The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (17 page)

“I wish I could believe you,” Henrietta replied, smiling mischievously at Clarence’s way of feeling out a situation, as if he were a diplomat among an inscrutable, tricky people.

Clarence Anderson was not a lighthearted man, and when he took a notion to denounce someone, his nature forced him to assume a moralistic tone. This tone was quite in contrast to the way of the Nesbitts, who went in, simply and indefatigably, for the kind of impudence and gossip they judged to be amusing. Clarence never mentioned the defect of an acquaintance without clearly showing the poor, faulty person’s character to be morally inferior to his own. When he used the word “dull,” he did not mean to lament a lack of sprightliness so much as to expose a sluggish, self-loving soul, remarkably different from his own vigorous, light openness of feeling. With his impatient, moralizing bent, Clarence was a powerful enemy. Clarence’s enmity was, like the Nesbitts’ insults, purely verbal. He did not wish to effect a deterioration in his antagonist’s circumstances so much as to cause everyone to think of his victim precisely as he did. If he thought someone charmingly foolish or harmlessly inane, he was not satisfied until the whole world acknowledged this foolishness or inanity. It was an agony to him that there might exist an intelligent person who knew his circle of friends and yet saw the various members of it in a light opposed to his own. To insist on his own view was, to his mind, “telling the truth.” Stubbornly he repudiated the tolerant, careless opinion, and with a great show of idealism and objectivity he corrected it. This readiness to speak out led Clarence to imagine that others spoke out also, and when he was praised, as he often was by timid, well-mannered people, he took the praise as genuine and unmixed, and found much pleasure in it.

“I’ll go first. I’d love a martini, pet,” Henrietta said, leading the way into the living room. She sat down, crossing her long, handsome legs, of which she was very vain. She wore high heels, which would have been painful if her delight in the way they showed her legs to advantage had not mysteriously made her nearly unconscious of any such pain. For the rest, she was passable in appearance — round nose, brown face, good teeth, and graying brown hair, difficult to manage.

“I’m very fond of gin myself,” Dodo said thoughtfully. “I suppose one shouldn’t say a thing like that, but I do think a gin drink is awfully good before dinner. God himself wouldn’t drink it afterward.”

“And what about you, Anderson?” Willard said abruptly. “You aren’t to feel committed by the ready martini pitcher.”

“I don’t feel committed, but I’ll take one nevertheless. It would be a great deprivation to have to forgo what I really prefer.”

Clarence was as clerical-suited as Nesbitt was brown-tweeded. This evening, Willard was dressed with even more than his usual sportiness: he was wearing an old jacket with suede patches on the elbows. Clarence immediately analyzed the patched jacket as a form of condescension toward himself. He marked it down against Willard as inverted snobbery. Clarence had, by his quickness to spot pretension, succeeded in turning quite a few people against the Nesbitts. He had made Willard’s intellectual arrogance appear flimsy and ersatz. “What, in the long run, has Nesbitt written?” often passed Clarence’s lips. As for Henrietta’s connection with the Babcock family, Clarence sometimes made its very existence seem open to question, or, if admitted, a peculiar and interesting handicap, a disqualifying affliction.

When Willard saw Clarence’s red bow tie and inky sack suit, he felt a gush of irritation, even though he knew that this was the way Clarence would and did dress, with a reasonable sort of up-to-dateness and appropriateness, as economically and neatly achieved as a little suburban house, with its breezeway, utility room, and dining area. Nesbitt wanted Clarence, as he said, to be, like Thorstein Veblen, a radical from the Western plains, and Clarence, in turn, thought Nesbitt should go around with a sign on his back that read, “Born in Akron, Ohio, of simple, decent stock. Undergraduate at Wayne, connection with Harvard on graduate level
only
, wife from minor branch of well-known Chicago family — the poor side.”

Clarence smiled quietly at Dodo Babcock, and she returned his smile with equal quiet and composure. Dodo tended toward redness, even down to the girlish flush of her cheeks. Her hair was touched with auburn lights, her eyebrows were a scanty reddish brown, and her hands, pink as a shell, lay beautifully and languidly in her purple silk lap. In her face, there was the mark of a charming immaturity, of expectation still to be fulfilled, and a suggestion of hurt feelings — proud, disdainful chagrin, such as one finds in those for whom history is fully dramatized in the story of their own fate. A reactionary, of course, Clarence thought, but amiably, forgivingly.

“Well,” Willard said, with a short laugh, waiting for the conversation to begin.

After a pause, Clarence said, “Did you know that idiot G. B. Cooper was being sent to Baghdad by the Ford Foundation? I have no doubt scholars, even bone-lazy ones like Cooper, can benefit from the advantages of foreign travel, but — ”

“Baghdad. That’s pretty foreign indeed,” Dodo said vaguely.

“Exactly,” Clarence said. “There is something exorbitant — monstrous — about these foundation affairs. They go beyond what anyone would expect. In the long run, I am most bothered by the details — the luxurious, preposterous details. Wife and children and Chevrolet all sent, free of charge, to Baghdad!”

“G
.
B. Cooper? I can’t quite place him,” Willard said.

“He’s the most slavish follower of T. S. Eliot in America — perhaps in the world, for all I know. The whole — the whole, mind you — of his professional attitude comes out of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ I doubt he has read a critical work before or since.”

“That doesn’t seem quite enough baggage, somehow,” Henrietta suggested.

“Wife, children, and car sent to Baghdad,” Clarence repeated. “It’s an unnerving thought. For quantity, lavishness, excess, trust our dear, huge America!”

“I bet they wish they had some quantity in Baghdad,” Dodo said, nodding coquettishly.

Everyone smiled. “Have you ever applied for Baghdad yourself, Clarence?” Henrietta asked.

“God, no!” Clarence replied with heat.

“Or some more plausible place?” Willard added.

“To be perfectly frank,” Clarence said, delighted to be able to state his position, “I have not applied for Baghdad, or Istanbul, or even London, the love of my life. I can’t feel deeply needed in the Near East. I am astonished at those who can, and full of admiration for them. Trucking over the world with only my treasured Victorian prose to offer the fellahin — Cardinal Newman and Ruskin in the Garden of Allah? One must keep some sense of what is fitting. As for London, I am too full of gratitude and private feelings of reverence to want to go dashing over there, my pockets full of money, to tell them what they already know, or to do work they’ve already done.”

“That’s excessive. Your conscientiousness is out of control,” Henrietta said, with a clear trace of ill-humor.

One of Clarence’s “positions” was a refusal to apply for grants, fellowships, easy posts. Whether this attitude came from a fear of failure, even Willard, an inveterate and successful getter of grants, project funds, and endowments, was uncertain. Clarence had a way of suggesting that since he could never be entirely sure his researches would be of clear value to the world, it would be personally fraudulent for him to accept — indeed, to seek — generous sums. He preferred to let his lonely little bark move under its own sail.

Clarence continued, “When I was at Oxford in ’54, there was quite a bit of fun poked at American scholars and their foreign studies and lectures and cushy positions. It is easy enough to dismiss that as envy, but I think it is more serious — or less serious. I mean I truly believe one can maintain that all manner of stupid, incompetent, repetitious work is being done by our American scholars, and at an expense that staggers the imagination!”

Willard poured a second martini for everyone. Then he settled back in his chair and, smiling maliciously at Clarence’s flushed, eager face, said, “What you people never seem to realize is that these foundations literally —
literally
, mind you — have more money than they can spend. To look upon the few thousand one may get for teaching as something that must in the purest, most competitive sense be earned is sheer conceit!” With a modest, self-deprecating laugh, he added, “This thing is bigger than any of us. Of course, you aren’t married, Anderson, and so perhaps you are allowed more perfection and chastity than the rest of us. Without undeserved honors and unearned foundation funds, how on earth could I keep my son Clark at Groton, where he is dreadfully and expensively out of place?”

Clarence knew well that Willard Nesbitt did not think of himself as the recipient of undeserved honors and unearned funds. It was enraging that by this insincere show of cynicism Nesbitt could make him seem to be guilty of false piety and pretentious scrupulosity.

“Groton?” Dodo said vaguely. “I wonder if Clark sees anything of Babcock Van der Veen, who is also there. You remember — he’s old Cousin Jimmy’s nephew.”

“That I couldn’t possibly say, dear,” Henrietta answered. “Boys of Clark’s age are very odd. They seem to fear nothing so much as their blood relations.” Henrietta’s smile for Dodo was just a little too brilliant, too sweet. All of Henrietta’s pride and her habit of condescension came together in the smile. Her arrogance was of the enduring, comfortable kind, and came from her sheer and bold delight in being who she was. She felt she and Dodo had something no deprivation or failure could erase; beyond that, everything was trimming, superstructure. It was a pleasure to feel herself clever, to be married to a well-known man, but these were truly to be described as pleasure, not as the very foundation of her personal well-being or her belief in herself. Henrietta’s tendency to patronize was just as real and unmanageable as her family pride. She was tolerant of Dodo as a fellow-Babcock but also superior to her cousin’s helpless pale eyes, her innocence of intellect, her bald and uncomplicated assumptions. She felt that Dodo’s imagination declined to supply the facts relating to her true situation.

Turning suddenly to Clarence, Dodo asked, in her thrilling and beautiful voice, “Did you admire Adlai Stevenson terribly?”

Clarence blushed. He longed to resent Dodo as a foolish woman, but when his intense powers of observation revealed to him the ambivalence of the Nesbitts’ presentation of their cousin, the way they at once displayed and gently mocked her, he felt hopelessly drawn to her — allied even to her complacency and childishness.

“Yes, yes, I must say I did — quite a lot. He seemed to me a remarkable man,” Clarence answered. “And I am not ashamed to admit that I cherished his literacy. It is a mistaken notion that one can think without words.” He did not smile, he did not adopt his moralizing, rebuking tone. He treated, or pretended to treat, Dodo’s question with deep and puzzling seriousness. Also, he was curious to know how this creature might express herself on the subject of politics and whether she might not discomfit her hosts. Clarence secretly suspected Willard and Henrietta of political dishonesty. He believed they were more conservative than they appeared, more willing to compromise with the status quo than they admitted.

“I dislike Adlai Stevenson terribly,” Dodo offered. Willard laughed indulgently, but she appeared unaware of the meaning of this laugh, which was designed to stop the free expression of her political notions. “I know quite a few people who know him personally. The idea seems to be that he is very superficial.”

“Are you a great partisan of Eisenhower, then?” Clarence said, bending politely toward Dodo and waiting gallantly for her reply.

“I am indeed. I love him. Terribly,” Dodo said, with her great, pale-eyed earnestness.

Henrietta coughed. “A perfectly atrocious dinner is awaiting us,” she said. “I have my part-time maid here this evening. She was a short-order cook — for the White Tavern or some such place.”

At that moment, a moon-faced colored woman appeared and said, “O.K.”

They went into the dining room and settled themselves under the Sully portrait of
Aunt Mag Pierce
and the disk of hammered copper. Willard had trouble with the wine bottle, but when the cork was at last extracted, he said, “The wine is not superb, that I grant you. But it is just good enough to resent being on the same program with the overdone lamb that is as sure to follow as the night the day.”

“Do you remember Hélène, Mummy’s wonderful Swiss cook?” Dodo said wistfully. She was incorrigibly reminiscent. The disposition came upon her with the regularity of a stutter.

“I do remember her, dear, and a painful memory it is, at the moment,” Henrietta replied.

During the meal, Clarence observed Dodo — trained the heavy ammunition of his mind upon her, as if he were a general besieging an undefended shepherdess on her lonely hill. At the same time, he was careful to conceal the wild unruliness of his natural curiosity. Dodo was, he saw, of a savage invincibility and bitter composure. She lived, waiting patiently and proudly, like an old deposed tribal chieftain indolently dreaming of a hopeless return to power and dignity. “I passed our old house recently,” she said, accepting a second potato. “Can you imagine, the old red draperies — the velvet ones with gold braid — are still hanging, even after all these years! It’s an awful thought — insulting, somehow. I felt, looking at those dingy curtains behind the smeared windows, as if some part of my past were still in the house, rotting away. It’s a rooming house, or so I gather from the looks of the place. Milk cartons on every window ledge, miserable faces peering out of the windows, dirty, torn shades in the room that used to be mine. Do you remember the dressing table with the pink brocade skirt I was so fond of, Hennie?” Dodo coughed, reproaching fate and adversity. Henrietta gave a melancholy sigh in honor of the old, decaying red-brick mansion and the memory of gold service plates, four butlers, and the little Babcocks, pale and fair and spoiled.