I had been nervous about meeting Mrs. Leitner, feeling sure that she, at least, would find me a frump. Like any woman, I was perfectly prepared to be cowed by and scornful of the exotic clothes and house I had heard of. But instead she won my heart. She seemed at once to separate herself from her Oriental trappings and to reach out cheerfully to meet me on my own ground. She applauded my decision to be a lawyer and cited her old acting days as proof of her basic feminism. There was such a quaint simplicity and honesty in those clear, gazing eyes (like Felix’s) and in that high, childlike tone, that one dismissed her background as some kind of a crazy and irrelevant charade.
“You completely won Mother’s heart,” Felix told me afterward. “She whispered to me that if I let you slip between my fingers, I deserved to live and die a bachelor.”
“Oh, she’s just afraid you’ll do worse.” My nerves, at this suggestion of a proposal, made me petulant and scratchy. “She thinks you’ll bring home a chorine.”
He caught me by the hand. “Why do you fight me so, Frances?”
I jerked free. “Because I can’t believe in you! What can you see in me?”
“Isn’t that my affair?”
“No!”
“Very well, then.” He stopped in the street and turned to contemplate me carefully, as though I had been a portrait. “To begin with, I like your spunk. Your spirit. I can’t imagine you compromising on a moral issue.”
What I said to this will show my reader how desperately I was at odds with myself. I had become two women: one bitterly critical; the other a lovesick fool.
“Meaning you’re afraid you might?” I cried.
Felix flushed. At least he came as near flushing as I ever saw him. For one horrible moment I thought I might have alienated him forever. But then his tensity was suddenly relaxed. He even smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s just it.”
“You need me, then, like a calcium pill for a weak spine!”
“Frances!” It was almost a call of distress.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m being a beast!” And here, fortunately for both our sakes, I burst into tears. “Forgive me. I’m such an ass!”
When I told Mother about this scene, she quite agreed with my classification of myself. But she understood that I was overwrought, and she bathed me in maternal affection. She put her arms around the law student, the would-be judge, the savior of the poor and wretched, and crooned over me, telling me that I was as lovely as a princess and that Felix would be the luckiest man in the world if he were allowed to kiss my little finger.
“But you mustn’t be too snippy, darling,” she concluded. “That’s a fine tactic for a time, but it can be very easily overdone.”
This was just what I needed. I was now much calmer with Felix. How I remember the first night he kissed me! He always had his own way of doing things. There were no preliminaries, no timid request for permission, no gradual circling of my shoulder with an arm, no pressing closer. Very simply, at the bottom of our brownstone stoop, after I had bid him goodnight, he placed his hands firmly on my shoulders and kissed me on the lips. Then he gazed at me for a silent moment, with an air of mild gravity, nodded, and departed.
The next time we went out, no reference was made, on either side, to this kiss, but it was repeated. This time I seemed to make out, in that blue-green stare, a look of assured possession. Recalling it afterward in my bedroom, I felt a panic at least equal to my pleasure. What did he think of me? What did he expect of me?
After the third kiss I was ready for him. I did not turn to go up the stoop. “Why do you do that?” I asked him deliberately.
“Because it gives me great pleasure,” he replied with equal deliberation. “I hope it gives you the same.”
“I don’t know what it gives me. What does it mean?”
“It means that I love you.” When I simply stared, half in awe, he continued: “It means that I love you and want to marry you.”
“Oh!”
“Is that something so terrible to hear?”
“I don’t know,” I said again, but this time desperately. “You’ll have to give me time, Felix. You’ll just have to give me time!”
And like a giddy fool of a girl, not at all like a law student or an emancipated woman, I turned and fled up the stoop.
***
The two things that helped me most to pull myself together were, first, Mother’s unfailing encouragement and, second, my discovery that Felix had thrown away an inheritance because his father had refused to clean up his slums. He told me this one evening very simply, when we were discussing our careers. I was overjoyed. Until that moment I had been convinced that Felix was deeply attracted to the material pleasures of this world. His mother lived well, almost opulently. He, like her, loved fine clothes. He obviously envied his Aunt Renata her ability to purchase beautiful things. In theaters he always bought the best seats, and in restaurants he liked to show himself a gourmet. But now everything was different. He had turned his back on a fortune, or something like it, and for the most delicate of moral reasons. He said he loved me. God knows I loved him! How long could I keep on turning my back on a destiny that seemed obsessed with heaping my lap with gifts? The front of the picture was certainly handsome. I had turned it over and over and could find no spots on the back. I decided to accept Felix’s offer of marriage.
As he had committed himself to a year in Washington as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Miner, and as I had another year at Brooklyn Law, it was decided that we should not be married until the following spring. Mother, knowing that all my nervous doubts would be revived by separation from Felix, wisely urged me to go every other weekend to Washington, where I stayed with cousins until Justice and Mrs. Miner, very kindly, insisted on putting me up themselves. This worked out very well. Left to myself in New York, I should probably have broken our engagement three times over.
Felix had been disappointed not to have been chosen a secretary to Justice Holmes, but he never indulged his disappointments for long. He was always one to make the best of things, and soon he was taking the position that being secretary to so great a man as Holmes would be too overwhelming, that Holmes’s amanuensis would have no chance to write opinions, whereas working for a less titanic individual, a man had a better chance to plumb the role of the judge in American political life.
Justice Miner was a type of conservative that I had not met before: the tory with no ax to grind, no visible advantage to be culled from an economic system of laissez-faire that he revered as if it had been incorporated in an eleventh commandment. He and Mrs. Miner had no personal wealth; they subsisted entirely on his judicial salary, out of which they had to support an invalid son with a wife and several children. Yet the judge, in his simple, plain, high-minded way, believed that if a state legislature were allowed to pass a law barring children from mines and sweatshops, or that if a federal court interfered with the political process in a southern state so as to enable a black man to cast a ballot, the Constitution had simply been torn to tatters. And yet this same man believed to his dying day that the Constitution, as he interpreted it and for which he would cheerfully have given up his life, was the greatest guarantee of human rights and human liberty in the history of the world!
He was still an enchanting old boy to know. He was kind and cozy and witty, a scholar in Greek and Latin, deeply versed in both common and constitutional law. He and his wife had taken Felix to their hearts, and they wanted to do the same with me. I was more reserved with Mrs. Miner, whose chatty desire for intimacy put my back up the slightest bit, but alone with the old judge, I had soon made him the depositary of all my secrets.
“You’re afraid that Felix may love you for your brains and political opinions? Is that it, my dear? But can’t brains have sex appeal? Would you object if Felix loved you for your eyes or your lips or your hair? Not that he doesn’t!”
“Yes, I think I would. I want to be loved for something that is me. Quintessentially me.”
�
��And what is more that, pray, than the brain? Do you know that some of the ancients located the soul there?”
“Let me put it this way, sir. I’m not sure that Felix is really in love with me at all. I’m not sure he doesn’t simply want a partner. Someone to work with him in his career.”
“What are you describing but a beautiful marriage? And why should a man who seeks a beautiful marriage not be in love?”
Felix, like me, was fond of the old man, and he seemed to enjoy working for him. He was able to turn himself into the judge’s mouthpiece more easily than I could have done, and he would actually chuckle to himself while drafting, in language superior to Miner’s own, opinions with which he violently disagreed. And yet, in the long run, Felix was to show an objectivity with respect to his boss that I could not share and did not really envy.
One Saturday night as he dropped me back at the Miners’ house after taking me to dinner, he handed me a typewritten manuscript.
“Be sure not to leave it around where the old man will see it,” he warned me. “It’s for your eyes alone—at least in this house.”
“But, darling, what is it?”
“A study of the American judicial process—as manifested in the mental processes of Mr. Justice Miner.”
I think the first time that I knew with absolute conviction that Felix was going to be a great writer was when I read that essay. It appeared years later, after Justice Miner’s death, in somewhat altered form, as part of Felix’s book on the due process clause. It was a little jewel of style and precision, a charming mixture of the personal and the historical, with its vivid contrast of the old man’s sunny, saintlike disposition and his compulsion to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment in a way to transfer the rights of the manumitted slave to the great corporations. That so high-minded a man should dedicate himself to such a task was surely one of the ironies of American judicial history. Felix in writing of it seemed to combine the pens of Boswell and of Justice Holmes.
But there was still something that I didn’t like about it. That Felix should sit month after month with this dear old fellow, discussing his cases, writing his opinions, having meals at his board, allowing himself to be treated as a kind of son, while all the while he was etching in acid his portrait for posterity, chilled me. I asked him if he planned to show his piece to the judge.
“Heavens, no!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “He’s capable of getting a court order to keep me from publishing it.”
“You mean you would publish it?”
“Well, not while I’m his clerk, of course not.”
“But after?”
“Why, certainly, after.”
“You wouldn’t even wait till he died?”
“I might.” Here he chuckled to lighten his words. “If he’s not too long about it.”
“But, Felix, is that loyal?”
He didn’t seem in the least to resent this. “It’s loyal to truth,” he answered simply.
It was difficult for me to argue with this, but I was beginning to equate my cause with that of Justice Miner. I was also beginning to see that there was a side of Felix, perhaps even a whole of Felix, that was not going to be subject to the ordinary rules of human loyalty and human affection.
The real effect of Felix’s Miner piece on me came when the old man urged Felix to spend a second year as his law clerk. I found that I was suddenly very determined that Felix should not do this. It seemed to me that the best way for him to counterbalance the cold, almost inhuman objectivity of his nature was to leap into the fray of courts and litigants, to get himself caught up with the tumultuous fracas of justice in a big city. Life in judicial chambers was austere, clerical, set apart. I dreaded the relentless eye that followed each turn and twist in the mental evolutions of the aging Miner.
But how was I to accomplish my goal without telling Felix of my fears and doubts? Very simply. All I had to do was tell him that I had morally committed myself to work for Legal Aid in New York after graduation and that I couldn’t bear the idea of another year away from him. And indeed I couldn’t! Felix seemed perfectly content to leave Washington. We agreed to marry in the spring, go abroad for a summer’s honeymoon, and then settle in New York, where he had been offered a fine position in the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The wedding took place in the parlor of my family’s brownstone on Twenty-third Street. Mrs. Leitner looked very splendid in what I seem to remember as a green velvet eighteenth-century riding habit with a hat swathed in ostrich feathers. Mr. and Mrs. Justice Miner seemed a bit surprised at some of my sisters’ friends but were reassured by the presence of the Ward cousins. The Leitner uncles and their families kept a bit truculently to themselves, but Aunt Renata was lovely to everybody. Felix spent too much time at our little reception talking to a New York Times editor about the possibilities of a major war in Europe. But that was always to be the way. I felt, on balance, that I had started well.
Manuscript of Felix Leitner’s “The Versailles Treaty and Me,” Written in 1965 for Roger Cutter
LIKE MANY AMERICANS in the beginning of the First World War, I tended to regard it as a conflict of imperialisms in which the United States should take no active part. But as time went on, and as it began to look as if the Allies might actually lose, the majority became fiercely anti-German and interventionist. The important thing that happened to me was my discovery that I was not going to fall away from my initial position, or at least that I was not going to fall away from it so drastically. I always favored the British and French over the Central Powers, but I never regarded the German militarists as the persons solely responsible for Armageddon, and I never thought that we should enter the conflict, except to supply the Allies with arms and ships. I believed passionately that such aid would give us a voice in the peace treaty and that that voice would be the last hope of the civilized world.
I had to learn to be unpopular, but I have never found that difficult. To tell the truth, I have always found it rather exhilarating. When Frances decided to become an outspoken pacifist, I made no move to discourage her, although I have never believed, legally or morally, in the cause of the conscientious objector. We found ourselves increasingly isolated from old friends, but we supported each other stoutly and managed to continue to be happy.
I had become too absorbed in the course and origins of the war to continue working for the U.S. Attorney, so early in 1915 I resigned my office and accepted an income from Mother, who had always taken the position that half her money was morally mine. I then wrote the two little volumes that first made me known—if “notorious” be not a better word: The Causes of the War and The Peace That Should Follow, the first of which, as Frances’s mother enthusiastically put it, caused more dyspepsia from undigested meals at angry dinner parties along the Eastern seaboard than any book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
By the time America finally entered the war, I had become so convinced that the future of man would depend on the terms of the ultimate peace treaty that I considered it my duty, at any price, to find a way of working on them. I resolved that I must not waste my time or risk my life as a soldier. I know that this will strike my reader as either a piece of monstrous arrogance or a bald excuse for cowardice, if not both. All I can say, so far as my conscious thinking was concerned (one can never answer for the subconscious), is that I was at all times perfectly sincere. I truly believed that I had ideas that the world could not afford to lose and that a bullet through my brain would eliminate a feeble force for war, but a vital one for peace. I remember that Heyward Satterlee, who was afterward decorated for gallantry in combat, told me at the time:
“Gosh, Felix, I’d never have the guts to seek exemption from the draft on grounds like that!”
Well, seek it I did. I went down to Washington and saw Justice Miner. The dear old boy supported me enthusiastically and recommended me to Secretary Lansing. Thus it came about that I was commissioned an officer of the Department of State and put to work in a secret chamber where some ha
lf dozen men were laboring over maps and documents to prepare the background information that might some day be used to educate our peace commissioners. We were instructed to tell curious outsiders simply that we were in “intelligence.”
Frances was pregnant with our daughter Felicia and running her Legal Aid office almost single-handedly; she could not come to Washington. I lived in a hotel room, worked almost every night and saw nobody but my fellow workers. Yet on the whole it was a happy period. It was impossible for me not to dream, as I struggled to make sense out of borders and populations, out of sea routes and land corridors, out of ethnic diversities and religious differences, that I was manipulating facts toward a solution of the insoluble, toward a bounteous period of peace and plenty that might even some day justify the distant daily slaughter—in those muddy, rat-filled trenches of northern France—of the finest youths of my generation.
With the coming of the Armistice and the appointment of the Peace Commission, I was an obvious staff candidate, and I had the good fortune to be selected as an aide by that benevolent and experienced old diplomat, Mr. Henry White. There was no idea of Frances going with me to Paris; our baby Felicia was an ailing child who hung between life and death a good part of the first two years of her life, a price that she may have paid for the robust health she has since enjoyed. I am afraid that I was too full of my sense of mission to give Frances the proper help and consolation at this time. She seemed, however, to take my preoccupation in good part, and our only real argument, in the days before I sailed, was over the prospects of a lasting peace treaty.
“The old imperialists will have it all their way,” she warned me. “France and England will hoodwink Wilson. He’s too new at the game.”
“Everything can still work out if we can form a league of nations.”
The House of the Prophet Page 8
