The Friend of Women and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  The idea that she might become his possession, as if, like Attila, of whom she had read in Gibbon at Mr. Hazelton’s, he had a right to a captured Roman princess, considerably diminished the raw male sex appeal that she had been at least trying to see in him. She had visions of being led in triumph with a rope around her neck. Yet although her manner with him became brusquer, he did not deign to notice. He was too sure of her.

  The niece, unlike her, settled down quite contentedly in their new ménage. She and Cora had a circle of old friends, mostly school or dancing class pals, with their new husbands or old beaux, conservative Knickerbocker New York, faintly dowdy, smugly satisfied with their memories of a grander past, conventional, dull, and decent. Cora found their world a stifling one, but she lacked the imagination or initiative to find one of her own.

  Why had she been given nothing but the ability to attract a man she didn’t really want? Why had her mother had the wonders of the world piled in her lap? And why should her mother’s salon now appear to her like that dome of many-colored glass that had disappeared into the radiance of the sky, leaving Cora to a dull gray, sunless planet? When trapped at a cocktail party given by one of her cousin’s boring friends, she would find herself daydreaming of the long parlor that had run the length of the old family brownstone, with its dark green tapestries and heavy, dark Renaissance chests, the room filled with chattering celebrities, where one might find oneself talking to Walter Lippmann or Helen Hayes or even Harpo Marx. Everybody was there, everybody who was anybody, and the fact that Cora King had been nobody didn’t matter, as she was the only nobody in the room, which in itself was a kind of distinction.

  She confided her misery to Hubert Hazelton one day at lunch.

  Which gives me the clue to resume my narrative in the first person.

  ***

  “Do you know something, Hubert?” Cora and I had long been on first-name terms. “Mother predicted just what would happen to me. It’s amazing how clearly she understood me, even without being very strong in maternal affection. She should have been a writer, I suppose.”

  “You’re right, and so I told her, at one of her gatherings she was kind enough to ask me to. But she told me she preferred to live the novel she would otherwise have written.”

  “Which is just what she did, damn her! Leaving not a page for a survivor to read. She took everything with her. Yet I have to admit there was a magnificence in her very selfishness. She didn’t really need either of her husbands, and certainly not any of her children. They, poor things, needed people. Oh, she saw that. She thought I could make do with Larkin. Maybe she was right. What do you think?”

  “Gracious me, Cora. What a question! Could you love the man?”

  “I certainly don’t love him now. Is that necessary?”

  “Well, it certainly helps. I don’t say that love is always strictly necessary, but the woman who doesn’t feel it is undertaking a big job when she offers to make a man happy.”

  “Make him happy? But I want him to make me happy!”

  “My dear girl, you’re joking of course.”

  “Oh, Hubert, can’t you stop being Thackeray for a minute? I’m deadly serious. I’m consulting you about what to do with my life!”

  My thoughts became grave indeed at this. “Then don’t misunderstand me, Cora. I’m being equally serious. If you marry this man with no other object than to use his wealth to solve your personal problems, you will be doing a wicked thing.”

  “Oh, Hubert, wicked. Wake up. This is the twentieth century we’re in.”

  “I needn’t choose to be in it. Wicked is a fine old term to remember. There’s something virile in it, as opposed to lame excuses like compulsive or obsessive or driven.”

  “And you think I’d be wicked to marry Ralph?”

  “Unless you were prepared—sincerely prepared—to do your best to make his life a happy one.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “I do. My dear Cora, when your very soul is at stake, I don’t beat around the bush.”

  “You think when I die, I’d go to hell?”

  “I don’t believe in hell. Except to the extent that it exists in this life for those who have risked it. Don’t be one of them. Don’t do this to any man. You’ll live to regret it as much as he will.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll find that Ralph can look out for himself.”

  “He’s not my concern, Cora. You are.”

  “Perhaps I’d better relieve you of that. I can’t bring myself to accept your credo, Hubert.”

  3

  For Letty Bernard, the trio on my Saturday mornings was an oasis, not exactly in a desert, but in a life that reached few things in the center of her heart. It was true that she was the only child of rich and indulgent parents; that she lived in a Beaux Arts mansion glittering with the objects that her father had captured from the Italian Renaissance; that she had a keen eye for arts and letters, but it was also true that she was endowed, or perhaps hampered, with a vision that took in her environment without the least illusion. Pale, square-faced, with straight dark hair and a strong stocky figure, Letty knew exactly what were her assets and what were her liabilities.

  She knew, for example, that her slender allowance of feminine charm was only in part balanced by her wealth, that she was both fortunate and unfortunate to have been admitted to Miss Dickerman’s Classes only through that elite young ladies’ academy’s strictly limited quota for Jewish students, that her mother was an amiable fool and that her father, overcome by her beauty, had married her, even knowing that it had taken his fortune to appease her Episcopalian family’s anti-Semitism. And she also knew that her beloved male parent was a cool, calculating man, always ready to listen to a compromise.

  Yet Elias Bernard occupied most of the available area of his daughter’s carefully guarded heart, as she suspected that she did his. They were full partners, however undemonstrative, in a shared life, each fully aware that an impassive demeanor, a tight control of temper, a habit of checking every initial impulse, need not indicate any inability to love, to hate, to admire, or even to scorn. Elias was a handsome man, of a strong lean figure, calm, evaluating gray eyes, a firm, authoritative nose, a high, pale brow, and a receding hairline. From his office in the prominent Wall Street law firm of which he was a senior but largely inactive partner, he wisely and benevolently ruled his inherited empire: the family trust company, the vast Idaho ranch, the Bernard Foundation, and the very reputable political and scholarly quarterly the New Orange Review, named for an early Dutch designation of New York. Elias’s goal in life, never articulated but deeply felt, was to inculcate whatever clear sense his fine mind possessed into a world sadly inclined to take the wrong turn. Through all the media available to him he tried, in every public issue, to take a rational stand.

  Sometimes his daughter thought he went too far. For example, she criticized him for accepting a trusteeship of her school, thus seemingly endorsing its stingy quota for Jewish students, or even, as she put it, endorsing any quota at all.

  “You know they’re just after your money,” she pointed out in the blunt way that attended their discussions. “They want to add a top floor for a new gym, and their drive has bogged down.”

  “I’m aware of that, Letty, and I’m ready to help out. They need that new gym badly. And don’t forget it’s a first-class school. Otherwise I’d hardly send you there, even if your mother is an alum. Eventually that quota will fall. As you know, I’m a great one for not rushing things. Time often does the trick, and a great deal of bitterness is saved.”

  “Like your old theory that slavery would have died a natural death without the Civil War. But would it have?”

  “Wasn’t saving six hundred thousand lives worth taking a chance?”

  But Letty agreed with her father’s sister, Aunt Rhoda, who criticized him for sometimes giving parties where no Jews were invited. At all her famous dinner parties, the very social Rhoda always included a respectable percentage of Jews�
��though neither she nor her brother ever entered a temple except for a wedding or a funeral. But Elias scoffed at his sister’s little rule as “racist.”

  Letty also felt that he was wrong in preserving his marriage to her mother, though she never voiced this. She felt strongly that each of her parents would have lived a franker and freer life apart from each other. Their extreme incompatibility was painfully evident, though her father’s behavior with his wife was irreproachably polite and overly considerate. Fanny Bernard had everything she wanted, and she had certainly seen to it that her life was as comfortable as money could make it, but she nonetheless chafed under the scorn that she rightly suspected her husband felt for her vanity and triviality. She was fond of Letty and liked to complain to her about all the little things that went wrong in her life, but she always knew that her daughter’s firm alliance with her father constituted a bond that she could never in the slightest degree weaken, and that Letty’s sympathy was based on duty and indeed on something dangerously close to pity. For Letty knew that despite her mother’s fancy clothes, fine jewels, and sparkling foreign town cars, the latter would only have been truly happy had she lived in the mauve decade with other ladies in big plumed hats and Irish lace strutting down the peacock gallery of the Waldorf-Astoria.

  Of course, Letty likewise knew that her own plainness in face, dress, and general attitude was distressing to her mother, but the latter had long given up trying to change her, and had learned, however regretfully, that she was not fated to play any but a walk-on role in her daughter’s life and education.

  Elias Bernard’s concept of his civic duties made his daily and nightly routine something of a public one, with a considerable amount of entertaining done at home, all managed by a skillful housekeeper, as Fanny confined her job as hostess to striking if belated appearances, which meant that his serious talks with Letty usually had to be assigned to Sundays, when they walked in Central Park with his two greyhounds. These strolls she indeed treasured, but she needed something more, and she found it to some extent in the weekly Hazelton meetings with Alfreda and Cora. With one such day in each week, her imagination was kept from running dry.

  Neither Alfreda nor Cora elected to go to college after graduating from Miss Dickerman’s Classes; both made early marriages. Letty went to Barnard, where she majored in history and won a Phi Beta Kappa key her junior year. Her life seemed dedicated to serious study, and she professed to having little time for beaux and dates.

  The question of her marriage was never discussed at home, but Letty had little doubt that it was very much on her father’s mind. Her mother avoided the subject probably because she feared that Letty would never attract the right man or that she would turn him down if she did. The topic was therefore taboo, like any reference to the Catholic Church in the presence of Irish servants. Fanny presumably had to content herself with the prospect of her daughter becoming one of those rich, indomitable old maids who loomed so grandly and formidably over the metropolitan social scene. Letty went out occasionally with some sober young man or other from one of the respected families of “our crowd,” usually one more interested in taking a brainy girl to a problem play or a concert than in getting married, and there had so far been no question of the heart.

  And then at last, on one of their Sunday walks, her father spoke out.

  “I am, of course, delighted, my dear, that you are doing so well at Barnard. It would be unthinkable for a woman of your intellect not to be a college graduate. But I don’t want you to regard it as simply an interlude before marriage, the way your mother does. She expects a girl to quit college the moment Mr. Right appears. I want you to graduate, willy nilly.”

  “And I will,” Letty replied stoutly. “You needn’t worry about that. If Mr. Right objects, he’ll soon find he’s Mr. Wrong. Anyway, Mother doesn’t see him as coming at all.”

  “There are a lot of things your good mother doesn’t see. But we’ll leave her out of this. How do you see a Barnard degree as affecting your life?”

  “Mr. Hazelton thinks I might do well to study law. Does that strike you as wild, Papa?”

  “In no way. It may be an excellent idea. The professions are opening up to women. You could perfectly well become a lawyer or doctor. But I doubt that the top positions in those disciplines are going to be available to women in your generation. These things take time. It seems to me that in your lifetime the first rank will be more apt to be open to you in partnership with a man. A big man, of course. Maybe even a great man.”

  “You mean like Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV? That hardly seems my role, Papa.”

  “No, no, no. Don’t be silly. I mean as the wife of a prominent man. Consort and partner. Look at Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Everyone knows she’s the real power behind the throne.”

  “But, Papa, what can you be thinking of? What have I got to attract a great man? Let alone be a power behind his throne?”

  “You have spirit and character, my dear. You have wit and determination. You have courage and spirit. And you’re going to have money.”

  “Oh, money.”

  “Yes, money. It’s time we discussed its role in your life. For you’re going to be very rich, my dear, and that’s something that has to be faced. I’m going to look after your mother, of course, but the bulk of my fortune is coming to you outright.”

  “And you’re suggesting that this great man will marry me for it?”

  “He will not marry you for it alone. Not if he’s the right kind of great man. And I’m assuming that you’ll always have the perspicacity to see through the common or garden-variety fortune hunter, no matter how blue his eyes or rippling his muscles. What you have to understand, my dear, is that worthwhile men are not likely to be motivated simply by one thing. A woman to them is a whole package of things. There are looks, to be sure, but beauty is only one factor. There’s her brain, her integrity, her health, her child-bearing capacity, her congeniality, her family, her background, her tastes, and, yes, her money.”

  “But you weren’t motivated by money.”

  “No, because I had it. I was motivated solely by the very thing I’m telling you to beware of: sexual attraction. I’ll be utterly frank with you, my child. You’ve seen what happened between your mother and me.”

  Letty mused a moment over this. “Yes,” she agreed with a sigh. “I have.”

  “We mustn’t probe too deeply into a mixture of motives. What really matters is the caliber of the mate chosen. My partner, Tim Cowles, would be horrified at the very idea, but I believe that he married Anita partly because she was a great-granddaughter of Chief Justice Marshall, who was his god. And it’s been a very happy marriage. All I’m saying is that your money is only one of your trump cards. But it’s a trump that should be used to take a trick.”

  Of course now, when her father brought a handsome, twenty-nine-year-old law associate to the house to educate her in the nature and makeup of her diversified portfolio of securities, she saw in him a potential paternal candidate for her hand. Eliot Amory, scion of a distinguished Boston family, once but no longer wealthy, tall, lithe, and charmingly at ease, with smooth blond hair and eyes as blue as her father had attributed to less desirable suitors, seemed almost to be concealing a wit that was on the sharp side and a self-confidence that smacked of a sense of superiority. He was obviously what Letty, well acquainted with the young lawyers frequently brought to the house, had learned to spot as an about-to-be-made-partner, chafing at the bit.

  “Is he going to be one of your great men?” she asked her father on their next Sunday walk.

  “A good question. He’s going places, that fellow. He has all the credentials but one. He sees himself doing whatever he’s doing. Very clearly. And he’s not always sure it’s the right thing.”

  “And that’s bad? Why?”

  “If he grins at what he sees, it’s bad. And I think Amory does. A great man should take himself seriously. A sense of humor is not what he most needs.”

&nb
sp; “Abraham Lincoln had one.”

  “And it hindered him. If you laugh at yourself, you’re apt to underrate yourself. Lincoln would have dumped McClellan earlier if he hadn’t doubted his own doubts about him. George Washington would have sacked him after Antietam.”

  “But, Papa, you have a sense of humor.”

  “Which may be just why I get able men to run my businesses rather than doing it myself.”

  Letty had occasion to see Eliot Amory in action when he tackled the job of explaining to her the myriad details of a corporate reorganization he was handling of a small company in which she and her mother were substantial shareholders. Fanny Bernard understood nothing but she listened, entranced, as he made it sound like a tale from Arabian Nights.

  “You’re like Disraeli with Queen Victoria,” Letty told him when they were alone after one of these sessions. “Didn’t she say he made the dullest debate in the House of Commons sound like one of his novels?”

  “Weren’t they both fiction, anyway? But I do it all for your ma, not for you. You grasp every detail, no matter how boring. You don’t even seem to find them boring.”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, it’s my job, you know. I don’t much think about whether they’re boring.”

  “What do you hope to get from your job?”

  “What does anybody?” He shrugged. “To become rich and famous. Isn’t that about it?”

  “You think riches bring happiness?”

  “Compared to what poverty brings, yes. Haven’t your riches made you happy, Letitia?”

  It was the first time he had used her first name, and she liked it. It seemed suddenly to raise her to his intelligence level.

  “They have not,” she replied firmly. “Maybe you have to have earned them for that to happen.”

  “Anyway, you’ve learned something else. Something much more important. You’ve learned independence of mind.”

  Letty felt vaguely exuberant. “Papa wouldn’t be so sure about that. He thinks I should be more realistic about money.”