Theophilus North (21 page)

“Madam, as a member of this club I must restrain you from creating an unseemly disorder.” I added bitingly, “I had always heard that Mrs. Edom conducted herself as a woman of distinction, which has not always been said of her mistress.”

“What do you mean by
that?
”

I pointed to the clock. “You have only a quarter of an hour to wait.”

“What did you mean by that unpleasant remark?”

“It was not an unpleasant remark. It was a tribute to yourself, Mrs. Edom.”

“I am waiting—”

“If you sit down and stop abusing this club, I shall . . . give you a short explanation.”

She sat down and glared at me, expectantly. I returned to polishing my nails, but I began to speak offhandedly: “My dear wife does not engage in gossip. I have never heard her repeat a malicious remark—but once. By the way, we took the doctor's advice. We no longer serve the children kale soup and beef in brine.”

“You were about to tell me some remark about Mrs. Vanwinkle.”

“Oh, yes.” I lowered my voice and moved my chair toward hers. “There is a nickname that is going around about that otherwise
wonderful
woman.”

“A nickname!”

“My wife heard it from Mrs. Delgarde who heard it from Lady Bracknell who heard it from Mrs. Venable herself.”

“Mrs. Venable!”

I rose. “No! I don't circulate things like that. I've changed my mind.”

“You're a very exasperating man, Brother Asmodius. You'd better finish what you began.”

“All right,” I sighed, “but promise not to repeat it—least of all to Mrs. Vanwinkle.”

“I will
not
repeat it.”

“Well, Mrs. Venable heard that Mrs. Vanwinkle sent her husband—that great man—to Mrs. Temple's house to pick up a thirty-year-old egret feather, because she refused to believe Mrs. Temple's promised word that she would destroy it herself. Mrs. Venable said, ‘I shall not give another penny to those animal shelters until Mrs. Vanwinkle is locked up. She's a Delilah!' ”

“Delilah!”

“You remember that Delilah cut short the mighty Samson's hair whereby he lost his strength—so that his enemies could rush into his tent and blind him. She beat on cymbals and tambourines and danced on his prostrate body. Scholars of the Old Testament know very well that the story means that she performed a far more serious operation on him.”

Mrs. Vanwinkle had turned as white as a sheet. She was speechless.

“Shall I get you a drink of water?”

“Yes, please do.”

When I returned from the kitchen, Rip had climbed out of the fiddlers' gallery, descended the stairs, and was pounding on the locked door. I opened it.

Husband and wife stared at one another in silence. She accepted the glass from my hand without taking her eyes off Rip. Finally she said, “Nicholas, will you ask this dreadful man to leave the room?”

“This is my German professor, Pam. I'm driving him back to Newport in a few minutes. Ted, will you go upstairs and wait until I call you?”

“I'll start walking into town, Rip. You can pick me up on the road. Good morning, ma'am.”

And I went out the front door. As I passed the threshold I heard Mrs. Vanwinkle break into a convulsion of weeping.

It was a beautiful day. I walked for a quarter of an hour. Soon after I passed Tiverton I saw Mrs. Vanwinkle's car go by. She had lowered her veil but her head was held high. Not long after Rip stopped for me. I climbed into the car.

“You were very tough, Ted. . . . You were very tough.” He started the car. After a few minutes he said, “You were very tough.”

“I know I went too far, Rip, and I apologize.”

We drove in silence for a while.

Ten miles in silence. Then he said, “I told her you were an old joker way back in college days and that all that about Mrs. Venable was just horse-feathers. . . . But how the hell did you know about Mrs. Temple's goddamned feather?”

“I won't tell.”

He stopped the car and cracked my skull against his.

“Oh, you're an old son-of-a-bitch, Ted—
but I got a thousand dollars to go to Berlin!
”

“Well, you gave me a wonderful lunch at the Café de Paris—when you were low in funds, remember?”

At Mrs. Keefe's

The events that led to my obtaining an apartment occurred during my sixth week in Newport, perhaps later. I was living at the “Y,” contentedly enough; my relations there were impersonal and left me time to prepare for my classes. I was on good terms with the superintendent—unjustly called “Holy Joe,” for he was not at all sanctimonious. From time to time, for a change, I would descend to the “library” where card games of the family type, like hearts and three jacks, were permitted and desultory conversation tolerated.

It was in this library that I met a remarkable young man whose portrait and unhappy predicaments I find recorded in my Journal. Elbert Hughes was a reedy youth, barely twenty-five, belonging to that often wearisome category of human beings known as “sensitive.” This adjective once meant intensely aware of aesthetic and spiritual values; then it took on a sense of someone quick to resent slights; recently it has become a euphemism for someone incapable of coping with even the smaller demands of our daily practical life. Elbert chiefly fulfilled the third description. He was short but delicately proportioned. His eyes were deeply set under a protruding forehead, lending an intensity to his gaze. His fingers were much occupied with a tentative mustache. He was something of a dandy and on cool evenings wore a black velveteen jacket and a flowing black tie, recalling the students I had seen near the Beaux-Arts Academy when I lived in Paris. Elbert gave me a partial account of his life and I presently discovered that he was a sort of genius—subdivision, calligraphic mimicry. He was a Bostonian and had followed courses in a technical high school there, devoting himself passionately to copperplate writing and to lettering, with a particular interest in tombstone inscriptions.

By the age of twenty he had secured a profitable job at a leading jeweler's establishment where he furnished the models for engraved inscriptions on presentation silver, for formal invitations and calling cards. For another firm he wrote diplomas on parchment and honorary tributes to retiring bank presidents. He made no claims to originality; he imitated scripts from standard “style books” or from admired early English and American “plate” in museums and private collections. But that was not all. He could copy any signature or individual penmanship after a moment's profound “absorption” in a model before him. He could furnish a receipt in the hand of almost any signer of the Declaration of Independence at a moment's notice. He was a wonder.

It was not new to me that these “sensitives” are an unhappy mixture of humility and boldness. One evening he asked me to write a sentiment and to sign it. I wrote (in French, of which he did not know a word) a
maxime
of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld and signed it with my own name. He studied it gravely for a few minutes and then wrote:
Mr. Theodore Theophilus North regrets that he will be unable to accept the kind invitation of the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and of Mrs. So-and-so for such-and-such an evening
.” It was in my own hand, staggeringly in my own hand. Then he wrote it again and passed it over to me, saying lightly, “That is how Edgar Allan Poe would have written it. I like to do his handwriting best. When I do his handwriting I feel him moving my hand. People say I look like him. Can you see that I look like him?”

“Yes. But I never heard that he was much of a draughtsman.”

“We're a lot alike though. We were both born in Boston. . . . The thing I like to draw best is the lettering on tombstones. There's a lot about graves and tombs in Poe's writings. He's my favorite writer that ever lived.”

“What are you doing in Newport?” I asked.

“Much the same kind of work I did in Boston. A man named Forsythe saw some presentation copies I had made on vellum of a poem by Edgar A. Poe in Poe's handwriting, and some alphabets I had drawn up in several styles. He said he was an architect and building contractor with an office in Newport. He offered me a pretty good salary to come down here and work for him. I do lettering for the fronts of buildings—post offices, town halls, things like that. I do gravestones for masons too. I like that best.”

I had been staring at our (mine and Poe's) replies to the Governor.

“I'll show you something else,” he said. He extracted from a portfolio beside him a leaf of the Governor's personal stationery—seal embossed—and wrote the invitation for which he had twice written the reply.

“Is that the Governor's own handwriting?”

“I've done lots of work for both his office and his mansion. I've worked for all the best stationers and I collect samples. I've got a trunk full of the best stuff. There are collectors all over the world, you know—they keep it secret. I trade duplicates.” He laid before me: “The White House,” “L'Ambassade de France,” “John Pierpont Morgan,” “The Foreign Office,” Enrico Caruso's cartoon of himself as a letterhead, a bookplate by Stanford White. . . .

“Are you doing that kind of work for Forsythe here in Newport?”

“Not very much,” he answered, evasively, returning the “samples” to their portfolio. “We do something like it.”

He changed the subject.

Elbert Hughes might have been,
should
have been, good company, but he wasn't. He suffered like many of his kind from alternations of vitality and depletion. He would launch forth on a subject with enthusiasm only to fall silent in a short time like a deflated bellows. He was engaged to be married. Abigail was a wonderful woman; she was (he whispered) divorced; she was six years older than he was and had two children. He added, with abated enthusiasm, that he had saved up three thousand dollars to buy a house (where they would presumably live gloomily ever after). One couldn't help admiring and even liking Elbert, but I began losing interest in him; I tend to avoid the disconsolate. I am indebted to him, however, for awakening my interest in an aspect of Newport that I had neglected. Elbert took to bringing down to our little library the work he was doing; he said that the light was better than that provided in our rooms upstairs, as indeed it was. I would occasionally use the library for my own “homework,” when it was not also occupied by a conversational gathering. One evening I asked permission to see what he was engaged upon. He answered confusedly that it was just “some nonsense he was doing for fun.” It was a letter from the eminent historian George Bancroft inviting the equally eminent Louis Agassiz to an evening of “punch and good talk.” Elbert seemed to have given himself the enjoyment of writing Agassiz's reply to this attractive invitation.

“Where are the originals of these letters?” I asked.

“Mr. Forsythe has a big collection. He says he advertises for them and buys them from the owners.”

Entirely apart from Elbert's “fun” with such documents, I was delighted with them. That was Newport's Fifth City—the city that had disappeared leaving little trace behind it—the Newport of the mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals. My various jobs were nourishing my interest in the Second City, the Sixth City, and the Seventh City; I was living in the Ninth City. In my early twenties I had fancied myself as an archaeologist. Here was a field for excavation. Dr. Schliemann had possessed a large private fortune; I had not a dollar to spare. I reminded myself of an old saying I had read somewhere: “To the impassioned will nothing is impossible.”

There were still a few half-mornings and half-afternoons free in my schedule. I prepared myself by visiting the “People's Library,” and “reading up” on the period. Then I visited the antiquaries and second-hand stores. I nursed the hope that I might come upon things that no one else had spotted. I concentrated on letters and manuscripts—diaries, correspondences, job-lots of books and papers from old houses, family photograph albums, the emptyings of attics. . . . The James family, the Agassiz families (the great father and the great son), the Bancrofts, Longfellow. Longfellow spent his summers at Nahant, but he often visited his friend George Washington Greene at West Greenwich near Narragansett Bay and Greene's parents who lived in Newport. Two of his best-known poems show his interest in our First City, “The Skeleton in Armor” and “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.”

The “antique shops” were still selling objects from the First and Second Cities. The vogue for taking a half-condescending pleasure in the furniture and decoration of the Victorian age was still twenty years in the future. Here and there I found collections of daguerreotypes, framed letters or poems signed by the notable men of the time; but these had already been discovered and were beyond my means. I descended to the second-hand stores and received permission to climb ladders with a flashlight, to poke in old barrels and open old dressers, the flotsam and jetsam of the years: here a clergyman's wife had sold a lifetime of her husband's sermons for rag paper, a thrifty merchant's family their father's account books, and so on.