Powers of Attorney (28 page)

“You're a very tolerant man, Chambers,” she said with a laugh that was half hysterical. “I wonder if I could ever deserve you!”

And as she laughed again and held out her champagne glass to be replenished, she knew that the purpose of writing her article had finally been accomplished and that the business of living which she had once thought almost over was now to be fully, perhaps even painfully, resumed. Miss Tilney had said that most people's problems were without practical solution, but Lavinia knew that her own had one. She would telephone to Mr. Cup in the morning and tell him to accept the terms of her husband's divorce offer.

M
ISS
J
OHANNA
S
HEPARD
, like so many of the older members of the summer community at Anchor Harbor, had become a legend in her own lifetime. The renewed public interest in survivals from the “gilded” age had given her her own small corner in American journalism and letters. Cholly Knickerbocker described her as “Maine's most formidable dowager, who rules the summer world of Anchor Harbor with the absolutism of a czarina.” Cleveland Amory related in
Holiday
Magazine that “when she entertains at dinner in her rambling stone and shingle mansion on the exclusive Shore Path, the limousines of her guests line up ahead of time so that the first one can roll under the porte-cochere at exactly eight o'clock.” And a more critical observer from abroad, in a letter to the London
Daily Mail,
observed:

 

In America the term “dowager” signifies an embattled, elderly female who has triumphed over the fact of sex rather than one who has survived a member of the opposite. The virgin queen of Anchor Harbor, Johanna Shepard, has the long features and solemn mien of a Hapsburg archduchess and dresses with the same sumptuosity. Set in the irrelevant brilliance of her hat and scarfs, her face is like a stone sun dial in a rich flower garden. To watch her cross the lawn to her umbrella table at the swimming club on the stroke of noon is to watch a ceremony that seems to have been borrowed from the opening of parliament.

 

Nobody laughed at this kind of exaggeration more than Miss Shepard herself. “I'm just another old New York seal,” she would protest, “who likes the Maine rocks in summer and the scream of gulls.” Nobody, certainly, tried harder to keep abreast of the times. She played bridge for high stakes and into the small hours of the morning; she was propelled each spring, by jet motors as far as Hong Kong or Singapore, and it was she who had inaugurated the bold move, as chairman of the admissions committee at the swimming club, to take in a select group of “natives,” as the year-round residents of Anchor Harbor were known. “Their families are
much
older than yours or mine,” she would retort to any objectant, crushing his opposition by the simple expedient of bracketing his own dim origins with those of a descendant of John Jay, Gouverneur Morris and Chancellor Shepard.

But in recent summers it had begun to seem to Miss Shepard that people were taking her denials of rank a bit too literally. Their interest in the social routine of the older group at Anchor Harbor was friendly and even at times enthusiastic, but it was essentially the interest of a drama school audience at the revival of a Jacobean masque. The idea that Miss Shepard, or even the admissions committee of the swimming club, could have any direct impact on, much less jurisdiction over, their own lives seemed not to occur to them. Thus Miss Shepard found that although the younger people were always quoting with delight Amory's account of the limousines queuing up for her dinner parties, they rarely felt obliged to be on time themselves. Everywhere she looked she saw further evidence of the rise of this same egalitarian spirit: in the bank teller who was not in the least confused when he failed to recognize her, in the library clerk who fined her for overdue books, in the young doctor, giving her a midsummer checkup, who asked if she had ever had a baby. There was no hostility in the attitude of any of these persons, but Miss Shepard was beginning to wonder if she did not regret the old class animosities of the depression years. With animosity, there was at least recognition. Was it hopelessly reactionary to want to stand out a
little
from the dull grey mass of everybody?

She was always hoping better things of each new summer colonist and always being disappointed, but when Mrs. Tyng bought the old Strong place next to her own, she decided, as usual, to be her first caller. It was rumored that Emmalinc Tyng was a rich and attractive Washington widow, but Miss Shepard's little group, knowing how apt social climbers were to use a summer resort as a way of attacking the soft underbelly of the old guard in their home towns, always held aloof until their leader had scouted the field.

“But I was told that nobody in Anchor Harbor would come near me for years and
years!
” Mrs. Tyng cried with infectious gaiety. “And here the great Miss Shepard comes in person. I declare, if it isn't the sweetest thing!”

Mrs. Tyng was small and just a bit plump, with bright shining black eyes in a round pale face and black bangs like Mrs. Eisenhower's. There was a trace of Southern accent in her tone and much more than a trace of Southern effusiveness in her manner. She had painted the Strong living room white and filled it with Chinese things. Miss Shepard was unable to elicit any particulars about her, other than that she had lost a great many dear ones, but did not believe in being “morbid.”

“Do you think we could be friends, Miss Shepard?” she asked disarmingly when her approving visitor rose to leave. “Or would you be bored to death by a poor little rattle like myself? That's what they call you in Virginia, you know, when you go on too much about yourself. But it's all your fault. You're so sympathetic, everything just tumbles right out.”

Miss Shepard wondered just what it was that had tumbled out, but she was nonetheless touched. “I'd like to have you meet some of your neighbors,” she replied. “Would you come to the swimming club tomorrow at noon and sit at my table?”

“Oh, Miss Shepard! Of course, I'll come, but I warn you, I'll be scared stiff!”

Mrs. Tyng presented herself the next morning, dressed discreetly in navy blue, but she did not seem very scared. She chatted volubly yet modestly with all of Miss Shepard's group, with old Colonel Townsend, the collector of doorknobs, with Mrs. Potts, the richest widow of the resort, with Tommy Landon, the golden-haired, epicene muralist who had been their “youth” for twenty years. They all agreed that she was charming—and impenetrable.

“I'll bet it's nothing but an act,” Miss Shepard suggested, enjoying the independence of seeming to depreciate her own protégée. “If I wanted to crash 'us,' I'd try to seem mysterious. Here we are, all talking about her past when she probably doesn't even have one!”

All that summer Miss Shepard never gave a big party without asking Mrs. Tyng, and her delight in her new neighbor steadily increased. The latter seemed ready and able to exercise upon her aging group of pleasure seekers the rejuvenating influence of a Madame de Pompadour in the court of Louis XV. It was Emmaline Tyng who organized picnics by buckboard along the old carriage trail to Porpoise Rock where they could watch the sun plunge behind the Green Mountains and the cold sapphire sea turn to a phosphorescent ebony. It was Emmaline who thought of renting the old tea house on top of Hamlin Hill and serving a champagne lunch before the panorama of pine forests and crags. It was Emmaline who organized the tombola lunches at the swimming club and who got Sunny Dixie from the North Shore to play at the Tennis Week ball.

“She's taken us over, Johanna,” Mrs. Potts told Miss Shepard at the end of Emmaline's first season. “She's taken us over, and we're all the better for it. You were right, my dear. I had my doubts at first, but I should have known. You're always right.”

Miss Shepard accepted the compliment as simply her due. She had already conceived the idea of her new friend as a successor to herself, as a person who would preserve and maintain in a chaotic future some of the standards of hospitality and graciousness of the old Anchor Harbor. Like a late Roman emperor, she now began to invest her adopted heir with the purple and to insist that equal honors be rendered. She and Emmaline were inseparable, a sort of Mutt and Jeff, as in her own brusque way she liked to put it. Heads turned at noon at the swimming club to watch them cross the lawn to what was now
their
umbrella table: Miss Shepard, so tall and broad shouldered and big chested, so lanky and pale and long nosed, and yet at the same time so frilly and flowery and gauzy, hobbling like a rolling vessel with her cane, one hand on the shoulder of Mrs. Tyng, so round and smiling, so bouncing and vivacious, so simply and impeccably dressed, so giggling, as much aware of all who were looking
on as
her companion seemed aloof. They had even developed a special way of talking to each other, an elaborate exchange of mannered truculences.

“Don't bring anything to my friend, Mrs. Tyng,” Miss Shepard would say gruffly to the white-coated waiter who hurried to take their order. “Unless it's a glass of tomato juice. I'm afraid she overindulged last night.”

“It's true, Johanna. I found myself in some pretty bad company.

“Is that so? I heard you were seen about with a respectable old body, a most virtuous spinster. I trust you did not expose the poor dear to the temptations of your fleshpots.”

“The poor dear, indeed! There's a smell of brimstone in the very daisies on her straw hat!”

The waiter would smile and bow and bring them their martinis as usual.

 

If the friendship, however, in its early stages, might have suggested the Well-Beloved and his Pompadour, alas, it was not the sovereign who was the first to be bored. Emmaline Tyng, having established her rule at Miss Shepard's, began, as early as her third summer, to sigh, like another conqueror, for more worlds. There were a number of old summer families, older even than the Shepards, particularly from Boston, who held aloof from the social life of the swimming club, in dowdy shingled isolation, without lawns or formal gardens, who came to Maine only for the sea air and the pine trees and whose wives and widows were to be observed padding along the sides of roads in sweaters and sneakers, even sometimes pushing bicycles. Of such were the Motley Goodriches, regarded by Miss Shepard, and by her parents before her, as the natural targets of summer levity. She really stared when Emmaline suggested that they be included in a charade party.

“My dear, they're the most terrible frumps. What on earth put that idea in your head?”

“They have that divine old turreted castle on Porpoise Point. Wouldn't it be fun to give a picnic there?”

Miss Shepard, to tell the truth, was becoming the least bit tired of picnics. Even with the efforts of her old chauffeur who toted a camp chair and wrapped her knees in a steamer blanket, her limbs tended to stiffen in the night air.

“My father used to say that Anchor Harbor had never recovered from two things: the road up Hamlin Hill and the Goodriches' August clambake.”

But Emmaline simply smiled the formal smile of the child who knows that she has only to wait till teacher's back is turned, and a week later Miss Shepard had the mortification of learning that invitations had gone out to a charade party without finding one in her own mail.

“Of course I'd have asked you,” Emmaline pointed out when she protested. “Only I was afraid you'd be bored to death. The Goodriches are coming. If you think you can stand them, come along!”

Miss Shepard came to her friend's party and was very gracious indeed to the Goodriches, but she did not delude herself about the extent of her concession. She could tell, from the more pebbly note in Emmaline's Southern chatter, that her heir no longer expected to await her demise before coming into possession of her rights. It was soon only too clear that Miss Shepard's younger cohort in the imperial purple intended to enroll the entire colony under her standard. It was not enough for her to assemble a chosen few around the best umbrella table at the swimming club and live with the satisfying knowledge that there was nobody on that long lawn by the swimming pool who would not have gladly exchanged his canvas chair for one at that charmed circle. No, such were the joys of mere society creatures. Emmaline's ambition was more imperial. She wanted to know the old families and the new, the smart and the dowdy. She wanted to give lawn parties that were like palace receptions, to control the clubs, to sponsor the debutantes and hand out the silver cups at Tennis Week. She wanted the admiral to call first at her house when the fleet came in. She wanted, in short, to be Mrs. Anchor Harbor.

But only of the summer colony. She had no interest in the “natives” or in the village fathers except to form committees to protest their real estate taxes. Emmaline subscribed to the prevailing opinion on the Shore Path that the Anchor Harborites existed only to “do” the summer people and went to Miami every winter to spend their ill-gotten gains. Miss Shepard, on the other hand, conceived of her relationship with the village people more as that of a landed aristocrat with the local peasantry. Old ties and obligations held them together with a bond that was stronger than any between herself and mere summer swallows from distant metropolises. Did not Mr. Durand, the druggist, remember her mother's heart flutter pills? Had not Mr. Wiley, who ran the Anchor Motor Company, started his business with a loan from her father?

It was not surprising, then, that the ultimate break between the two friends should have come over Miss Shepard's policy of sponsoring natives for membership in the swimming club.

“I think,” Emmaline announced at a board meeting, with a little smile at the gentlemen on either side, which betrayed a preconcerted move, “that, with all due respect to Miss Shepard, the time has come for an ‘agonizing reappraisal' of our admissions policy. We have at the moment not one, but
two
local candidates up for consideration.”