Part 6

What were you to do with a boy like that, whose sweetness was indomitable?

They sat on the coping of the fountain, against a back-rest formed by a Malaga-grape vine the thickness of an arm. Delicate Asia Minor aconite crawled along the coping; and even though not one of Rarick’s hundreds of species of orchids was at the moment in bloom, an overheated air of exotic humidity prevailed.

“You’re a silly boy for making me indulge your whim for a cocktail in this ridiculous conservatory of my husband’s, where nothing ever really blooms, but unpronounceable, unwearable species and expensive botanical things are always about to happen and somehow don’t. Except by the time orchids are ridiculously cheap at every corner florist’s.”

The impersonal portion went sailing over his head.

“I know it is only a little glass house, but it cannot ever seem quite that to me, since it is where you first let me dare know you a little better.”

“I’m afraid, dear boy, there is nothing to know. If I am still water, I am not only the kind that doesn’t run deep, but perhaps the kind that doesn’t run at all.”

“You do not expect me to believe that.”

No, she did not, but she said it again.

“You are a liberal education to me.”

“How liberal?”

“I am tired of all your pretty girls here in this country who have no faces in particular. You have a face.”

“My dear boy, are you given to profound observations like that?”

“You must not make me ridiculous. I mean you have a face that hangs like a cameo in the memory.”

She looked at him, and, through the glazed fabric of a skin that did not easily take the flush, blushed with the surprised sweetness of a girl.

“You naughty Latin boy. I am old enough to be your mother.”

“I am glad, though, that you are not. Fancy the tragedy of having to be no more than son to Dusé or Cleopatra or Bernhardt.”

“My boy doesn’t feel that way,” she said, clambering back to what safety-ledge she could.

“Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“It hurts me.”

“What?”

“‘My boy’--in that tone. I am jealous, Mrs. Rarick--not of him--but of all the life that has claim on you----”

She had the impulse to rise and rebuke him, and, instead, permitted his hand to wander again toward the thick fur ruffs at her wrists. Then a butler served cocktails, and they were silent and at nice distance while he puttered; but the eyes of young Lopez, above the three cocktails he tossed off, were over her face with the sweetishness of an anæsthetic mask.

“I’m going to send you along home now,” she said, and rose. There were no lights, and a thick hush of November snow was falling against the glass walls, closing them in.

“I don’t want to go home, Jenny.”

Jenny. The plushy way he had of saying that. The impertinence of his saying that. The dearness....

“I don’t want to go home, Jenny, without something to tide me over until next time.” That plushiness in his speech was not from the effect of the three cocktails, but from an excited lisp, adorable to her, that seemed to crowd his speech.

“Impertinent,” she said, frightened, in an exultant way beyond anything that had ever happened to her, and putting out a stiff arm to ward him off.

He used the arm as a lever to draw her toward him. To the silence of the big white flakes that were pasting themselves against their glass inclosure, he dipped the back of her neck against his arm and sank his lips down on to hers.

Racing home from a charity bazaar, where she had raffled off character dolls with conspicuous success, to change her clothes for a tea dance at the St. Regence, a surprise awaited Jenny.

Avery was home.

An envelope addressed in his large free hand was handed her by the maid in the Breton cap.

DEAR MOTH:

Hullo! Surprise, eh what? I’ll wait in my bedroom until you pop in on me.

AV.

Avery home!

The first thought that flashed through Jenny’s mind, as she stood with the note dangling among her purse and gloves, flooded her with such self-disgust that, on the very heels of it, she went hurrying to Avery’s room, as if in expiation, the enormous sable coat that wrapped her from eyes to knees still dangling back off her slight shoulders.

If only she had gone straight from the bazaar to the St. Regence, without having bothered to come home and change into a taupe Lanvin gown with a high neck-ruche of chinchilla that Ramon liked. It made Ramon nervous to wait. Actually gave him indigestion, which asserted itself in little splotches of pink across his forehead. High-strung....

A lump of mortification was in Jenny’s very soul as she sped to her son. Was Avery ill? Crazy thought, but this was the first time she had seen Avery in the two months since--Ramon. Would he--could he--sense anything different? No. No. No. She need not reproach herself where her children were concerned. She had been plugging harder than ever for Avery’s speed-boat. Would--Avery--being home--make a difference to Ramon? He had never seen her with her boy. With Jennifer, now, it was different. With that not-to-be-resisted lisp of his when he attempted to employ the idioms of American slang, he called them the “Flip sisters.” But Avery--Avery, though only sixteen, had a grave, rather precious quality. His blond straight youth, while boasting a maturity of appearance that matched some of the young fellows who trailed around Jennifer, was shot through with the most knowing perceptions. Would Avery, with those curiously delicate perceptions, sense that in the two months since she had seen him, strange, turbulent, and high emotions had been sluicing through the slim being of his mother?

How annoyed Rarick would be if something only casual were bringing Avery home in the midst of his semester. He had come down so flat-footedly against it. Surely Avery could not be ill....

He was standing in a striped-flannel dressing-gown, tamping tobacco into his short-stemmed pipe, when his mother entered. The contents of a large pigskin bag, good accouterments, littered the room. A portable phonograph was open on the table, with a disk on, and a needle in position.

“Good for you, Mother! I was afraid it might not be you. Peacock tells me father often gets home nowadays around four.”

“Avery, you’re not ill?”

“Nothing so pleasantly explanatory of my sudden return to the magnificent fold of the family,” he said, giving his parent a lift off the floor as he kissed her.

“Avery, you’re not in trouble of any sort?”

“Not the kind you think.”

“What other kinds are there?”

“Deep psychological fee-fie-fo-fum ones.”

“Avery, don’t tell me you’ve started to be foolish about a girl--or anything like that,” she cried, flashing a glance, even in the suspense of her sudden suspicion, to her wrist watch.

“No, I’m off women,” he said, with elaborate grandeur and innocence of them, that made her take his long, pale cheeks between her hands and kiss him.

“Darling, tell me what has brought you home in this sudden fashion. You know how set your father is against it, since all those supper dances we used to drag you in for. Tell me, son, I’ve only a moment between appointments.”

“Mother, be a brick and cancel. How can I talk to you if you’ve only a moment? I must see you before father comes in. Please manage.”

She stood fluttering between her indecisions. After all, the important thing was that Avery was well. Some schoolboy predicament no doubt, that seemed enormous enough to the schoolboy living it. Ramon hated to wait. Waiting acted as an actual physical depressant upon him, from which he was slow to recover. Jenny had learned that. Their most violent quarrel had resulted from her arrival twenty minutes late at a small tea-room in West Seventy-sixth Street which they were beginning to frequent for its obscurity. Women who took tango lessons of Ramon learned quickly, too, that to keep him waiting was to receive only desultory and sullen attention, instead of the subtle thrills they came for and paid for.

Jenny’s virtue as wife and mother had been founded on no principle of life or religion. That she happened to possess it up to now had apparently been a matter of no counter-forces sufficiently strong to imperil it. Raging to see Ramon, who in five minutes would be beginning his wait for her, Jenny regarded this slender choirboy-faced son of hers, while turmoils battered her. He was not an easy son. Never had been. There had been long and frequent sieges of difficult child-illnesses and curious phases of mental reserve. His schooling had not been an easy matter to settle, what with his father’s desires, the boy’s, and her own. She had won her points, where Avery was concerned, too slowly to have them appear won.

The years at Newberry, and now his freshman year at Eastern, had drawn Avery out of his reticent, inhibited, boyhood precisely as she had predicted they would. Avery was pretty much of a regular fellow now. He had “made” the right fraternity. The son of a former Vice-president of the United States had sponsored him for K. A. K.; and the Avery who used to hide from his riding-master and feel squeamish in a rowboat now rode his own polo mount and did not remonstrate at Jenny’s high desire for him to own a speed-boat. As a child he had feared water.

Yes, Avery was pretty much of a fellow now. In fact, she was fond of admitting, a little slyly and with innuendo that was without foundation, that he was too much of a fellow.

“Boys will be boys” flowed in relief off the lips of Jenny, who had spent her quota of time doubting if her boy would. Ah yes, boys nowadays knew how to handle their love-affairs, various tooth-cutting amours and indiscretions, as skilfully as they knew how to handle their cars. That was to presuppose that Avery had always handled his, just that casually.

Avery, always more or less at shy odds with life, with his father, and even with Jenny herself, had not been the gay and uncomplex youngster that Jennifer had been. Even now he was sometimes dark and turgid water to her. Had she failed him as confidante on those occasions when he had seemed to want to grope his way into her understanding of this or that plight of his? Chiefly psychological ones that she had found it hard to comprehend. She had read books on adolescence. In a vague way, they accounted.

Once, on one of his Easter vacations from Newberry, Avery, to whom his mother was by far the happiest aspect of his holidays, had tried to read her excerpts from a very private journal which he had kept for three years, and which locked with a key he kept on a chain with his fraternity symbol.

She had felt deeply the spirit which prompted the confidence, but was conscious of having failed miserably to understand what to her had seemed the rather embarrassing vaporings of a young mind floundering to climb out of some sophomoric morass. It was a phase of adolescence, she concluded, as she dismissed the sense of failure that had followed these private disclosures of some of the mental travail of her son. No one could quite be expected to be able to comprehend the tortuous and tortured workings of the adolescing mind. From the books she had read, it would be rather abnormal to find Avery normal at this stage. All would work itself out. As a matter of fact, of course, a boy’s father was the proper confidant at such times.... But secretly, Jenny gloried in her strategic position in the minds and hearts of both her children. It was a sort of trump card up her sleeve; it was the writing on the wall of who was who.

Was she about to fail again of her coveted place in the eyes of her son? If Avery were impelled to once more put before her the difficult and even embarrassing torments of his expanding and maturing mind, would it not be better, after all, to evade the issue, than to fail in it?

Let Avery have it out with his father! Let them become acquainted and find a common language. It was not even fair to continue to stand as buffer between them. Great responsibilities, that had to do with his father, were ultimately to descend upon this young boy. Better to try to have him cross the stormy Niagara gorge that divided the two of them.

But, in her heart, Jenny knew that the source of all this hurried disposition of her immediate predicament was the fact that Ramon was waiting. He must be chewing at his lip now, and sliding in and out of the waistcoat pocket that lay against the slim torso of his dancer’s body, a platinum-and-diamond watch, the thickness and diameter of a silver dollar, Jenny’s first gift to him.

“Mother, I know I’m putting the cart before the horse, to try and make you understand the result first, and then give you the reasons that led up to the decision, but the fact is, I’m done with college.”

Then it _was_ something schoolboyish! Let him have it out with his father. Eastern was the ideal college for a son of the rich. Important connections. Socially right. Proper setting. Rich men with sons about to inherit vast responsibilities, chose Eastern for their boys. Ramon was waiting ten minutes by now. High time Avery and his father were making each other’s acquaintance.

“You talk as if such decisions were a matter of course, Avery. I’m surprised.”

“I knew you would be, Mother. That’s why I want like the dickens to talk to you before the explaining to father begins. Or maybe you’ll talk to him, Mother?”

“I cannot always be taking sides with you against your father, Avery. After all, he is your father and my husband, and must be respected.”

That, ever since the advent of Ramon, was part of her new psychology of atonement to her husband. She had applied it directly to Rarick the few weeks just passed, causing him no surprise in particular, because he was no longer sensitive to her doings. Her son, however, looked up at her in almost startled surprise.

“Out of whose book of life have you torn a new page, Mother? Not your own?”

Now he was going to be abstract! That was the difficulty about being able to understand Avery. It made her proud of what she was pleased to call his depth; but, just the same, he was at the stage where he was forever vaporing about life. As such. It was a thoroughly concrete affair to Jenny, life was. Witness the precise situation of Ramon waiting for her. It was hard to treat life as a generality. You talked about your own life, of the life of some one in whom you were passionately interested. Just life as a subject was sermon matter, or something you did not discuss except under precious circumstances.

“You’ve only three more years at Eastern, Avery. There is something about the idea of a college degree! It’s an asset in after-life. Avery T. Rarick. Century Club, Racquet Club, Eastern Club. It’s fine to hear one man say of another, ‘We finished at Eastern together. We made the polo teams together at Eastern!’” (Ramon was capable of going off, after waiting a half-hour.)

“Mother, I want a couple of years to myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yes. Alone. Mother, I want terribly some time to myself. In Europe. On my own. I imagine Paris is as good a place as any for a place to get one’s bearings. Or, better still, some off-the-beat places like Sicily or Greece. I’m fed up. College is all right for a certain sort of fellow; I’m wasting my time at it.”

“That’s ungrateful, Avery. I’ve almost won your father over about your boat.”

“Mother, I need to tell you a few things about myself. I’d have told you long ago, you’re so sweet. But you dodged; and I do hate like the dickens to say them....”

Then it was to be in the key of the writings in that locked journal of his. Darling, silly adolescent! Ramon was waiting.

“Avery, I cannot stand the strain of the rôle of go-between for you and your father any longer. Isn’t it manlier for you to face him yourself? This is too serious for me. You yourself must ask him for what you want----”

“Why, mother, do you know I’ve never really wanted anything before? It is you who have always wanted for me. That’s what makes it impossible for me to really get at father. He thinks I’m the fellow who has wanted all the things I’ve never really wanted.”

So! It had come home to her. So much sooner than she could have dreamed. It was for this she had practically alienated her husband, worn down her vitality, sacrificed her peace of mind. From the very infancy of her children, Jenny had been fighting for what she wanted for them; and here was her son interpreting it for her in a way that robbed her of any of the fruits of sacrifice.

“Avery Rarick,” she said, with everything reproachful in her voice that she could muster, “I cannot believe my ears.”

“Mother dear, you mustn’t take it that way! Let me explain.”

Ramon was waiting.

“Listen, dear, I must----”

“Mother, I haven’t hopped on to this decision today or yesterday. I’m everybody’s total-loss at college, dear.”

“That’s a pretty disheartening thing to have to hear, after the long wrangle I had with your father, who wanted a state university. Really, Avery----”

“I’d be no go at any college, Mother. It’s hard as the devil to try to explain--even to you.”

“Yes, Avery,” she said, mashing out a cigarette off which she had taken two puffs, and trying to bite down an impatience that was almost a frenzy within her; “I should think it might be.” Ramon was waiting.

“Mother, what do you think?”

“I can’t. I don’t,” she said, and pressed her eyeballs.

“Mother, for the last six months I’ve been carrying only one course at college. You might as well know and have it over with.”

“You’ve made excellent connections. Donnie Chattenfield told Jennifer that Hal is inviting you to Whitecastle for the Christmas holidays.”

“Mother, doesn’t that surprise you?”

“Why should it? The Chattenfields weren’t always as socially secure as they are now. I----”

“I mean, doesn’t it surprise you that I’ve only carried one course, and that a dead-cat one in current events?”

“Of course it does----”

“It doesn’t really, old darling, because you’ve never thought about it one way or another. But anyway--even my address at college has been a fake one, Mother. I’ve faked.”

“Avery!”

“I haven’t lived on the campus for six months. The college canning-factory began to tin my brains, so I moved out of it. I’ve rooms up on the hill with an artist and his wife.”

“Why, Avery Rarick, how could you!”

“It’s the only thing I could do, Mother. I’m not cut out for the college-factory. Matter of fact, if I am cut out for much of anything, I haven’t found out yet what it is. That’s what I want to talk about. You’ve been such a brick getting Father to put up with me, that it’s kind of rotten to bring this home to you after the way you maneuvered for Eastern. But it would have been the same at Penn, or whatever state university it was Father preferred. It isn’t that I haven’t been working. I have--after a fashion--worked, if you’d call it that!”

“Oh, Avery, don’t meander. Talk to the point.”

“Right, Mother. I mean, I’ve been scribbling. Writing a little. Verse and stuff. Pretty rotten. Wouldn’t like to see it, would you? Might give you a better idea of why I think a couple of years on my own--knocking about Europe--alone--alone--would put me straight--with things. Mother, you’re not listening!”

She lifted her tormented eyes to him, which for the moment she had closed against the milling of her inner frenzy, and made the pretense of having heard.

“That is all stuff and nonsense, Avery. You are to bide your time at college, and next summer take that trip to Norway and Sweden with the Stanley-Blake twins.”

“I don’t give a damn for those saps, Mother.”

“‘Those saps,’ as you are pleased to call them, will some day be two of the most powerful men in America.”

“I tell you I need to be alone, Mother. To find myself.”

“Oh--Avery----”

“I know! I sound like a letter to a newspaper. Well, I’m capable of writing one like this. ‘Editor, _Daily Bunk_. Dear Sir: What should a young man of seventeen years of age do who simply cannot get interested in life as he sees it about him. I cannot find myself. Everything becomes disgustingly monotonous. Not interesting enough to call for any real effort. I’m a perfect failure to date, and unless I pull out, may remain so for the rest of my days on this supposedly glorious earth. Everything about me is as interesting as a morgue, where I am concerned. What’s wrong with this picture?’

“Letter from Editor to Morbid Young Man: ‘Your symptoms, young man, include indifference to whatever you do and the belief that a congenial task would reveal your hitherto unappreciated values. As you see the world, it is sadly out of joint, and you wonder why others are so indifferent to the pearl of great price hidden in your personality. Young man, behind your inability to connect with life, lurks an egregious self-centeredness and an exaggerated idea of your own consequence.’”

“Avery, I can’t bear it. You’re too funny to be borne. Stop it, idiot! How can one take you seriously?”

“But I am serious, Mother. I’m clowning Hamlet for you.”

How slenderly handsome he was, his father’s son around the eyes and brow, but son of his mother in the lean, lithe figure. As he sat there on the edge of the table, dangling one long cleverly-clad leg, and showing, as if to excellent stage-direction, his clean blade of profile, he was like one of those well-made youths in English society-comedies.

“Avery, I simply must go. My advice to you is to pack yourself back to college without even letting your father know about this--brainstorm.”

“Mother, I’m in hell!”

“Then you _are_ in some trouble, son,” she cried out, a sudden terror dilating her eyes.

“I know, Mother, I know, it all sounds like tommyrot,” he cried, and struck his breast with a gesture that immediately became sophomoric to her, once he followed it up with words. “But can’t you understand? The hell is here inside me. I must get away. Alone. To think--it out----It’s too cluttered up here. I can’t stand the clutter. I’m sick of being me. And doing the things a fellow has to do if he is me. Give me a year or two on my own, Mother. Get Father to. I want to think. I want to think my way out....”

“Of what?”

“How do I know? How can I try to tell it, when you sit there thinking of other things. When you won’t understand.”

How dear he was! How inexpressibly dear. Hurtingly young. Silly, sensitive, sophomoric dreamer. She had never seen him like this. At least not exactly like this. She wanted to take him in her arms.... Ramon was waiting.

“Mother dear, be a brick. Put it up to Father before I have to face the music. Make him see that I need a couple of years away--to myself----”

“I simply must go, son.”

“He’ll never understand, Mother. Coming from me, the suggestion will only antagonize him. I can’t be myself with Father--any more than I sometimes think he can be with me.”

“Hush, Avery.”

There was one principle of hers which Jenny had never even bent, much less broken. She could not bring herself to discuss her husband’s shortcomings with his children.

“I must go!” she cried, wildly. “If you insist upon coming home from college with such ideas, son, it is manlier that you should face your father yourself. Tell him just what you have told me.”

“I can’t! I can’t! You know that.”

“Then begin to learn now. I cannot always be buffer between you. Tell him what you’ve told me.”

“Not in a thousand years. He’ll want facts. I haven’t any.”

“Here he comes. Tell him now.”

“Mother, for God’s sake! You wouldn’t do that----”

For the first time in her life, Jenny would. She was off and gone, down the corridor, frantic with haste, just as Rarick, attracted by his son’s voice, paused at his door to peer in.

For several years now, Rarick had been cultivating this habit of extricating himself from his office at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was not easy, except that he had found that the closing of his multifarious day, whether at four or six or eight, was sure to leave an overflow of affairs to which he could not get around.