The Fourth Side of the Triangle

Dane was very like his father in appearance. He had inherited the high color, the Caesarean nose, the imperial chin, the wavy brown hair women liked to stroke. But where the father’s eyes were the chill gray of his ancestors from “the bleak and difficult Hebrides,” the son’s were the china-blue of his mother’s. And the clusters of muscle at the corners of Ashton’s mouth were missing from Dane’s except when Dane flew into one of his rages.

“Mother!” Dane sprang from the chair, pretending a surprise he did not really (and this was curious) feel. “Are you dead sure? I can’t believe it.”

But he could.

Ashton’s doubts about his son were of long standing. They had been born in Dane’s childhood. A boy who preferred books to football! Mendelssohn to “Old Man River” (and later, Mozart to Mendelssohn)! Languages to Math! Comparative Religion to Economics! Ancient History to Business Administration! Coin collecting to coin amassing! What kind of McKell had he spawned?

The father told himself that it was all “a phase,” like Dane’s incredible preference (at the appropriate age) for poetry over whorehouses. “He’ll grow out of it,” Ashton McKell kept saying. When Dane was in private school, his father was confident that prep school would “change” him. Groton having failed, perhaps Yale would succeed. Privately Ashton held that a hitch in the Marine Corps might prove a likelier agency, but of course the very idea could not be breathed to Lutetia, who considered the National Registration Act an affront to decent people. Dane continued to hack out his own trail.

For all his misgivings, Ashton McKell never once envisioned the worst. Dane dropped out of Yale, disappeared. His father found him toiling under a beefy sun in one of North Carolina’s tobacco plantations — not even McKell-owned! Later he took a job as a deck hand on one of the McKell freighters. But he jumped ship in Maracaibo, and turned up six months later in a Greenwich Village pad, shacked up with a long-haired girl with dirty bare feet and oil paint on her nose. He spent the better part of another year riding the rods and bunking down in hobo jungles; in the space of the following three years he was a Hollywood extra, a carny roustabout, buddy-buddy with a gang of braceros down around the Mexican border, a beach boy at Santa Monica, a field hand on a Hawaiian pineapple plantation, and legman for an alcoholic Chicago police reporter who needed somebody to keep him from being rolled and perhaps knifed in a Loop alley.

When Dane showed up at home, lean and hungry-looking as Cassius (his mother spent three marvelous months cooking for him with her own hands — a service, Ashton remarked wryly, that she had never rendered to him), his father said, “Every McKell for centuries has gone into the family business.”

“I,” said Dane, “am breaking the chain.”

It was as if he had announced that he was en route to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky to take the vows of silence.

“You mean you’re not?”

“Why should I, Dad? I don’t like business. Any business. Yours included... Anyway, it isn’t as if I had to.” Dane was on the pale side, but the McKell chin was noticeably firm.

“What in hell do you mean by that?” Ashton shouted. Silence swallowed the shout.

At least, the father thought, he’s not being flip about it. He realizes what this damned radical nonsense means... Ashton could not have endured it if the boy had been casual.

“I’m of age,” Dane said. “It doesn’t mean merely that I now have the vote and can join the lodge. Grandfather McKell and Grandfather DeWitt both made provision for me in their wills, Dad. What do I need business for?”

“You mean to say you intend to live without working? By God, Dane, that’s cheap — I mean, cheap!”

“I didn’t mean that at all. I’m going to work. But it’s work of my choice... In a way,” Dane said thoughtfully, “I didn’t choose it so much as it chose me.”

Ashton McKell did not live by bread alone. He was a confident communicant of his faith, and a vestryman. This rushed into his head. Appalled, he cried, “You’re going into the Church?”

“What? No.” Dane laughed. “I’m going to write.”

There was a blank space. Then Ashton said, “Well, I don’t think I understand. Write? Write what?”

A writer?

Ashton probed his memory. Had he ever known a writer? Known anyone who knew a writer? There was Lamont’s son Corliss, but he was a Socialist. And that young Vanderbilt, Cornelius — he hadn’t even had that excuse. And... yes, his late mother’s friend, Mrs. Jones, who had written novels under her maiden name of Edith Wharton. But — damn it all! — she had been a woman.

“So you’re going to write,” Ashton said slowly, and he asked again, “Write what?” searching his mind for a sensible explanation. He fell on one: his mother. His mother spoiled him.