The Friend of Women and Other Stories (2 page)

C
ORA
(
perhaps finding Alfreda a bit prim
): Maybe Elizabeth's a bit too much of a realist. Doesn't Darcy's great house and garden play a role in her affection for him? You will remember, Alfie, that when Jane asks her how long she has loved Darcy, she replies that it dated from her first sight of his beautiful gardens at Pemberley.

A
LFREDA
: But she was only joking!

L
ETTY
(
judiciously
): Still, Cora may have a point, Alfie. My father used to say that if you take everything said in jest literally, you'll be right as many times as you're wrong. When a man jokes, “I'd like to kill my mother-in-law!” he may mean just that.

A
LFREDA
: And even if Elizabeth
was
motivated in the least bit by Darcy's great position in the world, where's the harm? She knew that he needed a woman with taste and moderation to run his households and that she herself would be just the person. She had seen in his aunt, Lady Catherine, how badly the rich often do it.

C
ORA
: Is that what you would think, Alfie, if you were courted by a millionaire?

M
E
: Girls, girls, let's not be personal.

L
ETTY
: What Cora is suggesting could, of course, be true of anyone. There are imps in our souls of whom we are not even aware. Sometimes they emerge when we're old and senile. I had a great aunt who had lived a life of the severest virtue. No untoward word or phrase was ever heard from her lips. But when she became incompetent she suffered from an illusion that she had been captured by the Barbary pirates and sold to the proprietor of a house of ill fame. Her language was such that her doors had to be closed to all but the immediate family.

M
E
: Dear me, shall we get back to Miss Austen? Cora, who is your favorite?

C
ORA
: Cathy Earnshaw in
Wuthering Heights.
She was married to the proper Edgar Linton, but her love was all for Heathcliff.

A
LFREDA
(shuddering):
But he was a monster!

C
ORA
: A monster with sex appeal, Alfie. You can see why Isabella Linton went off with him even after he strangled her little dog.

A
LFREDA
(
to Letty
): Cora's giving us the example of the beauty and the beast. She prefers the jungle because her beauty would give her the advantage over you and me. All the beasts would go for her, of course.

C
ORA
: Thanks, Alfie, for the Irish compliment!

M
E
: Ladies, please! Letty, will you give us your candidate?

L
ETTY
: Let me say one more thing first about Cathy Earnshaw. I share Cora's sympathy for her. Her dilemma is a hopeless one. She sees that Edgar Linton is a better man and a better husband than the savage Heathcliff could ever be, and that a marriage to Heathcliff would be a social disaster for her. Yet there she is: Heathcliff has her soul. It's a pitiable situation, and death seems the only solution.

M
E
: So she's not your favorite.

L
ETTY
: No, Jane Eyre is. She's so straight and clear-visioned and firm. So modest, yet so proudly independent, And so brave. I love the way she stands up to Mr. Rochester's bullying.

A
LFREDA
: I agree about her, but isn't the novel too full of exaggerations? There's something so violent about the Brontës. Would the daughter of a peer really rebuke a servant with “Cease thy chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding!”

M
E
: But I love that! It's so Charlotte Bronte! No one else would have written it.

L
ETTY
: And who's to say it's exaggerated? The Brontës had governesses—they knew the score.

 

In writing about my girls I obviously can choose any technique I prefer, but it is impossible for a teacher of English literature not to be very much aware of the points of view. Can I possibly forget that I am the Hubert Hazelton who wrote that little study (forgotten, alas, by everyone else) “The Styles of the Master”? And did James not condemn the first-person narrator? I may not be writing fiction, yet to some extent all writing is fiction. I can certainly use the art of the novel for part of what I shall write about Cora and Letty, for I think I have some “in” as to what they might say in my absence, but Alfreda is more of a mystery, and I can set down only my speculations.

Anyway, I shall start with Alfreda, for she is the only one of the trio whom I knew before I had her in a class. Her parents summered, as they put it, in Bar Harbor, Maine, where I too used to spend July and August in a rented room at the DeGregoire Hotel. As a bachelor who knew members of the summer colony who had daughters at my school, I received frequent invitations to dinner parties, some of which I found tedious but, as the representative of an academy at least partially dependent on their bounty, I hesitated to decline. I know it was something of a joke among the more liberal visitors to that enchanted island that my “kill off” dinner, given at the end of the season at the Pot and Kettle Club, was the best fun of the summer, as at the last minute I found I could not bear to invite all the bores who had wined and dined me and instead confined myself to the much more amusing folk who hadn't.

Mrs. Belknap, Alfreda's mother, was a very sensible woman, not at all one of the summer bores, though a bit on the dry side, and I went with considerable pleasure to her shingled villa on the Shore Path where I met her then sixteen-year-old daughter. Alfreda was small, dark eyed and dark haired, reserved, and pretty, and dressed with a fashionable neatness that seemed more of her own taste and choosing than that of her rather plain and sober parent. Her conversation was advanced for her age, precise and a bit formal. She was very much the young lady. When I called one afternoon and found her mother out, Alfreda invited me to stay for tea and presided over the table like a practiced hostess. But she was intelligent and, unlike so many of her contemporaries, already had a clear concept of the woman she wanted to be.

“I know it sounds odd,” she replied in answer to my question, “but I think what I'd like would be to find myself in a position in life where I'd be among the people who make the world go round.”

“And would you be giving it a push of your own?”

“In a way. But the great thing would be to be there.”

“You mean, as the wife of some great man?”

“Well, that would help, of course. But what I really mean is that I'd like to be able to shed some degree of influence. And not just on one man, but on more than one, and women, too. There's much talk these days of women's rights, and that's well and good, but I'm still old-fashioned enough to think that the greatest effect that women can have on things is through their effect on men.”

“You mean romantically?”

“Well, that's one way. But not the one I'm thinking of. I was thinking more of women as a necessary supplement to men. As stimulating ideas and projects that men might not realize without them.”

“In what way?”

“Well, one way might be to create an attractive milieu for the exchange of ideas.”

“Like a salon?”

“Something like that. I believe uptown should be just as important as downtown. And a dinner party as productive as a conference room. I want to prepare myself for some such role. That's why I'm so glad to be an eleventh grader this fall. I'll be able to take your English course. Everyone says you have a wider vision of culture than any other teacher.”

“Heavens! Well, you'll be very welcome.”

She proved almost at once to be one of my star pupils, and soon joined Cora and Letty at our weekend gatherings.

When the question arose, after Alfreda's debutante year, as to where she would best find the right matrimonial material, it came as something of a surprise to me, but not to the Bar Harbor summer community, that she did not go farther afield. The Belknaps were hardly an adventurous clan and seemed always to have been satisfied with the company of relatives and neighbors. And Tommy Newbold was a man whom everybody liked. He had messy blond hair, laughing blue eyes, and a strong, short, stocky figure; he joked about everything, sometimes a bit tiresomely but with an infectious good humor that nothing seemed able to quell. And yet he was reputed to be a shrewd and capable lawyer with a bright future in the great Wall Street firm for which he clerked. His family occupied a summer villa next to the Belknaps, and he had been “sweet on” his prim, pretty little neighbor from an early date. She must have seen greater possibilities in him than I did, though I by no means underrated him. But would he make the world go round?

They made, it was true, a somewhat incongruous pair. Where she was so neat and dainty, presiding over the younger gatherings at her parents' house with grace and precision, he was a rather fumbling sort, apt to spill a drink or slump too heavily in a delicate chair or even tell an off-color story to a prudish aunt. Yet he worshipped Alfreda; he seemed indeed almost in awe of her. She was always a little princess in his adoring eyes. She must have imagined that he was the kind of clay she could handle. Had she been a teacher as I was, she might have recognized that there were clays capable of resisting the deftest hands.

They started well enough after a big stylish wedding at St. James's in New York and a honeymoon in Majorca. Tommy soon became a partner in his firm, and Alfreda, in a few years' time, was known about town for her elegant dinner parties in their small but exquisite penthouse on Park Avenue. She certainly did things well. Her food and wine were fine, her decoration tasteful, and she was clever in bringing people out, in making them talk. But there was no concealing from so close and interested an observer as myself that our hostess was not as satisfied with her achievement as her guests. The reason came out one evening when she had selected me to chat with after dinner. I had just congratulated her on the congeniality of the group she had assembled.

“There are too many lawyers,” she complained. “Tommy always has his list of musts. And when they're not lawyers, they're clients. In Tommy's world people dine out only to eat, drink, and talk shop. They have no interest in the exchange of ideas. Or of a social gathering as the soil in which the finest things can grow. I suppose they're all as American as apple pie. But I sometimes wonder how long I can stand it, Hubert.”

“You're not really serious, Alfreda?”

“I've never been more so!”

“Then you've been dreaming, I suppose, of some kind of brilliant salon. Perhaps like Cora's mother's?”

“Well, something of that sort. It was part of my old credo that a woman's role is to make something of a man. Have I just been a fool?”

“No. But you may have been born at the wrong time. And in the wrong place. Women are thinking today that their role is to make something of women.”

“Which to me is the same thing. But Tommy is perfectly content to remain exactly what he is. He doesn't want to change a thing about himself except to become a better and better lawyer.”

“Which he will be,” I replied in stout defense of her worthy spouse. “You may find yourself the wife of a famous judge one day, my dear.”

“And what will I be? An old, dull woman, the recipient of a million legal anecdotes. What can I make of a man who's already made himself?”

I was only left to hope that if Alfreda didn't have a husband who could be fashioned into the man of her dreams, she might have a son or sons whom she could work on, but as time went by and no offspring appeared, I began to wonder if they ever would.
Les petits dues se font un peu attendre,
as my beloved Dumas
fils
wrote of the barren marriage of the due and duchesse de Septmonts in a late play.

I have followed Alfreda's life up to marriage, and I shall do the same with Cora King and Letty Bernard before enlarging upon the bitter crises that awaited all three in the early years of wedlock. Because I have always emphasized the great things that women can do without the assistance or even the presence of men, I do not wish to be taken as downgrading my own sex or exaggerating the problems of finding a worthy husband. All of my girls might easily have made happier matches. The only thing wrong with Tommy Newbold was that he wasn't the right man for Alfreda. Luck plays a major role in matrimony.

Cora King was something of a lost soul when she graduated from Miss Dickerman's Classes. She should, of course, have gone to college, but she stubbornly refused to take the exams. I suspect this was because she feared failing all but English lit and dreaded the humiliation. It was certainly true that her grades in history and mathematics were dismal—only in my course did she excel. Like Alfreda and Letty she was an avid reader of fiction and poetry. She had even struck me at moments as being almost frantic to escape from a world in which she felt somehow inadequate to the world of her imagination.

When I urged her to at least take a course at Columbia, she demurred, telling me that she wanted all her time for the composition of a novel. And indeed she wrote one, the dreary tale of a jaded debutante who has a tumultuous affair with a gangster, modeled no doubt on her adored Heathcliff. Of course she gave it to me to read, and of course I had to tell her, as gently as I could, that it wouldn't do.