Manhattan Monologues (22 page)

Arnold had consulted Harry before accepting Rod's resignation from the firm. He felt that the value of his son-in-law's legal services was too great to be dispensed with on his say-so alone. But Harry had seen no alternative.

"You know what pals Rod and I have always been, so you can imagine, sir, what pain it gives me to say what I have to say. Rod will be regarded by many, perhaps by the majority of your partners, as one who has offended you beyond the scope of real forgiveness. The spirit of unity that has been your great creation in Dillard Kaye would be shattered fatally if you kept him on. And you needn't be concerned about Rod's future. He will find another good post soon enough. No doubt with one of our rivals."

Arnold nodded slowly as he took this in. "And how do you think I should advise my afflicted daughter? I know she has a loyal friend in you, Harry."

"I am proud to hear you say it, sir. I think, of course, a divorce is necessary. Your pride and hers could hardly let you consider a reconciliation under the circumstances, even if one were offered, which seems most unlikely."

"I have to agree with that."

"And in choosing the jurisdiction in which to sue, I see no reason to look beyond the borders of the state in which the wrong occurred."

"You mean New York? On the grounds of adultery? Do we want a scandal greater than we already have? What are you talking about, Harry?"

"I'm talking about something we can do for Rod. Something that may help to beat him back into the senses he seems temporarily to have lost. What the psychiatrists call shock treatment. Let him see in our papers his spades called spades, his paramour named, his sin defined. Why should we smooth it all over in a Reno fantasy where we ask for a decree because he failed to respond to a two-demand bid at a bridge table? We owe it to Rod, a man we have loved and respected, to show him just how low he has sunk. And maybe that will help him get back to his feet."

Arnold could hardly swallow. His throat was choked until he coughed several times and wiped his eyes. He recalled the day of the Armistice, in 1918, when he had been an army major on staff duty behind the front, safe from enemy fire, though not through any choice of his own, and the ecstasy he had felt at the thought of the beaten Boches, throwing down their arms and preparing to return to homes made hungry by the Allied blockade. The old song "We Bring the Jubilee!" had echoed in a heart full of righteous hate. Day of Wrath! Day of God!

"Well, Harry, there may be justice in what you say."

Despite his exaltation, Arnold knew he would have to discuss this with his wife, which he did that very night, after dinner, when they were having their coffee in the library. She sat there, impassive, enigmatic, on the other side of the fireplace, her black beady eyes, under her pasty brow and messy auburn hair, fixed on him as he talked. She had not attracted him physically for a decade or more; her native high spirits had faded, little by little, as if they were Boston foliage bound to wither in a New York climate.

"You seem unusually Zeus-like today, my dear," she offered at last. "When may I expect the first thunderbolt?"

He used to tell friends, more or less jocularly, that Eleanor exceeded Browning's last duchess in that her ribald laughs rather than her smiles "went everywhere," including in his direction, and that, had he been a Renaissance despot, he might have "given commands." She prided herself, he knew only too well, on her contempt for social snobbery, for "pseudo-intellectualism" and for the vanities of dress and domestic elegance, but the austerity of her absolute faith in the essential moral Tightness of her Shattuck and Lowell ancestors made something of a desert of whatever bright colors and excitements Manhattan and Glenville had to offer. The air of the desert, however, was clear and dry. For if her Beacon Street ancestors had lifted her above the strife of Fifth and Park Avenue social climbers, so had her transcendental ones (she had Emerson blood as well) freed her from the clutch of religious creeds. Eleanor, on the ramparts of the Colony Club, brandished her weapons alone.

Somewhat gruffly, Arnold summarized his discussion with Hammersly.

"Harry recommends a New York divorce?" she queried. "And we thought him and Rodman such pals."

"He's thinking of Vinnie. Why should the poor child have to take herself to some godless western state and swear falsely that she resides in it, when our own legislature in Albany has provided the just and effective remedy for the wrong she has received?"

"Why? To avoid a stinking scandal; that's why."

"The scandal is already here. Our son-in-law has seen to that!"

"But you'd make it worse. And don't talk to me about false swearing. Your firm has sent plenty of clients to Reno, including your niece, who had the same grounds of complaint as Vinnie."

"That was different."

"It was different in that you had no particular resentment against her husband. You just wanted to get rid of him; that was all. And she had another fool ready to marry her."

"Which is hardly Vinnie's case."

"What do you really know about Vinnie's case? What's got you worked up is Rod. I've never seen you so violent."

"And what about you?" he demanded, raising his voice to take the offensive. "Wouldn't a little violence become a mother whose daughter has been so foully treated? But no, you must always be the priestess of the life of reason. I daresay you think Rodman is behaving only as most men would, given half a chance. Isn't that part of your blind faith in cynicism? It's a great way, I suppose, of avoiding upsetting emotions."

Eleanor cut through his reproaches to make a single point. "I don't think Rod is behaving at all like other men. He's basically a puritan. Maybe it takes a Bostonian to see that."

"Well, he's certainly not acting like a puritan."

"But maybe he's reacting like one. A puritan turned inside out."

"A puritan gone to the devil, you mean?"

"That could be it. Maybe he hasn't learned that if God is dead, the devil must be, too."

"Which is taking us a long way from choosing a forum for the divorce."

"Oh, if you're going to get it, I don't really care where. And I suppose the divorce is inevitable. You don't hear much these days of reconciliations. The first thing that goes wrong in a marriage, and, bang, call the lawyer. And after that it's hopeless."

"The bar has always had your good opinion, my dear."

It had been easy to predict that Eleanor's reaction to the proposed method of divorce would irritate him, but Vinnie's came as a surprise to her father. She seemed upset, nervous, fidgety, during their conference in his office, where they met to emphasize the gravity of what he proposed. Twice she rose and strode to the window to contemplate the view. He thought she looked less pretty than usual, and he hated this, for her looks were always important to him. The big blond girl with the laughing blue eyes and cheerful smile had become plumper with the years, not enough to make her in the least unattractive but enough to take her out of the category of beauties in which he had once so proudly placed her. Arnold could not understand why his motherly old secretary, Mrs. Peck, insisted that her added pounds had made her rounder and "sexier."

She uttered a little cry of dismay when he came to the point about the New York divorce.

"You side with Harry, then?"

"I most certainly do."

"Well, if both of you agree, what can I do but go along? I know Mummy's against it, but then Mummy's always basically neutral, and she doesn't really care. I've been brought up all my life to think of Dillard Kaye as something that couldn't be wrong. As a kind of holy tribunal. Or King Arthur's round table. Where all the knights were perfect gentlemen and invincible fighters. And Rod as Lancelot. And now look what's happening. Lancelot is being thrown out of Camelot!"

"Not for an affair with King Arthur's wife!" Arnold couldn't help interjecting.

"Not with Mummy, hardly!" Here Vinnie broke into a kind of gasping laughter that shocked her father. Had she been drinking? At ten o'clock in the morning? "No, he's more like Satan than Lancelot, isn't he? So he must be cast out of heaven, down, down, down..." She leaned over and stared at the floor.

"So there we are, my dear," Arnold murmured in a softer tone, beginning to be alarmed at her uncharacteristic mood.

"Well, I guess I must do as I'm told, Daddy. One rebellion in Dillard Kaye is surely enough for one year."

"Vinnie! You're beginning to sound like your mother."

***

Her father, at least until her marriage, and arguably even afterward, had been the principal figure in Vinnie's life, and she presumably in his. He had made little secret of his preference for his oldest, prettiest and brightest daughter over the other three, which the latter had accepted, almost without jealousy, as a fact of life, evident from their earliest days and also as a matter not of the first importance. The overworked and con-stantly absent American father of the nineteen twenties and thirties was not the primary figure of the home, and the younger Dillards turned for the permission needed for their various pleasures to the actual ruler of the household, Mummy. And Eleanor Dillard tended to regard her eldest daughter's total dependence on her father as something of a welcome relief, as if the latter were reducing her parental burdens from four to three. Which did not keep her, however, from being sarcastic about their relationship, describing it to her cronies as a Victorian pastel of the benevolent aging sire stroking the golden hair of the lovely child whose eyes are fixed adoringly on his. Couldn't one see it as the ultimately idealized union of the sexes, with the male providing wisdom and strength and loving protection while the female furnished an absolute loyalty and a purity of body and mind? Union of the sexes? No! Abolition of sex! Wasn't that what a true civilization required?

Vinnie had never quite understood her mother, but she deplored her detachment and feared her tart tongue. She saw how some other girls controlled their mothers by turning down or off the daily show of affection the latter seemed to need, but her mother did not appear to have any such necessity. Her father, of course, was just the opposite, at least where she was concerned, and she did not hesitate to draw heavily on the large balance of love that he kept in store for her. She had love to return to him, indeed, but her love went hand in hand with a shrewd habit of appraisal that did not characterize his—in her case, at any rate. Thus, she had quite understood that when he had offered her the alternative of a splendid debutante party, with all the trimmings, or a trip to Europe with a girlfriend, she would get both if she chose the latter, so she did. And when he promised her a large check if she didn't smoke or drink hard liquor until she was twenty-one, she agreed, knowing that she could plead with him successfully for dispensations for certain weekends and holidays. But she also deeply appreciated the vast scope of his mind and outreaches—she deemed him to know everything from Anglo-Saxon law to Dadaism—and she conceived of it as a sacred duty—made more sacred by her mother's patent neglect of it—to be an acolyte at his altar. An acolyte, of course, could rise, could be a cardinal to a pope or an eminence grise to a king, couldn't he? And one of her greatest contributions would be to bring her father, by way of a son-in-law, the son he had always wanted.

She met Rodman Jessup at a party given for her in Glenville by her parents on her twenty-first birthday, when her father handed her, along with the apparently hard-earned martini, the large promised check. Rodman was the houseguest of Dillard neighbors, and Vinnie, instantly impressed by his good looks and serious, assured manner, had slipped into the dining room during the cocktail hour to change the place cards so that he would be next to her. He seemed to drop into her life like a prince in a fairy tale.

He was, however, no prince. His father had died in the war and he had been raised, an only child, by a widowed and desolate mother who had supplemented a small income with the offerings of better-off relatives. For the Jessups, like many large Manhattan clans, had connections among the rich as well as the middle class. Rodman had fulfilled all of his devoted mother's hopes, as well as the more sober expectations of the contributing kin, by graduating
summa cum laude
from Columbia College and becoming the editor of the law journal. And as luck would have it, he was already a strong admirer of Arnold Dillard.

There was little coyness between him and Vinnie. They expressed almost at once their mutual attraction and were soon going out together in town on the few nights when he was not working. She had finished at Vassar and was unemployed, and she had no desire to embark on any work until she decided how this new friend was going to change her life. For all the gravity of his airs and thoughts, he was capable of bursts of enthusiasm and excitability, which she found utterly charming. He talked, it was true, a great deal about himself. But that was because there was a world before him that he could hardly wait to conquer.

"Of course, you're going to apply to Dillard Kaye for a job," she told him one night at the automat where he took her for supper. She liked the fact that he never apologized for, or even mentioned, his limitation to inexpensive spots. It showed that he took for granted that she was above such things.

"You think they'd take me?" he inquired earnestly. "I'm hardly a white shoe type. I didn't even go to a prep school. And I'm told most of the partners are in the
Social Register
"

"That's because most of them have worked their way up. Daddy doesn't give a hoot about those distinctions. I thought you knew that."

"Oh, I wasn't thinking of
him.
To work for him would be my dream of dreams!"

"Please! You'll be making me think I'm only a rung in your ladder to fame."

He became instantly solemn. "You couldn't think anything as awful as that, could you, Vinnie?"

"Why not? A talented young man without a fortune has to look about him to get started. In Europe it's taken quite for granted that one of the functions of a wife is to have something to give a push to a climber, whether it be blood or connections or just hard cash."