The Towers of Love (14 page)

“What else do you want?” Hugh had asked him.

“Oh, I want—I want a lot of things,” Joe said.

“Tell me.”

“Well, I want a job where I can make a lot of money. I want to be making at least fifty thousand dollars a year by the time I'm thirty. And then, by the time I'm making enough money to afford to do the sort of things I'd like to do for a wife, I'll get married. And—oh, I want a great big Park Avenue apartment. A big apartment on Park Avenue, on right about Seventieth Street. And I want a house—a big house for the summer on the beach somewhere. Somewhere like Deal, for instance, on the Jersey shore. And I want my wife to have a butler and a maid and a cook, and a mink coat, and I want a chauffeur to drive me to my office, and I want a fancy car—a Rolls-Royce, maybe, or a car like your mother's red car. And I want—” The list had contained several items.

Joe's dreams, Hugh had realised, were always orderly, specific. Matters of the heart were tailored to those dreams. (“If you fool around—you know—too
much
with girls, it can make you dissatisfied with the wife you finally get.”) And he lay on the rock, thinking about the tidy avenues of Joe's heart, with their pruned shade trees, their ornamental catalpas, and wondering why his own heart's landscape seemed to contain so many unruly clumps of shrubbery. He had always admired Joe's certainty, his specificness, the directness and purpose with which he went about getting what he wanted. (In their room, Joe would pick up a book, flip it open, sit down, and say, “I'm going to get an A on this damn' history test,” and, as it would turn out, he would get the A.) With Hugh himself, it was always different. The future did not define itself in such a precise, clear way. Yet it beckoned just as surely, if in vaguer terms. Lying there in the warm May sun, with his eyes and all his senses awake, his life and the future seemed to be somewhere ahead of him, but hidden behind a bright bit of gauze, yet with glitter-dust and sunshine dazzling all around it.

He looked at Bash Bish Falls, that pounded in the noisy rhythm of their Indian name. Suddenly he jumped to his feet. “Look!” he said.

At the brink of the falls, high above them, a fawn was standing. And now it leaped, arching in the air, for the opposite side of the stream. But it landed short of the rock in the water. “Oh, God!” Hugh said, as it began to go over the falls.

It fell with a terrible slowness, seeming to take an eternity to reach the bottom. At times it seemed arrested in the thick cataract of falling water—perhaps as, with its feet, it found brief anchoring places in the rocks behind the falls—and for several repeated instants it seemed as though the fawn might save itself and be able to jump to safety. But it continued to fall, in these endless stages, until it last it lay turning slowly in the pool where Hugh and Joe had just been swimming, its white belly floating upwards, its neck twisted backward and broken.

“Oh, God,” Hugh whispered. “That was my fault. I startled it when I jumped up.”

Joe Wallace was standing beside him, looking at the dead fawn, at the gathering circle of crimson blood around it in the water. “No, it wasn't your fault,” Joe said. “It's just the laws of nature I was talking about. The survival of the fittest.”

Coming back, they had almost missed the train. Just as he and Joe got to the station, the train had been pulling out They had had to run down the track after it and jump aboard.

He remembered Joe Wallace telling his mother about it when she had come up to the school the following week-end. “Boy, you should have seen us, Mrs. Carey,” Joe had said. “Running down the old track, waving and yelling our heads off, trying to catch the old train.”

“
Did Hugh make it?
” she had demanded in her tense voice.

“Sure,” Joe said easily. “Sure he made it, Mrs. Carey.”

“Oh, thank God!”

His mother had always talked to him very frankly about all the girls he knew; she told him what she liked about them, and what she didn't. “Too bad she's so hippy,” she would say of one. And “God, but doesn't she have a marvellous figure!” she would say of another. She analysed them all for him. “Watch out for little Barbara Brewster, darling,” she would say. “She wants to marry you—I see that gleam in her eye.” And “Don't you think Diana Barnes is a gorgeous thing? She has a marvellous,
abandoned look. Abandonnée
, as the French say. She can be had, baby, I'll wager anything. Take a tip from the wise, darling—that pretty little thing can be
had
!”

And much later, in his senior year at college, he had come up to the house for a week-end from New Haven. And he had mentioned to her that he had been thinking—at least off and on lately—seriously, about Edrita. She had been equally explicit about that.

“We always reach
upward
, you and I,” she said. “Not downward, or towards some middle ground.”

And when he had asked her what she meant, how this applied to Edrita, she had said, “Darling, the Everetts aren't much. Really they aren't. Henry Everett made a lot of money back in the twenties by pulling off a lot of very shady stock deals, and he got out of the market just in time, before the crash. He's been extremely lucky in a way, and he's been very smart. He's been smart enough to cover up all his deals and come out of it all seeming to be absolutely soaked with respectability. But if the truth were ever known about some of Henry Everett's manipulations, Henry Everett would be in jail.”

“But I think Edrita's nice,” he said.

“Oh, so do I! I think she's very nice, too. Very nice. I just don't like her, that's all.”

“What is it you don't like about her?”

“Doesn't she strike you, Hugh, as a little fresh and brassy? Doesn't she? Look at her a little more closely, dear. Try to look at her dispassionately. She's—well, she's a little cheap, darling. I hate to say it, but the lack of breeding and background
does
show through.”

“I think that's very silly,” he said.

“Do you? Well, let me try to give you a tiny example of what I mean. Do you know what Clara Everett asked me once? She said to me, ‘Alexandra'—Clara always calls me
Alexandra
—she said, ‘Alexandra, darling, tell me something: Do you wash your milk bottles before returning them to the milkman? My maid never bothers to, and the other day the milkman complained to me about taking back dirty milk bottles.' Clara said to me, ‘Alexandra, what do
you
do?' Now,
really
. That's the kind of person Clara Everett is.”

He laughed. “Well,” he said, “what did you tell her? What
do
you do with your milk bottles?”

“My dear, I didn't know what to tell her. I said to her, ‘Clara, that's the most bewildering question I've ever had asked me.' I really hadn't the faintest idea what we did with milk bottles at the house. Frankly, I didn't even realise milk
came
from bottles. I know it comes from cows, but how it gets from the cow to me is something I've never really looked into.”

“Well,” he said, “I wasn't talking about her mother, Sandy. I was talking about Edrita.”

“Darling,” she said, “all I ask you to do is to
think
a little bit. Try to look at the thing sensibly. Think about her, and about your feelings towards her. You see, my dear, I know you awfully well. We've been very close, you and I. We've been through a lot together. I think I know what would be best for you, and also the kind of girl who would make you happy. You just wouldn't be happy with Edrita, baby. I know you wouldn't because I know
you
. Do you want me to tell you
exactly
why you think you might like to marry her?”

“Yes,” he said. “Tell me.”

“Because she's close,” she said. “She's next door. You've grown up with her, played together as children. She's the easy one. She's the obvious one—the one you can marry without half trying. You're reaching years of discretion, a lot of your friends are getting engaged, and now you're thinking perhaps you should get married, too. And you've thought: Well, there's Edrita, a stone's throw away. A lead-pipe cinch. Well, darling, this is not the sort of attitude that leads to a successful marriage, I can assure you of that.”

He had said nothing.

Then she had said, “And there's another thing. I hate to mention it, but I will. You've made marvellous progress, extraordinary progress. Sometimes it's hard to believe the great progress you've made. But your health is—well, you've got to realise, you've got to face the fact that you've always got to be careful—not to tire yourself, to keep yourself rested, and in shape. It's the most important thing you have to do. And Edrita—well, she's such a husky, active girl. All-night parties, that sort of thing. I'm afraid if you married a girl like that she'd wear you out!”

Later that same afternoon, his sister Pansy had come into his room. Pansy was seven years younger, about fourteen at the time, and she had come in in a pair of blue jeans and Western riding boots and flopped down across the top of his bed. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi, Pan,” he said.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

He reached in his shirt pocket for a pack and handed her one.

Pansy lighted it, blew out the match, and coughed. “God, I've been smoking too much,” she said.

He smiled at her. “I guess maybe you have,” he said.

“Sandy doesn't know about it, of course. Don't tell her.”

“I won't tell her,” he said.

She held the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger, studying the lighted end. “Joanne Gibbs and I are both going to quit for Lent,” she said.

“Good idea.”

“Hugh,” she said, “I heard you and Sandy talking downstairs before.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. I don't know what Sandy means, Hugh.”

“Means about what?”

“About Edrita.”

“Well, I guess Sandy doesn't think Edrita and I would be the perfect match,” he said.

“Hugh,” she said, “is Sandy a snob?”

“I don't know,” he said. “In some ways, I suppose. But in some ways everybody's a snob.”

“Really?”

“In some ways. We're all snobbish about certain things, I guess. We all try to imitate what we think better people do—or smarter people, or more successful people. Or, in your case, older people.”

“What do you mean, in my case?”

“Smoking that cigarette, for instance.”

She smiled faintly. “Oh,” she said. “I see what you mean.”

“Yes.”

She rolled over on her back, put the cigarette between her lips, and blew a thin stream of smoke straight up at the ceiling. “Well,” she said, “I like Edrita. I just wanted you to know that.”

“I like her, too,” he said.

“I think she's—very nice. I think she's the nicest of all the older girls I know. I think she's the nicest of all the girls you've ever taken out, I really do. And I think it would be very nice if you married her.”

“Well,” he said, “I haven't really decided anything yet, Pan. There's plenty of time to decide things like that.”

“Hugh,” she said, “don't act superior to me. Please don't act superior.”

“I didn't mean to be,” he said. “Was I?”

“I thought you were being—just then. Just a little bit.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Because I'm really very mature for my age. I really am,” she said. She put her booted foot on her knee and put her head way back, her short brown hair falling backwards from her face, across the coverlet, staring at the ceiling. “Sometimes I think that I think too much,” she said.

“About what?”

“About life, death. Marriage. Things like you and Edrita. Hugh, would you like me to intercede for you with Sandy? Tell her that I think you
should
marry Edrita?”

“I think we should let the subject lie for the time being,” he said.

She sighed. “Of course,” she said, “I really don't know anything about anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—marriage, for instance. I don't know anything about that. Nobody will tell me anything.” She continued to look up at the ceiling. “Hugh,” she said, “will you tell me?”

“Tell you about what?”

“Tell me about
everything
. I told you—I don't know anything. About anything. I mean, literally, I don't. I don't know what it means, or—you know, what married people do. Not even that.”

“Get Sandy to tell you all about that,” he said.

“She won't. I've tried. I've tried to ask her. All she'll say is, ‘Don't worry about things like that yet, dear. Just run along and be pretty.' But I
do
worry about things like that, Hugh. I do.” She paused. “You see, I want to become deeply involved in life.”

“Well—” he began.

“I mean literally. I mean I've seen—you know, words. Written places. But I don't know what those words mean. The other day, for instance, at school—somebody said something about a—a jock strap. I didn't know what that meant, and they said it was sort of like a brassière. But how could
that
be? I don't understand what that means. All I know is that it has something to do with sex.”

“Well, it doesn't,” he said. “Not really.”

“Well, what is it? Can you tell me any of these things, Hugh? I'm the only one of any of my friends, you see, who has an older brother, and I thought—perhaps—”

“Really, I think this whole subject is something you'd better discuss with Sandy.”

“But she
won't
, I tell you! I told you what she says—run along and be
pretty
.”

“Discuss it with Sandy, or—”

“Or who? Who is there? Won't you tell me anything, Hugh? You know something about some of these things, don't you? After all, if you're thinking about getting married—”