The Lord Won't Mind (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy)

The Lord Won’t Mind

The Peter & Charlie Trilogy

Gordon Merrick

For Didine

“I say, if it’s love, the Lord won’t mind. There’s enough hate in the world.”

—
Mrs. Sapphire Hall

Harlem, 1940

“HE’S coming in a week,” C. B. said, laying the letter down beside her breakfast coffee.

“I suppose he’s wildly good-looking,” I said. No, not I.
He
said. He. I will not associate myself with the things I have to tell. If I must intrude occasionally, it will be from the distance of time and change. Charlie Mills has nothing to do with me.

“I suppose he’s wildly good-looking,” Charlie teased his improbable grandmother.

“I’ve never made any secret of liking handsome young men.” She smiled roguishly, a roguish smile in a face that remained invincibly impish in spite of her elaborate and rather old-fashioned style. She derived not from the Twenties but from a more gracious Edwardian era. “But you must admit, I also insist on their having some wits. Yes, he’s very—no, not handsome—but very attractive in his way. In your way, really. You’re enough alike to be taken for brothers by the unobservant.”

“Are you trying to say I’m not handsome?” he protested with a playful show of indignation.

“Not really what we’d have called handsome in my day. I’ve never said you were. But very, very attractive, my dearest.” Again the roguish smile, a flirtatious tilt of the head. Charlie felt himself melt with delight. Her accent was self-Anglicized with broadened
a
’s and well-shaped
u
’s from which emerged occasionally an unexpected echo of the South. She lifted a scrap of lace handkerchief and twirled it once in the air as if conjuring the future. “We must take him in hand. You’re just what he needs at this stage—someone to look up to, someone who can offer him understanding. He gets none at home. Imagine being a general’s son! Imagine being packed off to West Point! It won’t do. His tastes are the same as ours. Books. The theater. You must take him under your wing for the summer.”

“But he’s only a kid.”

“Pooh. Three or four years’ difference. Nothing.” Her hand remained suspended in mid-air as if she held all the elements of the situation firmly fixed before her. She invested even her smallest effects with drama. He adored her. “In England, he’d be considered a finished gentleman. Why, men are already launched on careers at his age. Look at the poets.”

“That may be true in England, but it isn’t here.” He couldn’t understand his elders’ habit of dismissing three or four or even five years as being of no consequence. It made all the difference in the world. This Peter Marshall or whatever his name was couldn’t be more than eighteen at the most. Callow, all knobs and knuckles with nothing matching anything else, probably smelly, no matter how good-looking. The prospect failed to please. “He just won’t fit with any of my crowd. He’ll be too young for any of the girls.”

“I don’t think we need worry about girls for the time being. I want him here for you. I can count on you to stir him up, draw him out. He’s like Sleeping Beauty. He needs only a kiss to wake him up.”

Charlie threw his head back and laughed to cover a blush. “Really, C. B. Aren’t you getting things mixed up? Surely you want a girl for that.”

She flicked her handkerchief at him playfully. “Don’t be dense, my dearest.” She picked up a small silver bell and rang it briskly as they rose from the dining table. The sharpness of her perceptions sometimes struck him like a blow in the stomach, quite taking his breath away, even though she seemed an innocent in many areas. She couldn’t say the things she said if she weren’t. Nevertheless, he was glad for movement now.

It was hot outside, but here in the big dark rooms of the old summer house, with every window guarded by a great white mushroom of awning, they remained crisp and comfortable in their smart summer clothes. I remember it was hot all that summer, although none of it has anything to do with me; nor will my memory always be reliable. What year was it, in fact? Had the war already started? No, it must have been the last summer of peace. The last summer Charlie spent with his grandmother. He hadn’t always spent his summers with her. Although he would have been happy to forget it, he had more immediate family—mother, father, brother—living outside of Philadelphia, whose conventional provincial life dealt death to his soul. As long as he could remember, C. B., as unique, original, unclassifiable as the initials that made her nickname, had embodied the glittering alternative of the great world. She had disposed conversationally of his mother some years before. “There’s no point in denying the fact that your mother is my daughter,” she had said to him once. “That doesn’t mean that I’m obliged to like her.” It had suddenly made life enormous, trackless, frightening, but boundlessly exciting. Needless to say, C. B. was a widow. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that she had murdered her husband. There was mystery enough, but so far murder had not been hinted at.

Mystery? It pleased him to think of her as mysterious, although there was nothing really to justify the epithet, except that he didn’t know anybody like her. This house. Why had she chosen to spend her summers in the rather obscure grandeur of Rumson, New Jersey, rather than in, say, one of the stylish Long Island resorts? It had the look of old family property, but she had acquired it only ten years ago, just at the beginning of the Depression, when Charlie’s parents were deciding they couldn’t afford to keep their New England summer cottage. He didn’t think of her as more or less rich than other people; she was the way everybody should be: money flowed from her effortlessly, without being mentioned. All his formative years had been lived in the gray shadow of the Depression; she was the only person he knew who continued to bask in the bright light of ease and prosperity. While his parents’ friends were leaping out of high windows, she maintained her two imposing establishments (his childhood impressions of her apartment in New York had endowed it forever with the vastness of Versailles) as if nothing had happened. Others grimly discussed Hitler and such uncongenial places as the Sudetenland; C. B. projected a vision of marching heroes and flashing banners when she referred to the impending war. Al her causes and interests were cloaked in glamour.

Peter, whose last name turned out to be Martin, received the full treatment in the week that preceeded his arrival. He was apparently some sort of cousin. The South was populated with C. B.’s vague relations. They all paid an annual visit to New York that in turn became an annual visit to C. B. From time to time, she pounced, extracting from their unpromising ranks a son who struck her fancy. Peter was the latest in a long line, but the first with whom circumstances permitted Charlie to be involved. He expected the worst, but somewhere in the back of his mind an insistent hope lingered.

“I’m going to put him in the little room next to you,” she announced at lunch. “I want you to be near each other so you can make friends quickly. Young men like to burn the midnight oil. You’ll be quite on your own up there together, with nobody around to bother you.”

“I hope we don’t hate each other on sight.” The prospect of a friend-in-residence was undoubtedly appealing. Except for the constant joy of her company, he found the summers with C. B. a trifle empty. The country-club life, the enforced companionship of young people with whom he had little in common except age, made him restless. There was no opportunity for the sexual adventures that had been for years the core of his existence. He thought of his childhood visits to C. B. in the city, when he would find the closets piled high with gaily wrapped presents, impromptu Christmases whose memory still made him tingle with delight. It was like her to make him the gift of an ideal companion. When he thought of the difference in their ages, though, his hopes dimmed.

“It’s going to be perfect. When I saw him this winter I knew you were made for each other.” Her laugh was irrepressibly youthful. “I sound like a silly matchmaking old lady.”

“You sound as if you were planning a marriage.” Charlie forced a laugh, suddenly self-conscious at having put it so succinctly.

“Friendship is much more important to a man than marriage,” she said with a wave of her hand. “A man can never be friends with his wife. The English understand it so well—their men’s clubs. That’s where an Englishman’s real life is lived. I’m so glad you’ve never been silly about girls. So many men your age become total bores over them.”

“Oh, well, that’s just kid stuff,” he said, relaxing into his most worldly manner. Her attitude toward girls had always relieved him of the necessity of inventing romances. His mother pushed them at him and plagued him with anxious leading questions so that he had always to be on his guard to conceal his indifference. “What about your precious Peter?” he asked, tackling the question that had been uppermost in his mind since she had confirmed his imminent arrival. “How do you know he’s not going to be a bore about them?”

“He’s not that sort at all. He has great delicacy of feeling. It’s the first thing one sees in him.”

There were moments when they achieved such perfect understanding that he felt himself drawn giddily close to total self-revelation.

“I know exactly what I hope you’ll accomplish,” she said, drawing circles in the air with her fingers as he drove her to the hairdresser in the little sports car she had given him. She was dressed all in white and wore a rakish straw hat that lent extraordinary chic to every tilt of her head. “It’s too late to save him from West Point. The die is cast. What he needs is an ideal that’ll help him resist being swallowed up by the military mentality. Once he’s known you he’ll never accept the second-rate.”

“Goodness. Is that the effect I have on people?” Charlie asked with a chuckle.

“You have so many splendid qualities, my dearest. Knowing you is bound to be an important experience for anybody with dawning perceptions. The fact that you’ve finished college and are about to embark on a career will give you an enormous influence over him even if there’s no great difference in age. Oh, yes, we’ll rescue him from the General.”

Charlie laughed again. “You really are a born conspirator, aren’t you?”

“Women are so useless. I’m no exception, but at least I’ve had the opportunity to help some talented young men make the most of their lives. I don’t claim any credit for you, my dearest. I’ve simply had the pleasure of watching you turn into the fascinating person you are. I admit you’ve frightened me at times. You have almost
too
much talent. Your acting. Your painting. Of course, making a career of either would have been out of the question, but it’s a relief to know that your life has taken its final direction. I’ve looked forward to the years that are beginning now.”

“Me too, so long as we don’t really have a war and everything’s turned upside down.”

“We mustn’t think about it. Thank heavens, there are always strings to pull. I understand that if there
is
a war, some of the most interesting jobs will be right in New York. You’ll be absolutely stunning in uniform.”

He executed a racy left turn, displaying his skill for her admiration and marveling at his good fortune. Nobody he knew had family like C. B.—gay, clever, still attractive, generous, devoted, and incapable of a critical word. He couldn’t imagine what life would be like without her.

“One thing about West Point,” she said over after-dinner coffee. “It’s not far away. If you really do hit it off together, as I’m sure you will, he can always come to us for weekends. We can take him to the theater and get his mind off tanks or machine guns or whatever it is they talk about at West Point.”