Skinny Island (8 page)

Mrs. Perkins herself, erect, immaculate, always in her widow's spotless black, became Marcus's symbol of the civilization that the Hun could never beat, the image of the domination of self. One had to resist the enemy within as well as without; one had to put down fear as well as lust. The world could always be beautiful to one who would not compromise.

When Mrs. Perkins died, very suddenly, after the armistice, in the flu epidemic, Marcus, awestruck in his grief, wondered if she might not have used up the capital of her fortitude and been ready, perhaps even grateful, to succumb to an efficient and speedy killer. At least she had given him the strength to return to America. It was as if she had said, in her gruff way: "Very well now; I've shown you the way.
Live!
"

When Marcus returned to Clare, after an absence of six years, he was a very different man from the unhappy and disillusioned creature who had fled to France. His slender shape had so filled out that he was almost stocky, and much of his blond hair had disappeared from his round scalp. He moved deliberately now rather than jerkily; there was something almost magisterial in the dignity of his diminutive figure, swathed in dark brown or black. Marcus had settled upon an image that would last him for the next twenty years and the personality that would go with it.

He had no favorites now among the boys, although he held small sessions for the especially gifted. There developed a legend that he had once dismissed a class because he seemed on the verge of tears in a lecture on the death of Keats. Rodman Venable had been killed in the war, and it was widely believed that it was Marcus who, in his memory, had paid for the great west window in the chapel that showed Christ with the children. He seemed to have no life outside the school, nor did he ever spend a night away from the tiny Greek Revival villa he had built just off the campus, except for one week every summer with the Forresters in Maine.

He was satisfied that he had carried the passion for beauty, which in his case was manifested not in music or color or any of the plastic arts but in words alone, words in prose or verse, to the highest and most intense pitch possible for man, and he conceived it his simple and sole duty as a citizen of the world to try to transmit this passion to any individual in the marching regiments of youth who chose to turn aside to receive it. He did not persuade himself that there would be many of these, nor did he greatly care. He was on earth, presumably, to offer a remedy to desperate souls; perhaps they had to be desperate before they sought it. For himself, anyway, he was content that beauty had entered his blood stream to satisfy his every appetite. He did not, like Omar, have any need of a jug of wine or "thou beside me singing in the wilderness"; the book of verses underneath the bough was quite enough for him. Marcus likened himself to the young Alfred de Musset, who was reputed to have swooned away on hearing a couplet in
Phèdre.

In 1937 there was a sixth former at the school called David Prine, a scholarship boy, ungainly, large, with glossy black hair and rather wild eyes, who was so brilliant that Marcus took him on as a single student in Greek. No one else could keep up with him. Unfortunately, the boy was prone to ask awkward questions.

One evening, as they discussed Plato, Prine brought up Jowett's change of genders in translating the
Symposium,
making some of the "he's" "she's."

"How could he justify it, sir?"

"Well, you see, David, Jowett was writing for an English nineteenth-century audience. They would not have understood that kind of attachment between two men. So he deemed it better to make it between a man and a woman."

"But that doesn't make sense, sir! You told me that Plato was talking about friendship. About 'platonic' love. Wouldn't his contemporaries have been more ready to believe in a nonphysical relationship between two men than in such a one between a man and a woman? Didn't he make it harder to understand by changing the gender?"

"Plato maintained that the highest form of love was nonphysical. A friendship—perhaps what one might call a romantic friendship—between two men was the highest of all. But there were friendships in his day between men that were not platonic. That was something that troubled Plato less than it troubled the Victorians."

"Does it trouble you, sir?"

"What do you mean, David?"

"That two men should have such a friendship?"

"Such a relationship is not part of our culture. Or admitted by our religion."

"But we admire the Greeks so, sir!
You
admire them, certainly. How can you admire a people who did things of which you disapprove?"

"We live in different times, David."

"Do we, sir?"

"And now, I think the subject had better be closed."

"Oh, Mr. Sumner! I thought you were the one man in Clare I could talk to!"

But Marcus was not touched by this appeal. Indeed, he was very much relieved that David's graduation was so near at hand. He discontinued his individual instruction of the boy and told the headmaster that he had grave misgivings about his future.

Mr. Forrester, now in his sixties but as vigorous as ever, glanced down at the little man, who was walking as rapidly as he could to keep up with him. They were on their way to morning chapel.

"But the boy's a near genius, I thought you told me, Marcus. Why won't he go far?"

"I was thinking of his morals."

"Well, he'll have problems, of course. Perhaps he will find a milieu where people like that are accepted."

Marcus put his hand on Forrester's arm to support himself after this shock. "You mean you know?"

"I don't know that there's anything to
know.
As yet. And let us devoutly hope there won't be till he's out of Clare. But a headmaster learns to recognize certain types."

"You mean you can spot something like that and not move to stamp it out?"

"Oh, my dear Marcus, what powers you ascribe to a headmaster!"

"But don't you even
want
to put it down?"

"I didn't make the world. There are things in it that it is better we should accept."

"I don't agree!"

"Didn't you learn acceptance when
you
were young?"

"What do you mean, sir?" Marcus could hardly credit his hearing.

"Don't you know what I mean, Marcus?"

Marcus stopped and let the headmaster go on to chapel where he would start the service. He stared ahead at the great craggy tower shooting up into a soft, clouded, indifferent sky, a phallus thrusting into a universe that did not care, discriminate or fear. Beauty fell about his feet in a thousand fragments as if the west window that he had commissioned had shivered and been blown all over the campus.

The next day he again resigned from Clare. He reoccupied his old house and lived there henceforth alone.

B
EING PRESIDENT
of the commuters' club car operating between Brewster and Grand Central Station was just the kind of thankless job with which Horace Devoe was always finding himself stuck. Because he did not have to work and commuted only in the spring and summer from his Palladian villa and five hundred acres of landscaped forest and meadows in Katonah to the bare, austere office on Vanderbilt Avenue where, with the faithful Mrs. Sprit, he clipped his coupons and paid his taxes, it was assumed by his year-round neighbors that he had all the time in the world to spare. "Oh, if he wants to pretend he's working," he could almost hear them say, "we'll see he has something to do!" And similarly, in town in winter, because he was known to leave his house on Park Avenue to go only as far as his midtown private perch and not to the competitive reality of "downtown," he was made to pay for such simple pleasures as the opera, the symphony or the watching of animals with expensive and time-consuming trusteeships in opera, symphony and zoo. Of course, he was well enough respected, but he was also certainly used. And having no job, how could he ever retire? The balding, pokerfaced, wistful little man who stared bleakly out of his page in the current 1937 edition of
Parson's Notable New Yorkers
, always laid beside the
Social Register
on his neat, bare desk, betrayed clearly enough his age of sixty.

"My dear Horace," a voice boomed in his ear, "may I have the honor of your company? May I share your pot of coffee?"

Horace looked up helplessly. Simon Regner got on the train at Mount Kisco on the rare days when he was not driven to town in his yellow Hispano-Suiza.

"Of course, Simon, please do."

When Horace had first joined the club car, back in 1921, there had been no question of Jewish members, but with the many resignations caused by the depression, the club had become more liberal. Regner, the investment banker, a rather magnificent, if stout, gentleman with flowing gray hair, a pince-nez and velvet lapels on his black suits, had been the first Jew elected.

"You can dispense with your newspaper, Horace. I can tell you the news is all bad. I had a call from Washington while I was shaving. The price of gold is down again."

Horace had no feeling against Jews, but he had been brought up to believe that they were not desirable company, and he hesitated to assume that the older generation had been entirely wrong. But what particularly embarrassed him about Regner was the latter's habit of inviting him to his grand musical evenings, which Amelia would not even consider attending. "No, darling, you go if you like. Leave me out of it. I can't abide the man." And Regner would always accept Horace's stammering excuses in good faith, waving a hand airily and saying: "Another time, another time."

"We had the pleasure of your son Douglas last night with his charming wife," Simon continued now. "They were brought to our Wagner evening by the Hulls. Oh, what you missed, Horace! Flagstad at her most sublime! And when it was over the young Devoes stayed on, and I had a real chat with your son and heir."

"Oh? And what did that young good-for-nothing have to say for himself?" Horace adopted the bantering tone deemed proper in speaking of an adult child. Why the devil should Simon Regner be interested in Douglas Devoe?

"My dear Horace, I hope you won't mind if I talk to you candidly. I assure you I have only your boy's best interests in mind."

"That boy, as you call him, is thirty-one."

"Precisely. Isn't it time he was doing something he really wants to do?"

Horace stared. "You suggest he doesn't like being a lawyer in Curtis and Day?"

"Be honest with me, Horace. Wasn't that your doing?"

"You mean his getting the job there? Well, I suppose my being a client didn't exactly hurt. Douglas's record at law school left something to be desired. But I've never interfered since."

"Would you interfere to have him made a partner?"

"Certainly not!" Horace exclaimed indignantly. "We don't do things that way." Then he reflected that his pronoun might imply that only Jews did things that way. "I mean
I
don't," he added lamely.

But Simon seemed unrebukable. He fixed his pince-nez carefully to the thin bridge of a nose that swelled out over his nostrils, and looked glitteringly at Horace. "And do you think he'll be made a partner without your assistance? Or, frankly, Horace, even with it?"

"I haven't the least idea." Horace now found the discussion positively offensive.

"Suppose I were to tell you that your son doesn't believe he ever will be made a partner?"

Horace was trapped now. If Regner had actually received Douglas's confidence, he could not ignore it. "I suppose there are other firms," he said impatiently.

Regner shook his head. "I'm afraid your son is bored with the law. And that will be fatal to his advance in any firm. But is there any reason he should practice the law at all if he doesn't like it?"

"No reason," Horace replied coolly. "Let him get another job if he wants. And if he can."

"He tells me he'd like to be a writer. That he used to write plays when he was at Harvard. Did you not approve?"

"I didn't approve or disapprove," Horace retorted testily. "But there didn't seem to be much future in it. Don't forget that since that time he's acquired a family. Five little Devoes can't be fed on one-act plays produced by avant-garde theatre groups."

Anyone else in the club car would have dropped the subject at this. The duty of self-support in a Christian adult male, no matter what the family circumstances, was never questioned. But Regner was shameless.

"Let me tell you something, Horace, that may surprise you. I gave each of my children a million dollars when they came of age."

Horace was scandalized at such lack of reticence. "I have no wish to intrude into your family finances!"

"Of course you haven't. I'm volunteering the information. And I'm volunteering more. Each one of the five has increased that sum."

"Ah, well, but they're all—" Horace stopped in time. "No doubt your children have inherited your financial acumen. Of course, I would help Douglas if he were in trouble. I give him something on his birthday and at Christmas, and big enough to be invested, too, not spent. But as for anything remotely like what you're talking about, I'm afraid he'll have to wait till I'm gone."

"But don't you see what a premium that puts on your death? You're making him look forward to it!"

"I hardly think Douglas is that sort of person. And I suggest this discussion is leading us nowhere. I happen to have very strong principles about not spoiling young people by showering them with money."

"But you came into yours when you were young."

Really, the man was impossible! "That was because I had the misfortune to lose my father early." Misfortune! Even Horace blushed at this. Would Regner have the gall to cackle with laughter? But he didn't. "And even that hardly proved a good thing for my poor brother, as no doubt you know." The club car seemed for a moment to rattle like the dice at Monte Carlo. "Perhaps our young people are not brought up to handle money like—"

"Like ours? Yes, we Jews are more realistic with our young. We trust them, for we teach them to be trustworthy. But I miss my guess if you'd be taking much of a chance with Douglas. And you'd have the joy of making an investment in his happiness. Don't make him wait to be a writer till you're dead, Horace. It may be too late by then!"