The Towers of Love (15 page)

“I know, but—from a male point of view. And you're a girl, which is different. You should hear about it from another woman, like your mother. Or a book. Why not ask her if there's a book you can read.”

“Oh, I don't want to read about life in some old
book
!” she said. “I want to hear about it from people, real people.”

“Ah, Pan, I can't explain any of these things to you,” he said. “Really, I just can't. It isn't going to be right, coming from me. It's got to be from Sandy. Or—or how about Reba?”

“What does Reba know about marriage? Reba's an old maid.”

“Or a book.”

She was silent for a moment. “You're just—just too embarrassed to tell me things, aren't you?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “perhaps I am.”

She lay on the bed, frowning at the ceiling. She put her cigarette to her mouth again, took a deep pull, and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Oh, nobody tells me anything!” she said.

As it had turned out, in the years after the day at Bash Bish Falls, he had begun taking Anne Cromwell out. He had taken her out a good deal, in fact. His mother had liked Anne. Anne came from an old and distinguished New York family, and she lived, in the winter, in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and, in summer, in a large house in Locust Valley, on Chicken Valley Road. She was a beautiful girl, blonde, with high, fine cheekbones; she had gone to Spence and Vassar and, as he had found out later, the story about the baby pillow was true enough. It had been, she confessed, a silly childish habit, and she had outgrown it by the time she got to college. But it seemed doubtful that the baby pillow had ever joined her and Ted Stranahan in a room sub-let from a Millbrook cook. When Anne was a débutante, Hugh had been invited to all the parties that Anne went to, and—because he had nothing against Anne, and really liked her quite a lot—he hadn't thought anything about it when his mother invited her up to the house in' Connecticut for week-ends, or when her family invited him to New York or to Long Island. Only once had his mother said to him, with a little laughing look, “Darling, if you want to marry someone—marry Anne!”

He remembered the summer after he had graduated from Yale, when he and Anne had been sitting beside the pool at the Piping Rock Club. They had been playing canasta most of the afternoon and then, bored with that, Anne had stretched out, slim and tanned in her bathing suit, on her stomach on the terrace, and had started doing card tricks.

“Pick a card, any card,” Anne said, fanning out the deck in her hand.

“This one?”

“Fine. Look at it. Don't show it to me.”

He had looked at it.

“Now put it back on the top of the deck. Now,” she said, “watch me very closely. I'm going to cut the cards, see? See, I'm cutting them. Now I'm going to shuffle them. Watch me. Now see, I'm shuffling them. Is one shuffle enough?”

“Shuffle them again,” he said.

“Gladly, sir,” she said. “See? I'm shuffling them again. Now, do you agree that the cards are thoroughly shuffled?”

“They're shuffled,” he nodded.

“Now I'm going to find your card,” she said, and she started going through the deck, biting her lower lip as she concentrated on the magic she was about to perform. “Let me see,” she said, “is it the nine of clubs?”

“No,” he said, smiling.

“Then it must be the jack of hearts?”

“No,” he said.

“Then it is—uh, is it the five of clubs?”

“No again,” he said, laughing.

“Darn!” she said. “It worked yesterday.”

“It was the seven of spades.”

“Darn,” she said.

“What you have to do,” he said, “is to give the deck a very sloppy shuffle. You see, what you did was to look at the top card on the deck and then put mine on top of that. When you cut and shuffled, you had to just hope that those two cards would stay together so that when you went through the deck again, and found your old top card, mine would still be next to it. But it doesn't always work.”

“Meanie!” she said. “You knew the trick all along!” And, in mock rage, she tossed the cards across the terrace, scattering them in all directions.

Then she had picked up her bottle of sweet-smelling suntan oil, and, cupping a few drops of oil in her palm, began rubbing it across his back. She spread the lotion, in slow, angel-wing patterns, across his shoulders, down his back, along the top of his trunks, spreading it smoothly and gently and evenly with the practised motion of her cool fingers.

“You have marvellous shoulders, Hugh,” she said.

And he had suddenly turned on his side and said to her, “Anne, will you marry me?”

And she had laughed softly and said, “All right.”

He had gone to tell Edrita. “I'm going to marry Anne Cromwell,” he had said.

“Oh,” she had said. “I see.”

“I wanted—you know, to tell you.”

“Well, I'm glad you did. I've met Anne. I like her. She's very nice.”

“I love her very much,” he had said.

“Do you, Hugh?”

“Yes. And I'm very happy. I think we're both going to be very happy.”

“I'm sure you will be,” she had said. “Anne's a nice girl.”

“Well,” he said, “I just wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know. You see, Edrita, it just wouldn't have worked out for us. Would it?”

“I don't really think that's the point,” she had said.

“I mean we wouldn't have been happy together, not really.”

She had laughed and said, “But that's not the point.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the point is not whether you and I would have been happy together or not, or whether it would have worked out or not.”

“I don't understand, Edrita.”

“The point is simply that you and I would never have had the slightest chance—not the slightest chance in the world—to even see whether or not we'd have been happy, or whether it would work out.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, Hugh. There's never been the smallest possibility that you and I would ever marry each other.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I don't know about that.”

“Don't you? I do. It's always been out of the question. I've never considered it the remotest possibility.”

“I didn't know you felt that way,” he said.

“I'm not talking about the way I feel,” she said. “But I gave up any consideration of marrying you—oh, two or three years ago. When I was seventeen or eighteen and was wise enough to get the lay of the land. I thought you'd see it too, how things had to be.”

“What do you mean—the way things
had
to be?”

“How could we ever get married? Your mother wouldn't permit it.”

“My mother has nothing to do with it,” he said.

“Doesn't she? Well, all I know is that your mother would never let you marry me, and when I was wise enough to see that—that was that. I put the whole idea out of my mind entirely.”

“Listen,” he said to her, “my mother has absolutely nothing to do with this. This decision to marry Anne was entirely my own—I decided it myself, and my mother had nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, poor Hugh, poor Hugh,” she had said. “We weren't talking about you and Anne. We were talking about you and
me
! Your mother would never allow you to marry me. She'd simply say no. And everybody knows that you always do everything your mother says.”

Eight

There was a note from his mother, on her pink Rampanaug Towers stationery, that had been tucked under his door the next morning.
Darling
, it began:

I'm dashing into New York with Titi to look at something he's picked out for me. Home for dinner. Be good.

Love & X's

S
ANDY

He dressed and went downstairs for breakfast.

“Has my father been down yet, Pappy?” he asked him.

“Oh, sir, he is down one hour ago,” Pappy said, smiling. “Gone to office now.”

“Oh, fine,” Hugh said.

When Pappy returned with his eggs, he said, “Sir, to-day, Thursday, Maria and me go off for day. You like Maria fix something for you lunch?”

“No, tell her not to bother,” Hugh said. “I'll fix something myself, Pappy.”

“Good, sir.”

He ate his breakfast in silence and then, by half past nine, he found himself alone in the house.

He began wandering through the rooms, idly picking up and setting down little objects—the little objects that a big house collects, that seem to settle on it like a silent snowfall—the crystal paperweights with trout flies imprisoned in their centres; the Dresden figurines; the sea-shell collection, under glass, from someone's forgotten Florida vacation; the cigarette lighters that no longer worked; and all the souvenirs of trips and places and people: a flinty chip from the Petrified Forest; a silver goblet inscribed to commemorate the Paris Exposition; a small, bronze-like metal miniature of the Empire State Building, with an unreliable thermometer on it, that his brother Billy had once brought home to his mother from New York. None of the things had any value, really, or any use. They were just the things that a house collects and, since they were gifts from givers whom people in the house had loved, they could not be thrown away, like pencils. Many of the little objects had been carefully arranged on the Paisley scarf that covered the library piano and, as he picked them up one after another, turned them in his hands, and put them back again where they had been, he found that he was looking at Anne's eyes that stared out from a picture frame in one of the bookshelves behind the piano. She was standing, tall and nunlike in her wedding veil and gown, her face frozen in the expression of bridal austerity which characterised so many Bachrach wedding portraits. With her, on the same shelf, stood several other less formal views of the wedding: he and Anne, looking breathless and somehow guilty, emerging from the door of St. James's Church; he and Anne, smiling and still looking guilty, in the back seat of a big car that was about to drive them away; he and Anne, a few minutes later, at the reception, gingerly toasting each other with champagne; then he and Anne cutting the cake; then Anne being toasted by his ushers; then Anne kissing Joe Wallace, who had been his best man; then Joe and the ushers presenting him with the silver cigarette box with all their signatures etched in the top—their nicknames: Zip Walton, Bouncer Graves, Little John Moffitt, Moose Devereux—names that had sprung from some bit of reputed prowess, or characteristic, at school or college. The faces looked unfamiliar now. “Anne Lindsay Cromwell Weds Hugh P. Carey,” he remembered reading in the
New York Times
the next morning. “Graduates of Yale and Vassar Marry.” He and Anne looked unfamiliar too, standing there in all those different poses, and he wondered if they had ever really looked like that: proud, wistful, haughty, gay, triumphant, ashamed—they looked like characters from some other story. He looked at his watch and wondered if it was too early to telephone Edrita.

He sat down at the piano. He had never learned how to play it. But, as a child, he suddenly remembered, he had loved to play
under
the piano. Under the piano had been a strange, dark, dusty, and Gothic world that could become whatever sort of place you wanted to make it—a house, a railroad station, a coal mine, a dungeon. He saw the under-the-piano world quite clearly now, the medieval columns that hung down suspending the pedal mechanism, the fat sculptured legs on their brass castors, the raftered underside that still looked varnished and new, and that sheltered numerous interstices and spaces and ledges that could become unequalled hiding-places for any number of small treasures, and the gloom of the place that had made it all so private, with the fringe of the Paisley piano shawl hanging down in thick points all around. He had introduced Edrita once to the land of the sub-piano, he remembered, and she had been just as impressed with it as he.

The telephone rang now, and he got up to answer it. He had thought that it might be—and it was—Edrita.

“I was calling to thank your mother for the lovely party last night,” she said.

“Sandy's gone to New York for the day,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I can confess then. That wasn't really why I called. That was just what I was going to say if she answered the phone.”

“I see,” he said. “What did you call for, then?”

“To talk to you,” she said. “Of course I had rather thought that you might call me.”

“I was going to call you,” he said. “I was sitting here thinking about it. But I thought it might be too early; you might not be up.”

“Well, I'm not
officially
up,” she said. “I'm still in bed. But anyway, here we are.”

“Yes. Here we are.”

“Goodness, in the old days I'd have
died
before I'd ever call a boy up. And here I've called you up twice in two days. What's happened to my scruples, I wonder?”

“Would you feel better about it if we both hung up and I called you back?”

“No,” she said. “No, this whole house is practically wiretapped. The minute the phone rings, everyone in the house lifts up a receiver. And I can't help—well, feeling a little sinful about it.”

“Sinful about what?”

“Sinful about this. Calling you.”

“No need to feel that way. I'm all alone here. Sandy's gone, and Pappy and Maria have gone for the day.”

“Oh,” she said. And then, “What are you doing for lunch?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Would you like me to come over and fix something for you?”

“Why, yes,” he said. “I'd like that. That would be very nice.”

“I'm a lousy cook,” she said with a laugh. “But I'm probably better than you are.”