Manhattan Monologues

by Louis Auchincloss

  But the following morning my attack was direct.

  “I want to talk about your butler at the abbey, about Gaston Robert,” I began bluntly. “I don’t believe that he got the information that he fed to the Resistance merely by listening as he served at table. I believe he had help.”

  Arthur gazed at me in mild astonishment. “My dear boy, what on earth do you know about Gaston?”

  “I know what British Intelligence knows. That he supplied the Resistance with some valuable tips picked up from German officers at the abbey.”

  “And you suppose that I assisted him?”

  “I do.”

  “But, Tony, surely you know what people say about Leopoldine and me?”

  I noted that he did not use her nickname, and I read a meaning into it. “Yes, but I don’t believe a word of it. Certainly about you. That a veteran of the first war would have behaved that way is unthinkable. I remember what you used to say about keeping things to yourself. About the vulgarity of communication. Are you keeping your heroism to yourself? Please, Arthur, if you tell no one else, tell me! That’s what I have come to Málaga for.”

  He was interested now. “If I’d been working with Gaston, why wouldn’t the Resistance and British Intelligence have known it?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out. Did Gaston want all the glory for himself? I did discover that he was a rabid communist, and I speculated that he may not have wanted a bloated American capitalist to share in the birth of a new France. But then I wondered why you wouldn’t have exposed his failing to give you any credit for his glory. If not for your sake, for your wife’s.”

  Arthur nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “Is this really that important to you, my friend?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “And will you promise not to reveal what I say?”

  “I promise. Unless you authorize me.”

  “Which I never shall. In the brief time that awaits me. Very well. I’ll do it for you and for your ears alone. Because you do seem to care. And in memory of our marsh rambles.” A small smile and a considerable pause followed before he resumed. “You were right about Gaston’s communism. He didn’t want his fellow Reds to know that he had an American goldbug as his partner. I believe he has ambitions of becoming a commissar in a Marxist Gaul and needs the glory of his wartime work for himself alone. And he’s jealous, too. You were right about our partnership; I was very much the senior partner. Gaston would have had nothing without me; he wasn’t very smart. But he had Resistance connections, which I needed, and he promised absolute secrecy as to his source, which was all-important to me, as my utility depended entirely on the Germans’ trusting me. That was vital, and I knew that even the Resistance made slips. Sometimes fatal ones.”

  “But now, Arthur! Surely now it can be told!”

  “Gaston has another hold on me, my friend. A shameful one, I fear. He has let me know, through his slave of a wife, who came to the abbey shortly before we left France, that if I claimed any share in his spying on the Boches, he would publish proof of the collaboration with them of a person close to me. A collaboration that might easily be classified as criminal by a France freed at last from the grip of her ancient enemy.”

  We did not have to name Leopoldine. I could only stare at the floor. When I looked up, Arthur’s eyes were closed; he wanted to rest. Then the nurse came in, and I had to depart. I took no leave of my hostess.

  ***

  I did not see Arthur again. I was told at the door the next morning that he had lost consciousness, and ten days later he was dead.

  Arthur’s wife returned to France, after the resentments of wartime had somewhat simmered down, and reoccupied the abbey After she had given it and its treasures to France as a monument historique, reserving for herself only a life estate, her social position was much improved, although there was always a certain odor attached to her name. She continued to buy objects d’art for the abbey and became renowned for her sharp eye and expertise. The younger generation, often bored with the past, took delight in her wit and lavish parties.

  I shall release this memoir when I hear of Leopoldine’s demise, and I have given my instructions to my executor, should I die before her, as to how to make it known. Arthur’s secret will not have gone to the grave with him.

  I have often speculated as to why Leopoldine went as far as she did in her collaboration with the Germans. I have a dreadful suspicion that she may have discovered by chance, or guessed, that Arthur was communicating with the Resistance. Surely he would never have told her, partly for security reasons and partly to keep her out of it in case the Germans discovered him. But to her it may have been a repetition of his old severance from her ties, not unlike his walk on the marshes, and by dragging him down into the fetid embrace of a shared collaboration she would have joined him to herself forever. He would not share his heroic act with her, so she would make him share her shame. Perhaps not, but she was capable of it, and I will remember that at Málaga he never once referred to her as Polly.

  The Justice Clerk

  MY EXEMPTION from military service in the Second World War, on account of a limping and slightly shrunken left leg, the relict of a childhood bout with polio, has sorely intensified my lifelong sense of my greater exemption from all manly activities, and as I sit at my desk, as a tax lawyer in the Wall Street firm of Haight and Dorr, now deserted by a good half of its clerks and younger partners summoned to battle, I feel acutely the relative powerlessness of the written word, once my sole tool in the struggle of life.

  I went into law originally, some eight years ago, because in college I had proved myself a third-rate poet and a worse spinner of short stories, and hoped to make a better use of words in briefs and arguments. I was an only child whose mother had died young in the flu epidemic of 1918 and whose grief-stricken father, a freelance accountant with too few accounts, had somehow managed, in the teeth of the Great Depression, to put me through college and law school at New York University before he too expired. I hope it was of some consolation to the poor man, who gallantly tried to hide his obvious dismay at my poor physical condition, that my law school grades were the highest and that on graduation I was chosen as a clerk by a United States Supreme Court justice. For these goals I had toiled night and day and sacrificed such social life as might otherwise have come my way. Yet solitary as my academic life was, it still brought me Nora, my ex-wife, then an NYU undergraduate whom I had met as we were eating our sandwich lunches on the same bench in Washington Square.

  I can see now what I should have seen from the beginning: that Nora, a small, pale, plain, raven-haired and intense young woman, was the type who would take people up violently and then put them down with equal violence when their opinions or acts have ceased to jive with her own. I should also have seen that there was little in my physical appearance to arouse her libido. Why, then, did she marry me? For it was she who proposed the match, not I, one day on that same bench. The answer is obvious enough. On her graduation, in the same spring as mine, no job, or even the distant prospect of one, awaited her. She faced a bleak future in Manhattan, living with an ailing mother almost as poor as herself, while through me she could visualize the excitement of Washington in the tumultuous days of the New Deal! It was an easy choice—for her.

  And then, too, she had been intrigued by my position as an editor of the law review. She herself had wanted to study for the bar, but there were no further funds for her education. Her courses, all in modern history and economics, had brought her as close to the law as she could get. She was inclined to see it as a tool for the disadvantaged, as a substitute, perhaps, for riots or, indeed, for revolution.

  On our dates she liked to discuss articles that she had read in my law journal and asked why I did not solicit more pieces on social unrest and injustice. As I had had little or no experience with girls, I was flattered by her interest in the only field where I had anything remotely like expertise and enjoyed answering her questions, sometimes at length, p
robably at too great length. I recall the following exchange, which shows the diverse directions in which we were heading.

  “What made you first decide to become a lawyer?”

  “Because it was a profession where I could use words. They were the only tools I had.”

  “But aren’t they what everybody uses? What else is there? Muscle?”

  “It’s a matter of degree. I have only words.”

  “And what’s so great about them? Aren’t Hitler and Mussolini bewitching their countries with words?”

  “Bad words. Which will be followed by guns. Bad words usually are.”

  “But so are good words. In Russia they were followed by a revolution that liberated millions from virtual serfdom.”

  “I think they were bad words. They led to the slaughter of the Imperial family in that cellar in Ekaterinburg.”

  “Surely, Peter Mullins, you can’t defend the czar and his idiotic wife, who let a mad monk oppress their nation!”

  “But why did the Reds have to gun down that poor little boy and the four innocent grand duchesses? Did you ever see those old films of them, all in white with big hats, so lovely and smiling, waving from a carriage at shouting crowds?”

  Nora gazed at me in genuine perplexity. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said at last. But I wasn’t. Then she went on, deciding, evidently, not to comment on so poor a joke. “What in your opinion is the difference between good and bad words?”

  “Good words lead to sympathy and understanding, to peaceful settlements of controversies and general good will. Bad words lead to usurpations and seizures of power.”

  “What about the words of the Gospels? They led to the power of the Christian church.”

  “And to the Inquisition and the religious wars.”

  She looked at me with more approval now. “Didn’t Marx say that religion was the opiate of the poor?”

  “Well, there you are.”

  “And what about the words of the Constitution? Didn’t they help to make America a great power?”

  “No!” My exclamation was now triggered by sincere emotion. “They had nothing to do with power! Indeed, they were specifically designed to restrict power. They created our wonderful system of checks and balances. Which is currently in danger of being overthrown by the federal government’s grabbing of powers inherent in the states.”

  “My economics professor says that the Constitution is nothing but an elastic band that can be stretched to encompass any old political philosophy that happens to be held by a majority of the Court.”

  “That’s a very superficial view.”

  “You think it means what the Founding Fathers intended it to mean?”

  “Well, to a much greater extent than most academics believe today. You couldn’t assemble, at this point in our history, a constitutional convention with a tenth of the brains and vision of the 1787 one, even though our population has increased fiftyfold.”

  “So what they drafted, according to you, was like the tablets that Moses received on Mount Sinai?”

  I don’t think Nora was being as sarcastic as that sounds. She was still of the opinion that she had some things to learn from me, and she had not yet lost her awe of the law school.

  “Something like that,” I muttered.

  “Yet those wise men tolerated slavery. It was written right into the original document, wasn’t it?”

  “An amendment wiped it out.”

  “Yet God, like Homer, must have nodded when it went in.”

  “If you like. It was a necessary compromise at the time. The price of our union.”

  “And the seed of a war.”

  “Alas.”

  “And wasn’t it one of your good words that brought about that wicked compromise?”

  “You have me there, Nora.”

  Justice Irving P. Davenport, of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose law clerk I was to be, had, though born a Virginian, practiced for many years in a large Wall Street firm, which was why he had adopted the habit of selecting his clerks from schools in the city. A partner in his old firm was delegated in each instance to make the choice for him, and it so happened that the one in my year was a devoted graduate of NYU who had himself been editor-in-chief of the review and regarded me in the light of a successor. When I informed Nora of my acceptance, on our now habitual bench, she flung her arms around my neck and announced that she would marry me! And as early as the following Labor Day we were established as man and wife in a two-room flat in the District of Columbia.

  Judge Davenport was an impressive enough figure to meet. He was a tall, straight, handsome but rather stiff septuagenarian, with a long, lean, brown countenance and snowy white hair. His manners were formal and minimally courteous; he was patently a man not to suffer fools gladly nor to tolerate any intrusion on an attention usually devoted to matters weightier than the intrusion boded. He had been a lifelong bachelor without either of the customary excuses, so far as I could make out: a youthful unrequited affection or the tragic loss of a beloved. He seemed independent of all human support and lived rather opulently alone, except for two devoted and silently efficient black servants, a butler and a cook, in a beautiful red-brick Georgetown house, full of fine books, furniture and pictures. He had apparently made a fortune at the bar in New York.

  He was known to be capable of singular rudeness where one of his prejudices was involved—I soon saw that he was barely civil to Justice Brandeis—but he was sufficiently agreeable to me, if on the gruff side, probably because of my bad leg and the fact that I was quick at my work and asked him a minimum of questions. Although I went to his house frequently in the evening when he wanted to work at home, he invited me and Nora only once to dinner, during which repast she, out of awe or timidity, hardly opened her mouth. The judge’s social life seemed to consist of an occasional stag “breakfast,” really an early lunch, to which he would invite a handful of elderly savants.

  What I loved about him from the beginning was his fine use of the English language. His opinions were by far the most elegant of any written by the Court; sentences with the lapidary succinctness and arresting style of Emerson would be qualified by longer ones imbued with the grace and polish of Walter Pater.

  “But isn’t he to the right of Louis XIV?” Nora demanded one evening after reading one of his opinions that I had brought her. “If Madame de Maintenon complained, about Versailles and its gardens, that she perished in symmetry, isn’t social progress going to perish in your boss’s lavender prose?”

  Well, of course, it was true that Nora’s question was being irately put by half the editorials in the liberal journals of the day. A narrow majority of five judges (Davenport was one) was widely accused of engrafting onto the Constitution the economic doctrine of laissez-faire, which had not existed when the document was written. That very day at noon, when I was having a sandwich in my office, the judge, who had come in to get a book from my shelves that I had taken from his library, but whose step I had not heard, saw over my shoulder the newspaper that I was reading, open at the editorial page.

  Snatching the paper from my hand, he snorted, “You’re not paid to read that trash!” He tossed the journal back on my desk and proceeded to the door, but then, as if seized by a compunction, he paused and turned to me. “I’m sorry, Mullins. It’s your lunch hour, isn’t it? Of course, you can use it to read what you like. But maybe it’s time that you and I had a little discussion about our personal views on the Constitution. Come to my office when you have some time.”

  Needless to say, I had time very shortly, and I found myself ensconced in the armchair facing his big flat unpapered desk while he held forth solemnly, as follows: “These parlor-pink whippersnappers on radical rags love to accuse me of being the compliant tool of the great corporations. Nothing could be further from the truth. I worked for many years as counsel to such corporations, yes. That’s what a lawyer does; he represents clients. And I chose to represent clients who could pay for my services. And pay w
ell, to be sure. Is there anything wrong with that? The laborer is worthy of his hire. My firm did its share—more than its share, for that matter—of pro bono cases. Although I didn’t work on these myself, what I brought in paid the salaries of those who did. But to deduce from all this that I was in any way governed by, or that I admired, the men in charge of those corporations is grossly unjust. My job was to keep their proceedings within the law, and I did. Nor was it always easy. I worked at times with individuals who, left to themselves, might have made mincemeat of legislative prohibitions. But they knew that if they did so, Irving Davenport would promptly withdraw as their counsel, and the world would make its own deduction as to why he had done so. And your radicals say that I admired such men? I most certainly did not! I agreed totally with Charles Francis Adams, Jr., when he wrote in his memoirs that he had worked with many of the greatest business tycoons of his day and had found them a dull and uncultivated lot. I never had any social dealings with such men; I saw them only in my office or theirs. Pierpont Morgan was the only gentleman among them, and he felt pretty much as I did. At least he knew a good etching or oil painting when he saw one. Or a good bronze.” He pointed to a David holding up the head of Goliath on a table in the corner. “I got that one at the executors’ sale of some of his art in 1914.”

  I realized that I was expected to fill in the pause that followed. “I suppose we can’t expect the average journalist to distinguish between representing a client and admiring him.”

  “It’s too much, no doubt, for his pea brain. And he carries his delusion to the limit. The judge who finds something unconstitutional must think it’s bad, and if he finds it constitutional he must think it’s good. That’s their simple idea of how we interpret the Constitution.”

  “Would it be in order, sir, to ask what you think of the doctrine of laissez-faire and to what extent, if any, it should be abrogated?”