The Young Apollo and Other Stories (8 page)

Newport, obviously, was my chosen battleground. Few observers have understood it as did the French novelist Paul Bourget, who in
Outre-Mer,
the account of his American travels, pointed out that it was entirely dominated by formidably respectable middle-aged or elderly females, the wives or widows of largely absent husbands, who had rid the summer colony not only of bohemian artists and writers but of anything remotely resembling a demimonde. The extra men at their parties were a dressy bunch, more or less epicene, and any husband who kept a secret mistress to entertain him on his rare visits to Aquidneck Island dared not lodge her any closer than Narragansett.

Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, in her memoirs
Roman Spring,
related that the so-called four hundred would have fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman, and she described well its organizer and acknowledged leader, Mrs. Astor: "She always sat on the right of the host when she went out to dinner parties; she wore a black wig and a great many jewels; she had pleasant cordial manners and unaffectedly enjoyed her undisputed position."

Yet it was from the side of this great matron that I seduced the young or youngish man who became what he himself liked to term my major-domo and court jester. Beverly Dean, despite his long and rather messy blond hair, his mocking blue eyes, and his screeching laugh, might have struck an observer as a regular and even almost sturdy American youth had not his habit of overgesticulating and nervously twisting his shoulders and torso seemed to indicate that he was warning one against any overestimate of his masculinity and strength. He had wit and impudence and a species of charm, no known occupation or source of income or even family, and he was a fixture at every party. He was generally supposed to be trying to occupy in Mrs. Astor's court the place of her late guide and mentor, Ward McAllister.

The conversation that led to his brief reign over my equally brief social endeavors occurred after a dinner party at Alice Vanderbilt's Genovese palazzo, The Breakers, when he and I were sitting in a far corner of the vast marble hall to which we had retreated so that we might chat without disturbing those guests who were listening to a rather mediocre string quartet.

"Our hosts have certainly made the grade," I commented drily, glancing toward the crowded and respectfully listening audience in the parlor. "But then there is really no resisting the Vanderbilts. Such a numerous clan, and each member richer than the one before. And actually quite amiable, too. And handsome, unlike the Astors, who are so plain. Yesterday there was no knowing them, and today you can hardly tell a Vanderbilt from a Van Rensselaer. But where, after all, have they got to? Now they're as dull as the rest of us."

"Nobody had called
you
dull, dear lady."

"Not to my face, anyway, and God knows, you're all welcome to my back. But what in the name of Lars Porsena and his nine gods have we or the Vanderbilts gained, my dear Beverly, by housing ourselves in the borrowed glory of the Italian Renaissance? Think of what the marble walls of a palazzo like this would have witnessed in the days of the Borgias! Murder and poison, no doubt, but also passion and great art! And what do they see today but a bunch of overdressed old women lost in a snowstorm of cards, both playing and calling?"

"Write up that onslaught, will you please? It should make your name in belles lettres." And he crushed my incipient retort with his high cackle of a laugh.

"But seriously, Bev, what is it that gives Newport its peculiar deadness? For some of the architecture is not so bad, really, and the air and sea are delightful. Not to mention the matchless gardens. Why do I want to scream?"

Beverly resorted to his favorite nickname for me. "It's just your good taste, Lady Kate. You see the summer colony as a farce. It has nothing to do with what is really going on in America. Tiaras and porte-cocheres. Emblems of royalty. It's a court without a sovereign, a religion without a deity, a ritual without a cause. At fancy dress balls how do the guests dress up? As kings and queens! As Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette!"

"You mean they lose their heads?"

"But not their headdresses."

"Yet isn't that the way with fancy dress the world over? You remember all those pictures of the British peerage at the famous Devonshire Ball? They all came that way."

"True. For the Brits suffer from the same disease. Their lords and ladies try to kid themselves into believing they have some of their old power left by strutting about a ballroom in the glad rags of the glorious dead. Except they still have a monarch and an upper house to give them a kind of sham glitter."

I was struck by the comparison. "But if you see it so clearly, my friend, why do you spend your life in it?"

"A good question. But I didn't always see it so clearly. It's only recently that I have become bright-eyed. And that is why I have cultivated
you
, dear lady. You thought it was
you
who found the apple in Eden. But it was I who put it there, right under your keen and curious nose."

As a matter of fact, I had half suspected this. His many crossings of my social path could not have been entirely accidental. "And what was your purpose in attaching yourself to a woman almost old enough to be your mother?"

"Oh, quite old enough to be my mother!" he retorted with another outrageous laugh. "I was looking for a woman who had the brains, the imagination, the genealogy, the wit, and the coin to turn Newport on its heel. And if she could turn Newport, wouldn't she turn the hundred lesser Newports across the nation that devour our social doings in the evening press?"

"And you found such a woman in me?"

"I did. And you had another virtue as well. You were a rebel. I gleaned that from the famous photograph showing you and Mrs. Astor at a garden party. The great Caroline is plodding ahead with the placid conviction of a dedicated princess performing her function at some idle ceremony, while you, with that tall lean lacey figure, are bending down, probably to murmur some heresy in an ear that will never understand it."

That was where he had me. Knowing that I wanted something different. Knowing that I hated to be classified with the group I was killing myself to lead.

"It's keen of you to have spotted that," I admitted after a thoughtful pause.

"Well, Falstaff said he was the cause of wit in other men. You're the cause of it in me, Lady Kate. We could be a great team. The parties we could throw would set the colony on its ear."

"And how would you dispose of Mrs. Astor in all of this? Hasn't she a first claim on you?"

"The great Caroline would have to give up her place. Her sun, anyway, is setting."

"Isn't that rather disloyal? Like those little brown creatures that have such an aversion to leaky vessels?"

"Not if it's a case of
sauve qui peut,
We have lived in the last days of great queens. Victoria and Tzu Hsi. It is only realistic to turn one's gaze to the future."

***

Thus my famous summer partnership with Beverly Dean began. He was constantly at the "castle," ever at my side, escorting me to parties almost as if we were a recognizably united couple. But like what? A dowager sovereign with her minion? Or the old British queen with her gillie, John Brown? Or even Elizabeth and Essex? I didn't give a hoot how people saw us; I was amused, and that was enough for me. He organized and gave life to my entertainments, and it is not too much to claim that, between us, we altered irretrievably the revels of the summer colony.

To start with, we reduced the time spent at the dinner table from three hours to one. We instituted parlor games and elaborate charades with dazzling costumes. We abandoned place cards and adopted Thomas Jefferson's rule of pell-mell. We played tricks on our friends, picking certain guests in advance of a party to dress as maids or footmen, to prove that people never really look at servants. We organized tableaux vivants in which some of our prettier young people appeared almost (but not quite) scandalously unclad. I gave a party for an "unknown Russian grand duke" and introduced a chimpanzee in full regalia. At the dinner table, Beverly would sometimes scream for silence and call on people to confess their most shocking secret, with uproarious results. And sometimes, aloof and exhausted, I would retire with a chosen few to my bedroom suite to sip champagne and tear our other guests apart.

Of course, there were reactions. Mrs. Astor, piqued by Beverly's desertion, let her opinion be known that we were fatally lowering the tone of society, that we were undermining the orderly hierarchy that she and Ward McAllister had been at such pains to rear. I was denounced as a female Attila, scoffing at the ruins of the noble Roman temple I had blown apart. It was all great fun, and as my cynical husband observed on one of his rare visits, using a marine term, perhaps it was the sanitary hosing of a greasy deck.

Beverly had now become one of the principal figures of the Newport social scene; his blazers and cravats were louder and louder, and his high chortle could be heard up and down Bailey's Beach at noon when he visited the cabanas of his adoring women friends. His jokes and gibes waxed freer and freer, and though he continued to amuse me, there were moments when I wondered if I were not going to have to caution him to treat me with more reserve. It was all very well for him to call me his adopted mother, but his behavior at times bordered on the too impudently filial, or even resembled the impatience of an aging heir apparent enviously eyeing the crown of a too-long-surviving monarch.

I never knew what he lived on, though it was bruited about that he received commissions from the caterers in town whom he recommended, but I didn't like it when he began seeking loans from me. Twice I supplied him with moderate sums, but on a third occasion, when the amount requested was considerable, I suggested an alternative.

"Why don't you marry? I can think of at least three widows who would jump at the chance. And you wouldn't have to perform any prodigies of romantic passion, either. They'd settle for a black or white tie to escort them to parties."

"Lady Kate, you're wonderful! You know what's on a man's mind before he even tells you."

"A man? You wouldn't even have to be that. Though I don't doubt you could take care of any appetites that you aroused. No matter how tough the old bird." Beverly, of course, was widely supposed to be homosexual, a matter of small concern in society, but I rather imagined that he could handle either sex—if it was to his advantage to do so.

"What would you say, Lady Kate, if I told you I had already cast my eye on a
princesse du sang}
Of your
sang,
too. Can a cat be so bold? Can even a kitten?"

"A princess? Here in Newport? I thought we allowed only princes and that we kept them for our richest virgins."

"I don't mean a European one. I mean a Yankee princess closely allied to my queen. Your charming cousin Adelaide."

So he was ahead of me! He already had his candidate. I didn't know why, but I didn't quite like it. Adelaide Welldon, fair, fat, and forty, was the widow of a wealthy steel heir who had died of alcoholism. She was the daughter of a first cousin of mine, and although dull and a bit on the silly side, I had included her in my larger gatherings because she was kin and amiable and flattered me.

"You'd be calling me Cousin Kate, I suppose," was my rather dry comment, after a moment's silence.

"That, of course, would be one of the principal motives for the match!"

"Hmph. Would you be kind to her?"

"Kind to Adelaide? Why, I'd adore her!"

"She might prefer to be loved."

"Never fear. Our attachment is quite mutual."

"Oh, you've found that out? You've asked her?"

"I have been so bold."

I viewed him skeptically. "You couldn't hold yourself back, I take it. Passion overwhelmed you? Then where do I come in?"

Beverly's features assumed what seemed almost a businesslike expression. "She won't marry me without your blessing."

"That's a condition?"

"She says it's an absolute one. I take it, dear lady, you won't let me down?"

I was about to give him the nod, but some impulse made me pause. "I'll talk to her," was all I could promise.

Adelaide came to me that very afternoon. She seemed divided between a palpitating self-satisfaction and a dread that I would laugh at her. Her round, bland, fair countenance was puckered with agitation, and she kept clasping and unclasping her hands until I told her flatly to stop.

"Of course, I know that my money is something of an inducement," she said defensively.

"Well, of course. He couldn't marry at all without that."

"But I think he also cares for me. Somewhat, anyway." Her eyes were suddenly alarmed, almost beseeching. "He has a heart, hasn't he, Cousin Kate? You must know!"

"We all have hearts, surely, Adelaide."

"And he wouldn't say he loved me if he didn't, would he? If he didn't at all, I mean?"

"My dear, I'm sure he's very fond of you. Who wouldn't be? But you don't want me to tell you he's Romeo, do you? We're not in Verona, after all. This is Newport!"

"Oh, I know! Which is why I've come to you. Because you know us all so well. Of course, I'd be happy to be able to buy all the things for poor Beverly that he needs. And I do love him, Cousin Kate, I really do! And although I don't expect him to be a Romeo, I don't want to have what they call ... or what the French call ... what is it?"

"A
mariage blanc?
"

"Yes, that's it! It wouldn't be that, would it?"

"My dear, what a question to put to me! You're not asking what
my
relations with Beverly have been, are you?"

Adelaide's face was at once drawn with horror. "Oh, my goodness, no! However could you ask? Oh, Cousin Kate, what you must think of me!"

"Well, you needn't take it so for granted that I'm as neuter as an old rock," I retorted. And then I stopped. Perhaps it was just what I was! But I knew, as clearly and vividly as if I saw Adelaide stretched, absurdly and expectantly, on the nuptial bed, her hair tied in pink ribbons, her too ample white flesh tingling, that she would never be the bride she dreamed of being. Any performance on Beverly's part would be, at best, perfunctory.