Rode the Great Captain

THE guest list’s just right, she’s just the right age,” Lisa heard her mother say to her father as he shuffled around in the coatroom, hanging up his poor beat old hat, dumping his brief case, blowing the commuter fumes from his nose, steeling himself for the dinner party. “All this is part of their education. She’s got to learn —”

“Awl right, perfectly awl right ” drawled her father in the special tone he used for assent to feminine proposals for which he felt no enthusiasm but which he was prepared to accept. “Never cared for kids at the dinner table, myself. Remember at the Foleys’? Water on the tablecloth, butter on the knife handle, you and Edna trying to make teen-age conversation? Draw him out?”

“Annabelle Foley carries all good things nine times too far, and everybody knows it,” rejoined her mother crisply. “That boy’s a boy, and thirteen. Nobody but Annabelle . . . Lisa’s fifteen and exceptionally . . Alices trailed off into the clump of a swinging door, continuing only as murmur punctuated by the plink of ice cubes into a metal sink.

Lisa rather pitied them both for being so analytical about what promised to be a very minor episode, but she had to admit that she was pleased, and interested in the contemplation of this party. First on the guest list as far as she was concerned was Mr. Wilbur. He was her English teacher, but this fact had little to do with his presence at her parents’ dinner table. He was the young cousin of an old college friend of theirs, tweedy, good-looking, pipe-smoking, vest-wearing, just dished up hot out of Harvard. The boys in his Country Day School classes looked upon him with dark awe and dread. The girls accepted him simply as a sort of tribal image. To be able to discuss calmly his presence in her home would add to Lisa’s stature.

Second, there would be Mr. McKenna. He too was a figure at school, simple stockbroker and parent though he was. He was president of the board, he was civic, he presided over meetings of the village caucus. The school knew him as the one who was always addressing the Parents’ Association. He was considered dangerously liberal by conservative parents, or a champion by liberal parents. He was fine with the Boy Scouts, fine with the Community Chest; he addressed the school assemblies on the subject of tolerance and generosity. Lisa thought it would be interesting to see him up close. Everybody knew he was important and modern.

Lisa twitched her blue dress, clipped on her modest pearl earrings, made sure that her lipstick was light enough and pink enough to escape her father’s stinging attention, and ran downstairs. She was helping Dora with canapé trays and emptying ice cubes into the bucket when her father came into the pantry, clean now and smelling of astringent. His mouth was open and ready for his initial wisecrack when the doorbell rang, and Lisa slithered past him with a swish and a smirk.

The first guests to arrive were the third names on the list: old Meriden Hewitt, the big-game hunter, and his wife. His immemorial age of seventy-five put him far out of Lisa’s world, but he was able to represent something in that world all the same. None of her friends knew what he did — he was a businessman, that was all — but what he was, he still was; at seventy-five, still a hunter after big game and small, trophies for clubs, and specimens for museums. Africa, India, and the jungles of the Western Hemisphere had known and still knew his famous gun.

She greeted the Hewitts courteously, as she had been taught, just in time stopping herself from curtsying. She hadn’t curtsied since fourth grade, but there was something about the old man that brought it out in you, somehow. She coped with the coats and passed the Hewitts on to her mother and father. She opened the door for the McKennas, and saw Mr. McKenna up close. He had rimless glasses and practically no eyebrows. But Mrs. McKenna was so lovely that Lisa felt again a little sense of being given pause; that delicate throat and jaw as the lovely lady turned her profile, the violet eyes as she turned round to smile, the silk of hair and voice! Lisa felt a rising tide of excitement.

She looked up over the collar of Mrs. McKenna’s larkspur-blue coat and caught the eye of Mr. Wilbur, standing in the already populous little entry hall, grinning unconcernedly at her in his careless way. For students he grinned with his pipe, and the clench of his strong white teeth around the black stem was rather good, tightening his jaw muscles as it did. toning up his smile, heightening his resemblance to everybody in the best advertisements. For Lisa’s mother he removed the pipe and bent forward, giving her his succinct handshake, saying “Dyew do?” to one and all, being just properly nephewy.

The party swirled about the living room in the flurry and clink of drink production. Lisa’s father put on his Sazerac act, waggling a little green bottle of absinthe. His Sazeracs were very punchy, Lisa knew from many subsequent-breakfast-table inquiries into why he’d let So-and-so take so many when he knew. Now, to her surprise, she saw the expression she thought of as Cocktail Alarm on two pretty faces, her mother’s and Mrs. McKenna’s. You never saw Cocktail Alarm until the third round at least! But Daddy had given Mr. McKenna an unusually large and vibrantlooking Sazerac.

Mr. McKenna noticed her, passively sipping her tomato juice, and in a moment was at her side. She forgot his eyebrowlessness in the kindness and good will of his brown eyes.

“T should be joining you,” he confided in a stage whisper, clinking his ice around in his glass. Lisa fumbled for an answer — what, since he already had joined her? Then she saw that he meant the tomato juice.

“Been feeling so much better lately, I thought this would be the right time to celebrate,” he said, and she smiled kindly at him,

“Dad’s Sazeracs are pretty special, I guess,” she said.

“So is Daddy, and so is Daddy’s daughter, I guess,”said Mr. McKenna, referring in a very sweet though kittenish way to her blue dress, her earrings, her newness on the adult scene. Lisa felt again a bit of excitement. Mr. McKenna was going to make her a participant, not just a spectator; the latter role was all she had planned on. Gravely, with hesitation, she began to talk to him, answering his amiable questions about school and tennis. He sipped as he talked and sipped as he listened; her father filled his glass when it was half empty, over a token protest. Lisa gathered that he shared the bottomlessly tedious adult propensity to go on diets, be on diets, talk about diets. Yet it seemed less tedious with him, somehow. He was so nice generally that you found yourself thinking defensively, he’d have to be really pretty sick to go on a diet.

SHE went in to dinner just behind her mother and father, and caught a breath that passed between them: “thought he wasn’t taking . . . but in a moment she was lost in the spectacle of her mother dealing with the problems posed by a table for eight. She slipped neatly into her seat between old Mr. Hewitt at one end of the table and Mr. McKenna on her left.

Mr. McKenna had a little patch of scarlet right under the bottom of each lens. He twitched out his napkin with a sort of snap and pressed it down with a queer frenzied gesture. Lisa reached quickly for her water glass, but he twisted sideways and spoke to her in a tone quite different from his living-room tone, right into her ear, his eyes straying past her to the foot of the table.

“Hunting, fishing! All these hunters and fishermen. Takes courage, all that killing!” He choked a little, and the red spot on his cheek got bigger. Lisa’s fingers clutched her cold glass in paralysis. But he was all right again. He drew a long, shaky breath and smiled at her again as he had in the living room, making a friend of her.

“Takes a lot more than courage, though,” he went on in a normal, even subdued conversational voice. “My psychiatrist says there’s a lot goes into the making of a sportsman that the sportsman doesn’t know about ” Lisa was so fascinated that she forgot her surroundings and her position. She heard a great deal, at her enlightened school, about the practice of psychiatry, generally referred to as “help”; but this was the first time she had heard anybody openly mention “my psychiatrist.” Her deep interest must have showed, for Mr. McKenna forgot about hunters and began to talk about himself. He told her that both he and Mrs. McKenna had been “going” for over a year. They were confident now that something could be salvaged. His eyes glowed redly at her.

“I shouldn’t be talking to you this way, my dear,” he said simply and with sadness. “But how very nice you look. You’ll have to learn that if you look sweet and sympathetic, people will tell you their troubles.” A sudden spasm of coughing shook his thin features. His napkin veiled his face, all but those hot-looking eyes, quite red now. Lisa felt the appalled gaze of her mother, who sat just opposite. But as the cough absorbed Mr. McKenna, the girl’s attention was drawn gently to her other side. Old Mr. Hewitt addressed her in his gnarled deep voice, and she was effortlessly disengaged.

“With what does Mr. Wilbur regale you in the name of poetry?” he asked her. For a moment she goggled as she had at Mr. McKenna, unable to imagine what he was driving at; but she recovered quickly. He just wanted to know what poems Mr. Wilbur gave them in class.

“Not much, really,” she said, and composed a civil smile. “We’re just sophomores. We get lots of short stories — Mr. Wilbur says they’re like poems — and, oh, yes, we had Mr. Prufrock. Eliot,” she explained, and immediately felt like a fool.

“What, no Longfellow?” asked Mr. Hewitt, and his long powerful gray eyes dragged Mr. Wilbur and her mother both into their conversation. Mr. McKenna was still coughing intermittently, but he was talking quite sensibly to Mrs. Hewitt on his other side. “Animals . . .” she heard him say, but she had to stop listening.

“Now really, sir,” said Mr. Wilbur, spreading his hands in a gesture Lisa knew well. “Tenthgraders nowadays aren’t exactly at the Hiawatha stage,” and he smiled clubbily at Lisa in the candlelight.

“What do you think, yourself?” asked the old gentleman of Lisa with grave interest.

“Mr. Wilbur doesn’t think ... I mean . . . well, nobody really. When we were in lower school ... I guess . , .” Did the old man really want to know what she thought of Hiawatha? But just as she lifted supplicating eyes to Mr. Wilbur, Mr. Hewitt leaned forward and began to speak in a low, harsh, yet beautiful voice, unlike anything Lisa had ever heard.

he said, and his long eyes narrowed beautifully, then widened, gray-green, black-lashed, edged with fine lines graven by sun and wind. He looked so deeply into Lisa’s eyes that she could think of nothing, nothing but his voice, and those names.

Wilbur heard it, and her mother, and she heard it right down to her feet, but nobody else did. How could he recite, like that, without casting an awkward, terrible hush over everything? Nine more lines rolled from his mouth, and Lisa suddenly smiled at him, a real smile, not just the liptwist. His voice marked the rhythm strongly; it sank deep. He grinned at her, widely and sweetly, then began to talk to her about Vikings, Indians, tigers, she didn’t know what. The cadences ol his voice spoke to her in sounds underneath the words, yet deeply and rightly connected with the words. She couldn’t think about his voice and his eyes and what he said, all at once, yet she heard with great distinctness as he spoke of the African natives he loved best: “. . . and in the high land of the lion, the elegant Masai . . .”he said, in cadence. Lisa began to love him. He waved a bread stick, white with baker’s dust, at her; couldn’t make much of an impression on it, he said. “These bars of silver thou canst not eat!” he said. They both laughed.

“I liked about ‘Rode the great captain Alau,’ ” she said softly.

“Some things are always poetry, some things are sometimes poetry,” he said imperturbably, plying his butter knife. “But don’t let anyone tell you anything is no good, or nothing but good. Don’t let them get you pinned and wriggling on the wall,” and he beamed at Wilbur, who was now staring at him, unable to cope with him. Mr. Hewitt talked with Lisa’s mother as the plates were changed, and the girl heard almost with relief that he could speak in the normal boring way, grumbling about the greens committee at the club, worrying about where they were going to put the new tennis courts. Those baroque cadences were lost in the ordinary rhythms of small talk. He even ran on a bit, telling her mother about his wife’s new doctor.

But his eye caught hers as he turned his heavy torso toward her to serve himself from the meat plate. He smiled and nodded a bit, as if to encourage her. He let her look in silence at his bronzed face, so old to her and yet unmarred by time, made by time; the high arch of the Roman nose, the massive cheekbones, the smooth modeling of temple and jaw. She could look at him as if he were in a museum or some great old animal in a zoo: he just looked back and made it unnecessary to twitter or to chirp.

Her mother leaned across the table. “Mr. Hewitt was a teacher when he was a young man, but he changed his mind and went into advertising,” she told Lisa.

Advertising! Lisa had been led to think it was pretty unwholesome. Mr. Wilbur talked about it and said ‘’Madison Avenue” always in a very critical way, though he himself reminded one so much of Hathaway shirts and this was because of advertising. Confusion! But Hewitt wasn’t “advertising.” Was he “hunting”?

“Mr. Hewitt is still a teacher,” said Mrs. Hewitt, surprisingly, to no one in particular, above the low murmur of Mr. McKenna’s conversation. Lisa felt she wasn’t going to make head or tail of this whole affair. What? . . . but she could see that Mr. Wilbur was impressed by him, Longfellow, advertising, and all. And when the wine came out, she was aware that her father cared for nothing but that Mr. Hewitt should like it. She had seen the label in the kitchen and knew that it was her father’s Big Deal wine. Now the old hunter sipped it. looked at his host, and inclined his head gravely. Her father beamed and said, “Mr. Hewitt is a master gastronome.”

What? thought Lisa, but she had better sense than to say it out loud. The word fitted, though, she felt, with its queer geological sound. She glanced at Mr. Wilbur, hoping for help, but he was not thinking of her. Mr. Hewitt said calmly, “I like things, he means. Many things to celebratc! Clos Vougeot particularly,” and again his time-honored smile filled her with obscure delight.

“Like hunting! Blood!” interjected Mr. McKenna suddenly and loudly. Astonishment.stopped all conversation. “Sticking hooks in fishes’ jaws, shooting helpless tracked-down animals.”His trembling hand jerked, knocked over his glass. The red stain spread.

“Just can’t understand it,” he said more quietly, making an effort. “Of course maybe I’m wrong, but it’s always looked like cruelty to me. Insensitive I may be . . . “ Lisa was frightened; surely he was right? “I shouldn’t talk this way,” he said softly to her, giving her again that crippled smile. She remembered the hunter’s lecturing about shoulder shots and forehead shots. Everybody knew Mr. McKenna was a “distinguished humanitarian. She looked in terror at Mr. Hewitt; now what would happen?

HEWITI cut into his little cake of spinach, some special thing her mother loved to fix, herself, for guests. Nervously Lisa popped a bite into her mouth. Even in her agony of uncertainty and mortification for everybody, she felt its complex, powerful, yet subtle flavor; not cheese, not onion, not garlic, not . . . just itself; a single taste, made up of much. Meriden Hewitt savored it, looked back at Mr. McKenna, and said nothing. An expression of complete but amiable imperviousness masked his whole face, so legible before. Into the twiddling silence fell little feminine coos and murmurs, attempts to distract and repair. But Mr. McKenna was going on.

“Wilbur, do you agree with me that blood sports, let’s call them that, are . . . are passing from the scene?” You couldn’t help feeling that he had made a really good effort, not saying “are something no decent man can tolerate, let alone enjoy?” Even though that was what he meant.

Mr. Wilbur was good at times like this. He was hard to shake up. He picked at his food and said evenly, “Well, now, don’t really think I do. Hunting is one of the last ritual forms of violence. It has its barbarians, of course. But if the rituals are observed, and the proper relationships established, and the overtones of primitive sacrifice appreciated, well, now, there really is an aesthetic element . . .” What he meant Lisa could not think, but Air. Hewitt laughed pleasantly. She could see that Mr. Wilbur hadn’t counted on the laugh. She intercepted the glance the old man bent upon the young, and it vibrated in her mind, for she had never before seen malice and good humor blended in a single expression.

“Sorry ... I just can’t follow that,” muttered Mr. McKenna. He suddenly rose to his feet, swayed, caught at the tablecloth. Lisa’s mother rose quickly and smoothly, saying, “Let’s have dessert served in the other room, shall we?” and began to shepherd people out. Mr. Hewitt looked regretfully at his spinach, swallowed the last of his Clos Vougeot, and rose. “Sorry . . . sorry . . .” Ah-. McKenna kept saying, but it was hard to believe he was displeased with himself now. “Never could see the sport in inflicting pain,” he said as they all trailed into the living room. “Must be something wrong with me. Did you ever shoot live pigeons in the trapshoot at Monte Carlo?” he asked Mr. Hewitt. The old man just looked at him calmly, rolling a cigarette back and forth in his hand. You couldn’t tell whether he’d shot the live pigeons or not.

“Wonderful stuff, that spinach, Laura,” he said to Lisa’s mother in his strange, beautiful growl of a voice, “great stuff. Have your cook fix me up a couple of those little cakes in some foil. Take them home. Eat them cold. Done it before. Something really good is always good,” he said to Lisa, “even if it doesn’t come out just as you think it ought to.” He smiled over her head now, at her mother, and moved toward the kitchen door. “I’ll ask her myself,” he said, and withdrew.

But how Mr. McKenna had denounced him! This word Lisa remembered from A Tale of Two Cities. Mr. Wilbur was no part of the scene; Lisa felt he would never be really a part of any scene again, for her. He didn’t figure. He’d spoken on Mr. Hewitt’s side, but . . . well, what was he trying to get across? All that fancy stuff! Something about himself. He wanted to be on Mr. Hewitt’s team, not on Mr. McKenna’s. But Mr. Hewitt didn’t need anybody on his team. Mr. Wilbur knew it as well as she did. He just wanted to be seen on Mr. Hewitt’s side.

Confused feelings rose in Lisa. She wanted to help her mother save the party, but Mr. Hewitt needed no help. If you got mixed up in these grown-up things, you had to do something. She and her mother began to fuss with coffee things and dessert plates. Mr. McKenna came up to his hostess, muttered something, massaged his head, and left the party and the house, signaling to his wife from the entryway. What was there to do?

Yet she knew, with piercing sudden clarity, that there was pain in this room somewhere. The suffering of animals evoked by Mr. McKenna’s speeches had disappeared somehow into the massive personality of Meriden Hewitt. Her mother was exasperated. Her father was grumbling in an undertone to his wife, “A drink and a half! all that on a drink and a half.” Mrs. Hewitt, gentle and gracious, was twittering with Mr. Wilbur over some pictures, and he was chirpingback.

Lisa saw, slanting across the divan, the slender drooping figure of Mrs. McKenna, who had been strangely silent at the dinner table. Her long lovely dark hair drew the skin tautly back from her face, leaving the violet eyes huge and dark; their wandering gaze crossed Lisa’s, and the sad look of them dismayed her young heart. Mr. Hewitt was lingering chivalrously in the kitchen. It was up to her.

She thought carefully. Mrs. McKenna had a little girl; her name wasn’t McKenna. Fat, blonde, fourth grade. In the Abraham Lincoln play she had played Abe’s stepmother. Lisa crossed the room and sat coolly beside Mrs. McKenna. In the course of this simple action, as in a flash, and only half aware of her vision, she saw all human life as a kind of weird landscape: far off, peaks like Hewitt, unassailable, snow-capped, forestated; down in some kind of subway channel, Mr. McKenna thrashing about with his psychiatrist in his pitiful undignified struggle; in between, people like her mother, her father, herself, Mrs. Hewitt, Mrs. McKenna, flitting about, skittering from tree to tree like figures in some shrubbery-shrouded Antony Tudor ballet she’d seen. Mr. Wilbur had no place in this landscape yet. He was too busy thinking about where to line up.

“Isn’t Ruth Carpenter your daughter, Mrs. McKenna?” she heard herself asking in banal tones, tones she used as deliberately as one would use a Band-aid. “Did you get to see the Lincoln play?”

She smoothed her dress, and Mrs. McKenna smoothed hers. They talked about Ruth. With an easy, natural joy Lisa observed that talking about Ruth made Mrs. McKenna happy. “Well, everybody’s either overor underweight at that age. I was so skinny and knobby-kneed. . . . She has such a pretty voice . . . she speaks like you . . . oh, camp? she’ll enjoy . . . she’ll love . . .” and Lisa watched faint flickers of hope and pleasure lighten fitfully that lovely face. Mr. Hewitt came in from the dining room and stood tranquilly in the arched doorway, surveying the scene, holding his coffee cup and a cigarette balanced between hard palm and trigger finger. Stalker of prey? But he stood there august and senior, an image of something authentic, something any tribe could still believe in. He crossed the room to them.

“Well, Mary! going to give you a spin in the new car tonight. Always love the smell of a new car; and you can add some of that rose smell you always have, my dear, to the general bouquet. Now be kind, and let an old man tell you about the road that leadeth to Isfahan,” and he began to picture for them both some wild beautiful landscape he had known and loved. Lisa listened. She saw her mother and father looking at her and murmuring at each other. Fixing to get her off to her room? She wouldn’t go. She was tired, and the corners of her mouth drooped a little. But she had never been so wide awake, nor so glad to be.