Diary of a Yuppie (13 page)

I looked darkly at those candid eyes. For a minute I did not know what to do with the anger that I felt jumping about inside me. It was as if I had risen to make a public address and found that somebody was trying to pull my pants off. At last I arose and walked to the window. When I felt in control of myself again I asked, "You're trying to tell me you'll give me a divorce?"

"If you want one."

"And if I don't want one?"

"You mean if I'm a convenience and not an obstacle? Perhaps even a protection to you? Poor Mrs. Sands! And I thought she seemed so nice."

"You know her?"

"She came to see me. Didn't she tell you? She thought we should have a talk because of Audrey and Sally. I considered that very sympathetic of her."

"Well, I'll be damned! Is that how a man's disposed of behind his back?"

"Don't be absurd. She simply wanted to know if I had any pointers on how to handle the girls. If there were any particular topics to avoid, or good ones to bring up. She's obviously a very intelligent woman."

"Maybe you're the one who wants the divorce," I went on wrathfully, ignoring what she had said. "Maybe you've found a man you want to marry. I don't suppose it's one of your poets, anyway. Their tastes are not for your sex, are they? Or would they put up with a woman to share in the settlement they hope you'll get out of me?"

Alice looked away, embarrassed by my crudeness. "I guess you'd better go, Bob. I was only trying to be helpful."

I looked miserably around the little room where I had once been so happy. Or at least where I had thought myself happy. The chintz on the sofa looked faded, and the clock on the mantel had stopped. Alice was poor! She was poor and wouldn't take anything from me. The stained old lithograph of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Winterhalter was evidence of her absence of taste, her total indifference to decoration. Sylvia wouldn't have lived with it, even for a night. But it broke my heart.

"I wish I was dead," I muttered.

"Bob, Bob, don't talk like that!"

"I still love you! In spite of everything."

"Please! You have a fixation about me. It's because you can't bear to fail in anything. You've got to develop some objectivity."

"If you send me back to Sylvia now, it may be forever."

"I'm not sending you back to Sylvia. I'm not sending you back to anyone. I want to find out what you are and what I am."

"You want to find out why the hell you married me! That's the long and short of it, isn't it?"

Alice folded her arms across her breast with a sigh. "All right, let it go at that. I want to find out why the hell I married you."

When I taxed Sylvia that night with her visit to Alice, she took a high stand.

"That's the kind of thing women do, my dear, and you had better learn to leave it to us. One way or another we have to put your house in order."

When I took Sylvia out to Keswick for a Sunday lunch with Mother and Dad, they behaved politely, but the occasion was still a chilly one. It was certainly not Sylvia's fault. She showed an irreproachable interest in my parents' lives and what they did, and never betrayed by a single reference the fact that she moved in more exalted social spheres. It was manifest to me that my progenitors disapproved of her, and it finally made me indignant. How could they be so absurd as to view her, a hard-working widow who supported her child, as a kind of whore of Babylon? Nor did I make things any better by touting, despite Sylvia's veiled pucker of a frown, her professional accomplishments.

"In my opinion, Dad, Sylvia's most remarkable work has been with institutions that had developed a pinkish look in the McCarthy era. She gives them a new look by getting their officers to build up a record of anti-communist statements made at periodic intervals over a span of time. When she's through with them they might look to a grant from the John Birch Society!"

Dad was determined to be pleasant, but there was nonetheless a jibe in his response. "I guess she's like the duchess in
The Gondoliers
who cleans up the lady of doubtful propriety. Is that it, Mrs. Sands?" And he proceeded to intone:

"Where virtue would quash her,
I take and whitewash her,
And launch her in first-rate society!"

"I wonder if it's ever really worthwhile," Mother observed bleakly, "to cajole or fool people into giving away their money."

"Most of the cultural institutions of this country would turn their faces to the wall under that theory!" I retorted.

"Maybe Mrs. Service thinks that would be a good thing," Sylvia observed in a tone that implied that she might agree with Mother.

I suppose there was an irony in my seeking to persuade Mother that Sylvia was a "nice" woman. As a boy I had violently resisted her and Father's constant inclusion of their friends and neighbors under the porous umbrella of that loose and sentimental term. I remember how cynically I used to react to the rushing together of their windy feelings in their obvious desire to inculcate a cynical son with some iota of virtue, as when one would say to the other across the dining room table, with a meaningful glance in my direction, "Well, I don't care what people say. I think the Ameses are
nice
people," or, "Isn't Mr. Cox the
nicest
man you've ever known?" or perhaps more simply and explosively and even more absurdly, "Aren't people
nice
!" And I would huddle lower in my chair, a retracting turtle, and blink from one to the other of them balefully, defiantly, until Mother would say to Dad in a tone of deep concern: "I'm afraid what Bob needs is a simple lesson in Christian principles!"

It was never, of course, that I thought
they
were not nice or even that they were not sincere in deeming others possessed of this nebulous quality. What made me gnash my teeth was the way they insisted on seeing their oppressors as benevolent guardians: the partners of Dad's firm who had extracted the last ounce of work out of him for a miserable stipend, my demanding maternal grandmother, who had lived with us until her dying day, making Dad feel a guest in his own home, and some of the richer Westchester neighbors who used Mother like a slave on their charity drives and never once asked the Services to break bread in their mansions.

And yet here I was, twisting my cap, so to speak, into a rag between my knees, like some tense sixteen-year-old bringing his first date to Ma and Pa in the hope of some dim expression of approval! I should have been enchanted to settle for a single "nice." But did I get one?

"Mrs. Sands, I'm sure, is a brilliant woman," was Mother's ultimate concession, imparted to me after lunch while Dad was showing Sylvia his tiny rose garden.

Of course, she filled me with angry doubts. What mother cannot do that? Who
was
Sylvia, as the bard asked? Did she even exist? I had read the Canadian, McLuhan, who, so far as I could make out, maintained that truth was only what most people believed at a particular time. Thus, Alger Hiss could be guilty or innocent at different periods. Perhaps what McLuhan meant was that people's ideas of what constituted a crime varied at different times, so that what wasn't a crime in the 1940s became one under Joe McCarthy. Or did he actually mean that a particular act, say, the copying of an official document, happened or failed to happen depending on what people thought?

Sylvia, like one playing an instrument in an orchestra, seemed to be taking her cue from a conductor. But who was he? She seemed to have no opinions herself on how the piece should be played, or even to consider that some conductors might be better than others. Yet she never appeared weak or faltering; her very refusal to be involved gave her a certain force of character. In her heart she seemed to stand aside, even when her mind was most active. But do not hearts atrophy if they are left indefinitely in the wings?

And who was I to blame her? Was I not committing adultery, at least twice a week, as casually as playing squash at the University Club? Would I not be more interesting, at least to myself, if I underwent some throes of guilt? When I turned to an author whom I admire almost as much as I do Pater—Hawthorne—I could see that the incomparable beauty of
The Scarlet Letter
lies in Hester's brooding sense of guilt, which permeates her vision of the town, the forest and the grim faces of her persecutors. Guilt over what? At having made love to a beautiful minister of God at a time when she was poor and abandoned, and believed her husband dead? No. Hester accepted the harsh judgment of her peers not so much as a judgment as a fact. It was hers; it was
she;
she had to live with it, for it had made her. And I was living without guilt, like Sylvia. Was that what made us both at times seem a bit dry?

I
FOUND
that I was becoming as close to Ethelinda as Sylvia, if not closer. The old lady wanted us both to be with her as much as possible, and she asked us for weekends at the great white glistening villa on the dunes in Southampton, transporting us painlessly thither in her little jet, but she also wanted me to lunch with her alone, and she took to telephoning me at the office to relay bits of gossip she had just heard or funny stories that were often quite unclean. Sylvia showed not the slightest jealousy; on the contrary she encouraged our intimacy. She put me in mind of Kate Croy, in James's
Wings of the Dove
, nurturing Merton Densher's romantic friendship with the dying heiress, Milly Theale, in order that he might inherit her fortune and share it with Kate. But surely Sylvia was not planning to marry me to Mrs. Low! Ethelinda was splendidly preserved, but, judging from the few biographical facts I had gleaned, she had to be eighty.

I was getting to know her pretty well. She had great qualities, but she had weaknesses, too. If she ran her establishments as tautly as naval vessels, with ashtrays emptied almost as the first cinder fell, with cushions plumped up the moment a sitter rose, if she remembered the favorite dish and conversational topic of every guest of honor, if she studied her city politics and contributed to every honest candidate, if she toured slums and hospitals to check the effects of her bounty, she had also an avid ear for scandal and a near terror of loneliness. She would do anything to avoid a solitary evening. Although she was supposed to be a difficult target for a social climber, she made herself shamelessly available to anyone who offered to fill a stubborn vacancy in her calendar. "Oh, we mustn't be stuffy; we must meet the new people," she would retort if Sylvia protested that she was dining with thugs. And I also began to note that Ethelinda's concern with maintenance was verging on the obsessive. She would redecorate new and shining chambers on the ground that they were "shabby." It was as if she wanted to scrub and clean the gilded shells with which she covered her old bones until she could crawl into heaven itself.

"Think what her childhood must have been like," was Sylvia's comment when I mentioned this. "She can never have enough beauty around her to shut out the memory of all that dirt and squalor."

"Does she ever talk about it?"

"Never. Not that she conceals it. She will say, 'You can't imagine, darling, what a sty I came from.' But then she shuts it out, muttering, 'One of the reasons I can do things for the poor and wretched is that I know how little can be done.'"

I also began to observe that the old girl's memory was going. One day when she and I were lunching alone at the Amboise, she betrayed a notable lapse.

"People have no idea what a job it is to give away money. They think you ought to be able to spot flatterers by their oiliness. They don't realize that the worst liars are the presidents of our great universities and museums. Because these men think it's morally justifiable to do anything under the sun for a good cause. Look at David King sitting over there, smiling smugly at that man—what's his name?—from the Colonial Museum. Can't you just see David's swallowing every word he's being told? And he's so puffed up, too, about running his own foundation. 'Why do I need a great staff, like Ford?' he asks. 'Does it take any more time to write a check for a hundred g's than one for a million?' Very amusing. And all New York worships David. So generous! So great-hearted! But I'll bet he gets taken to the cleaners on half his grants."

"He should be like the Ford Foundation, then, and have more staff?"

"Well, Ford's the opposite extreme. Too many people, too many reports. And that quaint dread of public opinion that foundations should be exempt from and aren't at all. No, I tell you, Bob, when I die, I'm going to leave what I have to half a dozen institutions that I believe in, to do with as they choose. Let them cut the lawn or build buildings, what does it matter? They're going to find a way to get around your restrictions, anyway. All you can do is pick the best, and, mind you, the best won't be any too good."

"But, Ethelinda," I protested, "what became of your idea of the charitable trust? With Sylvia as a trustee?"

"Charitable trust? Sylvia? What are you talking about, dear boy? You're thinking of some other old gal you were making up to after too many cocktails. I'm going to tell Sylvia she's taking you out too much."

I did not press the point and allowed her to tell me about David King's handsome young male secretary who was leading his boss by the nose...

"Nose, did you say?"

"Oh, Robert, you're terrible!"

I told Sylvia that night that I had found our great lady a bit tired.

"Tired? Did she say anything in particular?"

"She didn't seem to remember anything about our charitable trust discussion. Not a word."

"Of course, she's old. And older than people think."

"Yes, but is she...?"

"What?"

"Well, entirely all there?"

"Look here, Bob." Sylvia turned on me now, very firm. "Ethelinda's mind is as good as yours or mine. Her memory may be slipping a bit. But that doesn't mean she's non compos."

"Until it slips altogether. It's one thing if you forget what you had for dinner last night. It's another when you forget the question before you can answer it."