The Scarlet Letters

by Louis Auchincloss

  “My dear Vinnie, you know very well what I mean by that.”

  Which, of course, she did. Which, of course, they had been leading each other to. So here it was, right on the table. He did not try to fool her with any perfervid declaration of passion; he simply put it on the ground of a sensible, even a civilized, division of her life into what could be—with a little care, a little concern for the feelings and prejudices of others—a series of watertight compartments. There was no reason to believe, he now insisted to her, that what prudes called adultery had always to be found out. He knew of any number of cases, including couples of her acquaintance, where the so-called betrayed spouse remained in permanent and blissful ignorance of what was going on. Vinnie remained mostly silent on the occasions when he expounded his sexual philosophy, but her mind was afire with erotic images.

  One night, while Rod was on a business trip to Chicago, Harry, after taking her to a movie and afterward to his flat for the usual nightcap, had retired, for an oddly prolonged time, to his bedroom, leaving her alone with her drink. When he suddenly appeared in the doorway, she gasped. He was clad only in a silk kimono with an unmistakable bulge at his crotch.

  “Be not alarmed,” he reassured her calmly. “No hand will be laid upon you. I am going to put on a record of the great duet from the second act of Tristan. It is, of course, notoriously the musical expression of the physical union of the lovers. I suggest that we listen to it in silence, after which you will be entirely free to choose your own finale. It can end in your stormy exit, like the bustle of King Mark, in which case I shall simply call you a taxi, or in our happier submission to what I am bold enough to call our most mutual attraction.”

  She thought he looked almost magnificent as he stood there, silent now, before her. Then, when she nodded, he placed the record carefully on the machine and switched it on. She listened, transfixed, to the glorious voices of Flagstad and Melchior until Mark burst in to interrupt their climax. Harry rose, turned off the instrument, and faced her with a grave look of inquiry. Again she nodded, and he opened his kimono.

  IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED she found feverishly rewarding the different ways of lovemaking to which her imaginative and widely experienced guide introduced her. Their rendezvous were always in his apartment and took place at noon, on his ostensible lunch hour. In this new school she proved herself an eager and proficient student, and the guilt that now assailed her in every hour when she was not with him seemed even to add to the overall intensity of her pleasure. When she thought of the horror that some of her doings would arouse in Rod (whose suspicion she was careful not to arouse by any interruption of marital relations), or in her father; when she heard, ringing in her head, their imagined exclamations of “decadent” or “depraved,” she thought, with an acceptance and resignation, that heaven and hell had to be different places, and never the twain should meet.

  On Harry she now felt a dependence that was more like the blind devotion of a dog than a love in any romantic sense of the word. She took him as a kind of new god who had ravished her and become her master. One Sunday morning, when Rod was again away on a business trip, and she had gone to Harry’s flat instead of taking the girls to church, and found herself nude, kneeling on his living room rug, her hands clasping his bare buttocks and her lips receiving his ejaculated sperm, she knew, with a dreary satisfaction, that she had no further to fall.

  6

  SAINT JUDE’S, the Episcopal boys’ boarding school to which the twelve-year-old Rod Jessup had been sent by his father, himself a devoted graduate, managed to imply to a visitor, in the gray Gothic architecture of its rather severe oblong campus, that a strict adherence was therein paid to the commandments handed down on Mount Sinai. And indeed the boys adhered to most of them, certainly to the most important. They found a single God more than enough, and had no call for any others; they never even thought of making graven images, and they could hardly fail to remember the Sabbath day, so heavily emphasized in their weekly schedule. They honored their parents, in their own way, and the ideas of murder, theft, adultery or false witness (whatever that was) never crossed their minds, nor did they covet their neighbor’s wife or his servants or his ox or his ass. But they did covet a number of other things, and they certainly took the Lord’s name in vain whenever out of hearing of the faculty. Such, however, had to be minor violations of the code, and there were no injunctions against smutty talk or masturbation or any of the little sex games that one boy may play with another when only boys are attainable for the sport. So life went on pleasantly enough under the irrelevant prattle of Sunday preachers and instructors in sacred studies. The boys knew well enough how little their families at home cared for these.

  Rod, by the age of fourteen, was not only a very beautiful boy; he was a good student, an able athlete and an enthusiastic participant in all the major extracurricular school activities. He was a popular enough fellow, but he earned the hostility of some whose lewd invitations to bedtime visits after lights he rejected with scorn and contempt. It was not fatal to decline such bids, but the boys’ etiquette outlawed any sermonizing, and Rod felt compelled to condemn what he deemed sinful. A group, accordingly, was organized to teach a lesson in humility to this “Christer.” Six of them grabbed Rod when he was taking a shower in the gym and rushed him to a deserted corner of the locker room where they held him down on the floor and tickled his testicles and tweaked his penis until he ejaculated, at which point they fled, with hoots of laughter.

  They all assumed that Rod would soon forget the matter. They even liked him and hoped that he would profit by the experience and be less of a prude in the future. But they were wrong. Rod did not forget it, nor did it in any way alter his moral stance against their ideas of sexual fun. It did, however, have one serious repercussion with him. He never sought personal retaliation against any of the six. He did not feel that he had the right to do so, because—though he would have gone to the stake rather than admit it—he now saw himself as one of them.

  For there had been something deep within him that had not entirely rejected this initiation into shared sexual activity, something in the very intensity of his public humiliation, in the actual shame of it, that had been physically titillating. Horrors! But had he really struggled very hard to fight them off? No! For he might have done so; they were not so impassioned as to carry out their project at the risk of a really bloody fistfight, of which they all knew him capable. One of them, Harry Hammersly, the next day, had actually gripped Rod on the shoulder walking to chapel and murmured in his ear with a grin, “You didn’t really mind it, did you, Rod? You know, if you want, you can do it to me any day!” And Rod hadn’t killed him! He even allowed Harry to join his group on a bird watch the following Sunday afternoon.

  But Rod’s mood darkened in the following weeks. He began to shun even friendly groups and take long walks alone on weekend afternoons; he couldn’t seem to live with this new image of a self afflicted with sensual yens. The boys who had played the trick on him began to be alarmed at what they had wrought: might this new Rod be so irresponsible as to expose them to the faculty? Even if their little trick was not to be found on Mount Sinai’s list of don’ts, they knew only too well what a storm would be involved. But when they delegated Hammersly to intercede with Rod, he was given contemptuous assurance that no such exposure need be feared.

  One spring vacation Rod was tempted to confide in his father. But Rodney Senior had suffered another heart attack and was resting at home, barred for some weeks from attending his office, and Rod’s mother was very firm about his not being worried with anything. Yet the big, broadly smiling patient seemed to sense some of the boy’s chagrin; he clapped a hand under his son’s chin and made him look up into those serene gray eyes and hear the gentle paternal tone: “Rod, dear boy, if there’s something on your mind, you should be able to tell your poor old dad. I don’t care if it’s something you find a bit unattractive. We all have stinky thoughts and nasty urges. Maybe one day I’ll
tell you about mine. Oh, you’d be surprised! Maybe even shocked. We’re monsters, my boy. We’re all monsters. But monsters can be a little bit less monstrous if they love each other, don’t you think? The way you and I and Mummy feel about each other. Isn’t that so? Well, think it over, and if I can be the tiniest help to you, let me know. What else am I here for, for goodness’ sake, if it isn’t to help out a fine son like you?”

  Rod’s heart ached with love for this benevolent easygoing sire, so inexplicably stricken with a malady that Rod knew from his mother’s agonized anxiety was darkly menacing. He felt that his father was a kind of god of boundless mercy stretching out open arms to enfold him in everlasting bliss if he could only allow himself to rush into that embrace. But he could not bring himself to believe that his father—for all his talk of monsters—could really tolerate the idea that any boy who hoped to become a man could possibly have derived any pleasure from the revolting thing that had been done to him. Could he even imagine his father in such a position? Hell and damnation!

  He returned to school without having availed himself of the paternal offer to tell all. Yet even that Rodney Senior had seemed to understand. He had been as merry as usual in seeing his son off on the train. But a week later Rod was called into the headmaster’s study and gravely informed that another attack had ended his father’s life.

  Eleanor Jessup was largely responsible for her son’s surviving this crisis without major mental damage. She was a tall bony plain, exceedingly intelligent and intellectual woman, with messy reddish hair, a high brow and large nose, who regarded as the miracle of her life that she should have attracted such a man as her husband and never doubted that all hope for her future happiness had died with him. But she was a Roman in her sense of duty. She saw life too clearly to imagine for a moment that her son could make up to her for what his father had been or that she could make up to him for what he had lost. But together they could carry on; together they could be worthy of her husband’s faith in them. With an admirable minimum of words she put steel in Rod’s heart.

  And they did carry on. Rod at school recovered his balance and his popularity. His goal in life was now a simple and all-encompassing one. He would strive to replace his father in the world, an ideal rather than a possibility. Whatever cesspools lurked in the cavities of his mind, his heart could be pure.

  For the rest of their time at Saint Jude’s Harry Hammersly cultivated Rod’s friendship with what he at least regarded as considerable success. Rod was now among the leaders of the school—he had become a prefect and stroked the varsity crew—and though Harry was renowned and even a bit feared as a wit and had achieved the merely secondary distinction in a sports-worshiping academy of being editor of the school magazine, he enjoyed nothing like the popularity of the boy to whose friendship he aspired. He had, at least at school, far more to gain from Rod than Rod from him.

  Rod’s attitude towards Harry was more complicated. He could never, of course, forget the episode of the locker room; its fixed spot in his mind was even the core of his relationship with his new intimate. He never referred to it, but he developed the notion that by locating it essentially in Harry and assuring himself by their companionship that it was there and not in Rod Jessup, that he somehow had it under a kind of control. Harry, in a way, was thus everything that Rod was not, and his very presence seemed to make it possible for Rod to keep it that way.

  Which did not in the least mean that he could not become fond of Harry. The latter’s cultivation of him was flattering, and Harry cut a considerable figure among the more sophisticated minority of their class, even venturing to flaunt an occasional defiance against the solid wall of the athletic lobby. At Yale, of course, the balance tipped more in Harry’s favor; there were even those in their undergraduate circle who found the abrasively ironic Harry a more amusing companion than the more staid and literal Rod, but at law school Rod was again in the lead, his compulsive industry raising him to an editorship of the Law Journal, while Harry’s preoccupation with society and women limited him to the good but not top grades that his lightning grasp of the material brought him even in the few hours he accorded it.

  Eleanor Jessup did not like Harry and had no scruples about making her opinion known to her son. She and Rod shared a small apartment off Riverside Drive, and she spent long days teaching history at a private girls’ school, but there were some important New Yorkers who remembered with affection and admiration her brilliant and early cut-off mate, and she dined out from time to time in fashionable circles where her dry humor and terse wit were appreciated.

  “I must admit, Rod dear,” she confessed to him one morning at breakfast after one of these social evenings, “that seeing your friend Harry’s parents, as I did last night, fawning over Mrs. Neely Vanderbilt, may provide some excuse for his worldly streak. They say Harry’s father is completely bust and doesn’t even pay his bridge debts. But there they are, he and his wife, the two old dowdies, dressed to the gills with probably unpaid raiment, desperately cadging invitations to Palm Beach or the Caribbean. Ugh! It’s sickening to watch them at it.”

  “Poor old Harry! But he knows they have nothing more to give him. He’s on his own now. And, you must admit, he does pretty well.”

  “I hope you never lend him money, Rod.”

  “He always seems to have more than I have!”

  “And I wonder where he gets it.”

  “You’ve never been fair to Harry, Ma.”

  But Rod was never entirely sure of Harry himself. And when Harry followed his lead successfully in applying for a job in Vollard Kaye, he began to see him as a potential rival. Fortunately they were assigned to different departments, Harry having elected trusts and estates where his charm and cozy manners with individual clients, particularly rich elderly ladies, were strong assets and where the hours were not as long as in other sections. Rod, of course, reveled in the corporate work which constituted the firm’s main business. And when the year came for both to be made partners, and both were, Rod was reassured to know that there would be no further question as to which was the more qualified candidate for the future leadership of the firm. It would have to be a corporate man.

  Relaxed on the subject of competition, Rod was now able to take an unmitigated pleasure in Harry’s usually pleasant company. It was gratifying to see his friend rising to the top of a department that was a satisfactorily contributing part of the firm but not one that would ever be able to dominate management. For Rod still maintained secret doubts about Harry’s innate sense of right and wrong and would not have cared to see him in a position where he could in any way alter the sacred tenets that maintained the firm’s esprit de corps, tenets which, of course, had been laid down by Ambrose Vollard. But with his widows and young heirs and trusts Harry helped to run a lively department and kept the partners highly amused at the firm lunches with his merry tales of family frictions and extravagances. Oh yes, Vollard Kaye would always have a place for Harry.

  And he amused Vinnie. That, alas, was becoming an important thing. Rod had been troubled that she did not seem to gain happiness with the years. She never complained, and always insisted impatiently that she was just fine, and for him not to be such a worrywart about her, but there it was: things were not as they should be for a woman of her looks and charm and general capability. And if Harry could take time off from his own busy social schedule to escort her to an occasional play or concert or opera, well, that was just fine, wasn’t it?

  7

  ONE MORNING WHEN ROD had an uptown appointment, he decided after lunch not to go back to his office, but to spend the afternoon working in his apartment. The girls would be at school until five, and Vinnie had gone to Glenville for the day, so it would be quiet. He kept certain of his files in a closet that was also used as a liquor cabinet, and it was usually kept locked, as their cleaning woman was not above the temptation of an occasional nip. He had different hiding places for the key, and he now remembered that he had slipped it into one
of the drawers of his wife’s dressing table under a pile of her underwear. Reaching for it, his hands struck a notebook. Flipping its pages in surprise, he saw it was full of Vinnie’s handwriting, and after he had made out one sentence, he sat heavily down, ice sliding over his heart like a rapid glacier, and read the journal through.

  Vinnie had faithfully recorded what she and Harry had done. The journal was an inventory of their acts. What had induced her to record the shameful list? Some remnant of conscience, some throwback to her mother’s puritan ancestry? For a wild moment he thought it might be fiction. But it was too graphic. For another his astonishment was so great that he could almost set aside the scarlet fact that his world was now in tiny pieces, scattered all over the room. When he rose at last to his feet, he tottered and almost fell. Then he returned the journal to its place and closed the drawer. He left the apartment and walked over to Central Park where he sat for an hour on a bench.

  What he began to realize, slowly but with a creeping ineluctability, was that this experience, which was like nothing that had ever happened to him before, seemed to be occurring to a person other than himself, perhaps even an opposite. For what sort of man would have married a woman capable of doing what Vinnie had described on the last page of her abominably honest journal? Or did all women do it, or want to do it, and had he been living in a paradise of idiotic fools? Was it even conceivable that he would want a woman to do it to him? Was that why the horrid journal had an eerie fascination for him, over and above the wrath and indignation it inspired? How could he know what might or might not arouse the lust of the new man that Rod Jessup had become in a single morning?

  He then walked rapidly around the reservoir, only to find that his head was aching, and there was a queer buzzing in his ears. He returned to his bench and sat there until this stopped. He then proceeded to face his problem with all the clarity his legal training had given him. Was there anything left of his life, and if so, what? There were his daughters, of course, but this did not directly affect them. And there was the firm. Ah yes, the firm and Ambrose Vollard. Above the general rubble of his hopes and purposes the figure of his father-in-law loomed like an isolated tower. And Ambrose could be directly affected! Faced with the low conduct of his idolized daughter, might he not be hit in the very heart of his idealistic nature? Might the disillusionment not spread to stain even the beautiful windows of the church of law that he had so lovingly constructed? His partner Harry cuckolding his partner Rod with his own child! Would that be the logo of Vollard Kaye?