The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  Mother was as rational as she was plain, as sensible as she was unimpressable. I think of her now as she was in her later years, tall, gaunt, a bit bent, with dyed brown hair and a great hook nose and small, darting eyes, walking around and around the campus, even on the wettest afternoons, dressed in brown tweed with a small brown ridiculous beret pulled tightly about her oval head. I am sure the boys called her a witch, but I hope they thought her a friendly one. She was sometimes formidable and sometimes almost scaringly detached as a parent, but she always tried to make her girls feel that they were as important as Pa’s sacred boys.

  I don’t know how good a headmaster’s wife she was, by ordinary standards. She wasn’t gracious; she wasn’t stately, and she made a poor enough show on the dais on Prize Day squinting nearsightedly at the titles of the volumes that she handed out. But she never forgot a boy’s name, and she would argue with them over games of chance and in debates on “parlor night” as hotly as if they had been contemporaries. She was absolutely democratic, in an early Boston transcendentalist way, and she helped Pa to keep faculty feuds over precedence to a minimum. Above all, she could maintain Pa on an even keel when everyone else had failed. I think it must have been clear to all their intimates that she adored him (how that man was adored!) but she was never in the least a submissive wife.

  I remember one summer at the Cape when Pa had been paying too much attention to a pretty neighbor (oh, yes, Mr. Aspinwall, that happened—you needn’t look so shocked—maybe not actual infidelities, but cozy chats in windowseats and long, long walks on the beach) that Mother simply disappeared for three days. It turned out later that she had been in a hotel in Boston. When she came back, as seemingly cool and detached as ever, without offering the smallest excuse or explanation of where she had been, Pa, who had been frenzied by her absence, was a chastened man. He might have endured being left alone with his boys, but never with his girls.

  We children grew up without ever feeling that we belonged to any particular group or class. Pa and Mother, of course, were supreme at Justin, but from the beginning we knew that Justin was not the real world. The real world was a summer world, seen on trips to Europe or at the Cape, and although it treated Pa and Mother with respect, it was the kind of respect that people might pay to the sovereigns of a small Pacific Island kingdom, more exotic than powerful, not quite to be taken seriously, perhaps even a bit ridiculous. I thought I could sense as a child among the graduates and the parents of the boys that curious half paternal, half protective, almost at times half contemptuous, attitude of men of affairs for academics, and I was determined that I should lead my own life in such a way as to be able ultimately to bid a plague on both kinds of houses. I would be neither sneered upon nor a sneerer. I would be an actress, a poet, a great artist and return to Justin only when Pa begged me, as a special treat, to come back and perform to the dazzled boys.

  I should like to skip as quickly as possible over my first big mistake. Green as I then was, I still blush for it. I eloped with a young man whom I met at a tea dance given for me in Boston when I was seventeen by my great-aunt, Cordelia Hooper. His name was Cabell Willetts; he came of an old, devout Catholic family, and he had never in his life been away from his bigoted old mother, even to go to boarding school. He was mild and sweet and weak and ultimately stubborn. It’s easy to see what he represented to me: he was the reverse in every respect of what Pa would have wanted a graduate of Justin to be.

  I had hoped that my family would be shocked and by like token, impressed, by a daughter who had found her consolation in an older faith and in an older God, married to a husband who had always been above the juvenilities of football and “school spirit.” I should have known better. The eloping couple were greeted back with smiles and open arms, and Pa told me, in a private conference, shaking his head in his gravest manner, that he, too, had had his doubts over the historic break with Rome. If I, like Cardinal Newman, had been losing my sleep over the idea of a church founded on a king’s lust for Anne Boleyn, who was Frank Prescott, a simple, groping parson, to say I was a foolish worrier?

  Really! Anyone who hadn’t known Pa would have thought he was making fun of me. What was I to Anne Boleyn or she to me? The only queen who entered my mind in the wretched three years of my married life was Eleanor of Guienne who said of Louis VII that she had married a monk. But she, at least, got her divorce. Willetts and his mother adamantly refused me mine, and when I finally left the house in Dedham, with all its stucco virgins and gold crosses and jewel-studded missals, I felt lucky to be able to take the clothes on my back.

  I could have established a residence in a state with easy divorce laws, but at that point I could not be bothered. I went to New York and to Greenwich Village and rented a studio and tried to paint. It was what I call my “Edna St. Vincent Millay period,” and the less questions you ask about it, the better. What? You have none? How disappointing. But, of course, I must remember that you are interested only in Pa and that I exist simply in the biological fact that he sired me. It is a point of view to which I have become very accustomed.

  I don’t pride myself that my bohemian life scandalized Pa. I doubt if he wasted a serious thought upon it. Mother occasionally came to New York and insisted on staying at the studio and sleeping on a daybed; she shut her eyes to my men and opened them to my paintings. I think she was honest when she said that she liked them, and I have a suspicion that she envied me my independence. When we entered the war in 1917, I went abroad with the Red Cross, relieved and exalted to see the chaos of the world, and Pa, thoroughly approving of my adventurousness and jealous that I should be so near the Front and he so far, wrote me long, introspective letters to the effect that a lifetime’s education was not the equivalent of a minute of Armageddon.

  No, alas, I don’t have those letters. I always destroy letters. It’s a leftover from the days when they might have proved embarrassing. And, of course, I knew that Pa was not really writing to me; he was simply soliloquizing. We did not communicate, in the sense of his truly thinking of me and I of him, until more than a year after the war, in Paris where I had remained, an appropriate addition to the riffraff of Americans who could not face a return to a normalcy for which they tried to believe that the war had disabled them. Oh, Aspinwall, don’t shake your head; I know they weren’t all riffraff. But I was. And I was well aware that Charley Strong was not. It was over Charley that my first real bout with Pa began.

  He was one of Pa’s golden boys, Justin ’11, senior prefect and football captain, a kind of American Rupert Brooke, at least in romantic appearance, blond, with sleepy grey eyes, a bit on the short side, but muscular and stocky, terribly serious and sincere, a savage tackle but gentle as a mother with children, honorable, naïve, charming, the kind of man who would protect his lady fair from a hundred wild Indians but whom she would have to protect from a swindling salesman—in short a magazine-cover hero, a Parsifal, Pa’s ideal because the opposite of Pa.

  What, you may ask, was such a man doing with such a gal as me? Was not the chrism upon his head, on mine the dew? They were, indeed, but Mrs. Browning’s next line applied also, for death did dig the level where these agreed. Poor Charley was a shrapnel victim in 1919, one of his lungs torn to shreds, and he had stayed on in Paris, because, as he put it, there wasn’t enough of him to be worth taking home. He was condemned, but still beautiful in his decline, and the puzzled hurt look in those now desperately searching grey eyes was enough to turn to soapsuds a much harder heart than mine.

  We had met, of course, at Justin in the early days, but he had been one of those athletic adolescents who will not so much as look at the other sex until complete maturity. And if he had been interested earlier, he would not have looked at me, a snappish, pigtailed, awkward girl who tried to conceal her sticks of legs in blue-stockings. “Billy Budd,” I called him, in revenge for his indifference, but he was too unlettered to know what I meant. In Paris after the war, however, our physical positions had been reversed. I had
“filled out,” and Charley, poor darling, was a coughing shadow of the former football captain. He was dumfounded by the apparition in a city that symbolized to him the snatching of the day of a daughter of Francis Prescott.

  We met at Horace Havistock’s, that mean old friend of Pa’s whose final decadence, after a lifetime of sipping tea in Walter Gay interiors, cackling gossip and collecting the most banal kind of impressionist canvases, was to assemble in his chaste halls the forlornly aging youth of the lost generation. You smile. Do you know him? Well, that’s the way he is, isn’t it? He wanted, the old vulture, to console himself for his own wasted life by surrounding himself with wasted youth.

  Charley and I sat on his terrace till early morning, talking about what was real and what was sham. Charley had become very intense and passionate about finding what he called “some clean little rag of truth in the dirty laundry of the world.” What he wanted to know of me was whether or not the prewar Cordelia Prescott had been real. Had we actually existed, I and my sisters, in those quaint far-off Justin days? For if we had existed, then perhaps Justin had existed, and, of course, Pa, too, and how could he reconcile Pa and God (for Pa was God, I suppose) with what he had seen in the trenches?

  He wanted dogma, whether from heaven or hell, and he certainly got it, for I was then at my most dogmatic. I told him that reality consisted of intensity of emotional experience and that we lived solely in our feelings. We had only the present, and very little of that; most people, in fact, never lived at all. The past existed only in remembered emotion: therefore the retained horror of the trenches was more real than the vague, sweet pastoral idyll that had been Justin. Charley listened to me carefully. I don’t believe that anyone had ever spoken to him with such authority since the days when he had been under the spell of another Prescott. It was like a road company performance of Tannhauser, where the same soprano doubles for Elizabeth and Venus. Charley must have felt that he had heard that voice before.

  “There is sensation,” he kept muttering, “and there is Paris.”

  “And they’re one and the same. Let’s make the most of it!”

  We became lovers, but not as soon as you might have thought in those easy days. I had first to overcome his scruples about Pa. It took me three months to erode the paralyzing vision of his old headmaster in the pulpit, a hand and forefinger outstretched. Poor Charley wanted to marry me, but I was still undivorced, and the absurdity of my legal position, shackled to a monk, was my trump card in persuading him that Pa himself would not wish me denied all sexual gratification. Yet for all my chatter, for all my efforts to liberalize his thinking, after our first night together Charley solemnly took my hand in his and told me that in the eyes of God, if there was a God, we were now man and wife.

  We lived as such, anyway. Charley rented a beautiful studio in the Place des Vosges, embarrassingly grand for my inadequate oils but ideal for parties, and we soon became well-known hosts to the floating expatriate world that made a fetish of disillusionment. One begins to find references to us now in the journals and letters of the period that are being published. There is a tendency to sentimentalize the “lost generation” and its Paris refuge, and I suppose that it did include some important writers and painters. But for every man of talent in our group, there were three drunks, and a drunk is a drunk the world over.

  One thing I will admit about old Havistock is that he was the first to recognize this. He early became disenchanted with the disillusioned. My liaison with Charley may have hastened the process. For all his vaunted freedom from prejudice he was shocked to the core and dropped us both. Perhaps he was afraid that Pa would hold him responsible. Or perhaps he simply made the old distinction of a nasty Victorian bachelor between the monde and the demimonde. A lady, at least one who had been born one, could not exist in both. Horace Havistock was a malevolent survival from an early Bourget novel.

  You mustn’t get the notion that Charley and I did nothing but carouse. He would have died even earlier had that been the case. On weekdays we led a very regular life. I painted in the mornings, and Charley wrote, and in the afternoons we went for a drive, for he tired too easily for walking. We went to bed early, as he woke up continually in the night, and sometimes I would find him at dawn, sitting by the big studio window, a pad in his hand, usually blank, for he wrote very sparingly. He was working, he told me, on a semi-fictional journal about his childhood and the war, a kind of literary free association. Charley had read with passionate interest the first of Proust’s novels and had been taken by Mr. Havistock to visit the author in his cork-lined room. I suppose the journal was his own recherche du temps perdu.

  I would not read it, at least then. I was too sure that it would be bad, and I did not want to discourage him in any enterprise that gave him an interest in living. Also, I was afraid of the effect of what I then imagined would be a turgid, childish prose on my image of the doomed Keatsian hero. I was sophisticated enough to know that the written word is no mirror of the writer’s character, that the amateur, though a selfless angel, may show himself a pompous ass, while the professional, a monster of ego, can convince you in a phrase that he has the innocence of a child. I had in my mind’s eye a likeness of Charley that, for all my would-be realism, might have been sketched by Rossetti or Burne-Jones. I did not want it blurred.

  As I look back, I realize that I must have known him very little. Perhaps I talked too much. I always have. I thought he was conventionally neurotic, a standard case of postwar despair. I did not appreciate the difference between one like himself, who had lost a real faith, and one like me who had never had one. I wore the mood of Yankee Paris in 1920 as if it had been a new hat; he wore it in his soul. Charley was not content, like the rest of us, to bask picturesquely in the cemetery of his hopes, a shaker of martinis on one headstone, a pipe of hasheesh on another. He was desperately and earnestly fighting the chaos which I wanted to cut up into colorful strips to use for studio decorations. If he resented me, he was too much of a gentleman ever to say so. Besides, he needed a friend, a companion and, increasingly, a nurse. In the latter capacity my war training stood me in good stead. It gives me a bit of consolation now, in view of how often I failed him, to remind myself that at least I ministered to his physical comfort.

  One late June day at noon, while I was working on a still life, a glass of red wine on a table by my easel, and while Charley, still in a kimono and pajamas, was lounging on a sofa, pad in lap, gazing moodily out the window, there was a loud rap at our door. As I went to open it, I heard Pa’s unmistakable deep basso, singing, in perfect key, the theme of the students from the first act of Bohême. For one horror-stricken moment I debated not opening. Then I turned to warn Charley who fled to our bedroom. When Pa stepped over the threshold, his arms loaded with packages, he was at his most ebullient, his most awful.

  “Cordelia, my dear child! May the mild bright sky that shone on Vigée-le-Brun and Rosa Bonheur shine upon your palette! Give me a hug! Your mother and I docked last night at Le Havre. She’s unpacking at the Vendôme.”

  Once he had embraced me, he went straight to my canvas, taking in the wineglass with a flicker of the eye, as hard to miss as it was ostensibly tactful, that would have done credit to a veteran performer at the Française. “And is this what the French call a dead nature?” He nodded slowly as he gazed at my poor effort. “Ah yes, my child, I can see that you have made strides, and with seven-league boots! Only I wonder if that lemon couldn’t do with a little perking up.”

  It was just what it did need, damn him. “Look, Pa,” I said sourly, “if you and Mother have sprung this surprise visit to make an honest woman of me, you can save your breath. Charley and I are quite happy with things as they are.”

  “Can’t an old couple come to Europe on their vacation without being accused of interfering?” Pa rolled his eyes in a graphic parody of reproach. “Do you realize we haven’t crossed the Atlantic since 1912? Do you and Charley own Paris? Should I have gone to you for a visa?”
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  “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “I’m blessed if I do. How is poor Charley?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Pa turned to face Charley who had just emerged from our bedroom, in grey flannels and a red sweater. He was pale as I had never seen him, and his eyes had a dull glitter.

  “Charley, my boy!” Pa approached him with outstretched arms, but Charley stepped quickly back.

  “No, Dr. Prescott,” he said in a strangled voice, “I cannot take your hand until I know that you respect me.”

  “Respect you? Of course I respect you! What on earth are you thinking of?”

  “I mean, respect Cordelia and me as man and wife.”

  Pa’s pursed lips and soaring eyebrows, his immediate grave headshake and the suppressed whistle that one could almost hear would again have been worthy of French classical comedy. “But, my dear fellow, isn’t that precisely what you’re not? Isn’t it, so to speak, the point?”

  “The point of what?”

  “Why, the point of your being so prickly and defensive. The point of your not taking my hand.” Here Pa turned suddenly and shrewdly back to me. “Do you, Cordie, consider that you and Charley are married?”

  “Legally, no, of course not.”

  “Religiously, then?”

  “I don’t happen to be religious.”

  “Alas, poor child, you have suffered from an overdose of Rome.” He returned his full attention to Charley. “But of course I see what you mean. You mean that your relationship with Cordelia is a serious one. That neither of you would be unfaithful to the other. That you would, indeed, be married were it not for Cabell Willetts’ arbitrary refusal to give Cordelia a divorce. But I must still insist, all that does not make a marriage. It does not even make what is called a common-law marriage. Now, wait, wait, Charley, before you blow up.”