The Scarlet Letters (7 page)

And, as her father's all but acknowledged favorite, Vinnie ruled the roost at home. It was her mother's option to remain on the sidelines, content to criticize rather than lead, supplying a role not unlike that of the Roman sage who stood directly behind the general in the chariot leading a triumph to remind him that he was still a mortal. Vinnie thought she more than made up for this by extolling her father as a god,
her
god. She reveled in their intimate companionship, in sharing his problems in the leadership of his firm, in the turmoil of his visiting doubts, even in his relationship with her mother, confident that he loved her not only more than anyone else in his life but in a way that was different from any in which he had loved before. She sensed the emptiness that his own mother's indifference had left in him, and fancied that she could fill it, not only for his but for her own advantage. For what was the benefit of having a great father if some of that greatness did not rub off on her? Could such a supposition be called egotistical when it was just what he wanted himself?

Hetty Vollard tended to regard her eldest daughter's idolization of her father, and his of her, as something of a relief, as if it reduced her maternal responsibilities from three to two. She could turn her attention to making up to the younger daughters for any deficiencies in the paternal concern, which was not difficult as Ambrose's general amiability and kindness with all his progeny cloaked much of his preference for Vinnie. This did not deter Hetty, however, from being sarcastic among her lady friends over such a preference, describing it as a Victorian pastel of the benevolent aging sire stroking the golden hair of the lovely child who knows just how to get around him. Couldn't one see it, she would ask laughingly, as the idealized union of the sexes, with the male providing strength and protection, and the female fidelity and love? Wasn't that the bargain that assured the female of an unproclaimed but necessary dominion? Union of the sexes? No, abolition of sex! Wasn't that what a true civilization required?

Vinnie had never quite understood her mother, but she welcomed her detachment as she feared her tongue. She saw how other girls controlled their mothers by turning down or even off the daily show of affection the latter seemed to need, but her mother did not appear to have any such necessity. Her father, of course, was just the opposite, at least where she was concerned, and she did not hesitate to draw heavily on the large balance of love that he kept in store for her. She had, indeed, love to return to him, but her love went hand in hand with a shrewd assessment of his character and motives. She understood and went along with his habit of dramatizing himself to himself. But she also appreciated the large scope of his mind and its outreaches—she deemed him to know everything from the earliest Saxon law to dadaism—and she conceived of it as a sacred duty—made more sacred by her mother's patent neglect of it—to be an acolyte at his altar. An acolyte, of course, could rise in the world, could be a cardinal or an eminence grise to a king, couldn't he?

The question of her debutante party offered the perfect opportunity for filial maneuvering. Vinnie knew that a hotel ballroom had to be reserved long in advance, and it was necessary to remind her father of this. She brought up the subject at the breakfast table. For a minute he seemed disinclined even to answer her, engrossed in his
Times
editorial.

"Are you sure you really want this party?" he growled at last. "To me it's like throwing the money in the East River."

"Isn't it expected of me?"

"Expected of you? What do you want to be, the slave of fashion? And an idiot fashion, at that. How about setting an example to bust the inane custom of spending a small fortune on a single night's revel to introduce one's daughter to a list of idle young men, provided by a professional party giver, among whom one devoutly hopes she will
not
select a husband! Why, the other day, at my lunch club, they were talking about a family who actually allowed their son to quit college so they could pay for his sister's ball!"

Vinnie paused coolly to assemble arguments that she knew would dispose of his objections. "Of course, I don't want any-party if you think you can't afford it, Pa. Or even if you're going to worry about the cost. You've done enough for me already. More than enough."

This had its effect. "It's not so much the cost, my dear. I can handle that. And I haven't done a thing for you that you haven't well deserved. It's just the idea of the thing that bothers me. Doesn't it sometimes bother a bright girl like you?"

"Of course it does. I'd be horrified if I had a brother who gave up college for my party. But that boy's family must have been a very silly one. I don't see much point worrying about people like that."

"You have a point there."

"And if people who can afford it, give their daughter a coming-out party, is there really so much harm in it? Look at all the other crazy ways they spend their money!"

"I can't deny that."

"Of course, if I don't have a party, I shan't be able to go to any others."

Her father looked up from his paper now. "Why does that follow?"

"Well, think of it, Pa. If I took a high stand about the idiocy of debutante parties and still went to them, everyone would say I was a hypocrite. And what's more, that it was just a pose on my part to cover my family's stinginess in not giving me one of my own."

"That wouldn't have to follow at all."

"But you know it would. Anyway it doesn't matter, because I shan't really mind giving up the silly party." As she sensed the paternal crumbling she warmed to the game. She thought of the proposed new common room for the settlement house of which her father was a trustee and where she and her sisters sometimes put in an hour or so, angels of light, playing games with the children in the day care center. She had a vision of the explosive gratitude of all at a sudden unexpected donation and the immediate board resolution to name the new acquisition the Lavinia Vollard Room. "Why, the money saved might even pay for your new addition to the settlement house! You could call off your fund drive!"

Ambrose thrust his newspaper aside. "And supposing, Vinnie, I put it to you that I'd pay for that room with the money I'd save on your party, if you were really willing to give it up?"

"Pa! Are you serious?"

"Never more so!"

"Then I'd say yes, do it!"

"On one condition. That you agree to go to all your friends' coming-out parties. And, of course, you'll have one of your own, as well. Perhaps not quite as spiffy as it would have been without the expense of the new room, but spiffy enough."

"Oh, Pa!"

Vinnie rose to fling her arms around her father's neck while her younger sisters clapped. After he had left the table to go to work, accompanied by her sisters en route to school, she was left alone to finish her coffee with her mother, who had not contributed a word to the discussion.

"That was very neatly done, Lavinia," was Hetty's first dry comment.

"How do you mean, neatly?"

"Of course, you knew that by suggesting a charitable use of the party money, you'd get the ball as well. And far from being less spiffy, it will be one of the grandest of the season. Oh, your father will see to that. He's enchanted with your philanthropy."

"Oh, Mummy, you always see the low side of things. Can't you give a daughter some credit for even a smitch of generosity?"

"I give you more for insight, my dear. You're a clever girl. But even so, there are some things you don't see. Something you didn't see just now, for example."

"And that is?"

"That your father was perfectly aware of what you were up to."

"He thought I was putting it on?"

"He
knew
you were putting it on. He
liked
you for putting it on. What he really admires is the appearance of generosity and unselfishness. Your father has a great respect for appearances. Why not? Aren't they really what civilization is made of?"

"Oh, Mummy, there you go."

"Because I don't play the mother-daughter game? The way you play the father-daughter one? I'm sorry to have to tell you, child, but you do overdo it. I may admire the play, but I have to be concerned with what will happen when the curtain falls."

Vinnie said nothing to this; she simply left the table. She had learned not to pursue a topic too closely when her mother was in one of her "moods." There was a bleakness that Hetty seemed to have brought from New England climes that dulled even the dancing sunlight on the pavements of Manhattan. Deprived of the roasting faith of Dr. Shattuck's perfervid religiosity, his daughter's had dwindled to a rather chilling transcendentalism.

There was one snag for Vinnie in what her mother called the father-daughter game. She hated the idea that if her father had had a son, that son, unless he'd been a hopeless dunce or an irredeemable rotter, would surely have taken her place in the paternal adoration. He would have become a lawyer, of course, and the heir to the holy firm. Vinnie had had no ambition to join the bar; in her generation female attorneys were still rare, and Vollard Kaye numbered not even one in its roster. After college she had elected a rather leisurely postgraduate course at Columbia, applying for a master's in English lit. But she had always regarded with somewhat jealous eye the different young law associates whom her father seemed to favor, and when he brought one of them to Glenville for a weekend—usually devoted at least in part to brief writing—she had flirted rather shamelessly with the poor man in his few free hours. She derived a mild satisfaction from thus purloining a possible protégé from the grip of her powerful parent. But none of these flirtations amounted to much; the young man in question was often already engaged, and sometimes even married. The only way for her to get around the snag of a rival to herself in her father's love was the crude and obvious one of producing a son-in-law whom she could control even as he controlled her sire.

She met Rodman Jessup in her last year at Vassar at a cocktail party in New York, and she had been immediately attracted by his striking good looks and grave demeanor. He seemed to know few in the room—the party, she learned later, was given by the parents of his law school roommate—and he stood rather aside in a corner but without the least air of constraint. When Vinnie asked the daughter of the house about him, she was told, sarcastically, that he was the "strong silent type" and she asked if that wasn't "what we all want," particularly the silence. But introduced, she did not find him so quiet. They talked about Hider's occupation of the Rhineland, and he was very emphatic indeed about the need for immediate armed resistance. When he found that she agreed with him, he, rather surprisingly, invited her to have dinner with him at a cafeteria, announcing firmly that he couldn't afford a "fancier spot," and she heard herself, also rather surprisingly, accept.

At their table she asked him about law school and mentioned that her father was a lawyer.

"And one of the greats!" he exclaimed with an enthusiasm obviously genuine. "He spoke at my Yale graduation. Oh, I really stared at that party when I heard you were Ambrose Vollard's daughter."

She was amused but also pleased. "Is that why you asked me out?" And her question was frank, not coy.

"It was why I stared. Not why I asked you out. That was after we'd talked."

"Oh, then I was on my own."

"And a very beautiful own it was."

Her first reaction, that he was a pretty fast worker, was suddenly mitigated by her odd sense of his total honesty. She began to suspect that this young man was not a callow male looking for a quick smooch, but a creature of strong reserve and chivalrous good manners on whom her own appeal had made an unprecedented assault. But what grounds had she for so grossly flattering an estimate of her own charms? Few. She was bewildered.

"Tell me about yourself," was what she finally said.

He was only too willing to do this. He spoke warmly, even glowingly, about his parents, whose only child he was. His father had died when Rodman was fourteen, of a heart ailment, cutting short a brilliant law career that might have taken him to high office, and leaving his widow and son a sadly exiguous capital, the result of his habit of taking too many cases of a public interest on a pro bono basis.

"My father was all heart," he explained. "But he knew that his physical one was weak and that he might not live to see me grow up. The one thing he wanted to make sure of was that I should live my own life and make my own decisions. 'Never feel you have to follow in my footsteps or do anything because I have done it. Be your own man, sonny, and tell yourself that I'm always right there behind you. In spirit if not in flesh. And never regret our little quarrels. I've enjoyed them as much as you have.'"

"But you did go into the law, after all," she pointed out. "Are you sure it was entirely your own decision?"

"It was certainly mine in a way. Except you might say it had been made for me. Father was so much a part of me that it seemed almost inconceivable that I could choose any profession but his. And there was poor Mother, too. I lost her only last year. She had dedicated herself wholly to his memory. Too much so, I'm afraid. She was so bitter about his golden career cut short that she couldn't seem to reconcile herself to a fate that had done it."

"I suppose she wanted you to make it up to her in some way. That would have been only natural."

"But she was always fair. She knew I had to live my own life and that she couldn't share it as she had shared Father's."

"No. For that you'd have to find another
her.
"

"I should be so lucky," he said gravely and gave her a long look.

She changed the subject then and told him some of the story of her own life.

That summer she had three dates with him. She would have had more, had she not joined her family on a trip to Quebec. On none of those occasions was there a romantic interchange, but she certainly came to accept him as a beau. She was fairly confident that she could elicit almost any proposal from him the moment she wanted to, but she wasn't in the least sure that she was so minded. He was ... well, how could she put it? Not at all like the other men she knew. And she was not yet ready to introduce him or even mention him to her father. For the time being, anyway, she was keeping him to herself.