“What can I do for you, Clarence?”
“You know my mother,” he began rapidly. “You understand her. She’ll listen to you. You can tell her that she mustn’t take Neddy to this ball.”
“But why mustn’t she?”
“Why?” he exclaimed in a suddenly shrill tone. “Good heavens, man, you can’t have known Neddy all your life and not see what this will do to him! Just now, of all times, when he’s really painting, when for once he’s got parties and girls and drinking out of his mind—”
“But one ball, Clarence,” I protested.
“One ball!” he almost shouted. “One marihuana! One pipe of opium!”
“But what am I going to tell your mother?”
“Tell her—” He paused and then appeared to give it up. A bitter look came over his face. “Oh, tell her,” he went on harshly, “that as long as she’s taken everything she could from me all my life, she may as well take Neddy too. But why she has to have her gin-soaked body hurtled in a plane three thousand miles through the ether just to interfere with the only friendship I’ve ever had—”
“Clarence!”
But he was completely out of control now.
“Why do I ask you, anyway?” he cried. “You like people like her, you even write about them! You think she’s admirable, the old tart!”
“All right, Clarence, all right,” I said firmly, putting my hands up to stop him. “I’ll speak to her, I promise. But calm down, will you?”
He seized my hand in sudden embarrassed gratitude and hurried away without trusting himself to say another word. I shook my head sadly, amazed to have discovered such depths of feeling in him. I had always known that he had disliked his mother; I had not realized that he hated her. She must have seemed, in the isolation that even as a child he had preferred, the very essence of the vulgarity of living and loving as the world lived and loved, the symbol of the Indian giver, because for all her vitality he may have instinctively suspected that she wanted back the one pale spark she had emitted in bearing him. And even now, when she came to his beloved Italy, wasn’t it the same thing all over again, didn’t she participate more in the carnival life of the country by attending one crazy ball than he with all his monographs? That, she must have known, was his vulnerable point; that was why she struck at it year after year. It was as if she resented the very existence of what he called the gemlike flame within him and had determined to blow it out.
I telephoned Aunt Maud and invited her to have cocktails with me at Harry’s Bar that afternoon. She arrived in high spirits, in a red dress and an enormous red hat, and, as I had known she would, flatly refused my request about Neddy.
“What’s wrong, infant?” she asked suggestively. “Do you want to take him to the ball yourself?”
“I’m only thinking of Clarence,” I retorted. “This whole thing is bothering him terribly.”
“And why should it bother Clarence?”
I noted the glitter in her eyes. It was as if she had been playing bridge with children and had suddenly picked up a slam hand, a waste, to be sure, but a hand that she could still enjoy bidding.
“You know perfectly well why, Aunt Maud,” I said wearily.
“My dear Peter,” she said firmly. “I know a great many things, including what stones do not bear turning over. I have no idea of asking Clarence to explain to me, his mother, what his involvement with this young man is. But I cannot see that borrowing his precious Neddy for a single evening is interfering very much. Must he have Neddy with him every second? Why doesn’t he keep him in a harem?”
“You don’t understand, Aunt Maud,” I tried to explain. “Clarence thinks that Neddy has finally settled down to be a painter and—”
“Nonsense,” she interrupted firmly. “It’s selfishness, pure and simple, and you know it, Peter. Clarence is simply scared to death that Neddy will find the big world more fun than his cell. Which I should hope he would!”
“Aunt Maud,” I said desperately. “I’ll take you to the ball.”
“Thank you very much, Peter, but I haven’t asked you. It’s all very well for Clarence to go on about my interrupting Neddy’s work, but I’ll bet he doesn’t begrudge him the hours they waste sipping chocolate on the Piazza San Marco while he rants about his poor old mother’s wicked life. Oh, I know Clarence, Peter!”
This was a home thrust that I could not honestly deny. And what could I do, in any case, for Clarence, with a mother who felt this way about him? When I wrote him that night, for I couldn’t bear to face him, I made as light of it as I could. Aunt Maud, I told him, had refused to give up her “hostage.”
I saw neither Clarence nor Neddy for several days, but one morning as I was picking up my mail I encountered Neddy again at the American Express. He had evidently been waiting for me for he came right over and asked if he could talk to me.
“Why not?” I said, glancing through my envelopes.
“I wonder,” he began in a rather embarrassed way, “if you’re not doing anything tonight, whether you wouldn’t have dinner with Clarence and me. Quite frankly, I think we need a change.”
“Why? Are you bored with each other?”
“It’s not that exactly. But I’m worried about Clarence. He’s got this fetish about my not going to that damn ball.”
“Why do you go then?” I asked coldly.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he protested. “Who do you think I am, I’d like to know, that Clarence can boss me around?”
“It’s not a question of bossing. It’s simply a question of doing a very small favor in return for the considerable number you have received.”
Neddy smiled uneasily, probably the way he used to smile at his poor wife when she reproached him for spending his evenings in bars. He had almost a genius for evading any unpleasantness in the facts that surrounded him. When I failed to return his smile, however, he rather drew himself up.
“Any small financial aid that I have received from Clarence,” he told me with dignity, “will be paid in full when I’m on my feet. It will not be difficult, I assure you. You probably know your cousin well enough to be aware that he doesn’t play fast and loose with his money.”
The impudence of this quite took me aback.
“Why do you stick around him, then?” I demanded.
“You think it’s all one-sided, don’t you?” he retorted. “Well, you don’t know the half of it. You don’t have to listen to his ravings day in and day out. And when I say ravings, I mean ravings!”
“What sort of ravings?”
Neddy proceeded to tell me. I leaned against the counter and puffed gloomily at a cigarette while he unfolded, with the relish of one unjustly accused, the whole sorry picture. For the past five days, apparently, the ball had been the sole subject of their conversation. Whether in the studio while Neddy was trying to paint or during their long dinners in little restaurants, and even on Sunday when they had been lying on the sand at the Lido, Clarence had held forth on the iniquities of Olympia Lorisan’s friends and their destructive effect upon all who had any serious purpose in life. Neddy, thoroughly bored, had answered less and less, but Clarence, straining after his attention, had only become more vehement in tone and more fantastic in argument, hoping apparently by the very hyperbole in his speech to instill into his threadbare subject some dash of interest to make him listen. He had exhausted the epithets of his rather chaste vocabulary in withering descriptions of the aging guests and how they would look in their monstrous costumes. He had even tried to shame Neddy by telling him how contemptuously people spoke of impecunious young men who acted as escorts for rich old women and to alarm him by insinuating what attentions his mother, aroused by champagne and late hours, might take it into her head to expect from so junior a companion. He had cut reports out of the paper of the magnificent preparations for the party, insisting on reading them aloud with prefaces such as: “Neddy, listen to this! This really is the limit!” And when all else had failed, when he was desperate, he had actually resorted t
o the argument that the ball was a Communist plot designed to bring discredit on the idle rich of the Western world.
I listened to it with a sick feeling. I could hardly deny that the whole account, even exaggerated, had an unmistakable ring of truth. But in my sudden confrontation with the full extent of Clarence’s obsession, I found myself losing my temper at its fatuously smiling cause. Neddy stood before me smugly relishing each detail of his sorry story, pleased at my obvious dismay, satisfied that I would have to concede to him now that anything Clarence might have done for him was only a token compensation for what he, the long-suffering, had had to put up with.
“You’re nothing but a goddamn sponge, Neddy Bane!” I exclaimed angrily. “You don’t deserve to be considered anything but what you are considered!”
He turned pale.
“And what is that?”
“As Clarence’s kept boyfriend!”
He stretched out an arm to me in shocked protest, he opened his mouth to remonstrate, but I turned quickly on my heel and strode away.
I was quite unable to do any writing that morning. I thought how abominably Neddy had treated his wife and children, how shamelessly he had used his old mother, and even went farther back to our school days, when he had always been careful to curry favor with the strongest clique in the class. I conjured up other and more stinging things that I could have said to him and reminded myself that I had only done my duty. But at heart, all the time, I knew perfectly well that I was only repressing my own uneasiness at what I might have done to Clarence.
Retribution did not wait long. When I walked through the hotel lobby at noon, on my way out for lunch, I saw Clarence standing at the desk talking to the clerk and then I saw the clerk nod his head and point to me. He turned around as I started over to him, and I saw that he looked pale, almost stunned. His eyes met mine and wandered off in a way that was not like him.
“He’s gone,” he said as I came up to him. “He’s gone to Padua to paint. He said he couldn’t paint with me nagging him. He said awful things to me.”
“Let’s go out, Clarence. Let’s take a walk or have lunch or something.”
He followed me obediendy into the little square on which I lived.
“He said you said terrible things to him,” he continued in the same dazed tone. “Terrible things, Peter.”
I said nothing.
“Do you think if we both went to Padua,” he asked desperately, “and if you apologized and I promised not to nag him anymore, he’d come back?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“You don’t think he really might?” he insisted.
“Clarence,” I said firmly, turning to him, “for God’s sake, let him go. You ought to be congratulating yourself that you’re rid of him. You don’t know that guy, Clarence. You don’t know what he’s like. I’m sorry I ever brought you together.”
“Sorry!” he exclaimed, coming suddenly to life again. “Sorry! When it’s the one thing you’ve ever done for me! The one thing anyone’s ever done for me! Don’t you know what Neddy is to me, Peter?”
I looked down, embarrassed.
“Perhaps!” I muttered.
“Perhaps!” he repeated scornfully. We had stopped walking and were facing each other, Clarence again the dominant older cousin of my childhood, simply angrier, that was all. “Why, you couldn’t even guess! For all your reading, Peter, and for all your parade of tolerance, you’re as bad as Mother. You don’t want anyone to be happy unless they find their happiness in some noisy ordinary way. You tremble at the least deviation from your own mean little code or even the appearance of one. That’s why you and Mother leer and sneer and pretend I do things with Neddy that Italian boys do with middle-aged male tourists for a few lira!”
“But, Clarence, I never—”
“You pretend to be on the side of the angels,” he continued excitedly, “but I wonder if you’re not really the worst of all bigots. It’s amazing to me, Peter, that someone who even pretends to write should be so entirely incapable of visualizing the kind of pure love I feel for Neddy, a love that I’ve looked for all my life—ah, but what’s the use?”
He broke off and left me, and I stood there thinking of the hopelessness in his face, the hopelessness of ever explaining to me that even if there was something on which to base his mother’s leer, even if her leer was inevitably and forever tied up with every emotional state on his part, still there was a quality in his feeling that was over and above what is called sublimation, a quality that made of it something higher than—but what, I asked myself with a sudden shrug of the shoulders, echoing his thought, was the use? I hurried after him, determined that while he was desperate I would not leave him alone.
***
On the night of the ball Clarence and I went for a walk through the crowded streets of Venice. Olympia Lorisan had come through with an invitation at the last moment, but I did not feel I could leave him. Besides, I had no costume. In the neighborhood of the Palazzo Lorisan wine was being served to the public from huge vats, and in the little squares boys shinnied up and down the greased poles. There was dancing in the streets near the palace, both for the public and for those guests who found it more fun there; ladies in sixteenth-century costumes whirled about in the arms of Venetian boys to the hectic music of strolling players. Standing on a bridge in the area we had a view of the great baroque façade of the palace, lit up by rows of lights attached at the floor levels. In front was a wide platform, covered in red, where the guests were disembarking from gondolas freshly painted in gold or green or yellow and covered with wide silk canopies. Other gondolas glided under the bridge where we were standing, and the laughter of their masked occupants floated up to us. From one in particular we heard a loud and familiar laugh; it came to our ears while the gondola was still under the bridge, and Clarence drew back quickly as it emerged, but not so quickly that he didn’t see his mother in her enormous ruff, a small jeweled coronet perched on top of her pink hair, gesticulating with a paste scepter to friends in other gondolas. At her feet in red tights and smiling up at her—well, we did not need to look more closely to see who that was. Clarence turned away from the palace, and I followed him. Obviously he did not wish to be observed, lonely and ridiculous, watching their gaiety from the shadows. We did not talk but as I walked behind him, observing the straightness of his back, the erectness of his carriage, I had a feeling that there was a process of exorcism going on inside him, a process that was symbolized in his very act of walking away. If his mother liked a circus, the stiff back of his neck seemed to be saying, if Neddy liked it, if the Venetians liked it, if that was all they cared about, poor creatures, to be distracted in a distracting world, were they really to be blamed? Was it even reasonable of him, he seemed to ask himself, to assume that Neddy had the patience and devotion to tend the hard gemlike flame that burned within? Should not the true flame-tenders, the people like himself, enjoy in solitude the special compensations of their devotion? I realized suddenly that I had become accessory, irrelevant, and I stopped, calling after him that I was going back for another look at the ball. He barely turned his head to bid me goodnight as he continued his resolute stride away from the lighted palace and the gondolas that swarmed about it like carp.
THE MONEY JUGGLER
1966
WE HAD, the four of us, two things in common: we were all members of the Columbia class of 1940, and we had bought or rented summer cottages in the Hamptons on Long Island’s southern shore.
Townie Drayton, as befitted a Wall Street broker and a Drayton, lived in Southampton; Hilary Knowles, as a popular columnist of manners, good and bad, who had to thread his precarious way between the artistic and the ultrafashionable, rented in East Hampton; and John Grau, a hard-working corporation lawyer who came to the Island only to relax, exercise, and see his family, preferred the comparative simplicity of Westhampton. I, vice president of an auction gallery in the city which collected its treasure hoard from the estates of decedents in a
ll the Hamptons, owned a small, weather-beaten shingle cottage in neutral Amagansett which did not boast a single object that could remind me of those that poured through the doors of Philip Hone & Sons during the eleven other months of the year.
We had been closer friends at college than we were now; indeed, the past was the only real reason for our annual summer reunion at the Dune Club, where, after a Saturday morning’s eighteen holes, we would sit on the veranda overlooking the ocean and the slapping breakers and drink many rounds of gin. We must have enjoyed ourselves, for we rarely lunched before three, talking with the easy familiarity and bluntness that had characterized our younger days. I believe that the charm of these sessions lay in the very fact that we were no longer intimate, so that our stories evoked a past that had not been blurred by constant familiarity. It was an added advantage that, living so near to each other, our gatherings had none of the forced hilarity of a college reunion.
The great event that had occurred between the summer of 1965 and its predecessor was the failure and flight from justice of our classmate Lester Gordon, the “boy wonder” (if one could still be that at forty-seven) who had made fortunes in one enterprise after another—real estate, magazines, the stock market—only, at what had seemed the apex of a career of miracles, to plummet, a cherub (which he always a bit resembled) from a golden heaven to a most bankrupt hell. Needless to say, such a fall aroused the most complacent feelings in the hearts of those who had envied him, and there were four such hearts around the table at the Dime Club that day.
Hilary Knowles now regretted his friendship with Lester. “How can I write a really candid column about a friend in trouble?” he asked with a moan. “And yet it’s the perfect story of our time, tailor-made for my space, a bright, jingling morality tale. Think of it! Everything about Lester was what we were told as children to distrust: he was too glib, too smiling, too quick. He was all glitter and no substance, all hands and fingers and no soul. Do you remember how he was at college: round and ruddy-faced with that thick curly hair and those ghastly shirts and ties, pushing, giggling, unsnubbable? You couldn’t get rid of Lester; he stuck like glue. Until he had what he wanted. And then, when he used you as a ladder, he moved so lightly you hardly felt the foot on your face. Aren’t we all the better for his fall? The church bells can ring out bravely again, and we can stroll down Main Street in our Sunday best. God is in His heaven, and all’s right downtown!”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 19
