Читать книгу Mrs. Parkington - Louis Bromfield - Страница 3

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Outside the snow was falling, thickly in great wet flakes, so that the sound of the traffic on Park Avenue coming through the drawn curtains was muted and distant. Mrs. Parkington, seated before her mirror with a half-pint of champagne by her side, thought how nice it was to have a Christmas this year which seemed like Christmas. True, tomorrow the snow would be turned to slush, discolored by soot, and those great machines bought by the personable and bumptious mayor would be scooping it up and hauling it off to the North River; but snow—the mere idea of snow—was pleasant. Just the sight of it drifting down in soft white flakes through the bright auras of the street lights made you feel happy and content. And it summoned memories, very long memories, of the days when snow was not a nuisance in New York but brought out sleds and sleighs and there was racing in the park, and the sound of sleigh bells was heard everywhere in the city. Gus had loved the cutter racing; it suited his flamboyant nature. When one was eighty-four and in good health and spirits and had a half-pint of Lanson every evening just before dinner, one had a long memory. Long memories were perhaps common among widowed old ladies but memories so crammed with romance and excitement as that of Mrs. Parkington were rare.

She was doing her own hair, setting the waves exactly as they should be. She had always done her own hair and now at eighty-four she had no intention of giving it up. Ten years ago she had had it cut, not so much as a concession to fashion, as because it was simpler to do and less trouble to keep in order. She could not abide untidy women. Hair hanging down in strings at the nape of the neck implied some obscure weakness of character or an untidiness of mind.

She finished the last of the half-pint and suddenly called, “Mattie! Mattie!”

At the sound of her voice there appeared out of the adjoining bedroom the stout figure of a woman in her late sixties. She had a curious figure, almost round like the figures of those toys which return to an upright position no matter how often they are pushed over. In fact Mattie resembled such a toy in a great many ways. Her face was plump and round and with a snub nose. Her gray hair was done severely in a knot at the nape of her neck. She was dressed neatly in a gray dress with buttons down the front and a very full skirt. She was a Swede by birth and she was altogether a remarkable woman. She was masseuse, hair-dresser, secretary and friend, and she knew with a devastating and intimate knowledge everything that had happened to Mrs. Parkington during the forty-one years of close association.

“Yes, Mrs. Parkington,” said Mattie.

“Tell Taylor to bring up another half-pint.”

Mattie looked at her silently for a moment. Then she said, “Do you think it wise, Mrs. Parkington? If you’re having wine with dinner your acidity will be awful tomorrow. You’ll be like a vinegar bottle.”

Mrs. Parkington laughed, “I won’t have wine for dinner. Do as I say!”

“Very well, Mrs. Parkington, only don’t complain to me tomorrow. You know how you always feel after Christmas.”

The old woman did not answer her and Mattie went out and in a little while Mrs. Parkington rose from the dressing table and went into her own small sitting-room. She had a spare figure, very straight with very pretty hands and feet. She wore a black evening dress with a great deal of black lace to hide the thinness of her throat and shoulders and blue-veined wrists. Her eyes were remarkable, blue and very bright, like the surface of a mountain lake glittering in the sun.

The sitting-room was small and cluttered by a great deal of furniture, many books and photographs and bibelots on little tables. All of the articles were obviously expensive and a great many of them were ugly but she was fond of each one of them. When she moved out of the great house on Fifth Avenue to make way for progress and a seventy-story skyscraper, she had collected for what Mattie described as the “boodwar,” the things which she wished to keep about her because of the happy or sentimental associations they had for her. This room was the result, cozy and cluttered but warm. There were objects out of the “cosy corner” of the eighties and nineties, objects picked up during yachting expeditions in the Mediterranean and the Far East, two atrocious gilt chairs sold to her at a huge price as authentic sixty years ago before she learned about such things, a great many books, mostly obscure or forgotten novels in French and English, chosen not for their literary qualities but because they had attracted her by some character or incident; a chaise longue, a long “pier glass” with an ornate frame, and countless photographs of yachting parties and picnics at Newport, and shooting parties in Scotland and Austria. Nearly all of them were group photographs, as if all her life had been spent among crowds. Scattered among them were a few portrait photographs—one of “Major” Parkington, her deceased husband, one each of her two dead sons, William and Herbert, one of her daughter, the Duchess, a signed portrait of Edward VII as the Prince of Wales, and one of the Princess, a daguerreotype, very yellowed and dimmed by age, of a sturdy-faced man standing with his hand on the shoulder of a small pretty woman clad in a severe black dress with a collar of white lace. The daguerreotype stood on her desk, framed like a valuable miniature, in a frame of onyx and diamonds. It bore in a faded gold script across the bottom the legend, Forsythe and Wicks, portraits, Leaping Rock, Nevada. And there was a small old-fashioned photograph, which in its own onyx and diamond frame seemed to have a special importance, of a rather ugly but very chic woman sitting up very straight. Across the face of it written in fading ink was the inscription—à Ma Chère Amie Susie—Aspasie.

Her granddaughter Madeleine—the one who chose a cowboy as her third husband, said the sitting-room looked like the nest of a pack rat, but Mrs. Parkington only laughed because very few people ever saw it, and in any case it had been a very long time since mockery or disapproval had had any power to touch her. Her sitting-room was her own where she went when she wanted to be alone, in those moments when she felt impelled to withdraw from all the crumbling world about her and retire into the warmth of memories of the days when everything was pleasant and there seemed to be no trouble in the world.

As she came into the room she went straight to the old pier glass and faced it to look at herself. The glass had long ago begun to show streaks and splotches from age but she had never troubled to have it resilvered. Now there was scarcely any reason to go to the trouble; it would last out her time and afterward no one would want it. It wasn’t the sort of mirror which gained value with age; it was merely ugly and no one would ever buy it save as a freak, the way people now bought ugly Victorian things because they were becoming smart.

It was an odd thing about fashion. She had lived to see countless fashions in furniture, in architecture, in dress. Some of the changes she regretted but on the whole it seemed to her that the taste of Americans had improved immensely and that the present fashions were not only beautiful but simple and practical as well.

She stood for a moment looking at herself in the streaked mirror, thinking: You are old and withered, but you’ve stood time better than the mirror. Both of you have seen a good deal. And that is something for which both of you should be thankful.

The face was indeed immensely wrinkled, with many fine lines which had come of living, sometimes recklessly, sometimes sensibly, always extravagantly; but the extravagance, she thought, was not her fault. There had always been money, so much of it that it had ceased to have any value. She had always had whatever she wanted simply for the asking. Nowadays they said this person or that one was rich but they no longer knew what it was to be rich in the sense the Major had been rich. It had been an immense, almost incalculable wealth, with no income taxes to devour it before it ever reached you, and no reason to calculate here and there how you were to pay taxes and still have what you wanted.

She was still a very rich old woman, and as she had grown older she had wanted less and less of luxury and show, and so in a way she was still as rich as she had always been. In some ways it was good to have less money; for one thing it gave her an excuse to get rid of that vast absurd château, set among shops and skyscrapers on Fifth Avenue without trees or parks or even a blade of grass near it. The Major had wanted her to live there until she died and the children after her death, but he himself died before he knew what was happening to the world. He didn’t live long enough to see this new America with laws which would have put him in jail for life for the very acts which in his day had been called, “developing the resources of the country.” She had no illusions about her husband. He had built up a vast fortune, but at heart he had always been a bandit. She did even concede that perhaps in his day, when there were so many of his kind in America, it had never occurred to him that he was a thief, a swindler and a super-confidence man.

There was a knock at the door and Mattie came in. In and out of her skirts, like animated bundles of silken feathers, ran Bijou and Mignon, the Pekingese, yapping and barking. Directly behind her came Taylor carrying on a silver tray another half-pint of champagne and a glass. He looked as he always did, dignified to the point of grimness. He too had been with her for a long time, so long that his grimness and dignity sometimes filled her with a wild desire to laugh at him, considering how well they knew each other and how long they had been together. But she never did laugh because she knew that it would hurt him far more than any rebuke or sarcasm she might utter. Taylor had a frame and it was possible for him to live only so long as he kept within it. He was English but even in England frames were beginning at last to be smashed.

He put down the tray on the table beside the chaise longue and she said, “Thank you, Taylor.”

He stood very stiffly as if he, like Mattie, disapproved of the second small bottle. “Is that all, madame?”

“That’s all. No one has come yet?”

“No, madame.”

“I’ll be down directly to look at the flowers.”

“I think they look very well, madame.”

“I’m sure they do, but the florists’ men always make them too stiff and perfect.”

“Very well, madame.”

It was an old story—this business of the flowers. The florist, like Taylor, had a frame and he always wanted to stay within it. And his flowers looked that way. You knew by the way he arranged them that he was a vulgar man. He had no feeling for flowers. He liked a “rich effect.” Taylor was the same way. Taylor had never become reconciled to giving up the pomp and importance of the big house. Vulgarity, Mrs. Parkington reflected, was a strange thing, at once very simple and very complex. A few people were born with it. A great many learned by experience what it was and lost it. But most people were born vulgar and remained so to the end of their lives. And again there were so many varieties of vulgarity, not only ostentation, but hypocrisy and false simplicity, and pretentiousness ... well, she would think about all that another time. Commonness she liked. People who were common never suffered from the unforgivable sin of pretentiousness.

They would begin arriving for dinner soon and she wanted to be there to receive them. All her life she had been punctual, standing before the fire to welcome them as they came in. It was very important to have good manners and to be punctual; that was one of the things she had learned. If you had great beauty or genius you could afford to be slack, but there was really no other excuse. And even that excuse was not a very good one.

She seated herself by the tray where Mattie was pouring out the champagne, skillfully as a waiter at the Paris Ritz. Mattie was really a remarkable woman. She knew how to do everything.

The two Pekingese jumped into Mrs. Parkington’s lap and licked her hands and she caressed them for a second, her wrinkled face softening with affection. A great many people didn’t like Pekingese, especially men, but that was because they did not understand them ... that their courage and dignity and self-importance was too great for their small bodies and so they, like little men suffering the same lack of proportion, sometimes appeared to be merely boisterous and annoying.

She looked up at Mattie and said, “You take that glass, Mattie, and fetch me my own out of the dressing room.”

Mattie looked at her directly out of her blue, ageless Swedish eyes, a look of reproof.

“You know I never drink champagne, madame.”

The old woman laughed, “Well, tonight you’re going to drink it. It’s Christmas night. We’re going to drink as old friends and I want no nonsense.”

Mattie did not answer her but went quietly to fetch the other glass. Probably, thought Mrs. Parkington, she thinks I’m growing childish, and perhaps I am. But no matter. She could accept that too as she had accepted many things.

When Mattie returned they raised their glasses and Mrs. Parkington said, “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.” And as she drank she thought: I may not be here next year—without fear or regret. She was no more alarmed at the thought of death than she was now of the tragedies she had encountered in her long life. She had had more than her share of them, so many tragedies and such violent ones that people sometimes said that she must be a woman with no heart to have endured and survived them. That was only because they did not understand; they did not know that through sorrow she had acquired peace and wisdom. Tonight on Christmas night she was quite ready to die but she had a curious feeling that she must go on living because there was some new tragedy impending. It was not a new feeling—this sense of foreboding. She had had it before, many times, since that first occasion long ago when she knew that there was no use in searching for her father and mother because they were already dead. The feeling of presentiment was very nearly infallible.

She put down her glass quickly and said, “Well, there we are, Mattie. Another Christmas nearly over.” She crossed to the table and opened the jewel case and took out her diamond necklace. “Here, Mattie, fasten it,” she said, “it will make me feel brighter tonight.”

She needed the necklace just as she needed the extra glass of champagne. The prospect of meeting all the family wearied her. She could endure them separately but together they appalled her, all save her great-granddaughter Jane. The rest were dull, dull, dull. Oh, God, they were dull. Her granddaughter, Madeleine, it was true, sometimes made her laugh; Madeleine with all her husbands and now her cowboy, was common and sexy, as if the Major had been born again in woman’s clothing.

Now she would have to face them all again at the annual Christmas party which had been going on for thirty years. She was tired of her offspring and their offspring and their offspring’s offspring. She had felt very detached from them for a long time now, as if they were connected to her only by a slender thread which might be snipped off at any time, leaving her free.

When Mattie had fastened the diamond necklace she said, “Keep the dogs up here, Mattie. They make the Duchess nervous.”

Mattie said, “Very good, madame.” And then suddenly, “How is the Duchess, madame? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her.”

“Not much changed.”

It was odd how, although her daughter Alice had been married twice since her divorce from the Duke, she and Mattie and the whole family still called her the Duchess ... probably because Alice, even when she had had too much to drink, had dignity ... a kind of blank and meaningless tragic dignity. She was a period piece out of the nineties when rich American girls had married impecunious peers.

With a sigh Mrs. Parkington went through the door Mattie held open for her. The servant did not close the door at once but stood in the open doorway watching until her mistress reached the lift and went inside closing the door behind her. She still remained standing there, in an attitude of intense listening until she heard the elevator stop two floors below and heard Taylor open the door. Then she went inside the door of the boudoir to turn down the bed and put the dressing table in order. Once during her work, she paused and stood looking at the photographs in the “boodwar” and at last she picked up a small photograph of Mrs. Parkington’s two sons as boys. Eddie must have been about seventeen at the time and Herbert about nineteen. They stood in front of the stables at Newport each holding the bridle of a saddle horse, dressed in the funny old-fashioned clothes of the opening of the century.

After a long time Mattie put down the photograph, sighed and, turning, said, “Come Mignon! Come Bijou! We’ll go and have some supper.” But clearly she wasn’t thinking of the dogs. Her round, well-polished face wore a look of pity and abstraction, as if she had lost herself in the maze of the long distant past.

In the small drawing-room, Mrs. Parkington went from vase to vase of flowers, setting them right, giving each great luxurious bouquet a touch or pat, just enough to disarrange the florist’s rigid pattern and restore to the blossoms their right to existence as flowers. She loved flowers, not only as things of beauty but as symbols of the country and the open air and nature itself, from which she had been shut away all too much by the very circumstances of her life.

This room was quite different from the “pack rat’s nest” abovestairs. It was a beautiful room, and she knew it was beautiful and secretly was proud of it as a kind of symbol of her own achievement—that she had begun life in a boardinghouse in Leaping Rock, Nevada, passed through period after period of monstrous taste and finally emerged with an extraordinary knowledge of periods and architecture and the history of painting and decoration. She had never had any education at all beyond learning to read and write and do sums, but all her life she had been clever and God had endowed her with a memory which never forgot anything, and now, at eighty-four, she spoke French and German and English and was an authority on many subjects. It was not schools which educated people: it was something inside themselves.

And it was not money alone which had made the beauty of this room, but knowledge and taste, things which could not, despite the Major’s ideas to the contrary, be bought.

When she had finished with the flowers she went to the fireplace and stood beneath the Romney with her back to it enjoying the gentle warmth of the fire. The room before her seemed to her to have a kind of glow about it, of mahogany and jade and crystal and flowers.

Standing there she wondered who would be the first to arrive. She hoped it would not be “the Duchess.” She felt ill at ease with her own daughter as if the girl who was herself now over sixty, were a stranger. And the sight of her was always distressing because Alice was a kind of symbol of a something which, even now after forty-five years, still had the power of making her blush and feel ashamed.

She was disappointed for in a moment Taylor opened the tall mahogany door and in his English statesman’s voice, faintly deformed by the echo of a cockney youth, announced, “Mrs. Sanderson!” If Taylor had had his way, Mrs. Parkington knew, he would have ignored Alice’s other no less unfortunate marriages, and announced “The Duchess de Brantès,” but she had put an end to that snobbery long ago. Mrs. Parkington thought it silly to announce the guests at a family dinner but she had not the heart to deny Taylor a second pleasure and satisfaction.

Her daughter came in dressed in a gown which the old woman thought after the first glance, was much too young for her. Alice had never had any sense of choosing the proper clothes and she had stubbornly refused to allow anyone else to choose for her. She was wearing in her hair above her sallow face an absurd ornament of artificial flowers, sequins and tulle. Only a young and beautiful woman could have carried it off and Alice was neither. She looked like the Major’s side of the house, big and touched by what the old lady felt must be a congenital and inherited blowziness. Her drinking contributed nothing toward greater neatness or chic. Her maid might send her out looking almost chic but very early in the course of the evening, sometimes even before she arrived at dinner, she began to go to pieces. Her hair grew untidy, her corsets slipped up, her stockings wrinkled. Lately she had taken to spilling things at table. It wasn’t only Alice’s congenital untidiness, Mrs. Parkington knew; drink made it much worse. Only last week Alice had fallen off her chair during the music after dinner at the Desmonds.

Now, as her daughter crossed the room toward her, she watched for the signs. There were none. Alice seemed to be quite, as her father put it in the old days, “on an even keel,” but you could never tell how much she had had to drink in the bathroom out of the Listerine bottle. She was like her father that way, too, but the Major had had a prodigious head. Mrs. Parkington had seen him drink four times as much as the men around him who grew tipsy, without even showing any signs. It was an accomplishment he had used in business deals to make for him millions of dollars.

Alice was quite near now. She embraced her mother, kissing her on the wrinkled cheek and saying, “Merry Christmas, Mother.” And although she turned away her head, it was no good. There was a smell of spices on her breath.

“Merry Christmas,” said Mrs. Parkington, “and thank you for the lovely silver box.”

“It’s old,” said Alice abruptly, “Dutch, I should think. Is everyone coming tonight?”

“Everyone. It’s the first time in years the whole family has been in New York at Christmas.”

Alice said, “I want to see Madeleine’s cowboy. She is certainly insatiable.”

“She’s merely healthy and a little spoiled.”

“I hope he’ll stand up under the strain better than the others. Madeleine’s trouble is that she’s congenitally moral. If she were more promiscuous and married less she wouldn’t be in the papers so often.”

“Alice!” said Mrs. Parkington.

“I only mean it in a kindly way. I hope he’s good and strong for Madeleine’s sake.”

Talk of this sort always made Mrs. Parkington uneasy. It was “modern” she supposed but she had never grown quite used to it, and she did not like cattiness in women. But she knew that Alice had some right to talk thus; she remembered Madeleine’s own epithets “the disappointed Duchess” and the “bathroom drinker.” However Mrs. Parkington decided to veer away from the subject.

The Duchess sat down, wearily. You knew by the way she sat down that she was not only tired but she was bored, desperately bored. There was boredom in the weary eyelids, in the sagging throat. She had come to dinner because it was a ceremony, and because it was better than staying home alone. Her mother, watching her, reflected even while they talked how extraordinary it was that a woman who had had so much wealth and so many opportunities in life, should have so few resources. Alice did not even enjoy reading and she had no hobbies and was really interested in nothing whatever. It was extraordinary that she should seem older than her own mother.

There had never been much open sympathy or understanding between them. Mrs. Parkington could never find any means of keeping up a sustained conversation with her daughter. Their talk was always no more than a series of false starts which led nowhere. Now, in desperation, she said, “What have you been doing lately?”

“Nothing much. I went to the opera Friday in the Geraghty box.”

“Odd people. There was never as much ermine in the world as Mrs. Geraghty wears.”

“I suppose she needs to assert herself in some way. Oceans of ermine is as good as any other way. At least you can buy ermine if you have enough money.”

Mrs. Parkington made no reply. She had seen a great many Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Geraghtys come and go in her time. She wasn’t even bored by them any longer, because for a long time she had been quietly eliminating from her existence people who had to buy ermine in order to assert themselves. Of course you couldn’t eliminate your own family entirely, no matter how much they bored you.

The Duchess opened her evening bag and brought out an enameled box from which she took a small pellet, swallowing it quickly. Her mother saw the action without seeing it, out of the corner of her eye, wondering what it was Alice was taking—drugs or breath scent or one of those newfangled things like Benzedrine. Then she heard Taylor’s voice announcing Mr. and Mrs. Swann, and all her senses quickened at the prospect of seeing her granddaughter Madeleine’s latest husband.

She scarcely noticed Madeleine herself, coming toward her in that enthusiastic way she had of being a whole herd of steers about to trample you. Some day, the old lady felt, Madeleine in one of her rashes would be unable to stop short and the results would be disastrous for someone. Her granddaughter was a big, coarse woman, of thirty-nine with bumptious good health and the appearance and manners of an aggressive cook.

The old lady’s eyes were all for the husband and when she saw him, she thought: Anyway, he’s better than the Argentine or the other two. He’s a man and he’s hard and maybe that’s what Madeleine needs. They say little tough fellows like that are pretty good.

Madeleine did manage to pull up in time and gave her a heavy, rather wet and very enthusiastic kiss on the cheek. Mrs. Parkington was rather finicky and could not control a grimace of displeasure which Madeleine failed to notice as she said, with enthusiasm, “This, Grandmother, is my husband Al.”

Al took her hand and said, “How d’you do, ma’am?” And the old lady thought: Hear! A professional cowboy! A dude rancher! But his big hand, common and outsized for his small stature, a workingman’s hand, was horny, and she noticed that even his dinner jacket did not conceal that faintly protruding abdomen which cowboys no matter how young or thin, acquired from long slouching in a Mexican saddle.

Her first reaction was that he was common—incredibly common, but Madeleine with her concentration of purpose, would not of course, mind his commonness: on the contrary, with her strong tastes, she would doubtless find it an asset. He was spare, with a hatchet face, lined and leathery, but he had very nice eyes, very alive and blue, and a sensual but controlled mouth. The eyes and mouth made her like him.

“I’m very glad to know you,” she said, meaning it.

Then Madeleine presented him to the Duchess, who had been watching all the while with a faint glint of humor in the tired, heavy-lidded over-made-up eyes.

Then Amory Stilham came in with his wife and son—the old lady’s granddaughter and great-grandson. They came directly to her, and in her heart now she wanted nothing of them. With an effort she altered her features into a smile of welcome.

Helen, her granddaughter was not at all like her sister Madeleine. She was a thin, spare, nervous woman, with a mouth which sagged bitterly at the corners, as if she held a grudge against life because it had denied her something she wanted more than all the things which had been given her. You would have said that she had everything. She was married to one of the Stilhams, a big, handsome if stupid man, and she had wealth and a house in town and one in Westbury. She had horses and a yacht and two children, a boy and a girl. None the less, the thin mouth turned down at the corners. At times it turned down savagely.

Helen, it was true, was the only one in the family with brains—the kind of brains which could create or accomplish things, but she never seemed to accomplish anything more than to serve in a bored way on countless committees. There was no way of really communicating with Helen—Mrs. Parkington had discovered that long ago. Helen gave the impression of living inside a shell, one of those shells which required a knife and biceps to open. Her hand-clasp was flabby.

Then in the place of Helen’s hand, the old lady felt in her hand, the big hand of Helen’s husband Amory—St. Judes, Harvard, the Carnelian Club, descendant of the Stilham who had founded Barchester, Massachusetts. Mrs. Parkington had one strong reaction to her grandson-in-law and she had experienced it at once on the day long ago when he and Helen came into the immense drawing room of the old house on Fifth Avenue to tell her they were engaged to be married. “He is vulgar” she thought then, “incredibly vulgar.” It always astonished her that Amory thought there was something distinguished about being a stockbroker. He was big and floridly handsome, but vulgar—far more vulgar than the Major had ever been, even in the flashy days when he liked wearing big diamonds. The Major had been common, with dash and color and personality, but Amory was just plain vulgar. It was odd, too, when all his background and training were popularly supposed to produce only distinction and taste.

He said, “Well, Grandma, you’re a wonder. I never saw you looking younger. Why even the Duchess and your grandchildren look older than you!”

Mrs. Parkington’s skin was suddenly covered by goose-pimples, but she managed to say quietly, “I’ll be eighty-five next month but I’m still in my right mind, Amory.”

Then Amory’s son made a little bow and took her hand, “Merry Christmas, Grandma,” he said.

“Merry Christmas, Jack.”

He was handsome in a decadent fashion. He looked, Mrs. Parkington thought, as if he should have more common sense than he had, always being photographed in night clubs and at Palm Beach with glamour girls. Apparently he had no sense. He was much more a Blair than a Parkington—a Blair crossed with a Stilham. What could you expect?

Quickly she said to Helen, “Where’s Janie? She’s coming, I hope.”

“Oh, yes, she’s coming. She was going some place for a cocktail on the way. I couldn’t make out where. She’s very mysterious lately.” And as soon as she had finished speaking the mouth drooped again. She spoke, sententiously, as if there were worlds of mystery and disapproval behind her words.

Even while she spoke, Mrs. Parkington was astonished by the anxiety in her own voice. It was remarkable that at her age it should matter to her so much that an eighteen-year-old girl should not miss the Christmas party. In her heart she knew the reason. Janie meant more to her than all the others put together.

And almost at once Janie and Mrs. Parkington’s old beau, Harry Van Diver, came in together. Harry always came to the Christmas parties as if he were a member of the family.

They were late and hurried across the room. Mrs. Parkington thought what an absurd contrast they made—the one so young and pretty, the other so old, so faded, out of another century, another world. Even at seventy-eight Harry still preserved his manner of being an old-fashioned Union Club cavalier.

A light came into the eyes of the old lady at sight of her great granddaughter and when the girl kissed her there was warmth in the embrace.

“I’m sorry, Grandmother, but it’s snowing and I couldn’t find a taxi.”

“It’s all right, my dear, there’s no hurry. I always have dinner half an hour after people are asked.”

She liked good food, Mrs. Parkington, and she had an excellent cook she did not wish to lose because people who thought more of cocktails than food were late.

“Well, Harry,” she said, “What is your excuse?”

“The same as Janie’s. You look wonderfully well, Susie.”

“I’ve put on more rouge than usual.”

Taylor approached them with the cocktails, his friend Albert, the footman, who came in to “help out,” close behind him with the big silver tray of hors d’oeuvres. When she and Harry had each had a champagne cocktail and the servants had passed, she said, “I always like to look my best at the Christmas dinner. It annoys Amory.” Then in a lowered voice, “I suspect he thinks I’m going to live forever.”

Harry Van Diver chuckled. He liked Amory no more than old Mrs. Parkington liked him. Amory was of a generation when he-men were professional ... a bad generation, Harry always said, the men who were now between forty and sixty-five. They learned nothing in college. They were always attending class reunions. Their talk was entirely of the stock market or how much they had drunk the night before. They were all, like Amory, perpetual adolescents who, if they did not die of drink or overwork by sixty, found themselves deserted and dreary. Harry himself was old enough to belong to a generation which went to Europe and collected pictures and lived preciously on their incomes and wore out their lives sitting in the back of opera boxes. Also, because he was a snob, he felt that Amory had betrayed his club and his class.

He glanced at Amory who was talking to the Duchess, thinking with satisfaction how it must annoy Amory to see Mrs. Parkington going on and on, healthy and energetic and strong, standing always between him and his share of the vast Parkington fortune. Harry Van Diver, thin, shriveled, elegant and fastidious, was a he-bitch. That was why Mrs. Parkington liked him, why she had kept him about for more than twenty years since the time she had given up forever all thoughts of vanity or love. Harry’s bitter feminine tongue amused her, and he was safe. He had admired her for over forty years. There had never been any danger of Harry’s growing “sexy.”

As he watched Amory and the Duchess with his nearsighted malicious black eyes, so squinted that he looked monstrously like an elderly and clever monkey, Mrs. Parkington thought how long time was, how many things you could discover and learn in eighty-four years ... and how many things some people never learned though they lived forever.

Then Taylor’s pompous voice said, “Dinner is served, madame,” and addressing all of them, rather with the air of a hen mothering a flock of foolish chicks, she said, “Come along! Come along!” and led the way on Harry’s arm.

In the center of the great mahogany table stood a Christmas tree, lighted, with gifts for each member of the family and for Harry Van Diver, each one selected by Mrs. Parkington and Mattie during long days of earnest shopping.

Mrs. Parkington put Madeleine’s cowboy husband on her right and Harry Van Diver on her left. She did this in a half-conscious desire to annoy Amory. Beside the cowboy she placed Janie so that she might have the girl as near her as possible, then Amory, then Madeleine. (There was faint malice in this too because Amory with his St. Judes-Harvard mentality looked upon Madeleine and her amorous recklessness as a family disgrace.) Then came her great-grandson and then the Duchess and next to Harry Van Diver, Helen, with her bitter mouth and complaining eyes. It was not a good arrangement, she knew, but considering the material, as good as any other. At eighty-four, after a well-conducted life spent in entertaining, she had at last earned the right to the most entertaining company which, among the men, was certainly Harry and the cowboy.

She decided that she liked the cowboy. Now and then she forgot his name completely. Until Madeleine had had enough of him and divorced him, he would always be simply “the cowboy” to her as Madeleine’s first husband had been “the Argentine,” her second “that Racquet Club boy,” the third, “the horse trainer.” It was much simpler that way.

He sat there beside her eating and answering her questions with a polite “yes, ma’am” or “no, ma’am,” eating such food as he had never tasted before, with the little finger of his big bony hand crooked a little in spite of anything he could do about it. Mrs. Parkington knew that Madeleine had spoken to him about crooking his finger because every now and then he would remember and bring it down again alongside his other fingers. But almost at once it would fly up again into a crooked position. She supposed he had acquired the cocked finger trick out of an effort to make himself feel an equal of the divorcées he had met in Reno.

What a world! she thought, when a decent fellow like that has his natural good manners corrupted for the sake of a lot of concupiscent sluts who don’t know their own minds.

She had no use for what she referred to as legal and dishonest adultery.

Once or twice Harry Van Diver on her left attempted to claim her attention and force her to “shift” the table but she said sharply, “Leave me in peace, Harry. I’m enjoying myself. This is a family party.”

There were many things she would have liked to discover about the cowboy—whether he had lived with other women like Madeleine, what he thought of this queer family gathering. There was nothing lascivious in this curiosity; she only wanted to know for the most profound and human of reasons. Her interest was almost coldly scientific. She was curious because she liked him, because she felt sorry for him sitting here in this big elegant room, his face red with the effort of wearing a dinner jacket and trying to behave as he thought people should behave in such a house, with Madeleine’s eyes fastened on him, devouring him. She wanted to say to him, “Don’t worry about any of this. It’s all claptrap and most of these people, my descendants, are vulgar and pretentious and they are vulgar and pretentious because they’re afraid and they’re afraid because in their hearts they are aware they are inferior and that not even money can alter that. Don’t worry and fuss. It’s all right!” But she was also wise enough to know that he would not understand a word of what she was saying and that such a speech would only confuse him further. They could never find each other through all the clutter of rubbish which complicated all the human relationships here in this room—Amory’s stupidity and pretentiousness, the Duchess’s despair and weariness, Helen’s discontent and fear, Madeleine’s air of being a thwarted Venus Genetrix and all the vague hampering things which came of their all being too rich. Janie, she thought, glancing fondly at the girl, was different. It was still possible to save her.

And Mrs. Parkington knew suddenly through the conversation she was making why she was bored. These people all around her save for Janie and perhaps the cowboy with his big hands and his way of addressing her as “ma’am” were all dead. They were deader than she would be when she lay in her coffin. Nothing had ever happened to them, not even to the Duchess with her air of being a tired tragedienne, not even to Madeleine to whom love was a matter of mechanics, like one of those machines which kept swallowing up things. To Harry, on her left, nothing whatever had ever happened. His whole life had been spent collecting pictures or sitting in the back of a box at the opera. He was, she thought, the best “box-sitter” in the world, the best “filler-in,” the best gossip. People had sometimes whispered about his indeterminate sex, but Mrs. Parkington was shrewd about things like that. Harry had never had any sex at all. That was why he suggested marriage to her only when he knew that it was perfectly safe.

No, none of them would be sitting at her table if they had not been related to her, most of them the very fruit of her womb. They were “living dead” like the strange people who inhabited places like Pasadena and Santa Barbara.

She kept listening to two or three conversations at once, catching fragments of this one or that one, hoping that some phrase or remark might strike fire, like steel striking against flint, to illuminate and annihilate that sensation of suffocation she felt stealing over her as she listened to Harry’s small talk.

And suddenly she was rewarded. It was something the Duchess said. Amory had been holding forth against Mr. Roosevelt and all Democrats. It was a familiar harangue into which he would plunge at the slightest invitation.

He was saying, “And look at Wall Street now! It used to be a barometer of the state of the country’s prosperity. As a barometer it is destroyed. You can’t tell anything about prosperity any more from a stock market report.”

And then the Duchess began to be bored. The alcohol or the drugs or whatever it was which brought her spasmodic life, had ceased to function, and the massive weight of Amory’s dullness began to be unendurable. She struck then, like an asp. She said, looking at him under her dull, heavy-lidded eyes, “I’ve been thinking, Amory, that it would be a good idea for your club to have its reunion this year in Sing-Sing. It might be kinder to all the boys who won’t be able to get out.”

Then Mrs. Parkington saw Amory’s face turn first white and then red, a fierce apoplectic red which made Mrs. Parkington know that that was how he would die one day if he were not mercifully run over by an automobile or crashed in a plane before then. He stammered for a second and then said, “That was a rude and mannerless thing to say, Alice. You know as well as I do that neither Bill Jennings nor Percy Harris are guilty of any crime. They’ve been persecuted. That’s all, and you know it.”

But the stimulus which was driving the Duchess still operated and she said, “I’ve sometimes thought that my father—the gentleman from whom all our money comes—would have spent all his life in jail by the laws which exist nowadays—along with all the big shots of his time. They were all crooks and ruthless, every one of them.”

It was Amory’s wife who took up the battle for him. She said, “That was a shocking thing to say, Alice, about your own father.”

But the Duchess only said, “Do you really know anything about my father—except what you’ve read in that apotheosis of hogwash written by a hack writer who needed money to pay his rent?”

Then Mrs. Parkington by an effort of will spiritually absented herself from the conversation. If they chose to brawl among themselves, that was their privilege. She had no intention of interfering. At least something was happening.

She turned to Madeleine’s cowboy husband and said suddenly, “I was born in Leaping Rock, Nevada. It was quite a town in those days. Lola Montez came there.” And as she spoke she heard the music beginning in the hall, soft music which had very little to do with the quality of the party (What could Viennese music mean to a man like Amory or his droop-mouthed wife or the cowboy?)

Each year for more than ten years now, she had had in musicians to play at the Christmas party, music like this, soft and romantic which coming from the distant hall could not annoy the others, but which helped to soothe her own nerves and dissipate a little her own boredom. She heard it now, groping in her mind to place the name of the waltz, while it carried one part of her back, back into the remote, and glittering past out of which there emerged, even while she talked of Leaping Rock to the cowboy, romantic and glittering images, like figures out of a mist.

When she spoke the word “Leaping Rock” she struck fire. The cowboy said, “Do I know Leaping Rock, ma’am?... like the back of my own hand. I was born in the hills not ten miles from there. When I was just a kid we used to dare each other to go alone into the Opera House. People said it was haunted.”

“It probably was,” said Mrs. Parkington. “Is it still there?”

“No, ma’am, the roof fell in five years ago.”

Then suddenly while the cowboy was talking about Leaping Rock and the color of the dolomite peaks to the west of it in the early dawn when the sun came up beyond the range of mountains on the other side of the valley, she remembered the name of the waltz they were now playing; it was “The Music of the Spheres” and suddenly she forgot Leaping Rock and was in a baroque ballroom in Vienna. It was all peach pink and pale blue and gilt and someone was saying, “... présenter le Comte Eric Wallstein.” At the same time she was aware that the cowboy had come to life. Quite suddenly he was flesh and blood—very much flesh and blood, and no longer an automaton responding to strings held by Madeleine.

Then she heard Madeleine saying above the cowboy’s talk about Nevada, “Grandmother, don’t you think we could leave the table now?”

“Yes, my dear,” said Mrs. Parkington, taking the napkin from her lap and rising. She hated to break off the talk with the cowboy. He was enjoying himself for the first time—perhaps for the first time since Madeleine had snatched him up and brought him east. His extraordinarily clear blue eyes were shining. The shyness was gone. He called her “ma’am” quite naturally now, and not like a Hollywood actor playing the role of a cowboy.

“You must come to see me while you’re here,” she said as she rose from the table, “Come in to tea and we’ll talk our fill about Nevada.”

The rest of the evening passed for Mrs. Parkington in a cloud of weariness, save for two moments, one which happened as they left the dining-room when Amory came up to her side and said, “Could I speak to you privately, Grandmother?”

She looked up at him suddenly wondering what it was he wanted of her, and was struck again by the stupidity of his big, floridly handsome face. He had been told that he was a shrewd operator in the market, and he believed, she knew, that he was a shrewd operator. She thought: He is a fool beside the Major. There aren’t any longer men of the Major’s stature. He was the real thing.

She said, “Of course, Amory. Let’s go into the small sitting-room.”

He followed her into the room, closing the door behind him. It was a small room, intimate and feminine in its softness and elegance. Rather slyly she watched him and even by the dim light she saw that with the closing of the door his manner had changed. The air of confidence and conceit which approached arrogance, seemed to melt away. She knew that he was at his best with a crowd of men when he was acting the role of a “big shot.” When he was left alone with her he grew uneasy and almost timid, and she wondered whether he behaved in the same fashion when he was alone with another man. She had never been taken in by him. All his defenses, concocted of family, of clubs, of snobbery and complacency, of wealth were down when he faced her, because she had no proper respect for any of these things when they were used as he used them.

Now as he closed the door and faced her, she had the impression that not only was he uneasy but frightened. He stood there for a single unbearable moment facing her in silence, until she sat down and said, “What is it, Amory?”

He too sat down and lighted a cigar, “It’s about money, Grandmother.”

There was something absurd about his addressing her as “Grandmother.” He was himself over fifty and his pompousness made him seem older. In any case she disliked the habit of married relatives addressing in-laws as “Grandmother” and “Mother.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, “I thought you’d weathered the storm. Everyone says you were remarkably clever during the crash.”

He hesitated for a moment. “It isn’t that. We weathered that all right. It’s only that a loan for a few weeks—six months at the most—would be a great help just now.”

She did not answer him but sat waiting, with half-deliberate cruelty, putting the burden of the whole thing upon him. After a moment he said, “I’m a little short just now. I got in rather deeply on some utilities business which didn’t turn out very well. The government has ruined the utilities market like everything else.”

“I thought the government had put an end to that sort of gambling.”

“It wasn’t gambling,” he said dully, and she was aware suddenly that he was not only afraid but tired. At the same time she remembered how he had snubbed the shy, nervous cowboy with the clear blue eyes.

“How much?” she asked bluntly.

He did not answer her at once. When he did answer he said, looking away from her, “About seven hundred thousand.”

“That’s a great deal of money.”

Still looking away from her, he said, “I thought that ... until it’s paid, you could charge it up against my share of the inheritance.”

The answer not only shocked her, but made it impossible for her to answer immediately.

After a moment she said, “I’m not in the grave yet, Amory.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“In any case, it is your wife’s inheritance, Amory. The Major left everything to me to dispose of as I saw fit.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be untactful.”

“Never mind,” she sighed, “But seven hundred thousand is a great deal of money. When everything is washed up after I’m dead, Helen’s share might not amount to that much.”

He looked at her in surprise and alarm, and she added, “There are quite a number of heirs and a lot of inheritance taxes.” She smiled, “Money isn’t what it once was, you know.”

“Who should know better than a stockbroker?”

She kept hearing the waltz played by the orchestra in the hall. She wanted to be done with Amory, to escape from him and everyone and everything like him, so she said, “In any case I couldn’t lend even a much smaller amount without knowing the details.”

She remembered that he had thrust out his lower lip. It gave him a sullen, almost evil expression—one which his wife must have seen many times. It occurred to her that perhaps that was one reason why Helen’s mouth sagged at the corners. It was the expression of a spoiled willful boy who has been crossed. He had been born into a world with every possible advantage and taught that there was some special quality about all Stilhams and at fifty he still resented any doubt regarding himself or his ability or his remarkable gifts.

He said, “I can’t tell you the details now.”

“Can’t you raise the money among your partners?”

“They haven’t that much liquid cash.”

“I have the others to consider. In a sense it’s their money I should be lending you. Would you want me to go to them for their permission?”

“No. They wouldn’t give it ... certainly not Madeleine or ‘the Duchess.’ They’ve always disliked me for reasons I’ve never been able to understand.”

She moved as if to rise, and said, “In any case I couldn’t lend all that money without knowing everything about your financial circumstances. That’s what bankers ask, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, when you choose to tell me, Amory, we can consider its possibilities.”

He was silent then and his silence made the old woman’s restlessness and desire to escape being shut in with him almost unbearable.

He said, “If I find it’s necessary I’ll tell you everything. The circumstances may be desperate.”

“Even if you failed, I should always see to it that Helen and the children are taken care of.”

“Fail?” he echoed. “Me fail?”

She was aware of a gratifying sense of power and of a satisfaction in using it almost cruelly. But the man was a fool to think all he needed do was to ask for seven hundred thousand dollars and receive it. In any case the interview was getting nowhere. She stood up, impatient to return to the music.

“I’m sorry, Amory, to refuse you. You must have friends who can raise that amount of money—surely out of Wall Street and all the banks, and all your friends in Harvard.”

“It isn’t the way it used to be when the Major was alive. Money men aren’t allowed to stand together nowadays. It’s even against their God-damned New Deal laws for a friend to stand by a friend.” He flushed and said, “Forgive me for swearing. I forgot myself.”

She laughed. “I lived for forty years with the Major.” Then she moved toward the door. “Well, if worst comes to worst and you see fit to explain everything to me, come back again.”

He held the door open for her and she went out. Out of the small room she felt free again and relieved. The little band was playing the “Skater’s Waltz” now. That music too was filled with memories, of another, a gayer, less strained and tormented world. She kept seeing the baroque ballroom in Vienna and the station platform in Salzburg.

She wasn’t allowed to finish her conversation with the cowboy because Madeleine whisked him away a little while after she entered the room.

“We’re taking a plane, Grandmother, for Nassau in the morning. I hope you’ll forgive us.”

“Of course, my dear.”

The cowboy said, “Good night, ma’am, and thank you for a fine evening and a fine supper.”

As his blue eyes met hers there was a twinkle in them which made her feel suddenly very young. It reminded her that the two of them shared a secret from all the others.

They knew the color of the peak on the far side of Leaping Rock when the sun came up over the range to the east. She must have been, she thought, at least fifty years old when the cowboy was born and she had not seen Leaping Rock in more than sixty years, but it did not matter. The peak would still be there when both of them were long dead and there would be others not yet conceived who would share their secret and feel about the great peak as they felt. It was very odd, she thought, that this cowboy born and brought up in Nevada, should, like “The Music of the Spheres,” make her think of Eric.

She said, “Remember you promised to come to tea one day,” ... and softly with the coquetry of a young woman she added, “alone.” Quickly she turned to Madeleine, “It’s only because we wanted to talk about Leaping Rock and the old days.”

“Sure, I understand,” said Madeleine. “He’s crazy about it out there. He doesn’t even want to go to Nassau.”

The other moment came at the end of the evening when as they all rose to leave, Janie said, “Granny, can I talk to you a minute after the others have gone?”

“Of course, my child.”

“You aren’t too tired?”

“Not in the least tired.”

A moment before she had been desperately tired but when Janie spoke, the weariness vanished. The child would scarcely understand that a woman of eighty-four could be flattered by so simple a thing as the request of a child of eighteen to talk to her.

Janie was not obviously pretty; she was at once something more and something less than that, with her fair hair and blue eyes and perfect skin. The mouth was too wide, the forehead too high, the nose too tilted for the accepted standard of banal American prettiness. It was the play of expression which made her extraordinarily attractive, the mobility of the intelligent wedge-shaped small face which at one moment could be dark and sullen and the next brilliant as the morning sun. She had the sort of looks which would make her a beauty at thirty-five when other women were just beginning to fade. She had, even at eighteen, what none of the others had ever had—the elements of distinction.

The girl asked her brother to wait for her in the hall below, and when they had all gone, she said, “Granny, I’m in love.”

The old woman smiled, “In love ... with whom?”

“You’ve never heard of him.”

“Do your father and mother like that?”

“No, that’s the trouble.”

“Who is he?”

“Well, he works for the government. He is twenty-seven years old and he was born in South Bend, Indiana.”

Mrs. Parkington smiled again, “Now I understand why your father objects.”

“Mama is just as bad.”

“How did you meet him?”

“That’s it. I met him through Father. Father invited him to the country for a weekend on business. The funny thing is that Father seemed to like him very much at first and told me to be nice to him and give him a good time. So I did my best and then later on when I went out with him in New York they were both angry.”

“What did they say?” asked Mrs. Parkington.

“They said he was a nobody. That he had no money and no future, and that I wasn’t to see him because it might grow serious and at my age I wasn’t capable of judging about things like that ... all the kind of talk I’ve heard in movies and novels.”

Mrs. Parkington’s face grew serious. “Of course they may be right. What is he like?”

Janie looked away from her toward the fireplace as if she were trying to summon up a clear picture of the young man. Her great-grandmother watched her, thinking, “How young she is! How odd that this thing should have skipped two generations only to appear again in the child of Helen and Amory! How very unlikely!”

The girl was talking, saying, “Well, he’s tall. He has big hands but they’re beautiful. He has very nice white teeth. He has black, rather wavy hair ... plenty of it, and he’s dark but not the sallow kind of darkness. It’s the healthy kind.” She laughed, “He has rosy cheeks and a nice voice.” For a moment she felt about as if searching for something and then said, “And he’s clean. He’s so nice and clean.”

Mrs. Parkington chuckled, “I didn’t ask for a portrait in techni-color or a certificate of sanitation. I only meant why do you think you’re in love?”

Now the girl looked at her and smiled. There was something about Janie’s smile which could melt granite. When she smiled the big mouth curled up at the corners.

Now she said, smiling, “I don’t know, Granny. That’s a tough one. I love to be with him and I feel sure inside me that if I waited for fifty years I’d never find anyone I’d like better.” Shyly she looked down at her hands, “I’ve even thought about the children I’m going to have, and I’d like to have him for the father.”

Mrs. Parkington’s face was serious as she watched the girl. “Well,” she said, “Those are very sound reasons and very modern. Is he serious?”

“Oh, he’s very serious about some things, but he has a sense of humor, a wonderful sense of humor.”

“Where did he go to school?”

“To Wisconsin State and after that to law school at Columbia.”

“I see. He belongs to the future rather than to the past.”

Suddenly an extraordinary light came into the face of the girl. “That’s it, Granny! That’s what I feel, only I never was able to put it into words. It’s very clever of you to understand.”

“Maybe it’s because of my age.”

“He’s not like any of the boys I know. I don’t mean anything against them ... the kind of boys Father and Mama would like to have me marry ... only they always seem so ... I don’t know. They don’t seem to want to go anywhere. There doesn’t seem to be any place for them to go. They seem empty ... and dead. I don’t want that kind of life. I want it to be exciting. He makes everything ... the present and the future seem exciting.”

Mrs. Parkington sighed, “Yes, I know. I said that once, a long time ago. And it was exciting too. That’s why you’re here, my dear.”

“You do know what I mean, Granny.”

“Yes, I think I do.” She rose and said, “It’s very late, my dear. I’ll tell you what you do. You bring him to tea with me, some afternoon ... soon.”

“Oh, could I, Granny? That’s sweet of you.”

“Shall we say Thursday?”

“I’ll ask him. He’s awfully busy, but I’m sure he could get away early.”

The old woman kissed her and then stood by the fire looking after the girl as she left the room and went down the stairway to join her brother. When she had gone, Mrs. Parkington touched the bell and while she waited for Taylor to appear, she thought how like Janie she must have been more than half a century ago in Leaping Rock—how extraordinary it was that she herself had come out of a mining camp and Janie out of this decadent world which had surrounded her tonight, a world as different from Leaping Rock as day from night. She had asked Janie to bring her young man to tea rather than to dinner because tea did not involve a whole evening. Janie might be wrong; he might be terrible. Mrs. Parkington knew a great deal about love and what it could do to you.

Then Taylor appeared and she said, “It’s very late, Taylor. I shouldn’t bother about clearing away tonight. I shall be out for lunch tomorrow and you’ll have the whole day.”

“Thank you, madame.”

“Did you have a good Christmas?”

“Yes, madame. You’re not tired?”

“No, Taylor.” She started toward the door and he followed her. “There’s no need,” she said, “I’ll walk up. I think I’d like to.”

“Very good, madame.”

She didn’t know why she chose to climb the stairs, save that it suited her mood. She went slowly, thoughtfully, as if at each step she were climbing into another world, the world of memory, as if each step took her deeper and deeper into the past.