False Gods (22 page)

"Oh, Bella, you're wonderful!" Amy clapped her hands in evident relief. "Of course, you're right as right can be. I have been so worried that maybe it was my
duty
to give some of that money to good causes. My duty to Horace himself! And now of course I see it would be a shocking breach of faith. Oh, my dear, I shall sleep so much better tonight. The whole horrid business has been taken right out of my hands."

Myron was too shocked by the sudden slamming of shutters on so briefly glimpsed a horizon of shimmering beauty to say anything for a minute. He would need time to reflect on the matter. It was better now to make light of it.

"I guess this shows I've spent too much time with my animals. In the jungle one is less burdened with scruples. Everything eats everything!"

"And darling Bella, with her love of beautiful inanimate things, has the more delicate moral sense! Oh, how I see it! But I've kept you poor dears up long enough. You must go home now, and God bless you both!"

Their chauffeur was not separated from them by a glass, so it was natural enough that they should not speak of personal matters, but even so Myron felt sure that Bella was very conscious of the fact that they were not doing so. Even in their apartment they refrained. He simply offered her a cordial good night kiss before retreating to his own room. But then, on an impulse, he turned back.

"Bella. Are you perfectly sure that you gave Amy the right advice tonight?"

Ah, she had been waiting for that! Her eyes were fixed on his. "Perfectly."

"You don't think it's better that all those millions should go to our beloved 200 and gallery than to two arrogant and selfish people, already millionaires several times over?"

"Better? Of course, it would be better. But is that
our
decision? Amy gave her solemn pledge to her husband. I wouldn't urge her to break it to save our institutions from utter ruin!"

"Bella! How can you be that extreme?"

"Because, unlike you, I don't believe that ends, however shining, justify means, however filthy. Because I've seen your eyes grow hard as agates in the last two years. It's my fault, of course. I got you started in this game. But that's just why it's my job to pull you out."

He gazed at her in dismay. "Amy was right. You're as pure as a Ming vase."

"And as hard. Go on. Say it."

"And as hard."

"Perhaps something was left out of my nature. I've always preferred beautiful things to ordinary people. But not, I hope, to beautiful people. And, oh, my dear!" She was actually appealing to him now! "I have thought of you as a beautiful person. I can't bear to have you become an ugly one. Promise me that you won't become an ugly one!"

He stared. "What do you mean?"

"Don't go back to Amy and work on her to change her mind!"

"You think I was planning to?"

"Weren't you?"

The heaviness of his sigh showed that he had given it up. "All right. I won't." He paused. "I'll promise you that I won't. And like Amy I won't break it. Even, as you say, if our institutions should go to hell."

And going now to his room, he decided that he had, after all, married a remarkable woman.

T
HE NORTHERN MIGRATION
of financial business from the lower end of Manhattan had crowded at lunchtime the restaurants of midtown, and its clubs, once the seats of leisurely, drawn-out meals in quiet, dusky dining halls, were now jammed at noon with hurried, money-discussing eaters. When my law firm moved to Fifth Avenue in 1954 I found myself frequently lunching at the Yale Club and joining in the dark oak bar for a preprandial drink some old classmates whom I had not seen in years. It was on a midwinter noon of the following year that I encountered two of these, Fred Slocum, a psychiatrist, and Andy Ritter, a market analyst, gravely discussing a scandalous story about a third, Alistair Dows, which had just been revealed in a gossip column.

"You read it?" Andy asked gruffly as I joined them.

"My secretary showed it to me just before I left the office. She knows Alistair. We did a will for him."

"Well, you'll probably be probating it soon now. I know I'd blow my brains out if I'd done a thing like that." Andy, small, sharp and brusque, had always been very much of a no-nonsense man.

"But would Alistair have the guts to?" Fred Slocum inquired. "Aren't you begging the question?"

That, of course, was the point. The
Amazon,
a cruise ship, had caught fire in the Caribbean the month before and. gone down with considerable loss of life. Our classmate Alistair Dows and his wife had escaped in different lifeboats, but Alistair had saved himself at a heavy price. He was wearing a woman's fur coat and hat. The story had just been broken by the writer of "Kiss and Tell" in the
Evening Journal.
It was such a classic example of cowardice that I could hardly believe it. It was not like Alistair to be so grotesquely banal. But it was perfectly true that, with his smallish figure and boyish face, he could have passed for a woman, and I had already learned that his wife had moved to her mother's, though for what reason I had not known.

"I guess I
was
begging the question," Andy replied, with a shrug. "I always had an idea he was rotten. Rotten to the core, we now see."

"But, Andy, you can't have known that," I protested. "None of the rest of us even suspected it. Alistair was the skipper of an LST in the war. He was in the invasion of Normandy."

"That's like saying he couldn't be a fag because he's married and has kids. How do we know what went on on that LST? Don't forget I've known him longer than you guys. We were at Saint Ambrose's together."

"And did he show a yellow streak there?"

Ritter wrinkled his nose as if I were being unduly technical. "He didn't exactly show it, Jonathan, no. His guards were always up. But I could smell it out, as early as our first year there. He exuded a faint but unmistakable odor of decadence."

I tried not to look as disgusted as I felt. Andy was like a bloodhound. I could well imagine that he had been one of those ruthless boys dedicated to the mission of uncovering the sore and tender spots of his classmates. I could see him padding back and forth, sniffing the ground with his wide nostrils, and then..."You must have a sharp nose. I never smelt a thing."

"Oh, by the time he got to college, he was using a kind of moral deodorant."

Fred, a peacemaker, moved to raise the discussion to a more general plain. "Courage is an odd thing. Is it really courage if there's no fear? The ancients thought so. They believed true valor and fearlessness were the same.
Sans peur et sans reproche.
And they certainly didn't think a pure woman was purer for having to overcome lust. But we still have a touch of the puritan. We feel there should be a struggle. I remember in the war waiting on an airstrip on an atoll with my medical crew for a damaged fighter plane to make a crash landing. The pilot who jumped out of that flaming wreck had a normal pulse! Was he a hero or a psychic curiosity?"

"Do you really suppose Dows had a struggle?" Ritter asked sneeringly. "I'll bet it didn't last more than a couple of seconds."

"Well, whatever he went through, think what he's going through now!" I exclaimed. "Can you imagine a greater hell on earth than having to face the world with
that
on your record? It will dog him to his dying day. His wife seems to have left him. His two daughters will grow up to be ashamed of him. His advertising firm will probably ease him out. What sort of image will he cast for them now?"

"You're breaking my heart," Ritter retorted sourly. "For Pete's sake, the guy deserves anything he gets. He's not only yellow as a banana. He's a murderer, to boot!"

"A murderer?"

"There were women drowned in that wreck, weren't there? And didn't he take a woman's place in the lifeboat?"

"You'd have to show there was a woman on the spot who couldn't squeeze into the boat because he was there."

"There speaks the lawyer! I don't have to show a damn thing. There were female corpses in the water, and he was rowed off dressed as one. That's enough for me."

Our doctor still wished to be objective. "If Alistair were my patient, I'd try to show him there's no such thing as a permanent coward. There's simply a man committing an act of cowardice at a particular time. That might liberate him from the damning label, at least in his own eyes."

At this particular time, anyway, Alistair himself appeared in the doorway. His round pleasant face (we used to call it "cherubic" in college days) was paler than usual, which made his curly red hair seem redder, and his eyes exhibited a mood of sultry defiance. Spotting us, he came straight over and greeted us each by name in a flat tone that had none of his customary buoyancy.

Andy Ritter made no response, but simply picked up his glass and moved away. Fred Slocum responded rather too cheerfully; he gripped Alistair's shoulder and winked at him, then glanced at his watch, announced with an assumed shock of surprise that he had to grab a bite at the buffet before hurrying back to his office, and was off. It was quite possible that in fact he was rushed and simply feared that any inquiry into Alistair's trouble would entail too much time. I picked up my glass.

"If you're not lunching with anyone, how about ordering your drink and taking it to the dining room with me?"

Alistair regarded me quizzically. "Are you being nice or just curious?"

"Both."

"Good. I need to talk to someone."

And indeed he talked right through lunch and afterwards in my office until late in the afternoon. I could justify my loss of working time on the ground that he was a client and that I might well be retained to handle a separation agreement between him and his wife, but my real reason for providing him with a needed ear was neither curiosity nor professional duty, but the simple desire to help in any way I could a friend of whom I had always been particularly fond.

He had never, it was true, seemed equally fond of me. Oh, he had liked me well enough at Yale; he had even implied that he preferred my company to that of the more prominent men on campus whose society he so assiduously cultivated. Why then did he cultivate them? And why did I tolerate a habit so peculiarly unlovable to those it excluded? Because Alistair, however cheerful and outgoing, gave nonetheless the impression of being a sort of indentured servant to an invisible but inexorable taskmaster who was constantly interrupting him in the pursuit of his chosen pleasures to fix his attention on the more serious business of becoming a man of the world, one who would be assisted by the proper friends in taking his rightful place in the financial community, in marrying the right girl and in getting his children into all the right educational establishments and subscription dances.

Well, what was wrong with that? Weren't those the goals of half our Yale classmates? Yes, but Alistair struck me as a charming alien who had flown in from another planet, perhaps as a reluctant spy, or at least observer, and who was being coached by some distant intelligence officer on how to don the garb and adopt the manners of his new companions.

Now, anyway, I learned what that intelligence officer was. For here is the gist of what he told me.

If environment were a greater factor than heredity in the forming of our characters, you, Jonathan, would not differ so markedly from your siblings, nor I from mine. But in my case there may have been a difference between my own early ambiance and that of my brothers that the "environmentalists" could pounce on to explain the variation in our personalities. I was the youngest of four by six years. You know how big and brawny and tough my brothers were. Of course, it doesn't show so much now. Time has polished them up, or worn them down, whichever way you choose to look at it. Anyway, they're all corporation lawyers. Sorry, Jonathan. No crack intended.

They were away at boarding school in my younger years, but they were very much present in the long summers at our lakeside camp in Canada, to which my father came up from New York on alternate weekends. They spent their days hiking, hunting and fishing, cultivating, even to a silly extent, the air of the "strong, silent" man, and openly scorning the distant summer communities of girls, dances, white flannels and colored blazers. Of course in time I saw them, one by one, emerge from this state, surreptitiously combing their hair and donning cleaner pants before borrowing the family launch to scoot down the lake to some camp where a girl was visiting. You see, I missed nothing. I had them under constant scrutiny.

Father was much like them, a maritime lawyer in town and an expert, even a rather famous, trout fisherman in the woods, perfectly content to spend the better part of his vacation days and nights standing motionless in a stream or sitting alone in a rowboat. He was a gruff and unceremonious man, utterly selfish but never unkind. He seemed simply unaware of anything in life but wrecked ships and elusive fish. I am sure he was never unfaithful to Mother, who accepted her minor role in their shared existence with a meekness that probably concealed a nagging resentment.

Ah, poor Mother, you see her at once as the source of all my trouble! And indeed she hugged her youngest to her bosom; there was no holding on to the others once they were of an age to take to the woods. She was thin, pale and apprehensive; her hair was never waved and her simple brown or grey dresses were not only out of fashion—one wondered what fashion they could ever have been in. And yet she enjoyed good health, had plenty of money (even of her own) to spend and had the comforts of a devout faith (her father had been a bishop). Why should she have been afraid of so many things?

She was better in New York. Like many reared in Manhattan, she drew an unreasonable sense of security from the asphalt pavements. But the summers were agony. She hated the great dark forest primeval that surrounded her, infested, as she saw it, with savage and dangerous beasts, the nearest telephone fifty miles away and a doctor's only means of arrival a hydroplane. She would spend the whole day sitting on the porch of her cabin, scarcely pretending to read the book open on her lap, tormented by the vision of accidents that might befall her loved ones in the woods. But needless to say, her husband and three older sons paid not the scantest attention to her pleas that they should not wander too far from the imagined safety of the camp.