The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  Felix’s tone betrayed nothing. “I think it is an interesting idea. And very likely true.”

  Gladys might have made a mistake, but it did not take her more than a minute to change her tactics, recover lost ground and carry the campaign deep into enemy territory. “Oh, of course, we’re hopelessly fashionable in Butterfield Bay, Mrs. Nickerson. I plead guilty to that. We are poor butterflies. But what else do you leave us? You ladies at Seal have all the lore and the learning. Oh, you are formidable! But do you know something? If Shakespeare were alive in Maine today, I wonder if he wouldn’t spend more of his time in Butterfield than in Seal. What do you think of that, Professor Cutter? Aren’t great artists and writers notoriously drawn to gilded courts and lovely women?”

  I marveled at her skill. Not only had she managed to put Lila, who prided herself on moving with equal ease in both communities, in the position of a dowdy bluestocking who would be hopelessly out of place in any smart resort, but she had somehow divined that my father would take her side. She could not possibly have known that she had touched on one of his favorite subjects: the vulnerability of the creative artist to the lure of society.

  “Quite so, dear lady,” he boomed. “When Dr. Johnson was asked if he would rather meet a duke or a great writer, he said a duke, of course. For, once he had known the duke, he could meet all the writers in the world!”

  “I wonder if that would hold today,” Lila protested, obviously irked. “Not that I suggest we have yet achieved the classless society. But we have come a long way from Dr. Johnson. Certainly dukes aren’t what they were.”

  “Nor are literary men,” said Leo Troy unexpectedly. He was our host’s only son, a small, tense bachelor engineer of fifty who was reputed to be a near genius. “I believe that only two classes of people will survive the coming revolution; the only two that no society, capitalist or communist, can get on without. These are the technicians and the beautiful women. Well, I’m a technician, and I’ve chosen Mrs. Satterlee!”

  A round of surprised laughter from the whole table greeted this.

  “What will you do with Heyward?” Felix demanded with a chuckle.

  “Oh, I’ll send him to Siberia with the rest of you!”

  At this, the general conversation broke up, and after dinner, as usual, we played charades. Felix and Mrs. Troy were captains of the rival teams, and I noted that Felix chose Gladys as his first recruit. But not till near the end of the evening did they act out a word together. It was “cloak” from the quotation “Not alone my inky cloak, good mother,” and it took them only a moment to do it, but that moment became fixed in my memory and in the memory of all who were then present.

  It is difficult to tell why. The little scene was simple and brief. Gladys, with a piece of cardboard around her neck to represent what we soon understood was a ruff collar, walked across the room with an easy, loping stride and then paused as if observing an obstruction in her path. Felix hurried forward, stripped off his coat and flung it across her path. Smiling, she stepped on it, and we all roared “cloak.” It was easy, of course, but Gladys and Felix remained for a small fraction of time, a few seconds maybe, after the guess was made, still forming their tableau, she looking down at him, charmingly smiling, he crouching, his hand still holding the coat, gazing up at her, his eyes aglow. There was an immediate communication to the whole room of a new relationship.

  Then, to everybody’s embarrassment, somebody clapped. It was Heyward.

  “Bravo!” he absurdly cried, absurdly meaning it.

  The next day, I had a talk with Frances Leitner at the Seal Cove Sailing Club. She, herself, did not sail, but her fifteen-year-old son, Frank, did, and she drove him there almost every day. I had just come in from an afternoon cruise when I saw her with her knitting on the terrace. She waved to me and asked me to have a drink.

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time in Butterfield this summer,” she commented when I sat down. “We hardly see you at all any more.”

  “An extra man is much in demand there. They make it pleasant for one.”

  I must endeavor to be fair in my description of Frances Leitner, for her subsequent strong dislike of me could well bring down on my head the suspicion of resentment. I think I have none, but a chronicler must always be on his guard against it. Frances at the time was forty-seven, exactly her husband’s age. Unfortunately, where he was a splendidly fit example for his years, she seemed older than hers. She was a small gray woman, with a tendency to roundness; nothing about her figure or presence did justice to her admirable brain or elevated character. She was reputed to be a kind of saint; she hardly ever lost her temper, or even her calm. She would sit at a party at Seal Cove, absolutely still except for her busy hands, her mild, lined, pleasant countenance turned to the speaker, her lips fixed in that half smile that preceded her invariably intelligent qualification to every uttered generality. Frances’s concern for humanity had almost obliterated her interest in the things that so many women (at least in her day) cared about: clothes, parties, jewels, houses, all the paraphernalia of social life. She was too bright and had too keen a sense of humor to let herself become a bore about this, but I always felt the drop in her interest whenever the topic changed from the broad to the particular, or whenever it even bordered on “gossip,” as she was prone to label any discussion, however friendly, of the personalities of our acquaintances. I sometimes wondered if “people” had not replaced individuals in Frances’s heart and if this perhaps was not the rather unlovable characteristic of saints, but if so, she made a notable exception for Felix. There was never any question that he occupied the central position in her life.

  “I’ve never seen Felix more brilliant than he was last night,” I began, a bit mischievously, for I knew that she thought his brilliance was wasted at parties.

  “You mean at that silly game?”

  “He was much applauded.”

  “That kind of applause doesn’t do Felix any good.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “He likes it too much. Felix has quite enough appetite for social life as it is. He doesn’t need any encouragement.”

  “Oh, come, Frances, you’re being too severe. If ever a man deserved a little relaxation, it’s Felix.”

  “Relaxation, yes. But Butterfield Bay is not relaxation.”

  “I had thought we were in Seal Cove last night.”

  “Don’t play games with me, Roger. We had a delegation from Butterfield Bay, as you well know. They changed the character of the whole evening. A party to us may be simply a diversion. To them it is simply the whole of life.”

  “You take them too seriously.”

  “Because I see them so clearly. They corrupt people.” Frances’s smile and soft tone did not in the least mitigate the rigor of her sentence.

  “Why should they want to do that?”

  “It may be a form of self-defense. Perhaps an instinct. Society people arrange the outward appearance of their lives so as to make the observer think they are not only attractive but virtuous. If the observer has been inclined to consider them a public nuisance, and the system that fosters them an economic anachronism, he may now be persuaded to moderate his views. It’s the old business of Ramsay MacDonald being tamed by the Tories who put him in court breeches.”

  “You can’t think Felix would change his opinions because of a few dinner parties in Butterfield Bay?”

  “Can’t I? Felix in the last four years has been moving steadily to the right.”

  “But that’s been the maturing of his vision!”

  “Well, I don’t think it desirable that such maturing, if that’s what it is, should be accelerated by society people. Did you hear what he said about Shakespeare falling victim in the end to his own words?”

  “Yes. And I thought it beautifully put.”

  Frances sniffed. “He was describing his own danger. Felix has always been fascinated by words. I believe there are times when he would like to substitute them for actions.”
r />   “But words are his life!”

  “Words can never be life. Not in themselves. Words are aids to action. The most beautiful thought in the world is not worth a fig if it isn’t made to help people.”

  “But it isn’t Felix’s job to implement his own ideas! There have to be people whose only role is to comment and guide.”

  “I won’t positively deny that, though there’s a good deal I could say against it. Let’s leave it aside for the moment. What I affirm is that Felix’s role should be more than commenting. When I first met him, he wanted to change the world. Now I sometimes fear he wants simply to entertain it.”

  “But with the highest form of entertainment! As Shakespeare entertains us with Hamlet.”

  “That’s art, Roger. Don’t get things mixed up. Felix is concerned with politics and government. There’s no borderline in the fight for a good society between doing and thinking. They must fuse.”

  “They needn’t!”

  Frances saw that she was not going to convince me. Her slightly broadened smile was her way of indicating that she now gave it up. “Well, if you want to put him in an ivory tower, let’s see that it is ivory. Let’s see that it’s tall and clean, with a fine view of the world below. And not a shingle monstrosity in Butterfield Bay.”

  “You just don’t like Gladys Satterlee.”

  “I certainly don’t!” Frances’s whole tone changed now, and I had that uneasy sense of lost security that comes to us when an adult who has always treated us, however kindly and politely, as a child, suddenly admits us to the company of grownups. It can be flattering, even exhilarating, but there is a corresponding loss of exemption. “I certainly do not like Gladys Satterlee. The woman is rotten to the core. She sees that Felix has a quality beyond anything that exists in her tawdry world, and she wants to stamp it out. Oh, she doesn’t think that she wants to stamp it out. No, she believes she wants to wear it around her neck, like a glittering diamond. But once it’s around that neck, it will lose its glitter. Count on it, Roger.”

  “Of course I have to believe you’re exaggerating. Probably on purpose.”

  “Of course you do. Here come our drinks. Let’s talk of something else.”

  The next morning, early, Felix called me for a walk up Blaine’s Peak. I had never seen him in a mood of such strenuous cheer. I had almost to run up the mountain after him. At the top he stared out over the ocean, like stout Cortez, or as Keats should have put it, like Balboa.

  “Would you believe, Roger, that the same summer could mark the happiest time in a man’s whole life and the most miserable? That ineffable joy and atrocious agony can be simultaneous?”

  I had only to read my answer in the burning pink of his eyes.

  Gladys Leitner’s Account of the Summer of 1938, Written for Roger Cutter in 1974

  WE ALL TEND to think that our parents lived under fixed and inhibiting rules and that we know much more of life than they ever could have. Yet I am sure that my daughter, Fiona, thinks there is little to choose between her grandmother’s life and mine. Distinctions blur as we look back more than one generation. How much do I distinguish between the moral codes of my great-grandmothers and my great-greats’?

  Still, looking back on my youth, my mother seems to me an innocent, even if she was an innocent wrapped in whalebone. I was born in the eighteen-nineties; she in the seventies. Romantic ideas may have permeated her generation; they may have considered themselves flamboyant and passionate compared to their own, more composed and placid progenitors (illusions perhaps of the daguerreotype). Some of them had affairs; a few even divorced. But my contemporaries were of the First World War; they drank too much and smoked too much and married too much. I insist that the “generation gap” was at its widest in 1919.

  Mother’s conservatism, I must admit, seemed quite voluntary. It appeared to emanate not so much from a repression exercised upon her by people or doctrines as from her own simple enchantment with life exactly as it was. It did not matter to her that Ephraim Dunne, my father, was a gentle, unimaginative, methodical gentleman who had obviously married her because she was the daughter of the president of the Bank of Commerce. She seemed just as pleased with the kind of mild, exclusive devotion that he offered her as she was with the garden parties and card games and card droppings and dinner parties (oh, the length of them!) that made up so much of her very routinized existence. Mother did not see why anyone should want anything more than she had. America was the greatest of nations and had the greatest future; business was constantly improving the lot of the human race, and science would eventually find a solution to all the horrid diseases that threatened even a woman as robustly healthy as Isabel Dunne.

  I grew up in New York and Butterfield Bay, like all the other children of my parents’ friends. When we were in our teens we talked boldly of the possibility of “platonic” friendships with men, and by the time we were debutantes we believed that every woman’s life should contain at least one “great passion.” Only so, we proclaimed, could a woman be “fulfilled.” We did not consider that our mothers had ever been fulfilled. Their entire generation (think of it!) had been spiritually wasted, with the possible exceptions of Cousin Maud Tilson, who had run off with her son’s violin teacher, and Father’s college roommate, who was supposed to have had an affair with the diva Olive Fremstad.

  As I grew older, I grew a bit bolder. I took dancing lessons and acting lessons and even once played a maid’s part in a parlor comedy on Broadway. I smoked and drank in circles where it was still considered daring to do so and went a good deal further with men than other girls did. But not too far. I was basically a fake. I was basically my mother’s daughter. When I made my war marriage to Heyward Satterlee I was still a virgin. And when he returned from France in 1919—my soldier, my hero, my lover—when I went with bursting heart to meet his troop ship at the pier, I knew at the first sight of his shining face on the gangplank that I had made the mistake of my life!

  What will seem scarcely credible to young people in 1974 is that I remained faithful to Heyward for almost two decades. But fidelity was not so unfashionable in those days as it is now, and Heyward was an amiable and adoring husband who let me do anything I wanted and bought far more things for me than either of us could afford. I lived through the roaring twenties and went to a thousand parties. I think I even made him happy.

  But, oh, dear me, I tried to give him some bad times! If I was going to live vicariously, it would be with a vengeance. I turned life into a book, written by myself, of which I, of course, was the heroine. I would write letters that I didn’t send, sometimes to people I didn’t know or who didn’t even exist, and would leave them about, as if to invite a reading. I kept a diary with no other purpose, that I could make out, than that of entering my near indiscretions. My carelessly (or carefully?) scattered documents kept Heyward only too painfully abreast, not of what was going on, but of what I wanted to have go on, and there would be noisy scenes, which I would then write up in full detail in my diary. Was he made wretched? Or did the whole business simply titillate him? I was never sure.

  I always cherished the idea that one day I would go in for the real thing. So many of my friends did. There had to be something more in life than what I enjoyed! But Heyward was always so good, and then, also, he was very connubial. For years I compromised; I kept men dangling in attendance. There were epicene young men who did not in the least object to my limitations, and beefier types who did. But all the while, I was looking, waiting, hoping for that... all right, that prince who would never come!

  In the spring of 1938, desperate and forty-two, I made a crucial decision. I was going to find my great passion before the year was out. I was not going to wait any longer; I was going to give romance and nature a deliberate shove, and the man who seemed to be directly in my chosen path was Mark Truro.

  He had always intrigued me. He had been given so much: a huge fortune; fine, aristocratic, graying good looks; sleepy, sexy, laughing eyes; grace of bea
ring; a sharp wit and a liberal philosophy. What more could a godchild of luck demand? Of course, many of my crowd detested him for what they called his radicalism. Some even said he was a Red. “He’s so bloody rich,” they would sneer, “that he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn what that madman in the White House is up to.” We had emerged from the worst of the depression, but none of us had anything like what he had had in 1929. I was spending capital in a way that my mother thought damnable. Heyward disapproved, but he made it a rule not to interfere with what I did with my own money. I suppose I figured—if I thought about it at all—that he or Mother would have enough to keep me off the streets if I spent it all. I was becoming a great one for seizing the day.

  Mark Truro had been three times divorced, and he liked to make it known that he would never marry again. The children of his various unions lived mostly with their mothers, but they were apt to spend their summers with him at The Mount, that ugly old castle of his long-deceased grandfather’s in Butterfield Bay, now so oddly hung with Mark’s collection of modern paintings. The children adored him; the servants adored him; the sycophant house guests, employees of the liberal periodicals and institutions that he supported, pretended to adore him. Butterfield Bay, dazzled and disapproving, watched him warily. But everything—adoration, distrust, even outright hostility—amused Mark. He seemed as incapable of anger as he was of reverence.

  My contemporaries liked to accuse the younger generation of silly romantic illusions, but in fact my daughter, Fiona, and her friends were hard boiled compared to me and mine. I conceived the crazy idea that Mark Truro, an aging Byronic corsair, hardened by disillusionment, immune to flattery, despairing of love, walled up in his rugged tower of cynicism, was now ripe for the one great passion of his lifetime. I even pictured him as a Lord Nelson, weary of victories and adulation, and myself as a Lady Hamilton, seeking something deeper than the frivolous flirtations of the Neapolitan court. We had always been good, if casual, friends, had always laughed lightheartedly at the same things, but Mark, whose sensitivity to women was uncanny, picked up my intensification of feeling almost the very day it occurred. He promptly reacted.