The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  There was a gleam of malevolence in her black eyes. “Of course, it’s convenient that he’s no longer in a mental state to deny that.”

  “That would be true if I were lying. But I am not lying. I never lie about Felix. You should know that, Gladys. You were willing enough to make use of me in the old days when you wanted to get close to him. And the only reason you’ve disliked me since is that I was loyal to him, not you. That should be a sign to you that I’m truthful.”

  “Of course, I know that Felix has been your whole life. I suppose it’s only natural that you should want to write about him, no matter what the cost to the feelings of his family and friends.”

  “I don’t believe that great men belong to their families or friends. They belong to the ages.”

  “That sounds very well, but it’s often just an excuse to make a best seller out of their bad breath and body odor. Phooey! Would you put in the crazy things he said this afternoon?”

  “Yes. In the proper context. With the proper explanation. To my mind they have a certain relevance to his former thinking, like King Lear’s raving on the heath. I would put in nothing that was not relevant to his mind and soul, but I would put in everything that was.”

  “Well, that leaves me out. I was only relevant to his body. Surely you won’t ask me to expose this ancient carcass to your lewd, gaze?”

  “I’d be only too happy to gaze at it,” I replied, knowing that, with her, no flattery could be excessive. “But that is not precisely what I’m after. You were immensely relevant to Felix’s soul. His leaving Frances and his family for you was the single most important emotional and moral event of his lifetime. I want you to write it up for me in your own lively words. I know you can do it. Felix always said that nobody could write letters like you. I want you to put aside all trumpery inhibitions and recreate for my book exactly what happened in the summer of 1938.”

  Gladys was speechless for a moment. I could see that I had struck home. “Well!” she breathed. Then she resumed her suspicious air. “I suppose you’re asking every Tom, Dick and Harry to do the same.”

  “How many Toms, Dicks and Harrys do you think there are left? It’s appalling how rapidly the past falls away. Lila Nickerson is dead.”

  “Oh, no! I hadn’t seen.”

  “On Sunday, in New Mexico. It’s not in the paper yet. And Aleck is a vegetable. And Frances is long gone. And so is Felix’s old law partner, Grant Stowe. And Felicia’s never known anything about her father. All the real characters of the drama have faded away. Except you and me.”

  “And Heyward. Heyward’s still alive, you know.”

  “Yes, but he’d never talk to me. I doubt he’d even allow Felix’s name to be mentioned in his presence.”

  Gladys appeared less sure of this. “You could try him,” she suggested. “Time is a great healer. And Heyward has more ego than people think. He might even like to appear in your book. God knows what else the poor devil will have to show for his long life.”

  I suspected that in speaking so of her first husband, she was speaking of herself. For all her professed respect for privacy, she, too, wanted to be in my book.

  “Will you think it over, anyway?”

  “What else have I to do at seventy-seven but think things over?”

  I chuckled silently to myself. I knew she was seventy-eight.

  Our little party was breaking up. I saw Julie rise and go over to Felix. Apparently in response to an appeal from him, she leaned down and listened to something that he whispered in her ear. Then I saw him reach a hand into his coat pocket to give her a piece of paper which she slipped, rather furtively, I thought, in her handbag.

  The Post reporter was taking his leave. I escorted him to the door.

  “Of course, there’s nothing in that Agnew business,” I assured him. “I know you’ll be kind in your write-up.”

  He did not want me to think that he had been taken in, even for an instant. “He’s wonderfully convincing, isn’t he? You begin to wonder which is the visitor to the loony bin, you or he?”

  When the last guest had gone, I went to say good night to Felix, but he appeared to have gone to sleep in his wheelchair. I had the distinct impression that he was shamming. Mrs. Corliss and I had a brief colloquy in the front hall. I congratulated her on the party, and she simpered a bit.

  “We must give him all the pleasure we can,” she said. “Dr. Levy says that he’s subject to continual little strokes now. Sometimes he is not even aware of them. But it can’t be long before there’s a bigger one.”

  Because she loved clichés, I supplied her with one. “When it comes, it will be a release.”

  “I try to think of it that way.”

  “Did you find any new recruits among the guests?”

  “Oh, Mr. Cutter!” She gave me a little push. “You are terrible!”

  The next morning I telephoned Julie from my apartment.

  “What was that paper Felix gave you?”

  “Oh, Roger, I knew you’d see it. You never miss anything. The trouble is, darling, that he made me promise not to tell you. Of course, I know that a promise to a person in his condition is not exactly binding, but, still, when he’s so earnest and seems so rational, it’s hard not to do as he says.”

  “Just tell me one thing, Julie. Was it important?”

  “Well... no, not anything that concerned Mrs. Corliss or you or any of your arrangements. I think he really appreciates all you do for him. Certainly the rest of us do!”

  “That’s not the point. Does it concern his career?”

  “Well... yes, I suppose it does.”

  “Was it something that he wants published?”

  “Roger, you’re a fiend! How did you know?”

  “Listen to me, Julie. You and I are in a very delicate position. We are Felix’s closest friends—the only real ones he has left. But he is incompetent, at least some of the time, and I have no legal right to be handling his affairs. The bank has been cooperative; so has his lawyer. They’ve given me the green light. But I’m still sticking my neck out, and one day I may face a lawsuit from darling Felicia and her moron brother. I’ll take that risk—fine—but only on condition that I know everything that’s going on.”

  There was a long pause. “Very well,” Julie said with a sigh. “I have to admit that’s fair. We certainly don’t want Felicia barging in and taking over. What Felix gave me was a column. He asked me to deliver it to Sam Perkins.”

  Sam was the Washington editor of Profiles, the weekly magazine that had contracted to take a monthly column from Felix shortly before his stroke.

  “And you’ve done that?”

  “I’ve done it.”

  “Thank you, dear. Good-bye.”

  I hung up. There was no time to lose. Less than an hour later I was in Sam’s office on Connecticut Avenue, to confront his boyish, tousle-haired, disingenuous evasions.

  “But what is your authority for asking to see it, Roger?” he persisted.

  “I tell you I have none—other than that I’m the spokesman of decency and fair play. Felix Leitner is a lunatic—or an incompetent, if you prefer the word. I do not wish—nor would he, in his right mind—to have the end of his career muddied by the publication of some piece of idiotic drivel!”

  “You think I’d publish idiotic drivel?”

  “You might. Anyone might. If it was by Felix Leitner.”

  “Well, then, it’s not idiotic drivel.”

  “Is it perfectly rational?”

  “Perfectly rational?” He hesitated. “What is that?”

  “You know what I mean, Sam.”

  “Let me put it this way. It’s novel. It’s imaginative. It’s interesting.”

  “You confirm my worst fears. It’s nutty.”

  “Well... let’s say it’s unusual.”

  “Sam Perkins, if you don’t give me back that column, I’ll tell the whole world you’re nothing but a yellow journalist!”

  “All right, Roger, all ri
ght!” He raised his hands deprecatingly in the air. “I’ll give it back to you. But you’re going to have to square us with Leitner. Suppose he accuses us of censoring him? I’m not at all sure that he’s as far gone as you think. I want Leitner’s assurance, in his own writing, that he has withdrawn that column.”

  “You shall have it.”

  This gave me no trouble. Felix signed all the correspondence that I set before him without reading it. I took the piece of paper that Sam now handed me and left his office. In the corridor of his building I paused to read the following and to thank my lucky stars that I had taken action.

  America is engaging in one of the most ancient of tribal rituals: the burial of the fisher king. The ailing chief is made responsible for the wasting of the land; the tribe must kill and bury him so that out of his corpse, symbolic of winter, may sprout the redeeming spring. Americans have always loved and hated their presidents. Though they depend on their leadership in time of trouble, they are fretted by it in time of peace. It reminds them that they are never really free. Periodically, the chief must die, that his people may enjoy the illusion of living. Even Washington, the father, had his would-be entombers. Lincoln was buried in the body of Johnson. Grant and Harding were covered with the ashes of scandal. And now Richard Nixon, for a routine political trick that would never have come to light under a more cautious ruler—a Jackson, a Roosevelt, a Kennedy—must be sacrified to the public’s hatred of great men, like a Mayan victim driven up the steep stair of the pyramid to bare his chest to the obsidian knife.

  ***

  I had no trouble getting Felix to sign the letter to Perkins along with the rest of his mail, and I prayed that he would forget the whole episode, but he did not. After two weeks had passed and two issues of Profiles had failed to contain the column, he was very angry. When I arrived at the nursing home (as I did each day at noon) on the morning of the second deficient publication, it was to be greeted by a Felix angrily brandishing the magazine in his hand.

  “You will call Perkins immediately,” he cried out to me. “You will ask him to explain himself. How dare he presume to decide which columns of mine he will print and which he won’t?”

  “Oh, you sent him a column?” I rejoined weakly.

  “Don’t you know that I did?” He had entirely forgotten his subterfuge. “I expect you to take better care of my affairs. Please see that Perkins comes here himself to explain his conduct.”

  There was nothing to do but confess what I had done. Felix stared at me balefully while I did so.

  “And may I ask you to explain this remarkable effrontery?” he demanded in his coldest, most scornful tone.

  “Felix, you don’t realize how ill you’ve been,” I pleaded. “You’re going to get better. You’re getting better. It’s only a matter of time, but you do need that time. Please let me be your mentor in these matters for just a little bit longer. I can’t bear to have you hurt your reputation by something written when you’re not at your best and clearest.”

  “And what is that something, pray?”

  “A column that calls Mr. Nixon a great man. That implies he’s the victim of a plot.”

  “And when did I write such a thing as that?” he asked in astonishment.

  The very subject of the column had slipped from his mind!

  “Felix,” I begged him, “you’ve got to trust me. You’ve got to try to believe I’m acting in your best interests. You’ve got to...”

  “I haven’t got to do anything of the sort!” he interrupted me furiously. “And I don’t for a minute believe that you’re acting in my best interests. Ever since you were a boy, you have had designs upon me. I used to try to think it was a genuine admiration for my work, even a kind of filial affection. I knew of your loneliness, your problems of health. I wanted to be kind to you, to help you. But you have only had one thing in mind from the beginning. To own me! To own Felix Leitner. Because you had no life of your own, you were going to steal somebody’s else’s. And you aimed high, too, my boy!”

  “Oh, Felix!” I cried, looking away in pain. “Don’t. I can’t bear it.”

  “You can bear anything. It was you who persuaded the world I was crazy. It was you who locked me up in this so-called nursing home, with the help of your partner, that woman Corliss. It is you who intercept my mail, keep away my friends, give false testimony to my lawyers. And now, by God, you suppress my columns! Well, you will see, Roger Cutter, that I still have ways of getting around you. Don’t be too sure you won’t be dragged to justice yet. Julie is on to you. Julie will go to the police! You’ll see!”

  “I’ll leave you now. I’ll tell Julie to come. I shan’t bother you again. I’ll say good-bye, Felix.”

  I went over to his wheelchair to take his hand, but he slapped mine away. I left the nursing home and drove to Rock Creek Park, where I strolled for the rest of that bleak winter afternoon.

  I had too much sense to be really hurt by Felix’s senile accusations. In the past year I had become too familiar with his irrationalities to take any of them seriously. If a senile Felix hated and feared me today, a senile Felix had wanted to make me his residuary legatee only a week before. No, anyone who loves another person should be prepared for the rejection that may come with the mental ailments that attend our increasing life span. But what made my heart numb and my soul sick, what turned my life to dust and ashes, was the idea that Felix’s concept of a Roger Cutter who served him only to serve himself might not be simply the product of a burst blood vessel in the brain but the survival of a picture of myself entertained but never divulged in the time of his reason. If this were so, had I not better die when he died?

  When I came home that evening my telephone was ringing. I could hear it through the door as I fumbled desperately with my key. Suddenly it seemed as if my very life depended on answering it. I pushed the door open and ran into the living room, falling on the telephone and grabbing it as if it were some dangerous snarling beast.

  “Mr. Cutter?”

  It was Mrs. Corliss. Oh, God, may he be dead! Let this agony be over!

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Mr. Leitner...”

  “He’s gone?”

  “No. But the stroke has come. I don’t think he knows me. He can’t speak.”

  Roger Cutter (2)

  DR. LEVY said that Felix might live a year or die any minute. It was difficult, he said, to determine the exact amount of brain damage, as Felix could not speak and could not, or would not, respond to questions by moving his head or his hands, but it seemed fairly sure that there was little comprehension left. For all essential purposes, Felix Leitner was dead. I continued to go to see him, though now only twice a week, to be absolutely sure that he was properly taken care of. I would stay for an hour, telling him news of the world and spicy bits of carefully selected gossip. I had no idea how much of it got through—Dr. Levy thought none—but if the smallest fraction did, it was worth the effort. When I left him, he would press my hand in both of his, and I liked to imagine that he was telling me he had forgiven me. But I am afraid that he made the same gesture to Felicia and Julie, the only other persons admitted to his chamber.

  I had come to the end of my role in Felix’s life, but not of his in mine. I no longer performed duties or received a salary—the Riggs Bank had been appointed his conservator—but I had an income just adequate for my very simple needs, and I resolved to live for my two books alone. The one on Felix’s work could wait; all the material for that lay in my library. The book on his personality had to receive my initial attention, for I had to scurry about to interview the remaining friends. I had to hound Gladys Leitner to be sure that she wrote what I had asked her to write, and I had to get in touch with her first husband. Also I had to collate and annotate the material I had already collected and check its veracity with the dwindling group of people who were qualified to know.

  Felix had said to me, several years before: “Biography is a whole new ball game. It is possible now, even in
the lifetimes of our very greatest men, to persuade their friends and acquaintances to record on tape their most intimate impressions of these individuals. All you have to do is wave in their faces the sacred banner of history. The files of our universities are being filled to overflowing with unpublished recordings of the fears, the neuroses, the sexual habits, even the bowel movements of our public figures. Oh, yes, the readers who demanded information about General Eisenhower’s stools after his heart attack and who wished to study Adlai Stevenson’s income tax return to question the deduction of a dead sheep, will be denied nothing. And perhaps it is not altogether a bad thing. We shall learn too much, but for those who know how to pick and choose, it may be a gold mine. Let my past be an open book, Roger. I can think of things in it of which I’m ashamed, but none of which I’m afraid.”

  The increase of candor in modern speaking, matched with the decline of reticence and discretion, should go far to ease the task of the biographer. People tend today to be generous and frank with their reminiscences. But he who ventures into the field must always remember that his principal enemy is still the same who afflicted the chroniclers of old: the so-called witness who is really a would-be biographer himself, the person who is giving you not so much a memory as a creation, the man who has his own obsession, loving or hateful, about your subject. This has always been my biggest problem with the men and women in Felix’s life.

  What did I already have? I had three fine accounts, written by Felix himself after agonies of urging by me, about three periods of his life: his boyhood, his work at the Versailles peace conference, and his first divorce. These alone put me leagues ahead of any other potential biographer, for they were the only writings by Felix about his own life. Then I had—thanks to Felicia (but this was the only thing I ever got from her)—the privately circulated typescript of the first Mrs. Leitner’s memoirs, written for her family: two chapters of it dealt, very importantly, with her marriage to Felix. And there were the few rather touching pages from the Paris journal of Felix’s crippled stepdaughter, Fiona Satterlee, which she herself had kindly given me.