Honorable Men Read Online Free Page A

simply so bored, so horribly bored. When he shut out the world, was he shutting out clamorous, intrusive females? Or perhaps grinning, leering boys who knew what he really wanted? Or did he simply want to be alone with his intensely intelligent self? “No, I don’t aspire to the hand of my Galatea. She is too fine a property for the likes of me. But that needn’t mean I can’t have a candidate.”
    â€œOh, you have one?”
    â€œI think I may have.”
    â€œWhom I’ve met?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAnd when shall I meet this paragon?”
    â€œAh, but of course I’m not going to tell you. That would put your back up.”
    â€œWill you tell me after I’ve met him?”
    â€œOnly if I think you like him.”
    I admit that Gus was wise to make a mystery of his project. I found myself wondering now, every time I met someone at all attractive, whether this one might be he. And in a surprisingly short time it became an amusing game. I was constantly asking men I met: “By any chance, do you know Gus Leighton? Why? Oh, no reason. I was just wondering.” But then, of course, it was always possible that Gus did not know his candidate personally. He might have made his selection merely by title: a duke or a maharajah. At any rate, as the fateful season ended and I faced the long, familiar summer of Bar Harbor with my parents and Deborah, I began to wonder if Gus’s ambition for me might not be the only thing I had salvaged from a year of folly.

3. ALIDA
    H ENRY A DAMS , who was always concerned with the dichotomy of the one and the many, not only in the twelfth and twentieth centuries, but in the eras of his own life, professed to see unity in the sober, disciplined Boston of his childhood and multiplicity in the careless freedom of the countryside at Quincy. One represented winter and school; the other, summer and license.
    With me it was just the reverse. Manhattan, with its bustle of traffic and much-touted pace of living, with its ruthless competition in social and business life, struck me as the licentious “many,” while Bar Harbor, serene between its green mountains and the sapphire blue of Frenchman’s Bay, seemed a unit that existed only for itself. Bar Harbor made sense, or nonsense if you preferred, which in the silver air of its few peerless Maine days (one ignored the fog that shrouded the island for half the summer) was all that seemed to matter. For there was no world outside Bar Harbor, or really much of a one in it besides the summer community and the shops and servants and boats and glittering old limousines that made up the crazy round of its idyllic days.
    When I close my eyes I see the Swimming Club on West Street, with its terrace and lawn descending to the huge pool whose cement walls extended down the stony beach that was covered at high tide, as was the long sandy dike that connected Bar Island to Mount Desert. The club was the undoubted center of the “one,” and here at noon the leading ladies of the colony foregathered at umbrella tables while boys in scarlet jackets brought on silver trays the first cocktail of the day. I used to think of those half-dozen tables under their brightly colored shelters as a kind of senate, for surely here, by these broad-hatted, silk-gowned women, with their pearls and high heels and low throaty chuckles, all the decisions of the community were made. If their men had some voice in the distant cities, they had none here—nor did they seek any, except in the management of the golf club, carved out by them as a small, independent principality.
    My mother lived for that noon hour at the Swimming Club. Sitting with her needlework, a cigarette dangling from her always moving lips, she listened and chattered at once, missing nothing. She was the admitted historiographer of the island, even of the outlying and sometimes rebellious settlements at Northeast and Seal Harbors. I see myself coming