Lucy, permit me, this is you, this is your understudy. Congratulate me, my dear.
That evening at the recital the expectation was dead before you saw her. You arrived early, to be sure of not missing her entrance, and the two sturdy matrons on your right told each other all you didn’t care to know. One of them had heard her play in Vienna and had later met her in Cannes; the other had known her husband, who had left his estates in Bavaria to be with her on her American tour. Never had there been so devoted a husband, she declared. And so on. By the time she made her appearance nothing was left of this international artist to connect her with Ohio meadows and Cleveland nights.
She was very beautiful, superbly dressed, perfectly composed, completely charming. The audience loved her at once. You were thrilled for a moment as she stood at ease, graciously inclining her head to the applause; then as she sat down and began to play you felt bored and indifferent. This trained woman playing Mozkowski to a full house—what a place to come to, to find Lucy!
After the first intermission you did not return.
The one other time you saw her, that evening in Paris at the Meurice, you were positively frightened. Erma recognized her across the lobby and insisted on going over to her. You held her back, actually held her forcibly by the arm.
“It will be amusing,” she insisted. “Come, she may even fall on your shoulder and weep. Heavens she’s magnificent! She doesn’t look much like your little country shepherdess, does she, Bill? I understand she can’t play much, but all the critics rave about her so she’ll smile at them.”
You were ridiculously relieved that Lucy and her companions had disappeared through the revolving door into the rue du Mont-Tabor.
The year in Europe was fun. You went for three months, then extended it to six, and then to a year. Erma insisted; she also insisted that she be permitted to foot all the bills, which was just as well, since the suite at the Meurice, for instance, was two thousand francs a day. Good lord how she can spend money! At Algiers she practically gave away that Minerva because it had skidded on a narrow road in the Atlas Mountains and she said she would never feel comfortable in it again.
Yes, it was fun, but a dry remote fun with no juice in it.
None of those places was as good as the promise of its name. What joy you might have found in Paris, for example, if you could have seen it as a youth, with Jane! Or the drive from Perpignan to Port Vendres, through the little fishing villages and past the red and blue cottages among the vineyards on the terraced hills. Or that inn, on the road to Bou-Saada, with the little black table in the tiled alcove and the purple hens clacking outside the window under the almond tree, waiting for crumbs.…
“I think you should see Germany,” said Erma one evening in the hotel garden at Vienna. “At least Munich and Nurnberg. It’s another month before the year is up, and anyway what’s the difference if it’s two years, or ten?”
“None whatever,” you agreed, “Lawson’s signature on a voucher is just as properly illegible as mine. All the same I’m going back when the year’s up.”
It was arranged that you should go on to Munich alone, leaving Erma at Vienna, the reason given being that—no matter what, the real reason joined you that evening for dinner and the opera, as he had for some evenings past. He was a silent and melancholy Norwegian who had come to the Austrian capital to study psychoanalysis, and you reflected with amusement that he would learn damn little about inhibitions from Erma.
You wandered around Nurnberg a few days, wondering what the devil you were there for, and then went on to Munich for no discoverable reason save that you had a railroad ticket.
That was the best laugh you’ve ever given yourself. It is strange that you didn’t feel uncomfortable about it, for certainly you were sufficiently ridiculous. You made the decision one morning in your hotel room, after solemn deliberation: you would find out what a prostitute was like. You accepted the advances of one, that evening in a beer garden, and were taken by her to a clean and modest little room up three flights of narrow wooden stairs, in a side street, near a railroad station.
She slipped off her dress, and then, stopped by a question you asked about some German word, sat down on the edge of the bed with her fat thighs and knees extending like massive pillars from the lace edge of her pink underwear, and her fat bare arms crossed on her adequate bosom. You sat on a wooden chair directly in front of her with your hat on your knees.
She roared with laughter at your question and explained to you that one didn’t say that in German. This led to another question, and another. She suggested a bottle of beer; it was sent for, and brought, and drunk, while the lesson in German went on enthusiastically. About the only sentence of hers which you understood was when she said that the only way to learn German was to live with a German woman, men didn’t know how to teach anything.
There was a second bottle of beer. Suddenly she glanced at the clock on the table and observed that time was up. You arose, handed her some thousands of degraded marks, and departed, hearing behind you, as you descended the narrow stairs, a rollicking guttural song.
In the taxi on your way back to the hotel, and up in your room undressing, you laughed aloud; you hadn’t seen or heard of anything so funny in years. Wouldn’t Erma enjoy it! Or would she? Yes. You laughed again. A prize bit of erotica; there was so much of her, and you took so little! It was admirable of her to treat it as a matter of course. What was it she said with a grin as you went out—a phrase you didn’t know.
It was a day or two later that a telegram came from Erma saying that she had decided to go to Spain for a few months. You wired that you were preparing to return to the States, and departed that evening for Southampton via London.
The months in New York, stretching to over a year, with Erma away, showed to your astonishment her importance as your only surviving bond with life. You missed her amazingly; every day there was something you wanted to tell her about; you wanted her with you at the theatre, sitting there beside you with that deceptive disciplined stillness; you wanted to go home to her from the office, even if only to be greeted by—well, as she had greeted you one autumn afternoon, for instance:
“For god’s sake, Bill, why don’t you, just once, come home drunk riding an ostrich—or not at all?”
The discomfort of an interrupted habit, you told yourself; but she was no old shoe. You began to respect yourself for having married her, for apparently you had not after all merely prostituted yourself to a paper in your safe deposit box; and at least it could be said that she had treated you as she had treated no other man. So when her cablegram came from Scotland you were pleasantly excited by the task of scurrying to and fro for servants, finding John and persuading him to return, getting rugs and silver from storage, having the apartment renovated and arranged so that it would call from her one of those rare appreciative smiles.
On the pier you met her, alone by her wish; she kissed you facetiously, then meaningly, and declared that there was not a man in the world to compare with you except the Spanish soldier who had examined her passport on the border north of Figueras. Surrounded by an ocean of trunks and boxes and bags, you sat and amusedly heard her explain to an astonished customs inspector that since every article contained therein was dutiable, she hadn’t bothered to make out a declaration.
Within a month you wished she were back in Scotland, or somewhere out of sight of land, eastbound on the Mediterranean perhaps—or for that matter at the bottom of it. Incredulously you recalled that you had seemed to long for her return.
The following summer it was that at her suggestion you went to Idaho, to Larry’s ranch, where again you were close to Jane by the memory of her footsteps of the year before. A desert and mountain idyll that ended by your tiptoeing in your bare feet down an icy hall in the middle of the night, to hear Erma get slapped by your brother, presumably in the face, though in the darkness it might have been merely an arm or shoulder. How many times since have you looked at her and failed utterly in your effort to imagine a slap, an honest resounding slap, landed on that proud ironic lovely face! Certainly, Larry or any man could not have done it in daylight.
Earlier was that day when, lying on your back in the bright sunshine, by an insane trick of your fancy little Millicent suddenly became Jane.…
When you got back to New York you found the revolver in your bag.
That winter Erma suddenly took it into her head to give Margaret and Rose a lift. She and Jane have always been funny together—in a way they genuinely like each other, but from the first they’ve always backed off a bit, as much as to say, you may be all right but just keep off my grass if you don’t mind. She didn’t get far with Margaret either—Margaret’s a strange kid and a good deal of a damn fool, thinking she’s in love because Doctor Oehmsen has articles in the American Science Journal, or whatever its name is, and takes long walks with her and explains what electrons are or what he thinks they are. Presumably she has slept with him, so had Jane with Victor; your sisters seem to have a faculty for driving without a permit. Except Rose. At Erma’s first gesture didn’t she jump though! Erma soon got fed up with her clever tricks, but Rose held on till she got what she wanted.
At first you thought she was after Dick, and maybe she was, but if so she soon found that Mary Bellowes was ahead of her. Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes—it looked very imposing on the announcement, almost as imposing as one of her grand entrances into a drawing-room. Instantly and admirably Erma was on to her the first time Dick brought her around.
“Pure bitch,” she whispered to you as you lit her cigarette.
“Pure bitch or pure bitch?” you whispered back.
“Both—so much the worse,” she replied aloud.
Later, after they had gone, you told Erma that Dick deserved better, and that as an older sister it was up to her to save him from so unpleasant a fate. She replied that that remark was your record for stupidity, that if she poisoned la Bellowes that night, Dick, having apparently decided to get married, would find another just like her in a week, and that no nice woman should be wasted on him anyway.
“But what will happen?” you demanded.
“She’ll spend his money, which must have accumulated frightfully by this time, within a year he’ll drag her around the room and tear her clothes off, and the next time he goes to vote and they ask him if he’s married he’ll say no and get sent to jail for perjury.”
The wedding was as different as possible from your and Erma’s rustic nuptials; no Jersey parsonage for Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes. You were best man, and when at a solemn moment Erma made a grimace and winked at you, you almost dropped the ring. They took a mansion on Long Island and four or five floors on the Avenue, and for the first time Dick began to take an interest in the private ledger. But even her furious assaults could not greatly disturb the serenity of those colossal columns; and they were restored again to assured security within the year, when Dick declared to you one day at lunch:
“By god, Bill, every woman alive ought to be locked up in a little room and fed through a hole in the wall.”
You decided that it was not a propitious moment for sounding him on a proposal that had occurred to you that morning. Only a few weeks previously you had returned from Ohio, from your mother’s funeral, and to your surprise Larry had not only accepted Jane’s invitation to come to New York for a visit, but had apparently settled down for an extended stay, having moved recently from Jane’s house to a couple of rooms on Twelfth Street. He had told you nothing of his intentions, but you thought it just possible that five years of Idaho had been enough for him and that he might welcome another chance at the career he had once started so well and abandoned in disgust. You decided to ask Dick whether Larry was wanted and if so on what terms.
This project was temporarily set aside by the sudden appearance from nowhere of Mrs. Davis and your son. Your son Paul. For all the reality there is in them, those words might as well be your neighbor Mars or your great-grandfather Adam; and yet, during that brief episode, he did succeed in leaving his mark on you, with what must have been unconscious sarcasm—he wasn’t as acute as all that. It’s unbelievable that that was only two years ago; it seems a wild distortion of fact to say that the passage of time since you sat there in Paul’s studio has been the same as, for instance, that between your return from Europe and the trip to Idaho. Measuring time by clocks is a joke like all the other arithmetic. Two years ago! If you could go back.…
You thought the shoulders and chest and upper arms should show, but Paul would barely allow you a neck; he insisted that your head should emerge from a rugged column of unpolished marble. He gave many complicated reasons, none of which appeared to you to demolish the fact that you were paying for it and might therefore be permitted to have what you wanted; however, he had his way. Day after day you went directly after lunch to the bare little room overlooking the dirty little West Side street, and sat there and let your mind wander, jumping crazily from boyhood to yesterday and back again, while Paul worked away, sometimes whistling, sometimes with a cigarette in his mouth, always gay and intent. No one knew anything about it. You wondered what you would do with the darned thing when it was finished. Put it in a gallery; sure; stick it under your arm and go up Fifth Avenue stopping at each dealer’s to ask if he didn’t want a nice statue of a modern lieutenant of industry for his window. You couldn’t very well display it at home or at the office. You realized with surprised and mildly irritated amusement that it was in fact a problem, of which the only possible solution was to sneak it home secretly and hide it in a closet.
One day Paul said:
“The Greenwich Galleries over on Eighth Street would like to have this for a month or so, if you don’t mind; they’re going to have a little show of modern American sculpture.”
“Around the first of April.”
It was arranged, with the proviso that your name should appear neither in the catalogue nor on the card. Before the end of March it was finished and delivered; and Paul, with several hundred dollars of your money in his pocket and an account opened for him in a Paris bank, was gone. No sort of intimacy had developed between you; he was too shrewd and intelligent not to attempt to conceal how utterly you were to him merely a lucky find for which he owed gratitude to a smiling providence and a devoted mother; and the more you were with him the more removed you felt from that careless and cocksure beggar whose every attitude and word contradicted all the values for which you had sacrificed yourself.
Twice you visited the Eighth Street galleries to see your head and face in marble publicly displayed, and to watch others looking at it, while pretending your attention was elsewhere. It had been given a prominent position on a center table in the large front room. You thought it rather a good likeness, and unquestionably it was arresting and effective, with the large well-moulded head, tilted slightly backward and to one side, flowing gracefully out of the rough and jagged column. You both feared and hoped that someone would recognize you as the original.
Then the confounded idiots, forgetting entirely the careful instruction, given them by Paul, that it was to be kept there until you called for it, on the very day the show ended had it delivered to your address on Park Avenue. When you got home from the office there it was in the middle of the big table in the library, with a wreath of ferns and red roses around its brow and a circlet of yellow daisies hanging from its neck. Erma, having apparently just finished this decorative effort, was seated at the piano; you heard her strumming as you came down the hall; and when you entered she crashed into the Polonaise Militaire.
You tried to laugh, but it was too much for you. You struggled to hide from her the fury that was rising in you, but it was too late, she was looking at you, and suddenly she left the piano and came towards you, towards the table.
“I tried to fix it up as nice as I could,” she said, reaching over and pretending to adjust the daisy necklace. “There have already been three men after it for the Hall of Fame, but John and I chased them. Bill dear, it’s marvelous—that indomitable will, that gallant fling of the head—I’ve decided to call it William the Conqueror.”
You turned and left the room, and the house; got a taxi and went to the Club, and spent the night there.
By the following afternoon you felt better about it, especially about Erma. She might be cruel and pitiless, even malicious, but she was right. She had taken the only possible intelligent attitude toward the damn thing. Still you felt a little shaky when on arriving home and learning that she was alone in her rooms you went to the end of the hall and knocked on the door.
You entered, calling out:
“Vive William the Conqueror!”
She chose to be semi-serious about it, after you had explained its origin and reason of being and she had poured you a cup of tea.
“Your young sculptor is either very stupid or a first-rate satirist,” she said. “I’m sorry he’s gone; why didn’t you bring him to see me? He made gorgeous fun of you, Bill. It saddens me. You are the one man who I would have said couldn’t be fooled like that. Do you remember the granite Gaspard de Coligny on the rue de Rivoli, behind the iron fence? Beside every statue of a man folding his arms and looking masterful should be placed another of him in a dentist’s anteroom, or being seasick, or itching with love.”
“There are masterful men,” you observed.
“None with a sense of humor,” she replied, “and the others only when the forces that confront them happen to be inferior. Of course you aren’t masterful at all, there’s never been a minute in your life when you haven’t been ready to run if somebody made a face at you. That’s why William the Conqueror is so magnificently funny. Elizabethan. ‘In action how like a god!’ No, that was apprehension. All the better. And I thought you really did have a sense of humor, and you sat there day after day and let him do that to you!”
You wanted to say, casually, well, he is my son and I was willing he should amuse himself. That would have brought her up. She who was never startled or surprised would have opened her eyes a little on hearing that you had a son of that age and quality. You did very nearly say it, but instead took a second cup of tea and listened to her further analysis of your character.
That evening William the Conqueror was stowed away in a corner of your dressing-room.
You’ve never told yourself the truth about it, deep down. It seems perfectly simple: there it is, the marble head and face of a man who looks like you but who obviously is not you at all. You as you might be with Dick’s will and Jane’s serene confidence. Well, it isn’t you, that’s all there is to it, merely a piece of marble disfigured by falsehood, only a little more subtle than if it had a hooked nose or a double chin. But it’s exasperating that, no matter how many times you repeat it, you never quite believe it. What the hell, what does it signify, what’s the difference? Why do you try to kid yourself? Have you got a sneaking notion that your son, being a genius, penetrated to a truth perceived by none other? Jackass! Masterful jackass. Call yourself names and joke about it all you want to, some such idiotic idea is buried somewhere in your guts and keeps gnawing at you.…
You put it away in a corner, but not, observe, out of sight. Not boldly on a table—but not in a closet either. Sometimes, undressing, it would amuse you to call out, “Here, old top, make yourself useful,” and throw your shirt or underwear over its polished brow.
You couldn’t resist the impulse to show it to Jane, swearing her first to secrecy. You pulled it out near the light and introduced it derisively as William the Conqueror, explaining that it had been christened by Erma. She looked at it from all sides and then sat down on the floor in front of it and looked up at you.
“It’s extremely good,” she said, “but it isn’t you.”
“No? Why not?”
“It’s too—” she hesitated. “It’s too stupid. It’s what you would be like if you went around bumping people off of sidewalks.”
Doubtless Gaspard de Coligny did so.
That was the evening of your birthday party—your fortieth birthday—another of Erma’s unlikely gestures. Lord, families are jokes—look at that bunch around that table! Jane and Erma, Larry and Rose, Margaret and Dick, Victor and Mary. Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes Carr was the finishing touch. She could hardly eat her soup on account of a sore arm, said she had fallen off of a horse. “Probably Dick pushed her off,” you heard Erma say to Rose. Victor and Erma got into an argument about bringing up children and she was much too nimble for him, made him so mad he couldn’t eat.
“At least they have a better chance than the ones that are scraped out!” he yelled at her. Mary looked shocked and Rose giggled; Erma smiled sweetly at him and said:
“That’s not personal, is it? I’m sterile, you know.”
Which was a lie; she could have had a dozen if she’d wanted to. Not that you made a point of it.
There they were, seated around you, your world, gathered there in honor of your birthday, the oldest and fondest faces you knew after forty years; If there was happiness and security and love for you anywhere, here it was. Here it was! Larry had rejected you with scorn and severed whatever bond had been between you. Jane had deceived you and cut loose with a laugh. Dick had been willing, “on proof,” to kick you out, and would be again under similar circumstances. You could depend on Erma so long as you amused her; so could a dog. The others didn’t count. Was there then no assurance anywhere? People seemed to like it, they laughed and struggled and seemed to like it. With some the explanation was simply that they were brainless idiots, like that nut Simpson who kept the score card of his best game of golf stuck on the wall in front of his desk with a sign above it, Ad astra per aspera. Maybe that’s it, maybe the only ones who come out all right are those who have sense enough to go crazy.
Crazy or not, they had something to hold onto. Dick fought downtown all day long, day after day, competitors, fellow directors, lawmakers, nature itself—something, anything, to give a sock in the jaw. He would ride a horse over ditches and fences as if life and honor were both in the balance—only he wouldn’t care too much about honor, at least he’d furnish his own definition. No use sneering what for; he’s excited about it and he loves it. Jane got a kick out of everything, her children, her job, making wine out of raisins, hurrah for La Follette! Larry hated that office more than you did, but he was more a part of it in two years than you were in twenty. That summer in Idaho he rode forty miles and back in the mountains to get an old range mare, not worth ten dollars, which had got out of the corral and gone back to the Indian camp where she’d had a colt the spring before. Rose would spend two whole days walking all over town, hunting a new shade of rouge.
But Rose knew what she was about better than most; she’s really as lazy as the devil and wouldn’t walk across the street unless she was going to get something out of it. She’s the only person you’ve ever seen work Erma successfully, by sheer impudence. She had her way with Margaret too. It was the evening of the birthday party, up in your room, that Jane told you she had that morning had a final interview with Mrs. Oehmsen and arranged definitely that the divorce proceedings should be postponed until autumn, October at the earliest. Rose’s wedding was set for the middle of September; so Margaret could be a maid of honor a full month before she became a co-respondent; and Rose, off on a European honeymoon, would be three thousand miles from tabloids.
“How did you persuade her?” you asked.
“I told her that if she didn’t promise to wait Margaret would go off to the South Seas, and Dr. Oehmsen would follow her, and she’d lose all her fun.”
You reflected that Rose, whom you actively dislike and with whom you had had least to do, was the only member of the family who had got any considerable thing out of you. It was at your wife’s house that she had carried on her campaign and captured her husband. Jane and Margaret, nothing; Larry…
That wound had been reopened, but with less loss of blood and negligible pain. One day at lunch you said to Dick:
“By the way, I’m wondering about Larry. He seems to be hanging on here for no particular reason, and it’s just possible he’s fed up out there and would like to try his hand again at selling a few carloads of bridges. If he should ask me about it I’d like to know what to say. How do you feel about it? Would you want—”
You were stopped by the surprise on Dick’s face. He said:
“I’m buying Idaho and Larry’s going to run it. Hasn’t he told you?”
From the explanation which followed you gathered that shortly after Larry’s arrival in New York he had gone to Dick with an ambitious and carefully formulated proposal for buying an enormous tract of land, practically the entire valley in which his present modest ranch was located, and engaging simultaneously in cattle-raising and dry farming on a large scale. Dick had agreed to furnish over half a million cash capital, and the plans were now almost complete. Larry’s prolonged stay in New York was for the purpose of concluding arrangements regarding equipment and other details.
“Your kid brother knows how to drive a bargain,” Dick grinned. “He had the nerve to suggest that he keep the ownership in his pocket and give me a nice pink and green seven percent mortgage. Seven percent! The chances are probably about eighty to one against us, but he sold me.”
You were humiliated and furious that you had been left to learn about it from Dick. Only a few days later, however, dining at Jane’s, Larry told you all about it, explaining that he had purposely kept you out of it because he wanted Dick to come in purely as a business proposition, not as a favor to his brother-in-law; and you didn’t disclose that Dick had told you.
“I wanted to invite you to take a slice,” Larry added, “but it’s too risky. If Dick’s half-million is blown away in the sand it won’t break him, but you’ve worked for what you’ve got.”
You glanced at him quickly, suspecting irony, but saw none on his candid face. Doubtless ten years of Erma had made you a little touchy. Well, there’s more than one kind of work.
You walked home that night, a good three miles, with pleasant breaths of June air even there on Fifth Avenue, penetrating somehow through the miles of city pavements and smells. It would be peaceful and pleasant now, you reflected, back in the little Ohio town under the maple trees—good lord what a silly idea! That would be worse than this. Anything would be worse than anything else. Soon now Erma would be off again, you didn’t know where and you didn’t care, only you weren’t going with her; Larry would leave for his empire of sand and sagebrush; Jane and the children would pile in that old Stephens, headed for the seashore.…
You belonged with none of them. Nowhere.
Erma was not at home when you arrived. You wandered through the silent, vast and impeccable apartment—faience, chinoiserie, Sheraton, Kermanshah, bayeta—what bunk, toys for bored morons. The people who made them were bone-dust. You wanted to break or tear something.
You hated the thought of your bed, but it was at least inviolably yours, and you went to your room to undress. As you removed your coat you observed that the maid’s carelessness had left William the Conqueror out of his corner, pushed out away from the wall; there he was with his gallant head facing you, smiling and confident. In a sudden fit of rage you hauled off and gave him a kick, and nearly broke your foot in two.
Painfully you got the shoe off and put the foot in a tub of hot water and sat there looking at the evening paper.…