The Young Apollo and Other Stories (9 page)

We were sitting on the veranda, and I turned my eyes now to the sea and the racing sailboats, white specks on the gray-blue. Adelaide watched me anxiously.

"What is it, Cousin Kate? What are you thinking of?"

"Oh, nothing in particular." I closed my eyes for a mo-ment. Why should I make a fool of myself? Why should I deprive this foolish creature of a husband with whom, after the mild initial disappointment of a fumbling wedding night, she would settle down to a life of laughs and trips and parties? Wouldn't Beverly brighten up an existence stifled in a widow's dreary routine? I was taking her too seriously, Beverly too seriously, and myself too seriously. He and Adelaide would be a perfect case of symbiosis. Maybe even God had planned it that way.

"Don't worry about the bed side of things, my dear. Beverly's a man, and men can do anything. I'm told they even like it!"

Adelaide laughed and hugged me so tightly that I had to push her off. She even made me give her away at the wedding.

***

The honeymoon lasted only a week, for Beverly had promised to return for a bachelors' dinner given for one of Newport's rare old bucks who was getting married at last at age fifty. What was very odd was that neither Beverly nor his bride saw fit on their return to call on me or even to drop a card. Such a pointed omission could have only a serious reason, and I waited, with some curiosity and even a mild apprehension, to learn what it was.

My explanation came one day at noon when I was seated alone in my cabana at Bailey's Beach with a novel that was hardly amusing enough to distract me from gazing at the sea and the bathers. It was generally known that I did not welcome visitors at this time; Newport was accustomed to my matutinal grumpiness, and I was a bit surprised when Adelaide, fully dressed for some luncheon party, with no concessions to the sea or open air, asked if she could join me for a chat. "Chat" was the word she incongruously used, though her tense, set, flat, stupid face boded no such trivia.

"It's not my chatting time," I answered gruffly. "But you're welcome to a seat if you need a rest."

Adelaide plumped herself down on a stool and was silent for a long moment. At length she spoke up. "You may have wondered, Cousin Kate, why I have not called on you before."

"When I start wondering, my dear, you may say I'm wandering."

"And why," she pursued, ignoring my comment, "Beverly has not consulted you on your end-of-season ball."

"There's plenty of time for that. And I'm not even sure I'm going to give one."

"That's just as well, then. For my husband says he's not going to have any part in it. He says that the time for the kind of party you and he gave is past. That the job of breaking up the old ways has been done, and it's now up to him to create a more serious and stable society."

"Fancy! And one, I take it, in which I'm to have no part? The old nag is turned out to pasture?"

"Well, he didn't put it quite so crudely."

"Adelaide," I said severely, "you came here to say something even more disagreeable than that. Well, say it!"

I was interested at last. The woman, for once, was almost interesting. She had some spirit, or at least spite, in her, after all.

"It's this, then. You sacrificed me to a man you thought was your protégé. Your property. Well, now he's going to sacrifice you for me! He's going to make
me
the Mrs. Kate Rives of Newport!"

"Well, well!" I let my novel drop to the ground. "This beats fiction any day. How have I sacrificed you? To what strange deity have I offered so untempting a morsel?"

"To the god of your own pleasure!" Adelaide's face had turned a bright pink. "You knew what awaited me. Do you want to hear what happened on my wedding night?"

"Avidly."

"I'm sure you do. It was all that your jaded, decadent curiosity could have asked. My husband of a few hours made it very clear to me that he had no interest in me physically, that he offered me instead what he termed a 'congenial partnership' which would take us both to the top of the social ladder."

"Wasn't that more or less what you might have expected? Wasn't it what Newport rather took for granted?"

"I expected the partnership, yes, but I expected more. Because you had assured me there would be more. That I was marrying a man! And you
knew
he wasn't! You knew all about him!"

"What makes you think that?"

"Because you reek of such things! Do you deny it?"

I paused a moment. "No," I said at last. "Because any way you take him, he's good enough for you. You were nobody, and now you'll be somebody. Unless you're a complete fool, you'll learn to enjoy it."

"I'm going to try, anyway. And half my fun will be knowing that I'm undoing half the stupid things you made Beverly do."

"Oh, get out of here. I want to read my book."

By the time I had picked it up, she was gone. I had little compunction about her. No, my disgust was all with myself, for having so long put up with such a little rat as Beverly Dean, whose only ambition had been to replace Mrs. Astor with me and me with himself. Of course, he had no loyalties; the women he betrayed were only fantasies of himself. I had no doubt that he pictured himself, in his mind's eye, as a despotic hostess, dazzling in diamonds and ruling a world turned court. Adelaide would be his bank, not his hostess. And he would never leave her, as he would never find a richer or more compliant wife. He would grow fat and shrill, autocratic and occasionally obscene, with bigger and bigger jeweled cufflinks and studs, and when the social world ultimately tired of him, as they tired of every new favorite, he would become bitter and misanthropic, and Adelaide would have her ultimate revenge by supporting him in his lonely luxury and ignoring his sour complaints.

That night, at home, I was glad when my husband arrived for one of his rare Newport weekends. He listened politely, over a bottle of the finest Burgundy, while I voiced my grim little tale.

"Well, my dear, you have had the dubious privilege of presiding over the decline and fall of Newport society. But do not think you can be a Gibbon. If its golden age was a fiction, so will be its twilight. It really is hardly worth recording."

"But couldn't you say that of any period of history?"

"Perhaps. But if history, as has been said, is only biography, your Beverly is at best only a small footnote."

Which is what this memorandum is. Later that year we turned the Rives castle into an orphanage and took a cruise around the world.

W
HEN
M
RS.
W
INTHROP
C
HANLER
paid her last visit to my little
pavilion
in the Forest of Fontainbleau in the early 1950s, she had already passed her eightieth birthday and was the last survivor of what I like to think of as the galaxy of the American Renaissance. She had been dubbed by Henry James the most intellectual American woman (or had he said the only intellectual?); she had sat with Henry Adams under the blue brilliance of the windows of Chartres; she had motored in Italy and in Spain with Edith Wharton. As a girl, she had played the piano by listening to Liszt; as an equestrian, she had studied
manège
in Vienna. Tall and serene, she had gazed down the little green slope that unrolled from my terrace through geometrical garden plots to the
pièce d'eau
in the middle distance and asked me, "Tell me one thing, Leonardo Luchesi. What have you done to deserve so much beauty in your life? Have you sold you soul to the devil?"

"Not quite. I may have mortgaged it. Let us hope that I shall have paid it off before my time comes."

Have I? I'm afraid not quite. But I wasn't going to tell Mrs. Chanler that. She wouldn't have understood. Or should I say, she wouldn't have sympathized, for she understood many things. My point is that she had never encountered poverty or need. Her galaxy may have been, in my opinion anyway, the finest group that the culture of the New World has ever produced, but they were still a small, privileged, and even snobbish circle. If
they
had sold their souls for beauty, the bargain was well hidden. At least there was no trace of it. The same could not be said of mine.

I thought that day of baring my mortgaged soul to Mrs. Chanler, but I repressed the impulse. She would have been a wonderful listener, but I was not to forget that she had been raised by American expatriates in the Rome of Pio Nono and was the most devout of Catholics. Was there anyone who would see me quite as honestly as I saw myself? Not now. Since Mrs. Leila Warren is dead, and her personality lost in the glitter of the great art collection that I helped her put together, I can address these thoughts only to her shade.

***

I was born in Apulia, in the lower part of the Italian boot, in the poorest section of what was then a very poor peninsula, in the 1880s, in the coastal town of Trani. The book
Christ Stopped at Eboli
was later to describe vividly the dark poverty of that area, but I still cherish the mildly compensating memory that we had of the glory of the Adriatic at our doorstep. As a boy, lonely and dreamy and uncongenial with my clamorous siblings and schoolmates, I used to take long walks down the beaches and ponder what marvels might lie across the sea. My particular musing spot was by the plain bare Gothic church, standing by itself away from stores and habitations, on the very edge of the shoreline, like some great stranded wreck raising its lofty campanile over the long sands and the infinite stretch of blue water. There, with the ever circling, squawking gulls, I had beauty to myself as a solace. A solace for everything. It was there that I resolved that if I could have beauty in my life, I should have all that I needed.

My father, Antonio Luchesi, who as a bartender made a bare living for a large family, had an older brother who had emigrated to New York and achieved there a degree of economic independence as a tailor. He had married but had had no children, and as his wife was no longer of an age to have any, he offered to take one of his nephews as an apprentice and possible heir. My parents, relieved to be freed of at least one of their demanding brood, picked me as the one who was brightest at school and the most likely to learn a new tongue and new ways, and also as the child least likely to adapt to the rough-and-tumble of Italian village life, and so at age fifteen I was duly dispatched to the New World. I was not to return to my native land until I was equipped to deal with it as a source of art rather than the home of misery.

My uncle was a kindly but stolid and wholly unimaginative man who saw in me an able enough assistant and a docile schoolboy, but who hardly conceived that I would need anything beyond an elementary education to be a good tailor. It is to my dear aunt that I owe everything. She had all an Italian woman's longing for motherhood, and she clasped me to her bosom as her adopted son. It was she who persuaded my uncle, with much difficulty, to hand over enough cash to supplement the meager scholarship I had won at a city college, on the theory that a more literate tailor would attract a classier clientele. And of course she knew, as my constant confidante, that my only passion was for art and that I had chosen all the courses that bore on it and was reading every book on the subject I could get my hands on. My uncle never asked me about my classes or my reading—the university was a closed book to him—and when, graduating at twenty, I had to tell him that I was seeking a job in an art gallery, he exploded in wrath, called me an ungrateful scoundrel, and kicked me out of his home. Never mind. My faithful aunt had her own savings and helped me until I was able to take care of myself. I am happy to say that I was able ultimately to repay her many times over, and in his old age I made things up with my uncle. A good Italian will always forgive success.

On my early years I need not dwell. At first I performed every kind of task for a Chelsea dealer in pictures, bric-a-brac, and antique furniture. I swept the shop and cleaned it; I acted as a packer, later as a salesman and buyer, and eventually, with my aunt's financial backing, as a very junior partner. I read and studied at night; I explored other galleries on weekends and visited every museum in town; I was a totally dedicated student and never married. I moved in the course of time to other and much more important shops, and I began to acquire clients who retained me to find them beautiful things. I always had faith in my star, and I was sure that I would at last encounter what I thought of as the ultimate collector.

When I met Erastus Dunlop, I believed for some years that it was he. I met him at an exhibition of the paintings of a deceased collector, which were about to be offered for auction at Parke-Bernet. A gallery employee had respectfully pushed up a chair before a painting that the great collector wished to study at his leisure, and the stout, stocky, impressive magnate was silently contemplating it as he smoked a cigar. I took my stand beside him and watched his profile intently.

The painting might have been by Gerome or Delaroche; it was one of those academic historical scenes painted with vivid colors and painstaking realism to tell, of course, a dramatic story. Stretched on cushions spread over the floor in a dark, richly paneled chamber is the gaunt gray figure of the aged and dying Queen Elizabeth, whose haggard eyes and gaping mouth show that she is desperately trying to communicate something to the young Robert Cecil kneeling assiduously at her side. Standing behind these two figures is a small group of elaborately dressed courtiers, contemplating the grave event in silent awe. One could imagine Cecil uttering his famous plea, "Your Majesty
must
go to bed," and her haughty reply: "Little man, little man, the word
must
is not used to princes."

At length Dunlop turned to me, whom he didn't know from Adam, as if he took for granted that anyone standing so close to him was on his staff, or ought to be, and asked gruffly, "What do you think of it?"

"I don't think. I react. It's melodrama, isn't it?"

"Is it? Why do modern critics say this sort of thing isn't art? It states precisely what the artist wants to state, doesn't it? Could it possibly be clearer or more accurately shown? Of course, I'm not going to buy it, because collectors, the real ones, anyway, don't buy this sort of thing anymore. But can you put it in a few plain words just why that is so?"