False Gods Page 4

  “But Castledale is yours, Roger!”

  “Not in their opinion. I’ve forfeited my rights.”

  Ned’s finger rested on the base of his wineglass as he pondered something. “There’s one way you might bring them around.”

  “I know. By willing the place to Osgood. You’re a stuck whistle on that subject. But he couldn’t keep it up, even if he wanted it.”

  “He could if you left him the money.”

  “There’s not enough. He’d use it for his family, and it’ll be needed to maintain the house. Osgood hasn’t a penny over his wretched salary. Pratt cut off Felicia when she married without his consent.”

  “He’ll forgive. They always do in the end.”

  “But he’s damn near bust himself! Osgood wrote me about it. Pratt was always the world’s worst investor, and he got his ears pinned back in that Montana mine fraud.”

  “Oh, so Osgood writes you?”

  “When he’s desperate. Felicia had twins, you know. Oh, I sent him a check, of course. I’m not quite the ogre people say. But the real money has to go to the museum. You know that, Ned.”

  “I don’t know it. You may. I have no use for museums, at least in the country. Castledale should be owned by a Carstairs.”

  One night, after a solitary dinner, Roger had risen and strolled to the fireplace to take his usual leave of the portrait over it of General Carstairs. He would offer his great-grandfather a miltary salute, but he never went so far as to imagine that it would be returned. But that evening he had a curious feeling that it had been, that the hero of the Battle of Chesnut Hill, in view of some special and perhaps ominous occasion, was offering him a recognition that might never have to be repeated.

  And then the blankness returned to those authoritative features, and Roger felt, in a swirling, diving emptiness, that he himself was no longer there.

  When he regained consciousness he was in his bed, and Ned, standing by it, was telling him that he had suffered a heart attack.

  Roger eyed him curiously. Certainly Ned was very sombre.

  “What is the prognosis, Ned?” He heard his own voice, but faint and far away. “Facts, please, Ned.”

  “Not good, I’m afraid.”

  “How long?”

  “There’s no time given, Roger.”

  “But time enough to make a new will, is that it?”

  Ned looked pained but still resolute. “I think you’d be more at peace with yourself.”

  “Good old Ned, you never give up, do you? But you’ll be glad to know that I don’t have to make a new will. For I haven’t got one. I tore up the last one because I had some new ideas about setting up the museum that I wanted to think over. If I died now, Osgood would get everything.”

  “Except for Kitty’s dower rights.”

  “She waived them when I gave her the New York house.”

  Ned sat slowly down on the bed. He seemed suddenly very moved. “Roger, my dear brother, it’s not just Osgood and the place I’m thinking of. It’s you. Believe me. If you could just allow the normal succession of things in Castledale, you might rid yourself of the hate that’s been eating away at your heart all these years.”

  “Hate? What are you talking about? Hatred of what?”

  “I’ve never been sure. All I know is it’s there. And that it’s always been there. At least ever since I can remember. Of course, I’m seven years younger than you. Did it all start with that duel?”

  Roger stared with a new interest at this suddenly penetrating sibling. But he didn’t answer the question. “I don’t hate you, Ned.”

  “I don’t believe you do. But I’m part of Castledale. And you certainly don’t hate Castledale.”

  “But its ghosts hate me!”

  “Maybe you could change that.”

  Roger considered this. “But if I give up this hate or obsession or whatever it is, won’t it be too late? If I’ve lived with it so long, what will I have in its place? For whatever time I may have left?”

  Ned actually shrugged. “Nothing in particular, I guess. What I have. What other people have. Wouldn’t that be better?”

  “Would Osgood and Felicia live here if the place was theirs? How would they keep it up?”

  “They’d have me to help them.”

  And Roger realized that, of course, Ned had been writing to them. Well, why not? He closed his eyes as he felt the emptiness coming over him again. If it should be another attack, he could surrender to the soothing notion that he now needn’t do anything about anything. There was a wonderful ease to Ned’s concept of “nothing in particular.” The pavilions of the Lawn stretched down the valley of his mind to the great dome with all the grace and tranquillity of Mr. Jefferson’s noble scheme. He could forget the fire and the sword and the long sordid aftermath and soothe his tired spirits with the blessed memory of the red dirt and blue hills beyond a serene Castledale.

  HERMES

  God of the Self-Made Man

  MY FATHER changed his name from Oscar Ullman to Oscar Leonard in 1885, only a year before he changed (in wedlock) my mother’s from Hettie Straus to Hettie Leonard. To him it was neither an important nor a particularly significant act; it was his simple assertion to the world that he refused to be identified too obviously with a particular race or religion. “Leonard,” he would say, “commits me to nothing—I can be a citizen of the globe.” But to his and Mother’s New York relatives, including such distinguished interrelated families of German-Jewish origin as Seligmans, Lewisohns and Lehmans, though few of them had retained the Orthodox faith, his gesture, while not ranked as outright treachery, was sneered at as unworthy of a gentleman, as the repudiation of a noble heritage and, even worse, as a truckling to the Protestant establishment. They continued to receive my parents—indeed, their sympathy for the cousin now referred to as “poor, bullied Hettie” would alone have guaranteed that—but whenever introductions at a party were needed, you would be sure to hear: “And this is my cousin Oscar Ullman—oh, I beg your pardon—what am I thinking of—Oscar Leonard, of course.”

  Father didn’t mind. I sometimes thought he didn’t mind anything. He was a big, breezy, broad-chested man with high, wavy, once prematurely grey hair and a loud resonant voice. He had achieved some degree of fame as a popular professor of philosophy at Columbia and had written a couple of best sellers: The Wish for the Deed and My Brother’s Keeper. He was forceful and fearless, with a great capacity for enjoying life, which his modest share of a much-divided family fortune enabled him sufficiently to implement. Mother was very dear and very loving, but with little of his powerful intellect; she acted as his pleasant but by no means uncritical helpmate, showing at all times a remarkable equanimity of temper, but I suspect that she harbored inner doubts as to the wisdom or even the ethics of his having distanced himself from the tribe. The inspiration and education of their only child fell inevitably upon her mate.

  Father was determined that I should grow up as free a soul as he. “The world can be your oyster, my boy,” he used to tell me, “if you only have the guts to swallow it.” But it was the world of the spirit that he meant. Father loved good food and good wine and shiny gadgets and machines—he was an early convert to the automobile and tore about the dirt roads of Westchester with goggles in an open Bentley—but he had no interest in social or worldly success and tried to impress upon me that the only use of any money that he should give or leave me was to render me free to observe and think and perhaps create. He constantly mocked the materialism of our much richer relatives, I think because he suspected that my genes contained a goodly share of it. And of course he was right. I was greedier than even he divined. I wanted everything. I wanted their world as well as his.

  I also wanted to go to a New England boarding school, for I had learned that their graduates enjoyed a preferred social status at Yale and Harvard. Some of these academies, by no means all, accepted Jewish boys, but Father wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t want me to encounter anti-Semitism in any form
until I was old enough and tough enough to put it in what he at least considered its proper perspective. He had very definite ideas on the subject, which he set forth later in his privately printed memoirs:

  “Anti-Semitism in Europe, having its roots in the Dark Ages when a united Catholic Church portrayed Jews as the crucifiers of their god, was a vicious and almost unbeatable superstition. But in the USA, where religion has played only a minor role and where no federal or state government can enforce or even recognize it, weak little creeds multiply like thistles. There is thus no prevailing orthodoxy that can be martialed against Jews whose unpopularity may be attributed only to their greater success in the marketplace. Rich or even well-to-do Gentiles, therefore, have no cause to be jealous of Jews, and such anti-Semitism as exists in their ranks is a kind of inherited convention or even mannerism that has no real basis and will be put aside any time they find it convenient to develop a relationship with a particular Jew. Indeed, it will often become clear that they do not know what a Jew is, though a not inconsiderable number of them have some strain of Hebraic ancestry.”

  I attended a private day school on the west side of Central Park where at least half the boys were Jewish, as were a good proportion of the family friends who came to our parties at the big sunny apartment on Riverside Drive or the grey stone villa in Rye, so that when I went to Yale in 1907 I had not encountered any social milieu where I was not deemed as good as anyone else. Indeed, as I led my class in scholastic achievement and as my burly figure was an asset on the athletic field, I was inclined to feel myself a superior being. But I was not my father’s pupil for nothing. I never lost sight of a world in which I might have to start at a disadvantage. He had taught me, above anything else, even things of the spirit, to be a realist.

  At Yale that world indeed revealed itself, but for the first two years I was too proud—and too cautious—to expose myself to its sting. I worked hard for the high marks that I continued to obtain and confined myself largely to the company of those friends from my New York academy who had gone with me to New Haven. But I noted everything that went on on that campus, how men dressed and talked, what fraternities and societies were the most cultivated, what careers were looked forward to. And I think what most prompted me at last to seek to enlarge my social scope was the remark of a Harvard professor of philosophy, a superb old Boston snob, whose passion for the subject he taught had prevailed over his prejudice to induce him to visit my parents in Rye. When I told him, in response to his polite but perfunctory inquiries as to how I spent my time in New Haven, that I largely studied, he replied with a nod: “So wise of you. If you had cared for undergraduate frolics, you had done better with us. No Yale man, you know, is ever quite a gentleman.”

  Now the odd thing about this fatuous remark was that I thought I could see some truth in it. I had observed that there was a rackety, “boola-boola,” not so disarmingly boyish aspect to even the elite of my class that contrasted unfavorably with the more languid, more disdainful airs of the sons of Brahmins whom I had observed on a visit to Harvard Yard. Of course, it was all nonsense. But it was a nonsense with which I was beginning to see it should not be insuperably difficult for me to cope.

  My first step in junior year was to elect William Lyon (Billy) Phelps’s course in British nineteenth-century poets, with its heavy, its almost exclusive emphasis on Robert Browning. All the golden youth flocked to this. I had my eye in particular on two first cousins who were also roommates in Vanderbilt Hall: Gurdon and Horace Aspinwall. They came of an old Manhattan clan; they had gone to Groton School in Massachusetts, and they knew everyone in the group on which I had fixed my eye. Gurdon, I had heard, was supposed to be “snotty,” but Horace had a reputation of amiability, and when I took a seat by him in class he responded affably to my overtures.

  “Do you really like Browning?” I asked, as we crossed the old campus after class.

  “Of course! Isn’t he the greatest of the great?”

  “Which of his poems do you prefer?”

  “Oh, the love ones, don’t you? ‘Evelyn Hope’ and ‘The Last Ride Together.’”

  “But are they really love poems? Aren’t they too unilateral? Evelyn Hope is only a dead little girl. And the reason it’s the last ride is that he’s been turned down.”

  “But that’s just my trouble, you see,” he admitted with a grin that was half sheepish, half almost proud. “Unrequited love.” He paused to sigh. “I trust that won’t happen to you. Which poems do you prefer?”

  I had to think. “I suppose the Renaissance ones. Those about coldhearted villainous Italian nobles. Like the murderous duke in ‘My Last Duchess.’ Or Guido in The Ring and the Book. I feel they’re the real Browning.”

  “You mean he wanted to be like that?”

  “He wanted power. Like so many artists. And they know they’re never going to get it. So they enjoy fantasizing about it.” I shrugged. “Maybe I say that only because I do.”

  “That’s very interesting. Why don’t we have lunch and discuss it? Come to my frat.”

  I accepted. I knew he belonged to Psi U. I think he would have said “fraternity” to one of his Groton friends. But as so frequently happens in college life, a friendship was established that same day. I found myself a welcome visitor in the rooms he shared with his cousin Gurdon.

  Horace was much handsomer than Gurdon, though I don’t know why I say that, because Gurdon wasn’t really handsome at all, despite a balding, gleaming, eye-snapping, big-nosed desire to appear so. Perhaps it was because you didn’t realize that Horace was handsome until you compared him with someone else. His figure was lithe and well knit, but there was just a suggestion of slightness to it. His auburn hair was thick and long with a mild wave, and in profile his pallor and Greek nose gave him something of the air of a poet, but his determined stride across the campus in the company of his peers suggested a half-defiant need to proclaim himself “one of the boys.” In the same way his wide brown eyes, after fixing you with a luminous and faintly distrustful stare, would suddenly flash in mockery, and you would hear his cheerful but rather coarse laugh. But he willed the coarseness; that was the point. He could be very funny indeed, but he could also be very serious, and the latter mood, I soon learned, was the truer one. Horace was never sure of himself, but he had from childhood, I suspected, been very sure that he had to be a good boy.

  Young men, as I have implied, become intimate easily, and Horace and I were no exceptions. He never showed the slightest awareness of the difference in our backgrounds; he had been born, so far as I could make out, without a snobbish bone in his body. It was true that his friends, except for me, were all drawn from the same milieu, but that was because this milieu had been his natural habitat. That he had not had the imagination or even the curiosity to change it might have been simply the result of his failure to see that other habitats were any different.

  Gurdon was much more sophisticated, a natural snob born with the wit to conceal it. He was very social, an accomplished manipulator of men, smart and shrewd, with eyes that sparkled with the intent to convey an air of friendly mischief and a braying, humorless laugh. He treated Horace more like a kid brother than a cousin of equal age, and I had little doubt that he regarded me with a distinct suspicion, as if he could not believe that a man as intelligent as I obviously was would be cultivating Horace from motives of simple friendship. But he was cordial enough. Gurdon would never discard a card until he was sure it had no value. Not unlike myself.

  It was probably because of Gurdon’s superiority in worldly wisdom that Horace found me a more comfortable confidant to hear of his love for Dorothy Stonor. She was the only child of the second marriage of the twice-widowered Frank Stonor, with whose famous career I was sufficiently familiar, the streetcar magnate and statesman who had served briefly in Cleveland’s cabinet and was known as the patrician liberal who had reared a sober brownstone cube on a prominent corner of Fifth Avenue to mock the garish derivative palaces of his nouveaux riches
neighbors. The snapshot of his beloved that Horace carried in his wallet showed me a handsome rather than pretty girl with straight dark hair tied at the back of her neck, a firm nose and chin and candid, inquiring eyes. You could see that she was honest and would be frank. Perhaps even too much so.

  “Why do you think it’s all so hopeless?” I asked. “Aren’t you considered rather a catch? By mothers in Gotham, anyway?”

  “But Dorothy doesn’t have a mother. Hers died when she was a baby.”

  “Well, by fathers, then.”

  “Oh, Mr. Stonor has no use for the likes of me. How could he? A poor college student with law school still ahead of him.”

  “But surely your family has money.”

  “Not what he calls money. Dorothy will have millions, Maury.”

  “I don’t see that as a drawback. Besides, I thought these tycoons liked to marry their daughters into old families.”

  “But Mr. Stonor comes of an old family himself! The only thing self-made about him is his fortune. No, he has very different plans for his princess.”

  “Such as a foreign title?”

  “They’re out of fashion now.” Horace pondered for a minute and then admitted, “I guess I don’t really know what he wants except that it’s sure as hell something a lot better than Horace Aspinwall.”

  “But can’t Dorothy decide for herself? Or are we still in the day of arranged marriages?”

  “No, no, Dorothy could never be forced into anything. But she’s terribly under her father’s influence. She was brought up as an only child by one parent. Her half-brothers are much older and long married. She considers Daddy a kind of god.”

  “And how does she feel about you?”

  “Oh, she likes me well enough. She always seems glad to see me, and she writes me when she goes off on trips with her old man. In fact she’s too nice to me; that’s one of my troubles. She treats me more as a pal than a beau.”

  “But she must know how you really feel?”

  “Oh, yes!” Horace’s face lit up with his sense of this. But at once it seemed to drop. “Only she brushes it off. She mutters about our being too young and not knowing our own minds—things her father has told her, no doubt.”