There was something more honorable in an understanding than in an engagement. Mutual trust and confidence was deeply involved. An engagement had the status of a quasi-legal agreement, and a young man was bound by public opinion to conform to the social laws governing engagements. Strictly speaking he was not so bound in an understanding, except by honor and decency and love, and he was technically freer than in an engagement. In many cases the formal engagement came as a relief to both parties, since the restrictions of an engagement were traditionally defined, and both parties knew what they could and could not do. During an understanding, for example, a young lady could be escorted home from a picnic by a young gentleman who was not her fiancé-to-be, provided that the fiancé-to-be was not at the picnic. But after the announcement of her engagement she would not attend a picnic without her young man. At a ball an engaged young lady deferred to her fiance’s wishes as to her dancing partners, and engagements had been broken for violations of such rules.
A total virginity enveloped Eulalie Fenstermacher during the months of her understanding with George Lockwood, and this was acceptable to George Lockwood. Their early kisses, which had led to the understanding, were now timed to the precise point where amorousness was about to proceed into eroticism. The young man and the young woman were now so enormously conscious of the implications of marriage that if Eulalie parted her lips, if George put his hand anywhere on the front or the lower part of her body, he or she would withdraw from the embrace. Nor could they permit themselves to have conversation that mentioned her bosom or her legs. George Lockwood was not a virgin. During his first year at Princeton his father had recommended an establishment in Philadelphia that was the present-day version of the Phoebe Adamson place. “It’s where you’ll be safe,” Abraham Lockwood had said. “But always wash to be sure.” It had not seemed strange to George that his father should know of such a place; most fathers knew of such places and many fathers made the preliminary arrangements for their sons, sometimes with the injunction that a boy of eighteen should stop “flogging the dummy” and when he felt horny to save it for a woman. Once on a visit to Ezra Davenport’s house in northern New Jersey Mrs. Davenport’s personal maid, a French woman, had taken off her clothes for Ezra and George and rather roughly disposed of Ezra and sent him out of the room while she gently but quickly attended to George. “This Ezra, pouf! Nothing. He only wish to see me with you,” she said. But she was ugly with her clothes on, and on George’s second visit to the Davenports she was no longer there. Once on a northbound train from Philadelphia a heavily perfumed woman wearing an ostrich-plumed hat sat beside George, looked him up and down several times, and put her hand on his thigh, kept it there, then slowly moved it upward and gently massaged him. “Open up honey so I can get inside.” He undid his trousers and she brought him to orgasm. She said nothing more until the train was slowing down for Reading, when she handed him a calling card. “If you’re in the neighborhood, honey. A high-class place, for gentlemen.”
With so much experience in addition to the lore and legends he had absorbed at St. Bartholomew’s and Princeton, George Lockwood was not ignorant of the female body or of the excitements and pleasures to be enjoyed in intimacy with it. He was moreover conscious of an effect he had on members of the opposite sex, conscious of it when frequently they were not. Bold women—the Davenports’ maid, the woman on the train—seemed to recognize his special interest in them or at least to be aware of him as a comrade in a game. The girls in his own circle, the sisters and friends of his friends, might be less forthright or generous, or more obtuse, but within the restraints of the conventions they had always seemed to like him more than they did most of his contemporaries. His success with girls could not fairly or accurately be judged by the extent of his erotic experiences with them, since everything that could be done to deny privacy was being done. Ten minutes, five minutes completely alone with a girl was a rare occasion, even after Eulalie and George had reached their understanding. Girls were constantly watched by mothers, by sisters, by brothers, by servants, and especially by other girls. A maid would enter a room carrying a feather duster, a brother would come in to look for a book, and a girl’s contemporaries would not even bother to make a feeble excuse. But the closest surveillance was that of the young lovers themselves, by their sharpened vigilance over their erotic impulses. There were times when George knew that Eulalie was letting him make the next, more intimate move, anticipating the hand on her breast, the creeping fingers inside her thigh. She would sit on the sofa, enjoying the liberties he would not take, letting him enjoy them with her until he would take his lips away from hers and they would sigh together as though only a kiss had ended. He could not be sure how far the suppressed excitement had taken her, or had not taken her, but nearly always at such times she would say, “I love you,” in a way that was meant to be a reward, and a reward which indeed he had earned.
There was no doubt for George that he loved her. His curiosity made the familiar tests, and his feeling for her passed them alclass="underline" wanting to be with her, needing to write her, looking forward to her letters, wanting to confide in her, to tell her unimportant things, using her as a standard of her sex, wanting to protect her, and imagining the riotous pleasures that awaited them, to be followed by tenderness immeasurable. Then there were manifestations that surprised him: he became fond of her brother, wanting only the best for him. He became jealous of a friend named Mildred Haynes, whom Eulalie saw every day. And always, always, he wanted to talk about her.
To alleviate this compulsion he chose the least likely, most obviously wrong, confidant—the sardonic Ned O’Byrne. But O’Byrne’s ironic wit was one language; he also spoke another, that of sympathy (George now recalled how quickly O’Byrne had understood Ezra Davenport) and warmth. “I’m going to have my brother Penrose as best man, but I want you to be an usher,” said George Lockwood in their senior year.
“Don’t commit yourself, George. There’ll be a lot of noses out of joint if you have me.”
“Fuck them.”
“Well, if you feel that strongly about it.”
“I do. I’m not going to have anybody from St. Bartholomew’s. Except my brother, of course. And nobody from Philadelphia. Nobody from Ivy.”
“Not Ezra? He’ll cry his eyes out.”
“He can be ring-bearer. I might ask one boy from St. Bartholomew’s.”
“Chatsworth.”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I guess I was hoping you would. He got the shitty end of the stick here, some day they’re all going to be God damned sorry, because Chatsworth is a better man than most of them.”
“Why do you think that, Ned? I agree with you, but we’ve never had much to say about him.”
“Well, I don’t know. Dignity. Anson Chatsworth was more entitled to a club bid than I was. More so than at least half of those that got in the best clubs. I think it was an accident that he was passed over. You know now how those things can happen. A fellow like Chatsworth, nothing to make him outstanding, and yet eligible for every club here. So by accident no club gives him a bid, because they all think he’ll be in some other club. But he wasn’t a crybaby, and he didn’t resign from Princeton. The opposite of Ezra. I’m sure Ezra peed his pants when he made Ivy, and I’ve often wondered what possessed them. I’d give a lot to know how he made it. I think he had a great-great-grandfather that was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”