The Young Apollo and Other Stories (3 page)

"Did I say that? You and I were brought up in a different school, Millie. There was a code that applied to everyone. The men downtown were supposed to be strictly honorable in their financial affairs. And their wives were supposed to give them moral support. Mr. Coolidge said that the business of America was business, and we were meant to uphold high standards. Wall Street was to set an example to the nation."

"Exactly! I remember that Mr. Morgan said he would never do business except with men on whose word he could entirely rely."

"Of course, the men on whom he relied may not have dared to give him one on which he couldn't."

Camilla began to sense that her friend might not be quite with her. It irritated her, because Marielle's Pedro, the heir to a considerable fortune, had never so much as poked his nose south of Canal Street. He and Marielle had lived isolated and protected lives. "Are you implying, my dear, that our parents' generation were hypocrites?" she asked.

"Well, there's always some of that quality around, is there not?"

"If it existed among us women, I never ran into it. We believed in our men, you and I! We lived for them. We thought it was our role in life to do so. Of course, you were not challenged. I was. I believed in a man who was weak. But I still had to live for him. As you did for Pedro."

"What do you mean,
had
to? Wasn't it a choice? I didn't
have
to do anything."

"Of course you did! It was the way we were brought up." Camilla knew that her rising exasperation was liable to take her too far, but she went on. There is nothing as sharp as the irritation that one's nearest and dearest arouse when they do arouse it. "You deliberately squashed every artistic and literary taste you had in order not to embarrass in the smallest degree Pedro and his philistine friends!"

Marielle only smiled. "That's perfectly true."

"You even used to say, when you stole away to a concert or lecture, that you'd been 'naughty.'"

"I plead guilty."

"You mutilated yourself for a man! As I did!"

"And do you know something? Pedro didn't give a damn. I mean about whether or not I shared his obsession with sport. He was perfectly happy doing his own thing. His confidence in himself was unbounded. If I'd gone in for poetry or painting, no matter how extreme, he wouldn't have minded in the least. If I'd become as famous as Edna St. Vincent Millay, he'd have boasted about it in the locker room of the Racquet Club. 'You know, fellas, my Marielle has just won a Pulitzer. Isn't that great? How many of you are married to geniuses?' And then he'd have gone happily up to his court tennis game."

"So it was all for nothing."

"Not quite. For it made
me
happy. Doing what I thought would make him happy."

"And all the work I did to rehabilitate David was unnecessary? Does that follow? That he never needed rehabilitation?"

"Perhaps not as much as you thought. But what difference does that make? You were happy doing it."

"No, Marielle, I wasn't." Camilla shook her head somberly. "I wasn't at all. Perhaps it was all in the men we chose. You chose well. I less so. We were victims of our time."

"We were victims of ourselves."

"I don't think I can bear that. Anyway, I'm going home."

***

Camilla did a lot of thinking that night. It seemed to her that from childhood she had seen the world about her through two very different eyes. One saw the myriad chocolate streets where a large clan of parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins dwelled in rather noisy conformity, where husbands ruled from a moneyed "downtown" and wives ruled the uptown expenditure, where marriages were either happy or never spoken of, and where children were granted considerable liberty so long as they seemed headed ultimately to a repetition of the parental careers. But the other eye embraced a world of fantasy where one grew up to be Geraldine Farrar singing Tosca, or Maud Adams playing Peter Pan, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning composing a sonnet to the Portuguese. The second vision was the one that she shared with Marielle Loomis, who lived just across East Forty-ninth Street in a house with a Beaux Arts facade that marked her family as richer, though not unbridgeably so, than Camilla's family, the Townsends, in their brownstone residence somewhat "gussied up" with supposedly Egyptian trimmings.

Camilla and Marielle always sat together, at least whenever it was allowed, in classes at Miss Chapin's School for Girls and reveled in the English poets of the recently ended Victorian era, in Tennyson and Browning, and, more adventurously, in Byron and Shelley. They loved the haunting music of Debussy and Saint-Saens, and they particularly delighted in the new operas of Puccini when they went to matinees at the Metropolitan in Marielle's grandmother's box. They were daring enough to tell their parents that they favored votes for women and might even have joined a suffragette parade had not Camilla's mother, Eva Townsend, suddenly frowned, shook her head sternly, and told them, "Of course, you must realize that is quite out of the question."

But Camilla still liked to think that her Christian name was derived from the Camille of Corneille's tragedy
Horace,
though in fact it stemmed from a sweet and saintly grandmother who had had little enough in common with the fiery Roman virgin who paid with her life for cursing her fatherland over the war in which her betrothed had been killed. Camilla, in certain moments, had liked to imagine herself as endowed with the guts to stand up against a family united in defense of all the old ways and proclaim her independence. She and Marielle even had the nerve, once, at least, to discuss the possibility of a future in which they wouldn't marry at all but would share a little house full of lovely things and live for the arts, calling themselves a couple of
exquises.

But whatever fantasies they allowed themselves, they could never get away from the nagging suspicion that what Camilla had called her first vision of their world was the true one and that there would be no way of escaping their destiny to become wives and mothers. That there were such things as old maids in society was sufficiently obvious to them, but these fell into two categories, both unthinkable, one beyond their material means, even Marielle's, and the other too low to be borne. The first category contained the rich old virgins of New York and Newport, a strictly American phenomenon, as in Europe they would have been married off no matter what their disqualifications or reluctance. These included Miss Anne Morgan, Miss Annie Jennings, Miss Julia Berwind, Miss Ruth Twombly, and the Misses Wetmore, grandes dames who commanded wide reverence and respect. The second was the sorry residue of those too poor or too plain to catch a spouse, who were left to struggle for a living as teachers or paid companions or to haunt the upper stories of the houses of aged parents and dine on trays in their bedrooms whenever an extra man had dropped out of a dinner party below upsetting his hostess's
placement.

That the ultimate power rested with men was the
donnée
of a woman's existence. It was dogma, having little to do with any innate superiority. Eva Townsend, in her daughter's eyes, was an abler, stronger, more practical, and more decisive person than her gentle, easygoing father, and nor had Eva herself ever been in the least unaware of this. She and her sisters and sisters-in-law had taken firm control of the areas of life allowed them by the other sex: the household, the costs, the schools, the summer resorts, and the makeup of society itself—who was in it, who out. But in the final court of appeal, where life or death was at stake, the male alone voted.

One could, however, always laugh at men. Camilla recognized that her mother and aunts liked to chuckle over men's foibles: their tippling, their falling asleep after dinner, their obsession with spectator sports, their bawdry, and their passionate anger at anyone who suggested the mildest control of free enterprise. But the myth had nonetheless to be maintained that the head of the family was fundamentally benign, an "old darling" at heart, gruff but lovable and pleasantly subject to female wheedling. How else was one to handle him? And handled he had often to be.

There were males, of course, in Camilla's and Marielle's lives: the youths of the neighborhood, if they got through the girls' mothers' social sieves, for the most part wellbehaved, sometimes shy, even inarticulate, sometimes impertinent, sometimes almost coarse, always well dressed, at least at subscription dances, at times handsome, at times winsome, at times simply disgusting. There were flirtations, even kisses, but at least in Camilla's case, there was nothing really serious until her sophomore year at Barnard College, in 1919.

There had been a minor family issue over her going to college at all. Her mother, something of a reader of good books herself, had not been strongly opposed to it, and the end of the Great War had ushered in an era that was already showing signs of drastically changing the status of women, but the Townsend clan as a whole did not yet see the university as a necessary part of a woman's education. Did Camilla really want to be a bluestocking? But when Camilla, scenting a new independence in the air, found the courage to insist, objections were withdrawn, though on the condition that she should choose a college where she could still live at home. So she chose Barnard.

She had hoped that Marielle would go with her, but Marielle was now engaged to Pedro Blagden and already embarked on the career of preparing herself to share the life of a rich sportsman. Pedro had made one silly crack about her and Camilla training for an all-girls football team, at which his fiancée had promptly dropped all idea of further education. Camilla had rather pitied her for abandoning so easily the road to a higher culture and had entered enthusiastically into academic life, making several new friends among young women of backgrounds very dissimilar to her own. Indeed, she did well enough to be given a bid to the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma and was not in the least put off when Pedro, now married to Marielle, referred to it laughingly as "Wrapper, Wrapper, Pajama." It was so like him!

But a major crisis arose at home when it materialized that the night of her initiation coincided with that of an aunt's dinner party which she had agreed to attend. She protested to her mother that she would have to back out, that Aunt Maud would surely understand, but Eva Townsend was unexpectedly rigid.

"It happens to be an important party: your cousin Willy's twenty-first birthday. But in any event, when one accepts a dinner invitation, one goes. Or sends one's coffin."

Her father, appealed to, of course backed her mother, as he always did in any social question, and Camilla had tearfully to explain to her sorority sisters that she would have to be initiated in absentia. At the party she found herself seated next to David Hunter, whom she was meeting for the first time. As her mother who, like many New York matrons of her group, had at first been much taken with this handsome young man, commented, "It goes to show that it pays to stick by the old rules."

David Hunter, at twenty-two, was certainly gifted with looks. Just before he had been sent overseas as a second lieutenant, his adoring mother, desperate at the idea that she might never see him again, had sent him up to Boston to sit for a charcoal sketch by the great John Sargent, so that she would at least have a perfect likeness to console her in the event of disaster. The master had done a wonderful job, and reproductions of his drawing of the curly-headed, wide-eyed, noble-browed, square-chinned youth had been used on enlistment posters as the epitome of the young American fighting spirit. David, on the distaff side, was the great-grandson of a giant railroad tycoon, but the tycoon's children and grandchildren, famous for their flamboyant expenditure, had depleted his great fortune to a small fraction of its one-time glory, and this romantic-looking scion had been happy after the war to find a desk in the brokerage house of Jonathan Stiles & Son, where it was hoped that his looks and still stylish connections might attract investors.

He and Camilla hit it off at once. She was pretty enough to attract even a man who had his choice of her sex, and the badinage that she had learned from her new college friends struck him as livelier than that of the usual New York debutante. Besides, she was a good listener.

"Do you know what, Miss Townsend? The war hasn't just made the world safe for democracy, as President Wilson has said. It's made the world safe for young people, like you and me. We're not going to be confined as our parents were to all the petty dos and don'ts of the generation before us. We're going to be free to blaze new trails, to make our own rules for the game of life!"

Camilla had had enough of her mother's much-vaunted common sense pounded into her to suspect that this was the kind of thing that all the young men were saying, but she had also been indoctrinated in the maternal principle that a wise woman learns to tolerate, and even on occasion to applaud, banality in the opposite sex.

"A year in the trenches," she observed, "must have had the educative value of ten in an ordinary life. So it almost puts you ahead of the older generation."

"You see that, do you? It's because you're smart, Miss Townsend. I like smart women. The cute little 'you're so big and strong' type bore the bejesus out of me, if you'll pardon my French."

He had been only briefly at the front by the time of the armistice, but he certainly made the most of it, and he had the gift of talking about himself without either boring his listener or appearing arrogant. Or was it just the charm of his youth and beauty? Camilla didn't care, and knew that she didn't care. She was already well on her way to being pulverized. He went on to tell her that he intended to make a fortune on Wall Street and that he would spend it in ways to make even his most flamboyant forebears look like cheapskates. He absolutely declined to turn to his other neighbor at the serving of the roast, as etiquette then required, and blandly insisted on monopolizing Camilla in the parlor after dinner, also in flagrant contradiction of the established practice of mingling. Obviously, she didn't mind at all.