The Young Apollo and Other Stories (14 page)

"So he wasn't so bad, after all, the great hunter and fisherman?" Eppes saw that the moment had come when he could be facetious.

"Well, he was pretty bad for a while. How could he not have been after my confession? When I went to him the following morning and told him that I would never see his cousin again, he assumed I was up to some kind of trick. But in the days that ensued, I took him the desperate letters that my frustrated lover sent me, and he had to concede that I was serious. We took up our old life together, but it was a cold and formal one. Harold spoke to me only when he had to, about some detail of our daily schedule, and then as briefly and curdy as possible. I ignored this completely. I was wild with relief and passionately resolute to win him back. It was a task that took every minute of my days and nights and obliterated my love for his cousin—it became an obsession, but a happy one. I had to win! I knew I would win! I never missed one of his mean old mother's 'days' or protested at going to his sister's boring evenings. I insisted on going to his Canadian camp with him, even though I had to spend long days in our cabin alone, reading novels while he shot moose or wolves with his pals."

"But he came around at last?"

"After six months, yes. What a time! One day, when his old cat of a mother snapped at me with some only half-veiled crack about flirts in the family, he suddenly turned on the old girl and shouted, 'If you're referring to my wife, you should have your mouth wiped out with soap!' Never had anyone heard him use such violent language before, and to
her,
of all people! Our real marriage began that very night."

"You must have always loved him. Deep down."

"That's romantic twaddle, Mr. Eppes. I hadn't at all. I simply saw where my true happiness lay and grabbed it—literally only hours before I should have lost it forever. I have been a very lucky woman, that is all."

But that was not what Eppes finally put in his famous canvas. He couldn't bear it. It would never have redounded to his fame. It made mock of every great love drama of his time. The interior behind the figure of Mrs. Ames glimmered with gold and scarlet, but it hemmed her in. She was beautiful; she was loved—one saw that—but she was also confined. In her radiant eyes, in the near ecstasy of her expression one might have made out her vision of the life she had missed, the passion that could have enveloped her. It was not the portrait of an unhappy woman; it was the representation of a dreamer.

It was thus that the critic Shea interpreted it when Eppes first permitted the picture to be seen. The artist could not resist the temptation to temper his friend's admiration with the true story of the sitter. But Shea had the last word.

"So that's it, is it? Well then, Mrs. Ames is not unlike one of those Renaissance madonnas. The model need not resemble the conception. A saintly virgin of Raphael may have a streetwalker for her model. Is that the trick of great art? To make us worship a lie?"

a
MOS
H
ERRICK HAD NOT
thought as a boy, or even as a Harvard undergraduate, that he would ever become a lawyer. He had once eminently respected the distinguished old Wall Street firm that took care of his family's much dwindled but still good income-producing Manhattan real estate, but he had tended to regard legal counsel as he did doctors and business managers: as necessary supporters of the managerial class, which in a well-regulated republic should watch over and guide the multitude. What a young heir of such a class should do with his life ought to be something more important. Just what that was in his own case he had still not decided on his graduation at Cambridge. But he was able to take his time and, in the meanwhile, to look around. How he came in the end to choose law will be the subject of what follows.

At twenty-two Amos was a highly reserved and very sober young man, with a personality that some found serene and others merely impassive. Nobody denied his evident intelligence or the tenacity of his memory; he had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key in college and was deemed by his family and friends to be a near genius in the higher mathematics, which had been his undergraduate major. There might, however, have been more of a question as to the scope of his imagination or even the very existence of his sense of humor. In person he was slight and trim, very straight in posture, with slick dark hair parted in the middle over a round pale countenance and calmly gazing, faintly quizzical gray eyes. It may be hardly necessary to add that he was always impeccably clad, in black or somber gray, and that his only concession to brighter colors was in his silk Laotian ties. He lived harmoniously with his parents and two sisters in a large brownstone in the Murray Hill district and in a rather formidable stone pile by the sea in Bar Harbor, Maine. He saw no need, despite his ample means, to seek bachelor diggings. The Herricks were a closely united clan.

They were also old Knickerbocker New Yorkers. They had been Tories in the Revolution until the surrender of Cornwallis and Confederate sympathizers in the Civil War until General Grant had turned the tide in favor of the North, but ever since they had been staunchly patriotic and prided themselves on their public spirit. Herrick men had always sat on the boards of worthy civic institutions—Trinity Church, Columbia College, the public library—and their wives, selected without exception from their husbands' social milieu, were admirable examples of feminine decorum. Unlike many in their group, they never succumbed to the temptation of supplementing their diminishing funds by alliances with the new money that threatened to inundate their island. Had any of them aspired to draw a Thomas Nast cartoon of Christ cleansing the temple of money changers, he would have shown the lash falling on the backs of Vanderbilt and Gould.

Amos, as far back as his schoolboy days at Groton, in the early nineteen thirties, had taken in not only what his family was but what it was in relation to the rest of the world. He totally sympathized with their ideals and their feeling of responsibility to a community in which they still regarded themselves as leaders. He shared their belief that the nation should be governed by what John Adams had called "the rich, the wise and the good" and that by "rich" was meant the old rich. But Amos differed from the other Herricks in one important respect: he saw that their influence, social, moral, and political, had largely passed, and that whether it could be brought back or even preserved in its diminished state was gravely in question. What, however, he never questioned was that it would be his duty in life, no matter what the odds, to fight for it. Even in an ultimate defeat he would be like a Stuart devotee in Scotland and continue to raise his glass regretfully to the king across the water.

More intelligent, however, than conservatives who indulged in angry and idle vituperation, Amos saw that opposition to a superior foe required an icy calm and careful research. He had to be ready to rebut socialistic argument with cutting, deadly, and accurate replies, and always to maintain the appearance of goodwill with a bland gaze and even a faintly sarcastic small smile. Emotion was not to be shown, and appeals to emotion, in all fields, were to be regarded with suspicion.

Much of this attitude was hardened at Harvard, but it had been born as early as Groton. At the age of fifteen, when he was attending an Episcopalian confirmation class, a young priest who was assisting the headmaster, and who was passionately and enthusiastically devout, had taken a particular interest in this seriously attentive but never questioning boy who sat so quietly through every session without joining in any of the discussions of the creed or its implications. Perhaps sensing in Amos a future cleric—or even a future atheist, for who could tell with a thoughtful adolescent?—he took him aside for a private chat.

"You seem to have no questions, Amos. That's all right, of course, if you're satisfied with the creed. Is that it? Because if you're not, I'm here to help you. And you don't
have
to be confirmed, you know. Maybe you'd like to put it off for a year. And have a chance to think it over."

"No, sir. I'm ready now."

"You have no trouble with any parts of the creed?"

"No, sir. Do you imply that I should?"

"Oh, not at all. Though it's perfectly natural to wonder about some of its assertions. The descent into hell, for example. That bothers many people."

"It doesn't bother me, sir."

The minister seemed faintly shocked. "One way to mitigate the horror of the idea is to believe, as some do, that if there's a hell, there still may be nobody in it."

"It seems to me, sir, that if there's a hell, there must be people in it. What else would it be for?"

"The unimaginable sinner, I suppose. I confess that the idea of hell troubles me. Could one ever be really happy in heaven,
knowing
there were people in hell?"

"Perhaps one wouldn't think about it."

"Heaven would be oblivion?"

The boy faintly smiled. "Perhaps that's all one would need."

The minister soon saw that he was going to get nowhere with Amos, and he sorrowfully abandoned the quest. He could not penetrate a mind where two opposite points of view could exist tranquilly side by side. Amos was perfectly ready to accept the Nicene Creed as true for everyone but himself. And he was already learning that if one could keep one's thoughts strictly to oneself, one had taken a long step toward impregnability.

This meant, of course, that he had no truly intimate friends, persons, that is, with whom he wished to share his motivating ideas. Even his devotion to his parents did not induce him to do this. His mother was a small, gentle, graying lady, always perfectly neat and simple, who was happy to believe the best of everyone, especially of her "darling boy," as she always called him. Amos felt little need of words to supplement the deep sympathy that existed between them; he was satisfied to recognize that she lacked, and was quite content to lack, the clarity of vision that would enable her to comprehend him more fully.

His father, though equally loved, was a very different affair. His stout, rather formidable looks and the heavy gold objects attached to his watch chain seemed to deny the devotion and benevolence that he manifested to his wife and offspring and especially to his only son and heir. Disobedience to the rigid rules that he laid down for the government of his household might well have brought violence out of hidden places in his heart, but this he never encountered, as his family subscribed in all sincerity to his conservative moral and philosophical creed.

And to his political one. Mr. Herrick, like all his relatives and the bulk of his acquaintances, regarded the advent of the New Deal as an ancient Roman might have regarded the onslaught of Attila. "A traitor to his class" was the mildest of the terms that greeted any mention of President Roosevelt's name in the halls of his clubs. When the Supreme Court took to overturning what he denounced as "Bolshevik legislation," he wrote his friend Justice Van Devanter, "You are guarding the pass at Thermopylae with all the heroism of Leonidas." Amos, of course, was in entire agreement.

But the storm that now burst on the Herricks might have been the revenge of an outraged liberal god. In the fall of 1936 Mr. Herrick died of an apoplectic stroke, and Amos, as his executor, found himself in a desperate struggle to mitigate the impact of what threatened to be almost confiscatory estate taxes. The distinguished old firm that had for so many decades represented the Herricks proved to have been woefully deficient in preparing for what to them had evidently been the new and unfamiliar thrust of federal levies. Trusts that had been deemed immune from inheritance duties were found to contain powers that swept them into Mr. Herrick's taxable estate; gifts to Amos and his sisters were held to have been made in contemplation of death, and the final assessment of what was due Uncle Sam had to be raised by the sale of securities at an all-time market low. In the end, the widow and her offspring might still have been considered by some to be well-to-do, but the bloom was certainly off their rose. The house in Maine, with its gardens, pier, and small steam yacht, had to be sold, the staff in the townhouse slashed to a mere three, the charities drastically reduced, and the list of poor relatives to be helped stricken to almost nothing.

Amos, at least, now knew just what he had to do with his life. His career problem was solved. He would enroll in Columbia Law School and prepare himself for a lifelong battle with the commissioner of Internal Revenue, representing the unfortunate who were threatened with the same fate that his family had suffered. His determination was grim, but it armed him with a certain inner exhilaration. He now had a cause.

He was a few years older than the average student in his class, and he had never taken an interest in law before, but his aptitude with figures stood him well in tax courses and his high marks there brought his final average up to a respectable middle-of-the-road status. But taxes were all he cared about. His brother-in-law, Dexter Post, who had married his pretty (as opposed to his other) sister and who was forging ahead as an associate in the great firm of Coverly & Day, advised him that his marks and failure to make the law review would put him out of the running for the big downtown firms (such, indeed, as Dexter's) and that he might do well to seek employment with the old family counsel.

"After the way they manhandled Daddy's estate?" Amos retorted coolly. "Do you realize, Dexter, that they don't even have a tax partner? All that work is handled by a superannuated accountant who thinks Franklin is Teddy Roosevelt's son! And taxation is the only field in which I propose to practice."

His brother-in-law proceeded patiently to give him a list of smaller firms that had less exacting standards for their proposed associates to meet. Amos listened to him without interruptions, for it was not Amos's habit to interrupt. Besides, he highly esteemed his brother-in-law. The Posts were no "better" than the Herricks in Knickerbocker society but they were just as good, and the brilliant Dexter, handsomely hefty and well tailored, was considered the star of his family. He and Cora had extended their social sphere considerably beyond the limited pales of the Herrick-Post world, and their names were associated with those of "yesterday millionaires" as patrons of charity balls.