The Friend of Women and Other Stories Page 9

  The headmaster said nothing about it, and my curiosity—for it was impossible that he shouldn’t have been concerned—gave me the nerve to make this comment at one of our daily meetings in his office.

  “It must be so hard on his father,” I ventured.

  “Yes, Lyman has taken it very hard,” Lockwood answered, shaking his head and frowning. “It has almost killed the poor man. He’s a loving parent but not one to let his son live his own life. Few fathers do.”

  Lockwood had no children himself, and I would not have guaranteed their independence if he had. “Perhaps his son may come back to him yet,” I surmised. “That wild party on the eve of his vow taking doesn’t sound like the affair of a man who will submit forever to a monastic regime.”

  “Oh, Nick knows what he’s doing,” Lockwood affirmed gravely. “He’ll stay the course. And I think that farewell party had a certain style to it. You didn’t know Nick, but he has style. He could pick up a glass of gin and stare at it and say slowly to himself, ‘This is the last glass of gin I’ll ever drink’—and mean it.” Here Lockwood picked up the water glass on his desk and held it in front of him, staring at it intently. After a moment he put it down.

  “How tragic, then,” I exclaimed, “that a young man of such spirit should wall himself up in a monastery and be lost to any useful function in life!”

  Lockwood’s gaze was stern. “Who is to say he’s lost? Have you penetrated all the mysteries of life, Goodheart?”

  “Hardly. But you yourself, sir, must regret that so promising a graduate of yours should be lost to his family and friends. And lost to the great career he might have had and to the woman he might have married. And to our church, sir. Lost to our church!”

  “He made the decision that, after long consideration, he thought best for himself. I know how deeply he thought about it, for he honored me by consulting me over each step that he took.”

  “But surely, sir, you never encouraged him to become a Catholic? And you could never have gone along with his idea of becoming a Trappist!”

  “You’re being very free with your conclusions, Goodheart. What do you know of what I may or may not have gone along with?”

  “Oh, sir!” But then I was speechless.

  “As the French say, Pour les grands maux les grands remedès. Nick was a deeply troubled soul. He needed the kind of support that the Roman Church offers to some of its converts. And I think he even needed the bulwark of the Trappist discipline. There are different ways of coming to God. I believe he may have chosen the right one. For him, anyway. I pray for him. Do likewise, Percy.”

  I hardly knew that morning in my sacred studies class what I was saying to my students in our discussion of Saint Luke as the author not only of his gospel but of the Acts. My head was aswirl over the revelation that one of our foremost priests had actually recommended to a man his conversion to Rome and his submission to the Trappists! It would have defied my imagination had I not been prepared for a new insight into the insidious danger of evil. If Satan was working in the soul of the bewitched headmaster, was not God working in mine?

  I had always in mind a talk I had, one Sunday morning after chapel, when Mr. Lyman Rice, visiting the school for a meeting of the trustees, had taken me firmly by the elbow and guided me into the garth for a brief stroll and a confidential chat.

  “I know, Goodheart, that your duties take you closer to the headmaster than any other teacher at the school, which is why I am saying what I have to say to you. You are in a unique position to observe Dr. Lockwood in the performance of his multiple duties. The board is aware, of course, of his advanced age, and although we fully appreciate his continued fine physical strength and mental capacity, we wish to know if he shows any sign of strain or weakness. We are in a position to come to his assistance with any aid that he needs, like expert medical attention, extra stenographic or administrative help, even a limousine and driver, anything to lighten his load. He, I know, would never ask for these things, so I’m going to count on you to give me the word.”

  On Mr. Rice’s next visit, I requested a private interview, and he took me for another walk in the garth. I shall never forget how his features turned to stone when I told him what Lockwood had advised his son.

  ***

  When it was announced that the headmaster would retire at the end of the current school year, no reason was given, nor was one necessary, as his departure date coincided with his eightieth birthday, which was a time for even the greatest head to step down. There were rumors that Mrs. Lockwood had intervened to persuade him to give up his post, and I could well imagine that Mr. Rice had perhaps not even consulted his board, but had simply, in personal converse with the great lady, whose influence on her husband, if rarely exercised, was still paramount, convinced her that a silent withdrawal would eliminate the furor that might well be aroused by any public airing of the facts.

  The whole world, it seemed, now burst into plaudits of the great man’s long distinguished career and accomplishments. The campus was inundated with alumni coming to bid farewell to the revered pedagogue; newspapers and editorials trumpeted his prominence in the field of private education. He was too occupied now to see me nearly as often as he had, and on the few occasions that we still met, he gave no indication that he had the least suspicion of what I had done.

  But, oh, that brings me to the heart of the matter and to the cause of my crackup. He said only one word to me, but that word was enough to shatter my entire nervous system. On Prize Day, after his moving farewell address to the boys, the faculty, and the crowd of visiting parents and alumni, the masters of the school lined up to grasp his hand in a final tribute. I, as the youngest member, came last.

  Taking my hand, he smiled and pulled me close to him and whispered in my ear that one word before turning away. Judas.

  3

  The Call of the Wild

  I HAVE NEVER HAD a friend quite like Harry Phelps. Everyone has always liked Harry, well enough, that is, but there was a general feeling that he was something of a bore, however harmless and amiable a one. He had an even temper—remarkably so, you never saw him either depressed or elated—and a bland, round countenance, a strong stocky figure, a thick head of black hair, and large, rather expressionless blue-gray eyes. Some women credited him with a subdued sex appeal, but his nature was certainly not a passionate one. Nor did he ever say anything particularly witty or even very interesting. Yet you could count on him. He was there, so to speak, always reassuringly sympathetic. He was like a glass of milk, and you couldn’t be drinking Scotch forever, could you? He was certainly a loyal friend.

  Nor could he be pushed around too much. He could be directed, yes, he could even be bossed, as we have seen him be, shrilly, by Lola, his first wife, but there were still things about which he could be immovable: his Saturday game of golf, his summer fishing trip with old college pals, his pipe and favorite radio program, his early morning calisthenics. Lola would break her fingernails in any effort to interrupt these. He was like a domestic animal that would submit meekly to be trained in certain routines but could be adamant in rejecting others.

  And the animal is not a bad analogy, either, as Harry, like one of them, saw no difference between himself and other members of his species. Animals are not snobs, and Harry appeared to make no distinction, say, between the fashionable society of his parents’ world and the sundry employees of his brokerage firm on Wall Street. He treated everyone in his same mild and modest way. People who met him had no notion of a social register background or an elite private schooling; these things had washed off him without leaving a trace.

  I remember at the New England boarding school in which we were classmates, at age fourteen, before our voices had changed, that we were both cast as sopranos in the chorus of young maidens in a performance of The Pirates of Penzance. While delivering one of our songs, Harry noticed that his shoe had become untied. Calmly, stolidly, he leaned down slowly and carefully to retie the laces, utterly indiffer
ent to or at least unconscious of the fact that he was breaking the orderly line of the singers. After the performance the outraged director was heard to exclaim, “Harry Phelps has no idea there’s anyone in the world but himself, and he never will!”

  Life, however, doesn’t depend on one’s performance in amateur theatricals, and Harry passed easily enough through school and college and took his place ultimately in his father’s small brokerage house. He was the only child of very stylish parents who had just enough money to maintain their constant round of visits to the homes of their very much richer friends. The Gerald Phelpses were a handsome, beautifully attired, highly ordered, and disciplined couple of exquisite manners who played excellent bridge and golf. They were utterly baffled by Harry, but saw that he did well enough on his own and left him, after a few vain efforts to make him more socially presentable, pretty much to himself. This was fine by him. The only unfortunate part of their detachment was in their failure to prevent his picking Lola as his bride, or rather his being picked by Lola as her husband. Not that Mr. and Mrs. Phelps approved of Lola; they simply threw up their hands when confronted with her aggressive personality, her olive complexion, and sharp black eyes. She came from a dull, respectable family on the edge of the Phelpses’ fashionable world, close enough to be recognized and snubbed by it. But Lola knew enough to bypass them and go directly after Harry. He might not have been much, but she was shrewd enough to see that he was the best she could get.

  In my observance there are two kinds of nasty women: those who can be agreeable when they get what they want, and those who remain disagreeable even afterward. Lola was of the latter sort. She was one of those tormented souls who is always unhappy and wants everyone around her to be as unhappy as she is. Harry bowed meekly to all her demands: how the children should be educated, where the family should spend their vacations, what friends they should see, on what objects their money should be spent, even what church they should attend, everything, in short, except in the few areas of his pleasure specified earlier. Of course, these were just the ones she had to go after. Her possessiveness was satisfied only by totality; any reservation outraged her. But Harry was a rock when it came to these few retentions, and their domestic life was rent with turmoil. The two children, a docile son and a daughter who was her mother’s clone, had been drafted into the maternal alliance.

  I can see now that there may have been a latent cruelty in Harry’s submission to Lola in so many aspects of their existence. Her tantrums brought her no relief; she would have been happier without them. Had Harry only once said to her quietly, “Lola, I am moving out of the house. When you have calmed down and decided to be reasonable, I shall consider returning,” and acted on it, I have little doubt that she would have collapsed. And been the better for it. She needed a firm hand to steady her in her near fits. But it was never stretched out to her.

  I did not find Harry and Lola’s home a pleasant place to visit, and through the years I saw him mostly at bimonthly lunches at our downtown club. My law firm represented his brokerage house, and we occasionally had some business to discuss, but for the most part we simply exchanged items about old school and college mates. And so passed a decade and a half.

  The abrupt change in our talks came about one day when he brought me a startling piece of business. He announced it, however, in his customary dry tone, and for a moment I was too stunned to reply. He wanted me to represent him in a suit for divorce that Lola was bringing against him.

  When I spoke I was still too amazed to be tactful. “What did you do that finally broke the camel’s back?”

  “I rejected her plea for a reconciliation.”

  “Then you aren’t going to oppose her?”

  “Not in the divorce, no. But her terms are confiscatory.”

  “I suppose she wants the kids. That’s natural. You can always get visitation on holidays and summer.”

  “It’s not that. She can have the children. It’s my money I have to look out for.”

  “Well, of course you’ll have to give her a chunk of that. A big chunk, too. That’s inevitable.”

  “You don’t get it, Peter. She wants everything I’ve got. Right down to my last cuff link. I’m perfectly willing to be reasonable, even generous. But she wants to see me begging on the street corner with a steel cup in my hand.”

  I stared. “Harry, what have you done to her?”

  “It’s not so much what I’ve done. Though that’s certainly in it. It’s what I plan to do. I plan to wed Marianne Sykes. Do you know who she is?”

  Well, I did know. My firm represented Athena, a well-known liberal literary quarterly, with a reputation for controversy, that was backed by a wealthy woman client of ours. Marianne Sykes was one of its principal editors, and I had used her as a witness in defending the magazine against a libel case. And a very competent witness she had proved. She was a handsome, self-assured woman, with a reputation for being hard-boiled and famed for her biting wit. She was somewhere in her thirties, considerably Harry’s junior, and I knew she had been divorced at least twice. What in God’s name was a woman like that doing with Harry?

  “And she wants to marry you?” I couldn’t help it. My tact was gone.

  “I know it’s odd. She thinks so herself. But she fancies me. She likes me in bed.”

  “Harry! Is this really you talking?”

  Instead of returning to our offices after lunch, I took him down to the club bar where we drank an unprecedented postprandial liqueur, and I got the whole story out of him. This is what he told me.

  “You know that as counsel to Athena, Peter, you were kind enough to recommend my services to any of their editors who needed investment counsel. That is how Marianne Sykes came to me. She had a modest sum to place in the market, and I had the luck to make a good little profit for her. She was pleased and invited me to one of her magazine’s cocktail parties. It was July, and Lola and the children were in Maine, so I went alone. Of course, I didn’t know any of the literary celebrities who were there, but I enjoyed watching them. And then, to my surprise, when I was leaving, she hooked her arm under mine and said, ‘How about buying me dinner? Didn’t you say you were a summer bachelor?’ Well, of course I was delighted to take such a brilliant woman out, and we went to a neighboring restaurant and drank a good deal of wine while she told me some awful stories about the people we’d just left. She can be wickedly funny, you know. After dinner I walked her home to her apartment, and she asked me up for a nightcap. And do you know what, Peter? I didn’t even hesitate. I went right up!”

  “And then it happened?”

  He nodded several times. “Then it happened, indeed. After our first drink, she suddenly stood up before me and started to unhook her blouse. She simply asked, ‘Well, are we going to fuck or aren’t we?’

  “Peter, I was stunned. As you know, I never use four-letter words. My time in the navy sickened me of them. It seems to me that they turn the world into a brown stink. But I have to admit that the word she used was just the right one for what we did that night. She stripped off all her clothes, as easily as if we’d been a married couple, and told me she had no use for foreplay. And her body, Peter! Her flesh was firm, her skin like ivory. I guess I went kind of crazy. It wasn’t simply the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me. It was the only thing that has ever happened to me!”

  “And for her?”

  “Oh, for her, naturally, it was something much less.” Here he actually shrugged. “I’m not a total fool, Peter. I know she has what the auto dealers call mileage. It’s not only that she has had two husbands. There have been plenty of other men, too. She makes no bones about that. But she liked what she did with me. Oh, yes, I could tell that. And she’s willing to repeat it.”

  “How did Lola find out?”

  “I told her. I had to tell her when I said I wanted a divorce.”

  “My god, Harry, was that necessary? A one-night stand when your wife’s away and you’ve reached a dangerous age is
no reason to wreck a marriage. Even Lola might overlook it.”

  “Indeed, Lola offered not to overlook it, but not to let it break up our marriage. After her first terrible fit, she was ready to keep me if I promised never to see Marianne again. But I have every intention of seeing Marianne again. I have every intention of marrying her.”

  “Does she insist on that?” I could hardly believe that she did.

  “Not insist, no. But she’s willing to give it a whirl if I obtain my freedom.”

  “Harry, can’t you see that marriage means nothing to a woman like that? Sure, she fancies you now, as she says. You’ve given her some kind of a new jag, despoiling the innocent, perhaps—I’m sorry, but I must be frank with you—and when she’s through with you, she’ll toss you away like a bit of used Kleenex. And what will you be? A plucked chicken!”

  “I know the risks, Peter. And I’m willing to take them. Certainly, there’s something in what you say. But look at the other side. She’s younger than me by six or seven years, yes, but she’s still on the wrong side of thirty. Probably closer to the fatal forty than she admits. Brilliant and attractive as she is, husbands don’t exactly grow on trees at her age, and she’s too smart not to know it. I may not be such a bad investment, after all. The magazine world is notoriously fickle, and she has small means. And at the worst, marriage will give me more time with her. I’ll be harder to shed.”

  “Not much harder.”

  “But some.”

  “Harry, you’re a damn fool!”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?”

  Of course I agreed to take the poor guy’s case. But there was little I could do to reduce Lola’s voracious demands. When she had at last recognized that there was no chance of preserving her marriage, she had turned on Harry with an appalling hate, backed by a bloodhound of a lawyer. I could barely wrench a pittance of visitation of the children out of her claim for total custody, and my efforts to see that Harry retained enough of his property to live decently were constantly undermined by his anxiety to get the wrangling over with and wed his inamorata. In the end he yielded Lola full title to their house with all its furnishings, sixty percent of his income, and a goodly slice of his capital. What can you do when a client collapses on you?