The Young Apollo and Other Stories (13 page)

"No, my life down there was very dull. Very commonplace. I'm afraid I have nothing glamorous to tell you."

She saw that he didn't believe her but that he wasn't going to—and never would—pry. And for that she almost loved him.

Her next remark was delivered in her flattest tone. "You know what I think we both need more than anything else? To raise a family. And we might start this very night."

J
JOHN
E
PPES GLANCED
about the big studio that he occupied on West Forty-first Street to be sure that it was in reasonable order to receive his next sitter, Mrs. Harold Ames, whose husband owned almost as many city blocks in Manhattan as Colonel John Jacob Astor. There had not been many things to clear away, as the large, square, high-roofed chamber whose three great windows overlooked Bryant Park contained mostly empty space, space that Eppes loved now that he was prosperous enough to afford it. Aside from his easel and the marble-topped Italian Renaissance table on which he kept his paints and brushes, and the spectacular Persian carpet, there was little but the unfinished canvases stacked against the walls, the different period armchairs in which he sometimes seated his customers, and the various rolls of cloth and curtain that he used for backgrounds in his pictures. He turned a second easel so as to make visible to a visitor the charcoal sketch resting on it of former president Theodore Roosevelt, now on a much publicized safari. It had been the preliminary sketch to an oil portrait hanging in the Capitol in Washington.

Eppes, age fifty, though still the fine strong figure of a man, with large staring eyes and a full head of sleek black-and-gray hair, was at a crisis in his career. He had gone as far as one could go in the painting of fashionable portraits, and he was beginning to wonder if there might not be a higher goal to attain if he were to achieve any really lasting fame. Even though he received the highest fees of any portraitist and some of his works now hung in museums, he was only too bitterly aware of what younger art critics were saying about him: that he was slick and superficial, that his skill in detail was mere trickery, and that his flattering portraits of society matrons were fashion plates. The English critic Roger Fry had even gone so far as to state that it was hard to believe Eppes had ever been taken seriously.

Of course, much of this could be written off as jealousy or the resentment of plutocrats by radicals, but he suffered from the uneasy suspicion that there was still some basis for it. Had the gorgeousness of his dresses and interiors in his paintings of women manifested a too complacent acceptance of the vulgar values of a mercantile society? Had he become the apologist of the early-twentieth-century goldbug?

He had liked to think of himself as a Velazquez or Goya, able subtly to suggest the faults of an era in the very countenances and poses of the aristocrats who represented it, but wasn't it possible that he was actually more like Nattier, whose bland French court beauties gave little hint of the guillotine that awaited their like in the near future?

His reverie was interrupted by his sudden realization that Mrs. Ames had quietly arrived and was standing in the doorway.

"Are you ready for me, master? I hate to break in on great thoughts."

Really, she was lovely. A painter's dream. She had eager, darting, gray-blue eyes, a pale oval face, thin scarlet lips, and a small, perfect nose ending in a tiny hook, with hair a rich chestnut, and she was clad in red velvet with gold trimmings, an evening dress in which, quite rightly, she evidently wished to pose. She apologized for her lateness, for her presumption in choosing her attire, for her nervousness at meeting "so great an artist." She paused before the Roosevelt sketch and raised her hands in gratifying admiration.

"Imagine painting silly me after doing
him!
"

Eppes decided to paint her sitting, and he selected a gilded eighteenth-century Venetian armchair for the initial sketch. She adapted herself quickly and gracefully to each pose he suggested, and he finally chose one in which she was leaning slightly forward, as if to be sure to catch every word of the man—of course it would be a man, and a charming one—who was engaging her in conversation at a soiree. Her expression was amused, receptive, delightful.

She professed herself enchanted with the rapidly executed sketch and accepted cheerfully his invitation to stay for the tea that his manservant, rung for, now brought in. Eppes asked her what sort of pictures she liked.

"Oh, you'll think me a terrible philistine," she protested. "I love all those big academic historical paintings that tell stories. Of course, I realize that makes me totally out of fashion."

"You shouldn't be ashamed of anything you really like. Liking something is the start of appreciation in art. Liking can always be extended. It's indifference that can't be. Tell me about some of the academic pictures that you like."

She took him up enthusiastically on this. "Well, I remember one that particularly thrilled me. It showed Catherine de Mèdici coming out of the Louvre on the day after the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre to view the dead bodies lying about, half stripped, on the street. Her ladies, obviously compelled to follow her, exhibit every kind of horror and disgust, turning their eyes away and putting handkerchiefs to their noses. But the queen mother, stalwart in widow's black, strides ahead, taking in the bloody scene with a calm and glacial satisfaction. How terrible, but how unforgettable!"

"I know the picture. It's by Pinson. What else did you like?"

"There was one of the execution of Lady Jane Grey. Oh, you must find me very macabre. But they're so exciting, those scenes. In museums you always see a lot of people in front of them, until they're scared away by remembering the art critics. But this one was so pathetic. You see the poor girl, who was only fifteen, blindfolded, on her knees and reaching about for the block, helped by a kindly older man, while the headsman stands mutely by with his terrible ax."

"That's by Delaroche. He was very good. He also did the little princes in the tower."

"But you know everything, Mr. Eppes!"

"I know that, anyway. But you needn't be ashamed of liking those pictures. They're competently executed."

"
Executed
does seem the right word. And do you know something? I think there are stories in some of your portraits."

"Really? Can you give me an example?"

"Yes! In your rendering of the duke and duchess of Ives. She's so tall and proud and fine. The captive American heiress sold against her will to an impoverished peer. Talk about slave markets! And he's so short and plain and arrogant. You can see that he'll never even try to appreciate her!"

Eppes was amused. He had not thought of the duke so meanly. "Dear me. I had no notion of such a drama. And how do you think I have rendered, as you put it, the doomed duchess?"

"Oh, as bravely determined to make the most of her bad bargain. Which, by all reports, she has. One hears she is the toast of London. And that the duke is small enough to resent being cast in her shadow."

Eppes found this implausible, though he was flattered. After two more sittings he allowed a friendly art critic, Frank Shea, to come in for a private view.

"The pose is fine, and the colors quite up to your usual splendid standard," Shea assured him. "Of course, you're still developing the face. It will be interesting to see what you will finally do with her. Will she be at last your definitive study of the wife of the American goldbug? Lost in the silly pipe dream that she has affinities and aspirations nobler than those of her commonplace husband?"

"What's the husband like, have you heard? Pretty grim, I suppose?"

"Oh, not such a bad guy. But you know: stolid, stout, and dull."

"I might have guessed."

He had discussed several topics with Mrs. Ames in their sittings, as she was always lively and interested, but she had tended to shy away from questions about her life, preferring more general subjects. But at their next session he resolved to be more personal.

"I tell you frankly, Mrs. Ames, that you baffle me. I haven't been able to decide how to get the essential
you
in your likeness. You tell me that you see stories in some of my portraits. What story would you like to see in yours?"

She seemed to be thinking this over for a long moment. He had the notion that she was not going to dodge the point. Yet when she answered, with a sudden bright smile, he was not sure that she hadn't. "How about that of a perfectly happy woman?"

"Isn't that a conclusion rather than a story? It's like that last line: 'They lived happily ever after.' After what?"

"Do you have to know? Is it that important?"

"I don't
have
to, no. But let's put it that it might help."

Again she was silent for a time. "Is a painter like a priestly confessor? Are your lips sealed by professional discretion?"

"No, but they are by my word of honor. Which I freely offer you."

She nodded now with sudden decision. "That should be enough. Particularly as I shall be telling you nothing that my husband doesn't already know. And who else's business is it?"

"I can hardly be the judge of that."

"Hardly. Anyway, leave your easel and pull up a chair. I'm going to tell you my story."

He did as she suggested, turning away from her, at her further request, so that she could address his impassive back.

"My family, Mr. Eppes, was what you call old New York, but we were fearfully impoverished by my poor father's lamentable investments. He was one of those dear idealistic, impractical men who didn't realize that he could not afford to work. Had he sat back and simply cut his inherited coupons, we would have happily prospered. But no. He succumbed to the old American rule that a man must
do
something. So he did—disastrously. My mother spent her life trying desperately to claw her way back to the top. There is no one more ravenously ambitious than a woman who has had it and lost it. Mother was a woman of powerful personality. Her rages were terrifying. Had I not accepted Harold Ames when he emerged from the clouds, like the deus ex machina of Greek drama, to offer me his golden chariot, I think she might have murdered me. At any rate I was simply glad to be able to pull my father out of the creek in which he was drowning. And Harold was so kind and nice, and he always wanted to give me everything under the sun. What did I care that he was constantly off on hunting and fishing expeditions and that his heart belonged to whatever was at the end of his rifle or rod? There was plenty to amuse me at home. I had one child, my son, now fourteen, but others didn't come, and I had nurses to look after him day and night, and all New York and Newport in which to amuse myself with money and dogs and horses and new young friends in handfuls as rich and idle as myself.

"Harold had a cousin, younger and handsome and dashing, with a share of the family fortune as large as Harold's, who seemed more than willing to act as my escort to parties during my husband's frequent and prolonged absences. He was married to a dreadful woman who cared only for his money and refused adamantly to give him a divorce—besides, the Ameses were all devout Catholics, including Harold—and for a long time I thought his attentions were innocent and that I was simply a diversion for his loneliness and he for mine. It is the old story, Mr. Eppes. By the time he revealed his true feelings for me, I was already caught, violently in love for the first time in my life, which can be a terribly strong thing when it happens as late as at twenty-five."

She paused here for a moment, but Eppes knew better than to utter a word.

"We were soul mates," she resumed, "or so I assumed. He wanted me to leave home and child and flee with him to Venice, where he would buy a palazzo on the Grand Canal and we would live on love and beauty. There was no way, we both knew, that our spouses would ever free us or that Harold would give up his son and heir. We would be ostracized, of course, by New York society, but abroad we would associate with people of larger views. I was enraptured. I agonized at the idea of giving up my darling child, but I tried to persuade myself that when he was older he would understand and forgive me. I had to break my golden chains! We were not yet lovers, but we were obviously on the brink. I told my admirer that I had to think it over, but he was clearly convinced that he had already prevailed and that I would go."

The pause that now followed was so long that Eppes ventured to break it. "But you didn't go."

"I didn't go. Harold came home at just this time from a trip to the Arctic Circle. He summoned me to his study, very grim and stern. His old mother had written him about my goings-on. His cousin and I were causing a public scandal. He told me solemnly that he had no alternative but to insist that I give up seeing his cousin altogether. He turned quite black when I told him that I was in love with his cousin. I said I would give him his answer in the morning, fully intending that I would decamp that night. He left the room without a word.

"The miracle that saved me was that my cynical brother, Tim, a Harvard sophomore in love with himself and what he assumed was his wit, was staying with me at the time. I loved him dearly despite his airs and nursed the idea that if he cared for anybody, he cared a little bit for me. In my sudden desperation I went to his room, where he was dressing for a dinner party, and told him what I was going to do. You'll never believe what he said and what an extraordinary effect it had on me."

"Well?"

"It was like him to quote Oscar Wilde, even though Wilde's name at the time had been blackened by his trial and conviction. Tim obviously cared nothing about this. He quoted a line from
A Woman of No Importance.
'To be in society is simply a bore; to be out of it is simply a tragedy.' And it changed my life!"

"That glib quip? How, in God's name?"

"I repeated it over and over to myself in that long night, when I didn't sleep a wink. I came to see that it contained the moral essence of our time. Isn't it
Anna Karenina
all over? When being out of society ceases to be a tragedy, our whole class system must fall. Not that that would necessarily be such a bad thing. But it hadn't happened yet. Or at least it certainly hadn't happened ten years ago, when we were still in the nineteenth century. I saw in a blinding flash what my life would be like without my dear little boy, surrounded by the Venetian riffraff that illicit lovers attract. Was it too late? Would I ever be able to make it up to the decent husband who was giving me one more chance?"