The Scarlet Letters

by Louis Auchincloss

  Rod interrupted. “But the point is that the primary beneficiary in each case was yourself.”

  “Helping oneself can often be the surest way of helping others.”

  “That certainly seems to have been your guiding principle. How do you think the surrogate would react if he heard it?”

  “Very badly, I admit. But would I be surcharged? What would be the damages?”

  “Nothing would be lost, as Jim Fisk put it, but honor. And you might be asked to resign your fiduciary positions. Which I’ll save the courts the trouble of doing by asking it of you now.”

  “You’re asking me to give up my trusts? Have you taken leave of your senses?”

  “Very likely.”

  “What would that do to the firm?”

  “It might hurt for a while. But we’d survive. And in the long rim we’d all be the better for it.”

  “I have to assume you’re serious. Of course, I refuse.”

  “You’ll fight me on this? With what you know I can show the partners?”

  “To the last ditch. Somebody may get kicked out, but are you so damn sure it will be me?” Harry now moderated his tone. “Look, Rod. You’re sick. You need to see a doctor. Don’t do this to the firm. Talk to Jane.”

  “What’s Jane got to do with it?”

  “She makes sense, anyway. Do you mind if I talk to her?”

  “I don’t care who you talk to.”

  Which Harry did, that very afternoon, for when Rod got home she was waiting for him tensely in the living room. She rose and tried to put her arms around him, but he held her off.

  “Darling, I don’t care what Harry’s done—you can’t do this to him. You can’t destroy the firm you and he have built.”

  “He and I!”

  “Well, haven’t you? And is what you’ve been doing so very different from what he has?”

  Rod stared at her. “You mean we both should be disbarred? Maybe you’re right at that!”

  “Oh, Rod, if that were the real reason you were going after him, perhaps I wouldn’t so much mind. But it isn’t! It’s something black and horrid deep down inside you that you’ve got to be rid of!”

  “What is it, in God’s name?”

  “I don’t know! But if you do this thing, I’ll … I’ll leave you, that’s all!”

  And she ran from the room in a fit of tears.

  Rod felt a crashing in his ears. He had a sudden searing vision of Samson pulling down the temple on himself.

  14

  HETTY SHATTUCK, AS SHE WAS, forty years back, before she married Ambrose Vollard, suffered as a child severe attacks of asthma, from which her ultimate recovery was almost complete, but which for several years darkened her life with terrible gasping fits of breathlessness. Her keenest and most enduring memories of this painful period were of her benign and caring father taking hours out of his busy clergyman’s day simply to sit silently by her bed and radiate sympathy and love from every pore of his large and richly clad clerical body. He would also, when she was feeling well enough to listen, endeavor to comfort her with some of the precepts of his faith, assuring her that her courage in bearing her discomforts was appreciated by a deity who had suffered himself all the pains that human flesh could endure. Her mother was less articulate on this subject. As a good Boston spouse Naomi Shattuck left all matters of religion wisely and conclusively in the hands of a husband so uniquely qualified to handle them, but she offered equal comfort to her afflicted daughter. And Hetty, regarding them with the detachment of an invalid resigned to her fate, was able to love them as well as assess them.

  She saw them as souls favored by fortune, born to health, prosperity and riches and even more blessed by having the talent to relish and enjoy their benefits. They believed implicitly in a god who had showered these boons upon them, requiring only in return that they should lead virtuous existences, which they were only too happy to do. That she, Hetty, had been born under a different star with different liabilities, did not strike her as unjust or even cruel; it was simply the way things were. And she was somewhat compensated by being freed of the restricting religious views that had illuminated or clouded, depending on the point of view, the skies of her parents and her forebears and of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony themselves. But as she made it out, in her own careful and reflective way, this freedom applied only to thought and not to actions. Her activities, she was somehow sure, had to be as circumspect as those of all the other Shattucks. She was fated to be a true New Englander, after all.

  What it seemed to boil down to was that if she was a good girl, the world would be nice to her. And she liked having the world nice to her, particularly when the world was made up of persons as dear as Mummy and Daddy and her brothers and sisters. Nor was it very hard, after all, to be a good girl.

  And when she regained her health it was even easier. Hetty grew up to live at peace with a universe that, like Margaret Fuller, she had learned to accept. But that she was the acutest observer in her family was no secret to her parents and siblings; they cheerfully accused her of hidden heresies. Boston had no hostility to heresies that were veiled; Boston cared only for form, for propriety. Boston—and Hetty welcomed it as her salvation—didn’t care what you thought or even very much what you said so long as your outward demeanor conformed to the accepted norm. Boston was wise, even perhaps civilized.

  The historian Brooks Adams, a cousin of her mother’s (all of old Boston was kin), was a case in point. His dress, his demeanor and his conduct conformed perfectly to the social code; his ancestry was historic and his social circle select, so nobody objected to his scathing denunciations of the early fathers of the commonwealth or to his stark reports of their religious bigotry and savage persecutions. Even at the Reverend Philemon Shattuck’s board he was a constantly welcomed guest, and young Hetty, whose independence of mind he soon discovered, became almost his confidante. Adams, with the egocentricity of an obsessed and aristocratic scholar, made little distinction between those who had the patience to hear him sound off; a young girl and an old man were the same to him if he felt a response. To Hetty he became an oracle, the one human being who saw the world not necessarily as it was—for what was that?—but as she saw it.

  That her forebears should have fled religious intolerance in the old world to establish it in the new seemed no odder to her than that she should enjoy her father’s beautiful garden in summers in Nahant while the poor sweltered in the city slums. The symphony of different shades of green bushes and trees that she viewed from a cool terrace was all that man could do with the disorder of nature, and she applauded the victory, however brief, however doomed, of art over weeds. Her particular passion was history, and in history her greatest love was Gibbon, whose massive volumes of Roman history she read and reread, finding in them, more than anywhere else, the true picture of the human condition. The rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, attended by the same ambitions and the same decays, the endless repetition of devastating wars and massacres, the tinselly splendor and the gruesome gore, the old gods and the new, the theological superstitions and the religious hatreds—how could anyone endowed with her vision see a design in it? How could she see anything but chaos interrupted by monotony?

  Yet Gibbon, it was finally revealed to her, did make something out of it. He extracted a history out of it, and his history, like her father’s garden, was a work of art. That was the one answer that man could cast in the grinning face of pointlessness; those long golden sentences were coiled around the fleeting annals of the decline and fall of the western and eastern empires. Hetty had no reason to suppose that she herself would have the escape of becoming a writer; she was willing to content herself with the role of observer. But of an observer from whom nothing is concealed.

  In Ambrose Vollard the now maturer Hetty professed to see a kind of latter-day Germanicus or Marcellus, one of those noble Roman heroes on whom history seems to shine a brief spotlight, spread a wild hope in the surrounding shadows, soon
quelled, that a day of redemption may be actually at hand and that a firm administration is at last going to check the barbarians and restore dignity and rule to the Roman state. Such interludes, anyway, are gratifying to the watcher, and Hetty was determined to be that. What she had not counted on was that she should fall, for the first and last time in her life, violently in love.

  She was fated to take her crystal vision with her to New York and to her married life in that metropolis. It was not long before she could see that if Germanicus had ideals—and Ambrose certainly did—he was going to insist that those ideals be shared by all. If he had the stout heart of Marcellus, he had also the egotism of Augustus. This, however, could have been acceptable to a handmaiden of Gibbon had she occupied in her husband’s affections the position that she had once almost dared hope she might. And, of course, she had not. He was a man’s man who, however much he might refuse to acknowledge it, even perhaps to himself, could never regard a woman as a true soul mate. A wife was a kind of junior partner in the law firm of his life, maybe even a senior associate, and a daughter, like Vinnie, a sort of playful kitten until she had grown into a cat. Neither Hetty nor her eldest daughter could ever take over the role that Rod had played in Ambrose’s life nor hope to fill the gap that he had left.

  All this should have been foreseeable to a Boston virgin of supposedly Emersonian tranquillity, and to some extent it had been, but if Hetty had miscalculated the stubborn masculinity of her husband’s nature, she had also underestimated the jealous femininity of her own. She discovered to her dismay that she was unable to accept with a philosophical equanimity her cameo role in the Vollard order of things, and that she was more and more giving voice to little jabs of biting humor that gave her the local reputation of a brilliant wit but that led often to a rather sullen silence at the family board.

  Since Ambrose’s stroke, however, these tensions had greatly eased. His condition had now become pitiable, smothering her least resentments. Hetty knew herself to be a wonderful nurse. She always managed to be where she was needed, without ever seeming to hover. Her agile mind anticipated her patient’s every need, without his having either pathetically or petulantly to ask, and her anecdotes of the world outside the sickroom were always fresh and amusing. Ambrose, who understood perfectly just how and why she was transforming herself, did her the honor of never thanking her. He knew he now had a treasure, and a treasure too proud to be told what it was.

  When he got better and returned to his office, where he was of little use except to sign documents in matters of which he was still a fiduciary, she knew that he would waste some of his partners’ time by dropping into their offices to chat of old times, but she also knew how important this diversion was to him, and she used all of her still considerable influence in the firm to see that it was tolerated. She worked particularly on Harry Hammersly, who was somewhat in awe of his motherin-law and kept a wary eye on her ample portfolio of market securities.

  “If things get too bad, come to me,” she warned him. “And I’ll speak to Ambrose. But not till then. You mustn’t let any of your partners forget how much they owe him.”

  “Some of the younger ones are hardly aware of that, Mrs. V”

  Rod had been allowed to call her Hetty; Harry never.

  “Then you must instruct them,” she said grimly.

  “Aye aye, ma’am.”

  One day, when she had gone downtown to Ambrose’s office to sign a codicil adding a bequest to the newly born child of her youngest daughter, her husband had asked her to stay on afterwards to hear something which, as soon as the witnesses to the codicil had left, he wanted to impart to her.

  It was about the row between Rod and Harry. Harry had been in his father-in-law’s office the first thing that morning to beg him to try to pound some sense into Rod’s hot head.

  Hetty shook her head ruefully as she took in the details of the quarrel. She had long anticipated a blowout between her present and ex sons-in-law. The barbarians were at the gates of Rome as the consuls bickered. She took quick note, however, of one essential fact.

  “But if there have been no losses in the trusts,” she pointed out, “why can’t Harry put them back in order? Sell the wrong things and buy the right ones? And agree to stop favoring his pet charities?”

  “He could do those things, of course. And he’s even agreed to do them. But Rod wants blood! He wants Harry to resign all his fiduciary positions. He claims he’s not fit to hold them!”

  “And there may be something in what he says. But surely if he keeps an eye on Harry in the future, that will stop him from these excesses. After all, Harry is supposed to be a first-class fiduciary. Everyone seems to want him.”

  “But Rod’s inexorable. And do you know something, Hetty? In a way I can’t blame him.”

  “But, Ambrose, this thing may split your firm wide open!”

  “And maybe it’s about time for that. We used to represent a kind of high-water mark among the great firms. And now, under the joint leadership of our eldest daughter’s two husbands we have become what? Another wolf pack. Let it blow itself up, I say. It should make a splendid bonfire!”

  “For you to enjoy watching. Shame on you, Ambrose. I never heard anything so selfish. Maybe I’d better speak to Rod myself.”

  “Stay out of it, Hetty. It’s no longer really your or my affair.”

  “And it wouldn’t do any good, either, I suppose. When Rod gets his teeth into something there’s no letting go.”

  “You and I belong to the past, my dear. And I like to think a glorious one. Even if that’s only fancy. Shall I take you out for a very good lunch?”

  But she knew how much he craved the table reserved daily for any Vollard partners who cared to join it at his lunch club and firmly took her departure.

  In the reception hall a man hurried after her and caught her by the elbow. It was a very distraught-looking Rod.

  “Hetty, where are you going?”

  “Home, dear boy.”

  “Not till you’ve lunched with me!”

  “Rod, I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “Please!”

  “No!”

  “For God’s sake, Hetty!”

  To her horror he dropped to his knees. Right there, in the august reception area, before the astonished girl at the main desk and the gaping office boys.

  “Rod, get up! All right. Let’s get out of here!”

  He jumped to his feet and guided her to the elevator. After a five-minute walk, in which a severe silence was maintained, they faced each other over a booth table in the nearest restaurant.

  “I’m sure Ambrose has told you our problem,” he began.

  “He has told me your problem.”

  “You don’t see it as ours? As yours and mine? As the firm’s?”

  “Well, I see it as more particularly yours. Because you’re making it so. Perhaps because you even want to make it so.”

  “You sound like Jane.” Rod’s eyes seemed desperately to plead his cause. “She’s even threatening to leave me!”

  “Do you want her to?”

  “Oh, Hetty! How can you say that? You, of all people.”

  “Because, as I see it, everything is entirely in your control. If you don’t put things back in order, it must be because you wish the mess to remain.”

  “Oh, you mean let Harry fix it all up.”

  “Just so.”

  “Or cover it all up. Abet a crime, is that it?”

  “Not at all. Rectify an error.”

  “Which he may repeat at will in the future?”

  “He won’t. Don’t worry. He may lack scruples but he’s no fool. Besides, you’ll have old Tilley to keep an eye on him. You can live with Harry, Rod. We all have.”

  “And with the kind of firm he’s turned Ambrose’s old one into?”

  “You have so far. And is it really so different from what it was?”

  “Oh, Hetty!” he exclaimed again.

  “You forget, my dear, that I g
rew up in a time when insider trading was a coveted privilege and not a crime. When the maneuvering of stock prices for the benefit of a favored few was considered good business and not a fraud on the public. And where monopoly was God and the Morgan partners his apostles. I learned that morals change with the weather. You may not like Harry, but at least he knows how to find happiness.”

  “Spare me his way!”

  “It has indeed been spared you, poor boy. You are a genius at cultivating your own misfortune.” She reached a hand over to pat his. “Don’t lose Jane, whatever you do.”

  Tears sprang up in his eyes. “Hetty, what’s wrong with me?”

  “Well, perhaps I should start by telling you that I always knew why you started that business with Mrs. Fisk. You knew all about Vinnie and Harry, didn’t you?”

  “How in God’s name did you know that?”

  “It was the only thing that made it all add up.”

  “And did you tell them? Did you tell Ambrose?”

  “I didn’t tell a soul. I didn’t see it was any of their business. They had their own principles or life styles or whatever you want to call it. They could work it out for themselves.”

  “And have they? Vinnie and Harry?”

  “I think so. In their own way. Vinnie finally faced—what she must have always suspected—that she had been thoroughly used. Now she’s much less subservient. She knows that if Harry doesn’t give her everything she wants, she can do him a lot of damage. And Harry knows that. As I say, he’s no fool. Besides, he still has something of a physical hold over Vinnie. She’s a passionate woman, that child of mine, and she hasn’t got any prettier with increased avoirdupois. If she had to get another man today, she’d have to buy one.”

  Rod looked as shocked as he undoubtedly was. “I take it you’re not much drawn to your son-in-law.”