What, what, in God’s name, had prompted this death act of Avery’s? How
could this darling of her indulgence, her adoration, have snipped the
cord that bound his heart to hers, as casually as you would snip the
cord on a candy-box?
How could an offshoot of her own body-fiber have committed an act so
outside the dimensions of her own comprehensions?
One did things like this for concrete reasons. There had been no
love-affair. Avery’s adolescence had been almost too timid. There had
been no debts. Notwithstanding the ugly and humiliating innuendos of
the headlines, Jenny had always seen to it that Avery’s pockets were
well stocked, even when his bank account was exhausted and his father
questioning and stern.
Slow, smoldering conviction became Jenny’s that Rarick had been the
stone wall before which Avery had found life meaningless.
Rarick had crossed him so constantly. Passively, rather more than by
deed or stricture. That was what made it maddening to her and subtle.
You could not quite put your finger on--anything. And yet, it was
impossible not to know how dumbly and how gropingly he had failed to
understand his boy. Rarick was not vicious. He was just part of the
failure.... Her heart even bled for him, as he sat alone, looking at
the glow in his stones for hours on end now, or with Gerkes, in those
weeks preceding his departure, while the organ plowed up the more
melodious of the operas. Sometimes, particularly after the departure of
Gerkes for absurd points north, Rarick was just sitting. Pity of a sort
lay in her heart for him. Pity of sorts lay in her heart for herself.
She had been a good mother, neither Avery nor Jennifer nor even Rarick
himself had denied her that. Wherein had she failed? Or had Avery
failed? Her dear. Her beautiful. She had seen to it that his hands were
crammed unto bursting with all her love and indulgence could give
him. Nor had she stopped there, which would have made indictment of
her easy. She had crept into his spiritual life as far as she dared.
She had once discharged one of his tutors whom she suspected of being
agnostic. When Avery was twelve, she had attended a series of morning
lectures, at the Plaza, on “You and Your Child,” and had taken him for
a drive one morning before he left for Newberry, and told him “plain
little facts,” to which he had politely listened, without surprise or
embarrassment, or even, she suspected, enlightenment. The one, “Babies,
dear, do not just grow under the heart; it is not quite so simple as
that,” had not quite come off as the lecturer had anticipated. Avery
had sniggered.
But he had sent her roses that afternoon. When he was only fourteen,
there had been grace to Avery! Tears were at the edges of her lids
these months after the death, ever quick ones, ready to flow.
To go back and back and back, could there, after all, have been a
hopeless passion for a girl? Or a woman? Or was there something secret
and terrible that a mother could not understand? Ah no! Avery was
innocent. There was the case of young Tremoil, the college-senior
son of Augustin Tremoil, president of the Civic Bank, who had been a
college suicide over his hopeless infatuation for the happily married
wife, eleven years his senior, of a French viscount. No, no, there
had been no such attachment in the life of this boy of hers. Nothing
in his papers indicated it. Or, for that matter, indicated anything.
Just bits of verse--so sweet--and the journals of any growing lad. She
had not read them through. Rarick had sort of hogged them greedily for
himself, as if for what comfort he could squeeze out of them. Jenny had
for herself the sweet, personal mementoes. Things. Avery’s beautiful
platinum watch, the flatness of a dollar, that had ticked near to the
dear tick of his heart. Avery’s beautiful books. This superb edition of
Shelley. His collection of portraits of Shelley. His beautiful pearl
studs that had lain to the beat of his dear heart. She had thought of
the pearly quality of his pallor as she had purchased the set. Avery’s
signed photograph of Tagore. Out of it all, Jennifer had only asked for
his mauled copy of Marie Bashkirtseff.
Yes, Jenny had the dear things. Over them she cried and she cried.
His own portrait, in a soft shirt open at the neck, and his fair hair
seeming to fly backward to some breeze.
Dears, it was too much.... A.
What was too much, my darling? Avery, my darling, what, oh, what?
Avery, am I in a dream? Are you dead?
It was to Ramon she turned.
“Oh, my darling,” she told him over the small table of a
smaller-than-ever tea-room in West Ninety-seventh Street, where they
were venturing to meet, “you must be everything to me now.”
“You will not let me be.”
She knew what he meant. Ramon was more and more restive. This furtive
meeting here and there was degrading. To both. Sure as fate, it would
begin to attract notice. Cannot get away with this kind of thing
indefinitely.
“Yes, yes, darling, but----”
“But why procrastination? This eternal procrastination. Two years of it
now....”
“Darling, you are killing me. If ever I needed to mark time, it is now.
Lightning has struck my life....”
His beautiful black eyes could fill with tears for her. The death of
Avery, whom he had never seen, had affected him in a manner strange
to him. He, to whom sickness was an ugly misdemeanor, felt a strange
beauty in Avery’s kind of death. He thought of this boy nights, as he
lay trying to sleep. He had died with the flower of his body in full
bloom. No decay. No organs withering of disease. Avery had reminded him
of some one who had looked through the door of life, found what he saw
not pretty, and bowed out. The superb insolence of that gesture cast a
strange luster over the mother of such a boy.
She had given life, and the power of death, to that slim blond fellow
whose photograph, in a soft shirt with the neck open, was smeared now
with her tears. The glow of vicarious mystery was out over Jenny these
days. How damnable life was! Ramon, who wanted desperately to live,
yet found it so hard to be allowed to live. Struggle. Struggle. That
most precarious of struggles for existence off the whimsical bounty of
women. That strange boy in the photograph, with the open collar and
the hair flying backward like a woman’s in the wind, had willed not to
live, because the bursting cornucopia of life’s good things for him had
overflowed and suffocated him.
What a strange, a terrible, a revealing, a shameful note, “It was too
much.”
Too much, when Ramon, who loved life, was starving. Well, anyway,
starving for the good things of life. Perhaps this tragedy was
writing on the wall. Good times ahead. Out of the machine-stitched
infatuation which he allowed himself for this enormously rich woman,
must come security. Yes, “allowed oneself the infatuation” was what it
amounted to. One must live. It made it pleasantly decent that in his
relationship with this woman, who could do much for him, he had been
able to steam up a certain modicum of fascination. It gave him ethical
standing with himself.
Curious, slim, greenish woman, sitting opposite him in the glamorless
little tea-shop. Mother of a beautiful boy who had done a strange, wild
thing. Her grief made her sweet.
“Sweetheart, when you cry, your eyes are like deep pools filled with
sea water that cannot break into surf.”
“What would I do without you, Ramon? I need things like that said to
me. I’m frightened, Ramon. Life has showed a fang at me. Ramon, I was a
good mother to him. You know that!”
“You were too good, Jenny.”
“You mean I spoiled----”
“God has no use for protection. It leaves Him idle----”
“You are perfection, Ramon.”
“I am kissing you,” he said, letting his eyes, that were velvet to her,
lie along her narrow fretted face.
“Ramon,” she said, giving words to a thought that had smitten and
smitten her, “do you think it--possible--that some way--somehow--my
boy--could have known--about us----”
That thought, too, had flashed through his brain.
“That, Jenny, you know is impossible.”
In a way she did, only the thought would wedge in.
“He idealized me. He was sensitive. That could kill....”
“He was too much of a poet. He would have idealized our love.”
“You dear! You would see it that way.”
He laid hands over her small cold ones.
“Strange you,” he said, confusing her with the strange aura of the
strange death that hung over her.
“Am I strange to you, Ramon?”
“Only in the sense that the strange is beautiful and full of mystery,
like a little sea-flower captured in a bottle.”
“In that sense, Ramon, I think I was strange to my boy.”
“Strange....”
“He must have found life too--too----”
“Too exquisite.”
“Too exquisite.”
Too exquisite. They bandied words, prettily minted ones, across the
table, their glances jeweled with points of excitement.
“Too exquisite on one hand, Jenny--too putrid on the other.”
He meant Rarick. The strange, locked sense of her second-rate loyalty
kept her silent. With his capacity for reticence at the right moment,
he let the conversation end abruptly, as at a precipice, folding her
once more into the cloak of his dark-velvet glance.
“It is easy to imagine a death for love of you, Jenny.”
“You are all the strength I have, Ramon.”
He put out his hand again, stroking hers, insinuating his palm beneath
her palm.
“Ramon, dear, please! Those people at that table are glancing at us.”
He drew back stiff, taut, flushing down into his collar; and suddenly
she too flushed riotously.
“Dearest--of course. I have not forgotten what you asked in your note.
Here--forgive----”
She felt out timidly for his offended hand, pressing it, leaving a
small, folded five-hundred-dollar bill in it.