MADGE DYETT FELT that the year 1937, which had marked for so many of her friends a turning point in the Great Depression, seemed only to confirm its permanent doom for herself and her parents. They continued to live in the shabby, four-story, red brick house on East Thirty-fourth Street, but only because they could not sell it, and the top floor was rented to an uncle and aunt. Her father was out of work and prattled all day, with a self-confidence that nothing could justify, of his financial prospects and plans. Madge had had to give up college and take a job teaching at Miss Fairfax’s School, of which she and her mother were alumnae. Her only future seemed to be to stay there until she was old enough to retire.
She had a vision of herself that was jarred every time she caught her reflection in an unanticipated glass. When she was prepared for the vision—gazing affectionately into her bedroom mirror, carefully turned from the garish sunlight, a long tress of brown hair pushed artfully across her high forehead, the small, full, pink lips half-open and a brooding expression in her grave brown eyes—she could at least try to see herself as an emancipated young woman of the years immediately following the war, some poetess or social worker of 1922, wasp-waisted, plainly dressed, earnest, idealistic. But the figure that she saw suddenly thrust at herself in the long mirror of a hotel lobby, even if thin and trim enough, suggested nervousness and fatigue. Nor was there any question that the left cheek on that long, perhaps lugubrious face bore two pockmarks. Oh, yes, she was angular! Hers was not a body that men lusted after. What else was a body for?
She sometimes felt that it was only her parents’ attitude that made her life so intolerable. Through the years, without ever explicitly recognizing her father’s failure, her mother had seemed to admit it in her abandonment of all outward manifestations of success. Elaine Dyett had let her weight increase until she could only be called dumpy, and her once pretty features had been largely lost in puffed, powdered cheeks and a double chin. She got dressed later and later in the morning, and her billowing wrapper, spotted from meals on trays, from chewed candy, from surreptitious sips from bottles, came to be Madge’s mental image of the home. Yet innate fairness made Madge admit that her mother was never querulous or self-pitying; she seemed, on the contrary, oddly content with her solitary sybaritism. Elaine liked to keep up with the gossip of the great world, even though that world had passed her by; all the diversion that she appeared to need was to cut away, with complacent little snips, at the reputations of old friends and acquaintances who had acquired any degree of fame or fortune. Her conversation had reduced itself to a mild, continuous little stream of disparagement.
Had Madge been impressed by Mrs. Sabatière, the fashionable mother of one of her pupils at Miss Fairfax’s School? “Mrs. Sabatière? Muriel? Oh, don’t give me Muriel Sabatière.” It was Elaine’s illusion that people in the great world were constantly being “given” to her. “She was born Muriel Barclay, you know. Of the Barclay Street Barclays, yes, but a poor branch. I remember her at school: six feet in her stockings, with hair as straight as nails. Where did I read that some crazy portrait painter had boasted how he had caught the ‘elf’ in her? Elf, my hat! Her parents were happy enough to snag Paul Sabatière, though how they caught even him, I’ve never known. The gossip had it that old Tom Barclay had to get down his shotgun. And now Sabatière has dressed her up like a French doll and piled his collection of jade and porcelains around her and made her one of the sights of the town! But I’m afraid I’ll always think of her as the gawky schoolgirl who peed in her pants in assembly. And I suppose nobody remembers now that her husband was blackballed at the Union Club because of that business with old Mrs. Carey’s trust?”
Madge had long been indifferent to her mother’s interpretations of a world that they saw through different glasses, not because Elaine’s readings were inaccurate—there was always a grounding of truth in them—but because they were no longer relevant. Her mother might not want to be “given” Eleanor Roosevelt, but Eleanor Roosevelt was still First Lady of the land. There was something unseemly to Madge in this constant dredging up of ignoble aspects of the past, particularly when she contrasted it with the habit in all the Dyetts of dressing up their own failures in robes as grand as those they stripped off the real winners. The combination of praise of self and denigration of others, both false by all current values, made a world of stifling fantasy.
But 1937, as it turned out, was to bring a great change in Madge’s life. Thanks to the illness of an older teacher, she was asked to take over the English class of the twelfth grade, girls who would be coming out at debutante parties in the following year, or traveling around the world, or learning languages in European pensions, or even, in a few instances, going to college. Only four years before Madge had had some such dreams herself! Now she was only a plain brown figure, associated in the bright young heads before her, she bitterly assumed, with boring textbooks soon to be cast aside.
It needed no great experience to spot Lila Sabatière as the leader of the class. She had all the qualities admired by students and deplored by faculty. She was dark, striking, pretty, vivacious, mean of tongue and yawningly bored by everything but clothes and men. She managed to seem chic even in the ugly uniforms required by Miss Fairfax: round green bloomers with flat-heeled shoes and black stockings, and on Fridays, when, to every teacher’s dismay, the girls were allowed to wear what they wanted, she would saunter in, looking like a page from Vogue. She was dreaded by the older teachers for her ability to make fools of them by questions seemingly naive but actually designed to bring out a salacious interpretation of a passage in the text which the innocent pedagogue had missed. Madge was determined that the girl should not make a fool of her, and she kept a wary eye on the whispering corner where Lila sat with her small coterie of intimates.
“I think you had better sit up here in the front row, Lila, where we all can hear you. It seems a pity that the others should miss your witty comments.”
So Madge started her first class in English 12, and so she was resolved to keep it. But for some reason, probably because the girl was playing a deeper game, there seemed to be little trouble as the weeks progressed. Lila sat with pencil poised, her eyes fixed on the teacher, as if she were actually engrossed in what Madge was saying about Shakespearean tragedy. On the day when they had the trouble about Hamlet, it seemed almost more Madge’s fault than Lila’s. Apprehension may have made the former too tense. The topic set for class discussion was the comparison of Ophelia’s madness with that of the prince.
“Of course, we have no reason to doubt the genuineness of the insanity in Ophelia’s case,” Madge led off. “But we may not agree as to its cause. Is it really grief over her father’s death? Or is it the fact that Hamlet was the killer? Or does she see in Hamlet’s violence a further rejection of herself?”
Lila’s hand was in the air. “I suggest, Miss Dyett, that Ophelia went mad because she was so continually insulted.”
“That’s interesting, Lila. How was she insulted?”
“Well, every time another character lays an eye on her, he tells her not to go to bed with Hamlet. Laertes talks about her ‘chaste treasure’ and Hamlet’s ‘unmastered importunity.’ Her father prates about the dangers of pregnancy. And Hamlet tells her that her only hope is to get herself to a nunnery. Obviously, they all think she’s a complete tramp.”
Madge suspected that the girl’s language was a challenge to herself, but she was still impressed by her perceptions. “You must remember, though, that in Elizabethan drama a great emphasis was placed on virginity. It is not. only Ophelia but all the heroines who are constantly being warned.”
Lila glanced about the room. “Like us.”
A general laugh broke out, and Madge felt bleakly isolated. All these girls had a “chaste treasure” to guard from aggressive males, while she . . . “Let us return to Hamlet, please!”
“It’s just that things haven’t changed that much,” Lila continued boldly. “I guess we all know what it’s like to live in a world where men want you to be virtuous and loose at the same time.”
“Lila, that will do!”
“Small wonder Ophelia sang dirty songs when she went off her nut. What else had men taught her?”
“I said, that will do!”
“Oh, come now, Miss Dyett, you’re not that much older than the rest of us.”
“Lila Sabatière, will you please leave the room!”
Later that morning, when Madge was sitting alone in the tiny office that she shared with two other teachers, on the top floor of the converted brownstone that housed the school, she looked up to see Lila standing in the doorway, still unabashed.
“If you think I owe you an apology, I apologize, Miss Dyett. But I meant well. I only thought you were one of us. You’re so much younger and brighter than the other teachers.”
It was elementary, Madge knew, that a teacher should never succumb to flattery, but she simply collapsed.
“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered, flushing. “I was feeling a bit tense this morning. I have a ghastly headache.”
“I shouldn’t wonder, with a class like ours! I’m sure in your position I’d be fit for a sanatarium. But perhaps, then, this isn’t the moment to ask what I was going to ask.”
“About Ophelia?”
“Bless you, no! Ophelia can take care of herself. Or could have, if she’d ever learned to swim. No, I was wondering if you would consider taking on the job of tutoring me at home. Mummie said it wouldn’t hurt to ask you. She’ll make it worth your while.”
“Tutor you in what?”
“All the things I’m going to need for college. I’m horribly behind in everything.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to go to college.”
“I didn’t. But it’s a changing world, and I guess I’d better change along with it. A debutante isn’t the glamorous creature she used to be.”
Madge couldn’t help smiling. “I’m sure you will be, anyway, my dear.”
“Well, of course, I can go to college and still come out. But, seriously, would you consider the job?”
And so it was, the following afternoon, that Madge found herself outside the Sabatières’ house on Sixty-seventh Street. Such houses, or mansions as she liked to call them, she knew only by their facades, but from the East Fifties to the East Nineties she knew them all. She had little interest in their architectural merit; it satisfied her that their total function, as Veblen might have put it, was to proclaim the wealth of their proprietors. For this purpose it did not matter how crudely they were Gothic or French Renaissance or Greek Revival or Minoan, and Madge even liked one extravaganza on Fifth Avenue that rose from a French door sheltered by a marquise to an attic modeled on the Porch of the Maidens. She knew that she would recognize Number 34 when she saw it, but she could not remember it by its number alone, and she was delighted when it turned out to be one of her favorites: the purple Jacobean manor house with the two large bay windows on the piano nobile. She had no patience with those who maintained that such a facade should have overlooked a wide green park with peacocks or a lake with swans. She was quite content to have it in town.
The interior to which the impassive butler who answered her ring ushered her was dark with a sense of expensive things gleaming and glinting. She followed him swiftly up the low-stepped stone stairway, across a wide landing, and past a huge hunting tapestry to the gleam of an elaborate Louis XVI parlor, where a tall woman rose to greet her from behind a tea table littered with silver.
Madge had never seen anyone quite like her. Muriel Sabatière was arrayed (“dressed” would have been too common a term) in a sumptuous, ankle-length gown of crimson velvet, heavily interwoven with gold braid, and she wore a choker of rubies. She was large, with broad shoulders, but she was also slender and held herself very straight. The initial impression of fortitude was softened by the extreme femininity, even the affectation, of her airs and graces. Her large gray eyes flickered; her laugh was tinkling, almost intentionally artificial. The “haunting beauty” of which Madge had read in the society columns was made up in part of fine but very regular features in a long face and in part by the tricky makeup of the extended eyebrows and pink lips and by the elaborate frizz of small curls into which her auburn hair exploded at the back and sides of her head.
When Madge’s new employer had reseated herself to preside over the tea tray, her arms seemed to flow like the necks of the swans that did not swim outside.
“Why do you think my little girl wants to go to college, Miss Dyett?”
“She says it’s the modern thing.”
“And so, no doubt, it is. But why should she want to do the modern thing?”
“Young people are very conformist, I find.”
“It occurs to me, Miss Dyett, that as Lila’s mind seems to harp on the opposite sex, our clue may be there. Is it possible that the young men today are more attracted to industrious college girls than to idle debutantes?”
“I don’t suppose they have to be too industrious.”
“Happily for darling Lila! I think I knew your mother, Miss Dyett. Wasn’t she Elaine Strong?”
Madge assented, reflecting on the social distance indicated by her mother’s vivid recall and Muriel’s vague one. Indeed, why should anyone remember Elaine?
“Well, let us accept the good consequences,” Muriel said blandly, returning to the subject of her daughter, “regardless of the motive underlying them. I am glad, anyway, that Lila wishes to learn and that you will be teaching her. I have no doubt that we can all profit from you. I want you to feel a member of the family. There! I am going to start right off by calling you Madge. And I want you to be a friend of my son, Barclay, as well.”
“He’s a little boy?”
“No, my dear. He’s a very big boy! He goes to Columbia Law School. I hope your presence at our table may induce him to take more of his meals at home.”
Her smile was radiant, stylized, artificial, and yet . . . Could it be sincere? Mrs. Sabatière was an actress, a would-be Bernhardt, so stagey that Madge almost had to laugh. The tall woman looked beyond her visitor, as if to an auditorium; she seemed to scan upper balconies as she clasped her hands; she almost curtsied. It was a perfect curtain call. But what was it all about? Why should she want the tutor to be a friend of her son’s? Or was it all just frou-frou?
So, anyway, Madge’s new life began. Muriel Sabatière proved exacting; she required the tutor to come to the house three nights out of seven and to spend weekends at the country place in Westchester, but as she paid generously and as Madge had nothing in the world that she would rather do than watch the Sabatières in their own setting, Madge was perfectly satisfied.
Lila’s brother, Barclay, at first sight seemed as handsome and romantic as Madge could have wished, and her heart leaped at the prospect of the fantasies that she could embroider around his image. Were not his raven locks and shining eyes precisely what her scenario required? A Byronic hero? He had better manners, too, than any such, for he took the trouble, at Madge’s first dinner with the family, to be affable to her.
“They tell me Lila’s the very worst student in the whole history of the school,” he said, making a face at his sister. “And Miss Fairfax remembers back even to Mummie’s day!”
Madge wondered if he should have been quite so jokey; the Corsair would not have deigned to notice a kid sister. She observed now that his cheeks, instead of being pale and long, were round and almost ruddy, and that he had a habit of taking a small comb from his pocket and slipping it quickly through his hair. Barclay was nervous, and not like a panther but a domestic cat. He wriggled too much and giggled too much; he was always looking warily about as if to be sure that nobody was laughing at him. And he was patently terrified of his father, jumping up in an exaggerated military, almost heel-clicking, manner when the latter came into the room. Barclay seemed to relax only with the women of his family.
His father was a man who could turn his charm on and off like an electric light. It was as if he were hoarding what he regarded as a dangerously limited quantity; the moment it was not needed he would resume his habitual impassive stare and gruff manner. And then, when he wished to please again, the fiery little gleam in his opaque green eyes, the rumbling chuckle and liquidly articulated compliments were reactivated. There was a truculent independence in Paul Sabatière that seemed to make it difficult for him to sustain a flattering attitude even with the most important persons.
His bald, gleaming dome and quasi-military stance gave him a definite air of distinction; yet there was nothing, so far as Madge had been able to make out, of the aristocrat in his background. He was reputed to be the bastard son of a French priest who had arrived from nowhere and made a fortune, no one knew quite how. A poor Barclay had been the best Paul could find for a wife, yet he had perceived, with the eye of a maestro, just what could be done with her and how she could be trained to be the striking centerpiece of his collections. He had supervised everything personally: her hair, her makeup, her clothes; he had coached her in elocution and gestures, all with the idea of making her not the most beautiful or the most accomplished or even the most charming woman of the New York social scene—none of these would have been possible—but simply exotic. The danger had always been that people might laugh, but if they didn’t—and it was his genius to predict that in the long run they wouldn’t—what could they do but stare? And ultimately admire?
Muriel, Paul and Barclay were, of course, new to Madge, but she found that Lila was, too. The girl was as much of a capitalist as her father; basically she respected only those whom she had not yet bought. The moment Sabatière coins, however few of them, jangled in the tutor’s thin purse, the tutor belonged to her. Lila continued to treat Madge cordially, but she was much more casual now; the relationship between pupil and teacher had become more like that between mistress and lady’s maid. Madge found that they did their work at Lila’s time and place and no more of it than Lila strictly cared to do. But why should she object to this? Obviously, Lila’s college career, if indeed she should bother to have one, was going to be a minor episode in a life devoted to quite other things. If she chose to gossip during their study period, where was the harm? Only when Lila once directed that they should meet after school at the Dyetts’ house instead of her own, and then never showed up, did Madge object. The next morning at school she took her too-independent pupil aside.
“I can’t be used as a cover for dates that your mother doesn’t know about.”
“Oh Madge, how can you be so stuffy? I thought you were going to be such a friend! All we did was go to a lousy movie.”
“Well, you might at least have told me.”
“I will, dear, I will. Next time.”
“There’s not going to be a next time.”
“And I was thinking of asking Mummie to let you take me to Europe!”
It was a bribe that pulverized Madge. She knew that Lila had no immediate plans to go to Europe, but as Madge had never been abroad and wanted to go more than anything in life, she dared not take the smallest risk.
“If your mother finds out, it won’t be just a question of my job with her. It’ll be a question of my job at the school!”
“Trust me, dear!”
Madge didn’t trust her, not for a minute, but she decided that she had better pretend to. The Sabatières had become all the family she wanted to have.
The “home” on Sixty-seventh Street thus adopted by Madge was easily extended to include the country seat of the Sabatières in Westchester, a greenish-gray François I hôtel which seemed to miss an urban environment as much as the town house missed a rural one. But Madge missed nothing; she felt her soul stretching itself out, like Browning’s “long cramped scroll,” to freshen and flutter in the breeze of this new life.
It surprised her that she should always find herself seated by Barclay at the family board. When the party was only five, this was almost inevitable, but when, as was more usual, there were guests, it seemed to show a design, and certainly not Barclay’s. But why should his parents behave in precisely the opposite way to what might have been expected of them? Why should they encourage the proximity to their only son and principal heir of a plain, impecunious female?
Barclay himself seemed sufficiently at ease with her, but it was the same jokey, faintly evasive ease that he showed with his mother and sister. He liked to tell her mildly off-color stories, and she had a sense that at all times he had a supply of stronger ones waiting in the wings, so to speak, for her smallest encouragement. This was never forthcoming.
“Why don’t you take Miss Dyett to the horse show this afternoon, Barclay?” his father demanded one Saturday at breakfast. “She might like to see the jumping.”
“I thought I’d better study, sir.”
“Study? On Saturday afternoon? Isn’t that a bit stiff?”
Barclay flushed, with the resentful-but-obedient-little-boy look that he adopted for this somehow menacing parent. “You’re the one who wishes me to get good grades, sir.”
“Oh, very well, go to your books. But if I catch you roaming about the place the way you’re apt to do when you say you’re working, I shall consider that you have used Miss Dyett very badly.”
“Can’t she go with Lila?”
“With Lila!” Mr. Sabatière sneered. “This young lady wants a man. Damn it all, when I was a young buck, I didn’t moon over books on a lovely spring day when there were ladies about!”
Barclay looked more sullen than ever. When he rose to leave, he bowed stiffly, even a bit absurdly. “If you will permit me to say so, sir, nobody obliged you to study law.”
Madge, embarrassed by this interchange, turned to Lila when they were alone at the table and asked why Lila’s parents seemed to be pushing her at Barclay.
“They think Barclay’s terrified of women,” Lila replied with a shrug. “They must be hoping you’ll break him in.”
“Do I really look that type?”
“Is there a type? My old man has a dirty Gallic mind. He thinks he can get what he wants by yoking you and Barclay together.”
“What a charming image! I don’t feel very complimented.”
“Well, I wouldn’t take it too seriously. Parents are always up to something idiotic. So long as Daddy doesn’t take it into his head to set Barclay an example, you have nothing to worry about.”
“Set him an example?”
But Lila was already bored with the subject. Barclay did not interest her. “Let’s put it this way. Daddy’s not very good at keeping his hands to himself. Half the girls I ask home complain about it.”
Muriel Sabatière remained as she had started, a stage presence. She had no conversation, only monologues.
“I remember your mother at school quite well, my dear. She and I were the products of a stricter day. Oh, my, yes! We were almost Chinese in our reverence for the past. Old New York—dear, dim, quaint, brownstone old New York! It had values, I fear, that we have largely lost.”
Madge was to be reminded forcibly, on the very night of this soliloquy, of the decline of manners in her day. She was also reminded of Lila’s warning. After Lila and Muriel had gone upstairs, she had lingered by the fire to listen to Mr. Sabatière playing the Moonlight Sonata. He played it heavily and he made mistakes, but there was feeling in his rendition. When he had finished, she thanked him.
“You like music, Miss Dyett?”
“I like it when it’s played as well as that.”
“Dear me, your ear must be very untrained.” He came over to her chair and suddenly reached out a hand to cup her chin and raise her face to his. “You know, my dear, you’re really prettier than you think you are.”
Madge was conscious primarily of admiring her own poise. She gazed boldly back at him as Joan Crawford might have done in a movie about a shopgirl with an amorous boss. “What makes you think I don’t regard myself as irresistible?”
He chuckled, half-scornfully. Then he leaned down and kissed her on the lips. His were large and soft; they felt like rubber. And his breath was bad. He straightened up.
“Would you like me to do that again, Miss Dyett?”
“No, Mr. Sabatière, I shouldn’t.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You believe in skipping the preliminaries?”
She caught her breath at his presumption. But then she reflected that she had received his kiss. To such a man this was the equivalent of a complete surrender, and if not, tant pis. What did he care? And what would he do for her? Give her a jade necklace in return for one night? Madge’s nose wrinkled as she associated the odor of his stale breath with the odor of her parents’ bathroom, whose door seemed always to be left open.
“That kiss was a preliminary to nothing, Mr. Sabatière.”
“Very well. I see you’re a sensible girl.” He chuckled. “That little pass was only a test. I like to be sure of the virtue of any friend of my daughter’s—and of my son’s.” He lowered one eye in a half-wink to show that he was only half-serious, as he turned to the stairway. “Turn out the lights, will you please, when you go up?”
Alone, Madge reflected bitterly that he had not even bothered to ask her not to tell his wife. He didn’t care if she did!
It was late spring now and very warm. The next morning Madge rose early. She liked to walk about the place before it became too hot. She could more easily indulge in fantasies that she was its chatelaine when there was no human presence about, other than an occasional gardener, equally taking advantage of the cool in order to get his work done more comfortably. She roamed in the gardens, although flowers bored her; she looked at the statues of mythological subjects, although they were as bad as most garden statuary; she visited the stables, although horses alarmed her. She admitted to herself that a country estate had little value to her except, as in her favorite Veblen phrase, to demonstrate “conspicuous consumption.” But there were times, and this was one, when her mind became weary of the very persistence of her fantasies. If she had been Muriel Sabatière, what would she have fantasized herself as being? A queen? An empress?
As the heat began to steal over her, she became aware of a headache, one of those that would increase rather than diminish as the day wore on, and she sat down in the shade of the Spanish patio by the swimming pool. She chose a seat close to the wall, not to be unobserved by anyone who should use the pool but simply because it offered the most protection. But she was suddenly frozen to a tense stillness as she recognized that she must indeed be invisible to the person she was now beholding.
Barclay had walked out of the pool house and was standing by the edge of the water, stark naked. This in itself was not so surprising. A man alone at that early hour would not wish to be bothered with bathing trunks. And Madge was not ignorant of the male nude; she had been to art class. His well-shaped if pale and slightly puffy body had no surprises for her—but one. His male organ was erect. As she stared in astonishment he seemed to be looking right at her, with a fatuous little smile. And then he twitched his hips.
But he was not looking at her. He was looking at a figure that she now observed crouching in the flower bed at the far side of the pool. It was one of the gardeners, a man of middle years, bronzed and brawny, with a long, rather equine countenance. He had put down his trowel and was staring back at Barclay. Madge could make out in his Italian features a frank interest—the interest that any sexual question would at once arouse in him—an amused disgust, and greed.
He rose and strode slowly down the length of the pool to stand close to Barclay. Then he suddenly grabbed him in the groin and pulled him into the pool house.
Madge found herself almost running back to the big house. Slowing to a walk, she tried to make sense out of her own jumbled reactions. Why should she be shaking all over? Had she been aroused by Barclay’s state? Disappointed that she was not the cause of it? Disillusioned by this evidence that she was never likely to be? For if Barclay were to give up gardeners, it would surely have to be for a woman more alluring than herself. “No,” she cried angrily aloud, stopping to stamp her foot. It was none of these things. It was simply one more proof, if proof were needed, of how little use the world had for her!
“Very well, Madge Dyett,” she exclaimed, “you’re on your own. As if you hadn’t always known it!”
But she was on her own with a new asset; that was the point that she brooded over all that day. After breakfast, at which she darkly watched a rather febrilely chattering Barclay, she spent much of the morning in her room, putting together the pieces of the puzzle that he had left her. How long, to begin with, had he been indulging in these practices? Undoubtedly for some time, for the boldness of his self-exposure to a family employee hardly implied a virginal venture. How dared he take the risk? Precisely because the thrill lay in the risk! Madge had read enough of psychology in college to know that the dangers of blackmail and of betrayal to a parent of whose wrath he lived in constant dread might have given poor Barclay half his pleasure. And then to perform those acts under the very nose of the august sire—wasn’t that just a son’s revenge? Wasn’t there an exact precedent in Proust’s chapter where Vinteuil’s daughter and another woman make love before the composer’s portrait?
Surely she wished Barclay no harm, but the time had come to use him. If her suddenly conceived project should work, it would redound as much to his benefit as to her own. Courage, Madge Dyett!
The Sabatières gave a dinner party for twenty that night, and she found herself, as usual, next to Barclay. The dining room was paneled in Chinese lacquer: dragons and tigers prowled in forests; exotic birds took wing high over blue lakes toward snowy peaks. The huge porcelain centerpiece represented the rescue of Orion from his foundering craft by dolphins. It was a bit difficult to see all one’s fellow guests across the table, and the high-backed red Venetian chairs were set sufficiently apart that one had to speak distinctly to be sure of being heard by one’s neighbor. This, however, was what Madge was counting on; once two heads had approached, there was a privacy rare at dinner parties. And it was impossible for Barclay to run away.
She fixed the pitch of her voice so that it would just carry to him. “Why do you never trust me, Barclay?”
He was startled. “When do I not?”
“You never tell me anything about yourself. Anything personal, that is. You’re always making jokes. You’re never serious.”
“What do you want me to be serious about?”
“Oh, anything that you really care about. Your love life, for example. You can’t tell me a man as handsome as you doesn’t have a love life.”
His relieved smile readily granted this; oh, he could talk as long as she wanted in this bantering mood! “But men don’t tell those things to girls. Not to attractive girls, anyway. What sort of a fellow would I be if I boasted to you of my conquests?”
“I’m not an attractive girl, Barclay. And if I were, would it make that much difference to you?”
His eyes glittered. “What makes you say that?”
“Simply that I have a notion that attractive girls don’t interest you very much. Not at this particular stage of your life, anyway.”
He caught his breath. “You mean because I have to work so hard?”
“That’s it,” she replied flatly. “Because you have to work so hard.” She paused to watch his gathering reassurance. Then, abruptly, she changed her tone. “Barclay, I repeat, why can’t you trust me? I only want to be your friend. Not the sort your father wants me to be. A real friend, with no nonsense about sex. I know I need one, and I strongly suspect you do.”
“Why do you think I need a friend?”
“Do I have to tell you?”
“Yes!”
“Very well. For the same reason it would do me no good to make love to you.”
Oh, he was staring now! “And what is that?”
“What happened at the pool this morning.”
For a moment she feared that he would bolt.
“You’ve been spying on me!” he hissed.
“I have not been spying on you. I happened to be there, and I couldn’t help seeing what I saw. Never fear. I wasn’t shocked. That sort of thing strikes me as perfectly natural. I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone.” She paused again to let him consider these assurances. When there seemed no further danger of his leaving the table, she went on: “Let me put something else to you. I shall keep my voice very calm and matter-of-fact, and you must try to do the same. All right?”
He seemed almost hypnotized. “All right.”
“If you have many friends like this morning’s, you must get blackmailed from time to time.”
“Friends?” He was still not entirely subdued. “What makes you think there’s been more than one?”
“Oh, Barclay. What do you take me for?”
The remnants of his morale now collapsed. “All right, yes, I’ve been blackmailed.” His voice took on something of a whine. “You can’t imagine what my life’s been like, Madge. I’ve got to believe you don’t want to make it worse.”
“What I must convince you of is that I want to make it better. What would you say to a life where you could give up the law, travel, see the world, sail, dance, ski—anything you fancy—and at the same time enjoy complete sexual freedom with the complete approval of your family?”
“What would I say to that? I’d say you were describing paradise! But why play games?”
“This is no game. It’s yours for the asking.”
“Asking what?”
“Asking me to marry you. Now wait!” She reached over to touch his wrist in a quick gesture of reassurance. “There wouldn’t be any sex in it. The marriage would be a mask. The mask of a deep friendship and mutual understanding. We would be partners. Partners against the world!”
He was interested—oh, yes, he was intensely interested! “You mean I could do anything I wanted, and you could—”
“Do anything I wanted,” she finished for him. “Only I don’t think I’d want to do so much. If I could just get away from my family and my job and do some traveling—well, that would be paradise enough for me.”
“But I begin to see it!” he exclaimed, with rapidly rising excitement. “Mummie and the old man would be so tickled to see me married, it should be duck soup to talk them into my quitting law school. And then why not a year’s honeymoon? Why not a trip around the world? Think of it, Madge! Samoa, Tahiti, Ceylon, Naples, Algiers. Oh, my God! A whole year. And after that? Well, who cares what happens after a year? Madge, you’re a blooming genius!”
She now had her first moment of misgiving. She had a sudden vision of a long series of hotel suites where she would sit alone while Barclay pursued beautiful brown young men down golden beaches. Then she became aware of the patiently waiting old gentleman on her other side.
“We have to turn,” she murmured to Barclay. “That’s enough for now.”
It was not, however, to be enough for long. Later that evening, in the drawing room, when after their brandy and cigars the gentlemen joined the ladies, Barclay, ignoring his mother’s frantically signaled instruction that he sit by her guest of honor, came over to rejoin Madge. It was obvious that he had had several brandies.
“Your mother wants you to sit with Mrs. Stiles,” she warned him.
“To hell with Mummie! I’ve been bored enough already listening to the men curse out Roosevelt and talk smut. I’ve been thinking over our plan. And do you know what? The more I think of it, the greater it seems! Why don’t we get married right away? Next week?” He laughed aloud at her look of dismay. “Well, next month, then?”
What was most surprising to Madge about the announcement of the engagement, simultaneously in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, was how quickly it was accepted by everyone as a perfectly natural thing. The elevation of a humble teacher to the glittering rank of the Sabatiéres, after the first flurry of surprise, was rapidly assigned to the order of normalcy. “After all, who was Paul Sabatiére?” her aunts were asking already, to the irritation of her mother, who had now decided to upgrade her daughter’s new in-laws.
Muriel had been delighted from the first. She had folded Madge in silken arms with an air of total acceptance that would have been difficult even for her to feign.
“Oh, my dear, this is just what I have dreamed of! A lovely, sound, sensible and sensitive girl for my too volatile boy! Darling, you’ll be the making of him! Oh, what things we shall see! His father has been a bit put out by his wanting to leave law school, but I tell him it will be only a leave of absence. And a trip around the world is just what you both need, at just this moment! Ah, my two darlings!”
Paul Sabatiére had gruffly assured Madge that all Barclay really needed was the shaping and finishing influence of a clever woman.
“In my day,” he told her candidly, “that would have been the job of a married woman in society, some years his senior. But other times, other ways. I am satisfied that you are a very accomplished and sophisticated young woman. He should flourish under your care.”
Paul even condescended to take her father out to lunch and listen to the latter’s ridiculous stock-market theories, while Muriel called on Elaine and behaved as if nothing had interrupted their school intimacy of thirty years before. Miss Fairfax herself was quoted as saying that the match was “all in the family.”
Barclay, somewhat to Madge’s irritation, appeared to adore the whole thing. He was almost hilarious at the little parties that followed the announcement, and he was elaborately polite to everybody, except when he would drag her off into a corner, like a too amorous fiancé, and explode in fits of private laughter.
“Oh, Madge, has there ever been a couple like us before? Is there anything you and I couldn’t pull off together? I declare, I shall end up falling in love with you.”
“Maybe I’d better get a page-boy bob.”
“Darling, your tone.” And then he simply roared again with laughter.
Once Barclay had accepted the idea of a confidant, he embraced it with the same fervor that he must have formerly reserved for his hidden sex life. But Madge soon discovered that she was paying a price for the easy success of her stratagem in the unending flow of his confessions. Barclay’s repressed sexual history exploded before her in syrupy waves. There seemed no end to it. She was appalled at how early it had all started; there was no detail of grapplings in boarding-school cubicles, of rendezvous in the woods at summer camps, and, later, of elevator boys, grooms, taxi drivers and sailors that she was spared. He told her not only of the affairs he had had but of those he had wanted to have, or even dreamed about. His longings and his accomplishments were of equal importance to an imagination that seemed always on fire. And never once did he probe into her private life ; she existed to be an ear, never a tongue. One night, sitting up late at the nightclub La Rue, she at last ventured a protest.
“You never ask me about my life!”
“But you told me you didn’t have any,” he protested, with some justification.
“Well, you might ask if I’d ever wanted one.”
“But tell me! Talk, dear girl, please talk! Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
And, of course, she couldn’t. What fun would it be to make up a tale of frustration?
Lila’s attitude had been distinctly different from that of her parents. She had been casual, faintly sarcastic, about Madge’s advent as a sister-in-law. The tutor had moved up several pegs in the eyes of the world, but Lila seemed to want it known that she was not of those who were impressed. There was even, in her oblique glances, a note of something like conspiracy, and Madge finally determined to have it out with her.
Lila could never resist a shopping trip, and she accompanied Madge on some of the rounds for the purchase of her trousseau. At a department store, as they passed the maternity counter, Madge indulged a perverse impulse to pluck the girl by the elbow and murmur: “Don’t you think, if Barclay and I are going to be abroad so long, I should stock up here?”
Lila smirked. “You do keep it up, don’t you?”
“Keep what up?”
“Look, honey. This is Lila. Remember?”
Madge stared. “Remember what?”
“Who do you think you’re trying to kid?”
“I hadn’t been under the impression that I was trying to kid anybody.”
“Except people who don’t happen to know what your marriage to poor old Barclay is all about!”
“Lila Sabatière, are you implying something about your brother?”
“Nothing you don’t know, dearie.” But as Madge continued simply to stare blankly at her, Lila continued, shrugging: “Only that he’s . . . well.” Revoltingly, she linked her thumbs and made her fingers flutter to simulate the wings of a butterfly. Madge felt a belt of dampness tight around her heart.
“And do your parents think that, too?”
“Think it! Darling, they weren’t born yesterday. Daddy, after all, is an old frog, and Mummie, for all her fey airs, was brought up on a farm in Rhinebeck. She knows what cows do to each other!”
Madge felt suddenly sick. Her mind seemed to turn over and reel. “And they suppose I’m the sort of girl to cope with that?”
“Well, darling, aren’t you? Honey, it’s a compliment! Have I upset you terribly?”
“Not at all. It was foolish of me to worry about being the user, when I’ve been so comically used.”
“Oh, dear me, now you are mad. And everything was so perfect! Mummie said you were everything in the world she had dreamed of for Barclay!”
“How long has she known about him?”
“Everyone’s always known about Barclay! Everyone but Barclay himself. For some reason he’s always thought he was getting away with it.”
Madge nodded sadly. “It’s a common illusion. I should have seen it. Oh, what a fool I’ve been, Lila! But just what did your family expect me to accomplish?”
“They expect you to convert him, of course. Madge, where are you going?”
But Madge did not answer; she did not turn back or even wave. Fifteen minutes later, still in her hat and coat, she confronted Muriel Sabatière, seated behind the tea table, as when Madge had first met her. Barclay’s mother seemed to be expecting her; she held up a piece of sugar with the sugar tongs and smiled radiantly. But she was not wearing the ruby choker, as she had on that first day. After the largest stone had been removed to be set in Madge’s engagement ring, the string had been too short to go around even that slender neck.
“I was just hoping somebody would drop in for tea. How delightful!”
Madge remained standing. “Mrs. Sabatière, you knew about Barclay!”
“What did I know about Barclay? Not too much, I’m afraid. Oh, mothers, mothers!”
“You knew about the other men.”
“I warn you, darling. I shan’t listen to a word against my boy!” But there was no trace of indignation in that tone. It might have been some kind of lofty joke.
“I don’t want to say anything about him. I only want you to tell him our engagement is off.”
“Shouldn’t that sad piece of news come from you, dear?”
“If he cared, yes. But he doesn’t care. Ours was a business arrangement, pure and simple.”
“Can that not be binding, too?”
“If I married him and left him, I might be tempted to ask for a settlement. This way everything will be cleaner and cheaper. And more honorable.”
Muriel at this seemed to react for the first time. There was almost a throb in her voice. “Ah, my dear, stay with us! You are strong. You will change him.”
“And how do you propose that I manage that?”
“A woman can do anything with a man. If she wants to enough.”
“The way you did?”
Muriel hesitated. Then she nodded with a suddenly brisk assurance. “Very well. Yes. The way I did.”
Madge, desperate, became almost brutal. “By dressing up?”
Muriel’s stare might have concealed anything. “Yes! By dressing up!”
Madge, closing her eyes, had a vision of the gorgeous tapestry that the willpower of this woman held over her family. For a moment she was almost tempted to emulate her. To defy chaos with the robes woven by a simple faith in one’s own power to weave! But then it was as if she heard an imagined cough behind that imagined arras. Who could be concealed there but a pinching old man with bad breath? And who was the real weaver?
Deliberately now she removed the ruby ring from her finger and came forward to place it on the silver tea tray. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Sabatière. If there was anything I could do for you, I’d gladly do it. But there isn’t. At least now you can wear that wonderful choker again!”