He shouldn’t have done it to her, Dane ruminated. Not to Mother. She’s not equipped. Regardless of the deficiencies of their intimate life together, he shouldn’t have made her a victim of this commonest of marital tragedies. Not after living with her all these years. Not after taking her little Victorian self as it was and molding it to his accommodation. What did she have without her husband? Ashton McKell was her reason for being. It left her like a planet torn loose from its sun. Dane began to feel angry.
It made him re-examine himself, because at first he had been inclined to see it through male eyes. What might it be like to visit a father’s home and find some brittle, dyed creature in her sharp-featured forties... “Dane, this is your stepmother.” “Oh, Ashie, no! You call me Gladys, Dane.” Or Gert, or Sadie. Dane shivered. Surely his father couldn’t have fallen that low. Not some brassy broad out of a night-club line.
“Mother, has he said anything about a divorce?”
Lutetia turned her clear eyes on him in astonishment. “Why, what a question, Dane. Certainly not! Your father and I would never consider such a thing.”
“Why not? If—”
“People of our class don’t get divorces. Anyway, the Church doesn’t recognize divorce. I certainly don’t want one, and even if I did your father wouldn’t dream of it.”
I’ll bet, Dane thought grimly. He forbore to point out what Lutetia perfectly well knew — that so long as neither of the parties remarried after a civil divorce, no rule of the Episcopal Church was broken. But how could she stand for the adultery? To his surprise, Dane discovered that he was taking an old-fashioned view of his own toward the disclosure. Or was it simply that he was putting himself in his mother’s place? (All at once, the whole problem became entangled. He found himself thinking of the McKell money. The McKell money meant nothing to him, really — he had never particularly coveted it, he had certainly not earned a cent of it, with his two inheritances he did not need any part of it, and he had repeatedly refused to justify his legatee status in respect to it. Yet now the thought that the bulk of it might wind up the property of “another woman” infuriated him.)
“He’s cheated on you, Mother. How can you go on living with him?”
“I’m surprised at you, Dane. Your own father.”
She was ready to forgive adultery. Did the drowning woman refuse the life preserver because it was filthy with oil scum?
Lutetia sat patiently on a chair which a young male favorite of le roi soleil’s brother had given to his own female favorite — sat patiently and unaware of this aspect of the chair’s history — and stared without seeing it at a painting of the Fontainebleau school in which rusty nymphs languished under dark trees... a painting hanging where the portrait had hung of her Grandmother Phillipse, dressed in the gown she had worn on being presented to “Baron Renfrew” a century ago.
“I would give your father a divorce, of course,” she went on in her “sensible” voice, “if he wanted it. But I’m sure the thought has never crossed his mind. No McKell has ever been divorced.”
“Then why in God’s name did he tell you about this at all?” demanded Dane, exasperated.
Again the faintly reproving look. “Please don’t take the name of the Lord in vain, darling.”
“I’m sorry, Mother. Why did he?”
“Your father has never kept secrets from me.”
He resisted an impulse to fling up his hands, and instead walked over to the big window to stare out at Park Avenue.
Dane was not fooled by his mother’s assertion of faith. His father had kept plenty of secrets from her. If he really didn’t want a divorce, it was because he wasn’t in love with the woman. And this made Dane even angrier. It meant that it was a cheap passing affair, a meaningless tumble in bed, for the sake of which the old bull was ready to give infinite pain to his wife and face the possibility of a dirty little scandal in the sensational press if the story should leak out.
Poor Mother! Dane thought. Up to now the nearest she’s come to scandal has been at fifth or sixth remove; now here it is just around the corner. A lady’s name appears in a newspaper three times in her life: when she is born, when she marries, and when she dies. To this quaint credo Lutetia subscribed completely. Didn’t she realize what she was facing? He turned from the window and said something to this effect.
“I had naturally thought about that,” Lutetia said, nodding. Was there a flicker of something in the depths of those blue eyes? “And I mentioned it to your father. He assures me that there is no chance anyone will ever find out. He is apparently being very discreet. Taking special precautions of some sort, I believe.”
I am awake, Dane said to himself, this is not a dream. They had discussed the cheating husband’s precautions against being found out, and let it go at that! It made his father almost as unbelievable as his mother. Or had Ash McKell become so accustomed to twisting her to his every whim that he now had nothing but contempt for her? Have I ever understood my mother and father? Dane wondered; and he was struck by the predicament of modern man, not merely unable to communicate but, oftener than not, ignorant of the fact.
Talk about faithful Griselda! The heroine of the Clerk’s Tale was flaming with rebellion compared to his mother. She had devoted her life so single-mindedly to the happiness of her husband that she even went along with his betrayal of her as a woman! Or does that make me some sort of Buster Brown-haired prig? Dane thought. Considered as a feat of character, there was actually something sublime in Lutetia’s meekness. Maybe it’s I who haven’t grown up.
“Mother.” His tone was gentle. “Who is she? Do you know? Did he tell you?”
Again she surprised him. This descendant of a hundred Knickerbockers smiled her sweet and self-effacing smile. “I shouldn’t have told you any of this, darling. I’m sorry I did. You have your own problems. By the way, have you settled the question that was bothering you? I mean in your third chapter? I’ve been worrying about that all day,” and on and on she went in this vein, the subject of her husband’s unfaithfulness laid aside, as if she had put by her needlework for a more urgent activity.
I’ll have to find out myself who the woman is, Dane decided. It’s a cinch she’ll never tell me, even if she knows. Probably took some typical Victorian vow against ever allowing her lips to be “sullied” by the creature’s name.
“Never mind my third chapter, Mother. I’ll say one thing more, and then I’ll stop talking about this: Do you want to come live with me? Under the circumstances?” Even in broaching the possibility Dane felt like one of Nature’s noblemen. The most rewarding act of his life so far had been to take an apartment of his own.
His mother looked at him. “Thank you, dear, but no.”
“You’re going to go on here with Father, as if nothing had happened?”
“I don’t know what she is,” Lutetia McKell said, “but I’m my husband’s wife, and my place is with him. No, I’m not going to leave him. For one thing, it would make him unhappy...”
You, said Dane silently, are magnificence incarnate. You’re also either telling me a lie, which ladies do not do, or telling yourself one, which is far likelier, and more in accord with modern psychology. By God, the old girl had some iron in her after all! She was going to put up a fight.
Dane kissed her devotedly and left.
He had to find out who his father’s mistress was.
Exactly why he must unveil the other woman, Dane did not pause to puzzle over, beyond wondering mildly at his compulsive need and overhastily discarding the notion that it had something to do with Freud.