The Fourth Side of the Triangle

It turned out to be the kind of New York August which made it technically possible to walk from back to peeling back at Coney Island, from the boardwalk to the sea, without once touching the scorched sand. It was the season when mild little men who had never been known to raise their voices ran through the streets slashing at people with an ax... when those New Yorkers who owned no air-conditioners used fans, and those who owned no fans slept on kitchen floors before open refrigerators, so that the overloaded circuits blew out, nullifying refrigerators, fans, and air-conditioners alike.

Tempers erupted, gangs rumbled, husbands slugged their wives, wives beat their children, offices closed early, subways re-enacted the Inferno, in the thick and dripping air hearts faltered and gave up the blood-pumping struggle, and Lutetia McKell told her son that his father had confessed to her: “There is another woman.”

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

But he could. Queer. A moment before his mother said, “There is another woman,” Dane could have said in truth that the thought of his father’s possible infidelity had never crossed his mind. Yet once the words were uttered, they seemed inevitable. In common with most of mankind, Dane could not think comfortably of his parents in sexual embrace; but in his case the Freudian reasons were complicated by the kind of father and mother he had. His mother was like a limpet clinging to a rock, getting far more than she gave; for she could only give acquiescence and loyalty as she moved up and down with the tides. Somewhere deep in his head flickered the thought: she must be the world’s lousiest bed partner.

It seemed obvious to Dane that his father, on the other hand, was a man of strong sexuality, in common with his other drives and appetites. The surprise lay not so much in the fact that there was another woman as in that he had been so blind.

So — “Are you dead sure? I can’t believe it.” — when he was certain from the first instant, and belief came flooding.

“Oh, yes, I’m sure, darling,” said Lutetia. “It’s not the sort of thing I would imagine.” No, Dane thought; you’d far likelier imagine a Communist revolution and a commissar commandeering your best silver service. “But for some time now I’ve... well, suspected something might be wrong.”

“But, Mother, how did you find out?”

Lutetia’s cameo face turned rosy. “I asked him what was wrong. I could no longer stand thinking all sorts of things.”

“What did he say?” So you do lead a mental life, Dane thought, after all. Funny, finding out about one’s parents at such an advanced stage of the game. He loved his mother dearly, but he would have said she hadn’t a brain in her head.

“He said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. There is another woman.’”

“Just like that?”

“Well, dear, I asked him.”

“I know, but—! What did you say?”

“What could I say, Dane? I’ve never been faced with such a situation. I think I said, ‘I’m sorry, too, but it’s such a relief to know,’ which it was. Oh, it was.”

“And then what did Dad say, do?”

“Nodded.”

“Nodded? That’s all?”

“That’s all.” His mother said, as he winced, “I’m sorry, darling, but you did ask me.”

“And that was the end of the conversation?”

“Yes.”

Incredible. It was like something out of Noel Coward. And now Dane realized something else. Just below the level of consciousness he had been aware lately of an aura of disturbance about his mother. It probably accounted for his uneasiness and reluctance to leave the city. Her dependence on her menfolk was bred into his bones.

As Dane once joked to Judy Walsh, his mother represented a species perhaps not quite so extinct — if there were degrees of extinction — as the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, or the Carolina parakeet, but rarer than the buffalo.

Anna Lutetia DeWitt McKell was an atavism. Born six years after Queen Victoria’s death, Lutetia in her single delicate body carried the Victorian spirit into the middle of the twentieth century, nursing it as if she were the divinely appointed guardian of the eternal flame. It was true that, being left motherless, she had been reared by a choker-collared grandmother who was by birth a Phillipse, and who never let anyone, especially Lutetia, forget it; the old lady considered herself spiritually, at least, a daughter of England (the Phillipses were Tories during the Revolution); she never failed to take offense at being called an Episcopalian — “I am an Anglican Catholic,” she would say. But the grandmother did not entirely explain the granddaughter. On the paternal side Lutetia inherited all the pride and prejudices of the ingrown Knickerbocker breed from which her father’s family descended. Between the Victorian and Dutch burgher virtues, Lutetia never had a chance.