Skinny Island Page 5

  He had a distinct sense that lone was lost to the cause. The moment her mother had raised the flag of unity, she had bowed. The two ladies listened with unconcealed impatience while he again stated his case, in tedious detail. He was making no headway.

  “Look, Griswold,” Elsa Carruthers stated at last in her firmest tone, which was very firm, “even if I were disposed to oblige you as a happy addition to my family, even if I sincerely wanted to do this favor for you, I could not. My position in society would forbid it. You men of the Patroons Club may not take New York society seriously, but thousands of others do. Society is not just a question of dressing up and giving parties. It is a question of setting a moral example for the whole community. If a woman like Mrs. Norrie came to this house at my invitation and was introduced under my aegis to my friends, the inference would be clear that I approve of her moral character. That I approve of unchastity and free love! And that I cannot allow!” Elsa seemed carried away by the force of her own rhetoric. She actually stamped her foot. “No, Griswold Norrie, that you cannot ask of me. Never, never, never!”

  He caught the flash of alarm in Ione’s eyes as she stepped over to place a warning hand on his arm. “Please, darling,” she murmured. “It’s not good for Mamma to get so excited. Remember her heart.”

  “Very well, I shall not ask you to invite her,” he retorted in choked tones. “I shall invite her myself. I shall ask her to come as the guest of the groom. Surely it is proper to accord the groom and his family a list of invitees. I shall limit mine to Mrs. Atalanta Norrie.”

  “And do you know what I shall do if that woman dares to cross my threshold, Mister Griswold Norrie?” Elsa’s eyes were now bulging, and her voice rose almost to a shout. “Did you see Lady Windermere’s Fan? Well, I shall do what Lady Windermere only threatened to do. I shall strike that woman across her face with my fan!”

  Ione hurried over to her mother, put an arm protectively around her shoulders and led her from the room. She was gone for fifteen minutes. When she returned alone she was very cool and poised.

  “I’m surprised to find you still here. Haven’t you done enough for one day? Do you want to kill my mother?”

  “Ione, darling, I never thought—”

  “You never thought, I know. But think now, Griswold. You cannot possibly expect Mrs. Norrie to come here to be insulted, nor can you risk Mother’s heart by allowing her to insult her. Give up your foolish idea. Would you like me to go to Mrs. Norrie and explain the whole thing?”

  “But that’s my job!”

  “As I’ve said already, don’t you think you’ve done enough? This is women’s work, my dear. You had far better stay out of it altogether.”

  Griswold felt his heart pounding in sudden violent gratitude at what this enchanting creature was willing to do for him. He stepped forward to clasp her in his arms and was deeply relieved that she did not repulse him.

  “My angel, you’re right. Of course you’re right. How could you not be? I’ll take you to call on Atalanta, but not till I’ve explained to her first how things are.”

  Atalanta Norrie continued to occupy her late husband’s gray stone tomb of a mansion on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. It seemed to have no function but to repel; it was devoid of decoration except for its Romanesque windows, and its interior was made up of huge, sparsely furnished, needlessly dark chambers. Its owner did not entertain, but she was surrounded by a motley court of hangers-on, some of whom seemed to live in the upper stories—muttering ancient women, presumably relations, and young, colorfully dressed, apparently unemployed young men. It was widely believed that Mrs. Norrie gave lessons in spiritualism to her disciples.

  She received her step-grandson alone. The tall, exotic, red-haired female preacher had filled out into a strong, straight, rather massive woman of sixty, with a firm, almost unlined face and thick gray hair piled in layers, like a pagoda, over her high brow. The eyes, large and expressionless, were fixed on Griswold as he made his stumbling explanation.

  “I understand everyone’s position with the utmost clarity,” Atalanta said at last. “I am not in the least interested in going to Mrs. Carruthers’s against her will. I shall go to the church to see you married, dear boy, and that will be quite enough for me. I don’t suppose that Elsa Carruthers will deny me a seat in the house of God, even her God. The only reason that I allowed you to requst an invitation for me to the reception was to see if you could stand up to them.”

  “Them? Don’t you mean her?”

  “Certainly not. I mean her and her daughter. I mean the women. The women of your world.”

  “They’re very fine women,” Griswold insisted.

  “Fine is not an exact term. They know they’re engaged in a war, and you don’t.”

  “Oh, a war, Atalanta, really!”

  “Really,” she echoed him grimly. “Because you and I have become friends, I decided to help you. To rescue you, before it was too late. Listen to me, Griswold. Put your prejudices in the corner for a minute and listen to me. Don’t worry. I’ll give them back to you. Almost intact.” Atalanta paused now as if to decide how best to proceed. Then she nodded. “Let us start with your grandmother. My predecessor. I have learned what I could about her. She was like all the wives of the financial pioneers. Simple, religious, awed by her dominating husband, awkward in society, nostalgic for the day when she did the sewing and helped the maid-of-all-work. She learned not to wince when her more sophisticated children found her gauche. She consoled herself in church work. But her hidden resentment was passed on to her daughters and daughters-in-law. They were determined that her fate would not be theirs. Their tool would be society. With palaces and parties, they would shackle the weaker sons and grandsons of the tycoons. In golden chains! And how they’ve done it! Look at your father. Look at Ione’s uncles. The wife’s revenge was castration!”

  “Atalanta!” Griswold jumped to his feet in horror.

  “I wanted to save you,” she continued imperturbably. “But now I am very much afraid it’s too late. I can only look into the future and see what I can see. Sit down again, dear boy, and hold my hand.”

  Griswold sat beside her and held that large cold hand in both of his. Atalanta closed her eyes and was silent for two minutes. It seemed much longer. When she spoke, her eyes still closed, it was in a slow monotone.

  “Let the years pass. Many years. I see you in an office. You will not have to work, but it will get you out of the house, which will be Ione’s domain. I see you lunching with your friends and planning fishing and hunting trips. I do not see you indulging in furtive adulteries.”

  “Thanks,” he breathed.

  “But at times you may regret your fidelity.”

  “Please, Atalanta!”

  “Hush!” She opened her eyes to look at him blankly and closed them again. “Ah, yes, now I see. You are sitting in a club in the late afternoon, having come there from the office—you come there every afternoon. You are tired, and you hope you can dine there with old friends over gin and fishing stories. You hope it is not a night when your wife is entertaining. Then the butler always calls the club at six to tell you to be home in time to dress, and you know when this has happened because you see a page crossing the floor towards you carrying a small silver tray with a message. Oh, yes, you are weary. You are praying this night will be a free one and that you can relax behind the high walls of your sanctuary. You think the dread moment is safely past and you are raising the ice-cold gin to your thirsty lips … oh, what heaven!…But no, now you observe the spot of red in the big doorway, and it grows before your tired eyes into the form of the page, and you see that he is carrying a small silver tray, and yes—”

  “Atalanta! I’m leaving!”

  He and lone stood in the library before the long trestle tables with the presents. He was very grave, but she was smiling, a bit oddly.

  “Say it, Gris, darling! Say what’s on your mind.”

  “If I can’t have my grandfather’s wi
dow at my wedding reception, I don’t want anybody there!”

  She nodded, considering it. “I can see that. Yes, I think I can see that.”

  “Would you marry me without a wedding reception? Now? Or next week?” He could hardly believe it when she did not scream. “Oh, darling, would you?”

  “That’s what you really and truly want?”

  “Yes!”

  “And you really and truly believe it’s for our greater happiness?”

  “Oh, I do!”

  “Then I agree.”

  “Angel!” He swept her into his arms, wondering wildly if it wasn’t dangerous to be so happy. Then his eye took in the rows of presents over her shoulder. “Look at all this crazy gold and silver! Doesn’t it seem to be laughing at us?”

  She disengaged herself from his embrace. “These things, of course, must all be sent back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we cancelled the reception and kept the presents, we’d be guilty of a fraud. People expect something for what they’ve spent.”

  Griswold, stunned, began to move slowly along one of the tables. “Good heavens, what a job!” He picked up a silver epergne and put it down. He leaned over a magnificent George II tray. A horrible thought struck him. “But, lone, all this stuff is monogrammed with our initials.”

  “It does make it awkward, I admit. But it can hardly alter the principle.”

  Griswold now began feverishly to examine the different objects. A complete set of the finest damask table linen from his aunt Eleanor Frost, with the huge woven letters G and I interlaced over an N. A set of gold service plates from his aunt Julia Post similarly dedicated; a vast diamond clip pin from his aunt Mabel Onderdonk with the fatal initials set in sapphires. On and on—there seemed no end to it.

  “We can’t do it,” he groaned. “We just can’t do it!”

  “Then we must go through with the reception.”

  And he knew now that he would never know whether or not she had believed, even for a minute, that they wouldn’t.

  Marcus: A Gothic Tale

  MARCUS SUMNER had been one of the first students at Clare when the school had opened, a circle of Tudor gray on a verdant tract of land near Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1905. The young founding headmaster, the Reverend Philemon Forrester, had inspired the confidence of Marcus’s banking father, who, like all of his peers in Manhattan, holding to the creed that male progeny could be educated only in New England, had sent his ailing and precocious motherless child to be placed under the special care of the principal and his wife. Marcus, happy to be removed from the tutelage of his stern, elderly sire, and protected from the roughness of schoolmates by the headmaster, in whose house he actually lived, had sunk deep roots in the Forrester family and had grown up as a kind of adoring eldest son or younger brother of Philemon. When he graduated from Clare he spent only the necessary four years at Harvard before returning to the expanded school to become its youngest faculty member and to dedicate his life and the fortune that he had now inherited from his deceased parent to the glory of Clare and Philemon Forrester.

  The latter was a huge man with a great square blocky head and long, prematurely gray locks that suggested the cleric of an earlier era. He was so moving a preacher that many deplored his isolation in a private school, and there were always those ready to propose him for a bishopric. But Forrester seemed contented in that smaller sphere, which he dominated so absolutely. The souls of four hundred boys were enough for him, plus the parishioners of neighboring churches in which he regularly preached, and the readers of his published sermons and spiritual poems. He was happy to labor in his own vineyard, regarding his oratorical gift as an endowment from God for that purpose. And was he really good enough even for that? There were moments when, standing in the pulpit before commencing an address, the eyes under those bushy eyebrows tightly closed in silent orison, he seemed to be clutching for an inspiration that might at any time be withdrawn.

  Marcus Sumner, on the other hand, small, spindly and pale, with thick blond hair and green burning eyes, deprived by a fibrillating heart of all sports but sailing, and that only with a crew for the heavy work, found in the mansion of the headmaster’s soul enough rooms for all the love of which he deemed his nature capable. What return, what contribution could he make to such a man, who was all the deity he needed, even in the craggy Gothic school chapel? What service could he render to a god who worshiped God? But Marcus was not long in concluding that if the juggler of Anatole France’s tale could bring his tricks to the altar, so could he offer his scholarship as an embellishment of the school. And Forrester, having first dutifully warned the young man that he ought to see something more of the world before shutting himself up in a New England boarding school, having reminded him that Clare and its headmaster already occupied too large a space on his horizon, had given in before Marcus’s stricken look. Perhaps he recognized that a rejection might prove fatal, and had therefore accepted a responsibility not to be escaped. He embraced the trembling slim shoulders with these warm words:

  “Very well, dear boy, come to us, come to us, by all means. We shall profit by your fine appreciation of letters and be heartened by your faith in our undertakings. And it need not be forever. We can always release you when occasion beckons. Oh, yes, we can even push you up the ladder of fame!”

  “When I leave Clare,” Marcus cried in the passion of his gratitude, “it will be feet first!”

  In the classroom Marcus would confront his pupils without a textbook. He would make no reference to the given assignment for the day. Pulling up the old map of the Roman Empire that covered his blackboard he would reveal the sonnet or short poem or quotation that he had chalked thereon, without indication of date or author. He would then, for the given hour, limit the discussion to the phrases and words before the eyes of the class, reciting the lines one by one in different tones, from the mocking to the sublime, revealing feelingly towards the end of the period, his own emotions, either for or against the poem, and calling for assent or dissent. At first he encountered sullen silence, then ridicule and at last applause. Little by little Mr. Sumner became “the thing.” Some boys actually began to read poetry without its being assigned. Others became enthusiasts. A few even caught fire.

  The most brightly burning of these, Rodman Venable, was a dark, handsome boy, tall and very thin, with enormous brooding eyes, who would stare at Marcus as if he could not believe that the latter could really mean anything as daring and original as he seemed to be saying, which made the disconcerted teacher search his mind to see if he could not come up with something that would not let the boy down. Rodman became a quick, too quick convert to the doctrine of Walter Pater; he wanted to burn with a hard, gemlike flame, and it was he who suggested to Marcus that he invite a select group of students to spend a part of their summer vacation with him.

  “I understand, sir, that you have a shingle palace on Long Island Sound and a trim sailing yacht. We could recite Keats and Shelley as we buffeted the waves of the wine-dark sea! Aren’t such vacation visits common between masters and boys in the English public schools?”

  Well, of course they were, and Marcus was enchanted with the idea. The month of July was chosen, and the visitors, all poetry enthusiasts, were selected by Rodman. He hilariously compared the project to that in Love’s Labour’s Lost where the king and peers agree to abjure the company of women in favor of study. They would sail in the morning, read in the afternoon and engage in Platonic dialogues at night.

  When Marcus told the headmaster of his plan, however, the latter showed a decidedly guarded enthusiasm, and the very next weekend Marcus was asked to meet Rodman’s father in Mr. Forrester’s study, vacated by the headmaster for the occasion.

  Mr. Venable was a species of gentleman with whom Marcus was not familiar: the New Yorker who emulated the cultural aspirations of Boston. He sat in his armchair with an artful combination of stiffness and ease, as if he were a visiting legate to whom
the proconsul had had temporarily to yield his bench of authority. He was serene, bald, glacial, and absolutely still, except for a finger that stroked the full, silky mustache.

  “I do not for a minute, Mr. Sumner, wish to convey any disapproval of your inspiring my boy to a love of fine poetry. Yours is a noble calling and one, if I may say so between ourselves, that fills a definite need at Clare. Mr. Forrester, for all his undoubted virtues and vibrant faith, is hardly an intellectual man.”

  Marcus clenched his fists in a sudden spasm of uncontrollable resentment. “Oh, sir! How can you say that?”

  Mr. Venable’s bland, tan eyes widened slightly. “My dear Mr. Sumner, his verse! Surely you, of all men, are not going to defend ‘Oh, Jesus, have I hurt you? Your pain lies at my door’?”

  Marcus’s heart seemed to be rolling about under his rib cage. He had so successfully suppressed all awareness of the headmaster’s revivalist hymns that any reminder of them came as a whiplash across the cheek. “We might say that his stanzas are the crumbs of the feast of his faith,” he muttered.

  “Very well put, Mr. Sumner! And I value loyalty above all other qualities in a schoolmaster. But to the matter in hand. I am of the opinion that Rodman would be better at home this summer than with you. I am aware that you have a charming house on the North Shore and a beautiful sailing yacht, but I understand that the company will be entirely male and that there will be long sessions where music and art and beauty will be ardently discussed.”

  “And that is objectionable?”

  “Surely you are not unaware, Mr. Sumner, of the excesses to which sentimentality among ardent and impressionable young men may lead?”

  Marcus looked at him with horror. “To what do you refer, sir?”

  “Well, you are too young, of course, to remember the Oscar Wilde business, but surely you have heard of it?”

  “Mr. Venable!” Marcus leaped to his feet. “You cannot think—?”