A little time before I went to Wah I received a questionnaire from the University at which I received my degree. Among the questions was one which read, "What benefits do you consider you received during the four years you attended the University?" In a moment of bitterness I wrote, "None," and returned the questionnaire.
In this I was wrong and unfair for I did receive perhaps some benefits. I made some friends who remained friends. I did learn something about getting on with people and came to have some understanding regarding good books and I learned a few facts which remained in my mind. I think, quite honestly, that this was about all I got out of the four years spent there. The tormenting thing is the speculation which returns to me again and again that I might have learned much more during those four years by striking out into the world on my own, and that in doing so I might have lost or destroyed the middle-class complacency and paralysis which reduced my whole life to the monotonous level o uninspired work, material rewards, and conformity, out of which it became slowly apparent that the only escape was neither physical nor intellectual but through drinking. The whole experience at college only tended to fertilize and cultivate the snobberies, the conformity, the shibboleths of the life which had already begun to limit and stifle me. In a sense the four years were spent in a vacuum four years in which I was protected from almost all reality, four years in which I had neither to go to work nor to face the business of living. I emerged a pitifully immature specimen, in reality no older, no wiser, no more experienced than when I entered. In a way the University only served to arrest my development and preserve my adolescence.
In those four years I might have simply knocked about the world. I might have gone to India or Sumatra or China. I might have met all sorts of people fascinating or strange or even evil but at least real. I might have starved or have fallen ill in a strange country. I might have learned a language or two. But I did none of these things. Instead I spent four years at a university without much work, in the illusion that I was enjoying myself and during that time did not have to be every morning at nine o'clock in my father's office. I joined one of the good fraternities and won my letter in basketball and was on the wrestling team, and I emerged from college no more mature or experienced than I entered it.
The next step of course was marriage and then a family, and by that time it was too late and I was too weak to change a pattern of which most of my friends were the victims. Today those wasted four years when I was young and completely free seem a terrible loss, not only as wasted years but for what I might have done during them things perhaps which would have changed my whole life and set me free.
I have tried many times to think why I went to the University. My future was assured in my father's business. I did not need the technical education necessary to become an engineer, a lawyer, or a doctor. I was certainly not a genius or even brilliant. I always had good marks which I got without too much work. After thinking and thinking I can only discover one or two reasons pressure from my parents who, never having been to college themselves, placed an exaggerated value, common to their generation, on what was called a "college education" or "a college-bred man" (another expression which belongs with the vulgarity of "gorgeous drapes" and "occasional chairs"). I also went to college because that was the thing everybody in my world did, whether they learned anything or not.
I found that I was not alone in this situation. Plenty of the boys I knew were in college for those reasons and for some others, equally beside the point. Some of them had been sent to college because "they might make connections there to whom they could sell stocks or bonds or insurance" and some because their fathers wanted them to belong to the same club or fraternity. The idea that a university was a place dedicated to that precious thing called learning scarcely occurred to most of my friends. They managed to stay in college and get decent marks either because they were not too stupid and the standards were not too high or because in order to play on the team it was necessary to get passing grades. Among the others were the men who wanted an education badly enough to work their way through school or the "grinds" or -those who happened to be among the elect, possessing brains and charm and good looks and athletic prowess all combined through some special blessing. These last, of course, were in the vast minority. Most of us were simply the sons of middle-class well-to-do parents who were at once in awe of education and in terror of intelligence or intellect or genius.
It did seem odd that there were so few who really wanted to learn or who really emerged at last with any evidence whatever of having been to a great university. Most of them, on receiving their degrees, considered their education finished and from that point believed it unnecessary to learn anything more or to take any special interest in anything. Most of them have remained culturally and intellectually at the level marked by their graduation, as life grew duller and duller and they came more and more to kill time until they died.
I "made" one of the better fraternities for a variety of reasons. I was not bad-looking. I had clean expensive clothes. I was presentable. I showed some prowess in athletics and I had money to spend. These factors, on the whole, seemed to be the qualifications for being invited to join any of the better" fraternities. I drank beer. I "necked" appropriately on the occasion of college dances. In the last year I had a car of my own. Now and then, rather in a spirit of bravado, some of us went to the nearest city and visited a brothel, but most of us were a little scared and some of us did nothing at all but drink beer after we got there.
The only one who went regularly and for enjoyment and perhaps relief was a dark, tense, brilliant fellow named Frank Saunders. Everybody knows his name now for he is the head of a great corporation and did much to organize industry and carry on the war. At the time he was not too popular and was regarded with mingled envy and distaste for his experienced ways. He was older than the rest of us in his class by three or four years because his father had sent him off on a leisurely trip round the world so that, as the father expressed it, "He would have some sense by the time he went to college." He knew what he wanted in life and went after it. For this he was regarded as being eccentric. There were, of course, a few boys known as "literary" who instinctively drew together through mutual intellectual interests. They represented the one in a hundred and I scarcely knew any of them. During the first two or three years I would have been ashamed of being friends with any of them.
When I try to remember what happened during those four years I find it very difficult. The years seem to remain blurred in a lazy, agreeable haze in which nothing happened of any importance. That phrase "nothing happened" is a terrifying one when one considers how brief is life and how great and varied are its delights and how immense are the fascinations of a still almost unexplored and unknown universe. It seems to me that I was driven by nothing, neither by ambition nor sexual appetites nor curiosity nor indeed anything at all, and in this I was like most of my fellow classmen. There were no torments, no bitter disappointments, no ecstasies, no tragedy, no great honors or great defeats, in fact "no nothing," I suppose this is what some men consider happiness when they talk of the happy years spent in college. It is this, I suppose, which leads them back on class day to make fools of themselves in a foggy, sometimes drunken effort to recapture that happy dullness. Few things are sadder than the class-day reunion with its hordes of middle-aged, rather baffled and puzzled men attempting to recapture not only something which has gone forever but should have been gone and been forgotten as they grew into maturity and achievement, something which, often enough, never existed at all. This immature institution of the reunion, it seems to me, is a bitter commentary on the failure both of education and indeed of a civilization. It is very special to this country.
I went back twice to reunions before I came out to this island, but the pleasures I found there were very mixed. In the beginning I was glad to see some of my old friends, and then after a little time I became bored and saddened because the tie between us was so artificial and so faded and because it quickly became even more frayed and worn. And so I too began to drink and in drinking I found the illusion which I had returned to find. With alcohol in my veins I began to think that the others, like myself, were very amusing and I fell back into the flow of conversation confined entirely to the category of "Do you remember the time that good old so-and-so climbed the bell tower?" The ones with whom I might have enjoyed a conversation, the ones who had gone out into the world and made a civilized life for themselves, were not there, perhaps because they had grown into maturity and because their immediate lives were so satisfactory that there was no need and no time to return and attempt to recapture the past.
After the second time I never went again to a class reunion, and it is highly unlikely that I shall ever go to another if and when this bloody war ever comes to an end.
Education is, I suppose, largely a matter of the individual, both on the side of the teacher and of the scholar, and both teacher and scholar are perhaps born and not made. I would say that if a man does not want an education nothing on earth can force it down him and, conversely, that if he desires it nothing can prevent him from achieving it. In between, of course, are all the people who do not know whether they want to learn or understand anything or not, and that is where the inspired teacher comes in, the man or woman who can lend excitement to any subject and surround himself with young people whose whole lives may be changed by contact with the flame he represents. These of course are all too rare, for the great majority of those who teach are not thus blessed but are merely making a living, a task which gradually becomes more and more distasteful or maintaining toward their work an attitude of dullness and detail which turns any subject into a misery. And of course there is in the teaching profession itself an element which inevitably leads toward eventual desiccation and academic God-almightiness the fact that a teacher sits on a throne and dictates to those with less academic knowledge and less authority.
In all my experience in college I encountered only one teacher who possessed the flame and was capable of transmitting the spark to those to whom he addressed his efforts. The others certainly failed to kindle any fire in me and I find great difficulty in remembering most of them or anything they taught me. They have simply faded out without leaving an impression. This single teacher did bring to me something which has remained precious to me and will so long as I live and has been a refuge and a consolation and a bulwark against the buffetings of existence. He taught me to read. I mean, really, to read. In Oakdale I doubt that any of our friends read a book a year. The women sometimes talked about books but had rarely read them. They got their information from professional female book reviewers who dressed elaborately and badly and used extravagant hats for "bait."
It seems to me that most people never arrive at much achievement or even satisfaction in life because they do not know what they want or because, if they do from time to time have an inkling, the objective constantly changes. And of course there are those who are always looking to get something for nothing and those who will work harder to keep from working than if they simply buckled down and did a job. I do not know what it was I wanted and I do not know today except that I would like the life which I have missed, a life full of excitement and fun and recklessness and satisfaction and achievement. (I write all of this with a kind of agonizing truth and bitterness. It is my own story, my own failure but, God knows, I am not alone.)
I could leave my family today, throw all responsibility to the winds, set out as a tramp around the world, run off with another woman than my wife. Oh! there are a lot of things I could do, but after forty they seem a little silly and the whole effort would be a phony. There is nothing at once sillier or more tragic than the middle-aged man who discovers he has missed the train and tries to make up for it when it is too late.
Twice... only twice did I have a real glimpse of that life which under other circumstances I might have had if I had been brought up in a different background, with different parents, and if I had been a different character with just a spark of something. It happened the first time on the only visit I made to Frank Saunders family.
They lived in summer in a big house in the East. Frank's father was an architect and a very distinguished one and the house was a Georgian house, although even as a junior at the University where I was supposed to be receiving a cultural education I had not yet learned that there were such things as Georgian houses, or Renaissance or Jacohean houses, or any other kind of houses. All I knew was that there was a type called Colonial and one called "English Rustic" and of course "Early American" which is scarcely architecture at all The Saunders' house was, I recognized even by my uninformed standards, a very beautiful house. I knew it because when I stood near the entrance to the grounds the sight of the house with its great windows and pink brick, partly covered with ivy, and the horseshoe-shaped stairs leading to the main entrance all made me feel good, much as some music makes me feel.
The hall inside made you feel the same way, with its high ceiling and the great door at the far end and the curving stairway which mounted to the rooms above. At one side there was a big table which always carried a tray on which stood drinks of all kinds so that anyone coming in from tennis or a long walk or a ride could have a drink at any hour of the day or night. Near it there was a wooden chest in which, standing upright, was a collection of walking sticks and umbrellas to be used by the family or guests for walks in every kind of weather.
At the right was the dining room which I remember as one of the most beautiful rooms I have ever seen, dark with paneled woodwork but gay and bright with the light which came in through the big square-paned windows. It glowed with silver and porcelain and crystal and there were always flowers, not just tight little bouquets but huge exuberant bunches of flowers of many kinds and colors. They were not simply stuck into vases. They were not arid garden-club "arrangements compounded self-consciously out of aspidistras and old beer cans. Always they were what might be called "creations" in which a variety of colors and forms were woven together in a kind of exuberant architectural pattern. They gave me the same satisfaction that I found in looking at the faade of the house. They were "right" for the house and for that particular room and I had not seen many things that were "right" ever before in my life. Frank's mother always did the flowers herself every two days. It was the first time I ever realized that flowers could be more than a mere bunch of carnations and roses or that they could become architecture or painting or music.
On the opposite side of the hall there was a big room called sometimes the living room and sometimes the drawing room. It had big doors which stood open day and night during the summer overlooking the garden where the flowers were not in "beds" but existed in a kind of ordered riot of design and color. There was a big table covered with books and magazines, many of them French or English or German. There were ashtrays everywhere for smoking and, mixed with the English furniture, a great many comfortable sofas and chairs upholstered in bright chintz. There were none of the mud colors so favored in Oakdale. The colors were clear and gay and positive without timidity or conformity.
The floor was covered by a huge Chinese rug spotted here and there where drinks had been spilled or puppies had let themselves go. One evening Frank's mother indelicately remarked that she favored rugs with intricate designs on them since the puppy spots showed less and eventually seemed to become part of the design. I never saw the room in what might have been called a "state of order" let alone the inhuman meticulous order of my mother's house or Enid's. The drawing room too was always filled with flowers. The odd thing was that the English furniture and the great rug had a value many times that of the constantly polished, perpetually dusted stuff in my mother's house or the things which Enid later bought for our "lovely home" with "gorgeous drapes" in Oakdale.
I remember at first a feeling of shock at the disorder and a suspicion that Frank's mother was not a very good housekeeper, for my mother never allowed dogs in the house and she kept in the living room a set of minute ashtrays arranged in a rack just in case any not too welcome sprawling smoking guest entered the place. The ashtrays at Frank's house were huge affairs of heavy glass, and usually by the end of the evening they were pretty well filled unless someone emptied them into the fireplace behind a paper screen made in the shape of a fan simply to hide the rubbish until it was burned the following morning.
Frank's mother was a warm handsome woman who must have been very beautiful as a girL She was big and rather plump and appeared nearly always during the day in a rough tweed skirt and plain blouse with a small ruffle down the front. In the evening she dressed almost as simply as in the daytime and wore as adornment rather heavy gold jewelry. There was nothing fussy or "dainty" about her. You got the impression that she was so busy living that she did not have time for fussiness. Yet somehow the handsome simple costumes were a symbol of her character, her serenity, her taste. They defined and indicated a person of quality.
She was at the door waiting for us when we arrived, and after an introduction and a warm greeting she enveloped Frank in a great hug and kissed him on both cheeks. It was the first time I had ever seen such an embrace. My mother always kissed me full on the mouth almost with the violence of a mistress, and I have never been able to persuade Enid that I hate the taste of lipstick and the smell of cold cream, probably because both have become associated with Enid and because I have never had the courage to say to her that I could not bear going through the farce of kissing her on the mouth when there was no longer any passion involved. But this mouth-kissing business with its simulation of passion is all part of Enid's show and play-acting. If in public she were ever seen kissing me in any other fashion, the other women in her world would begin at once to say that things wer not going well between us. I suspect that she likes the smell of tobacco and shaving lotion no better than I like the taste of lipstick and cold cream. But she has to put on a show.
Frank's mother took me up to the room I was to share with him because she said the house was full of people. The younger children had even been moved out to sleep on cots in the play house by the tennis court. She was delighted to have me if I didn't mind not having a room of my own. It was a big house, although it probably had no more rooms than the ornate house in Crescent City in which I was still living, and it struck me that if the house was filled there must be a lot of people there. And there were...
At home we rarely had an overnight visitor, and my mother frowned upon my having a friend to stay overnight when I was small. The only visitors I can remember were relatives who stayed with us over the funeral of my grandfather and an occasional big-busted, aggressive female who was a fellow member of one of my mother's many organizations and whose visit seemed more like that of a general or an institution than a visitation from a human being.
Even now, years later, as I sit here in the jungle the memory of that visit is a glowing thing. In the beginning I was perplexed by it, by the people I met there, by their vitality and grace and by something I only came to understand much later their capacity for living. None of the people in that house ever seemed to have enough time, not because they were rushing about in planes and automobiles or from bar to country club to convention, simply killing time until they died, but because there was so much to do, so much to see and hear, so much to learn and understand. In that house I heard conversation for the first time, and by that I mean conversation for the sake of conversation, for the delight in the exchange of ideas, for the give and take of good argument which sometimes waxed furious and angry because the individuals believed passionately in the idea or the theory they were expounding or defending. I had my first insight into the thing called principle as opposed to the thing called prejudice. Most of the arguments I had heard until that time might have been encompassed by the words "bickering" or they were flat statements of inflexible uncompromising intolerance.
Thinking of it now, it seems to me that in the world I had known until then the violent opinions and principles of the early pioneer had simply degenerated into statements of prejudice and intolerance based upon nothing much but ignorance and petulance and conformity, and in that same world opinions and ideas rarely rose to the level of intellectual discussion. So conversation as such became a revelation to me as something stimulating and even exciting, which left me, when I was again in bed with, the lights out, excited and sleepless and confused, and although I was, perplexed I was aware that I was having a glowing experience in which I myself was an outsider, and this knowledge created within me two things, a gentle melancholy and a sense of envy for Frank who had been so lucky as to have grown up in such a world.
And I began to understand why Frank, at college and in the fraternity house, was not popular and was taciturn and sometimes sullen, why he worked hard and made a brilliant record and seemed to find, without ever saying so, the activities of the rest of us a little Juvenile and boring. He did not talk much because there was no talk about anything except beer drinking and football and jokes that were pretty bad. The fraternity had made a mistake about him. They had been fooled by his good looks, his air of worldliness, the certain dark intensity which he had, and the attractive violence of his personality. I think most of our fellow members would gladly have been rid of him. For his mere presence in the same room with them induced an almost universal and annoying sense of clumsiness and inferiority. He had quality, a characteristic rare in these times and steadily becoming more so. It was something intangible but inexpressibly irritating. The only thing he brought to the fraternity was the brilliant scholastic record and a real mind, which to the other boys was of little importance as compared with the record of any quarterback who barely managed to stay in school on "scholarship" through the unmoral connivance of the University authorities.
I did not know why he asked me to visit his family and I do not know until this day. We were not especially good friends, and my only guess is that he found me more tolerable and perhaps possessed of a little more potential intelligence than the others and that he perhaps detected in me a spark which has never grown into a flame but only weakened and threatened, at last, to destroy me a spark that was a kind of yearning for something better than I had known up till then, something which I could not define, much less understand. I only knew that it must exist and even then that in my life it was missing.
As I have grown older and more experienced it has occurred to me that there existed between Frank and myself a land of physical attraction which perhaps, with his greater experience, he recognized more clearly than I was able to do. It was, of course, something which neither of us could or would recognize and something which most people never quite understand or realize the attraction of two pleasant, good-looking people of the same sex for each other and the pleasure they find merely being in each other's company. It explains certainly the attraction possessed by certain individuals for others who share few of their qualities or tastes but find pleasure merely in their physical presence. The physical attraction comes first accompanied by the desire that on the spiritual and intellectual side, in the matter of common tastes, there may be a sympathy as great as the original attraction. There is nothing in the least wicked or perverse about such an attraction, although it sometimes leads to the bewilderment and confusion which colored the whole of my brief, fairly intense friendship with Frank. I think he found in me during our college days the illusion of common interests and a sympathy which scarcely existed in reality and that it probably was some faint physical attraction which led him into that illusion. I know now that on my side I was actually dazzled by the combination of his dark good looks, his vitality, his precocious wisdom, and his brilliance. And, of course, my vanity was flattered by the fact that, although he scarcely had any real communication with the other members of the fraternity, he had chosen to invite me to his own home. Even today I am flattered by the thought that in me he at least found possibilities that were not at all apparent in the others.
My mother was anxious to have me make the visit. She knew the celebrated name of Frank's father and I fancy that she believed I might achieve some material gain through contact with the world he represented. I might even make "contacts" among the Eastern millionaires to whom I could sell whopping life-insurance policies.
It was not only that I was confused by the fast-moving and exciting conversation but I was confused by other things. I remember that on the first night I was dressed for dinner before Frank, and he said, "Go along downstairs to the living room and get yourself a drink. I'll be down in a couple of minutes."
So I went down the big stairway to the sound of wonderful music which came from the living room and which I recognized at once as beautiful just as, instinctively, I had recognized that the house and flowers were beautiful and organized and were possessed of a design, a balance, and a purpose something which had received neither respect nor understanding in the world from which I came.
Someone was playing the piano, wildly and exuberantly, improvising a flamboyant waltz in the Viennese manner. It was a kind of apotheosis of the waltz which seemed to lift you out of reality and into a world which never existed on land or sea, in which everything was all right and gay and beautiful and there was no dullness nor any misery. I have not heard much music beyond the recordings I have collected through the years and for which Enid has no taste, but I think I never heard any music so brilliant, so effortless, so good feeling. My own feet grew lighter. As I descended the stairs it was as if I had no weight at all. Quite literally my heart sang, and I divined, in a sudden flash of emotion and excitement, something which was good and even wonderful that I had never experienced and which lay somehow just beyond my reach. I felt for a second or two as if I belonged," as if I had escaped. I did not know what it was to which I belonged nor very clearly what it was from which I had escaped, at least momentarily. I wanted suddenly and shamelessly to weep out of sheer happiness.
I did not go into the living room at once but stopped by the table in the hall where the drinks were kept and poured myself a cocktail from a silver pitcher which sat in a pail of cracked ice. It tasted clean and cold and lovely. I wanted to stay there forever just as I was in the beautiful hallway, listening to the incredible music which seemed to me like very beautiful fireworks against a brilliant blue night sky.
And I thought, "What a wonderful house! In it there seems to be no troubles, but only fun. Everything is pleasant. Everything is beautiful. Everything seems to fit. Nobody is pretending to be anything. Nobody is gossiping or quarreling or getting drunk."
Above the music I heard the sound of laughter and voices and I experienced a faint sense of shock because there was not a complete silence in the presence of such music. I thought, "Surely this must be a great musician and they should be listening with respect."
Then Frank appeared running down the stairs with the peculiar grace and muscular control which was a large part of his attraction. He stopped at sight of me and laughed, saying, "What's the matter? Scared?" and I said, "No, I was just listening."
"It's Scherbatov," he said. "He's showing off for free. There's nobody like him when he gets going."
He poured himself a cocktail and said, "Come on," and put his arm through mine and led me into the living room. I think he understood how much I felt an outsider, like a beggar at the door.
In the big room there were a lot of people, some of whom I never got quite straight during the whole visit and do not even remember very well. They all seemed alike in one thing that they were gay and that somehow they all seemed to be extremely friendly. Two of them, a dark man and a blonde woman, sat a little apart, listening to the fireworks from the piano. A third turned out to be Frank's father, a big man with a rather florid face and a rich pleasant voice who welcomed me by putting his great arms about my shoulders in a warming gesture, as if by instinct he were trying to gather me into the curious gay atmosphere of the room. And there was a very odd scrawny-looking woman dressed in rather a grim fashion tailed Lady Fitzsimmons whom you could not possibly forget even after years because of her sharp and entertaining tongue. She looked very ill but it did not seem to affect her spirits. There was, too, a very beautiful dark woman of about thirty with an Italian name which I do not remember any longer except that they called her Paula. She need never have spoken at all, for simply to look at her was enough satisfaction for anyone. I found her beauty almost terrifying and I could find nothing whatever to say to her on the single occasion when I discovered myself for a moment in a corner with her.
And there were other people whom I remember less vividly after so long a time, but they all seemed to be possessed of the same brilliance and good nature. It struck me that these people really enjoyed living. They did not pick at it or turn their backs upon it. Doubtless they had personal tragedies and disappointments and they could not have been consistently as gay and as carefree as they seemed to be in this peculiar new world.
The man at the piano went on playing. He appeared simply to be enjoying himself, pausing now and then for a second to take a swift drink from the glass that stood beside him on the piano. He was by all standards an extraordinarily ugly man with a great prominent nose and a bald head with a fringe of curly hair and rather popping eyes, but he seemed enveloped in a flame of vitality and good humor so that even with all the other remarkable people in the room you kept turning to watch him. Twice the beautiful dark woman called Paula went over to the piano and said something to him at which he nodded his head, and even to an inexperienced novice like myself it was very clear that she was passionately in love with him.
Among them all moved FranFs mother and a whole troop of dogs, a big boxer, a poodle, and two Aberdeens. It seems to me now that there were more dogs, but those four I remember very well. They were all trained beggars, and no one in the room seemed to have any scruples about feeding them bits of the thin excellent sandwiches which were served with the cocktails, a procedure which seemed to me unbelievable. My own mother only allowed me to have a dog after years of begging and then never permitted it in the house except to sleep in the cellar on cold nights since it might ruin some of her expensive, ugly furniture or the hideous fake "Oriental" rugs.
Just before we went in to dinner two of Frank's younger sisters, about fifteen or sixteen years old, came in and said, "How do you do?" to all the people in the room, explaining that they were going off to a neighbor's for dinner. The ugly pianist stopped playing and swung about and kissed them both warmly on the cheek as they left. They were pretty girls, and I remember thinking that if I married one of them I might by that very act find my way into this magic circle. The odd thing was that the two girls, despite the fact that they were at the awkward age, did not seem shy or resentful or strange as you might have expected. I understood this only later when I came to notice that in this house there was no such thing as age. The young were not separated from the old, and one discovered a great interest and animation and friendliness and mutual respect among them all. At the dinner party there were people of every possible age. To me, accustomed to a society in which people were stratified according to age and the young regarded the old as fossils and the old regarded the young as "squirts" all this was startling.
The food at dinner was wonderful. It was not simply food. Everything had its own taste instead of all tasting alike from soup to pudding. I drew a place between the dark beauty and a Mrs. Somebody or other who was a neighbor. It turned out that she was divorced and had a thriving business of her own in New York which had to do with furniture and glassware. I was a failure, I am afraid, merely answering the questions of the beauty about the part of America in which I was living and which she was about to visit for the first time. The smart, businesslike divorcee had a cousin who had once lived in Crescent City, and the contact helped a little with the conversation. The cousin's name was Mary Raeburn, whom I knew but slightly although much later she was to make a great upheaval in my life. I envied Frank who seemed to be having no trouble at all between Lady Fitzsimmons and a pretty blonde woman of perhaps thirty. I could see now, more than ever, why at school he had been taciturn. Certainly he talked enough now to make up for months of silence. At school he had found nothing to talk about and no one with whom it was possible to hold a conversation.
After dinner some of them played bridge in a small room off the drawing room and the others talked, and presently Scherbatov went to the piano and played some serious music, and then he and Frank's mother and another of the older men did a wonderfully funny burlesque of an opera which I discovered was Tristan und Isolde. Scherbatov improvised fake music with a Wagnerian sound and an occasional Wagnerian theme. Frank's mother, Enveloped in a mass of draperies, played Isolde, and the older man, with an aluminum saucepan on his head, a long cape, and an old saber did Tristan, returning from far into the kitchen and singing as he came closer and closer until he joined Isolde on a settee where they sat at arm's length, embracing each other as they sang a boisterous version of the second-act love duet. And after that Frank's mother, leaning against the piano, gave an imitation of an arty and bad concert singer. I remember that one of the florid pieces she sang was called, "D'une Prison," and the other, "Esclave." In the midst of it the big poodle suddenly sat uptight under the piano, opened his mouth, and joined in the concert with a series of wonderful and mournful howls.
"Long after midnight we all had more good sandwiches. Some lad milk and some had drinks and at last the party broke up. Half the people were staying in the house and the others went off into the night to other houses near by.
Upstairs, after I had got into my pajamas, I sat on the edge of the bed still dazzled, still thinking, still bewildered, and when Frank came out of the bathroom he looked at me, grinned, and said, "What's the matter? Depressed?"
"No, I had a wonderful time. I never saw people like that "before."
"I guess there aren't many of them around. Did you get them straightened out?"
"Some of them, I guess. The Italian woman is the most beautiful woman I ever saw."
"Yes. She's famous for that. Quite a girL She's Scherbatov's -mistress." He noticed the bewilderment in my face. "Yes. That's Tight. Don't discount Scherbatov because he's ugly. He's a famous lady-killer. Women run after him every place he goes."
Then I stepped into the trap which I suspect he had been setting for me in his sardonic way. I asked, "Does your mother know about it?"
He laughed. "Of course. She's put them in adjoining bedrooms so they won't have to wander about trying to find each other."
I felt the color coming into my face, and Frank seemed suddenly sorry for having exploited my provinciality. "You see," he said, "she thinks things like that are none of her business... that is, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. If people are nasty or mean it is quite a different matter. You should see her then. Nobody can trample and squelch people like Ma if she wants to, when she finds somebody has been cruel or cheap. She thinks what people do in their private lives is none of her business. Everybody knows about Scherbatov and Paula. Her husband is a Roman Catholic and won't divorce her."
In the darkness I found it all very puzzling, and what puzzled me most was the figure of Frank's mother who seemed so warm and healthy and pleasant and quite obviously a happy and faithful wife and a very good mother. In my world where everything was black or white she would have been considered wicked for having such a couple as Scherbatov and Paula in the house. If sin were such a terrifying and evil thing how could these people be so happy and, above all, so gay? How could she permit her young daughters to speak to a woman like Paula who was living in sin, nay, even in open adultery.
There is no use in going further into the rest of the week. People came and went. It seemed that the big beautiful house was always filled with dogs and people and children, all of whom seemed to get on admirably together regardless of age. A good part of the time they talked about things of which I had little or no knowledge so that, even if I had been less shy and awkward in such a society, I still could not have taken part in any conversation worth listening to.
On Sunday evening when the servants were out Frank's mother turned in and cooked the dinner, and an excellent dinner it was, and the angular, sharp old Lady Fitzsimmons turned herself into a kitchen maid and a good one, preparing the vegetables and washing up the saucepans. Scherbatov and Paula on Thursday night made a wonderful dish of Spaghetti Bolognese, and Frank's father took over the salad. After both meals Frank and I and his two sisters washed up the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, Mary, the prettier of the girls, mopping up the floor with the expertness of a charwoman. Even the dogs took part in the affair, lying around underfoot and being fed morsels from time to time. It was all over and we were back in the living room an hour from the time we left the table... I was useful then, and I think I enjoyed those two evenings the most of the whole visit. I could listen and participate without seeming an oaf.
But the thing which impressed me most was that these people enjoyed what they were doing that old Lady Fitzsimmons took pride in her job as kitchen maid and probably did a better job than any of the servants. Scherbatov and Paula put their whole souls into the spaghetti along with the meat and tomato sauce, and Mary, Frank's sister, scrubbed the floor probably more thoroughly and efficiently than it had been scrubbed in years.
When the conversation turned upon servants, Frank's mother said, "I've never had any servant trouble. We all get along well and I have had the same couple for eighteen years. My father gave me wise advice when I was a girL He said, I learn to do everything. You can never know too much in this life, and so I did learn, and if a laundress walked out on me or a cook became insolent, I could always say, I leave if you want to, but if you stay try to be good-tempered. There's one thing I won't have around the house even in my own family and that's a sullen sulky person, I could always say, if you leave I am not helpless. I can do your job probably better than you can do it. I've never been sorry in following my father's advice."
It is something I have never forgotten, particularly the part about "learn to do everything. You can never know too much in life." I have not always followed that admonition. I wish I had.
During the week I developed an intimacy with Frank himself which had not existed before. This was so perhaps because we were sharing a room and perhaps because for a little time Frank almost felt sorry for me and tried in his abrupt direct way to help me, even at the end when he must have seen that I was bewildered and hopelessly out of my depth.
Once I said to him, "Your father must be very rich," and he laughed. "You'd be surprised how broke he always is. He spends his money on pictures and furniture and on his big family and on his friends. He likes to eat and drink well and he's the kind that always grabs the check. I hate to think how much the old man is in debt. He makes big fees, sometimes enormous ones, but it all goes out of the window. None of us kids will inherit a cent. He keeps telling us that. He says, Tm spending it all on you so that you'll know how to make your own living and, what's more important, how to get the most out of life. If you have capital in a bank, the bank can go bust or your stocks and bonds can go up the flue. If you have it in your head it's indestructible." Frank laughed again. "I know I'll have to make my own living. The old man keeps telling me so over and over again, and I'm not interested in Just making a living. I really want to do something and be somebody."
That night he seemed to have been released somehow and talked more than I had ever heard him talk. Some of the talk was directed at me and more of it I think was directed at himself, as if he were trying to straighten things out.
He said, "I know some of the Choristers in the club disapprove of me, especially my going over to Jessie's place now and then, but I know what I'm doing. I know what I want to do. My father sent me out to the Middle West to college because he didn't want me to be provincial and know nothing but fellows from the East or fellows who had nothing but money. He sent me around the world first, telling me to take my time and find out what things are about and then maybe when I went to college I'd have some sense and know the answers and know what I wanted to do. Well, that's exactly what happened. I do know what I want to do. I want to be an engineer and, by God, I'm going to be a good one. I'm a sexy guy, and when I go over to Jessie's if s to get it out of the way so I can do my work. It's a lot better than seducing the daughter of some campus boarding-house keeper or smooching around in the bushes with some nice girl and getting nothing for it but a lot more agitation. I haven't yet got enough sense to get married and stay married, and I'm not fool enough to get myself handicapped at my age with a lot of kids and diapers. Maybe some day I'll fall in love and that'll be fine, but I hope by that time I'll have enough sense to make it last and enough money so that I'm not going to settle down for good in a six-room house in the suburbs with no prospect of escape. Jeez, if we don't have enough sense to manage our own lives then we shouldn't whine afterward."
And then remembering all the scare stories and the colored slides concerning social diseases we had all been treated to again and again, I asked naively, "Aren't you afraid of catching something?"
At that he laughed. "I can take care of myself... If they'd teach kids more about that and less about the horror side, everybody would be better off."
And then he told me that he didn't see the regular girls at Jessie's place. He told me what I had never known before. He said, "Jesse has a list of girls on call. They wouldn't stay in her house and most of them won't even come there. They'll meet you at Jessie's home on the edge of town. Some of them are pretty nice women young widows or wives whose husbands are impotent. I've had one girl for the last two years. Her husband has an electrical repair shop and she's fond of him and doesn't want to leave him. We meet mostly on Thursday nights when he goes to the lodge. She's a good girl and not stupid at all. She doesn't want to leave her husband and I don't want to get married, so everything is jake. I'm very fond of her."
I left at the end of the week and I saw Frank again the following year at college, but the old brief intimacy seemed to have vanished and he appeared no longer to have any interest in me. He was polite and even friendly, but he never mentioned the visit and he was so set upon what he wanted and what he was doing that he had very little time for me. I still do not know why he asked me in the first place to visit his family. I can only speculate. If he saw anything in me, any possibilities over the other men in the fraternity, he must have become disillusioned when he discovered how awkward and ignorant I was in such a world. He knew as I knew that I did not belong, and he probably felt that I never could belong or that, if I could, it would take too much of his time and energy to accomplish the trick. You must remember that he was nearly four years older than I and in maturity and background and sense of values hundreds of years older. Out of the background of that wonderful house, he had, as a boy, simply absorbed more than I would ever learn or assimilate in a lifetime, or could ever learn in any college or university, and after him the young sisters were repeating the process. How lucky they were!
The visit might have been a cruel thing for me at the time, and later on, after I married Enid and had two children and realized that there was no way out, it did turn into a cruel thing because by the time I was trapped, by myself as well as by Enid, I began to realize what had happened. If I had never had that sudden brilliant glimpse of another, richer, more exciting world, I might never have known, like most of my friends in Oakdale, that I had missed anything at all, and been moderately content. But I had seen beneath the curtain, and when I began to be bored and started to drink like all the others in order to find even the shabbiest kind of satisfaction in life, it was too late.
It is strange that I remember so vividly the whole of the visit. As I grow older it seems to become clearer to me and I remember things and even speeches and remarks which I had forgotten during the intervening time. Clearest of all in the memories is Frank's mother with her warmth and good looks and health and infectious gaiety. How wonderful it would be to have a wife like that! Or a mother! I doubt that I could ever have found a woman like her in my world, and, after all, one has to deserve such a woman, to offer something even to attract her.
What I saw during that visit to Frank's family was a civilized world in which there was a set of sound values and things fell into place according to those values. It is something that does not happen overnight Many things go into its accomplishment background and spirit and taste and brains and, above all, values themselves. It was a world in which two cars in the garage was of no interest whatever except as a convenience. A car, whether a jalopy or a Rolls, was simply something to get you from one place to another. It never became a chromium-plated symbol.
I know now that the people in that world looked upon cars and plumbing and telephones and all the materialist, mechanical paraphernalia of our age simply as the means of providing them with more time to devote to those things which are civilisation and bring deep satisfaction and richness to living. Without all the mechanical, material things, I know now that these people would have been much the same. They would have lived well and richly in a shack or a cave, and out of all the world they would have found each other so that when the time came for them to die they would do so pleasantly and without reluctance or bitterness or fear or regret, because they had very largely fulfilled the destiny set for intelligent and civilized mankind. The cars, the telephones, the radio, tie plumbing were not the goal nor the measure by which one's material position was determined as richer and more successful than that of other men; they were merely the means of achieving something far beyond that. The odd thing was that these people were not only much happier than most people that I have known; they were also richer in worldly goods and success and fame. It was as if a sorry world sought them out and forced these rewards upon them as a just compensation for the light they shed, whether it was the music of Scherbatov or the architecture of Frank's father or the beauty of Paula or the gaiety and wit of Frank's mother or the bitter brilliance of old Lady Fitzsimmons. The world, it seems, is hungry for such things and will pay well without ever being billed for the account. It is people like these who provide the real escape. They are the fortunate and the blessed because they are not afraid. Perhaps, being the blessed, there is no need for them to know either fear or despairing boredom.
