“I’m glad you insisted on payment. I don’t like to accept favors from Julian English.”
“Well, that’s your business, George. He’s not a bad fellow, but he does rub people the wrong way,” said Arthur. “Once he settles down he’ll probably become as stodgy as his father. Or me, for that matter. Now if there’s anything else you want me to do, I’ll be at my office. If you want to talk to Joe Chapin, he’ll be in court till four, but he should be in the office around five.”
“I can’t think of anything that’s likely to come up,” said George. “You’ve taken care of everything in your usual masterly fashion.”
“Well, most of it could have been done by a law clerk, but I like to go over everything so that your New York lawyers can’t find any fault with what we do. Joe and I may be a couple of hayseeds, but we don’t want the New York fellows to find that out. You understand that stuff about posting the bond, and those disbursements that we’re charging against Pen’s widow’s share.”
“All clear.”
“Fine. Then I think I’ll run along, George. Nice to’ve seen you. Please remember me to Geraldine and our best wishes to Tina.”
“Thank you, Arthur. See you in a few weeks,” said George.
He would see no one in a few weeks.
THREE
HE parked the borrowed Buick in front of the garage, which was locked. He peered inside the garage, where the Lincoln was jacked up and covered for the summer. Thus shrouded and given the extra height of the blocks under the axles, the car seemed enormous. He made a mental note to give some future consideration to a trade-in on a new limousine. Brewster was putting out a town car on a Ford chassis that was just the kind of swank that Geraldine would enjoy. Geraldine was going to benefit in such ways from her altered position in his life. He wondered how long it would be—not long, surely—before she became fully aware that her position had been altered. He would stay married to her, continue to be courteous and generous to her, and he probably would sleep with her, since marriage to Angela was out of the question. On the other hand, if Geraldine decided to make trouble, even a little trouble, he would deal with that at the proper time. At the moment he was working on a schedule that went only as far ahead as the Christmas dance for Tina and her husband. At the moment Angela Schultz-Schuyler was in ignorance of the coming alteration of her position in life. Inevitably she, a retiring whore, would give him trouble; he was not deceiving himself on that. In a year, possibly sooner, she would have a tantrum and say, “Where am I better off than I used to be?” He would be prepared for such outbursts, and the most solid preparation would be to have Angela convince herself that she wanted to be his mistress, solely his mistress, and to let the idea seem to originate with her. It was an important point and would take some doing, but if he could not outgeneral a whore, he did not deserve to dominate her.
He was pleased with the way things were turning out for him. Another man—yes, a lesser man—would be crushed by the disasters of the past year. A lesser man was crushed and had created the principal disaster by murdering his mistress and killing himself. A lesser man, listening to the sordid confession of his daughter, would have succumbed to anger and self-pity. And a lesser man, informed that his youngish son was an outstanding crook among crooks, would surrender to shame, a shame that he might not feel so deeply as he felt that he ought to feel shame. Each disaster would have been crushing to an inferior individual; and when all three had made impossible a man’s lifelong ambition of an enduring place in the history of his homeland, he had all the necessary excuses to plead for charity. An inferior man, getting closer to sixty, would allow himself to be subdued by charity and spend the rest of his days subsisting on compassion. But not George Lockwood.
In the whole country there was not—may never have been—a man who had come through such ordeals and vicissitudes with his spirit intact. No, not only spirit; integrity was better. Old Moses Lockwood, a man of vigor and violence, had survived and prevailed; Abraham Lockwood, the first of the line to learn manners, had behaved like a gentleman and misbehaved with the gentlemen’s ladies; and George Lockwood’s son, a scoundrel already, was almost predictably a man of national notoriety who would be immune to the tiny pinches of small morals. When the friendly biographer prepared the life story of Bing Lockwood—in 1960, at a guess—he would not fail to emphasize the integrity and independence that had been so characteristic of the family from generation to generation. George Lockwood now believed that the major triumph would belong to his son, but he was his son, just as he was the son of Abraham and the grandson of Moses. The previous postponements of major triumph were fateful; the Lockwood destiny, the Lockwood dynasty, either or both were awaiting a more suitable moment and a larger stage than the previous century and a small valley in Pennsylvania. J. P. Morgan’s grandfather got rich in the hotel and stagecoach businesses before the family left Connecticut.
And why should he not be pleased with the way things were turning out? He was convinced by recent events (and his son’s predictable future) that he belonged to a line of men who had proved and would prove that they were of harder stuff than the generations of conventional men who had rejected one Lockwood after another. There for the alert and friendly biographer to see was a record of struggle and conquest that in another day would have elevated the Lockwoods to the status of nobility—if, indeed, it stopped at nobility. The Lockwood women had contributed nothing much but the Lockwood sons, when they had contributed anything. The Lockwood daughters had gone insane or, in the case of Tina, been sterilized. Even Tina had not escaped the madness that had destroyed her great-aunts. George Lockwood would always love his daughter, but what was the use of denying that she was afflicted as her great-aunts had been afflicted, with an emotional disturbance that had left her a barren woman already and a bad risk for future stability? Among the Lockwood men only Pen had acknowledged defeat, yet even he in the final hour of his life had behaved with a kind of vigor and integrity that was not inconsistent with the acts of superior breeds. Self-destruction had never been contemplated by George Lockwood, but there may have been courage as well as desperation among the factors that dictated Pen’s decision. In his own peculiar way Pen had met the requirements of the superior breed, as George Lockwood now saw them.
It was the right of the superior breed to do just what he was planning to do. History was crowded with cases of kings who had taken whores as their mistresses. It was almost the mark of the superior man to indulge himself with a female animal of low degree, to flaunt her publicly. The gesture would not be complete if he kept Angela hidden in a flat on Central Park West; in the weeks to come he would determine the extent to which he might conform to the royal precedent. He discovered now that secret liaisons with Marian Strademyers, supposedly exciting because of their secret nature, were actually paid for in a loss of dignity and self-respect. The superior man did as he pleased; the clandestine romance was for the Kevin O’Brynes. Were it not for the chance of spoiling Tina’s party, he would have enjoyed having Angela make her debut as his mistress at the Christmas dance. Lantenengo County would never recover from that. But the party was for Tina . . .