False Gods Read online

  “Puppy love?” I was sorry for the term when I saw the pain in his eyes.

  “I daresay Mr. Stonor would call it that.”

  My parents were in England; Father was teaching for a term at Oxford, and Horace invited me for a weekend at his parents’ house in New York. It was to be the occasion of my meeting the famous Dorothy. But first let me say something about his family.

  They were certainly not rich by the standards of 1909; their brownstone with a stoop on East Fifty-sixth Street had only a three-window frontage, and a picture in the hall of their summer cottage in Maine showed an unpretentious shingle pile. But they kept five maids and hired a motor when needed, and Horace’s father belonged to several clubs to which he rarely went. The interior of the brownstone, virgin to the reforming hands of Elsie de Wolfe and Elizabeth Marbury, was conventionally cluttered, though relics of the Federal period, mute emblems of the finer taste and greater affluence of an earlier generation, peeped out between trinket-filled étagères and bronze groups of animals in alarming combat. I recall in particular a lovely Aspinwall bride in marble, done in Rome on an 1840 honeymoon, and the miniature of a romantic youth with a grace and charm not unlike Horace’s.

  Mrs. Aspinwall was a small reserved woman, with lips that seemed always pursed and an air of mild benevolence ever ready to be withdrawn, who cosseted a supposedly frail health. I say “supposedly,” though certainly none of her family ever doubted its frailty. Her confidence that the duties from which her weakened state exempted her would be performed by her husband and children was entirely justified in the fact.

  Her husband was a large man with a larger stomach who might have been handsome enough as a youth, but who was now the product of physical inactivity (except for fishing), much eating and (I suspect) private drinking in the study where he spent most of his day. He had no occupation when I knew him except handling his and his wife’s securities, though he had once served on a couple of railroad boards and even, according to a family legend, been kicked off that of Illinois Central for opposing Mr. Harriman. This was always cited by his children as an example of his courage and independence, but Gurdon, who saw his uncle with a less partial eye, told me that it had been simply a case of Uncle John’s awakening from his usual snoozle at a directors’ meeting and forgetting for once his role of rubber stamp.

  Both he and his wife carried self-absorption to a high degree, but whereas she could at least turn her attention to a guest on a social occasion, he was almost incapable of taking in anything you tried to tell him and would fix a glassy eye on you until he had a chance (soon seized if not offered) to put in a story of his fishing or stock market acumen (the latter, again according to Gurdon, a total fiction). So removed was he from any sense of what people might notice that he must have believed that his noisy habit of scraping his molars with a toothpick behind his napkin went unobserved. Gurdon at Yale used to embarrass Horace by “doing Uncle John” for an irreverent group, throwing a towel over his face and making rasping sounds from behind it. But Mr. Aspinwall’s indifference to the world was interpreted in his family as gentle kindliness and his platitudes as the tip of a concealed iceberg of wisdom.

  Horace’s two younger sisters, Chattie and Lizzie, were much alike, plain and bumptious, prone to ecstatic enthusiasms and sudden storms of tears, and given at table to high screeches of laughter after whispered confidences soon subdued by a glance from their rarely amused mother. They had kind hearts, however, and the warmth of their sympathy supplied the sex appeal with which they both ultimately obtained surprisingly attractive husbands.

  Stewart, the eldest, aspired to be the dapper dandy of the day. He was always immaculately and colorfully dressed, but saved from foppishness at a rather high cost by the rigidity of his stature, the length of his nose and the cold stare of his grey eyes. He resembled his younger cousin Gurdon, but had few of his brains. He loved to play the man of the world, the showy soul of courtesy in the drawing room to the ladies, but always ready with a sly poke in my ribs to assure me that he was equally welcome in very different female company. His mother unaccountably adored him, almost to the exclusion of her other children.

  How could she fail to see that Horace was the star of the family? But she did fail. And so did the others. Oh, the girls were fond enough of him in their demonstrative way; they responded to his good looks and shrieked at his jokes; Stewart found him a gratifying confidant for his amorous adventures; and even Mr. Aspinwall preferred him to the others as a fishing companion. But they couldn’t, any of them, see that he was as strange an occupant of their noisy nest as if the egg from which he hatched had been deposited there by some irresponsible cuckoo bird. And with his mother I suspect it was something worse. I think she may have understood that Horace, for all his ostensible consideration of her aches and pains, had penetrated to the root of her inveterate selfishness. She may even have disliked him. For she made one flat statement to me: “Horry has shown me less affection than any of my other children. I wonder whether his isn’t a cold nature.”

  She should have known!

  Dorothy came to dinner on the Saturday night of my weekend visit. It was a tense occasion for Horace, as it was the first time she had met his parents, and I think he had waited for my moral support. She was very much what I had imagined: the serious, direct young lady of the era, determined not to be taken in by the “gold sachet” of its opulence and to find a life of civic usefulness compatible with a woman’s domestic role. Looking back, I can see how little progress these brave young society women had really made; they were basically already mortgaged to their parents’ standards. But though lacking any kind of subtle female charm, Dorothy was fresh and healthy and … well, I guess the adjective is “good.” I have already used it about Horace. I could see perfectly why he was in love with her.

  He wanted Dorothy and me to have a chance to chat alone, so he led us to a corner of the parlor where we waited for his mother to come down.

  “Will you be going to law school, too, Mr. Leonard?” she asked me. I nodded. “I’m sure it’s a fine career for a man.”

  “You sound as if you weren’t entirely sure.”

  She was surprised to be so promptly taken up. “Well, my father always says he’d rather be a client.”

  “I suppose he hires lawyers by the dozen. He says to this one ‘Come’ and he cometh, and to that one ‘Go’ and he goeth.”

  “Now you’re laughing at me, Mr. Leonard.”

  “Not at all. For I quite see his point. Why not be the boss while you’re at it? But what I like about the idea of being a lawyer, particularly a lawyer for businessmen and bankers, is that you’re always dealing with the basic underpinnings of organized society. You can think and philosophize while you’re making money. Most men act in a naturalistic play. I want mine to be in blank verse.”

  Of course I was playing with her. She stared at me suspiciously.

  “My father doesn’t act in a naturalistic play. Do you mean something like Ibsen? My father is very much concerned with history and philosophy. He’s a great reader. And it may interest you to know that he’s a friend of Mr. Adams, the historian, in Washington, and Mr. Adams sees only a small number of intellectual men.”

  “Oh, I know that,” I responded airily. “Billy Phelps at Yale let me read his copy of The Education of Henry Adams. It’s been privately printed. He mentions your father, you know. He says that like John Hay and Whitelaw Reid he owed his ‘free hand’ to marriage.”

  Dorothy’s countenance lengthened ominously. “And just what does that imply, Mr. Leonard?”

  “I assume it means that all three men married money. Wasn’t that the case?”

  Her gaze turned to Horace across the room with his sisters. “I think I had better join the others.” She rose, but paused when I jumped up to protest.

  “You disappoint me, Miss Stonor. I thought you were a modern woman.”

  “And should a modern woman sit by while her father is traduced?”

&n
bsp; “Do you call being mentioned by our greatest historian a traducement?”

  She resumed her seat at this, troubled. “I haven’t read Mr. Adams’s book. I know he sent Daddy a copy.”

  “Would he have sent it if it contained offensive matter?”

  “No, I suppose not. And I suppose there are things a historian can mention that would not be proper on social occasions.”

  “And are you and I to be confined to what is said or not said on social occasions?”

  She gave me a clear look. “All right, no, Mr. Leonard. But I want you to know that my father has made on his own a much larger fortune than what his first wife brought him.”

  I felt elated. I had made her break a tabu! She was actually talking about money. I was going on to point out that her father had at least got his start with his first wife’s money, but I decided that would be pressing her too far.

  “It can’t be easy, being the daughter of such a famous man,” I said, in a more conciliatory tone. “Horace says you’ve never shown the tiniest bit of vanity about it.”

  “Oh, Horace is too kind about me altogether.” She laughed now, almost relaxed. “But you’re right that it’s not always easy. I remember, when I was in my last year at Miss Chapin’s School, one of President Roosevelt’s nieces or cousins, I forget which, said right out in class that Uncle Thee had called my father ‘a malefactor of great wealth.’”

  “I trust you didn’t take that lying down.”

  “You can be sure I did not, Mr. Leonard!” Her eyes shone becomingly. “I retorted that my father had described the president as ‘an irresponsible demagogue.’ But, oh, I hated it!”

  Mrs. Aspinwall now made her belated entrance with her usual air of having had to use a goodly portion of her store of courage to rise from a bed of pain. In the dining room the conversation, marred by an occasional explosion of giggles from Horace’s sisters and his father’s veiled teeth cleansing, was led by his mother. She asked a few quiet, banal questions about a course in literature that Dorothy was auditing at Columbia.

  “I suppose you read all the great classics, Cooper and Hawthorne and Mrs. Stowe.”

  “Oh, yes, we read them,” Dorothy confirmed. “But the course takes us right up to date also. We have read Howells and Henry James. And next week we’re going to discuss Mrs. Wharton’s House of Mirth.”

  “Edith Wharton? You surprise me, Miss Stonor. I shouldn’t have thought her work would be considered in a serious course of American letters.”

  “You don’t like her books?”

  “I don’t say they’re not entertaining. But they are full of society gossip. I used to know her in Newport when she was Miss Jones. Pussie, she was called then. Her parents were friends of my parents, but she gave herself airs. I think she considered that she was too intellectual for Newport. We were only good enough, I suppose, to be made fun of in her fiction. Well, now, it seems that our Pussie has matured into a full-grown cat.”

  This was an unusual exercise in wit for Mrs. Aspinwall, and she looked down the table with a mild gratification as all but Dorothy laughed.

  “My father admires Mrs. Wharton,” the latter observed, as if this should lead to a general retraction.

  “Well, your father always had rather advanced ideas. In my opinion they sit better with gentlemen than with ladies.”

  “Oh, do you know my father, Mrs. Aspinwall?” Dorothy asked with a surprise that she did not appear to consider might be rude.

  “I did know him, certainly. Again in Newport, in our younger days. It was a smaller society then. You might say that everybody knew everybody. My father used to say of your father: ‘Watch that young man. He’s going to make his mark.’”

  The extraordinary thing about Horace’s mother was the way she could make her judgments appear absolute. Even Dorothy seemed to react as if Mr. Stonor had received some kind of ultimate accolade. What was it to have made a fortune or even sat in the cabinet of President Cleveland (a Democrat, after all) compared with the distinction of having attracted the notice of an old Newporter like Beverly Beekman on a summer day in 1880?

  Horace seemed very pleased at Dorothy’s reception by his family. I believe that he accepted as praise from the heart the perfunctory approval of the evening that she may have conceded to him in the cab when he took her home. The sainted Dorothy could speak nothing but the truth, could she? At any rate when he came back and after we had retired to his bedroom, which we shared, he kept me up half the night singing the praises of his “wonderful girl.” He also professed great gratification at the impression I had apparently made on her.

  “She said she was glad I at last had an interesting friend and not just another New England church school type.”

  Horace had charm, but he could be a bore. I suppose most people in love can be.

  I returned to New Haven that Sunday morning, as I had a paper to prepare for a Monday class, but Horace stayed on to lunch at the Stonors’ and escort Dorothy in the afternoon to an exhibit of miniatures at the Metropolitan Museum. He would take a late afternoon train back and said he would drop by my room in the evening. But nothing in his plan prepared me for the pale face and reddened eyes that confronted me when I answered a late knock on my door.

  “It’s all over!” he exclaimed dramatically and stumbled past me to slump on my sofa.

  “What’s all over?”

  “Me and Dorothy. Or rather me.”

  He sat up suddenly straight now, holding himself very still, as if the least movement might cause a twinge of pain.

  “I take it then she’s sent you packing.”

  “Well, not quite. She says we can still be friends.”

  “That’s the usual way, isn’t it?”

  At this he began actually to sob, and I turned away in embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry, Maury.” He wiped his eyes. “I’ll try not to be such an ass. She sprang it on me in the museum, right in front of that Sargent painting of the three sisters in white. She’s going abroad with her father for three months.”

  “Is that against the law?”

  “But they’re going to meet that oily protégé of her father’s, Guy Thorp, in Marseille! He’s going to join them for a Mediterranean cruise on a yacht Mr. Stonor has chartered. I told her she’d meet all kinds of dukes and princes and never give another thought to Horace Aspinwall!”

  He looked more fourteen than twenty as he said this.

  “And what did she say to that?” I asked roughly. “That she never would? If she did, you deserved it.”

  “No! She said she’d always value my friendship. But she got furious when I told her she’d probably come back engaged to Thorp.”

  “I don’t wonder. It’ll be your own fault if she does.”

  He looked aghast. “How will I have done that?”

  “By whimpering. By playing the little boy who doesn’t dare so much as touch his goddess’s fingertips. What woman wants to be treated that way? Except perhaps some frigid old maid, which your Dorothy is very far from being.”

  “Just as far as she is from being my Dorothy. No, Maury, it won’t do. I’m not in her league, any way you look at it. I’ve given her up, and I’ve written her so. And don’t try to talk me out of it, because I know it’s the best thing for both of us.”

  Well, of course, I wasn’t going to let that pass, and we sat up a large part of the night arguing. By early morning I had induced him at least to reconsider, and I sent him off to bed with the assurance that we would discuss a plan of action the following afternoon.

  But that next morning, when I had returned to my room from a nine o’clock class, I received my first visit there from Horace’s cousin. Gurdon entered when I answered his knock with his usual twinkling condescension.

  “I trust I’m not intruding?” When I assured him he was not, he came in and looked around at his ease. “But you have made yourself very comfortable, I see. Much more elegant than anything we have at poor old Vanderbilt. What nice things you’ve got
! May I inquire who is the lovely young lady? A very particular friend, I hope?”

  “It’s a pencil sketch of my mother as a girl. By MiLlais.”

  “Oh, I see. Very fine indeed.” He continued to allow his appraising eye to roam. At last he took a seat and cleared his throat. But still no word.

  “Gurdon, is there something on your mind?”

  “In fact there is. You won’t object if I’m frank?”

  “Not if you really are.”

  “You don’t trust me, do you, Maury? You haven’t from the beginning.”

  “I simply like to know where I stand.”

  “Then here it is. Horace told me this morning that he had made up his mind to give up his romance with Dorothy Stonor—if that’s the right word for an affair so one-sided—but that you, it appears, have persuaded him to go on with it.”

  “Is that so wrong?”

  “We are a proud family, Maurice. You come of one yourself, so you know whereof I speak. It has never been our way to push in where we are not wanted.”

  “Not wanted by whom? By Dorothy or her father?”

  “By both, I’m afraid. Mr. Stonor’s candidate for his daughter’s hand is obviously Guy Thorp. Do you know about Guy Thorp?”

  “Horace has mentioned him.”

  “He’s worth more than a mention. He’s a very courtly diplomat, currently attached to our embassy in London. Considered brilliant. Some thirty years of age, of no particular fortune, but backed by the mighty Stonor, who presumably intends to make an ambassador of him. Or maybe even one day a secretary of state. Who knows, in these days of fat campaign funds?”

  “And how does Dorothy feel about this paragon?”

  “I think the best way to put that might be that she feels he’s inevitable.”

  “You mean she has to have him? But why, in God’s name?”

  “Because he’s so damned appropriate. Because he’s what Doctor Daddy has ordered. Because she feels that a dutiful daughter should have a very good reason indeed before turning down so fine and upstanding a suitor. And I very much doubt whether she will see our Horace as such a reason.”