Ten North Frederick

by John O'Hara, Jonathan Dee

Genres: Classics; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The National Book Award-winning novel by the writer whom Fran Lebowitz called "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald"

Joe Chapin led a storybook life. A successful small-town lawyer with a beautiful wife, two over-achieving children, and aspirations to be president, he seemed to have it all. But as his daughter looks back on his life, a different man emerges: one in conflict with his ambitious and shrewish wife, terrified that the misdeeds of his children will dash his political dreams, and in love with a model half his age. With black wit and penetrating insight, Ten North Frederick stands with Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, Evan S. Connell's Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, the stories of John Cheever, and Mad Men as a brilliant portrait of the personal and political hypocrisy of mid-century America.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Release date: June 24, 2014

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 464

Sample

PART ONE

Edith Chapin was alone in her sewing room on the third floor of the house at Number 10 in Frederick Street. The room was warm, the day was cold and unbrightened by the sun. The shutters in the bay-window were closed, but the slats in the shutters were open, and Edith Chapin could, when it pleased her, go to the bay-window and look down on her yard and the two-story garage that had been a stable, and above and beyond the gilded figure of a trotting horse on the weather vane she could see roof upon roof upon third story upon third story of the houses on the rising hill. She would know the names of nearly all of the people who lived in them, she knew the names of the owners. She had spent her lifetime in the town, and it was easy to know who everyone was and where everyone lived. It was especially easy for Edith because she had always had a reputation for shyness, and it was not expected of her to make a fuss over people. She could notice them and study them, if it pleased her, without any further social effort on her part than simple politeness called for. It had always been that way.

At a gentle knock on her sewing-room door—two knocks, not an unnecessary third—Edith Chapin cleared her throat and said, gently, “Who is it?” Her enunciation was slow and precise.

“It’s me, ma’am. Mary.”

“Come in,” said Edith Chapin.

Mary was an Irishwoman from Glasgow with a clear skin and brown eyes full of self-respect behind her tortoise-shell spectacles. Her bust was abundant and her waist not thick.

“What is it, Mary?”

“It’s Mr. Hooker, the newspaper editor, wants to see you, ma’am.”

“To see me? Is he here?”

“Yes, ma’am. I put him in the sitting room.”

“Alone, or is Mrs. Hooker with him?”

“Nobody with him, just himself,” said Mary.

“Are there a lot of other people down there?”

“There’s quite a crush, ma’am, sitting and talking. There isn’t chairs for all.”

“I know. Did anyone offer Mr. Hooker a chair?” said Edith Chapin.

“Not by the time I left. I come right up. Maybe somebody did offer him one since.”

“Mm-hmm.” Edith Chapin nodded. “This is what I’d like you to do, Mary.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go downstairs, and if Mr. Hooker isn’t sitting with someone, if he’s just standing with the others, you go up to him and ask him if you can speak to him for a moment. Then when you get him out in the hall, tell him I’ll see him. But if he’s sitting down with some people—You see, I don’t want to make an exception for anybody. I haven’t seen anybody, as you know. But I think I ought to see Mr. Hooker. Such a good friend of Mr. Chapin’s.”

“A great admirer of Mr. Chapin’s. Great. The article yesterday, it made you realize if you didn’t already.”

“Yes, that’s why I would like to make an exception in his case.”

“Will I bring you a cup of tea, ma’am?”

“No, no thanks. I don’t want him to stay that long. Remember now, if he’s sitting down with the others, don’t single him out. But if he’s standing, it’ll look as though he had an appointment with me.”

“I understand perfectly, ma’am,” said Mary.

“You can bring me a cup of tea after he’s gone. I’d like a cup of tea and two soft-boiled eggs. Some toast and some of that grape jelly, if there’s any left.”

“There’s a whole new jar I opened.”

“Oh, then there was some more. I was sure we had some left. Where did you find it?”

“It was in with the currant, on that shelf. It didn’t have the label on it.”

“Oh, that’s where it was. And some cigarettes when you bring the tea. It might be a good idea if you put the cigarettes under a napkin. Some of the older ladies . . .”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mary, and left.

Edith Chapin composed herself in the ladderback rocking chair, and was so arranged a few minutes later when Mary’s knock came again. She knocked twice, and waited, then knocked twice again.

“Yes?” Edith Chapin called out.

“It’s me, ma’am, with Mr. Hooker,” said Mary.

“Come in, please,” said Edith Chapin.

Mary swung the door open, making way for the man. “Mr. Hooker, ma’am.”

“Good morning, Robert,” said Edith Chapin.

“Good morning, Edith.”

Mary closed the door behind her.

Robert Hooker went to Edith Chapin and took her extended hand in his two. “Edith, I call myself a dealer in words, but today I have none to offer.”

“Today, but not yesterday.”

“Oh, you saw my editorial?”

“If I hadn’t seen it on my own—you have no idea how many people called up about it. Joe would have been—well, pleased is hardly the word. I consider it one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read, and not only because it was about Joe.”

“It was from the heart, Edith.”

“Oh, yes. Yes,” said Edith Chapin.

“The Bar Association is having it reprinted, I thought you’d like to know. Henry Laubach called up this morning and ordered a thousand cards, about the size of a postcard, with my small tribute to Joe printed on them. I feel signally honored, but it’s a pretty empty honor, when I think of—well, I wish the occasion hadn’t arose. Arisen.”

“Joe was very fond of you, Robert.”

“Well, I always hoped so. We didn’t see nearly enough of each other. In this crazy old newspaper business, I work in my shirt-sleeves, you know. Joe, the soul of dignity. Not what they call a stuffed shirt, by any means. But as I said in my editorial, the very presence of Joseph B. Chapin in a courtroom provided the room with the dignity one associates with the court of law, but so often lacking in these days of spectacular circus tactics.”

“Joe would have liked that, every word of it. The dignity of the law was precious to him,” said Edith Chapin.

“How are you, Edith? That’s a foolish question, of course. What must be going on inside, but I don’t think there’s a man or woman in town that expected you to behave any differently than you are. It’s a rare sight to see such courage in these days.”

“Courage?” said Edith Chapin. “I have no courage, Robert. I am so used to living the kind of life I’ve led that now, at a time like this, it’s one advantage of having a naturally retiring disposition. I’ve always lived for my husband and my family, nothing else. No outside interests, no hobbies, really. So that now, if I were to make some display of how I am feeling, it wouldn’t be at all typical of me, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“Even my friendships, they had to come through my husband. If they were friends of his, they could be friends of mine, but I was thinking this very morning how few women friends I have. Oh, I like women, I have nice relationships with the members of my sex. I suppose I’m as womanly a woman as the word could mean. But when you have reached my age—and you know how old I am, Robert. But as I was saying, if you’ve lived in a town all your life, except for boarding school, you would think I might have formed some close friendships with women of my age and so on. But the truth is, so many men came to this house, clients and friends and associates and men in the political world, that I neglected my contacts with my women friends. Do you know that outside the family, I haven’t received a single woman acquaintance in the past three days?”

“A great symbol of your devotion to your husband, Edith.”

“Well, I hope it will be taken for that, and not as an indication that I don’t like the members of my own sex, and don’t interest myself in their problems, because I do. When things settle down here I’m going to have to find something to do with my time. I have no idea what sort of thing I’ll do, but I imagine anything I do will involve working with other women, and I don’t want to start with any more handicaps than I have already.”

“You have no handicap in whatever you do,” said Hooker. “Whatever you decide to do.”

“Oh, that’s nice of you, but you forget my—shyness,” said Edith Chapin. “Whenever I had to go to any public function with Joe, oh, it was sheer torture. I was always afraid. Not afraid I’d do the wrong thing, or say the wrong thing. I think one’s natural instincts or upbringing carry one through. But my—reserve—that’s what I was afraid might be misunderstood. Has it been, Robert?”

“Not one bit. Not one bit. I know the people of this town. I know what they think. I know how they feel. It’s my business to know. And I can reassure you on that point. Your what you call shyness and reserve, that’s one of the things that has endeared you to them.”

“Joe was so good with people. He could mix with them and be friendly, to the exact degree that he wanted to be. He really could handle people, couldn’t he?”

“One of his greatest gifts.”

“It was hard for him, too, you know,” said Edith Chapin.

“It was, Edith?”

“Yes. Joe was not naturally gregarious. When we were first married, I think it was before you moved here, Joe confined himself to the people he grew up with. Two or three friends that we saw a great deal of, and as a matter of fact, Joe actually used to seem to prefer the company of older men. Judge Larkin. Old Mr. English, Doctor English’s father, that is. And they seemed to enjoy his company, too. It was a great change when he decided to enter public life. He had to force himself to be patient and tolerant of other people. But I remember his saying to me later on, how he’d been missing a lot of fun out of life by not getting about more in his young manhood.”

“I never knew that, Edith. I never knew that. I would have said that Joe Chapin was one of the greatest mixers I ever saw.”

“And he was, but he had to learn it. It wasn’t the natural thing for him to do, the way it is with some men. He practically made a study of it. But of course Joe had one thing I never have had. Confidence. Complete confidence in himself.”

“The aristocrat, in the better sense,” said Hooker.

“Well, of course he didn’t like that word, but I’m inclined to agree with you.”

“You have it too, Edith.”

“Oh, no. Not a bit.”

“I think so. I think you have. You may be shy, but I’ve watched you, I’ve studied you. You may not be the outgoing type, the extrovert, but people know that underneath that shyness is a woman of great courage and principle. Look at you now. If they could see you now they’d know they were right. It’s a great honor for me, you letting me have these few moments to pay my respects.”

“I wonder why I let myself prattle on this way. I’ve talked with you more than any other person. In fact, I haven’t really talked to anyone else at all.”

“It’s a great honor for me. I suppose we newspaper men, we’re told so many things in confidence, there must be something about us that makes people trust us.”

Edith Chapin hesitated. “It must be more than that, too,” she said. “Thank you for coming to see me. It was very kind of you. And later, when things—settle down—I’m going to ask you for some advice.”

“I am at your service.”

“And remember me to Kitty.”

“She wanted to come with me, but I was sure there’d be too many people. By the way, I had a very pleasant visit with Joe Junior downstairs. Amazing, how much like his father.”

“Yes, at least in appearance. They’re really quite different.”

“That’s what I meant. This is a grand old house, isn’t it?”

“Full of memories, happy ones and sad ones.”

“The way a house should be,” said Hooker.

“Frederick Street isn’t fashionable any more, but it’s much more convenient than Lantenengo Street. We’ve always had the noise and the smoke from the trains, and some of the neighbors on William Street leave a lot to be desired, but we’re used to it.”

“A speaking tube. I guess there aren’t many houses left with a speaking tube.”

“Oh, it has all those things. I suppose you noticed the dumbwaiter. And on the second floor, the busybody.”

“I had a story about busybodies last year. I sent one of my reporters out and he counted I think eighty-seven left in the whole town.”

“When I was a girl I don’t suppose there were eighty-seven houses that didn’t have one,” said Edith Chapin. She smiled her sad smile and Robert Hooker went to her and shook her hand in both of his.

“You are very brave, Edith Chapin.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“And call me for anything, anything at all.”

“Thank you again, Robert,” she said.

He braced his shoulders like the National Guard lieutenant he once had been, and marched out of the sewing room. She waited until she heard his step on the second-floor landing, then went to the speaking tube and blew the whistle.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mary.

“I’m ready, Mary,” said Edith Chapin.

• • •

The will of Joseph B. Chapin contained no surprises. It was an orderly document, meant to be read in public. Certain sums were to be paid to servants and charities, and those sums were specified in dollars, but the bulk of the estate was in stocks, bonds, and mortgages, identified by name or location.

The sum of $100,000 was to be paid to the son, Joseph Benjamin Chapin Junior, and a like sum to the daughter, Ann Chapin. The remainder was to be used to create a trust fund for the widow, Edith Chapin. Upon her death the fund was to be divided equally between the son and the daughter. Personal items such as cuff links, cigarette cases, pearl studs, watches, watch chains were to be the property of the widow, but it was suggested that they might be distributed among friends: Chapin’s law partner, his physician, the steward of the Gibbsville Club and the first, as yet unborn, grandson.

Edith Chapin, as she always had been, was a woman in comfortable circumstances. Now, in fact, in 1945, she was in more than comfortable circumstances. She was rich. But it would not be known that she was rich. The details of her wealth were known to only a few persons, who were not likely to discuss those details with others not privileged to have the information. The directors of her bank would know, her husband’s law partner would know, the county Register of Wills would know. But there was no gossip value in the size of Joe Chapin’s estate or the terms of his will. He had left more money than anyone had expected him to leave, but not so much more that the amount was sensational. If he had died poor, or enormously wealthy, the public, the public curiosity would have had to be satisfied. He had not died poor, and only a little richer (and that was to be expected of a man like Joe Chapin); consequently there would be no dislocation of the Chapin family status, and the status had always been described as in comfortable circumstances. There was a butcher on the West Side of town who had less money than Edith Chapin, who lived on the East Side of town. The butcher had a Cadillac, and so had Edith Chapin, but the butcher’s was newer. The butcher’s son was studying for the priesthood and was no great drain on his father’s income; but Joe Chapin Junior was not studying for the priesthood, and he would be no great drain on his mother’s income. The 18th Street butcher was said to be getting rich; the Frederick Street widow was said to be in comfortable circumstances.

The butcher was not in attendance at the funeral of Joseph Benjamin Chapin, which took place in Trinity Church. The butcher and Joe Chapin never had spoken a word to each other in all their lives, and yet the butcher would have been surprised to discover how much Joe Chapin knew about him. A clever man who is a lawyer and bank director, and whose family have lived in a town through three generations, acquires and usually retains a great deal of information on his fellow citizens. And it was too bad, in some ways, that the butcher and the lawyer had not been friends, or at least closer acquaintances. There was only a small difference in their ages, an inconsiderable difference; and the two men had several matters in common. Each man had a son and a daughter, disappointing children. Both men had remote wives. from whom they never had been separated. And now, with most of life gone in the one case and all of it gone in the other, it was too late for either man to realize his great ambition. The butcher had wanted to be heavyweight prize-fight champion of the world. Joe Chapin had always wanted to be President of the United States, and thought he ought to be.

One man among the imposing company of honorary pallbearers in Trinity Church knew how deep and serious Joe Chapin’s ambition had been. One man knew, and another suspected. The man who knew was Arthur McHenry, Joe’s law partner. The man who suspected was Mike Slattery, state senator and chairman of the Republican county committee. Arthur McHenry always thought Joe Chapin would have made a good President, and Mike Slattery hardly thought of it at all. Arthur McHenry knew more of the thoughts and deeds of Joseph Benjamin Chapin than any other man had known, and through all phases of Joe Chapin’s life; his boyhood, his young manhood, his middle and declining years. He knew how much Joe Chapin depended upon him, and he knew that Joe Chapin believed he depended on no one. Joe Chapin never required a pledge of secrecy before revealing a matter to Arthur McHenry. And there were few matters he did not reveal. Indeed, it was not so much that he revealed a secret as bestowed it. In the reporting of an intimate detail, the pledge of secrecy was taken for granted, as Arthur McHenry himself was taken for granted. From another man the details that Joe Chapin felt free to discuss with Arthur McHenry would have been distasteful, but there was a kind of arrogant and trusting innocence in Joe Chapin’s revelations to Arthur McHenry, and Arthur McHenry respected the innocence. Somewhere along the way he realized that Joe Chapin’s dependence on him gave him strength. Seemingly his status was secondary to Joe’s; Joe was a handsomer man, possessed of immediately effective charm in the clubhouse or the courtroom, and it had been more or less that way since kindergarten. But Arthur McHenry knew that the charm was less effective when he was not around. Whenever he returned from a trip of long duration Arthur McHenry could see that Joe Chapin’s frown had become set; a few days later, with their hours of confidings and revelations, the frown would begin to disappear. “We’ve missed you, Arthur,” Joe would say—and never understand that he was uttering more than a politeness. With realization Arthur McHenry became more comfortable in the relationship. It was quite enough for him to have the consciousness of his indispensability to the only man he loved.

The man who might have done more than he did to expedite Joe Chapin’s ambition was not a fellow to waste love on anyone who would not return it. Mike Slattery was easy to define; too easy. He was Irish, second generation, and he had the pleasant, unlined face of a well-fed, successful parish priest. He had the look of a man who spent a great deal of time with the barber, the manicurist, and the bootblack. He had small, hairless hands, and small feet that in another time and land would have been expert in step-dancing. He was exquisitely tailored, always in dark blue, and always wore a black knitted necktie with a pearl stickpin. His Irishness was a secret weapon. He was frankly and proudly Irish, but the Irishness was actually a means of allowing the non-Irish to succumb to self-deception. He could tell a funny story, and he had a quick wit, and no one would ever have mistaken him for anything but what he was, racially. He was good company, not to be ignored. But where the non-Irish made their mistake was in assuming that that was all he was; a jovial man from the Emerald Isle. He didn’t fool the Irish; they saw through him while yielding a sort of loyalty to his accomplishments. But the non-Irish had to learn through associations and battles that he was a realistic, crafty, treacherous politician. He was contemptuous of the common Irish, and they sensed it, but he was the man to go to for favors, which whenever possible he granted, and with the favors and their pride in his prestige he kept them in line. As soon as he suspected that Joe Chapin was beginning to act like a man who wanted to be President he decided that Chapin was not presidential timber, and from that moment on Joe Chapin never had a chance. And Mike Slattery liked Joe Chapin. Joe Chapin was a gentleman, generally predictable in his actions and reactions and thus not likely to be troublesome. Also, he had a boyishness about him that was attractive to Mike Slattery, the father of four girls and one of them a nun. Much of what he did for Joe Chapin he did because he used him as a son, without being responsible as Joe’s father. And some of what he did for Joe Chapin he did because he admired Edith Chapin. “If I’d been a Protestant I’d have married Edith Chapin,” he once said, leaving no room for doubt that Edith would have accepted him.

Funerals were a part of Mike Slattery’s life, and they might have been as much so even if he had not become a politician. This one was going well, predictably well. He looked over to the pew in which Edith Chapin, heavily veiled, sat impassive with her son and daughter and her own brother. At a Protestant funeral someone might faint, or have a heart attack, but there never was as much weeping, quiet or otherwise, as at a Catholic funeral. Mike Slattery did not weep at funerals or anywhere else; he had not wept twice in his entire manhood. This one time he had wept was on the day that Margaret, his daughter, had come to him and told him quietly that her mind was made up; she had a true vocation and was joining the Sacred Heart nuns. And it was not sadness that had made him weep that day; it was for fatherly joy, that this plain girl had found a life for herself in which she would be happy. And there was pride, too. The Sacred Heart were an aristocratic order, and if a daughter of his was going to be a nun, it was nice to be able to think of her with the daughters of the best Catholic families. If Edith Chapin had been a nun, she would have been a Sacred Heart nun. The presence of her son and daughter beside her in the pew detracted not at all from Mike Slattery’s fancy of Edith Chapin as a nun, and the veil she wore gave a realistic touch to the fancy. In his life as a politician he had had to hear and make use of many intimate facts about many people, including what he called their bed life. He had used the secret homosexuality of one political opponent to advantage; he had told an associate to get out of politics long before the nymphomania of the man’s wife became common knowledge. No one had any information that could be used against Mike Slattery, but there were no peculiarities, perversions, excesses or denials that were unheard of by Mike Slattery—and nothing shocked him. But he never had been able to imagine Edith Chapin without her clothes on, nor Edith and Joe Chapin in the positions of bed life. He could not picture Edith Chapin getting out of her tub, drying herself. She was always to him a rather tall woman who was always fully dressed, who had a bosom without nipples. But along the way he had learned a thing or two about Joe Chapin, and what he had learned contradicted the notion that Edith Chapin was no more than a head on a virginal torso. Mike Slattery’s repeated inability to illustrate in his mind the thought of Edith Chapin with her legs spread, ready to receive her husband (or any other man), was, he had sense enough to know, a part of her attraction for him. And she attracted him; always had.

Not so Ann, her daughter, a young woman who had been loosely called beautiful when people would enumerate the beauties among the girls of the Gibbsville upper crust. No one ever had called Edith Chapin beautiful, but in Mike Slattery’s estimation she came closer to beauty than Ann did. His standards were his own and never stated, but Mike Slattery never had been known to call beautiful a woman who had any connection with sin. Ann Chapin Musgrove had been more or less vaguely connected with sin as far back as Miss Holton’s School. The four Slattery girls had gone to Miss Holton’s and the stories the girls brought home from Miss Holton’s had sometimes given Mike Slattery useful leads for subsequently useful information. Ann Chapin’s smoking was not extremely useful, but it had prepared Mike Slattery for the later news that Ann Chapin and one of the Stokes girls had gone for a ride down country in a butcher’s delivery truck. The girls had left the school after the eleven o’clock geometry class, wearing their school uniforms. As part of the adventure the truck had had to get stuck in the spring mud, “miles” from the main highway. It was seven o’clock in the evening before the girls got home. At eleven o’clock in the evening Mike Slattery had persuaded Joe Chapin not to have the boy fired. “Get him fired and you’ll never hear the end of it,” said Mike. “You handle the people at Miss Holton’s. I’ll take care of the boy.” There was no traceable connection between the frolic with the Chapin and Stokes girls and the boy’s departure. The boy left town and, as Mike said to his own wife, never knew what hit him.

Nineteen years ago, that was.

Not so long, at that.

Still, pretty long, when you consider that Edith Chapin was only forty when it happened. A woman forty is only a year out of her thirties, and Mike Slattery had three daughters in their thirties and he considered them young girls.

For no more than a second or two he was tempted to turn around and see if he could find his wife’s face in the congregation. He quickly conquered the temptation; it would not look well, and besides he knew she would be somewhere in the church. Peg Slattery didn’t have to be told twice which funerals to go to and which not. Her attendance at a funeral was to some extent a measure of the importance of the deceased or the survivors. She attended all politicians’ funerals, regardless of party; practically all lawyers’ funerals; all clergymen’s funerals, and nearly all funerals for doctors, bankers, merchants, officers of fraternal orders and veterans’ organizations; and popular freaks, such as old athletes, crippled newsdealers, Chinese laundrymen, canal-boat captains, aged Negro waiters, retired railroad conductors and enginemen, and children of unusually large families (ten or more). Joe Chapin came under several classifications and was in addition a personal friend, although Peg Slattery never had been inside his house. At the funeral Peg Slattery and her daughter Monica sat where they could be seen. With long practice she had mastered the impersonal bow for funerals and other state occasions: if someone looked at her, met her eye, she would nod, and if the person chose to take it as a bow, a bow it was. If the person was not someone to be bowed to, she would quickly turn away, and the person could think, because she had turned away, that no bow had been intended. In any case it was an unsmiling bow, or nod, or mere inclination of the head, quite suitable for use at funerals and other solemn occasions. The bow, or nod, was a part of her awareness of her position as the wife of Mike Slattery, a man to whom powerful people came for favors, who was powerful enough himself to grant the favors—and who discussed everything with her. No bridge was built over an obscure creek, no boy got an appointment to Annapolis, no reassessment of valuable property was put through without a discussion between Mike Slattery and Peg. It had taken some men thirty years to realize that fact, during which time they had antagonized Peg Slattery by ignoring her.