Skinny Island

by Louis Auchincloss

  Suddenly she began to sob, but when he hurried to her side she pushed him roughly away. He felt in that moment what it was actually to want to be dead.

  “Whatever my life has been, dearest, it’s been you!” he almost shouted.

  “But what have I made of it, if that’s true? No, Horace, let’s not talk about it any more. It’s too painful.” She rose, putting a handkerchief to her lips. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Damn Simon Regner!” he shouted.

  Amelia paused at the door. Then she turned back in surprise. “Why do you damn Mr. Regner?”

  “Because he started me on all this. I was perfectly happy until he persuaded me that I wasn’t. That I had wronged Douglas and was wronging you. Well, he was right about Douglas, so I—”

  “Right about Douglas?” Amelia seemed now to lose all sight of her own discouragement. “You mean it was he who gave you that ridiculous idea of settling money on him?”

  “Why ridiculous? Didn’t it work?”

  “Work? It has made him miserable! It has made him discover he has no talent for writing.” And then, abruptly, another thought seemed to strike her. “But how did Mr. Regner know about Douglas? Did Douglas complain to him about money?”

  “He told him he couldn’t afford to be a writer.”

  “Then, Douglas deserves what he got!” she exclaimed indignantly. “Imagine whining to Regner!” And as she took in at last Horace’s stricken countenance, it was as if the rehearsal of a dramatic scene had been interrupted, and the performer was herself again. Amelia took a step towards Horace, paused and then impulsively stretched out her arms. “Oh, you poor darling! I never meant to tell you that about Douglas. It was Elly who wrote me about it. I replied that of course he ought to go back to his old job, but she said it would look too silly now that he doesn’t need the salary. Ah, now I have made you unhappy! Oh, Horace, can you ever forgive me?”

  Six months later, when Simon Regner and Horace were again rolling towards the city in the club car, Regner asked, “What is this I hear about Douglas taking the chairmanship of the Turtle Bay Settlement House? Is he giving up Paris? I hope he’s not giving up his writing.”

  “Let’s put it that he wants to do something useful at the same time. Frankly, Simon, I’m not sure that Douglas needs that much time to write.”

  “His muse has dimmed, eh? Well, that happens. And we were sorry we couldn’t induce your wife to be chairman of the Public Library ball. I had hoped that you two might be going to step out a bit more.”

  “We’re quite happy, I guess, the way we are.”

  “And Simon Regner had better keep his big mouth shut, is that it?” Regner nodded vigorously to show how well he could take it. “Of course, I understand.”

  “No, I’m grateful for that big mouth, Simon,” Horace replied with a new confidence. “Not so much for its effect on the lives of my wife and son as on my own.”

  “Oh? A salutary one, I hope?”

  “Well, I don’t think I’m going to tell you what it is. As you’ve gathered, I’m a rather private sort of person. But I will say this. You’ve helped me to see things that I hadn’t seen before. And I think that’s going to make me a better husband.”

  “But without any change in your life?”

  “Without any outward change.”

  Simon Regner grunted and was silent. It was he this time who erected the protective wall of the Herald Tribune. But when he told his wife about the interchange that night at dinner her only comment was: “Those people are incredible, Simon. They’re like crustaceans. Deprived of one shell, they’ll scuttle about till they find an empty one. Anything, anywhere, so long as they don’t have to live!”

  America First

  TIME HAD BEEN heavy on the hands of Elaine Wagstaff ever since she had abandoned her lovely pink house on the Avenue Foch and scuttled back to New York before the Nazi hordes. She used the word “scuttle” only to herself, for only to herself was she obliged to admit its appropriateness. She could never quite overcome the feeling that she should have stayed on and joined the resistance, though the resistance of a septuagenarian American widow would hardly have saved her beloved France. But wasn’t there always an element of scuttling in any self-removal in the face of danger, particularly when so many brave friends were left behind? Elaine had hardly relished seeing the Rolls-Royce of the Windsors on the road before her; it was hateful to be identified with the international trash rushing to safer harbors to pursue their dolce far niente. Privilege in defeat makes for unlovable bedfellows.

  This sense of unjust exemption from peril and hardship continued even more intensely after she was settled in the comfortable third-floor bedroom of her daughter Suzannah’s brownstone of East Seventy-third Street, from the bay window of which she could gaze west to Central Park as she sipped her coffee on chilly fall mornings in 1940. Certainly she had to concede that Suzannah was doing her best to take the blame for that exemption upon her own square shoulders. Never in a long lifetime of being spoiled had Elaine felt quite so “nannied” as she did under her daughter’s unceasing ministrations.

  “But, Mother darling, no matter what you say, you’ve been under far greater strain than you can possibly realize. Oh, I’ve talked it over with Doctor Jennison! He quite agrees, and he has many refugees among his patients.”

  “I am not exactly a refugee, Suzie. I am still, after all, an American citizen, and not a poor one, either. It isn’t as if I were costing anyone anything, and generous as you and Peyton have been—oh, generous to a fault!—I count on making it up to you.”

  “Oh, Mother! You know we’d never take a penny. Peyton would be mortally insulted.”

  “Well, we needn’t dwell on it. After all, everything I have will soon enough be yours. It would only be robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

  “Mother, don’t talk that way! You’re going to live to be a hundred. Anyway, you’ve got to take it easy until you have your strength back. Crossing the Atlantic through submarine packs has to take a toll on the nerves.”

  Suzannah looked as if it would not have taken much toll on her nerves. She was all Wagstaff, all her father’s child, with a round flat face, a tiny mouth and owlish eyes under thick black brows. Elaine never ceased to wonder that her own family, which had produced so many long-necked, slender beauties, so many “Boldinis,” as the saying used to be, should have ended with Suzannah. But Suzannah, after all, was fifty; she did not need allure. Would allure have even suited the wife of a lawyer as important and unattractive as Peyton Priest? Elaine always thought of him as grinning and bony, with thumbs under his lapels, a Daumier caricature.

  “You forget I came on an Argentine ship, darling. They don’t sink neutrals.”

  “Oh, don’t they! Half the time they don’t even know what they’re shooting. Peyton gets it all from his friends in the State Department. And aren’t I the lucky one to have had all those wonderful trips abroad when I did! Do you know I totaled up from my diary the number of times I crossed the Atlantic with you? Thirty-two! Do you remember how you used to come to my cabin and wake me up before dawn so we could be up on the bridge with the captain and catch the first sight of land? No matter how late you’d been up playing bridge or dancing, you’d always be ready to stand with little Suzie straining for the first glimpse of Europe!”

  But no. Elaine readjusted the shawl on her shoulders as if to shake off the cocoon in which Suzannah was trying to envelop her. No, no, no. It hadn’t been that way at all on those voyages across the wintry Atlantic on the Beren-garia, the Olympic, the Majestic. She had taken the little girl out of school against everyone’s wishes (“But, Miss Chapin, you know she’ll learn more French in Paris”) and left a hurt David to the obsessive pursuit of his decaying business (“Darling, if you’re too proud to live on my money— our money, as I’ve always regarded it—if you insist on wasting your life in a family business that hardly pays the cook, then that must be your problem. I’m going to Paris”). She had gone abroad year after yea
r and had finally bought the house on the Avenue Foch which, after David’s death, had become her principal residence. She had been selfish, but at least she had lived, as the Wagstaffs would never have allowed her to had she knuckled under to them and stayed home. And she had preserved her marriage, too, such as it was; she had successfully reared her only child, such as she was. But she wasn’t at seventy-five going to kid herself that it had all been a howling success.

  Yet that was precisely what Suzannah seemed determined to make it, and, in her own way, always had. From her earliest years she had constituted herself as a kind of protector of both her parents. Daddy had always to be made to feel the successful businessman that he only too obviously wasn’t, and Mummy, despite her globe-trotting, her frenetic social life, her passion for cards, her fear of boredom, had to be represented to the world as an almost compulsively loving parent who would give up the greatest party of the year to sit at the bedside of an even mildly ailing daughter. And when Suzannah screamed and threw tantrums about being left behind when Mummy went to Europe, wasn’t it because of her child’s insight that Mummy needed a chaperon?

  And hadn’t she? Hadn’t little Suzie proved an effective one? Would Elaine have gone further with Rex Anders, or even with Guy de Vierzon, had Suzannah and Suzannah’s governess (who could forget Miss Prunty?) not been in Paris? Perhaps, though she had been inclined to believe that it was more the warning example of her cousin Theodora, of just her age and looks and means, but who always went too far, much too far—she would read aloud to Elaine, with that piercing laugh, the worst tabloid extravagances about herself—that had kept her in line. Much as she had loved and admired and envied Theodora, who had sometimes traveled with her to Italy and Morocco, she could still see that a part of her value to her wayward cousin had lain in her own unquestioned respectability. The respectability of which little Suzie had certainly been a symbol.

  Ah, what would Theodora, long dead now of a liver ailment, have thought of the war? What could she have thought of it but that it had made final ashes of the charred world that had been left of their youthful one after the ravages of its predecessor? Elaine shivered. Was Suzannah still talking?

  She was.

  “Of course, I don’t expect you, darling, to spend all your time cooped up in the house. Fleming can drive you around the park in the afternoon and maybe over to Riverside Drive. And in another week or so we’ll plan some little parties of your friends.”

  “Suzannah, I don’t think, after what I’ve seen in France, I’m going to be in much of a mood for parties.”

  “Oh, I don’t really mean parties. Just a few old pals in for supper. But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps we should find something for you to do more in keeping with the times. You might even be interested in helping with some of my work.”

  “What sort of work is that?”

  “I’m in an organization called America First. We’re trying to rally antiwar opinion against Roosevelt’s underhand efforts to get us involved in Europe.”

  “You mean you’re against Lend Lease?”

  “Well, not if it’s really confined to that. We don’t object to giving some help to England. We’re not for the Nazis—far from it! But what we don’t see is why American boys should be sent abroad to pull England’s chestnuts out of a fire lit by her own imperialism and stupidity!”

  Elaine had often wondered what sort of a cause Suzannah would ultimately embrace, for she had always seemed made for one. But through the matrimonial years this large, somehow steaming girl had seemed oddly dominated by her sarcastic, grinning husband. Elaine disliked the very thought of Peyton Priest.

  “I suppose a Nazi victory would be a very nasty thing,” she ventured.

  “But that won’t happen. England can always negotiate some kind of stalemate. The point is that it’s a European mess and should be solved by Europeans. England and France got us in once before, and what good did it do us? Or them, for that matter?”

  “My poor France,” Elaine murmured sadly. “If she has made mistakes, she is paying sadly for them.”

  “Mother, darling, I’m afraid you’ve always had a blind spot on the subject of the French. Yet deep down, I suspect you know how rotten their whole society is. New York is full of your titled friends who’ve fled the country they’ve betrayed and are now using the dollars of their American wives and mothers to buy the blood of our boys for their lost cause!”

  Elaine blinked. Certainly Suzannah had a cause now! “Well, I must admit, my French friends did make rather a shamble of things. But I can only think of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem about the lovely light shed by the candle that burned at both ends. Oh, I suppose you’re right, my dear. Why should boys who’ve never known the beauties of France die for her? Did I?”

  “Exactly! You wouldn’t want to send Bert to fight overseas, would you?”

  “Dear Bert. When will he come home to greet his loving grandmama?”

  “Soon, I hope. I don’t want him to cut any classes at Stanford. The draft only defers him while he’s in school, and his marks have not been all they should be.”

  “The draft! Horrors. How close it all makes you seem to the war. But, of course, you’re right. Bert mustn’t fight for an old, decayed civilization. He’s so American, Bert.” Elaine wondered what her only grandchild looked like now. She had not seen him in three years. He had been a nice enough boy, but short and stout and, she was afraid, dull. “Yes,” she mused, “what has Bert to do with all that? His life is here. His future is here.” The memory of the Windsors’ fleeing Rolls jarred suddenly upon her mental vision. What an idle life she had led! What a waste. What trivial occupations. And poor, awkward, unlovely Bert should die for all that? “Do you know, Suzannah, I think I’ll look into this thing of yours. What do you call it? America First?”

  “Oh, Mother, that would be so wonderful!”

  Elaine did not find her tasks, when she took up the isolationist cause the following week, very demanding. She went to the large office leased by Suzannah’s organization from a bank on Madison Avenue and helped to draft responses to letters inquiring about its goals. She was given a good deal to read, mostly in the form of newspaper and magazine articles. Elaine had never taken much interest in public affairs, but she had tended to take for granted, like most of her fellow expatriates, that America should oppose the Axis powers, even at the risk of war. Now, however, reading this new material with what she hoped was more an open than an empty mind, she found some of it rather persuasive. Mightn’t it be better to let Germany win a round once in a while rather than having to send troops to Europe every twenty-five years?

  But the real issue for her was Suzie. Here at last was something she could do for Suzie to make up for having been an indifferent parent. For the whole painful business of her repatriation had taught her to face up to her own deficiencies, at least in the maternal department. And poor Suzie had always been such an angel to her! Never once complaining about being made to feel a dowdy and unwanted child. She would come now into her mother’s tiny office two or three times in a morning (Elaine worked only in the mornings) to ask what she was reading and then hug her and cry: “Oh, Mummy, it’s such fun our being together in all this!”

  Suzie’s intense preoccupation with her immediate family, Elaine decided, had to explain her attitude towards the war. For if Suzie adored her mother, she adored her son Bert even more. Bert must be kept alive, no matter what happened to the boundaries of Europe. And wasn’t it possible, Elaine wondered, that Bert might have been as cool a son as his grandame has been a mother? Why had he gone so far away to college if not to escape the tightness of Suzie’s embraces? Suzie had always been determined to have a loving family around her, even if she had to create it out of the fevered workings of her own imagination. Had her father come back to earth, he would no doubt have been smothered with kisses and put to work in America First.

  As Elaine’s social life since her return to New York had been largely circumscribed by her
daughter’s, she had had little occasion to encounter the opposition in what was left of the old world of her friends and cousins to the cause she was now promoting. But one day, when she had decided for a change to lunch at the Colony Club, and was walking to a quiet corner of the members’ dining room, she happened to pass a table at which some of her old acquaintances were seated, one of whom she instantly recognized as the recently arrived Marquise de Monrives, born Adelaide Stutz of Pittsburgh. Elaine particularly disliked Adelaide because of her appropriation, many years before, of Rex Anders, whom Adelaide had been willing to treat with far greater warmth, and she was disgusted to see her rival now, bloated, huge, with a choker of rubies and hideous purple eyebrows, laughing her high, shrieking abominable laugh, culminating in a screamed “Oh! Oh! Oh!” and apparently taking over Elaine’s old New York circle. She quickened her step, only to be stopped by the marquise’s direct address.

  “Isn’t that Elaine Wagstaff? Of course it is! Elaine, darling, don’t run away. We were just speaking of you. Tell us the truth. Tell us that you’ve been libeled.”

  Elaine paused, smiling briefly at the others, considering, with perfectly justified smugness, that she was better preserved than any of them. “How have I been libeled, Adelaide? I must warn you, it may be perfectly true.”

  The table exploded in remonstrance, as if she had not been in jest.

  “Oh, it can’t be!”

  “We won’t believe it.”

  “Never. You, almost a Française!”

  “What is it, girls?” Elaine demanded, surprised.

  “They say” Adelaide murmured throatily, “they say, my dear, that you’re … America First.”

  Elaine stared coolly at each of the five in turn. She finished with the Marquise de Monrives.

  “And what are you, Adelaide? America Last?”

  And she reveled in the quick stride of her own immediate departure.