have not seen fit to impart them to me. May I ask why?"

"Because
you
are not planning to marry him."

The ponderous graying figure before her seemed to brace itself to sustain this shock. Violet, surveying him with a cruel detachment, had never felt less married.

"That seems a new slant in the married relationship!" he exclaimed.

"Or a very old one."

Irving cleared his throat as he decided he had better return to the point. "Is it your position, Violet, that this amiable and attractive young man, equipped with an honorable character, respectable antecedents and a reasonably secure future, is not a qualified candidate for our daughter's hand?"

"I don't deny any of the attributes you ascribe to him. I have considered them carefully. And I have found them inadequate."

"Because he lacks riches?"

"Not at all."

"Or isn't blue-blooded enough for you?"

"You know that's ridiculous."

"What is it, then?"

"Simply that he will never become, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, even the hollow copy of a great man."

Irving's glance at his daughter seemed to indicate that they were dealing with one at least temporarily bereft of her senses. "So! You fly high, I see. And what leads you to suppose that Clara is entitled to—or even wants—a great man?"

"Only the fact that she is capable of getting one."

"And that is all that matters to you? Worldly success?"

"I never said it had to be worldly. But yes, it would have to be success, of a sort. Even if Clara herself were the only one to recognize it."

"What about Clara's happiness? Or doesn't that matter to you?"

"Oh, I care a great deal about Clara's happiness. More perhaps than you do."

"And just what do you mean by that?"

"That I think I know her better than you do."

"You think she's more like
you,
that's what it is, isn't it?"

"I think she's ambitious, yes."

"As you are?"

"Yes."

"Oh, Mother!" There were sudden tears in Clara's eyes.

Irving looked very grave as he now stood up. "Does that mean that she can't be happy without what
you
call success?"

"Yes!"

"And that you can't be, either?" In the silence that followed, Violet simply stared up at him. "Violet, are you trying to tell me that
you
haven't been happy?"

"Yes!"

"Oh stop it, you two, for God's sake stop it!" Clara thrust herself between them and then turned, with a despairing look, and shook her mother by the shoulders. "Will you even wreck your marriage to prove me wrong?" She broke away from her parents with a sob. "I don't know where I am anymore. I don't know what I'll do!"

Violet always knew when to stop. She signaled to her husband to leave their daughter alone and went out for a long walk. When she returned, Clara had gone back to Vassar, and Irving at lunch had the good sense not to return to the dangerous topic of what regrets, if any, his wife harbored about her quarter of a century with himself.

***

There he was! Slipping into the back of the living room to sit by Clara on a sofa, not threading his way through the twenty-odd students who had assembled around the table where his hostess was pouring tea, though it was his first appearance at one of her little gatherings and he should properly have come over to greet her, even if he wasn't aware that Violet had been a classmate of his mother's. But the Hoyts were all that way—a rule to themselves, it used to be said. He would come with his swanky pals to Irving's readings in the cellar—these passed his muster—but to a silly tea at "meatball" Pierpont? Never! Only Clara could have changed
that.

Violet watched him with a cautious eye—not that she need fear his noticing. He was intent in his talk with Clara. He looked as if he ought to be much handsomer than he was, which in an odd way made him so. He was tall and thin with a long narrow head and a dark complexion. His brow was high, his nose strong with a slight, quite superior hook; there was something of the red Indian about him, and indeed his mother's family, the Kanes, were supposed to have a squaw somewhere in their ancestry. Everything about Trevor Hoyt, from the easy smiling way he seemed to take over the chatter of Clara's little group, whom he probably despised, to the blackness of his well-pressed and well-fitting suit and the radiant scarlet of his wide tie proclaimed an assurance that was curiously inoffensive.

How different, Violet recalled, from his mother! Charlotte Kane, child of a Morgan partner, had been as a schoolgirl at Miss Chapin's as big and plain and bossy as Charlotte Hoyt, wife of the president of the Bank of Commerce, was at present, the only differences being that the older woman was gray and gravelly-voiced and fifty pounds heavier. But Violet did not have to read many social columns or talk to many of her old-time friends to know that Mrs. Hamilton Hoyt was a dominant voice in the New York world of the private schools, the subscription dances, the opera, the art museums, the benefit balls. When people, appalled at the rapid turnover and changing manners of the urban élite, asked if there was anything left of "old New York society," the answer was apt to be: "Well, we still have the Hamilton Hoyts."

Violet sought her daughter's eye now and, pointing to Hoyt, signaled to her to bring him over. It was the first time she had dared even to notice a beau of her daughter's since the shedding of poor Bobbie. She knew not to push her luck. Clara spoke to her friend now, and a minute later he was seated at Violet's side.

"I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Hoyt. I used to know your mother."

"Really?"

"We were at school together at Miss Chapin's."

Was there the faintest flicker of surprise in those dark eyes? Had he thought it the least bit odd that a mere spouse of academe should have been educated with the daughter of a Morgan partner? If so, his recovery was quick and natural.

"May I give her your best when I see her next?"

"Please do. The bad lady in one of Oscar Wilde's comedies says of the good one that at school she always won the good conduct prize. Well, Miss Chapin didn't hand out such a prize, but if she had, your mother would have certainly got it."

"Yes, Mother's quite something, isn't she?"

He was used to hearing his mother praised; that was not the way with him. "And she has continued to gather all the prizes, right through life, has she not? But tell me something, Mr. Hoyt. Supposing your mother had been a man ... that is, if you can imagine such a thing."

His laugh was spontaneous. "Oh, I can easily imagine it!"

"What would she have become?"

"President, at least!"

"Like the great Theodore? I remember at school a daughter of President Roosevelt saying to your mother: 'My father calls your father a malefactor of great wealth.' And your mother snapping right back with: 'Mine calls yours an irresponsible demagogue.'"