Skinny Island (17 page)

"But mightn't I lose all discrimination this way?" she asked him after they had attended a show of nineteenth-century sculptors of the Roman school. "Do I want to reach the point where I equate that nude Christian slave girl with the Venus de Milo?"

"Must we always be comparing things? There's only one great dividing line that we must never forget: between art that is serious and art that is not. But forgive me. There can be no such thing as art that is not serious. Between art and ... well, what is not art."

"You judge, then, solely by the intention of the artist?"

"Not at all. I simply respect his intention. If it be serious."

She began to find it exhilarating to live in a world where no doors were banged shut. And she began as well to develop a pleasant and warming confidence that she was more to him than a promising pupil. She was coming to understand that he was a person incapable of subterfuge. The frank and open friendship that he offered meant as much to him as to her.

"I felt from the beginning that we might be friends," he told her. "I had a funny sense that your barriers were like those Indian bead curtains, easily thrust aside. And perhaps only put there to be thrust aside. You and I have both lived in worlds where communication is not much trusted. Yours has been one of reticences where clichés take the place of confidences. Mine has been one of garrulousness where too much candor creates the same blockage."

"Oh, it's true, Manny! I feel so easy with you."

"That's because we're learning to love each other. Oh, if you could see your eyes right now! My dear, you're horrified. But of course, I'm using that dirty old word in its Christian sense. Is that better? Can you relax now?"

"Isn't it funny?" she responded with a nervous titter. "Even in its Christian sense it still seems dirty to me. Or at least in poor taste, which is worse."

"Ah, but the fact you can say that shows how far you've come!"

"But how far am I going?"

"You see? You're still apprehensive. Love, you suspect, may land you in some very odd places. But don't worry, my dear. It commits you to nothing. You don't have to go anywhere. You're already there!"

"Where?"

"Having a little fun with poor old Manny. Is that so wicked?"

"I wonder if it isn't."

She was very nervous when he came out for his first weekend at Bedford. Leslie and Polly both had houses on the estate and would expect to be asked for a meal to meet any house guest of their mother's. And then there was Alice Nicholas, who had still not met him. Frances was not at all sure that it was wise to mix her new life with her old, but she had to do something about it. Leslie had already questioned her rather archly about Manny, and Alice's total silence had perhaps been more ominous.

He came out from the city by train on Saturday morning and was very enthusiastic about everything. Frances tried to imagine Crossways as it must strike him. It was a large, square, white old frame house, built more than a hundred years ago, to which had been added a modern wing with a living room, greenhouse and a pavilion over a swimming pool. It was a blend of the genteel old Westchester County with the prosperous new one; it was comfortable and homey and occasionally unexpected. It had oddly small rooms between the big ones and narrow corridors that led one to a proliferation of small stairways and different landings. It was decorated with good, but not the best, early American, and with Stuart's rather cautious collection of prints and watercolors: Audubon's birds and animals, English hunting scenes, Georgian political cartoons, and, here and there, a fine oil. Frances noted that Manny at once picked out the Martin Heade with the hummingbird and orchid. It was a man's house, she thought, a bit ruefully. One felt the touch of the late Stuart Hamill, the large-minded lawyer who was not going to allow any corner of his life to lack some grace.

"How do you run it all?" Manny wanted to know. "Can you get help out here?"

"I have a couple. And a part-time gardener."

"A couple!" he exclaimed with a laugh. "That's the height of sybaritism today."

Leslie had invited herself to lunch. It was warm enough to sit outside and the three had drinks on the terrace. Leslie was at her worst: bright-eyed, fidgety, insinuating, determined to be daring.

"Mummy tells me that you and she have been living the life of Riley, Mr. Mabon! I must say, I'm very envious."

Frances could feel that Manny was never going to like Leslie. She saw her daughter now through his eyes. Leslie too evidently considered herself the one sound member of a giddy clan. Her auburn hair had been rigidly set, probably just for this lunch; her puffy lips were ruby red. She had a way of tilting her head back as she talked, so that her gray-green, rather staring eyes could take in her interlocutor as someone to smile at, perhaps to condescend to. There was an air of self-obsession in her frozen combination of grin and grimace. It was as if she were constantly thinking: how do I look, how do I sound?

"I should have thought the term 'Riley' a bit florid to describe a respectable widow's existence," Manny retorted mildly.

"Oh, I think there's a great deal to be said for a widow's life these days. Ma can travel and go to the theatre and tour the art galleries. In fact, she can do anything she jolly well wants to do. Unlike me, she doesn't have three great gangling girls at home, and a hungry husband to feed at night."

Frances reflected how little this description seemed to fit Leslie's ordered life in the small, perfect French house built on the best corner of the family property.

"But I don't suppose you'd change with her," Manny observed.

"I wouldn't change, no, Mr. Mabon," Leslie replied in a faintly reproving tone. "I adore my family, of course. All things in due time. What I mean is that it's good to be a wife and good to be a mother and—who knows?—it may be good to be a widow."

"That doesn't seem to be generally felt."

"It's certainly not generally
said.
But I had the distinct feeling, when my husband's father died, that my mother-in-law, deep down—oh, ever so far down, quite unconsciously, of course—may have had the tiniest feeling that she was now free to catch up with her friends on their garden tours and world cruises. They had been romping, so to speak, while she'd been tied to an invalid's wheelchair!"

"Your father was never an invalid, Leslie," Frances pointed out.

"Oh, Mummy darling, don't take things so personally. I wasn't suggesting that you're like my mother-in-law." She turned back to Manny. "But, still, the worst of it is over now, and Mummy's hardly an old woman. She can see whom she likes. She can go out with attractive men like you. Nobody could have a more trusting husband than my Felix, but I assure you that I would have quite a scene on my hands if I went gadding about the town like Ma!"

"'Gadding,'" Manny mused. "It seems to me that the term rather deprecates your mother's activities."

"Oh, come now, Mr. Mabon. You do take one up on things. I simply meant that Mummy can now live for pleasure."

"It intrigues me how often wives seem to equate pleasure with the unmarried state."

"Evidently
you
do, Mr. Mabon."

"You mean because I've kept the best years of my life for myself?"

"Precisely."

Manny had a somewhat easier time with Polly, who came for tea in the afternoon, but even this was tense. If Polly believed, as Frances surmised (in what Polly would surely have deemed her mother's old-fashioned way) that women ought to have men's jobs, would Polly not also hold that at least some men should have women's, and did Manny justify his existence even as a children's nurse or housekeeper?

"I was hoping, Mr. Mabon, that you could get Mummy interested in some kind of work."

"Such as?"

"Well, would it really matter? Something where she'd be using her undoubted talents for a benefit to her fellow mortals."

"Do you think she should become a lawyer, like her brilliant daughter?"

Polly looked startled, though whether at his familiarity or at the oddness of his suggestion, Frances could not be sure. "But Mummy hasn't even a college degree. I'm afraid that particular form of social utility is out of the question."

"Has it ever occurred to you, my dear Polly, that your mother may be at least as useful to the profession of law as yourself?"

"No. How?"

"By being a client. Isn't she a client of yours?"

"Indeed she is. But how does that make her useful to the law?"

"By being useful to the lawyers. And isn't it true that the more mixed up a client's affairs are, the more the lawyer has to do? So that your mother can help you simply by creating problems for you to solve? The client and attorney—aren't they one and the same? Of equal merit?"

"But that's ridiculous! You might as well say that a great dentist is no more to be esteemed than his patient's sore tooth!"

"And so I do."

Polly was frankly exasperated. "Is there anyone you
do
admire, Mr. Mabon?"

"Certainly. The man or woman who creates beautiful things."

"And what of the people who admire those beautiful things?" Polly demanded with a note of triumph. "Aren't they as necessary to the artist as the sore tooth to the dentist? Shouldn't they be rated as highly?"

"But I'd never dream of denying it!"

Frances took Manny to church on Sunday morning. St. John's Chapel seemed the very definition of the term "Wasp." It was a clean, crisp, light, vaguely Palladian structure of yellow brick with big oblong windows showing, instead of biblical scenes in stained glass, the glory of the Westchester autumn woods. The congregation, in white pews enclosed by little doors, seemed of a spotless gray and white, in hair, in skin, in clothing; they raised mild voices to sing familiar hymns, holding hymnals at which they glanced only for the fourth or fifth stanza.

If there was something a bit dry in the air, a hint of the faded, of bygone fashion, of the survival of form and the evanescence of matter, Frances liked to believe that she could also make out something sweet, something fine and rare, as some old pressed leaf discovered in a gilded tome might suggest the deep, rich green of a primeval forest without the darkness, the danger, the lurking bandits, the sudden death. She liked to imagine that she was breathing the sanctified air of what was finest in a dead tradition: the simplicity, the probity, the reverence of Puritan forebears. Or was it just a congregation of ghosts?

She saw Alice Nicholas in the front of the church turn her head, but only for a second. Alice smiled and nodded at her, but no doubt her purpose had been to observe Manny. What would she make of him? What would any of them? Would a sociologist today find her friendship with Manny the symptom of a sterility that marked the last stages of a Wasp ruling class?

She liked the way Manny sang "There's a wideness in God's mercy," which preceded the sermon. He did not sing too heartily loud or too self-deprecatingly low; he did it as naturally as he talked and turned to her with a sly little smile of affected self-congratulation to point up the smugness of the lines:

"
There'll be welcome for the sinner,
And more graces for the good.
"

The sermon was about death, how we must not refuse to think about it and talk about it. Manny seemed to take it all in, his eyes politely and sympathetically fixed on the minister as if the discourse were addressed exclusively to him. Frances was afraid of death; the prospects of extinction or eternity were equally appalling to her. She would try to tell herself that if there were an afterlife, there might be no time, but this was inconceivable. She shuddered now and tried to think of the words of a prayer. Then she turned to read the memorial plaque beside the pew. Then she murmured to herself: "O God, O God, O God." She looked out the window at the sunlight on the grass and felt a bit better. It
was
a beautiful church, after all, and there
were
good and kind people in it. Even if life in half the world was vile and miserable, this was still true. It was still part of the rest.

"And then you can't get away from death," the minister was saying. "We all think about it a good deal more than we care to admit—even to ourselves."

It occurred to Frances that her attitude towards religion was the rankest heresy, that she treated the hymns, the liturgy, the sermons, the flowers on the altar and the anthems of the choir, the very church itself, so fresh and varnished and white, so pure, as parts of an anesthetic to keep her free from the panic of the interstellar darkness. It wasn't that the Christian doctrine had to be true; it had simply to get her through. She wanted to live in distraction and die in her sleep.

She made herself think now of Stuart. She always felt guilty when she had not been thinking about him. It was as if, in living without considering him, she was depriving him of a portion of his afterlife. She thought of the great brow, the bushy eyebrows, the piercing eyes lit up with a constant laugh that denied the seeming total seriousness, the slow, soft, emphatic, lawyerlike tone, the constant little throat-clearings, the broad, round, continually shrugging shoulders, the heavy tweeded frame, the big arms and long, thin legs down to the old, well-polished shoes of finest leather. Was he laughing at her? Or frowning? Did he love her still? Or did he just pity her? Hadn't most of his love been an engulfing pity?

"Oh, Stuart, I miss you so!" she whispered.

It was a relief to think that if he were seeing her now, he must be seeing all of her. He would understand Manny; he would see him as a kind of friendly priest. A "priest," yes, that was the word! Was it? Almost at once she seemed to hear Stuart's braying laugh and see him joyously flinging an arm over Manny's shoulder, overwhelming him with benignity, playing with him, a big, genial cat, until the poor staring mouse was torn between gratitude at not being eaten and concern that he had been.

"Leave me Manny, Stuart," she silently prayed. "You had everything else."

After the service she drove Manny to Alice Nicholas's for Sunday lunch. Although she was not at all easy in her mind as to what they would make of each other, she knew what he would think of the house. It was a jewel, a long, low, pink Jacobean structure, partially ivy-covered, surrounded by a rich green lawn with elms and plots of rosebushes planted right by the walls. The interior was surprisingly light; there was more glass than in the usual Jacobean house. In the living room a huge bay window rose two stories, and sunshine was dazzling on the heavy silver on the black mahogany tables and on the crimson covering of the chairs and sofa. Alice had chosen her period because it evoked a man's world, a huntsman's world, yet at the same time it offered the opportunity for an exquisite taste to operate, so to speak, under cover. In this way Alice would not "intrude" upon her husband.