The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  “And what of that, sir? Are they not more qualified?”

  “Tell me, sir. Are you yourself not one of the financial leaders of the country?”

  “That is not for me to say, Mr. Florham.”

  “But if you are—and let us suppose, for the purposes of this discussion, that you are the greatest of such—would you not have a power comparable to that of the President himself?”

  “Granting your hypothesis, yes, sir, I should.”

  I groaned inwardly. I had a vision of what the newspapers would surely make of this. They would shout from coast to coast that Lees Dunbar deemed himself more powerful than Warren G. Harding. And wasn’t it true that he did believe it, even if he had not said it in so many words? It was not so much that my hero had made himself into a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal; anything could be forgiven the senescent. What split my heart was that I was now beginning to see that this streak of megalomania had always been there. I had been fighting off my suspicions for some time, but now my vision had been horridly cleared. The Dunbar on the stand was not so different from the one I had worshiped in my mother’s salon. Had he not always harbored the illusion that he was running his little world, like Napoleon in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, pulling the straps and cords in the back of his plunging carriage in the belief that he was making it go? What was Wall Street in the obsessed imagination of Lees Dunbar but a parade ground where regiments in close-order drill executed his barked commands of “Squads left!” and “Left by squadrons!”? And what was I but the dazzled child who had believed it all?

  Mr. Dunbar did not long survive the congressional hearing or the embarrassing publicity that followed it, though the worst of the latter I was able to spare him. His last days were marked by delirium, and I hardly left his bedside. His ravings about a Brazilian rain forest made little sense to me until at last he gave this seeming cohesion to them:

  “That company we had on the Amazon. Do you remember, George? We had to clear a great area for rubber farming. And then that crazy manager chucked the work. After the men tried to kill him, do you remember? And how fast the jungle filled it all in. In weeks, George! In just weeks!”

  I supposed this was his way of expressing the futility of trying to make any permanent clearing in the jungle of economic life and that the poor old boy was experiencing some of the same sour disillusionment that I was facing. I attempted to console him, but he did not seem to hear me. Soon after he became entirely incoherent. When at last his heavy breathing ceased, and I contemplated that strangely still body, I was seized with a wild despair. Marion, hearing my cry in the next room, hurried in with the doctor. I shall never forget the shocked look on her countenance as she contemplated mine.

  I can appreciate now that what had shocked her was not my grief but its cause. How could a woman, brought up to admire the strong and superior in the male sex, feel anything but distaste for a man who sobbed over the death of an old gentleman who was not even kin to him? And how could such a man take up the scepter that old Dunbar had meant for warlords? Hadn’t I just proved myself inept?

  With Lees Dunbar’s death I seemed to have lost my purpose in life; I began even to wonder if I might not as well have lost life itself. For three weeks I did not go to the office at all. I stayed alone in the house in Old Westbury, leaving Marion and her father to cope with the problems of the estate of which he and I were executors. I wondered at times if my depression would not congeal into a permanent state.

  Marion telephoned every other day to see how I was doing. Her attitude was that of a nurse to a child whose illness might have been feigned; she showed a businesslike concern, but little sympathy.

  “I suppose you must be aware there are important questions to be decided in the firm. Do you really think it’s wise to be away?”

  Of course, she meant the question of succession. Marion’s conscience required her to warn me. But I had a distinct sense that she was just as glad to have me where I was.

  “I can always be reached by telephone.”

  “All right, George. If that’s the way you want to play it.”

  Mr. Dunbar, even approaching senility, had retained the function as well as the title of managing partner. His replacement would now have to be proposed by a nominating committee on which I, as a likely successor, did not sit. The only other serious candidate was Hugh Norman, and everyone knew that Mr. Dunbar had given me his preference.

  It was my embarrassed father-in-law who drove out to Long Island to inform me of the firm’s choice.

  “I needn’t tell you, George, how esteemed you are by all your partners,” he assured me, after several throat-clearings. “But there does seem to be a feeling that your talents do not include a taste for the petty details of day-to-day management. Why should they? We have partners who even like that sort of thing. You’re too valuable to be wasted on questions of promotion and demotion, or hiring and firing, or whether the reception hall needs redecoration or should we put urinals in the old washrooms.”

  “In other words, I should stay in my ivory tower.”

  “Now, George, you mustn’t take it that way. This is all very well meant. You can say your partners are greedy if you like. They want to squeeze the last drop out of what you’re best at. Leave administration to Hugh Norman. Nothing’s too petty for Hugh. He’s that rara avis who can see both the forest and every damn tree in it.”

  It was thus I first learned that, without either my advice or consent, Hugh Norman had been chosen to succeed Lees Dunbar as managing partner of the firm. John Leslie was too old, and I . . . well, it was obvious that the membership did not see in me the image they wished to present to the world. It was also obvious that Marion had conspired with her father to promote her lover ahead of her husband. But wasn’t the lover more of a husband than I?

  The crisis for me was simply that the elaborately wrought inner scaffolding on which I had gingerly positioned my entire emotional life had been swept away overnight by the roaring cataract of Hugh Norman. At dreary dawn I found myself forlornly stranded on the gray banks of his relendess river. Where now was the long envisaged role of the arbiter of Wall Street? Oh, no, not quite of Wall Street—I was never such a fool as to think I could attain that, though in dizzy dreams such a pinnacle might have seemed almost achievable. But I had certainly visualized myself in a position of power comparable to that of Lees Dunbar, though without his hallucinations of national dominance. I had seen myself, much more modestly, as the umpire of corporate conflict within my chosen bailiwick, as a man who could bring some degree of governance into the chaos of my immediate economic vicinity, who could impose the order of the balance sheet on clients of messy thinking and even messier emotions. All I had wanted was to create a little civilization in my own back yard.

  But now! Now I was only the expert diagnostician of corporate ailments. My analyses would still be sought by my partners, but how they would use them was no longer my affair. They would, of course, be concerned only with profit. In other words, my firm would be just like all the others. Some would ask: had it not always been? Who cared about George Manville’s dreams? Did anyone even know about them? Whom had I ever told but the unlistening Marion?

  8

  I had never liked Hugh Norman, even before his affair with Marion. Not because he was cold; I have never minded coldness. It was more that I suspected he was at heart unscrupulous. Oh, he would do everything according to the rules, yes. But if he should ever learn that a form of profitable wrongdoing had become at least tolerated by the “better sort,” I had little doubt that he would engage in it. His morals, so to speak, depended on his private poll of the marketplace. Like a courtier of Henry VIII, as interpreted by Holbein, he would nurse no ideals. His courage consisted simply in his willingness to risk the headsman’s ax in his pursuit of power.

  He and I had always got on well enough, outwardly anyway, and he probably assumed we would continue to. He undoubtedly despised me as a cuckold, but this was not a matter that mu
ch concerned him. He exactly appreciated my value to the firm, and now he had the satisfaction of knowing I was no longer a rival.

  How long his contempt and my resentment would have jogged along uneventfully together without the incident of the “pool” for the cornering of a certain stock, I do not know, but that changed everything. Hugh asked me to attend a small gathering of bankers and brokers at his house in Old Westbury one Sunday afternoon. It was not a firm matter, and it was not my custom to go in for such games, but I had no wish to offend him without good cause, so I went, to be polite.

  It was three o’clock on a peerless June afternoon. Most of the dozen gentlemen gathered in that dark library, surrounded by English hunting prints and standard sets of unread classics, would have been on the golf course had not a sharper game attracted them. They had lunched with their host; brandy and whiskey glasses were on the tables, and the air was heavy with cigar smoke. Having walked over from my own place in the glorious air, I felt an immediate revulsion.

  “Ah, George, good, we can start,” my host greeted me. I declined both drink and weed a bit brusquely and took a seat in the corner. “I think you gentlemen will all agree that this is a very pretty little scheme. I miss my guess if even the great George isn’t tempted.”

  He proceeded, without interruption, to oudine his plan to corner the stock of a vulnerable food-store chain of whose precarious financing he had had a careful study made. It was a simple and classic scheme. A graduated purchase of the company’s common stock would drive the market price to an unrealistic high, at which point the pool would dump its holdings, leaving a gullible public to pick up the pieces in the subsequent crash. It was the same old game played half a century before by Jim Fisk and Jay Gould except on a smaller and less market-threatening scale, a kind of gentlemen’s cockfight, disastrous largely to gambling short sellers with whose welfare the loftier bankers and brokers had little concern. It was not my practice to take part in such ventures, but I had never expressed disapproval of them. I had followed the lead of that greatest of stoics, Marcus Aurelius, who deemed it his duty to attend the bloody but popular games at the Colosseum which even he was powerless to ban, but, seated in the imperial box, kept his eyes fixed on some learned scroll.

  “How about it, George? Can we count you in?”

  “I think I’ll pass, thank you.”

  I received some surprised looks, even a couple of critical ones, and a general discussion began in which I took no part. But I was confused by my own unrest. Where was the emperor, calmly perusing a tract of Zeno while the gladiators dueled below? I should have been above it all instead of being angry. Was it my function to interfere with bread and circuses? No! But I didn’t have to stay and listen. I rose.

  “Gentlemen, I leave you to your little frolics.”

  Hugh followed me out of the room to the front door. “You won’t play with us, George?” he asked in his usual quiet tone. But there was a hint of a rasp in it now.

  “No, I find I have put away childish things. Particularly when the other children are playing such dirty pool.”

  “Dirty pool! It wasn’t too dirty for your sacred Mr. Dunbar to play!”

  “That’s a lie! He never did!”

  “Really, George, you’re too naive. This business of the one god being Lees Dunbar and Manville being his prophet has got to have an end. Dunbar himself didn’t dare tell you all he was up to!”

  I went on my way without another word, but fury and sickness ate at my heart.

  That night Marion accosted me in my study, where I was sipping a strong but single predinner martini.

  “Aggie Norman just called me. She said you were shockingly rude to Hugh this afternoon. They’re both very upset. She thought you must have been feeling ill or perhaps had had some piece of bad news.”

  “No, I’m feeling fine. And the only bad news I’ve had is that Hugh and his little gang are planning a vicious stock market raid. But the good news is that I’ve taken a resolution which has given me the greatest satisfaction. I intend never to set foot in Hugh Norman’s house again. Seeing him in the office will be quite enough.”

  “George!” Marion looked aghast. “Hugh and Aggie are my closest friends!”

  “Oh, you may go there as often as you like. My good resolutions apply only to myself.”

  “But what on earth has Hugh done to you?”

  “Nothing to me. And nothing to anyone else that he hasn’t done a dozen times before. It’s simply that now at last I see him. And I find I don’t like what I see.”

  “But that’s crazy!”

  “Will you kindly then allow a lunatic to finish his cocktail in peace? I have nothing more to say on the subject of Hugh Norman.”

  Marion left me at this, but the following day, finding me still adamant, she proposed—and I, after some musing, accepted—this practical compromise. She would continue to go to the Normans’, attributing my absence to a need of evening hours for the composition of an economic thesis, and Hugh and Aggie would come to us only for larger parties where he and I need exchange only a few formalities.

  To tell the truth, I was surprised at my own obstinacy in refusing to cross Hugh’s threshold. I suppose it was my only way of expressing my hostility to everything he represented to me. Other than that, I had no recourse but in the dreamland of fantasized violence. But what a hotbed that was! I imagined myself as a fiery U.S. attorney, brilliantly reinterpreting old cases and laws to criminalize his pools. I saw him abjectly pleading for mercy before a stern, gavel-wielding judge. I even saw . . . but a truce to this childishness. The only benefit I conceivably derived from my rage and helplessness may have been in a dim, dawning sense of what I still might accomplish with my wrecked life.

  Some such glimmer, anyway, may have prompted me to come to better terms with Marion. After all, our absurd and unnatural design for living had been as much my doing as hers. I invited her to my study at cocktail time to discuss how our compromise was working.

  “Don’t you really think, Marion, that under the circumstances my distancing myself from Hugh may have made all our relationships easier? Not only his and mine, but yours and mine and even yours and his?”

  She examined the back of her outstretched left hand as if she were appraising her ring. “You and I have never really discussed my relationship with Hugh.”

  “What would have been the point? Obviously, I have accepted it. It was quite clear to me, long before you took up with Hugh, that your heart had not died with Malcolm Dudley.”

  “I was an awful goose about that, George.”

  “But I knew you were. Not a goose, but deluded. I knew you’d get over him, and I took advantage of that. That’s why I have no moral right to object to Hugh. As your friend. He need not, of course, be mine.”

  “That’s really very handsome of you. And if at any time you want a friend, a lady friend I mean, you will find me equally understanding.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it might even be a relief to you. But I shan’t be needing one.”

  “You don’t ever have the needs of other men?”

  “Let’s put it that I’m neuter. That avoids odious speculations.”

  But Marion did not want even her husband-in-name-only to be that. “I’d rather put it that you’re virtuous.”

  “Thank you, my dear. I accept the mask.” In fact, I was virgin to both sexes, as ascetic as a priest. But only in priests was this considered admirable. “Let me put something more serious to you. Isn’t divorce the obvious solution to our bizarre situation? You married me to become the consort of the future sovereign of Dunbar Leslie. You overestimated my claim to the succession. Why not marry King Hugh?”

  Marion’s expression was fixed now as she concentrated on the problem. “Hugh and I have discussed that, and we had guessed you wouldn’t stand in our way. But there are two compelling reasons against it. First, a double divorce under the circumstances, followed immediately by the marriage of a partner’s wife to the senior partner, would dam
age the reputation of the firm. And secondly, Hugh and I could not bear to hurt Aggie Norman, who has been so wonderfully understanding about us.”

  “More so than I’ve been?”

  “Oh, yes. Because I haven’t been giving Hugh anything that you really wanted. And Aggie has wanted Hugh to have the kind of love she hasn’t been able to give him since her illness. I can’t take anything more from her than I already have. She must remain Mrs. Hugh Norman.”

  I wondered if this generosity did not spring more from Marion than from Hugh. But anyway I approved it. “Aggie has told me herself that the polio gravely damaged her heart. She doesn’t believe she has long to live.”

  “All the more reason not to hurt her! And of course she might live for years. I sincerely hope she does. But that brings me—plunk—to a very, very delicate question. One that I’ve been wondering if I’d ever have the courage to ask you.”

  “You mean, how good is my health?”

  “Oh, my God, no! For what do you take me? I’m sure you’ll bury us all. And I shouldn’t blame you if you did it with some satisfaction. No, what I was going to ask you . . .”

  She paused. “Really, I wonder if I can.”

  “I think I’m beginning to guess. Marion, are you by any chance pregnant?”

  “No!” she exclaimed excitedly. “But you’re very warm. Thank you, George, now I think I can tell you. I want to bear Hugh’s child. Only one, if it should be a boy. Or more, until a boy came. Call me crazy if you will, but I have this strange feeling that a son of Hugh’s and mine would one day be head of the firm! Oh, I’m sure of it! Try to believe at least in my sincerity, George.”

  “I should think the boy would indeed have an excellent chance. Your father would probably leave him his entire interest in the firm, and with that, added to Hugh’s, he’d have to be retarded not to go far.”

  “Oh, George, don’t make mock of it, please.”

  “I’m entirely serious. You and Hugh, I assume, would be counting on me not to deny paternity.”