It seemed obvious to Dane that his father, on the other hand, was a man of strong sexuality, in common with his other drives and appetites. The surprise lay not so much in the fact that there was another woman as in that he had been so blind.
So — “Are you dead sure? I can’t believe it.” — when he was certain from the first instant, and belief came flooding.
“Oh, yes, I’m sure, darling,” said Lutetia. “It’s not the sort of thing I would imagine.” No, Dane thought; you’d far likelier imagine a Communist revolution and a commissar commandeering your best silver service. “But for some time now I’ve... well, suspected something might be wrong.”
“But, Mother, how did you find out?”
Lutetia’s cameo face turned rosy. “I asked him what was wrong. I could no longer stand thinking all sorts of things.”
“What did he say?” So you do lead a mental life, Dane thought, after all. Funny, finding out about one’s parents at such an advanced stage of the game. He loved his mother dearly, but he would have said she hadn’t a brain in her head.
“He said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. There is another woman.’”
“Just like that?”
“Well, dear, I asked him.”
“I know, but—! What did you say?”
“What could I say, Dane? I’ve never been faced with such a situation. I think I said, ‘I’m sorry, too, but it’s such a relief to know,’ which it was. Oh, it was.”
“And then what did Dad say, do?”
“Nodded.”
“Nodded? That’s all?”
“That’s all.” His mother said, as he winced, “I’m sorry, darling, but you did ask me.”
“And that was the end of the conversation?”
“Yes.”
Incredible. It was like something out of Noel Coward. And now Dane realized something else. Just below the level of consciousness he had been aware lately of an aura of disturbance about his mother. It probably accounted for his uneasiness and reluctance to leave the city. Her dependence on her menfolk was bred into his bones.
As Dane once joked to Judy Walsh, his mother represented a species perhaps not quite so extinct — if there were degrees of extinction — as the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, or the Carolina parakeet, but rarer than the buffalo.
Anna Lutetia DeWitt McKell was an atavism. Born six years after Queen Victoria’s death, Lutetia in her single delicate body carried the Victorian spirit into the middle of the twentieth century, nursing it as if she were the divinely appointed guardian of the eternal flame. It was true that, being left motherless, she had been reared by a choker-collared grandmother who was by birth a Phillipse, and who never let anyone, especially Lutetia, forget it; the old lady considered herself spiritually, at least, a daughter of England (the Phillipses were Tories during the Revolution); she never failed to take offense at being called an Episcopalian — “I am an Anglican Catholic,” she would say. But the grandmother did not entirely explain the granddaughter. On the paternal side Lutetia inherited all the pride and prejudices of the ingrown Knickerbocker breed from which her father’s family descended. Between the Victorian and Dutch burgher virtues, Lutetia never had a chance.
Secretly, she still considered it “wrong” for young people of opposite sexes to be left alone together under any circumstances; the social freedom of the twentieth century bewildered and offended her. The very word “sex” was not used in “mixed” conversation by “ladies”; it had taken all her strength to utter the phrase “another woman” in the conversation with her son. There were other social distinctions as well in Lutetia’s lexicon. Judith Walsh, for example, was “a business associate” of her husband’s (and what a wrench it was for her to acknowledge that “a nice young woman” could be engaged in “business”!); had she had to think of Judy as an employee, Lutetia would inescapably have lumped her with the “servant class.” One always spoke politely, even kindly, to servants; but one did not, after all, dine with them.
Lutetia DeWitt had led the proper sheltered life; she had attended the proper young ladies’ schools; she had made the grand tour properly chaperoned; she had never been inside a night club (Lutetia called it a “cabaret”) in her life (a night club, after all, was a sort of saloon). She sipped a glass of sherry on occasion; beer she regarded as a food, which might be drunk for the purpose of gaining weight; whiskey was exclusively for men. She liked to devote at least one hour a day to her “needlework,” but this was never worked on in the presence of callers because it consisted of “tiny garments,” prepared for a lay sisterhood of her church which aided “unfortunate” young women.
She was, as Dane remarked to Judy, beyond belief. “I love Mother,” he said, “but to be in her company for any length of time is like living onstage during a performance of Berkeley Square.”
“Dane! What a thing to say.”
“I’ve had to live with her, Judykins.”
Divorced women who remarried were living in adultery; there was no more to be said on the subject, except of course that one was sorry for their unhappy children.
It was in the area of sex and marriage that Lutetia McKell’s upbringing expressed itself most strongly. A woman came to her marriage bed a virgin; the mere contrary thought was unspeakable. She would no more have thought of taking a lover than of allowing herself to be eaten by bears. Twin beds were as alien to her as prayer rugs or cuspidors, although separate bedrooms served certain marital situations. She knew dimly that in the unmapped seas in which husbands moved, there were such monsters as “loose women,” for each of whom there had to be a philandering man; in a vague way, while she disapproved, she also accepted. In this sense Lutetia McKell was far more middle-class French than upper-class English or American.
That she possessed an independent fortune was a felicity, a convenience that meant she had the means to indulge in private charities and bestow personal gifts. For family and domestic expenses she did not handle a penny or sign a check, and it had never occurred to her to demand the right as a matter of wifehood.
Lutetia McKell lived where her husband decreed, traveled when, as, and where he stipulated, bought what he told her to buy, ran her home as he wanted it run. She was happy when her husband seemed content; she grieved when he was out of sorts. She had no significant hopes or desires that were not Ashton McKell’s, and she felt no lack of any.
Still... “another woman”...
Why, the old goat, Dane thought.
Most deeply, he felt sorry for his mother; on another level, not so deep, he felt rather sorry for his father. But it was his mother who preoccupied him. How could she cope with a situation for which she had no background or resources? She was not like other women.
“It’s never happened before,” she said, and her lips compressed ever so slightly, as if to say, And it should not have happened now; but the lip compression was as far as the criticism would ever get. “I know that men have, well, certain feelings that women may not have, and there are undoubtedly situations in which they — you — cannot control yourselves absolutely. But with your father it’s never happened before, Dane, I’m quite certain of that.” It was as if she were pleading her husband’s case before some attentive court. She sat in her chair with hands lapped over, no hint of tears in her childlike blue eyes — a fragile figure of middle-aged porcelain.