The Young Apollo and Other Stories (2 page)

Well, I shall certainly use Elihu's story.
If I
write the book at all. It is indeed exhilarating to contemplate how much Lion did for his older friends. Would I have ever written
Life of a Voyeur
without his urging? I doubt it. I had overdisciplined myself in the business of keeping my own quirky personality out of my history books, to the point of deeming it almost obscene to write about myself. Lion fixed all that when he told me, "The man who talks about himself at a dinner table is a bore. The man who fails to talk about himself on the platform is a greater one. The audience has come to hear about him." And think what he did for Ella, though of course I can't use her story! Nor can I use the incident when Lion kept his father from agreeing to endorse the appointment to the federal bench of a crooked Rhode Island politician. Which is too bad, as it graphically illustrates the strength of his character.

George Manning had summoned me to his house to intercede with his son. He explained that Lion was threatening to cease contacting his father, and even to cease receiving financial aid from him, unless he agreed not to support the unsavory proposed appointee.

"You've got to help me drum some sense into that stubborn head of his, Ralph," the anguished senator had wailed. "You've got to help make him see that the real issue is between me and my state's political boss. Mike O'Shaugnessy and I have formed a working relationship that, as you know, enables us pretty much to run Rhode Island. I've had to make some compromises, to be sure, but so has he. And it's been on the whole a good thing for the state. And now this business of making Lew Kraft a judge threatens to upset the whole applecart. O'Shaugnessy simply won't give in on it. Kraft has some hold on him that I don't know anything about, and he's adamant on the subject. What's got into Lion? He's about to marry his lovely Bella, and they won't have a nickel without my help, except for what he may get for his poetry, and you know what people pay for that."

I knew that George, a wealthy man, had always given Lion a large allowance but had never settled any capital on him. It was like George to wish to keep control of his family. But I also knew that Lion would not hesitate for even a minute to pauperize himself for a principle.

And indeed, when I faced him that day in his father's study, I found him impossible to budge. His manner to his father was perfect, even affectionate. He simply regretted that they should have come to this pass, but come to it they certainly had.

He interrupted me when I started to defend the principle of political compromise. "I know about that, Uncle Ralph. I am very much aware of Dad's alliance with O'Shaugnessy. But there still have to be limits. I have been up to Providence and talked to members of the legislature. Democrats, I grant you, but still men who know what they're talking about. Kraft has had a hand in too many purchased elections not to be known, among the Republican Party faithful, as the 'King Fixer.' I cannot sit by and see Dad stick his fine fingers in such slime."

What could I do? What could anyone do? Of course George surrendered, and the name of Kraft was not even submitted to the Senate. The alliance with O'Shaugnessy tottered, but it survived.

The beautiful Bella, Lion's brave and stalwart widow, who had been married to him for only a year when he died, was not enthusiastic about the proposed volume, but she muted her objections because her father-in-law cared so strongly. She came to me privately.

"The senator insists," she told me, "that the book contain a goodly number of Lion's poems. Indeed, I think he sees your text primarily as an introduction to them. Of course, as he is printing the volume and paying for everything, he can do as he pleases. But, Ralph, I'm sure you feel as Ella and Elihu and I do about the poems. We're hoping you can limit the number and not include any part of the unfinished epic. Need I say more?"

No, she needn't. Lion's odes and sonnets and elegies and even the famous epic are dead, dead, dead. You couldn't exactly call them bad, or even embarrassing; they are filled with noble thoughts and grave ideals. But they are lapidary. They are dull. Lion was one who could inspire genius without being one. Maybe his life was genius. But it had to be lived, not printed.

But yes, I will write the little book. Even if it bodes to be a work of contrived hagiography. After all, it will be read only by a few relatives and friends; it will be soon forgotten. I can feel Lion's eye on me. "Do it for Dad," he seems to be saying. "It may help him to remember me, as he passionately wants to."

C
AMILLA
H
UNTER HAD NOT
thought that lightning could strike twice at the same family, nor that at age eighty she would be forced to relive in 1981 the same kind of Wall Street scandal that had disgraced her husband in 1937. Back then, David Hunter had been implicated in the embezzlements of his mighty boss, Jonathan Stiles. It was true that their lawyer had argued that David, as the most junior partner in the brokerage house of Stiles & Son, might not have been fully aware of the criminal aspects of the jobs he was carrying out for his boss, but the jury had thought otherwise, and Camilla had had to admit reluctantly to herself that her husband's raiding of her own little fiduciary fund, entrusted to his firm, could hardly have been at the instigation of the great Stiles. Both men, at any rate, had been sentenced to stiff terms in Sing Sing, and the presses of the nation had rung with denunciations of the guilty brokerage house. Stiles had been held up to the scorn of the society in which Camilla had been raised as a "traitor to his class," and backs had been turned on her husband even after he had served his sentence.

And now here it was upon her again, almost half a century later, as if the windows of the neat little parlor of her modest Madison Avenue apartment had been blown open by a black storm and her small trove of lares and penates scattered over the floor. Could a white-haired but impeccably trim and still unwrinkled widow, who had managed to survive everything with her dignity intact, not be allowed to relish the seeming serenity that she had so precariously achieved? Evidently not. Bronson Newton, the husband of her favorite niece, Genevieve, considered the star of the family for the vast fortune he had made on the stock market in a scant five years' time, had been indicted for using inside information in his trading and sentenced to two years in jail.

"I can only thank God that my poor mother didn't live to see this second disgrace in her family," Camilla moaned to herself as she contemplated the headlines of the evening paper.

But of course she couldn't just sit and sigh. She would now have to help steer her poor niece through this crisis, drawing from her own experience to teach her how to handle the falling away of friends, and even relatives, and how to maintain the oasis of a cherished home when the condemned man was released from incarceration. She wrote to Genevieve to ask when it would be best for her to come and received an answer suggesting a wait of some days. Bronson was planning an appeal, of course, but as a reversal of the conviction was believed by his lawyers to be unlikely, he had opted to start his jail term at once to get it over as soon as possible.

It was a week, therefore, before Camilla presented herself at her niece's splendid Park Avenue duplex. She found the beautiful blond Genevieve, radiantly clad as usual, in the front hall taking what seemed to be a lively leave of some ladies who had been calling on her. As they departed she turned to her aunt with a cheerfully welcoming smile.

"Darling Aunt Millie, how sweet of you to fly to my side! Come in, come in."

Camilla followed her into the great drawing room, done entirely in gleaming white except for the ebony arms of the chairs and table legs and the black jade of the lamps. On the walls hung canvases of Picasso, Miro, Pollock, and Jasper Johns. She declined all offers of tea or a cocktail and sat quietly for a moment in an armchair, gazing sadly at her hostess.

"I had to come," she said at last. "I was waiting until the first rude shock was over. I knew you had to face that with Bronson and the children."

"And that was typically tactful of you, you old darling. But as it happens you've come just at the right time to hear some wonderful news."

"Really? Is it the appeal? They think it will work?"

"No, no, no. That's quite hopeless, I'm afraid. But what our able lawyers
have
achieved is to get Bronson into a minimum-security prison. One that's almost like a country club. He can see me quite freely. He can even run his business from there. And I know he'll be on his best behavior, so he should be sprung in only eighteen months. And if there are any nasty types among the jailmates—you know, you never can tell—I'm told we can easily arrange to pay them off when they come out, so they'll leave Bronson strictly alone."

"I see you're being very practical about this."

"Doesn't one have to be? Didn't you? And then, of course, we have a couple of friends who've suffered through the same rigmarole. They've given us some very helpful advice."

"And the fines? The ones I've read about? They seemed so huge to me. Will you have to make changes in your life-style?"

"Not a bit. It sounds rather lordly to say it, auntie, but sixty million doesn't make that fatal a dent in Bronson's fortune. We may have to give up the place in Arizona, but we'll certainly keep Southampton, Jamaica, and this old flat. And to tell the truth, I was getting a bit sick anyway of all that sand and cactus."

"I guess not having to cut down may help assuage public opinion," Camilla commented, now in a drier tone. "People seem to have a great respect for money these days."

"These days? When didn't they? But what do you mean, auntie, by assuaging public opinion?"

"Well, when something like this happened to your uncle, we had a lot of trouble even with some of our oldest friends."

"You mean they were ashamed of him?"

"Well, yes. They seemed to feel he had betrayed them."

"You mean the ones who had lost money because of what he had done?"

"No, no." Camilla was beginning to feel frustrated and even a bit vexed. "I mean the ones who thought he had been dishonorable. That he had let down the system in which he had been raised." She paused, and then finally brought it out. "They thought he had given the New Dealers in Washington the chance they had been waiting for to destroy Wall Street in the public eye! Your friends don't feel anything like that, I take it?"

"Good lord, no!" Genevieve's laugh was perfectly good-natured. "You're talking about another era, auntie. Let's call it the Iron Age. No, the attitude of our friends might be described as 'There but for the grace of God go I!'"

"I see." What more was there for Camilla to say? She listened and let Genevieve rattle on about how best and how often to arrange for the children to visit their father, and took her leave as soon as seemed decent.

But she didn't go straight home. She was too upset. She had to talk to someone about the shock of this new experience, and who was there better than her oldest and dearest friend of the heart, Marielle Blagden, fellow widow, whose apartment hotel was only a few blocks south of Genevieve's dwelling? She turned her steps thither.

Marielle, after her husband's death, ignoring the concerned protests of her family and friends, had divided the bulk of his large estate, bequeathed to her outright, among their two sons, reserving just enough to maintain herself comfortably in two rooms. But the building she had chosen was a first-class one, and the two rooms were handsome and properly furnished with fine things from the big Blagden Georgian house in Long Island, so Marielle was not, as she had wisely planned not to be, to any degree an object of pity. "I am doing exactly what I want," she had answered all objections firmly, "and living exactly as I choose. Call it selfish, if you like. Indeed, I'd rather have you call it selfish."

But Camilla knew that her friend had always lived for Pedro, as Peter Blagden was affectionately known, and had adapted herself totally to the hunting and polo-playing tastes of that kindly, charming, but unimaginative sportsman, and had, losing him, adapted herself in turn to the needs of their two kindly, charming, but unimaginative sons, whose wives needed the money that their husbands were too busy hunting and polo-playing to earn.

Camilla thought, as Marielle opened the door, how marvelously preserved she was—tall, slim, elegant, with large, smiling brown eyes under a fine pale brow and sleek undyed black hair still only faintly lined with gray. And she seemed to sense at once that Camilla was troubled. She listened in grave silence as the latter described her interview with Genevieve and then rose to mix her a cocktail at a small bar table.

"I think you may need this," she said, handing Camilla a glass. "Let us drink to the new age we're living in."

"Must we like it?"

"Of course not. We must only accept it. For as long as it lasts. Ages don't last forever. This one, however, can be counted on to last our time. Yours and mine, I mean."

"What have I just told you that makes you think I don't accept it?"

"Your clinging to a bygone moral code."

"You mean that all these stock market shenanigans are no longer crimes?"

"No, they're still crimes. What has changed is the public attitude toward them."

"People approve of them now, you mean?"

"That's putting it rather strongly. But they recognize how widespread they are. How many others are involved who never get caught. So they don't judge too harshly. It might be
them
tomorrow."

"Yet people still go to jail for these crimes."

"Oh, yes. There have to be rules in any game. For that's what the stock market has become: a game. If you're caught inside trading or gambling with other people's money or making illegal investments, you're docked so many points, so to speak. But nobody thinks any the worse of you."

"So when you get out of prison, you take back your old place in society? Nobody snubs you anymore."

"Just so."

"And you approve of all that, Marielle?"