The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  “He did not! She was all for the life of the mind, then.”

  “Oh, that was just lovers’ talk. Felix wasn’t fooled by that for a minute, and you know it.”

  I collapsed. “You’re so reasonable, Fiona. How do you manage always to be so reasonable?”

  She did not answer me, but I suspected that, if she had, she would have said it was because of her art. Fiona had developed a small but definite reputation of her own. She had abandoned her earlier tempestuous themes and had settled, curiously enough, on exquisitely colored, highly accurate studies of birds and animals, which enjoyed a fashionable sale on Madison Avenue to just the sort of people of whom Fiona, in earlier days at least, had seemed most strongly to disapprove. But now they supplied her with an additional income, assuring her independence, and she seemed satisfied.

  What she had told me, anyway, prepared me to witness, with more sympathy for Gladys than I might otherwise have felt, the scene that occurred at the Aleck Nickersons’ dinner party to welcome the Stuart Hamills to Washington.

  Stuart Hamill had just been appointed a roving ambassador to discuss nuclear treaties with those nations that were in a position to develop such power in the foreseeable future. There had been a good deal of publicity given to the appointment, and Hamill was very much the man of the week, that week anyway, in the volatile capital. He was a Yale classmate of Felix’s (and, of course, of Hey ward Satterlee’s) and had been, at least until the divorce, one of Felix’s good friends. Hamill was a man who had seemed to prosper from the very cradle. He came of a wealthy Providence family, and he had risen rapidly to the senior partnership of one of that city’s oldest and most respected law firms. He had served Rhode Island as both congressman and senator. He was a big, hearty, noisy man, whose style in dress and automobiles was as pronounced as his mild political liberalism was determined.

  “Stuart does everything right,” Felix once said of him. “His clothes are from Brooks Brothers, his sports equipment from Abercrombie and Fitch, and his opinions from the New York Times editorial pages. He is against all the bad things: fascism, communism, isolationism, laissez-fairism. He was a rich boy who was brought up with an iron sense of public duty. He is damned if he won’t be good!”

  “What’s so wrong with that?” I asked.

  “Simply that one of these days he may explode all over the room.”

  “You mean because it’s his real nature to be a robber baron and grind the poor?”

  “Not at all. He doesn’t have a real nature. He hasn’t been allowed to. But he has a strong ego and a hot temper, not to mention a first-class mind, and he must get weary of keeping them all under such tight control. Don’t you sense that in the way his words jump out at you? Like a growling dog on a leash? Can’t you hear his inner thoughts: ‘Go to hell, if you think you’re going to get me to admit I’m any better than you are, you poor sap! Damn it all, I’m a good guy, a good guy, a good guy!’”

  “I’m afraid that’s too imaginative for me.”

  “Well, wait.”

  Dorcas Hamill was a female counterpart of her husband. She was so soft and smiling and fragrant, with such faintly fading beauty, that she made one think of a fine old Chinese shawl. Yet it was draped, one also felt, over a hard substance. One suspected in Mrs. Hamill a character that might yield temporarily but would always snap back. She had borne children when doctors had warned she was risking her life; she had accompanied her husband on trips to distant lands when she had been told that her health would not stand it. She was passionately admired in Georgetown. “Dear, darling Dorcas” was considered the model of womanhood, one who combined the graciousness of a past era with the intrepidity of the modern female.

  Only such a couple could have challenged the Leitners’ social supremacy in Georgetown. It hardly surprised me that Aleck and Lila Nickerson should have offered the Hamills their first, big welcoming dinner party. Aleck was representing the Times in Washington now, and Lila and Gladys, out of their mutual need, had patched up a sort of friendship.

  At cocktails, after all the guests had arrived, Lila talked briefly with me. It might have been supposed that I was too obscure to merit such attention on so great an occasion, but Lila’s need to denigrate Felix to his intimates transcended her natural snobbishness.

  “Felix’s nose is really out of joint tonight,” she observed.

  I glanced across the room to where Felix and Stuart Hamill—in a way that Washington ladies tolerated and New Yorkers would not have—were engaged, quite by themselves, in an animated discussion.

  “Why out of joint? It doesn’t look so from here.”

  “Oh, you know how Felix’s back goes up whenever an old friend gets a position of real power.”

  “No, Lila, I don’t.”

  “Come off it, Roger! I can almost smell his jealousy from here.”

  “Do you imply that Felix couldn’t have a position in government if he chose?”

  “Oh, if he chose. But he doesn’t choose. He doesn’t dare. He couldn’t face the responsibility. He’s always been that way. The divine umpire. The great onlooker who doesn’t want to get his feet wet.”

  “I suppose there are always going to be people who sneer at political philosophers as non-doers. But it seems curious to find them in the family of the New York Times.”

  Lila did not notice criticism from pygmies. She brushed this aside. “Did you happen to see Lionel Straus’s ‘Letter from America’ in the Times Literary Supplement?”

  “I don’t read Straus. He’s a chronic liar and a self-made Cockney.”

  “He speaks of calling on the Leitners. He says he could hardly recognize his old friend Felix as the Duke of Georgetown. That the one-time socialist was now fussing over silver spoons and tea cups and boasting of his socialite friends!”

  “The old bastard! I suppose you sent Felix a copy?”

  “I thought he ought to know.”

  I was too irritated to talk to my hostess further, and I went over to Felix, who had just risen to greet Mrs. Hamill. I could tell by his mild stare that he questioned my interruption, but his manners were too good for a further hint. I told him bluntly that Lila had just informed me of the Straus column.

  “How considerate of her,” he said in his level tone. Then he turned to Mrs. Hamill. “Let me tell you how an old British friend has treated me. He comes to Washington to report on our national activities. He remains here for two days, a generous allowance you will admit. He has no time to call on me, but we meet briefly at the house of a common acquaintance. He also gives me five minutes on the telephone. From this exiguous communication he draws a picture of me at home, in which I appear as a debilitated Samson, shorn of my hair and manhood and sprawled amid the tea cups! You can imagine who my Delilah was.”

  “Oh, but, Felix, you must surely be used to that kind of thing!” Mrs. Hamill exclaimed warmly, clasping her hands. “You have to give envious mortals a chance to get rid of their excess bile. Look at you, my dear, so smooth and handsome. If I didn’t know you’d been in Stuart’s class at Yale I’d swear you were ten years younger. How is foolish Mr. Straus to believe that behind that cool facade is a furnace of hard work? He can’t know what your friends know. Forgive him, Felix.”

  What a woman, this Dorcas Hamill! So charming was the appearance of her sincerity that it did not really matter whether or not it was true. A perfect work of art had to have validity in itself. I had been in the habit of criticizing Lila Nickerson for not being more grateful to providence for her brains and position, for allowing her spirit to be corroded by a hankering resentment that she was not beautiful and feminine, but when I contemplated the success of Dorcas I wondered if Lila were not justified. What were any gifts in a woman compared to those with which Dorcas was endowed? Even Felix, who had seemed more riled by the Straus episode than was his wont, was now mollified.

  Perhaps Dorcas Hamill had a sense of trouble in the air already. Perhaps, like a good diplomat, she was trying to create an atmosp
here of gentility that only a churl would break up. We had not proceeded through more than one course at the dinner table before Lila announced that we were to have general conversation. She then put a question to her guest of honor about the Russian government.

  Hamill spoke well and convincingly, but he was inclined to lecture his audience. I noted the fixed stare on Felix’s expressionless face as he listened. It meant that he was dissenting, for whenever he agreed with a speaker he would offer him the briefest of nods, or the slightest of smiles, but he would respond only to a direct question.

  “It has become a platitude, I suppose,” Hamill seemed now to be concluding, “to point out that the free world must win every election, but that Russia need win only one. Yet it puts the problem in a way that one is not apt to forget. When we say that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, we are speaking only a literal truth. One blink, and we may be in the darkness forever.”

  As this marked a pause in what had been a considerable harangue about bolstering anti-Communist governments throughout the world, Lila asked Felix to comment.

  “I think Stuart has put the matter very clearly,” he began amiably enough, in that easy tone that took so wonderfully for granted the room’s total attention. “But I’m afraid I cannot see the world situation in terms quite so simple. I see many gradations of communism, as I certainly see many gradations of capitalism. I do not foresee a world struggle of black against white, or perhaps I should say of red against white. I tend to be critical of any foreign policy that regards compromise as weakness. It seems to me that this may be the same dangerous point of view that was behind the demand for unconditional surrender in both wars.”

  “You would have made peace with Hitler, Felix?”

  “I don’t say that, Stuart. But I might have offered terms to any group in Germany that undertook to topple him.”

  “They would have been Nazis! There were no groups that weren’t. How could you have trusted their word?”

  “What country keeps its word when it’s not to its advantage?”

  “Britain! And, I’m proud to say, the USA!”

  “Our history, until very recently, has been one of isolationism, where promises need not be given. As to Britain...”

  And so it went. Hamill, who for all his efforts to be fair, was still a man who obviously detested contradiction, began to become heated, and his wife intervened to change the subject.

  “I’m afraid I lean to Felix’s persuasion,” she said tactfully. “I’ve always been afraid of blacks and whites. I prefer softer shades. I suppose if I’d been a Roman I’d have asked Attila to dinner. Yet who knows what I might have accomplished? Isn’t one of the Russian troubles that they have no attractive wives in their diplomatic corps?”

  But Lila was determined to have her two lions fight it out, and she now asked for their opinions on the secretary of state’s last statement on Russian aggression. Hamill promptly labeled it a “great” speech.

  “But who was it aimed at?” Felix inquired. “The Russian people won’t read it. Their leaders discount it and ask their intelligence people what Acheson really meant. Our allies shrug and look to the results. American fulminations tend to be aimed at Americans. Dean Acheson is trying to convince the Republicans in the House and Senate that he’s just as anti-Red as they are.”

  “And do you suggest he’s not?” Hamill demanded, almost threateningly.

  “My dear Stuart, of course, I know he is!” Felix explained, almost gaily. “They think he’s not. They think the State Department is full of cookie-pushers and parlor pinks. Dean went to Groton; you went to Saint Paul’s. Obviously, this only confirms the damning opinion of that most fatuous of all our patriots: the right-wing, middle-western congressman!”

  Hamill was only half appeased by this. Clearly he did not care to be identified, even at a small dinner, with so sweeping a condemnation of any elected legislator. “Well, if that is so, is the secretary not right to make his position crystal clear?”

  “I do not think so. I do not believe in addressing one audience, while you are really speaking to another. In Dean’s case it is a kind of public muscle-flexing that is demeaning to him and confusing to others. I suspect, if there be a danger in schools like Groton and Saint Paul’s, that it is precisely the opposite of what our western legislators supposes. It is not cookie-pushing; it is pugnacity. The violent games, the football, the intense team spirit, the sense of Christian gentlemen standing together against barbarians—I wonder if it doesn’t all tend to make their graduates too aggressive, too belligerent. As if America were one team and the Soviet Union another, pitted against each other in a new kind of world series.”

  “Are you suggesting that the secretary of state and I are acting like schoolboys?” Hamill demanded, beginning to look black.

  “Well, I remember, Stuart, in freshman year, that you actually wept when Harvard beat Yale!”

  This may have been delivered in a good-natured tone, but the circumstances made it decidedly unpleasant. I had hardly ever known Felix to make an ad hominem argument in public. In private, yes—some of his most perspicacious observations were made as to the true motives underlying the actions of public figures. But when he spoke for the record—and even a small dinner party to him was a kind of record—he was usually detached and impersonal.

  “I’ll have you know, Felix, that I resent what you have just said! On my own behalf and on Mr. Acheson’s!”

  The “Mr.” before the secretary’s name was a nice little additional twist of the jabbing knife. It seemed to call into question Felix’s prior use of the name “Dean.” But Felix did not even blush. He simply looked serenely down the table at his adversary and blinked his eyes. After a minute of almost unendurable general embarrassment the conversation scurried desperately into smaller groups and finally settled in uneasy pairs.

  There was no further confrontation between Hamill and Felix that night, but when I walked the three blocks afterward with Felix and Gladys to their house, the latter was ominously silent, and Felix’s invitation to me to come in for a nightcap was almost in the nature of a plea for an ally.

  “I don’t in the least mind if Roger comes in,” Gladys said coldy. “In fact, I should be rather glad to have him hear what I am going to say.”

  One might imagine that a person of tact would have absented himself, but when had I been that? I had no idea either of abandoning my friend to his enraged wife or of giving up my seat to an important scene in his drama. Felix and I sat in the living room, each with a brandy glass, while Gladys, smoking furiously, paced the floor.

  “I know why you said what you did tonight, Felix. You may think I’m an empty-headed rattle, but I see what I see. For all your great brain and wisdom, you’re petty and jealous. You can’t stand Stuart Hamill’s success!”

  Felix’s bland stare seemed to take her in and find her wanting. His silence drove her to fury.

  “You hate Stuart Hamill! The way you hate his boss! Because they’re above you. Yes, above you. I use antiquated social terms because they express so exactly what you’re thinking!”

  “You might spare Roger this final vulgarity.”

  “I’ll spare Roger nothing! He loves it, anyway. You can’t bear that men who were your social superiors when you were young are now running the world. Stuart Hamill was in Skull and Bones and on the football team at Yale, and now he’s trying to save the world from blowing itself up. What were you doing then but scribbling for the Yale Literary Magazine, which nobody read? And what are you doing now but writing a silly column for old women to read while they sip their coffee?”

  “Gladys, that’s ridiculous!” I cried. “It’s ridiculous and you know it!”

  “Of course, it’s ridiculous. I know what Felix is worth. I put it that way because I want him to recognize what goes on in his psyche. If he can ever learn that, it may help him to understand what he’s doing to Stuart Hamill when he takes off at him that way at a dinner party. And if he can ever real
ize that, perhaps he’ll stop!”

  Felix now raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Never have I been more impressed by the old adage that a little Freud is a dangerous thing.”

  “Well, it’s helped me to understand a lot of things that have happened to me. For example, why you wanted me in the first place.” Gladys ceased her pacing now and turned to her husband with what I thought was a rather stagy stamp of her foot. “You had to take me away from poor Heyward because he was a bigger guy on the Yale campus than you!”

  Felix rose at this and came over to shake my hand. “The discussion has become inane. I am sorry to have exposed you to it. I’m going to bed. Good night, Roger.”

  ***

  It was never much fun for people to stay angry with Felix, because he would never acknowledge a feud and would greet you in the street just as politely as if nothing had happened. So in a few days’ time Stuart Hamill had called to make up, and he and Felix were soon on as intimate terms as ever. Even Gladys seemed convinced that all was over, for she sent out invitations to a dinner party in honor of Ambassador Hamill and the lovely Dorcas, to which I, as an extra man, was invited.

  It was a small dinner, only a dozen as I recall, and the first person I met in the living room was Lila Nickerson. She seemed very excited and motioned me over to the seat beside her.

  “Haven’t you heard?” she demanded.

  “What?”

  “The jury’s in. Hiss has been convicted,”

  “He has!”

  I knew that would be the end of any other conversation that night. When Hamill arrived, he made no effort to disguise his agitation, and the party again became an exchange between him and Felix, heated by the cocktails, which were rapidly, almost unconsciously, consumed.

  “It’s a national outrage!” Hamill exclaimed. “It’s another Sacco-Vanzetti. I know the secretary feels as I do. I believe he’s going to say something at his press conference.”