The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  As Winthrop walked up to Annie, she threw back her head to emit the famous laugh.

  “Hello, King Arthur,” she greeted him in her deep voice. “Here are all your court! There may be a few dents in the Round Table, but nothing that can’t be hammered out. If one has a good hammer. And you always do have one, don’t you, dear?”

  “I try to please.” Nothing could dampen Winthrop’s sudden exhilaration. Here were Annie and Charley together, and his plans for Bleecher were working!

  “What have you been saying to my father, Winthrop?” Jane King asked with a little grimace. “I never saw such a scowl.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll tell you about it,” Winthrop responded cheerfully. “Don’t you and he have little father-daughter chats from time to time?”

  “Angels protect me!” Jane turned to Annie. “What do you suppose Winthrop’s telling him?”

  “I hope he’s told him what you’ve been up to,” Charley said to Jane with a sneer. “I daresay the old man won’t fancy the kind of service you apply to Annie’s journalist friends . . . oh, dear!” Seeing Winthrop’s frown, Charley clapped his hand over his mouth with mock dismay. “I promised not to mention a certain name, didn’t I? I promised to leave him to Cousin Winthrop!”

  “And you had better keep that promise, too,” Annie retorted with heat. “Or our so-called reconciliation will be of brief duration.”

  Winthrop, seeing Lewis Andros in the doorway, escaped to his side. “Have you a word for me, sir?”

  “Yes. Are you calling on the Cranberry Hardys today?”

  A wrinkle of scorn slid over Winthrop’s face. “I wouldn’t normally.”

  “Well, I suggest you do. His store takes a full-page advertisement in the Daily Post twice a week. A word from him to the editor, and Bleecher’s out of a job. I’ve sent my son-in-law to broach the matter with Hardy. It’s up to you to close it.”

  Winthrop’s nod was military in its abruptness. “I’m on my way, sir.”

  Cranberry Hardy had built the largest mansion in Manhattan, larger even than Mr. Astor’s. Its four tall stories were encased in white marble, covered by a high mansard roof and studded with clusters of Corinthian columns. Hardy was the greatest merchant of New York and the proprietor of the largest department store, but the money was new and the family plain, and the Ward ladies had never called. Winthrop, however, had met Hardy in Trinity Church business matters and had received his New Year’s bid. It was the perfect chance; he was not expected to bring Rosalie.

  He donned his friendliest smile as he passed through the crowded reception rooms of the marble mansion. He was careful to betray none of the condescension that he felt for the over-opulent interior, filled with marble statues from American studios in Rome: a Cleopatra, an Augustus, a Miles Standish, two fighting gladiators. Winthrop recognized none of the guests; he wondered if Hardy recruited them from the store’s personnel.

  He found his host puffing at a large cigar and talking to a small, respectfully listening group of younger men. Hardy was a bald, heavy-jawed man with tiny, glistening eyes. He broke away without a word of apology to his audience when he saw Winthrop. Taking him firmly by the elbow, he propelled him to a corner.

  “So you’ll call, Winthrop Ward, when you want a favor from the merchant. Is that about the size of it?”

  “So it might appear. But it also so happens that I was planning to give myself the pleasure of calling today in any event.”

  “Without the Mrs.?”

  “My wife is receiving today.”

  “How would I know? She didn’t ask me.”

  “She will next year.”

  Hardy snorted. “Well, enough of that. I shouldn’t be too rough with a man who comes to bid me a happy New Year. But this business of Jules Bleecher sticks in my craw. What’s it to me that the man’s a bounder? Why should I care if he hankers after one of your society matrons? Can’t you take care of your own? Must I get the poor lecher fired for you?”

  “We hoped that you might regard our cause as yours,” Winthrop answered smoothly. “And that you might agree that such a wrong inflicted on a gentleman like my cousin affected all the leaders of the city.”

  “I ain’t in your crowd, Ward.”

  “Isn’t that your choice, sir?”

  Hardy stared. “Are you telling me that I could get into the Patroons’?”

  Never had Winthrop’s mind worked so fast. “I am not telling you that you could get in. That would be a question for the Admissions Committee. But I can certainly tell you that I should be glad to write you a letter of endorsement.”

  Hardy snickered. “I know that dodge. ‘Dear Board of Admissions: I promised Mr. Cranberry Hardy that I would write a letter for him. This is the letter. Very truly yours, Winthrop Ward.’”

  Winthrop breathed in relief. Now he had him! “Mr. Hardy,” he said in a higher tone, “I cannot conceive what there may be in our past relations to justify your impugning my honor. If I were to write for you, it would be to heartily endorse your candidacy. And I should stand by my letter. After what you’ve just said, of course, there can be no further question of that.”

  He turned to go, just slowly enough to give Hardy the time to catch him by the arm. “Don’t take offense, Ward. I was too hasty.”

  “I’m afraid you were.”

  “Maybe one day I’ll ask you for that letter. But not yet a bit. In the meantime, thank you. Tell me, what’s old Andros going to do if I don’t bring him Bleecher’s head on a platter? Have the Bank of Commerce call all the store’s demand loans?”

  “Not at all. Mr. Andros is simply asking a favor from one business leader to another. He may be in a position to return it one day.” Hardy put his thumbs in the pockets of his red waistcoat and balanced to and fro, his lips pursed as if to whistle but emitting no sound. “Well, I confess that I wouldn’t mind having a few more friends in your crowd. God knows, Jules Bleecher doesn’t mean a damn thing to me, and he’s probably a horse’s ass anyhow. But I don’t much care for the idea of old Lewis Andros sending first his son-in-law and then you. Damn it all, Ward, if Andros wants Bleecher’s head, let him come here and ask for it!”

  “Today?”

  “Well, there’s no time like the present, is there?”

  “I can’t guarantee it, but I’m on my way back to Great Jones Street!”

  4

  Ten days later, at nine o’clock in the evening, Winthrop again received Jules Bleecher in the library at Union Square. This time Winthrop sat at his desk, touching his fingertips together, his face impassive, grave. Once again his heart was beating uncomfortably, but this time the discomfort was punctuated with the tickling of a fierce jubilation. Bleecher, with darkened countenance, was walking up and down the Persian carpet.

  “My first impulse was to call you out,” he was saying, “but I knew that would do no good. You burghers don’t fight. Then I thought of going to your office with a horsewhip. But that would have been playing into your hands. Your friends on the bench would have put me in jail for a year or more. And then, 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, Winthrop Ward? Or are you a man at all?”

  “What I am need not concern us, Bleecher.”

  “Oh, but it concerns me. I find myself without a job and without a friend in a city of brownstone fronts with locked front doors. How the hell did you do it? And why? You’re not her husband. You’re not even a very close relation.” Bleecher paused to stare at his silent host. “It couldn’t be that you’re in love with Annie yourself?” He shook his head slowly as Winthrop failed to move a muscle. “No, that would be impossible for a snowman like you. But I still must ask of someone, as Othello asked of Lodovico:

  ‘Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil

  Why he has thus ensnared my soul and body?’”

  Winthrop’s lips tightened in contempt. How typical of the poetaster to turn to Shakespeare in his ranting! “You and I
, Bleecher, will be bound to disagree on which is the demi-devil. You have lived much abroad and cannot be expected to understand the customs of simple American Gentlemen who still believe that a marriage vow is sacred and that homes should be protected.”

  “But from whom, in the name of God? Your cousin is the one who has threatened his own home from the beginning. Have you any idea, Ward, what his wife has had to put up with?”

  “I think I have an idea.”

  Something in Winthrop’s tone made Bleecher stare at him again. “Maybe you’re not a snowman, after all. Be frank, Ward. If you did what you did out of jealousy, I’ll forgive you all. I’ll even shake your hand!” Winthrop rose. The exhilaration had departed from his chest. “We could talk all night and never understand each other. Let me put my last proposition before you. You have in your possession certain letters from Mrs. Ward and Miss King. Is that not so?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because I want them and because I’m in a position to barter for them. If you will deliver them to me, I will ask the Daily Post to reemploy you as a foreign correspondent. You will be able to live in London or Paris. I have no doubt that you will find life in one of those cities, particularly the second, preferable to our quiet existence on this side of the Atlantic.”

  Bleecher looked at him now with something like fascination. “And will the Daily Post do as you tell them?”

  “I think so. If my proposition be endorsed—as I trust it will be—by certain gentlemen of prominence in this town.”

  “Like Messrs. Hardy and Andros. I see. And now the bounder is supposed to crumble. Or, like Shylock before Portia, be sent to renounce his faith. Only you have the wrong script, Ward. In my script, the villain turns upon you with a splendid defiance. You may take your proposition and cram it up the aperture—if indeed there be one in a snowman—in the nether part of your frozen body.”

  Ward averted his eyes from his foul-mouthed visitor. “I suppose I should expect such talk from you.”

  “You will be relieved to hear that I am removing myself from your ‘quiet existence.’ I have 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 help to warn them in the South what they are up against. They think, because they know how to fight bravely, that they are bound to prevail in a struggle with men of straw and men of ice, such as I have met up here. But they may well 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 and Andros and Hardy, who can tell the outcome?”

  “Then you keep the letters?”

  “What I may do with the letters must remain the one little cloud of uncertainty on your cerulean sky of fatuity. Keep your eye ever peeled on it, Ward! Keep your umbrella in constant readiness!”

  “Even if you want revenge of me,” Winthrop protested earnestly, “must you take it out on Annie, too? Must she live in the daily fear of seeing her letters printed somewhere?”

  Bleecher’s gasp was incredulous. Then he burst suddenly into a harsh, raucous laugh. “Annie! That teasing, tantalizing little bitch? Do you honestly think she’d give one holy goddamn if I told the world she copulated with sailors every Saturday night on a public pier?”

  “Get out of my house!”

  “You don’t know her, Ward.”

  “Get out of my house!”

  “I can’t go fast enough.”

  Winthrop drank two whiskies before he went upstairs. Rosalie was at her dressing table, already in her nightgown. As she removed her earrings, she studied his face in her mirror.

  “You didn’t get the letters.”

  “No,” he replied with a sigh, sitting down on the bedside.

  “I didn’t think you would. But it doesn’t matter. He’ll never do anything with them.”

  “Now what makes you say that?”

  “Because he’s a gentleman.”

  “Oh, Rosalie! Are you trying to annoy me?”

  “No, dear. But I think you should face a fact every now and then. Even a disagreeable one.”

  “He’s going to Richmond. He loves the Southern aristocracy. Slaveholders! How does that go down with your abolitionist principles?”

  “Very badly.” Rosalie’s smile was obscure. “I never said I liked him, Winthrop. Or that I approved of him. I merely said he was a gentleman. To me that is a technical term. But one can deduce certain things from it. And one is that he’ll never use those letters.”

  “And what about me? Am I a gentleman?”

  “No, I don’t really think you are.”

  “Rosalie!”

  “I don’t really think any man in New York society is. It’s not what we go in for here.”

  “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “Good, dear. Do.”

  But later, in the dark, she put another question to him. “Tell me something, Winthrop. Do you really think you have done a good turn for Annie and Charles in salvaging their marriage?”

  “I did what I had to do.”

  “What you had to do? Why you? Nobody else felt that way. Certainly none of our friends or family. You were the designer of the whole plot. Has it ever occurred to you that you’ve been playing God, Winthrop?”

  “Maybe that’s what I meant by doing what I had to do. Maybe there are times when one has to play God—when everyone else seems to forget He exists.”

  But Rosalie seemed unimpressed by his religious turn. “Do you suppose that’s how history’s written?” she mused. “Like a play being put together for the dress rehearsal? With one little man rushing about, shouting directions and trying to get people into the right costumes? Not necessarily a powerful man—simply a man with an idée fixe. A man with a sense of how things should at least look. Even a fussy man, a . . .”

  “Rosalie, I want to go to sleep.”

  When a silence of several minutes followed by gentle snoring indicated that he had no farther interruption to fear, Winthrop moved his lips in silent prayer:

  “Dear God, if I have ever thought of Annie carnally, please forgive me. Remember that I have never given her or anyone else the right to say so. My conduct has been correct, even if my heart has been sinful. And let me face the facts of my motive in doing what I have done to Bleecher. Did I destroy him because I was jealous? Perhaps. But would I not have done so even if I had not been wickedly attracted to Annie? Yes! Yes, I would have! So is it a sin to enjoy performing a task essentially done for thee, O God? Is it wrong if jealousy gives a fillip to doing one’s duty? Make me humble, dear God. Crush me, overwhelm me. I am nothing, nothing, nothing . . .”

  Winthrop felt calmer now and hoped that he would doze off before his excitement returned. Two drinks! He should never have had two drinks. Oh, why had he remembered them? He was wide awake again, watching the curtains gently blowing in the moonlight. The Enquirer? The Richmond Enquirer? Bleecher would be writing for that? Was that not the rag which had urged secession that very morning, suggesting that the Southern states place themselves under the protection of Louis Napoleon? What traitors! How could one govern a nation with such firebrands trying to pull it apart?

  “Dear God, of course I know that we must allow our Southern states to live in peace. But if in thy great wisdom thou seeest fit to permit them to strike the first blow, if thou turnest thine eyes away and allowest them to secede, then will it be wrong if we leap to arms with joy and jubilation in our hearts and if we bring the devastation of thine anger to their fair land, burning their plantations with a cleansing fire and chastising their rebel people with the sword? Or even with worse? Wilt thou blame us if their women are raped by the very slaves whom we have freed, if . . .”

  He started as he heard Rosalie’s voice. “What’s wrong, Winthrop? Are you having a nightmare? You’re rocking the bed!”

  THE FABBRI TAPE

  1980

  I HAVE BEEN FRETTING for some days now over an article in the Manh
attan Law Review: “Hubris and the American Lawyer,” which contains, in addition to essays on Alger Hiss, Dean Landis and John Dean, a piece on myself entitled “Mario Fabbri, Merchant of Justice.” Ordinarily, in the now considerable literature dealing with the bribery trial of Gridley Forrest, it is the judge who occupies center stage, and indeed it is hard to imagine a greater exemplar of the arrogance so fatal to the Greek tragic hero than my late, unhappy friend. But this particular author has chosen to see me as the principal villain, the mastermind behind the tragedy. And he has taken the trouble to carry his research down to this year of our Lord 1975, for he ends on this note: “Fabbri, hale and hearty at eighty-four, sole survivor of a scandal that four decades ago shook our bar from coast to coast, cheerfully persists in his ancient error. ‘Believing what I then believed to be the facts,’ he told a reporter recently, ‘I’d do the same thing again!’”

  It is perfectly true. I would. But it behooves me, I suppose, in an era of general review of moral values, to make some effort to set down my reasons for the benefit of any posterity that cares to hear them. We live in an age of records, where history is transcribed on a minute-to-minute basis. So long as I am still in possession of my faculties, I may as well add my tape to a heap already so high that future scholars will be tempted to make a bonfire of it. Why not? Doesn’t each generation want to rewrite history according to its particular lights?

  Young people today, including my grandchildren, are very busy reevaluating the morals of the past. They tend to see American history as a study in hypocrisy. To them crime is largely a technical matter. If you are caught, you go to jail, and that is that. You are no longer made an outcast as I was. Unless, of course, you have been guilty of discriminating against an ethnic or religious minority, and then you are wicked. Sometimes I think that is the only moral value we have left.