The Young Apollo and Other Stories Page 7

  That was where he had me. Knowing that I wanted something different. Knowing that I hated to be classified with the group I was killing myself to lead.

  "It's keen of you to have spotted that," I admitted after a thoughtful pause.

  "Well, Falstaff said he was the cause of wit in other men. You're the cause of it in me, Lady Kate. We could be a great team. The parties we could throw would set the colony on its ear."

  "And how would you dispose of Mrs. Astor in all of this? Hasn't she a first claim on you?"

  "The great Caroline would have to give up her place. Her sun, anyway, is setting."

  "Isn't that rather disloyal? Like those little brown creatures that have such an aversion to leaky vessels?"

  "Not if it's a case of sauve qui peut, We have lived in the last days of great queens. Victoria and Tzu Hsi. It is only realistic to turn one's gaze to the future."

  ***

  Thus my famous summer partnership with Beverly Dean began. He was constantly at the "castle," ever at my side, escorting me to parties almost as if we were a recognizably united couple. But like what? A dowager sovereign with her minion? Or the old British queen with her gillie, John Brown? Or even Elizabeth and Essex? I didn't give a hoot how people saw us; I was amused, and that was enough for me. He organized and gave life to my entertainments, and it is not too much to claim that, between us, we altered irretrievably the revels of the summer colony.

  To start with, we reduced the time spent at the dinner table from three hours to one. We instituted parlor games and elaborate charades with dazzling costumes. We abandoned place cards and adopted Thomas Jefferson's rule of pell-mell. We played tricks on our friends, picking certain guests in advance of a party to dress as maids or footmen, to prove that people never really look at servants. We organized tableaux vivants in which some of our prettier young people appeared almost (but not quite) scandalously unclad. I gave a party for an "unknown Russian grand duke" and introduced a chimpanzee in full regalia. At the dinner table, Beverly would sometimes scream for silence and call on people to confess their most shocking secret, with uproarious results. And sometimes, aloof and exhausted, I would retire with a chosen few to my bedroom suite to sip champagne and tear our other guests apart.

  Of course, there were reactions. Mrs. Astor, piqued by Beverly's desertion, let her opinion be known that we were fatally lowering the tone of society, that we were undermining the orderly hierarchy that she and Ward McAllister had been at such pains to rear. I was denounced as a female Attila, scoffing at the ruins of the noble Roman temple I had blown apart. It was all great fun, and as my cynical husband observed on one of his rare visits, using a marine term, perhaps it was the sanitary hosing of a greasy deck.

  Beverly had now become one of the principal figures of the Newport social scene; his blazers and cravats were louder and louder, and his high chortle could be heard up and down Bailey's Beach at noon when he visited the cabanas of his adoring women friends. His jokes and gibes waxed freer and freer, and though he continued to amuse me, there were moments when I wondered if I were not going to have to caution him to treat me with more reserve. It was all very well for him to call me his adopted mother, but his behavior at times bordered on the too impudently filial, or even resembled the impatience of an aging heir apparent enviously eyeing the crown of a too-long-surviving monarch.

  I never knew what he lived on, though it was bruited about that he received commissions from the caterers in town whom he recommended, but I didn't like it when he began seeking loans from me. Twice I supplied him with moderate sums, but on a third occasion, when the amount requested was considerable, I suggested an alternative.

  "Why don't you marry? I can think of at least three widows who would jump at the chance. And you wouldn't have to perform any prodigies of romantic passion, either. They'd settle for a black or white tie to escort them to parties."

  "Lady Kate, you're wonderful! You know what's on a man's mind before he even tells you."

  "A man? You wouldn't even have to be that. Though I don't doubt you could take care of any appetites that you aroused. No matter how tough the old bird." Beverly, of course, was widely supposed to be homosexual, a matter of small concern in society, but I rather imagined that he could handle either sex—if it was to his advantage to do so.

  "What would you say, Lady Kate, if I told you I had already cast my eye on a princesse du sang} Of your sang, too. Can a cat be so bold? Can even a kitten?"

  "A princess? Here in Newport? I thought we allowed only princes and that we kept them for our richest virgins."

  "I don't mean a European one. I mean a Yankee princess closely allied to my queen. Your charming cousin Adelaide."

  So he was ahead of me! He already had his candidate. I didn't know why, but I didn't quite like it. Adelaide Welldon, fair, fat, and forty, was the widow of a wealthy steel heir who had died of alcoholism. She was the daughter of a first cousin of mine, and although dull and a bit on the silly side, I had included her in my larger gatherings because she was kin and amiable and flattered me.

  "You'd be calling me Cousin Kate, I suppose," was my rather dry comment, after a moment's silence.

  "That, of course, would be one of the principal motives for the match!"

  "Hmph. Would you be kind to her?"

  "Kind to Adelaide? Why, I'd adore her!"

  "She might prefer to be loved."

  "Never fear. Our attachment is quite mutual."

  "Oh, you've found that out? You've asked her?"

  "I have been so bold."

  I viewed him skeptically. "You couldn't hold yourself back, I take it. Passion overwhelmed you? Then where do I come in?"

  Beverly's features assumed what seemed almost a businesslike expression. "She won't marry me without your blessing."

  "That's a condition?"

  "She says it's an absolute one. I take it, dear lady, you won't let me down?"

  I was about to give him the nod, but some impulse made me pause. "I'll talk to her," was all I could promise.

  Adelaide came to me that very afternoon. She seemed divided between a palpitating self-satisfaction and a dread that I would laugh at her. Her round, bland, fair countenance was puckered with agitation, and she kept clasping and unclasping her hands until I told her flatly to stop.

  "Of course, I know that my money is something of an inducement," she said defensively.

  "Well, of course. He couldn't marry at all without that."

  "But I think he also cares for me. Somewhat, anyway." Her eyes were suddenly alarmed, almost beseeching. "He has a heart, hasn't he, Cousin Kate? You must know!"

  "We all have hearts, surely, Adelaide."

  "And he wouldn't say he loved me if he didn't, would he? If he didn't at all, I mean?"

  "My dear, I'm sure he's very fond of you. Who wouldn't be? But you don't want me to tell you he's Romeo, do you? We're not in Verona, after all. This is Newport!"

  "Oh, I know! Which is why I've come to you. Because you know us all so well. Of course, I'd be happy to be able to buy all the things for poor Beverly that he needs. And I do love him, Cousin Kate, I really do! And although I don't expect him to be a Romeo, I don't want to have what they call ... or what the French call ... what is it?"

  "A mariage blanc?"

  "Yes, that's it! It wouldn't be that, would it?"

  "My dear, what a question to put to me! You're not asking what my relations with Beverly have been, are you?"

  Adelaide's face was at once drawn with horror. "Oh, my goodness, no! However could you ask? Oh, Cousin Kate, what you must think of me!"

  "Well, you needn't take it so for granted that I'm as neuter as an old rock," I retorted. And then I stopped. Perhaps it was just what I was! But I knew, as clearly and vividly as if I saw Adelaide stretched, absurdly and expectantly, on the nuptial bed, her hair tied in pink ribbons, her too ample white flesh tingling, that she would never be the bride she dreamed of being. Any performance on Beverly's part would be, at best, p
erfunctory.

  We were sitting on the veranda, and I turned my eyes now to the sea and the racing sailboats, white specks on the gray-blue. Adelaide watched me anxiously.

  "What is it, Cousin Kate? What are you thinking of?"

  "Oh, nothing in particular." I closed my eyes for a mo-ment. Why should I make a fool of myself? Why should I deprive this foolish creature of a husband with whom, after the mild initial disappointment of a fumbling wedding night, she would settle down to a life of laughs and trips and parties? Wouldn't Beverly brighten up an existence stifled in a widow's dreary routine? I was taking her too seriously, Beverly too seriously, and myself too seriously. He and Adelaide would be a perfect case of symbiosis. Maybe even God had planned it that way.

  "Don't worry about the bed side of things, my dear. Beverly's a man, and men can do anything. I'm told they even like it!"

  Adelaide laughed and hugged me so tightly that I had to push her off. She even made me give her away at the wedding.

  ***

  The honeymoon lasted only a week, for Beverly had promised to return for a bachelors' dinner given for one of Newport's rare old bucks who was getting married at last at age fifty. What was very odd was that neither Beverly nor his bride saw fit on their return to call on me or even to drop a card. Such a pointed omission could have only a serious reason, and I waited, with some curiosity and even a mild apprehension, to learn what it was.

  My explanation came one day at noon when I was seated alone in my cabana at Bailey's Beach with a novel that was hardly amusing enough to distract me from gazing at the sea and the bathers. It was generally known that I did not welcome visitors at this time; Newport was accustomed to my matutinal grumpiness, and I was a bit surprised when Adelaide, fully dressed for some luncheon party, with no concessions to the sea or open air, asked if she could join me for a chat. "Chat" was the word she incongruously used, though her tense, set, flat, stupid face boded no such trivia.

  "It's not my chatting time," I answered gruffly. "But you're welcome to a seat if you need a rest."

  Adelaide plumped herself down on a stool and was silent for a long moment. At length she spoke up. "You may have wondered, Cousin Kate, why I have not called on you before."

  "When I start wondering, my dear, you may say I'm wandering."

  "And why," she pursued, ignoring my comment, "Beverly has not consulted you on your end-of-season ball."

  "There's plenty of time for that. And I'm not even sure I'm going to give one."

  "That's just as well, then. For my husband says he's not going to have any part in it. He says that the time for the kind of party you and he gave is past. That the job of breaking up the old ways has been done, and it's now up to him to create a more serious and stable society."

  "Fancy! And one, I take it, in which I'm to have no part? The old nag is turned out to pasture?"

  "Well, he didn't put it quite so crudely."

  "Adelaide," I said severely, "you came here to say something even more disagreeable than that. Well, say it!"

  I was interested at last. The woman, for once, was almost interesting. She had some spirit, or at least spite, in her, after all.

  "It's this, then. You sacrificed me to a man you thought was your protégé. Your property. Well, now he's going to sacrifice you for me! He's going to make me the Mrs. Kate Rives of Newport!"

  "Well, well!" I let my novel drop to the ground. "This beats fiction any day. How have I sacrificed you? To what strange deity have I offered so untempting a morsel?"

  "To the god of your own pleasure!" Adelaide's face had turned a bright pink. "You knew what awaited me. Do you want to hear what happened on my wedding night?"

  "Avidly."

  "I'm sure you do. It was all that your jaded, decadent curiosity could have asked. My husband of a few hours made it very clear to me that he had no interest in me physically, that he offered me instead what he termed a 'congenial partnership' which would take us both to the top of the social ladder."

  "Wasn't that more or less what you might have expected? Wasn't it what Newport rather took for granted?"

  "I expected the partnership, yes, but I expected more. Because you had assured me there would be more. That I was marrying a man! And you knew he wasn't! You knew all about him!"

  "What makes you think that?"

  "Because you reek of such things! Do you deny it?"

  I paused a moment. "No," I said at last. "Because any way you take him, he's good enough for you. You were nobody, and now you'll be somebody. Unless you're a complete fool, you'll learn to enjoy it."

  "I'm going to try, anyway. And half my fun will be knowing that I'm undoing half the stupid things you made Beverly do."

  "Oh, get out of here. I want to read my book."

  By the time I had picked it up, she was gone. I had little compunction about her. No, my disgust was all with myself, for having so long put up with such a little rat as Beverly Dean, whose only ambition had been to replace Mrs. Astor with me and me with himself. Of course, he had no loyalties; the women he betrayed were only fantasies of himself. I had no doubt that he pictured himself, in his mind's eye, as a despotic hostess, dazzling in diamonds and ruling a world turned court. Adelaide would be his bank, not his hostess. And he would never leave her, as he would never find a richer or more compliant wife. He would grow fat and shrill, autocratic and occasionally obscene, with bigger and bigger jeweled cufflinks and studs, and when the social world ultimately tired of him, as they tired of every new favorite, he would become bitter and misanthropic, and Adelaide would have her ultimate revenge by supporting him in his lonely luxury and ignoring his sour complaints.

  That night, at home, I was glad when my husband arrived for one of his rare Newport weekends. He listened politely, over a bottle of the finest Burgundy, while I voiced my grim little tale.

  "Well, my dear, you have had the dubious privilege of presiding over the decline and fall of Newport society. But do not think you can be a Gibbon. If its golden age was a fiction, so will be its twilight. It really is hardly worth recording."

  "But couldn't you say that of any period of history?"

  "Perhaps. But if history, as has been said, is only biography, your Beverly is at best only a small footnote."

  Which is what this memorandum is. Later that year we turned the Rives castle into an orphanage and took a cruise around the world.

  The Attributions

  WHEN MRS. WINTHROP CHANLER paid her last visit to my little pavilion in the Forest of Fontainbleau in the early 1950s, she had already passed her eightieth birthday and was the last survivor of what I like to think of as the galaxy of the American Renaissance. She had been dubbed by Henry James the most intellectual American woman (or had he said the only intellectual?); she had sat with Henry Adams under the blue brilliance of the windows of Chartres; she had motored in Italy and in Spain with Edith Wharton. As a girl, she had played the piano by listening to Liszt; as an equestrian, she had studied manège in Vienna. Tall and serene, she had gazed down the little green slope that unrolled from my terrace through geometrical garden plots to the pièce d'eau in the middle distance and asked me, "Tell me one thing, Leonardo Luchesi. What have you done to deserve so much beauty in your life? Have you sold you soul to the devil?"

  "Not quite. I may have mortgaged it. Let us hope that I shall have paid it off before my time comes."

  Have I? I'm afraid not quite. But I wasn't going to tell Mrs. Chanler that. She wouldn't have understood. Or should I say, she wouldn't have sympathized, for she understood many things. My point is that she had never encountered poverty or need. Her galaxy may have been, in my opinion anyway, the finest group that the culture of the New World has ever produced, but they were still a small, privileged, and even snobbish circle. If they had sold their souls for beauty, the bargain was well hidden. At least there was no trace of it. The same could not be said of mine.

  I thought that day of baring my mortgaged soul to Mrs. Chanler, but I repressed the impu
lse. She would have been a wonderful listener, but I was not to forget that she had been raised by American expatriates in the Rome of Pio Nono and was the most devout of Catholics. Was there anyone who would see me quite as honestly as I saw myself? Not now. Since Mrs. Leila Warren is dead, and her personality lost in the glitter of the great art collection that I helped her put together, I can address these thoughts only to her shade.

  ***

  I was born in Apulia, in the lower part of the Italian boot, in the poorest section of what was then a very poor peninsula, in the 1880s, in the coastal town of Trani. The book Christ Stopped at Eboli was later to describe vividly the dark poverty of that area, but I still cherish the mildly compensating memory that we had of the glory of the Adriatic at our doorstep. As a boy, lonely and dreamy and uncongenial with my clamorous siblings and schoolmates, I used to take long walks down the beaches and ponder what marvels might lie across the sea. My particular musing spot was by the plain bare Gothic church, standing by itself away from stores and habitations, on the very edge of the shoreline, like some great stranded wreck raising its lofty campanile over the long sands and the infinite stretch of blue water. There, with the ever circling, squawking gulls, I had beauty to myself as a solace. A solace for everything. It was there that I resolved that if I could have beauty in my life, I should have all that I needed.

  My father, Antonio Luchesi, who as a bartender made a bare living for a large family, had an older brother who had emigrated to New York and achieved there a degree of economic independence as a tailor. He had married but had had no children, and as his wife was no longer of an age to have any, he offered to take one of his nephews as an apprentice and possible heir. My parents, relieved to be freed of at least one of their demanding brood, picked me as the one who was brightest at school and the most likely to learn a new tongue and new ways, and also as the child least likely to adapt to the rough-and-tumble of Italian village life, and so at age fifteen I was duly dispatched to the New World. I was not to return to my native land until I was equipped to deal with it as a source of art rather than the home of misery.