The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  “When the boxholders have concluded their conversations, the performance will be resumed. That is all. Thank you.”

  And he walked offstage as rapidly as he had come on. There was a moment of shocked silence, then a buzz of startled whispers, then some whistles and finally the roar of resumed conversation and a stamping of feet. The boxholders consulted each other indignantly; there were shrill complaints and some laughs. From the galleries came catcalls that might have expressed anger at the interruption or approval of the management. One could not be sure of anything in the general confusion.

  In the midst of it all Uncle Ed appeared again, but this time in the back of our box where he took a seat beside Uncle Harry, for once thoroughly awake. Uncle Ed tilted his chair back and crossed his arms over his chest in the gesture of one who was prepared to wait all night. In a minute the entire diamond horseshoe was aware of his presence there. The issue was joined.

  I am sure that that was the most terrible moment of Granny’s long life. I had heard of her near insanity at the early death of my apparently charming grandfather, and I was later to minister to her in her desolation at the death of each of her two sons. But there is a compensation in the very fullness of the tide of love that creates the agony of bereavement; there is the luxury of memory always open to us. No such leavening existed that night for Granny. She could not even console herself that her most beloved child was showing an admirable courage in his isolation. It is always difficult for the conventional to recognize courage in what they deem ridiculous causes. Here was Granny, surrounded by the only world that she knew and admired, in the very heart of it and at its dressiest moment, and having to behold it united in an anger and contempt, which to her, alas, was a justifiable anger and contempt, by the perverse, misguided son who sat behind her with folded arms and icy countenance, identifying her and her family and her sister with his foolish fads. It was as if a respectable Roman matron, on a holiday matinee at the Colosseum, should have had the shock of seeing a son leap into the arena to shield some dirty Christian from a hungry and deserving lion. Granny’s discipline was of the tautest, but I could see her jaw tremble as it only did in moments of the very gravest tension. Then, without turning to me, she touched my elbow.

  “Ask your uncle to have the performance resumed,” she murmured, as I leaned over to her. “Tell him I say: ‘please.’”

  It was in our family a lady’s SOS, the ultimate appeal. I stepped to the back of the box, terrified to think that the eyes of the multitude were upon me, and whispered the message hastily in his ear. He nodded gravely, and in the second that I caught his eyes I read in them all of his gallantry and all of his defeat. He rose and left the box, and in five more minutes the curtain rose again, before a still chattering house, on the garden by King Mark’s castle. It was then that I grew up—in a single minute—and felt at last the full tragedy of what had happened.

  ***

  Only two days later Father gave us the news at breakfast of Uncle Ed’s resignation.

  “I’m afraid it’s a case of ‘I quit,’ ‘You’re fired,’” he said with a sad headshake. “He’s going abroad almost at once. Your grandmother is terribly upset, Amy, and she finds it easier on her nerves not to be left alone with him. I think you’d better take the day off from school and spend it with her.”

  “But why is it hard for her to be alone with Uncle Ed?”

  Father and Mother exchanged glances, and then he abandoned the subterfuge. “Well, I guess you’re old enough to hear about it. Your uncle has run up some very serious debts, and he will find it cheaper and more convenient to live in Germany while arrangements are being made about them. Your grandmother can’t afford to dig any deeper into her capital than she’s already done, and she’s afraid that he will try to persuade her.”

  I do not know if it was the restraint of my presence, but Uncle Ed certainly made no remark during lunch at Granny’s that could even remotely be construed as referring to his financial exigency. Indeed, anyone watching the three of us in that dusky, silent dining room would have assumed that Granny was the one harassed by creditors. For all the reputed discipline of her generation, she made not the slightest effort at conversation, but simply sat there staring with tear-filled eyes at the errant son who was holding forth gracefully to me about the reasons for the popular failure of German opera.

  “Haven’t we heard enough about that sorry business?”

  “Very well, Ma.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so cold, so casual.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so flurried, so emotional!”

  “Edmund!” Granny cried. “I can’t bear it! You know, my dear, that I would give you what you ask if it was fair to the others . . .”

  “I know, Ma. Of course. Please! Remember Amy.”

  After lunch, when Granny had gone to her room for a nap (nothing ever interrupted that), Uncle Ed followed me down to the hall and helped me into my coat. It was a long red coat with some twenty buttons down the front, and in my nervousness and distress, I buttoned one in the wrong hole. Uncle Ed turned me around to face him and carefully unbuttoned it to button it again properly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I murmured. “I’m only going home, just a block.”

  Uncle Ed raised a reproachful finger. “It always matters, Amy. Remember that. It always matters. Those are the only words of wisdom—the only assets, in fact—that your departing uncle leaves behind.”

  And then, like Granny, I too broke down. I threw my arms around his neck and sobbed.

  “Poor Amy,” he said, stroking my hair, “life is going to be hard on you, too. Just remember what I told you about the buttons. It doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not much, but it may be better than nothing. If it’s all you’ve got.”

  I ran out the door and down the stoop, and I never saw him again.

  Three years later, when I was in Paris with Father and Mother, they went to see him at his hotel, but they would not let me go with them. By then he was intoxicated most of the time, and in a few more months his liver mercifully gave out.

  My own story is only a sad postscript to Uncle Ed’s. Without his example I might have faced the fact earlier that I did not have a voice for Wagnerian opera and reconciled myself to marriage and children. But the idea of a Stillman carrying on where he had failed became a fixation. I even believed that I owed it to him to sing the great roles as gloriously as he had dreamed of hearing them. Had Mother and Father ever divined this madness, they might have helped me, but it was part of my crazy integrity to tell them nothing.

  After graduating from Brearley School, I refused adamantly to “come out,” and I opposed my mother and grandmother so violently in every other plan which they proposed for me, that Father, always the peacemaker, at last had to take charge of the situation. He decreed that I should be allowed to study the voice under professional auspices. Of course, it went without saying that I should continue to live at home, but I was permitted to spend my mornings in the studio of Madame Grisi-Helsinka, to be ostensibly trained to appear in benefit performances on the concert stage. Of course, I was determined that I would make my debut as Sieglinde, but there was no need to throw it in my family’s face until the time arrived.

  My teacher scoffed at my Wagnerian pretensions and tried to turn me to operetta. My voice, such as it was, turned out to be nearer contralto than soprano. But there was still Fricka, Erda, Ortrud to be sung. I persisted in my lessons. For ten years I studied German opera, the same decade that witnessed the great popular triumph of Wagner in New York that Uncle Ed had predicted. The irony of my situation and the endless queries of my family drove me at last abroad, where, at the age of thirty, I sang Ortrud for a road company in Rouen, my debut and my finale.

  For a cable came, not of congratulation but of recall. Granny was ill. She had had a stroke, which I was made to feel was not unrelated to the absurdity of my operatic career. Father had at the same time come down with a kidney disease that was to kil
l him, and as Mother had to spend all her time with him, she insisted that my place was with Granny. I debated my reply for a desperate week, and in the end I decided that Mother was right. I sailed home from Le Havre and spent seven dreary years with Granny until her death at the age of ninety-one. By then I was thirty-seven, and there was no further question of an appearance in opera. The family had won—or thought they had.

  But I must insist on one point. Everybody has always taken for granted that I was talked into looking after first Granny and later Mother. They say: “Poor old Amy. She wanted to have her little fling, you know, but old Mrs. Stillman put a stop to all that. They preferred to have her a useful ‘companion’ to an indifferent opera singer.” Everybody assumes that I was simply another of those weak-minded spinsters of the late Victorian era who bowed their heads submissively as they were cheated of their birthrights by selfish mothers and grandmothers. But it wasn’t so. It cannot have been so! What I did, I did under nobody’s persuasion but my own. I took a long clear look at my opera career and weighed it against what I could do for Granny. Had I had the voice for Isolde I hope I would have had the divine egotism and the courage to let Granny die alone. As it was, I could not sacrifice the small consolation that I was able to bring her for the chance to sing second-string roles in third-rate opera companies.

  But we had our moments, Uncle Ed and I. Who knows, as Robert Browning might have put it, when all is finally added up, if we will not have had as much as the others? It is more graceful, anyway, to think so. It is like keeping that twentieth button properly buttoned on one’s coat. And so I am going to be glad for what I have had. I am going to be glad for my little night in Rouen, and I wonder if Uncle Ed, even in those sorry last years, was not occasionally glad that he had had the thrill of producing Tristan, if only to a golden horseshoe of chattering friends and relations.

  Sincerely yours,

  AMY STILLMAN

  THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER

  1970

  1

  BROOKS CLARKSON knew at once when his wife had gone too far. For years he had waited for the moment, knowing that he would recognize his doom when it fell. And, what was more, he was convinced that the other guests at that little Saturday night party in Glenville, all contemporaries, all weekday commuters like himself, had recognized it at the same time. That might have seemed curious to some. Was it so unusual for one of his crowd, on Long Island’s not notedly puritan north shore, to get roaring drunk on Saturday night? If Fanny Clarkson, so gay, so fée, such a bewitching little wisp of a blond doll, kicked off her slippers, stripped to the waist and sang an obscene song, wasn’t it the natural release of any poor female after a week of suburban coping? Doomed? Brooks Clarkson doomed? Doomed at thirty-nine, when one was as handsome as he, a partner, like his father before him, in the Broad Street firm of Emmons, Taylor & Clarkson, with a beautiful house in Glenville, a beautiful wife and three beautiful daughters? Yes! Certainly!

  Fanny, like Eve, had first tasted of the apple, but he, like Adam, had readily followed. For years now they had been going to bed half sozzled. It was such a simple way to cloud over the beady eyes of the world: the eyes of his law partners, who suspected that his smooth talk and high connections covered a deficiency in aptitude, the eyes of his fellow trustees of the Glenville Library, the Glenville Museum, the Glenville Art Society, who suspected that he used his civic positions as a cover for his spiritual emptiness, the eyes of Fanny herself, who suspected that he was only half a man. Oh, blessed sin, blessed whiskey! But, of course, he and she were bound to drink more and more, and people were bound to get sicker and sicker of them. And that, in the long run, would provide a kind of dim solution.

  Brooks had a theory of what was wrong with him. He had never divulged it to a living soul, not even to Fanny, and he never would, but he hugged it to his heart. It was a conceited, odious little theory, but it did not have to be either conceited or odious if no one knew. It was simply that he was different from other people. He was different from his clients, his partners, his Glenville friends, his cousins, even his brothers and sisters. He was different because he was an aristocrat, the last of his breed.

  It was not, obviously, considering those who were not aristocrats, a mere question of birth or money or position. These things were only the outward and dispensable signs. It was a question of soul, and questions of soul could never be hidden. Somehow he stank of it, somehow it exuded from him, and, inevitably, like some bleeding creature in the ocean, he was bound to attract the notice of carnivorous neighbors. For his fellow Americans might worship wealth and admire arrogance; they might be dazzled by power and taken in by strutting, but they would never pardon an aristocrat. They could never forgive a man who conceived it his duty and privilege to serve his social inferiors. They would never forgive noblesse oblige.

  And now the farce was almost over. Now the last invitations in Glenville would cease. Now his partners would meet secretly without him to discuss steps to be taken. Now he had been summoned, so to speak, before the Committee of Public Safety, and everyone knew how that had to end. There would be a brief incarceration; there would be the travesty of a trial; there would be the ride in the rumbling cart through narrow, jeering streets and finally the relief of turning into the big sun-bathed square and seeing ahead, soaring over the upturned faces of the vulgar and curious, the tall narrow instrument that guaranteed his swift release.

  Fanny could not suspect all this, but she suspected something. She gazed at him darkly over the rim of her cocktail glass the next day, a Sunday, when they were alone before lunch. Brooks stood with his back to her at the bar table, slowly mixing his own, feeling the intensity of her gaze.

  “Why do you give me this drink, darling?” she asked in her high, bright tone. “Shouldn’t I be punished?”

  “Punished? For what?”

  “For disgracing you. For behaving in a way that would have convinced your late sainted grandmother that I was the Whore of Babylon. Don’t minimize it, Brooks. Be angry. Don’t you see, I want to be punished?”

  “You were a bit gay. Why not? Is that a crime? Remember what Sylvia Fales did last week.”

  “Ah, but she’s not a Clarkson.”

  “She’s married to my cousin, isn’t she?”

  “Somehow it’s different. Anyone can do anything but a Clarkson. As a matter of fact, any Clarkson can do anything but a Brooks Clarkson. Tell me the secret, honey. Why do you bear the sins of the world alone? I pine to know.”

  “There’s no secret, Fanny.” He turned and brought the shaker over to fill the empty glass that she held out to him. “You’re imagining things. All I want is to have you enjoy yourself. All I want is to have you be happy.”

  “Even if I’m a happy lush?” She took a deep sip from her refilled glass. “Even if I made an ass of myself again next Saturday night?” Her luminous, faintly feverish eyes followed him about the room. “Sometimes I think you’d be glad if I went to pieces. To get it over with, once and for all.”

  “Fanny!” he cried. “How can you say anything so horrible? Don’t you know I want the world for you?”

  “Oh, your world!” She laughed desperately. “What do I want with your world, Brooks? What could I possibly do with it? Does it even exist?”

  Brooks never had anything to say to this kind of comment, and when he had finished his drink, he quickly poured himself another. Not until the third, however, did he begin to sense the tingle in the ears, the prickle in the chest, the glow about the heart, that accompanied the gradual cessation of pain. With gin they would get through until the guillotine.

  2

  Brooks had no real friends, but, as appropriate for an aristocrat, he had a protégé. Patronage was a function of his class, and he took it seriously. He made himself responsible for Benny Galenti, whose position in life he saw as the inverse of his own. If this were so, the ultimate outcome had to be as happy for Benny as it should be sad for himself.

  Benny had started in Emmons, Tay
lor & Clarkson as an office boy. He was the son of Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side, and his original ambition had been to be a lawyer. He had a slight, tight physical build, thick shiny black hair and blue, staring eyes, slightly misted, as if the sunny Sicilian sky of his family’s origin had been diluted with the smog of a new world. Like many second-generation Italians, he had lost the color and excitability of the first. He was careful, methodical, almost Nordic. He had gone to night college and completed one year at law school when the disaster of his fiancee’s pregnancy had necessitated their marriage and the permanent abandonment of law.

  Brooks had been attracted to him from the day when Benny, intuitively sensing the junior partner’s need to befriend an inferior, had walked into his office and asked for a loan. His wife, it seemed, was having a second child, who would be an “Irish twin” of the first. Brooks at once advanced the money, which was promptly repaid, and later made many other loans, which enjoyed the same happy fate. Benny, eased of his burdens, shot ahead in the firm. He seemed pushed by a demoniac energy that might have been designed to prove that he was as good as any lawyer. When he finally achieved the post of office manager, petted by the partners and feared by the clerks, Brooks was especially gratified. If he was the soft old past, Benny was the ruthless future.