The Young Apollo and Other Stories (17 page)

Evalina one day decided to plumb her father on a subject he seemed never to discuss.

"We
are
still American citizens, are we not, Papa?"

"Oh, yes, my darling, always."

"Then why don't we ever think of living there?"

"Because your mother, sweetheart, would hate it."

"Couldn't she learn to like it?"

"I don't really think so. Let's put it that the climate over there doesn't agree with her."

"But it's a huge country, Papa. Couldn't we find a state with air that would suit her? What about the West? Isn't the atmosphere there dry and clear? I've read about it in geography class."

"Oh, yes, I've had that in mind," her father replied, talking suddenly as if to himself. "I even thought of moving to New Mexico or Arizona. A magnificent ranch near Phoenix was once offered to me for almost nothing."

"Could you still get it?"

"Oh no. But of course there are others."

"Oh, Papa! Do let's go!"

Evalina was never in her life to forget the look her father now gave her. The eyes that met hers in that long loving stare were not those of a man to a little girl but those of one understanding adult to another. When he answered her at last, it was in a somewhat choked tone.

"Well, darling, we might. We just might."

"Oh, Papa, how wonderful!"

But nothing was to come of it. Their little chat was in the spring of 1914, and summer brought Armageddon. Schuyler, who had had some early military training at home in the National Guard, felt impelled to apply successfully for a commission in the French army and fight for the country in which he had lived for a decade and a half and whose benefits he had taken. He was soon sent to the front and was killed in the first battle of Champagne.

Perhaps it was a relief to him.

Eliane had been so keyed up by the excitement of the war, so almost hysterically patriotic, that she tended to regard her husband's death as a sacrifice on her own part that crowned her with a halo of glory. She converted a life of pleasure into one of rather frenzied service and volunteered for hospital work of the utmost drudgery, drawing on a rich supply of energy long hidden from herself as well as the world. Her poor little grieving daughter seemed irrelevant to a Paris in arms, and she decided to send the girl to the safety of her paternal grandmother in New York.

Evalina was glad enough to go. Crossing to England with her governess, she sailed on what was to be the next-to-last voyage of the ill-fated
Lusitania.
Sitting in a deck chair beside the apprehensive Mademoiselle, huddled in a blanket and gazing at the bleak, gray, restless ocean, she contemplated without fear the possibility of drowning in a submarine attack. Might it not unite her with her beloved father? But something like hope revived in her at the vision, bursting unexpected from under suddenly lifting clouds, of the towers of New York. It was an inspiring sight; it had been
his
birthplace and early home. And in another couple of hours she was being hugged and comforted in the warm embrace of her tear-stained lovely old grandmother. Evalina knew at once how tightly her grief was shared.

She was to stay with her grandmother for the remaining three years of the war. The time passed quietly and uneventfully in the old lady's serenely ordered brownstone existence. Fanny Lane was the breed of gentle and kindly dowager who mitigated the reputation of hauteur that social newcomers were apt to attribute to "Old New York." She made the rounds of the tenements owned by the Lane trustees and insisted on improvements, even at the expense of income, and she taught classes in poetry to stenographers attending night school. Yet she shared the discipline of many ladies of her class: her rooms were spotlessly neat, her maidservants silently efficient and trimly clad, her Rolls-Royce town car a brightly shining maroon. However humble her heart, her appearances were impeccable.

Evalina was enrolled in Miss Chapin's School for Girls, where she soon equaled her Paris record for high marks. She got on well enough with her classmates, though they were inclined to find her too serious and too averse to giggly confidences about boys and sex. She made one true friend, Ella Pratt, the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor, who hoped to become a poetess. Evalina remained a nominal Catholic, but she suspected that her father had been at heart an agnostic, and she supposed that she would be one as well. Her grandmother suspected this but said nothing about it, hoping that such a state of doubt might be the prelude to a return to the Protestant faith.

Mrs. Lane lived alone, her two married daughters having moved to their husbands' cities, and she and Evalina passed most of their evenings together in the big, dark, cool, leathery library, she at her needlepoint and the girl at her homework. Before retiring they would have a half-hour's chat. Evalina learned from her grandmother all the details of the family fortune.

"Ordinarily it would be the duty of your parents to explain these things, my darling child. But unhappily, you have no father to do it, and your mother is across the sea and besides, her lovely head was not made for business. So it is up to your poor old gran to prepare you for your future. As you know, neither of your aunts has been blessed with babes, and one day all the Lane trusts, for me and for both of them, will break and pour their contents into your little lap. That, in addition to what your father has already left you, will make you a remarkably rich young lady. Money, of course, can bring pleasure, but it can also bring problems. It will sometimes be difficult for you to distinguish between people who are genuinely your friends and those who merely want to stick their hands in your pocket. Unfortunately, the latter are often gifted with a deceiving charm. But it won't do to be always suspecting people. The great remedy is to distract yourself with the duty of disposing of the money for the ultimate benefit of your fellow men. You will find it no easy task. And you must not forget to benefit yourself as well as others. You must always look well and live well. I want you to be worthy of the Lane inheritance. That is what your father would have wanted. And I haven't a doubt but that you will be! Hug me, my child!"

Evalina threw her arms around the old lady's shoulders. "I shall do my best to be like you, Gran!" she exclaimed with an earnestness that she fully felt.

Nineteen-eighteen brought the armistice to Europe and graduation from school to Evalina. She was eighteen and ready now to return to her mother, whom she had not seen in three years and whose letters, brief and gushing, had given little information about life in Paris and shown little curiosity about life in New York. The New World, of course, had never really existed for Eliane. Evalina discussed her future with her friend Ella Pratt.

"Will you live in France now?" Ella wanted to know.

"Not permanently. My place is here. The family fortune was made here and will be spent here."

"Spent? Whoopee!"

Evalina frowned. "I mean used. Used for the betterment of all concerned. Gran has taught me that it's a kind of sacred trust."

"My father would certainly approve of that. But you make it sound so serious, Lina. Won't you kick up your heels a bit?"

"My father didn't kick up his heels, Ella."

"Didn't he ever? Just a little? How can you be so sure?"

"If he did, he made up for it at the end. He died a hero."

"Oh, Lina, you can't live on that!"

"Can't I?"

Before she sailed for France, Evalina received a grave warning from her grandmother about a matter she had not wanted to bring up before it should be absolutely necessary.

"My dear child, this is a painful subject, so sit down here beside me and just listen. You are going to be away from me, and anyway I haven't that much longer to live, so I must speak now, while I can. It's about your mother. Your mother, child, is an ill woman. Not so much physically, as she constantly supposes, as mentally. She cannot help her dark moods any more than she can moderate her high ones. That is in the nature of the disease. But God or Nature does not wholly neglect people stricken as she is. He endows them sometimes with the instinct to recognize and attach themselves to the particular humans who are adapted to support them. They are like certain natural parasites: vines that know what tree to entwine, small fish that ride on the backs of larger ones. Your mother found your father, who devoted his life to her. Don't let her do that to you!"

"But Gran," Evalina protested in distress, "if I can help her wouldn't Papa have wanted me to?"

"Up to a point, yes. I'm not saying you shouldn't love your mother. But you can help someone without becoming their slave. Your father was always worried about that happening to you. Don't doubt me. I
know!
You'll always have the means to keep yourself independent of anybody. Well, use them!"

Evalina arrived in France determined to have good relations with her mother. Eliane was still her legal guardian; Evalina would have to await her twenty-first birthday before she came into full possession of her property. She had learned a good bit about the family finances from her grandmother and been told to rely on the advice of Thaddeus Warwick, the reputedly brilliant young man at the Morgan Bank who was in charge of the Lane interests in France. She had also been warned that her mother had been making deep inroads into that part of the family capital that her father had unwisely bequeathed to her outright. But even if all of this portion of the fortune should be dissipated, a far vaster share was safely in the hands of trustees holding it for Evalina's sole benefit. She had been told that she had only to bide her time till the day when she should be utterly free.

She had little affection for this mother across the sea, and she blamed her for the waste of her father's life. Had he come home to America, he might have had a fine political career. Nor would he have been killed in the war, as by the time the United States entered the conflict he would have been above military age. But she was also aware that her father had deeply loved his difficult spouse and would certainly have expected his daughter to do her duty by her. Which indeed she would, though not without thorough and discreet observation of this Gallic parent.

She found a mother still beautiful and stylish, if faintly raddled, so to speak, about the edges, living superbly in the glorious old
hôtel
in the Rue de Grenelle and waited on by smartly uniformed footmen and maids. Eliane was one who had flung to the winds all the cares and worries of four years of carnage and resumed with a kind of ecstasy of relief the old life of pleasure, greeting the nineteen twenties as a golden age. She appeared to regard her commendable war work as the fulfillment of every duty she owed to her deity and a license to make up now for every hardship endured.

She greeted Evalina with more enthusiasm than the latter had expected, evidently regarding it as a high amusement to have an heiress daughter to launch in what was left of the best society.

"You are going to simply adore your new life here,
ma chère.
You will go with me everywhere and meet all my friends. They will adore you. But first we must get you a new wardrobe. I can see that your grandmother has had a hand in your outfitting. Oh, you needn't tell me. I have eyes! You will find yourself, as they say, in the desirable position of being naked with a checkbook. And you'll see what money well spent can accomplish. You don't have to be Helen of Troy, my sweet, for something to be made of you. You've really got quite a decent figure and complexion, and your eyes are fine—your best asset. And we'll get that Lane reserve out of your expression. We'll endow you with some of my family's
joie de vivre!
"

Evalina accepted this outpouring, as she did the many others that were to follow, with silent acquiescence. She submitted herself to the visits to dressmakers and milliners, conceding that the maternal taste in such matters was peerless and that Eliane would never buy anything that would clash with what she was keen enough to recognize as her daughter's unalterably subdued personality. A good workman, she accepted her basic material. But Evalina had more trouble with her mother when it came to her firm intent to take courses at the Sorbonne, which meant curtailing the social schedule to make time for reading and preparation. Her adroit argument, however, that her lessons in French literature would help her with some of the writers who attended her mother's salon brought the latter ultimately around.

"When I talk to your friend Monsieur Paul Bourget, Maman, it should help if I've read
Le Disciple.
"

"There's something in that, I admit," her mother, who had not herself read the novel in question, conceded. "Society is becoming more and more mixed. Before the war, if you wanted intellectual chatter, you could go to Madame de Caillevet's and talk to Anatole France. Today you might meet him at the Noailles. But don't get the idea that the old values are gone. They lurk. Our faubourg used to be an ace of trumps. It isn't that anymore, but it's still a trump. You have to learn to play every card in your hand. I once asked Laure de Saxe which of the many handles to her name she was apt to use. 'It depends on the group I find myself in,' was her reply. And while I'm on the subject I should warn you that a
mésalliance
can still be just that. No matter how democratic we've become or how wide the doors are open. Your
dot,
my dear, is going to attract a lot of young men, some of whom, even the most charming, will be quite impossible matches. You must learn to discriminate."

Evalina wondered if her mother included Thaddeus Warwick, of the Morgan Bank, among the impossible matches. Certainly he was the most charming of all the men who came to her salon, and he reputedly had a brain on a par with his dark, dashing good looks. And he came to the house, moreover, less for her mother than for her whom he was supposed to educate in the financial responsibilities that would one day be hers. But he did his job with lightness and charm.

"I see you as a latter-day Isabel Archer," he told her one evening as they sat in a corner of her mother's crowded parlor, under the great green tapestry that depicted Louis XV at a hunt.