Melville Goodwin, USA (1952) by John P. Marquand

Author:John P. Marquand [Marquand, John P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Family Life, General, Historical
ISBN: 9781504015752
Google: kHqrCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

XXI

No Mothers to Guide Them

I had seen very little of Dottie since her marriage to Henry Peale and, except for that war trip overseas, very little of her after Henry Peale’s death. When you stepped very suddenly from one category to another, you did not always have the capacity for bringing old friends with you. You no longer had the former common interests, or even the same kind of money. However, having found myself in ascending circumstances during the last two years, I could sympathize with Dottie’s problems more than I had a year or so before. They were still more complex than mine, but now I, too, had been thrust unexpectedly into a style of life to which I was not accustomed.

It was preposterous to think of descending from my Cadillac, even if it was a company car, and walking with Dottie into the Peale residence and hearing Dottie say “Hello, Albert” to her butler. When the door closed behind us, I was thinking that we were in a larger, more complicated version of Savin Hill. We were both interlopers, not legally but spiritually. We were both intelligent enough not to make fools of ourselves, but still we did not belong. In the end we could only do the best we could, as other boys and girls do when they try to get ahead. Other poor girls had married wealthy husbands and other poor boys still came into the chips rapidly in some way or another. This, as they still said over the air, was America.

The house had been built in the early nineteen-hundreds along those pseudo-English, pseudo-baronial lines that were popular in the days when Robert W. Chambers wrote The Danger Mark and The Fighting Chance, and when the gay young blades quaffed champagne from the slippers of the girls of their choice and white doves were occasionally released at banquets at Delmonico’s. The house had a frontage of at least thirty feet. The entrance hall was paved with marble. A dark oak double staircase swept upward. In one gloomy corner, near the door through which Albert the butler had retired with my hat and topcoat, was a suit of armor on a pedestal. I had never seen one of those things outside of a museum, except once, in an English country house during the war, but in the Peale house it looked moderately appropriate.

I had never made any comment on the house to Dottie because there had always been Henry Peale or company when I had been there before, but now I felt impelled to whistle softly in a slightly vulgar way.

“All right,” Dottie said, “all right. What about that little shack of yours in Connecticut?”

“It isn’t quite the same,” I said.

“No,” Dottie said, “it isn’t but it’s the same in principle. Darling, I can’t help it. There’s an income from a special trust fund running it.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said, “don’t exhibit social guilt.”

“Oh shut up,” Dottie said. “We might as well take the elevator up to my study.

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