The Young Apollo and Other Stories (22 page)

Some cousins at this point crossed the room to bid me good night. The party was over, and Uncle Jack departed, leaving me to my troubled thoughts.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Uncle Jack's revelation was that it gave me a nasty kind of exhilaration. Of course, I knew perfectly well that a certain number of family friends and relations believed that there had always been something more between Mother and Sam Pemberton than an
amitié amoureuse.
But my sister and I had both firmly repudiated the idea. That Mother, so tall and straight, so grave, so unbending, so somehow chastely beautiful, with her prematurely snow-white hair, her lineless face, high cheekbones, and noble brow, could ever have shared her couch with a man as unimpressive as Sam was unthinkable. Sam, however grinning and good-natured, however accommodating, was still a balding, rotund little bachelor who taught French at a fashionable private girls' day school. We thought Mother liked him because he read Gallic plays and poems aloud with her and that Father put up with him because he listened, seemingly impressed, to Pa's monologues. It was true that he was a household fixture, but such a harmless one!

And why should all this now titillate me when all three participants are dead? I suppose it is possible that I felt in Pa's humble acceptance of the eternal triangle some settling of an old score between him and me. He, who had been so superior, despite any effort he may have exerted to condescend, whose towering masculinity had seemed to relegate his daughters to a kind of mock respect and reverence, had in reality allowed a silly little man to be his pal, his constant houseguest, and the lover of his wife!

How the past now unreeled itself through my mind, like a film played backwards! I saw Mother passing serenely through the years, calmly going about her domestic tasks, efficiently organizing the social gatherings that Pa required for an audience, attending to the myriad problems of complaining daughters, always in control of everything, yet always placidly aware of the respite that awaited her in the arms of her lively if diminutive bedmate. Mother was never unreasonable in her requirements; she rarely raised her voice, because she rarely had to: there was something ineluctable in her tone and demeanor. Her daughters knew—and Pa knew—that she revered the rule of reason, and that if ever reason was ousted by emotion in her house, she would simply walk out and never return.

I can remember a party that Dicky and I gave for a visiting English economist who expounded after dinner on the subject of a novel theory of taxation. Pa took extreme objection to some of his points and even heckled him, to the poor man's obvious embarrassment. Mother at last spoke up in her fine, clear tone that everyone heard: "Lionel, if you make another objection, we're going home." That was the way she would do it, without a trace of anger or even criticism in her voice. And when Pa
did
make another crack, she simply rose, went over to him, and told him, "We're leaving now," and he followed her out of the room like a dog with its tail between its legs.

It was probably in the same fashion that she had put to him her proposed solution for their more intimate marital problem. I am sure that she never reproached him for his bullying manners at parties or for his sexual inadequacy; she simply took the steps she deemed appropriate for the situation at hand. She was always a realist, but one doesn't always relish so much realism in a wife or in a mother. Pa, of course, must have blamed himself for his impotence, if that was what it was. I don't think many men could have helped that, no matter how fiercely they told themselves it was not their fault. And I don't blame them. I even think I might have admired Pa more had he smothered Mother with a pillow, like Othello. What I suppose I resented was that, however small he may have come to think himself, he still thought he was bigger than I.

It was like him to overdo his role of
mari complaisant.
There was always something of the ham actor in him. Was it his way of recapturing the lead from his wife? Surely otherwise he wouldn't have made such a pal of Sam Pemberton. He wouldn't have invited him for long visits to our summer camp in Maine, or made him a member of his elite men's discussion group, the "round table," at the Patroons Club. Was it even his way of taking Sam from Mother? What she thought of her lover and her husband being such friends I cannot imagine. Perhaps it amused her. She would have been capable of that.

Sumner Shepard, my first husband, and the only real love of my life—which reminds me, I must hide this manuscript from Dicky, who is utterly amoral about reading things not addressed to him—was one of Pa's golden boys. He had been first in his class at Harvard Law and editor in chief of the review and on graduation could have gone to any of the great Wall Street firms (which, of course, he eventually did), but he chose instead to go first to Albany and clerk for a year for Pa. This was not, in 1927, considered the bright choice it is today, but Sumner was in love (there's no word more fitting) with the luminous prose of Pa's judicial opinions and yearned to sit at the great man's feet. And it was no surprise to anyone that Pa rejoiced in an esteem so flattering and reveled in a brilliant and handsome young assistant who saw, as he did, the law as great literature.

Pa stayed in Albany only while his court was sitting; the rest of the time, except for our Maine summers, he was in Manhattan in our East Side brownstone. In order to have Sumner available for discussions, particularly in the evening, he arranged for him to occupy a spare bedroom on the top floor whenever they worked late, as a result of which he was frequently present at our family board. I was attracted to him at once, for he was not only bright but beautiful. But at first my sister, Edith, and I were cast in the role of rather dumb listeners while he and Pa argued about law, and Mother and Sam Pemberton, another constant guest, discussed French literature. Of course, my ears were open only to Sumner. To me the law was mere nitpicking, something men adored and women had little use for. But I noted that Pa and Sumner seemed to be looking for beauty, even when they worked on the draft of one of Pa's opinions; you might have thought they were carving a statue out of marble. I couldn't for the life of me see why it was such a big deal to dress up a dry legal opinion in purple prose. Who but other lawyers were going to read it, anyway?

I should make it clear that I was no philistine. If I cared too much for dancing parties and smart clothes, if I spent too many weekends visiting rich friends in chic resorts like the Hamptons, if I had a bit of a yen for gambling and casinos, I was still up on the latest novels and plays and served three afternoons a week as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was not from a lack of appreciation of the finer things in life that I found Pa and Sumner's ecstasy over some silly little phrase excessive.

Of course I had the ancient weapon of sex, and I decided it was time to wield it. I began to ease myself into their discussions. One night, when they were making rather heavy weather over how best and concisely they could phrase the excuse of a defendant who had severely damaged a plaintiff while pulling him out of a burning house through the jagged glass of a shattered window, not having noted that the same room had an open door to the outside, I had a bright idea.

"Peril blunts caution!" I suggested in one of my rare flashes. I had always been clever at parlor games.

"Peril blunts caution," Sumner repeated slowly and thoughtfully. He turned to Pa. "It's perfect! Just three words. Let's start the opinion with them."

"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!" Pa murmured approvingly, and he pulled out his notebook and jotted down my suggestion.

I didn't have to say another word, and I had the sense not to. I had gained Sumner's full attention, and that was all I needed. He looked at me; he really saw me, for perhaps the first time, and Pa thereafter got only his second glances. I won't say that I caught Sumner with three words, but they gave me a start. To keep up his image of the bright and thoughtful woman he had idealized for himself I had only to let him develop his own conception. I wouldn't have to do a thing until we were married. Then, of course, I could relax. Hasn't that been the story of millions of women?

***

We were married right after the completion of Sumner's year's clerkship with Pa and enjoyed a glorious honeymoon in Hawaii before he started work in the great law firm of Harris & Eyer, of which he and his friend and ultimate successor to my hand, Dicky Phelps, were to become partners. Pa had wanted to keep him as his clerk for another year, and Sumner had wanted this too, but I had pointed out that we might as well get started on a career that would bring him eventually the income we were both going to need. It was the first time that I had to take a firm position in my share of the direction of our joint lives, and it was not by any means to be the last. Sumner always had a tendency to espouse the ideal as opposed to the practical, but he was at the same time generous and malleable, particularly with a woman he loved. And he certainly started by loving me. By loving me almost to distraction.

Yes, I'm getting to it. Getting to the point. Sumner in time discovered that he had attributed qualities to me that I did not have. He had assumed that I was much more my father's daughter than I really was, and I had certainly, at least until our marriage, done my best to sustain that illusion. I daresay he agreed that it was all very well, to some extent anyway, for a woman of the earth to be earthy, but he had expected this to be counterbalanced by something more ethereal, and there was very little of the sky in my nature, except the suspicion that those who claimed it bordered on the hypocritical. Yet I have to admit that he never breathed a word about this; he was always the perfect gentleman, and, yes, the perfect husband. I could nonetheless feel his concealed disillusionment at finding that I did not share my father's tastes and appreciations and that our life together was not going to be a joint search for all that was glorious and inspiring in the universe. However, he put the best possible face on it.

We never quarreled about it; we did not even talk about it. We had many friends, and we went out and about socially, at least on weekends, for he worked too hard to do so on weekdays, and we both loved and fussed over our only child, Gwendolyn. We were considered a well-matched, happy, and attractive couple, and to some extent we were. But now I think I can see that the reason he worked so hard was not only that he loved the practice of law, which he did, but that he wished to bring me the worldly success he knew I wanted. At least, he may have generously thought, he could do that much for me.

And he did. He became a partner in the firm at twenty-nine, and it was evident to all that he was destined to be one of the leading lights of the New York bar and no doubt, when his fortune was made, a judge on a high court.

Oh no, I had nothing to complain about, but that never stops one from complaining. I fretted constantly at the notion that I was not the woman he had dreamed of, and tended more and more to resent the fact that he had presumed to have such a dream. I offer this memory of the kind of thing that used to exasperate me. It was on a night when Pa and Mother were dining at our place—just the four of us—and Sumner and Pa were discussing John Gielgud's performance as Hamlet, over which they were both lyrically enthusiastic. Mother had preferred John Barrymore's earlier interpretation of the vengeful Dane, but they had almost violently disagreed with her.

"Nobody," Pa murmured in his most velvet tone, "has a voice as musical as Gielgud's. The poet Alfred de Musset is supposed to have fainted dead away when he heard the divine Sarah utter that exquisite line in
Phèdre
with the two
accents circonflexes: "Ariane, ma'sœur, de quel amour blessée / Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée.
" I felt almost that way in the final scene, where the dying Hamlet addresses the staring onlookers: 'You that look pale and tremble at this chance / That are but mutes or audience to this act.'"

"Yes, what glorious lines those are!" Sumner exclaimed. "It is as if Hamlet is suddenly breaking out of the play and addressing not only the gaping Danish court but the audience at the Globe Theatre. We have been sitting on the edge of our chairs for two hours, and now, at last, at the end, we are with him!"

That was one of the times that I spoke up. "How can you both go on so about a simple sentence? One that anyone might have written. 'You that look pale.' What's so great about that? 'And tremble at this chance.' Oh, come off it, Sumner! And you too, Pa! It's really too silly to make so much of that."

Sumner said nothing, but Pa turned on me. "Aren't you exposing something of a tin ear, Kate? Though perhaps your reaction would have been shared by some of the great ladies of the Tudor court. I seem to see you as one of Holbein's pale, grave beauties playing the deadly game of power because it's the only game to play, even if you end with your head on the block. Isn't Lady Macbeth one of them? Resolute, realistic, eager to shake her husband out of his inhibitions and fantasies? Of course, my sweet, I don't accuse you of murder."

"Lady Macbeth had no imagination," Mother commented. Mother would. "She could not foresee what guilt would do to either of them."

Of course, it was a crack at me. But Mother was wrong. I had quite enough imagination to see the flaw in my marriage.

The great grief of my life—at least as I have always tried to see it and make others see it—was Sumner's death as an officer in the British army in the evacuation of Dunkirk, in that grim spring of 1940. But what I can now privately inscribe is that the blow to my pride was as heavy as that to my heart when I learned that Sumner had confided to my father but not to me all the tumult and agony of his decision to leave his wife and child and country to enlist in what was still a foreign war. To his "beloved Kate" he had presented only the "kinder and quicker" last-minute announcement of a fait accompli. Quicker it certainly was; kinder it was not.

Of course I had known that Sumner was following with the most intense interest every item of European news, from the Munich Pact to the invasion of Poland, and that he passionately believed that we should have been in the war from its start. And of course I was aware of his keenness for military training; he belonged not only to the Seventh Regiment but to the National Guard. But it never crossed my mind that he would do anything so rash as to desert his family and the great firm of which he was so valued a young partner to rush abroad and join a fight in which his nation was still neutral. He simply came home from the office one night, grim and tense, poured each of us a stiff drink, and told me he was leaving for Montreal on the morrow. He had already assigned all his work in the office to Dicky Phelps.