5
I WAS INTRODUCED TO KITTREDGE TOWARD THE END OF JUNIOR YEAR AT Yale. Just before Easter vacation, a summons came by telegram: COME MEET MY FIANCEE HADLEY KITTREDGE GARDINER. SPEND EASTER AT THE KEEP WITH KITTREDGE AND JEAN HARLOW.
Back to Doane. I had not been to the island since my father, in need of the money a couple of years ago, had pushed and cajoled his two brothers and single sister into agreement on the sale. Why his funds needed replenishment remained one more family mystery. Among the Hubbards, windfalls, disasters, and outright peculation were kept at a greater distance from the children than sexual disclosure; all we knew (and it was talked about in whispers) was: “A damn shame. Got to sell the Keep. Boardman’s idea.” My father walked about for two weeks that summer with a mouth as tight as a South American dictator under palace arrest. I hardly cared. I loved the Keep less than the others, or so I thought. It was only over the next summer, which I spent at loose ends in Southampton with my mother, getting drunk with new, rich friends I did not like, and banging tennis balls through August days, that I came to understand what it was to lose the splendor of afternoon silences over the Maine hills.
The call to go back to the Keep was then agreeable; the opportunity to see Harlot spoke of more. I was still like a girl who fell in love with a man who went away to war. If he had not come back for three years, no matter. The girl went on no other dates; she did not even accept telephone calls from nice boys.
I was in love with CIA. I am one of those types—is it one in ten, or one in fifty?—who can give up just about all of life for concentration upon a part of life. I read spy novels, made island hops from word to word in Skeat, attended foreign-policy forums at Yale, and studied photographs of Lenin and Stalin and Molotov, of Gromyko and Lavrenti Beria; I wanted to comprehend the face of the enemy. I eschewed political arguments about Republicans and Democrats. They hardly mattered. Allen Dulles was my President, and I would be a combat trooper in the war against the Devil. I read Spengler and brooded through my winters in New Haven about the oncoming downfall of the West and how it could be prevented. Be certain that under these circumstances I sent Harlot a telegram that I was on my way, signed it Ashenden (for Somerset Maugham’s British spy), and drove my car, a 1949 Dodge coupe, up from New Haven all the way to the backside of Mount Desert, where I found the house not at all as it used to be.
I do not know if I care to describe the changes. I would need to add a treasures-in-trash catalogue to the insights of a geologist: Generations of Hubbards had left their strata. We used to have oak whatnots in corners, and blonde-wood Danish in the Cunard; one fine old drafting table at the Camp had come down to us from Doane Hadlock Hubbard (who also left us punctilious drawings of a proposed lookout tower one hundred feet high that he once planned to build on the southern head of the island). Along the walls were hordes of washed-out framed photographs, spotted, glass-cracked, oak-mitred, come down to us from the 1850s on. Then there were the color prints, long sun-faded, of Matisse, Braque, Dufy, Duchamp—all introduced by my mother. They had been kept, even if she never came back. Once up on a wall, things remained; it was a summer house. No wars of selection went on—merely an accommodation of accumulation. The beds were a disaster area, summer-cottage pallets. Lumpy, broken-spring mattresses with old ticking, wooden bureaus with thick paint scored by fingernail scrapings to attest to hot bored summer afternoons; spiderwebs on casement windows, birds’ nests under the eaves, and mouse droppings in many an unused room were the price we paid for that much spread of house.
Rodman Knowles Gardiner and his wife fixed it up when they bought it from us. Kittredge’s father, being a Shakespeare scholar (distantly related to the famous Shakespearean George Kittredge, also of Harvard), knew enough about the unwinding of plots to stipulate later in the deed of transfer to the couple for a wedding present that in the event of Kittredge’s divorce from Hugh Montague, she was to own the Keep without impediment. Which is how I returned to living in it. By way of Kittredge. But that was in time to come. Now in the Easter of my junior year at Yale, more than two years after the closing with the Hubbards, Dr. Gardiner and his wife had certainly spruced up the Keep. Retired from teaching, they moved some of their best Colonial furniture from their Cambridge home to Maine. There were drapes on the windows now and the walls bore Dr. Gardiner’s collection of nineteenth-century Victorian paintings. The bedrooms had new beds. At first sight I hated it. We now looked like a New England hostelry of the sort that keeps the temperature too high in winter and screws down the windows.
I spent a difficult two hours after my arrival. Neither Hugh Montague nor his fiancée were there—instead, I was received by the eminent Shakespearean and his wife, Maisie. They endured me; I suffered. He was a Harvard professor of a variety that may no longer exist. Dr. Gardiner was so well established that there were tiers to his eminence. Stages of his personality, much like assistants in a descending chain of command, were delegated to conversation. We spoke of the Yale and Harvard football teams of the previous fall, then of my category in squash—I was a B-group player—and of my father, whom Dr. Gardiner had last seen with Mr. Dulles at an annual garden party in Washington: “He looked very well indeed—of course, that was last year.”
“Yessir. He still looks well.”
“Good for him.”
As a tennis player, Dr. Gardiner would not have let you enjoy rallies during the warm-up. He’d drive your innocent return crosscourt and leave you to trot after it.
Maisie was not conspicuously better. She spoke of the flower garden she would put in this May; she intoned in a dreary if nonetheless dulcet voice against the unpredictability of spring weather in Maine. She mentioned the hybrids she would plant; when I offered mention of some wildflowers to look for in June and July, she lost much interest in me. Conversational pauses expanded into extensions of silence. In desperation, I tried to charge into Dr. Gardiner’s center of strength. I expatiated on a term paper (for which I had received an A) on Ernest Hemingway’s work. The consciously chosen irony of the later style showed, I said, that he had been enormously influenced by King Lear, particularly by some of Kent’s lines, and I quoted from act one, scene four, “I do prefer . . . to love him that is loved, to converse with him that is wise and say little, to fear judgment, to fight when I cannot choose, and to eat no fish.” I was about to add, “I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message bluntly,” but Dr. Gardiner said, “Why concern yourself with the copyist?”
We sat. After a stretch, Kittredge and Hugh Montague came back in the twilight. They had been—it was a very cold Easter—ice climbing on parts of the lower trail of Gorham Mountain. Nice stuff, Kittredge assured me, and she looked full of red cheeks and Christmas.
She was lovely beyond any measure I had for a woman. Her dark hair was cut short like a boy’s, and she was wearing pants and a windbreaker, but she was the most wonderful-looking girl. She could have been a heroine out of her father’s collection of painted Victorian damsels, pale as their cloisters, lovely as angels. That was Kittredge—except that her color today after the afternoon’s ice climb was as startling as a view of wild red berries in a field of snow.
“It’s wonderful to meet you. We’re cousins. Did you know that?” she asked.
“I suppose I did.”
“I looked it up last evening. Third cousins. That’s no-man’s-land if you get down to it.” She laughed with such a direct look (as if to speak of how very attractive a man younger than herself might be if she liked him) that Hugh Montague actually stirred. I knew little enough yet of jealousy, but I could feel the wave that came over from him.
“Well, I must tell you,” she said, “all the while Hugh was taking us up this dreadful pitch, I kept saying I wouldn’t marry him until he promised never to do such a thing to me again, whereupon he said, ‘You and Harry Hubbard are in the same boat.’ He banishes us equally from his grubby art.”
“Actually,” said Hugh Montague, “she’s a little better than you, Harry. All the same, it’s hopeless.”
“Well, I should hope so,” said Maisie Gardiner. “Fool’s play to risk your neck on ice.”
“I love it,” said Kittredge. “The only thing Hugh would bother to explain was, ‘Ice won’t betray you until it does.’ What a husband you’ll make.”
“Relatively secure,” said Hugh.
Rodman Knowles Gardiner had a coughing fit at the thought of his daughter in marriage.
At precisely that moment Kittredge said, “I believe Daddy thinks of me as Desdemona.”
“I don’t see myself,” said her father, “as a blackamoor, nor espoused to my daughter. You have rotten logic, darling.”
Kittredge changed the subject.
“Never did any ice climbing?” she asked of me. When I shook my head, Kittredge said, “It’s no worse than the awful thing they do to you at the Farm when you have to leap out of a mud ditch and scramble up a link fence in between sweeps of the searchlight.” She stopped, but not in caution, more to calculate when I would be eligible for that chore. “I guess you’ll be getting into it year after next. The fence is modeled on the Grosse-Ullner barrier in East Germany.”
Hugh Montague gave a smile with no amusement in it. “Kittredge, don’t practice indiscretion as if it were your métier.”
“No,” said Kittredge, “I’m home. I want to talk. We’re not in Washington, and I’m tired of pretending through one blah-blah cocktail party after another that I’m a little file clerk at Treasury. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘what do you file?’ ‘Oodles of stuff,’ I tell them back. ‘Statistics.’ They know I’m lying. Obviously, I’m a madwoman spook. It stands out.”
“What stands out is how spoiled you are,” said her fiancé.
“How could I not be? I’m an only child,” said Kittredge. “Aren’t you?” she went on to ask.
“By half,” I said, and when no one responded, I felt obliged to give a summary explanation.
She appeared to be fascinated. “You must be full,” she said, “of what I call ghost-overlays.” She held up a marvelous white hand as if she were playing traffic cop in a skit at a charity ball. “But I promised everybody I would not theorize this weekend. Some people drink too much. I never stop theorizing. Do you think it’s a disease, Hugh?”
“Preferable to drink,” he offered.
“I’ll tell you about ghost-overlays when we’re alone,” she declared to me.
I winced within. Hugh Montague was possessive. If she smiled nicely at me, he saw the end of their romance in her smile. Ultimately, he was right—it is just that lovers condense all schedules. What would take us more than fifteen years looked like immediate danger.
On the other hand, he was bored. Carrying on a conversation with Rodman and Maisie Gardiner was equal to taking dinner in a room where light bulbs keep going off and on. Most of the time we talked as if there were rules against logical connection. During drinks I kept track of a few remarks. Ten statements were uttered over ten minutes. Three belonged to Dr. Gardiner, two were by Maisie, three by Harlot, one from Kittredge, one from me. There are limits to memory. I offer a reasonable substitute.
Rodman Knowles Gardiner: “I’ve got Freddy Eaves at the boatyard looking out for a new spinnaker.”
Maisie: “Why do the royal purple zinnias slip into blight so much more readily than the cosmos zinnias?”
Hugh Montague: “There was word of a major avalanche yesterday in the Pyrenees.”
Kittredge: “If you would give the purple zinnias a bit less mulch, Mother . . .”
Maisie: “Is Gilley Butler a reliable handyman, Mr. Hubbard? Your father, Cal Hubbard, says to watch out for him.”
Myself: “I should listen to my father.”
Montague: “They weren’t carrying avalanche cords so the bodies are not recoverable.”
Dr. Gardiner: “The spinnaker ripped in the Backside Regatta. I had to finish with a jenny. Half as much headway.”
Montague: “Three cheers for making the honor roll again, Harry.”
Dr. Gardiner: “I’m going to fill the martini shaker.”
Kittredge and I had, nonetheless, one hour alone. She demanded it. On Sunday morning, coming back from Easter Mass, with an hour to wait for Maisie’s cook to serve us Sunday dinner, she forced the situation. “I want Harry to show me the island,” she said to Hugh. “I’m sure he knows the nooks and crannies.” A lack of plausibility quivered in the air. It would not require a guide to find nooks and crannies on our small island.
Hugh nodded. He smiled. He held out his hand like a pistol, thumb up, forefinger extended. Wordlessly, he fired a shot at me. “Keep those nasal passages clean, Herrick,” he said.
Kittredge and I walked in kelp and sea wrack on the pebbled shore. Near us reared the unseen presence of Harlot, a stallion over the field of our mood.
“He’s awful,” Kittredge said at last and took my hand. “I adore him but he’s awful. He’s raunchy. Harry, do you love sex?”
“I would hate to think I didn’t,” I said.
“Well, I would hope you do. You are as good-looking as Montgomery Clift, so you ought to. I know I like sex. It’s all sex with Hugh and me. We have so little else in common. That’s why he’s jealous. His Omega is virtually void of libido and his Alpha is overloaded.”
I did not know as yet that she had been consorting with these two principalities, Alpha and Omega, ever since the concept first came to her four years ago. Now I heard of them for the first time. I would encounter those words again over the next thirty years.
“What makes it worse,” she said, “is that I’m still a virgin. I think he is too, although he won’t offer a conclusive word about it.”
I was twice shocked, once at these astonishing facts, and again that she would tell me. She laughed, however. “I take a True Confession pill every night,” she said. “Are you a virgin, Harry?”
“Regrettably,” I replied.
She laughed and laughed. “I don’t want to be,” she confided. “It’s absurd. It isn’t as if Hugh and I don’t know each other’s bodies rather well. In fact, we know them perfectly. We’re very much naked together. That kind of truth binds us. But he insists on waiting for marriage to consummate the last part.”
“Well, you’ll be wed soon, I guess.”
“In June,” she said. “We were supposed to gather up a few final plans this weekend, but Daddy and Hugh when put together are hopeless. Worse than two relics in an old folks’ home trying to make conversation with each other’s dentures.”
It was my turn to laugh. It went on for so long that in embarrassment I sat down. She sat beside me. We perched on the southern head of the island and looked down Blue Hill Bay to the cold Easter sun shining over the remote Atlantic.
“Hugh may be the most complicated person I’ve encountered,” she said, “but this weekend he’s ridiculously simple. He’s in a thundering grouch because we can’t get together at night. Daddy insisted on putting me in the room next to Mother and him. So Hugh is falling apart. He’s outrageously priapic, you see. Back in Washington he’s on me all the time. I hope you don’t mind hearing this, Harry. I’ve got to talk.”
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. The facts seemed to contradict each other. “How can he be on you,” I asked, “if you’re both virgins?”
“Well, we go in for what he calls ‘the Italian solution.’”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know anymore. Then I did. It was physically painful to contemplate what she allowed him to do. Nor could I conceive how it connected with all her soap and sunlight.
“Actually,” she said with the quick, rising zephyr of a Radcliffe girl, “I love it. It’s debauched. To be a virgin and yet feel so wanton. Harry, it’s opened a purview on the Renaissance for me. Now I see how they could observe the Catholic forms and yet live in such near-mortal violation of so much. That’s not the unhealthiest approach, you know.”
“Do you talk this way to everyone?” I asked.
“Heavens, no,” she said. “You’re special.”
“How can that be? You don’t know me.”
“I only needed one look. Before it’s over, I said to myself, I’m going to tell this man everything. You see, Harry, I love you.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I love you too.” I did not have to pretend. The thought of Hugh Montague as a satyr hot on her back left me feeling criminally wounded. I might as well have been the cuckolded lover. I hated how her confidence had reached so easily to the very center of me.
“Of course,” she said, “you and I are never going to do anything about it. We’re cousins, and that’s what we’ll always be. Dearest friends. At worst, kissing cousins.” She gave the littlest example of such a kiss to my lips. That too went all the way in. Her mouth had the scent of a petal just separated from the flower. I had never been near a nicer breath. Nor one with more surprises. It was like picking up a great novel and reading the first sentence. Call me Ishmael.
“Someday,” she said, “after Hugh and I are tired of each other, maybe you and I will have an affair. Just the passing kind to give a lot of naughty pleasure.”
“Kissing cousins,” I replied hoarsely.
“Yes. Only now, Harry, I need a good friend. I need one like pure stink. Somebody I can tell everything to.”
“I’m incapable of telling all,” I confessed, as if I had numerous adventures meticulously secreted away.
“You are buttoned up. It’s what I brought you out of the house for. I want to talk about your ghost-overlays.”
“Is that phrase from your psychological theories?”
“Yes.”
“My father told me you’re a genius. Allen Dulles says so.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said petulantly as if the stupidity of the supposition doubled every likelihood of great loneliness. “I have a brain that’s marvelously empty when I’m not using it. So it allows thoughts to enter which other people would sweep away. Don’t you think the heavens often reach us with their messages just as fully as dark forces below tickle our impulses?”
I nodded. I would not have known how to argue with this. But then, she was not looking for a debate. By her change in tone, I could sense that she was in a mood to expound.
“I’ve always found Freud uncongenial,” she said. “He was a great man with bushels of discoveries, but he really had no more philosophy than a Stoic. That’s not enough. Stoics make good plumbers. The drains go bad and you’ve got to hold your nose and fix them. End of Freud’s philosophy. If people and civilization don’t fit—which we all know anyway—why, says Freud, make the best of a bad lot.”
She had obviously given this speech before. She must have to explain her thesis often on the job. So I took it as a mark of friendship that she was willing to outline it for me. Besides, I liked listening to her voice. I felt she would give this lecture because she wanted us to be closer. And felt a pure pang of the nicest kind of love. She was so beautiful, and so lonely. Wildflowers in her hair, and blue sneakers on her feet. I wanted to hug her, and would have, if not for a sense of the prodigiously long shadow of Hugh Montague.
“Philosophically speaking,” she went on, “I am very much a dualist. I do not see how one can not be. It was all very well for Spinoza to postulate his Substance, that wonderfully elusive, metaphysical, metaphorical world-goo he employed to bind all opposites together and so be able to declare himself a monist. But I believe he was scuttling the philosophical bark. If God is trying to tell us anything, it is that every idea we have of Him, and of the universe, is dual. Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, good and evil, birth and death, day and night, hot and cold, male and female, love and hate, freedom and bondage, consciousness and dreaming, the actor and the observer—I could add to such a list forever. Consider it: We are conceived out of the meeting of one sperm and one ovum. In the first instant of our existence, at the moment of our creation, we are brought to life by the joining of two separate entities; how very much unalike they are. Immediately, we start to develop with a right side and a left side. Two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two lips, two sets of teeth, two lobes to the brain, two to the lungs, two arms, two hands, two legs, two feet.”
“One nose,” I said.
She had heard this before. “The nose is only a work of flesh surrounding two tunnels.”
“One tongue,” I said.
“Which has a top and a bottom and they’re awfully different.” She put her tongue out at me.
“Five fingers on each hand.”
“The thumb is in opposition to the others. The big toe used to be in opposition to the foot.”
We began to laugh. “Two testicles,” I said, “but one penis.”
“It’s the weak link in my theory.”
“One navel,” I went on.
“You’re awful,” she said. “You’re implacable.”
“One head of hair.”
“Which you part.” She ruffled my hair. We almost kissed again. It was delicious to be flirting with a third cousin who was a couple of years older than me.
“Try to be solemn,” she said. “There’s really more evidence for duality than singularity. I decided to take the next step. What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person. Everything that happens to one, happens to the other. If one gets married, the other is along for the ride. Otherwise, they are different. They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.” She stopped for a nearer example. “Or optimism and pessimism. I’m going to choose that because it’s somewhat easier to discuss. Most things that happen to us have optimistic overtones, and pessimistic possibilities. Suppose Alpha and Omega—for those are the two names I’ve finally applied to these two psyches—one has to offer them some kind of name, and A and Z is much too cold to live with—so, Alpha and Omega. It is pretentious, but one does get used to it.”
“You were going to give me an example,” I said.
“Yes. All right. Let us say that Alpha tends to be optimistic in most situations, whereas Omega is inclined to pessimism. Each experience that comes their way is interpreted with different sensitivities, so to speak. Alpha picks up what might be positive in a specific situation; Omega anticipates what could be lost. That divided mode of perception operates for any duality you wish to invoke. Take night and day. Let me propose that Omega is a little more responsive to nocturnal experiences than Alpha. In the morning, however, Alpha is better at getting up and going off to work.”
As if to prove the presence of Alpha and Omega within herself, her intimacy, so innocent and audacious at once, had by now drawn back, and the pedant had appeared. One would have to win both sides of this woman. It also occurred to me that I was not being very loyal to Hugh Montague, but what the hell, that might be my Omega. “I just don’t see,” I said, “why the two must react differently all the time.”
“Remember,” she said, holding up an instructor-like finger, “Alpha and Omega originate from separate creatures. One is descended from the sperm cell, Alpha; Omega from the ovum.”
“You are saying we have a male and a female psyche inside ourselves?”
“Why not? There’s nothing mechanical about it,” said Kittredge. “The male side can be full of the so-called female qualities, whereas Omega can be an outrageous bull of a woman just as virile and muscular as a garbage collector.” She gave a merry look as if to show the return of her Alpha. Or was it Omega? “God wants us to be as various and faceted as kaleidoscopes. Which looks to the next point: Hugh and I agree on this: The war between God and the Devil usually goes on in both psychic entities. That’s as it should be. Schizophrenics tend to separate good and evil altogether, but in more balanced people, God and the Devil fight not only in Alpha, but in Omega as well.”
“There seems to be endless capacity for strife in your system.”
“Of course there is. Doesn’t that fit human nature?”
“Well,” I said, “I still can’t see why the Creator desired such a complicated design.”
“Because he wished to give us free will,” she said. “I agree with Hugh on this as well. Free will amounts to giving the Devil equal opportunity.”
“How can you know that?” I blurted out.
“It’s what I think,” she said simply. “Don’t you see, we have a true and real need for two developed psyches, each with its own superego, ego, and id. That way, one can feel some three-dimensionality, so to speak, in our moral experience. If Alpha and Omega are quite unalike, and, believe me, they often are, then they can look upon the same happening from wholly separate points of view. It’s why we have two eyes. For the same reason. So we can estimate distance.”
“Account for this,” I said. “When our eyes become too different from each other, we need glasses. If Alpha and Omega are awfully different, how can a person function?”
“Look at Hugh,” she said. “His Alpha and Omega must be as far apart as the sun and the moon. Great people, and artists, and extraordinary men and women have dramatically different Alpha and Omega. Of course, so do the feebleminded, the addictive, and the psychotic.”
Something in the certainty of her voice was making me dogged. “How do you account, then,” I asked, “for the difference between an artist and a psychotic?”
“The quality of inner communication, of course. If Alpha and Omega are incredibly different, but can manage all the same to express their separate needs and perceptions to each other, then you have an extraordinary person. Such people can find exceptional solutions. Artists, especially. You see, when Alpha and Omega don’t communicate, then one or the other must become the master or there’s a standstill. So the loser becomes oppressed. That’s a desperately inefficient way of living.”
“Like totalitarianism?”
“Precisely. You do see what I’m talking about.”
I was awfully pleased to hear that. Encouraged, I asked: “Would a healthier person have an Alpha and Omega about as different, say, as Republicans and Democrats? Agree on some things, disagree on others, but work it out?”
She beamed. I had brought out her better side. The wicked light was in her eye again. “You’re wonderful,” she said. “I do love you. You’re so direct.”
“You are making fun of me.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m going to use your example with some of those dummies I have to give explanations to.”
“Don’t they love your ideas? I can see where Alpha and Omega tell us a lot about spies.”
“Of course. But so many of the people I work with are afraid to trust it. I’m just a girl to them. So they can’t believe that this could prove the first reliable psychological theory to explain how spies are able to live with the tension of their incredible life-situations, and in fact, will not only bear up under such a double life, but indeed, go looking for it.”
I nodded. She had termed me direct, but I was wondering if her mode of presentation might not also be somewhat too unadorned. Most of the intellectuals I had met at Yale seemed obliged on first meeting to fire off an artillery barrage of great and/or esoteric authors they had presumably absorbed. With Kittredge, however, one citing of Spinoza plus one reference to Freud seemed to take care of it. She had not sent out a cavalry of esteemed authorities to turn my flank. She pursued her thoughts; they were enough. I thought she showed the forceful but innocent head of an inventor.
Well, we went on talking. We never came to ghost-overlays, but before we were done with our hour in the nooks and crannies of Doane, I was somewhat offended that she could take as much pleasure in exposition as in our flirtation. Before we went back to the house, therefore, I tried to tease her. I asked her to confess: Who was her own Alpha, her own Omega?
“Oh,” she said, “others perceive such things better than oneself. Tell me your impressions of how they shape up in me.”
“Oh,” I said in imitation of her voice, “I think your Alpha is full of loyalty and your Omega is as treacherous as the tides. Alpha is surfeited with chastity, and Omega is unbalanced with sacrilege. You’re a spontaneous child on one side and an empire-builder on the other.”
“You’re a devil through and through,” she said, and gave me another kiss on the lips.
Nothing will ever tell me for certain whether Harlot saw that small embrace or merely sensed it. As we walked back, hand in hand, we came on him standing above a rock. He had been holding a view of our approach. I have no idea how long he had been there, but some constraint in the pit of my heart seemed confirmed. He certainly did not alter his manner, but intimacy between Kittredge and me was singed by his presence. The word is just. When we came near, my eyebrows felt like ash: I wondered if I would pay for my hour with his fiancée when I joined the CIA.
What I have next to relate is painful. That Easter Sunday evening, Dr. Gardiner gave vent to the buried furies in his throat, and honored his guests: By the light of the fire in his den, he read Shakespeare aloud to us.
He offered an early work: Titus Andronicus. An odd choice. I would not recognize how bizarre until I knew the family better. While Dr. Gardiner did not belong to the school of scholars who thought Shakespeare had not written Titus Andronicus, he did consider it, he told us, one of the Bard’s poorest plays. Uninspired, and much too dreadful. Yet Dr. Gardiner read from it on Sunday night with a voice full of passion, choosing the terrible speech where Titus tells Chiron and Demetrius that in consequence of their vile acts on his family—they have severed his hand and cut off both hands of his daughter, Lavinia—he, Titus, will now revenge himself.
Hark, wretches! How I mean to martyr you,
This one hand yet is left to cut your throats,
Whilst Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold
The basin that receives your guilty blood.
Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust,
And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste;
And of the paste a coffin I will rear;
And make two pasties of your shameful heads.
And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,
Receive the blood, and when that they are dead,
Let me go grind their bones to powder small.
And with this hateful liquor temper it
And in that paste let their vile heads be baked.
Come, come, be everyone officious
To make this banquet, which I wish might prove
More stern and bloody than the Centaurs’ feast.
He recited it in the full sonority of a renowned lecture voice, gave it all the Elizabethan hullaballoo due vowels and consonants grappling with one another over hurdles and down falls: How he relished the conjunctive sinews of these words. Hair stood on my neck. I knew then what a sixth sense was hair.
“I do not approve of the play,” said Dr. Gardiner when he was done, “but the bile of the ages is in the boil of this fabulous stuff.”
Maisie had fallen asleep while he read. Her head was to one side, her mouth was open, and I thought for a moment she had suffered a stroke. She had merely taken her nightly jot of three Seconals; soon Dr. Gardiner walked her up to bed. It would also take years before I learned—how many little confessions was Kittredge eventually to make!—that Dr. Gardiner had a preferred means of connubial union: It was to investigate Maisie while she slept. Kittredge discovered her father’s habit when she was ten. She peeped and saw it all. In sleep, Maisie, a wanton of Morpheus, made cries like a bird.
Husbands and wives have been known to discover that their separate childhoods are curiously linked: Kittredge and I had both seen our parents in the act of love. Or, more to the fact, we had, between us, seen three of our four parents. Titus and Lavinia, taken together, had lost three of their four hands. The allusion is meaningless, I am certain, except that numbers command their own logic, and Augustus Farr may have been on a promenade that night while Dr. Gardiner and his somnolent Maisie were transported to those underworlds that dwell beneath the navel.