Part 4

Three enormous chandeliers, designed after the crowns of Merovingian kings, poured cunningly diffused pools of light on to this scene of mediæval resurrection. The very modern young Jennifer, who wore her docked head like Jeanne d’Arc, and whose metallic frock clicked, slouched in on slim, inelegant legs.

Her smartness, even back in the St. Louis days when she had first begun to drift from him, had always been a source of her father’s deep admiration. Not her indubitable smartness in the worldly sense, but the brand of it that was indicated in the intelligent bright dark eyes, set into a head that stood so erect and right between its slim shoulders. She could have been anything, Jennifer could have been, except the thing she was. And the thing she was, without his being able to define the exact why, was anathema to her father.

It was not that she carried her cocktails vulgarly, or said gross things with what passed for the new frankness. She was no more and no less than any girl of her upbringing. Or her mother’s upbringing. If anything, a little more. She drank rather less, smoked not at all, and, in her own phraseology, had remained a virgin chiefly because she had never let her curiosity get the better of her.

When she said a thing like that, Rarick ground his fingers into his palms to keep from boxing the ears of the consciously modern young Jennifer. She was so cocksure of what a sophisticated, unillusioned, amusing thing it was to be Jennifer. She was tiresome and a swine, yes, she was willing to admit, but only in the sense that her rattling-good brain was going to waste in cocksure and debonair fashion. You couldn’t live in her swinish set and take the world seriously enough to concentrate. Hang it all! why try to write plays, even if you felt a talent for it, when, to be true to the life she knew, they would have to be dirty plays? Or why do charity or social work, when the world hadn’t time for the dirty-nosed little darlings even after you’d gone to all the trouble to save them for it. Part of the amusing thing it was to be Jennifer was to be brutal and frank and unsentimental and greedy and a little foul-mouthed.

To Rarick, this young woman of his flesh, his board, his keep, who stood there on the hearth-rug before him, glittering in her gown of fake armor, was as strange as if she had just stepped full grown from the life-size silver-and-chalcedony Zeus that stood on a _credenza_ against the wall. Everything he felt about this illuminated edition of himself was imbedded in disapproval. Had been, since the Mary Institute days back in St. Louis, when she had stopped bounding the state of Missouri for him in an unaffected little voice that was appealing, and had first started going to football games in the white-kid gloves her mother provided for her, with boys in their first long trousers, who came calling for her in their family automobiles. He despised what she had become, chiefly in terms of what she might have been.

“You sent for me, Father?” she said, the glance she guarded from ever meeting his sliding to the spot where his graying hair hung in the Napoleonic forelock down his brow, and simulating unconcern by feeling very concernedly along the rear edges of her shining curtain of coiffure.

“Dr. Felix Gerkes, of the National Museum and a scholar of considerable consequence, is going to make his home with us. I suppose you know that, Jennifer?”

Jennifer did. In fact, she was the one who had passed along to her mother the first information concerning the thin-bristled hair-brush and the square of American cheese, as they had sat, in pajamas, in Jennifer’s bedroom over coffee one morning. Pretty snide, to stick a fossil in the yellow suite, with the blessed old Gothic mausoleum as cramped as a Harlem flat, when it came down to actual living-quarters.

But nevertheless a sense of relief ran through Jennifer. Thank Heaven, he had not got wind of the whole silly business of “Casanova, Be Careful.” They were damned clever lyrics, if she did say so, but fat chance to get anything but a dressing-down for them from her father.

“I’m like the fellow, Father, when it comes to science, who kept ‘Stones of Venice’ on the geology shelf of his library.”

“Dr. Gerkes’s scientific achievement is by no means all there is to him, Jennifer. I want you to cultivate him.”

His ability to antagonize his children was infallible.

She drew back from his command, with the kind of rearing of the neck that he had beheld countless times in his boy Avery. A dull sense of his impotence, where these youngsters were concerned, was a chronic rage within him.

“I want you to have dinner with Dr. Gerkes and me tonight.”

“That’s impossible. I’m late as it is for early dinner with the Delaney Stuarts. Shibby sails tomorrow.”

The name “Shibby Stuart” was no more anathema to him than a dozen others which were constantly on the lips of his wife and daughter. In fact, there were important reasons of diplomacy why there should be an _entente cordiale_ with Delaney Stuart, president of an Eastern Federal Reserve Bank with which the Rarick Chain, Inc., had enormous transactions. But the picture of Shibby Stuart as he had once seen her lying sick-drunk on a couch in his house, during one of Jennifer’s dinner dances, rose crazily before him.

“You will remain at home for dinner tonight. It may help you to remember you have a home.”

“Don’t be absurd, Father,” said Jennifer, and began pulling at the net edge of her handkerchief. Her rage, which she felt hitting in hot points against her eyeballs, was out of all proportion to the dilemma of being obliged to cancel her dinner with Shibby Stuart. As a matter of fact, even as she had been sliding into the armor gown that clicked, the thought of evasion had flashed through her brain. What with her back stiff and sore from riding a new mount that afternoon, and a more recent invitation to go off to a speak-easy for dinner and dancing with Berry Rhodes, here was an opportunity to pass up the Stuart farewell dinner and incidentally repay Shibby for a last-minute non-appearance of hers that she had recently staged at one of Jennifer’s bridge luncheons.

“It isn’t often I make demands, Jennifer. I let weeks go by without so much as seeing you at the dinner table. This is one of the times I want you here.”

It seemed to her at the moment that nothing mattered quite so much as dinner at the Stuarts’.

“You should have given me warning.”

“You should have had sufficient judgment to know there comes a time when a halt must be called, if you won’t call it yourself. You haven’t sat down to dinner in this house for three weeks or more.”

“Why should I? Everything I do gets on your nerves. If I’m so much as called to the telephone, you humiliate me before a butler by refusing to let me answer it.”

“I have known you to spend twenty minutes of a dinner hour at the telephone.”

“If I say the moon is made of green cheese, then I’ve said something off-color. Hell! why should I want to stay at home, Father?”

He reached out and hit a gong with a baton of lapis-lazuli, padded in velvet.

“Miss Jennifer will join us at dinner,” he said to an immediate butler.

She waited until the door had closed again, and then, with her face clenched and her hands clenched and her gown making jangling little sounds as the quivers of her wrath shot through her, she lowered her face until it almost touched her father’s.

“I just hate you sometimes,” she said, and began to cry the invariable tears of anger and humiliation to which these scenes could reduce her. “I wish I had the guts to go out and scrub floors for a prostitute, rather than put up with being treated like one here.”

A fit of trembling that went through him like a tree-shake caught him at the words which came off her lips, which were so close to his face that it was as if he could feel their shape.

“You will have dinner at home tonight, Jennifer, even if your temper does turn you into a barmaid.”

“It must be a splendid feeling to have to force the members of your family to your side.”

“It is, Jennifer,” he said, and looked at her with what, for a moment, threatening to disarm her, seemed like a film across his eyes. She sat down, still pulling at the net edge of her handkerchief and every so often scraping it angrily along her wet cheeks.

“Well, now you’ve got me, what is it you want with me? I suppose it isn’t asking too much to be allowed leave-of-absence to get a message off to the Stuarts. God knows what I am to say.”

He beat the gong again. “Telephone Mrs. Delaney Stuart that, owing to an unavoidable change in her plans, Miss Jennifer will be unable to come to dinner tonight.”

She held her face, during this, averted from the butler’s view of it, a little squeal of rage rising to her throat.

“Now what? I suppose I am to spend a jolly evening at home talking isinglass, or blue grottos, or dinosaurs’ eggs, or whatever it is one talks to fossil-finders.” Her rage ended on a spurt of laughter and for the life of him, he could not see her face break into amusement, her eyes crinkling, and keep his own face straight.

“I want you to meet a great and simple person, Jennifer. A man who has not grown simply great in his work, but great simply.”

“He sounds as if he ought to be done in stained glass.”

“He is witty enough to think that poor wit.”

“Thank you, Father. Any more lilies today?”

“Cultivate Dr. Gerkes, Jennifer. Cultivate Gerkes. You want to learn.”

He knew he was being roiling and didactic and tiresome again but to his surprise, she flashed a tear-stained face at him that was lit with a sudden sweetness, a clear-eyed curiosity to it that was reminiscent of the small brown jug of a girl who had bounded Missouri.

“I do, Father! I know I’m all of a total loss. I’m on to myself, don’t you forget it. I want to sit at the feet of somebody and learn. God knows I don’t know anybody with a pair of feet like that. Trot out this wise guy, Father. I’ll chuck everything and stay home at the indoor sport of improving my so-called mind. Do you think he’d like to collaborate with me on a book I’ve long had in mind, called ‘Sex O’Clock’? Really, Father, I _am_ in favor of more and better brains.”

Jenny came in then, wearing a yellow satin gown that had been dry-cleaned to the color of an old tooth, and so shrunken that it spanned. She had long since discarded it from her more formal wardrobe, but, with a survival of an old instinct for economy, went through the mean and futile performance of reserving it for just such occasions as this, when they dined alone and _en famille_.

“You look like the devil, darling,” said Jennifer, and kissed her.

“I feel like him and his bride,” said Jenny, stooping to draw at a thread that was raveling at her hem. “I thought you were having dinner at Shibby’s.”

“I’m dining at home with the Department of Arts and Sciences,” said Jennifer, and dropped a large slow wink to her mother.

Across the island of the hunting-rug, Jenny regarded her husband with eyes that had no gleam.

“I didn’t mind canceling the Dentons at the last moment and leaving a vacancy in her opera box, but I don’t relish the idea of also being on Shibby Stuart’s black list, any more than you should, Rarick, considering your banking connections with them.”

“You leave my banking connections to me.”

“Gladly.”

“Never mind, Mother. Father and I have evolved a new philosophy of life. Less philosophy and more life.”

“The philosophy, I suppose, that the rich are all mean and frivolous and vicious, and the poor holy and righteous.”

He regarded her with the masked look to his face that could cause her to say over and over to herself: “Little man. Little man, you. Little fake Napoleon, you.”

“Holy righteousness, my dear Jenny, cannot reside exclusively among the poor while you are you.”

“Attaboy, Father!” said Jennifer, and jammed a pillow into the cave between the small of her back and the couch. “I can forgive a dirty dig if it’s well dug. Can’t you, Mother?”

Her mother glanced at her wrist watch, a singular and precious one, set into the plane surface of a square diamond.

“It’s a wise house guest who is on time for his meals.”

“At that rate, Jenny, our average run of them must be morons.”

“Life among the Raricks,” sang out Jennifer and hurling out the pillow, jumped to her feet and to some inner syncopated rhythm, began teetering on her slim toes down the great length of room that led to an organ at its far end.

Carved down the pipes of the towering instrument was the legend of the St. Gregorian Mass, the meeting of Abraham and Melchisedec, and the Last Supper. A chime, somewhere in the complicated heart of the organ, which was rigged with all sorts of mechanical attachments, gave out the half-hours. To Jennifer’s hilarity, it played the grand operas, stained-window versions of the action springing into light above the keyboards. “Father’s folly,” she called it.

“Jennifer, if you turn that on, I’ll scream!”

“Keep your well-known equilibrium, Jenny. I just wanted to see the fat Brünnehilde, in purple cheeks and corsets, heave in stained glass.”

How small they made him, these women of his. That organ, built in at tremendous expense and effort by tearing out one entire end of the house, was as dear as someone beloved could have been. The storied operas, stalking in stained glass to the pressure of a button, peopled his solitude, plunged, in the glory of melody, through his evenings, saturating his thirsting spirit. Chromoesque tinned music, perhaps, but full of solaces....

“Jennifer!”

“I’m not! I’m not turning it on. Surely, if Father can stand his ‘Faust’ served up to him like Campbell’s soup, you should be able to endure a magenta and majestic trickle of ‘Tannhäuser.’”

“Do you think Gerkes understood the dinner-hour, Rarick?”

“Why, Jenny, what _is_ the matter? The man is not even due for five minutes. I’ve known you to hold dinner three-quarters of an hour without a whimper when the guests happen to be yours, as they almost invariably are.”

“She’s a cave-in from dieting, Father.”

That was doubtless true. It offended him to the point of disgust to see this angular woman responding to a herd instinct that apparently deprived her of logic, trying to reduce herself still closer to her skeleton by nibbling at meal-time on a special faddistic diet of chop and pine-apple slices.

“I’m a cave-in, all right,” said Jenny, and stretched her thin body outright on a divan and pressed her fingers into her eyes and bared her teeth in an on-edge fashion.

“Nerves. Underfed,” said Rarick, eyeing her from the opposite side of the hearth.

“Nerves, all right. Reason, all wrong.”

There descended a silence characteristic of their times together. Taking up an object here and there, as she wandered aimlessly about the museum-like room, Jennifer began to whistle in short, breathy snatches.

“For Heaven’s sake, Jennifer, stop it!”

“Sorry, Mother.”

Silence.

“Say, Dad, what do you call this?”

“That’s a Tau-crossed pastoral staff. French, about the eleventh century....”

“No, I mean the gold panel above it!”

“Oh, that’s a reredos of St. Peregrine. It’s part of an old altar-table. I bought it at the Donetti auction at the same time I got the ivory panel of the Virgin Mary with the pearl crown there, over the doorway.”

“I think it’s a waste of those lovely seed pearls, Rarick. You might have them done into something wearable for Jennifer or me.”

He did not answer.

“I was going to say, Father, I saw what might be a sister panel to that reredos today, at Duveen’s. I was there with Mary Dakin. She got caught in a tumbling market and was trying to unload two Romneys that came with her share of her grandmother’s estate. By the way, wouldn’t be interested, would you, Father, in buying a pair of Romneys? Mangy-looking, but frightfully _bona-fide_. Girl with a lamb. And Boy with a Goat. Or maybe his was a lamb, too. Well, anyway, Mary’s asking fifteen thousand for the pair, and Duveen’s sent a man to appraise.”

“Not interested.”

“What did they stick you for the pearl-incrusted reredos, Dad?”

“Hellman bid for me ... something like twenty-five thousand, if I remember....”

“Good God!” said Jenny from her reclining position, blowing smoke and holding her cigarette at bare arm’s length upward from her.

“Good God, what?” barked Rarick, ready to be on edge.

“Good God, she’s hungry!” said Jennifer, and resumed her aimless tour.

Silence.

“A Baby Gar speed-boat for your son would have cost half that much. Why is it so much easier to understand your own desire to own a sixteen-thousand-dollar piece of ivory slab than it is for you to understand a boy’s desire for the things that mean youth and sport to him?”

“Because it is not his desire. I am convinced that all these notions to add more and more dangerous and expensive toys to the jumble of things with which you are cluttering his school life and educating both your children to demand, come from you.”

“In which Jennifer is drawn dirtily into the picture.”

“Keep quiet, Jennifer.”

“Sorry, Mother.”

“Your boy demands precious little.”

“I realize that, Jenny. In fact, it is just my point.”

“Fortunately, Rarick, I am of sufficiently tough fiber to nag in his behalf for some of the things he is too sensitive to nag for himself.”

“What are some of those things, Jenny?”

“The things to which, as a rich man’s son, he is entitled.”

“Meaning....”

“O Lord! Rarick, I haven’t it left in me to go over it all again.”

“I’ll go over it for you. Meaning things. Things to keep him moving instead of thinking. Devices for speed. For motion. Things to distract him from books, _things_ to distract him from thinking.”

“Good Lord, Dad, where do you get off? Things? You’ve spent half your life shoveling snide things into the shopping-bags of snide people who need snide things like safety-pins and stewpans. You’ve glorified the American dime by making it stand for _things_. You’re the Thing King!”

How astute she was! Clever, slim Jennifer, with her sophisticated Egyptian-looking eyes, merciless in her ability to lay him open to himself.

“A major reason why I want to spare my own from the tyranny of things,” he yapped back at them, trying to express, with the chronic sense of futility, some of the malaria of his spirit which managed to keep his family at this kind of antagonized arm’s length.

“You don’t seem particularly inclined to spare yourself the tyranny of those fifteenth-century tapestries or that enameled Pietà up there that cost a king’s ransom, or unpronounceable and unwearable gems with which your pockets are crammed.”

“There is at least something of the story of mankind to be found in historical objects.”

“There’s beauty in that motor-boat Avery isn’t going to get,” sang Jennifer, cupping the tall heel of her slipper in her hand and teetering. “Slim, speedy beauty, let me tell you that. And as for that story-of-mankind stuff, if you ask me, it is pretty much the low-down same, whether you read it off the hieroglyphics of an amulet from Hindustan or study our gigolo civilization through a magnifying-glass shaped like a monocle. And, Father, speaking of gigolos, I’m in love! He’s a window-dresser for a haberdasher by day, and dances at Florentine’s by night. Abbey Chadwick engaged him for her dinner dance, and I’m going to have him for mine next week. He tangos like a patent-leather-haired god, and his name is Nemo.”

“Darling, that’s the name of a rubber corset or a comic strip or something.”

“No, Mother. He wears one and is the other; but, oh, my beating heart!”

“Bicarbonate of soda, darling!”

Why must he stand there with disgust printed on to his features, instead of meeting her vulgarity as Jenny did, by snapping her fingers. Was Jenny, after all, clever and even subtle with her children, giving them their heads, to prevent them from running away? Her children adored her. They were easy and indolent and insolent in her presence. Sometimes he even felt himself hankering for some of that insolence. Avery had once said to his mother in Rarick’s presence, “Shut up, old darling,” and he had rebuked him for it. At that there had flashed between Avery and his mother a look of amused understanding at his lack of understanding. Letters from Avery to his mother were constantly lying about the gold-stoppered bottles and knickknacks of her dressing-tables. He never read them, even surreptitiously, but he knew they were chatty letters that preyed upon the easy indulgences of his mother; and, meticulous as he was not to read, constantly his glance was being snagged by such salutatory exuberance as “Dearest Brick of a Mother” or “Dearest Mother-on-the-Spot.”

That was precisely what Jennifer was saying to her now. “Mother-on-the-Spot, you’re beautiful, but dumb.”

Dr. Gerkes entered then, after the inconsequential manner he had of appearing on a scene without the slightest preamble. His dinner clothes, which he called his “overalls,” because he wore them when he lectured, hung from the rounded part of his back like a suit that had been suspended from a nail. His shuffling footsteps skidded the small rugs from under them like so much silent gravel.

There was a graciousness to Gerkes. A man of almost unlimited intellectual contacts, he could be loquacious enough on subjects where he felt informed, and an indulgent listener to those who, in his opinion, wanted to talk more than he. Stupidity he regarded as a cardinal vice. It made him snappy. His principal income was derived from lecturing, but he could be thoroughly rude to the interrogators who crowded and chirped around him at women’s clubs; and even at the meetings of such learned organizations as scientific and historical societies he was capable of rebuking a colleague for the inattention to his lecture that his question had implied.

On the other hand, there was an amusing mixture of the Socratic and Rabelaisian about Gerkes. He loved the private and impolite jokes that had to be told behind the barrier of a hand, and the curbstone and the platform were alike his rostrums. He had never married, due principally to chronic lack of income and what he regarded as the popular fallacy that two could live as cheaply as one. His eye for a pretty woman was a quick, discerning one. It lit on Jennifer, who was standing in one of the pools of light, glittering in her armor, her dress a blaze of winking metallic disks, and her eyes as if they had come off the gown.

Rarick’s pride in his friend was pretentious and clumsy.

“Gerkes, I wish you’d tell my daughter that story about the Taoist priest who once found himself, when a meteor fell, in Lahore, India. There’s a mighty fine moral there.” Or, “Gerkes, I’d like for my wife to hear your opinion of our own Arizona summers and how they compare with say a country like Switzerland. I cannot get my family to realize that they don’t have to cross the Atlantic for beauty of scene or variety of climate.”

“Three chamber-of-commerce cheers,” said Jennifer, and held her cocktail-glass up against the light.

“See America first,” said Jenny, and gulped hers down.

It was the kind of patter for which Gerkes had little retort. Persiflage, the smiting word at any price, chic sophistication for the average truism, tea-table and round-table caliber of profundities, disarmed and bewildered him. He was at his worst. The descent to the dining-room through aisles of tapestries was made goose-step. Gerkes, who was never ill at ease, only silent where it seemed the better part of wisdom, plowed solemnly through the high-napped rugs.

Not even port wine or champagne-cup, made by Jenny at table in a frosted-silver pitcher over a _mélange_ of fresh, whole, cling-stone peaches and black cherries, could succeed in drawing him out of the slough of amiable silence into which the occasion had thus far submerged him.