The Friend of Women and Other Stories (5 page)

“You're like Disraeli with Queen Victoria,” Letty told him when they were alone after one of these sessions. “Didn't she say he made the dullest debate in the House of Commons sound like one of his novels?”

“Weren't they both fiction, anyway? But I do it all for your ma, not for you. You grasp every detail, no matter how boring. You don't even seem to find them boring.”

“Do you?”

“Well, it's my job, you know. I don't much think about whether they're boring.”

“What do you hope to get from your job?”

“What does anybody?” He shrugged. “To become rich and famous. Isn't that about it?”

“You think riches bring happiness?”

“Compared to what poverty brings, yes. Haven't your riches made you happy, Letitia?”

It was the first time he had used her first name, and she liked it. It seemed suddenly to raise her to his intelligence level.

“They have not,” she replied firmly. “Maybe you have to have earned them for that to happen.”

“Anyway, you've learned something else. Something much more important. You've learned independence of mind.”

Letty felt vaguely exuberant. “Papa wouldn't be so sure about that. He thinks I should be more realistic about money.”

“That may be why he singled me out to talk to you about it.”

You mean he singled you out for me,
was Letty's unspoken thought. She felt the chill of something like fear.

Not long after this chat, Amory was made the youngest partner in the firm, of which some observers already speculated that he would one day be the leader.

Amory became an accepted and constant visitor at the Bernards, both in the city and in the big Tudor villa in Rye. He was not considered so much a beau of Letty's as a kind of adopted member of the family. Fanny, whom he flattered in a half serious, half joking way, adored him, while Elias continued to find him what he rarely found his business and legal acquaintances: a worthy intellectual companion. To Letty her relationship with this stimulating and sexually attractive young man was confusing. He made her feel that she was the object of his visits without ever a hint of a romantic purpose. Was she just a pal? And did she really want to be anything more?

Of course, she debated with herself as to whether or not she was falling in love. Certainly what she felt for Amory was something a good deal milder than what Cathy Earnshaw had felt for Heathcliff. However, one day when work had held him over at the firm and he failed to appear at a Sunday lunch, she had been sorely disappointed. Sorely.

Her father seemed to have gleaned something of her state of mind, for he brought up the subject quite openly on one of their walks.

“I think I should tell you, my dear, that I have settled any doubts that I may have once had about Amory. I believe now that he
is
capable of becoming a great man.”

“You mean a great man for
me?
”

“Well, yes. That is, if you should want him.”

“What if he doesn't want me?”

“But I think he does.”

“He certainly hasn't shown it, Papa. Not that I've expected him to.”

“I'm aware of that. He doesn't know how you feel about him. And, of course, he's uncomfortable about his position vis-a-vis your money. He doesn't want to look like a fortune hunter.”

“Oh, Papa, there you go again. It's always the money. Have I no identity without it?”

“Listen to me, my dear.” Elias paused now, and then motioned her to a bench on which they both sat, as did the dogs at their feet, always immediately obedient to their master. “We must have this out, you and I. I'm not going to be with you always. I have some reason to say so, but we won't go into that now. No, don't protest. I haven't come here to discuss my health. There's nothing to get upset about yet, so we'll drop it. But one of these days you're going to find yourself in charge of a lot of things—the magazine, the foundation, the ranch, the businesses, and even your mother. And you're going to need a competent and trusted partner. All I'm saying is that Amory could be that. He's honest, he's straight, and he's a kind of jack-of-all-trades. He approaches every problem that confronts him with an absolutely open and fresh mind. You two together could be a power in the land.”

“Oh, Papa, please!” She jumped up, feeling the sudden tears in her eyes, and walked on quickly, followed by her now silent parent. Neither said a word all the way home.

The next week, sitting alone with Letty in the plant-filled conservatory after a large Sunday lunch party, Amory proposed. Coolly, quietly, earnestly. She could only gasp at first. Then she protested.

“But, Eliot, you haven't even told me that you love me!”

“I love you, Letitia, as far as my nature allows me to love. I have never loved anyone better, or as much. And I never shall.”

Even at such a moment, she noted his use of the verb
shall.
It denoted simple futurity, without determination. But what if determination were not necessary for him? Why was she so prone to distrust people?

“Oh, Eliot, I don't know what to say. You'll have to give me time. Maybe a lot of time.”

And she left him to rejoin the now departing guests.

The next day she dined with her old guide, Hazelton, and told me all.

“But the love he offers you isn't enough, my dear girl,” I exclaimed with feeling. “It isn't nearly enough. I don't care what your father says. It isn't enough to base a marriage on!”

“But if it's all he's capable of, how can I ask for more?”

“If it's all he's capable of, he shouldn't marry at all. Or at least he should wait until he finds a girl as cool as himself. I know what I'm talking about, Letty. Believe me. There's a bit of Amory in myself. Except I have always recognized what it should limit a man to. He shouldn't offer to share his life with some deluded woman.”

“And you don't think that Eliot and I between us might accomplish what Papa visualizes? Or something not too unlike it?”

“Make him your partner then. Not your husband.”

Letty was a bit surprised to find how little persuaded she was by her mentor's deeply felt objections to a match between herself and Amory. After all, old dear that I was, had I any real part in the life of the great world? Had I not been content to pass my days in a quiet and protected corner? That might be well enough for me, but for her?

***

I break off my story here. Once I start speculating about what Letty thought of me and my advice, I become uneasy. The work becomes too personal, and I find myself embarrassed. And I find it a sort of impertinence to bust my way into Letty's heart and fantasize as to what she did or didn't feel about the man she married. I should at least keep a certain distance.

I feel safe, anyway, in asserting that if Letty was strongly attracted to Amory's intelligence and personality, if she even felt a need for him as a lover, she was disturbed by his lack of anything resembling sexual passion. Oh, yes, she knew that he liked her well enough, but didn't he like even more the multitude of opportunities that marriage to her would bring? I had once pointed out that there is no intenser ambition than that felt by the young genius who's the heir of a grand old family that has fallen on evil days. The Amorys had lost their fortune in the panic of 1907. His parents had once owned the most splendid sailing yacht on the North Shore. Eliot always kept a large photograph of it on his desk.

I did, though, install sufficient doubt in Letty to induce her to postpone any decision about Amory for a year, and the following December saw our entry in World War II and Amory's departure to the Pacific as a lieutenant, JG, on a destroyer. When he returned to his firm in 1945, with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star, to find a Letty desolate with the recent loss of her father from heart failure and overwhelmed with the obligations of his estate, he had little difficulty in persuading her to join her troubled life to his. I am afraid she was even grateful to the hero for coming back to the girl who had almost rejected him.

I have the three girls all married now, for Cora, of course, went ahead with her plan to become the wife of wealthy Larkin, and I have to admit that my basic distrust of all three unions put a crimp in my relationships with them. Oh, we continued our lunches, if less frequently, but our conversation was more literary than personal. The first marked return to our old ways came with Alfreda's need to consult me about her childlessness.

“We've both had all the tests,” she told me. “And now we know just what it is. It's not my fault.”

“Fault?” I queried. “Must there be one?”

“Biological fault, I mean.” But her very definite tone did not convince me that she exempted poor Tommy of all moral responsibility. “Tommy, it appears, has a low sperm count. We have to face facts squarely, don't we, Hubert?”

“Of course. But a low sperm count doesn't mean his case is hopeless. As I understand it, it means that a pregnancy is unlikely. But not impossible.”

“Hubert, I've waited four years. Isn't that what the lawyers call a reasonable time?”

“For what?”

“For me to wait. Now I must try something else.”

“Like adoption?”

Alfreda made a little face. “I hate the idea of taking some other woman's unwanted baby. You may call me a snob, if you like, but I do have good blood.”

Alfireda did not boast of it, but I knew how much she relished her descent from Pieter Stuyvesant. “Then there's always artificial insemination,” I observed, responding to her appeal for honesty. “Would Tommy agree to that?” She nodded. “Well, at least the child would have blue blood on the distaff side.”

“But what about the father?” she demanded with something like indignation, as though the whole idea had been mine.

“I believe it's usually a medical student.”

“Ugh! And what do we know about
his
family? No, I can't bear the thought! That's what I've really come to talk to you about. You and nobody else, my dear old friend. Why wouldn't it make sense for me to choose the father myself? Why shouldn't we have the perfect father for the perfect child?”

“How many perfect fathers have perfect children?”

“Oh, I know all that. But at least there's a chance they will. What about the two Dumas you're always raving about? What about the two Pitts? And think of all the Adamses!”

“And when you've found this paragon, will you persuade him to donate his seed to the necessary test tube?”

“Never!” she cried. “How could I possibly ask such a man to go through so humiliating a procedure in some ghastly laboratory—probably before some leering intern?”

“It could be quite private.”

“No, no! My boy would have to spring from a glorious mating!”

“Your boy? Why mightn't it be a girl?”

“Because I know it wouldn't!” She spoke with a curious passion.

“And what about Tommy? Would he agree to be a
mari complaisant?
”

“Oh, never! But he wouldn't have to know. I'd simply tell him that I'd gone through the clinical process. He'd accept the proposition that neither of us knew anything about the child's father.”

“I see.” But I was deeply shocked. “And this divine stud? Have you already someone in mind?”

“No,” she said firmly, though her denial was preceded by a distinct pause.

“Then give up the idea. If you deceive Tommy in a matter so grave, there's bound to be a dire consequence. For him, for you, for the man you select, maybe for the child. I can't tell. All I know is that you won't get away with it. That something always happens to people who believe that the effective concealment of a crime will wash away their guilt.”

Alfreda subjected me to a long evaluating stare. “So in your opinion it would be a crime?”

“It would.”

She nodded, and then suddenly smiled. “Then it will be I who goes to the lab and not what you call the stud.”

“Bless you, my child.”

We discussed the subject no further, which is often the best way to handle a delicate problem. Alfreda never referred to it again, but her husband did. Unlike the husbands of Cora and Letty, he had always totally accepted and even encouraged my intimate friendship with his wife and actually chose to share it. “You give her things I can't, Bertie,” he would tell me cheerfully. “All those books and poems you and she talk over. It's great.” And he invited me to lunch at his downtown club to discuss, in Alfreda's absence, an idea he had about the product of her artificial insemination.

“The big question is whether to let it be known that Alfreda has undergone this process. Our family and friends all know that I
could
sire a child. It's just that it's unlikely. So we could take the position that the near miracle has happened, and who would there be to deny it?”

“The imps of comedy,” I answered gravely. “They're always on the lookout for someone trying to get away with something. People are bound to pry when they're suspicious, and with enough prying they're apt to come up with something. Once you've made an open statement about a matter like this, they'll lose all interest in it. Believe me.”

And Tommy did. But when, at a later date, I asked him how Alfreda had fared under the process, for I knew that in some cases it was accompanied by acute discomfort, he assured me that she had had none. But he also told me something disturbing. Alfreda had refused to tell him anything about what she had had to go through, or allow him to be with her on visits to the hospital, saying that the whole thing was a woman's private matter and that a husband had no role but one of possible humiliation. Recalling what Alfreda had suggested to me as a very different solution to her problem, I could hardly resist the ugly suspicion that she might have implemented it.