And all the women were beautiful, gorgeous, grieving’s colors good for them, aloof mantles which made them seem (though I knew better) unattainable, virgins again, yet sexy still as secret drinkers. God, how I lusted when I was with them! I could barely put two words together for them or accept their condolences without feeling my importunate, inopportune blood thicken, my senses as ticklish as if Persian whores had gotten to them. Which added to my gloom, of course, because I was dishonoring my parents in their death as I never had while they lived.
Only the necessity to cope saved me from some sacrilege. (Oh, the confidence of lust! Surely that’s the basis of its evil. The assumptions it permits one, glossing reality like a boy in the dark, touching himself and thinking of his mother’s bridge guests.) Somehow, however, I managed to see my tailor, somehow got the arrangements made, somehow wrote the necessary checks and visited the near-at-hand safe-deposit boxes before they were red-flagged, somehow got through the inventories, spoke to the obituary people at the Times, prepared the eulogies somehow, and fielded all the questions of the well-meaning that are asked at times like these.
“Will there be a foundation, do you suppose, Ashenden?” asked an old friend of the family who had himself been an heir for as long as we had known him. (And oh, the effect of that “Ashenden”! It was the first time one had been thus addressed, at least officially, since one’s roommates at boarding school and college, thinking of their own inheritances, had used it.)
“I don’t know, sir. It’s too early to tell. I shall have to wait until the estate is properly probated before I can be certain what there is.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, “but it’s never too soon to start thinking about a foundation, fixing your goals.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me give you a little advice on that score. The arts. There are those who swear by diseases and the various social ills, but I’m not one of them. And of the arts I think the performing arts give you your best return. You get invited backstage.”
“I’ll have to look into it.”
“Look into it.”
And one of Mother’s friends wondered if marriage was in the offing. “Now you really are eligible, Brewster,” she said. “Oh, you were before, of course, but now you must certainly feel a bit of pressure to put your affairs in order and began to think about the next generation.”
It was a rude thing to say (though something like these had been almost Father’s last words to me), but the truth was I did feel it. Perhaps that was what my shameful lust had been about, nature’s way of pointing me to my duty. My search for myself seemed trivial child’s play now. Honor did subsist in doing right by the generations. I know what you’re thinking: Who’s this impostor, this namby with no will of his own? If he’s so rich, why ain’t he smart? Meaning glacial, indifferent, unconscious of the swath of world he cuts as the blade of what it leaves bleeding — the cosmos as rich man’s butter pat. Listen, disdain’s easy, a mug’s game, but look close at anything and you’ll break your heart.
I was inconsolable, grave at the graveside, beside myself like a fulfillment of Mother’s prophetic double vision.
“People lose parents,” a Securities and Exchange Commission cousin told me. (Yes, yes, it’s nothing, only nature bottoming out.) “Sons lose mothers,” he said, his gray hair trimmed that morning, wet looking. “Fathers die.”
“Don’t look,” I said wildly, “shut an eye. I am beside myself.”
I keened like a widow, a refugee from hardest times, a daughter with the Cossacks, a son chopped in the thresher. I would go about in black, I thought, and be superstitious. My features will thicken and no one will know how old I am.
“There, there,” he told me, “there, there.”
“There, there. There, there,” said this one and that.
My pals did not know what to make of me.
“My God, Ashenden,” one said, a roommate from boarding school, “have you seen the will? Is it awful?”
“I’ve been left everything,” I told him coolly.
He nudged me in the ribs. I would have called him out had I not been in mourning.
Only the sight of Mrs. Lucas saved me. The thought of that brave woman’s travail enabled me to control myself at last. I no longer wept openly and settled into a silent, stand-offish grimness, despair like an ingrown toenail on a man of fashion.
The weekends began.
All my adult life I have been a guest in other people’s houses, following the sun and seasons like a migratory bird, an instinct in me, the rich man’s cunning feel for ripeness, some oyster-in-an-r-month notion working there which knows without reference to anything outside itself when to pack the tennis racket, when to bring along the German field glasses to look at a friend’s birds, the telescope to stare at his stars, the wet suit to swim in beneath his waters when the exotic fish are running. It’s not in the Times when the black dinner jacket comes off and the white one goes on; it’s something surer, subtler, the delicate guidance system of the privileged, my playboy astronomy.
The weekends began, and the midweeks and week- and two-week stretches in the country. I was very grateful to my friends’ sense of what I needed then. Where I was welcome before, I was now actively pursued. My friends were marvelous, and not a mean motive between them. If I can’t say as much for myself.
In the luggage now with the bandboxes of equipment, the riding boots and golf clubs and hiker’s gear, was a lover’s wardrobe: shirts like the breasts of birds, custom ties that camouflaged themselves against their backgrounds or stood out like dye in the sea, ascots like bunting for the throat’s centennial, the handmade jackets and perfect trousers and tack room leathers. I dressed to kill, slay should I meet her, the mother of my children. (These were my mourning togs, mind.) And if I brought the best that could be had, it was not out of vanity but only respect for that phantom girl who would be so exquisite herself, so refined and blessed with taste that it would have been as dangerous for her to look at the undistinguished as for another to stare directly into the eclipse. So it was actually humility that made me dress as I did, simple self-effacement, the old knight’s old modesty, shyness so capitulative that prostration was only a kind of militant attention, a death-defying leap to the earth. And since I had never met her, nor knew her name, nor had a clue to where she might be, I traveled alone, for the first time taking along no guest of the guest. Which my friends put down to decency, the thirty- or sixty- or ninety-day celibacy of the orphaned. But it wasn’t that.
It was a strange period of my life. My friends, innocent of my intentions and honoring what they supposed to be my bereavement, omitted to invite any girls for me at all, and I found myself on this odd bachelor circuit, several times meeting the same male guest I had met at someone else’s house a few weeks before. We crossed each other’s paths like traveling salesmen with identical territories. And I rode and hunted and fished and stayed up all hours playing whist or backgammon or chess with my hosts or the other male guest, settled before fires with sherry and cognac, oddly domestic, as if what I owed the generations was a debt already paid, a trip in the time machine, keeping late hours in libraries until the odor of leather actually became offensive to me. On the few occasions I retired early it was at my host’s instructions. (I am an obedient guest.) The next morning there was to be an excursion in the four-wheel drive to investigate property he had acquired in backwoods forty miles off — a lodge, an abandoned watchtower, twice an old lighthouse. And always, nodding my approval if the purchase had been made or giving my judicious advice if it hadn’t, I had this sense that I’d had the night before in the library: that the property in question was my property, that I was already what I was dressed to become.