Set This House on Fire (13 page)

His wealth, his glamorous connections, his premature ease with the things of the flesh—they worked on me a profound fascination. Why he in turn should have been attracted to me I have never known for certain. My background, for example, is almost triumphantly middle-class. I have a feeling that Mason’s interest in me was largely based on the fact that—at least then—I laughed unfailingly at his jokes, nodded amiably at his lies, and in my sycophant’s role mirrored some desperately needed approval for all his greedy desires. Actually I always felt that he somehow admired me—for whatever sentimental altruism I possess that allowed me to tolerate his own excesses. It has taken me years to learn how to reproach people to their faces.

At any rate, Mason at sixteen was more worldly—or gave the impression of being so—than many young men who look wan and deflated at thirty. He dressed in sleek trim suits tailored in New York, smoked English cigarettes, and though he had never left America his voice was the exhausted querulous vibrato of a man who had savored a score of exotic coasts. Already he had outstripped his own adolescence and was lean and handsome, with a supremely becoming suggestion of whiskers and a horrible turn of mind that could cause him to whisper, as he did to me one morning in chapel: “I try to pray but all I can think about is getting laid.” It shocked me, for my belief in God, though fading, was still alive and suffered few fleshly intrusions. But my bulwarks were breaking up. I continued to be beguiled by Mason while the other boys were losing interest in him. They were less susceptible to his wealth, became tired of his endless stories, and were finally outraged when Mason, who had the makings of a good athlete, counterfeited something sprained and sat out the whole football season. Of all the boys I think I alone regarded that act as something other than cowardice. In the end I was the only friend he had left—which as I look at it now may well have been a measure of my corruptibility.

The Flaggs were the only people I ever knew who were millionaires. Mason’s father was a New Yorker, an investor who had made some sort of a fabulous killing in the distributing end of the movie industry (“About the only one in the business,” Mason used to say rather proudly, “who isn’t a Jew or a Greek.”) and had come down to the fashionable part of Gloucester County to set himself up as a Virginia gentleman. He was a success at it, buying an enormous estate called Merryoaks, which was a Colonial plantation manor authentic in every respect—at least until the addition of a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a stainless-steel boathouse. That year I went there with Mason many times—it was only an hour or so’s drive from the school. In the early fall there were often parties for the grownups, New York celebrities going and coming in Cadillacs, and a grove of pastel paper lanterns sprouting each dusk upon the lawn. Once a ball-bearing mogul from Sweden named Aarvold landed his airplane on the grassy meadow which was the Flaggs’ back yard. In those antebellum days this was an exploit of spectacular dash, and it took me a long while to get over it. That was the same week end, I recall, that Mr. Flagg hired a whole choir of Richmond Negroes to sing spirituals for the guests, and I remember Mason remarking that the entire proceedings were “impossibly vulgar.” “Old Cuh-nel Flagg,” he said scornfully, with that pained awareness he always had that he was not really a southerner, and that his family were Johnny-come-lately Virginians. That week end, too, I remember everyone was waiting for Greta Garbo to show up but for some reason she never came. Lionel Barrymore was there, though, and Carole Lombard, and a very young starlet of about seventeen—she never amounted to much in the movies—with whom I was feverishly smitten, and who teased me so unmercifully about my tidewater drawl that I eradicated it on the spot. To this day, because of her, my accent has remained as amorphous and orderly as a radio announcer’s. My very breath turned to dust around her, and I suspected that she loathed me for the soft patina of acne that hovered rosily about my nose. But I felt blessed just to walk where her shadow fell and would willingly have died after the ecstasy of that night, when doggedly, sweatily, and stricken mute as stone I danced with her until dawn, and until the last of the hired musicians began packing their horns and violins, and the renovated castle in the morning mists loomed with drowsy parvenu splendor amid its garland of extinguished lanterns.

I never got to talk to the elder Flagg at all. He always seemed oddly removed from Mason. I was constantly aware of some unspoken resentment between them which Mason, on his part, would relieve by stealing the old man’s liquor. He was a bald, mustachioed, freckled little man with an adjutant’s strut and a bearing which I couldn’t help but associate with spurs and jodhpurs, rather than with the soft effeminate flannels and sandals in which he was usually decked out. Young as I was and diminutive as he was, I could sniff when I was near him a tremendous power and affluence. It was easy to tell he liked the presence of celebrities, who in turn flocked like famished, irrepressible moths around his opulent flame. He dropped dead later during the war, in South America, where he was financing a huge new chain of theaters. I only realized his eminence—specialized as it might have been—when I saw his obituaries everywhere, making him out as something of a mystery man who had always shunned personal publicity. Resentment, ill-will, whatever, he nonetheless left Mason a trust fund which amounted to nearly two million dollars.

Wendy-dear, however, I knew much better, for she worshiped Mason, and with the blind constancy of some devout communicant, seemed always to be hovering near the image of her adoration. Mason had already been expelled from two New England prep schools and it is doubtful that he would have been admitted to a school less hard up for money than St. Andrew’s; even so, it was not hard to tell that she sent him there mainly in order to be close to him, and that those dark moods of apprehension which flickered from time to time across her lovely face expressed a fear, constantly jangling and discordant, that he would get booted out again. She was a marvel to me. Rich flaxen hair brushed with electric perfume and a high flush of rouge at her cheeks, inch-long vermilion fingernails and a jangle and bangle of brass at wrists and ears—these were attributes I had never connected with mothers, who in Port Warwick tended to be portly and subdued, and she seemed to me a fantastic apparition, irresistibly, almost alarmingly beautiful. However, she smoked a lot, and drank; in fact, she was the first lady lush I had ever seen. Three bourbon old-fashioneds after dinner (this was always when Flagg, Senior, was away, which had become more and more frequent toward the spring of that year) made her diction almost as impenetrable as something croaked out by a deaf-mute; she began to weep and fawn over Mason, telling him that for her sake, for his future’s sake, for Princeton, he must be a good boy at school, suggesting now with a hoarse sob, now with a martyred shrug or a final haggard grimace, that since his father was seeking another woman’s bed, he, Mason, was the only thing she had left on earth. I had lofty southern notions about ladies at the time, and scenes like these left me flabbergasted and depressed.

But when sober, such talk from a mother! Such enchanting, indiscreet, worldly-wise chatter I had never heard.

“But
chéri,
you have so much to learn. You’re really so young yet, darling. Sex—I mean the physical union between man and woman—is a beautiful experience, not something foul-mouthed and vile. You’ll learn. No wonder Dr. Morrison lectured you. You say he overheard you telling that perfectly horrible joke?”

Still unwitting, still unaware that Mason had been sacked only the night before, she drove us in her convertible down to Merryoaks on that fatal birthday week end, her gorgeous hair flying out behind her in streams of undulating gold. Like his silent pimply equerry I reclined on the back seat behind Mason (it had been no simple joke the headmaster had reckoned with, but some carnal embrace in which the old doctor, fumbling around and with palsied fingers lighting matches in the chapel basement, had ambushed Mason stark naked with the weak-minded daughter of a local oysterman, both of them clutching bottles of sacramental wine; and no lecture—“He whaled the hell out of me,” Mason later said—but a public proclamation cast in the form of such black anathema that Istill recall how the last part of it read: “… a stench and a rottenness in the Nostrils of Almighty God, and I am grieved to say that it is no lingering fragment of Christian forbearance, but only the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which prevents my exacting a retribution more severe than silent and expeditious banishment.”); Mason, unperturbed and elegant in a camel’s-hair jacket beside his mother, would turn his luxurious profile toward her from time to time and lightly peck her cheek, the two of them lost in tender banter, gazing long at one another while the car, swaying from side to side and under no control at all, hurtled down dusty country roads like a runaway rocket.

“Yes, Wendy-dear, the joke about the duchess and the poodle.”

“Well, no wonder, it’s perfectly
vile.”

“How else then, dear heart, is an unmarried man going to get his kicks? In France—”

“Oh, I’m sorry I ever talked to you about France. You’re not a
man.
I hate to tell you this, dear, but when you get to Princeton they’ll consider you the merest boy.”

“Wendy, sometimes you’re such a trial. Besides, remember your promise.”

“What promise, angel?”

“That when I’m eighteen you’ll take me to—what do you call it?—one of those bordellos.”

“Darling! Peter, don’t listen to him! Darling, you’re absolutely vile!”

I was unhappy for Mason’s sake that day, fidgety with apprehension over the scene I knew must come, but Mason and his mother were all high spirits and merriment. Before noon the three of us went sailing in the Flaggs’ trim little sloop, landing across the river at Yorktown, where we spread a picnic lunch upon one of the grassy breastworks so lucklessly defended by Lord Cornwallis. To me Wendy had never looked so devastating as she did that day, all sheen and gold and radiance; with a saucy wink for me, prankishly tousling Mason’s hair, breathing soft phrases of flattery and devotion to both of us, she seemed hardly a mother at all but some grown-up Dulcinea possessing both sexual allure and incalculable wisdom. It was a hot spring day and we had drinks—for Mason and me beer, for Wendy martinis, which with fetching nonchalance she poured from a Thermos bottle. “Certainly not, my pet,” she said to Mason, with a bright little grin, “young lips that touch martinis shall never touch mine. Drink your beer like a nice boy. In a year you can drink anything you like.” Later on, recrossing the river, we met a flat calm which set the sails flappily sagging. “Who cares?” cried Wendy, throwing her arms around the two of us. “It’s birthday time! Oh
Gawd,
to be seventeen again! Let’s drift away, away to the sea!” Even I in my anxiety found her spirit contagious; we all began to sing songs, sprawled out on the deck in sodden contentment while the boat, unhelmed and sideslipping gently downriver, edged out into wide waters toward the sea.

“In the evening by the moonlight,

    You could hear those darkies singing—”

we sang, floating past the mouths of tideland streams on the distant shore, sunny meadows on the slopes above, fish stakes in the water, and once an old Negro out tonging oysters, whose eyes rolled white and wonder-struck as we passed. An hour, two hours went by. “Look at him, Peter,” she murmured sleepily, “isn’t he the adorablest thing? Why, he has practically no hips at all.” To which Mason, inured to this kind of talk but flustered because of my presence, said, “Wendy-dear, sometimes you’re such a trial,” as the wind rose abruptly and whisked us homeward—sunburned, half-stupefied—trailing seaweed in our wake.

I had never been really drunk before that afternoon and I was just sixteen: everything, even my premonitory sense of doom, I remember as in a shimmery haze through which the visions of my mind glowed with beauty and with bright ineffable glamour. Far up its hill above the river Merryoaks stood solitary and colonnaded in imperial grandeur, its windless, porticoed façade serene in shadows above an emerald sweep of lawn where reflections from the swimming pool sent dancing oblong shapes of light against the grass. A Negro, white-jacketed, appeared briefly on the heights, then disappeared. Twilight was drawing in behind the pines, which cast stiltlike silhouettes across the rolling landscaped terraces and flagstone walks. As we approached the dock, closehauled and decks awash in one last windy sweep across the shore, I raised my bedazzled eyes in almost tearful gratitude to this place, and Wendy took my hand, squeezing it gently, as if to indicate, “Because you are Mason’s friend, this too is yours.” But again my exalted mood began to fade a little as we docked, when it occurred to me that still he hadn’t told her. We were met there by Richard, the thin-lipped, poker-faced Alsatian who was the Flaggs’ butler, chauffeur, and factotum, brought down from Rye; a burly fellow, he reminded me of a movie villain, and whenever he smiled, which was practically never, it was with a crude perfunctory smirk that was like a surgical incision. He always left me feeling cowed and intimidated—although this may have been because he was the first white manservant I had ever seen. The two Great Danes leashed to his wrist were as big as panthers and they strained for Wendy as she lurched ashore, whimpering their love as she embraced them and crooned baby talk into their ears, and vaulting finally with great savage groans into the back seat of the Cadillac, where they settled among the three of us licking their chops and shuddering with power.

On the drive up through the pinewoods to the house, Wendy fell softly and suddenly asleep on Mason’s shoulder. As for Mason, for the first time since I had known him he seemed despondent, and crestfallen. Drops of sweat stood out on his brow, and as he tenderly held Wendy against him he drew his mouth tautly down and sent me an abject look of dread. Possibly only then, the giddy voyage downriver finished, had he realized the consequences of the brainless thing he had done. Whatever, this pale glance and then his whispered words—“How am I going to tell her, for Jesus sake?”—made me feel a renewed misery, for Mason, but more now for Wendy—who I felt was the most glamorous mother on earth—and for all of her blasted hopes.