This Side of Paradise | Page 4

less fortunate little rich boys were defying
governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored or
read to from "Do and Dare," or "Frank on the Mississippi," Amory was

biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural
repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and deriving a highly
specialized education from his mother. "Amory."
"Yes, Beatrice." (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged
it.)
"Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that
early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde is having your
breakfast brought up."
"All right."
"I am feeling very old to-day, Amory," she would sigh, her face a rare
cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile
as Bernhardt's. "My nerves are on edge-on edge. We must leave this
terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine."
Amory's penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at
his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about her.
"Amory."
"Oh, yes."
"I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just
relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish." She fed him
sections of the "Fjtes Galantes" before he was ten; at eleven he could
talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and
Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs,
he sampled his mother's apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he
became quite tipsy. This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette
in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though
this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became
part of what in a later generation would have been termed her "line."
"This son of mine," he heard her tell a room full of awestruck, admiring
women one day, "is entirely sophisticated and quite charming-but

delicate-we're all delicate; here, you know." Her hand was radiantly
outlined against her beautiful bosom; then sinking her voice to a
whisper, she told them of the apricot cordial. They rejoiced, for she was
a brave raconteuse, but many were the keys turned in sideboard locks
that night against the possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara....
These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids, the
private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a physician.
When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted specialists glared
at each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the
number of attendants, including physicians and nurses, totalled fourteen.
However, blood being thicker than broth, he was pulled through.
The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of Lake
Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of friends,
and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But Beatrice
grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances, as there
were certain stories, such as the history of her constitution and its many
amendments, memories of her years abroad, that it was necessary for
her to repeat at regular intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be
thrown off, else they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But
Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating
population of ex-Westerners.
"They have accents, my dear," she told Amory, "not Southern accents
or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any locality, just an
accent"-she became dreamy. "They pick up old, moth-eaten London
accents that are down on their luck and have to be used by some one.
They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago
grand-opera company." She became almost incoherent-"Suppose-time
in every Western woman's life-she feels her husband is prosperous
enough for her to have-accent-they try to impress me, my dear"-
Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she considered
her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her life. She had once
been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more
attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother
Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she

deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy, and
was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental
cathedrals her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of
Rome. Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport. "Ah,
Bishop Wiston," she would declare, "I do not want to talk of myself. I
can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering at your doors,
beseeching you to be simpatico"-then after an interlude filled by the
clergyman-"but my mood-is-oddly dissimilar."
Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance. When
she had first returned