Manhattan Monologues Page 4

  I should have got up and walked away. But I didn’t, and his horrid smile took full advantage of my indecision.

  “How dare you speak of my father like that!”

  “Everyone knows it. Certainly everyone who knows Otto.”

  “Otto is outrageous.”

  “Let’s leave that aside. Will you marry me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Shall we dance?”

  “I think we’d better.”

  And we danced. But from then on our relationship was distinctly changed. He was—to me—a declared suitor and a constant caller at the house. My parents were not aware of his intentions; I can now see that they probably considered him a confirmed bachelor, or even a pederast, though the latter term was unknown to me at the time. Papa did, however, see fit to warn me of Miles’s complete ineligibility.

  “Mr. Constable is a pleasant enough addition to any dinner party, Agnes. But don’t get into your head the idea that he could ever, by the remotest possibility, be considered an appropriate mate for any of your circle. He is jobless and penniless and has no purpose in life but to amuse himself and others. Such men end up either in the gutter or marrying rich women. I don’t know which fate is worse.”

  This was quite in keeping with what I expected of Papa; it was obviously in keeping with his role in my life. But I was beginning to suspect that Miles might be offering me something different and more interesting, no matter that it was fraught with unfamiliarity and danger. I had never had much feeling that the men in control of my world were necessarily right or wrong. They were the powers that were; that was all. But the question—was it all?—was never totally banned from my speculations. One answer may have been that I was a pagan: I believed in gods, all right—how could I not, when thunderbolts so often threatened—but it did not follow that the gods were beneficent, or that a less black-browed one might not occasionally surface. I remembered Dionysus.

  There was, however, an aspect of Miles that bothered me greatly, and that was the somber side of his nature, which I had not known before and which showed itself more sharply as his courtship (for that was what I now fully recognized it to be) progressed. He seemed to have a dark sense, which made me uneasy, that I, in some strange fashion, represented his “last chance.”

  “I don’t see why you undervalue yourself,” I protested to him once. “It seems to me that you make too much of your disadvantages in life. You have all kinds of abilities. Everyone says that! You could go into business.”

  “There speaks the tycoon’s granddaughter! Me, in business? Can you imagine it? I’d go mad after my first week in the counting house. And so would my poor supervisors.”

  “Well, you could be a lawyer. Or a doctor.”

  “Agnes, I’m thirty-two! And utterly untrained for law or for medicine. Don’t you see it? I’m in a world that has no use for me—commercially, professionally, even artistically. I’m a fifth wheel in Mr. McKinley’s America.”

  “You get on. Look how well you get on!”

  “From hand to mouth. Until the first day I bore Old Lady Astor. Or Alva Belmont. Or Mamie Fish. And then my goose is cooked.”

  “But it’s still very tasty, I’m sure.”

  “Laugh on. I’d be indigestible. Always overdone. No, I’m like you, Aggie. We don’t belong.”

  “What do you mean, I don’t belong? It seems to me, if anything, I belong too much.”

  “On the surface, yes. But it’s not only you, dear child. It’s you and your siblings and the whole tribe of your cousins—all of your grandpa’s multitudinous progeny. Let’s take them, one by one. We’ll start with your brother, Otto, a weakling, a doomed failure…”

  “Otto is brilliant! You’ve said so yourself!”

  “What has that got to do with it? I’m speaking of character. Otto is twenty-five and hasn’t done a thing in his life but hate his father. That’s an interesting occupation, but hardly a life’s work. Your cousins Jack and Billy Hammersly are already on their way to the devil—Jack with drink and Billy with gambling. Oh, they’re both charming and still young, and everyone smilingly assumes they’ll straighten out, but a sharp eye can see what the end will be. Sammy Thorn is somewhat steadier, for he’s being trained to be the rich one, but he wholly lacks the imagination to handle a fortune, and his undiscriminating susceptibility to designing women almost guarantees that he’ll marry a gold digger who’ll make a dent even in his pile. As for his brother Alistair, he’s…”

  “But what about the girls?” I interrupted indignantly. “You can’t say any of them drink or gamble.”

  “No, they’re better off, I admit. The stronger sex always is. But they’ll still be married, every one of them, for their money.”

  “You can’t know how that worries them! They’ll be cautious about that, never fear!”

  “It won’t do them a particle of good, because they expect mercenary men to be greasy moustache-twisters and not broad-shouldered, blond, blue-eyed Yankee Adonises. Some of the girls, of course, may marry peers, whose money motives, for reasons of pure snobbery, are forgiven by their fathers, but they will be miserable if not salvaged by divorce or annulment. The lucky ones will marry solid burghers who will be content with their dowries and leave their spouses to enjoy cards and clothes while they engross themselves in a stock market that doubles the money they can never learn to enjoy.”

  “Oh, you’re terrible! And what do you leave for me? What do you offer that’s so great? Aren’t you as much after money as the others? Why, you don’t even have the decency to make a secret of it!”

  “I don’t!” Miles jumped to his feet and spread his arms out as if to embrace the gilded little French salon in which I had chosen to receive him. “But I’d use your money to get you out of all this! To make you free! To make us both free!”

  “And you’re the only man who can give me this freedom?”

  “You know, I really think I am. The only man, anyway, who can give it to you and love you at the same time. It’s a rare chance, Aggie. You’d better grab it!”

  And I believed him! I still, looking back, believe him. Had I thought myself a free agent, I wonder whether I shouldn’t have accepted him then and there. But I had to consult my parents, and that night I went to Mama, who hardly listened to me before sending me straight to Papa’s study. And there all hell broke loose.

  ***

  What I had to make clear to my parents was that Miles was now presenting himself as a suitor for my hand. I had by no means made up my mind as to whether I would ultimately accept or deny his suit, but I did not feel that I could allow my family to continue to receive him under the illusion that he was just another Sunday afternoon caller. I suppose I should not have been surprised that Papa failed utterly to understand my noncommittal attitude. He assumed, with his usual violence, that I was already in passion’s grip and that I might be expected to climb down a rope ladder one night from my third-floor bedroom to the pavement on Fifth Avenue to elope with Miles, presumably clutching, like Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, as many of the family jewels and ducats as I could get my hot little hands on.

  “I have always taken pride in your intelligence and common sense, Agnes,” he barked at me. “I have regarded you as a striking exception to the weakness to which your sex is lamentably subject. And you know what plans I had for you! But now you have shown yourself one of the very weakest of women! That man—if the term applies to him—will not be received under this roof again! And I forbid you to meet him elsewhere.”

  “What am I to do, then? Not go out at all? For Miles goes to all the parties I go to. And he’s Sammy Thorn’s best friend. How am I to avoid meeting him?”

  Papa appeared temporarily nonplussed by the coolness of my logic. But he came up with an answer. “I mean you should not see him alone. Or by appointment. If you attend a party, and he comes in and joins the group of which you are a part, I suppose you shouldn’t make a scene by refusing to nod to him. But let there be no going int
o corners for tete-a-tetes!”

  “But, Papa, what if the group breaks up, and I’m left alone with him?”

  “Don’t ask such silly questions!” he exclaimed in exasperation. “I want your intimacy with that scoundrel to cease. How it’s to be done I leave to you. What are your brains for, I’d like to know?”

  I knew when to stop. I had got all the leeway I needed. I didn’t want to push Papa into sending me up the Hudson to stay with his two dismal maiden sisters in their bleak Gothic tower. And I soon learned that the surest way to placate him and to avert his watchful eye from my comings and goings was to treat with common courtesy any new candidate that he brought forward to displace Miles from what he called my “obsession.”

  And he soon enough had one. In fact, it became apparent that the true cause of Papa’s unreasonable and ungoverned fit of temper over poor Miles was less the latter’s marital ineligibility than the untimeliness of his proposal, coming as it did at the moment when Papa had at last selected his own candidate for the honor of my hand. The “great man” of the future, his and mine, was to be Walter Wheelock.

  The most extraordinary thing about Walter—and he was a most extraordinary man—was that nobody, including me, ever really got to know him, ever fathomed the depths of his arcane personality. The almost impenetrable personality he turned to the world and, with only a few changes, to his immediate circle was a gracious but formal one: that of a tall, slender, handsome man, with a strong chin, a commanding nose, piercing eyes and a high clear forehead reaching up to a balding yet noble scalp. But if he was gracious to the world, it was also apparent that he expected to conquer it.

  Papa had told me his history The offspring of two old but impecunious Manhattan families, he had been raised by a widowed mother who had denied herself every luxury in order to give him the best of schooling, clothes and travel. And he had rewarded her every expectation: leading his class at Yale, being “tapped” for the prestigious secret society, Skull & Bones, writing a best seller on the history of the Monroe Doctrine at twenty-five, and having now earned, still in his early thirties, the reputation of being one of the brightest and most coming young men in the State Department. Papa admitted to only a single check in Walter’s rising career: that of being rejected as a suitor for the hand of my cousin Beatrice Thorn, the great heiress of the family, by her father on the grounds that he was a fortune hunter. Papa’s low opinion of Uncle Sam Thorn had dropped even lower when he learned of this.

  “Your brother is an even greater ass than I suspected,” he fumed to my placid and indifferent mother at the breakfast table. “He cannot see the difference between a man who seeks a solid financial basis for a career that may lead to his being Secretary of State and one who is looking for money to keep himself in racehorses and mistresses.”

  Yet Walter must have been enough of a realist to revise downward the estimate of his financial requirements, for he evidently saw no objection to my less brilliant expectations. And I can certainly assert that from the very beginning of his attentions to me, when he assumed the infelicitous role of suitor into which my father, with his customary absence of any concession to subtlety, had thrust him, he tactfully refrained from all adulatory compliments or factitiously romantic phrases. He could, by his easy, cool manners, have been an old family friend or a relative, a pleasant bridge between the generations (he was halfway between Mama’s age and mine) and a gentleman who did not consider a lady his conversational inferior. I can see in retrospect that there may have been a shrewd design in his letting me see him as the precise opposite of Miles (whose name he never mentioned), as a man, in short, who sought to reorganize the world rather than sneer at it, and as a guide to fit a woman into the new creation rather than fly with her out of it to some never-never land. And he did succeed in weakening my prejudice against him as a paternal candidate; I came to accept him, not certainly as a lover, but as a new friend.

  Walter’s views on the role of women in our society were considerably more liberal than those of my father and uncles. While he did not rule out a future for us in the professions or in business, he believed that at present our best hope was to be the wives and helpmates of important men.

  “There’s no point in getting too far ahead of the times,” he told me. “If I were a woman, I’d want to marry a man whose career I could share. It wouldn’t be a businessman. What role is there for a Mrs. Rockefeller or a Mrs. Carnegie to play, in oil or in steel? But in politics and diplomacy, the husband and wife can be almost equal partners. That is something some of our First Ambassadresses have learned better than some of our First Ladies.”

  This faintly irritated me. It was too much of his plan to show me all I could do for him, and it gave me the nerve to twit him with the rumored engagement of his former inamorata.

  “Well, at least we know one kind of marriage that is a true partnership,” I affirmed. “My cousin Beatrice and the Earl of Chester. Aren’t lords and ladies equal stars in the ceremony of an ancient peerage?”

  “They could be. Perhaps they should be. But American brides don’t always do their part; they don’t believe in it.”

  “Beatrice will. She loves coronets and tiaras!”

  “As bangles, yes. But wait till she sees great gobs of her fortune going to pay the earl’s pile of old debts and to set up his younger brothers. And wait till he wants to use the money she’s designed for a splendid new mansion in London on some moldy old castle in a remote part of Wales.”

  I must admit that things turned out for Beatrice much as he predicted. She ultimately found happiness in a second union, with her oldest son’s tutor.

  Miles, of course, was forbidden our house, as well as the homes of Mama’s sisters, but Uncle Sam Thorn would listen neither to hints nor bold requests from his siblings: Miles Constable was a friend of his son Sammy, and no friend of Sammy’s was to be denied access to the big reproduction of Blois in which Grandpa’s principal heir resided. Lily Hammersly would alert me to when Miles was going there, and he and I had many a forbidden tête-à-tête under the palms of the dank conservatory.

  Miles was taking his banishment from the distaff Thorn establishments more bitterly than I had expected; he obviously resented what he called my passivity under the paternal interdict, and he was most sarcastic about Walter.

  “Though I have to admit that your old man has chosen cleverly,” he conceded. “Even rather devilishly. Wheelock doesn’t fit into any of the categories of fortune hunters about which I warned you. Not, of course, that he isn’t a fortune hunter. But he does offer something besides his greed.”

  “I suppose that’s big of you. What is it that he offers?”

  “Well, I imagine he’d be a faithful spouse. He’s too cold for anything else. And I don’t think he’d waste your money. He’s too careful for that. He might even be a good father. There’s only one thing he’d never be able to give you.”

  He paused, until I asked him: “What?”

  “Oh, a little thing that some people think makes the world go ‘round.”

  But it irritated me that he should so blandly take for granted not only that love was what I needed but that Walter was any less capable of providing it than he was.

  “So there is one little thing that the ever scornful Miles Constable doesn’t scorn!”

  “There is,” he replied, with uncharacteristic complacency. “And that little thing is love. Wheelock can’t give it because he hasn’t got it to give. He’s like Alberich in The Ring. He’s given up love in exchange for power.”

  “And how do you know that I don’t agree with him that it’s a good bargain?” I was exasperated with Miles, perhaps with his whole sex. “How do you know that I’m not a Thorn through and through? How do you know that the only thing that will make me happy isn’t to be in a position like Grandpa’s, where he can say to one man ‘go’ and he goeth and to another ‘come’ and he cometh?”

  “Oh, Aggie, don’t joke about this. You’d be a lost thing without love!
Why don’t we run off together and get married and live in Florence for a year? I could just afford it, and then your family would be bound to come around. They always do, after the first baby!”

  And do you know, if he hadn’t laughed that high screeching laugh of his, I might have done it? For laugh or no laugh, he still loved me. I was always, oddly enough, sure of that. And my feeling for him was always bubbling up, never quite high enough, because of my constant sense that he wasn’t quite real, wasn’t a man a Seward or a Thorn could marry, but there might not have needed too great a change of circumstances to push me over the dam. Anyway, that laugh annoyed me sufficiently to make me rise and go home.

  There, I was confronted with an irate father who had discovered my trysts with Miles and decreed that I should leave at once for a Caribbean cruise on our yacht, The Osprey, with Mama and my sisters. He would join us later in Nassau. On the deep blue sea amid the emerald isles I would have the opportunity to contemplate all the possible consequences of my persisting in such rash and disobedient conduct.

  I was in a desperately sullen mood during the cruise and would hardly exchange more than monosyllables with my family at meals. There were days when I declined to go ashore and would sit on the fantail with an unopened book in my lap. My reluctance to leave the ship, however, received Mama’s support when she discovered that we were being followed by Sammy Thorn, Jr., in his beautiful sailing yacht, and that he had Miles Constable on board!

  This chase, if chase it was, was picked up by a society reporter, who wrote a lurid tale about it in a New York evening paper, which brought down upon us a series of irate cables from my furious sire at home. The reporter had great sport with his account of the two great pleasure crafts plying the waves of the Caribbean, carrying the pursuer Theseus and the pursued Ariadne. Mama at last expressed herself with a tight-lipped severity almost unknown to her usually bland and accommodating nature.

  “I’d rather see you in your grave than married to that man.”