Testimony Of Two Men (25 page)

“I cooked the dinner for you tonight, Jon. But I’m afraid it’s very heavy on a night like this. Wiener schnitzel; you always liked it.”

“I still do. But you shouldn’t have bothered.”

“It’s no bother.” She moved restlessly. “I do hope it’ll be nice on the Fourth. Whom shall we invite—it’s very late now —for our usual picnic?”

“I’ve already invited Bob Morgan and his mother.
I
know. She’s all whalebone, flatus and fraudulent copperplate.”

Marjorie sipped at her glass. “And I’ve invited people, too. Didn’t I tell you? Rose and Albert Kitchener, and their daughter, Maude. She’s such a nice girl, and so very pretty and talented, and intelligent. Such beautiful eyes and curly auburn hair, and a delightful figure.”

“For Harald?”

“No, dear. Harald left today for Philadelphia. What a bad memory I have! Didn’t I tell you that he is to have a show in Philadelphia on the fifth? He’s already shipped twenty canvases. You know that private and very exclusive gallery on Broad Street? Yes.”

“Yes,” said Jonathan. He stood up and filled his glass again. “It will cost him a nice penny.”

“He can afford it. And the owner has been advertising for two weeks, and issued invitations and there has been such a wonderful acceptance. It will be very successful.”

“Why didn’t you go, too?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve gotten out of the habit of going to Philadelphia. Most of my relatives are dead now, and it makes me feel very sad, and I was a reserved sort of girl and didn’t make many friends. Many of them have moved away.
I
should have gone, I suppose.”

“And you didn’t want to leave me alone on the Fourth.”

“Well, dear, it would have been lonely for you.” She looked at him. “I also invited Jenny.”

“What? Without Harald?”

“Jon. Please don’t sneer. It makes you look quite ugly and you are really a very handsome man. Yes, you are.”

Jonathan said in a mocking and musing voice, “Childe Harald. I don’t understand his impressionistic style, but he may be good at that. He’ll shock the hell out of Philadelphia, and so I wish him well. How did you shuck Jenny from that island?”

His mother was watching him very carefully again. “I just invited her, and she accepted. Poor Jenny.”

“I know. She’d mourn for our Harald. It’s a wonder he didn’t pack her up and take her with him.”

“Jon, dear. Is it possible that you don’t know that Jenny-dislikes—Harald? Are you that blind? You know very well that she grimly stays on that island because it is her home, and her father built that house, and she adored him, and she regards Harald as an impudent intruder. She won’t let him have it alone. She just sits and stands there, waiting for the day when he won’t come back again.”

“Oh, Mother. I don’t believe that for a minute. She stays there because of our Harry.”

“You really do believe the gossip of the town, Jon? Oh, no, you simply can’t! You, above all! Jon, Harald wants to marry Jenny. He told me so himself.”

The glass became very still in Jon’s hand, the yellow liquid as quiet as stone. Marjorie watched her son’s dark face and heavy brows and hidden eyes with great intentness.

“Harry? He wants to marry Jenny?”

“Yes. He’s asked her dozens of times.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve been there very often, and I’ve watched her. She stares at him as if she’s—hungry. She listens to every word he says as if it came from God. She follows him all around with those big blue eyes of hers. She isn’t aware of anyone else when he’s around. It’s not just the town gossip. I wouldn’t consider that for an instant. But I’ve seen Jenny—looking at Childe Harald. And I’m acutely sensitive to people; I have to be. When he moves near her, she actually trembles. And she waits. She’s a woman in love.”

Yes, thought Marjorie. But she said, “Jenny is only twenty, Jon. And though I don’t like to say it, you really don’t know much about women, and especially not about young women.”

“No,” he said. “You are quite correct. I didn’t know.” He was thinking of Mavis. His mother saw the clenching of his facial muscles. He stood up as if to hide from her and again refilled his glass. Her anxiety came back to her, sharper than ever. He stood by the table and his face was turned away from her. “You ought to have provided me with sisters.”

“Well, it’s too late for that, I’m afraid.” Marjorie smiled painfully. Jon did not look at her. “Dear,” she said, “if Jenny does as you say, it is because she hates Harald. She’s watching him all the time. I even think she is afraid of him, in
a
way. I think she thinks—”

“What?” He sauntered back to his chair. “What does sweet Jenny think, if anything?”

But Marjorie sipped at her glass. “What she thinks of Harald is wrong. I can’t tell you what she told me. It—it is probably just her imagination. She’s so young and she’s always been so secluded, and girls have fantasies.”

“She certainly has a fantasy about our Harry. Mother,
I
may not know all the mysterious thoughts that flitter around a girl’s head like bats and butterflies, but I do know a woman in—”

But she said with quietness, “In passion, Jon? Most probably. But in love, Jon? I don’t think you could ever detect that!”

“I don’t want to. I doubt most women could love, anyway. They don’t have the capacity. It’s all frivolity to them, and pretentious houses and clothes and jewelry and teas.” He waved his hand. “And darling little children and places in society and mean little ambitions. Tell me”—and now he turned abruptly to her—“did you love my father?”

The pallor about Marjorie’s mouth increased. She said, “I thought I did. In the beginning. Then I didn’t. It took a long time.”

“Well, what did happen to all that love?”

“Jon, do you want me to tell you?”

“Yes, now that we’re in a romantic and melting mood.”

“Very well. Your father wasn’t very intelligent, Jon.
I
know that hurts you to hear that. You loved him so much. And he loved you dearly and always wanted you near him. I don’t think he cared about anyone else, especially not Harald. I was just, eventually, the gracious mistress of his house. Jon? Does that hurt you very much?”

He went back to his chair. There was a dull flush on his cheekbones. He considered his mother for a long hard moment. “My father was kind,” he said at last. “I appreciate kindness. There’s so damned little of it in this world. If
a
man is kind he should be celebrated.”

“He wasn’t kind to Harald.”

“Because Harald is a fool.”

“Why?”

“He listened to my father. He had a way of trailing him.”

“Yes, I know. Poor Harald.”

“Wasn’t he kind to you? It seems to me he was the soul of consideration.”

“He never saw me, really, after you were born, Jon.”

“Were you jealous?” He smiled at her incredulously and with amusement.

“No. I’d long given up caring.”

He considered that. Then he said, “If he was such a fool, as you seem to think, then he’d have been devoted to Harald.”

“But he never knew he was—a fool—and that makes
a
difference.”

“A fool. What was he to you, Mother, really? Your opinion?”

“It seems odd to say that so distinguished a man, and so aristocratic, had many, many pretensions.”

“To what?”

“To taste. To intelligence. To worldliness. To cosmopolitanism. He was really naive. And naivete in a mature man isn’t so beguiling, Jon. Except to superficial people, and I’m not superficial. He could talk eloquently; he knew poetry, he thought He had a wide acquaintance with literature and art and music. Yet, he never felt them at all, where it matters. One thinks that only the vulgar are pretentious. But the pseudo-cultured, vaguely feeling some inadequacy, are desperate to be considered more sensitive than they are.” She sighed: “It’s very pathetic, in an ordinary man, to struggle to be more than he is, and your father struggled. It was wretched for me to know that and I was so sorry. When he saw he couldn’t impress me any longer, he abandoned me and avoided me. I don’t blame him. I should have been more tolerant but I wasn’t.”

“And you probably think these things about your sons, too.”

“Jon, don’t sound so hard and unforgiving.”

Neither Marjorie nor Jonathan was notable for loquacity even when they felt no strain between them, merely passing pleasant remarks or none at all during the hours they dined together. In this, Marjorie had once reflected, Jonathan resembled herself. Harald was more like his father; they both liked conversation. It was as if words protected them in some manner, kept a bright and defensive barrier between them and what it was they had always feared. What had they feared? Marjorie had been reared in an atmosphere where it was considered unpardonable even to speculate about those deep and hidden sanctuaries of the human spirit in others, and worse even to comment about them. The retreats of a beloved child, or wife or husband, were inviolate and it was indefensible to assault them. It was the lowest vulgarity and outrage of all, it was a Peeping Tom voyeurism engaged in only by the obscene of heart. Therefore, if Adrian Ferrier had obviously feared others—though Marjorie admitted that it was wise to fear your fellowman to some extent—the fear had been out of proportion, invariably, to his routine run of living and circumstance.

But then, she had thought, we always turn a facade to others behind which we watch and wait, hope or fear, love or hate, pray or curse. That is our privacy, that facade. We all have our individual approach to the world, and if Adrian fears that is his particular response to life, and no stranger than belligerence, suspicion, amiability, trust or mistrust, responsiveness or unresponsiveness, exploitation or charity. Even animals have their particular reaction to their immediate life and environment, and none is the same as another’s.

Tonight, as they ate their dinner together and drank their wine, Marjorie and Jonathan were unusually silent even for them. The thunderstorm had burst out from its lair beyond the mountains and was assaulting the small city and the river with fire and great explosions. Mother and son were not aware of it. Marjorie was already regretting that she had so violated her code as to speak intimately of her dead husband to Jonathan. It was disgraceful. She had held her husband’s secret—which he had never guessed she knew, just as he had lived unaware that there was anything at all to guess about him—to herself alone. To reveal Adrian as he had been, even to his son, was particularly shameful, and she was disgusted and appalled at herself. She recalled every word she had said. What had been the matter with her, to descend to such betrayal, such vulgarity? It was all those months of strain, which were not ending but only mounting, and the dread in which she lived and the daily terror, and the obvious decay of Jonathan and his increasing addiction to drinking, and the wild beast which he denied existed but which was mangling him. And Harald, too, and Jenny. The world was full of menace. Of course, she reflected, it always had been full of menace, for it was a mysterious and dangerous place despite all the songs of its “wonder” and sweetness and “love,” and all its ridiculous slogans concerning the “progress of man,” but its threat remained faceless until it entered one’s own house. Then, as the door opened to admit it, one saw the abyss just beyond the garden, the innocent, lying garden.

She saw that Jonathan’s exhaustion appeared to be growing. His color was extremely bad, the sallowness accentuated. He was drinking the good wine not with pleasure but with grim absentmindedness. He had told her nothing of the operation he had performed not very long ago, nor who had so suffered. That was not unusual; he rarely mentioned his cases. But Marjorie saw that he had totally forgotten who had lain unconscious under his hands that day, and this was indeed unusual for him.

She wanted to say to him, “Forgive me for telling you what I knew about your father. I have no excuse; it was degrading of me. Why did I tell you? I don’t know, my dear. I never told anyone else. Malice didn’t inspire me, nor indifference, nor dislike. I liked your father as a person to the day he died, and was often fond of him. I still don’t know why
I
told you. It was very wrong, for you loved him dearly and believed in him.”

Her thought suddenly stopped as she remembered that Jonathan had had no objection at all to her removing the absurd and stylized painting of “The Storm” after Adrian had died. In fact, he had remarked—he had not yet been twenty-three—“I’ve always despised that thing. It’s ridiculous and pretentious and a dozen other things, though I suppose our Harald would call it well-drawn.” Marjorie put down her coffee spoon in surprise, and stared at Jonathan, who sat in his father’s place in the thunder-vibrating soft light and subdued glitter and pale elegance of the dining room. Certainly, Jonathan had said that, and how strange of her not to have remembered. It had been Harald who had always laughed at “The Storm,” but not Jonathan. Adrian had disliked Shakespeare and had read poetry to Jonathan by the hour in his secluded library, but it had been Keats and Whitman and Emily Dickinson and Wordsworth and Browning and Tennyson and Longfellow—particularly Longfellow. He had read prose to Jonathan from the latter’s earliest childhood, but it had been Dickens and never Thackeray, Dumas never Zola.