FOR AS FAR BACK AS he could remember, Alvin Mopworth had liked girls. He had liked them so much, from such an early age, that he soon earned for himself the expectedly derisive nicknames from more normal boys in the English schools among which he was successively shunted in the effort to cure him of his weakness. The taunts were whispered in the classroom and shouted at him from street corners where he could be seen passing in the company of some pretty little classmate, carrying her books. It all began in London.
His concerned mother, a designer for a fashionable milliner in the West End, sent him to a private school in Switzerland, in hopes of correcting his obsession in fresh surroundings and a healthy outdoor environment, but it did no good. He continued to seek out the company of little girls, again carrying their books when he was not strapping on their skis for them or buckling them into their iceskates. “He was always rather an odd boy,” said a motherly marquise who witnessed his removal from that school to still another, this time in Somerset.
There, one day, his mother took him out on a picnic, hoping to air her anxieties to him in a heart-to-heart talk.
“Why aren’t you romping about with the rest of the boys?” she asked.
“I’d rather the other,” he said.
His mother shut her eyes, as though flinching under strains of discordant music. “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” she said. “Pray God England hasn’t another war.”
“If she does I shall try for the Air Force.”
“To impress the girls with your uniform and brass buttons, no doubt.”
“I say, this ground’s a bit damp here, Mother. Why must we eat sandwiches in a field?”
“Because that’s what a picnic is,” his mother explained, closing her eyes again. “Eating sandwiches in a field.”
Why must we eat sandwiches in a field? Smiling a little to himself, Mopworth remembered the incident now as he crossed the Spoffords’ walk. Marching toward the house (with that brisk, erect stride he had indeed learned in a hitch in the R.A.F.), he had caught, between the barns and chickenhouses, a glimpse of pastureland behind the farm, and that had no doubt stirred the recollection. Perhaps the white paddock fence beyond it had something to do with it too, because they’d had to climb one to find a place on which to spread their picnic lunch. Hadn’t a bull hovered threateningly in the background, like a raincloud? And hadn’t he made a joke about the rather modish toreador slacks Mum had had on? They’d laughed heartily together at that, except for Mum.
It was at Somerset that he had in any case for the first time given Mum some reassurance. Instead of whacking about with girls that year he had joined the Dramatics Club and won a leading role in the class production of As You Like It, acquitting himself with such credit as Rosalind that Mum had gone both nights in a delirium of pride, pleased by this sign that he was participating in school activities and being one of the gang. This was in 1950. His mother, then long widowed, had suddenly married again, a retired manufacturer with whom she now lived in Mayfair. They and Mopworth rarely corresponded any more.
The bent for acting steered him into radio and television after his graduation from college. It was a good livelihood, but after the first excitement it settled down into merely that. He cast about for something more “emotionally rewarding,” while sensing vaguely that only something like writing or painting would genuinely suffice to that end. He wrote some light verse, selling a few pieces here and there. Nothing much. Meanwhile the occupational environment supplied unending rounds of pretty girls, whom he pursued on a scale rendering him, once again, suspect in the eyes of his contemporaries—this time on intellectual grounds.
We know today that everything is the opposite of what it seems. Thus lavish tipping conceals a niggardly nature, filial devotion the wish to do one’s parents in, and sexual athleticism a basic doubt of one’s masculinity. The shadow of overcompensation fell early across Mopworth’s youth, because of this great jolly keen yen for girls, but the really grave doubt of his sexual adequacy had its beginnings at a party in Chelsea where he found himself messing about with two women at once—or so nearly so as made no difference in the reckoning. It was the party where McGland had wound up the bender touched off by the discovery that he was to be dropped from the cast of the Tuttles. It all happened after McGland had left with the dark baggage he had picked up there. Much to Mopworth’s relief, for relations between them had been strained in those first days, not relaxed as they were to become later when Mopworth was no longer acting and McGland was riding high as a literary lion.
Mopworth had been in a canoodle with a tall brunette in a red dress, who was wearing a perfume so heady that when he went out onto the terrace for a breath of air later he carried her spoor with him. Because the girl with whom he started a canoodle out there drew back at one point and, sniffing, asked, “What’s that you’re wearing? Bellodgia?” Mopworth had had to admit that he didn’t know; that the fragrance adhering to him had been picked up in a previous canoodle, inside.
“Well, wear it in health,” the second girl said. “Because you’re not admitting—you’re bragging—and when a man does that it’s for a damn good reason.”
“What?”
“He’s got to prove something he isn’t.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything. I just want a spot of the old slap and tickle. No harm in that surely. Come on, give us a kiss.”
The girl’s name was Peggy Schotzinoff—there was no doubt about it—and she was a dancer in a ballet troupe. They were exponents, not of the classic ballet, but the more modern variety of which the dances, spastic, vital, often American-influenced, are concerned with the depiction of contemporary phenomena such as slum clearance or the installation of high tension wires through valleys in which people have hitherto lived in peace.
A gramophone had started up inside, and Mopworth said, “Then give us a dance.” After he had propelled her for half a chorus about the gravel floor of the terrace (enough for him to confirm privately the legend that ballet dancers are poor ballroom ones), Peggy Schotzinoff leaned back away from him a bit and said with a smile, “You’re very graceful,” adding suggestively to the onus under which Mopworth now already labored. He knew that she would blab about this. He shrugged and wagged his shoulders in an exaggerated, almost oafish, fashion, to indicate that her remark was not unqualifiedly true, or indicated at best a merely primitive zest for rhythm. He hadn’t really wanted to see this baggage again, or anyhow not much, but wishing to redeem himself he plowed ahead in the only manner open to him under the circumstances. “Are you free for tomorrow night? We can have dinner and then go up to my place for a spot of heavy breathing.”
“You do go at one.”
“Well then, later in the week.”
They did eventually dine, and afterward went to Mopworth’s flat for a brandy. There, after some strenuous importunities in shirtsleeves, he was forced back with an understanding laugh. “Don’t struggle so hard, Alvin.”
“It seems to me you’re the one who’s struggling.”
“No, I don’t mean that way. I mean don’t fight so hard to prove what you feel this need to. That you’re a man.”
“I don’t want to prove anything. I just want to go to bed with you.”
“You see?”
“You’ll hate yourself in the morning.”
Mopworth rang up the baggage of whose essence he had reeked in the first instance, when all this had gotten started, but by the time she could have dinner with him, which was a good month later, word had gotten around in this rather knowledgeable set that Mopworth was racing his motor, and why. In the cab after dinner, he seized her in a passionate embrace and began to devour her with kisses, gobbling her throat, her bare arms and shoulders hungrily. She wriggled free of his grasp after a moment and sat back in her corner to tidy herself.
“We all admire the way you’re fighting homosexuality, Alvin,” she said, drawing her lip down as she applied lipstick to it.
Mopworth nodded, looking out the window as he recovered his wind. “We’ll go up to my place and talk about it.”
Perception in these matters was, if anything, even further advanced in the United States, and, of course, most acute in that part of it to which his pursuit of McGland eventually took him. Thanks to some there who had known him in London, or had known of him through mutual friends, his reputation preceded him everywhere he went in the purlieus of literary New York and its environs—to be eventually watered by his own conduct. It was a vicious circle. It was to define and color his pursuit of Geneva Spofford. Before he could get to her, though, it appeared he must contend with the very formidable roadblock thrown in the way in the form of her mother, who received him when he called at the farm after McGland’s death. After a few preliminary words, he asked after Geneva.
“She don’t feel good,” Mrs. Spofford said, watching him pace.
“I know. Cut up after the news. It must have been a shock to her.”
“Why to her more than the rest of us?”
“Well, after all—” Flustered, Mopworth realized he had stumbled on a naturally sensitive point. “I mean we both saw him only the night before. It’s all so awful.”
“What’s all so awful?”
“Death and all that. So dashed absolute.”
“Were you all together?”
“Not actually,” Mopworth said, marking where his feet fell in the pattern of the rug he systematically traversed, as though its design were some sort of maze which if properly followed would bring him out to daylight. “We just happened to sort of converge, you see, at poor Gowan’s.”
“The motel?”
“Yes.” He made a vague gesture of belittlement of the fact, shrugging off what his very shrug caused to germinate the faster. Mrs. Spofford waited until his labyrinthine passages about the surface of the rug had him marching straight toward the chair in which she sat. She then said, as he swerved to avoid her:
“If you want to know what she visited him in his room for, I can tell you. It was to try to break it up between us two.”
Mopworth had become familiar with, indeed addicted to, those American comic strips in which consternation among the central characters is depicted by liberal interpolations of the word “gulp,” as well as by a quantity of nuts and bolts flying graphically in all directions in the thought-balloons over their heads. What he answered now might have been rendered: “Between—gulp—you?” Nuts and bolts.
“Gowan McGland and me. He chased everybody, I knew that, but it didn’t make no difference. Well, Geneva went to ask him not to see me any more, because it would only lead to heartache.”
“I see. That comes as rather a stunner to me,” said Mopworth, touching his breast pocket to make sure he had his notebook with him. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“If you want to talk about it, I think it might be better if we went somewheres else. I’d rather not be overheard here.”
“I quite understand how you feel. Maybe we can find a nice quiet pub where we can have a pint or two.”
Maybe he should never have gotten into this at all, Mopworth thought as he followed Mrs. Spofford into Indelicato’s. Maybe he should have taken a heave at fiction instead. He might by now have a novel finished, even published. Something worthwhile too, a novel of social analysis or protest. One of those books about sensitive chaps who can hear their father hawking and spitting in the next room. Well, too late for that now, he thought as he threaded his way among the tables toward one in the corner. But up what byways the life of a Boswell took you! That McGland certainly got around. How had he beat the Proving Something rap anyway? Probably because he had the Tortured Artist thing going for him, and the pigeonholers can’t put you in but one pigeonhole at a time.
Seated at the table with a firm grasp of his stein, Mopworth tried to listen attentively as the woman went on about how she couldn’t talk about it. She let drop key phrases like “give each other something” and “unhappy boy at heart,” key phrases that unlocked no doors, while Mopworth turned over in his mind the possibility of a chapter on geniuses who had had mistresses from the lower orders, that he might sell first as an article. Let’s see, there was Rossetti with his cockney model, Dowson with his waitress, van Gogh and the chit he gave his ear to, and now McGland with this good woman of radiant health, maternal solidity and sandy coloring. Such women no doubt appeased that nostalgia for the primitive that haunts overintellectual man. God knew he needed some side money, Mopworth. The expense of feeding these informants was wellnigh ruinous; his advance had run out and appeals for more expense allowance were eliciting sharp squawks from London. He must try to horse some money out of an American publisher. Let’s see, there was Brahms and his prostitutes, and didn’t Moussorgsky spend a lot of time whacking about with tarts? Lucky chaps to be born before psychoanalysis, too. Mopworth always found himself coming back to the problem of beating that rap.
Being seen about with the likes of Mrs. Spofford did little to get him off—it fitted too well into the angle with which the pigeonholers cut off your escape from that quarter: the proverbial gravitation of jessies to older and dowdier women who “posed no threat,” etc., especially if they were married, etc.
It took Mopworth some few interviews to suspect that there was less here than met the ear—a smoke screen no doubt to shield her daughter from the research attendant on public curiosity? Not that Mary Spofford needed him to take her out, or remained dowdy for long. She gave up the men’s trousers for women’s trousers, and for dresses of flattering color and design, the mackinaws for belted tweed coats. She was seen in the company of New York journalists and photographers, all on expense accounts and all vying with each other in the restaurants to which she might be taken in hopes of pumping more from her than the repeated “We were just friends,” spoken in a manner guaranteed to leave the opposite impression.
No one was let near Geneva, who was in any event soon packed off to Wycliffe for her final year. The story on McGland appeared in Life, with a spread showing comparative landscape shots of Scotland and Connecticut, countries in which the poet had begun and ended his life, respectively. There was one of Mary Punck Spofford in a green sweater and scarf, her hair cropped and dyed gold, smiling against the flowers and white Leghorns of the farm “among whose simple folk the driven artist had found friendship and a measure of peace in his last days.”
With the publication of the article the Spoffords were no longer simple, and their own peace was at an end. Geneva was asked everywhere on the strength of her mother’s widely known liaison with McGland, and her family were pointed out on the streets of Woodsmoke. The Spoffords now had a kind of aggregate chic, in the special aura of which each of the individual members moved. Harry Pycraft, his motel now a landmark, pestered Spofford to come and have a nip with him again. He finally did. In Pycraft’s office he was shown a fattening scrapbook which included a newspaper feature picturing the Dew Drop Inn along with the ship from which Hart Crane had jumped, the house in which Vachel Lindsay had drunk the disinfectant, and other comparable cultural attractions. The visit was interrupted by a party of pilgrims who had motored out from New York, for whom Pycraft excused himself to go show them room number 23. Spofford left the office and never went back there again.
He did not resent Mare’s appropriation of the limelight, from which he was in any case far from wholly excluded. He was discernible in the background of her Life picture, scowling into the sunlight in a tweed jacket and cap, and he was widely mentioned in Woodsmoke gossip as the companion with whom McGland had gone pub-crawling, getting into brawls now, of course, a matter of police record. The breaking and entering indictment seemed least of the adventures of a certified eccentric and bohemian.
Thus that prestige the Spoffords had never enjoyed by reason of their being old Yankee stock—hardworking, sober, frugal—was now showered on them as principals in a legend. Scandal made them what virtue could not: people who mattered. A date with Geneva was the goal of every blade at Amherst and other nearby schools; an invitation to her house a prize to which only the privileged dared aspire. That Christmas she turned up with her roommate, Nectar Schmidt.
Spofford met them at the railroad station in his rig, wearing the goggles and white driving coat he had acquired for the old-car gymkhana at the country club (in which he was now up for membership). Nectar, a short girl with cropped black hair and a habit of twitching her nose in a manner that made her dark glasses jump, saw him instantly as the mixed contemporary type of which she fancied herself one: the blend of the intellectual and the colloquial, a capacity for the artistic combined with the discriminating nostalgia for junk. She loved this car they bounced home in, with the “Antique” license it now sported. Her parents were divorced and she made her home with her brother in Pennsylvania. This was the holiday invitation she had wanted. She looked past Geneva, who was seated in the middle, studied Spofford a moment with a gravity in no way lessened by the nervous twitch of her nose that often accompanied her sober contemplation of something, and remarked that his profile reminded her of their history professor.
“Your grandfather would pry shoot me if he could meet Timken,” she said. “But I mean just Timken’s face, before he opens his mouth?”
“Grandpa’s pry more intelligent,” Geneva said. Though radically dissimilar in appearance and temperament, the girls resembled one another in many ways, due to Geneva’s habit of modeling herself on the more worldly girls she met, at the moment Nectar Schmidt. Her own speech was liberally sprinkled with this slurred rendering of “probably,” a word which rarely if ever has all its syllables pronounced in any case.
“Timken’s pry the least interesting professor there, ackshy,” Nectar said. “I mean all he can do is harp on knowing something about the subject. In class the other day he ranted and raved about how few people know what a centurion is. I mean do you, Mr. Spofford?”
“I think it’s a mythological creature, like a satyr.”
“That’s the way I feel about it,” said Nectar, who had no doubt this humor was intentional, like all the other amusing solecisms the old fellow got off.
She decided he was one of the most fabulous things going, trailed at very little distance by Geneva’s mother—who was by now accustomed to the word fabulous and beginning to use it herself. The woman called Mrs. Punck seemed a little hazier, a little harder to place here. Put her down as a quaint touch of the kind that can be accommodated by people secure in their status, like the Currier and Ives print one hangs on one’s wall because one knows better, or expressions like “ain’t” and “stood in bed” which are all right to use because one knows better than to do so. A form of slumming, they are, conscious barbarisms whereby the mind revitalizes itself from below. These were all things Spofford had once tried to drum into Mrs. Punck, who now planned to marry Dr. Rappaport in the spring and move into his house in the Hollow. As for George, he took one look at Nectar and went and hid in the barn, where he remained for the rest of the afternoon stacking bags of feed. Nectar’s first impressions were little subject to verification anyway, since the two girls rarely saw the family. The minute they arrived the telephone rang, and the whirl of holiday parties was on.
Tad Springer called to ask Geneva to the annual Holly Ball at the country club. His mother had spent the day prodding him into it. Geneva agreed provided a date were got for Nectar Schmidt. Before Tad could report back after a canvass of his available friends, Mopworth rang up to invite Geneva out and was dragooned for Nectar. He agreed in order to get to see Geneva, whom he tried to date in the course of his first dance with her at the ball. “Well all right, if we can get somebody for Nectar,” Geneva had to say again.
“Wouldn’t that be a sticky switch? I mean I’m with her here.”
“I guess. I’ll have to think about it.”
Later that evening, flushed with punch, Mopworth took Geneva’s hand in the lounge to which they had strayed from the dance floor for a breather. She tried to turn it off by moving on toward a window which looked out on a view of the golf course, frozen under moonlight. Since this involved edging round behind a clump of potted palms, Mopworth took it as a quest for seclusion, and tried to kiss her. “How about a spot of the good old will toward men?” he said. “You’re divine. Aren’t you glad?”
Nectar noticed both the brief but significant absence in which this occurred, and the smudge of red on Mopworth’s jawbone, and, her perceptions fired to twice their normal acumen by personal injury, she minced no words in her verdict on Mopworth as she and Geneva lay in bed together that night holding their post-mortem on the ball. “He’s pry a fag,” she said.
“You mean because . . . ?” Geneva let her response hang fire till she saw where her own sagacity was expected to lead her. She had no wish to appear wanting in that quality prized above all others by her generation, the ability to see through people. Many of her crucial reactions awaited the cues from Nectar, who would, herself, never be caught on the naïve side.
“He left me for you, and you for the Endicott piece. You saw him bearing down with her, didn’t you? I don’t know what else in skirts he chased after that. Anybody gunning his engine at that rate has reasons.”
“What do you think of Tad?”
“He’s sweet but kind of weak. The sort of man who could go either way in the end, as a husband. I mean a joy around the house because he’s so good-natured, or a poop because he’s got no starch. Well, that’s about it. He needs a little more lemon in him.” Nectar bounced over and lay with her back to Geneva, a position that, in these wee-hour post-mortems, usually presaged an intimate cross-examination. “Are you two supposed to be a team?”
“Not especially. People are such contradictions, aren’t they? I wish I had your sharp insight into them, Nectar. I have no idea what people are like. It’s at the bottom of my insecurity I think.” Geneva took pride in her insecurity, which she and Nectar had turned and examined from every angle, like a precious stone. Between them they built it up, they polished it. Geneva bounced over on her own side and said suddenly, “Would you like to date Tad? Because go ahead, Nectar. I’ll fix it up. See what comes out of that?”
“What can we lose?” said Nectar.
That arrangement was made for the New Year’s Eve party the Springers gave. Tad invited Geneva to it when at the last minute it was decided he might ask some of his contemporaries to an affair his parents were giving for theirs. Learning Mopworth had already dated her for that night, Tad agreed to pair off with Nectar Schmidt in order that they might all be together again.
The experiment aimed at mixing the two generations resulted in the elders being rather put on their good behavior. Along with the usual quota of students going steady, dancing only with one another, etc., was a fair sprinkling of campus conservatives in the matter of politics. There was one Goldwaterite, a Wesleyan boy, whose opinions were too reactionary even for some of the older Republicans. An argument between him and the graying Beauseigneur took up the first hour. These samplings of the young were relieved only by a few intellectual bums—what old Spofford called Harvard beats.
“Nobody’s having any fun,” C.B.S. protested to Bobsy, aside. “Where did we get all these wet blankets? I thought you were supposed to have fun at parties. Or is that a quaint predilection of mine? Correct me if I am mistaken.” Beauseigneur, at his elbow, nodded agreement with these general complaints. Both men sulked under their funny hats, which were cone-shaped and secured by elastic straps under their thickening chins. They were both holding highballs in tumblers of hobbed milk glass, which C.B.S. had been browbeaten into collecting as a means of relieving the strain of business life, and both seemed genuinely disturbed at having to see the old year out discussing fundamentals.
“When we were young we had some gumption, it seems to me,” Beauseigneur said. “We were radicals. I wouldn’t give a dime for a youngster who isn’t a radical, for a while.”
“Run along to the game room then,” said Bobsy, watching her son and the Goldwaterite in serious conversation with Geneva Spofford and another girl.
“I’m not one now—a radical I mean,” Beauseigneur persisted, “but I do consider myself a liberal, stockbroker or not. I’m a liberal Republican. He,” he continued, pointing at the Wesleyan student, “is one of those Republicans who are giving the party a black eye. Who don’t seem to realize that it began as a liberal party. Why, we were sponsoring social legislation before the Democrats ever heard of it. But I think the important thing, the thing that gives me pause about the younger generation, is that the element of rebellion is missing. We all revolted against our parents.”
“Because they were conservatives,” Bobsy said. “We’re liberals and bohemians, so to revolt against us our children have to be stuffy. Nothing could be more natural. Their children—your grandchildren, Beau—will be like us again. So run along and have your fun, you and C.B.S. There’s a new electric pinball machine downstairs.”
Thoroughly depressed by the intrusion of the grandparent theme, the two men trooped off to the game room.
An even worse pall had settled on the gathering there. Some of the owlish young had found their way to it, including another campus reactionary who was giving Haxby a bad time about the Kennedy administration, drawing him into a support of it so far in excess of anything he seriously adhered to, or would ten minutes ago have dreamed himself capable of espousing, that he scarcely knew whom he hated the more, the boy or himself. Seen from behind, Haxby presented a picture of controlled hostility which his face would have confirmed. His stocky trunk was held stiffly erect up to his neck, which bulged red over the collar of his dinner jacket. One hand also gripped a milk glass tumbler filled with whiskey and soda. The other arm hung at his side, the hand alternately doubled into a fist and held with one finger pointing straight to the floor, like the barrel of a pistol. While he debated with the boy he watched his wife and the young Englishman named Mopworth. They were the only ones at the new pinball machine, but the Englishman was using it as a desk to write down something in a notebook that Lucille was telling him. It was toward the latter pair that the two newcomers made their way. “Get this party off the ground,” C.B.S. was saying. “Right,” Beauseigneur echoed, following his host to the pinball machine. They advanced on it with the air of gangsters about to appropriate it for the failure of the owner to pony up a specified amount of protection money. “Could we trouble you for this, if you’re not using it?” C.B.S. said. “Of course,” said Mopworth, and led Lucille Haxby off to a corner where there was an unoccupied leather sofa. But before they sat down, Lucille made some excuse about freshening her drink and darted off through the crowd and upstairs, Mopworth after her. Haxby followed all this with his eyes while the youth he was stuck with elucidated his views on the malfunction of liberalism since Roosevelt.
Since research for McGland in America consisted principally of retracing the erotic swath cut by the poet down the Eastern seaboard, Mopworth found himself pursuing, week after week, the same women McGland had done, for journalistic reasons. Notebook in pocket he tried to pump the poet’s “conquests” without letting on he knew there had been anything between them but just friendship. “I understand you’re one of those who met him socially,” was his gambit, or sometimes he would say “culturally.” In the case of a few chatterboxes with their hearts set on a place in the McGland legend, this was a bung drawn from a brimming barrel, but it sealed the mouths of those with any real secrets. Mopworth soon learned to tell the difference. The number of the latter to be seen at one of Bobsy Springer’s parties was more than might have been thought possible, and they all avoided Mopworth like the plague, for the word was out that he was at work on a book. He suspended his chase of Lucille Haxby until after midnight, in hopes that copious draughts of champagne and a round of “Auld Lang Syne,” sung with hands linked, might loosen her tongue.
The result was that he spent even less time with Geneva than, at the Holly Ball, he had with Nectar Schmidt. Which gave Nectar all the data she needed to nail down her diagnosis. She assured Geneva, again as they lay in bed holding their post-mortem, that she now had Mopworth taped.
The thing that made him chase everything in skirts was a basic hostility toward women. By promiscuous pursuit, he made them look promiscuous, and thus unworthy of pursuit. “And that flamenco dance he does every time he’s cross,” she said. Now Geneva had never actually seen Mopworth stamp his foot, but she could vividly see him doing it now, under Nectar’s analytical spell, and striking a dozen other attitudes as well. “Oh, he’s pry trying to fight it, in his way, I don’t deny that, but there it is.” Mopworth disposed of, Geneva turned the discussion to Tad.
“How do you like him now? After tonight?”
“He’s O.K. Fine.”
“You two danced a lot.”
“He’s a good dancer.”
“Does he want to see you again?”
“Let’s talk about it in the morning. I’m absy exhausted.”