Honorable Men Read online

  Politics and war were shut out of Bar Harbor. It was difficult even to read the newspaper. Yet it was saved from being too hopelessly silly or artificial by being only itself. When the husbands and fathers from New York talked of distant disasters after dinner over brandy and cigars, the ladies in the drawing room, resuming the discussion of the umbrella tables, knew that they were coping with the “real” problems.

  I think that one of my principal reasons for loving Bar Harbor was that my parents seemed less ridiculous there. It was hard to take the values of New York too seriously, and the social game, the gossip, the endless mirth, seemed to fit in with the squawking of the gulls that awoke one on misty mornings and the reflection of the midday sun on the vivid shutters of the shops on Main Street. And so, in the long summer that followed my hectic debutante season, although my heart was filled with a sense of anticlimax, I could at least hope that it might be dulled by the euphoria of a Maine July.

  Gus Leighton had taken his usual rooms at the Malvern, and he told me firmly that he was “off duty.”

  “But suppose Mr. Right comes along?” I protested. “Will he give us a second chance? Won’t we have to pounce?”

  “You know nothing ever happens in Bar Harbor. It’s a Garden of Eden where everybody’s allowed to eat the apples.” “And the poor snake is out of a job.”

  “Precisely. Which is why I have cast off my shiny green skin and intend to doze. Go thou and do likewise.”

  Of course, Gus was not serious about relaxing his social life. He dined out nightly. But although no one expected so elegant a bachelor to return their hospitality, Gus was meticulous about his obligations and would give a monthly dinner party at the Swimming Club that he called a “massacre” (“kill-off,” he insisted, being too mild a term) to satisfy them. But as he would think over each boring hostess to whom he was indebted, and picture to himself what havoc she might create in an otherwise congenial gathering, he would end by striking her name, until finally his “massacre” had evolved into a delightful party of only those persons (always the most amusing) who had not invited Gus Leighton to dine in the preceding four weeks. When I asked him why he accepted so many bids from hostesses who simply wearied him, he wailed, “Because I have no one to answer my telephone, and I haven’t time to think up an excuse!” He once showed me a notebook in which he had rated (or berated) the different entertainers of Bar Harbor, and I recall such brief jottings as: “Mrs. Hale. Fish house punch! Never again.” or “Mrs. Twining. Took me out of a business double. Nevermore!” But he always did go again; a good Bar Harborite never kept a good resolution.

  At Gus’s first dinner party that summer I found myself seated next to Jonathan Askew, a tall, baggy bachelor of twenty-seven, whose mother, Lady Lennox, had recently (for tax reasons, according to my all-knowing ma) abandoned the United Kingdom for her native land and had repurchased her parents’ old place, Arcadia, on a peninsula that gave her a double view of Frenchman’s Bay. Askew, the sole issue of her earlier American match, was making his first visit to Mount Desert.

  “What do young ladies like to talk about in Bar Harbor?” he asked me in a loud hollow tone, as if he were offering me a tray of goodies.

  I knew right away that this had to be Gus’s candidate. Askew, thanks to an ancestor who had invested first in the China trade and then in railroads, bore a famous name. He looked the part, too; he had a large aquiline nose, a high sloping forehead, curly auburn hair and watery gray eyes that stared at one blankly, haughtily, suspiciously. His voice was high and affected, and he moved his large body with a kind of arrogant clumsiness. He would have been perfectly cast in a Cecil B. DeMille film about a Roman emperor.

  I took a firm line.

  “Young ladies in Bar Harbor like to talk about different things at different times,” I replied to his question. “When I have the honor of sitting next to an Askew, I feel inclined to ask what it feels like to be one.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing so great.” He took his status as much for granted as if he had been a prince or a movie star. “It’s rather a bore, really. One can’t see why one’s all that different from another chap.”

  Chap. But of course he had been raised in England. “Aren’t you afraid that people are after your money?”

  His eyes widened. “The girls, you mean?”

  “Aren’t they all dying to be Mrs. Askew? Perhaps you should confine your attentions to heiresses.”

  “My mater says that makes no difference. According to her, the average heiress is even greedier than the poor girl. She would want what I have either to add to her pile or else as a guarantee that I wasn’t marrying her for her money.”

  This was my first glimpse of the sort of mother Lady Lennox must be. I felt almost sorry for him. “So that it’s impossible for you to be married except for mercenary reasons?”

  “So it would seem,” he agreed gravely. “Unless I were to find someone indifferent to money. Someone who had enough accomplishment in her own right to be above material needs.”

  “You mean a famous actress? An opera singer? A trapeze artist?”

  “Would I have to go quite so far? What about a famous debutante?”

  He was actually flirting! My lips parted in surprise. “But I thought they were the most dangerous of all! Why on earth would they become debutantes but to make good matches?”

  “I should have thought a girl who appeared on the cover of Life could pick just about any man she wanted.”

  “Well, Mrs. Simpson’s already got the King of England. So the rest of us will have to make do with simple dukes. And maybe here and there an Askew.”

  “Oh, come, you’re pulling a fellow’s leg.”

  “I’ve never been more serious. Do you realize what I’ve staked in this game? My coming-out party represents my inheritance from my grandmother. And at the rate Mummie and Daddy are going, they’ll be totally bust in a few years’ time. I can promise you, Jonathan Askew, that I don’t relish the idea of becoming a waitress at Jordan’s Pond or begging Miss Herron to take me in as an assistant in her kindergarten.”

  “But surely things can’t be that bad.” He looked bewildered. “You wouldn’t be living the way you are if that were the case. And you wouldn’t be … well, you certainly wouldn’t be…”

  “Telling you?” I finished for him. “To your face? Why not? I’m like the trick man who shows you his outstretched palms and lets you search his pockets before he picks a gold piece out of your ear. It’s a question of skill. Professional skill. You’d better watch out, my friend. Or don’t go out at night on Mount Desert Island without your mummie to protect you!”

  I continued in this jocose vein, ignoring his pleas that I be “serious,” until it was time to turn to my other neighbor. Askew was oblivious of the rules of dinner table conversation; he seemed to feel quite entitled to monopolize my attention. I had to show him my back to keep him from butting in. And after dinner, when he should have joined one of the ladies who had not been his neighbor at table, he made his deliberate way to the sofa where I was sitting.

  “Really, Mr. Askew,” I protested, “how is our host to entertain his guests properly if you are so unruly?”

  Looking very cross, he actually left the party! When I got home at midnight Mother was still up with her eternal needlepoint, listening to the radio. She switched it off at once when I told her whom I had sat next to.

  “He’s staying with his mother, of course. I suppose he considers it slumming after Newport.”

  “Is he as rich as they say?”

  “Who says so? The Askews believe in primogeniture. His cousin Matthew got the bulk of the fortune. Of course, Jonathan came into what he has early, when his father was killed playing polo. It was a long minority. I suppose he may have five millions.”

  “Well, isn’t that enough?”

  “For what? For a man who thinks he’s entitled to fifty? I’m sure Jonathan feels he’s been very badly treated indeed.”

  I should say here that M
other, for all her rapt concern with the social game, never once tried to make a match for me. She seemed to regard it as an entertainment that had no necessary relation to her family.

  “What is Lady Lennox like?”

  “She tries to be that tough, down-to-earth, damn-your-eyes British type. You know, heavy gold jewelry, tweeds, and dogs all over the place. She has one qualification for the role, anyway. A tin heart.”

  “You mean she doesn’t give a damn for Jonathan?”

  “She doesn’t give a damn for anyone.”

  I was not really surprised when Askew called me the next morning. I knew when I had made a hit. He asked me if I would take him on one of my walks up a mountain. He explained that Gus had informed him that I knew them all.

  “I’ll pick you up at ten,” I told him crisply. “We can do Jordan and then lunch at the tea house.”

  He huffed and puffed a good deal going up the trail, for he was obviously not used to much physical exercise, yet he insisted on talking all the way. As soon as he dropped the arrogant manner, which I divined was really a cover of shyness, he became confiding and rather sweet. He had never, so far as I could make out, done a thing with his life, or even seriously contemplated doing one. He had been brought up to consider that being an Askew was an occupation in itself, like being royalty. Yet he was not really conceited; he was almost humble about the little that his confused mishmash of European schools had taught him. I gathered that he had spent most of his life in the disordered wake of an aggressive mother. One of the things he seemed proudest of was that he had spent a whole winter in London tutoring his younger half sister, Amy Lennox, because her psychiatrist had pronounced her too tense and indrawn to endure a strange teacher. Obviously, his mother was a horror.

  “But you can’t just be a family tutor all your life,” I pointed out.

  “No, I suppose I can’t, can I?”

  “Don’t you think you could bring yourself to do something more creative?”

  “It’s good of you to ask. I thought I might write a history of the Askews. These society reporter chaps, you know, get those things all botched up.”

  “It so happens I do know something about that. But is there really so much point in unbotching it?”

  “Well, facts are facts, you know.”

  “Do I?”

  When I dropped him back at his house, we met Lady Lennox in the doorway, about to step into the little Bugatti in which she tore about the island at dangerous speeds. She was a large, much-powdered, false blonde, dressed in immaculate white. She leaned down to stare at me with glinting, mocking dark eyes.

  “So you’re the famous Alida Struthers! I’m relieved to see you’ve brought my boy back in one piece.”

  “Did you think I would eat him up?”

  “Well, I’m not sure he could stop you—once you’d started!”

  “Oh, come, Mother, that’s no way to talk to Alida!”

  She ignored him. “Come around some afternoon, my dear, and you and I will have a little chat alone. I was a debutante myself a century or so back. We might compare notes. Or is it just a case of plus ça change?”

  I decided boldness was the only way. “What I’d really like is a tip on how you did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Married an Askew.”

  Lady Lennox snorted. “You’d better watch out, Johnnie boy! This one plays with her cards on the table! They’re the worst.”

  I never did have that cozy chat with Lady Lennox, but I had several more walks with Jonathan. In fact, he attached himself to me as far as I would allow it, and he was constantly on the telephone when I would not. At the club he would join me and maintain a sulky silence if any other friends came by. If I sent him away, he would retire to the veranda and sit by himself, staring moodily across the lawn at me. And at the Saturday night dances he would have no partner but me.

  My feelings were ambivalent. I liked him; I even pitied him; and I enjoyed our long, rambling, rather childish talks. We told each other endless silly stories about ourselves and laughed at our friends and relatives. Alone with me, he showed a naive, sunny, confiding nature; his sulkiness and pride were only poses. He blandly announced that he was in love with me on our second walk and proposed to me on our third, but he made no clumsy efforts to kiss or maul me after I had told him firmly that I preferred to be let alone. And, of course, it was fun to have all Bar Harbor know that the scion of the Askews was at my beck and call. What an easy and obvious solution to all my problems!

  On the other hand, it went against my grain to know that everyone in the summer community, nay, every employee of the Swimming Club, every merchant on Main Street, was convinced that I was using all the tricks in my bag to capture a man whom I would have scorned had he not been an Askew. How could I bear to be so exactly what everyone thought me, to fit into the pattern of our crazy social fabric as neatly and as inevitably as the parents for whom I had never felt aught but contempt? I had turned myself into a newspaper debutante, and now it began to look as if I should be a newspaper bride.

  Lady Lennox seemed to penetrate my mind and to revel in reading it aloud to me. My dislike of her at last broke into the open one morning when I drove to her house to pick up Jonathan for our now daily walk. I had arrived a bit early, and as he was still upstairs dressing, I joined Lady Lennox on the patio, where she was finishing her breakfast. It was one of Mount Desert’s peerless days, and the sparkling sea dazzled, but Jonathan’s mother, blinking her black eyes at me, her powder caked in the glaze of the sunlight, seemed at once passive and dangerous, inert yet potentially agile, a lizard on a rock. When she spoke, she justified my uneasy apprehension.

  “It won’t be as bad as you think.”

  “What won’t?”

  “Marriage to Jonathan. He’s not hard to handle, and you strike me as having already learned the knack.”

  “You take it for granted that I want to marry him?”

  “Why on earth else would you bother with him?”

  “Can’t you see any good qualities in your own son?”

  “Of course I can. A mother is perfectly qualified to appraise a son. So long as she doesn’t succumb to middle-class maternal blindness. I can see that Jonathan is rather a dear—when he’s not being stuffy and Askewish. But being a dear isn’t what a girl like you looks for in a man.”

  “How do you know what I look for in a man?”

  “Because I understand you. Remember: I was a debutante myself. And a poor one, too. And my parents were almost as bad as yours.”

  I had no interest in resenting this. “And you were after an Askew, too!”

  “And one who was even less attractive than Jonathan. Max was actually unfaithful to me on the honeymoon. I was about to divorce him when he was killed on that polo field.”

  “That must have been a relief.”

  “It wasn’t, in fact. Because it turned out that the money was all in trust for Jonathan. I had to spend my life in the Surrogate’s Court trying to get a decent allowance. Fortunately George Lennox turned up. He had a few shares of a Canadian gold mine. Not many, really, but enough to exempt him from the British duty of wedding Yankee heiresses. Or perhaps he assumed, because I was a Mrs. Askew, that I was one. They’re so careless about American facts and figures.”

  “Fortunately for you.”

  “Yes, my dear, fortunately for me. His death was untimely, too, unless you prefer to call it timely. He had received some rather nasty letters about me—all false, of course—at the time of his heart attack.”

  I rose, trembling. “Lady Lennox, I could almost marry Jonathan to make up to him for having a mother like you!”

  I was answered only by her deep rumbling laugh. I don’t know what more I might have said had Jonathan not appeared in the doorway.

  “Hallo! What are you two yacking about?”

  “Oh, just women’s chatter, darling. It wouldn’t interest you. Besides, he wouldn’t understand it, would he, Alida?”

 
; I turned away, tears now in my eyes, and shook my head angrily when Jonathan questioned me about it. We drove in silence to our trail and climbed in silence to the peak. At all times I kept a lead of several yards between myself and my puffing companion.

  “For God’s sake, Alida, what’s wrong?” he demanded when we were seated at last with our backs to a rock to contemplate the view. “What horrible things did Mother tell you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t give a damn what she says or thinks.”

  “That’s my girl. Neither do I.”

  “Oh, but you do! Don’t kid yourself.”

  “I don’t. I swear I don’t!” And as I looked at him, it suddenly occurred to me that he might not. “If you marry me,” he went on with a gasp, “you’ll never have to see her. I promise!”

  As I have said, it was a day of breathtaking clarity. I could see for miles over the untroubled blue of the Atlantic to the gray-white speck that was Egg Rock. I could see the whole village of Bar Harbor, with its neat white and yellow box houses, and the gray battleships of the visiting fleet, exactly like the toy vessels they are always compared to by observers at my elevation. I could see the long climbing forests in the neighboring hills and the black soaring dots of two eagles as high above us as we were high over the sea. Surely it was Lucifer who had lured me up there to show me the kingdoms of the earth!

  “But supposing I tell you, Jonathan, that no matter how much I may like you, I’d never dream of marrying you without the money?”