Skinny Island

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Oh, but I do, Mr. Sumner. Not that you would in any way foster such horrors, of course. I am talking only of possibilities. And with boys all things are possible. Boys can be vicious, sir! And if you don’t know that, you should learn it as soon as possible.”

  Marcus sat down again, crumpled. “You mean such things go on here? At Clare?”

  “My son has implied to me that they do.”

  “Not surely…? I mean … not he}”

  “Oh, no.” Venable shook his head decisively. “But he has not manifested as much disgust at those who may have been guilty as I should like to see. He seems to have adopted what I hesitate to call a fashionable tolerance for vice and perversion. There is a kind of ‘Oh, Daddy, don’t be provincial’ sneer in his attitude that I find most disturbing. That is why I think he will do better this summer with his family in Narragansett where there will be golf and tennis and young ladies and dances. We can safely leave Keats and Shelley until the fall.”

  “And Oscar Wilde.”

  Venable’s eyes at this showed a hint of concern that he might have gone too far. He contemplated the devastated creature before him with something like dismay. “You mustn’t take these things too hard, Mr. Sumner. Perhaps you will come in July and visit us for a week. I think Rodman would like that.”

  “I’m afraid I must stay on Long Island. I have asked the other boys. Though perhaps that should be canceled now.”

  “My dear Mr. Sumner, you are going much too far!”

  “How can I?” cried Marcus as he hurried from the room.

  Late that night, after the boys in his dormitory had gone to bed, the headmaster himself knocked at Marcus’s study door.

  “Venable said he had upset you. May we discuss it?” Taking in now the younger man’s emotional state, Forrester closed the door leading to the dormitory. Then he put his arm around Marcus’s shoulders and allowed him to sob. “You take it too hard, my boy. Venable accused you of nothing.”

  “Except of living in a fool’s paradise!”

  “Well, that may be a very sensible place to live.”

  Marcus broke away from his senior. “Does that mean you think I do, sir?”

  “No, no, of course not. Calm yourself.”

  “How can I? If that kind of thing goes on here among the boys!”

  “Oh, did he say that?”

  “He said that Rodman had implied it. And that Rodman tolerated it, too.”

  Forrester pursed his lips as if he were about to whistle. Then he turned and paced the length of the little chamber and back, swinging his arms slowly, pondering something. “Tell me, Marcus. If Venable were your father, might you not find him a difficult parent to love?”

  “I’m afraid I should find him difficult not to hate.”

  “And do you not suppose that Rodman may also experience some of that difficulty?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And if Rodman disliked his father, would it not be natural for him to wish to hurt him?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And how better could he do that than by instilling in the paternal mind the suspicion that his son had had at least a taste of vicious activities?”

  “But that would be at his own expense, sir!”

  “I wonder, Marcus, if you have any conception of how far a child will go to revenge himself upon a parent.”

  Marcus quailed before the worldly wisdom of his god. Then he closed his eyes as he made himself consider the grievous problems that faced a headmaster. And he, puny ridiculous Marcus, dared to question the warrior in the front row of so savage a battle!

  “I resign my post, sir. I am unworthy of it.”

  “Now, now, my boy, we’ll sleep on this. Things will take their proper shape in the light of morning. You have been hurt. That is regrettable, but in the long run the experience may be of value. It will toughen you. Go to bed now. And remember: Clare needs you. And I am happy to think that you need Clare.”

  Marcus, however, did not sleep that night. Through the long hours the features of Rodman Venable bobbed up and down in his fevered brain. The dark eyes had become yellow, leering. He was like the young Apollo of the medieval legends of the survival of pagan gods into the Christian era, disguised, proscribed, but still possessed of magical powers, inciting the youths with his charm and flute and dancing feet to the pursuit of strange pleasures, unspeakable joys, until in their frenzy they would tear him to pieces. Rodman’s ears began to seem pointed; now he was Pan, capable of killing as well as loving. Now he was nude and beckoning with a lewd smile that seemed to mock Marcus’s reluctance. And Marcus, leaping from his bed and hurrying to the window to look up at the stars and pray, saw Rodman’s laughing eyes in the pale horror of the morn. Yes, he wanted to do those things, whatever they were; he wanted to do them with Pan!

  The next day Marcus resigned his position at Clare. Forrester pleaded with him for a day and most of a night, but he was adamant. He finished the term, to give the school time to find his replacement, and never again addressed a single word in private to Rodman Venable. When he was free at last, he closed his house on the North Shore and sailed for France. He took rooms at the Crillon in Paris where he decided to remain indefinitely, adopting an unvarying solitary routine. His mornings were devoted to walks and museums; his afternoons to reading in his suite; his evenings to theatre and ballet. He had no idea of what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and he tried not to think about it.

  He went four times to see Phèdre at the Comédie Française. It seemed to him that Racine, through Ré jane, was speaking directly to him. But what was the message? He pondered every scene, every couplet of the great play. Always before he had thought of the heroine as evil because she falsely accuses her stepson of attempted rape. But now it began to seem to him that Racine was showing Phèdre as too distracted by passion and baffled by circumstance to be responsible for her acts. Her real sin is the mere existence of her passion.

  But could that really be? Marcus asked himself as he wandered through the brilliant gardens of the Tuileries in the incomparable spring of 1914. Phèdre doomed to eternal fire for a merely inward feeling? Suppose she had never confessed her love, never got herself tangled up with the other characters? Suppose she had died in sole possession of her guilty secret? Would she still have been damned?

  No! His very soul revolted at last from the idea. He could not believe there was sin even in the grossest lust if the lusting man shut the gates to its escape and held it tightly within. On the contrary, might not repressed emotion ferment like the juice of the grape and turn itself into fine wine? Might that not even be a way in which art was born? Might God not have put lust into the world like a vineyard to bring forth a harvest of beauty?

  What was Paris itself, Paris shimmering in that glorious spring, all white and gold and light green, but an example of this? Everyone knew what revolting things went on in the French capital; they were attested to by winks and “Oo-la-la’s” the world over. But was there anything more beautiful than the center of the great city, a soul much finer than the vulgar body that encased it? And in his own case, was there any reason that a certain stirring within should not be converted to a purely aesthetic sense and guide? If Oscar Wilde had carried his urgings to the depths of vice, had not Walter Pater raised them to the heights of which the poets sing?

  So absorbed was Marcus in his own thoughts that the outbreak of war caught him almost by surprise. The only friend he had in Paris was an old one of his mother’s, a Bostonian expatriate, Mrs. Lyman Perkins, at whose house in the Pare Monceau he paid a weekly visit at tea time. She vigorously counseled him not to “slink home,” but to stay in France and do war work.

  “It’s going to be a long war, the wiser folk are saying.” They were seated on the little terrace by her rose garden, a setting of elegant peace that seemed to deny her fiery tone. “Don’t believe this ‘home by Christmas’ rot. You say you have no goal in life. Why not work for civilization? The poor Belgians are
pouring over the frontier. They’re going to need everything: shelter, food, clothing. I propose to organize all the Americans in Paris. We can set up an office right here in this house. Oh, I’ll keep you busy!”

  He always thought afterwards that Mrs. Perkins had provided just the tonic he needed. She was a perfectionist; her garden had the finest roses, her drawing room the loveliest boiseries, her table the most succulent food. She spoke French almost too well, and knew her French history and literature in depth. Yet she remained an unreconstructed New Englander who judged herself and her fellow Americans by the strict old Yankee moral standards from which she regarded her French friends as somehow exempted. She was always practical and realistic, uninterested in philosophical or political speculations. The here and now was good enough for her; she had little use for shadows or subtleties, even in her friendships. She seemed to believe that if insight was keen enough, intimacy was unnecessary. As to the war, she adopted the prevailing violence. The Germans were barbarians who had to be crushed, and that was that.

  Marcus found the war years in Paris curiously happy ones. He worked hard enough in the organization of the refugee camps and later in hospitals to feel some relief from the sense of guilt at his own exemption from the horror of the trenches. He knew, after all, that he was doing all that could be expected of one of his fragile physique, and he was content to be bossed about by his own indomitable and indefatigable general. There were moments, particularly in the dark days of 1917 before the arrival of the American troops, when he wondered if it was possible that such concentrated carnage, month after month, year after year, could be justified by any moral goal, but then he would tell himself that it was not up to him to decide these matters and that, anyway, the more carnage, the more necessary was the work that even one as puny as himself was performing. He saw unspeakable horrors in the wards that he visited, but he was somewhat consoled by the thought that for every hideous wound there was a courageous heart, that for every act of destruction there was a brave deed of defense, that for every devil there seemed to be an angel. God had a use for every seeming ill.

  Mrs. Perkins herself, erect, immaculate, always in her widow’s spotless black, became Marcus’s symbol of the civilization that the Hun could never beat, the image of the domination of self. One had to resist the enemy within as well as without; one had to put down fear as well as lust. The world could always be beautiful to one who would not compromise.

  When Mrs. Perkins died, very suddenly, after the armistice, in the flu epidemic, Marcus, awestruck in his grief, wondered if she might not have used up the capital of her fortitude and been ready, perhaps even grateful, to succumb to an efficient and speedy killer. At least she had given him the strength to return to America. It was as if she had said, in her gruff way: “Very well now; I’ve shown you the way. Live!”

  When Marcus returned to Clare, after an absence of six years, he was a very different man from the unhappy and disillusioned creature who had fled to France. His slender shape had so filled out that he was almost stocky, and much of his blond hair had disappeared from his round scalp. He moved deliberately now rather than jerkily; there was something almost magisterial in the dignity of his diminutive figure, swathed in dark brown or black. Marcus had settled upon an image that would last him for the next twenty years and the personality that would go with it.

  He had no favorites now among the boys, although he held small sessions for the especially gifted. There developed a legend that he had once dismissed a class because he seemed on the verge of tears in a lecture on the death of Keats. Rodman Venable had been killed in the war, and it was widely believed that it was Marcus who, in his memory, had paid for the great west window in the chapel that showed Christ with the children. He seemed to have no life outside the school, nor did he ever spend a night away from the tiny Greek Revival villa he had built just off the campus, except for one week every summer with the Forresters in Maine.

  He was satisfied that he had carried the passion for beauty, which in his case was manifested not in music or color or any of the plastic arts but in words alone, words in prose or verse, to the highest and most intense pitch possible for man, and he conceived it his simple and sole duty as a citizen of the world to try to transmit this passion to any individual in the marching regiments of youth who chose to turn aside to receive it. He did not persuade himself that there would be many of these, nor did he greatly care. He was on earth, presumably, to offer a remedy to desperate souls; perhaps they had to be desperate before they sought it. For himself, anyway, he was content that beauty had entered his blood stream to satisfy his every appetite. He did not, like Omar, have any need of a jug of wine or “thou beside me singing in the wilderness”; the book of verses underneath the bough was quite enough for him. Marcus likened himself to the young Alfred de Musset, who was reputed to have swooned away on hearing a couplet in Phèdre.

  In 1937 there was a sixth former at the school called David Prine, a scholarship boy, ungainly, large, with glossy black hair and rather wild eyes, who was so brilliant that Marcus took him on as a single student in Greek. No one else could keep up with him. Unfortunately, the boy was prone to ask awkward questions.

  One evening, as they discussed Plato, Prine brought up Jowett’s change of genders in translating the Symposium, making some of the “he’s” “she’s.”

  “How could he justify it, sir?”

  “Well, you see, David, Jowett was writing for an English nineteenth-century audience. They would not have understood that kind of attachment between two men. So he deemed it better to make it between a man and a woman.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense, sir! You told me that Plato was talking about friendship. About ‘platonic’ love. Wouldn’t his contemporaries have been more ready to believe in a nonphysical relationship between two men than in such a one between a man and a woman? Didn’t he make it harder to understand by changing the gender?”

  “Plato maintained that the highest form of love was nonphysical. A friendship—perhaps what one might call a romantic friendship—between two men was the highest of all. But there were friendships in his day between men that were not platonic. That was something that troubled Plato less than it troubled the Victorians.”

  “Does it trouble you, sir?”

  “What do you mean, David?”

  “That two men should have such a friendship?”

  “Such a relationship is not part of our culture. Or admitted by our religion.”

  “But we admire the Greeks so, sir! You admire them, certainly. How can you admire a people who did things of which you disapprove?”

  “We live in different times, David.”

  “Do we, sir?”

  “And now, I think the subject had better be closed.”

  “Oh, Mr. Sumner! I thought you were the one man in Clare I could talk to!”

  But Marcus was not touched by this appeal. Indeed, he was very much relieved that David’s graduation was so near at hand. He discontinued his individual instruction of the boy and told the headmaster that he had grave misgivings about his future.

  Mr. Forrester, now in his sixties but as vigorous as ever, glanced down at the little man, who was walking as rapidly as he could to keep up with him. They were on their way to morning chapel.

  “But the boy’s a near genius, I thought you told me, Marcus. Why won’t he go far?”

  “I was thinking of his morals.”

  “Well, he’ll have problems, of course. Perhaps he will find a milieu where people like that are accepted.”

  Marcus put his hand on Forrester’s arm to support himself after this shock. “You mean you know?”

  “I don’t know that there’s anything to know. As yet. And let us devoutly hope there won’t be till he’s out of Clare. But a headmaster learns to recognize certain types.”

  “You mean you can spot something like that and not move to stamp it out?”

  “Oh, my dear Marcus, what powers you ascribe to a headmaste
r!”

  “But don’t you even want to put it down?”

  “I didn’t make the world. There are things in it that it is better we should accept.”

  “I don’t agree!”

  “Didn’t you learn acceptance when you were young?”

  “What do you mean, sir?” Marcus could hardly credit his hearing.

  “Don’t you know what I mean, Marcus?”

  Marcus stopped and let the headmaster go on to chapel where he would start the service. He stared ahead at the great craggy tower shooting up into a soft, clouded, indifferent sky, a phallus thrusting into a universe that did not care, discriminate or fear. Beauty fell about his feet in a thousand fragments as if the west window that he had commissioned had shivered and been blown all over the campus.

  The next day he again resigned from Clare. He reoccupied his old house and lived there henceforth alone.

  The Shells of Horace

  BEING PRESIDENT of the commuters’ club car operating between Brewster and Grand Central Station was just the kind of thankless job with which Horace Devoe was always finding himself stuck. Because he did not have to work and commuted only in the spring and summer from his Palladian villa and five hundred acres of landscaped forest and meadows in Katonah to the bare, austere office on Vanderbilt Avenue where, with the faithful Mrs. Sprit, he clipped his coupons and paid his taxes, it was assumed by his year-round neighbors that he had all the time in the world to spare. “Oh, if he wants to pretend he’s working,” he could almost hear them say, “we’ll see he has something to do!” And similarly, in town in winter, because he was known to leave his house on Park Avenue to go only as far as his midtown private perch and not to the competitive reality of “downtown,” he was made to pay for such simple pleasures as the opera, the symphony or the watching of animals with expensive and time-consuming trusteeships in opera, symphony and zoo. Of course, he was well enough respected, but he was also certainly used. And having no job, how could he ever retire? The balding, pokerfaced, wistful little man who stared bleakly out of his page in the current 1937 edition of Parson’s Notable New Yorkers, always laid beside the Social Register on his neat, bare desk, betrayed clearly enough his age of sixty.