The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  “No.” Felix seemed vastly amused at my display of temper. “I told you, I declined the job.”

  “But you think she may have been right. You just said so. It makes me sick to see that woman trying to turn you into something you’re not. Good God! As if she’d had the whole world to pick and choose from!”

  “Gladys, Gladys! Take it easy.”

  “I won’t take it easy! What sort of a moral code do we have that hands you over to a person like her, for life, because of some crazy sexual impulse that you felt two decades ago? It’s all wrong! Look at Mrs. Roosevelt, married to the most charming and the greatest man of our time, and all she can think of is her boring causes. Does she appreciate him? Of course not! Small wonder that he had a fling with her secretary before his polio.”

  “But he needs Eleanor. They’re a partnership. He’d never have been elected if there’d been a divorce.”

  “But you’re not running for office!”

  Felix jumped up at this, and we stood for a moment staring at each other. He had turned very pale.

  “Oh, of course, I hate your wife,” I said with an angry shrug, turning abruptly away. “But only because she hates me. Don’t deny it. I can tell. But I’d even forgive her that if she would only admit it’s jealousy. But, oh, no. She’s above a paltry female weakness like that, isn’t she? I’ll bet she tells you she dislikes me because I distract you from being the great man she would have you be!”

  “Gladys, how do you know these things?”

  “Because I know women. Which is more than you do, my dear.”

  “Perhaps I know more about one of them than you think.” He had stepped close to me, and I felt his hands on my shoulders, turning me around, when we both saw Lila Nickerson’s head emerging over a boulder, and he stepped back. In a few more minutes the rest of the party was upon us, and Felix and I had no further chance for private talk.

  Lila arranged to walk down the mountain with me and took the occasion to deliver a discreet little sermon.

  “You don’t fool me, you know, Gladys. Not for a minute. I’m perfectly aware that behind that pose of the carefree butterfly of Butterfield Bay is a shrewdness second to none in Seal Cove. But perhaps there are one or two little things that may have escaped even your penetrating observation.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the fact that everybody in Seal Cove is absolutely devoted to Frances Leitner. Including Felix.”

  “You think I have designs upon him?”

  Lila did not look at me. She seemed intent on the rocks beneath her feet, to avoid stumbling. “I think you are engaging a great deal of his attention. I think it may be disturbing to Frances.”

  “Did I ask her not to come on this walk?”

  “She has asthma. Walking makes her short of breath.”

  “Is it my fault that her husband won’t stay home with her?”

  “I think so.”

  “Lila Nickerson, you’re being perfectly ridiculous. Wives don’t own husbands—not husbands like Felix, anyway. He needs the stimulation of other people.”

  “Frances knows best, I think, what Felix needs. She has been the anchor that holds him down to earth. Felix, left to himself, is inclined to fly off on tangents. His head is always in the clouds. She knows that he must give so much to his law firm, so much to the bar, so much to his writing, so much to the public.”

  “And why does she know that so much better than he?”

  Lila did not answer this. “What you don’t realize, Gladys, is that for all our joking in Seal Cove, for all our parlor games and seeming lightheartedness, this little community is sincerely dedicated to making the world a better place for everyone. And none more sincerely so than Felix and Frances Leitner.”

  The nerve of the woman! To put herself in that class. As if she had ever cared about any human being but Lila Nickerson! But she had given me an idea so suddenly exciting that I felt my heart pound. For was not what Felix really needed the exact opposite of what his wife provided in such chilling profusion? Was it not the freedom to think great thoughts and to express them? Supposing I were in the seat of the censorious Frances and able with my money to free him from the bondage of his law firm so that he was able to devote all of his genius to the discovery of the good life, the good society, the good world? Should anything be allowed to stand in the way of such a goal? What became now of a fatuously grinning Heyward, of a drearily sermonizing Frances? Were they to be allowed to dim the beacon light that Felix might hold up to a darkened planet? I was too thrilled at this answer to all my problems to be angry any further with an object as puny as Lila Nickerson.

  “Well, you needn’t worry about my sirenizing Felix,” I said with apparent magnanimity. “Heyward is coming back from New York on Friday, and I’m inclined to think he’s had a sufficient dose of Seal Cove. Poor darling, he takes you all at your face value and fancies he’s way beyond his depth. I shall lead him back to the bridge tables of dear old Butterfield Bay. But don’t think I’m retreating, Lila! Or that for one minute I agree with your theory about Frances’s beneficent influence on her husband. I know a possessive woman when I see one. After all, I’m one myself! And I know that if I put Heyward under too severe an intellectual strain—or what the dear dodo considers an intellectual strain—he’ll spend more and more time in New York. And then who knows what might happen? So you see, Lila, I shall be polishing my Culbertson in the interests of my own domestic bliss!”

  With this I left her, but to show that I was not being subservient, I hurried ahead to where Felix was leading the group and accompanied him down the mountain.

  “You’ll be hearing from me,” I told him, as we parted, with an enigmatic and (I trusted) bewitching smile. “I shall call you next week. I think I may have a message that will amuse you.”

  In Kent, a village ten miles inland, by a lovely lake, a rich woman friend of mine had a camp, which she used only two weeks out of the year and which she was delighted to lend me. It was from her lonely but charming cabin, decorated with light green curtains and dark green wicker furniture and hung with Picasso prints, that I telephoned Felix one morning in the solitary shack that he used for his writing. I invited him to a lunch of chicken salad sandwiches and a bottle of Moselle.

  He agreed to come.

  Manuscript of Felix Leitner’s “My First Divorce,” Written for Roger Cutter in 1965

  IN THE SUMMER of 1938, at the age of forty-seven, I endured the greatest emotional crisis of my life. I use the superlative because I cannot conceive that, at the age I have now attained, any comparable experience could still be in store for me. What happened was simply this: the biological urge to mate created between myself and Gladys Satterlee a tension that subverted all of our other interests: intellectual, physical, spiritual, domestic. I recognized the force of the famous cry of Racine’s tragic heroine: Venus, with all her force, attached to her prey!

  I found myself at once exhilarated and profoundly depressed. I was ecstatically happy and at the same time achingly miserable. I had thought I had known passion, many times; I had certainly believed myself in love with Frances. But those earlier emotions, in contrast to what I now felt, seemed to bear the relation of a tranquil pastoral scene by Puvis de Chavannes to a flaming Tahitian landscape by Gauguin. Even as a young man, when I had reveled in the poetry of Byron and Shelley, I had never associated a woman with such acute pain. But now the mere idea that I might never possess Gladys Satterlee was like a drill on a tender tooth.

  This tension between us, I should explain, was not only biological. If we were animals, we were still among the higher animals. Our physical union, when it ultimately came, acted to intensify the already existing union of our hearts. Never had I thought or written more clearly or cogently than in the first months of our affair; never had I felt stronger or more physically fit. I had the exciting sense that every talent with which, as a homo sapiens, I had been endowed, was being utilized to its highest degree. It made me feel like a god! Bu
t what kind of god? A god who meted out justice and mercy? A god who sanctified the solemn engagements that men and women made to each other in the ceremony called marriage? Hardly.

  Until the Industrial Revolution our European forebears had lived in a society where the universe was deemed to have a purpose and where a deity judged men, rewarding them or condemning them according to an absolute standard of right and wrong. And the dethronement of the deity was followed by a long succession of political theories as to who was to judge men and by what standards: a king, a parliament, a congress, the people. But now we exist in a cold, mechanical universe where we are obliged to accept the lonely responsibility of each man for his own soul. I could not escape the bar of my conscience. I had to decide for myself how much I owed my friends, my children, my wife, my beloved.

  I had first to review my duty to Frances. She had been a good and faithful spouse; she had given me, as the rather meaningless phrase put it, the best years of her life. It was not her fault that she no longer attracted me. Indeed, she had been a good sport about the cessation, a couple of years before, of our sexual relations, bravely putting the blame on her asthma in order to spare me the embarrassment of having to confess to a loss of desire. Whatever her physical need of me—and I was sure, poor woman, that it continued—she was willing to settle for what the French call a “white marriage” rather than risk alienating me altogether. Would she have countenanced an affair on my part? No. But she might have been ready to look the other way.

  So far as Gladys was concerned, I could judge her joy by my own. If she, like me, felt that no punishment was too great a price to pay for the bliss of our physical union, I was under no duty to spare her the possible consequences. And our children, I argued to myself, her one and my two, had reached an age where they might be expected to absorb without undue damage the knowledge (assuming that such knowledge should have to come) that their parents had impulses that wandered beyond the neat and narrow park of matrimony. It was Heyward who continued to be my chief stumbling block. Surely I had a peculiar duty to Heyward. I had always allowed him to consider himself a more intimate friend than he actually was. Now I was stuck with his illusion.

  There were two reasons for our special relationship. At Yale, he had represented many things that I had not had and envied him: athletic good looks, easy popularity, reputable money and social position. I had been touched by his frankly offered affection—unusual in the Yale of that day between a well-connected Gentile and an undistinguished Jew—but because I had feared that there might have been some element of social climbing behind my reciprocation, I had resolved that I should give Heyward every bit as much as he gave me. So it was that when I became a public figure and he remained a very private one—and when, to tell the truth, he lost the charm of youth and began to bore me—I took considerable pains to convince him that nothing had changed between us. The second reason was simpler. Heyward had always been sensitive and easy to hurt, and I had always dreaded hurting people.

  But the presumption that informed the commencement of my affair with Gladys—that it should be kept secret to the world—was to be the guaranty of Hey ward’s continued serenity. It was also to be the guaranty of our reputations. I emphasize this last point because I still believed at that time that my duty to society at large obliged me to maintain the forms of marriage and the family. I had always allowed for divorce, but only in cases of serious incompatibility and after a prescribed waiting period. I did not believe that society would benefit from an absolute license in matters of sex, and now that we more or less have it, I still have doubts. So I planned to satisfy my passion without disturbing my family, to achieve my bliss without outraging convention. I would have my cake and eat it. No doubt millions of husbands have tried. Who knows how many have succeeded?

  I was not destined, anyway, to be among the latter. From the beginning I worried about Gladys’s indiscretions. Our setup, but for them, seemed foolproof. I had told Frances that I was planning a new book and needed to take long solitary walks on the mountains with my notebook. As this had been my custom with other books, it aroused no suspicion. Heyward had gone back to New York, and Gladys did not have to account for her time to anyone. If she were seen in the village of Kent buying groceries, she could say that she was redecorating her friend’s camp. We used to meet there at noon and make love and then lunch by the lake. There was no other camp in the immediate area. We had the Maine woods and the shimmering water and the blue hills to ourselves. We were Adam and Eve in Paradise, and there were no snakes to bother us. Those days were the richest, the most heart-exploding, of my lifetime.

  I have said there were no snakes, but if Eve’s snake was really her ungovernable curiosity, perhaps Gladys’s was her compulsion to embellish her surroundings. She had her alibi that she was decorating her friend’s cabin, but that alibi was soon converted into truth. Every day she would arrive with something new: a cushion, a coverlet, flowers, silver, a teapot, a cocktail shaker. I would protest that we needed nothing but a “jug of wine” to adorn our wilderness, but I might as well have told a busy wren to abstain from building its nest. Sometimes I felt that Gladys actually enjoyed playing with fire. Some women cannot be content unless the world knows of their happiness. She must have had to struggle with the impulse to cry our love to the tree tops.

  One day at noon I drove into camp to find an upholsterer’s truck parked by Gladys’s little Renault. She had asked a man from Kent to hang new curtains in the living room! I backed my car away quickly, turned it around and drove off, but I had seen a face in the window, and my initials were on my license plate. When I returned later in the afternoon, Gladys accused me of having made matters worse by my guilty flight. She was probably right, but who had gratuitously created the dangerous situation? We became so angry that we parted that day without the usual intimacies. It was the only time that this happened.

  Who actually betrayed our hideaway we never learned, but only a week after the episode of the upholstery truck, when Gladys and I were in bed at noon, we heard the sound of a seemingly stuck automobile horn from the driveway. The horrid noise went on and on, blaring, declamatory, accusing, filling the forest air with its shrill note of human outrage. In my first dazed reaction, as I leapt from the bed, it seemed to me that everything behind the limits of the lake and the spruce trees, everything of man and woman, everything beside Gladys and myself, was unutterably low and vile. What fiend was sitting out there before the front door with a hand pressing down that horn?

  Gladys pulled the covers over her head, and I hurried to the window to peek through the slats of the Venetian blind. There, only a few yards from the window, sat Heyward at the wheel of his open Bugatti runabout. He was staring right at the window; he might just have been able to make out my outline. But, of course, my car was fatally parked beside Gladys’s at the front door.

  Suddenly the horn stopped. “Hiya, lover boy!” I heard him shriek. And then, before I could even consider how I should try to handle the situation, he started up his motor and drove off in a spluttering roar.

  ***

  Later that day, Gladys telephoned me from her house in Butterfield (she knew that Frances was away, visiting one of her sisters at Camden) to tell me that Heyward had gone to New York, leaving no message. But the next day she received a curt notice from a lawyer in New York to the effect that Mr. Satterlee had retained him to bring suit for divorce on grounds of adultery. I assured Gladys that she could count on me to the end, and, without explaining what I meant by this to her, or indeed to myself, I rang off, just as Frances entered the room. She had come back that morning, and it was at once evident from her gray face and glittering gray eyes that she knew all.

  “What does Mrs. Satterlee say?” she demanded in a harsh voice. “Are you to come to her at once? Or may we have a talk first?”

  “I had hoped, Frances, that you and I might face this thing without recriminations.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing for the past thr
ee years. Not recriminating. Where the hell has it gotten me?”

  “Three years? I thought we were concerned with what’s happened this summer.”

  “Oh, it’s not just her. She’s only a detail, if one can call the last straw a detail. I mean your whole attitude toward me, toward your work, toward... well, the whole world.”

  I began to suspect that Frances might have been drinking. She sometimes did, in times of great emotional tension.

  “Can’t we ever be particular? Even now, for God’s sake?”

  “It’s like the NLRB job,” she retorted, in some confusion. “You won’t soil your hands with our grubby problems. You want to be above us all... way up on top of some mountain of yours. But you’re not as detached and spiritual as you think you are! Because the only people who can join you on that mountain top are those who can afford their own private planes!”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors, Frances. Planes can’t land on mountain tops.”

  “Damn it all, I’m not writing a column!” She actually stamped her foot. “You know well enough what I mean!”

  “I know you’ve always believed that I’ve somehow ‘sold out.’ To whom and for what, I confess, has always mystified me.”

  “But you haven’t sold out! You haven’t had a penny for your soul! Do you think I think you could be bought? I’m not so naive. You gave yourself away! For a few swank dinners, for a dozen lunches at exclusive clubs, for a ‘May I call you Felix, old man’ from a Morgan partner... or for a roll in the hay with Milady Satterlee, you’ve joined the Pharisees!”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that I’m not obligated to spend my life trying to be the man you thought you’d married?”

  “Oh, but Felix you were!” she cried with a sudden wail.

  “We must agree to disagree about that. I have a totally different conception of my function in life than you do.” I decided, despite her obvious overwroughtness, that there was no avoiding the big issue. It had to come now. “And feeling as differently as we do about so many topics, don’t you think...”