The Scarlet Letters Read Free Page B

afternoons in the school gym.
    It helped, too, that Stuffy and Rosebud were both now married and away from home. Ambrose's family life, and even social life, were mostly reduced to Bertha, on whom her mother had largely given up after her adamant refusal to "come out" or even to attend any debutante parties. Bertha, stout, plain and emphatic, was allowed to come and go pretty much as she pleased. She adored Ambrose, and her passionate espousal of his side in any family dispute contributed to the comparative silence in which meals at the Vollards were held. And when, in Ambrose's first year at Columbia, he came home drunk one night and encountered his shocked mother in a corridor, it was Bertha who quieted the ensuing furor by suggesting that he move to a college dormitory, which the very next day he did.
    He had chosen Columbia because he had no wish to resume his old acquaintance with Chelton classmates at Yale or Harvard. The Chelton values, which he now associated with the parental ones, he had repudiated. As an angry young man he cultivated the radical elements of his new institution, inveighed against the trusts and found President Taft a sad step backwards after the great Teddy. But his political liberalism was tempered by moods of deep depression when nothing seemed really worth fighting for, when the world seemed a flourishing garden only for such noodles as Stuffy and Rosebud, and a desert for the likes of him. Then he would turn away from his dogmatic and obstreperous new friends and solace himself alone in his room with whiskey. He had no opportunity to travel or even to wine and dine expensively; his father, fearful that he would give his money to some leftist cause, kept him on a spare allowance.
    But he had one salvation; he read. As with his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, reading with him was a "disease." He reveled in the English poets, especially Byron and Shelley, whose fire and cynicism he tried to emulate; he delighted in the madness of Dostoyevsky, the oratory of Milton's Satan, and the violence of Ahab in the newly appreciated
Moby-Dick.
He wrote stories himself, about evil men who preyed on dolts, women who betrayed their lovers, bankers who degenerated into vampires, and clergymen who dwindled into sheep. He sent them to magazine editors who invariably rejected them, though one more percipient reader commented on the vigor of his style and suggested that he try his hand at more neutral subject matter. "For neutral read neuter," he snorted in disgust.
    It was Bertha who promoted the idea of his going to law school. She was just as antagonistic to the old world as he was, but more objective. And she was less wrapped up in Bertha than he was in Ambrose. She was capable of putting herself in his shoes while preserving her own outlook. But then she loved him, and he, as yet, loved no one.
    "Male and female twins aren't really twins, you know," she told him one day as they lunched in a Broadway café, which they frequently did now that she was enrolled in Barnard. "Obviously they can't resemble each other in all respects.
Vive la difference!
as the French say, though I'm not sure what good it's done
me.
But the point is that you've got a bigger brain than I do. And a bigger spirit, a bigger future. Your trouble is that you don't know what to do with it. You need time to decide. And the classic way to spend that time is in law school. For whatever you ultimately decide on, a law degree will be a bonus. Except perhaps in medicine, but I don't see you becoming a doctor."
    Of course he had thought of this. But now she helped it to take root. "Will Papa stake me to it?" he wondered.
    "Leave that to me!"
    In fact she had already crossed that bridge, by persuading her parents that the study of law was really the study of law and order and might have a mollifying effect on their wide-eyed son.
    Which it did. Or rather which Professor Gideon Gregg did. He was a small dry neat bald sexagenarian, with a voice so low that he