Skinny Island (5 page)

"Oh, John, don't be a stuffy idiot!" she cried in an explosion of impatience. "What have you known in your easy life of his temptations? What have you known of passion?"

"Passion? You ask me that, Jane?" He looked appalled. "What have
you
known of passion, I'd like to know?"

"Oh, a bit," she said grimly, turning back to the pictures. "I may have learned it late in life, but I've learned it. I've felt it."

"My dear Jane, what can you be talking about? Has some dirty old codger had the gall to—?"

"Oh, no, no, nothing so ludicrous," she retorted with a hard, dry laugh. "Maybe I've learned it from these."

"From the stations of the cross?" He still gaped. "But, my dear sister, the passion of our Lord wasn't
that
kind of passion!"

"Wasn't it? Isn't passion passion?"

But when she looked up to see the stricken expression on his innocent, clear, wrinkled old face, she relented. There was no point smashing anything more than had already been smashed. If their brownstone walls were made of cardboard, at least they were still standing.

"No, John, I'm not crazy. You needn't call a doctor. It's just that I'm ... well, you know what there's no fool like."

And cutting a piece of string from the spool on the table she started tying up the framed pictures in bundles of three.

I
N THE EARLY SPRING
of the first year of this century Griswold Norrie, a handsome, lean, blond young man, whose broad shoulders and tall straight build moved supply to his long stride, passed up Fifth Avenue at midday towards his destination at Sixty-fifth Street, the Patroons Club. He had come from a final fitting for the cutaway that he would wear at his wedding to lone Carruthers in only four weeks' time. The sky was a glorious, cloudless light blue, the air velvet, and his heart sparkled like the pavement under the noon sun.

Griswold had always loved Fifth Avenue and its double row of mansions, turning to one at Fifty-ninth Street, where the green park began its function of supplying a view to the more northerly proprietors. He knew all the houses by the names of their owners and kept a mental list of those in which he dined. But his particular interest lay in putting together the houses constructed by his relatives, assembling in a secret fantasy a real estate package that showed most of the glittering avenue controlled by his kin. Here, for example, was the high-dormered, red brick Louis XIII château of his aunt Eleanor Frost, and two blocks north the Doric marble façade of his aunt Julia Post, and beyond that the bleak Romanesque stone box of his step-grandmother Norrie. And when he added the many great structures of the Carruthers family and the huge brownstone cube of his fiancée's late great-grandfather (unfortunately now a jewelry store), did his fantasy not approach reality? He and lone between them would be connected by blood or marriage to every family that counted in Manhattan society!

Griswold was taking the day off from the Standard Trust Company, where he worked on the family accounts. He did not like to ask for special privileges—he had every intention, despite his personal means, of being a serious banker—but there was no question that his commitments, as a junior trustee of the Patroons Club and treasurer of the Bellevue Racing Association, as a founder of the Bachelors Ball and Secretary of the Harvard Class of '91, had on occasion to take priority over the daily grind. Did not even his bosses say so? And if being seen as an active member of respected institutions had its importance in the career of a junior trust officer, how much more was his marriage into the family of the largest holder of railroad securities in the nation?

Of course, his was a marriage of love. He paused now to gaze appreciatively at the lovely nude lady washing herself high over the basin in Grand Army Plaza. Soon his bride would be displaying her own lovely limbs and body to his enraptured eye. Oh, yes, he had been to Paris; he had seen the world; he did not have to blush at such thoughts. Indeed, lone and he had come close to a frank discussion of future intimacies—for lone regarded herself as a modern woman—or at least as close as he had allowed her. At a certain point he deemed it prudent to pull her up. She had a way of pushing ahead into realms where women should tread with reserve. She was too fond, for example, of reading Veblen and was always pointing out egregious examples of his or her family's "conspicuous consumption." But after one of her flights of fancy, when he would summon her back to reality with a gentle "Where is my giddy angel soaring to?" she would fling her arms about his neck and kiss him warmly on the lips and cry: "Don't worry, sweetheart, I'll always come home to strong sensible
you!
"

Entering the Patroons Club he paused to take in the splendor of its marble hall with the vaulted Adamesque ceiling and the Palladian archway leading to the monumental red-carpeted stairway. As his father put it: "Stanford White is the only architect who can build for gentlemen." But Lewis Norrie, who was as cynical as he was conservative, and as intelligent as he was hard-headed, would then go on to add: "The Patroons is the last men's club that won't even permit an annual ladies' day. But I wonder if you, my boy, at the rate we're going, won't live to see it go down like Custer's Last Stand!"

Griswold thought of this now, for it was not unrelated to the topic he had come to discuss with his father. The latter put down his newspaper as his son approached him in the reading room, and the two of them silently repaired to the dark, glinting, cavernous bar where the senior drank iced gin and the junior, considering the early hour, a glass of fizzy water.

"I want Atalanta to come to my wedding," Griswold began boldly. "I want you to speak to Mrs. Carruthers about it. It's unthinkable that my grandfather's widow should not be present on the occasion."

Mr. Norrie pursed his lips and coughed. He was not taken by surprise; these signals were simply to underscore the acknowledged gravity of the subject. He was a gentleman of sixty who seemed to be made out of highly durable leather. The gray hair looked as hard as a statue's, and the serene eyes seemed not so much cold as all-seeing. Griswold inwardly charged his father with living in a very small world—he prided himself that his own was much less limited—but he recognized that the old boy knew every nook and cranny of that restricted domain.

"I think you might leave that issue to me, Grissy." There was only the faintest reproach in the clear flat tone. "After all, if she is the widow of your grandfather, she is the widow of my father. That, it seems to me, should give me the prior responsibility."

Griswold knew that his father would never refer to the lady as his "stepmother." It was not only that Atalanta was the same age as his father; she had married old Mr. Norrie over the violent opposition of the entire family. Cyrus Norrie, the founder of the fortune, had been over seventy at his second wedding and approaching senility. Atalanta Ferris had been—well, almost everything, a female preacher, a suffragette, a medium, an advocate of companionate marriage and free love. She had become famous in the seventies, shaking her long red locks on platforms, inciting audiences to near riot in this cause or that, a handsome demagogue, a maenad. Old Mr. Norrie had consulted her about investments and had been impressed by her divinations. He had defied his son and daughters in making her his wife and further defied them in leaving her a third of his huge oil-derived fortune. After years of bitter litigation this had been reduced to a fifth, but even this had been considered "highway robbery" by Griswold's aunts.

"But, Father, leaving it to you would mean she'd never be invited. And as you know, I have been seeing her. We have become friends. I feel she has been misjudged by my aunts. And I feel very strongly, as the only son of Grandpa's only son, that I should take a stand in favor of her more decent treatment."

His father nodded, as if to do this proposition justice. Hardly ever in his life had Griswold seen him lose his temper, and then only in minor matters of maintenance where servants had not done as they had been instructed. "I call on Atalanta every New Year's Day," he observed. "All the people at her reception can see me do it. Of course, your mother does not come, and I thought it wiser not to urge her. I also see Atalanta occasionally on matters of family business. There is no acrimony between us, for I do not share the violent feelings of your aunts. I think I understand Atalanta better than they do. But the real point, Grissy, is this. Atalanta is just as willing as I am to leave things as they are. She respects me, I believe, without in the least liking me. I feel the same way about her. Why can't you accept a modus vivendi that she and I have worked out and that is satisfactory to both?"

"Because, sir, if you will forgive me, I cannot believe that it is, at least to her. I believe that Atalanta considers herself deeply wronged by my aunts and by Mother. I believe she has welcomed my visits and my offer of friendship. I consider her a remarkable woman. I want to show before all the world that I take my grandfather's wife by the hand."

"You'll reap the whirlwind, my son," Lewis Norrie muttered with a grunt. "You don't know the power you will be challenging. If you ask Atalanta to your wedding you may have nobody else there. Including your bride!"

"Oh, lone is with me on this!" Griswold exclaimed, "lone feels just as I do."

"Has she talked to her mother?"

"Not yet. That's why we decided to appeal to you. We thought Mrs. Carruthers would be more apt to come around if you spoke to her."

"Oh, so
I
am chosen to walk into the dragon's lair? Thank you very much, but I think I shall leave the pleasure of that particular form of suicide to those who propose it. I am delighted, dear boy, at the prospect of your union with the enchanting and amiable lone, but I do not consider it one of the duties of her prospective father-in-law to take on the formidable Elsa."

"Oh, Father, come, Mrs. Carruthers isn't that bad."

"My dear son, you're simply talking through your hat. I can see that chapeau in front of your mouth just as clearly as if you hadn't checked it in the cloakroom. Elsa Carruthers has been sweet-mouthing you because you're one of the most eligible bachelors in New York. No, don't frown and shrug your shoulders: you
are,
my boy. Have you ever stopped to consider how mothers like Elsa dread the sleazy fortune hunters who inhabit this town? And then along comes Griswold Norrie, clean, intelligent, without vices or degrading attachments, handsome to behold and damn near as rich as her daughter. By God, of course she has to have you! But even so, don't kid yourself. Once she has you, or once you cross her on a real issue, that sweet smile will vanish, and the true Elsa will spring like the armed Athena from the brain of Zeus!"

"And will poor Atalanta really present such an issue?"

"'Poor' Atalanta! How your aunts wish she were that. But certainly, she would present it. The women of your mother's and Elsa's world can never forgive her her past. According to them, she's no better than a prostitute."

"Father! You surely don't believe she was that."

"I don't know what she was, my boy. I admit I find it hard to believe that she ever sold herself. However, it seems indisputable that she had love affairs. After all, she advocated free unions."

"But not after she married Grandpa?"

"So far as I know she has been utterly respectable ever since she married your grandfather."

"Well, why should we care what happened before? If
he
didn't?"

"Of course, we don't know that he knew. He was not the man he had been when he married her. But who are 'we'? The men? What do we count for? The women are down on her, no matter how pure she was after her marriage. And do you know why? Because a woman who gives her body to a man without making a husband of him is considered a traitor to her sex. The only way they can cope with our power is through marriage. And a woman who is unchaste is exposing her sex to the enemy!"

Griswold sighed. He knew that when his father took refuge in theorizing it was to avoid the principal issue. And when he avoided that it was because he had decided not to grant what had been requested. And his mind, once made up, was unchangeable.

"I see that I shall have to speak to Mrs. Carruthers myself. Do you think I might use the French analogy? She's very keen on things European."

"What do you mean by the French analogy?"

"In France a fallen woman may be ostracized by society but never by the family."

"Elsa would point out that your wedding is going to be attended by several hundred people who are not family."

"But we could
have
it just family."

"With a million dollars' worth of wedding presents already received? Isn't that the figure the tabloids are quoting? If you think Elsa Carruthers is going to marry her daughter in some kind of hugger-mugger ceremony, you are dreaming."

Griswold rose. "All I can do anyway is try."

His father merely cackled.

Griswold knew that his father was not exaggerating the formidable aspect of his mother-in-law-to-be. Priding himself on the cosmopolitan education that he had received on his "grand tour"—a whole year of London, Paris and Rome—he thought he could classify Mrs. Carruthers as a uniquely American type: the plain, stocky woman who, without any great pretensions of family or fortune (her father had been Commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard) had managed to capture the charming son of the richest man in New York. And it had all been done, too, so far as Griswold could make out, by force of character and the simple willingness to be disagreeable at the right moment. Of course Mr. Carruthers had not been faithful to his Elsa—even she could not ask for everything—but he had taken great, if unsuccessful, pains to conceal his infidelities.

Elsa Carruthers had pale skin, flabby on the cheeks, a square chin, thin long lips, agate staring eyes and straight black-olive hair. She spent large sums on dress and on big jewelry, yet she wore it all carelessly, as if aware of not needing it for her real purpose, which was simply to dominate. Griswold, who liked to think he had an eye for a setting, would have dressed her in black, with a white collar, against a decor of dark sinister French Renaissance—a Catherine de' Medici—but she insisted instead on a totally inappropriate Louis XV background in vast chambers full of panels showing ladies in swings with lovers peeping.