Watchfires

by Louis Auchincloss

  "I thought I should leave that task to Charley."

  "My King Arthur? Some saint! But if I'm to be stuck with an Arthur, I must still have a Lancelot. Are you prepared to be my Lancelot, Dexter?"

  "Lancelot's mission has just been accomplished."

  "Lancelot's mission is just beginning!" Annie exclaimed sharply. Her tone was almost menacing. "Do you really think you can walk out on me now, Dexter Fairchild?"

  He stared back at her, dazed. "What ... what are you suggesting?"

  "Suggesting? I thought I was shouting it to the rooftops! As evidently a woman has to, in this new year of 1860! You have removed Juley from my life. Very well! I accept it! Isn't it up to you now to take his place?"

  "Are you trying to tell me ... are you trying to tell me ... that you care for me? In that way?"

  "Oh, Dexter, what a fool you are! The gentleman is supposed to take some lead in these matters."

  But Dexter was still in his daze. "And what about ... Bleeker?"

  "Do you think for a minute I'd have let you touch Juley if I'd really cared about him? You don't know me!"

  He wanted to fall to his knees. "Annie, I adore you!" he murmured.

  The next minute he heard her high, excited laugh, and she had left him. It was time to go home. Rosalie's reception would already be drawing to a close.

  12

  THE OFFICES of Fairchild & Fairchild, at 57 Wall Street, occupied the second floor of a pleasant green three-story building that presented three white-shuttered windows to the street. Dexter's own chamber was hung with prints of English judges and contained, in neat stacks rising to the ceiling, the firm's small library. The heavy figure of Jules Bleeker moved slowly back and forth before the desk at which his unwilling host was motionlessly seated. The visitor spoke in a cold, speculative tone.

  "My first impulse was to call you out, but I knew that would do no good. You burghers don't fight. Then I thought of coming to your office with a horsewhip. But that would have been playing into your hands. Your friends on the bench would have had me in jail for a year or more. And finally, thinking it over, I began to cool off. I began to be even interested in what had happened to me. What sort of a man are you, Fairchild? Or are you a man at all?"

  "What I am need not concern you."

  "Oh, but it does concern me. I find myself without a job and without a friend in a city of locked front doors. How the hell did you do it? And why? You're not her husband. You're not even a blood relation." Here Bleeker paused to stare at his adversary. "It couldn't be that you're in love with her yourself?" He shook his head slowly as Dexter failed to move a muscle. "No, that would be impossible for a snowman like you."

  "You have lived too much abroad. You can't be expected to understand the motives of a simple American gentleman."

  "Maybe you're not a snowman, after all. Be frank, Fairchild. If you did it out of jealousy, I'd forgive you. I might even shake your hand!"

  Dexter rose, to terminate the interview. "We could talk all night and never understand each other. What's the use of it?" He paused briefly. "There is, however, one more thing. If you are in possession of any letters from Mrs. Charles Fairchild, I should be willing to pay a good price for them."

  Bleeker stared. "You think I'd sell them?" Then he laughed bitterly. "Oh, of course. The bounder is beaten, so he's supposed to crumple. Or, like Shylock, to renounce his faith. Only you have the wrong script, Fairchild. In mine, the villain turns on his prosecutor with a splendid defiance. You can take your proposition and cram it up the aperture—if indeed a snowman has one—in the nether part of your frozen body!"

  Dexter sniffed in distaste. "I suppose I should expect such talk from you."

  "You will be relieved to hear that I am removing myself from your city. I have had a standing invitation to come to Richmond and write a column for the Enquirer. It will be pleasant to be among gentlemen again. Perhaps I can warn them about what they are up against. They think, because they know how to fight bravely, that they will prevail in a struggle with men of straw and men of ice, such as I have met up here. But they may be wrong. If your millions of labor-slaves are ever harnessed into an army and sent into bloody battle by such remorseless bigots as you, who can tell the outcome?"

  "Who indeed? May God preserve our union! Keep your letters. Annie can't be hurt by the likes of you!"

  Jules burst into a harsh, raucous laugh. "Annie! That teasing, tantalizing little bitch? Do you honestly think she'd give one holy goddam if I told the world she copulated with sailors every Saturday night on a public pier?"

  "Get out of my office!" cried Dexter, livid.

  "You don't know her, Fairchild!"

  "Get out of here!"

  "I can't go fast enough."

  ***

  When Dexter left his office, shortly after Bleeker had gone, it was to make his weekly call, on his way home, at his mother's house on Fourteenth Street. Mrs. Fairchild lived in a tiny brownstone, with only two round-topped windows to each of its four stories and with a snug but cluttered interior in which the handsome, austere Federal pieces of her prosperous days were fitted in among the beaded curtains and strewn shawls and tasseled cushions of her widowhood. But its small, vivacious, chattering proprietor, whose lips seemed to keep time with the eager fingers that darted at her needlepoint, managed to dominate and somehow harmonize the scene.

  "It's this business of Aunt Serena's will. I know you're sick and tired of the subject, but I want you to listen to me. There are seventeen residuary legatees, including myself, all nephews and nieces. But the bequest of the Alberta Mine stock to the three Stocktons, who are only the remotest sort of cousins, comes to as much as the whole residuary estate. Now you know Aunt Serena never intended that! Besides, she was eighty-nine and thoroughly addled."

  "Are you trying to tell me, Mother, that she didn't recognize the natural objects of her testamentary bounty?"

  "What do you mean? Don't push your legal jargon at me!"

  "The law has its tests for testamentary competence. Did Aunt Serena know that she had an estate to dispose of and who were her closest relatives? I suggest she did."

  "But it was all so hazy to her!"

  Dexter closed his eyes. He was in a cool green forest by a sylvan pool. He was a satyr, tawny and strong, his lower regions clad in shaggy pants which might and probably would, with a little pulling, slip off, to expose him, erect, splendidly prepared, to the naked wood nymph, all pale, shimmering skin and loose, damp dark hair, who cupped her little breasts in her hands and hooted at him with mocking laughter.

  "Dexter, are you listening? John Hone was in to see me this afternoon. He says that if the seventeen residuary legatees get together and allege that Aunt Serena didn't know what she was doing when she signed that will..."

  "Even when she named you as her residuary legatees?"

  "Well, John says that if we knock the will out, we'll take the whole estate. By the law of ... what do you call it?"

  "Intestacy. And you won't mind going into court and stating under oath that Aunt Serena was insane?"

  "But it's just a formality, Dexter!"

  The nymph was now accompanied by other naked nymphs, but his eyes were only for her. Laughing, shrieking, they surrounded him to push him in the pool. They pulled him and pushed him, and he felt her fingers under the belt of his shaggy pants...

  "I'm sorry, Mother, but I can't represent you in this. I believe that Aunt Serena, if a bit vague, was nonetheless essentially of sound mind."

  "But, Dexter, you know I won't go to court unless you represent me! This is too mean of you!"

  The pants suddenly swooped to his ankles, and slowly, menacingly, he stepped out of them. The other nymphs fled away screaming, but she remained. She cowered against the damp black rock where a water slide fed the little pool, her bent back and pinched buttocks before him, her head turning slowly around...

  "When the good lord distributed consciences, my boy, he gave you more than your share. But it's your ol
d mother who has to pay the price for it!"

  Dexter, looking up at his mother now, felt a strange immunity to her reproaches. All his life he had been afraid of disappointing her, as if her image of him had been a kind of ideal that he could only live by constantly aspiring to. She was the brave little woman who had battled for him in adversity, who had cadged his tuition expenses from richer relatives, who had sold her last bits of family jewelry to dress him like a gentleman. It was true that he had paid it all back, and more, but what were such payments, made when he was established, in contrast to what she had given him through the sweat, so to speak, of her social brow? No, the very essence of a debt to a mother was that it was unredeemable, like the pangs of childbirth. And now he no longer cared to redeem it. That was the difference.

  "You know you don't really need that money, Mother. Jane and I will always look after you."

  Where was the nymph? He felt a sudden shocking sense of loss. Ah, there she was! She had laid herself down, stretched out on the bank, bold as brass, shameless, smiling provocatively up at him. Now she was slowly raising her knees...

  "Oh, Dexter, go home! You're not paying any attention to what I'm saying."

  He left his mother without regret, almost without apology, and that same evening he was aware of a similar independence with respect to his wife. They were at dinner at Mr. Handy's at Number 417, as they so often were, a family party consisting of the old man, his four daughters and three sons-in-law. Dexter noted that Rosalie kept glancing at him with annoyance as he stared down the table at Annie. And he hardly cared!

  "The Democrats are bound to split," Mr. Handy was saying. "There's no other way. The Southern Democrats are intransigent. I assume the Northern party will nominate Senator Douglas. And I shall certainly vote for him. To avoid certain warfare."

  "I'm not sure I shan't find myself casting my vote for the Southern candidate," Rutgers Van Rensselaer stated with much throat-clearing. He was stout, bushy-haired, with a dangerously scarlet complexion. "You'll probably all call me a Simon Legree, but I can't see it's any affair of mine what they do with their niggers."

  "Rutgers is thinking about his phosphate mine in Georgia," Charley Fairchild observed with a wink. Everyone at the table was surprised to hear him speak, as he had seemed absorbed in his wine glass and in signaling to the waitress to keep it filled. "We don't want that confiscated, do we?"

  "Well, some of us at least have property to worry about!"

  "Don't mind him, Rutgers," Mr. Handy cautioned his oldest son-in-law. "Charley is only trying to get your goat. What about you, Dexter?"

  "I'm keeping an eye on Lincoln, sir."

  "Bully for you!" Joanna exclaimed with a little clap of her hands.

  Her father glared at her. "The election of Lincoln will lead to secession," he announced solemnly.

  "Not necessarily, sir," Dexter objected. "He is pleading for moderation. It is true that he once invoked the God of Hosts, but recently he has been toning down his speeches." He turned now to Annie. "What about you? Who are you for?"

  She answered his gaze with the same directness. "What does it matter? I have no vote."

  "You might influence one."

  "Whose? Charley's?" She laughed bitterly, without even looking at her husband. "Why should I care about slaves? I'm one myself."

  "A slave with a rather long chain," Charley sneered, and there was a moment of general constraint.

  "You should be for helping the slaves if you are one," Rosalie reproached her.

  "And you, my dear, who are you for?" Mr. Handy asked.

  "Oh, I think the time has passed for talking," Rosalie replied with a sigh. "We've talked and we've talked and we've talked, and where has it got anybody?"

  Dexter reflected that the slavery question had destroyed all good conversation. One knew how one's friends stood on every point; dinner parties were like endless dress rehearsals for a dull play. Nobody had any true objectivity; they simply took the point of view that answered their immediate needs. Rutgers cared for his mine; Joanna needed a cause to make up for the lack of a husband; Charley sided against anyone he disliked; even Mr. Handy was devoted to his own image as a peacemaker, operating with the cigars and brandy behind the social scene. And wasn't Rosalie looking out for her soul? And Annie? What was Annie looking for?

  As he looked at her again now, she seemed the only real person in the room. Her white skin, her dark eyes and hair, were real. Her marriage, which he had patched up, seemed as shabby and rotten as the union of North and South. Who had cared about it but he? Had not all New York, his New York, been willing to wink at adultery and accept the separation of spouses? It had been only when he had raised the banner of the sanctity of marriage that the others had reluctantly fallen into line. Once the sacred words had been spoken, the revolt had been quelled. But did he want to do it again? Did even he care anymore?

  That night, when he and Rosalie were back in Union Square, he asked her to come with him for a moment to the library. As if she had anticipated some such move, she went at once to the fireplace and, sitting on a stool before the grate, leaned forward to apply a match to the prepared paper and logs. Standing behind her, he watched the slow start of the fire.

  "I know that you are doing something that's probably illegal," he began. "I don't want to know about it. But I'm willing to pay for it. I shall give you five thousand dollars for anything you like. And there will be more later."

  She did not turn around; she did not answer him for at least a minute. Then she asked, "Is this a bribe?"

  "You may call it what you like. It has no strings attached."

  "You mean it's for your conscience? Very well. I'll take the money. You're right about my doing something. It's in a good cause."

  "Don't tell me about it! Let me simply say that I admire you."

  She was silent, as if thinking this over. But he was not to have her comment. "Why don't you go to bed, Dexter?" she suggested at last, still facing the grate. "I think I'll sit and watch by the fire a bit."

  13

  THE AFFAIR started a week after his silent compact with Rosalie. Leaving the office early one afternoon he told Charley that he was going to his house to discuss Annie's new will with her. Charley, who started his drinking now at noon, looked up from a desk bare of paper to give his cousin a long stare and then, quite deliberately, winked.

  "Put in a nice little trust for me, will you?"

  Dexter did not deign to answer him.

  The Charles Fairchilds' house stood directly across Union Square from their cousins'. Dexter, standing in the bow window of Annie's blue drawing room, done in the latest deuxième empire style, looked down to where a nurse was departing for a walk with little Kate. Then he glanced across to his own abode. Rs blank façade seemed to proclaim that Rosalie was not in. Where was she? At some secret meeting in an abandoned warehouse? He shrugged. Annie's voice came from the sofa behind him.

  "I knew my will bored me. But it really must be very boring if it bores you. Or are you lost in the arcane mysteries of a distribution per stirpes and not per capita?"

  "I'm not thinking of your will. I'm thinking about you."

  "Well, that's better. I like that much better. Tell me what you're thinking about me."

  "I can't see you this way anymore. You've got to be all mine or none. Charley doesn't care. And I've squared Rosalie."

  Turning now, he caught the flicker of triumph in her eyes. But it was only a flicker. Nothing could take the place of her curiosity for long. "How on earth have you squared Rosalie?"

  "I've given her money for her causes. Whatever they are. Whatever she wants."

  "And she let you off for that? How curious! You don't suppose she has a Juley concealed somewhere?"

  "Please don't speak of her that way."

  "I'm not good enough? Is that it?"

  He took a step towards her but stopped. "It's not that. It's just that she has nothing to do with you and me. Nobody has. But I can't make love to you i
n Charley's house."

  "Actually it's mine. You should know that. You drew the deed. I can make love to anyone I choose in it!" She stretched her arms out invitingly along the back of the divan. "But I think I'm going to have to give you some lessons first. You're too intense. Not that it isn't a good way to start. But after a bit of it a lady likes something gentler. Come and sit by me."

  He shook his head gravely. "I can't even touch you in this house. It's Charley's home, whoever owns it."

  "What are we to do then? Take to the streets?"

  "Have you ever known me to be unprepared? I've rented a little house in South Vesey Street. I've engaged a discreet, decent sort of woman as housekeeper. I've hired a cab that can meet you any time outside Grace Church, take you to the house, wait and bring you back. The driver won't even know where you live. The woman at the house won't even know who you are. You can be veiled. There'll be absolutely no risk."

  Annie's eyes were fastened upon his as he told her this, her lips parted in a half-smile. "It seems to me that you take me rather for granted. Imagine going to all that expense without even asking me if I would come!"

  "Do I take my life for granted? What's the expense to me? What have I to lose? If you don't come, I shan't care about anything."

  She brought her hands smartly together. "Oh, let us hope you won't be reduced to that sorry state! Of course, I'll come. Shall we say tomorrow? I know you like to do things formally. Good! Have your cabby parked across the street from Grace Church at two o'clock. Right? Tell him to pick up a lady in a blue hat with a veil." She threw back her head and burst into her high laugh. "I hope it will be the right one!"

  When she came to South Vesey Street the next day, as agreed, tightly veiled and clad in a long blue coat that covered all her dress and presented a vertical line of pearl buttons from her neck to her ankles, he found himself as shy and awkward as a boy of twelve at his first dancing class. Annie, without taking off her veil, perched primly on the edge of a chair.

  "Aren't you even going to show me your face?"