At the University, away from his family, Abraham Lockwood identified himself with the campus social life rather than with the bookish. He had a large allowance, spent it freely on his wardrobe and the entertainment of his new friends, and the money enabled him to participate in games of chance for comparatively high stakes. He learned to play whist, and was invited to join a club at which the new duplicate whist was played. Membership in this club was a major social triumph for Abraham Lockwood of Swedish Haven; the other members were undergraduates whose families were the bon ton of Philadelphia and nearby Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. As merely a good whist player Abraham Lockwood could have been ignored; the invitation signified the members’ unanimous approval of Abraham Lockwood as a good fellow. He wore the club badge, a golden scarf pin in the shape of a question mark, like a decoration, which indeed it was; to be made a member of The Ruffes was a more promising augury for the post-college future than his membership in Zeta Psi.
It had been taken for granted at Zeta Psi and among The Ruffes that Abraham Lockwood—handsome, clever, well supplied with funds—was related to certain other Lockwoods of substance. He seemed to take for granted that everyone would assume he was one of those Lockwoods; consequently he was not asked the direct question and was not compelled to give the kind of evasive answer that would immediately have made him suspect. His only lie, in that respect, was to say offhand that most of his people had gone to Yale, although his father had not. In a sense he was telling a half-truth; the closer descendants of 1630-Watertown Robert Lockwood had gone to Yale in abundance, and it was not then or ever established that Abraham Lockwood was not somehow connected with 1630-Watertown Robert. In any event it seemed altogether likely to the members of Zeta Psi and more particularly to the members of The Ruffes that Abraham Lockwood, son of the upstate magnate, was all they made him out to be—a gentleman.
The Ruffes, who were twelve in number, had an arrangement with a Miss Adamson that made her, in effect, the club’s mistress. She had a house in Juniper Street where she lived alone with a maid. Unlike the Greek-letter fraternities and the upperclassmen’s societies, The Ruffes had no secrets of a ritualistic nature; even the name was quite obvious to anyone who had ever heard of the game of whist; but it was understood by the members that anything and everything said or done during gatherings of the club was not to be talked about with outsiders, and the arrangement with Phoebe Adamson was in the same esoteric category as the stakes the members played for. Under the arrangement, any member of the club could go to Phoebe whenever he felt the need, and she would accommodate him. If too many—more than two—members desired to be accommodated, Phoebe would dispatch her maid to bring in other girls who were on her carefully selected list, and who were regularly employed as hotel chambermaids, housemaids, and salesladies in the stores and who wished to augment their salaries. Phoebe, through her own maid, could round up a dozen young women in a couple of hours.
On such occasions Abraham Lockwood was splendid company. He was extraordinarily well equipped by nature and immediately and inevitably was nicknamed The Stud-Horse. His fellow members of the club would time him with their watches to test how long he could postpone orgasm; and when Phoebe was introducing a new girl, the members would gather around to watch her amazement when she saw him stripped. Away from Phoebe’s he was discretion itself; his dignified conduct was given credulity by his appearance, his blameless complexion, his innocent wavy locks, his unworldly look of slightly bewildered friendliness. “It’s hard to believe it,” his fellow members would say—and Abraham Lockwood himself became one of the few club secrets.
His army assignment in Washington was a post-graduate course in the amenities he had so quickly mastered at Penn. His Pennsylvania Dutch was offensive to the German-speaking diplomats, but he at least could understand a great deal of their conversations; and at the University he had liked and done well in French. Having been partly bilingual since boyhood, he was less self-conscious about using a foreign language than his fellow students; consequently he seemed a more alert, interested student and, in turn, his professors reciprocated with an interest in him. His accent and intonations needed practice, but he could understand and make himself understood for hours at a stretch. This was not an unimportant attribute; any effort, large or small, that succeeded in making the French nation hesitate to help the Confederacy was worthwhile. Abraham Lockwood was fed harmless military information to be passed along at the parties he attended, in the hope that it would be carried back to the French embassy. There was no way to estimate the efficaciousness of this minor propaganda scheme, but the French stayed out of the conflict. Abraham Lockwood was the more effective because the highly sophisticated French diplomats regarded him as a completely ingenuous Yankee, who possessed some small skill at cards but was otherwise little more than a dancing-man in a blue uniform.
One result of his Washington experience was Abraham Lockwood’s discovery that Philadelphia was not the capital of the world and that Philadelphians, even the families that were represented in The Ruffes, were not taken at their own valuation when they journeyed away from home. It was true that in diplomatic-society small talk Abraham Lockwood was often asked about individual Philadelphians who were acquaintances of the foreigners, but it was as individuals and not as Philadelphians that they had made an impression. Abraham Lockwood never forgot this lesson, and its immediate effect was to keep him from making a fool of himself.
No young woman in Swedish Haven had attracted the young buck as a suitable nubile prospect. He had gone to Washington with the thought that when the war was over he would live in Philadelphia and in due course marry some sister of some University friend. He discarded the plan after he had begun to see Philadelphia from another perspective. Philadelphia was only Philadelphia, and a marriage of convenience could turn into a lifetime of boredom, convenient only as a means to achieve high standing in a city that had begun to disappoint him. With this thought came two others: in Washington he realized that he had not often been invited to visit the homes of his fellow members of The Ruffes, and that on the rare occasions when he dined with his clubmates’ families, the daughters of the house had not been present. He slowly found an explanation for this careful oversight: his antics at Phoebe Adamson’s.
The other thought, which came as he projected his plans into the post-war future, evolved into the scenes that would take place if he got himself engaged to a Germantown girl and there was an exchange of visits by the two sets of parents. Moses Lockwood in his middle fifties had acquired dignity through success and suffering and reticence through his fears, but he had no polish and he did have, literally, half an ear. He was bothered by phlegm, and his efforts to clear his throat stopped conversation until he had caught the bothersome wad and spat it, when luck would have it, into one of the brass spittoons that were in nearly every room in the house. When there was no spittoon he would leave the room, saying, “I gah geh rih oh this,” and get rid of it. Abraham Lockwood’s mother could read and write and play a few favorite hymns on the organ, but she had never been to Philadelphia, never read any book but the Bible, never seen a play, never danced, and never had guests for a meal. In the red brick house she had employed her first help, a woman to do the laundry; but despite her husband’s prosperity she did all the cooking, cleaning, mending and fancywork. Abraham Lockwood’s sisters took Louis Antoine Godey’s Lady’s Book, and they had been to Reading and Gibbsville, but they would add neither beauty nor social charm to the hypothetical visit of the imaginary Germantown girl’s parents. Daphne Lockwood looked exactly like her brother, was the same height, had no bust and had a scramble of incisors that made her speech inaudible, made extra-inaudible by her habit of covering her mouth with her fingers. Rhoda Lockwood, the other sister, was dumpy like her mother, and washed her hands and face only when specifically ordered to do so. Long past the age when it was excusably childish, the sisters would giggle together whenever any visitor came to the house. There were other problems the sisters might create: Rhoda, at fifteen, had once slapped her mother when Abraham kissed their mother goodnight. Daphne, when late for a meal, could usually be found locked in the privy.