“Now you’re defending him, Forrest.”
“I’m not! I hate his guts; undoubtedly he’s a crook. But I tell you it was a shock to me to find that father didn’t have any principles. He and his friends sit around the Downtown Club and pan Chauncey Rikker, but when it comes to keeping him out of a club, they develop weak spines.”
“That was a small thing.”
“No, it wasn’t. None of the men of father’s age have any principles. I don’t know why. I’m willing to make an allowance for an honest conviction, but I’m not going to be booed by somebody that hasn’t got any principles and simply pretends to have.”
His mother sat helplessly, knowing that what he said was true. She and her husband and all their friends had no principles. They were good or bad according to their natures; often they struck attitudes remembered from the past, but they were never sure as her father or her grandfather had been sure. Confusedly she supposed it was something about religion. But how could you get principles just by wishing for them?
The maid announced the arrival of a taxi.
“Send up Olsen for my baggage,” said Forrest; then to his mother, “I’m not taking the coupй; I left the keys. I’m just taking my clothes. I suppose father will let me keep my job down town.”
“Forrest, don’t talk that way. Do you think your father would take your living away from you, no matter what you did?”
“Such things have happened.”
“You’re hard and difficult,” she wept. “Please stay here a little longer, and perhaps things will be better and father will get a little more reconciled. Oh, stay, stay! I’ll talk to father again. I’ll do my best to fix things.”
“Will you let me bring Alida here?”
“Not now. Don’t ask me that. I couldn’t bear—”
“All right,” he said grimly.
Olsen came in for the bags. Crying and holding on to his coat sleeve, his mother went with him to the front door.
“Won’t you say good-by to father?”
“Why? I’ll see him tomorrow in the office.”
“Forrest, I was thinking, why don’t you go to a hotel instead of the University Club?”
“Why, I thought I’d be more comfortable—” Suddenly he realized that his presence would be less conspicuous at a hotel. Shutting up his bitterness inside him, he kissed his mother roughly and went to the cab.
Unexpectedly, it stopped by the corner lamp-post at a hail from the sidewalk, and the May twilight yielded up Alida, miserable and pale.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“I had to come,” she said. “Stop the car. I’ve been thinking of you leaving your house on account of me, and how you loved your family—the way I’d like to love mine—and I thought how terrible it was to spoil all that. Listen, Forrest! Wait! I want you to go back. Yes, I do. We can wait. We haven’t any right to cause all this pain. We’re young. I’ll go away for a while, and then we’ll see.”
He pulled her toward him by her shoulders.
“You’ve got more principles than the whole bunch of them,” he said. “Oh, my girl, you love me and, gosh, it’s good that you do!”
IV
It was to be a house wedding, Forrest and Alida having vetoed the Rikkers’ idea that it was to be a sort of public revenge. Only a few intimate friends were invited.
During the week before the wedding, Forrest deduced from a series of irresolute and ambiguous telephone calls that his mother wanted to attend the ceremony, if possible. Sometimes he hoped passionately she would; at others it seemed unimportant.
The wedding was to be at seven. At five o’clock Pierce Winslow was walking up and down the two interconnecting sitting rooms of his house.
“This evening,” he murmured, “my only son is being married to the daughter of a swindler.”
He spoke aloud so that he could listen to the words, but they had been evoked so often in the past few months that their strength was gone and they died thinly upon the air.
He went to the foot of the stairs and called: “Charlotte!” No answer. He called again, and then went into the dining room, where the maid was setting the table.
“Is Mrs. Winslow out?”
“I haven’t seen her come in, Mr. Winslow.”
Back in the sitting room he resumed his walking; unconsciously he was walking like his father, the judge, dead thirty years ago; he was parading his dead father up and down the room.
“You can’t bring that woman into this house to meet your mother. Bad blood is bad blood.”
The house seemed unusually quiet. He went upstairs and looked into his wife’s room, but she was not there; old Mrs. Forrest was slightly indisposed; Eleanor, he knew, was at the wedding.
He felt genuinely sorry for himself as he went downstairs again. He knew his role—the usual evening routine carried out in complete obliviousness of the wedding—but he needed support, people begging him to relent, or else deferring to his wounded sensibilities. This isolation was different; it was almost the first isolation he had ever felt, and like all men who are fundamentally of the group, of the herd, he was incapable of taking a strong stand with the inevitable loneliness that it implied. He could only gravitate toward those who did.
“What have I done to deserve this?” he demanded of the standing ash tray. “What have I failed to do for my son that lay within my power?”
The maid came in. “Mrs. Winslow told Hilda she wouldn’t be here for dinner, and Hilda didn’t tell me.”
The shameful business was complete. His wife had weakened, leaving him absolutely alone. For a moment he expected to be furiously angry with her, but he wasn’t; he had used up his anger exhibiting it to others. Nor did it make him feel more obstinate, more determined; it merely made him feel silly.
“That’s it. I’ll be the goat. Forrest will always hold it against me, and Chauncey Rikker will be laughing up his sleeve.”
He walked up and down furiously.
“So I’m left holding the bag. They’ll say I’m an old grouch and drop me out of the picture entirely. They’ve licked me. I suppose I might as well be graceful about it.” He looked down in horror at the hat he held in his hand. “I can’t—I can’t bring myself to do it, but I must. After all, he’s my only son. I couldn’t bear that he should hate me. He’s determined to marry her, so I might as well put a good face on the matter.”
In sudden alarm he looked at his watch, but there was still time. After all, it was a large gesture he was making, sacrificing his principles in this manner. People would never know what it cost him.
An hour later, old Mrs. Forrest woke up from her doze and rang for her maid.
“Where’s Mrs. Winslow?”
“She’s not in for dinner. Everybody’s out.”
The old lady remembered.
“Oh, yes, they’ve gone over to get married. Give me my glasses and the telephone book… Now, I wonder how you spell Capone.”
“Rikker, Mrs. Forrest.”
In a few minutes she had the number. “This is Mrs. Hugh Forrest,” she said firmly. “I want to speak to young Mrs. Forrest Winslow… No, not to Miss Rikker; to Mrs. Forrest Winslow.” As there was as yet no such person, this was impossible. “Then I will call after the ceremony,” said the old lady.
When she called again, in an hour, the bride came to the phone.
“This is Forrest’s great-grandmother. I called up to wish you every happiness and to ask you to come and see me when you get back from your trip if I’m still alive.”
“You’re very sweet to call, Mrs. Forrest.”
“Take good care of Forrest, and don’t let him get to be a ninny like his father and mother. God bless you.”
“Thank you.”
“All right. Good-by, Miss Capo—Good-by, my dear.”
Having done her whole duty, Mrs. Forrest hung up the receiver.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine (19 December 1931).
