The Young Apollo and Other Stories (24 page)

He had been, of course, a hero in the war. He had served under Lee, whom he had idolized and with whom he remained in correspondence until the latter's death. He had lost an arm in the Battle of the Wilderness just before the surrender. And he hated the Yankees with an animosity that never ebbed with the passing years.

Yes, he was a great man, a big one anyway, a frog that couldn't even immerse itself in its exiguous puddle. He ran everything there was to run in Blue Hill: he was mayor, state senator, head of the local bar association, and the principal farmer of the countryside. He was determined to save his home area, to bind up its wounds, to make it prosper, and to the very mild extent that it did that, it was owed to him. He was equally resolute to train his only son and heir to carry on his good work. And as he evidently believed that I would have a hard time in accomplishing this, he made sure that I should be as hard as he could make me.

If Father had ever voiced his deep and undying resentment of our northern victors, it might have helped me. Growing up, and particularly after I had matriculated at the University of Virginia, I might have critically assessed it against the increasing sense among my contemporaries that the past was past and that it behooved us to get on with the present. But Father's worship of General Lee motivated him to follow his leader's principle of silence about old wrongs. And so I was always conscious at Blue Hill, in the formidable and stalwart presence of my unloquacious sire at the head of the table, of a will to discourage all idle chatter or gossip and a tolerance only for subdued comment on the weather and the performance of daily tasks. The great unsaid was any reference to the churning of a fierce and constant inner protest against the source of all our sorrows: that northern nation which had so crushed us that we could barely afford to repair the leaking roof over our heads. Could such a man as Father be wrong? Particularly when he uttered nothing for me to rebut? I came to accept his rigid discipline and his hatred of our conquerors as a marine in boot camp might accept the rigors of his initiation as the necessary preparation for inevitable battle.

My earliest sense of injustice arose from my perception of the difference with which my sister and I were treated. Father indulged Dora in her every whim; to her he showed the respectful and at times the incongruously playful gallantry of the southern gentleman for his lady folk. I did not then see that this was the mask of a serenely assumed sense of complete masculine superiority over the supposedly weaker and gentler sex, and I wondered at moments if it was really so good a thing to be born male. But this was always tempered with angry fantasies of dominating Father by growing even fiercer and stronger than he. Of course, I yearned for his approval, even for his love. If he had any to give. But didn't he? I can remember moments when his eye seemed to soften when he gazed at me, and I distinctly recall my thrill at a rare moment when he cast his arm over my shoulder. Oh, how we might have understood each other! Or am I being nostalgically sentimental? Mightn't a Freudian today say that deep in Father's psyche he resented the fact that I was growing up hale and hearty, exempt from the bloodshed of a losing war, possessed of two arms and unburdened by the weight of an undying hatred for a conquering foe?

At any rate, all chance for an ultimate partnership between father and son exploded when my inexorable parent chose to see the humiliating and final defeat of his glorious plans for me in an unfortunate episode that occurred while I was studying law at the university. On the beautiful multicolumned lawn of Mr. Jefferson's masterpiece, I had encountered new friends from the old families of the Richmond area, who were considerably more liberated than the sons of the Calvinistic clans of Blue Hill. I was introduced to gin and whiskey and went to parties where I met and made love to women whom my mother and sister would have crossed the street to avoid. Indeed, I ran a bit wild—not surprising, I suppose, considering the repressions of my boyhood. All this might have been forgiven, even by Father, who, after all, had been to the university himself, had it not been for an incident that was not in keeping with his code of gentlemanly conduct.

Among my new friends there was a particularly rowdy small group, and not, I may add, from the better families, who made a fetish of preserving the resentments of the old South and glorying in violent racism. Some were simply showoffs; a few were grimly in earnest. I made the mistake of identifying their creed with the one that my father never articulated, and it seemed to me that I was simply proving myself a chip off the old block in joining them. Most of their activities reduced themselves to silly toasts at drinking parties, but at last they planned an overt act that obliterated the smile and shrug with which the university had so far viewed them.

A visiting law professor from Harvard, invited to Virginia to give two lectures, ventured to criticize the South's voting restrictions and expressed the hope that lynching would soon be a thing of the past. My little group took strong exception to such sentiments, and breaking into his assigned study on the Lawn late one night, we covered his desk with every kind of filth. We were witnessed, exposed, and expelled from the university.

Father, when I came home, was cold, distant, and unforgiving. "You have associated with trash and become trash. The man whose desk you violated was the guest of the university and entitled to believe that he would receive the hospitality of gentlemen. He will return to Harvard to say, with every justification, that our proudest seat of learning has become the haven for brutes. I can only conclude that some of the bad blood that came into the family with my grandmother's McClintock connections may have found its way into your veins."

The terrible thing about Father's obsession with genealogy was that it barred one from redemption. If you were cursed with bad genes, you were doomed. It might not be your fault, but you were still a kind of pariah. Father allowed me to come into his law firm and to take the bar exam, which did not then require a law degree, but, though he no longer supervised me with a meticulous care, his new coldness was worse than his old ire. Yet I worked hard and well, and I was even beginning to hope I could see a chink in the armor of his sustained disapproval when my life was changed by the passion that erupted between myself and my cousin Clara Caldwell.

Clara was my mother's niece, and it is time that I should say something about my mother. In many ways she was the perfect mate for Father: a tall, handsome woman, if a bit put-offing by the severity of her dress and manner, a wonderfully efficient housekeeper, and a much respected, even venerated leader of the local society. She was a woman of few words, but her words were very much to the point. She deferred to my father in almost all of his views and decisions, but on the rare occasions when she disagreed, she could be as firm and as stern as she had been at the end of the war, when she stood off a band of drunken ex-slaves who had threatened to take over the mansion. Mother had had to concede to her husband the apparently inalienable right of a father to train his son for the succession, but she had also seen that it was necessary to supply the driven lad with a minimum of sympathy, and she had allowed me as much of that as her undemonstrative nature permitted. Of course, I loved her.

Clara, her niece, small, dark, as witty as she was pretty, and as cheerful as she was frail, suffered from tuberculosis and spent most of her days in the house next to ours, the home of my uncle, Mother's brother, and his numerous brood. It was the second-best house in the village, and the Caldwells were the second-best family, and there was nothing to prevent a marriage between me and Clara but our kinship, easily overcome in the South of that day, and her illness. But this last obstacle, never mentioned, was silently accepted as a reason that poor Clara could never wed. She was not expected, as the brutal phrase was, to make old bones. Yet her buoyancy, her gaiety, the lovely ripple of her laughter, the shrewdness of her comments, the generosity of her attitudes seemed to defy the dismal if unuttered prognostications. To me she was the one shining light of Blue Hill.

Only with her could I discuss my troubles with Father. She was quick to put her hand on the essence of my problem.

"It sounds terrible to say it, but it has to be said," she told me. "You'd be better off, Lanny dear, if you could accept your resentment of Uncle James as something he deserves. Your hang-up is your reverence for his war record. Deep down—maybe even without being aware of it yourself—you think that such a hero can't be wrong. But he can, Lanny! He can be very wrong and still a hero, still a great man, if you like. To you he takes up all the room in Blue Hill. How can there be two such men in so small a place? So there you are! There's no room for you here!"

"And what can I do about that?"

"Isn't it obvious? Go elsewhere."

"Where?"

"Well, what about New York? That's where Roger Pryor went. You remember who he was?"

"Wasn't he the young firebrand in Charleston who waved his handkerchief to excite a mob of secessionists? And didn't he shout, 'Fire on Fort Sumter, and with this handkerchief I'll wipe up all the blood that's spilt!'"

"Exactly. He must have had a cloudy crystal ball. But he fought gallantly through the war and then went north to become an important judge in New York. Go thou and do likewise."

"Father would simply die if I did that."

"No such thing. He's much tougher than you think. And he's too tough for you. That doesn't mean that you're weak or in any way deficient, Lanny. It's simply that fathers have an unfair advantage. It's not cowardice to flee them. It's only common sense. Anyone else you can beat. Or at least you have a fair chance."

This was the first time we discussed my breaking away from Blue Hill, but thereafter it was the constant theme of our discourse. I began to be excited by the new image of myself as a man in charge of his own life, for better or—what did it matter?—even for very much the worse. I suddenly saw that I might become what the French writer Sartre today calls an existentialist. And out of this grew my awareness that my feelings for Clara had nothing to do with our kinship and that she was going to be an essential partner in any new life on which I embarked.

She had no shyness or reluctance in admitting that she fully returned the love that I at last found the courage to offer her, but she insisted, with a firmness that showed that she had anticipated our crisis, that we had to confine ourselves to friendship, as marriage was out of the question.

"Oh, dearest Lanny, you want to see yourself as an ardent Robert Browning breathing a new life into poor me, but I'm not Elizabeth Barrett. I'm neither a poet nor a
malade imaginaire,
as she probably was. I know what I am and what I'm in for, and I have the will to accept it. So let well enough alone, my love.
Help
me!"

But I couldn't accept this. I insisted that without her I was bound to lose my way. I finally induced her to take her doctor into her confidence and ask him if marriage was feasible for her, and she reluctantly did so, receiving the dubious answer that a recovery of health in her case was not an absolute impossibility. I clung to this; I built on it; I argued that it was all we needed. I worked myself into the full belief that I was indeed a Robert Browning and that love would work miracles with her lungs. In fact, I even persuaded myself that Clara would probably die if she
didn't
marry me.

At this point, both families awakened to what was going on. You might have thought that they were oddly late in doing so, but the notoriety of Clara's illness and the fact that as cousins and next-door neighbors she and I had always been close allowed them to attribute my visits to sympathy over her condition. Now, of course, such visits were strictly prohibited. Clara, however, was twenty-one, and her parents could hardly stop her from walking with me in their garden. They appealed to my father to use his influence, and he took a high stand with me.

"Do you want to be the death of your unfortunate cousin, sir?" he demanded. "Playing on the poor girl's emotions may be fatal to her. I forbid you to see her except at family gatherings, and I doubt if we shall have many of those until this sorry business has died down."

"I am not playing with her emotions, sir! It is my intention to marry her and take her to New York!"

That same day I moved out of the family mansion into a room in the one poor inn our village boasted. Father owned even that. He did not, however, throw me out. I resigned from his law firm and waited to hear from Clara. I had a few savings that would keep me for some weeks. After that I was on my own.

After three days of silence from both families, I received this note from Clara:

It seems you have crossed the Rubicon, my love. I fear that Uncle James may never forgive you. I do not see how I can desert you now. I have warned you, and you are resolved to ignore my warning. Very well. A girl can resist so long and no more. Let me know your plans, and I will join you. I have a little money. I enclose a bank statement showing how much. Consider it your own.

The person who brought me the note was my mother! She sat beside me, grimly silent, in the shabby little empty bar of the inn while I read it. Then she spoke.

"I don't suppose either of you has enough to live on if you marry and move north. You may know that I had a small legacy from an aunt who married in Boston. I have never spent it, as your father called it abolitionists' gold. It should keep you for a year. I am placing it in your account. It is not that I approve of what you and Clara are planning. But it's your lives, not mine."

"But, Mother dearest, what will Father say?"

"He will be much vexed. But I can handle him. Now I must go. Bless you, child."

Clara and I took a train to Richmond, where we were married and spent a week's honeymoon. Her parents pursued us, but what could they do? At length they gave in and even sent us a check on condition that in New York I should take her to a well-heated building. I of course agreed.