But that is all right. I can live with that. I grew up as a youngster in Manhattan when to be poor, Italian and Catholic was hardly a ticket to fame and riches, and although I always regarded social prejudices as simply hurdles that I had to get over, I can agree that in a decent society they should be eliminated. And as to the concept of other crimes being technically rather than morally reprehensible, I can only point out that that was precisely my own gospel and the reason I did what I did. In an era that valued appearances I strove to save the appearance of the bar, the appearance of the judiciary, indeed the appearance of our whole legal system. I still believe it would have been better for everybody had Gridley Forrest never been found out.
My late wife, I should admit, never agreed with me. She believed that I had been profoundly evil and left me for a time because I would not repent. She would have loved me as a sinner, but only as a repentant sinner. And in the end it was her duty that made her return, not my persuasiveness. She decided that a wife never has the right to give a husband up.
Let me fill in, as briefly as I can, the minimum of background that the person listening to this tape should know. My parents emigrated from Genoa in the late eighteen-eighties and started an Italian restaurant in Twelfth Street. I was one of eight children, but because I was bright my father lavished his particular attention on me. His small means required him to pick and choose among his offspring. It was through him that I got a job as an office boy with Mr. Findlay of the great Wall Street law firm that bore his name. Mr. Findlay was a bachelor who lived on Washington Square and frequently dined at my father’s place. After my employment he kept a sharp eye on me, and finding me quick, responsive and able, he decided to put me through college and law school and then to hire me as a clerk. Once I had a hand on the bottom rung of that ladder I never loosened my hold. I stayed in the firm until I became a member and, after Mr. Findlay’s death in 1930, I succeeded him as managing partner. That is the story, in its very briefest form, of my rise.
Let me say just a word about Thomas Findlay. He was the most impersonal man I have ever known, a close-mouthed, hard-hitting, utterly industrious Yankee. He lived, so far as I could make out, for the love of the law alone. He never spent much money on himself, and he bequeathed the substantial fortune that he made to a hospital in which he had shown only a perfunctory interest in his lifetime. Our relationship was one of symbiosis. As he grew older, he leaned increasingly on me, but he always recognized that I needed him quite as much as he did me. He never praised or dispraised my work. He knew that I knew just how good it was. And somehow, without ever expressing his affection for me, he managed to make me feel it. I was the nearest thing that he had to a son, perhaps the nearest thing to a friend.
The gulf between us, as I look back, seems limitless. He was small and dry and lived to work. I was large and, in my young days, rather floridly handsome, and I craved pleasure as much as work. I loved music and art and food and wine and women. He did not so much object to these tastes as to seem to find them irrelevant to what life, to him anyway, was all about. The nearest thing we ever had to an intimate conversation was when I told him that I had fallen in love with Pussy Fish, the daughter of one of his partners.
“I suppose it’s a social step up for you,” he observed, with his usual candor. “But not very far up. And you’re quite capable of making it on your own.”
“But, Mr. Findlay,” I protested, “you don’t understand. I love the girl!”
“Of course you do, my boy. I didn’t mean to imply the contrary. But girls like that . . . well, they either believe in the things their parents pretend to believe in, or they don’t. And I don’t know which is worse.”
I didn’t know what Mr. Findlay meant by that, but it didn’t worry me. I was too much in love. I see it now, however. He wondered what would happen to me if I were absorbed into what we now call a WASP culture. Mr. and Mrs. Fish, unlike Mr. Findlay, who had been a poor parson’s son from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, were “old New York.” Mr. Fish was an elegant, rather wizened, very thin and very brown-faced gentleman who owed his position in the firm to a long-deceased father. He had lost his lawyer’s nerve (if he had ever had it) and tried to make up for this deficiency by charming manners. He and his rather mousy wife made no objection to my suit for their only daughter; indeed, they seemed to encourage it. After Pussy and I were married, I discovered that they had almost no means besides the slender percentage of the firm’s profits that Mr. Findlay allowed my father-in-law in deference to his father’s memory. They had regarded me all the while as a catch! And indeed, from their point of view, I suppose I was one.
I should say at once that Pussy belonged to the first category of Mr. Findlay’s “girls like that.” She believed in what her parents professed, not in what they did. There was not a worldly bone in her body.
It is common today for young people to speak scathingly of the former domination of American culture by WASPs, but, for all their violence, they have little conception of just how dominating it was. In my youth American society and government were almost entirely in the hands of big business and the legal profession, and both of these were very white and very Protestant. What we now call ethnic groups, Jews, Irish, and Italians, had managed to get hold of political organizations in the larger cities, but even there the financial districts—the real centers of power—remained predominantly WASP. I do not mean that there was not plenty of opportunity in New York City for a young lawyer of Italian-American origin, but if he wanted to join the Union Club or the Piping Rock, if he wanted to send his sons to Groton or Andover, if he hoped ever to be president of the American Bar Association or achieve high federal office, it was going to be a lot easier for him if he became an Episcopalian and treated his homeland as an exotic memory rather than a present-day inspiration.
Yet it would be totally to misinterpret Mario Fabbri to assume that I adopted a religion and a social philosophy—indeed, a whole new code of life—for self-advancement only. As a boy I associated the Catholic Church and my family’s Italian traditions with the rigors of an ancient class system of which we had been the victims. I believed in the American way: in its deity, its ideals, its good manners, its restraints, its orderliness and its cleanliness. I still do. Of course, I perceive its faults—what child of Italian parentage would not?—its priggishness, its prejudices, its materialism, its hypocrisy. But it still seems a lot better to me than what my parents ran away from. The tragedy of American civilization is that it has swept away WASP morality and put nothing in its place. Franklin Roosevelt was not a traitor to his class, as his old college classmates maintained: he was its last great representative.
When Pussy and I were married in 1915 I was not yet a partner in the firm, but I was headed for it. Mr. Findlay accorded me the signal honor of attending my bachelors’ dinner and even had several more than his usually moderate quota of drinks. When I asked him confidentially if he did not recant of his proffered warning, he simply shrugged and said: “Well, you picked a fine girl. Pussy has none of her father’s weakness. We can be frank, my boy, you and I. But what she will never appreciate is your success, or why you care about it. I told you how it was, Mario. They go either one way or the other. And I don’t know which is worse.”
It was not long before I discovered what the old man meant. Pussy was the dearest little thing you can imagine, with brown eyes and chestnut hair and a kind of breathless enthusiasm, and she had seemed to find it terribly exciting that I was Italian and Catholic. I had been aware that she had a deep puritan streak and an exaggerated sense of civic duty—she spent half her evenings at a settlement house teaching poetry to telephone operators—but I had never doubted, despite my boss’s warning, that I would be able to change all that. Once married to me, would not Pussy be glad to shed her girlish fads and share my tastes and enthusiasms? Should I not open up to her a larger life?
Never was fatuous man more deluded. What I had not gleaned—what man of Mediterranean background could have?—was that once ma
rried to me, Pussy should have conceived that I had become incorporated into the tight box of her own gray puritan fate. Oh, she loved me, yes, but she loved me now as a fellow prisoner, as one who had volunteered to leave his privileged seat in the arena and leap down to join her amid the hungry lions. The sacrifice was touching, no doubt, even overwhelming, but for better or worse I was now subject to her god.
By which I do not mean an Episcopalian god. Far from it. Pussy, like many religiously inclined Protestant agnostics of her generation, cared nothing for sect or dogma. Her god refused to be tied down; he was too busy tormenting consciences. Pussy was even shocked at my giving up Catholicism. She said it might look as if I were doing it for social reasons.
“Do you mean I can’t give up something I don’t believe in because someone might call me a toady?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured doubtfully. “Is that what I mean? Perhaps it is.”
Let me hasten to add that, for all our differences, Pussy and I were basically happy. Not that she ever changed. Oh, no! The big income that I ultimately earned, the ostentatious way of life that I adopted (a Georgian town house in the East Sixties and a country estate on the north shore of Long Island), the private schools to which I sent our son and daughter, even my art collection of Post-Impressionists and Fauves—all of these she accepted without in any way altering the basic pattern of a daily existence largely devoted to school and hospital work. She never sneered at my enthusiasms; she rarely even criticized them, but she sometimes looked askance. She lived like an unimpressed poor relative in the midst of my glory. She was always perfectly amiable, if slightly distraite, as my hostess at dinner parties where the guests, wines and menus were chosen by me. I think that without my considerable contributions to her charities, she might have absented herself from some of these. But her puritan conscience would not allow her to accept something for nothing. Oh, yes, she was always just.
And she was the stronger of us two. That showed in the children. Both Alma and Tomaso were essentially hers. They were obedient and respectful to me, at least until they went to college and became tinged with radicalism, and I think they cared for me, in their own way, but Pussy was always the “real” parent. Her murky god got his long fingers into their consciences, too, and made them view me somewhat in the light of a genial Philistine. Alma, fortunately, majored in the history of art and gave me substantial help with my art collection. It was thanks to her advice that I bought the Pissarro from the sale of which Pussy and I have largely subsisted since my disbarment.
Which ugly term brings me at last to Gridley Forrest. I had known him slightly ever since my marriage, for Mathilde, his wife, had been a classmate and cousin of Pussy’s, but the two girls were too different to be congenial, and we had seen little of the Forrests until the late nineteen-thirties, when he became a judge at the federal circuit court of appeals. It was he who then sought my company, he who initiated the friendship, if that is the proper word for the relationship that developed between us.
But a word first about his wife, Mathilde, which name she pronounced in the French way. She had been brought up in the same fashion as Pussy, but if ever there was an argument in favor of heredity over environment, it was the contrast supplied by these two. Mathilde, presumably, was the other type of New York girl to whom Mr. Findlay had so darkly referred. She was no more like my Pussy than if she had been born and raised in the Antipodes. To begin with, she was beautiful and blond and had a bewitching charm of manner. And then, instead of suffering from Pussy’s deep sense of personal unworthiness, Mathilde took for granted that every gift life tossed in her lap was not one jot more than her due. Indeed, as a girl she had considered that fortune had rather scanted her. Why had her family had to make do with a shabby brownstone house off Gramercy Park when the Vanderbilts had marble palaces?
Her marriage to Gridley Forrest, a young man of no particular means or social position at the time, had come as something of a surprise to her friends, but when they learned that he was not only brilliant but forceful, they decided that she knew what she was doing. His legal future seemed assured, and Mathilde certainly did not care whether money was old or new so long as she had it. When it later became apparent that Gridley had political and judicial ambitions, these were perfectly acceptable to her, so long as he had put aside enough to make up for any diminution in income.
Mathilde would never, beyond the merest civility, have much to do with any of her husband’s legal or political associates who were not of her own social set. In this she actually regarded herself as morally justified. Once, when I ventured to suggest to her that it might help Gridley if she would broaden herself a bit, she retorted that, thank you very much, she was not going to turn herself into a hypocrite for the sake of money or high office! But I must admit that she was a delightful woman—when things were going her way. She was bright and observant and could be very funny. And she certainly played a marvelous game of bridge.
Much later I learned another of her characteristics. She was a tribal creature, and when society condemned her husband, she accepted the verdict without question. Yet I do not believe that she had the smallest sense of personal outrage at what Gridley had done. That was all some kind of senseless men’s business. But when she heard the chief medicine man, so to speak, proclaim the oudawing of her husband, what could she do but join the others in the ritual dance? She was decent enough to Gridley when he came out of prison, for she had a basically kind nature, but she continued to dine out and to play bridge in houses where he could not accompany her. Perhaps it was just as well. Cooped up alone they might have come to loathe each other.
Gridley Forrest, I sometimes think, was put on this earth to destroy me, the one being equipped by a malign creator with the apparatus fatal to my defenses, as the mongoose is to the cobra or the desert wasp to the tarantula. That word wasp again! He had an uncanny way of seeming to enter inside of one, to rummage around in one’s basement or attic, turning up this or that, pulling soiled clothes out of baskets, and all with an air of total matter-of-factness, as if it were something he had to do, a kind of chore—perhaps, indeed, just such a thing as you would naturally do to him, if you only could.
He was a very large man, portly but square-shouldered and strongly built, with a shiny bald dome and a severe square face, small but pronounced features and gray, cold eyes that glittered with a seeming severity behind his pince-nez. He was always opulently and immaculately dressed, either in dark suits, or, in the country, in rather surprisingly loud tweeds. He was never loved by underlings. Yet he had an astonishing way of achieving rapid intimacy with people, once he had decided that he wished it. It was almost as if he might ask you, on a first acquaintance, if you had slept with your wife before you married her. And yet his manner was so direct, so judicial, that one hardly resented it. There was even something a bit flattering about it. You were raised to his level. You might even begin to wonder if he would not tell you if he had slept with his.
The Forrests and the Fabbris exchanged dinner invitations perhaps twice a year, but Gridley and I did not become personal friends until my election to the Greenvale Country Club in 1934. I should admit here that election to this club was the social triumph of my life. I never could see why Pussy and the children found it stuffy. I enjoyed it just as much as, during my two years on the waiting list, I had thought I should. I loved the big white shiny clubhouse, always so freshly painted, with its porticos overlooking the green stretch of the golf course merging in the distance with the green or golden woods; the huge sapphire swimming pool; the grass courts; the smart women in tennis clothes with well-set golden hair and golden jewelry. My son, Tom, said that I liked it because it looked like a Packard advertisement. But wasn’t a Packard advertisement meant to convey the idea of a luxurious and agreeable existence?
Forrest played golf every weekend at the club, and soon after my election he started asking me to join him. In the course of a year this became an established thing. We met every
Saturday to play eighteen holes and have a couple of drinks afterwards in the bar that looked over the riding ring. Forrest never asked anyone to join us, and he was not a man whom one approached without a bidding, even in that club. I don’t think he was ever much interested in people. An audience of one was all that he needed to discuss his two favorite topics: the craft of judging and the state of the real estate market, in which he had invested Mathilde’s money and his own savings. Of course, I was more interested in the former, but with a couple of large construction companies among my clients, I cared a good deal about the latter as well. Forrest would always indulge my curiosity with fascinating tidbits about his cases and fellow judges before pumping me about housing developments. I was perfectly aware that I was being pumped, but I had no objection. Was I not, in my own way, pumping him? It was useful, in my practice, to know all I could about his court.
He knew that I admired him as a judge, and he took my admiration, like everything else, for granted. He had a just rather than a conceited view of his own distinction, and he fitted himself appropriately, I thought, into the history of the American judiciary. Only he was less sanguine about his future than I. He shook his head with sudden, sharp irritation when I once predicted his ultimate elevation to the Supreme Court.
“Not a prayer!” he retorted. “I’d have as much chance as John W. Davis.”
“But Davis is an arch-conservative. Even if he is a Democrat. You haven’t opposed the New Deal.”
“But a man’s got to be more than neutral these days. He’s got to be committed, dedicated. From now on every justice appointed to that Court is going to have to be a man who will make old MacReynolds and Butler vomit all over their black robes!”
The image seemed unduly violent. “Roosevelt isn’t going to be in office forever.”
“Don’t bet on that! We’re living in a revolution. It’s going to be a long time before moderate men are listened to.”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 34
