False Gods (12 page)

Horace had begged my forgiveness, almost on his knees, for the fiasco with his firm. I could only offer my pardon formally, to be rid of his lugubrious presence.

"Don't flatter yourself that you had anything to do with Oscar's enlistment," I couldn't help adding. "It was entirely a matter between him and Hitler."

Some weeks later, when I encountered Gurdon in the washroom of a downtown lunch club, a hotter scene occurred. I had meant not to speak to him at all, but he sidled up to my wash stand with a long countenance.

"Maury, I can't tell you how sorry I was about your son. We thought he was the finest fellow in the world. Of course, we don't give summer jobs to fully fledged lawyers, but we were planning to offer him a full-time one as soon as the war was over."

And there, in the presence of all those middle-aged and elderly hand-washing and urinating gentlemen, I spat in his mournful face. It was one of the more satisfactory moments of my life.

It seemed for a long while that all the things I had achieved in life were simply the vanities of which the sages speak. I almost wanted it to be so. What was the point of living in a world where the Oscars were killed and the Gurdons survived? I tried to take a gloomy pleasure in my own futility. But my egotism, like the cheerfulness of Doctor Johnson's friend, was always breaking in. I could not blind myself to the fact that some Oscars would survive a war fatal to many Gurdons. And the day came when, standing before my great Gauguin of a yellow idol on a green beach by a red sea, I congratulated its astute purchaser. The following week, in Virginia, I visited my stables and recognized my revived affection for my beautiful horses. There was talk now of my receiving an important post on the War Production Board. I was coming back to life in spite of myself. Or was it, really, in spite of myself?

T
UXEDO
P
ARK,
some forty miles northwest of New York City by beautiful Sterling Forest, was still, in the autumn of 1948, a reservation of large estates where some of the richer burghers of Manhattan could escape the urban heat or crush in summer or on weekends, protected, like the ancient Chinese, from the invasion of intruders by a long encircling wall and a guarded gate. In this House of Mammon were many mansions, and of many styles, most of them now weatherbeaten and maintained less lavishly than in the
belle époque,
but still making a brave enough show to impress the houseguest, and it was generally conceded that old Humphrey Kane's little gem of a French Renaissance château, designed in the 'twenties by his nephew Gilbert, before the latter went "modern," was the prize of them all.

Humphrey's wife, Heloise, a generation younger than her husband and half-French to boot, had worked closely with his nephew in planning the house, inspired by Azay-le-Rideau on the Loire, and in laying out the grounds, which included a moat, a formal garden and a maze. There were those who had not scrupled to say that the whole undeniably beautiful place was a monument to their illicit passion. But that was more than two decades ago. Gilbert Kane in 1948 was sixty, with a fashionable wife and four teenage children, and his uncle, a hale ninety, no longer seemed unseasonably old for his now fading spouse. When the Gilbert Kanes arrived to spend an October weekend with their relatives to discuss the proposed demolition of the now obsolete servants' wing and the reorganization of the
corps de logis
to make it manageable by a hired couple, only the oldest residents of the Park wondered whether Olive Kane still harbored any jealousy of her aunt-in-law, or whether old Humphrey yet kept a wary eye on his nephew.

Certainly Gilbert, circling the house alone in the chilly twilight of that Saturday, was not thinking of his uncle's wife. He was utterly absorbed in the contemplation of his early work, and his heart ached as he took in, with each new vista, a further and deepening reassurance of its continuing lightness and loveliness. American houses of the Beaux Arts school, even the best of them, even those of Hunt and White, had always struck him as tending with time to take on a dank, heavy, institutional quality, which had been a principal reason for his giving them up in favor of contemporary styles. But now it actually began to seem to him that he may have constituted a blessed exception to that rule, that it may have been his unique distinction to transport the spirit of the European country manor to the West in such a way as to enhance and even enrich what Henry James had called the "thin American air."

But few, alas, of his earlier creations had not been destroyed or perverted. His proud Roman villa in Bernardsville, New Jersey, was now a scrubby college sprouting two grotesque dormitory wings. His serene Irish manor house in Westbury, Long Island, like a sleek racehorse harnessed to a hay wagon, served as the "social centre" of the housing development clustered thickly around it. And the romantic, rambling Jacobean mansion that had commanded a rocky peninsula on Mount Desert Island was a heap of ashes after the great Bar Harbor fire of the preceding year.

Still, his masterpiece remained before his vision, or would until he had fulfilled his uncle's commission. Its chaste white front under the high gabled windows and turrets of its roof seemed to cast a reproach at him over the glinting moat and the pale park in the darkling air. Never had he conceived a more perfect thing! There was no way he could remove a shutter or add a window without marring the harmony of the whole. Returning now to the house, he knew he would have to tell his uncle to get another to do his dirty work.

He entered the parlor by a French window and found the other three seated by the fire, as if they had been waiting for him. His uncle, rigid, gaunt and brown, with snowy hair, rarely spoke these days, though his mind, once largely occupied in multiplying a modest inheritance, like a shiny tool kept in a velvet case, was still in perfect order. Heloise, interrupted by his entrance in something she was saying to Olive, let her arms, which she no doubt had been using in an emphatic Gallic gesture, drop to her sides. She was painfully thin and too pale, and her hair was almost absurdly gold. Olive, nearly as trim and straight as when she had married Gilbert, her lineless face bearing only a hint of marble, had no need to be concerned. But her small piercing eyes told the advent of the mood of apprehension with which she so constantly had to grapple.

"This house is the best thing I've ever done!" he exclaimed too loudly. "It's a shame to slice off even one room."

His uncle shrugged. Heloise murmured something about eight servants' rooms being a lot for a couple. Olive came straight to the point,
her
point, anyway.

"What does it tell you about our marriage," she demanded in the cool, mocking tone that had helped to make her reputation as a wit, "that Gilbert thinks his best work was done in his bachelor days?"

"It tells me that he was dreaming about the lovely girl he would one day marry," Heloise suggested, in a tone too bright.

Gilbert sighed. Why could Olive never endure the idea that he might have had even a moment of true satisfaction before the advent of her love? It was his cue to inundate her with affectionate reassurance, but the vision of the façade and moat was still too strong in his mind, and he breached, even brutally, his old habit.

"It's perfectly true! I
did
do better work then. Much better than anything I've done since." But the instant agony in her eyes smote him. "I don't suppose it was just being a bachelor," he added lamely. "It may have been youth."

Heloise took it all in, perhaps a touch maliciously, glancing from husband to wife. Then she turned to her own.

"Come, Humphrey, dear, it's time for your nap. He always takes one before dinner," she explained as she led the old man to the hall.

Alone with her husband, Olive wasted no time. "It's better out in the open." Her tone was sharp and clipped. "Let's face it. You
were
happier back then. Much happier. What did you need an expensive wife for, or four expensive children? What did you care for being the maker of Clinton Village or Knickerbocker City? All you wanted was to build fancy villas for your rich friends and hear them praised by your silly old aunt! Busybody that I was! I should have left you alone."

"Olive, Olive..."

"And I wish to God I had!" Her voice rose to a wail as she shut her eyes and clenched her fists.

"Olive, darling, you know that's all perfect nonsense. Those villas were doomed anyway. Are you forgetting the Depression? I'd have had to go into public building whether or not we'd married. Uncle Humphrey was the only Kane who wasn't bust."

"No, no, bachelors can always get by. You'd have had all those free meals and weekends. Maybe there wouldn't have been as many private houses being built, but there'd have been some, enough for you anyway. And you'd have been happy, perfectly happy!" She patted her nose and eyes with her handkerchief. It was the sign that remorse was following anger. "I should never have interfered with your life."

"Olive, you're being ridiculous. You know how I love you and the children. I couldn't do without you."

"Maybe not now. But I'm talking about then. Oh, I know you love us in your own way." She put away her handkerchief; now she would try to be fair. "I shouldn't have been mean about your houses. They
are
works of art. Great art, I'm sure. And you're probably right. They may well be what you should have been doing all these years. Very well then, let's go back to them." Oh, she would make up to him now if it killed her! "You don't have to spend all your time on housing developments and shopping centres. There must be a hundred ways we could cut down on our style of living without even feeling it."

Maybe it was only a game, but it was one that he was very much tempted to play. "But nobody wants the kind of houses I used to build. 'Derivative' has become a dirty word."

"Among our friends, perhaps. They have to be modern. But the new rich aren't all that way. Read your house and garden magazines. In Dallas and Houston, they tell me, there are areas where you might be floating down the Loire."

Gilbert was struck by the truth of what she was saying. In his office, only the week before, he had been trying to persuade a client planning a new house in Greenwich that he would do better to follow Frank Lloyd Wright than Palladio. But suppose he should show the client on Monday his old portfolio of the villas he had drawn during his stay in Vicenza in 1924?

"You know, darling, you have an idea there. You really have."

And he was sure that his violent spouse would now expend as much energy in making him pick up the past as she had in her youth, when she induced him to drop it.

In 1927, at age thirty-nine, Gilbert was still a bachelor. He had always tolerated the notion, clamped firmly but unobtrusively to the back of his mind, that he would marry at forty. He favored what he liked to think of as the European point of view, that a man should keep the best years of his life for himself. His concept of the young American suburban marriage, with a youthful father throwing balls to little boys on the lawn or taking a noisy rabble of kids with a barking Airedale for a Sunday drive, had little appeal for him. Of course he wanted, in due time, to have a lovely younger woman to be the congenial partner and charming hostess of his middle and later years and a couple of well-brought-up children to be the delight and support of his senescence, but there was no rush about these things, and he was not such a fool as not to realize that any family that fate should accord him might be very different from his projected ideal. He was, after all, a very social creature, and he had observed, at close enough quarters, several of his friends' marriages falling apart.

Though "pushing forty," he still felt youthful; he had kept his tall muscular figure and all of his wavy auburn hair. He played squash in the winter and tennis in the summer; he drank moderately and never smoked; and his success as the designer of private houses and his popularity as a man about town provided a civilized blend of work and pleasure which it seemed folly even to think of interrupting. Might not a man in such good shape put off the fateful decision until forty-five? Or even fifty?

His friends and relations, however, and particularly the widowed mother whose only child he was, had a very different theory as to the cause of his prolonged unmarried state. They placed the blame, articulately voiced to all ears but those of Humphrey Kane, squarely at the door of the latter's younger wife, at whose smart new house on Sutton Place, overlooking the East River, her nephew-in-law and near contemporary called every evening on leaving work.

She was always alone when he came. There would be a bright fire and tea things on a little table, to be followed, after the consumption of a single cup, by the butler with the cocktail tray. Heloise was not so much beautiful as exquisite. Her blond hair and wide opaque eyes and pale luminous skin might have evoked a sense of serenity had they not been balanced by her darting gestures and the vivid mobility of her facial expressions, which announced the accomplished
maîtresse de maison,
and by the low musical voice that constituted so perfect an instrument for her fine intelligence.

"Do you know, my dear," she asked him on an evening which seemed for her to be a kind of summing up, "that this is my favorite part of the day?"

"Mightn't that be because it's mine?"

"Oh, you don't have to say that. I wasn't fishing. And I suppose it's a mistake to chatter about the things one really loves. They sound smaller when you try to put them into words. But the two of us here by the fire, with the slight lift of the cocktail and with our beloved understanding that it's just this and doesn't have to be anything else at all ... ah, it's time suspended, it's magic! But how I go on. Tell me to shut up. Tell me about your day. How is the house in Syosset coming? Did you solve the problem of the tower?"

"No. Except that I may eliminate it. It was a quiet day. Nothing at all, really. Oh, except that Mother called. She wants me for dinner on Monday. I said I was going to the opera with you and Uncle Humphrey, but she insisted she absolutely
had
to have me and promised she'd square it with you."