Manhattan Monologues

by Louis Auchincloss

  And then our captain brought us an appalling wire from New York. Papa had died of a stroke.

  ***

  On the long trip home on The Osprey I remained most of the time shut up in my cabin, at first in a state of near shock. I had little doubt that Papa’s stroke had in part been brought on by a fit of gargantuan rage at one of the saucier of those newspaper reports. If these were not directly attributable to my actions, they were indirectly so, and I had to face the grisly fact that I might have been guilty of a kind of patricide. I had also to face the bleak realization that, despite his sternness and irascibility, I had loved my father. And what was even harder to bear was my new strong feeling that he had loved me—that I had very likely been the only person in the world whom he had loved.

  Grandpa Thorn’s favoritism may have been a kind of pose, the lovable old tycoon’s fondness for a dear little girl, but Papa’s was true. Oh, I could see that now! Mama had faintly bored him; Otto had alienated him; and my sisters’ frivolity had exasperated him; but he had found me worthy of the brilliant life with Walter that he had so carefully and, I now supposed, lovingly planned. He had wanted me to have the success that he had never attained, which was why he had rejected Miles so fiercely and why he had retrieved Walter from his broken romance with Beatrice.

  When we arrived in New York, I saw Miles among the waiting crowd at the dock, but I wouldn’t speak to him, nor would I see him when he called later at the house.

  After the long funeral and the sober sight of the big clan all in black, life for my mother and siblings began slowly to resume its normal course. Mama, for the rest of her long life, believed with me that Papa’s demise had been caused by the newspapers, but I don’t think she ever held it against me. He had been a mildly disturbing element in the placid silence of her card-playing, card-leaving existence. Serenity now could reign. Otto, deprived of his old grudge, had to content himself by muttering to me, “I don’t know if there’s a hell, but if there is, he’s surely in it.” And the effect of Papa’s steely control of his female offspring was easily cast off by my sisters. I was the only member of the family, and certainly the only one of Grandpa’s posterity, to be strongly affected.

  It was as if Papa had rung down a heavy curtain, like the big red one we faced at the opera, or the drab asbestos one that preceded it, on any future that I may have dreamed of having with Miles. I could not face the imagined prospect, no matter how fanciful or superstitious, of his rising from the dead—or from Otto’s hell—to blast me for defying the prohibition for which, it gruesomely struck me, he had died to prescribe. I could not so turn him into a futility, even though Otto did not hesitate to suggest that only by doing so could I liberate myself and live. But was Otto much freer? He was t die at thirty-five from an overdose of morphine, whether taken accidentally or on purpose we never knew.

  So I gave up Miles. And I was not being weak-minded. I knew, perfectly well, that Miles would have been a poor husband. I had always known it. It was indeed perhaps the strongest of his attractions, that he failed so completely to fit into the world of the Thorns except as a jester or clown. And I? Had I not seen it as my doom that I was too natural a fit not to make a life of fitness? We would have been an illfated match.

  It is all very well for Lily to maintain, as she still does, that Miles might have made something of his life, married to me. But I doubt if men who need a woman to make a success of their lives ever do. Certainly Walter had no such need. And Lily herself married a man of great steadiness and common sense; it was he who helped her to make a success of her life. While poor Miles failed in everything he did. When, twenty years later, having gone into a business of importing silk ties and scarves from Cambodia, he never returned from one of his expeditions into jungle territory, he left an estate of nothing but debts. I found it lugubriously fascinating that his jungle tracks had been followed into a copse of trees with nothing leading out, so that the two survivors of his trek had theorized that he may have been attacked, strangled and consumed by a giant python. It would have been like the god Dionysus, of whom he reminded me, to have left no trace of his exit. If these reflections sound cold, I remind myself that I had not seen him in two decades.

  Wintie Tillinghast was not the person who decided me to marry Walter, but it was in a conversation with him that I came to that conclusion. He had made a condolence call at the house, and I received him alone. Wintie was the perfect confidant, because he was so little concerned with anything but form. Talking to him could be a kind of confessional. Though stiff, he was kind.

  “Do you know what is really odd about me?” I asked. “It’s my feeling that if I had had a real romance with Miles, if I had felt for him what Juliet felt for her Romeo, I shouldn’t have minded so much what it did to Papa. It would have been worth it, in a horrible way. But to have killed him over someone I wouldn’t have married anyway seems to call for expiation.”

  “And Walter will be that?”

  “Yes, don’t you see it?”

  “No, Agnes, I do not.”

  But I was hardly listening. What I had said was a monologue. And life with Walter turned out to be exactly what Papa had wanted for me. I had some fascinating times; I saw much of the world; I met all kinds of famous people. And I did my part, too, my small part. And my money, too, my small fraction of the Thorn millions, was quite enough to take financial concerns off Walter’s busy mind and to maintain us in a style befitting his importance. Was it all worth it? To know that I’d have to know what a different life would have brought me, and that, fortunately, is something we can never know.

  Harry’s Brother

  AT LEAST they don’t laugh at me anymore. Oh, of course, I know that many people feel it’s better to be laughed at than despised, but they haven’t been laughed at all their lives as I have. As far back as the years immediately preceding the Great War—the first one, I mean, when I was a boy at the Bovee School on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street, in 1911 and 1912—my egg-shaped head and goggly eyes, my lisp and roly-poly torso aroused sniffs and sneers. And even at home, in our tall, narrow graystone house on East Seventieth Street, I was aware that the opaque eyes of my erect and awesomely well-dressed father and the more brooding ones of my plain but nobly profiled mother, and the sometimes tolerant ones of my cheerful but easily irritated Irish nurse, tended to glance past me to the romping jovial figure of my younger (by only a year) brother, Harry—the ever-adored Harry. And let me set down right here that Harry was always nice to me. Yes, Harry was lovely to me. He was the only person, I sometimes think, who was.

  Harry found everything to his taste: our parents loving and life congenial. I did not. My father, Charles Augustus Pierce, an eminent figure at the New York bar (in a day when birth and superior airs almost made up for minor deficiencies in talent), an eloquent and unheeded advocate of political reform, and my serious, high-minded mother, noted for her night classes in poetry for female telephone operators, had the peculiar aptitude, common to many of the upper class of their day, of making a comfortable life uncomfortable. There was always a principle to be evoked whenever a pleasure loomed. If we traveled as a family in Europe, for example, the big rented Daimler or Panhard limousine had to be stopped on the outskirts of any town visited so that we could trudge our weary way through the banlieue to the luxury hotel where we were to stay and be edified by the reminder that the comfort in store for us was not shared by all. But if Harry complained, however insincerely, of a sore foot or headache, the limousine would whisk him on to our hostelry.

  I never had to be told of the precariousness of our so-called privileges. The high fence around the campus of the New England boarding school to which I was sent after Bovee was as instrumental in keeping the enemy in as in keeping him out, and I was constantly reminded by jeers and sometimes blows that my speech was affected, my walk mincing and my general appearance that of a sissy. I could only try to counter this by concentrating on my studies and achieving a high academic status, but unfortunate
ly I was living in a milieu, both at school and later at college, where good grades were a detriment in the cultivation of popularity.

  Harry’s grades, of course, were abysmal. But he was loved by any group in which he happened to find himself, though neither particularly handsome—short, if muscular, with craggy features and tousled blond hair—nor particularly athletic, except in boxing. The explanation of his popularity had to be in the extraordinary charm of the good will and good-natured laughter that radiated from him and seemed to puncture the sullenest or moodiest skin. Harry defied the world to pout. He would give away his last nickel to a beggar, but he would give away yours too, if you let it slip into his hands. He had little sense of private property, which, of course, was to lead to his doom. He was never able to earn a living, but felt passionately that he—and everyone else—was entitled to live.

  He had our parents completely under his thumb. They seemed to feel that God had made up to them for his first mistake in me, Charles, Jr., with this subsequent rectification. And when Harry came home in 1919 after the war, where he had first been an ambulance driver and later a second lieutenant at the front, with a Silver Star for gallantry in action, these two old patriots believed that their role in life was to support and back up their hero in his every venture. It was to cost them dearly. But would they listen to me, who through no fault of my own, had been rejected by the armed forces for deficient eyesight? Need I answer the question?

  Harry’s business ventures—an oater movie, a small yacht-rental company, a silver mine and ultimately a waxwork museum—were all disasters and made disastrous holes in the family capital. But Father felt that his darling could not be let down, and after his death Mother was worse. Nor were Harry’s three marriages more successful. The first was to a gold-digging Hollywood starlet who left him for a bag of gold—and with a bag of gold. The second was to a genial and beautiful society heiress, and their ten-year union was a romp in which each beautifully tolerated the affairs of the other. When she left Harry for an obvious gigolo with whom she was unashamedly infatuated, Harry not only refused a penny of the big settlement that she cheerfully offered him but gave her a great bash of an engagement party! “A mari complaisant can be a gentleman,” he observed when I protested that he should accept some reparation for what she had wildly spent of his money, “but a paid mari complaisant can only be a cad.” His third wife, an unexpectedly dear little brown thing, poor as a church mouse, whom he adored, died in giving birth to a stillborn babe, the sole issue of his three matrimonial ventures, and he mourned her grievously. “What does it tell you about me, Chas, that I’ve caused the death of the only person I’ve ever loved more than myself? I must have the evil eye. Why don’t people avoid me?”

  Because they couldn’t. Could I? Harry never gave up trying to “make a gentleman” of me, or what people might consider a gentleman. He introduced me to girls, nice girls, carefully selected by him, who would not be too bold or too flashy to put me off, who might be content to become the friendly if not adoring spouse of such a respectable and providing mate as I might prove. All in vain. I was not aroused. Then he took me to an expensive brothel, where he had coached one of the gentler inmates on how to lure me without alarming me. It didn’t work. At last he decided that he had better accept me as neuter and train me to look as well as I could in that role.

  “Be a permanent bachelor, if that’s what you want, old boy,” he told me with a clap on the shoulder, “but be a great one. Acquire the reputation of being a ‘character.’ We’ll get you dressed up in the finest dark suits and white stiff collars—no color except for a gorgeous Charvet tie. You must become known as punctual, exact, a bit on the pompous side. Don’t be afraid to look shocked at modern slang and dirty talk. Go in for mens’ clubs. Their committee chairmanships are always available to anyone who’s willing to do the work, and you’ll find yourself running each place in no time. And when people start saying, ‘God broke the mold after he created Charley Pierce,’ you’ll know you’ve made the grade!”

  And do you know, he was right? Between us we created the Charles Pierce who has for years been the secretary-treasurer of the Hone Club and who is known as the punctilious and exacting eminence grise behind the popular and easygoing president of that venerable institution, and an active vice-president of the Sons of the American Revolution. People may have still laughed at me, but their laughter was friendlier, and Harry’s was the loudest and friendliest of all.

  My rise from a clerk in the Standard Loan and Trust Company to that of senior trust officer seemed somehow inevitably wedded to my rise to a highly respected niche in Manhattan mens’ club life and Knickerbocker society. I also found myself in a position to pay Harry back for his kindness to me by rectifying some of the damage he had done to the family finances. When I discovered that Father, clinging in his old age, to the starchy habits of old-time lawyers in having no social contact with the less savory of the firm’s clients, was losing much of his percentage of its profits to greedy younger partners who failed to recognize the kudos that Father’s small civic reputation had brought to them, I was able to arrange not only that my bank should continue to give its substantial legal business to them (the use of another law firm had been strenuously urged by the officers of another bank with which we had merged) but that Father’s name should be kept in the firm’s books as the partner in charge. And after his death I persuaded Mother to place all of her much-diminished assets in a trust, with my bank and myself as trustees. At the last moment she insisted that Harry, from whose importunities I was, of course, protecting her, should be a third trustee, and I acceded to her wish, confident that the bank and I could always outvote him if necessary and perfectly willing that he should get the commissions that I would gladly renounce.

  Was there hidden envy of or hostility to Harry in my making up for his depredations? Was it intensified by our parents’ stubborn refusal to see in what I did for them anything more than my duty, while the smallest favor conveyed by Harry was greeted with hugs? At any rate I must have been sorely tried.

  Harry’s last venture was the waxwork museum, with which he hoped to rival Madame Tussaud’s in London. But it was from the beginning a small and somewhat tawdry affair, based on one floor of a loft building in Chelsea with dioramas of scenes from New York City history, financed insufficiently by a rich army friend. (His pre-war pals were disillusioned, at least with his businesses.) I had put up a small sum and vowed that was all.

  World War II was in its closing weeks, and Harry, who had served as lieutenant colonel on MacArthur’s staff in Australia but had been released from duty after a mild heart attack, had had a year to develop his new project. I found Mother, who had welcomed old age as an overdue admirer, gaunt, bent over and beshawled before the big pasteboard on which she had affixed the newspaper clippings of the gallant war doings of younger friends and relations around a large central photograph of Harry receiving his honorable discharge from the hands of the great liberator of the Philippines. The contrast between the pictured uniforms and my habitual black made me feel like a minor minister of state having a wartime conference with his august sovereign. I almost wondered whether I should take a seat before I was bidden.

  “Will Harry have a waxwork of General MacArthur in his museum?” I asked, as little sarcastically as I could.

  “Why not?” Mother demanded indignantly, picking up at once such sarcasm as appeared. “There might be a wonderful one of his wading ashore on the beach of Leyte. It ill becomes those who have stayed at home to sneer, Charles.”

  “Nor had I any intention of doing so, Mother. But I suppose it wasn’t to discuss subjects for Harry’s dioramas that you sent for me.”

  “Not at all. I am afraid that Harry is going to need a substantial sum of money to save his museum from bankruptcy.”

  “And how can he expect to raise that? No bank will look at him, as we know, and even this latest of his army friends must have seen the writing on the wall.”

 
“You’re very harsh on the subject of your brother’s finances, Charles. Not everyone has had the good fortune that has favored you. And I wonder that it doesn’t occur to you that those men who were exempted from military duty in two world wars may have incurred the obligation to come to the aid of those who served their country in the battlefield.”

  I could almost admire my intrepid parent for scorning to be anything but undiplomatic. “It was not my fault that the army rejected me. And I have always been ready to assist Harry in his personal needs, though not in his business enterprises, except for a token contribution. If Harry needs money to pay his household bills, he knows he can send them to me. I never give him cash, because I know what he’ll do with it.”

  “But that’s so insulting, Charles!”

  “It’s based on painful experience. Anyway, to anticipate your request, I am not prepared to give him a cent for his waxworks.”

  “I am not asking you to do that,” Mother retorted with considerable hauteur. “I know you too well, Charles. What I am suggesting—or rather what I am requesting—is that you advance Harry the hundred thousand dollars that he needs from my trust.”

  I bit my lip in surprise. Such a sum was a small fortune in 1945. “It can’t be done. It’s out of the question.”

  “What do you mean, it can’t be done?”

  “Correction. I mean it won’t be done.”

  “Does the trust deed not give the trustees the power to invade principal?”

  “For your benefit. Not for Harry’s.”

  “But you wouldn’t be giving the money to Harry! You’d be giving it to me first, of course, if you must be technical about it. And I’d be directing you to pay it to Harry. Can’t I do what I wish with my own?”

  “When it’s your own, yes. But your fiduciaries must use their discretion in distributing capital for your benefit. And two of your three trustees, the bank and I, will hardly find it discreet to strip the fund, on which you none too lavishly exist, for a waxwork museum.”