Saturday Evening Post (19 December 1931)
I
Here and there in a sunless corner skulked a little snow under a
veil of coal specks, but the men taking down storm windows were laboring in
shirt sleeves and the turf was becoming firm underfoot.
In the streets, dresses dyed after fruit, leaf and flower emerged
from beneath the shed somber skins of animals; now only a few old men wore
mousy caps pulled down over their ears. That was the day Forrest Winslow forgot
the long fret of the past winter as one forgets inevitable afflictions, sickness,
and war, and turned with blind confidence toward the summer, thinking he
already recognized in it all the summers of the past — the golfing, sailing,
swimming summers.
For eight years Forrest had gone East to school and then to
college; now he worked for his father in a large Minnesota city. He was
handsome, popular and rather spoiled in a conservative way, and so the past
year had been a comedown. The discrimination that had picked Scroll and Key at
New Haven was applied to sorting furs; the hand that had signed the Junior Prom
expense checks had since rocked in a sling for two months with mild dermatitis
venenata. After work, Forrest found no surcease in the girls with whom he
had grown up. On the contrary, the news of a stranger within the tribe stimulated
him and during the transit of a popular visitor he displayed a convulsive
activity. So far, nothing had happened; but here was summer.
On the day spring broke through and summer broke through — it is
much the same thing in Minnesota — Forrest stopped his coupé in front of a
music store and took his pleasant vanity inside. As he said to the clerk, “I
want some records,”a little bomb of excitement exploded in his larynx, causing
an unfamiliar and almost painful vacuum in his upper diaphragm. The unexpected
detonation was caused by the sight of a corn-colored girl who was being waited
on across the counter.
She was a stalk of ripe corn, but bound not as cereals are but as
a rare first edition, with all the binder’s art. She was lovely and expensive,
and about nineteen, and he had never seen her before. She looked at him for
just an unnecessary moment too long, with so much self-confidence that he felt
his own rush out and away to join hers — ” . . .from him that hath not shall be
taken away even that which he hath.” Then her head swayed forward and she
resumed her inspection of a catalogue.
Forrest looked at the list a friend had sent him from New York.
Unfortunately, the first title was: “When Voo-do-o-do Meets Boop-boop-a-doop,
There’ll Soon be a Hot-Cha-Cha.” Forrest read it with horror. He could scarcely
believe a title could be so repulsive.
Meanwhile the girl was asking: “Isn’t there a record of
Prokofiev’s ‘Fils Prodigue’?”
“I’ll see, madam.” The saleswoman turned to Forrest.
“‘When Voo — ’” Forrest began, and then repeated, “‘When Voo — ’”
There was no use; he couldn’t say it in front of that nymph of the
harvest across the table.
“Never mind that one,” he said quickly. “Give me ‘Huggable — ’”
Again he broke off.
“‘Huggable, Kissable You’?” suggested the clerk helpfully, and her
assurance that it was very nice suggested a humiliating community of taste.
“I want Stravinsky’s ‘Fire Bird,’” said the other customer, “and
this album of Chopin waltzes.”
Forrest ran his eye hastily down the rest of his list: “Digga
Diggity,” “Ever So Goosy,” “Bunkey Doodle I Do.”
“Anybody would take me for a moron,” he thought. He crumpled up
the list and fought for air — his own kind of air, the air of casual
superiority.
“I’d like,” he said coldly, “Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata.’”
There was a record of it at home, but it didn’t matter. It gave
him the right to glance at the girl again and again. Life became interesting;
she was the loveliest concoction; it would be easy to trace her. With the
“Moonlight Sonata”wrapped face to face with “Huggable, Kissable You,” Forrest
quitted the shop.
There was a new book store down the street, and here also he
entered, as if books and records could fill the vacuum that spring was making
in his heart. As he looked among the lifeless words of many titles together, he
was wondering how soon he could find her, and what then.
“I’d like a hard-boiled detective story,” he said.
A weary young man shook his head with patient reproof;
simultaneously, a spring draft from the door blew in with it the familiar glow
of cereal hair.
“We don’t carry detective stories or stuff like that,” said the
young man in an unnecessarily loud voice. “I imagine you’ll find it at a
department store.”
“I thought you carried books,” said Forrest feebly.
“Books, yes, but not that kind.” The young man turned to wait on
his other customer.
As Forrest stalked out, passing within the radius of the girl’s
perfume, he heard her ask:
“Have you got anything of Louis Arragon’s, either in French or in
translation?”
“She’s just showing off,” he thought angrily. “They skip right
from Peter Rabbit to Marcel Proust these days.”
Outside, parked just behind his own adequate coupé, he found an
enormous silver-colored roadster of English make and custom design. Disturbed,
even upset, he drove homeward through the moist, golden afternoon.
The Winslows lived in an old, wide-verandaed house on Crest Avenue
— Forrest’s father and mother, his great-grandmother and his sister Eleanor.
They were solid people as that phrase goes since the war. Old Mrs. Forrest was
entirely solid; with convictions based on a way of life that had worked for
eighty-four years. She was a character in the city; she remembered the Sioux
war and she had been in Stillwater the day the James brothers shot up the main
street.
Her own children were dead and she looked on these remoter
descendants from a distance, oblivious of the forces that had formed them. She
understood that the Civil War and the opening up of the West were forces, while
the free-silver movement and the World War had reached her only as news. But
she knew that her father, killed at Cold Harbor, and her husband, the merchant,
were larger in scale than her son or her grandson. People who tried to explain
contemporary phenomena to her seemed, to her, to be talking against the
evidence of their own senses. Yet she was not atrophied; last summer she had
traveled over half of Europe with only a maid.
Forrest’s father and mother were something else again. They had
been in the susceptible middle thirties when the cocktail party and its
concomitants arrived in 1921. They were divided people, leaning forward and
backward. Issues that presented no difficulty to Mrs. Forrest caused them
painful heat and agitation. Such an issue arose before they had been five
minutes at table that night.
“Do you know the Rikkers are coming back?” said Mrs. Winslow.
“They’ve taken the Warner house.” She was a woman with many uncertainties,
which she concealed from herself by expressing her opinions very slowly and
thoughtfully, to convince her own ears. “It’s a wonder Dan Warner would rent
them his house. I suppose Cathy thinks everybody will fall all over
themselves.”
“What Cathy?” asked old Mrs. Forrest.
“She was Cathy Chase. Her father was Reynold Chase. She and her
husband are coming back here.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I scarcely knew her,” continued Mrs. Winslow, “but I know that
when they were in Washington they were pointedly rude to everyone from
Minnesota — went out of their way. Mary Cowan was spending a winter there, and
she invited Cathy to lunch or tea at least half a dozen times. Cathy never
appeared.”
“I could beat that record,” said Pierce Winslow. “Mary Cowan could
invite me a hundred times and I wouldn’t go.”
“Anyhow,” pursued his wife slowly, “in view of all the scandal,
it’s just asking for the cold shoulder to come out here.”
“They’re asking for it, all right,” said Winslow. He was a
Southerner, well liked in the city, where he had lived for thirty years.
“Walter Hannan came in my office this morning and wanted me to second Rikker
for the Kennemore Club. I said: ‘Walter, I’d rather second Al Capone.’ What’s
more, Rikker’ll get into the Kennemore Club over my dead body.”
“Walter had his nerve. What’s Chauncey Rikker to you? It’ll be
hard to get anyone to second him.”
“Who are they?” Eleanor asked. “Somebody awful?”
She was eighteen and a débutante. Her current appearances at home
were so rare and brief that she viewed such table topics with as much
detachment as her great-grandmother.
“Cathy was a girl here; she was younger then I was, but I remember
that she was always considered fast. Her husband, Chauncey Rikker, came from
some little town upstate.”
“What did they do that was so awful?”
“Rikker went bankrupt and left town,” said her father. “There were
a lot of ugly stories. Then he went to Washington and got mixed up in the
alien-property scandal; and then he got in trouble in New York — he was in the
bucket-shop business — but he skipped out to Europe. After a few years the
chief Government witness died and he came back to America. They got him for a
few months for contempt of court.” He expanded into eloquent irony: “And now,
with true patriotism, he comes back to his beautiful Minnesota, a product of
its lovely woods, its rolling wheat fields — ”
Forrest called him impatiently: “Where do you get that, father?
When did two Kentuckians ever win Nobel prizes in the same year? And how about
an upstate boy named Lind — ”
“Have the Rikkers any children?” Eleanor asked.
“I think Cathy has a daughter about your age, and a boy about
sixteen.”
Forrest uttered a small, unnoticed exclamation. Was it possible?
French books and Russian music — that girl this afternoon had lived abroad. And
with the probability his resentment deepened — the daughter of a crook putting
on all that dog! He sympathized passionately with his father’s refusal to
second Rikker for the Kennemore Club.
“Are they rich?” old Mrs. Forrest suddenly demanded.
“They must be well off if they took Dan Warner’s house.”
“Then they’ll get in all right.”
“They won’t get into the Kennemore Club,” said Pierce Winslow. “I
happen to come from a state with certain traditions.”
“I’ve seen the bottom rail get to be the top rail many times in
this town,” said the old lady blandly.
“But this man’s a criminal, grandma,” explained Forrest. “Can’t
you see the difference? It isn’t a social question. We used to argue at New
Haven whether we’d shake hands with Al Capone if we met him — ”
“Who is Al Capone?” asked Mrs. Forrest.
“He’s another criminal, in Chicago.”
“Does he want to join the Kennemore Club too?”
They laughed, but Forrest had decided that if Rikker came up for
the Kennemore Club, his father’s would not be the only black ball in the box.
Abruptly it became full summer. After the last April storm someone
came along the street one night, blew up the trees like balloons, scattered
bulbs and shrubs like confetti, opened a cage full of robins and, after a quick
look around, signaled up the curtain upon a new backdrop of summer sky.
Tossing back a strayed baseball to some kids in a vacant lot,
Forrest’s fingers, on the stitched seams of the stained leather cover, sent a
wave of ecstatic memories to his brain. One must hurry and get there — “there”
was now the fairway of the golf course, but his feeling was the same. Only when
he teed off at the eighteenth that afternoon did he realize that it wasn’t the
same, that it would never be enough any more. The evening stretched large and
empty before him, save for the set pieces of a dinner party and bed.
While he waited with his partner for a match to play off, Forrest
glanced at the tenth tee, exactly opposite and two hundred yards away.
One of the two figures on the ladies’ tee was addressing her ball;
as he watched, she swung up confidently and cracked a long drive down the
fairway.
“Must be Mrs. Horrick,” said his friend. “No other woman can drive
like that.”
At that moment the sun glittered on the girl’s hair and Forrest
knew who it was; simultaneously, he remembered what he must do this afternoon.
That night Chauncey Rikker’s name was to come up before the membership
committee on which his father sat, and before going home, Forrest was going to
pass the clubhouse and leave a certain black slip in a little box. He had
carefully considered all that; he loved the city where his people had lived
honorable lives for five generations. His grandfather had been a founder of
this club in the 90’s when it went in for sailboat racing instead of golf, and
when it took a fast horse three hours to trot out here from town. He agreed
with his father that certain people were without the pale. Tightening his face,
he drove his ball two hundred yards down the fairway, where it curved gently
into the rough.
The eighteenth and tenth holes were parallel and faced in opposite
directions. Between tees they were separated by a belt of trees forty feet
wide. Though Forrest did not know it, Miss Rikker’s hostess, Helen Hannan, had
dubbed into this same obscurity, and as he went in search of his ball he heard
female voices twenty feet away.
“You’ll be a member after tonight,” he heard Helen Hannan say,
“and then you can get some real competition from Stella Horrick.”
“Maybe I won’t be a member,” said a quick, clear voice. “Then
you’ll have to come and play with me on the public links.”
“Alida, don’t be absurd.”
“Why? I played on the public links in Buffalo all last spring. For
the moment there wasn’t anywhere else. It’s like playing on some courses in
Scotland.”
“But I’d feel so silly. . . . Oh, gosh, let’s let the ball go.”
“There’s nobody behind us. As to feeling silly — if I cared about
public opinion any more, I’d spend my time in my bedroom.” She laughed
scornfully. “A tabloid published a picture of me going to see father in prison.
And I’ve seen people change their tables away from us on steamers, and once I
was cut by all the American girls in a French school. . . . Here’s your ball.”
“Thanks. . . . Oh, Alida, it seems terrible.”
“All the terrible part is over. I just said that so you wouldn’t
be too sorry for us if people didn’t want us in this club. I wouldn’t care;
I’ve got a life of my own and my own standard of what trouble is. It wouldn’t
touch me at all.”
They passed out of the clearing and their voices disappeared into
the open sky on the other side. Forrest abandoned the search for his lost ball
and walked toward the caddie house.
“What a hell of a note,” he thought. “To take it out on a girl
that had nothing to do with it” — which was what he was doing this minute as he
went up toward the club. “No,” he said to himself abruptly, “I can’t do it.
Whatever her father may have done, she happens to be a lady. Father can do what
he feels he has to do, but I’m out.”
After lunch the next day, his father said rather diffidently: “I
see you didn’t do anything about the Rikkers and the Kennemore Club.”
“No.”
“It’s just as well,” said his father. “As a matter of fact, they
got by. The club has got rather mixed anyhow in the last five years — a good
many queer people in it. And, after all, in a club you don’t have to know
anybody you don’t want to. The other people on the committee felt the same
way.”
“I see,” said Forrest dryly. “Then you didn’t argue against the
Rikkers?”
“Well, no. The thing is I do a lot of business with Walter Hannan,
and it happened yesterday I was obliged to ask him rather a difficult favor.”
“So you traded with him.” To both father and son, the word
“traded” sounded like traitor.
“Not exactly. The matter wasn’t mentioned.”
“I understand,” Forrest said. But he did not understand, and some
old childhood faith in his father died at that moment.
II
To snub anyone effectively one must have him within range. The
admission of Chauncey Rikker to the Kennemore Club and, later, to the Downtown
Club was followed by angry talk and threats of resignation that simulated the
sound of conflict, but there was no indication of a will underneath. On the
other hand, unpleasantness in crowds is easy, and Chauncey Rikker was a facile
object for personal dislike; moreover, a recurrent echo of the bucket-shop
scandal sounded from New York, and the matter was reviewed in the local
newspapers, in case anyone had missed it. Only the liberal Hannan family stood
by the Rikkers, and their attitude aroused considerable resentment, and their
attempt to launch them with a series of small parties proved a failure. Had the
Rikkers attempted to “bring Alida out,” it would have been for the inspection
of a motley crowd indeed, but they didn’t.
When, occasionally during the summer, Forrest encountered Alida
Rikker, they crossed eyes in the curious way of children who don’t know each
other. For a while he was haunted by her curly yellow head, by the golden-brown
defiance of her eyes; then he became interested in another girl. He wasn’t in
love with Jane Drake, though he thought he might marry her. She was “the girl
across the street”; he knew her qualities, good and bad, so that they didn’t
matter. She had an essential reality underneath, like a relative. It would
please their families. Once, after several highballs and some casual necking,
he almost answered seriously when she provoked him with “But you don’t really
care about me”; but he sat tight and next morning was relieved that he had.
Perhaps in the dull days after Christmas — Meanwhile, at the Christmas dances
among the Christmas girls he might find the ecstasy and misery, the infatuation
that he wanted. By autumn he felt that his predestined girl was already packing
her trunk in some Eastern or Southern city.
It was in his more restless mood that one November Sunday he went
to a small tea. Even as he spoke to his hostess he felt Alida Rikker across the
firelit room; her glowing beauty and her unexplored novelty pressed up against
him, and there was a relief in being presented to her at last. He bowed and
passed on, but there had been some sort of communication. Her look said that
she knew the stand that his family had taken, that she didn’t mind, and was
even sorry to see him in such a silly position, for she knew that he admired
her. His look said: “Naturally, I’m sensitive to your beauty, but you see how
it is; we’ve had to draw the line at the fact that your father is a dirty dog,
and I can’t withdraw from my present position.”
Suddenly in a silence, she was talking, and his ears swayed away
from his own conversation.
“ . . . Helen had this odd pain for over a year and, of course,
they suspected cancer. She went to have an X ray; she undressed behind a
screen, and the doctor looked at her through the machine, and then he said,
‘But I told you to take off all your clothes,’ and Helen said, ‘I have.’ The
doctor looked again, and said, ‘Listen, my dear, I brought you into the world,
so there’s no use being modest with me. Take off everything.’ So Helen said,
‘I’ve got every stitch off; I swear.’ But the doctor said, ‘You have not. The X
ray shows me a safety pin in your brassiere.’ Well, they finally found out that
she’d been suspected of swallowing a safety pin when she was two years old.”
The story, floating in her clear, crisp voice upon the intimate
air, disarmed Forrest. It had nothing to do with what had taken place in
Washington or New York ten years before. Suddenly he wanted to go and sit near
her, because she was the tongue of flame that made the firelight vivid.
Leaving, he walked for an hour through feathery snow, wondering again why he
couldn’t know her, why it was his business to represent a standard.
“Well, maybe I’ll have a lot of fun some day doing what I ought to
do,” he thought ironically — “when I’m fifty.”
The first Christmas dance was the charity ball at the armory. It
was a large, public affair; the rich sat in boxes. Everyone came who felt he belonged,
and many out of curiosity, so the atmosphere was tense with a strange
haughtiness and aloofness.
The Rikkers had a box. Forrest, coming in with Jane Drake, glanced
at the man of evil reputation and at the beaten woman frozen with jewels who
sat beside him. They were the city’s villains, gaped at by the people of
reserved and timid lives. Oblivious of the staring eyes, Alida and Helen Hannan
held court for several young men from out of town. Without question, Alida was
incomparably the most beautiful girl in the room.
Several people told Forrest the news — the Rikkers were giving a
big dance after New Year’s. There were written invitations, but these were
being supplemented by oral ones. Rumor had it that one had merely to be
presented to any Rikker in order to be bidden to the dance.
As Forrest passed through the hall, two friends stopped him and
with a certain hilarity introduced him to a youth of seventeen, Mr. Teddy
Rikker.
“We’re giving a dance,” said the young man immediately. “January
third. Be very happy if you could come.”
Forrest was afraid he had an engagement.
“Well, come if you change your mind.”
“Horrible kid, but shrewd,” said one of his friends later. “We
were feeding him people, and when we brought up a couple of saps, he looked at
them and didn’t say a word. Some refuse and a few accept and most of them
stall, but he goes right on; he’s got his father’s crust.”
Into the highways and byways. Why didn’t the girl stop it? He was
sorry for her when he found Jane in a group of young women reveling in the
story.
“I hear they asked Bodman, the undertaker, by mistake, and then
took it back.”
“Mrs. Carleton pretended she was deaf.”
“There’s going to be a carload of champagne from Canada.”
“Of course, I won’t go, but I’d love to, just to see what happens.
There’ll be a hundred men to every girl — and that’ll be meat for her.”
The accumulated malice repelled him, and he was angry at Jane for
being part of it. Turning away, his eyes fell on Alida’s proud form swaying
along a wall, watched the devotion of her partners with an unpleasant
resentment. He did not know that he had been a little in love with her for many
months. Just as two children can fall in love during a physical struggle over a
ball, so their awareness of each other had grown to surprising proportions.
“She’s pretty,” said Jane. “She’s not exactly overdressed, but
considering everything, she dresses too elaborately.”
“I suppose she ought to wear sackcloth and ashes or half
mourning.”
“I was honored with a written invitation, but, of course, I’m not
going.”
“Why not?”
Jane looked at him in surprise. “You’re not going.”
“That’s different. I would if I were you. You see, you don’t care
what her father did.”
“Of course, I care.”
“No, you don’t. And all this small meanness just debases the whole
thing. Why don’t they let her alone? She’s young and pretty and she’s done
nothing wrong.”
Later in the week he saw Alida at the Hannans’ dance and noticed
that many men danced with her. He saw her lips moving, heard her laughter,
caught a word or so of what she said; irresistibly he found himself guiding
partners around in her wake. He envied visitors to the city who didn’t know who
she was.
The night of the Rikkers’ dance he went to a small dinner; before
they sat down at table he realized that the others were all going on to the
Rikkers’. They talked of it as a sort of comic adventure; insisted that he come
too.
“Even if you weren’t invited, it’s all right,” they assured him.
“We were told we could bring anyone. It’s just a free-for-all; it doesn’t put
you under any obligations. Norma Nash is going and she didn’t invite Alida
Rikker to her party. Besides, she’s really very nice. My brother’s quite crazy
about her. Mother is worried sick, because he says he wants to marry her.”
Clasping his hand about a new highball, Forrest knew that if he
drank it he would probably go. All his reasons for not going seemed old and
tired, and, fatally, he had begun to seem absurd to himself. In vain he tried
to remember the purpose he was serving, and found none. His father had weakened
on the matter of the Kennemore Club. And now suddenly he found reasons for
going — men could go where their women could not.
“All right,” he said.
The Rikkers’ dance was in the ballroom of the Minnekada Hotel. The
Rikkers’ gold, ill-gotten, tainted, had taken the form of a forest of palms,
vines and flowers. The two orchestras moaned in pergolas lit with fireflies,
and many-colored spotlights swept the floor, touching a buffet where dark
bottles gleamed. The receiving line was still in action when Forrest’s party
came in, and Forrest grinned ironically at the prospect of taking Chauncey
Rikker by the hand. But at the sight of Alida, her look that at last fell
frankly on him, he forgot everything else.
“Your brother was kind enough to invite me,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” she was polite, but vague; not at all overwhelmed by
his presence. As he waited to speak to her parents, he started, seeing his
sister in a group of dancers. Then, one after another, he identified people he
knew: it might have been any one of the Christmas dances; all the younger crowd
were there. He discovered abruptly that he and Alida were alone; the receiving
line had broken up. Alida glanced at him questioningly and with a certain
amusement.
So he danced out on the floor with her, his head high, but
slightly spinning. Of all things in the world, he had least expected to lead
off the Chauncey Rikkers’ ball.
III
Next morning his first realization was that he had kissed her; his
second was a feeling of profound shame for his conduct of the evening. Lord
help him, he had been the life of the party; he had helped to run the
cotillion. From the moment when he danced out on the floor, coolly meeting the
surprised and interested glances of his friends, a mood of desperation had come
over him. He rushed Alida Rikker, until a friend asked him what Jane was going
to say. “What business is it of Jane’s?” he demanded impatiently. “We’re not
engaged.” But he was impelled to approach his sister and ask her if he looked
all right.
“Apparently,” Eleanor answered, “but when in doubt, don’t take any
more.”
So he hadn’t. Exteriorly he remained correct, but his libido was
in a state of wild extroversion. He sat with Alida Rikker and told her he had
loved her for months.
“Every night I thought of you just before you went to sleep,” his
voice trembled with insincerity, “I was afraid to meet you or speak to you.
Sometimes I’d see you in the distance moving along like a golden chariot, and
the world would be good to live in.”
After twenty minutes of this eloquence, Alida began to feel
exceedingly attractive. She was tired and rather happy, and eventually she
said:
“All right, you can kiss me if you want to, but it won’t mean
anything. I’m just not in that mood.”
But Forrest had moods enough for both; he kissed her as if they
stood together at the altar. A little later he had thanked Mrs. Rikker with
deep emotion for the best time he had ever had in his life.
It was noon, and as he groped his way upright in bed, Eleanor came
in in her dressing gown.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Awful.”
“How about what you told me coming back in the car? Do you
actually want to marry Alida Rikker?”
“Not this morning.”
“That’s all right then. Now, look: the family are furious.”
“Why?” he asked with some redundancy.
“Both you and I being there. Father heard that you led the
cotillion. My explanation was that my dinner party went, and so I had to go;
but then you went too!”
Forrest dressed and went down to Sunday dinner. Over the table
hovered an atmosphere of patient, puzzled, unworldly disappointment. Finally
Forrest launched into it:
“Well, we went to Al Capone’s party and had a fine time.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Pierce Winslow dryly. Mrs. Winslow said
nothing.
“Everybody was there — the Kayes, the Schwanes, the Martins and
the Blacks. From now on, the Rikkers are pillars of society. Every house is
open to them.”
“Not this house,” said his mother. “They won’t come into this
house.” And after a moment: “Aren’t you going to eat anything, Forrest?”
“No, thanks. I mean, yes, I am eating.” He looked cautiously at
his plate. “The girl is very nice. There isn’t a girl in town with better
manners or more stuff. If things were like they were before the war, I’d say —
”
He couldn’t think exactly what it was he would have said; all he
knew was that he was now on an entirely different road from his parents’.
“This city was scarcely more than a village before the war,” said
old Mrs. Forrest.
“Forrest means the World War, granny,” said Eleanor.
“Some things don’t change,” said Pierce Winslow. Both he and
Forrest thought of the Kennemore Club matter and, feeling guilty, the older man
lost his temper:
“When people start going to parties given by a convicted criminal,
there’s something serious the matter with them.”
“We won’t discuss it any more at table,” said Mrs. Winslow
hastily.
About four, Forrest called a number on the telephone in his room.
He had known for some time that he was going to call a number.
“Is Miss Rikker at home? . . . Oh, hello. This is Forrest
Winslow.”
“How are you?”
“Terrible. It was a good party.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Too good. What are you doing?”
“Entertaining two awful hangovers.”
“Will you entertain me too?”
“I certainly will. Come on over.”
The two young men could only groan and play sentimental music on
the phonograph, but presently they departed; the fire leaped up, day went out
behind the windows, and Forrest had rum in his tea.
“So we met at last,” he said.
“The delay was all yours.”
“Damn prejudice,” he said. “This is a conservative city, and your
father being in this trouble — ”
“I can’t discuss my father with you.”
“Excuse me. I only wanted to say that I’ve felt like a fool lately
for not knowing you. For cheating myself out of the pleasure of knowing you for
a silly prejudice,” he blundered on. “So I decided to follow my own instincts.”
She stood up suddenly. “Good-by, Mr. Winslow.”
“What? Why?”
“Because it’s absurd for you to come here as if you were doing me
a favor. And after accepting our hospitality, to remind me of my father’s
troubles is simply bad manners.”
He was on his feet, terribly upset. “That isn’t what I meant. I
said I had felt that way, and I despised myself for it. Please don’t be sore.”
“Then don’t be condescending.” She sat back in her chair. Her
mother came in, stayed only a moment, and threw Forrest a glance of resentment
and suspicion as she left. But her passage through had brought them together,
and they talked frankly for a long time.
“I ought to be upstairs dressing.”
“I ought to have gone an hour ago, and I can’t.”
“Neither can I.”
With the admission they had traveled far. At the door he kissed
her unreluctant lips and walked home, throwing futile buckets of reason on the
wild fire.
Less than two weeks later it happened. In a car parked in a
blizzard he poured out his worship, and she lay on his chest, sighing, “Oh, me
too — me too.”
Already Forrest’s family knew where he went in the evenings; there
was a frightened coolness, and one morning his mother said:
“Son, you don’t want to throw yourself away on some girl that
isn’t up to you. I thought you were interested in Jane Drake.”
“Don’t bring that up. I’m not going to talk about it.”
But it was only a postponement. Meanwhile the days of this
February were white and magical, the nights were starry and crystalline. The
town lay under a cold glory; the smell of her furs was incense, her bright
cheeks were flames upon a northern altar. An ecstatic pantheism for his land
and its weather welled up in him. She had brought him finally back to it; he
would live here always.
“I want you so much that nothing can stand in the way of that,” he
said to Alida. “But I owe my parents a debt that I can’t explain to you. They
did more than spend money on me; they tried to give me something more
intangible — something that their parents had given them and that they thought
was worth handing on. Evidently it didn’t take with me, but I’ve got to make
this as easy as possible for them.” He saw by her face that he had hurt her.
“Darling — ”
“Oh, it frightens me when you talk like that,” she said. “Are you
going to reproach me later? It would be awful. You’ll have to get it out of
your head that you’re doing anything wrong. My standards are as high as yours,
and I can’t start out with my father’s sins on my shoulders.” She thought for a
moment. “You’ll never be able to reconcile it all like a children’s story.
You’ve got to choose. Probably you’ll have to hurt either your family or hurt
me.”
A fortnight later the storm broke at the Winslow house. Pierce
Winslow came home in a quiet rage and had a session behind closed doors with
his wife. Afterward she knocked at Forrest’s door.
“Your father had a very embarrassing experience today. Chauncey
Rikker came up to him in the Downtown Club and began talking about you as if
you were on terms of some understanding with his daughter. Your father walked
away, but we’ve got to know. Are you serious about Miss Rikker?”
“I want to marry her,” he said.
“Oh, Forrest!”
She talked for a long time, recapitulating, as if it were a matter
of centuries, the eighty years that his family had been identified with the
city; when she passed from this to the story of his father’s health, Forrest
interrupted:
“That’s all so irrelevant, mother. If there was anything against
Alida personally, what you say would have some weight, but there isn’t.”
“She’s overdressed; she runs around with everybody — ”
“She isn’t a bit different from Eleanor. She’s absolutely a lady
in every sense. I feel like a fool even discussing her like this. You’re just
afraid it’ll connect you in some way with the Rikkers.”
“I’m not afraid of that,” said his mother, annoyed. “Nothing would
ever do that. But I’m afraid that it’ll separate you from everything worth
while, everybody that loves you. It isn’t fair for you to upset our lives, let
us in for disgraceful gossip — ”
“I’m to give up the girl I love because you’re afraid of a little
gossip.”
The controversy was resumed next day, with Pierce Winslow
debating. His argument was that he was born in old Kentucky, that he had always
felt uneasy at having begotten a son upon a pioneer Minnesota family, and that
this was what he might have expected. Forrest felt that his parents’ attitude
was trivial and disingenuous. Only when he was out of the house, acting against
their wishes, did he feel any compunction. But always he felt that something
precious was being frayed away — his youthful companionship with his father and
his love and trust for his mother. Hour by hour he saw the past being
irreparably spoiled, and save when he was with Alida, he was deeply unhappy.
One spring day when the situation had become unendurable, with
half the family meals taken in silence, Forrest’s great-grandmother stopped him
on the stair landing and put her hand on his arm.
“Has this girl really a good character?” she asked, her fine,
clear, old eyes resting on his.
“Of course she has, gramma.”
“Then marry her.”
“Why do you say that?” Forrest asked curiously.
“It would stop all this nonsense and we could have some peace. And
I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a great-great-grandmother before I die.”
Her frank selfishness appealed to him more than the righteousness
of the others. That night he and Alida decided to be married the first of June,
and telephoned the announcement to the papers.
Now the storm broke in earnest. Crest Avenue rang with gossip —
how Mrs. Rikker had called on Mrs. Winslow, who was not at home. How Forrest
had gone to live in the University Club. How Chauncey Rikker and Pierce Winslow
had had words in the Downtown Club.
It was true that Forrest had gone to the University Club. On a May
night, with summer sounds already gathered on the window screens, he packed his
trunk and his suitcases in the room where he had lived as a boy. His throat
contracted and he smeared his face with his dusty hand as he took a row of golf
cups off the mantelpiece, and he choked to himself: “If they won’t take Alida,
then they’re not my family any more.”
As he finished packing, his mother came in.
“You’re not really leaving.” Her voice was stricken.
“I’m moving to the University Club.”
“That’s so unnecessary. No one bothers you here. You do what you
want.”
“I can’t bring Alida here.”
“Father — ”
“Hell with father!” he said wildly.
She sat down on the bed beside him. “Stay here, Forrest. I promise
not to argue with you any more. But stay here.”
“I can’t.”
“I can’t have you go!” she wailed. “It seems as if we’re driving
you out, and we’re not!”
“You mean it looks as though you were driving me out.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“Yes, you do. And I want to say that I don’t think you and father
really care a hang about Chauncey Rikker’s moral character.”
“That’s not true, Forrest. I hate people that behave badly and
break the laws. My own father would never have let Chauncey Rikker — ”
“I’m not talking about your father. But neither you nor my father
care a bit what Chauncey Rikker did. I bet you don’t even know what it was.”
“Of course I know. He stole some money and went abroad, and when
he came back they put him in prison.”
“They put him in prison for contempt of court.”
“Now you’re defending him, Forrest.”
“I’m not! I hate his guts; undoubtedly he’s a crook. But I tell
you it was a shock to me to find that father didn’t have any principles. He and
his friends sit around the Downtown Club and pan Chauncey Rikker, but when it
comes to keeping him out of a club, they develop weak spines.”
“That was a small thing.”
“No, it wasn’t. None of the men of father’s age have any
principles. I don’t know why. I’m willing to make an allowance for an honest
conviction, but I’m not going to be booed by somebody that hasn’t got any
principles and simply pretends to have.”
His mother sat helplessly, knowing that what he said was true. She
and her husband and all their friends had no principles. They were good or bad
according to their natures; often they struck attitudes remembered from the
past, but they were never sure as her father or her grandfather had been sure.
Confusedly she supposed it was something about religion. But how could you get
principles just by wishing for them?
The maid announced the arrival of a taxi.
“Send up Olsen for my baggage,” said Forrest; then to his mother,
“I’m not taking the coupé; I left the keys. I’m just taking my clothes. I
suppose father will let me keep my job down town.”
“Forrest, don’t talk that way. Do you think your father would take
your living away from you, no matter what you did?”
“Such things have happened.”
“You’re hard and difficult,” she wept. “Please stay here a little
longer, and perhaps things will be better and father will get a little more
reconciled. Oh, stay, stay! I’ll talk to father again. I’ll do my best to fix
things.”
“Will you let me bring Alida here?”
“Not now. Don’t ask me that. I couldn’t bear — ”
“All right,” he said grimly.
Olsen came in for the bags. Crying and holding on to his coat
sleeve, his mother went with him to the front door.
“Won’t you say good-by to father?”
“Why? I’ll see him tomorrow in the office.”
“Forrest, I was thinking, why don’t you go to a hotel instead of
the University Club?”
“Why, I thought I’d be more comfortable — ” Suddenly he realized
that his presence would be less conspicuous at a hotel. Shutting up his
bitterness inside him, he kissed his mother roughly and went to the cab.
Unexpectedly, it stopped by the corner lamp-post at a hail from
the sidewalk, and the May twilight yielded up Alida, miserable and pale.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“I had to come,” she said. “Stop the car. I’ve been thinking of
you leaving your house on account of me, and how you loved your family — the
way I’d like to love mine — and I thought how terrible it was to spoil all
that. Listen, Forrest! Wait! I want you to go back. Yes, I do. We can wait. We
haven’t any right to cause all this pain. We’re young. I’ll go away for a
while, and then we’ll see.”
He pulled her toward him by her shoulders.
“You’ve got more principles than the whole bunch of them,” he
said. “Oh, my girl, you love me and, gosh, it’s good that you do!”
IV
It was to be a house wedding, Forrest and Alida having vetoed the
Rikkers’ idea that it was to be a sort of public revenge. Only a few intimate
friends were invited.
During the week before the wedding, Forrest deduced from a series
of irresolute and ambiguous telephone calls that his mother wanted to attend
the ceremony, if possible. Sometimes he hoped passionately she would; at others
it seemed unimportant.
The wedding was to be at seven. At five o’clock Pierce Winslow was
walking up and down the two interconnecting sitting rooms of his house.
“This evening,” he murmured, “my only son is being married to the
daughter of a swindler.”
He spoke aloud so that he could listen to the words, but they had
been evoked so often in the past few months that their strength was gone and
they died thinly upon the air.
He went to the foot of the stairs and called: “Charlotte!” No
answer. He called again, and then went into the dining room, where the maid was
setting the table.
“Is Mrs. Winslow out?”
“I haven’t seen her come in, Mr. Winslow.”
Back in the sitting room he resumed his walking; unconsciously he
was walking like his father, the judge, dead thirty years ago; he was parading
his dead father up and down the room.
“You can’t bring that woman into this house to meet your mother.
Bad blood is bad blood.”
The house seemed unusually quiet. He went upstairs and looked into
his wife’s room, but she was not there; old Mrs. Forrest was slightly indisposed;
Eleanor, he knew, was at the wedding.
He felt genuinely sorry for himself as he went downstairs again.
He knew his role — the usual evening routine carried out in complete
obliviousness of the wedding — but he needed support, people begging him to
relent, or else deferring to his wounded sensibilities. This isolation was
different; it was almost the first isolation he had ever felt, and like all men
who are fundamentally of the group, of the herd, he was incapable of taking a
strong stand with the inevitable loneliness that it implied. He could only
gravitate toward those who did.
“What have I done to deserve this?” he demanded of the standing
ash tray. “What have I failed to do for my son that lay within my power?”
The maid came in. “Mrs. Winslow told Hilda she wouldn’t be here
for dinner, and Hilda didn’t tell me.”
The shameful business was complete. His wife had weakened, leaving
him absolutely alone. For a moment he expected to be furiously angry with her,
but he wasn’t; he had used up his anger exhibiting it to others. Nor did it
make him feel more obstinate, more determined; it merely made him feel silly.
“That’s it. I’ll be the goat. Forrest will always hold it against
me, and Chauncey Rikker will be laughing up his sleeve.”
He walked up and down furiously.
“So I’m left holding the bag. They’ll say I’m an old grouch and
drop me out of the picture entirely. They’ve licked me. I suppose I might as
well be graceful about it.” He looked down in horror at the hat he held in his
hand. “I can’t —I can’t bring myself to do it, but I must. After all, he’s my
only son. I couldn’t bear that he should hate me. He’s determined to marry her,
so I might as well put a good face on the matter.”
In sudden alarm he looked at his watch, but there was still time.
After all, it was a large gesture he was making, sacrificing his principles in
this manner. People would never know what it cost him.
An hour later, old Mrs. Forrest woke up from her doze and rang for
her maid.
“Where’s Mrs. Winslow?”
“She’s not in for dinner. Everybody’s out.”
The old lady remembered.
“Oh, yes, they’ve gone over to get married. Give me my glasses and
the telephone book. . . . Now, I wonder how you spell Capone.”
“Rikker, Mrs. Forrest.”
In a few minutes she had the number. “This is Mrs. Hugh Forrest,”
she said firmly. “I want to speak to young Mrs. Forrest Winslow. . . . No, not
to Miss Rikker; to Mrs. Forrest Winslow.” As there was as yet no such person,
this was impossible. “Then I will call after the ceremony,” said the old lady.
When she called again, in an hour, the bride came to the phone.
“This is Forrest’s great-grandmother. I called up to wish you
every happiness and to ask you to come and see me when you get back from your
trip if I’m still alive.”
“You’re very sweet to call, Mrs. Forrest.”
“Take good care of Forrest, and don’t let him get to be a ninny
like his father and mother. God bless you.”
“Thank you.”
“All right. Good-by, Miss Capo — Good-by, my dear.”
Having done her whole duty, Mrs. Forrest hung up the receiver.