The Question of Max Read online

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  Amanda Cross

  THE QUESTION OF MAX

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  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PART TWO

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART THREE

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

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  Also by Amanda Cross

  and available from Bello

  In the Last Analysis

  The James Joyce Murder

  Poetic Justice

  The Theban Mysteries

  The Question of Max

  No Word from Winifred

  A Trap for Fools

  The Players Come Again

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  To Joan Ferrante

  Art, if it doesn’t start there, at least ends,

  Whether aesthetics like the thought or not,

  In an attempt to entertain our friends.

  W. H. Auden

  PART ONE

  March

  Chapter One

  Kate Fansler’s life had achieved, within the last year, a neat division between urban elegance and rural simplicity, even if, as was certain, the rural simplicity was a lot simpler than the urban elegance was elegant. Her farmer neighbors observed with ill-concealed scorn her one-room cabin and unmowed grass, while her urban associates placed her on the scale of elegance only so far as their own eyes could reach. If she appeared easily affluent to her colleagues, she was considered, by those of her mother’s generation who chanced to come across her, to be close to slumming. At this particular moment in March, she was priding herself on the sharp contradictions in her life, those contradictions which gave flavor to experience and rest to the soul. Such sharp contradictions, of course, require a dexterity bordering upon gymnastics. With a sense, therefore, of an acrobat whose muscles have suddenly frozen, Kate watched Maximillian Reston search in vain the uncut meadow surrounding her cabin for a path to her door.

  Max was the last person in the world to whom a wild rural retreat would hold any attraction. But even had her country refuge been run on the elegant lines of Edith Wharton’s famous turn-of-the-century mansion not far distant in the Berkshires, Reston’s unannounced approach would have been a cause for astonishment. He was not a man given to excursions into other people’s lives. Their work, yes. Friendship, or what passed with Max for friendship, allowed response in beautifully contrived letters to the publications of one’s friends. But intimacy he considered a contemporary fall from grace as regrettable as the loss of manners, formality, and sartorial distinctions between the sexes.

  Kate, looking down at her mud-stained sneakers and ancient blue-jeans, considered several mad escapes. She could run straight out the back door into the woods and there lurk undiscovered until Max departed. But when and, more importantly, how would he depart? He had dismissed the taxi which had deposited him upon her road, and her house contained no telephone with which to summon another. Flight seemed inadvisable. Disguise? Suppose she were to pretend to be a tramp or a besotted old woman mumbling about goblins . . . Not bad, that, but it presented the same problem as the first alternative. How would Max depart? Nothing for it, perhaps, but to face the man. And Max, once he had seen her in this state, in this house, she who had never dined with him or talked with him in any elegance less than that provided by his club (on those few evenings when his club admitted the other sex to its sacred precincts), would he leave her cabin and her life forever? With a pang, Kate realized that she would regret the loss of him. Damn and blast Max.

  Unaware of the curse directed toward him, Reston looked for a moment down the rutted road, longing, perhaps, for his now departed taxi. One could observe, even at this distance, the moment when he had decided to plunge across the meadow to the greater civilization, he supposed, that lay within the cabin. Kate thought wildly of changing her clothes. But the dishonesty of this disgusted her, nor was she positively beguiled at the thought of being found by Max in, so to speak, the chrysalis stage of nudity. I must stand my ground, she muttered to herself, tucking back the loose strands of hair.

  The question was, how had Max found her? She had known him an expert in all the byways of civilization, but rural ingenuity she would not have expected. Cautiously, but accepting her fate, Kate went to the door and opened it, watching Max pick his way across the muddy meadow. When he was still ten feet away, she spoke: “There are two questions. How you found me, and why? It is perhaps unfeeling of me, but I think I am more intrigued by the first.”

  “Guy told me about it,” Max said, stepping inside and viewing the cabin with a critical scrutiny he made no attempt to disguise. “He also told me that Reed had given it to you. When you failed to turn up in any civilized place, I decided to try this on a long shot.”

  “Did Guy describe exactly in which Berkshire wood it lay?”

  “Of course not. He mentioned the nearest town, from where I made inquiries about an isolated cabin and a lunatic woman. Do you have drinking water that runs from a faucet, or must one throw oneself down beside a babbling brook?”

  “There are faucets,” Kate said. “Sit down and I will get you a drink of water. I’m afraid there is nothing else I can offer you, except tea from a bag, coffee of the instant variety, or California wine.”

  With visible effort, Max restrained a shudder. “Water will be excellent,” he said. He stared about him and Kate looked at the cabin through his eyes. It consisted of one large room with a vaulted ceiling, beneath which, on one side, was a sleeping balcony. For furniture there was another mattress on legs, covered with pillows and a throw, for sitting. Two overstuffed chairs of the sort someone had obviously decided to do away with when he came into money, and a round deal table with two straight chairs completed the furnishings.

  “Guy said he and Reed built this with their own hands,” Max said, dropping with a mixture of relief and distaste into one of the deep chairs, whose innards hit the floor as they felt his weight. Max was not the sort of man to loll, and he contrived to look more uncomfortable than he would have in a straight-backed chair of rigid proportions. Still, he had found Kate, which said a good deal for his perseverance and, one supposed, for the seriousness of his intentions. What these could possibly be Kate forbore even to imagine.

  Max seemed strangely reluctant to come to the point of his extraordinary visit. “This looks as though someone built it with his bare hands.”

  “Guy built it, with only occasional help from Reed. I thought he told you?”

  “One gathered it was of his own devising. He didn’t go into details, and I somehow assumed supervision rather than actual fabrication.”

  “Guy has been Reed’s friend for a long time,” Kate said. “Years before Reed and I were married, Guy had a breakdown. What is described by the doctors as a ‘moderate depression.’ Caused, if depressions can ever be said to have a cause, by what the poets call ‘the melancholy of all things completed.’ As an advertising man, Guy had great success very young. There was the usual psychotherapy, the usual drugs, but he cured himself or, more accurately, guided himself out of the trouble through work. Manual work. Here. Guy had inherited these woods, oh, years ago. He started to build this house more or less in the
middle of his acres, with Reed’s help. He said that Reed’s quiet presence and assistance had saved him. Later, when he was well again, he sold Reed the house and land, and Reed gave it to me for a retreat. ‘It saved Guy,’ he said, ‘and it may you.’ Not that I was collapsing, just nervy. Naturally Guy told you none of this.”

  “Naturally,” Max said, his tone speaking volumes.

  “Well, if you want discretion, Max, and the decency of keeping one’s feelings to oneself, you’ve come to the wrong place. I didn’t say person, I said place. I’m here alone much of the time, but alone or not, I play no games. This place saves one.”

  “From what?” Max asked, getting up to look out. “From civilization, I suppose. From gracious living, courtesy, style, and decent demeanor.”

  “Oh, Max, what a snob you are. I know all the metaphors about ill-tended gardens, with the hedges a thicket, the weeds in the drive, and the wind whistling in the trees. I prefer my nature wild, and don’t find it gloomy or demoralizing. In fact, I suspect this is what the Garden of Eden was like, if you want to know. No doubt most people think it resembled an expensive golf course. Can you imagine how many birds I have here in summer, because of the thickets? Of course it’s not your style but, if I may assume what I’m sure you would not call decent demeanor, I never supposed it was nor would have dreamed of submitting you to this wilderness, nor to me within it.”

  “My dear, of course.” Max struggled to reassume his wonted courtesy. “Perhaps I had better telephone for my taxi to return. I ought not to have tracked you down in this obtrusive way, and then criticized . . .”

  “There is no telephone. I thought you’d grasped the fact that I’m away from it all.”

  “But what if there was an emergency?”

  “Most emergencies are so only in the eyes of those having them, and can await my attentions. Suppose, after all, I were climbing in the Yukon. Reed and one or two of my most intimate friends know of a number down the road. It is that of a grasping and narrow-minded woman who has been promised a large reward for every time she comes and tells me of a call. There have not been many. When you decide to leave I shall drive you to town, and throw myself upon your mercies not to tell anyone where you found me, or how. Do you want to go now?”

  “Might I have a cup of tea after all?”

  Kate rose to her feet to comply with this request. “Perhaps,” she said to Max, “you would be more comfortable at the table. I do have a proper bathroom, by the way, in case you were wondering.”

  “Did Guy put that in, too?”

  “No. Guy built all this, but without indoor plumbing or an actual road in through the woods. I added these, and the Franklin stove over there.”

  “Do you mean you come up here in the winter?”

  “Of course. Its beauty cannot be imagined, though the silence, which used to be its greatest attraction, has been shattered. Don’t get me started on that. Those lunatic snowmobiles, screaming through the night with the noise of a buzz saw, disturbing hibernating animals and ruining people’s lawns. Fences are no protection from them, but woods, fortunately, are. And then there is a damn snow-making machine on some blasted ski slope, miles from here, but on a clear night I’m sure they can hear it in Schenectady. My lawyer is making inquiries.” Kate brought in the teacups and placed them on the table. “There is sugar, if you take it. People suppose I come away to commune with some spirit, my own or another. And I do, in a way. But I spend an unconscionable amount of time dreaming of the eradication of the internal combustion engine. A system of planes and railroads, great public transportation in the cities, bicycles for those who choose to pedal, and horses and buggies for the aged, the infirm, and the nostalgic. How does it strike you?”

  “I don’t think it will ever catch on.”

  “Alas, no. But who is to stop me dreaming of General Motors converting to electrically powered urban transportation? Max, what on earth brought you here? Even if you didn’t know I was roughing it quite to this extent, you might have known you wouldn’t find me in something like the Oak Room at the Plaza.”

  “I hoped,” Max said, stirring his tea and gazing into the distance, “to persuade you to take a trip with me. Now,” he added. “In your car,” he finally concluded, as though to get all the outrage on the table between them at once.

  Kate stared at the man. Had the president of the university or, for that matter, the shah of Iran turned up with such a suggestion, she would not have more readily begun, with an anxious pang, to doubt her own sanity. Or could Max, elegant, controlled, brilliant Max, have gone all suddenly and unexpectedly round the bend? Max must have seen a look of apprehension pass over her face.

  “An odd request, I know,” he said, pushing back his chair and crossing his long, elegantly trousered legs. Max was one of these men who would as soon have walked the streets in his underwear as reveal any flesh between his socks and trousers. Kate—and this was one of the more acrobatic features of her inconsistent nature—admired this. She tried, nobly, not to draw any conclusions about character from the kind of socks a man wore—that would be ridiculous—but at the same time she could not help noticing socks. Reed, who agreed with her in the matter of socks, comforted her in this strange intolerance. “I,” he informed her in consoling tones, “cannot abide red nail polish. One must tolerate oneself.” There is no question, Kate thought, I am beginning to think in the sort of stream of consciousness written by second-rate writers under the influence of imitators of Virginia Woolf.

  “An odd request indeed,” Kate said, concentrating her thoughts. “Where did you have in mind to flee to?”

  “Not flee,” Max said. “Visit. The coast of Maine. Cecily’s house.”

  “Now? Didn’t she die a short time ago? In England?” Never mind the length of his socks, Kate mused. Of what length are his thoughts?

  Max, having asked and received permission to smoke, lit a cigarette in a style that had departed, one thought, with the late Noel Coward. Suddenly Kate felt better. After all. Max, whatever his prejudices—and they were, God knew, both vehement and reactionary—was the sanest man she knew, no doubt because he was so absolutely certain about everything. Kate had once remarked of Max that she wished she were as certain of anything as Max was of everything, a comment originally made of Macaulay. Conversation with Max, despite this, was lively and interesting; one steered through his prejudices as through a mined harbor, but the view and the breeze were rewarding. A professor of art history. Max was equally renowned for his achievements as a scholar and his elegance as a bachelor and man about town. Widely disliked and envied, he had the talent of befriending anyone who appealed to him. These were not many, but they were always an interesting lot. Kate, received from the frigid hinterlands into the still chilly regions of acquaintainceship, had developed over the years a profound affection for Max. She dined with him, talked with him, exchanged with him witty letters which cost her, she suspected, more effort than they cost him. But the only trip she had ever expected to take with Max was in a taxi, being dropped home by him on his way to his elegant flat in Turtle Bay.

  “I’ll tell you all about it in a minute,” Max said.

  “Tell me about all this. . . .” He waved his cigarette. “I didn’t know you went in for depressions. But then, before the advent of Reed, I didn’t know you went in for marriage.”

  “Spoken like a true bachelor,” Kate said, “with just the proper tone of regret. Yet you know perfectly well if I weren’t married, you would never have arrived here and asked me to drive off with you into darkest Maine.”

  “The coast,” Max said. “Not darkest. It is true one is more comfortable with married women, but there are always exceptions. You are one.”

  “You are not. I have noticed that bachelors are far more fun to dine with than married men, even if one could dine with a married man unaccompanied by wife, which usually one can’t. Why do you think marriage has s
uch a dreadful effect upon men’s conversation, their manners, and their wit?”

  “Because bachelors must earn their supper by being charming.”

  “Balderdash. You could resign from the university tomorrow and never have to earn another supper by any means whatever.”

  “Perhaps. Reed’s conversation, manners, and wit seemed satisfactory to me.”

  “And to me, praise the Lord. I come here from time to time not to escape Reed, but myself. Reed is a miracle in understanding that, and in giving me this place. Yet Reed is not frightened by intimacy and you are. Perhaps the wit of bachelors is a defense against humanity. How little we ever know about people.”

  “A fact I have always roundly applauded. Surely one can have conversation with someone of similar tastes and intelligence without examining, in turn, the most agonizing details of each other’s intimate psyche.”

  “Well, I don’t agree about conversation, but I do about life in general. Which is why I am here, seeking an absence from the domination of things and the expectation of people.”

  “I completely deserve that and humbly apologize.”

  “Are we to drive from here to Maine without examining our psyches at least to the extent of learning why? Particularly since we are to travel in my car? You did mention that.”

  “Well, either in your car or in one we might rent in town. I didn’t, you know, tell Reed I was coming. He didn’t give away your location, but accepted with a certain amount of grace the knowledge that I would seek you out. I explained to him about Cecily.”

  “My heart beats as one with Reed’s, but we are not in telepathic communication. You were not to gather that from the absence of a telephone.”

  “Asperity suits you, Kate. Better than that dreadful male and oversized shirt. The great, cool, imperturbable Max Reston does not want to visit Cecily’s house alone. I throw myself upon your mercy. The neighbors up there think there may have been intruders. As her literary executor, I must go. As a man, I’m funking it alone. My need of you, while it partakes more of admiration than of passion, is intense. Would you come with me now? We can spend the night at a quiet civilized inn in a charming town on the coast, if you will honor me?”