Manhattan Monologues (11 page)

"The comfort is in the beauty of the expression."

I sighed. "Well, maybe I'll come to see it."

I was always aware of what to me was the anomaly of so serious a thinker as Mr. Slocum being on such congenial terms with my parents and, indeed, with all of their tightly knit affluent and mundane little groups of Cedarhurst summer residents and year-round commuters. Of course, though he was their intellectual superior, his charm and modesty, to say nothing of his skill as a polo player, enabled him to amuse and divert them without arousing the least jealousy or resentment. Oh, yes, that explained their liking of him well enough, but why was he so content to shine unrivaled in a group that, however friendly and well meaning, was never challenging or even critical? Was he lazy? Or simply desirous of avoiding contradiction or dispute?

When I asked about this on our next meeting, he appeared to agree, if a bit ruefully, with my assessment of his choice of social life.

"Well, you see, it's Polly's world, my wife's world, or, you might say,
the
world, which Polly somehow epitomizes. You know, the jolly world, full of laughter and fun and good spirits, and success. Yes, success is part of it, part of the
real
world."

"And Mrs. Slocum represents all that?"

"Well, say she represents the best part of it. She helps keep me alive. Out here on the marshes, she says, I lose myself. I am no longer me. I'm dissolved. There's nothing left of the corporeal Arthur Slocum."

"Except his soul," I offered boldly.

What I wanted to get at was the unique value he placed on solitude. It was as if that was where his soul existed. Of course he was not alone when he was with me as we trudged through the marshes, but I took it that he regarded me as somehow indigenous to the territory, like a tern or a gull, and therefore not an intruder on his privacy. And certainly on our peregrinations he was a different man from the one I observed at a Sunday lunch given by my family. There was little enough in common between the brooding observer of flora and fauna and the quoter of romantic verse, and the genial tippler at Mother's long table who would always laugh the loudest at his wife's jokes, and the desperately serious polo player who was constantly taking spills in showing off his dubious prowess to a spouse more absorbed in the gossip of her box in the stadium. But which was the man he really wanted to be?

He responded now to my last remark about his soul.

"That is one way of putting it, I suppose. But if the soul is stripped down to its essence, isn't that a state of death? And I want to live, don't I? Doesn't every man? Polly to me is life!"

We trudged on in silence after this fervent exclamation, both a bit embarrassed by his outburst.

"It must be wonderful to feel that way about one's spouse," I said at last. "How did you and she meet?"

He was only too glad to reminisce. "It was five years ago at a polo match at Meadowbrook. Before the game I happened to walk by her box, and a mutual friend in it hailed me over. She was wearing a straw hat with an enormous brim, and as she turned to greet me, with a radiant smile that I supposed she gave any man lucky enough to be introduced, I was a goner. She was married at the time, Tony, but I knew I could wait for that woman forever if I had to! A man can get anything in the world if he really, really wants it. I believe that, my boy! I almost broke my neck that day playing polo. I wouldn't have given a damn so long as she noticed."

It was hard for me, at my age, to see his Leopoldine in quite the dazzling light in which he enshrined her. It was not that she was not interesting; she
was
interesting, even at times fascinating. She was hardly a beauty, but she may have been something of one when she was young; that is, younger than her present age of fifty. We knew she must be that old, for she had been in Mother's class in Miss Chapin's School. She was tall and thin and a bit boney, but her movements were graceful, and she was always elegantly attired with large, rather jangling jewelry. Her dark hair was drawn straight back over a noble pale brow; her features were large and handsome, and her big, roving, gray-blue eyes seemed, somehow intelligently, to be seeking something more amusing than what she was presently offered. At social gatherings, where I observed her, usually at my parents', she was animated and perhaps a bit grabby with the conversation, but she could be very funny, and when she wasn't, her loud, rather raucous laugh tried to make up for it. Mother, who was inclined to be catty about her, said she drank too much.

It interested me to watch her with Arthur. I've said that her eyes were roving, but they always came back to him. She seemed intent on bringing him out, calling attention to his remarks and laughing loudly at his jokes, which she must have heard before, yet also correcting him, reproving him, almost at times shutting him up. It struck me that she treated him like a precocious favorite child who, from time to time, needed to be disciplined. And yet I must not overdo the maternal note, for it was obvious from the loving way she touched his arm, his hand, any available portion of him, that she was a doting spouse. Perhaps too doting.

Their relationship was the subject of much discussion in my family. Father's interpretation of it was crude but insightful: "Polly makes him feel like a man; she gives him balls. Arthur has always felt inferior to muscular types, like her first two husbands, who were both great college jocks. When she was finally free of the second, he jumped almost hysterically at his chance at achieving big muscles by becoming the mate of his antiquated Venus. Of course, she had what I call 'mileage'; she'd been all over the lot in addition to her two spouses, and even with her dough she was lucky to get anyone as respectable as Arthur for Number Three."

"I think you're right about her being desperate," Mother conceded. "But not about getting a third husband. You underestimate the lure of her fortune, which quite makes up for her age and other things. I suggest that what drew her to Arthur was that he fell head over heels in love with her at first sight and didn't give a damn about her age or money or previous affairs and marriages. He was like Alfredo in
Traviata
, bursting into rapturous song over an ailing prostitute, happy to throw away his future and career for her."

"I didn't call Polly a prostitute," Father objected. "If anyone had to pay, I'm sure it was she."

"Don't be so literal. What I mean is that Polly, middle-aged and battered, suddenly finds a glowing younger man who worships her for just what he sees in front of him—nothing else. I don't think anything like that had ever happened to her before. Don't forget that I've known her from way back. There's always been something essentially unlovable about Polly. Wherever you tap her, she rings a bit false. She's used her wealth to buy everything she thought she wanted in life, and what's she got? Nothing, or at least nothing that she now values. And suddenly here is love, steaming love, from what to her is almost a youth, handed her on a silver platter, something that at her age she can never expect to duplicate! Why of course she grabs it! And of course she's going to hang on to it, if she has to kill to do it. She'll eat him alive!"

I had an uncomfortable vision of the female insect that devours the smaller male after copulation. "But of course she can never be his intellectual equal," I muttered.

"Then she'll smother his intellect!" Mother exclaimed. "All I can say is, he'd better watch his step."

If Mrs. Slocum watched her husband as closely as Mother implied, then it was inevitable that she would take an interest in his marsh excursions even with someone as insignificant as myself, and indeed I got notice of this at a buffet Sunday lunch at my parents' when she chose me as her meal companion at a little table for two.

"My husband tells me, Tony, that you're an expert on the flora and fauna of our neighboring marshlands. Would you be kind enough to take me on a guided tour some afternoon?"

Well, of course, that was easily arranged, and the very next day at three she met me at the foot of our driveway on Breezy Way, smartly attired in red leather boots, tan slacks and a mauve sweater. She listened to me, as we walked, with polite but distant attention while I discoursed on birds and amphibians, and it wasn't until we had paused to rest, sitting on my favorite log, that I learned, without surprise, that she had other than Mother Nature's creatures in mind.

With a sweeping gesture she encompassed the marsh. "Tell me, my friend, just what my dear spouse sees in all this."

"Well, I guess you've got to feel it. If you don't, you don't."

"Meaning I'm hopeless?"

"Oh, no. Meaning you probably respond to other kinds of beauty."

"Thank you, Tony. You're a gentleman. It's true that I respond to art. To lovely paintings and drawings and sculpture and all the beautiful things that make up a handsome interior."

"So there you are. You're an interior person. Perhaps Arthur is an exterior one."

"An interior person." She sniffed. "It sounds like an odalisque."

I blushed, for that was exactly what I'd meant. "Oh, please, Mrs. Slocum..."

"Don't mind me," she interrupted. "I'm laughing at you. But seriously, don't you think that Arthur likes beautiful man-made things as well as natural things? His taste is not confined, is it, to crabs and muskrats and God knows what that teem in this—if you'll forgive me—somewhat smelly spot?"

"Oh, no!" I exclaimed in all earnestness. "He loves poetry more than anything. He loves all beautiful things, whether manmade or godmade. But he has this idea that there may be something vulgar in communicating one's sense of the beautiful. He likes to keep it to himself."

"Isn't that like a monk praying for his own salvation, locked away in a monastery?"

"I suppose you could say that."

"And doesn't he share it with
you?
"

Was it my morbid imagination, or did I detect something like jealousy in her tone?

"You know," she went on, in a more bantering way, "what some people may say about a middle-aged man who habitually disappears into the solitude of the marshes with a boy young enough to be his son?"

In my horror and disgust, I could only shake my head, and Mrs. Slocum uttered one of her loudest laughs. But what really appalled me was my curious impression that she might have actually preferred that her husband's relations with me should be sexual rather than intellectual. She could have coped with buggery!

"Well, you give me hope," she continued, in an almost businesslike tone. "If Arthur can share his love of beautiful things with you, perhaps he can share them with me. I'm sure that you agree he could do more with his life than sell stocks and bonds for a salary that we are far from needing."

"Oh yes! He should write."

"Well, maybe he'll come to that. But I have another plan, one to start with. He's just inherited that old abbey in Normandy where he grew up. His father gave his stepmother a life estate in it, and she recently died. Arthur supposes that we should sell it, but I have a better idea. Why not keep it, move over there, and fix it up with fine things? Make it into a
monument historique?
We could shop together, comb the Paris art galleries and
antiquaires
together and be partners in a work of art!"

"I think it's a wonderful idea!"

"It is, isn't it? Unless you happen to be wedded to Cedarhurst." She threw me a sly wink and rose to make her way back from a marsh that she would obviously never revisit. "And unless you can't live without crabs."

I thought her idea had merit and that Arthur might indeed find diversion in embellishing the old family abbey, but I was nonetheless uneasy. Remembering what Mother had said, I couldn't but speculate on the effect on him of the constant close attention of his daily and nightly partner in the enterprise, binding more and more tightly to him in the bonds of gratitude by what I was sure would be the reckless expenditure of her wealth.

***

On our last walk on the marshes before his move to France, Arthur was in a contemplative, almost melancholy mood.

"I'm going to miss all this, Tony."

"Even in beautiful Normandy?"

"Even there."

"But I'm told that when you and Mrs. Slocum are through with the abbey, it will burn on the water—of its moat, presumably—like Cleopatra's barge!"

"Oh, we'll do that, of course. And it will be amusing, I suppose. The abbey will be fixed up, all right. As fixed up as possible. Within an inch of its life! When Polly decides to spend, get out of her way! But never forget, my boy, the marshes are just as good. The marshes may even be better. It comes pretty much to the same thing, though—the beauty of nature and the beauty of art. What is art doing but trying to excel nature?"

***

I didn't see the abbey until I graduated from Yale four years later and went abroad to spend the summer in Europe before starting at graduate school. It was the summer of 1939, and I had to scurry home when the war broke out, but I had time for a weekend visit to the Slocums'. The abbey was indeed gorgeous. The gray walls sloping over a richly kept lawn to a shimmering moat and formal French gardens; the long succession of lavishly appointed chambers, Venetian, Baroque, French eighteenth century, English Regency; the tapestries, bronzes, ceramics and paintings of every school, made it a choice museum that was open to the public three days a week.

Arthur was my grave and courteous guide who lost his gently mocking tone only when he spoke of the imminence of hostilities.

"I ended up in the last war hoping for peace at any price. I was like Siegfried Sassoon, only I didn't have his courage to speak out. But the irony of our situation is that
now
we are faced with the war that we thought the first one was: a crusade against the devil himself. The poor old Kaiser—
think
how warmly we'd welcome him as the German leader today!"

We ended our tour in the main parlor, and his wife caught his last remark.

"There may still be time for another Munich, Arthur!" she exclaimed.