False Gods (13 page)

It was their tacit understanding that she would always re-lease him. "That's quite all right. We'll be four without you, so there'll be three in the front row. You know Cousin Polly's rule when she gives you her box. No gaps in the diamond horseshoe! But why is your mama so desperate?"

"It's always the same thing. She's got some sweet little body she wants me to meet."

"She never gives up, does she?"

"Do you imply she should recognize that the case is hopeless?"

"Not at all. I haven't the slightest doubt that you will marry when
and whom
you wish."

"At any rate she will be a young lady who is glad to recognize your place in my life. One who will know how much she has to gain by your friendship."

"Oh, my dear Gilbert, you don't know our sex if you really believe
that.
She will want my head on a silver platter. That's fine. She shall have it. But not yet. No, not quite yet. Never fear. I shall know the time when it comes."

The more delicate-minded among the acquaintance of Heloise and Gilbert preferred to describe their relationship as an
amitié amoureuse;
the more earthy called it an affair. Gilbert took a pleasure which his mother found perverse in the confusion of his observers. He felt it important for himself as an artist to be in constant touch with a fascinating and sympathetic woman, to be able to tell her what he was building and dreaming of building, to discuss with her the current books both were reading, to laugh, not always with malice, at the foibles and pretensions of their nearest and dearest, and to rejoice with her in a world where he was able to do the only work he cared about and have her appreciate it with a pleasure so obviously genuine that he was not obliged to feel selfish. But it was also important for him to feel that he had not neglected the imperious call of romance to the eyes of a world disposed to consider it an essential part of the "real" life of every man and woman.

This was where Heloise was perfect; she never made him feel that he offered her too little or too much. He knew that, like himself, a true artist at heart, she made little distinction between appearance and what the crowd called reality. She was the product of two very different societies, and she had learned at an early age that one can seem anything to others that one wishes to seem. Her father, an American puritan and a lecher, had married, in the Paris of the 'eighties to which he had emigrated in pursuit of pleasure, a pearl of the demimonde with a passion for respectability. Each had been cruelly disillusioned. She had wanted to move to New York, where her past might not be known, and he, a stubborn expatriate, had been disgusted to find that marriage had not made her acceptable to the American colony in Paris. They had already separated when he died of a venereal disease, and his family had reclaimed little Heloise against a maternal opposition motivated only by cupidity and brought her up in New York. It was not, however, her shrewd and worldly old paternal grandmother, but Heloise herself, an alert and sharp-eyed young lady, sophisticated beyond her years, who had decided that marriage to Humphrey Kane, twice her age, was probably the best that the child of a bankrupt father and a disreputable mother could expect. She was wrong. New York memories of the past, particularly a trans-Atlantic past, were soon faded; she could have made a younger and equally advantageous match. But true to her Gallic blood, she carried out her side of the bargain, and no one ever dared offer a hint about her and Gilbert to the latter's infatuated old uncle.

Heloise now thought of another point to make in their discussion of Gilbert's mother's matchmaking.

"Your father was older than Humphrey, you know. He was older than you are now when he married your mother. Why must she be so impatient?"

"She thinks I should be making babies. She has rather a thing about that."

"But she made only one herself!"

"Maybe that's just it. Maybe she wants me to make up for her deficiency."

"Oh, Gilbert, be serious. You must admit it's a curious obsession for a woman of the world. And that's what she is, you know. She cuts a considerable figure in society."

"All hundred and eighty pounds of her."

"I certainly wasn't referring to
that.
And anyway, she carries her weight with a kind of majesty. Those shiny black curls and that stately stride. And that wonderful rich deep voice ... at times I actually envy her."

"At times."

"I'm serious, Gilbert! And she enjoys all the good things of life. I'm sure, for example, that she takes the greatest pride in your work."

"Well, I think she
does
appreciate it, yes. She has taste, despite her rather florid style of living. But I feel she suspects a devil lurking behind anything
too
beautiful. A devil that may be preventing the artist from performing his proper domestic role."

"Like making babies?"

"Yes! Art to her is like a tame leopard walking gracefully at your side, but muzzled and on a strong leash. If it ever gets loose, it may chew up babies and spouses and cozy cottages and all the warm cuddly things any 'real' life should be full of."

"What a concept!" Heloise raised her hands in dismay. "But wasn't there a time when she herself was concerned with artistic things? Didn't she have stage aspirations as a girl? I seem to recall the story of a recitation before the great Réjane herself."

"It's perfectly true. When my grandparents were living in Paris, because Grandpa was working on his monumental life of Napoleon, Mother, who, believe it or not, was then a slip of a girl, learned to recite French classic drama with great skill and effect. And one evening when Réjane was at the house, my grandmother had the nerve to bring her daughter downstairs to recite a
tirade
from
Phèdre.
Réjane was so struck that she offered to take her under her wing and train her! And poor Mother was dying to do it. But my grandfather, who was a bit of a despot, like his biographical subject, was certainly not going to expose his virgin daughter to the
louche
stage world of Paris. No sirree! The sobbing girl was trundled straight home and married off to poor old Dad."

"But, Gilbert, they loved each other!"

"Did they? Or rather did she? She was certainly good to him, particularly in his long painful last illness. But I've always nursed the fanciful notion that she kept a hot little flame burning inside her, walled up behind that solid flesh. And that when you hear that rich deep voice of hers announcing some spicy bit of society gossip, she may be inwardly declaiming:
'Ah, cruel, tu m'as trop entendu ... Connais done Phèdre et toute sa fureur!'
"

"Which should make her then understand the needs of an artist."

"Or how important it is to circumvent them!"

He saw at once that he had been perfectly right about his mother's dinner party. There were eight guests besides himself, seven of whom had been invited in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that he had been asked to meet the eighth. She was Olive Payson, a trim, handsome, dark-haired woman, of presumably undoubted competence in everything she did, who might have been twenty-nine for a couple of years now.

His mother explained her briefly. "She's going to do over this room and the dining room. I'm told she's the cleverest decorator in town. Doesn't insist I have to get rid of everything. 'This house is
you,
Mrs. Kane.' I like that. No fancy pants."

Gilbert certainly agreed that the house
was
his mother. It had been the old Kane family mansion, tall, high-ceilinged, full of huge cabinets and jardinières, with potted palms in corners, more like a French commercial art gallery than a residence, but his mother, with her ample figure and high-piled glistening black hair, her big flat pearls and rich brocaded gown, fitted it like another jardinière.

"She's charming-looking," he conceded.

"And with a mind like—"

"I know. A steel trap," he finished for her. "Like the one you want to catch me in. Don't overdo it, Ma."

"She's too good for you. That's for sure."

"She'd better be. Or I won't look at her."

Like all the girls his mother picked out for him, she was the opposite of Heloise. Why were women supposed to be subtle?

The dinner party was one lady short, so Gilbert had on his other side a deaf old bachelor cousin. That too had been an obvious maternal design. He could talk throughout the meal with Olive.

She told him that she had recently redecorated rooms in two of his houses.

"It's a delight to work in such beautiful buildings, even if they set a tough standard for a decorator to live up to. Which is your favorite, of all your houses? Or don't you have one?"

"I'm like a mother with a large brood. It's always the newest baby."

"Do you confine your practice to private houses?"

"Pretty much so. I did a country club last year, but that was along the same lines, I guess."

"No schools? No office buildings? No factories?"

"You sound as if you might find me trivial."

"No, no. It's not that I have anything against villas. Only don't they represent a rather limited section of our society?"

"Aren't the best things usually limited?"

She nodded, but didn't return his smile. "But even if your houses are the best of their kind—and I have no doubt they are—mustn't they still represent a culture that's past?"

"You mean dead and gone? Well, if Brunelleschi and Palladio and Adam and Mansart are dead and gone, then I am too. And glad to be!"

"I don't mean to take anything away from those old masters. But shouldn't a man of your genius sometimes speak for his own era?"

Decidedly, he was going to like this young woman. "Leaving my 'genius' aside, are you telling me I ought to go 'modern'?"

"Well, not exclusively, of course. But in the age of the skyscraper, I think it would be a sorry thing if Gilbert Kane was not at least represented."

This was the note on which Olive began and which she continued to strike on the evenings when he took her out to dinner, at one expensive restaurant after another.

Never in his life before had an emotional relationship developed in so sure and speedy a fashion. Olive made him feel they had been destined to be close to each other like two characters in the first act of a romantic comedy, the happy ending of which is taken for granted. She took hold of him as easily and firmly as if she had been prepared for the role. Yet that was not possible; she had met his mother only the month before. She was never in the least hurried; when she bade him good night, reaching in her purse for her latchkey, the swift little peck of a kiss she gave him on the cheek seemed more the expression of a pleasant proprietorship than any anticipation of deeper delights. They talked about everything from architecture to the repeal of Prohibition, and about all the people it turned out they knew in common, except two. He never spoke of Heloise, and she never mentioned his mother.

The Humphrey Kanes went to Palm Beach every winter, but this year they had gone early, and Gilbert's mother with them. Had she badgered Heloise into advancing the date on some plea that Humphrey should escape the unusually low temperatures of the season? And could Olive have
known
of that? At last he ventured a reference.

"There's someone I'd love to have you meet when she gets back to town."

"I know. Your aunt. I've heard of her fabulous charm. I'm terrified she'll find me a hayseed."

"You? How ridiculous! She'll delight in you."

"I doubt that." And now, for the first time, she gave him an appraising glance, a look that seemed to be asking just how far, after all, they had come. "I rather fancy she may tell me that she wants her nephew back."

"Has he been away?"

"I hope so."

"Far away?"

"I'm hoping that too."

He smiled, took her hand, which was resting on the table, and held it a moment. "Heloise can have him back only if you come with him."

She didn't return his smile. "Do you mean a package deal?"

"Maybe something like that."

"Oh, no." Her headshake was firm. "I wouldn't share you."

"What a funny girl you are! I have no idea what you feel about me. Am I just the suave older man with whom it's fun to talk about art and such things over a good meal, or am I—"

Her interruption was sharp and definite. "Don't ask me that, Gilbert. Don't ask me anything like that. Wait until you're very sure about your own feelings. I don't talk about mine because if I let them out of the bag, I might not be able to put them back. I warn you: I can be a violent woman. When I care, I care a lot. But I don't throw myself at anyone. No one gets what he hasn't asked for."

He winced. "Couldn't you put it just a wee bit more romantically?"

"No, Gilbert, I play fair."

He was a good deal put off by this and didn't call her for two days. But then in the middle of a snowy afternoon, as he was sitting over his drafting board, the idea suddenly and shockingly presented itself, as if in huge black capital letters—right there between his staring eyes and his drawing of a wing to a bathing pavilion—that if he let this girl go, he might never, never find anyone to match her. For where in the name of matrimony was he going to encounter the combination of so fine a mind and so fine a body with such extraordinary sympathy and so unprecedented an interest in his own silly self? True, she had warned him she could be violent, but what did that mean except that she was capable of jealousy, and why should he ever have to give her cause for that?

He telephoned her at her office. "I want to marry you," he heard himself blurt out.

A long silence ensued. "I'll tell you what, Gil. I'm going to Palm Beach tonight on a big job. The house is vast, and I'll be there at least two weeks. That should give you time to think this over. In the meantime I shan't regard you as in the least committed. We can talk when I get back."

Why was it, he wondered afterwards, that he was suddenly grateful for the delay? Was it anything more than the last desperate reassertion of the doomed bachelor within him, the squeaking prayer for one more chance?