The Opposite Sex

THE reader who completes John O’Hara’s latest, biggest, thickest, greatest, finest novel, From the Terrace, must think back occasionally to a conversation in one of the early chapters. Kindly old Grandfather Johnson, sizing up young Alfred Eaton, his grandson, offers the boy a warning.

“You have only to watch out for one thing,” says the old man.

“What’s that?”

“The opposite sex.”

Surely no more prophetic words were ever spoken by any character in fiction. Not only doecs it apply to Alfred’s case, but it fits everyone else in the book as well. For here is a book peopled almost entirely by characters engaged in a vast competition of seduction. It’s like the Olympic games, with all sorts of contests going on at the same time, only lasting years and years. Poor Emma Bovary, by comparison, with all her troubles, had little more than a night out. O’Hara’s men and women are real casebook types; in fact one of the women — and it could have been just about any one of them — does a good deal of reading in books that are obtainable only on a doctor’s prescription, and she’s not going to medical school, either. She reads for enjoyment.

Naturally, things have to quiet down from time to time; even O’Hara’s people show up at the office occasionally or go to football games or attend funerals and weddings. There was one night when it looked as if Alfred and Mary Eaton, who seem to be the principal couple and decathlon titleholders of the story, were in for a genuinely dull time: a charity dinner-dance for two thousand at the Waldorf, at which the Eatons had to dine with a small party of relative strangers. Just as the reader is wondering how O’Hara is going to solve that one, Mary Eaton leaves the table with a Hollywood movie magnate. She is gone for one solid hour, and the tale she unfolds to Alfred after the party does much to enliven what has been up to that point a thoroughly humdrum soiree.

Only two couples in the book seem to avoid getting into the scrum: Mary Eaton’s parents, who keep pretty much to themselves in Wilmington, Delaware, and the Benzigers, safely tucked away in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town, parents of beautiful Natalie. (It is Natalie Benziger who takes Alfred Eaton away from Mary just as briskly as Dr. Jim Roper takes Mary away from Alfred.) There is also Alfred’s Grandfather Johnson, but he is well along in years when the story begins to warm up. These in-laws and older characters appear to be harmless, conventional men and women, intended only to account for the existence of the principals. Their lives are more or less normal, or abnormal, depending on how one looks at such things. Mr. Benziger is unique as the only attractive personality in the book. From the point of view of Alfred’s Manhattan and Long Island circles, they would all seem quaintly eccentric, and O’Hara loses no time in killing off Benziger père before he has a chance to be influential.

The main localities in From the Terrace are Pennsylvania, where Alfred originated; New York and Long Island, where his Wall Street career begins and ends; and Washington, scene of Alfred’s dutiful and unhappy hitch as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Toward the end there is a sort of epilogue in California, but what brings all these places into unity is the unceasing restlessness in the sexual activities of all the supporting characters wherever Alfred happens to be. It is a quality that seems unpredictable to the reader for a time in the early parts of the book, but one comes to realize that almost any new character important enough to have a name in the story will sooner or later set the gossips’ tongues to clacking.

Early on, for example, there was Nellie, faithful housemaid employed by Alfred’s parents. She was thirty-one, and he was eleven, when she rescued him from a nightmare and soothed him to sleep by certain odd ministrations, incompletely described but surely above and beyond the requirements of domestic service even back in 1908. As for George Fry, the family coachman, he was a reassuring figure in his modest gray whipcord livery and squarish bowler, yet what happened to him? George Fry went to jail for drunkenness and indecent exposure on one of the downtown streets and eventually died in the county lunatic asylum. Victoria Dockwiler, in her early teens, was killed in an automobile accident before Alfred Eaton’s expectations of her could be rewarded, and Alfred’s first major coup, Norma Budd, was murdered at age twenty-three by a “former Yale football star” while Alfred was still an undergraduate at Princeton.

Alfred’s mother, meanwhile, had not been idle. Her first venture outside matrimony, with a Mr. Miller, came when Alfred was a schoolboy. The Millers were the Eaton’s closest friends, and Mr. Miller brought this episode to an end by shooting himself (in the head). By the time Alfred is in Princeton his mother has woven a new web of deceit, and Alfred learns the worst when Sally, his younger sister, begs him to come home for Thanksgiving instead of tending to the New York debutantes as he had planned. He finds a characteristically complex intrigue going on. “I want to prepare you for a shock,” Sally tells him: not only has their mother been carrying on with a lecherous Philadelphian named Charles Frolick, but this same Charles Frolick is now brazenly making overtures to Sally as well. Alfred settles Frolick’s hash by stopping off at Philadelphia and giving him a good thrashing, and the mother withdraws to chronic alcoholism.

Multigeneration didos of this sort are a commonplace among O’Hara’s characters, although some are mere flare-ups and come to nothing. Years later, for instance, Alfred Eaton and Natalie, his ex-mistress to whom he is now married, are chatting about the Warrens, a Boston couple whose daughter Sadie would have married Alfred’s son, had not the latter been killed in an airplane crash. Natalie correctly suggests that young Sadie Warren is “in love” — whatever that may mean by this time — with Alfred, and she goes on to speculate idly that something of the same sort might be stirring in Annabella Warren, Sadie’s mother.

“She would interest me more than Sadie,” Alfred admits to his spouse. “Sadie is a pushover.” These musings lead Alfred to explain the rigid code governing his general policy on infidelity. To Natalie’s question whether he would consider having “a real affair” with Annabella, Alfred replies: “No, I wouldn’t have an affair with her, not while I’m married to you. But if you change it and ask me if I’d sleep with her maybe once or twice, with an impossible guarantee that you’d never know about it, I’d have to say yes.”

Even minor characters have trouble with marriage, just for the record, apparently, and not because it matters at all in the story. The rich Texan, Jack Tom Smith, describes himself to Natalie as “a four-time loser,” and his latest wife — No. 4 or No. 5?—is about to walk out on him. Jerry Kelly, an airplane test pilot, occupies less than a page of the 897 in the book, but even this fleeting glimpse of him recalls to us Grandfather Johnson’s warning about the opposite sex. Alfred remarks that Kelly does not look old enough to have a son in the Navy, which touches off the following exchange:

“Don’t let the sunburn fool you. Although that’s what I have it for. My kid and I double-date sometimes.”

“Where’s the mother?” Alfred asks, always hewing to his main line of interest.

“Oh, I been married four times,” Kelly tells him. “God damn it, no, I been married five times. I just got divorced this year.”

The opposite sex gives an especially rough time to Lex Porter, Alfred Eaton’s classmate and best friend. They shared a Gramercy Park apartment during their bachelor days, and no one ever did keep tally of their female overnight guests, who must have totaled in the hundreds. “Moderately notorious” is the way O’Hara describes the reputation of these lodgings. Lex marries, moves out West to a ranch life, and drops in on Alfred Eaton in wartime Washington after a long separation. Lex is limping from a combat wound, but he says he is not going back to the hospital. “I have a date with a senator’s girl friend,” he explains.

“You made fast time.”

“Yep. I met her this afternoon at a cocktail party. I took one look at that shape and I said, ‘Dear one, you could do a lot for Navy War Relief.’ She looked at me and didn’t say anything and I thought she was going to haul off and poke me, but then she said, ‘I’m interested.’ ”

“Do you know anything about her?”

“All I need to know. She’s about thirty-five or so, divorced, has an apartment that the senator pays for, and she works in some department store.”

Lex dies shortly afterward in the wreck of the advance Congressional Limited. His “nearly decapitated body” was found in the club car. Killed in the same car, according to the papers, was “Stahlmyer, Mrs. Cora B., age 40, Washington, D.C., former secretary to U.S. Senator Peter D.

Carriman (D., Mont.), saleswoman, Woodward & Lothrop . . .”

Alfred is nobody’s fool when it comes to putting two and two together under these circumstances. “I guess he wasn’t traveling alone,” he remarks to Natalie.

“Do you know it was his girl friend?” asks Natalie in her role of straight woman.

“I didn’t know her name, but the other facts fit. Yes, I’m sure,” says Alfred.

Perhaps the most baffling of all the careers in the book is that of Mary Eaton, Alfred’s first wife. Things seemed to be looking up for the young couple in the early chapters: a handsome, prosperous pair, they were even beginning to get their names into the society columns, when Mary finds herself irresistibly attracted by Dr. Jim Roper, an old flame whom she had jilted in order to marry Alfred. It is fair to say that Mary has no great sense of discretion anyhow, and her dealings with Dr. Jim are showy, even in this context. Dr. Jim begins to develop homosexual tendencies, apparently in the course of the psychiatric treatments he is giving young men to rid them of just such tendencies. His therapy is simple: for each of his patients, seriatim, he arranges an affair with Mary. Not only does this keep Mary happily occupied, but it gives her also a feeling of independence of Dr. Jim, a fine thing in itself.

Most of the adults in From the Terrace — husbands and wives, strangers, lovers, financiers, clubmen, gaffers, members of Princeton’s Class of 1919 — converse, at dinner parties, in board rooms, or in bed, in the vernacular of Holden Caulfield and his young friends in The Catcher in the Rye. We have all met the individual in real life who keeps up a constant flow of conversation and comment at the card table or on a tennis court or in a round of golf, but never did so many grownups prove so talkative about the sexual act. A certain sameness inevitably occurs in most of these reports, so that by the time the female has shifted into her kimono and Alfred has begun shedding his pajamas, the reader is sure that these chatterboxes will end the episode shortly with an exchange that could be summarized as follows:

“How was it for you?”

“Fine.”

“Me too.”

The advancing years deal harshly with Alfred. Natalie, although she still asks the right questions for Alfred to answer from his store of worldly wisdom, is putting on weight (39 hips, 37 bust), and Alfred’s affectionate nickname for her is Fatso. At the end of the book Alfred is past fifty, down to his last million and a half, his health is poor — and he’s married.