The Scarlet Letters (16 page)

Less intent now on demonstrating to her his skill as a lawyer, Rod could concentrate more on impressing her as a man. If her wealth and social position had promoted a rather vulgar desire in him to show her that he was her equal, her charm and beauty had turned this into the equally crude wish to be her master. But now something much more benign seemed to be happening to him. It was simply that he was falling in love.

For too long a time now he had lived in a kind of proud and resentful chastity. It was as if he had come to deem himself superior to the demands and preoccupations of sex. But it was certainly intensely agreeable to feel that this immensely sympathetic and widely popular woman was frankly interested in him.

He quite understood that what most intrigued her about himself was the aura of masculine ruthlessness that she imagined him to emit. By instinct as well as by will, he had taken to making the most of this.

"Practicing law, as I do it, seems to satisfy something basic in my nature," he told her on one of their late nights. "It's a kind of zest for combat that some unlucky men seem unable to get out of their systems."

"And women."

"Do you feel it too? It doesn't really surprise me. You strike me as having a touch of Semiramis or Boadicea in you."

"Is that a compliment?"

"From me it is. I don't mind that in a woman. And I wonder if a certain native combativeness in a man isn't more attractive than its total absence."

"Oh, I agree with you! I can't stand wishy washies. We seem to be forgetting these days that a man's not a real man unless there's a bit of a brute in him. And you needn't look at me that way. I'm perfectly aware that I'm politically incorrect. I share all the old Wasp values, and I glory in it!"

Rod thought she was going a bit far, even for him, but he didn't dislike it. He wondered if she wouldn't make love like a lioness, snarling at and scratching her mate. He became graver. "Brooks Adams maintained in his
Law of Civilization and Decay
that the warrior class is bound eventually to be replaced by the usurer. The crusaders were noble but futile; they had to fall before the moneylender. We must bow to history, I suppose, and accept the world as it is. But I like to think I can find in the battle of the corporate takeover some faint remnant of the warrior spirit. It's a way of playing the old game of kill or be killed without breaking any law. Harmless, isn't it? Or is it?"

"I like that!" she exclaimed with enthusiasm. "And I don't give a damn if it's not harmless!"

The way she looked at him now made him wonder if Harry had not been right in the first place. Was Harry going to take over his life again?

"I haven't told you, Jane," he now informed her, "because it's still not definite. But I think we can expect your husband's total surrender in a matter of days."

She leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. "My hero! My Vercingetorix." And then she broke into a hearty laugh. "But will there be anything left of my settlement when I've paid your fee?"

He smiled. "There'll be me."

W
HAT JANE HAD BEGUN
to realize, in the year following her debutante party in 1937, was that if she didn't somehow break away from the appalling normalcy of her family, she would be condemned to become appallingly normal herself. She was under no misapprehension that her parents were as expertly adapted to cope with their environment as polar bears to the Arctic or camels to the desert. The Seatons lived in a standard Manhattan brownstone, furnished tastefully but unsurprisingly by W. & J. Sloane, and a small shingle villa on the dunes in the Hamptons. Daddy, a stockbroker who had made some money in the roaring twenties but had put just enough into treasuries to survive the Depression, even in a much depleted fashion, was a kind if undemonstrative parent, moderately content with the golfing weekends he could just still afford, with his easy if poorly remunerated office routine and his long downtown martini-laced lunches. Mummy, whose smiles and sympathy almost made up for her voids in humor and imagination, divided her time innocuously between her family and the bridge table. Jane had "leaked out" at a modest tea dance at home and was now taking courses in art appreciation while waiting for "Mr. Right" to come along. The usual noisy and impudent kid brother was at Groton.

But that was not all. It did not take in the ease with which they compromised with the less lovable aspects of their era and class. Jane's parents were, of course, good Republicans, but they never went overboard in hating FDR; they even dared to hint that he might have forestalled a social revolution. As Christians they were Episcopalians and went to church on rainy Sundays, but they had no theological tenets and gave little more than lip service to the conventional anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic prejudices of their friends. The motto they might have chosen, "Nothing in excess," extended to their enthusiasms as well as their dislikes: art and literature were welcomed but not embraced; self-sacrificing devotion to worthy causes was admired but not emulated. On the whole, they liked the world, and the world, on the whole, liked them.

Where Jane made out at last that she would have to break with their values was in their attitude towards the "great world" of society, on the fringes of which they precariously lived. Nothing in the world would have persuaded Sophia or Gridley Seaton that they were in the least snobbish or even worldly, qualities that they roundly deplored. Why then, their daughter wanted to know, did they belong to the most restricted clubs and send their children to the most restricted schools; why was their acquaintance limited to the Social Register and their summers to the swankiest beach resort? Why? they repeated. Why, because they always
had.
It had nothing to do with what they thought or whom they respected. And what really upset them in Jane's attitude was not, as with so many privileged children of the Depression, that she had gone so far left—that was so common as to be almost respectable—but that she had gone so far right!

Jane had observed, with a realistic eye and a bitter heart, just how the Depression had cut into her family's life style, just what sacrifices had had to be made to keep up the appearance of gentility. She had known what it was to be on a scholarship in a rich girls' school, to have few dresses amid the dressy, to have to give up the beach club and rely on the invitations of the supercilious. She saw that in a world of multifold discomforts the well-to-do were the only ones unaffected, and she made it her resolve that one day she would be numbered among them. It was not that she did not perfectly see what hash so many of the wealthy made of their lives, but they were fools, and whatever Jane was destined to become, it was not that. Marriage was the only viable out, and fortunately her family's proximity to the palaces of prosperity offered ample opportunity.

Families note everything. As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, you can't fool a regular boarder. Sophia Seaton was well aware of her daughter's cultivation of the richer among her old classmates and at last reproached her for it. But she was hardly prepared for Jane's stinging retort.

"Haven't you brought me up cheek by jowl with people who had all the things we didn't? How could I be expected not to try to be a part of them?"

"I expected that you might try to use your good brain and the advantages of an excellent education to make a decent place for yourself in the world," was her mother's tart reply. Sophia, behind a placid front, had preserved some old values. "It had not occurred to me that the spectacle of a few show-offs marking a display of their new money would go to your head. You've always had the things that mattered: a good home, good teachers, good friends and all the comforts a girl could need. Don't be always looking up, my dear. Look down and see the millions who haven't a fraction of what you've had!"

"What can you gain by looking down? You might even drop! But looking up, you might find a ladder somewhere."

"A ladder! Don't tell me that a child of mine could ever become a social climber!" Sophia's pride was now aroused. After all, the Seatons weren't nothing. "I wonder, child, if you haven't inherited some of the genes of my Grandmother Bane. We used to marvel at the crudity of some of her social assessments. It wasn't as if she had been born on the wrong side of the tracks. She had been a Babcock, which, as the French say, was
assez bien.
But I remember that when I told her I didn't like a particular friend of hers, an old lady called Mrs. Dows, who for some reason had been mean to me, she retorted, 'You mustn't say that. Mrs. Dows has three million dollars.'"

"But that must have been a huge fortune in those days!" Jane exclaimed. "Great-Grandma Bane had simply the candor to express what the rest of you were all thinking! Yes, I think I
have
some of her genes. And I'm proud of it!"

"Jane, Jane, what are we going to do with you?" her mother wailed.

Jane lived in a world where there were plenty of rich young men, but they were inclined to be edgy about girls with the reputation of looking for what they had, and Jane had found herself furnished with such a taint, no doubt by some girls with the same objective. She was eventually to find what she needed, but not before she had made one seemingly fatal mistake.

Tommy Seitz had no money, but everyone seemed to assume that he would make a fortune. He certainly had no doubts about it himself. He had everything in the world that was desirable except money. He was handsome, athletic, bright, witty, cheerful and good tempered, a popular member of his Yale class, elected to the distinguished secret society of Scroll & Key, a champion squash player and now the promising employee of a known investment banking firm. And he shunned all the heiresses at the Southampton Beach Club to devote himself to the beautiful but penniless Jane, who had only appeared there as a guest! It would have broken a harder resolution than hers, and it now broke her determination to limit herself to the ugly and awkward son of a shipping magnate who, despite his mother's disapproval, had been showing her timid attention. For Tommy, it appeared, was really serious and not the idle philanderer she had first taken him to be.

Yes, he had actually proposed! Could she still care that his family were a good deal dimmer and simpler than her own? She could only assume that some bright-colored cuckoo bird had deposited an alien egg in their dingy nest.

He was bravely candid about himself.

"All my friends have taken for granted that I would make what is called a great match. But what's the use of a fortune if one hasn't a beautiful and enchanting spouse to spend it with? You and I are a pair marked for the role. Don't you see it? Will you be willing to take your chances with me?"

Jane thought she did see it. She also assumed that she was in love, as it was hard for her not to imagine herself in love with such a swain as Tom. And this despite her uneasy and constantly stifled small suspicion that there was something wrong with him, that he was another Tom Seitz pretending to be the Tom Seitz she was seeing before her. But if he didn't know it himself...!

Shortly after they were married he was off to the wars as executive officer of a sub chaser, and this added to his romantic glow. But when peace returned, it seemed to have brought a turn in his luck. Not only was she faced with the unexpected barrenness of her marriage—though there seemed no physical reason for it—she was confronted with the barrenness of their means. Tom changed from company to company with a consistent lack of success, while spending freely on the hectic and supposedly brilliant social life that he insisted was essential to his business ventures.

After two years of such a life he announced to her blandly that he was dead broke. He did not seem surprised or even depressed by the fact. He proceeded to outline what he called "Plan B" as coolly as if she, a presumably cool partner, would at once recognize its inevitability.

"It hasn't worked, my love. It simply hasn't worked."

"What hasn't worked?"

"Our marriage. My whole initial scheme. I've had a vicious stream of bad luck, which no one could have visualized, and now I have no credit to seek further capital with. There's only one way I can get it, and that is by a rich marriage."

Jane felt something more like awe than outrage. She stared at the monster before her and realized that she had never known him to be anything but the appearance of what he was not.

"Are you telling me that you want a divorce?" she asked, almost in curiosity.

"Not that I want it, but I have no choice. Any more than you do. We both have to seek new and rich spouses while we still have a modicum of youth and beauty."

She saw now that she must have long suspected that she was wed to a man, like the Tin Woodman of the Oz books, who had no heart. But unlike the Tin Woodman Tom had no concept of his lack; he did not know what a heart was, yet some basic instinct had taught him to conceal this fact from a world in which it might not have found favor. She found herself marveling that he could have kept up so brave a show before all his friends—if indeed any of his acquaintance could really be called that. Could a monster have friends? Could a monster be loved? Even by his wife? Oh, certainly not by his wife! And yet ... could a monster really help being what he was?

"And who have you selected for a better mate?" she asked.

"Oh, I think Ella Ripley will have me. In fact, I think I may say I'm sure of it."

"So? You've been at work already. And who, may I ask, have you picked for me? Or am I left to do my own work? You might have given me more warning. It's much easier to attract a man behind a marriage than after a divorce."

"But are you blind, my dear? Everyone knows Paul Farquar is gaga about you! He may be a trifle long in the tooth, and he's got two failed marriages behind him, but he'll give you a position second to none in the whole damn town! And what you say about operating better as a married woman than a divorcée is absolutely true. Ella can wait—so long as I keep her satisfied—and you can have all the time you need to hook Paul. I'm sure I don't have to warn you not to let the old goat have his way with you until the ring is firmly on your finger."