Never Victorious, Never Defeated

  He walked on, and Cornelia followed, lifting her skirts from the cold dew. “I can offer no advice except patience, Cornelia, and kindness, and love. If you can’t understand, at least pretend you do.” He wondered if he should talk to Cornelia about Tony, but decided against it. This was a resolute and inexorable woman, and Tony was only seventeen, with an almost abnormally developed sense of duty. He did say, however, “Tony has been a great comfort to my father since my mother died two years ago. He always visits Dad in the summer and on his vacations.”

  “Tony is a very serious boy,” said Cornelia absently. She was aware that Michael had been telling her very portentous things, and she was grateful for his kindness. But she was more impatient with Allan than ever. Something had not been conveyed to her by this plump and gentle monk, and she suspected that it had been withheld in mercy. This annoyed her, and humiliated her.

  “I have decided to begin walking. Now,” said DeWitt to his mother on a day in late November, after the family’s return from Newport.

  “Good. It’s about time,” replied Cornelia briskly.

  She did not believe in pampering the sick; she never entered DeWitt’s room for the sentimental reason of comforting, cheering, or amusing him. She went on: “I’ve been coming into this room just waiting to hear from you when you are going to walk. And, incidentally, I’m not going to help you.”

  DeWitt was not wounded by this statement. He sat in his large bright room overlooking the mountains, propped up in bed by many pillows. Against all that whiteness, his dark and gnomelike face, his sharp features and his piercing black eyes, his delicate black skull and his brown hands, were thrown into strong relief. He had suffered almost intolerably for several weeks, but only the tightly drawn skin on his small face, the short deep line between his eyes, betrayed the pain he had endured in silence and resentment. Cornelia, studying him with a friendly smile, thought: He was never a little boy at all. Even as a baby he was an old man. At sixty, he will look almost exactly as he does now. He is ageless.

  As DeWitt was incapable of loving anyone in the full meaning of the word, he did not love his mother. He thought her gaudy, too large, coarse, and common. Nevertheless, he sensed that in her was a power that could never be quenched or overthrown easily. He was well aware that he was her favorite child, a favoritism mixed not with real maternal love but with a kind of respect for him for being what he was. They understood each other perfectly.

  “Well?” said Cornelia, smoothing her violet-velvet thighs with her big white hands. “When do you start?”

  “Now,” he repeated in the low flat voice that was one of his characteristics. He threw back the silken quilts and fixed his old eyes on his mother. She regarded him with calm curiosity and made no movement. His nurse had been sent from the room; they were alone. Cornelia said, “You know, of course, that that leg is shriveled and shortened, and weak, though you can move it a little. You must allow for that.”

  He did not reply, but he smiled his small and saturnine smile of contempt. “Don’t start pitying me,” he said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” answered Cornelia without rancor.

  He swung his left leg to the edge of the bed; his right followed with a feeble and jerking motion. He regarded it with detestation. Now he just sat there and concentrated on the miserable member, and Cornelia watched. The boy did not move, but slowly his sallow forehead became moist, his yellowish mouth tightened, his thin nostrils flared. Cornelia was filled with admiration, and she became a trifle breathless. Will was in action, almost visibly. She leaned forward, not speaking.

  In complete silence, DeWitt slipped toward the floor, his tense little hands gripping the side of the bed. A long shaft of wintry sunlight struck through the wide window and enveloped the boy, lay redly in the folds of his white nightshirt, fell across one taut cheek, bathed his legs. Now the small dark feet were on the floor, the right wrinkled and bending. All DeWitt’s concentration was turned upon it, all his will commanding it to support him. Some moments passed. Then, almost imperceptibly, the foot straightened out, wrinkle by wrinkle. Its dead sallowness became infused with living blood. The knee became rigid, instant by instant. The sweat on DeWitt’s forehead began to run down his face like tears, gathered in the corners of his mouth.

  Now DeWitt was pushing himself away from the bed with his hands, inch by inch. Then he was standing, unsupported. Cornelia held her breath. Her son stood there, swaying, livid, his hands clenched and held away from his emaciated body in order to balance himself. Cornelia said very quietly, “Good.” He lifted his eyes, so fathomless and yet so flat, and looked at her, and she smiled.

  He continued to sway and his color was frightful. His mouth was so compressed that the lips disappeared and left only a wide and narrow slit in his face. He was giving his next command, and his leg was frantically trying to obey. He took one short step, tottering, not with his strong left leg, but with the right. He staggered, fell sideways, and caught at the bed. He pushed himself away from the bed, stepped forward with his left foot. This gave him more balance. Then, step by step, limping, bending sideways, he moved into the center of the room. He spoke for the first time: “I’ll need a cane. The leg is too short.” His tone was uninterested, as if speaking of another person and not himself.

  “Your grandfather has a dozen or more,” said Cornelia. “There’s one with a gold head, wide and bent. Old Mr. Regan gave it to him years ago. He must have been in a sentimental mood when he had it inscribed, in Latin: ‘Not even hell can prevail against the human will.’”

  The boy stood in the center of the room, weaving, sweating, the shriveled leg straight beneath his nightshirt. Short of stature though DeWitt was, bearing all the marks of long suffering, thin and yellowish and contracted of face, unprepossessing, even ugly, there was yet about him a profound dignity. He said, “Yes. I’d like that cane.” He smiled at his mother, and she smiled back broadly.

  He turned slowly and made his way back to his bed. He climbed into it. He did not permit himself to fall in exhaustion against his pillows. He wiped away his sweat, folded his handkerchief neatly, and laid it beside him. He pulled the quilts over him, arranging them as neatly as he had arranged his handkerchief. He commanded his environment, and it fell into sharp and angular folds about him.

  Then, as if he had not performed something close to a miracle, he said, “How is Dad these days?”

  “Splendid,” replied Cornelia. She went to the window and looked down at the tumbled blackness of the mountains heaving against the crimson sky. “He evidently can’t stand what he calls ‘idleness.’ In some way, Portersville is his base of operations; he thinks he is really working when he is here. Like,” she added, remembering that conversation with Allan in March, “a Titan needing to touch earth for his strength. Perhaps”—and she turned and looked at DeWitt curiously—“we also have our own delusion.”

  “It operates handily for us,” said DeWitt. He picked up a glass of water and sipped it. Cornelia, with pleasure, noted the pronoun, and was gratified. He was not unconscious of the flattery he had extended to his mother, and he nodded at her. “Why do you haul him around, all over the world? Let him stay here. Grandpa is failing rapidly, and I”—he paused and looked again at his mother—“am still only fifteen.”

  Cornelia burst out into one of her loud and boisterous laughs. “You are forgetting Tony,” she said derisively.

  “Tony,” repeated DeWitt. He lifted his folded handkerchief and contemplated it. Then he tossed it from him delicately. “Don’t you know about Tony? He isn’t interested in the railroad. Does he ever go down to the switchyards or accept invitations from Grandpa to visit our offices here, in Philadelphia, or New York, as I have done? I think he is interested in something else. While I was”—he paused to consider his illness with distaste and disgust—“incapacitated, he would have long walks and talks with our monk-uncle. I could see them from my window, and hear them muttering downstairs, very cosy.”

  “What are yo
u trying to imply?” asked Cornelia.

  “I think he’s influenced Tony for a long time, since they first met about ten years ago. Tony’s ‘got religion,’ as the quaint saying is. While we were at Groton together, he attended some Romish church every Sunday. One of the fellows told me.”

  Cornelia was alarmed and dismayed. “What does that matter? Of course, it would be ridiculous. … I never interfere with the religion of others, and if any of my children should want to be a Buddhist or a Mohammedan, or a Roman Catholic, that would be none of my affair. Anyway, what has that got to do with the railroad, and Tony’s interest or lack of interest in it?”

  DeWitt permitted himself to lean back against the pillows. “It’s my opinion that Tony wants to be a priest.”

  Cornelia gasped. “Don’t be an idiot, DeWitt!” She stood there, lushly shaped and magnificent in the violet velvet of her gown, her red hair catching the last light of the sun. How overcolored she looks, thought DeWitt fastidiously. Like a florid painting by an Italian amateur who has gone mad among his paints. “Why get in Tony’s way, Mother, if that is what he wants? You are always so tolerant, you know.” He squinted at her. “Some of the best people, I understand, are Catholics these days. Or”—and he stopped to study his mother—“are you afraid of some kind of upheaval in my father?”

  Why, the little monster! thought Cornelia. He puts his monkey-hands right down into your vitals and tears at them. He knows too much.

  She said, “DeWitt, have you been giving Tony some of your hypocritical encouragement, for your own ends?”

  “I?” he asked disdainfully. “I’ve always admired him more than anyone else in the world, but the compliment isn’t returned. I have seen Romish books in his room, and when I asked him about them, he would not answer me. Why don’t you ask him, yourself, when he comes home for Thanksgiving?”

  “I certainly shall,” replied Cornelia. She scrutinized the sick boy, and her smile was ugly. “Quite a little schemer, aren’t you, angel?”

  “Thank you,” said DeWitt with the utmost gravity. “It runs in the family, doesn’t it? And now that we’re talking frankly, Mother, don’t you think I’d do better than Tony, anyway?”

  She walked to the door with a rich rippling of her skirts. She paused on the threshold and turned her head over her shoulder. DeWitt was smiling. In spite of herself, and her anxiety and dread, she could not prevent herself from smiling in return. “That was quite a display this afternoon, and I admired it.”

  “You know, Papa, that you are allowed only one cigar a day,” Cornelia said to her father as she sat with him in his room before dinner. Yes, Rufus was failing; he was almost visibly losing flesh. Wrapped in a soft quilt, and still dressed in a silk robe, he had not as yet prepared to go downstairs after his afternoon nap. But as he leaned back in his chair, smoking with pleasure and care, his vitality still seemed immortal. His white hair was still thick and rose crestlike on his head, and his eyes sparkled with golden youth and virility. When he smiled, his smile was still ripe and urbane, and there was none of the slow infirmity of age about him, no vagueness or weariness of mind, no difficulty with memory or reflection.

  He waved his hand affectionately at his daughter. “Never mind my cigar, dear. A non sequitur, after what you’ve just been telling me about DeWitt. He has a measure of us in him, combined with something else. Cold. Almost vicious. He doesn’t take the joy we take in scheming and planning. He lacks the capacity for pleasure—not Allan’s lack, which comes from his never having had pleasure in his young years, but a kind of despising of lightness and gaiety.” Rufus chuckled, still richly. “Allan, if I am right, wanted power to satisfy some hurt in him, some vengeance. But DeWitt wants it just as a thing in itself. And he’ll get it, mark my words.”

  He exuded a huge fog of smoke. “Yes, he’ll get it. It comforts me to know that I’ll have continuity, in this boy. But he’s not my favorite. Not any more. Tony is the one, and I want him with me to my last day. A wonderful boy. Now about this priest matter. I don’t believe it, Cornelia.”

  Cornelia opened her jeweled case and took out a cigarette. She tamped it on the back of her hand, and leaned forward for her father to light it. “I noticed something remote in Tony this time, something withdrawn. And he is becoming thin and pale. He doesn’t want to hurt us, but he’s being pulled somewhere.”

  The sky over the mountains had turned a deep purple, slashed with brilliant yellow and rose. Rufus contemplated it. A strange, far-away look settled on his face, a kind of transparency. Seeing it, Cornelia was frightened. She put her hand over her father’s; the fingers were cold. She got up and poured two glasses of brandy, and gave one to her father. “Damn the doctors. Brandy always was our specific.” Rufus took the glass with an absent smile and began to sip. Cornelia waited.

  “Suppose the worst came to the worst, and Tony did become a priest,” said Rufus. “I’m too old now to worry about any reaction among our alleged friends. I’m too old to tell a man he is a fool if he is drawn to any religion. I only ask of him that he doesn’t annoy me, fanatically, with his convictions. A priest in the family even amuses me in a way, except for the fact that I don’t want to lose Tony’s company, though he’d never leave me until. …”

  “Don’t talk like that!” said Cornelia with such a sharpness in her voice that her father looked at her.

  “Well,” he said, and his voice was moved. “In the way of nature. … I won’t speak of it if it distresses you. But, my darling, it isn’t so much Tony you are worried about. What is it?”

  Cornelia got abruptly to her feet and stood by the fire. “Allan,” she said almost inaudibly. “It would shatter him.”

  “He was once a Catholic, child.”

  “But he isn’t, now. He thinks he is not, but he is a churning chaos of emotions, and it is getting worse all the time. When we heard about DeWitt, in Cannes. …” She stopped and drew a deep breath. “You can’t shake off your childhood. It comes roaring in on you, with everything terrible that ever happened to you, under stress. I read about it in a book by that doctor named Freud, and though I discounted it, I was struck by certain things about Allan. … Thank God, my childhood was pretty much what my life is now, and it is all of one piece. That’s not so with Allan.”

  “I see,” said Rufus very quietly. Then, as always, he was stung with jealousy. “You love Allan very much.”

  38

  While Laura Peale waited for her husband to answer, she watched him, and her thoughts, distressed and melancholy, became rapid and confused. He is four or five years older than Allan, but in some way he appears much younger—fifty-two, white just at the temples, hair still thick and brown and curling, face lined and seamed; yes, but the lines express so little, as if put there by accident—Why did I never see it before? He looks like an ageless Puritan, fanatical, frustrated, and made coldly fiercer by his frustration. I should not be thinking so, my husband. … It is his small stature which makes him seem so much younger than—but no, he actually appears old—I am full of confusion. … He is a stranger to me; we were always strangers; did I ever love him? Yes, I think so. But not for a long time, a very long time; he has no heart, no real heart; I never knew. …

  They were sitting in Patrick’s library in their house on Mountain Heights, some few miles from the deWitt home. The house had been furnished by Patrick; Laura’s suggestions had been ignored. I should have known, then, that he had no respect for anyone but himself, thought Laura, now. He is, to himself, the rare human being incapable of making mistakes. A tyrant. Dogmatic. He should never have been in the Senate; I am glad he was defeated the last time. Yet, so blameless, so righteous: The house resembles him: thin, cold, austere, with windows that seem to repel even the hottest summer sun or spring warmth; I have never been comfortable here, in spite of the furnaces and the fires. I have always hated this house, the dusky, lean furniture, the tapestries, the dim draperies, the faded old rugs which were never brilliant even when new, the somber paintings. All t
he corridors are narrow and ghostly, and filled with echoes. A Pharisees’ house; the mirrors seem to hold only his own image.

  “There is no need to become emotional, my dear,” said Patrick. He wore a crimson velvet smoking jacket, though he did not smoke, and his elegant feet were stretched toward the fire this cold November day. Spectral drifts of gray snow blew across the windows; the chimney howled with wind, and the gray mountains stood at a distance in the gray air.

  “I thought I was discussing all this very quietly,” said Laura. Her fine black hair was a shadow on her cheek and neck. She regarded her husband without expression, and her large gray eyes were very still, her folded hands motionless on her knee. Patrick, watching her for signs of “weakness” so that he might reprove her, shifted in his chair. He would never have admitted it to Laura, but it annoyed him that she looked much less than her forty years. It was Patrick’s opinion that his wife had small mental capacity, very slight and superficial emotions in spite of an occasional tendency to womanish “hysteria” over the most insignificant things. He was aware that for over half their married life her presence had made him uneasy, that the curious way she had of “staring emptily” at him was a source of vexation, and that her silences, after he had delivered himself of an eloquent attack on the faults, stupidities, malevolences, plots, lack of integrity of neighbors, relatives, friends, or colleagues, provoked him.