Chapter II: Part 2

There had been a matter that had to do with Jennifer, who had played high stakes beside her mother at the baccarat tables of Nice and won sums large enough for the papers to carry the story in headlines that had been the occasion of peremptory cablegrams for their return to America and had virtually shut off subsequent trips abroad.

There had been the affair, too, of the young Argentinian, son of a castor-bean magnate, driving his Hispano-Suiza into the swimming-pool at the Roslyn, Long Island, estate. Jenny had been as outraged as Rarick, except that he went to the extreme of keeping the house closed for two subsequent seasons.

There were certain well-defined limits to opposing Rarick, which were none the less tricky limits, because there seemed to be no way, except the intuitive one, to anticipate them. He would give in on many a grand issue, such, for instance, as the Ficke house, Jennifer’s fabulous string of matched pearls, or Jenny’s whim for five thousand acres of French-Canadian tract north of Quebec, upon which they had built an artificial lake, a forty-room chalet, “The Cataract,” and which had been opened exactly twenty days in five years. On the other hand, a trifle like Avery’s roadster, or this matter of Dr. Gerkes, would set his head rigidly into the valley of his shoulders and square him for fight.

The coming of Dr. Gerkes was one of those occasions. This time Jenny knew it even before she raised the first faint dust of issue; but she could not forego that first faint dust. The coming of Gerkes angered her. It went against the grain. Not that, offhand, it would seem to cause much of a ripple in a household where thirty-one servants reported to the housekeeper every morning; but it did matter more than was discernible at the first glance.

From the first, Jenny had found the Ficke house deceptive. A Gothic library, two stories high, which ran across the entire Fifth Avenue frontage, a drawing-room of enormous proportions, a Roman dining-room into which you ascended by Pompeian-marble steps, and a glassed-in conservatory for which a breakfast-room had been sacrificed as Rarick’s passion for difficult and exotic transplantation began to grow, left embarrassingly few bedroom suites.

An additional story would have marred the Hellenic grace of the building, and the owner of the adjoining pile of magnificence felt affronted, rather than tempted, by the Rarick offer to buy.

The yellow suite assigned to Dr. Gerkes subtracted one from the five small suites of guest-chambers that Jenny had so elaborately planned and redone. It is true that the comings and goings of Gerkes, who preferred to use what was known as the service-entrance and the small rear staircase that led quite privately up to his rooms, made practically no dent in that household. He dined in his rooms, except on those rare occasions when the family was home alone and Rarick wanted him at table. He was seldom, if ever, seen in the wide, beautifully vaulted corridors of the house; and yet to Jenny there was something repulsive about his being there at all. The shabby black figure somehow recalled the musty memory and figure of an old music-teacher back in her St. Louis girlhood, whose face, close beside hers at the piano, and his audible breathing had been repellent to her. A lady’s-maid had gossiped to Jennifer, who gossiped to Jenny, that he used only three towels a week, and no bed-linen, because he slept on the floor, wrapped in one of the beautiful canary-yellow camel’s-hair blankets. A secret survey of his rooms, one day during his absence, revealed to Jenny’s horrified eyes the yellow-brocade hangings and bed-coverings removed and crammed into a corner, the tops of her lovely curving period-furniture covered with a layout of lean-looking hair-brush, a whisk broom, and primitive stone implements, her paneled yellow walls hung with pin-studded maps, and, on the mantelpiece, beside the meticulously right ormolu clock, a box of Swedish biscuit, a cube of American cheese, and a huge pocket knife, open.

That evening, before they went down to dinner, Jenny’s anger overflowed her discretion.

“There’s a time and a place for everything, Rarick,” she said to him, as he stood tugging at his collar in the enormous mirrored bathroom which gave off their bedroom. “That man is no more comfortable here than we are in having him.”

Standing in a foundation slip of coral-colored silk, over which she was presently to slip a coral-colored evening dress of all front and no back, her carrot-colored hair caught upward in the tight perpendicular line which accentuated the narrowness of her head, she could see Rarick’s neck, through the wall of mirror, drop into the slit of his shoulders, and that peculiar look of the hunchback which she dreaded, and of which she was wary, come cunningly into his face.

“What man?”

“Gerson, or whatever it was you said his name is.”

He turned, in his black trousers, stiff white shirt, black suspenders, still tinkering with his tie, so that, as he faced her, she could see his eyes ride up under his lids.

“I said his name is Felix Gerkes,” he pronounced, slowly and meticulously, as you might mouth a lesson to a child. “Dr. Felix Gerkes has condescended to come and make his home here.”

“Isn’t it usual, Rarick,” she said, her rising anger crowding closer on her discretion, “for even so great a patron saint of indigent college professors as yourself to consult the members of his family before introducing a worthy outsider into the household?”

“There are few demands I make here. This is one of them.”

“You have a young-lady daughter to consider.”

“That is precisely what I did, when I introduced into this madhouse a human being out of the world of ideas.”

“I see. You feel that Jennifer’s scientific education has been neglected and that no young woman is equipped for life without a Ph.D. knowledge of the glacial age,” she said, and glittered as she stood there with her bronze-colored eyes and the points of light off the tapping toe of her slipper. She could have plunged her long jeweled fingers into the valleys of his shoulders and shaken him, as a smothering sense of futility began to crowd her in.

“Not at all, Jenny. Our daughter’s education is all one could ask. She knows a Hispano-Suiza from a Rolls-Royce. She knows a Cartier setting, Theodore at the Ritz, her finishing-school ‘R’s,’ and how to stack her artichoke leaves. I notice our son, too, already has quite a way with his artichokes.”

The speech was not like him, but rather in mimicry of what she might have said under similar circumstances.

“What a devil you are, Rarick!”

“A poor devil, Jenny,” he said, his face as pulled-looking as tarpaulin.

“You are a poor father.” She was going to add, “and a poor husband,” but she let the words lodge in her eyes.

“I am that,” he said, replying to the spoken and unspoken indictment.

“What is it you want of us?” she cried. “Must you oppose your children on every occasion, just as you have always opposed me? Is merely the fact that we want something, sufficient itself to dispose you against it? Why must you always be the stern parent to them, with me the buffer between? What do you want?”

She did not know it, but she was voicing the cry within his heart.

What did he want? He wanted some of the intimacy from that boy of his that was Jenny’s. He wanted some of that intimacy from Jennifer. He wanted.... What did he want?...

“Do you want your children to skip their youth, so that they may follow in the footsteps of some doddering college professor who spends his life fiddling among arrow-heads?”

“I want Felix Gerkes in my house,” he said, climbing back from what was sure to be a discussion of defeat by reason of what he considered her colossal lack of logic, “because he knows things that we don’t know. That we cannot buy for them. He has not mere learning. He has wisdom.”

“I see. Why Eskimo Indians like blubber.”

There was absolutely no way to capture a focal point of discussion when you found yourself in argument with such a woman. She invariably answered you in terms of something irrelevant, making you wild with futility. Damn her! Damn her! In the years since that thought first lightened into his brain, it had flashed there with recurring frequency.

“Yes, Jenny,” he said again, driven to the extremity of employing her same skidding method, “and why your son, a second-year boy at Newberry, maintains two roadsters, a motor-boat, a trotting horse, and fails in his mid-year examinations.”

“No man ever understood a high-strung boy less than you understand yours!”

The dart struck sure, and sent his head retreating down into his shoulders. True. True. Too, too true.

“Nor a gay and beautiful daughter, one with brains, let me tell you that, although you prefer to treat her as if she were a moron. She’s a match for your professors. Jennifer’s got brains!”

“Exactly, damn it all! And for what? Waste. Waste.”

In a world of superficial interests, filled with the need to be clever and sophisticated, you could be clever with the sharp edge of your brain, if you had one, and sophisticated on a shoestring of intelligence and no heart.

“Your merely clever person is only a first-rate second rather.”

“Try being one.”

“I can’t; it’s not in me.”

“Lots of things are not in you, Rarick. The ability to meet your world is not in you.”

“I wish to God it were not so deeply in you.”

“Gerkes’s world, I suppose....”

“I don’t know his world. He knows the secret of things and of not being smothered by them. Like you. Like me. Like your children.”

“Obviously, from the look of his hair-brush.”

You couldn’t argue with a woman like that. You couldn’t. You couldn’t. The crazing sense of futility....

She was in her gown by now, a sort of henna-colored affair, as if the threads had been picked from her hair--a gown that wrapped her eccentrically thin body on a diagonal, rushing to a high ruff about her neck in front, cut daringly, almost to her waist line, behind. Between the bang of her hair and a stiff, enormously brilliant dog-collar of diamonds, her eyes were red and level and full of the impudence of her remark.

“Doctor Gerkes remains, Jenny.”

She shrugged her shoulders and walked out.

Damn her! Damn her! Damn her!

A story about Jennifer Rarick went the rounds that winter, creating hilarity at many a cocktail and dinner party.

It seemed that the Rarick house, shiningly conditioned, was now being shouted out by sight-seeing-omnibus megaphones as the billion-dollar Ficke-Rarick mansion purchased with Rarick dimes.

One morning, just as Jennifer, in riding-habit, was emerging from the house to enter a large fawn-colored roadster which she was accustomed to drive herself across the Park to the academy where she kept her mounts, one of these omnibuses slowed while the megaphone roared of Rarick dimes and billion-dollar mansions.

Throughout this canned oration, the daughter of John Rarick, one hand against her slim hip, the other thumbing her nose at the omnibus, held posture, precipitating the picture by a dash into her roadster at its conclusion, and leaving a gasping and bucolic sight-seeing omnibus load not quite sure that it had happened.

Whether it did happen or not, the gesture might be said to be somewhat typical of Jennifer. I am. You are. Take me. Leave me.

Usually you took her. Even at her worst, when she was cocksure and tiresomely sophisticated and pseudo and pretentious, there was about her a hearty self-loathing, concerning which she was robustly frank.

“I despise myself,” she was constantly saying to people on club verandas and in grand stands at polo matches, where patter predominated. “I am a swine. I’m N. G. I’m stealing a ride through life. I’m a panhandler.”

After a fashion she meant it. After the fashion of one who attempts to appease a dissatisfaction by throwing to it slops of words.

People were always saying of her, “She has brains,” in the key of saying, “Too bad, the girl has brains.”

“So’s my old man,” was Jennifer’s usual retort, in the slang with which she hung her speech. She meant this. She admired her father from the distance that lay between them. She wanted his respect and, strangely enough, gave him precious little of hers.

The evening following his scene with Jenny regarding the coming of Gerkes, Rarick sent for his daughter.

In a house filled with the confusions, the comings, the goings, the ringing of telephones, and the hurrying of servants, that the two women, mother and daughter, managed to create about themselves, the occasions of family conference were seldom enough.

When the summons came for Jennifer to go to her father, in the library, she was in the act of slapping about her rooms, with her own confused English maid and her mother’s Breton maid hurrying at her heels, in the effort to help her toward a dinner engagement for which she was already thirty minutes late.

The fact of the matter was, she had remained shockingly overtime at a bridge game at the Mayfair, vainly trying to retrieve a several-hundred-dollar loss.

Jennifer was of that species of tormentor who, abusive of her servants, was none the less beloved by them, because, quickly contrite, she wooed them back by anointing their wounds with tips and gifts.

It was her maid Mariana’s boast that these tantrums kept her supplied with furs, French gowns, and even jewels.

The last time Jennifer had been summoned in this fashion by her father was about two years before. She had bought on a dare, at the auction of a famous Long Island estate, a cigar-shaped roadster with an Italian engine of very special make, for eleven thousand dollars. The estate was being sold because the owner had been killed in this very car. Jennifer had stood on a table in the garage and led the spirited bidding.

Rarick, after a high and ugly scene with her in the library, had paid the eleven thousand dollars, and the day following, in her enraged and humiliated presence, had sold it to a dealer for twenty-five hundred.

“The meanest man in the world,” Jennifer had ground through clenched teeth into her mirror after the episode, the tears of her humiliation splashing down a face which, although molded after her father’s, had a lightning beauty that darted into it and played around her eyes and her lips. A straight brown slab of a girl, with a brilliant sort of Jeanne d’Arc directness to her eyes, which were surrounded by a mediæval-looking curtain of straight brown bob.

There had been, too, the highly unpleasant occasion when, like a small girl, Jennifer at twenty had been obliged to endure the unendurable indignity of standing beside her much younger brother for a dressing-down from Rarick that had to do with Avery’s presence--to say nothing of her own--at a swimming-pool party at Greenwich that had found its way into insinuating print.

As a matter of fact, both Jennifer’s and Avery’s presence had been the result of a flat tire in front of the estate of the friends who had detained them. But somehow, facing her father, as she stood beside her slim brother, there on the mysterious beauty of a sixteenth-century Kuba hunting-rug, the truth of the story seemed too flimsy to bear the telling, or something grim and hating in these children kept them silent. Rarick was always to believe, not from what they said, but from what they did not say, that their presence on this notorious occasion had been deliberate.

In any event, a summons to her father in the library was grimly associated with the scratching memory of scenes like those.

Then there had been the excruciating occasion when Jennifer and her mother, returning from a season at Deauville and Le Touquet, had successfully passed customs officials without declaring three important and perfectly matched pearls, which they had sewn on to a beaded gown. There had been an outrageous scene in the library when these facts became known to Rarick; in fact, rage and terror had caused Jenny to swoon--cutting her forehead as she went down--at her husband’s reiterated threats to reveal the whole untidy business.

There was rankling, in some terror at the moment, in Jennifer’s mind, a dread that an extremely private dramatic evening, entitled “Casanova, Be Careful,” which had been staged with great lavishness in the garden-amphitheater of a Connecticut estate, was through some mysterious leak about to find its way into notorious publicity.

Hang it all! she had been lured into the thing chiefly because it had given her an opportunity to try her hand at what she secretly suspected in herself to be a talent for lyrical writing.

Hang it all! the way to avoid such jams as this was to ditch the home condition. Marry forty-million-dollar Charley Kempner and spawn him square-faced little Kempner heirs with Kempner casts in their Kempner eyes. Or not marry Lew Bissinger and live in embroidered sin with an already married man. Or pursue Berry Rhodes, who was simply unassailable with social position, and who fascinated her. Or just ditch it. Open a tea-room. Write a scandalous book. Hang it all! No parent can hope to get away with _moyenâge_, maiden-in-a-tower stuff. Yes, she had written the “Casanova, Be Careful” lyrics and danced in the last of seven veils. Damned talented job, if she did say it. “Well, Father,” she improvised to her mirror, “it’s come to this between you and me; has been coming to this between you and me since you popped me into a world I didn’t ask to be popped into. I’m no nincompoop. You’d see to it that a daughter of yours wasn’t. But I’m tired being treated like one. I’m finished. If you want to throw me a million or two to save me from being somebody’s expensive hussy, I’m not too proud to accept it. If you don’t, and since I’m not made of the stuff you seem to think your daughter should be made of, I’m through, anyway. I’ll go off and write a dirty play and show up the whole wretched business of life as it is lived behind the tessellated walls of the million-dollar Rarick mansion that is built out of dimes. If the walls aren’t tessellated, they ought to be. I’ll give them a megaphonefull that they’ll remember. I’ll tell the story of how somebody took a couple of hair-pins and bent them into a couple of frowns and stuck them into sour dough and made a little man who lived in tall marble halls that kept him looking like a dwarf, and who would have thought he was Napoleon, if he had quite had the nerve, but who only got as far as owning everything in the world he could lay his hands on that had belonged to Napoleon or was about Napoleon. I’ll tell the world about this little man who got so rich on needles and pins that he hated himself--and his family. I’ll tell the world, damn it! I’ll tell....” cried Jennifer to herself, as she ran down the hall toward the library; but not without pausing to snatch up a spangled scarf to throw across the back of her dinner gown, which was cut to one inch above the waist line, where a topaz buckle bit softly into the flesh.

What Rarick wanted with his daughter was to have her meet Gerkes.

He was standing waiting for her, on the hearthstone of a vaulted fireplace that had been lifted out of the palace of a Milanese Sforza, a small man who was forever to be dwarfed by the Gothic grandeur through which he moved, and yet to whom the Druid twilight of such splendor was to become a fetish.

Three enormous chandeliers, designed after the crowns of Merovingian kings, poured cunningly diffused pools of light on to this scene of mediæval resurrection. The very modern young Jennifer, who wore her docked head like Jeanne d’Arc, and whose metallic frock clicked, slouched in on slim, inelegant legs.

Her smartness, even back in the St. Louis days when she had first begun to drift from him, had always been a source of her father’s deep admiration. Not her indubitable smartness in the worldly sense, but the brand of it that was indicated in the intelligent bright dark eyes, set into a head that stood so erect and right between its slim shoulders. She could have been anything, Jennifer could have been, except the thing she was. And the thing she was, without his being able to define the exact why, was anathema to her father.

It was not that she carried her cocktails vulgarly, or said gross things with what passed for the new frankness. She was no more and no less than any girl of her upbringing. Or her mother’s upbringing. If anything, a little more. She drank rather less, smoked not at all, and, in her own phraseology, had remained a virgin chiefly because she had never let her curiosity get the better of her.

When she said a thing like that, Rarick ground his fingers into his palms to keep from boxing the ears of the consciously modern young Jennifer. She was so cocksure of what a sophisticated, unillusioned, amusing thing it was to be Jennifer. She was tiresome and a swine, yes, she was willing to admit, but only in the sense that her rattling-good brain was going to waste in cocksure and debonair fashion. You couldn’t live in her swinish set and take the world seriously enough to concentrate. Hang it all! why try to write plays, even if you felt a talent for it, when, to be true to the life she knew, they would have to be dirty plays? Or why do charity or social work, when the world hadn’t time for the dirty-nosed little darlings even after you’d gone to all the trouble to save them for it. Part of the amusing thing it was to be Jennifer was to be brutal and frank and unsentimental and greedy and a little foul-mouthed.

To Rarick, this young woman of his flesh, his board, his keep, who stood there on the hearth-rug before him, glittering in her gown of fake armor, was as strange as if she had just stepped full grown from the life-size silver-and-chalcedony Zeus that stood on a _credenza_ against the wall. Everything he felt about this illuminated edition of himself was imbedded in disapproval. Had been, since the Mary Institute days back in St. Louis, when she had stopped bounding the state of Missouri for him in an unaffected little voice that was appealing, and had first started going to football games in the white-kid gloves her mother provided for her, with boys in their first long trousers, who came calling for her in their family automobiles. He despised what she had become, chiefly in terms of what she might have been.

“You sent for me, Father?” she said, the glance she guarded from ever meeting his sliding to the spot where his graying hair hung in the Napoleonic forelock down his brow, and simulating unconcern by feeling very concernedly along the rear edges of her shining curtain of coiffure.

“Dr. Felix Gerkes, of the National Museum and a scholar of considerable consequence, is going to make his home with us. I suppose you know that, Jennifer?”

Jennifer did. In fact, she was the one who had passed along to her mother the first information concerning the thin-bristled hair-brush and the square of American cheese, as they had sat, in pajamas, in Jennifer’s bedroom over coffee one morning. Pretty snide, to stick a fossil in the yellow suite, with the blessed old Gothic mausoleum as cramped as a Harlem flat, when it came down to actual living-quarters.

But nevertheless a sense of relief ran through Jennifer. Thank Heaven, he had not got wind of the whole silly business of “Casanova, Be Careful.” They were damned clever lyrics, if she did say so, but fat chance to get anything but a dressing-down for them from her father.

“I’m like the fellow, Father, when it comes to science, who kept ‘Stones of Venice’ on the geology shelf of his library.”

“Dr. Gerkes’s scientific achievement is by no means all there is to him, Jennifer. I want you to cultivate him.”

His ability to antagonize his children was infallible.

She drew back from his command, with the kind of rearing of the neck that he had beheld countless times in his boy Avery. A dull sense of his impotence, where these youngsters were concerned, was a chronic rage within him.

“I want you to have dinner with Dr. Gerkes and me tonight.”

“That’s impossible. I’m late as it is for early dinner with the Delaney Stuarts. Shibby sails tomorrow.”

The name “Shibby Stuart” was no more anathema to him than a dozen others which were constantly on the lips of his wife and daughter. In fact, there were important reasons of diplomacy why there should be an _entente cordiale_ with Delaney Stuart, president of an Eastern Federal Reserve Bank with which the Rarick Chain, Inc., had enormous transactions. But the picture of Shibby Stuart as he had once seen her lying sick-drunk on a couch in his house, during one of Jennifer’s dinner dances, rose crazily before him.

“You will remain at home for dinner tonight. It may help you to remember you have a home.”

“Don’t be absurd, Father,” said Jennifer, and began pulling at the net edge of her handkerchief. Her rage, which she felt hitting in hot points against her eyeballs, was out of all proportion to the dilemma of being obliged to cancel her dinner with Shibby Stuart. As a matter of fact, even as she had been sliding into the armor gown that clicked, the thought of evasion had flashed through her brain. What with her back stiff and sore from riding a new mount that afternoon, and a more recent invitation to go off to a speak-easy for dinner and dancing with Berry Rhodes, here was an opportunity to pass up the Stuart farewell dinner and incidentally repay Shibby for a last-minute non-appearance of hers that she had recently staged at one of Jennifer’s bridge luncheons.

“It isn’t often I make demands, Jennifer. I let weeks go by without so much as seeing you at the dinner table. This is one of the times I want you here.”

It seemed to her at the moment that nothing mattered quite so much as dinner at the Stuarts’.

“You should have given me warning.”

“You should have had sufficient judgment to know there comes a time when a halt must be called, if you won’t call it yourself. You haven’t sat down to dinner in this house for three weeks or more.”

“Why should I? Everything I do gets on your nerves. If I’m so much as called to the telephone, you humiliate me before a butler by refusing to let me answer it.”

“I have known you to spend twenty minutes of a dinner hour at the telephone.”

“If I say the moon is made of green cheese, then I’ve said something off-color. Hell! why should I want to stay at home, Father?”

He reached out and hit a gong with a baton of lapis-lazuli, padded in velvet.

“Miss Jennifer will join us at dinner,” he said to an immediate butler.

She waited until the door had closed again, and then, with her face clenched and her hands clenched and her gown making jangling little sounds as the quivers of her wrath shot through her, she lowered her face until it almost touched her father’s.

“I just hate you sometimes,” she said, and began to cry the invariable tears of anger and humiliation to which these scenes could reduce her. “I wish I had the guts to go out and scrub floors for a prostitute, rather than put up with being treated like one here.”

A fit of trembling that went through him like a tree-shake caught him at the words which came off her lips, which were so close to his face that it was as if he could feel their shape.

“You will have dinner at home tonight, Jennifer, even if your temper does turn you into a barmaid.”

“It must be a splendid feeling to have to force the members of your family to your side.”

“It is, Jennifer,” he said, and looked at her with what, for a moment, threatening to disarm her, seemed like a film across his eyes. She sat down, still pulling at the net edge of her handkerchief and every so often scraping it angrily along her wet cheeks.

“Well, now you’ve got me, what is it you want with me? I suppose it isn’t asking too much to be allowed leave-of-absence to get a message off to the Stuarts. God knows what I am to say.”

He beat the gong again. “Telephone Mrs. Delaney Stuart that, owing to an unavoidable change in her plans, Miss Jennifer will be unable to come to dinner tonight.”

She held her face, during this, averted from the butler’s view of it, a little squeal of rage rising to her throat.

“Now what? I suppose I am to spend a jolly evening at home talking isinglass, or blue grottos, or dinosaurs’ eggs, or whatever it is one talks to fossil-finders.” Her rage ended on a spurt of laughter and for the life of him, he could not see her face break into amusement, her eyes crinkling, and keep his own face straight.

“I want you to meet a great and simple person, Jennifer. A man who has not grown simply great in his work, but great simply.”

“He sounds as if he ought to be done in stained glass.”

“He is witty enough to think that poor wit.”

“Thank you, Father. Any more lilies today?”

“Cultivate Dr. Gerkes, Jennifer. Cultivate Gerkes. You want to learn.”

He knew he was being roiling and didactic and tiresome again but to his surprise, she flashed a tear-stained face at him that was lit with a sudden sweetness, a clear-eyed curiosity to it that was reminiscent of the small brown jug of a girl who had bounded Missouri.

“I do, Father! I know I’m all of a total loss. I’m on to myself, don’t you forget it. I want to sit at the feet of somebody and learn. God knows I don’t know anybody with a pair of feet like that. Trot out this wise guy, Father. I’ll chuck everything and stay home at the indoor sport of improving my so-called mind. Do you think he’d like to collaborate with me on a book I’ve long had in mind, called ‘Sex O’Clock’? Really, Father, I _am_ in favor of more and better brains.”

Jenny came in then, wearing a yellow satin gown that had been dry-cleaned to the color of an old tooth, and so shrunken that it spanned. She had long since discarded it from her more formal wardrobe, but, with a survival of an old instinct for economy, went through the mean and futile performance of reserving it for just such occasions as this, when they dined alone and _en famille_.

“You look like the devil, darling,” said Jennifer, and kissed her.

“I feel like him and his bride,” said Jenny, stooping to draw at a thread that was raveling at her hem. “I thought you were having dinner at Shibby’s.”

“I’m dining at home with the Department of Arts and Sciences,” said Jennifer, and dropped a large slow wink to her mother.

Across the island of the hunting-rug, Jenny regarded her husband with eyes that had no gleam.

“I didn’t mind canceling the Dentons at the last moment and leaving a vacancy in her opera box, but I don’t relish the idea of also being on Shibby Stuart’s black list, any more than you should, Rarick, considering your banking connections with them.”

“You leave my banking connections to me.”

“Gladly.”

“Never mind, Mother. Father and I have evolved a new philosophy of life. Less philosophy and more life.”

“The philosophy, I suppose, that the rich are all mean and frivolous and vicious, and the poor holy and righteous.”

He regarded her with the masked look to his face that could cause her to say over and over to herself: “Little man. Little man, you. Little fake Napoleon, you.”

“Holy righteousness, my dear Jenny, cannot reside exclusively among the poor while you are you.”

“Attaboy, Father!” said Jennifer, and jammed a pillow into the cave between the small of her back and the couch. “I can forgive a dirty dig if it’s well dug. Can’t you, Mother?”

Her mother glanced at her wrist watch, a singular and precious one, set into the plane surface of a square diamond.

“It’s a wise house guest who is on time for his meals.”

“At that rate, Jenny, our average run of them must be morons.”

“Life among the Raricks,” sang out Jennifer and hurling out the pillow, jumped to her feet and to some inner syncopated rhythm, began teetering on her slim toes down the great length of room that led to an organ at its far end.

Carved down the pipes of the towering instrument was the legend of the St. Gregorian Mass, the meeting of Abraham and Melchisedec, and the Last Supper. A chime, somewhere in the complicated heart of the organ, which was rigged with all sorts of mechanical attachments, gave out the half-hours. To Jennifer’s hilarity, it played the grand operas, stained-window versions of the action springing into light above the keyboards. “Father’s folly,” she called it.

“Jennifer, if you turn that on, I’ll scream!”

“Keep your well-known equilibrium, Jenny. I just wanted to see the fat Brünnehilde, in purple cheeks and corsets, heave in stained glass.”

How small they made him, these women of his. That organ, built in at tremendous expense and effort by tearing out one entire end of the house, was as dear as someone beloved could have been. The storied operas, stalking in stained glass to the pressure of a button, peopled his solitude, plunged, in the glory of melody, through his evenings, saturating his thirsting spirit. Chromoesque tinned music, perhaps, but full of solaces....

“Jennifer!”

“I’m not! I’m not turning it on. Surely, if Father can stand his ‘Faust’ served up to him like Campbell’s soup, you should be able to endure a magenta and majestic trickle of ‘Tannhäuser.’”

“Do you think Gerkes understood the dinner-hour, Rarick?”

“Why, Jenny, what _is_ the matter? The man is not even due for five minutes. I’ve known you to hold dinner three-quarters of an hour without a whimper when the guests happen to be yours, as they almost invariably are.”

“She’s a cave-in from dieting, Father.”

That was doubtless true. It offended him to the point of disgust to see this angular woman responding to a herd instinct that apparently deprived her of logic, trying to reduce herself still closer to her skeleton by nibbling at meal-time on a special faddistic diet of chop and pine-apple slices.

“I’m a cave-in, all right,” said Jenny, and stretched her thin body outright on a divan and pressed her fingers into her eyes and bared her teeth in an on-edge fashion.

“Nerves. Underfed,” said Rarick, eyeing her from the opposite side of the hearth.

“Nerves, all right. Reason, all wrong.”

There descended a silence characteristic of their times together. Taking up an object here and there, as she wandered aimlessly about the museum-like room, Jennifer began to whistle in short, breathy snatches.

“For Heaven’s sake, Jennifer, stop it!”

“Sorry, Mother.”

Silence.

“Say, Dad, what do you call this?”

“That’s a Tau-crossed pastoral staff. French, about the eleventh century....”

“No, I mean the gold panel above it!”

“Oh, that’s a reredos of St. Peregrine. It’s part of an old altar-table. I bought it at the Donetti auction at the same time I got the ivory panel of the Virgin Mary with the pearl crown there, over the doorway.”

“I think it’s a waste of those lovely seed pearls, Rarick. You might have them done into something wearable for Jennifer or me.”

He did not answer.

“I was going to say, Father, I saw what might be a sister panel to that reredos today, at Duveen’s. I was there with Mary Dakin. She got caught in a tumbling market and was trying to unload two Romneys that came with her share of her grandmother’s estate. By the way, wouldn’t be interested, would you, Father, in buying a pair of Romneys? Mangy-looking, but frightfully _bona-fide_. Girl with a lamb. And Boy with a Goat. Or maybe his was a lamb, too. Well, anyway, Mary’s asking fifteen thousand for the pair, and Duveen’s sent a man to appraise.”

“Not interested.”

“What did they stick you for the pearl-incrusted reredos, Dad?”

“Hellman bid for me ... something like twenty-five thousand, if I remember....”

“Good God!” said Jenny from her reclining position, blowing smoke and holding her cigarette at bare arm’s length upward from her.

“Good God, what?” barked Rarick, ready to be on edge.

“Good God, she’s hungry!” said Jennifer, and resumed her aimless tour.

Silence.

“A Baby Gar speed-boat for your son would have cost half that much. Why is it so much easier to understand your own desire to own a sixteen-thousand-dollar piece of ivory slab than it is for you to understand a boy’s desire for the things that mean youth and sport to him?”

“Because it is not his desire. I am convinced that all these notions to add more and more dangerous and expensive toys to the jumble of things with which you are cluttering his school life and educating both your children to demand, come from you.”

“In which Jennifer is drawn dirtily into the picture.”

“Keep quiet, Jennifer.”

“Sorry, Mother.”

“Your boy demands precious little.”

“I realize that, Jenny. In fact, it is just my point.”

“Fortunately, Rarick, I am of sufficiently tough fiber to nag in his behalf for some of the things he is too sensitive to nag for himself.”

“What are some of those things, Jenny?”

“The things to which, as a rich man’s son, he is entitled.”

“Meaning....”

“O Lord! Rarick, I haven’t it left in me to go over it all again.”

“I’ll go over it for you. Meaning things. Things to keep him moving instead of thinking. Devices for speed. For motion. Things to distract him from books, _things_ to distract him from thinking.”

“Good Lord, Dad, where do you get off? Things? You’ve spent half your life shoveling snide things into the shopping-bags of snide people who need snide things like safety-pins and stewpans. You’ve glorified the American dime by making it stand for _things_. You’re the Thing King!”

How astute she was! Clever, slim Jennifer, with her sophisticated Egyptian-looking eyes, merciless in her ability to lay him open to himself.

“A major reason why I want to spare my own from the tyranny of things,” he yapped back at them, trying to express, with the chronic sense of futility, some of the malaria of his spirit which managed to keep his family at this kind of antagonized arm’s length.

“You don’t seem particularly inclined to spare yourself the tyranny of those fifteenth-century tapestries or that enameled Pietà up there that cost a king’s ransom, or unpronounceable and unwearable gems with which your pockets are crammed.”

“There is at least something of the story of mankind to be found in historical objects.”

“There’s beauty in that motor-boat Avery isn’t going to get,” sang Jennifer, cupping the tall heel of her slipper in her hand and teetering. “Slim, speedy beauty, let me tell you that. And as for that story-of-mankind stuff, if you ask me, it is pretty much the low-down same, whether you read it off the hieroglyphics of an amulet from Hindustan or study our gigolo civilization through a magnifying-glass shaped like a monocle. And, Father, speaking of gigolos, I’m in love! He’s a window-dresser for a haberdasher by day, and dances at Florentine’s by night. Abbey Chadwick engaged him for her dinner dance, and I’m going to have him for mine next week. He tangos like a patent-leather-haired god, and his name is Nemo.”

“Darling, that’s the name of a rubber corset or a comic strip or something.”

“No, Mother. He wears one and is the other; but, oh, my beating heart!”

“Bicarbonate of soda, darling!”

Why must he stand there with disgust printed on to his features, instead of meeting her vulgarity as Jenny did, by snapping her fingers. Was Jenny, after all, clever and even subtle with her children, giving them their heads, to prevent them from running away? Her children adored her. They were easy and indolent and insolent in her presence. Sometimes he even felt himself hankering for some of that insolence. Avery had once said to his mother in Rarick’s presence, “Shut up, old darling,” and he had rebuked him for it. At that there had flashed between Avery and his mother a look of amused understanding at his lack of understanding. Letters from Avery to his mother were constantly lying about the gold-stoppered bottles and knickknacks of her dressing-tables. He never read them, even surreptitiously, but he knew they were chatty letters that preyed upon the easy indulgences of his mother; and, meticulous as he was not to read, constantly his glance was being snagged by such salutatory exuberance as “Dearest Brick of a Mother” or “Dearest Mother-on-the-Spot.”

That was precisely what Jennifer was saying to her now. “Mother-on-the-Spot, you’re beautiful, but dumb.”

Dr. Gerkes entered then, after the inconsequential manner he had of appearing on a scene without the slightest preamble. His dinner clothes, which he called his “overalls,” because he wore them when he lectured, hung from the rounded part of his back like a suit that had been suspended from a nail. His shuffling footsteps skidded the small rugs from under them like so much silent gravel.

There was a graciousness to Gerkes. A man of almost unlimited intellectual contacts, he could be loquacious enough on subjects where he felt informed, and an indulgent listener to those who, in his opinion, wanted to talk more than he. Stupidity he regarded as a cardinal vice. It made him snappy. His principal income was derived from lecturing, but he could be thoroughly rude to the interrogators who crowded and chirped around him at women’s clubs; and even at the meetings of such learned organizations as scientific and historical societies he was capable of rebuking a colleague for the inattention to his lecture that his question had implied.

On the other hand, there was an amusing mixture of the Socratic and Rabelaisian about Gerkes. He loved the private and impolite jokes that had to be told behind the barrier of a hand, and the curbstone and the platform were alike his rostrums. He had never married, due principally to chronic lack of income and what he regarded as the popular fallacy that two could live as cheaply as one. His eye for a pretty woman was a quick, discerning one. It lit on Jennifer, who was standing in one of the pools of light, glittering in her armor, her dress a blaze of winking metallic disks, and her eyes as if they had come off the gown.

Rarick’s pride in his friend was pretentious and clumsy.

“Gerkes, I wish you’d tell my daughter that story about the Taoist priest who once found himself, when a meteor fell, in Lahore, India. There’s a mighty fine moral there.” Or, “Gerkes, I’d like for my wife to hear your opinion of our own Arizona summers and how they compare with say a country like Switzerland. I cannot get my family to realize that they don’t have to cross the Atlantic for beauty of scene or variety of climate.”

“Three chamber-of-commerce cheers,” said Jennifer, and held her cocktail-glass up against the light.

“See America first,” said Jenny, and gulped hers down.

It was the kind of patter for which Gerkes had little retort. Persiflage, the smiting word at any price, chic sophistication for the average truism, tea-table and round-table caliber of profundities, disarmed and bewildered him. He was at his worst. The descent to the dining-room through aisles of tapestries was made goose-step. Gerkes, who was never ill at ease, only silent where it seemed the better part of wisdom, plowed solemnly through the high-napped rugs.

Not even port wine or champagne-cup, made by Jenny at table in a frosted-silver pitcher over a _mélange_ of fresh, whole, cling-stone peaches and black cherries, could succeed in drawing him out of the slough of amiable silence into which the occasion had thus far submerged him.

“I hope you are finding your quarters comfortable, Doctor Gerkes,” said Jenny from the head of her table, where they sat sparsely grouped, because it could have accommodated four times their number. The secret of the icy grace with which Jenny presided at her table, Jennifer was fond of declaring, was that her mother never permitted her head to touch the back of her tall chair, or her hand to lie along its arms.

“Very comfortable, thank you,” said Gerkes, who was interested in his portion of slim frizzled smelts. “It’s a pleasant room.”

“Room?” repeated Jenny, and swung her high, curved glance to her husband.

“You’ve a couple of them, Gerkes, or is it three? Don’t guess you’ve had time to check up.”

“Well now, Rarick, I haven’t,” said Gerkes without embarrassment. “There’s another room leads off, I take it.”

“No, old dear, you don’t take it,” said Jennifer, popping an almond into her mouth and grinning; “you apparently leave it.”

“I’m pretty much of an Eskimo,” he said. “They live in bare rooms and keep stacked such furniture as they need, outside their houses, until a piece is called in for use. Simplifies.”

“Dr. Gerkes has lived up there a lot among them, Jenny. He also spent two years in Lapland, studying.”

“You don’t say so,” said Jenny, regarding him over a smelt poised on the end of her fork. “Wasn’t it somebody or other said of the French that no race which eats little _escargots_, suffocated in their shells, can ever achieve civilization? Well, that’s the way I feel about Eskimos and blubber. Fancy being the kind of person that can drink it!”

“One must fancy it; because they don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Drink blubber.”

“But I always thought....”

“No, my dear lady, you never thought, or you wouldn’t be of the opinion that Eskimos drink blubber.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Why can’t you drink this wine-tumbler full of olive-oil?”

“Why--er--obviously--I can’t.”

“Well, for that same obvious anatomical reason, the Eskimo, who, strange as it may seem, is constructed just as you are, could not drink quantities of oil, either, and keep it down. Sorry to have to seem to be concrete.”

“You _are_ smart, aren’t you?” said Jennifer, and propped her elbows on the table and her chin in her palm, and regarded his lusterless figure across the table. “Now tell me how they put ships in bottles, and who wrote ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

“The best way to make a ship in a bottle is to begin working from the inside of the bottle, outward. Glycon is the reputed inventor of a kind of logaœdic verse. Bivalves have snouts. Biology, around the time of the Council of Trent, insisted that the vein of the fourth finger of a _fiancée’s_ hand led to the heart. Does that square me scholastically with your daughter, Rarick?” said Gerkes, irritated or stimulated to a point of loquacity that took his breath away.

“I think it must be wonderful,” said Jennifer, widening her eyes at him, “to be wise enough to play dumb. I’m always trying to be not too dumb to play wise. It can’t be got away with.”

“Nothing of the sort,” championed her mother. “You’ve a good brain. Jennifer is a graduate of Miss Pratt’s, Doctor Gerkes.”

“Yes, and I would have gone to college, Doctor, but I would have been sure to fall in love with all my professors under forty, and it would have been so complicated.”

Gerkes told a none-too-chaste tale then from the _Cent Nouvelles_, about a lady and a certain three lovers.

“He’s a nasty old _roué_,” said Jenny to herself, although she had rocked with laughter through far more pointless tales when her table blazed with friends of her own choosing.

“By the way, Rarick, there’s an idea behind the story I just told that ought to interest you. Louis Sixteenth, to whom the authorship is attributed, goes on to relate that this lady, while bathing, lost her diamond ring. While diamonds were undoubtedly not common at this time, it proves, however, that the stone which Henley picked up for you at Bruges, could easily date back to at least 1460.”

“By Jove! So it could! It also proves that they faceted their stones back in those days, too, now doesn’t it? That’s a mighty interesting point. That’s what I mean, Jennifer, by the historical value of inanimate things.”

It was Rarick’s way of attempting to justify to his daughter the telling of the _risqué_ story. “Even at his worst, the talk of Gerkes mattered, which was more than he could say of the endless sluices of it that roared through the Rarick functions,” was what he was desperately and in his clumsy, antagonizing way, trying to convey to Jennifer.

And strangely enough, Jennifer’s reaction to one whom she might just as readily have regarded as a vile old bore, was as rare to herself as it was to Rarick.

After coffee, when the candles softened down closer to their reflection in the long fine pool of table, and Jenny, maneuvering to extricate her daughter from the vise of a dull evening, suggested that she accompany her to the last act of “Louise,” for which a pair of tickets were going begging, there was hesitation from Jennifer. She knew that after the opera they were sure to join up with the Chadwicks and the Edgertons for dancing at Florentine’s. Except for the seductive fact that Berry Rhodes might also be in the party, and Berry could tango like the Argentine Republic, Jennifer for the moment, wanted to remain around the pool of quiet talk and quiet candlelight and the slow syrupy flow of liqueurs and the intellectual luster of this dim old fogey, Gerkes.

Except there was that seductive possibility that Berry might drop in at Florentine’s....

“I’m glad you’re going to stick around,” she told Gerkes, when she gave him her hand in good-night.

“Doctor Gerkes has promised to make this his home indefinitely.”

“Let me come up, will you, and get on to some books to read and some things to think about?”

“Come up and I’ll show you a manuscript of the ninth century, which I am translating for a library in Cologne. It will make the hottest sex-novel in your library look like a juvenile book.”

“I think you’re immense. You keep your feet nice and pedicured, because I am going to sit at them. Do you think you can convert a sow’s ear into a silk purse?”

“I might find I have a silk purse to start with, and what if I should unwittingly reduce it to a sow’s ear?”

“Father, where _did_ you find him!”

“Dr. Gerkes will tell you for himself tomorrow evening, if you will join us.”

“Have a footstool ready for me every evening, Doctor Gerkes. I’m going to try a new way of showing myself a good time. My present one is a flop. Until tomorrow....”

Poor Jennifer. She meant it. But, as a matter of fact, she saw him exactly two subsequent times, that high-exciting and excited winter of her twenty-third year. Once when muffled from her knees to the tip of her nose in an ermine-and-sable wrap, she had rushed downstairs between two young men who were making noises with their teeth like ukuleles, just in time to nod to Gerkes as he came out of her father’s library with a stack of books in his hand.

The second time, she had seen him quite crazily, through a keyhole. She was never to be quite clear about that, however. It was six o’clock in the morning, and she had been “on a party” with Berry Rhodes. The door before which she had crouched had lurched about so; and so had the figure of Dr. Gerkes, seen crazily through the keyhole.