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56 / Grace Hegger Lewis In her autobiography, Grace pulled no punches in detailing her husband’s peccadilloes and blaming him for the failure of their marriage. Source: Grace Hegger Lewis, With Love from Gracie (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 324–25. I had thought that Katonah was too far from New York for casual acquaintances to drop in, but drop in they did without telephoning and they expected to be fed, given many drinks, and to sit about for hours talking. And Hal welcomed them, for Mantrap was not the absorbing, fact-­ finding job that the previous novels had been, and he was not enjoying the Edith Wharton atmosphere of this community of old New Yorkers related by blood or business interests who were fast becoming relics of a changing order. “Relics,” that’s what Hal thought they were and he was not interested in them even as copy. Hal had chosen the empty chauffeur’s cottage to work in, and at midday I would sometimes bring a picnic basket and thermos bottles and Wells, and we would eat lunch on a hilltop out of sight of the house. In the late afternoon if there were no unexpected guests we would play tennis for an hour, tennis which had never progressed farther than ball-­ batting, or we would drive in the car un­ til we came to one of those beckoning dirt roads which the motorist flashes by regretfully, and leaving the car we would walk for several miles in the deep country. Cocktails before dinner had become a habit and Hal liked the mellow haze of three or four which enveloped him after his walk or tennis sweat, his cold shower, and a clean shirt. There was no doubt he was drinking more, much more, than he did in Europe. Everyone we knew did. When we had guests there were more drinks after dinner, and then Hal would be doubly amusing, then argumentative , then a nasty remark, an abrupt exit, and my embarrassed good-­ byes to discomfited and often angry guests. Hal was asleep. Equally bad were the evenings when we were invited out to dinner, and I would go to his room and find him sitting on the edge of the bed in his under- 152 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered drawers, his face vacant with drink, and muttering: “Grace, I will not go to this goddamned stupid party. They only want me to make themselves important. You go.” And go I would, but how I dreaded the lies I would have to tell. Hopefully I suggested that we have only two cocktails at dinner and nothing else during the day when we were alone and that I keep the “cellar” in my bedroom instead of his. Skeptically he agreed but on the third day he was so wildly voluble at lunch that afterward I counted the bottles in my bedroom closet and found two missing. Obviously this was the wrong way to go about it. I felt degraded by the whole maneuver. Degraded, too, by his not very skillful surreptitious kissing of the casual wives of his casual visitors. Also by the unknown female voice which had been calling him frequently only to ring off when I came to the telephone. What did he get out of this philandering? I have been told that what he aroused in women was the mothering instinct, which must have been a disappointment to him and yet at bottom that was what he was seeking. On many a lone woman’s door did he bang at midnight, demanding noisily to come in, demanding a drink, then talking until dawn about his dissatisfaction with life though with no definite complaint , and suddenly falling asleep. If he had been very tight he would remember nothing when he awoke, and if the woman were very pretty and she told him that she had listened to him talk, and nothing more, he would be furious at the lost opportunity. He seemed unable to recognize that the sexual act was not important to him, that making love was rather a nuisance, and though he was essentially masculine and abnormalities of any kind were shocking to him, he could not supply the confident and robust elements which make for success in a love affair. As he did not believe in his own capacity to evoke love, it was to be that this realization of his inadequacy drove him to the solace of drink. In his novels there are no...

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