Skinny Island

by Louis Auchincloss

  The little affair—I say little because it was of such brief duration—occurred in the spring of 1946. My first awareness of it came at a party at the Eliots’ big double brownstone on Forty-eighth Street. Grace’s Wednesday nights, which began at nine and ran as late as anyone cared to stay, with a constant, abundant buffet and flowing bar, represented her effort to bring those she considered “possible” or even “redeemable” in her husband’s financial and social worlds together with writers and artists of the Village. As her own work was highly respected in both the milieus that she sought to mix, and as her food and liquor would have drawn the artists to the very gates of hell, she was successful. And of course, her husband had a way of putting effective pressure on any of his business associates who might have otherwise shied away from meeting “Marxists.” Andy Eliot, despite Grace’s perennial complaints of being “misunderstood,” backed his talented wife in all her undertakings with almost too much zeal and heft.

  He was a large, strong man, with a big head and small features and short, closely cropped sandy hair, who might have been almost handsome had he been a good deal less stout, and who was noisily proud of his wife. I do not suppose he could have really appreciated her books, but he was quite willing to play the devout high priest of a cult whose deity, in the holy of holies, he might never fully understand. That Grace was “too good” for him he seemed cheerfully to concede, even in the confidences he made to me, with a painful jab in my ribs, of excursions beyond the temple that need not be confided to the goddess. After all, even high priests were men.

  On one such Wednesday evening, when the weather was warm and the general discussion in the parlor had abated, Grace drew me out to a corner of the garden, where we sat alone. It was known that when she so removed herself with a chosen disciple she was not to be interrupted except by the butler, who constantly replenished her glass of champagne. She was in one of her moody moods of high seriousness, and she listened pensively while I praised a group of love sonnets that she had just completed, likening them to modern-day Sonnets from the Portuguese.

  “Well, I haven’t got a poet to sweep me off to Italy,” she rejoined sadly. “No, my lord and master doesn’t believe that nation even exists beyond the Lido. Yet who knows? Mrs. Browning may have faced the same sort of thing. Wasn’t her Robert really thinking of his next dramatic monologue while he was reading those sonnets? Did he not, if he happened upon a line superior to one of his own, die a little? Oh, husbands! What can a poor woman do but write her heart away?”

  “Well, that should be enough when the writer is Grace Eliot.”

  “Enough? How can you say that, dear boy? Are you implying that writing is better than living? Or even a halfway substitute?”

  “Of course I am. Writing is living in the highest sense.”

  “You really believe that? You? But how can you, when you don’t write yourself? Or do you? Are you a secret poet?”

  “No, I don’t write. It would have been my tragedy had I tried. But luckily I had the common sense to turn my frustration into a useful asset. That is why I became an agent. That is what gives me the tiny scrap of genius that I do have. It enables me to understand writers.”

  “But I wonder if you understand the woman under the writer.” Now she put her hand to her breast with a deep sigh, trying perhaps to emulate a Mucha poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. “Thou wouldst not think, Horatio, how ill here’s about my heart—but it is no matter.”

  “On the contrary, it’s a great matter. To me.”

  “Is it? I sometimes wonder how much you care about women, Bertie. I know you care about writers. I know you care about Grace Eliot. But suppose I were to tell you that Grace, the woman, has discovered something in her own heart that means more to her than any book she’s ever written.”

  “I wouldn’t believe it!” I exclaimed heatedly.

  “No, you wouldn’t, would you?” she responded, shaking her head. “Ah, the densities of incomprehension—the densities! To live without ever having another soul do more than brush athwart your wings in passing!”

  “Who only does that, my love?” crashed in the rumbling voice of Andy Eliot, whom neither of us had noticed moving up. “Surely not your loving husband? Surely you have had more solid treatment from him?”

  She gazed at his twinkling eyes without in the least changing her dreamy expression. At last she seemed to make him out, as through a mist.

  “Andrew, dear, would you please tell Mercer that we need more champagne? There’s no reason that our guests should parch just because it’s midnight. The Cinderellas have all gone home, and the rest of us can make merry.”

  Grace’s mood was broken; there were no further confidences, and soon others joined us. When I was looking for my coat in the hall, I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to face the tall, elegant figure of Leonard Esher, a peer in a Sargent portrait. At least he always struck me as having just changed from a scarlet huntsman’s jacket.

  “I say, old fellow, do you mind if I walk out with you?”

  I was taken aback. Never before had Leonard done more than acknowledge my existence. Yet such is the force of a notorious snob who suddenly ceases to snub that my natural churlishness was disarmed.

  “I live only three blocks from here,” I heard myself saying. “I can give you a nightcap if you’d like.”

  “Actually, that would be perfect. I should particularly like to see your digs.”

  My flat, then as now, was small but cozy, with a tiny paneled library full of my collection of American firsts and some old master drawings that I had picked up as bargains. Its two windows looked north to the lights and activity of the Queensboro Bridge. Leonard stood by one of these, looking out as he sipped his cognac. I knew he would never have come up except to say something special, but that something seemed difficult for him to say.

  “It’s a nice place you have here, Bertie. Grace has told me about it.”

  “She comes here occasionally to discuss her work. I don’t go to the office unless I have to. It’s nicer and quieter here.”

  “Precisely. And Grace says she doesn’t know anyone else who works at home.”

  “Oh?” I waited for the relevance of this.

  “I’ll tell you what, old boy. I’d better be blunt.” Leonard turned to place his glass decisively on the table. “Grace, after all these years, has at last consented to be my mistress. You can imagine how honored and deeply affected I am.”

  I did not trust myself to speak. My throat felt as if a piece of iron had been crammed down it. At the moment I could only imagine that he sought to torment me. But why? Why did I, a poor worm, have to twist in the flame of their repulsive ardor?

  “It has all come as a wonderful surprise to me. Years ago I had proposed it, but she had always been adamant about her duty as a wife, though God knows, Andrew has not deserved such loyalty. At length I ceased to press the matter, and we seemed to have attained a kind of platonic friendship, or amitié amoureuse, if you will. But now suddenly, perhaps with a sense of the passing years, Grace has seen fit to offer the gift of herself to your unworthy servant.”

  Was he laughing at me, the old satyr? Did he even want poor Grace now? “And where do I come in?” I gasped at last. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Ah, that’s just it, isn’t it? Well, you see, dear fellow, we have no place to meet. Grace would never come to my house, nor have me, for such a purpose, at hers. She is much too shy for a hotel, and she balks even at the idea of a rented flat, a ‘love nest,’ as she disdainfully calls it. She is morbidly afraid of discovery and says that yours is the only apartment in town that she’s known to visit in the daytime.”

  “You mean she’s safe here because people think me such a eunuch?”

  Leonard dropped his eyes at this atrocious lapse of taste. “Please, please. There is no idea of any such thing. It is simply known that your apartment is used as an office.”

  “And you would bring her here! While I did what? Wou
ld you have me, in Iago’s phrase, ‘grossly gape on’ to see her topped?”

  Leonard, who had just seated himself, now quickly rose. “Of course, at that I must leave. I had no idea of insulting you, nor did Grace, whose notion it was to ask you. We merely thought that, as an old and understanding friend, you might not object, on a few occasions, to using my comfortable office at the bank for a couple of hours, with my highly competent secretary and limousine thrown in. Had we known we should hurt you, the suggestion would never have been made.”

  “Don’t go!” I cried in misery as he turned to the door. “I lost my head. Of course I’ll do it; I’ll be happy to do it. Tell Grace she’s welcome here whenever she wishes.”

  “Well, that’s very decent of you, I must say.”

  “No, no! It’s decent of you to forgive my boorishness. And now we’ll not speak of this again until you want the apartment. It can be ready for you any time.”

  Grace and I did not meet while the affair lasted; we could not have faced each other. I abominated the idea of what was going on in my poor little flat, but I will have to admit that there was never so much as a cigarette ash or an indented pillow to bring me evidence of it. After each meeting Leonard sent in a cleaning woman who left the place spotless. Yet its very shininess seemed to pollute it the more to my eyes.

  Why did I mind so much? Was I in love with Grace? No, but I had made her into an idol, and I could not endure the presence of an iconoclast in her temple, particularly when this temple, this shrine, was the very home that I had dedicated to her, full of her books and manuscripts, and the rooms where she and I had worked for years over her wonderful tales. It was too horrible to think of Leonard violating her on her very altar. And this, I don’t think, even in retrospect, is simply neurotic of me. I believed and still believe that the hot, rutting Grace Eliot of those fevered afternoons had no necessary relevance to the chaste goddess of letters, that Grace’s genius had nothing to do with Grace’s navel and that the lust of Leonard to “possess” her was his lust to bring her down to his own brute level, to prove to himself that his “creativity” was the equal of hers. And I must deny that while I live!

  As I went to none of Grace’s parties in these weeks and communicated with her only by letters on business matters, the end of the affair came as a complete surprise to me. As I was coming out of my building one morning I met Leonard at the door. He had been about to ring up.

  “What luck, old man. I was just coming to see you. Can we walk a couple of blocks? Which way are you going?” I pointed in silence, and we fell into stride together. “I wanted to give you back your keys.” I grasped these quickly as my heart soared.

  “You’ve found a better place?” I muttered.

  “We won’t be needing one. La comedia è finita.”

  A glance assured me that, if there had been any suffering, it was not registered on that craggy profile. “I hope Grace has not been hurt.”

  “Oh, Grace is never going to be really hurt by anything but a rash on the face or a bad book review.” Here Leonard risked a sudden gesture of intimacy, rare in one so formal. He actually put his arm around my shoulders. “Take it from me, pal: never get involved with a middle-aged virgin. They have too much to make up for.”

  I jerked myself free from his clutch. My astonishment was such as momentarily to stun my outrage. “How could the wife of Andrew Eliot be a virgin?”

  “Oh, I don’t mean a virgo intacta. Andrew wasn’t that much of a fumbler. But the clumsy old goat could never arouse her and soon gave up trying. And after twenty years in the deep freeze poor Grace comes panting to yours truly for a bit of heaven. My God, was I ever tossed about! There were moments when I actually considered setting off your fire alarm!”

  Twice I tried to speak, but no sound emerged. Was this sleazy old sport always to have the last word? Then my voice erupted.

  “That lips sanctified by hers should be so foul! You great clown, don’t you know you have no existence except what Grace has given you? Go down a pothole, bug.”

  I hurried away from him and the loud angry screech of his astonished laugh.

  And now I turn again to the letters.

  Oh, my lover, however little I may have given you, be assured that it was all I had. Had I been wiser I might have hoarded it and doled it out in smaller portions, but I could not do so. I opened my vault, my doors, my cupboards, my windows; I flung every gold piece and copper piece that I had at your feet. Imprudent maybe, but I care not. I shall be forever grateful. When you look with the kindly patience of an uncle whose little niece still believes in Santa Claus, I’ll murmur under my breath: “Bless you for not telling me he’s a fable. Bless you for letting me pretend a little longer.”

  Grace! Really!

  And I must read that in the Hamilton Review and the Dartington Quarterly?

  Well, yes, of course I must. For I cannot destroy or even conceal these letters. They must be entered in the record. I have been kidding myself; I’ve known that all along. If they will turn Grace Eliot’s life into another of her novels, was it not to fiction that her destiny led her? And is it not, after all, only consistent with the justice meted out to mortals on this planet that I, who dedicated my genius to Grace Eliot, should have done less for her in the end than a man who merely unzipped his fly?

  The Senior Partner’s Ethics

  BRENDAN BROSS, Princeton ‘77, had intended to teach history, but after two years of graduate school he became engaged to be married, and he had to face the facts that America was an expensive place for raising families and academic jobs were in short supply. Accordingly, he abandoned his dreams of becoming the great scholar of the Byzantine empire and entered Columbia Law where, to his own surprise, he achieved high grades and an editorship of the law journal. On graduation he was offered a job in the Wall Street law firm of Nichols & Phelps, but his fiancée, who had now become a devoted social worker and a convert to Zen Buddhism, made their union contingent upon his turning down this job with “mammon.” Brendan, objecting more to the imposition of the condition than to the condition itself, started work still a bachelor.

  For a year this seemed just as well, for his hours were taxing. He did not mind for a time jumping into the heavy waters of bond indentures and registration statements, buffeting through days and nights and weekends the relentless breakers of galley proofs and computer printouts, because he assumed that one day he would be promoted to a position where he would be able to raise his head above the troubled surface and look over to a shore that might even contain cultural diversion, travel and, in time, a family life. But it began to strike him, as he came to know the firm better, that the intensity of industry was the same in the paneled parlor of the senior partner as it was in the whitewashed cubicle of the most junior paralegal. If there was no hell, there was also no heaven, only the endless purgatory of small print.

  Well, what was wrong with that? Nothing, so long as that was what he wanted. But he had his doubts. Had the day passed when a man could succeed in a profession without becoming its slave? In the world where Brendan now began to think of himself as entrapped, he was borne along in the current of dedication. The men and women around him were forever droning about the number of billable hours they clocked per week. So long as they seemed doomed to be a chain gang, they must have chosen to glory in their shackles. To question the validity of a life dedicated to the apotheosis of money-making was to be guilty of heresy. So glorious indeed was the glittering gold at the apex of the corporate mountain that its mere reflection had to be reward enough for the toilers on the rocky slopes below, most of whom could not even expect to become partners of the law firms that were themselves mere handmaidens in the procession marching round and round that refulgent peak.

  Or was this only Brendan’s imagination? Was he losing his perspective?

  A welcome change came into his life when Theodore Childe, the partner in charge of East River Trust Company, asked him to become his full-time assistant. Brendan welcomed
the chance to specialize. He permitted himself to hope that once he had come to know one client and one partner intimately, there might at least be a visible constellation in that cloud-covered night sky of corporate operations.

  And for some weeks, indeed, he thought he had reason to believe that he was fortunate to be working for Theodore Childe. His new boss was a straight, tall, stiff, handsome man with perfect features and a large serene brow that made his bald dome seem a crown rather than a disgrace. He was scrupulously, almost painfully neat, in his garb, in his chamber, in his very opinions. Yet he never seemed to demand an equal standard of tidiness in others. It was as if some angel or demon of his own had assigned to Theodore Childe the purely individual task of personal correctness. This might even have been, Brendan speculated, why Childe was so invariably pleasant and patient with those who worked for him. He seemed to recognize, in some curious fashion of his own, that they were not subject to the same discipline. He was almost apologetic when he corrected Brendan’s work.

  “There are many ways of phrasing a refunding clause,” he would say, coming into his associate’s office to place on his blotter a heavily blue-penciled draft on which his junior had worked a whole weekend. “I am sure that yours is as good as most, but if you don’t mind looking at some of my stylistic preferences…”

  And he would leave Brendan with an amended version of his work that represented a humiliating improvement. It was nonetheless an attractive way to be instructed, and Brendan prided himself that he responded well to it. Certainly the blue marks were soon diminishing on his drafts.

  A change in his assessment of his superior was generated by the chance remark of another associate at lunch, one Jim Moher, merry, fat and (discreetly) irreverent.

  “How are we getting on with Childe?” Jim asked.

  “Pretty well, I guess. He seems easy enough to work with.”