The Friend of Women and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I know it sounds odd,” she replied in answer to my question, “but I think what I’d like would be to find myself in a position in life where I’d be among the people who make the world go round.”

  “And would you be giving it a push of your own?”

  “In a way. But the great thing would be to be there.”

  “You mean, as the wife of some great man?”

  “Well, that would help, of course. But what I really mean is that I’d like to be able to shed some degree of influence. And not just on one man, but on more than one, and women, too. There’s much talk these days of women’s rights, and that’s well and good, but I’m still old-fashioned enough to think that the greatest effect that women can have on things is through their effect on men.”

  “You mean romantically?”

  “Well, that’s one way. But not the one I’m thinking of. I was thinking more of women as a necessary supplement to men. As stimulating ideas and projects that men might not realize without them.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, one way might be to create an attractive milieu for the exchange of ideas.”

  “Like a salon?”

  “Something like that. I believe uptown should be just as important as downtown. And a dinner party as productive as a conference room. I want to prepare myself for some such role. That’s why I’m so glad to be an eleventh grader this fall. I’ll be able to take your English course. Everyone says you have a wider vision of culture than any other teacher.”

  “Heavens! Well, you’ll be very welcome.”

  She proved almost at once to be one of my star pupils, and soon joined Cora and Letty at our weekend gatherings.

  When the question arose, after Alfreda’s debutante year, as to where she would best find the right matrimonial material, it came as something of a surprise to me, but not to the Bar Harbor summer community, that she did not go farther afield. The Belknaps were hardly an adventurous clan and seemed always to have been satisfied with the company of relatives and neighbors. And Tommy Newbold was a man whom everybody liked. He had messy blond hair, laughing blue eyes, and a strong, short, stocky figure; he joked about everything, sometimes a bit tiresomely but with an infectious good humor that nothing seemed able to quell. And yet he was reputed to be a shrewd and capable lawyer with a bright future in the great Wall Street firm for which he clerked. His family occupied a summer villa next to the Belknaps, and he had been “sweet on” his prim, pretty little neighbor from an early date. She must have seen greater possibilities in him than I did, though I by no means underrated him. But would he make the world go round?

  They made, it was true, a somewhat incongruous pair. Where she was so neat and dainty, presiding over the younger gatherings at her parents’ house with grace and precision, he was a rather fumbling sort, apt to spill a drink or slump too heavily in a delicate chair or even tell an off-color story to a prudish aunt. Yet he worshipped Alfreda; he seemed indeed almost in awe of her. She was always a little princess in his adoring eyes. She must have imagined that he was the kind of clay she could handle. Had she been a teacher as I was, she might have recognized that there were clays capable of resisting the deftest hands.

  They started well enough after a big stylish wedding at St. James’s in New York and a honeymoon in Majorca. Tommy soon became a partner in his firm, and Alfreda, in a few years’ time, was known about town for her elegant dinner parties in their small but exquisite penthouse on Park Avenue. She certainly did things well. Her food and wine were fine, her decoration tasteful, and she was clever in bringing people out, in making them talk. But there was no concealing from so close and interested an observer as myself that our hostess was not as satisfied with her achievement as her guests. The reason came out one evening when she had selected me to chat with after dinner. I had just congratulated her on the congeniality of the group she had assembled.

  “There are too many lawyers,” she complained. “Tommy always has his list of musts. And when they’re not lawyers, they’re clients. In Tommy’s world people dine out only to eat, drink, and talk shop. They have no interest in the exchange of ideas. Or of a social gathering as the soil in which the finest things can grow. I suppose they’re all as American as apple pie. But I sometimes wonder how long I can stand it, Hubert.”

  “You’re not really serious, Alfreda?”

  “I’ve never been more so!”

  “Then you’ve been dreaming, I suppose, of some kind of brilliant salon. Perhaps like Cora’s mother’s?”

  “Well, something of that sort. It was part of my old credo that a woman’s role is to make something of a man. Have I just been a fool?”

  “No. But you may have been born at the wrong time. And in the wrong place. Women are thinking today that their role is to make something of women.”

  “Which to me is the same thing. But Tommy is perfectly content to remain exactly what he is. He doesn’t want to change a thing about himself except to become a better and better lawyer.”

  “Which he will be,” I replied in stout defense of her worthy spouse. “You may find yourself the wife of a famous judge one day, my dear.”

  “And what will I be? An old, dull woman, the recipient of a million legal anecdotes. What can I make of a man who’s already made himself?”

  I was only left to hope that if Alfreda didn’t have a husband who could be fashioned into the man of her dreams, she might have a son or sons whom she could work on, but as time went by and no offspring appeared, I began to wonder if they ever would. Les petits dues se font un peu attendre, as my beloved Dumas fils wrote of the barren marriage of the due and duchesse de Septmonts in a late play.

  2.

  I have followed Alfreda’s life up to marriage, and I shall do the same with Cora King and Letty Bernard before enlarging upon the bitter crises that awaited all three in the early years of wedlock. Because I have always emphasized the great things that women can do without the assistance or even the presence of men, I do not wish to be taken as downgrading my own sex or exaggerating the problems of finding a worthy husband. All of my girls might easily have made happier matches. The only thing wrong with Tommy Newbold was that he wasn’t the right man for Alfreda. Luck plays a major role in matrimony.

  Cora King was something of a lost soul when she graduated from Miss Dickerman’s Classes. She should, of course, have gone to college, but she stubbornly refused to take the exams. I suspect this was because she feared failing all but English lit and dreaded the humiliation. It was certainly true that her grades in history and mathematics were dismal—only in my course did she excel. Like Alfreda and Letty she was an avid reader of fiction and poetry. She had even struck me at moments as being almost frantic to escape from a world in which she felt somehow inadequate to the world of her imagination.

  When I urged her to at least take a course at Columbia, she demurred, telling me that she wanted all her time for the composition of a novel. And indeed she wrote one, the dreary tale of a jaded debutante who has a tumultuous affair with a gangster, modeled no doubt on her adored Heathcliff. Of course she gave it to me to read, and of course I had to tell her, as gently as I could, that it wouldn’t do.

  Her reaction was violent. Instead of working on the drastic revisions that I had suggested, she burned the manuscript and vowed to write never again.

  “I suppose it’s just as well I found out young that I was no good,” she moaned. “Otherwise I might have wasted my whole life trying.”

  I was very much afraid that she was headed toward the wasting of her life in any case. She saw less of Alfreda now that the latter was married and absorbed in what Cora rather scornfully referred to as her “neat little housekeeping,” and Letty, though always friendly and hospitable, was now very taken up with her studies at Barnard. Cora was the financially unendowed only child of a second marriage; unlike her older and richer half-sisters, she was entirely dependent on her mother and lived at home. She did have a couple of love affairs, not as us
ual before World War II as now, but hardly surprising in view of her loneliness and stunning appearance. Neither, however, worked out. One was with an older married man, a painter whom she met at one of her mother’s gatherings, and who broke it off roughly when a former mistress wanted him back. It simply confirmed her idea that her mother’s guests found her good for only one thing. The other was a homosexual poet who was trying to persuade himself that he not what he manifestly was, and poor Cora insisted, typically, that her own ineptitude as a lover was the real cause of the tepidity of his performance. I began to think of her as a splendid but lonely lioness deprived of her pride—a word I use in two senses.

  I think I was close enough to Cora, whom I loved the most of my three, to continue my version of her story as though I were writing a novel. I am bold enough to hope that my reconstruction of conversations that I did not hear bears a sufficient resemblance to what may have actually been said.

  Cora always felt that her particular stumbling block in life had been that she had been brought up not in a home but in a salon. Her father, like his predecessor, had been divorced when she was three, and her mother, thereafter single, had been totally preoccupied with her gatherings. Alexia Gordon King—she always preserved the name, although only as a middle one, of the multimillionaire first husband she had long ago shed—was the renowned hostess of a famed salon that met on alternate Thursday evenings in her double brownstone mansion in Manhattan’s Murray Hill. There the talked-of writers, artists, and musicians of the day mingled freely with the more liberal politicians and the more open-minded of the old Knickerbocker society. Alexia had no special artistic genius of her own, but she had an unerring eye and ear for what was at least provocative in the new and, above all, a magnificent self-confidence that enabled her to push open any closed door and to demand—successfully—the impossible of anyone whose intellectual pocket she chose to pick.

  Cora’s mother, who noticed everything, was quite aware not only of her daughter’s deficiencies, but of her daughter’s awareness of them, and she was quite smart enough to perceive that the latter was the more truly harmful. The trouble was that when she had time to correct a child, which was rare enough, she did it with the sharpness of a professional dramatics coach at a rehearsal. She probably considered this a compliment to the child.

  “You think too much about yourself, Cora. You’re always fretting about what’s the right thing to say. I’ve watched you, my dear, even when you’ve no idea that I am. A hostess learns how to do that. Self-consciousness makes one awkward. You’ve got the right looks, the right appearance. Use them. Get into the person you’re talking to. Forget about Cora King and the impression she’s making. It doesn’t so much matter what you say as how you say it. Every professional comedian knows that. Of course that doesn’t mean you can say dumb things. Just learn to be silent about what you know nothing about. I heard you the other night, when you told Irving Berlin that your favorite of his songs was ‘Over There.’”

  Indeed Alexia had always seemed to be within earshot every time a gaffe was made. But there had been compensations in Cora’s life. The attention she received from boys at any mixed party of her own age was certainly flattering. But that sort of thing, she had strongly suspected, was trivial, or at least of minor importance in her mother’s greater world. She had not seen a place for herself of her very own until she had been invited to join a reading group of girls at school.

  This had come about from a seemingly unlikely source. Alfreda Belknap had appeared her opposite in every respect: small, neat, and orderly. But Alfreda’s inclinations were not all shaped by her discriminating taste. She had succumbed to a violent crush on Cora, sitting by her in class and whispering to her even in silent study periods. Cora accepted this with a rather benign indifference, but her enthusiasm was at last aroused when Alfreda directed her reading away from the detective stories that she had favored and focused her attention on The Idylls of the King. The next year Cora went on to Jane Austen and the Brontës and was introduced to the poetry of Keats and Shelley by the more serious Letty Bernard, who had accepted her as a now necessary appendage of her pal Alfreda. The “three musketeers” were soon a special trio at Mr. Hazelton’s once-a-week.

  What these meetings did for Cora was give her a sense of having a milieu of her own that was not only utterly independent of her mother’s exclusive and excluding salon, but that, in its own small way, had elements in common with it. Mr. Hazelton himself had on more than one occasion been asked to a gathering of Alexia’s, and he had spoken of it to Cora in terms that did not suggest it was Olympia but merely an agreeable medium for the exchange of views.

  “Would you like to be a great hostess like your ma?” Alfreda had asked Cora one day, as they walked home from a Hazelton meeting. “A Madame Recamier? Greeting the arriving guest with a sighed Enfin! and the departing one with a regretful Deja?”

  “I’d probably get them mixed up.”

  “Silly! You’d only have to look at your guests and be silent. God, if I had your looks, Cora, what couldn’t I do with them?”

  But time removed even this compensation from Cora’s life. After graduation from Miss Dickerman’s, the musketeers met much less often. Letty was busy at college, and Alfreda, cured of her teenage infatuation, was seriously dating Tommy Newbold.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and a year later a man appeared at Cora’s mother’s parties who showed a greater interest in her than did the other guests. Ralph Larkin, a bachelor nearing forty, a dark, heavyset, rather morose-looking man with bushy black eyebrows, heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, was invited to Alexia’s salon as trustee of a family foundation famed for its patronage of the arts. But he did not go into society with any aim of meeting artists and writers; he had simply decided that the time had come for him to marry, and he was looking for an appropriate mate. No doubt he assumed that any girl he picked would think twice before refusing him. His air of absolute self-confidence gave him an authority that somewhat offset the sullenness of his usual expression. One felt that here at least was a man.

  “Do you go in for all these longhairs, Miss King?” he asked Cora in a sneering tone.

  “Well, I’ve got rather long hair myself, Mr. Larkin.”

  “Yes, but it becomes you. And I mean that.”

  “I’m glad I have one asset. I was beginning to wonder.”

  She happened to be going to a subscription dance that night, and on sudden impulse she invited him to accompany her. He was not at all like the usual stags at such parties—college men who came to dance, drink, and flirt. He frankly admitted that he came to social gatherings only to pick a young and beautiful bride from the flock. After he had danced once with Cora, he danced with no other partner.

  “How many of these jamborees do you feel you have to go to?” he asked after he had firmly guided her to a lonely table in a corner for supper.

  “I go to all my friends’ dances, of course. Isn’t that what debutantes do? Even old post-debutantes?”

  “Until when? Until they’ve definitely nailed some poor guy?”

  “Or some rich one. No, that’s not it at all. That used to be the idea in my mother’s debutante days. But not anymore. The last group parents want to pick a son-in-law from today is Miss Juliana Glutting’s list of eligible males. That’s like the telephone directory.”

  “What’s the point then?”

  “There isn’t any point. Do things have to have a point? Do you have a point?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, don’t tell me about it. I have no patience with other people’s points.”

  A woman as keen as Alexia Gordon King was not long in divining the real reason for Larkin’s coming so often to her gatherings.

  “Mr. Larkin seems to have an eye out for you, Cora. He’s a person to keep in mind. You can always do something with a man who has character as well as money. I know he looks like a coal miner, but that’s soon forgotten. He isn’t wishy-washy as so many of the more epicene of
my bachelors are. You know where you stand with a man like that. And never forget, my dear, that when I’m gone—and my heart is very precarious—the big Gordon trust on which we largely live will go entirely to your half-sisters. That is the way my first husband provided in his will, and as your own papa left everything he had to the little tart he left me for, you will be reduced to what I have in my own right, which is meager, to say the least.”

  Ralph, however, did not give her mother even the tolerably good marks she had accorded him.

  “I suppose your mother’s hangers-on all go home to write up her jamborees in their journals,” he snarled. “They imagine historians will one day read their wet dreams as if they were Pepys or Saint-Simon. What phonies they all are!”

  “Then why do you come here, Mr. Larkin?”

  “One of these days I may tell you, Miss King.”

  Cora began to feel the excitement of a coming event in her future. Here was what her mother would describe as a “catch,” and she might actually be the one to catch him! But did she want to? He had a rough sex appeal, but was that what Cathy Earnshaw felt?

  But her life changed again when her mother’s ended. Alexia died dramatically, as she had lived: she collapsed at one of her parties, joking and laughing in the group that she dominated, robed in gold lamé with a necklace of large emeralds. The passage of another year found the brownstone mansion sold and Cora and a young niece of her mother’s reduced to living in a small apartment somewhat absurdly overfurnished with her mother’s elaborate things. They were not uncomfortable, but their position in urban society was a sad contrast to what it had been. Everyone was very kind, including the enriched half-sisters, but the great world had essentially passed them by.

  Ralph Larkin, however, reappeared in her life, but something in his eyes, as they took in her modest environment, seemed to proclaim, “Now I’ve got you, as I always knew I would!”