Manhattan Monologues

by Louis Auchincloss

  It was in the year after my debut, a time when it was generally expected that a young lady of decent looks and ample fortune should take a mate, that I learned of a third role that I was perhaps destined to play. It was Papa who revealed this to me. He did not, after all, it appeared, wish me to remain a virgin priestess at his altar. Far from it! He wished me to marry, not one of what he called “the silly fops you and your cousins play around with” or even one of the golden heirs of our circle; oh, no, he wanted me to marry a “great man,” or one who bore the signs of becoming—a statesman, an ambassador, a many-starred general!

  He confided in me gravely that I was the only one among his offspring who had any of his brains and talent. He described my two poor younger sisters as giddy and party-obsessed, and I have already written what he thought of Otto. He predicted that, as the partner of greatness, I could make a contribution to history and that it was a woman’s only way. But wasn’t he in fact preparing the sole poor candidate he had to attain the success that had consistently eluded him? Did he love me? Could he? And did I love him? Really and truly? Certainly he frightened me, but he also awed me. I had always been flattered by his attention, which made me feel pleasantly superior to my siblings. Now I began to wonder whether I was getting too much of it.

  He and I had in common a love of reading; his happiest, or perhaps I should say his least frustrated, hours were spent in his dark leathery library, whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with shelves of closely packed volumes, including the rare quartos and folios of his favorite Jacobean dramatists. He liked to read aloud to me from the latter, and, though impressed by his noble tone and theatrical emphasis, I was sometimes appalled at the blood and thunder he admired. I can still hear him in Malcolm’s speech in Macbeth.

  Nay, had I power, I should

  Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,

  Uproar the universal peace, confound

  All unity on earth.

  Was that what Papa would do if he were a great man? Was there a wish under all his oratory to wreak revenge on the universe? At any rate, after his first pronouncement of the desirability of my ultimate union with a gentleman of national importance, he did not mention the subject again, and I am fairly sure that he never discussed it with Mother or any of her family. I began to wonder, with some relief, whether it had been a momentary fancy on his part. I should have known better.

  It was my cousin Lily Hammersly, Aunt Maud’s daughter and my exact contemporary (we had “come out” together in a joint ball given by Grandpa and Grandma), who came closest to convincing me that life didn’t have to be as I or even as Papa visualized it. She was considered the “belle” of the family, though her little brown pert face was not much prettier than my rather pallid blondness. But she had animation and high spirits and wit, and wasn’t in the least in awe of anyone, even Grandpa, whom she dared to tease, or Papa, her uncle-in-law, who was strangely tolerant of her even when she contradicted one of his pronouncements. She regarded the older generations as obstacles that could be made to yield to cajolery, and all of the cousinage depended on her to extract permission for whatever outing or other project that, without her, might be subject to family veto.

  In the first year after our coming-out, Lily’s interest vested exclusively in the young men who called at our houses on afternoons when our parents received and among whom it was expected we should ultimately find a spouse. Needless to say, Lily’s temperament led her to entertain highly romantic ideals, and she had little patience with the concept of an “arranged match.” She also had little patience with my mild preference for Winthrop, or “Wintie,” Tillinghast, who was the most assiduous of my not madly assiduous beaux.

  “He’s too old and too stuffy, Aggie,” she insisted. “He’s like Osric in Hamlet. He genuflected to his mother’s dug before he sucked it.”

  Lily was not only well read; she was very free with her literary allusions. But she had a point. Wintie was certainly older; he was thirty plus to my nineteen and already established as a junior officer in the bank that handled the Thorn trusts. He was tall and perhaps too dignified, with a regular, rather immobile countenance and prematurely gray hair, but he had a surprising sense of humor and a kindly manner. He knew everybody, was well liked and a popular leader of cotillions. The Tillinghasts were not rich but were well connected, and his two elder brothers had married substantial fortunes. I classified him as the kind of man who, even if he had to marry money, would marry only a rich girl he sincerely loved. That was a distinction that most of my female cousins learned to make early. I was very fond of Wintie and tended to resent Lily’s aspersions, but she did alter my vision of him.

  We used sometimes to take afternoon callers next door to see Grandpa’s great picture gallery, and once, when Wintie and I found ourselves alone there, we had a colloquy that irritated me.

  Of course, the paintings that Grandpa so lovingly collected are all—or almost all; some of his canvases by Corot and Millais are still admired—subject to public ridicule today. They tended to be academic and what was then considered realistic: Meissonier’s Napoleonic battles gleaming with brandished swords and rustling with charging horse; elegant Roman dames by Alma-Tadema gazing down at blue seas from marble balustrades; stout cardinals drinking champagne in paneled parlors by Vibert. I quite accepted the high estimate of the gallery by family and friends and took it for granted that although Leonardo and Michelangelo may have produced greater art, it was because it was locked away in museums that it had not been lured across the Atlantic by Grandpa’s checkbook.

  Wintie took his stand for several minutes before a picture by Géróme entitled Thumbs Down, depicting a scene in the Roman arena where a victorious gladiator, astride the stricken body of his antagonist, appeals to the audience for that which will bid him to dispatch or spare his victim. The Vestal Virgins, seated in a unit by the railing, are unanimous for death, while in the imperial box above them, Marcus Aurelius, conspicuously indifferent to the outcome, is seen giving his total attention to the perusal of some learned scroll.

  “It’s a wonderful painting!” Wintie exclaimed. “You can see so clearly the attitude of the imperial philosopher. He will never neglect his official duties, one of which is to lend his presence to the popular diversions of his people. On the other hand he is disgusted by the bloody spectacle and sees no reason to lose time from the learned studies that enhance his administrative talents.”

  “But why can’t he at least save that poor man’s life?” I demanded.

  “Because he believes he shouldn’t interfere. Panem et circenses—that’s what kept the people happy. Without them, there was no telling what civil unrest might occur. The man who had the whole civilized world to govern couldn’t be concerned with the life of one gladiator.”

  “Civilized! I’m glad you call it that! A great man would have taken one position or another. He would have joined in the applause and the decisions, or he would have stopped the games altogether. Napoleon would have. Lincoln would have.”

  “President Lincoln was something of a compromiser, Miss Seward. And always a realist.”

  “Do you think he would have put up with this? Never! And anyway I can’t see a man, a real man, sitting in his box reading Plato or Zeno while dwarfs armed with spears and nets battled barbarian women with sabers.” Perhaps I had been reading too much Lew Wallace or Bulwer-Lytton. And then it occurred to me that I could imagine Papa taking an interest in such conflicts; in Madrid, he had adored the bullfights. And I could even see Grandpa putting a stop to the whole business. But to do nothing! “Only a woman would act like Marcus Aurelius!” I went on to protest, not caring whether Wintie took this personally.

  But he only chuckled. “My dear Miss Seward, may I point out that it is the Vestals who are condemning the poor man who has lost his round?”

  “Maybe that’s what happens to us poor women when the men won’t take any position!”

  But there was another picture in the gallery, a
lso depicting a scene in the Colosseum, that was my particular favorite. The legend on its frame was The Last Token, and it showed a young woman, barefoot and clad in a plain white gown, standing alone on the sandy floor of the arena, with nothing between her and the two snarling felines emerging from the lifted grilled gate. But she pays no heed to the hungry beasts; her eyes are searching the front row boxes for the noble lover who has just tossed her a farewell rose. It was not long after this colloquy with Wintie that I found myself again alone in Grandpa’s gallery with a young man who was skillfully attempting to replace Wintie in my still rather smothered affections. He was Miles Constable, the possessor of a florid manner and many smiles who tended to make fun of everything and almost everybody. I thought he overdid this, but he intrigued me.

  He knew of my preference among the paintings and was re-examining The Last Token with a critical eye.

  “Do you really admire this daub, Aggie?” He had dropped the address “Miss Seward” as early as our second meeting. “What a cad the poor girl’s lover must have been! I presume he was a noble and she a Christian, and that it was his loose tongue that betrayed her secret to the police. Unless he was tired of their liaison and tipped them off about her Sunday visits to the catacombs to hear Mass.”

  “That’s so like you, Miles! Always to attribute the lowest motive to anyone! Her lover hadn’t been condemned, because he wasn’t a Christian. What could he do against the might of Rome but stay as near to her as he could until the end and show her that he would never forget her? It would take more courage than I have to see my loved one torn to pieces. That rose he tossed to her was like the crucifix that a holy monk braved the flames to hold up to the eyes of the dying Joan of Arc!”

  “Only your Marcus Pomposus, or whatever his name was, wasn’t risking his well-pressed toga in any fire. He was probably too busy passing sweetmeats to his new girlfriend in the imperial box.”

  “What could you expect him to do? Jump into the arena and feed himself to those leopards?”

  “They’re not leopards; they’re jaguars. I noted that the first time you introduced me to this chamber of horrors. You may ask what jaguars were doing in the Colosseum centuries before the discovery of South America. Well, I made a point of reading up on the Viennese painter who executed your masterpiece and discovered that he used animals in the local zoo for his models, obviously without checking on their usual habitat.”

  “Very clever of you.” It was like Miles to know everything. “But I wonder whether you’re not like that Roman lord yourself. I can see you, sitting calmly in that box—oh, possibly with a stray tear quickly brushed away—and flicking with your fingers one perfect rose at the unfortunate but soon-to-be-forgotten girl. After all, wasn’t it folly on her part to get mixed up with those preachy, lower-class Christians? And to think I criticized Wintie Tillinghast for admiring Marcus Aurelius in the Gérôme picture! At least the emperor turned his eyes from bloodshed to a learned tract!”

  “Except Wintie Tillingsnob would be turning his eyes to Colonel Mann’s Society Notes. Whereas I would have leaped over the railing of my box in a futile attempt to lure away the jaguars with those same sweetmeats you saw me offering to the high-born Roman damsel sitting by me. And when the disgusted jaguars had eaten me instead, an amused Caligula or Nero would have freed you from the arena and invited you to an imperial orgy.”

  “Me? Why me? Am I the girl in the arena?”

  “Aren’t you? Isn’t that why you’re drawn to the ghastly picture?”

  I blushed. He was uncanny. It was what made people uneasy about him. “We all have our fantasies, I suppose,” I muttered. “Harmless fantasies.”

  “Are they so harmless? Mightn’t they be keys to our personality? Might it not be significant that Agnes Seward sees herself as a martyr?”

  “You really think me such an idiot?”

  “I don’t see you as an idiot at all.” Miles was suddenly serious, a rare pose for him. If it was a pose. “I see you as a very perceptive person in an unperceptive world. And if you ever should be a martyr, you’d be a brave one.” I found the odd compliment almost exhilarating. Yet there was apprehension in my reaction as well. Why should Miles have the gift of probing so deeply behind the masks we all had to wear? If it was my fate to play different roles in a tragedy or comedy with whose composition and direction I had had nothing to do, was it not somehow in the cards that the production should end in a martyrdom? If the last act was not to end in a guffaw, should it not terminate on a scaffold? Wasn’t anything else banal, presumptuous, even irreligious? And didn’t a tragedy have to begin with a seeming success?

  Miles Constable looked younger than his thirty years. He was short and verging on plump, with a clear, fresh, boyish countenance, a smile constantly on his red, full lips, thick wavy chestnut hair and an effervescence of spirit. Had he been taller and more slender, he might have suggested a romantic poet, a Shelley; as it was, one was more put in mind of a cherub, who, like the mythical Dionysus, was capable of impish, perhaps even sinister tricks. Miles had no visible employment nor any known private income to explain his expensive tweeds, his ruby cufflinks, the elegant little dinner parties that he hosted in Delmonico’s, and it was rumored that he was not above taking commissions from the grocers and decorators and wine merchants whose products he recommended to his rich friends. And furthermore, there was no recognized family of respectable Constables he could claim as his own. Yet he was never spoken of with the mild contempt that society reserves for its most coddled sycophants. Miles was taken seriously by the great dames of Manhattan society and was not scorned by even the most Philistine of their husbands. They sought him in every capacity but that of son-in-law.

  Now what explained this? I think they may have feared his wit and his startling insight into the most carefully hidden traits of character. My comparison to Dionysus was not casual. There was a legend that this god had survived the pagan era and had inhabited medieval Catholic Europe in disguise. People who met him felt his charm and the amiable freedom of his manners and ways, but they also felt the chill, as from another era, of a system of opposite values that vaguely but ominously threatened them. Maybe it was that Miles, in the traditional role of social climber, never seemed to climb, and that in the expected guise of a flatterer he rarely paid compliments. If Miles really wanted something, what did he really want?

  In his dealings with any pretty young woman he played—amusingly, never offensively, even rather delightfully—the role of a swain smitten by her charms. I enjoyed the game when he played it with me, and I was startled and excited—though I didn’t believe it—when my cousin Lily Hammersly confided in me that she thought Miles was less joking and more in earnest with me than with others.

  “But why should that be?” I demanded.

  “I assume he thinks the time has come to get married. Don’t they all?”

  “And what makes me the lucky girl?”

  “Because he’s in love with you, silly.”

  “Maybe he’s in love with what he imagines to be my money.”

  “Oh, they all want money. That’s what the French call the donnée. We’re not above it ourselves, are we? The Thorns, I mean. How did Descartes put it: Je dépense; donc je suis? That’s me all over.”

  “But Lily, love? What about that?”

  “Do you think money rules out love? Dream on, dear.”

  Well, such an idea was intensely interesting to any girl of nineteen, and I was no exception. Miles immediately became the principal preoccupation of my agitated mind and spirits, and a strong sentiment for him soon bit the heels of my temporary doubts. Was there a real Miles under the cynical wit, the perennial extra man? And would he be real to me when he was only a jester in the court of the great Mrs. Astor?

  I had, as must now be clear, little basic confidence in my own attractions. I may have been blond and blue-eyed and made a pleasant enough impression when I entered a room, but brother Otto used to observe, in his sour fashion, that I
had bad bone structure and would probably have a pancake face at thirty and that I’d better catch a man while I could. I became what I considered engagingly coy at Mile’s advances.

  “You pretend to find me bold and brassy,” he told me, as we sat out a dance at Lily’s younger sister’s coming-out ball, “but you don’t. In fact, I rather intrigue you, don’t I?”

  “And just what, besides your elephantine ego, gives you that idea?”

  “Because you intrigue me. And girls who do that are apt to find me really intriguing.”

  “But you’ve heard of exceptions that prove the rule.”

  “Agnes Seward, haven’t you divined by now that I’m considering proposing to you? And do you think I’d do that if I had any reason to believe you didn’t have the sense to find me charming?”

  “Propose to me! Are you in a position to propose to anyone? Can you support a family?”

  “No, but you can.”

  “Merci du compliment! Anyway, that would depend on what Papa would do for me. And it’s not likely that he would approve of you. Why, you don’t even have a job!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t throw away your money the way he has your mother’s.”