Diary of a Yuppie

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I’ve told you. He’s old-fashioned. And I have to get ahead.”

  “Have to?”

  “Well, do you think my family don’t cost me a mint? It’s all very well for you to spend your days with your poets and think high and lofty thoughts, but I notice that you expect private schools for the girls and that you like to travel and—”

  “Yes, of course I do. You don’t have to be a financial giant to have those things.”

  “But if I’m going to be anything, I’m going to be a giant. There’s no halfway for me.”

  She sighed. “That’s it, then. You want to be what you’re making yourself. It’s a free choice.”

  “And always has been. I haven’t changed. That’s where you’re wrong. I could prove it to you in the papers I’ve kept.”

  She visibly shuddered. “You mean you might let me read them? After all these years? I wonder if I want to. Now.”

  “Because they might show you had married the wrong man?”

  Our eyes met. “Maybe. Maybe that is what I’m afraid of.”

  If she had only burst into tears! There is nothing I would not have done for a weeping Alice. I have a recurring dream of Alice suffering some cruel and undeserved punishment, writhing, bewildered, clutching a rag about her exposed limbs as a savage tormentor strikes blow after blow upon her bare back. Alice hurt, terrified, pleading, desperate…; I wake up and cry out aloud at this picture, as vivid as some nineteenth-century academic painting of a tortured Christian slave girl. At such moments I love Alice so passionately that I can imagine myself, like the Roman officer in The Sign of the Cross, tearing off my insignia and leaping into the arena to meet the lion’s gory mane at the side of my love. A happy death!

  But no. Alice always has to be above me. She has to be the angel of light. She seems almost able to divine the rush of my inner sympathy and anxious to head it off. I suppose she spurns it as sentimentality. But love is love, in all its forms. It is not to be lightly rebuffed.

  4

  ALICE THINKS we have been drawing apart. We haven’t. She has been drawing apart from me. And she thinks that we are becoming disillusioned with each other. We aren’t. She is becoming disillusioned with me. I have the same opinion of her that I had when I married her, and I believe that my opinion is still a correct one. This is not because I am more perceptive than Alice. It is simply that I am not burdened with the astigmatism of her need to idealize people. She is not unlike Mr. Blakelock in this. As a matter of fact, she is not unlike many of our middle class in this. Her parents had the same failing and taught it to her. My parents also tried, but they were inept teachers. Any child could have seen through them.

  When Alice and I enter a cocktail party, we tend to give the impression of a fine young American couple who will probably go to the top of their ladders, or fairly high up anyway, and who will grace those ladders in doing so. “What a fine pair!” people exclaim. We are both of a good size, well made, with little fat; Alice has rich dark hair, a squarish face, perfect skin, and her eyes, wide apart, bear an expression that combines, charmingly, a warm sincerity with a faint, pleased surprise that she is so continually being confronted with such wonderful things. And I, of course, as I have so often confided to these pages, am the all-American kid (the kid in his early thirties, however), who looks as if he would like nothing better than to bound out of the house and pass a football with his host’s sons and who was probably freckled when he was their age. The great difference between us is that Alice supposes that the impression we give bears some relation to the actuality. I know that it’s just an act, like other people’s acts. That does not necessarily make it sinister. Are other people sinister?

  If I were to tell Alice that I love her as much as I did on the day we were married she would probably retort that in that case I have never really loved her. But would it be true? What is love? She has never ceased to be physically attractive to me, and I delight in her sense of humor and respect her intellect when it is not clouded by illusions about love and duty. If she were a little more honest with herself, she would be almost perfect. It is a fact, as she complains, that I do not miss her when I go off on business trips, but then I never miss anybody when I know I shall see them again in due course. This is true of all but the neurotically dependent, but it does not make one popular to say it. Alice likes to make a great deal of missing me, but then she wants to miss me. She does not think she would be a deep person if she did not miss the man she loved. Or ought to love.

  For love to Alice is a very big thing. She thinks that people who do not have it have missed the best in life. She does not realize that everyone has it. That might make it seem too cheap. And it has to be based on a solid pedestal of honor; true love, in Alice’s book, exists only between two morally upright and mutually trusting persons, who should also have a generous political and humanitarian viewpoint. I should not go so far as to say that she believes true love exists only between Democrats or liberal Republicans in tune with the New York Times editorial policy, but there might be a kernel of truth in it. True love may be found between Romeo and Juliet, but never between Macbeth and his lady. And indeed if Alice is today beginning to see me as morally unworthy of a great passion, it is because she is building an excuse for its failure between us. It cannot be she who has failed in the challenge of love. That would be unbearable to her.

  Alice and I were both only children. Only children are apt to be extreme realists or extreme idealists; it is obvious how that turned out in each case. And the reasons are also obvious. Alice’s father was a man who considered that he was a failure when he was actually rather a success. My father considered that he was a success when he was actually rather a failure. The offspring of each reacted in such a way as best to protect themselves from a repetition of parental illusions.

  The Jock Nortons, Alice’s parents, lived down the road from us in the village of Keswick in Westchester County. Alice and I were classmates in high school and later at Columbia, where we became engaged in our senior year. We were “childhood sweethearts,” which Jock Norton always maintained was the American nightmare, only half laughing when he said it. He was a freelance writer who always believed—according to Alice, for he was too much of a gentleman to say it—that, had he not saddled himself with a wife and child and an expensive house in the suburbs, he might have been a first-class novelist. What he never realized was that his genius was precisely for the kinds of pieces that he did write: brilliant short stories, witty satirical poetry, devastating movie reviews, which brought him a modest but regular income. He was better off, I am sure, lamenting a career as a major writer of fiction than facing its failure. Isabel, his wife, was saved from the boredom of suburbia by her constant anxiety as to whether her husband’s regular drinking and irregular adulteries would get out of control. They never did. Jock Norton always knew what he was doing. He was a bit of a ham who was ashamed but not ashamed enough of being one. He even had the decency to be a bit ashamed of his success in playing the role of adored father to a too genuinely adoring daughter.

  Fatuity, on the other hand, was the keynote of my father’s life. Jason Service was and still is, at seventy, an associate in the great Wall Street firm of Burr & Doyle. When he started practicing law in the late 1930s that firm had perhaps fifty lawyers; now it has three hundred. Dad’s tall, ambling figure, his high, shiny dome, big nose and bleary gray eyes are almost a trademark of the organization. Everyone knows him; everyone respects him; everyone pities him. Why did he not move on when he failed to make partner thirty or more years ago? Because he had a specialty in patents and a safe little niche, and he always claimed that he was not interested in the “rat race for partnership,” that there was adequate dignity and satisfaction in a job well done. He loves, or purports to love, his little nook in the law and insists that it is a relief not to be bothered with administrative problems or what he likes jocularly to call “ambulance chasing,” by which term he simply means acquisition of the roster of clients
necessary to support any law practice. He has always made a decent salary, and our small Queen Anne house and acre of land in Keswick are situated on a pleasant rural road. He could afford to send me away to Haverstock Academy for my last year of high school, so I was able to enter Columbia with some air of being a “preppie.” And poor Mother, spare, thin, angular, apprehensive, has always been so fiercely defensive of him that I believe she has almost dreaded that my own incipient success might tear the blinders from his eyes as to what his own career has not been. She needn’t worry. Deep down he knows. People always know.

  My reaction to Father’s position in Burr & Doyle was one of violent humiliation, all the worse in that I recognized that the truly shameful thing was my feeling so. Father and Mother were very well thought of in Keswick; their friends and neighbors would have been shocked by my attitude. But my trouble had begun at the age of twelve when I had the bad luck to see my father through the eyes of the snotty son of a senior partner. Mr. Doyle and Father were exact contemporaries and had started in the then firm of Burr & Hutchinson right after law school, even sharing an office. The rise of one to senior partnership while the other remained a salaried associate naturally put a strain on the friendship, but Mr. Doyle was not a man to let it too glaringly show, and he always affected a rather demonstrative heartiness towards Father when they met. Once, when we were asked to a firm outing at Mr. Doyle’s estate in Roslyn, Long Island, his son Tom was delegated to take the lawyers’ children on a ramble in the woods. Walking in the lead with me he asked me my name. “Oh, yes,” he commented when he heard it, “you’re ‘Old Jake’s’ son. My dad says yours is one of his top clerks. ‘They don’t make ‘em like Old Jake anymore,’ he always says. ‘They broke the mold after they made him.’”

  Oh, the compliments of children! That one broke my life in two. I thought of Father from then on as a kind of Uncle Tom, and I should not have been surprised to hear that the usually benevolent Mr. Doyle, chancing to find his faithful servitor in some breach of duty, had brought the lash down on his stooped shoulders. To my parents’ dismay I refused ever again to go to a firm outing, becoming almost hysterical when pressed. And when I graduated from law school I hurt my father deeply by declining even to be interviewed for a job in Burr & Doyle, although Mr. Doyle, impressed by my grades and Law Review editorship, had been genuinely anxious to offer me one. But I knew that David Burr, Jr., had just been taken in as a partner, and I would rather have died than give people the chance to quip: “Burr & Doyle is the only firm in town with a father and son among the partners and a father and son among the clerks!”

  Now who would have said a thing like that? Very likely nobody. But the fact that I knew that my soul was the only one on fire did not make the suffering less acute. Indeed, the only thing that would have made it more acute would have been precisely if others did suspect it. Alice, for example. She might have left me had she known that I was ashamed of my father, whom she adored. But then Alice’s mind is as different from mine as day from night. She may hardly realize that Dad is not a partner!

  5

  ATLANTIC RYLANDS has lost its bid to take over Shaughnessy Products, and even though it has made millions out of its defeat because of the boosting of Shaughnessy shares it had to acquire, the feeling among its officers is bitter. It is an instance of money not being everything; victory can be more coveted than profit. One vice president went so far as to imply to me that Blakelock’s friendship for Albert Lamb had signally reduced his aggressiveness. What would this officer have said had he known of the unused opportunity of Lamb’s brother!

  “Frankly, Bob,” he told me, “there were some of us—and I don’t mind including the chairman of our board—who wish you’d been in charge.”

  “Oh, come now. Branders Blakelock is one of the undisputed leaders of the New York bar. He’s taught me everything I know, and I’m still learning.”

  It was loyal of me to say this, but loyalty is a quality that is highly regarded in corporate circles. A young man who turns on one boss may turn on another.

  “He may be a leader of the old bar, but this is a new one. I don’t really believe that men of his generation have what it takes for this kind of work. They’re too bogged down in old ideas of politesse. Like that French officer in the history books who invited the enemy to fire first.”

  “I guess you have to have been born after World War II to be a real skunk.”

  My friend grunted appreciatively. “And I guess you need one to fight one.”

  I have been giving the most serious consideration to the question of whether or not Hoyt, Welles & Andrew is the right firm for me. I’ve been compiling statistics, breaking the partners down according to age, social background, religion, inherited wealth, law school, competence and legal specialty. I am troubled particularly by their ages. Nineteen out of thirty-six are over fifty and six are over sixty-five, which means that the next echelon will already be old by the time they take over management and will tend to lack the vitality and keenness needed to fight cases of increasing toughness and complexity. As a junior partner I could not reasonably expect to have a determinative share in executive decisions for at least a decade, by which time the firm might be down the drain. For we have seen grand old firms fall apart; it is a known thing.

  And how do I feel as I write this? As I face the fact that I may have spent eight years of exhausting work in the wrong law firm? I think what I feel is actually a kind of excitement! What is it but a great challenge, and one that I already begin to make out a way of meeting? At least it is more interesting than much of what is contained in my daily grind. And suppose I lose? But I shall not lose.

  The key to my solution is going to be Glenn Deane. Glenn is thirty-five and still an associate, though he has not yet been passed over, for he started late as a lawyer in the firm, having first been employed as an accountant who studied law at night. He is brilliantly able, but his partnership is not fully assured, as he is not considered “attractive” by some members of the firm. And indeed, he is not attractive. He is big, but on the stout side, and he is very plain, with a cauliflower nose, pushed a bit to the left, pockmarked cheeks, an oval chin and clever, mocking, small greenish-brown eyes under a high brow and balding dome. But he makes a bold and abrasive use of his unattractiveness, converting it into a kind of rough sex appeal. He knows when to wheedle and cajole and when to be brutal, even a bully. He is quite untrustworthy and capable of maudlin self-pity, but he can also be devilishly funny, and at weekend gatherings at his house in Chappaqua he is the life of the party, except to the occasional guest whom he tears to bits, egged on and applauded by his heavy, devoted wife, to whom he is periodically unfaithful. Glenn has worked with me in takeovers, and he is resourceful, imaginative and perfectly ready to use any weapon that he finds to hand. With someone of my “polish” to make up for his lack of it there is almost nowhere that he might not go. So we shall see.

  He and his wife, Lynne, have asked us to spend Saturday night at their house in Chappaqua. They are giving a cocktail party and have suggested that we may not want to drive back to the city before Sunday morning. Norma has agreed to stay with the girls, and Alice has reluctantly consented. Reluctantly, because, understandably, she dislikes the Deanes. But she is always a good office wife.

  Alice has been on a be-nice-to-hubby kick ever since the collapse of the Atlantic bid. I think that even she has been able to take in the gravity of one of these affairs when the client is dissatisfied, and she is troubled that she may have gone too far in criticizing my “aggressive” tactics. And of course she did go too far. She was pulling me down while I was trying to earn the money that she likes to spend. But I can overlook this because I love Alice and consider her a wife of great character and charm. She is an asset in my life, in my career, in my bed. And I suppose in my soul, if I have one. But I must also record that I gain an advantage over Alice if I abstain from open recrimination and allow her sense of guilt to work for me. And an advantage is somethi
ng one can always use over a spouse. The occasions do present themselves.

  The weekend of the Deanes’ party is over.

  Their home in Chappaqua is an old white farmhouse reduced to a half-acre of land by the encroaching suburb and containing enough bedrooms for five little Deanes. Lynne Deane is a noisy, stout blonde, efficient, direct, unimaginative and easily hurt, frequently reduced to despair by the cleverer but malign spouse whom she resentfully worships. Unlike Alice, who stands aloof from office gossip, Lynne knows everything about everyone in the firm, and she loves or loathes them in exact proportion to their being aids or obstacles to her husband. Needless to say, she is a veritable cesspool of gossip, and Glenn occasionally flies out at her savagely for going too far. “Do you want to ruin me, woman?” he will bark at her, and she will shriek back at him and then storm out of the room in a torrent of tears.

  Their cocktail party, which lasted for four hours, was made up half from the office and half from the neighborhood. The office people talked exclusively with one another, and the neighbors did the same; we formed two distinct groups, both perfectly content. Alice, following her old-fashioned notion that a guest should “help out” her hostess by cultivating strangers, did her best to talk to the neighbors, one after the other, who would each regard her with a faint suspicion and then resume their gossip with one another. At length she gave it up and joined me, like the other office wives who, whether from timidity, boredom or lack of social initiative, tended to remain glued to their husbands for the whole evening.