The Young Apollo and Other Stories (20 page)

"Come sit with me a moment," she urged her. "I want to ask you something."

She led Ella into the library, which was deserted, and they sat in two chairs.

"Thad always likes to talk of the novelist George Meredith's fondness for what he calls the imps of comedy," Evalina began. "They look down on us poor mortals and smirk. And when they spot a particularly pompous ass, they skip down to play tricks on him."

"And who is the ass you have in mind?"

"Evalina Lane Warwick."

"Well, I can think of words to describe you, my dear friend, but that is the last that would have occurred to me. Of what do you imagine your assaninity to consist?"

"In my perhaps willful failure to recognize that Thad is having an affair with Mary Appleton."

Ella's features congealed. That she uttered no immediate denial was sufficient evidence that she already knew. "What makes you think so?"

"Ella, you're my best friend. You wouldn't lie to me."

"But I don't have to say anything."

"But you might tell me what I should do about it."

"Nothing." Ella was very definite.

"I should simply look the other way?"

"It shouldn't matter where you look, so long as you don't
do
anything. Look, Lina. You and Thad have a great life. Don't wreck it."

"You mean I should continue to ask that woman to my house so she can make love to my faithless husband under my very eyes?"

"Thad is faithful to you, Lina. After his fashion, as the poet put it. This thing with Mary is only a fling. It won't last."

"How can I be sure of that?"

"Because the others haven't."

For several moments Evalina was speechless. The imps of comedy had not prepared her for that! In the tumbling whirl of her various reactions she felt plummeted into a new world, and a very strange one. When she spoke, it was in a muted tone. "There have been others, then?"

"I don't know how many, but I can think of two. Some men have to blow off steam every now and then. It's no big deal, Lina. It's as if he had masturbated without imagining he was making love to you."

"Ella! Is that really you talking?"

"Oh, it's me, all right. I'm trying to find some way to drum into your head that this isn't the end of the world."

"Would you feel that way if it was your Sam who was sleeping around?"

"No. Because if Sam ever had an affair, it would be a serious one. He and Thad have different temperaments. And anyway, Thad doesn't sleep around. He's too busy to give that slut Mary more than a late afternoon hour of his time."

"Ella, I appreciate your candor, but I think I've had about all I can take for now."

"Just remember, dearie. Don't upset the apple cart. You'll never get a better one."

Ella shook off the hand that tried to retain her for further colloquy and hurried upstairs to her room. After the party, she and Thad dined alone together. He had noted her leaving the parlor. He always noted everything. But he did not allude to it.

"Maman's having one of her seizures," she informed him. "Rather worse than usual. Peter writes that he would be glad if I came over."

"I thought your mother's seizures were largely imaginary. Is this one really so different, my dear?"

"As she ages they tend to become more real. I think I'd better go to her. Mademoiselle can take care of Wendy. I shan't be gone forever."

He didn't answer for a minute, and she remembered that he always sorted the mail to separate her letters from the many he received from his constituents. Of course, he knew that she had received no recent communication from her stepfather. But wasn't it better that way? It would be too ugly to have to articulate the real reason.

"I'm going to miss you badly."

"Oh, you'll survive."

After that he knew everything. It was not like her to make so cold a retort. But with his customary tact, he still offered no comment. Any discussion would have bordered on the vulgar. She was even grateful to him.

He assured her that his office would take care of all the travel arrangements.

Crossing the Atlantic on the
Normandie,
she slept little and read less. Sitting on her deck chair and watching the tumbling sea, she reviewed her life and wondered why it had been so shockingly sundered in two, leaving her with a stained past and a bleak future. Why, as Ella had put it, did she make so much of a common or garden species of adultery? Was she bitterly jealous? No. Was she passionately angry? No. Was what had happened not to have been expected of a man lured into what to him may have been a tepid marriage? Possibly, yet she had certainly not expected it. But there it was, and it seemed to have robbed her life of all its dignity.

What she at last seemed to make out was that she had been left on one side of an infinitely stretching fence with a limited number of fatuous and misguided idealists while the rest of humanity was on the other side. It was not that she wanted to leap that fence and join the fornicating, self-deluded advocates of the glory of sexual love, but that her cohorts on the minority side now struck her as shrill and futile. She wondered if she could fit in anywhere.

Eliane and Peter Everett greeted her warmly when she arrived at the beautiful Spanish pavilion in Cannes overlooking the wine dark sea. The former and Evalina had long since made up their early differences; Eliane was far too sensible to hold a grudge indefinitely against a daughter who was not only rich and fashionable but married to a man who might well become a famous statesman. Peter had proved just the husband Eliane had needed; he took all her ailments at her own valuation and fussed over her as much as any
malade imaginaire
could possibly have wished. Nor was it any loss on his part; their relationship was a case of symbiosis. He had no financial concerns, lived in grand style, and had ample time for the composition of his charming and increasingly popular belles-lettres.

Evalina got on easily and well with both her mother and her stepfather, and she found herself for the first time in her life submitting to a routine of idle drift. She played bridge with her mother and the local friends; she went out with Eliane and Peter to their elegant dinner parties; she read mysteries sitting on the beach in their cabana; she took walks with Peter.

It was on one of the latter that he asked her suddenly, "How long are you planning to stay with us, Evalina? I hope indefinitely, but it strikes me that we must not rob Thad of his adored spouse too long."

"Oh, Congress keeps him well occupied."

Peter paused to look at her harder. "Do you mind if I ask you an impertinent question?"

"Not in the least. Though I don't promise to answer it."

"If you decline to, that will be answer enough. Have you and Thad had a quarrel?"

"No. But we might have had. Had I not gone abroad."

"But will you? When you go back?"

"I'm not entirely sure I'm going back. I may just send for Wendy to join me here."

"Oh, Evalina!"

"Look, Peter." There was a bench near them, and she sat on it, patting the place beside her to indicate that he should join her, which he did. Her tone was very firm. "I don't intend to share my husband with another woman."

"But it's hardly sharing him if she takes only a tiny sliver."

She stared with something like curiosity into the blinking eyes of this wrinkled, brown-faced, lean, and oddly distinguished old man. "You sound like my friend Ella. What do you all know about my husband? What makes you so sure that he gives only a sliver, as you call it, to his mistress?"

"People from the States come to Cannes, you know, my dear. Rather too many of them, in fact. Including a gossiping aunt of Thad's."

"Matilda Gray? That old cat?"

"Exactly. But even she, under my cross-examination, admitted that Thad's little escapades seem brief enough."

"They may not last long for him," Evalina retorted grimly. "But they may last for a considerably longer time for me."

Peter's eyes quit blinking as they saddened. "Listen to me, dear girl. I'm not going to stand by and see you throw your life's work away. For that's what you'll be doing if you let this nonsense ruin your marriage. You've invested too much in Thad to toss it to the winds. And that's where it will go if you leave him. He'll never get ahead without you."

Evalina was shocked to feel that she was suddenly about to sob. "Oh, he'll do well enough without me."

"No, he won't, and you know he won't. You're his pilot, and left to himself, he may end up on a reef. You know your father threw his life away. First in peace, then in war. Don't be a copycat. It's not in your genes. You don't
have
to do it."

"Have to? How do you mean?"

"Well, my generation did, you know. England in 1914 was a kind of paradise on earth, at least for the privileged, and I was one of them. Oh, yes, our young men were brave and true and nobly spirited. Rupert Brooke. 'A body of England's, breathing English airs, washed by the rivers, blest by suns at home.' And they were all killed in the trenches. I would have been, too, had I not had the luck to be wounded. My friend Patrick Shaw-Stewart, who we had thought was safe on Mediterranean duty, was shifted at the last moment to Flanders. A poem was found in the copy of
A Shropshire Lad
that he had in his pocket when he was killed. Some of the stanzas show how grimly we all accepted what we were sure would be our doom."

Peter threw his head back and intoned:

But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean sea,
Shrapnel and high explosive,
Shells and hells for me.

O hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me!
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

I will go back this morning,
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me!

"You see, dear Evalina, we all knew that we had had everything and that we would lose everything, and that it was all for nothing, but at least we remembered our Greek."

She was temporarily distracted from herself. "But didn't Germany have to be stopped? Was it totally futile?"

"My dear girl, what do we have today? Hider! He makes the Kaiser seem like a cherub! But why do I drag you through all this? To show you how I survived! When I picked myself up, so to speak, after the armistice, I gathered together my few assets and determined that, however shaky, I was still intact and was not going to waste another minute of my life. It takes guts not to give in to bitterness, melancholy, and false pride. But you have guts, Evalina! The guts not to give in to the temptation to wreck your life and Thad's and maybe even Wendy's!"

Evalina rose, and they walked back to the villa in silence. At the door she kissed him and murmured, "Stand in the trench, Achilles, flame-capped, and shout for me!"

That night before dinner she went to her mother's boudoir where Eliane was sitting before a triple mirror, applying the last touches of her makeup, and told her of her talk with Peter.

"I knew he was going to talk to you, darling," her mother told her, without turning from her task. "And I can only hope that you took it to heart."

Evalina, gazing at her thoughtfully and recalling how beautiful this parent had once been, heard herself asking suddenly, "Mother, before I came over to you, after the war, did you and Thad have an affair?"

Eliane whirled around and looked at her daughter in horror. "Whatever put such a dreadful idea in your sick, twisted mind?"

"Would it have been so dreadful? You were a lovely widow and he a charming and unattached young man. What could have been more natural? You had no reason to think he'd one day be your son-in-law."

"Evalina, you should have your mouth washed out with soap! Now get out of here, and get ready for dinner!"

Evalina went to her room with a lighter heart. It was not because she necessarily credited her mother's inferred denial. It was because she no longer felt obliged to believe or disbelieve it.

Ten days later, when the
Normandie
docked at her pier in New York Harbor, she spotted Thad in the crowd below. He had skipped a session of Congress to meet her.

"Darling, I've missed you so!" he cried, embracing her as she stepped off the gangplank.

Gently but decisively she released herself. "And what about Mary Appleton? Will you give her up?"

"I already have!" His smile was radiant. "And there won't be any others, I swear! Ever, ever!"

She too smiled as she sent him off to deal with her luggage and the customs. She no longer had to believe him, either.

I
N THE EARLY SPRING
of the year 330, by Christian tabulation, and such was the common use since the emperor Constantine had transferred the capital of the world to the city on the Bosporus named for himself, Caius Lentulus Desideratus, a still nobly handsome quinquagenarian, still a senator and still, despite all the modern changes, a lover of the old Roman ways and traditions, of the old Roman gods and poets, had returned to his long-abandoned city residence. He had left his family to enjoy the sea breezes in his Ostian villa and had come back to supervise the reopening of what he had once deemed his perfect little pink marble palace on the slopes of the Viminal Hill, overlooking the forum. And now, a day's work done, he was taking advantage of the mild evening air and the pleasant sight of the streets below, less clogged with daytime shoppers and sightseers, by stepping out onto the terrace, which commanded a distant view of the Arch of Titus and the looming gray wall of the Colosseum. With him was his old friend and cousin, Marcus Publius Varco, newly named one of the seven quaestors of the empire, soon to leave for his post in the new capital, and around them were some of the statues of Lentulus's collection, long in storage and now brought out for possible relocation in the refurbished mansion.

"You are certainly running against the tide, my dear Lentulus," the quaestor observed. "Half our friends are building sumptuous villas along the Bosporus and selling their old homes here for a song."