Watchfires

by Louis Auchincloss

  Uncle Corneel, who was suffering from bronchitis, greeted them without rising from a Belter rococo divan upholstered in maroon. He was clad in a multicolored dressing gown and was smoking a pipe.

  "You've had a blow, lad," he said to Fred when his guests were seated, "and I'm sorry for it. Someone should hang, and my choice would be Gould."

  Fred nodded, a bit stiffly. "I had hoped we were going to change the Erie management, sir."

  "We will, lad, we will. But Central, like Rome, can't be built in a day. We'll get hold of Erie in time, and then you'll see the difference!"

  Fred remained discreetly silent.

  "Tell him about the wreck you were in, Uncle Corneel," Ellie put in nervously.

  "Oh, that. It must have been thirty-five years ago. It put me off railroads for a while, I'll tell you that." He chuckled at the vision of his own historical importance. "Yep, that wreck must have put the clock in rails back a dozen years."

  Another silence fell, which Ellie again felt constrained to break. "Did you have another message for Fred today, Uncle Corneel? Papa said you might."

  "A message? Oh, yes. If you have any of that bogus Erie stock to unload, young man, just give me the figure, and I'll write you a check."

  Fred looked startled. "You wish to make good my losses, sir?"

  "Why not? It was in a good cause. I look after my people."

  "I beg your pardon, sir, but may I ask if the check will be drawn against your personal funds?"

  "You think it may bounce?"

  "Hardly that. And if it did I should frame it. It would be a museum piece." Ellie, astonished, joined their laughter. Was Fred actually coming out of the slough? But his next words disheartened her. "I mean, will it be to you that I owe the restitution or to the Erie stockholders?"

  "Oh, I'll be paid by Erie. Surely that's only right? They swindled me. Now they can cough up."

  "If it was Gould or Fisk who had to do the coughing, sir, I'd agree with you. And heartily. But it won't be, surely? They'll just put their paws right back in the Erie till."

  "What's it to me where they get the money?"

  "But don't you care, sir, if it's the stockholders who are really paying?"

  "Did God appoint me to look after the shareholders, young man? Let the shareholders look after themselves."

  "If they only could! But they're helpless, the way things are. I'm sorry, sir. I can't take their money."

  The old man shrugged. "Very well. I can't force it on you. Elmira tells me you may set up to be a lawyer. Sounds like it might be the right trade for you. I ain't got a very high opinion of lawyers or judges, but maybe you can help make things better. They sure as hell couldn't be much wuss!"

  Ellie was almost without hope after this visit. Yet when Fred took her back to Madison Square and asked her grimly on the threshold if she was ready to give him up now, she retorted "Never!" and then slammed the front door enigmatically in his face. What more could she say? What more could she appeal to? His obligation to her, created by the blackmailing of her own father? That would be moving indeed. She might have tried to induce herself to give him up, had it not been for his little joke about Uncle Corneel's check. If he had retained even a grain of humor in his depressed state, might it not be something to build upon, a tiny oasis in the swirling whirlwind of his self-hate?

  Whom could she consult? Her family were out of the question. His father was in Washington. Miss Handy probably had a kind heart, but old maids were apt to be disappointing. In the last analysis they couldn't give enough of themselves. And as for Mrs. Fairchild, wasn't she a hopeless fanatic, roaring up and down the streets, shrieking about women's rights...?

  Or was she a possibility? She was at least detached from family matters. What was there to be lost?

  The following afternoon at five Ellie presented herself at Union Square and was ushered into the library where Rosalie, in black, was seated at a desk writing letters. She rose at once to greet her visitor, and there was a momentary awkwardness as to whether they should kiss. Ellie then reached out her hand, which Rosalie clasped in both her own.

  "My dear. How good of you to come."

  "Oh, Mrs. Fairchild, I've thought and thought of you!" Suddenly, to her own surprise, Ellie found that her eyes were full of tears. "I loved Selby!"

  Now they did kiss, and Rosalie led her to the sofa. "I'm sorry my husband is not here. He's gone to Washington, you know, to help with the President's defense."

  "Yes, I'd heard. It's very fine."

  "I'm glad you think so. I wish more people did."

  "Oh, people." Ellie was about to denounce her parents for their radical Republicanism, but then thought better of it. Mrs. Fairchild might not consider this consistent with filial piety. "Silly people," she finished vaguely.

  "My poor Fred has taken his brother's death very hard," Rosalie continued. "I hope it hasn't made any difference between you two."

  "With me, none at all. How could it? But he wants to break off. Or rather he wants to give me back what he calls my freedom. He says he's bust and out of a job and can't afford to marry."

  "Not for just now, perhaps."

  "That's what I keep telling him. I'll wait forever if need be."

  Rosalie's expression seemed to mingle sympathy with a faint surprise. "Ah, my dear, you do love him."

  "Did you think I didn't?"

  "But, child, think how little I know you! And then there was all that terrible Erie business, and Fred's leaving your father's employ. I don't suppose your parents can have approved of that."

  "And, of course, you don't like my parents." Ellie checked herself in time from adding, "Nobody does."

  "I don't know your parents," Rosalie corrected her firmly. "I had to assume that your father's business was important to him."

  "Well, it's not to me. I detest the brokerage business! And I'm glad Fred's out of it."

  Rosalie's eyes gleamed a still surprised approval. "So am I. But what do you think he should do instead?"

  "Be a lawyer. In his father's firm."

  "Ah, my dear, how we agree! Do you think you could persuade him? His father would be only too proud and happy to stake him to it. After all, what have we left but him?"

  "That's what I tell him. But he's so pigheaded about not wanting to owe anything to anyone. Dear Mrs. Fairchild, what can I do?"

  Rosalie frowned as she reflected. "He won't do it for his wife-to-be?"

  "He says I'm not his wife-to-be."

  "But as you decline to release him...?"

  "I guess that just makes me his wife-to-be, indefinitely postponed. Not a very strong position."

  Rosalie rose and walked slowly across the room and then back. When she spoke, it was with an artificial casualness.

  "Suppose you were something more than his wife-to-be?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "Suppose you were ... well..."

  "His mistress?"

  The two women stared at each other.

  "Well, a mistress who's also engaged ... wasn't she a wife under the common law?"

  "You surprise me, Mrs. Fairchild."

  "I'm sorry. You seemed so independent. So modern."

  "I didn't say you had shocked me. You haven't. I said you surprised me. I hadn't thought a lady of your world would want her son to marry a girl who wasn't ... pure."

  "But you would be! To him."

  "I see." Ellie rose and walked to the window. She was very tense, but she thought she was beginning to see her way. "I suppose it's your work for women's rights that has liberated you from the old prejudices."

  "Well, I hope it has! Why should we be ashamed of what our bodies want? Men aren't!"

  Ellie turned to study this earnest woman who might one day be her mother-in-law. "Men certainly are not," she agreed tersely.

  "My boy needs you desperately. Go to him! It's the only way to shake him out of this ... this temporary madness. If you love him, you must want him! I know what that's like, old and staid as I must se
em to you. I've known what it is to want to be loved by a man, and I'm not talking about my husband, either. I knew before I was married to him. And afterwards, too!" She paused as something less than sympathy flared in Ellie's eyes. "I'm not saying I gave in to it. I didn't. But with you it's different. You're going to marry Fred."

  Ellie crossed the room to place her lips, the least bit coolly, on the older woman's cheek. "Thank you, Mrs. Fairchild. You've been wonderfully frank. I do appreciate it."

  When she left the house in Union Square she had already made up her mind what she would do. She would call the next day at the boarding house in Rector Street and, instead of waiting in the parlor, she would go directly up to Fred's room. The landlady was not the sort who would object; five dollars would quickly smooth the furrows of her false frown. But Ellie had not told Mrs. Fairchild of her decision, and she resolved that she never would. For she was very certain that, if she was going to be the kind of woman who made love to a man out of wedlock—a fornicatress, as the Bible put it—she was never going to be the kind of woman who talked about it. She had found Mrs. Fairchild's frank avowal of her sexual urges distasteful in the extreme. It was Miss Handy, and not her younger sister, who was going to be Ellie's model in the future.

  33

  FEED FAIRCHILD sat with his grandfather Handy at the end of the picture gallery at Number 417 on a Sunday afternoon after a five-course lunch, when it was too cold and snowy outside for him and Ellie to take the walk that they had earlier planned. Ellie and Aunt Jo, arm in arm, were pacing the long chamber. When they reached the far end Fred could no longer hear even the murmur of their voices.

  "I can't tell you, dear boy, how grateful I am that you have decided to go into law. And it will mean everything to your father. A fine firm like his—it would be the greatest pity to have it taken over by strangers. You will be the fourth generation of Fairchilds in it, isn't that so? Let me see. Your father and your uncle, that's one. And your father's uncle, that's two. And your great-grandfather Fairchild, wasn't he in it, as well?"

  "I believe he was, sir."

  "That must make it one of the oldest firms in the country. For we're still a young nation. Only a few years older than me, think of it! Unhappily, that doesn't make me a young man."

  "You're young for your age, Grandpa."

  "Thank you, dear boy, thank you. I believe I do look younger than most of my contemporaries. The few who are still around, anyway. But let me see ... what were we discussing?"

  "My going into Dad's firm. You were good enough to approve it."

  "Ah, yes. The law. We need more law these days, Fred. Selby's terrible tragedy proves that. We have gone too far in letting these so-called financial wizards do things their own way. They're not gentlemen, Fred; they're not gentlemen. We need laws with teeth for their kind. I see you look surprised. You'll be calling me a share-the-wealther next! But I don't care. I've always prided myself on being ahead of the times."

  "You certainly were, in the war, sir," Fred agreed politely. "Dad always says you were one of the first to realize how long and bitter the struggle would be."

  Mr. Handy smiled and coughed with pleasure at such incense from a veteran. "What field of law will you specialize in? Estates and trusts, like your father?"

  "No, I think I shall go in for business law. Corporations, and how they operate."

  "You're right, my boy. That's where the future is. Your father has a fine practice, of course, but, between ourselves, there's a bit too much fussing over old women in it." Mr. Handy winked. "Holding hands and sympathizing." But now a disagreeable thought seemed suddenly to strike him. "Except I wish he were doing a bit more of that right now."

  "You mean instead of defending the President?"

  "Just so. What did he have to get into that mess for? The President's got plenty of lawyers without him. Why must he throw away his reputation for a rascal like Johnson?"

  "I feel differently, Grandpa. I'm proud of Dad for doing it. I look at this impeachment business as another example of the same lawlessness you were just talking about. We had to fight a shooting war to free the slaves. Now it appears we must fight a legal war to save the chief executive. We didn't ask if a slave was good or bad before we freed him. I think the same should be true of Presidents."

  His grandfather appeared perplexed. Fred knew that the old man loved to feel that a grandson, particularly a decorated veteran, was on his side against a stuffy, set-in-their-ways, intermediate generation. But to find the two younger generations in sudden, unexpected alliance under a "liberal" banner was decidedly less rejuvenating. Mr. Handy scrambled to reassemble his position.

  "I suppose that something may be said even in Mr. Lincoln's favor."

  "Mr. Johnson's, you mean, sir."

  "Mr. Johnson's, of course. Didn't I say Johnson?"

  "Perhaps you did."

  "Anyway, there are always going to be people who will claim that what a President is doing is unconstitutional. I had an uncle who maintained to his dying day that Mr. Jefferson should have been impeached for purchasing Louisiana from Bonaparte without an amendment!"

  The ladies had turned and were approaching them. Ellie seemed totally absorbed in her conversation with his aunt. She appeared to be listening intently, her face turned up to that of the taller woman, and when she smiled and laughed in response, it was with an almost too girlish enthusiasm. She was certainly making a great play for Aunt Jo's approval, and it wasn't necessary, either. Aunt Jo would have been automatically on the side of any sweetheart of her nephew. But what struck Fred particularly was the innocent, the virginal quality of Ellie's demeanor. It was hard to believe that only that morning, in his room at Rector Street, he had held her naked in his arms. Heaven was but three hours past!

  "What are you ladies conspiring about?" he called out. "We feel excluded."

  "Oh, you are excluded," Aunt Jo replied gaily. "We're having a women's talk."

  Was it possible that she was telling Aunt Jo about him? Fred felt the back of his neck tingle excitedly at the idea that, behind the wall of female solidarity, there might exist a communion where a woman as pure as Aunt Jo and one as passionate as Ellie could share secrets never to be expressed to a world of jealous males.

  "I hope you're not trying to persuade my granddaughter-to-be that women should have the vote," grumbled Mr. Handy.

  Fred snorted to himself. As if a woman who could make love like Ellie needed a vote! She made him feel ... how was it that that soldier had put it on the long night in the trench before Richmond, speaking of his girl back home? As if a flight of doves had burst from his ass when he came! Fred wondered if he wouldn't even vote against Grant if Ellie told him to. When he thought of all those awkward tales of his friends' wedding nights with sticky scared virgins...

  "Nothing like that, Papa. If you must know, we were making wedding plans. We were discussing just how much could be done or not done with the family in mourning."

  "Mourning doesn't seem to interrupt your sister Rosalie in her activities."

  "Oh, Papa. Poor Rosalie. Her activities have not amounted to so much recently. There can't have been more than a hundred people at her big Brooklyn rally."

  "Perhaps that will help her to see the light."

  But Jo was not going to allow even the question of women's rights to spoil Ellie's visit. She addressed herself now to Fred. "Ellie has been telling me about Charley Fairchild's offer to you."

  "Isn't it wonderful of him, Aunt Jo?"

  "Indeed it is. Though, of course, he must rattle around in that big place by himself. Did you know, Papa, that Charley has offered the bride and groom an apartment in his house?"

  "His house? You mean, Annie's house. My daughter's house. It seems to me that's the least he can do."

  "And Dad's giving us an allowance until I can support myself," Fred intervened hurriedly to get his grandfather off an awkward topic. "I didn't want to accept it at first, but Ellie persuaded me it was the right thing."

  "Elli
e's a smart girl," Mr. Handy said approvingly. "Which should hardly come as a surprise in a niece of old Vanderbilt's. A chip off the old pirate, shall we say?" He seemed to have forgotten that Ellie was present. "More Vanderbilt than Bristow, let's hope," he added, giving Fred a knowing poke. "Egad, let's hope so!"

  Aunt Jo gently propelled Ellie back to their promenade, but not so tactfully as wholly to conceal from the old gentleman his gaffe.

  "Did I say something wrong?"

  "Not really. I'm beginning to suspect that Ellie feels pretty much as you do about her family."

  "That shows her perspicacity. But you spoke just now of an allowance from your father. That is all well and good, and I shall be happy to add my own small contribution to the kitty, but surely the Bristows are going to do something handsome for their daughter?"

  "Not a thing."

  His grandfather stared. "There's to be no dot?"

  "Not a penny!" Fred let all the pride he felt vibrate in the last word.

  "You mean they disapprove of the match? How extraordinary! There's no understanding these new people. But are you seriously telling me that a man who calls himself Seth Bristow, married to a nobody, of the humblest Dutch origin, possibly even Jewish—you will forgive me, dear boy, if I'm a bit free with your future in-laws; once that lovely girl has become your bride nobody will look behind us for her antecedents—but I repeat, a man like that dares not to feel honored when two families like the Handys and Fairchilds condescend to seek his alliance?"

  Fred was amused. He had always suspected that his family must despise the Bristows, but he had not known how strongly. It seemed almost a pity to pour water on a fire as crackling as the one he had just ignited.