Ten North Frederick (21 page)

“Was I frowning? I didn't mean to show it. I just remembered my operation. I wonder how long before we can be married. I don't like very long engagements, do you?”

“I've never had one,” he said.

“Oh, Joe, seriously.”

“I'm sorry, dearest.”

“I never thought of it, but we have to, don't we?”

“Yes,” he said.

“That side of marriage is—a complete mystery to me.”

“I know, dearest.”

“You will have to—I must learn everything from you. Men always know, don't they?”

“Yes, we find out.”

“Shall I ask Billy English? He's really not so much older than we are. I didn't mind his operating on me, that was different. But this is—do you think I could go to that new doctor, that woman? Dr. Kellems?”

“If you prefer, dearest. I could ask Bill English. He knows I'm in love with you. I told him while you were in the hospital. I could ask him how soon we can get married and we wouldn't have to go into details.”

“I wish you would. That would make it so much easier for me. See him and ask him before we announce our engagement.”

“Bill's a gentleman, but he's a doctor too, and he has to meet this situation every day. Look at all our friends that go to him.”

“That's true,” she said. “Oh, dearest, I'm so pleased.”

“And I,” he said.

“Mrs. Joseph Benjamin Chapin,” she said.

“Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Benjamin Chapin,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

 • • • 

In Gibbsville, in
1909
, only a few men could tell with exactness the true wealth of the wealthy Gibbsville families. A family that had assets worth $
800
,
000
could, and usually did, live in great comfort without spending much more money than a family worth $
200
,
000
. It was a matter of pride with the best people of Gibbsville to live comfortably, but without the kind of display that would publicly reveal the extent of their wealth. A few families, whose names were given to large holdings in coal lands and to breweries and meat-packing houses, lived in American luxury. They were the owners of the early motorcars. They employed the larger staffs of servants. They had summer homes at distant resorts and led the lists of contributors to church and charity. Their wealth was a known fact and they were free to enjoy it. But behind them, obscured by the known wealthy, were the well-off, who possessed considerable fortunes and who quietly ran the town.

The Benjamin Chapins were one such family. They lived within their income, they bought only the best and they bought to last. They ordered the more expensive cuts of meat, but they watched their butcher bills and they would hold up payment over a single lamb chop. In their home was a kind of restfulness; all that was needed was there, and nothing would be changed and no additions made unless the change or addition was required for permanent improvement. The lighting fixtures had been installed for gas; when electricity was decided upon, the fixtures were converted, not taken down. Every room in the Frederick Street house was given a good cleaning once a week, and repairs were made promptly and by men and women with special skills. When something went wrong it was rectified before it got worse, whether it was a broken breeching strap or a brick in the sidewalk. Woodwork, furniture, silverware and brasses were worn smooth in the Chapin household and everything was always in its place because its place had been carefully decided upon at the very beginning. The Benjamin Chapins made no compromise with taste as they felt it or quality as they understood it. With those principles to guide them, they also privately believed, privately but firmly, that the very fact that an object was owned by
them
made it all right, good enough for anyone and too good for most.

For the Benjamin Chapins were convinced of their own superiority, and when they compared themselves with other Gibbsville couples they always were able to reaffirm their self-appraisal. Benjamin Chapin's wife was born Charlotte Hofman, a Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, Hofman, and therefore connected with the Muhlenbergs, the Womelsdorfs, the Montgomerys, the Laubachs, the Penns, the Boones, and the Leisenringers, the FitzMaurices, the Blooms, the Dickinsons, and the Pennsylvania Lees. Charlotte Hofman was only twenty when she married Benjamin Chapin, who was thirty-four, but she was quite aware that towns and counties had been named after members of her family and that noble German blood flowed in her veins. She was a woman with a live sense of her duty to the past and the future, a conviction that her body was the inheritor of elements that needed only proper fertilization for the breeding of a superior offspring. She was small, dark, and pretty, and rich, and had many suitors. She accepted Ben Chapin because he was old enough in Pennsylvania lineage to have connections almost as imposing as her own, and earlier New England connections that produced educators, soldiers, and governors. As to his own qualities, he was healthy and honest and well liked by the major stockholders of the Coal & Iron Company. She married Ben Chapin in
1881
and their son, whom they called Joseph Benjamin Chapin after Ben's father, was born in the succeeding year. The first was the only child to live; he was followed by two stillborn babies, the second of them badly deformed, and after the birth of the sub-normal child Charlotte Chapin withdrew almost completely from society and devoted herself to the fancywork at which she was proficient and the raising of her son.

Her son grew quickly and tall, and ever closer to his mother. He displayed admiration and respect for his father, but demonstrations of affection were reserved for his mother. As he grew taller she would make him sit on the footstool so that she could rumple his fine brown hair, which was silky and straight and unruly until he went to Yale and slicked it down. Throughout his prep school years in Pottstown, the four years in New Haven, and the time at law school in Philadelphia, Joe wrote his mother twice weekly without fail. His letters were slangy and largely in a humorous vein, often padded with scores of athletic contests and university notices that were extracted from the college newspaper, but also providing a fair chronological record of his social and scholastic activities, and keeping her informed of his friendships and what he called his hateships. He wrote to his father only when it was necessary, as for accounting purposes and for permission to change college courses and take trips, and to tell him that he was going to join Alpha Delta Phi, his father's fraternity. He went out for the freshman crew and for the varsity eight in his sophomore year and almost made the tennis team, but among his friends athletic prowess was not regarded as the thing, any more so than conspicuous brilliance as a scholar or success as a heeler of other extra-curricular activities.

In his letters from New Haven and from Philadelphia, Joe Chapin mentioned girls' names only when they were to be, or had been, hostess or guest of honor. In the hearty tradition of his college and his day, Joe referred to girls as women, making generalizations about women that characterized the entire sex as foolish or romantically cruel, and in any case to be avoided. The attitude, of course, pleased his mother. She seldom lost an opportunity to point out that she had married his father when Ben Chapin was thirty-four. Women, she generalized, aged more rapidly than men; a man ought to marry a much younger woman; a man of forty was still a young man, a woman of forty was well along in years. She did not touch upon the subject of the menopause as such, but she convinced her son that to marry before thirty was to take on burdensome responsibilities that could easily thwart a young lawyer's career, and unnecessarily at that, since a man had all his life in which to raise a family. Impersonally, without mentioning any names, Charlotte Chapin would remind her son that the girls he was seeing during his college years were not really a great deal younger than he was. There was, she said, all the time in the world before getting serious.

The campaign was enormously successful, not only in the way she had planned, but in a way she could not have thought of. Joe Chapin, fixing on no particular girl, increased his popularity because he was equally attentive to all girls. He was handsome, he had nice manners, he was graceful, he dressed well, he seemed to have money, he was a member of Wolf's Head, he was considerate of his elders, and he laughed readily. At the same time he was not a fop or effeminate, nouveau riche, or patronizing with the parents of the girls he saw. A few of the fathers dismissed him as a snob, but there was one New York mother who lightened that characterization: “But what has he got to be snobbish about? He's from Pennsylvania.” Joe's own father had unintentionally prepared the way for his son. There were men in New York and Philadelphia who had known Ben Chapin at Yale, and remembered him as a worthwhile fellow who had made no enemies, had got into no scandal, and of whom they would say to Joe: “I think I must have known your father. Was he a Yale man, about the Class of '
68
or '
69
?” It was easy, in those days of more difficult transportation, for a New York man to lose touch with fellows he had known in college, and it was especially easy with a fellow like Ben Chapin, who had left a favorable but not an indelible impression. Chapin, moreover, was not an extraordinarily uncommon name. Thus when the personable young man turned out to be the son of Ben Chapin, '
69
, the boy's attractiveness was of a safe kind: nothing dangerous could possibly have been sired by old Ben, and if the boy wanted to be a bit of a snob, well, that was a more self-respecting characteristic than if he had chosen to be a rounder and a roué, or a worthless bohemian.

“Do you ever see any old friends of mine?” Ben once asked his son. “In New York, I mean.”

“Yes, Father. Oh, yes.”

“Who, for instance? Frank Garth, for instance? He lives in New York. And a doctor named Ralph Dole?”

“Dole, let me see. No, I don't think so, Father.”

“What about Frank Garth?”

“Well, I'm not sure. Frank Garth. Mr.
Blaine.
I met a Mr. Blaine that asked me if you were my father.”

“Oh, really? L. B. Blaine?
That
Blaine?”

“L. B.? Yes, Mr. Lewis Blaine.”

“Is that so? I never knew him very well. I'm rather surprised he remembers me. He was in Skull & Bones. Family had a big place at City Island. Very well-to-do people. I haven't seen Lew Blaine in over twenty years. Guyon Bardwell. Ever see a fellow named Guyon Bardwell? He lived on Staten Island, and I imagine still does.”

“Bardwell. No, I don't think so, although I did go to Staten Island this year. It's a beautiful place.”

“Beautiful. I used to visit the Bardwells there. Guyon Bardwell had a sister Amy, married a classmate of ours from Chicago. My, it's a long time since I've thought about some of these people. Do you realize it was only a short time after the Civil War? If the war'd continued a few years longer, I'd have been in it.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Lew Blaine. He had a brother Ivan, and I've often wondered why they chose a Russian name. We had some very interesting fellows in our class. For two years I was the only Gibbsville boy at Yale. I think that's the only time that ever happened, that only one Gibbsville boy was at Yale. Scranton, Reading, Harrisburg. But I was the only one from Gibbsville. It just happened that way. Fellows like Lew Blaine had never heard of Gibbsville.”

“They still haven't,” said Joe Chapin. “I've often found it saves time and useless explanation if you just say you're from Philadelphia.”

“You do? Why did you do that?”

“To save time and useless explanation.”

“But I don't think it would have been useless explanation. There's such a thing as polite curiosity, you know, and if someone is curious enough to ask you where you came from, they probably are polite enough to, and curious enough to, listen while you tell them. Now how much more interesting you'd have been if instead of aligning yourself with the large crowd of Philadelphia boys, you told them you were from Gibbsville. All those people know all about Philadelphia, but they don't know a thing about Gibbsville.”

“That's exactly my point, Father.”

“Then you should have told them.”

“What is there to tell? It's a small town in the Pennsylvania coal region. Not even as big as Scranton.”

“Not even as big as Wilkes-Barre, either. But not the
same
as Scranton, not the
same
as Wilkes-Barre.”

“If I started to expatiate on the glories of Gibbsville I'm afraid my audience would turn away.”

“Then I'm afraid I have a low opinion of their manners, a very low opinion indeed. And if all they're interested in is New York and Philadelphia and Boston, then I won't give them much credit for their intelligence. It isn't where a man comes from that counts . . .”

“Yes, but Father, that's
my
point. Would you consider it polite if I were to bore my friends with a description of the town I happened to be born in?”

“And your mother and I, both your grandfathers and both of your grandmothers, and
their
fathers and mothers.”

“But some of those New York people, and Boston, and Philadelphia, their families go back so far that I'd run out of greats.”

“Well, in my day they were ladies and gentlemen, and if they asked a man where he came from, they had the good manners to let him answer their question. And they might learn something into the bargain.”

“Well, I suppose I'll have to tutor in Gibbsvilliana. I'm not even sure of the population.”

“No, you won't have to tutor, but you might brush up on your own manners, starting with more respect for your father.”

“I'm sorry, Father.”

“I trust you are, and I accept your apology.”