Jonathan took another big swallow. The glittering surfaces in the room dazzled him. Cautiously he extended a hand and eased himself into a chair. Some whiskey spilled on his knee, and he cursed abstractedly.
“Poor Pa,” he said. “Your parents and your friends protected you. Everybody did. You were so easy to be fond of, with your gentle platitudes and cliches; you never said a word to offend anyone. You couldn’t imagine speaking harshly, and I doubt you ever had a mean thought, either. You just weren’t bright enough, Papa. The only one who refused to protect and shelter you was dear Mama. I think you came close to hating her, as close as you could hate anyone. You ran away from her. She probably impressed you as a gentle and understanding girl when you were both young, and here was a new Mama already made to replace the one you had lost. But Mama never really was a Mama, though she bore you two sons. Except, of course, for darling Harald, the apple of her eye.”
There was one last boom of thunder and then the storm retreated and now the rain was steady and swishing against the glass and the wind had died.
“You know,” said Jonathan, smiling at the chair where his father used to sit “to receive my child’s closest confidences,”
“I
don’t think you really knew a bad poem from a good one, a stinker of a picture from a fine one. But you tried. I think that’s damned touching, and always did. I particularly hated The Storm,’ over the fireplace, but you adored it, and though I never looked at it if I could avoid it, I knew that you loved if and found it beautiful. It was just like you, Papa.
“Yes, Papa, you were sweet and kind. Above all, you were harmless, and that’s a damned rare and precious quality in humanity. Harmlessness. I cherished that in you. And I never let you know one single infernal thing about me. It would have scared the dung out of you, and I loved you too much, and had too much tenderness for you, to tell you the truth. You couldn’t have stood it. So I invented dear little boyish troubles which you could handle nicely with aphorisms and strokings of my head and soothing murmurs. It made you happy. You died thinking kids are innocent lambs, trailing clouds of glory.’ That’s from your pet poet, Wordsworth, and he makes me ill.”
Jonathan filled his glass solemnly. He toasted his father’s empty chair. “I miss you like hell,” he said. “I miss your harmlessness. You were the only harmless creature I ever knew. Papa, your health, wherever you are.”
He laughed a little and sprawled in his chair. “Papa, if there is anything to immortality, I just know what you are now and what you are doing. You are wandering around the blue and shining halls of heaven with a feather duster in your hands, and all the angels pat you on the head as they hurry about their business. You are probably about seven years old. God must love you particularly. I bet you never committed a mortal sin in your life. The capital sins were only words to you, weren’t they? What did you tell the priests in the Confessional, Papa? Did you have to invent little venial sins? The sins of a child?
“You never knew what Mavis was. You loved her always, didn’t you? You didn’t live to see us married. You spoke of her as a ‘dear girl, a treasure, a love.’ Yes, Papa, she was indeed. Indeed. I’m glad you never knew how many times I came close to killing her. I thought of a thousand ways—”
The glass slipped from his inert hand and dropped to the floor and spilled its contents. He neither knew nor cared. He was fully drunk. He stared blankly before him, but his thoughts were not blank. His exhausted face took on the dark shadow of agony.
Mavis, Mavis, Mavis, he thought. Oh, my God, Mavis! Mavis!
He had been twenty-three years old, two years in medical school, when he had first become aware of Mavis Eaton, niece and adopted daughter of Dr. Martin Eaton and his wife, Flora. Certainly, he had seen the little girl from babyhood, then as a toddler, then a running child shrill and insistent, for she was very spoiled. (Her uncle and aunt invariably referred to her, even after they had adopted her, as “That sweet, motherless, fatherless little one!”) But so small a child hardly could inspire a boy and a youth with tenderness except in an academic way, for Jonathan even so young liked children. So, he had seen her, had absently noted her, had thought she was exceptionally handsome for a child, had idly admired her, but had not been attracted by her pert ways, her open rudeness to her adoring uncle and adopted father, and her loud and unexpected outbursts of somewhat rough laughter. There had been a period when she had been grubby, and Jonathan, even hardly past puberty, had disliked grubbiness. Still later, she had lost her baby teeth, and her hair appeared lank and uncombed, and though he was polite to her in her uncle’s house —which he visited often—she appeared to him to have lost the shining and spotless and rounded sweetness of earlier years.
She had not liked him. Other visiting young men, studying medicine, had deferred to her ostentatiously so that the formidable, rich and famous Dr. Eaton would look upon them kindly and, possibly, in the future, sponsor them. But Jonathan Ferrier was aloof and independent, and these the ten-year-old Mavis interpreted as “stuck-up” and “thinks right well of himself, and he’s so homely, too.” He never brought her little gifts to flourish above her eager hands in the presence of the smiling Dr. Eaton and her Aunt Flora. On several occasions, annoyed at her vexation that her uncle and Jonathan were going into his study, where they would close the doors, Jonathan had said to her in a peremptory way she hated, “Run along, little girl, and play with your dolls or pester someone else.” This seemed outrageous to Mavis, for had not her uncle intended to take her for a ride to the ice cream parlor before “the prig” had appeared? She came to hate him.
When she was between the ages of ten and twelve, Jonathan had rarely, if ever, even seen her, probably because when he was at home, he contrived to visit the house when she was at school, or bicycling or away on the interminable picnics with which her generation were engrossed. He would sometimes hear her demanding voice in the kitchen or in the halls, but he never encountered her in them.
The Eaton house was on a street broad, spacious and filled with trees and exceptionally wide even for Hambledon, which was famous for its expansive thoroughfares. It stood on two acres of land, far back from the street and cloistered in a heavy stand of linden trees, a tree not common in town. It was said that the whole of Hambledon was fragrant when they bloomed, and certainly a warm damp wind carried their scent for long distances. The house rose above all its neighbors, for Dr. Eaton’s father had fancied a tall knoll, and so it overlooked the roofs of other houses, and the upper windows, where the servants slept, stared at distant streets and had a long close look at the river. In fact, the deep and rambling rear gardens sloped down to the river promenade, as the townsfolk liked to call the smooth, silvery gray planks that ran at the rear of the big houses very close to the water. But every house’s rear gardens were guarded by low fences with doors in them, usually locked, though a tall youth or man could easily have jumped over them.
Jonathan Ferrier thought the house and its neighbors were hideous, though they were considered very stylish with their wide shadowy verandas and shutters and little turrets and small silly towers and fretwork and stained-glass hall windows and double oaken doors leading to small vestibules and to another door. “Dripping with tortured cellulose,” he would say of them. “Well, I suppose it gives jig-cutters employment, but that is about all you can say for all that wooden lace drooping from every possible knothole and eave.” The Eaton house had even more “wooden lace” than its neighbors, and was made of wood painted a particularly—to Jonathan—repulsive chestnut brown, with bright yellow shutters and yellow shingles. It had two towers in front, one at each end, and the dormer windows of the second and third floors had tiny little spires rising from them, intricately carved, and not only was there a stained-glass window in the front hall door but a huge one, at least twelve feet high and eight across, in the exact middle of the house, indicating the spiral staircase inside.
It was called a “mansion,” for it had eighteen rooms and even one referred to as a “ballroom,” though it was hardly that even in size. (It became a “ballroom,” when Mavis was older.) Its rooms were long, narrow and gloomy even on the brightest day, but that was the style, to preserve the glow of wood and the fabric of expensive brocade draperies and the shimmer of Aubusson and Oriental rugs. When the walls were not paneled, they were hung, in the drawing room (no “parlors” for the Batons!) with crimson rose damask, and in the dining room, golden damask. Even so, so fearful was Mrs. Eaton and her generation of the burning rays of the incontient sun that all the windows, except the servants’, could be found at least half shuttered even in winter, except on the very darkest days. The fear of the sun and its “harmful propensities” was not the only reason for the murkiness of the house’s interior. There was also a belief, generally held, that only the vulgar threw open windows and shatters all the time —such as servants—and “had no respect for their privacy.” Servants, of course, were not genteel. They had no private lives.
The house was richly furnished and was as hideous to Jonathan Ferrier as the exterior, and all the tables and sofas and chairs were big and heavy and upholstered in dark velvets or horsehair or somber silks, and the fireplaces were thickly cluttered with masses of ornamental china, elks’ horns, vases, clocks, little gilt boxes, shells, Staffordshire ware and containers for artificial flowers (waxed or fashioned of crepe paper, even when gardens were exploding with color). And, of course, at each side of the fireplaces stood immense Chinese jars filled with gilded bulrushes or ostrich plumes or any other exotica the lady of the house fancied, such as pussywillows in the spring, the only sign of any particular season.
Only the broad gardens, with their conservatory, were absolutely beautiful, though even here there was a gazebo of latticework painted brilliant white and filled with wicker furniture with velvet cushions, where the ladies took their tea on hot summer days, or their ices. The gardens were formal and had been designed by an artist who was now long dead. His successor was a genius of his kind, and managed, on two acres, to hint of forests of tall pines, grottoes, little wayward paths, hidden cool nooks and silent recesses. The lawns cunningly appeared immense and endless, for there were no definite boundaries, and the trees, which included an oak or two, several maples and a cluster of elms and one pointed poplar, seemed about to advance at any moment on that stretch of incredibly green grass, meticulously cut and totally without a single weed. Gardens of flowers, always in bloom, gave the impression that they had simply dropped from the cerulean heavens at a gesture of grace, for they were not formal and were idly shaped. All this was artful, of course, but it was also charming, and Jonathan loved the Eaton gardens almost as much as his mother’s. “Artistry,” he would say, “can be so superb, sometimes, that it exalts nature.”
Invariably, every summer, Mrs. Eaton received the first prize of the Garden Club, though her labors in her gardens often consisted of inspecting the work of the gardeners every morning and speaking to them sharply, and strolling, in a light frothy dress, every evening to permit the scented rising wind to play with her thick masses of bright dark hair. She
was a thin woman, too slender for fashion, but her wardrobe was superb, she purchasing all her dresses in New York, and these expensive treasures drew attention away from her dark and predatory face with its big lean nose, her tight and colorless mouth and her small penetrating black eyes. She had great style, everyone said, and marvelous taste, and she had also inherited a great deal of money, which covered many malicious little sins of character and a truly awesome stupidity, not to mention very black and very thick eyebrows that were a single bar over her eyes.
Dr. Martin Eaton, in contrast with his wife, was big, lumbering, awkward and clumsy, except in the operating rooms, where his deftness and delicacy were famous. He had a fat face, almost square, small kind blue eyes, a nose like a peeled potato and heavy nearly Negroid lips, which could give a smile singularly tender, steadfast and sweet, inspiring courage and trust in anyone who was favored by it. Even when he had been thirty, he had been nearly totally bald, and now his head was a vast dome of which he pretended to be very proud. “Houses an enormous brain, Flora says,” he would say with a wink. “My friends, however, remark that the feller —-what was his name?—who immediately preceded Homo sapiens had a brain cage about twice the size of a normal man’s these days.”
As he had inherited a considerable fortune, a few who did not admire Flora would often wonder why he had married her. It would have surprised these to know that the two had a remarkably compatible marriage, even a serene one, for Flora fully believed that her husband was not only the handsomest of men but a tremendous genius, and Martin Eaton loved his wife for her deference to him, her devotion to his smallest need and comfort, her admiration, her absolute loyalty to her household, and her love for his niece. Unlike other wives, she never suspected that her husband was sometimes foolish and childish and unreasonable and illogical, and so he could relax in his house at night, confident that no wifely comment would be made concerning his appearance, the people he was treating, his particular friends, or his behavior at the last dinner they had given, or the amount of “spirits”—very copious—he had drunk yesterday or was drinking to night. “Gentlemen must have their relaxations,” she would say in tones of absolute authority, “and doctors more than most.”
This, then, was Mavis Eaton’s background, she who had inherited quite a fortune herself and was to know no suffering whatsoever in her life until the final days of her last agony, when she was nearly twenty-four years old. To some that death appeared more tragic than ordinarily, for Mavis had lived in eternal sunshine, adored, admired, courted, pampered, petted, rich, beautiful and totally fascinating. Still others bitterly remarked that into that “Eden of a lovely life had come the snake of Jonathan Ferrier to destroy it.”