The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (23 page)

“You mean she'll fly all the way from New York to go to a ball?” I asked in mild surprise. “All those expensive miles for one party?”

Clarence nodded grimly. “She's even proud of it,” he affirmed. “Mother's not afraid to face the absurdity of her own motivations. I'll say that for her.”

“But I rather admire that, don't you? I hope I have that kind of spirit when I'm seventy.”

There was a disapproving pause while Clarence sipped his
cinzano
.

“Sixty-eight,” he corrected me dryly. “You forget, Peter,” he continued more severely, “that someone always pays for a woman like Mother. I don't mean financially because, obviously, my grandfather left her very well off. But emotionally. She is quite remorseless in the pursuit of pleasure.”

“Oh, come, Clarence, I'm sure you're being hard on her,” I protested. “How do you know she isn't really coming over to see you?”

He smiled sourly.

“The Lorisan ball is far more important than I,” he replied. “Though I won't deny,” he conceded, “that seeing me may provide a subsidiary motive for her coming. She knows how I feel about Olympia Lorisan and that set of international riffraff.”

“You mean she's coming here to
annoy
you? Don't you think that's going rather far?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Not altogether to annoy me, of course not. But it adds the icing to the cake. Oh, she's up to no good. You can be sure of that.”

I had to laugh at this.

“Do you honestly think she cares that much?”

Clarence had to pause to think this over.

“We are the two most different people in the world,” he said more reflectively, “and we know it. We each know in our heart that the other will never change. Yet we go on as if there was a way, or as if the other must be made to see the way even if he won't take it. In any event,” he continued, changing to a brisker, more deliberate tone, as if embarrassed by his reverie, “she will not find me this time. I shall be safely in Rome while the Princess Lorisan's friends are debauching the bride of the Adriatic.”

“You won't even stay to see your mother?”

“She can meet me, if she cares, in the eternal city. Will you go with me?”

I told him I had to stay in Venice and work, ball or no ball.

“I suppose you might even go to it?” he speculated.

“I might. If I'm asked.”

“I see, Peter, that I must not overestimate you,” he said regretfully, shaking his head. “You are essentially of that world, aren't you? Yet I wonder how any artist could really prefer to dance and drink with those shallow people than walk in Hadrian's Villa or in the moonlit Colosseum. Mind how you reject me, Peter. Haven't I told you that I burn with a ‘hard, gemlike flame'?”

As a matter of fact, he had. He had told me the first night that we had dined together and in that same mocking tone. He had said that most people saw only the “brownstone front” side of his nature, the austere, stiff, conservative side, but that there was another, a truer side, a romantic, loyal, idealistic one. This was what he meant when he quoted Walter Pater, but the disdainful smile that accompanied his phrase made me wonder if any gemlike flame within him had not been smothered or at least isolated so that it burned on invisibly, a candle in a crypt.

“Well, some of us have to do more than burn for a living,” I was saying, rather crudely, when looking up I saw Neddy Bane crossing the square alone.

“Why, it's Neddy Bane!” I exclaimed.

Clarence looked up too, immediately alarmed at the prospect of a stranger.

“And who, pray, is Neddy Bane?”

“And old friend of mine,” I said promptly, feeling for the first time that he was. “We went to school and college together. Let me ask him over, Clarence. You'll like him.”

“Yes, why don't you do that?” he said in a dry, suddenly hostile tone. “But if you'll excuse me,” he continued, glancing down at his watch, “I think it's time that I was on my way.”

“Now, Clarence, wait. Don't be rude.” I put my hand firmly on his arm. “It's not that late.”

I turned and waved at Neddy, who stared for a moment and then smiled and started toward our table. It was suddenly important to me that Clarence should make this concession. The sight, as he approached us, of Neddy's friendly smile made me feel that the last three evenings had been a lifetime. It was as if I had been locked in a small dark library with the windows closed and Neddy Bane, of all unlikely people, was life beating against the panes.

“Neddy!” I called to him. “How are you, boy? Come on over and drink with us.” And as he came up to the table I put my hand on Clarence's shoulder. “Do you remember my cousin, Neddy? Clarence McClintock?”

***

Neddy was my age, about thirty-three, but he was not as tall as Clarence or myself, and this, together with his gay sport coat and thick, brown, curly hair, made him seem like a smiling and respectful boy at our table. He had large blue eyes that peered at one with a hesitant, almost timid friendliness, but when they widened with surprise, as they were apt to if one said anything in the least interesting, their blue faded almost into gray, the puffiness above his cheekbones became more evident and he seemed less boyish. He was weak, and he was supposed to be charming, but I have often wondered if his charm was not rather assumed by people who had been told that it was a quality that went with weakness. He had been a stockbroker in New York with an adequate future, married to a perfectly adequate wife, the kind of nice girl of whom it was said that she would bloom with marriage, that even her rather pinched features would separate into better proportions and glow when love had touched her. Conceivably something like this could have happened had another husband been her lot. She wanted only what so many girls wanted, a house in the suburbs in which to bring up her children and a country club whose male members were all doing as well or better than her husband. But Neddy was constitutionally unable to find content in any regular life. He could not even commute. He would get to Grand Central and drink in a bar until he had missed his train and every other reasonable one and had to spend the night with his widowed mother in the city. He was fond of rather dramatic collapses, of simply lying back and doing nothing when he felt pressure, refusing to answer questions or to give explanations, and his poor wife, lacking the maturity or the understanding to be able to cope with him, gave vent to her deep sense of injustice that he was not as other husbands and nagged him until he walked out on her and the children and fled to Europe.

It was like Neddy that he had made no arrangements for divorce or separation or for his own or anyone else's support. All this he left to his mother, who, far from rich, sent him a check when she could, at great sacrifice. He professed to be an artist, but he did condescend to take various jobs. He worked for a travel agency, for the French edition of a New York women's magazine, as secretary and guide to a Pittsburgh industrialist. Now, he told Clarence and me, his money had really given out and he was going back to New York.

“Well, it's been fun while it lasted,” he said with his disarming smile, raising the drink I had ordered for him, “and I'm never one to regret things, as you, Peter, ought to know. Peter has never really approved of me, Mr. McClintock,” he continued turning his attention suddenly to Clarence. “Peter is the greatest bourgeois I know. Despite his writing and despite his being over here. Fundamentally, his heart has never left Wall Street.”

I glanced at Clarence and noticed to my surprise that he no longer seemed bored.

“But you're quite right, Mr. Bane,” he said seriously. “Peter isn't really willing to give himself to the European experience. I'm interested that you see that.”

I could hardly help laughing at this unexpected alliance.

“Perhaps it's because I don't burn with a hard, gemlike flame,” I retorted. “Do you, Neddy?”

Neddy glanced from me to Clarence and saw from the latter's quick flush whom my reference was aimed at.

“Do I? Of course I do!” he exclaimed. “And I'll bet your cousin here does too. Every true artist or art lover burns with a hard, gemlike flame.” He turned back to Clarence. “Naturally Peter doesn't understand. What would a novelist of manners, bad manners at that, know of the true flame? I can see, Mr. McClintock, that you're a person who cuts deep into things. You have no time for surfaces. It's the only way to be. Oh, I've batted around a lot myself, as Peter here knows; I've wasted time and energy, but none of that's the real me. The real me is a painter, first and last!”

“Is it really?” Clarence asked. “But how sad then that you have to go back. People who can paint Italy should stay here. It's the only way we can contribute.”

“Do you paint yourself, Mr. McClintock?”

“Alas, no. I'm a bit of a scholar, that's all. I hang my head before a real artist.”

“But why!” Neddy cried. “The artist and the scholar, weren't they the team of the Renaissance?”

They continued to talk in this vein, Neddy putting himself out more and more to please Clarence. I knew his habit in the past of trying to placate the kind of disapproving figure that Clarence initially must have seemed to him at the expense of familiar and hence less awesome figures like myself. I had never, however, seen him carry it so far. When he talked about painting he deferred with humility to Clarence's amateur yet aggressively old-fashioned judgment and sought his opinion on recent exhibits. When he elicited the fact that Clarence's last monograph, on the art collection of Pius VII, was to be published in
Via Appia
, he praised the discrimination of Princess Vinitelli, its publisher. I knew that he must have heard me describe Clarence in the past as my “rich” cousin, and decided that he was simply after a loan. What really surprised me, though, was Clarence's reaction. At first he glanced at me from time to time while Neddy was talking to see if I shared his interest, but after a couple of rounds of drinks he forgot me entirely and kept his eyes riveted on Neddy. I had noticed on our previous evenings that he had drunk almost nothing, which was evidently because of a light head, for now under the influence of the mild
cinzanos
he became almost as loquacious as Neddy.

“It's wonderful to find someone who really
feels
Italy,” he said, looking around at me again, but with a reproachful look. “I had begun to be afraid that the whole world was a Lorisan ball.”

When I glanced at my watch and saw how late it was and got up to go, Clarence only squinted up at me, his usually sallow features softened with what struck me as an air of rather smug satisfaction, and said that he and “Neddy” would sit on a bit and have “one for the road.” I left them together, amused at their congeniality, but slightly irritated at being made to feel like an elderly tutor after whose retiring hour the young wards, released, may frisk in the dark of a forbidden city. Really, I said to myself, with a sneer that surprised me, what an ass Clarence can be.

I didn't see either of them again until I ran into Neddy a week later when I was getting my mail at the American Express.

“I thought you were going home,” I said.

“Well, no,” he said, looking, I thought, slightly embarrassed. “I'm not exactly. Not for a while anyway.”

“Where are you staying?”

He hesitated a moment and then stuck his chin forward in a sudden gesture of defiance.

“I'm staying with Clarence.”

“With Clarence!” I exclaimed. “In his apartment? Why, I thought nobody ever stayed with Clarence.”

“Maybe he never found anyone he wanted to ask,” Neddy said in a superior tone.

“But how did it happen?” I asked. “How did you ever pull it off?”

Neddy was like a child in his obvious pleasure at my interest. All his pores opened happily under the reassuring sunshine of curiosity.

“Well, after you left us the other night,” he said eagerly, “Clarence and I sat on and had a few more drinks. He became very reminiscent and told me about his mother and how dreadfully she had treated him when he was little. She must have been awful, don't you think, Peter? Except rather wonderful at the same time.” He looked at me questioningly, afraid that his speculation was bold. I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, anyway, when I finally got up to go, just when I thought I was saying goodbye to him for good, he suddenly seized my arm and blurted out: ‘If you really want to stay here and paint, you can, you know. You can set yourself up in my apartment. I'm quite alone.' Don't you think that was marvelous, Peter? From someone who looks just as cold as ice?”

“Marvelous,” I agreed dryly. “And you accepted, of course?”

“I moved in the very next day! Wouldn't you have?”

“What does that matter?”

I thought over what Neddy had told me, and two days later I called on Clarence at his small, chaste, perfect apartment. He received me alone, as Neddy was out sketching. I noted that the somber living room with its carved-wood medieval statues and red damask curtains had already been turned into a studio.

“I suppose you've been wondering,” he told me in his cool formal tone, “whether or not I've taken leave of my senses.”

“No, Clarence. I'm just interested, that's all.”

“As a cousin or as a novelist?”

“As a friend.”

He looked at me suspiciously for a moment and then, nodding his head as if satisfied, proceeded in his own slow, measured pace to give me the story of what had happened. I had the feeling as he went along that his formality concealed a sort of defiance, a smug, rather cocky little satisfaction that he should have captured Neddy. It didn't matter what I thought; I was simply a person to whom an accounting had to be rendered, a visiting parent at the school where Clarence was headmaster. He admitted, to begin with, that he had been terrified at what his unprecedented impulsiveness might have led him into. Never before, he assured me, had he assumed so much responsibility for a fellow human being. But Neddy, it appeared, had soon set his mind at rest. He had proved as docile and pliable as a well-brought-up child, not only applauding the quiet and orderly routine of Clarence's life, but earnestly adapting it to his own. Clarence had found himself the preceptor of a serious and dedicated art student.