The Scarlet Letters Read online

  “I can’t deny that.”

  “Of course, if I don’t have a party, I shan’t be able to go to any others.”

  Her father looked up from his paper now. “Why does that follow?”

  “Well, think of it, Pa. If I took a high stand about the idiocy of debutante parties and still went to them, everyone would say I was a hypocrite. And what’s more, that it was just a pose on my part to cover my family’s stinginess in not giving me one of my own.”

  “That wouldn’t have to follow at all.”

  “But you know it would. Anyway it doesn’t matter, because I shan’t really mind giving up the silly party.” As she sensed the paternal crumbling she warmed to the game. She thought of the proposed new common room for the settlement house of which her father was a trustee and where she and her sisters sometimes put in an hour or so, angels of light, playing games with the children in the day care center. She had a vision of the explosive gratitude of all at a sudden unexpected donation and the immediate board resolution to name the new acquisition the Lavinia Vollard Room. “Why, the money saved might even pay for your new addition to the settlement house! You could call off your fund drive!”

  Ambrose thrust his newspaper aside. “And supposing, Vinnie, I put it to you that I’d pay for that room with the money I’d save on your party, if you were really willing to give it up?”

  “Pa! Are you serious?”

  “Never more so!”

  “Then I’d say yes, do it!”

  “On one condition. That you agree to go to all your friends’ coming-out parties. And, of course, you’ll have one of your own, as well. Perhaps not quite as spiffy as it would have been without the expense of the new room, but spiffy enough.”

  “Oh, Pa!”

  Vinnie rose to fling her arms around her father’s neck while her younger sisters clapped. After he had left the table to go to work, accompanied by her sisters en route to school, she was left alone to finish her coffee with her mother, who had not contributed a word to the discussion.

  “That was very neatly done, Lavinia,” was Hetty’s first dry comment.

  “How do you mean, neatly?”

  “Of course, you knew that by suggesting a charitable use of the party money, you’d get the ball as well. And far from being less spiffy, it will be one of the grandest of the season. Oh, your father will see to that. He’s enchanted with your philanthropy.”

  “Oh, Mummy, you always see the low side of things. Can’t you give a daughter some credit for even a smitch of generosity?”

  “I give you more for insight, my dear. You’re a clever girl. But even so, there are some things you don’t see. Something you didn’t see just now, for example.”

  “And that is?”

  “That your father was perfectly aware of what you were up to.”

  “He thought I was putting it on?”

  “He knew you were putting it on. He liked you for putting it on. What he really admires is the appearance of generosity and unselfishness. Your father has a great respect for appearances. Why not? Aren’t they really what civilization is made of?”

  “Oh, Mummy, there you go.”

  “Because I don’t play the mother-daughter game? The way you play the father-daughter one? I’m sorry to have to tell you, child, but you do overdo it. I may admire the play, but I have to be concerned with what will happen when the curtain falls.”

  Vinnie said nothing to this; she simply left the table. She had learned not to pursue a topic too closely when her mother was in one of her “moods.” There was a bleakness that Hetty seemed to have brought from New England climes that dulled even the dancing sunlight on the pavements of Manhattan. Deprived of the roasting faith of Dr. Shattuck’s perfervid religiosity, his daughter’s had dwindled to a rather chilling transcendentalism.

  There was one snag for Vinnie in what her mother called the father-daughter game. She hated the idea that if her father had had a son, that son, unless he’d been a hopeless dunce or an irredeemable rotter, would surely have taken her place in the paternal adoration. He would have become a lawyer, of course, and the heir to the holy firm. Vinnie had had no ambition to join the bar; in her generation female attorneys were still rare, and Vollard Kaye numbered not even one in its roster. After college she had elected a rather leisurely postgraduate course at Columbia, applying for a master’s in English lit. But she had always regarded with somewhat jealous eye the different young law associates whom her father seemed to favor, and when he brought one of them to Glenville for a weekend—usually devoted at least in part to brief writing—she had flirted rather shamelessly with the poor man in his few free hours. She derived a mild satisfaction from thus purloining a possible protégé from the grip of her powerful parent. But none of these flirtations amounted to much; the young man in question was often already engaged, and sometimes even married. The only way for her to get around the snag of a rival to herself in her father’s love was the crude and obvious one of producing a son-in-law whom she could control even as he controlled her sire.

  She met Rodman Jessup in her last year at Vassar at a cocktail party in New York, and she had been immediately attracted by his striking good looks and grave demeanor. He seemed to know few in the room—the party, she learned later, was given by the parents of his law school roommate—and he stood rather aside in a corner but without the least air of constraint. When Vinnie asked the daughter of the house about him, she was told, sarcastically, that he was the “strong silent type” and she asked if that wasn’t “what we all want,” particularly the silence. But introduced, she did not find him so quiet. They talked about Hider’s occupation of the Rhineland, and he was very emphatic indeed about the need for immediate armed resistance. When he found that she agreed with him, he, rather surprisingly, invited her to have dinner with him at a cafeteria, announcing firmly that he couldn’t afford a “fancier spot,” and she heard herself, also rather surprisingly, accept.

  At their table she asked him about law school and mentioned that her father was a lawyer.

  “And one of the greats!” he exclaimed with an enthusiasm obviously genuine. “He spoke at my Yale graduation. Oh, I really stared at that party when I heard you were Ambrose Vollard’s daughter.”

  She was amused but also pleased. “Is that why you asked me out?” And her question was frank, not coy.

  “It was why I stared. Not why I asked you out. That was after we’d talked.”

  “Oh, then I was on my own.”

  “And a very beautiful own it was.”

  Her first reaction, that he was a pretty fast worker, was suddenly mitigated by her odd sense of his total honesty. She began to suspect that this young man was not a callow male looking for a quick smooch, but a creature of strong reserve and chivalrous good manners on whom her own appeal had made an unprecedented assault. But what grounds had she for so grossly flattering an estimate of her own charms? Few. She was bewildered.

  “Tell me about yourself,” was what she finally said.

  He was only too willing to do this. He spoke warmly, even glowingly, about his parents, whose only child he was. His father had died when Rodman was fourteen, of a heart ailment, cutting short a brilliant law career that might have taken him to high office, and leaving his widow and son a sadly exiguous capital, the result of his habit of taking too many cases of a public interest on a pro bono basis.

  “My father was all heart,” he explained. “But he knew that his physical one was weak and that he might not live to see me grow up. The one thing he wanted to make sure of was that I should live my own life and make my own decisions. ‘Never feel you have to follow in my footsteps or do anything because I have done it. Be your own man, sonny, and tell yourself that I’m always right there behind you. In spirit if not in flesh. And never regret our little quarrels. I’ve enjoyed them as much as you have.’”

  “But you did go into the law, after all,” she pointed out. “Are you sure it was entirely your own decision?”


  “It was certainly mine in a way. Except you might say it had been made for me. Father was so much a part of me that it seemed almost inconceivable that I could choose any profession but his. And there was poor Mother, too. I lost her only last year. She had dedicated herself wholly to his memory. Too much so, I’m afraid. She was so bitter about his golden career cut short that she couldn’t seem to reconcile herself to a fate that had done it.”

  “I suppose she wanted you to make it up to her in some way. That would have been only natural.”

  “But she was always fair. She knew I had to live my own life and that she couldn’t share it as she had shared Father’s.”

  “No. For that you’d have to find another her.”

  “I should be so lucky,” he said gravely and gave her a long look.

  She changed the subject then and told him some of the story of her own life.

  That summer she had three dates with him. She would have had more, had she not joined her family on a trip to Quebec. On none of those occasions was there a romantic interchange, but she certainly came to accept him as a beau. She was fairly confident that she could elicit almost any proposal from him the moment she wanted to, but she wasn’t in the least sure that she was so minded. He was … well, how could she put it? Not at all like the other men she knew. And she was not yet ready to introduce him or even mention him to her father. For the time being, anyway, she was keeping him to herself.

  “Of course, you’re going to apply to Vollard Kaye for a job,” she told him one night at their Automat.

  “You think they’d take me?” he inquired earnestly. “I’m not exactly a white shoe type. And I’m told that most of the partners are listed in the Social Register.”

  “That’s because most of them have worked their way up. Pa doesn’t give a hoot about those distinctions. I thought you knew that.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t thinking of him. To work for him would be my dream of dreams!”

  “Please! You’ll be making me think I’m only a rung in your ladder to fame.”

  He became instantly solemn. “You couldn’t think anything as awful as that, could you, Vinnie?”

  “Why not? A talented man without a fortune has to look about him to get started. In Europe it’s taken quite for granted that one of the functions of a woman is to have something to give a push-up to a man, whether it be blood or connections or just hard cash.”

  “Vinnie, I don’t want you to talk that way. Those things have nothing to do with how I feel about you. Tell me that you believe that, Vinnie. Tell me, please.”

  She was a bit taken aback by his gravity, but decided to pass it off. “Of course. I was only joking.”

  She discovered that his stern morality was absolutely consistent. He had no use for ambiguities or double standards. A discussion they had after attending a Saturday matinee of Hedda Gabler brought this out rather too forcibly for her. It was a play that had excited Vinnie, an Ibsen enthusiast, but which had failed to arouse Rodman on this, his first experience with the great Norse playwright.

  “What does it all add up to?” he wanted to know. “A bored, idle woman in a fit of petty jealousy burns the manuscript of a presumably great book by a drunken genius and then goads him into suicide. After which she follows in the same godforsaken path. Is that a tragedy? Or even a comedy?”

  Vinnie tried to recall the lecture of a favorite Vassar professor. “It’s neither. You might call it an ancient morality play. Of man and morals, and a world outside of man and morals.”

  “What kind of a world is that?”

  “We don’t know! That’s what’s so spooky. Ibsen seems to believe in something like the survival of the old pagan gods. They lurk in the dark air around us. Old wild demiurges. Wasn’t there a medieval legend that Dionysus reappeared in a monastery in the form of an impish youth and presided over orgies? Hedda is subject to some terrible influence like that. She has great force and will, but she is completely unrestrained by any modern sense of right or wrong.”

  “But she knows she’s doing a wrong thing when she burns that manuscript,” he objected. “She gives her husband a false excuse to explain what she’s done.”

  “That’s just to shut him up. She recognizes that other people know right from wrong. She even despises them for it. You must see her as a wild creature caged in a zoo of Victorian morality.”

  “Victorian? Is it Victorian to disapprove of destroying works of genius and handing loaded pistols to depressed alcoholics?”

  “Well, call it man-made morality.”

  “Man-made! As opposed to what, Vinnie?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She waved a hand vaguely in the air. “Maybe Ibsen is saying that other systems and values exist beside the frail ones that man has put together to separate himself from the beasts. They aren’t necessarily what we would call nice ones.”

  “Well, if he means that, why doesn’t he say it?”

  “Because he’s dealing with imponderables. With mysteries.”

  “Well, all I can see is that he’s dealing with a wicked woman who gets what’s coming to her in the end. There’s your moral, I suppose. But wouldn’t it be better to redeem her? To make her see the error of her ways? Isn’t it rather crass the way he handles her? Sets her up and then knocks her down?”

  “Certainly, the way you put it.”

  “I don’t see any other way to put it. I can’t see that it’s any halfway excuse for her to say she was worshiping Dionysus or Bacchus or whoever, if that’s what Ibsen is saying. There was a minister at school who used to preach a sermon about what he called overtolerance. ‘Boys,’ he used to say, ‘you’ll hear a lot of excuses these days for the bad things people do. You will hear that they are manic, or neurotic, or obsessed, or whatever. Don’t forget, boys, one useful little word in your vocabulary. Wicked. Those people are wicked.’ That may sound harsh to you, Vinnie, but it’s really not. It’s really kinder. Because the wicked can be redeemed. Isn’t redeeming them better than explaining them?”

  It struck Vinnie that his features had none of the dark, comminatory look that his words might have conjured up in another. He took no visible pleasure in the idea of stern judgment or punishment. If he was a knight, he was a knight like Galahad, more intent on rescue than revenge.

  “I suppose if we go to A Doll’s House next week—it’s alternating with Hedda —you’ll say that Nora should have stayed home and raised the children. And you might be right, too. Poor little things, look at the father she leaves them with.”

  And she came to the happy conclusion that he was not a man to slam doors but to open them.

  But then, all at once, everything changed for her. Rod’s roommate’s family had a house in Glenville not far from the Vollards, and when Rod came down for a weekend visit there Vinnie drove over to join him at their pool. He was clad in tight white swimming trunks, and for one blinding moment as she caught sight of him she thought he was naked. His skin was an ivory white, unlike the tanned bodies of the others at the poolside, for unlike them he had been cloistered in the city, but his torso, his shoulders, his thighs, finely sculpted, were splendid. She was confronted no longer with an overworked law student, a pale library product, but a magnificent man. She noted the sizable bulge in his pants where they covered his genitalia.

  What now crawled over her like a massive skin itch was such a lust as she had never conceived herself having. She felt giddy, shocked. She was not only confronted with a new Rodman Jessup but a new Lavinia Vollard. She was going to have to reckon with a totally new force within herself.

  Sitting beside him at the far end of the pool to which they both repaired, she found her mind so stuffed with sexual images that she had to find an outlet in a subject somehow related. She found herself telling him of a Vassar classmate who, finding herself pregnant at the termination of a wholly clandestine love affair, had availed herself of an abortion, without telling her family. He was visibly shocked. She should have had the child, he argued.

&n
bsp; “But it would have been her social ruin,” Vinnie protested. “She wanted to go on with her life as before, the way her ex-lover was doing. Of course, no one would have blamed him, even if it had become known.”

  “I would have blamed him. Just as much as I blame her. Even more, perhaps, because as a man he should have been stronger against temptation.”

  Vinnie debated for a moment in her mind. Was this naïveté or something finer? Had this near naked sleek animal been reserved for her alone? Her giddiness returned. “You hold that a man should keep himself as pure as a woman?”

  “If he expects it of her, yes. Why should he have any lesser obligation?”

  “And that he should be a virgin until he marries?”

  “As much as his wife, anyway.”

  “But what about the old theory that he should have enough experience to initiate his bride in the rites of love?”

  “Does it take so much experience? The birds and the bees don’t seem to think so.”

  “They haven’t been petrified by civilization. They haven’t had to wear clothes.”

  “You think Adam and Eve had an easier time? Of course, they had no alternative to each other. Anyway, I don’t think you’ll find me lacking in that respect if you marry me.”

  “Heavens!” she gasped. “Is this a proposal?”

  “It would be, if there were any chance of its being accepted.”

  “Too soon, too soon,” she murmured, almost breathless at his precipitation. When he wasn’t looking serious, he was almost too light. But there was no mistaking the yank at her heart. She had brought this man into her life, and she was going to have to cope with him. “I need more time, my friend. Only don’t think I’m letting you off the hook. I shall remember that you have made a formal proposal.”

  “It’s not binding, of course, until accepted. And it must be accepted or rejected within a reasonable time. How long shall we give it?”

  “Say a year?”

  But it only took months. They were married after his graduation from law school, during the first year that he worked at Vollard Kaye. Her father, delighted at the match, supplemented Rodman’s slender salary, and they were soon settled very comfortably in a charming small flat in town. Rod, as a lover, proved indeed that he had no need of earlier amatory lessons, and there seemed no cloud on their wedding bliss.