“Isn’t there ANY kind of security anywhere?”
“You mean some country to run to or put money in?”
“More than that. Isn’t there some way of feeling that whatever happens certain things in one’s own life are safe? Maybe that’s a selfish feeling, but it’s what I mean by security.”
“I’d call it only an ILLUSION of security at best, but of course for those whom it satisfies it’s all right.”
“Well, how can one get it?”
“I don’t really know. I suppose some people BUY it—hence the uses of good investment stocks. And others imagine it—perhaps religion helps in that.”
“Oh dear, what an icy way of looking at things.”
“It’s an icy world, Carey, except for the small corner of warmth at one’s own fireside.”
She knew he was telling her, obliquely in his fashion, how much he loved her, and it was comforting, but at the moment she found it easier to be disturbed by the remarkable similarity of Paul’s views and his about security. Nothing, she felt, could symbolize insecurity more than their agreement.
On an impulse to treat him as frankly as he deserved, she said: “Guess whom I saw today on Fifth Avenue?… PAUL… of all people.”
Just as Paul would make drama, so Austen would destroy it if he could. He answered, in a tone that could have been a parody of an Englishman receiving news that his house was on fire: “Really? What was he doing in New York —or didn’t you stop to talk to him?”
“He’s sailing back to Europe tonight. He dragged me off to lunch, and it was all I could do to keep him from taking me to Twenty-One. We went to a place on Upper Broadway. I don’t suppose anyone saw us.”
“Doesn’t much matter if they did. How is he? Quite prosperous nowadays, I believe.”
“He seems to be. His mother died. That’s what he came over for. Just a short visit. He has big plans for a new picture.”
“Still in Germany?”
“No, France now.”
“Well, that makes a change. He’s really a true internationalist—he doesn’t care where he lives provided he can do the work he wants… He didn’t talk of coming back here to direct any more plays?”
“No, and I don’t think he will. The stage doesn’t give him the chance to be such a dictator. Or so I gathered, though of course he didn’t put it that way. In films he can control more people more of the time.”
“Provided he makes it pay. One flop and that kind of dictatorship can end up pretty badly. The same, by the way, applies to Hitler. He can’t afford to have a flop either. As long as he goes on winning he’s safe, but sooner or later something else will happen and… By the way, has Paul married again?”
“He didn’t say. I should imagine not.”
“You mean you didn’t ask?”
“To tell the truth I never thought about it. Paul married or unmarried makes so little difference to the kind of person he’d be—”
“And which he still is, I presume?”
“Oh yes. I thought at first he’d changed a lot, but it was only the shock of seeing him. He doesn’t look much older.”
“Fatter? You always told me he put on weight easily.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps not. He looked more… to me… it’s hard to think of the right word…”
“Well, now, what DID he look?”
Austen was smiling and she answered honestly, yet knowing it would take the smile from his face: “He looked GREATER, Austen.”
* * * * *
It had always been Austen’s dream that as Norris grew older their misunderstandings would disappear and a friendly father-and-son relationship develop; but this did not happen by the end of the boy’s schooldays, and Harvard, which was to have performed the miracle if nothing else could, proved a special disappointment. For it was there that Norris became avant-garde both artistically and in politics, and this worried Austen all the more because he found it difficult to tell either Carey or Norris exactly why. Clearly it was not because he was shocked by the boy’s opinions as such, and it annoyed him to guess that Norris thought so. But it was one thing for himself, in private and with regret, to doubt the future of the capitalist system, and quite another thing for Norris to do so openly and disputatiously. Thus even the feeling they shared was a barrier rather than a union, especially with the approaching need for Norris to consider what he was going to do in the world.
Years before, when a brash newspaper reporter had asked Austen to what he attributed his business success, Austen had been stung to the epigram: “I always sell too soon.” Actually this was true; he had sold out, and what was more, sold short, as early as 1928, and during the first half of 1929 it had required iron nerve not to admit himself wrong and get back into the market. The years that followed had trebled his fortune, and during this period there had doubtless developed the tight-lipped ambivalence of his attitude towards life. For he was a genuinely kind man, devoted to the few whom he considered his friends; and the spectacle of ruin all around him, the ruin that was of such profit to himself, gave him a complete absence of personal pleasure as well as grim satisfaction in finding how right he had been.
And by the same principle of ‘always sell too soon’ he had decided, about midway during the ‘thirties, that the planning of Norris’s future demanded a sacrifice from himself on the altar of that long-range expediency which was so often his almost unknown god; he would NOT urge the boy to follow exactly in his own footsteps, entering the brokerage firm, learning the ropes, and eventually taking over. Since Norris had never shown any wish to do this, the decision presented no problem at the time; the real problem would come later, when Austen’s more positive plan would require skilled unveiling. Briefly, it was that the boy should graduate into the same world as his own but under slightly different auspices—the slight difference, perhaps, between something that had a past and something else that might have a future. Banking was the profession he had in mind, but not ordinary banking— rather the new semi-governmental kind, of which the Bank for International Settlements at Basle was but the first of probably an illustrious succession. With his influence he might find Norris a job of that sort in which the boy could start a career that might conceivably lead to high and highly secret places. In all this Austen was pushing antennae, as it were, into the years ahead—a vastly more subtle accomplishment than mere indulgence in prophecy.
Father and son had once come close, but not nearly close enough, to a discussion of the issue, during which Austen had been driven to say: “Even assuming that all your extreme ideas are correct, don’t you realize that even in Russia financial experts are necessary? Of course there’d be no place for a firm such as mine, but banking people, fiscal and treasury officials… why, I’ve met some of them, Norris—brilliant fellows—I’ve sat in conference with them. Naturally they didn’t talk politics—they didn’t have to—because the field we were all specialists in is by no means tied to Wall Street or the so-called competitive system or any other particular bęte noire of yours. Every country, no matter what economic road it takes, has currency and exchange problems.”
All this time Norris had been listening more and more cryptically. Presently he said: “You know, father, I’m not easily shocked, but you almost do that to me. Are you seriously suggesting I should enter a bank and learn the tricks of the trade so that when the time comes I can be Commissar for Currency and Exchange?”
This was the kind of remark that grieved Austen immeasurably, bringing him to the edge of a mental abyss. He retorted sharply: “Don’t be so naďve. All I’m suggesting, if you want to know…” And then he hesitated. Even if Norris did want to know, did he want Norris to know? He had all the embarrassment that fathers of an earlier generation were supposed to have when faced with the problem of telling their sons the facts of life. But the facts in those happier days had been merely sexual; now they were economic and cosmic, and in Norris’s case complicated by the shattering likelihood that he knew them already and was wond
ering how innocent his father was.
“Yes, I would like to know, father.”
The tone was ironic, forcing Austen to make some sort of a reply. This he did, coming to grips with the situation as squarely as he ever could or did. “All I’m suggesting, Norris, is that the world of the future will be increasingly in charge of experts, and that politics, of the street-corner or even the Congressional variety, is becoming very much of a smoke-screen behind which the real rulers quietly get to work with the real issues. If you’d rather be a part of the smoke-screen, fine—though you’ll find it tough going, in the direction you favour, and I shan’t be able to help you. Whereas for the expert, life will continue to offer fascinating employment, a secret choice of sides according to the dictates of one’s mind and heart, and a very fair chance of surviving catastrophe… Technical brains, remember, are the booty that the modern conqueror cannot afford to destroy—while mere soldiers and shouters are a dime a dozen in all countries.”
Norris was silent for so long that Austen added, more uncomfortably than ever: “Well, it’s your future, after all—you HAVE the brains— no one else can finally decide how you use them. Perhaps at least I’ve given you something to think about.”
Norris answered, in a bemused way: “You sure have. You’ve really opened my eyes. I’d no idea you had such a… a mind. WHAT a mind!”
The matter was never again broached with such near frankness. He was less certain now that he wanted to be a writer, despite his ability to sell an occasional magazine article or short story. With rare self-criticism he admitted his lack of everything but talent, and a spiritual arrogance made him feel that talent was not enough. Presently it came to be understood that after finishing at Harvard he would take a year for travel during which he would make up his mind what he wanted to do, not merely what he wanted not to do—an apparent surrender on the part of Austen. But of course Austen never really surrendered, either on that or any other matter; it was his campaign plan of life to avoid direct challenge, to stave off the final no, to make opposition to himself a bore even if it were not to be a hazard.
Meanwhile the war had started in Europe, and once again Austen was faced with his familiar cross: something which he foresaw as inevitable yet also deeply regretted. This was America’s intervention. Liking the cause of the European Allies as little as did the Chicago Tribune, yet as anxious for them to win as was the William Allen White Committee, he found himself gagged as usual by his own awareness of how readily he would be misunderstood; and among those who would misunderstand was certainly Norris. So he would hardly discuss the war with him, though he noted with some satisfaction the boy’s utter confusion about it; at one moment he was violently anti-Hitler, at other times pacifistic, the two often blending into a ‘plague-on-both-your-houses’ cynicism. All of this seemed to Austen relatively unimportant compared with the extremely practical problem of what Norris should do when the war (as Austen was certain it would) engulfed America. Since Norris would be of military age he would have to get into uniform somehow or other, and Austen’s idea was to pull strings to have him commissioned as soon as possible in one of the services; then other strings could be pulled. Unfortunately all this was the kind of thing Austen knew he could not discuss with the boy without risking a direct rebuff, and during the summer of 1941 the relations between them grew strained to the point of an infinite politeness. Sometimes Norris talked to strangers in the Park far more freely than he ever could or did at home, and once he got into an argument that led to a fist fight. He had happened to remark that it was strange that people who professed to follow a religion founded by a carpenter should be so derisive because a certain ruler had once been a house-painter. Part of the small crowd took this to be anti-Christian, another part took it to be pro-Nazi; and as Norris was neither, the whole episode became a lesson to keep his mouth shut such as (though he never guessed it) his father had well learned in his own youth.
A few weeks after returning to Harvard Norris suddenly settled the whole issue in his own fashion by an act which to Austen seemed quite appalling; he volunteered for the American Field Service which was then sending ambulance units to work with the British in Africa. When Norris announced what he had done, Austen could not hide his grief nor the boy a certain sardonic comfort. “I don’t know why you’re worrying so much, father,” he said. “America’s bound to get into the war soon, and then I probably wouldn’t have any choice.”
“CHOICE?… But my dear boy…” It was impossible, of course, to say what was in his mind.
“Besides,” Norris went on, enjoying the effect of his own casualness, “if I waited to be drafted I think I’d have to be a conscientious objector. So you ought to be glad I’ve spared you that to worry about.”
Actually Norris was only just in time, for he was on a troopship in mid-Atlantic on the day of Pearl Harbour.
* * * * *
For Austen the war, on the emotional level, was his anxiety over Norris. The boy was at Tobruk, then at El Alamein; he was risking his life, and it was not part of Austen’s plan that this should have happened. In a sort of way he was proud, and he was also aware that countless other parents were suffering like himself; but neither pride nor anxiety increased his sense of fellowship with his countrymen as individuals, any more than the fortune he had made after the market crash had diminished his sympathy with the victims. So far as his own personal affairs were concerned, it was not too difficult to bring even the war into the master plan. Indeed, one of the changes it made in his life suited him very well, for within a few weeks of Pearl Harbour he had accepted a dollar-a-year job in Washington, and it could truthfully be said that he had never worked so happily as when he found himself serving his country. Was this patriotism? He was honest enough not to assume so, and sensible enough not to deny it if others called it that. The truth was that the war, by enabling him to take a Government post without giving up his firm, had made it comfortingly possible to serve God and Mammon, had put the future and the past in some sort of temporary truce.
As for Carey, the war led indirectly to the fulfilment of her own teasing dream about Norris—that he should, sometime, see her in a play. But it happened far differently from anything she had envisioned. To begin with, it was not a first night, but nearer a hundred and first, and Norris, who should have been starry-eyed, was almost condescendingly cynical. Perhaps this was just another disguise for his real emotions, whatever they were, but she had not reckoned on it any more than she had pictured him clumping into her dressing-room in a uniform that made him both shy and truculent.
She herself had returned to the stage in the autumn of 1942, and for a number of reasons, none of them separately decisive, but all contributing to the event. First, there were Austen’s frequent absences on business, that took him mysteriously by air across oceans and continents, so that she was left increasingly alone and for the first time in her life lonely. Austen had never had a wide circle of acquaintances, and this had suited her well enough when he was with her all the time, but as soon as he was gone (and with Norris also away) she realized how many friends she had practically given up since her marriage. Most of them were in the theatrical world, and once she re-established contact with them it was inevitable that the idea of a play should crop up. She was still remembered by producers, and since her biggest success had been in a rather trifling comedy, the fact that wartime audiences favoured light entertainment brought her many approaches. The lure of the stage, so harped upon and romanticized, did not specially operate; on the contrary, the FEAR of the stage, the memory of strain and tension, nearly made her say no to every proposition. Then a play came along that exactly suited her style; she was good, the critics were warm, it made a hit, and at the back of her mind was always the escape clause that if she got bored, or felt herself too spent, she could give up. Perhaps because of this she enjoyed success for the first time in her life without qualification.
Nor had Austen opposed the idea; if he had, she would probably
not have indulged what had originally been hardly more than a whim. But he merely cautioned her against overwork and stressed the escape clause. He seemed to regard the whole thing as covered by some aura of wartime expediency, like his own missions abroad and the loss of his butler to become a butler in uniform.
Norris had enlisted in the A.F.S. for a year, but it was the spring of 1943 before he came home for transfer to a regular medical unit. He had sailed from Egypt on a slow boat round the Cape; it had dumped him in a southern port where red tape had held him for days before he could get a furlough. It was like him not to wire the news of his return until he could give the time of his arrival in New York; he did not want his father to start doing things on his behalf. As it happened, Austen was away at the time, and it was Carey who met him at Penn Station. The train was late and, after an almost frantically embarrassed greeting, she had to leave immediately for the theatre. She had thought he would want to go home for a good meal and a rest, but instead he said he would rather have a bath at the station, see the show, and take her to supper. She was too excited to argue about it, so she arranged for him to have one of the house seats and asked him to come round to her dressing-room afterwards. This he did, joining the group of admirers whose shrill and fashionable chatter made him stay in the background till she caught sight of him. By this time her excitement over his return had become part of her usual exuberance after a performance, and she could view him with a certain detachment. He was handsome enough, she perceived, to transcend the ill-fitting uniform; that is, it looked even more eccentric on him than he did inside it. She gave him a lavish welcome, her pride masquerading as motherliness, for she felt, as always after a show, extravagant in all her emotions, both genuine and acted.
“WELL!” she exclaimed, embracing him as she wouldn’t have done except at such a moment. “What’s the verdict? How did you like it?”