“Why should I, Dad? I don’t like business. Any business. Yours included... Anyway, it isn’t as if I had to.” Dane was on the pale side, but the McKell chin was noticeably firm.
“What in hell do you mean by that?” Ashton shouted. Silence swallowed the shout.
At least, the father thought, he’s not being flip about it. He realizes what this damned radical nonsense means... Ashton could not have endured it if the boy had been casual.
“I’m of age,” Dane said. “It doesn’t mean merely that I now have the vote and can join the lodge. Grandfather McKell and Grandfather DeWitt both made provision for me in their wills, Dad. What do I need business for?”
“You mean to say you intend to live without working? By God, Dane, that’s cheap — I mean, cheap!”
“I didn’t mean that at all. I’m going to work. But it’s work of my choice... In a way,” Dane said thoughtfully, “I didn’t choose it so much as it chose me.”
Ashton McKell did not live by bread alone. He was a confident communicant of his faith, and a vestryman. This rushed into his head. Appalled, he cried, “You’re going into the Church?”
“What? No.” Dane laughed. “I’m going to write.”
There was a blank space. Then Ashton said, “Well, I don’t think I understand. Write? Write what?”
A writer?
Ashton probed his memory. Had he ever known a writer? Known anyone who knew a writer? There was Lamont’s son Corliss, but he was a Socialist. And that young Vanderbilt, Cornelius — he hadn’t even had that excuse. And... yes, his late mother’s friend, Mrs. Jones, who had written novels under her maiden name of Edith Wharton. But — damn it all! — she had been a woman.
“So you’re going to write,” Ashton said slowly, and he asked again, “Write what?” searching his mind for a sensible explanation. He fell on one: his mother. His mother spoiled him.
“Fiction. Novels, principally,” Dane said. “I’ve already dipped my toes in the short story — one was published in a little magazine; I don’t suppose you found time to read it in the copy I sent you.” Dane smiled faintly. “I’m lucky. I mean, having the means to write without having to worry about rent money or the electric bill — or, for that matter, deadlines. A lot of writers have to write stuff they loathe, just to keep the fuel pump going. I don’t have to do that—”
“Because of money you didn’t earn,” said his father.
“I admitted I’m lucky, Dad. But I hope to justify my luck by producing good books.” Dane saw his father’s look and said carefully, “Don’t get me wrong. Supplying people with sugar and coffee is honorable employment—”
“Thanks!” Ashton said sarcastically. Nevertheless, he was touched. At least, he said to himself, the boy doesn’t accuse me of being a rotten capitalist exploiter or sneer at the way his people have been making a living for almost three hundred years.
“Only it’s not for me, Dad. I’m going to write. I want to. I have to.”
“Well,” said Ashton McKell. “We’ll see.”
He saw. He saw that it was neither phase nor fancy, but good solid ambition.
Dane took an apartment of his own in one of the buildings he had inherited from the estate of Gerard DeWitt. He did this with kindness, and for a long time scarcely a day passed without a visit home; but Ashton knew that it was not so much from genuine involvement as out of consideration for his mother’s feelings.
The boy worked hard, his father had to concede. Dane allowed himself exactly one weekend off each month; the rest was four walls, stuffy cigaret smoke, and the firing of his typewriter. He wrote, rewrote, destroyed, started over.
His first novel, Hell in the Morning, was a flop utter and absolute. No major reviewer mentioned it, and the minor ones were merciless. A typical notice from a provincial book column said: “Hell in the Morning is hell any time of the day.” He was scolded as “a rich man’s Nelson Algren” and “Instant Kerouac” and “a moth in the beard of Steinbeck.” One lady reviewer (“Why doesn’t she stay home and wash the dirty diapers?” roared Ashton McKell) remarked: “Rarely has such small talent labored so hard to produce so little.” Dane, who had been absorbing punishment like an old club fighter, in grim silence, cried out when he read that one. But his father (only Judith Walsh, Ashton’s private secretary, knew that the tycoon had subscribed to a clipping service) stormed and raved.
“The Duxbury Intelligencer! What’s that smelly little rag good for but to wrap codfish in?” and so on. Finally, anger spent, came consolation. “At least now he’ll give up this tomfoolery.”
“Do you think so, Ashton?” Lutetia asked. It was at one of the family dinners from which Dane was absent — his absences were becoming more frequent. It was clear that Lutetia did not know whether to be sorry for her son’s sake or glad for her husband’s. The struggle, as usual, was short-lived. “I hope so, dear,” Lutetia said. If Ashton thought writing was bad for Dane, it was.
“I simply don’t understand you people.” Judy Walsh was a more than occasional visitor to her employer’s home. Ashton required outlandish hours of his secretary, sometimes dictating well past midnight in his study, so that Judy was frequently there for dinner. She was important to Lutetia McKell in another way. Lutetia’s never-expressed regret had been for lack of female companionship. Her few nieces were too emancipated for her taste, and there was Judy, an orphan, trim, efficient, outspoken, and yet, under the independence, with a need no one but Lutetia suspected, a need like her own, feminine, and yearning for tenderness. Judy’s hair bordered on Irish red, and she had a slanty little Irish nose and direct blue Irish eyes. “Really, Mr. McKell.” Thus Judy, at Ashton’s remark. “Give up this tomfoolery! You sound like a character out of the Late Late Show. Don’t you know enough about Dane to realize he won’t ever give up?”
Ashton growled into his soup.
Dane’s second novel, The Fox Hunters, was a failure also. The Times called it “Faulkner and branch water, New England style.” The New Yorker said (in toto): “A teen-ager’s first experience with Life turns out to be not at all what he had thought. Callow.” The Saturday Review...
Dane continued to plow away.
It turned out to be the kind of New York August which made it technically possible to walk from back to peeling back at Coney Island, from the boardwalk to the sea, without once touching the scorched sand. It was the season when mild little men who had never been known to raise their voices ran through the streets slashing at people with an ax... when those New Yorkers who owned no air-conditioners used fans, and those who owned no fans slept on kitchen floors before open refrigerators, so that the overloaded circuits blew out, nullifying refrigerators, fans, and air-conditioners alike.
Tempers erupted, gangs rumbled, husbands slugged their wives, wives beat their children, offices closed early, subways re-enacted the Inferno, in the thick and dripping air hearts faltered and gave up the blood-pumping struggle, and Lutetia McKell told her son that his father had confessed to her: “There is another woman.”
“Mother!” Dane sprang from the chair, pretending a surprise he did not really feel. “Are you dead sure? I can’t believe it.”
But he could. Queer. A moment before his mother said, “There is another woman,” Dane could have said in truth that the thought of his father’s possible infidelity had never crossed his mind. Yet once the words were uttered, they seemed inevitable. In common with most of mankind, Dane could not think comfortably of his parents in sexual embrace; but in his case the Freudian reasons were complicated by the kind of father and mother he had. His mother was like a limpet clinging to a rock, getting far more than she gave; for she could only give acquiescence and loyalty as she moved up and down with the tides. Somewhere deep in his head flickered the thought: she must be the world’s lousiest bed partner.