The Friend of Women and Other Stories (13 page)

I did my best for him, but my case was undermined by his eagerness to obtain a rapid release from his matrimonial bond. And when he married Marianne—for she did agree in the end to have him—he rejected my urging him to tie her down with a premarital agreement and executed a new will leaving her everything that Lola had not grabbed.

I will admit that Marianne was not mercenary. She had total confidence as a provider for herself and never gave a thought to any future financial emergency. Money was of little importance to her, and she spent freely and carelessly any that came into her hands. Harry bought her many things that she not only didn't need, but didn't even much want. What was worse for him, however, was the considerable sums that she took from him to loan to talented but deadbeat literary friends. And when she accepted an offer to teach English for a year at a famed western university without even consulting Harry, he took a year off from his work to accompany her. Coming back he found his percentage of the firm's profits drastically cut, and he resigned in a huff. He was reduced now to living on the remnant of his capital, facing actual poverty when that should be exhausted.

Of course, Marianne left him. That had always been in the cards. But she left him not because of his decreased means, but because she had met her fourth husband at the western university, and she shed poor Harry just as she would have shed the piece of used Kleenex that I had once likened him to. She never even raised her voice. Harry was simply as if he had never been. She didn't ask for a penny of alimony and paid her own lawyer in the speedy divorce proceeding.

When we lunched, he and I, after the decree came down, at what was now my but no longer his club, to discuss what the future might have in store for one so stripped of everything, he still insisted that what he had done had been worth it. The one thing he still seemed to care about was making me see this.

“Marianne gave me the only life I've ever had,” he kept saying.

“Oh, Harry!” I cried at last in an exasperation I could no longer suppress. “Do you really call
that
life? And all of life, too?”

“I can try.”

I refused to discuss it further. I simply couldn't. He had shocked me to the core of my being, and I didn't really much care what happened to him now.

4

L
ORNA
C
OATES
was a very proud and bitter woman. She was herself of an army family, and she had fallen in love with her handsome and stalwart husband when he was an aide to her father, a brigadier general stationed in the Philippines. She had envisioned a career that would ultimately take him to a president's staff in Washington, and, if he had the good luck to serve in a war, to the high national awards of heroism. And indeed the brave year 1917 had brought the desired Armageddon, and Stanley Coates, to the trenches in northern France, but a tragic tactical error on the part of his commanding officer, which was to some degree unfairly attributed to him, resulted in long postwar assignments to obscure army bases. Her husband, Lorna indignantly believed, could have saved his reputation with a candid revelation of just what had happened at the battlefront, but with stubborn rectitude and misguided loyalty he had insisted on sharing the blame with a superior who was only
too
willing to dilute his own guilt. Though devoted to his wife, Coates was deaf to her pleas in what he deemed a case of personal honor, and he accepted the lifetime consequences of his silence with grim but uncomplaining reserve. He had the total courage that sometimes accompanies a total lack of imagination.

Lorna had now only her son, Frederick, as her one hope for the larger life. She was determined that he should not follow his father in a military career; she saw, clearly enough, that in America the path to glory was nearer to Wall Street than to West Point. She taught the boy never to be distracted from a goal by an idle enthusiasm, or, particularly, by an idle animosity. “The world is largely run by fools,” she would warn. “They must be suffered not gladly but mutely. Let them have their silly gods, their inane causes, their cherished fetishes. Never make an enemy until you're sure his teeth have been drawn. Even religious maniacs should be tolerated. Their god, note, is hungry for praise. Even an eternity of anthems won't satisfy him. Why do they worship him? Because they believe he has power. Which shows they at least have the sense to know that power is the supreme thing. Very well. Let us have power. I don't mean riches or thrones or having people bow down to you. That's just vulgar. I mean power to sway the destinies of man. For man's greater good, of course. And for your own good, my boy.”

When Fred was fifteen and attending high school in San Diego, where his father was then stationed, his mother determined that he should go to Chelton, a prestigious boys' boarding school in Massachusetts that had recently established a scholarship for the sons of military officers. She applied successfully for this without telling her husband. Coates at first objected to sending his son to an academy where he would be associated with boys so much richer, but he encountered a resolution in his wife so furious that he soon abandoned the fray, consoling himself with the notion that the Great Depression, through which the country was then passing, might reduce some of the Chelton parents to an economic level not too distant from his own.

Fred had already developed into a sober, thoughtful, closely observant if somewhat detached youth. Fortunately for his mother's plans for him, he was remarkably handsome. His wavy auburn hair, strong regular features, serious gray eyes, and fine muscular figure, always so darkly and neatly clad, attracted the admiration of both sexes. But perhaps his most winning quality was the grave attention that he accorded to those who conversed with him. He was a good listener, and his short comments were to the point. His grades were the highest in his class, and his skill at games, if less notable, was adequate, but his inclination to isolate himself, without betraying any contempt for the crowd, somewhat dampened the popularity that he initially evoked.

Fred respected his father without missing any of his limitations, and he thoroughly understood his mother and the dreams in which she indulged about his own future, while carefully weighing their extravagance. He harbored an ambition quite as great as hers, but, unlike her, he knew the dangers of letting it be seen. The lesson that he had best learned from her was that a man's truest friend, perhaps his only real one, was himself.

***

At Chelton he found he was in a new world, but not one for which he was unprepared. The sons of eastern bankers and corporate lawyers, who deemed him at first a somewhat alien body, soon came to respect his easy proficiency in class, his agility on the field, his quiet manner, and his ready fists if antagonized. As the students were not allowed to have any cash on their person but small change for Saturday afternoon purchases at the local village drugstore, there was no way for the richer ones to display their family's wealth but in more expensive suits, which meant nothing to other boys, or boasting, which only brought them jeers. There was no racial or religious discrimination, as there were no Jews or blacks or Latinos, and very few Catholics or foreigners (a tiny group of diplomats' sons among the latter), and Fred's classmates enjoyed a social equality among themselves, for which he was gratified that he did not have to struggle as his mother had taught him to expect. He even discovered that his army background had an exotic flavor to a few of his new friends. It was true that his parents never came to visit the school in a Lincoln town car or a Hispano-Suiza as some other parents did, but then, finding travel across America a needless expense, they didn't come at all. Fred came to Chelton without attachments, and attachments could be liabilities as well as assets.

Chelton was an Episcopalian Church school, and religion was heavily emphasized by the veteran cleric headmaster who, hale and hearty in his seventies, had been principal when half the students' fathers had been his pupils, and who was regarded as a kind of deity by both the boys and their families. But Fred soon gleaned that the Reverend Doctor Emerson could be easily handled: all he really required was that the boys should
look
respectful and God-fearing when in chapel or when any topic of faith or morals was discussed. Outside of these all freedom of thought and much of action was permissible, but freedom of thought by no means implied freedom of speech. The first rule of a Christian society was a rigid prohibition of any articulated criticism of its accepted mores. Grant that, and you could do pretty much as you liked. It was not difficult. For example, Fred observed that almost none of the Chelton graduates went into either politics or the ministry, despite the thunderous urgings of their revered and totally sincere headmaster, but instead dedicated their lives to commerce. Yet this seeming inconsistency was rarely mentioned. Chelton, to the families that supported it, was a virtuous and noble institution essentially divorced from the real world, but an excellent training ground for youths who would thereafter wear its high standards like a brilliant feather in their hat. It was essentially a decoration, yet it had a distinct worldly value. It meant something to be a Cheltonian. And Fred was going to be one.

How did Chelton deal with sex? Doctor Emerson's principles at least were made very clear. Absolutely no sexual activity, solitary or in couples, could be tolerated outside of marriage. Yet the reverend headmaster demonstrated an uncomfortable and wrathful awareness that despite all his preaching and the threat of immediate expulsion from the campus, there were boys addicted to unseemly experimentation in this area, and prone to something he denounced from the pulpit as “sentimentality.” It was notorious among the students that the old man must have learned about this in his own boyhood at a public school in England, where his father had been an ambassador. Fred was quickly aware that these “experiments” were being carried on by a goodly number of his classmates after lights-out in their dormitory, and they did not seem oppressed by the least sense of sin. It was again the double standard.

He himself was not intrigued by mutual masturbation or sodomy. He developed an interest in girls earlier than other boys, and there were no girls at Chelton or even a pretty woman among the chambermaids and waitresses selected by a housekeeper trained by the vigilant headmaster. His good looks, however, invited a fair number of lewd propositions from some of his classmates. These he declined, but always in such a way as not to appear offensively prudish. “Sorry, pal,” he might mutter. “I guess I'm too much of a damn Christer.” Sex, no doubt, would have its role to play in his career, but not yet. In the meantime, what did it matter what others did or didn't do? He had taken to heart his mother's warning about making unnecessary enemies.

Sex did, however, have one indirect influence upon him. Alistair Simpson, the golden-haired, blue-eyed, but somewhat effeminate and delicate son of Chelton's richest alumnus, was attracted to Fred by something considerably stronger than the smutty physical curiosity of rutting boys. Yet Alistair, despite inclinations of which he had not yet gauged anything like the full force, was a prude who was shocked by the nocturnal activities in his dormitory and clung as tightly as he could to Fred, whom he extolled as his virtuous hero. He insisted that the latter visit him at his home on a spring vacation when it was too far and too expensive for Fred to travel to his own. It was in the great red-brick Georgian mansion of the Simpsons, on a thousand-acre plot in Westbury, Long Island, that Alistair's new best friend first met his formidable father.

Edgar Simpson, the Wall Street banker, was as large and hearty and stentorian as his high position in the world of finance seemed to require. He had four daughters, all attractive and self-possessed, all older than Alistair, but the latter, as an only son, received his father's particular attention and caused his particular disappointment. Edgar loved the boy in his own possessive way, but he wanted to make much more of him than was obviously possible, and he chafed openly at his frustration. Fred, who visited Westbury again in the summer, possessed, as the banker soon perceived, all the qualities that were missing in his son, and he wondered if some of them might not be transmitted to his heir by a kind of osmosis. When the boys were in their last year in Chelton and the choice of a college became an issue, Mr. Simpson, on a visit to the school, invited Fred, without Alistair, to lunch with him in the local village inn. This was most unusual for a visiting parent to do, but nobody questioned Mr. Simpson, who had given Chelton its new gymnasium and hockey rink and might even do more.

Fred was thrilled by his ride to the inn in the backseat of the rattling, shining Isotto Franchini that was sent to pick him up. It was the way he traveled in his dreams. At the destination, he was ushered into a private dining room where Mr. Simpson offered him a rum cocktail against every school regulation. Fred knew he was perfectly safe in discreetly sipping it. His host went straight to the point.

“I'll put all my cards on the table, Fred. I'll start by admitting that I've had you and your background thoroughly checked out. I know what a fine soldier your father is and that he has not been promoted as he should have been. I know that he is a man of honor and that he has paid debts incurred by his own father, which he was under no legal obligation to do, and that this has left him financially straitened.”

Fred simply nodded. It was not for him to criticize what, from a less powerful man, might have been deemed an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

“I know too that you have been an admirable son and have never exceeded what, at least by Chelton standards, must have seemed a slender allowance. And you have been a fine friend to my son, helping him in his studies and protecting him, as he is not strong, from bullying boys at school.”