The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  When he asked me to his house I was impressed at the easy air of equality with which he treated his parents, so unlike my alternately too submissive or too resentful behavior to my own. I was dazzled by Mrs. Leitner, with her high-piled red hair and rustling taffetas, and found her house utterly exotic. But when I tried to describe her and her home to my parents they simply looked at each other and smiled. I soon realized that there was no point trying to make them admire my new friends. If Mother had ever admitted that Mrs. Leitner was even handsome, it would have been as if she had admitted that a particular horse was handsome.

  Both my parents, however, behaved with perfect politeness to Felix when he came to our house. Father, after all, was a gentleman; he showed his prejudices only to those who shared them. Besides, like everyone else, he found Felix stimulating, even when they disagreed. I remember Felix facing him down, with perfect equanimity, over the issue of Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama Canal.

  “It was an act of great statesmanship!” Father declared in his most emphatic, not-to-be-disagreed-with tone. “Roosevelt showed himself the equal of Jefferson. You will recall that at the time of the Louisiana Purchase nobody was sure that the Constitution permitted the president to add territory to the nation. But there was no time to wait for Congress or the courts. Napoleon might have changed his mind. Jefferson had to act, and he acted!”

  “True, sir, but it was only a purchase. Jefferson had nothing to lose but what now seems an inconsiderable sum of money. Roosevelt’s case, I submit, is altogether different. When he couldn’t get the canal from Colombia, he sponsored the revolution that created the nation that would give it to him.”

  “Sponsored, you say? I believe the Panamanians were responsible for their own revolution.”

  “But Roosevelt prevented Colombia from suppressing it. I call that sponsoring it. Look what he said himself: ‘I took the canal.’”

  “Great Britain would have done the same!”

  “Undoubtedly. But to me it is sad that we should be like our mother country already. We had such brave hopes when we were weaned!”

  Father was completely stopped by this. He had not expected to be taught idealism by a Jewish boy. He was irritated, obviously, by my friend’s cockiness, but he was also impressed. I noticed in the future that he was more cautious in his statements. Yet I think both he and Mother were always pleased when Felix came to the house. Certainly our meals were livelier.

  Unfortunately for Felix’s future relationship with my father, he was responsible for my choice of Yale over Harvard. He himself was going to Yale because he had been convinced by his favorite teacher at Driscoll that Yale had the best history department in the country, and he had no difficulty persuading me to go with him. Indeed, the idea of Harvard, branded as it was with the paternal preference, struck me as the nightmare of Saint Paul’s all over again, and I resisted Father with a fierceness that at first astonished and finally disgusted him.

  “I wouldn’t expect your friend Leitner to understand distinctions that don’t exist in his background. For example, that a Yale man is never quite a gentleman to the same degree a Harvard man is. It’s a nuance, I admit, but still, it’s there. What really upsets me is that you should prefer the advice of an inexperienced Jewish boy, smart though he may be, to that of your own father!”

  Mother came to my aid again, and that settled the question. I am afraid that she was more influenced by the proximity of New Haven to New York than by the fact that Felix advocated Yale. She always liked to have her children nearby. But it was still a victory, and my first important one over Father. I never forgot that I owed it to Felix.

  Yet Felix’s own attitude toward a struggle so important to me was disappointing. He showed a rather chilling detachment and refused to condemn my father as I did.

  “I don’t know, Heyward, if I were you, that I shouldn’t go along with him. He’s so exquisite for his type. How many lawyers could you find on Wall Street who would refuse to acknowledge E. H. Harriman’s nod? And maybe there’s something in what he says, after all. Maybe a Harvard man is more of a gentleman.”

  “You can’t think I care about that?”

  “It’s not what you and I care about. It’s what he cares about. When you have a superb sample like that, don’t you want to bottle it? Every chance you have to study your old man, you should grab, it seems to me. And you don’t grab it by opposing him.”

  “You can’t be serious!” I exclaimed, and broke off the discussion in an agony of apprehension as to what he might say next.

  Felix wasn’t altogether serious, of course, but he half was. He wanted to dissect Father, to anatomize him. Even I couldn’t let him do that.

  Felix also disappointed me by declining to room with me freshman year. He said that college was the opportunity to broaden our acquaintance and that roommates from the same preparatory school presented an “established intimacy” that might act as a repellant to a shy neighbor. He said that we should see as much of each other as ever, but I was not sure of this. I suspected that he thought I might be a drag on him when he cultivated the brilliant men of the class. Father, to my surprise, took just the opposite view.

  “I must say that’s very tactful of your friend,” he said when I told him. “To be absolutely frank, I shouldn’t have thought him capable of such delicacy of feeling. But I give him credit now. He sees that rooming with him might cut you out with some of the better elements of the class.”

  It had not occurred to me that my “social position,” such as it was, would be much of an asset at Yale. At Saint Paul’s most of the boys had had the same degree of it, and at Driscoll almost none, with the result that there had been very little talk of it in either school, at least to my awareness. Of course, my parents, particularly Father, were always conscious of it, but I had the feeling, developed no doubt from my own abysmal failure to excel in any of the things that they valued, that their social position was a thing that belonged to them personally and was not transmittable to me. I felt like a waif who had been adopted. I never associated myself with their rank in life.

  At Yale, however, I began to find out that being a Satterlee and being handsome (for I was that—I can say it now) and being something of an athlete, opened plenty of doors to me. In my freshman year I made friends with most of the men who were to be the leaders of our class, and I was one of the first to be taken into the fraternity Psi U, which even my father conceded had almost the cachet of a Harvard club.

  Felix, on the other hand, devoted himself exclusively to the class intellectuals and worked very hard at his courses. It seemed to me that he was always reading. We visited each other’s rooms regularly and remained on much the same friendly terms as at Driscoll, but it was evident that our interests were increasingly disparate. I could not follow him as deeply into philosophy and government as he had gone, and he did not share my growing interest in sports and college activities. But we both enjoyed discussing how the world should be changed. Felix had become something of a radical, and I was always titillated at the prospect of the masses overturning Father’s world.

  You may imagine my surprise, therefore, in the middle of sophomore year, when Felix came to my room with a serious proposition. He wanted me to get him into Psi U! He came as close to looking embarrassed as he ever did, which was not very close. His eyes were fixed on me as if to show their determination not to glance aside.

  “But I thought you didn’t care for that sort of thing!”

  “I don’t, really. But I’ve come to see that it’s part of the college experience. It seems to me now that it might be a mistake to miss it. The men in Psi U represent a class that is still immensely powerful in this country. I think it behooves me to know what they’re like at first hand.”

  “You mean you want me to be a kind of Trojan horse? I can’t do that, Felix. Those men are my friends!”

  “And they shall be mine,” Felix reassured me. “I didn’t mean to sound so cold-blooded about it. I have no real ulte
rior purpose. I simply feel that I’ve been too narrowly intellectual. I want to broaden myself. I’d like to have different kinds of friends. I’d like to be more like you, Heyward.”

  Well, that did it! It had never occurred to me that I had anything that this remarkable friend could really want. In a single meeting he put all things right between us. You must remember that Felix was the first person who had ever treated me as having even normal brains and capabilities. I had been so cowed by my superior parents that I had come to consider myself a poor thing. Then Felix had picked me up and made me feel a man. It did not take him more than an afternoon to re-establish all his old ascendancy. I resolved to get him into my fraternity.

  This turned out to be a considerable job. My friends at Psi U found Felix attractive, but they suspected him of being an intellectual snob. And, of course, there was the terrible hurdle of his Jewishness. At first it seemed insurmountable. I devoted myself to inquiries that I never thought I should make. I discovered that Felix’s mother was not Jewish and that his father had abandoned the orthodox faith. I took the position with the fraternity leaders that Felix was not really a Jew at all. I pointed out tellingly that he did not look like one. My friends in Psi U did not know much, about Jews; they were amateurs in prejudice. By putting every scrap of my own popularity on the counter I was able at last to secure Felix’s rather grudging election.

  I had hoped that he would be delighted. If he was, he did not show it. He was grateful, but not demonstratively so. Of course, he could not have known what my struggle had amounted to. Or could he have? He did give me a gold pin with the letters PSI U in the center and our initials entwined on either side. When one of my prying sisters found this on my dresser at home and was mean enough to show it to Father, I had to endure the full explosion of his scorn.

  “I never saw anything so vulgar, so innately Jewish in my life! I was right in the beginning about that young man. He’s used you, Heyward, and he’ll keep on using you until you take your blinders off!”

  Felix came to the fraternity house often in the first months after his election and made himself thoroughly agreeable to everyone. I was even congratulated by some of his would-be blackballed on my perspicacity in proposing him. But after he had taken the full gauge of our members, he began to lose interest in the club. This was the beginning of his serious radical period, which was to culminate with his marriage to Frances Ward, who represented (except in the matter of birth) the opposite pole of all that Psi U had seemed to stand for. Felix was increasingly lost to his books and to what we at Psi U called “greasy grinds.”

  In the spring of junior year, when I was taken into Scroll and Key, Felix was not even “tapped” for a senior society. Even if one had wished to secure him, it could not have done so, for he declined to take his stand in the Old Campus with the rest of our class on Tap Day. I felt, still humbly, for all my own success, that he, at least, had put aside “childish things.”

  For the next half dozen years I saw little of Felix. He was a law student in Cambridge while I was a stockbroker in New York. Then he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Miner in Washington. When he did move to New York, he and Frances lived in Greenwich Village, and his work for the U.S. Attorney along with the books and articles that he wrote were far removed from my little world of stocks and bonds. Besides, I was still living with my parents—as young bachelors of that day whose families had large, well-staffed houses still did—and Frances Leitner did not feel comfortable with a host like my father, who evidently regarded her, professional woman and outspoken reformer that she was, as a “traitor to her class.” But Felix and I never allowed our friendship to drop. We corresponded; we occasionally lunched; and I came to some of his parties in the Village. We always had the bond of those years at Driscoll.

  In 1917 I was twenty-seven and had just been commissioned a second lieutenant. I was about to be shipped overseas, and my only concern in life was to persuade Gladys Dunne, then only twenty, to marry me before I went. Gladys had been, at least to my enraptured eyes, the most fascinating debutante of the 1915 season. She was small, dark-eyed, bright, vivacious... but why make more of a fool of myself on paper than I did in fact such decades ago? I was simply crazy about her. And she? Well, she liked my looks and liked my dancing and even liked my jokes, but she did not consider me, in her engaging candor, sufficiently serious for what she liked to call une grande passion. No, I was just her “amiable teddy bear.”

  But now things were different. Now I was in uniform, with the glamorous prospect of early death in the trenches to wipe away smiles, obliterate condescension. Even my parents, who found Gladys too “giddy,” and her own, who found her too young, were inclined to be benevolent about marriage among those whose future was so sadly in doubt. In the atmosphere of “seize the day” that now enveloped us, I saw that I was on the brink of sweeping Gladys off her feet. I decided that what I needed was the endorsement of someone totally dissociated with what she considered my “stuffy” background (not that hers was much better!), and whom better did I have to hand but Felix?

  I took her to a party given by the Leitners in the Village. There were artists, poets, radicals, even pacifists there. Gladys was thrilled. She had never been exposed to anything quite like it before, and her opinion of me took a leap up. When Felix, whose biography of Theodore Roosevelt for the Bull Moose campaign she had read in preparation of the meeting (it being the shortest and easiest of his publications and already considered a minor classic), took her over to a corner to tell her what a fine guy I was, my wedding was as good as settled.

  I had a different experience with Frances Leitner. I never knew quite what to make of her. She had been a surprising choice for Felix, being short and plain and on the verge of a word I hate and use hesitatingly... dumpy. Of course, she was a Ward and related to everyone in what Father called “old New York,” but her branch of that family had always been poor, and her rather left-wing good works had discredited her in conservative circles for which she cared less than nothing. She was supposed to be brilliant, but what did Felix need with brilliance? I supposed that he was attracted by her obvious devotion to him. And then, too, I must admit, she had a winning amiability, an extremely good temper, even though I could not help reading in the steady gaze of her glinting blue eyes: “Now just what do you see in my friends, Hey ward Satterlee? Admit you think they’re all anarchists! Come, now, admit it!”

  But what she said to me now was something quite different.

  “Miss Dunne is utterly charming. I am so happy you brought her. Are you planning to be married soon?”

  “If I have anything to do with it.”

  “Mightn’t it be wiser to put it off till you come back?”

  “But I may not come back!”

  “Oh, yes, you will. Mark my words. This terrible war can’t go on much longer. Flesh and blood won’t stand it!”

  “That’s what they said in 1914.”

  “But even so, the time must come. Don’t make decisions as if it were the end of the world.”

  I was suddenly shocked and angered by her gravely warning tone. How dared she talk to me in that way? She was younger than I! “You think I’ll come back and she’ll be tired of me!” I cried in anguish. I think there must have been sudden tears in my eyes.

  Quickly Frances caught my hand in both of hers. “No, no, it’s not that at all. I just think you may come back and find that you and she are different persons. Nice persons, of course, but not the same.”

  “Maybe better!”

  Frances’s smile was now perfectly without reservations. She nodded, as if to make up for her unseemly doubt, and squeezed my hand. “Maybe. I like to think that. I shall try to keep thinking that.”

  Gladys and I were married the following week. Felix was my best man. Father, who was becoming very old, became almost sentimental at my bachelor’s dinner at the Racquet Club. After Felix’s very funny speech and moving toast to the bride, he leaned over to me and whispered: �
�I have a confession to make, my boy. That man has been a better friend to you than I ever thought he would be. Bless you both!”

  I thank whatever God there is that Father never knew what happened twenty years later. Isn’t it odd? My strange, snobbish, violent old father, whose attitudes I so deplored all my days, proved the only human being in the end who ever really loved me.

  First Chapter from the Privately Printed Memoirs of Frances Ward Leitner, “My Life and Law”

  WHEN I WAS TOLD in January of 1951 that my asthmatic attacks were beginning to produce a dangerous strain on my heart, I decided that, if I were ever going to, it was time to write “that book” for my children and grandchildren. While I was given no estimate of the time I might have left (“You may bury us all,” Dr. Fitch told me in his jovial way), I was left with the distinct impression that a “reasonable man,” as we lawyers say, would arrange to put his affairs in order. And so I decided to prepare these chapters for those of my descendants, and the descendants of my parents, who may be interested.

  This one will tell the story of how I married Felix. So much has been made in the family of our divorce that I am afraid my offspring will think of our marriage as all unhappy. That is very far from the truth. It was the greatest part of my life, although I do not much care, as a staunch career woman, to have to admit it.

  Later, I shall write a chapter on my legal career. And perhaps another on my ideas about legal aid and what the duty of the bar should be about it. And one, I think, if time permits, about my father. Maybe even one about my mother. Oh, ideas proliferate as one looks back to the past! I have evidently spent too much of my life living in the present.