Diary of a Yuppie (18 page)

That summer, after graduation, when I went over to see Lindsay, who had returned from Arizona, I was told he was too ill to have any visitors. But his father came down to the front hall to talk to me. Mr. Knowles had always been in the city working on the days that I had come to swim at his place, and I knew him only by sight. He did not know me at all, but his air was cordial.

"So you're Bobby Service. Lindsay has told me some fine things about you. That you had only one year at Haverstock and helped him to learn more than in the other three. And that you've read all of
The Ring and the Book
and
The Faerie Queene.
If you become a lawyer like your old man, you're going to be the most literary one since Francis Bacon. And didn't he write all of Shakespeare, too?"

Mr. Knowles was the finest type of Yankee aristocrat, if that's not an oxymoron, a plain old shoe of a man, with short grizzled gray hair and leathery cheeks, a high-pitched laugh and the kindest, gentlest eyes I have ever seen.

"Let me tell you something, Bob," he said as he took me to the door. "You're going to have the life my boy may not have. Always remember that's a reason for you to be sure to get an extra kick out of every minute of it!"

I'm afraid that what I most minded when Lindsay died, only a month later, was that I could not see Mr. Knowles again. There was simply no way that he and I could be friends. It made Keswick and my parents seem duller than ever.

As a freshman at Columbia that fall I began at last seriously to brace myself for the future. I think I always had known, deep down, that I was not going to be a writer. I had too worldly a nature to cope with. But I still had my college years in which to equip myself with a philosophy that would carry me through at least the early years of my professional life—assuming, as I largely did, that I should be a lawyer. I had just about totally destroyed the last remnants of the parental standards and made a clean sweep of the lares and penates above their hearth. I was like Marius, whose "only possible dilemma lay between that old ancestral religion, now become so incredible to him, and the honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence."

And it was at just this point that not only my intelligence but my heart was confronted with the greatest exception I have ever known to my category of "shams." I fell in love with Alice.

I
T WAS AMAZING
how totally that hurled glass cured me of Sylvia. I was as cold to her now as some keeper of a zoo of big cats who, thinking he has made friends with one of the glowing tawny animals, enters her cage to find himself savagely scratched and gored. Obviously, that is the nature of the beast, and the keeper has no one to blame but his careless self. I recognized that Sylvia's very fury may have been evidence of her attachment to me, even of her passion, but it was equally a fact that I cannot value affection expressed so violently—nay, I actually abhor it. All I wanted to do was slam shut the door of her cage and walk away from that zoo for all time.

But I must say this for Sylvia. She knew when something was over. She made no desperate midnight calls to me, nor did I find any message on my desk the following morning. That shattered glass was an effective farewell.

I felt a strange stupor. I did not even look at my mail. I had no concern for Ethelinda's will or for the great merger that had been the subject of so many conferences. Was I a monster to have so little feeling for people who had done so much for me? Well, so be it. I didn't care. I was what I was.

My secretary entered, in response to my buzz. She was a silent, efficient, dark-complexioned middle-aged woman who never made personal remarks, worked any number of hours that I requested and had, I fatuously assumed, a crush on me.

"I'm going away, Elaine." The news came almost as much of a surprise to myself as to her. "I'm going away for a few days, and I shall leave no forwarding address. I shan't be reachable to anyone."

"And the merger?"

"The merger can take care of itself."

"What about your family, Mr. Service? What shall I do if one of the girls is ill?"

"Their mother can take care of that."

"If you will allow me to say, Mr. Service—"

"No, Elaine, I will not allow you to say anything. Just put it down that I'm temporarily off my rocker. Don't worry. I'll get back on it again."

I strode quickly down the corridor and out of the office, ignoring the receptionist's cry, "Lunch, Mr. Service?"

I went home, packed a bag, got my car from the garage and drove north to Millbrook. I found the little inn where my parents had stayed at the time of my graduation from Haverstock School; it was still in business and I took a room. Later that evening I drove to the school and called on Mr. Hawkins.

He was alone in his study, correcting examination papers, but he jumped up to greet me with a heart-warming welcome. I had seen him only half a dozen times in the eighteen years since my graduation, and he had changed very little, except that he was stouter and his hair, prematurely for one still under sixty, was now a snowy white. He was still a bachelor, and as intense and benevolent as ever. He let me talk until late that night as if he had nothing else to do, and the following afternoon we went for a ramble in the autumnal woods.

"I have thought of you often through the years, Bob. I wondered what was ultimately going to happen to you." Hawkins paused here to fix those glowing, concerned eyes on me. "I was terribly afraid it was going to be something bad."

"Like this?"

"Well, of course, I didn't know what form it would take. What I feared was that when you got what you wanted—and I was always sure you were going to get that—you would find it turn to dust and ashes in your mouth."

"Doesn't it for everybody?"

"Oh, my, no. Lots of people are utterly content with the rewards of this world. But you had been vouchsafed a vision of better things. You had loved Wordsworth and Hopkins. You knew long passages of
The Prelude
by heart. How were you ever going to be satisfied in a shallow pond?"

"But you never believed that I cared for Wordsworth!" I remonstrated, half indignant that his memory should be so flattering. "You thought I was a fraud, a phony! That I only read to get good marks and show off!"

"Is that what you thought I thought?" he asked in distress. "Is that what you think other people think?"

"It's what I know they think."

"My dear Bob, I may not have done you a good turn in encouraging your love of letters. Of course, I always knew there was a worldly side to your cultivation of the fruit of that garden. But that's not as uncommon as you seem to think. What I may have failed to recognize was that you were mixing two incompatible things: a
real
love of beauty with a
real
love of success. And perhaps that hasn't been possible since the Renaissance. Why don't you go back to your wife? She, I gather, at least shares your literary tastes. That's better than Mrs. Sands, surely."

"Alice won't have me."

"She wouldn't have the man you were yesterday. She might have the man you are today."

I seized on the idea at once. I knew now that I had been waiting for him to say it, that I had come up to Millbrook to hear him say it. "She's my soul," I murmured, and I was afraid that I sounded greedy.

"Maybe you're still a little bit hers."

I drove down to Keswick in the late afternoon and found Mother alone. Father was off on a fishing trip, but she was willing to give me supper and put me up for the night. We sat up late while I told her my story. She listened with that cool, faintly disapproving but essentially resigned air that she so often adopted with me.

"So you'll go back to Alice now? What will she say, do you think?"

"That's what I want you to tell me. You see her more than I do. Has she got anyone else?"

"One of her poets, maybe. I don't know how much there is in it. I met him once there. A John Cross. He's middle-aged, rather small and quiet, and walks with a limp. I believe he had infantile as a child."

"He doesn't sound like a very formidable rival."

"Don't be too sure. He may give Alice something she needs. Something you didn't give her. Are you really sure, Robert, that you want to go back to her?" Mother's eyes seemed to search me as if I had just reconfirmed that I should always be an enigma to her.

"Of course I'm sure!"

"Because I think she may be on the way to finding some kind of peace in her life. I'd hate to have her all riled up again."

Mother had never learned that the most essential maternal quality is loyalty—loyalty that can be blind, if necessary. The failure of this quality in a mother does even more damage than its presence does good. I felt at that moment that Mother was simply responsible for all the bad things in my life.

"I think I'll mix myself a stiff drink and take it to bed," I muttered in a kind of growl.

The next day was Saturday, and I found Alice at home when I telephoned. The girls were both at friends' houses for the weekend; she agreed, when I told her it was important, to see me any time that I wanted to call. I arrived at the apartment that evening at five to find her reading manuscripts by a fire. For the third time in two days I related the events of the preceding week. I told her that the revision of the Low will had upset our merger plans and that my old firm would now continue as it had been. I knew this to be a point in my favor as Alice, kept up to date in such matters by her good friends, the Peter Stubbses, did not like the prospect of Gil Arnheim.

"You see me right back where you and I started," I concluded. "I believe that I'm perfectly capable of doing as well as I did before, although it will be a handicap to have the record of a split-off merger to live down. But that, however, will be as nothing if I could have you with me again."

Our eyes met in a long stare. She was startled because she had not expected this ending. I was startled because she looked tired and even a bit older. I had been idealizing her for two stunned days; I had built up a high vision of pale, lofty beauty. But I quickly recovered. I loved Alice. I adored Alice. And I still do. We are all subject to these devastating and disillusioning flashes. It is part of learning to live to become indifferent to them.

"Oh, Bob, do you really mean that?" There was nothing in her tone that offered me the smallest encouragement.

"I mean that and much more. In the future you would be my guide in all ethical questions involved in my practice."

"But I don't ask for that. I don't want it!"

"
I
ask for it. Because I need it. I want to put our marriage back together on a basis that will wholly satisfy you. I have never stopped loving you. Sylvia was an interlude, one of those things that happen to lonely men. Why can't you and I be together and bring up our daughters as they should be brought up? If you're worried about love, you needn't be. You can have a separate bedroom for as long as you like. Of course, I'd always hope that would end, but it would be only a hope."

"I know I should think of the children," she said, turning her face from me. "But I have to think of myself, too. You say Sylvia was an interlude. I'm not at all sure I want to call my friend John that."

What a thing is jealousy! In a second the wan and tired look had disappeared from her countenance. Alice was as beautiful as when I had first loved her!

"Are you in love with him?" I cried.

Had Alice lit a fire in the grate so that she could stare into it? It seemed a necessary prop to her thoughtful reflection.

"No, I won't say I'm in love with John. I've wanted to be, I think. He's a wonderful man, and we've been very comfortable together. I never believed you'd come back like this. I thought you'd go from glory to glory."

"Not what you'd consider glory."

"Perhaps not. But I had a suspicion that without me to nag you you might develop more naturally. That you'd become a—"

"A tycoon?"

"I suppose so. Anyway, I don't think I'm quite prepared for this new Bob Service."

"You prefer me the other way?"

"No, no, it's not that." She shrugged uneasily. "It's just as I say, that I'm not ready."

"You don't trust my conversion?"

"I don't
know
, Bob!" she exclaimed, shaking her head in sudden pique. "I had told myself that I had been too prim and fussy. That, after all, you had never done anything actually wrong. That the world was a hundred times more your world than it was mine. That I had better face a few facts. And then I thought that if I was humble it would be all right for me to live alone with my own standards and ideas. And perhaps one day with John and his."

"I'll do all I can to prevent it!" I cried. "It means everything to me to have another chance with you. Even if I have to appeal to your sense of duty and what you owe the children."

"Oh, don't!"

"Because it wouldn't work?"

"No, because it might."

I paused for a second, suppressing something like a sob. "Do you dislike me so much?"

"No, no. In fact, I've never really gotten you out of my system. That's what to some extent has blocked me with John. But how can I go back to that former life, knowing it's only a matter of time before the old Bob reasserts himself?" She turned from the little flame with a kind of desperation in her eyes. "Why must I go through all this torment again?"

"Because this time it's going to be different."

"I'm sure you believe that. But can't you see it's hard for me to?"

"Yes."

Alice allowed me to take her out for dinner, and, away from the too haunting and familiar scene of our old apartment, in the green coolness and elegance of the Amboise, she relaxed and drank three cocktails in fairly rapid succession.

"Haven't you rather stepped up your quota?" I inquired, as she ordered the last one.

"No. In fact, I'd almost given them up. I'm afraid of solitary drinking. But tonight is exceptional, and I'm behaving exceptionally."

We talked about the girls at considerable length; we talked about her parents and mine; we even talked about Sylvia, and, finally, about John Cross.