Manhattan Monologues

by Louis Auchincloss

  At any rate, the poor girl wasn’t to have much of a life, for she died of cirrhosis of the liver three years later. Damon, who was still living at home with me and his father and sister and still supposedly working on his novel (never finished and perhaps never begun) was silent about the tragedy, but that was like him. It was always hard to tell whether his reaction to such news was a feeling too deep to be imparted or mere indifference. Leila was no longer in our picture. She had been reconciled to her husband and moved to California. But one hot summer night in Bar Harbor, when Damon and I were alone in the living room, I reading a novel and he a magazine, I couldn’t bear not to discuss poor Marjorie.

  “Do you think she may have married her husband on the rebound?”

  He did not look up. “Marjorie, do you mean? On the rebound from what?”

  “Oh, from her failure to land my handsome son.” I tried to make it light and failed.

  “What makes you think she tried to land him?”

  “I have eyes, haven’t I? She found you too preoccupied with your cousin Leila, perhaps.”

  At this, he threw aside his magazine. “Mother, what are you getting at?”

  But if he was going to be angry, so was I. “Well, you were having an affair, weren’t you?”

  Damon got up, strode to the fireplace and then turned to face me. He had submitted, as he rarely did, to the disagreeable necessity of a serious discussion. “We had had an affair, yes,” he said flatly. “Does that shock you? Do you think it was incestuous, between first cousins?”

  “Oh, no, dear, no. It’s just that everything you do is of the greatest interest to me.”

  “Leila and I always knew where we stood vis-a-vis each other. She was married and, as a good Catholic, would not countenance a divorce. Besides, we agreed that we were too closely related to risk having children. So what was left for us but to have an affair? Which we did, to our great mutual satisfaction. It seemed to me eminently sensible. It still does. Do you disagree?”

  “Oh, no, I’m not such a prude. But this affair, my dear, when did it end?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Some three or four years ago. When she started to have conscience pangs about her husband and whether or not she should go back to him. Which, of course, ultimately she did.”

  “That must have been very painful to you.”

  “You know, it wasn’t? That was always the strange thing about my friendship with Leila. We understood each other so well that the physical side of things, however pleasant, was not essential to us. It’s hard to explain, but since you’re so determined to know all, the act of love, or whatever you choose to call it, was simply another expression of our mutual understanding.”

  I was conscious of an odd mixture of emotions, but I’m afraid the primary one was jealousy. Here, through all the years, this seemingly docile son had been receiving such inspiration as he needed from another family source! It was bitter tea.

  “You must miss her terribly” was all I could say.

  “Oh, we write often. And she’s planning a trip east, if Jim will allow it. She’s made a clean breast of everything to him, and he evidently doesn’t much care. Of course, he’s had plenty of diversions of his own. But you needn’t be concerned. Whatever we do, we will not renew the affair. Leila is most clear about that.”

  “And it was all over at the time I thought you were making up to Marjorie?” Oh, it was I who was in for it now!

  He was indignant. “Mother, do you think I could flirt with a girl while I was having an affair with another? What sort of man do you think I am?”

  “I guess I’m beginning to find out,” I answered ruefully. “Would you say you were in love with Leila?”

  “Love? What is it, really? There was always peace between us, never torment. Certainly Proust wouldn’t have called it love.”

  “Were you in love with Marjorie?”

  “Mother, you really are the limit tonight! What’s eating you? No, I don’t think I was in love with Marjorie, but I may have been on the verge, because Leila left a vacuum and Marjorie was an attractive person to fill it.”

  “What stopped you then?”

  “You can ask that question?” he threw at me. “You, who told me she was a hopeless alcoholic? And that you’d practically expire if anything happened between her and me? I don’t say I’d have given up the love of the ages to oblige you, but the little thing that existed between me and Marjorie was not too great a sacrifice to make for a desperate parent.”

  He took in, without in the least comprehending it, my sudden look of despair, and tried to console me, offering me another drink, but I pushed the poor bewildered man aside and took myself up to a sleepless bed.

  The next day was Sunday, on which I always called on my mother-in-law. I hoped that this time it would provide a distraction from my misery, but, alas, it made things worse. Our discussion at once fell on Marjorie’s death, and, or course, it was like Grinnell’s nasty old mother to try to lay the blame of the tragedy at my door.

  “A terrible thing, this, about the Gleason girl,” she announced solemnly.

  “Isn’t it? But we can be grateful that nothing came of her friendship with Damon.”

  Mrs. Scott stared at me over her pince-nez. “But we all thought you had been pushing it!”

  “Until I decided that her drinking was incurable. As we now only too clearly see it was.”

  “Do we? And if it was, I should have thought you had always known that. Wasn’t it indeed one of her attractions?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, wasn’t it like that novel of Henry James’s?”

  I gaped. I reviewed in my mind some of the titles. “You mean The Wings of the Dove!” I exclaimed in horror. “You mean Damon would have married a dying heiress to inherit her money? Mrs. Scott, you can’t believe anything so dreadful!”

  “What would have been so wrong? The Gleason girl would have died happy, for everyone said she was crazy about him, and he would be rich, instead of still living, as he does, with you and Grinnell. I can’t say you’ve done very well, my dear. You may have broken that poor girl’s heart. And who knows? Married to Damon, she might have given up the bottle.”

  I left the house as soon as I could to go home on the path through the woods that separated our dwellings. Nor did I once look back. Like the ancient mariner, I dreaded to see the fiend that close behind me trod.

  Collaboration

  IN MY YOUTH in the 1930s, my parents had a summer home by the ocean on the south shore of Long Island in Cedarhurst, only an hour by rail from the heart of the great city, where my father went daily to his stock exchange firm, except in his vacation month of August, which he devoted to golf. Our house, at the end of a dead-end street called Breezy Way, was a large white-shingle affair, called the Bray, because it had once boasted stables, and was separated from the sea by a wide marshland on which it was my delight to take lonely rambles. Far enough out in it, amid the numberless muddy inlets, the tall reed grass, the impenetrable sedge and the rushes, one felt a world away from the distant and barely visible cottages in a manless territory of seagulls, terns, sandpipers, frogs, muskrats and herons. It was here that I indulged in daydreams fraught with romantic fluff, unsullied by any of the stern practicalities of home.

  I was not an only child but an only son; my sole sibling was my older sister, Edith, ever preoccupied with the social life of her contemporaries, who would never set a dainty foot on the muddy trail of the marshes. My father, rotund but athletic, hearty and well-meaning, but possessed of few interests beyond his stocks and his golf, was seemingly content in his marriage to my much more competent mother, a handsome, practical, socially minded woman, an excellent mâitresse de maison, who managed him as easily as she did the first families of the neighborhood who flocked to Breezy Way as to a natural leader.

  I always felt that I was a distinct disappointment to both of my parents, as I was not good-looking, athletic or gregarious, and cared only for such
passive activities as reading or listening to music or writing poetry. I must admit, however, that Mother rarely showed the chagrin that she surely felt, and wisely constrained my father into accepting her policy of allowing me freedom to indulge my tastes, so long as I conformed to the minimum standard she felt was needed to adapt me to the practical world in which I one day would have to live. I saw that, by her worldly rules, she was being fair, and did my best to obtain decent grades in the New England boarding school to which I, reluctant, was sent and which I cordially disliked. After all, I still had the long Cedarhurst summers.

  The marshes were my other life; I may even say they were my real life. I learned to identify the most infrequently visiting warblers, and claimed to have sighted a prothonotary; I spotted the rare wood duck and once saw a bald eagle, our national bird, ignominiously chased by a smaller but fiercer osprey. Toward the middle of the summer most of our neighbors fled the heat for Maine or the Massachusetts shores, and there were no parties of young people that Mother could urge me to attend, so, taking a sandwich lunch and a volume of Keats or Shelley, I could pass the whole day alone. But one summer, when I was seventeen, another person appeared on the trails of the marshes, and this person, at first seen by me as an intruder, became my most valued friend. He was also, oddly enough, a stockbroker and a good friend of my parents.

  I say “oddly enough,” as it would not have occurred to me that a member of my parents’ circle would have any use for the marshes or for me, and particularly such a one as Arthur Slocum, trim and elegant, still in his early forties, and married to a rich, vivacious and twice previously married woman, Leopoldine, commonly known as Polly, some years his senior, who shared with my mother the social rule of our little community. But Mr. Slocum, as I was to call him until my college days, differed from the family friends in that he shared my love of rustic solitude and won my trust at our first meeting on the brambled path that led from Breezy Way to my haunts by asking me, with an appealing deference to my greater experience, whether I would be his guide through the rough trails of the marshes. I was happy to show him all my little discoveries, and it soon became our habit to roam together by the creeks and rushes on weekend afternoons.

  If tall and slender, he was also firmly built and smartly clad, even for a country hike, usually in soft gray, as if to match the thick and prematurely whitening hair that descended in a triangle over a high clear brow, pointing to the thin tip of his aquiline nose. His voice was low and grave, his articulation precise, and his blue-gray eyes twinkled with a mockery that was inconsistently gentle. He had been, I learned from my parents, a long-time bachelor, marrying late the woman he had adored and continued to adore, having awaited her through two messy divorces.

  He was the first adult who had ever listened to me. My teachers at school were interested only in testing what I had learned, and my parents only in detecting some signs of a sensible maturity. But Mr. Slocum exhibited what I came to accept as a genuine desire to share with me the delights of poetry; he loved to quote and hear me quote bits of Shelley and Keats, and soon he was widening my literary horizon with choices of his own, particularly with samples of his idol, George Meredith.

  “He’s the only example we have, besides Hardy,” he suggested, “of a man who was at once a great poet and a great novelist. In English, that is. The French, of course, have Hugo. Meredith shows us that no literary form is beyond the range of a great romantic.”

  That very night I found Diana of the Crossways in one of the standard sets in the family library and finished it by the weekend. Mr. Slocum then lent me his signed first edition of Modern Love, which I devoured, wondering whether the adultery of Meredith’s first wife, which had so notoriously inspired the sonnet sequence, had a duplicate in Mr. Slocum’s vision of his own wife’s stormy love life. But I dared not ask him.

  When, as our mutual trust developed, I confided in him some of my distaste for school and for Cedarhurst society, he reminded me forcefully of my blessings. “You have the marshes, Tony! You’ve had the sense to grab hold of them and make them your own. Never underestimate that, my boy. The terns and the gulls and the herons. And you and I may have the luck to spot again that prothonotary warbler you were lucky enough to sight.”

  “But what can I do with all that? When I’m a lawyer or a broker or whatever?”

  “What does it matter what you’ll do with it? You’ll have your visions.”

  “Visions of what?”

  He embraced our landscape with a wide gesture. “All of that. What you see today.”

  “You mean if I write it down? In a poem, say?”

  “Well, yes, if you like, though it’s not essential. I used to write sonnets in the trenches during the war about the old abbey in Normandy that my father converted into our summer house.”

  “Did you ever publish them?”

  “Oh, no. They were no good.”

  “How do you know? Did anyone ever read them?”

  “Never. They were just mine. A single poet and a single reader. It was a very satisfactory relationship. A very fine one.”

  “But isn’t that selfish?” I asked, more boldly now. “Shouldn’t beautiful things be shared? Suppose Shakespeare had burned Hamlet when he finished it?”

  “Well, my efforts were not Hamlet. But I won’t get into the pros and cons of publishing. What I suggest is that some great art may never have seen the light of day. Because it was utterly free of the egotism and passion for glory that consumes so many writers.”

  “You mean like Emily Dickinson locking up her poems?”

  “Or Cézanne abandoning a canvas in the woods. Or Wordsworth leaving the Prelude unprinted for fifty years. I’m glad, of course, that those wonderful things were recovered for posterity; my only point is that the complete absence of ego, or its complete assimilation into the work created, may be a mark of great art. Like Emily Dickinson’s slant of light on a winter afternoon. Do you know it?”

  I asked him to recall it to me, and he recited slowly:

  When it comes, the landscape listens—

  Shadows—hold their breath—

  When it goes, ‘tis like the distance

  On the look of death—

  “Don’t you feel that you’re alone with the poetess, inside her brain, so to speak? I guess what I’m trying to tell you, Tony, is not to be afraid of your isolation. You’re happiest here on the marshes. Oh, don’t deny it; it can be a great strength and will do you for courage if we get into another war. Not that you don’t have courage anyway—of course you do. But freedom from your fellow men can be a resource. It reconciles you to the great black void of the universe where the end of animate life, as Walter Pater put it, is like the setting of a pale arctic sun over the dead level of a barren and lonely sea.”

  I shuddered. “Is that such a comfort?”

  “The comfort is in the beauty of the expression.”

  I sighed. “Well, maybe I’ll come to see it.”

  I was always aware of what to me was the anomaly of so serious a thinker as Mr. Slocum being on such congenial terms with my parents and, indeed, with all of their tightly knit affluent and mundane little groups of Cedarhurst summer residents and year-round commuters. Of course, though he was their intellectual superior, his charm and modesty, to say nothing of his skill as a polo player, enabled him to amuse and divert them without arousing the least jealousy or resentment. Oh, yes, that explained their liking of him well enough, but why was he so content to shine unrivaled in a group that, however friendly and well meaning, was never challenging or even critical? Was he lazy? Or simply desirous of avoiding contradiction or dispute?

  When I asked about this on our next meeting, he appeared to agree, if a bit ruefully, with my assessment of his choice of social life.

  “Well, you see, it’s Polly’s world, my wife’s world, or, you might say, the world, which Polly somehow epitomizes. You know, the jolly world, full of laughter and fun and good spirits, and success. Yes, success is part of it,
part of the real world.”

  “And Mrs. Slocum represents all that?”

  “Well, say she represents the best part of it. She helps keep me alive. Out here on the marshes, she says, I lose myself. I am no longer me. I’m dissolved. There’s nothing left of the corporeal Arthur Slocum.”

  “Except his soul,” I offered boldly.

  What I wanted to get at was the unique value he placed on solitude. It was as if that was where his soul existed. Of course he was not alone when he was with me as we trudged through the marshes, but I took it that he regarded me as somehow indigenous to the territory, like a tern or a gull, and therefore not an intruder on his privacy. And certainly on our peregrinations he was a different man from the one I observed at a Sunday lunch given by my family. There was little enough in common between the brooding observer of flora and fauna and the quoter of romantic verse, and the genial tippler at Mother’s long table who would always laugh the loudest at his wife’s jokes, and the desperately serious polo player who was constantly taking spills in showing off his dubious prowess to a spouse more absorbed in the gossip of her box in the stadium. But which was the man he really wanted to be?

  He responded now to my last remark about his soul.

  “That is one way of putting it, I suppose. But if the soul is stripped down to its essence, isn’t that a state of death? And I want to live, don’t I? Doesn’t every man? Polly to me is life!”

  We trudged on in silence after this fervent exclamation, both a bit embarrassed by his outburst.

  “It must be wonderful to feel that way about one’s spouse,” I said at last. “How did you and she meet?”

  He was only too glad to reminisce. “It was five years ago at a polo match at Meadowbrook. Before the game I happened to walk by her box, and a mutual friend in it hailed me over. She was wearing a straw hat with an enormous brim, and as she turned to greet me, with a radiant smile that I supposed she gave any man lucky enough to be introduced, I was a goner. She was married at the time, Tony, but I knew I could wait for that woman forever if I had to! A man can get anything in the world if he really, really wants it. I believe that, my boy! I almost broke my neck that day playing polo. I wouldn’t have given a damn so long as she noticed.”