The Young Apollo and Other Stories Read Free

principle of political compromise. "I know about that, Uncle Ralph. I am very much aware of Dad's alliance with O'Shaugnessy. But there still have to be limits. I have been up to Providence and talked to members of the legislature. Democrats, I grant you, but still men who know what they're talking about. Kraft has had a hand in too many purchased elections not to be known, among the Republican Party faithful, as the 'King Fixer.' I cannot sit by and see Dad stick his fine fingers in such slime."
    What could I do? What could anyone do? Of course George surrendered, and the name of Kraft was not even submitted to the Senate. The alliance with O'Shaugnessy tottered, but it survived.
    The beautiful Bella, Lion's brave and stalwart widow, who had been married to him for only a year when he died, was not enthusiastic about the proposed volume, but she muted her objections because her father-in-law cared so strongly. She came to me privately.
    "The senator insists," she told me, "that the book contain a goodly number of Lion's poems. Indeed, I think he sees your text primarily as an introduction to them. Of course, as he is printing the volume and paying for everything, he can do as he pleases. But, Ralph, I'm sure you feel as Ella and Elihu and I do about the poems. We're hoping you can limit the number and not include any part of the unfinished epic. Need I say more?"
    No, she needn't. Lion's odes and sonnets and elegies and even the famous epic are dead, dead, dead. You couldn't exactly call them bad, or even embarrassing; they are filled with noble thoughts and grave ideals. But they are lapidary. They are dull. Lion was one who could inspire genius without being one. Maybe his life was genius. But it had to be lived, not printed.
    But yes, I will write the little book. Even if it bodes to be a work of contrived hagiography. After all, it will be read only by a few relatives and friends; it will be soon forgotten. I can feel Lion's eye on me. "Do it for Dad," he seems to be saying. "It may help him to remember me, as he passionately wants to."

Other Times, Other Ways
    C AMILLA H UNTER HAD NOT thought that lightning could strike twice at the same family, nor that at age eighty she would be forced to relive in 1981 the same kind of Wall Street scandal that had disgraced her husband in 1937. Back then, David Hunter had been implicated in the embezzlements of his mighty boss, Jonathan Stiles. It was true that their lawyer had argued that David, as the most junior partner in the brokerage house of Stiles & Son, might not have been fully aware of the criminal aspects of the jobs he was carrying out for his boss, but the jury had thought otherwise, and Camilla had had to admit reluctantly to herself that her husband's raiding of her own little fiduciary fund, entrusted to his firm, could hardly have been at the instigation of the great Stiles. Both men, at any rate, had been sentenced to stiff terms in Sing Sing, and the presses of the nation had rung with denunciations of the guilty brokerage house. Stiles had been held up to the scorn of the society in which Camilla had been raised as a "traitor to his class," and backs had been turned on her husband even after he had served his sentence.
    And now here it was upon her again, almost half a century later, as if the windows of the neat little parlor of her modest Madison Avenue apartment had been blown open by a black storm and her small trove of lares and penates scattered over the floor. Could a white-haired but impeccably trim and still unwrinkled widow, who had managed to survive everything with her dignity intact, not be allowed to relish the seeming serenity that she had so precariously achieved? Evidently not. Bronson Newton, the husband of her favorite niece, Genevieve, considered the star of the family for the vast fortune he had made on the stock market in a scant five years' time, had been indicted for using inside information in his trading and sentenced to two years in