Edith Wharton
His Father's Son
TALES OF MEN
Wharton, Edith. "His Father's Son."
Scribner's Magazine 45 (June 1909): 657-665.
About the print version
His Father's Son
Wharton, Edith
Scribner's Magazine June 1909
Note: Vol. 45
Published: 1909
I
AFTER his wife's death Mason Grew took the momentous step of selling out his
business and moving from Wingfield, Connecticut, to Brooklyn.
For years he had secretly nursed the hope of such a change, but had never
dared to suggest it to Mrs. Grew, a woman of immutable habits. Mr. Grew himself
was attached to Wingfield, where he had grown up, prospered, and become what the
local press described as "prominent." He was attached to his ugly brick house
with sandstone trimmings and a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to
the similar row of houses across the street, the "trolley" wires forming a kind
of aerial pathway between, and the sprawling vista closed by the steeple of the
church which he and his wife had always attended, and where their only child had
been baptized.
It was hard to snap all these threads of association, visual and sentimental;
yet still harder, now that he was alone, to live so far from his boy. Ronald
Grew was practising law in New York, and there was no more chance of returning
to live at Wingfield than of a river's flowing inland from the sea. Therefore to
be near him his father must move; and it was characteristic of Mr. Grew, and of
the situation generally, that the translation, when it took place, was to
Brooklyn, and not to New York.
"Why you bury yourself in that hole I can't think," had been Ronald's
comment; and Mr. Grew simply replied that rents were lower in Brooklyn, and that
he had heard of a house that would suit him. In reality he had said to himself
-- being the only recipient of his own confidences -- that if he went to New
York he might be on the boy's mind; whereas, if he lived in Brooklyn, Ronald
would always have a good excuse for not popping over to see him every other day.
The sociological isolation of Brooklyn, combined with its geographical nearness,
presented in fact the precise conditions for Mr. Grew's case. He wanted to be
near enough to New York to go there often, to feel under his feet the same
pavement that Ronald trod, to sit now and then in the same theatres, and find on
his breakfast-table the journals which, with increasing frequency, inserted
Ronald's name in the sacred bounds of the society column. It had always been a
trial to Mr. Grew to have to wait twenty-four hours to read that "among those
present was Mr. Ronald Grew." Now he had it with his coffee, and left it on the
breakfast-table to the perusal of a "hired girl" cosmopolitan enough to do it
justice. In such ways Brooklyn attested the advantages of its propinquity to New
York, while remaining, as regards Ronald's duty to his father, as remote and
inaccessible as Wingfield.
It was not that Ronald shirked his filial obligations, but rather because of
his heavy sense of them, that Mr. Grew so persistently sought to minimize and
lighten them. It was he who insisted, to Ronald, on the immense difficulty of
getting from New York to Brooklyn.
"Any way you look at it, it makes a big hole in the day; and there's not much
use in the ragged rim left. You say you're dining out next Sunday? Then I forbid
you to come over here for lunch. Do you understand me, sir? You disobey at the
risk of your father's malediction! Where did you say you were dining? With the
Waltham Bankshires again? Why, that's the second time in three weeks, ain't it?
Big blow-out, I suppose? Gold plate and orchids -- opera singers in afterward?
Well, you'd be in a nice box if there was a fog on the river, and you got hung
up half-way over. That'd be a handsome return for the attention Mrs. Bankshire
has shown you -- singling out a whipper-snapper like you twice in three weeks!
(What's the daughter's name -- Daisy?) No, sir -- don't you come fooling round
here next Sunday, or I'll set the dogs on you. And you wouldn't find me in
anyhow, come to think of it. I'm lunching out myself, as it happens -- yes sir,
lunching out. Is there anything especially comic in my lunching out? I don't often do it, you say? Well, that's no reason why I
never should. Who with? Why, with -- with old Dr. Bleaker: Dr. Eliphalet
Bleaker. No, you wouldn't know about him -- he's only an old friend of your
mother's and mine."
Gradually Ronald's insistence became less difficult to overcome. With his
customary sweetness and tact (as Mr. Grew put it) he began to "take the hint,"
to give in to "the old gentleman's" growing desire for solitude.
"I'm set in my ways, Ronny, that's about the size of it; I like to go
tick-ticking along like a clock. I always did. And when you come bouncing in I
never feel sure there's enough for dinner -- or that I haven't sent Maria out
for the evening. And I don't want the neighbors to see me opening my own door to
my son. That's the kind of cringing snob I am. Don't give me away, will you? I
want 'em to think I keep four or five powdered flunkeys in the hall day and
night -- same as the lobby of one of those Fifth Avenue hotels. And if you pop
over when you're not expected, how am I going to keep up the bluff?"
Ronald yielded after the proper amount of resistance -- his intuitive sense,
in every social transaction, of the proper amount of force to be expended, was
one of the qualities his father most admired in him. Mr. Grew's perceptions in
this line were probably more acute than his son suspected. The souls of short
thick-set men, with chubby features, mutton-chop whiskers, and pale eyes peering
between folds of fat like almond kernels in half-split shells -- souls thus
encased do not reveal themselves to the casual scrutiny as delicate emotional
instruments. But in spite of the dense disguise in which he walked Mr. Grew
vibrated exquisitely in response to every imaginative appeal; and his son Ronald
was perpetually stimulating and feeding his imagination.
Ronald in fact constituted his father's one escape from the impenetrable
element of mediocrity which had always hemmed him in. To a man so enamoured of
beauty, and so little qualified to add to its sum total, it was a wonderful
privilege to have bestowed on the world such a being. Ronald's resemblance to
Mr. Grew's early conception of what he himself would have liked to look might
have put new life into the discredited theory of pre-natal influences. At any
rate, if the young man owed his beauty, his distinction and his winning manner
to the dreams of one of his parents, it was certainly to those of Mr. Grew, who,
while outwardly devoting his life to the manufacture and dissemination of Grew's
Secure Suspender Buckle, moved in an enchanted inward world peopled with all the
figures of romance. In this high company Mr. Grew cut as brilliant a figure as
any of its noble phantoms; and to see his vision of himself suddenly projected
on the outer world in the shape of a brilliant popular conquering son, seemed,
in retrospect, to give to that image a belated objective reality. There were
even moments when, forgetting his physiognomy, Mr. Grew said to himself that if
he'd had "half a chance" he might have done as well as Ronald; but this only
fortified his resolve that Ronald should do infinitely better.
Ronald's ability to do well almost equalled his gift of looking well. Mr.
Grew constantly affirmed to himself that the boy was "not a genius"; but,
barring this slight deficiency, he was almost everything that a parent could
wish. Even at Harvard he had managed to be several desirable things at once --
writing poetry in the college magazine, playing delightfully "by ear,"
acquitting himself honorably in his studies, and yet holding his own in the
fashionable sporting set that formed, as it were, the gateway of the temple of
Society. Mr. Grew's idealism did not preclude the frank desire that his son
should pass through that gateway; but the wish was not prompted by material
considerations. It was Mr. Grew's notion that, in the rough and hurrying current
of a new civilization, the little pools of ...
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