“You are absolutely safe,” said Marcus, responding to the laughter, “you are taking no risk whatever. We will all be dead before anyone knows if you are right or wrong.”
“I know now,” said Rudyard serenely, never admitting the small doubts which on occasion overtook him and suppressing his anguish at not being recognized as a great playwright.
“The fact is,” said Jacob half-aloud, thinking of the life which they lived, “we do not have very much of a choice. It is a question of your money or your life, the Mexican bandit’s question. We have a choice between doing what we don’t want to do or doing nothing.”
“Last week,” said Lloyd Tyler, the boy of the circle, and the most silent one, “my father bought his yearly ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes, and it all began again, just the same as every other year.”
He told them of the new dialogue between his parents, discussing the Irish Sweepstakes.
“What would you do, if you won one hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” Mrs. Tyler had asked her husband. The cruelest irony was in her voice, for she resented her husband very much because her life had not been what she had expected it to be. What she was saying was that he would not know what to do with a great deal of money.
“What would you do with it?” she said again for emphasis, disturbing Mr. Tyler’s careful examination of the evening newspaper.
“I would sleep,” said Mr. Tyler flatly and strongly, for he recognized this as a criticism of his powers and his way of life.
“But you sleep now,” said Mrs. Tyler, unwilling to be put off, “I never saw anyone sleep as much as that man,” she said to Lloyd who was trying to keep out of an interchange in which he recognized twenty-five years of feeling.
“It would be a different sleep,” said Mr. Tyler. “If I had one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, it would not be the same kind of sleep.”
“No one sleeps better than you do,” said Mrs. Tyler, but weakly, knowing that she had been worsted.
“What a triumph!” cried Edmund joyously. “Not even Swift would have made a better answer.”
“Yes,” said Rudyard, “we ought to strike a medal for your father, Lloyd. He has justified all of us.”
“I wonder what he would do with one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” said Marcus.
“He would sleep the sleep of the just and the self-fulfilled,”
Jacob answered. “What does he have to show for his thirty years of work? He has nothing.”
“He has himself,” said Rudyard, who often chose to regard all things in an ideal light.
“He does not like himself,” said Lloyd, “he does not care very much for himself.”
“It is his own fault if he does not care very much for himself,” answered Rudyard.
“Is it his own fault?” asked Lloyd sadly, for he liked his father very much, “He thinks that he would see my sister and her husband and his grandchildren more often, if he had money, and if he had given my sister a dowry. He thinks that his son-in-law would think more of him and ask him to dinner more often.”
“In my opinion,” said Rudyard, using the phrase which was always the introduction of a dogma, “money has nothing whatever to do with the matter. Pardon me for being intimate, but I would say that the real cause of all the difficulty is that your father did not know how to make love, or your mother has never wanted to have your father make love to her. This is the true meaning of the fact that she is dissatisfied with him. Love is always the beginning of everything, that’s obvious. And perhaps we may go so far as to say, that if there had been satisfied love between your parents, your father would have prospered and made as much money as your mother wanted him to make.”
“That’s just an idea, that’s nothing but an idea. Money is the root of all good!” shouted Laura from the kitchen, helping herself to one more pony of gin as the visitors arose to depart.
“Everything is mixed in everything else,” said Jacob to himself, thinking of how much Laura desired to be loved.
THREE: “NO ONE FOOLS ANYONE MUCH, EXCEPT HIMSELF”
The human beings of the circle and the circle as such existed for Jacob Cohen in a way private to him. The other boys of the circle often discussed each other, but seldom thought about each other when they were alone. They came together in order not to be alone, to escape from deviceless solitude. But Jacob enjoyed the solitude of the morning and the early afternoon, during which he strolled through many neighborhoods, inspected the life of the city, and thought about his friends of the circle. They were objects of his consciousness during his solitude and in this way they existed in his mind like great pictures in a famous gallery, pictures which, however, were studied not merely for curiosity and pleasure, but as if they contained some secret of all pictures and all human beings. Jacob, thinking about his friends and walking many city blocks, was borne forward by the feeling that through them he might know his own fate, because of their likeness, difference, and variety.
This day of September as Jacob set forth was a day of profound feeling because the children went to school again for the first time. Jacob and his friends had prospered in school, and most of all at the university, in a way they never had since then. Now five years had passed and were used. All of them were in some way disappointed as they had not been in school, where each had been able to do what he truly wanted to do. The school had been for them a kind of society very different from the adult society for which it was supposed to prepare them.
Jacob had arrived at Central Park. To the west was a solid front of expensive apartment houses, in front of him was a grove of trees and an artificial lake, next to which were empty tennis courts. Jacob decided to sit down on a park bench and let the emotion inspired by the first morning of school in September take his mind where it would.
He soon found himself thinking, as often before, of the character and fate of his friends of the circle.
Francis French, who now belonged to the circle less and less, had been at first the most fortunate one and the one who impressed the official middle class most of all. He was an extremely handsome young man who spoke English with a perfect Oxonian accent which he had acquired without departing from the state of New York. His presence, his manners, and his accent had secured for him immediately after graduation an appointment as a teacher of English literature in the best of the city universities. He was clearly marked out as a young man with a brilliant academic future.
At the end of the first term, however, the head of the department, who had chosen Francis from among many, found it necessary to summon him and ask him about an anonymous note which accused Francis of immoral relationships with some of his students. In this interview Francis had need only of the good manners and tact which he had cultivated for long and with easy success. But in the shock of the confrontation, he did not reply that the note was untrue and that his friendships with his students had been misinterpreted. Instead of making this nominal denial, which was all that was required, he replied with pride and hauteur. He declared that his sexual habits were his own concern and he said that he refused to recognize the right of anyone to question him about his private life. The head of the department liked Francis very much and he did not care very much what Francis’ habits were, for he was an excellent teacher. But he felt that the refusal to make the conventional denial suggested the likelihood of future difficulty, and being concerned about his own position, he felt he had no choice but to dismiss Francis. He tried again to suggest to Francis that a nominal denial would be sufficient, but Francis would not be moved. His stand gave him the pleasure of being self-righteous. For long he had felt strongly that homosexuality was the real right thing, the noble and aristocratic thing, a view he supported by citing the great authors and artists who had been as he was.