The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  Townie merely grunted as John continued: “Negotiations went on for months. Luella’s husband had to be squared as well, for it turned out that he was shattered at the idea of losing his status symbol, or at least of losing her to Lester. When the agreements were all signed, Gabrielle insisted that Lester and not she have the bother of going to Reno, although she knew that he was in the midst of the biggest proxy fight in his life and from which she stood to profit: the battle for Atlantic Enterprises.” John paused and looked around the table. “But you all know about Atlantic Enterprises?”

  “No, John,” I answered, “we don’t. Or at least I don’t. Please remember that we’re not all lawyers.”

  “Atlantic,” he continued, “is a holding corporation that controls a string of department stores, a bus line, a theater chain and some three dozen parking lots, all just outside the city limits. Lester was already president of the company, but he wanted control. He had a Napoleonic scheme of uniting Atlantic to his other interests, and to some further ones that he had in mind to acquire, in order to spread a belt around the city. He saw that New York was sliding into poverty and despair and that the middle and upper classes, together with most of the businesses, were fleeing to the suburbs. Out of this hegira Lester would make himself lord of the future. He would put himself in a position where all the insoluble growing problems of our time—overpopulation, racial strife and the growing indigence in the city—would operate to fill his pocketbook. How could he lose? As he once told me: ‘Only an ass can be poor these days.’ And I really believe that he might have achieved his goal had he been able to be in New York continuously during the battle. His particular kind of genius required him to be always on the scene. But in the hottest part of the fight he was stuck in Reno, having to check in at court every other day to establish his residence. He had a jet plane in which he tore back and forth through the ether. Never shall I forget the picture of that desperate little man, living on benzedrine, a telephone constantly cradled to his ear, talking, shouting, laughing. For that was the thing about Lester: he was actually enjoying the whole thing. And when I think what he was doing all the time, the risks that he was taking, when I think that he knew all along what was hanging over his head, I cannot decide whether he is the bravest man I ever knew or a simple lunatic!”

  “But what was he doing?” I demanded.

  “Man, didn’t you read the papers? The market had broken, money was tight, and Lester was always a borrower up to the hilt. I could not imagine where he was getting the money to buy Atlantic stock. I did not find out until Lester’s house of cards fell in that he had been using Atlantic’s treasury to buy Atlantic stock.”

  “And that was wrong?” I asked. “Wasn’t he president of Atlantic?”

  “Small wonder that morals are on the slide,” John answered with a snicker, “when the public no longer knows what’s right or wrong. Perhaps it’s not the public’s fault. Perhaps our laws are too complicated. But in this case it would be simple enough even for you, Roger, to understand. The officers of a corporation are not supposed to use its assets for their personal market speculations. Even when they claim, as Lester did, that they are supporting the price of the company stock. But Lester’s luck had run out at last. It was no fault of his that he encountered the worst stock market slide since 1929. It was a brief one, but it did for Lester. He ran short of money before he had completed his control of Atlantic, and that was the end. In a single day everyone turned on him. He lost his companies, he lost his reputation, and, needless to say, he lost Luella. In fact, on the rainy morning when he donned dark glasses and boarded the plane for Lisbon, he was not even divorced from Gabrielle.”

  “So he’s still your cousin, Townie,” Hilary observed dryly.

  “No, Gabrielle went out to Reno after he absconded and got the decree herself,” Townie hastened to inform us. “I advised her to do it. How much of what Lester settled on her she will be able to keep is a moot question, but you’ll be glad to know she’s got a crack lawyer.”

  Hilary and John and I burst out laughing at the idea of our being “glad” to know this, and Townie’s cheeks reddened.

  “Speaking of lawyers,” I said, turning back to John, “do you still represent Lester?”

  “No, I had to give him up. You see, Arnold & Degener are general counsel to Atlantic, and there was an obvious conflict.”

  “You mean,” Hilary put in quickly, “that having to choose between two clients, you kept the best?”

  “Not at all,” John retorted indignantly. “You don’t understand these things, Hilary, and you shouldn’t be so smart about them. We dropped Lester because he had deceived us. That was not true of Atlantic.”

  “But didn’t Lester bring you Atlantic?” Hilary demanded, and seeing that John was now becoming as angry as Townie, I intervened.

  “But I thought you had seen Lester in Lisbon?” I asked him.

  “I did see him. I stopped there on my way back from a business trip to Madrid. But I went to see him as a friend, not as a lawyer.”

  “And what happened when you saw him?”

  “We went to a bar and spent a couple of hours together. Lester was nicer than I’ve ever seen him. Subdued, but far from crushed, and utterly devoid of self-pity. He blamed no one but himself for the debacle and showed no bitterness toward his former business associates who had shrilly reviled him to reporters. As to Luella, he simply said that she had acted as he had told her to act, and even claimed that he had composed her savage press release. Townie and Hilary may sneer at him for being a parvenu, but he was a true gentleman that day. It was an odd background for him: that beautiful, quiet, decadent capital. Possibly some of its ancient style had crept into him through holes battered by disaster.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Hilary drawled. “Pray tell us, John, before you’ve sunk to the bathos of a column by our late lamented Elsa Maxwell, what Lester is going to do now. Will he be extradited?”

  “It won’t be necessary,” John snapped. “He’s coming back. He’s going to give himself up.”

  “And will he go to jail?” I asked.

  John shrugged. “Very possibly. Though he may get a suspended sentence. In any event, it would be a short term.”

  “And then?”

  “Oh, and then he’ll go back to business. Lester is far from downed. As I said before, he may even be glad to find that he can’t get away with everything. He’s like a schoolboy—there I go again!—who has almost taken over the school with his tricks and wiles. Finally, just as he is about to light a fire in the wastepaper basket under the headmaster’s desk, he is caught and has his ears roundly boxed. For the first time he respects the institution!”

  “And will he make another fortune?” I asked.

  “Who knows? He may. But I doubt it.” John frowned and shook his head. “I believe there’s just so much energy and just so much luck in any man. Lester has drawn heavily on his capital.”

  Silence enveloped our table now for a minute as we drank and smoked reflectively. Glancing from John to Townie to Hilary, I was suddenly struck by the size of their common denominator. It was in their eyes, in the opaque glitter of their distrustful eyes. They were all prosperous, all expensively and similarly clad. I would have defied John O’Hara himself to have told, in that assemblage of colored shirts, which was the descendant of a colonial governor, which the popular columnist and which the Wall Street lawyer. Over their apparel, which was as beautiful as a New Yorker advertisement, glowed the snakes’ eyes that saw the world at a snake’s level: one inch above the ground. Oh, yes, they saw it whole and they saw it clear—one inch above the ground.

  “What a society we live in,” I exclaimed, “that such men as you three should all have worked for such a man as Lester Gordon! And you all made a good thing out of him, too. Oh, granted, he made a thousand times more out of each of you, but you’ve had the last laugh, for you’ve still got it, while he is bankrupt. What impresses me—or rather depresses me—is th
e fact that you were his agents, that he was always the principal. You, Townie, with all your lineage and traditions; you, Hilary, with all your cultivation and sophistication; you, John, the brightest boy in Columbia law, were glad to be the servants of an adventurer whose god was the dollar and whose law was to get it for nothing. Is that capitalism? That the aristocrat, the intellectual and the professional are bound to the chariot of the money juggler? It seems to me that by contrast the Middle Ages, where the priest and soldier ruled, was a time of enlightenment!”

  “You talk like a goddamn red,” Townie growled.

  “More like a John Birchite, I would say!” cried Hilary.

  “It’s easy enough to be detached if you’re tucked away in an auction gallery, selling old lamps and pictures,” John pointed out. “If you’d been born in your precious Middle Ages, Roger, you’d have scrambled to the nearest monastery and told your beads.”

  “Not at all,” I retorted. “I’d have copied out the Iliad and saved it for future generations!”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Hilary exclaimed, waving for silence with both hands, “don’t you realize that we have in our presence the most gigantic hypocrite of all? When poor Lester Gordon’s art collection was placed on the block by his creditors, who do you think sold it, item by item, but our friend Roger here, the same Roger from whom Lester had bought it. And didn’t the whole works make a record-breaking price for ultra-fashionable impressionists? And didn’t Hone’s take its twenty percent pound of flesh? We three may have been the midwives of Lester’s fortune, but Roger was the undertaker!”

  In the explosion of laughter that followed this revelation, which, of course, I had known was coming—and would have volunteered myself had I not wished Hilary to have the pleasure of it—the irritation engendered by the afternoon’s discussion trickled off, and we were once again our congenial golf foursome. Why should we not, after all, have been the best of friends? What were we but four junior Gordons?

  THE WAGNERIANS

  1966

  January 1, 195—

  DEAR MR. STYLES:

  When I told you that I would not “write up” Uncle Ed for your history of opera in the Americas, you implied that I was being stuffy. Privately I have no doubt that you used a harsher word. “What bad luck,” you must have said to your fellow editors, “that the only person living who remembers Edmund Stillman should be a prudish niece who is determined to take her sixty-year secrets with her virginity to the grave!” Oh, yes, I can imagine how you young writers talk. I have not always led the cloistered existence of the New York old maid, bounded on the south by Carnegie Hall and on the north by the Colony Club. No, Mr. Styles, you will be surprised to hear that I had an operatic career of my own! I sang in public—on one occasion.

  And that is precisely why I have now revised (not changed) my position. I have decided that my reluctance to write about Uncle Ed must spring from my identification of his failure as manager of the opera house with my own failure as an opera singer. What egotism! To compare his magnificent and catastrophic experiment with ten years of voice lessons ending in a single appearance as Ortrud in a road company Lohengrin! And so I have resolved that I will do what you ask and record here my memories of my uncle. But, there is one very stiff condition. You may not publish it in my lifetime. For even though these memories are so ancient that they have ceased to hurt, there are still some that I do not care to see set forth in the impertinence of print: the quizzical, puzzled stare in Uncle Ed’s eyes after too many brandies, my father’s embarrassment before the devoted ushers at the opera house, who he feared were his brother’s unpaid creditors, my grandmother’s bewilderment at finding herself choosing to side with her own world against her favorite son. But when I am gone (and I am past eighty), you may do as you like with these pages. They will be in nobody’s memory then.

  I shall start, being old-fashioned, in the time-honored way of Balzac (the only novelist I still read), by saying a word about the position of the Stillmans in the New York of 1890. We were one of those unremarkable families, indigenous to the “best” society of any large city, who seemed to have no particular claim to our position other than the fact that we had always had it. By a claim I mean such an obvious thing as a fortune or a distinguished lineage or simply a relationship to some great man. There are New York families that have their colonial governor as Roman families have their Pope. But each generation of our Stillmans had managed to move gracefully across the social scene without particularly distinguishing itself or particularly disgracing itself and always without leaving more than a modest competence to the succeeding one. They were great believers in the “here and now.” So long as their dinners were good and their clothes in style, they did not much care what sort of old brownstone (provided, of course, it was in the right neighborhood) housed them. They found the world as it was a pretty good place. Of course, they didn’t go around turning over stones or poking behind curtains. They did not conceive that to be their function. But if a curtain happened to fall and a skeleton was revealed, if a moral issue developed and people started to raise their voices and take sides, if, in other words, the chips were down, the Stillmans, God bless them, were apt to be on the side of the angels.

  Uncle Ed, my father’s bachelor brother, was the Stillman who came closest to breaking the family rule of “Nothing in Excess,” but his excess was of a Stillman sort. In personal adornment he was a bit of a peacock, even in that gaudy age. Look at the photograph of him in Gustav Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book. The long slim body in the perfectly tailored Prince Albert with the velvet collar seems to flow gracefully upward to the grave bearded face, the reflective eyes and the glistening, narrow-brimmed stovepipe hat. The beard is neatly trimmed to follow the contours of the squarish chin and also those of the gently drooping mustache. It would be altogether the portrait of a dandy of the period, with a bit of the hardness of one of Whistler’s boulevardiers, a touch of the cruelty of a Paul Bourget hero, were it not for the eyes, large and brown and almost brooding. Oh, yes, the eyes gave Uncle Ed away as they gave my father away. They were eyes that could see the main chance, but beyond the main chance they saw perfectly the price that one paid for it.

  A more serious excess in Uncle Ed was his drinking, but this, too, was done with Stillman style. There was never (at least before his final European chapter) anything so vulgar as intoxication. Uncle Ed, as Father used to put it, was like a noble greensward that needed a constant, gentle sprinkling. Each drink had its consecrated hour: the midmorning sherry flip, the noon gin fizz, the afternoon cognac, the evening “cocktail” at the men’s bar, the midnight whiskey, without mentioning the diverse flow of mealtime wines that constituted the central river to which the other drinks were tributary. The family used to ascribe Uncle Ed’s drinking to his lack of steady employment, and from my earliest years I remember table discussion of how to lure him from his bibulous idleness. Uncle Ed, apparently, was always willing to try anything once, but his jobs had a way of terminating after a few months, always with the remarkable circumstance of his remaining a fast friend of his former employer.

  It was my father who first conceived the idea of finding him a job at the opera house. Father was always the most imaginative member of the family. Physically, he resembled his brother, but it was as a guinea fowl resembles a pheasant. Father was much less elegant and, by like token, much more responsible. But he had the kindness of the Stillman men, and when he put his mind on his brother, he thought of his brother and not of himself thinking of his brother.

  “Everybody wants Ed to do what they happen to like doing,” he told my grandmother, above whose sober widow’s establishment Uncle Ed maintained a bachelor’s top floor. “Uncle Harry wants him to go into the iron business. My boss keeps urging him to become a banker. And Marion Crawford tells him to write novels. We ought to be trying to make a life for Ed out of the things that Ed likes doing. Now what are they? Well, first off, he likes the opera. Couldn’t Uncle Harry get him somethin
g to do there?”

  It was the ace of trumps on the first draw! Granny Stillman’s older sister, my Great-Aunt Rosalie, was married to Uncle Harry Belknap, a rich ironmaster from Troy and a director of the opera. Nothing was easier for him than to secure for his wife’s nephew, whom most of the boxholders knew and liked, the position of secretary to the company, and for the next two years (an unprecedented tenure for him) Uncle Ed attended the board meetings faithfully and ornamentally, kept the minutes neatly and concisely and busied himself about the office, at least until the early afternoon. He even took to dropping in on rehearsals, and with his knack for friendship he soon became intimate with the leading singers and musicians. The opera house developed for him into a combination of hobby and club, and my family breathed in relief at Father’s brilliant solution of the problem.

  Promotion followed swiftly. In those days the gulf between the owners of the opera house, all New York businessmen, and the artists, already dominated by Germans and Wagnerites, was almost unbridgeable. Neither side could even listen to the other, and opera was produced in an atmosphere of what we would call a “cold war.” But Uncle Ed could talk to Mr. Morgan and to Mr. Damrosch and make each feel that he was on his side. When the general managership fell vacant in 1890, the board, after several long, wrangling sessions, was suddenly united by the prospect of this dark but very glossy horse.

  There was an outburst of enthusiasm. What did it matter that Ed Stillman was not a musician? Was there not too much expertise already? Were the directors not sick of managers who swore guttural oaths and regarded “opera” and “Wagner” as synonyms? The only trouble seemed to be with Uncle Ed himself, who resisted the appointment with a stubbornness that surprised everybody, and, when at last prevailed upon, accepted it with a gravity of manner that seemed almost Teutonic. Had the directors paused, however, to remember how the miter had changed Thomas à Becket (which, needless to say, they did not), they might have consoled themselves with the thought that they were twelve King Henrys to his single archbishop.