The Scarlet Letters Page 13

  But that was not all. It did not take in the ease with which they compromised with the less lovable aspects of their era and class. Jane’s parents were, of course, good Republicans, but they never went overboard in hating FDR; they even dared to hint that he might have forestalled a social revolution. As Christians they were Episcopalians and went to church on rainy Sundays, but they had no theological tenets and gave little more than lip service to the conventional anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic prejudices of their friends. The motto they might have chosen, “Nothing in excess,” extended to their enthusiasms as well as their dislikes: art and literature were welcomed but not embraced; self-sacrificing devotion to worthy causes was admired but not emulated. On the whole, they liked the world, and the world, on the whole, liked them.

  Where Jane made out at last that she would have to break with their values was in their attitude towards the “great world” of society, on the fringes of which they precariously lived. Nothing in the world would have persuaded Sophia or Gridley Seaton that they were in the least snobbish or even worldly, qualities that they roundly deplored. Why then, their daughter wanted to know, did they belong to the most restricted clubs and send their children to the most restricted schools; why was their acquaintance limited to the Social Register and their summers to the swankiest beach resort? Why? they repeated. Why, because they always had. It had nothing to do with what they thought or whom they respected. And what really upset them in Jane’s attitude was not, as with so many privileged children of the Depression, that she had gone so far left—that was so common as to be almost respectable—but that she had gone so far right!

  Jane had observed, with a realistic eye and a bitter heart, just how the Depression had cut into her family’s life style, just what sacrifices had had to be made to keep up the appearance of gentility. She had known what it was to be on a scholarship in a rich girls’ school, to have few dresses amid the dressy, to have to give up the beach club and rely on the invitations of the supercilious. She saw that in a world of multifold discomforts the well-to-do were the only ones unaffected, and she made it her resolve that one day she would be numbered among them. It was not that she did not perfectly see what hash so many of the wealthy made of their lives, but they were fools, and whatever Jane was destined to become, it was not that. Marriage was the only viable out, and fortunately her family’s proximity to the palaces of prosperity offered ample opportunity.

  Families note everything. As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, you can’t fool a regular boarder. Sophia Seaton was well aware of her daughter’s cultivation of the richer among her old classmates and at last reproached her for it. But she was hardly prepared for Jane’s stinging retort.

  “Haven’t you brought me up cheek by jowl with people who had all the things we didn’t? How could I be expected not to try to be a part of them?”

  “I expected that you might try to use your good brain and the advantages of an excellent education to make a decent place for yourself in the world,” was her mother’s tart reply. Sophia, behind a placid front, had preserved some old values. “It had not occurred to me that the spectacle of a few show-offs marking a display of their new money would go to your head. You’ve always had the things that mattered: a good home, good teachers, good friends and all the comforts a girl could need. Don’t be always looking up, my dear. Look down and see the millions who haven’t a fraction of what you’ve had!”

  “What can you gain by looking down? You might even drop! But looking up, you might find a ladder somewhere.”

  “A ladder! Don’t tell me that a child of mine could ever become a social climber!” Sophia’s pride was now aroused. After all, the Seatons weren’t nothing. “I wonder, child, if you haven’t inherited some of the genes of my Grandmother Bane. We used to marvel at the crudity of some of her social assessments. It wasn’t as if she had been born on the wrong side of the tracks. She had been a Babcock, which, as the French say, was assez bien. But I remember that when I told her I didn’t like a particular friend of hers, an old lady called Mrs. Dows, who for some reason had been mean to me, she retorted, ‘You mustn’t say that. Mrs. Dows has three million dollars.’”

  “But that must have been a huge fortune in those days!” Jane exclaimed. “Great-Grandma Bane had simply the candor to express what the rest of you were all thinking! Yes, I think I have some of her genes. And I’m proud of it!”

  “Jane, Jane, what are we going to do with you?” her mother wailed.

  Jane lived in a world where there were plenty of rich young men, but they were inclined to be edgy about girls with the reputation of looking for what they had, and Jane had found herself furnished with such a taint, no doubt by some girls with the same objective. She was eventually to find what she needed, but not before she had made one seemingly fatal mistake.

  Tommy Seitz had no money, but everyone seemed to assume that he would make a fortune. He certainly had no doubts about it himself. He had everything in the world that was desirable except money. He was handsome, athletic, bright, witty, cheerful and good tempered, a popular member of his Yale class, elected to the distinguished secret society of Scroll & Key, a champion squash player and now the promising employee of a known investment banking firm. And he shunned all the heiresses at the Southampton Beach Club to devote himself to the beautiful but penniless Jane, who had only appeared there as a guest! It would have broken a harder resolution than hers, and it now broke her determination to limit herself to the ugly and awkward son of a shipping magnate who, despite his mother’s disapproval, had been showing her timid attention. For Tommy, it appeared, was really serious and not the idle philanderer she had first taken him to be.

  Yes, he had actually proposed! Could she still care that his family were a good deal dimmer and simpler than her own? She could only assume that some bright-colored cuckoo bird had deposited an alien egg in their dingy nest.

  He was bravely candid about himself.

  “All my friends have taken for granted that I would make what is called a great match. But what’s the use of a fortune if one hasn’t a beautiful and enchanting spouse to spend it with? You and I are a pair marked for the role. Don’t you see it? Will you be willing to take your chances with me?”

  Jane thought she did see it. She also assumed that she was in love, as it was hard for her not to imagine herself in love with such a swain as Tom. And this despite her uneasy and constantly stifled small suspicion that there was something wrong with him, that he was another Tom Seitz pretending to be the Tom Seitz she was seeing before her. But if he didn’t know it himself…!

  Shortly after they were married he was off to the wars as executive officer of a sub chaser, and this added to his romantic glow. But when peace returned, it seemed to have brought a turn in his luck. Not only was she faced with the unexpected barrenness of her marriage—though there seemed no physical reason for it—she was confronted with the barrenness of their means. Tom changed from company to company with a consistent lack of success, while spending freely on the hectic and supposedly brilliant social life that he insisted was essential to his business ventures.

  After two years of such a life he announced to her blandly that he was dead broke. He did not seem surprised or even depressed by the fact. He proceeded to outline what he called “Plan B” as coolly as if she, a presumably cool partner, would at once recognize its inevitability.

  “It hasn’t worked, my love. It simply hasn’t worked.”

  “What hasn’t worked?”

  “Our marriage. My whole initial scheme. I’ve had a vicious stream of bad luck, which no one could have visualized, and now I have no credit to seek further capital with. There’s only one way I can get it, and that is by a rich marriage.”

  Jane felt something more like awe than outrage. She stared at the monster before her and realized that she had never known him to be anything but the appearance of what he was not.

  “Are you telling me that you want a divorce?” she asked, almost in cu
riosity.

  “Not that I want it, but I have no choice. Any more than you do. We both have to seek new and rich spouses while we still have a modicum of youth and beauty.”

  She saw now that she must have long suspected that she was wed to a man, like the Tin Woodman of the Oz books, who had no heart. But unlike the Tin Woodman Tom had no concept of his lack; he did not know what a heart was, yet some basic instinct had taught him to conceal this fact from a world in which it might not have found favor. She found herself marveling that he could have kept up so brave a show before all his friends—if indeed any of his acquaintance could really be called that. Could a monster have friends? Could a monster be loved? Even by his wife? Oh, certainly not by his wife! And yet … could a monster really help being what he was?

  “And who have you selected for a better mate?” she asked.

  “Oh, I think Ella Ripley will have me. In fact, I think I may say I’m sure of it.”

  “So? You’ve been at work already. And who, may I ask, have you picked for me? Or am I left to do my own work? You might have given me more warning. It’s much easier to attract a man behind a marriage than after a divorce.”

  “But are you blind, my dear? Everyone knows Paul Farquar is gaga about you! He may be a trifle long in the tooth, and he’s got two failed marriages behind him, but he’ll give you a position second to none in the whole damn town! And what you say about operating better as a married woman than a divorcée is absolutely true. Ella can wait—so long as I keep her satisfied—and you can have all the time you need to hook Paul. I’m sure I don’t have to warn you not to let the old goat have his way with you until the ring is firmly on your finger.”

  Paul Farquar was a gruff, dour man of fifty with short curly gray hair and a bulldog countenance, who had never tried to please and rarely succeeded. His abruptness of manner and rudeness of speech would not have been tolerated in a man of less wealth, but the Farquars, thanks in part to the indefatigable party-giving and high pretensions of his late mother and grandmother, enjoyed a unique social prestige in the city and, more importantly, in the press. Nor was Paul himself quite a nobody. He was intelligent, though his brain was largely unexercised, and he relished a proud nature that scorned anyone who made up to him. Jane had found his heavy streak of crude honesty not wholly unattractive.

  Besides that, he was smitten by her. Assuming that he had only one thing in mind, she had shrugged off his brash compliments and insinuations, which had only the result of intensifying his interest, and now she decided to be more receptive. In far less time than the unspeakable Tom was willing to accord her she had her cantankerous admirer totally enslaved, and when the time came for the divorce the Farquar lawyers speeded the process to its happily predicted conclusion.

  Of her dozen years as Mrs. Farquar Jane found adequate content in the first ten. She was able to perform her sexual role to her greedy spouse’s satisfaction, however little to her own, and she learned how to stake out her own independent demesne in what had been his rigidly ordered and isolated life. For he was quite capable of being fair. In return for his paying for, and even his occasional presence at, her grand successful dinner parties, she agreed to their long, lonely visits to his castle on the Hudson or his shooting lodge in South Carolina. And in return for the seats on the opera and museum boards that he had “bought” for her, she winked at the occasional girlfriend who took her willingly abandoned place in his bed. An unimpeachable wife herself, steadied by what she gratefully conceived to be the coldness of her nature, she would have willingly played the role of Madame de Pompadour to Louis XV and established for him a discreet deer park, but he, ultimately sensing that he repelled her physically, preferred to find his own does. And, inevitably, in the end one of these turned out to be a more designing type who resolved to become Mrs. Farquar.

  “Of course, I married Paul for his money,” she had told her mother, when she informed the latter of the proposed divorce. “No woman in her right mind would have wed him for any other reason. But I was no ordinary gold digger. With me it was a contract. He gave me all the things I wanted, and I in return gave him the nearest thing to happiness he’s ever had. He’ll find that out when he marries his concubine. And I would have stuck to him, too, if he had allowed me to. But, as it is, I’m delighted to be free and on my own, and I certainly intend to make sure that he pays me damages in full for breaking our agreement. Isn’t that only fair?”

  “Don’t ask me, my dear. I haven’t a head for these things. You’ve always had your own way. I can only pray it’s for the best.”

  UP IN A BOX overlooking the dance floor of the Plaza’s grand ballroom, Jane and Harry Hammersly, both members of the board of the charity hosting the benefit party, were showing little interest in the spectacle of the whirling couples. Only one of them held their attention. Rod Jessup was dancing with his ex-wife, Vinnie, and his expression made it clear that it was a duty dance.

  “You’d better go down and cut in, Harry.”

  “Those whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder. Besides, I want to talk about Rod. Or rather about him and you.”

  “I’ll tell you frankly that I like your partner, Harry.” Jane spoke in her definite tone, which was very definite. “Of course, I perfectly saw that you wanted me to.”

  “How did you see that?”

  “Because you never do anything without a purpose. Don’t be offended. I have no objection to purposeful men. But I don’t quite make out your motive. Is it to hang on to me as a client? Do you really think that, even if I were married to your handsome partner, I’d hesitate to leave your roster if I thought I wasn’t getting the best legal advice available?”

  “No, I know you too well. And don’t you be offended. I have no objection to purposeful women. You could do much worse for a third husband than Rod.”

  “What do you know about my husbands? Oh, of course, you know about Paul. But did you ever meet Tom Seitz?”

  “No. But I know he left you to marry an heiress.”

  “Just so. He was the one great mistake of my life. And I’m determined not to make another. My marriage to Paul may have broken up, but it was hardly a mistake.”

  “Hardly. With the princely settlement he’s made you.”

  Jane did not quite like this. “I got much more than my settlement through Paul. But I don’t expect you to see that.” She looked at Harry now more closely. She and he shared something like a meeting of the minds. She considered herself a nicer person than he but not much nicer. “Do you want to make up to Rod for taking his wife? To buy your atonement with my money? No, that wouldn’t really be like you, would it? You don’t believe in atonement.”

  “Hardly,” he said again. “I’m not trying to conceal anything from you, Jane. I worry about Rod. His temperament is so uncertain. I think it would help him—and help my firm, of course—if he were to find peace of mind, and settle down with a fine woman like you.”

  “Why, Harry! I’d no idea you could be so sentimental!”

  “Sometimes it’s realistic to be sentimental.”

  Jane was enjoying the subject. She was enjoying it intensely. She didn’t care if Harry repeated everything she said, as he well might. “And now tell me what’s in it for a fine woman like me.”

  “A first-class husband. A noble soul.”

  “Well!” She threw back her head as she laughed. “That from you, my friend, must be a real compliment. But why did this noble soul cheat on his wife?”

  “I can only suppose that he suspected that she was cheating on him.”

  “And was she?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  “I wonder with whom.” Again she laughed. “At least, Harry, you know that a mortifying truth is better to make your point with than a detectable lie. So I’ll be equally frank with you. I do really like your partner. I may even be a bit in love with him. I find him Byronic. Like a corsair.” Here she quoted from memory.

  “He knew himself detested, but he knew
<
br />   The hearts that loathed him crouched and dreaded, too.

  Lone, wild and strange he stood alike exempt

  From all affection and from all contempt.”

  BUT HE HAD A HEART, didn’t he?” Harry demanded.

  “Oh, certainly. A Byronic hero has to have that.”

  “If I’m sentimental, Jane, is it so odd that you should be romantic?”

  “But I’m a realistic romantic, Harry. I’m not a dream-crazed female who sees Lancelot in every handsome profile that pays her the least attention. I’ve reached an age of wisdom and achieved a fortune with which to implement it. I think I know just how to play all the cards in my hand—and in my heart, too—to find the kind of real happiness I want. I shan’t be fooled again.”

  “Rap on wood when you say that.”

  “Why, Harry, don’t you approve?”

  “One always has second thoughts when a dearly held project is about to succeed.”

  “How like you, my friend! You can never really believe in anything, even something you’ve done your damnedest to bring about!”

  “Call it my curse. Believe it or not, my dear, I’m actually thinking of you. Rod can be quite something to handle.”

  “Leave him to me. I know what he is.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  12

  JANE FARQUAR, NOW JANE JESSUP, had hitherto assumed that she was adequately equipped to handle any crisis that was apt to occur in her adequately protected life. This had certainly been true in her first two marriages. But her third had presented questions for which she seemed to have no easily available response. The bewildering aspect of her situation was that she seemed to have fallen in love—and that for the first time in her life. She had been pretty well convinced that such was a state of mind—or of heart or whatever it was—that would never happen to her, except insofar as her girlish flutters over Tom Seitz could have been called that. Nor had she in the least objected to such apparent immunity to the arrows of Eros. She had always regarded herself as a priestess of the life of reason and was quite content to remain that.