“Then the war itself is not immoral! It’s only how we fight it!”
“Precisely.”
“And you don’t see the United States as an imperialist power spreading death and destruction to preserve its status in the Far East?”
“On the contrary, I see the United States as engaged in an insane act of international altruism. No great nation since the Crusades has ever expended so much blood and money fighting a war without hope of material gain. Future generations will marvel at it! If they don’t merely laugh.”
“Mr. Leitner, I see now what I must take you for. I denounce you as the archimperialist of our time!”
“My dear boy, don’t be an ass. You’re allowing yourself to reflect the most inane shibboleth of your generation.” For a moment the audience was too surprised at this insult—so politely, so even amiably articulated—to be other than silent, and Felix was able to put in a few more words before pandemonium ensued. “You see evil only at home. You hate only Americans. You envision the world as threatened by Yankee militarists and Yankee financial pirates. But some day I’m afraid that you may awaken to face forces in Russia, forces in China, forces even in Africa, that will make Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara and all of their generals and all of the warmongers and all of the Communist-haters—nay, even the John Birch Society itself—seem like bright angels of love and mercy!”
Never shall I forget how Felix stood there amid the shrieks, the catcalls, the obscenities; smiling, nodding, raising his arms as if acknowledging an ovation. I made my way through the screeching mob to the dais and escorted him off it. As we came to the side door Varina rushed up with her hairy friend.
“Johnny warned me that you weren’t really with us, Grandfather!” she cried in a harsh voice. “He warned me, and I didn’t believe him. But he smoked you out!”
“Varina, you’re a perfect ninny. You’re worse than your mother. Nobody had to smoke me out. My opinions are available to all the world. Indeed, I’m very well paid for them.”
“You have your thirty pieces of silver, Leitner,” the young man, Johnny, sneered.
“The name is Mr. Leitner, and I’ll thank you, sir, to get out of my way!”
I called to the chauffeur of our hired limousine to drive at once to our hotel, but Felix reminded me that we had left Felicia behind. He insisted that we wait, sitting placidly in the back seat while students surrounding the car jeered at us. But after a few minutes they tired of this and went away, and a rather bedraggled Felicia, who had been much jostled by the crowd, came up. I jumped out and pushed her into the car and told the driver to move away quickly.
“Oh, Daddy,” Felicia exclaimed, bursting into sobs, “how could you? How could you?”
“Pull yourself together, Felicia.”
“Do you think Varina will ever forgive you? Never! You’ve betrayed their cause. You’ve insulted their generation! You’ve made filth of their ideals and aspirations.”
“Felicia, you’re a greater ass than any of them. And it’s worse for you, too, because you should know better.”
“Don’t be so high and mighty!” Felicia cried shrilly. “Do you think you’re God? Yes, I suppose you do! All my life I’ve had to truckle to the idea that you knew everything. Well, you don’t! You’ve missed the whole point of what’s going in in 1965. The whole point!”
“Listen to me, my dear.” Felix’s voice was cold now, cold and steely. “All your life, like your mother, you’ve tried to see me as something I wasn’t. You say you were made to truckle to the idea that I knew everything! Tommyrot! You resented everything about me from the beginning. You hated me for leaving your mother. You hated Gladys. You hated my success. More recently, you have tried to break up my friendship with Mrs. Pryor. You’re even jealous of Roger here. Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m an old man, and I am not going to have such little time as may be left me disturbed by your jealousy and possessiveness.”
“Felix!” I warned him, for I saw the look of desperation in Felicia’s countenance.
“When I return to Washington tomorrow,” Felix continued inexorably, “I shall expect you to remain here. I shall, of course, pay your hotel expenses until you find a new home. We may continue to visit each other, but we shall most certainly not live together.”
“Stop the car!” Felicia shrieked. “Let me out! I won’t ride with you!”
The chauffeur pulled over to the curb, and Felicia sprang out of the car. I reached over to restrain her, but Felix, with surprising strength, pulled me back.
“Let her go, Roger,” he said calmly.
For a long time, as we drove on uptown, we sat in silence. But when Felix spoke at last, his tone was almost matter-of-fact.
“Nobody could live with me, Roger. Nobody, that is, but yourself.”
Roger Cutter (8)
JUST A WEEK AGO, at eight in the morning, Mrs. Corliss telephoned to say that the maid who had brought Felix his breakfast tray had been unable to awaken him. The end had been too long expected to bring anything but relief. Everything was ready. I made my telephone calls to Felicia, to Julia, to Gladys, and then to the Washington Post and the New York Times. Their obituaries had long been prepared. Only the date was necessary. I turned on my radio and television and waited.
Less than an hour later came the first news broadcast. Then the second. More followed, more and more, longer and longer, now with comments from dignitaries reached by telephone, now with stories plucked from newspaper morgues, until at noon a reporter on the TV screen announced the regrets of President Ford. My little drop of sorrow seemed to have swelled into an ocean of public lamentation. But it would burst soon enough, and I would be left alone again.
I did not go out. I turned off my telephone. I did not want to see anyone. I desired only to be left with my documents and papers about Felix. But this, of course, was impossible. Julie arrived and punched my doorbell. She and I had to do everything, make arrangements for the cremation, the service. For the next three days we seemed to live in a frenzy of irrelevant activity and ringing telephones.
The service was held in the National Cathedral. This was another of Felicia’s eccentricities. She made her will—or should I say her whim?—much felt now. She said that so long as her father had had no religion, there was no harm in selecting any building that would comfortably shelter whatever multitudes should arrive. I thought fewer people would appear than she thought, but I was wrong, for the president came and, of course, then the church was packed. The prayers were innocuous—prayers usually are—but it irritated me that Felicia had insisted that we sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The whole thing seemed to have very little to do with Felix, and of course the Jewish friends and relations would say that it was the ultimate apostasy, that even in death Felix was trying to be a Wasp!
The long, laudatory obituaries, however, and the presence of so many of the mighty at the service had one good result. They briefly resurrected Felix, so that he seemed to stand before us again, as in raiment white and glistening. Then, as with a puff, he was gone again, restored to the nothing, the oblivion, in which the last two years had cast him. But as Easter brightens the darkness of the Passion, so did this momentary resurgence of Felix, young again and brilliant, provide me with what I hoped would become a permanent substitute for the sad memory of the sickroom and that vacant stare.
I took away my documents, and what I had written about them, for a solitary weekend in Julie’s cottage at Virginia Beach, which she had kindly lent me. It was an experience as painful as I had long before, deep down, suspected and feared that it was going to be. All the doubts that I had obviously stifled about Felix, all the resentments that had almost strangled my unacknowledging mind during the tantrums of his last illness, now claimed their revenge. The Felix that arose from these pages refused to behave as he ought to have behaved. But, oh my God, if Felix wasn’t Felix, what was I?
Had I loved him, or had I simply attached myself to him, like a pilot fish to a shark? And w
hy did I use that image?
As soon as I got back to Washington I hurried to Julie’s. She seemed to sense my perturbation, for she poured me a drink and simply waited, with an inquiring half smile, for me to tell her what was on my mind.
“Julie, tell me,” I blurted out. “Were they right about him? All those people like Lila Nickerson and my father who said he was a monster?”
“A monster? Come now, dear.”
“All right, not a monster. I’m being dramatic. But an egotist, a cold-hearted egotist, who wanted all the good things in life for himself. At least what he considered the good things: public glory and the joy of writing and a perfectly ordered home. At whatever cost to others, so long as their pain didn’t show enough to spoil his fun!”
Julie was grave now. “Yes,” she said. “He was that. Is it such a terrible thing to be?”
“But I’ve always denied it! I’ve always maintained that he was a man who had to subordinate everything and everybody in his life to his mission.”
“And what was his mission?”
“Truth! He had to tell the world what it was! Politically and morally. Nothing could be allowed to get between him and that. He was like the saints, excused from the petty duties and loyalties of everyday living.”
“Couldn’t both theories be true? Couldn’t he be a monster and a saint?”
“No! The issue has to be, Did he care more for truth or for the fame he derived in perceiving it? Did he love mankind or mankind as personified in Felix Leitner?”
“He was certainly very fond of Felix Leitner. But so am I of Julie Pryor. So are you of Roger Cutter.”
“But I’m not!” I cried passionately. “That’s just the point! Felix is more important to me than I am to myself. That’s why I’ve got to be right! And now all these questions come boiling up. I suppose I’ve been repressing them all along. I suppose I’ve repressed my resentments, too. Maybe I even resented the way the poor man treated me when he was out of his mind.”
“You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.”
“But he was a lunatic, Julie!”
“Lunatics can still hurt. What other kinds of questions keep boiling up?”
“Well, was he a free soul, or was he simply ashamed of his background? Was he the perfect democrat or... or was he the perfect snob?”
“He was certainly a snob.”
“Julie!”
“He was, darling. Now listen to me. I don’t share your theory about saints. I think they were all monsters, except perhaps Saint Francis of Assisi, and the tales about him were probably made up, anyway. But the point is that you have a very beautiful concept of Felix. Write it! What does it matter now what Felix actually was? How do you even know that he actually was anything at all? I should love to read a book about Felix as you see him. Or as you saw him, perhaps? You could call it your vision. Your vision of Felix Leitner.”
“But that would be a novel!”
“Well, what’s wrong with novels? After enough time goes by, they merge with fact. Would anyone care if I proved that Malory’s King Arthur was nobler than the real one?”
For a moment I was actually intrigued by the idea. Then I brushed it off.
“That’s ridiculous, Julie, Mallory probably thought his King Arthur was absolutely true to life. One doesn’t set about to create a legend.”
“Why not?”
“One just doesn’t, that’s all.”
Something, anyway, of vital importance to me, emerged from this discussion. After a long night of tossing on my bed and pacing the floor, I decided that, whatever should be my ultimate decision to write or not to write the book that would blend my raw materials into the portrait of a man who had dedicated every parcel of his being to the quest of truth, I owed something first to history. I had been Felix’s disciple long enough to have developed a harder theory of truth and of my own obligation to it than any airy theory that Julie might play with. I might continue my private debate on the true character and personality of Felix Leitner as long as I chose, but it behooved me to assemble my documents and commentaries in some sensible chronological order and put them in a place of safekeeping available to future scholars who could make up their own minds about the questions that had troubled me. Very likely they would not care, but that was not the point. The point was to make the record.
And this I will do. When it is done I shall deposit my material with Felix’s papers at Harvard. His shadow, then, will not be able to say that I tried to turn him into a puppet or to convert him into my own possession. My mission, whatever it was and whether or not it was one, will have been completed.
This decision made, I resolved to spend the day, not with the papers on Felix’s life, but with his own work, his columns, and I took down from the shelf over my desk the morocco-bound copy of an anthology drawn from these.
It was an exquisite, immediate relief. For the words, the wonderful words, the crisp and pungent phrases, the sharp staccato sentences and their longer, subtler, mellifluous counterparts, now swarmed together in my dazzled mind to obliterate doubt, to overwhelm criticism. After a tumultuous grouping and regrouping, after a soaring up and a crashing down, they suddenly emerged, in even rows, in fantastic drill, like some beneficent, redeeming army marching into a stricken city after its occupiers had fled. And I seemed to make out that the prostrate town was the soul of Felix, over which women, good and bad, had fought and for which lawyers and statesmen had struggled, and which a fickle public had greeted with shrieks of praise and howls of derision. But now the words, the blessed words, redeemed all, saved all!
I heard the tramp on the cobblestones; I listened with a frenetic joy to the blaring martial music. I stumbled out of the cellar where I had been hiding from our oppressors and tore off my tattered shirt to wave it wildly and shout my welcome. The factions that had so long and cruelly held our ravaged city were no more. I was alone with Felix at last.
About the Author
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS was honored in the year 2000 as a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. During his long career he wrote more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resided in New York City until his death in January 2010.
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