The Scarlet Letters

by Louis Auchincloss

  But now she was faintly disgusted to find herself fussing and fretting over the novel business not of being a dutiful wife—she had been that—but of being a loving wife. And it was certainly not that Rod had brought her any of the obvious troubles that a new mate might bring. He had moved without the slightest protest into her duplex apartment, and had been willing to go out to her Long Island villa on the few weekends when he wasn’t tied to his office. He had indeed accepted without a murmur her whole regimen of life: the servants, the cars, even the dinner parties (when he wasn’t working late). He didn’t change the position of a single chair or table or even suggest the rehanging of a picture. She had first supposed that his own possession of a large earned income freed him from any petty jealousy of his wife’s greater wealth, but she soon made out that it was rather a complete indifference on his part to money and things. He neither desired nor sought them; they simply didn’t exist for him. It was true that he was very careful to receive a lion’s share of his firm’s income, but this was more to retain his reputation among the law firms than anything else.

  As a domestic partner, in contrast to a legal one, he was above reproach. He treated her with a grave and kindly courtesy that she found utterly charming, listened with apparently sincere sympathy to all her enthusiasms and complaints, and rarely showed the least sign of irritation or temper. He was always firmly supportive. Yet he never flirted with her, never gave her the eye, and rarely even touched her except to guide her elbow walking on the street or assist her in donning or doffing a cloak. This might have worried or even alarmed her, had he not in bed made silent and fiercely passionate love to her. He never, however, on the morrow made any reference to these couplings. Did he forget them? Was he even perhaps a bit ashamed of them? She didn’t know, and somehow didn’t dare to ask. She felt like Psyche, visited only in the dark.

  Did he really love her? But if he didn’t, why had he married her? Or was it just for those nights? Was he capable of love? Certainly, if his obsession with his office work could be called love, he was. She had learned early that he would grant her any request except one that would interfere with his professional routine, but this routine was so pressing that the field of his favors to her was considerably limited. To have asked him to give up a single night’s work for a dinner party would have been like asking a surgeon to desert his operating table, and she had known better than to try.

  But at least in their first year Jane, on the whole, was contented with her lot. She had learned to amuse and interest herself with her board memberships in the long and unregretted absences of her second husband, so she never found time on her hands, no matter how tied up Rod was with his litigation. But in time she began to suffer from the greed that is always in store for those who are doomed to wreck their own good fortune, and she started to give in to the temptations of petulance over the fact that she didn’t share a greater part of her husband’s life.

  She had never been one to put much trust in the discretion of woman friends—particularly in the smart set in which she moved—and through the years, oddly enough, she had come to rely as the recipient of her confidences on a mother with whom, as a girl, she had not been very congenial. But a mother, after all, is always a mother.

  “I know it’s the fate of many American wives to become what are called business widows,” she told her parent one noon when Sophia had come to lunch. “But of course I never had to face that with Tom, who found only disaster in business, or Paul, who didn’t have any. But Rod is married to that law firm of his.”

  “Then he’s surely a bigamist, for he’s certainly married to you, my dear, and happily married, too. Don’t rock the boat!” Sophia didn’t like to show too much how deeply she savored her enjoyment of these lunches a deux in the cool Pompeian dining nook with its elegant service. She had come little enough to her daughter’s in the days of Tom, whom she had disliked, or of Paul, who had disliked her—as he had disliked everything pertaining to a bride whom he had wished to receive, so to speak, stripped of all remnants of a non-Farquar past. Rod had struck Sophia as the very welcome but quite undeserved final achievement of her daughter’s distressingly worldly life. But all was well that ended well. Or was it?

  Jane ignored the maternal warning. “Did you never find Daddy too taken up with his downtown life?”

  “Well, I don’t suppose many brokers of his day were quite as passionate about their trade as some lawyers are. Your father wouldn’t have worked a minute after five P.M. if our whole future had depended on it. If I was jealous of anything it was his weekend golf. But it’s not wise, my dear, to get between a man and his toys. It’s like finding yourself between a hippo and the water. There are a lot of worse things that a man can get into besides his job.”

  But Jane was not going to be shuffled off by any reference to banal triangles. “Oh, if you mean another woman, I think I’d know how to handle that. It’s not playing a secondary role in Rod’s life that really worries me. It’s wondering if I’m really playing any role at all.”

  “Oh, Jane dear, how can you even suggest such a thing?” Sophia was at last reluctantly alerted to the fact that there was a problem. “Rod’s crazy about you! Anyone can see that.”

  “Anyone but me,” Jane muttered, half to herself. “Maybe he’s just crazy.”

  “You know what you should do? You should have a baby. That would settle all these silly morbid doubts. Then you’d have something better to worry about than how much your husband loves you.”

  “Mother, something that didn’t happen with two difficult but far from impotent husbands isn’t apt to happen with a third. Nor do I think it would particularly help. Rod has two perfectly good children, and I’ve never craved motherhood. No, my problem is different.” As she went on, she was no longer hoping for any illumination from her friendly, worried and uninteresting parent, but she felt the need of an ear, and did she have any other? “What I think may be really wrong is that I’m going through the gushings and palpitations that I should have gone through at fifteen. And that I actually despise the silly little girl, so long repressed, who’s trying to take me over. I was so determined that I was not going to be like you or Daddy or brother Bobby that I didn’t see what I was doing to myself.”

  “Poor Bobby,” her mother murmured. “You have certainly not been like him.”

  Bobby Seaton, for all his boyish charm, had not made a success of his career as a broker in the paternal firm or of either of his two broken marriages, and now lived largely on Jane’s generous handouts. She was fully, if perhaps a bit complacently aware that her mother’s gratitude for these had gone a long way to silence any articulated disapprovals of what she considered her daughter’s too worldly espousals.

  “Do you know what Rod’s been doing for Bobby lately?” Sophia demanded suddenly, as if a ray of light had suddenly pierced the window blind of doubts that her perverse daughter insisted on lowering over her third and at last commendable marriage.

  “No. What?”

  “I thought you didn’t. It’s so like Rod to hide his light under a bushel. He’s taken Bobby twice out to lunch to discuss his future with him. He doesn’t feel that Bobby was really cut out to be a stockbroker. When Bobby told him he’d always had a hankering to do something in real estate, because he thinks he might have the knack of showing off houses and flats, Rod said he’d see what he could do in getting him an opening in a real estate brokerage firm that Vollard represents. Isn’t that fine of Rod to take that much time out of his busy day to look after his poor brother-in-law?”

  “Yes, it really is!” Jane exclaimed with sincere enthusiasm. She was always elated at any further proof of her husband’s essential good will. And she knew that he would have gone carefully into the question of Bobby’s capacity to handle such a new occupation and wouldn’t land him in a job with which he couldn’t cope. If anyone could get Bobby back on his feet, it would be Rod. And he would never say a word about it to anyone!

  But there was another
reason for Jane’s welcoming of this evidence of her husband’s humanity. For some time now she had been becoming concerned with the kind of law practice in which he so notoriously excelled. Was it as tough as some of her friends implied? Was it even brutal? When Rod was in the tense final moments of one of his corporate battles, when the chances of total victory or abysmal defeat seemed just about even, he would become silent and grim-featured, even at home, as if every corpuscle of his taut body and every nerve strand of his alert mind were arrayed for a last charge. At such times he would be distant; his evasive half-smile in answer to her questions hardly concealed his indifference to their purport; he barely noted what he ate or drank. Only in bed was he the same. Was it love or a kind of rape? Did he identify her body with the company he was trying to seize? Horrors!

  She was embarrassed now when she recalled how she had quoted Byron to Harry Hammersly. It was one thing to be a corsair and put your life and that of your crew at a bold risk where only your strong right arm and flashing saber could assure their survival and conquest, but surely it was quite another to bury your opponents under mountains of writs and interrogatories, to ensnare them in the meshes of law, cleverly twisted, perhaps, to mean the very opposite of what their legislators intended. Jane had been brought up under the doctrine, placidly accepted by her parents and their world, that the so-called robber barons of the previous century were to be largely forgiven the legal corners they had cut in return for their having provided the nation with steel and oil and railroads. All very well—she had no quarrel with that—but what was the profit to our world today in Rod’s internecine battles? Why wasn’t he a corsair in the bad old sense of the word? And why wasn’t Byron an ass to have idolized such a creature?

  Rod’s study was just off the library, and one night when he was working there and had left the door open, and she was seeking a book to read, she could hear him telephoning. When she heard him mention the name Meredith, she paused to listen. She knew it was the name of the president of the company his client was seeking to take over. It appeared that Mr. Meredith was to be offered a munificent sum.

  She went to the doorway as he hung up. “What are you offering Mr. Meredith? A consolation prize?”

  Rod was still so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not at once note the new tone in her voice.

  “Meredith will have a good post in the amalgamated company,” he replied.

  “They’ve given in, then?”

  “Not yet. But they will.”

  “You mean you’re offering this man a fortune before he’s given in? You’re bribing him to betray his stockholders?”

  Rod looked up at her with a sharpness that she had never felt before. Was she among the enemy now? And to be crushed? “What has possessed you, Jane? There’s no reason I shouldn’t make plans on how to run the amalgamated companies. And I have no idea of dispensing with Joel Meredith’s expertise. He can know it. You now can know it.”

  “But would you let the newspapers know it?”

  “When I need you to advise me about my press relations, Jane, I’ll let you know.”

  “But, Rod, don’t you see what you’re doing to that man? Don’t you—”

  He interrupted her firmly. “My dear, there are things about business you simply don’t understand.”

  “And that I’m not supposed to ask about.”

  “You can ask all you like. And I’ll be glad to explain the whole thing to you. I’m not doing anything, I promise you, that could get me into trouble, or of which you need feel in the least ashamed. Things are done differently today from the way they used to be done. That is all. But I have too much on my mind just now to go into it all. Forgive me, please, my dear. I have to make two more calls. I’ll see you later.”

  “And I know how you’ll buy my silence,” she said bitterly and left the room.

  But that night again he made love to her, and she was again the paramour of the corsair.

  Resolving on the morrow that she would do well to smother her doubts about Rod’s law practice, particularly as she could see she would never induce him to alter it, she decided to limit her interest in his firm to its social side. There was, it seemed, quite a bit of this: an annual outing for all in a country club, an annual dinner at Christmastime, semiannual partners’ dinners, cocktail receptions for different office departments, and a tea for the lawyers’ wives and the few women lawyers. As Mrs. Jessup she was invited to all of these, though Rod, who was inclined to downgrade such entertainments, assured her that she could pick and choose as she desired, or even attend none at all. But she now opted to be universal.

  The other office wives were friendly but deferential. Most of the associates’ wives and a goodly number of the younger partners’ came from other parts of the country and had originally little social nucleus outside of the firm itself, so they had tended, at least in their first years, rather to cling together. They were also knit by the strong common denominator that held their mates: the obsession to get ahead in the firm. They all knew that Jane had a life and a fortune utterly independent of the firm, and they regarded her as a sort of bird of paradise who had oddly condescended to alight in their back yard, a phenomenon to be greeted with respect and even some awe, but not one to promote chumminess. Jane found herself really only at her ease with Vinnie, her husband’s first wife, which the other women seemed to find faintly shocking. But Vinnie’s background, after all, was closer to her own.

  At the Vollard ladies’ tea Jane allowed herself the independence of leading Vinnie to a corner for a twenty-minute private converse. Vinnie had no objection to this; since her father’s stroke and the cessation of his active role in the firm, she had, despite Harry’s prominence, taken little active part in these gatherings.

  “Do you ever feel, Vinnie, as if the firm were standing between you and Harry?”

  “A good many things stand between me and Harry,” Vinnie replied, in a tone that implied that anything so well known need hardly be hid. “And I don’t regard the firm as the most important of them. In some ways I wonder if it isn’t the strongest bond between us. But you’re thinking of Rod, of course. I quite see that the firm is something that Rod would not share with anyone, except with my father, and those days are long past. I even wonder sometimes how long he will share it with Harry.”

  This gave Jane a bit of a shock, but she decided that it was neither the time nor the place to go into it. “Did you ever find, when you and Rod were married, that there were sides of his nature that you didn’t understand?”

  This might have sounded a bit desperate, but Vinnie didn’t seem in the least to mind. Her answer, however, was unexpected.

  “Oh yes, there were, and I advise you to leave them strictly alone.”

  Jane discovered, however, on further questioning that that was all that Vinnie was going to yield, and her only available source for further information on the subject would have to be Harry. Harry, ever since her marriage to Rod, had insinuated flatteringly to her that she brought wit, culture and sympathy into both his legal and private lives, implying that these qualities had been sorely needed there. In society, where they often met, and even in office gatherings, he treated her with a gallantry whose exaggeration seemed to imply its innocence—or seemed to be intended to imply it. He would go so far as to interrupt a tête-à-tête that she might be holding with some gentleman at a party by demanding loudly, “Does your friend know about us, Jane?”

  One day, when Harry was uptown in her neighborhood for the will-signing of a rich invalid client, he asked Jane to lunch with him at the Plaza, and she decided it would be the perfect occasion to quiz him about Rod and his law practice. She was well aware that Harry would delight in making things sound even worse than they were, but she thought she would know how to interpret this.

  “I know people used to frown on these corporate raids, if that’s what they’re called,” she began when they had finished their cocktails and were about to order. “But if everyone’s doing them now,
they can’t be all that bad, can they?”

  “Oh yes, they can!” Harry exclaimed cheerfully. “Face it, my dear, your husband and I are running a firm of shysters.”

  “Shysters! But Rod assures me that everything he does is strictly legal.”

  “Well, I should certainly hope so! That’s what the clients pay him for. And through the nose, too. When I say we’re shysters, I mean that’s what we would have been called a generation back. Now the term has been cleaned up. In fact, it’s rarely used anymore.”

  “What has changed it?”

  “Prepare your pretty head for a little lecture. In the past, legal ethics required that an attorney should invoke the aid of a court only to recover a sum due, or for damages suffered by his client, or to prevent an anticipated wrong, or to enforce the performance of a legal duty. To sue in a court of law simply to harass a client’s opponent into doing something he was not legally obliged to do would have been shysterism, pure and simple.”

  “And that is no longer the case?”

  “Can you ask? Don’t you read the newspapers? Nowadays, when one wishes to acquire a company that doesn’t wish to be acquired, one’s counsel bring all kinds of nuisance suits to induce it to change its mind. We sue for mismanagement by the directors, for unpaid dividends, for violation of the bylaws, for improper issuance of stock. We allege criminal misconduct; we shout about antitrust; we sue for ancient and dubious liabilities. And our opponent’s counsel will answer with inordinate demands for all our files and seek endless interrogatories in order to enmesh our client in a hopeless tangle of red tape. But my point is that in no case is either party in the least interested in obtaining the objective for which it is ostensibly suing. It is simply war, and you know the quality that applies to that and love.”