The Fourth Side of the Triangle (2 page)

“Well,” said Ashton McKell. “We'll see.”

He saw. He saw that it was neither phase nor fancy, but good solid ambition.

Dane took an apartment of his own in one of the buildings he had inherited from the estate of Gerard DeWitt. He did this with kindness, and for a long time scarcely a day passed without a visit home; but Ashton knew that it was not so much from genuine involvement as out of consideration for his mother's feelings.

The boy worked hard, his father had to concede. Dane allowed himself exactly one weekend off each month; the rest was four walls, stuffy cigaret smoke, and the firing of his typewriter. He wrote, rewrote, destroyed, started over.

His first novel,
Hell in the Morning
, was a flop utter and absolute. No major reviewer mentioned it, and the minor ones were merciless. A typical notice from a provincial book column said: “
Hell in the Morning
is hell any time of the day.” He was scolded as “a rich man's Nelson Algren” and “Instant Kerouac” and “a moth in the beard of Steinbeck.” One lady reviewer (“Why doesn't she stay home and wash the dirty diapers?” roared Ashton McKell) remarked: “Rarely has such small talent labored so hard to produce so little.” Dane, who had been absorbing punishment like an old club fighter, in grim silence, cried out when he read that one. But his father (only Judith Walsh, Ashton's private secretary, knew that the tycoon had subscribed to a clipping service) stormed and raved.

“The Duxbury
Intelligencer!
What's that smelly little rag good for but to wrap codfish in?” and so on. Finally, anger spent, came consolation. “At least now he'll give up this tomfoolery.”

“Do you think so, Ashton?” Lutetia asked. It was at one of the family dinners from which Dane was absent—his absences were becoming more frequent. It was clear that Lutetia did not know whether to be sorry for her son's sake or glad for her husband's. The struggle, as usual, was short-lived. “I hope so, dear,” Lutetia said. If Ashton thought writing was bad for Dane, it was.

“I simply don't understand you people.” Judy Walsh was a more than occasional visitor to her employer's home. Ashton required outlandish hours of his secretary, sometimes dictating well past midnight in his study, so that Judy was frequently there for dinner. She was important to Lutetia McKell in another way. Lutetia's never-expressed regret had been for lack of female companionship. Her few nieces were too emancipated for her taste, and there was Judy, an orphan, trim, efficient, outspoken, and yet, under the independence, with a need no one but Lutetia suspected, a need like her own, feminine, and yearning for tenderness. Judy's hair bordered on Irish red, and she had a slanty little Irish nose and direct blue Irish eyes. “Really, Mr. McKell.” Thus Judy, at Ashton's remark. “Give up this tomfoolery! You sound like a character out of the Late Late Show. Don't you know enough about Dane to realize he won't ever give up?”

Ashton growled into his soup.

Dane's second novel,
The Fox Hunters
, was a failure also. The
Times
called it “Faulkner and branch water, New England style.”
The New Yorker
said (
in toto
): “A teen-ager's first experience with Life turns out to be not at all what he had thought. Callow.” The
Saturday Review
…

Dane continued to plow away.

It turned out to be the kind of New York August which made it technically possible to walk from back to peeling back at Coney Island, from the boardwalk to the sea, without once touching the scorched sand. It was the season when mild little men who had never been known to raise their voices ran through the streets slashing at people with an ax … when those New Yorkers who owned no air-conditioners used fans, and those who owned no fans slept on kitchen floors before open refrigerators, so that the overloaded circuits blew out, nullifying refrigerators, fans, and air-conditioners alike.

Tempers erupted, gangs rumbled, husbands slugged their wives, wives beat their children, offices closed early, subways re-enacted the Inferno, in the thick and dripping air hearts faltered and gave up the blood-pumping struggle, and Lutetia McKell told her son that his father had confessed to her: “There is another woman.”

“Mother!” Dane sprang from the chair, pretending a surprise he did not really feel. “Are you dead sure? I can't believe it.”

But he could. Queer. A moment before his mother said, “There is another woman,” Dane could have said in truth that the thought of his father's possible infidelity had never crossed his mind. Yet once the words were uttered, they seemed inevitable. In common with most of mankind, Dane could not think comfortably of his parents in sexual embrace; but in his case the Freudian reasons were complicated by the kind of father and mother he had. His mother was like a limpet clinging to a rock, getting far more than she gave; for she could only give acquiescence and loyalty as she moved up and down with the tides. Somewhere deep in his head flickered the thought: she must be the world's lousiest bed partner.

It seemed obvious to Dane that his father, on the other hand, was a man of strong sexuality, in common with his other drives and appetites. The surprise lay not so much in the fact that there was another woman as in that he had been so blind.

So—“Are you dead sure? I can't believe it.”—when he was certain from the first instant, and belief came flooding.

“Oh, yes, I'm sure, darling,” said Lutetia. “It's not the sort of thing I would imagine.” No, Dane thought; you'd far likelier imagine a Communist revolution and a commissar commandeering your best silver service. “But for some time now I've … well, suspected something might be wrong.”

“But, Mother, how did you find out?”

Lutetia's cameo face turned rosy. “I asked him what was wrong. I could no longer stand thinking all sorts of things.”

“What did he say?” So you do lead a mental life, Dane thought, after all. Funny, finding out about one's parents at such an advanced stage of the game. He loved his mother dearly, but he would have said she hadn't a brain in her head.

“He said, ‘I'm terribly sorry. There is another woman.'”

“Just like that?”

“Well, dear, I asked him.”

“I know, but—! What did
you
say?”

“What could I say, Dane? I've never been faced with such a situation. I think I said, ‘I'm sorry, too, but it's such a relief to know,' which it was. Oh, it was.”

“And then what did Dad say, do?”

“Nodded.”

“
Nodded?
That's all?”

“That's all.” His mother said, as he winced, “I'm sorry, darling, but you did ask me.”

“And that was the end of the conversation?”

“Yes.”

Incredible. It was like something out of Noel Coward. And now Dane realized something else. Just below the level of consciousness he had been aware lately of an aura of disturbance about his mother. It probably accounted for his uneasiness and reluctance to leave the city. Her dependence on her menfolk was bred into his bones.

As Dane once joked to Judy Walsh, his mother represented a species perhaps not quite so extinct—if there were degrees of extinction—as the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, or the Carolina parakeet, but rarer than the buffalo.

Anna Lutetia DeWitt McKell was an atavism. Born six years after Queen Victoria's death, Lutetia in her single delicate body carried the Victorian spirit into the middle of the twentieth century, nursing it as if she were the divinely appointed guardian of the eternal flame. It was true that, being left motherless, she had been reared by a choker-collared grandmother who was by birth a Phillipse, and who never let anyone, especially Lutetia, forget it; the old lady considered herself spiritually, at least, a daughter of England (the Phillipses were Tories during the Revolution); she never failed to take offense at being called an Episcopalian—“I am an Anglican Catholic,” she would say. But the grandmother did not entirely explain the granddaughter. On the paternal side Lutetia inherited all the pride and prejudices of the ingrown Knickerbocker breed from which her father's family descended. Between the Victorian and Dutch burgher virtues, Lutetia never had a chance.

Secretly, she still considered it “wrong” for young people of opposite sexes to be left alone together under any circumstances; the social freedom of the twentieth century bewildered and offended her. The very word “sex” was not used in “mixed” conversation by “ladies”; it had taken all her strength to utter the phrase “another woman” in the conversation with her son. There were other social distinctions as well in Lutetia's lexicon. Judith Walsh, for example, was “a business associate” of her husband's (and what a wrench it was for her to acknowledge that “a nice young woman” could be engaged in “business”!); had she had to think of Judy as an employee, Lutetia would inescapably have lumped her with the “servant class.” One always spoke politely, even kindly, to servants; but one did not, after all, dine with them.

Lutetia DeWitt had led the proper sheltered life; she had attended the proper young ladies' schools; she had made the grand tour properly chaperoned; she had never been inside a night club (Lutetia called it a “cabaret”) in her life (a night club, after all, was a sort of saloon). She sipped a glass of sherry on occasion; beer she regarded as a food, which might be drunk for the purpose of gaining weight; whiskey was exclusively for men. She liked to devote at least one hour a day to her “needlework,” but this was never worked on in the presence of callers because it consisted of “tiny garments,” prepared for a lay sisterhood of her church which aided “unfortunate” young women.

She was, as Dane remarked to Judy, beyond belief. “I love Mother,” he said, “but to be in her company for any length of time is like living onstage during a performance of
Berkeley Square.
”

“Dane! What a thing to say.”

“I've had to live with her, Judykins.”

Divorced women who remarried were living in adultery; there was no more to be said on the subject, except of course that one was sorry for their unhappy children.

It was in the area of sex and marriage that Lutetia McKell's upbringing expressed itself most strongly. A woman came to her marriage bed a virgin; the mere contrary thought was unspeakable. She would no more have thought of taking a lover than of allowing herself to be eaten by bears. Twin beds were as alien to her as prayer rugs or cuspidors, although separate bedrooms served certain marital situations. She knew dimly that in the unmapped seas in which husbands moved, there were such monsters as “loose women,” for each of whom there had to be a philandering man; in a vague way, while she disapproved, she also accepted. In this sense Lutetia McKell was far more middle-class French than upper-class English or American.

That she possessed an independent fortune was a felicity, a convenience that meant she had the means to indulge in private charities and bestow personal gifts. For family and domestic expenses she did not handle a penny or sign a check, and it had never occurred to her to demand the right as a matter of wifehood.

Lutetia McKell lived where her husband decreed, traveled when, as, and where he stipulated, bought what he told her to buy, ran her home as he wanted it run. She was happy when her husband seemed content; she grieved when he was out of sorts. She had no significant hopes or desires that were not Ashton McKell's, and she felt no lack of any.

Still … “another woman” …

Why, the old goat, Dane thought.

Most deeply, he felt sorry for his mother; on another level, not so deep, he felt rather sorry for his father. But it was his mother who preoccupied him. How could she cope with a situation for which she had no background or resources? She was not like other women.

“It's never happened before,” she said, and her lips compressed ever so slightly, as if to say,
And it should not have happened now;
but the lip compression was as far as the criticism would ever get. “I know that men have, well, certain
feelings
that women may not have, and there are undoubtedly situations in which they—you—cannot control yourselves absolutely. But with your father it's never happened before, Dane, I'm quite certain of that.” It was as if she were pleading her husband's case before some attentive court. She sat in her chair with hands lapped over, no hint of tears in her childlike blue eyes—a fragile figure of middle-aged porcelain.

He shouldn't have done it to her, Dane ruminated. Not to Mother. She's not equipped. Regardless of the deficiencies of their intimate life together, he shouldn't have made her a victim of this commonest of marital tragedies. Not after living with her all these years. Not after taking her little Victorian self as it was and molding it to his accommodation. What did she have without her husband? Ashton McKell was her reason for being. It left her like a planet torn loose from its sun. Dane began to feel angry.

It made him re-examine himself, because at first he had been inclined to see it through male eyes. What might it be like to visit a father's home and find some brittle, dyed creature in her sharp-featured forties … “Dane, this is your stepmother.” “Oh, Ashie, no! You call me Gladys, Dane.” Or Gert, or Sadie. Dane shivered. Surely his father couldn't have fallen that low. Not some brassy broad out of a night-club line.

“Mother, has he said anything about a divorce?”

Lutetia turned her clear eyes on him in astonishment. “Why, what a question, Dane. Certainly not! Your father and I would never consider such a thing.”

“Why not? If—”

“People of our class don't get divorces. Anyway, the Church doesn't recognize divorce. I certainly don't want one, and even if I did your father wouldn't dream of it.”

I'll bet, Dane thought grimly. He forbore to point out what Lutetia perfectly well knew—that so long as neither of the parties remarried after a civil divorce, no rule of the Episcopal Church was broken. But how could she stand for the adultery? To his surprise, Dane discovered that he was taking an old-fashioned view of his own toward the disclosure. Or was it simply that he was putting himself in his mother's place? (All at once, the whole problem became entangled. He found himself thinking of the McKell money. The McKell money meant nothing to him, really—he had never particularly coveted it, he had certainly not earned a cent of it, with his two inheritances he did not need any part of it, and he had repeatedly refused to justify his legatee status in respect to it. Yet now the thought that the bulk of it might wind up the property of “another woman” infuriated him.)