The Friend of Women and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  “That may be why he singled me out to talk to you about it.”

  You mean he singled you out for me, was Letty’s unspoken thought. She felt the chill of something like fear.

  Not long after this chat, Amory was made the youngest partner in the firm, of which some observers already speculated that he would one day be the leader.

  Amory became an accepted and constant visitor at the Bernards, both in the city and in the big Tudor villa in Rye. He was not considered so much a beau of Letty’s as a kind of adopted member of the family. Fanny, whom he flattered in a half serious, half joking way, adored him, while Elias continued to find him what he rarely found his business and legal acquaintances: a worthy intellectual companion. To Letty her relationship with this stimulating and sexually attractive young man was confusing. He made her feel that she was the object of his visits without ever a hint of a romantic purpose. Was she just a pal? And did she really want to be anything more?

  Of course, she debated with herself as to whether or not she was falling in love. Certainly what she felt for Amory was something a good deal milder than what Cathy Earnshaw had felt for Heathcliff. However, one day when work had held him over at the firm and he failed to appear at a Sunday lunch, she had been sorely disappointed. Sorely.

  Her father seemed to have gleaned something of her state of mind, for he brought up the subject quite openly on one of their walks.

  “I think I should tell you, my dear, that I have settled any doubts that I may have once had about Amory. I believe now that he is capable of becoming a great man.”

  “You mean a great man for me?”

  “Well, yes. That is, if you should want him.”

  “What if he doesn’t want me?”

  “But I think he does.”

  “He certainly hasn’t shown it, Papa. Not that I’ve expected him to.”

  “I’m aware of that. He doesn’t know how you feel about him. And, of course, he’s uncomfortable about his position vis-a-vis your money. He doesn’t want to look like a fortune hunter.”

  “Oh, Papa, there you go again. It’s always the money. Have I no identity without it?”

  “Listen to me, my dear.” Elias paused now, and then motioned her to a bench on which they both sat, as did the dogs at their feet, always immediately obedient to their master. “We must have this out, you and I. I’m not going to be with you always. I have some reason to say so, but we won’t go into that now. No, don’t protest. I haven’t come here to discuss my health. There’s nothing to get upset about yet, so we’ll drop it. But one of these days you’re going to find yourself in charge of a lot of things—the magazine, the foundation, the ranch, the businesses, and even your mother. And you’re going to need a competent and trusted partner. All I’m saying is that Amory could be that. He’s honest, he’s straight, and he’s a kind of jack-of-all-trades. He approaches every problem that confronts him with an absolutely open and fresh mind. You two together could be a power in the land.”

  “Oh, Papa, please!” She jumped up, feeling the sudden tears in her eyes, and walked on quickly, followed by her now silent parent. Neither said a word all the way home.

  The next week, sitting alone with Letty in the plant-filled conservatory after a large Sunday lunch party, Amory proposed. Coolly, quietly, earnestly. She could only gasp at first. Then she protested.

  “But, Eliot, you haven’t even told me that you love me!”

  “I love you, Letitia, as far as my nature allows me to love. I have never loved anyone better, or as much. And I never shall.”

  Even at such a moment, she noted his use of the verb shall. It denoted simple futurity, without determination. But what if determination were not necessary for him? Why was she so prone to distrust people?

  “Oh, Eliot, I don’t know what to say. You’ll have to give me time. Maybe a lot of time.”

  And she left him to rejoin the now departing guests.

  The next day she dined with her old guide, Hazelton, and told me all.

  “But the love he offers you isn’t enough, my dear girl,” I exclaimed with feeling. “It isn’t nearly enough. I don’t care what your father says. It isn’t enough to base a marriage on!”

  “But if it’s all he’s capable of, how can I ask for more?”

  “If it’s all he’s capable of, he shouldn’t marry at all. Or at least he should wait until he finds a girl as cool as himself. I know what I’m talking about, Letty. Believe me. There’s a bit of Amory in myself. Except I have always recognized what it should limit a man to. He shouldn’t offer to share his life with some deluded woman.”

  “And you don’t think that Eliot and I between us might accomplish what Papa visualizes? Or something not too unlike it?”

  “Make him your partner then. Not your husband.”

  Letty was a bit surprised to find how little persuaded she was by her mentor’s deeply felt objections to a match between herself and Amory. After all, old dear that I was, had I any real part in the life of the great world? Had I not been content to pass my days in a quiet and protected corner? That might be well enough for me, but for her?

  ***

  I break off my story here. Once I start speculating about what Letty thought of me and my advice, I become uneasy. The work becomes too personal, and I find myself embarrassed. And I find it a sort of impertinence to bust my way into Letty’s heart and fantasize as to what she did or didn’t feel about the man she married. I should at least keep a certain distance.

  I feel safe, anyway, in asserting that if Letty was strongly attracted to Amory’s intelligence and personality, if she even felt a need for him as a lover, she was disturbed by his lack of anything resembling sexual passion. Oh, yes, she knew that he liked her well enough, but didn’t he like even more the multitude of opportunities that marriage to her would bring? I had once pointed out that there is no intenser ambition than that felt by the young genius who’s the heir of a grand old family that has fallen on evil days. The Amorys had lost their fortune in the panic of 1907. His parents had once owned the most splendid sailing yacht on the North Shore. Eliot always kept a large photograph of it on his desk.

  I did, though, install sufficient doubt in Letty to induce her to postpone any decision about Amory for a year, and the following December saw our entry in World War II and Amory’s departure to the Pacific as a lieutenant, JG, on a destroyer. When he returned to his firm in 1945, with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star, to find a Letty desolate with the recent loss of her father from heart failure and overwhelmed with the obligations of his estate, he had little difficulty in persuading her to join her troubled life to his. I am afraid she was even grateful to the hero for coming back to the girl who had almost rejected him.

  4

  I have the three girls all married now, for Cora, of course, went ahead with her plan to become the wife of wealthy Larkin, and I have to admit that my basic distrust of all three unions put a crimp in my relationships with them. Oh, we continued our lunches, if less frequently, but our conversation was more literary than personal. The first marked return to our old ways came with Alfreda’s need to consult me about her childlessness.

  “We’ve both had all the tests,” she told me. “And now we know just what it is. It’s not my fault.”

  “Fault?” I queried. “Must there be one?”

  “Biological fault, I mean.” But her very definite tone did not convince me that she exempted poor Tommy of all moral responsibility. “Tommy, it appears, has a low sperm count. We have to face facts squarely, don’t we, Hubert?”

  “Of course. But a low sperm count doesn’t mean his case is hopeless. As I understand it, it means that a pregnancy is unlikely. But not impossible.”

  “Hubert, I’ve waited four years. Isn’t that what the lawyers call a reasonable time?”

  “For what?”

  “For me to wait. Now I must try something else.”

  “Like adoption?”

  Alfreda made a little face. “I hate
the idea of taking some other woman’s unwanted baby. You may call me a snob, if you like, but I do have good blood.”

  Alfireda did not boast of it, but I knew how much she relished her descent from Pieter Stuyvesant. “Then there’s always artificial insemination,” I observed, responding to her appeal for honesty. “Would Tommy agree to that?” She nodded. “Well, at least the child would have blue blood on the distaff side.”

  “But what about the father?” she demanded with something like indignation, as though the whole idea had been mine.

  “I believe it’s usually a medical student.”

  “Ugh! And what do we know about his family? No, I can’t bear the thought! That’s what I’ve really come to talk to you about. You and nobody else, my dear old friend. Why wouldn’t it make sense for me to choose the father myself? Why shouldn’t we have the perfect father for the perfect child?”

  “How many perfect fathers have perfect children?”

  “Oh, I know all that. But at least there’s a chance they will. What about the two Dumas you’re always raving about? What about the two Pitts? And think of all the Adamses!”

  “And when you’ve found this paragon, will you persuade him to donate his seed to the necessary test tube?”

  “Never!” she cried. “How could I possibly ask such a man to go through so humiliating a procedure in some ghastly laboratory—probably before some leering intern?”

  “It could be quite private.”

  “No, no! My boy would have to spring from a glorious mating!”

  “Your boy? Why mightn’t it be a girl?”

  “Because I know it wouldn’t!” She spoke with a curious passion.

  “And what about Tommy? Would he agree to be a mari complaisant?”

  “Oh, never! But he wouldn’t have to know. I’d simply tell him that I’d gone through the clinical process. He’d accept the proposition that neither of us knew anything about the child’s father.”

  “I see.” But I was deeply shocked. “And this divine stud? Have you already someone in mind?”

  “No,” she said firmly, though her denial was preceded by a distinct pause.

  “Then give up the idea. If you deceive Tommy in a matter so grave, there’s bound to be a dire consequence. For him, for you, for the man you select, maybe for the child. I can’t tell. All I know is that you won’t get away with it. That something always happens to people who believe that the effective concealment of a crime will wash away their guilt.”

  Alfreda subjected me to a long evaluating stare. “So in your opinion it would be a crime?”

  “It would.”

  She nodded, and then suddenly smiled. “Then it will be I who goes to the lab and not what you call the stud.”

  “Bless you, my child.”

  We discussed the subject no further, which is often the best way to handle a delicate problem. Alfreda never referred to it again, but her husband did. Unlike the husbands of Cora and Letty, he had always totally accepted and even encouraged my intimate friendship with his wife and actually chose to share it. “You give her things I can’t, Bertie,” he would tell me cheerfully. “All those books and poems you and she talk over. It’s great.” And he invited me to lunch at his downtown club to discuss, in Alfreda’s absence, an idea he had about the product of her artificial insemination.

  “The big question is whether to let it be known that Alfreda has undergone this process. Our family and friends all know that I could sire a child. It’s just that it’s unlikely. So we could take the position that the near miracle has happened, and who would there be to deny it?”

  “The imps of comedy,” I answered gravely. “They’re always on the lookout for someone trying to get away with something. People are bound to pry when they’re suspicious, and with enough prying they’re apt to come up with something. Once you’ve made an open statement about a matter like this, they’ll lose all interest in it. Believe me.”

  And Tommy did. But when, at a later date, I asked him how Alfreda had fared under the process, for I knew that in some cases it was accompanied by acute discomfort, he assured me that she had had none. But he also told me something disturbing. Alfreda had refused to tell him anything about what she had had to go through, or allow him to be with her on visits to the hospital, saying that the whole thing was a woman’s private matter and that a husband had no role but one of possible humiliation. Recalling what Alfreda had suggested to me as a very different solution to her problem, I could hardly resist the ugly suspicion that she might have implemented it.

  At any rate, she gave birth to a fine healthy boy. Everyone knew the supposed circumstances of his birth, and nobody cared, except his wise old grandmother, Mrs. Belknap, who observed to me, in her dry way, “They don’t care so long as the child turns out well. But if he doesn’t, they moan, ‘Why the dickens did I have to get into this?’ It’s easier when you can lay the blame on your own inheritance. After all, there is nothing you can do about that!”

  I did my best to smother my unpleasant suspicions, but two years later they received an unexpected gloss from Letty Bernard, who, to my distress, had been having some rather sharp differences with her husband over their joint management of some of the interests bequeathed to her by her father.

  “Eliot seems never to tire of surprising one,” she told me on one of our Central Park walks that, lacking her father, she now sometimes took with me. “Who do you think his new best friend is? Tommy Newbold!”

  “Well, what’s wrong with Tommy?”

  “Nothing! He has a heart of gold, and we all love him. But you know as well as I, Hubert, that outside of the law, the dear man has very little to offer. Face it, he’s a bore about his cases. And Eliot flees bores as he would the plague. He may be a genius, but he’s a brutally intolerant one.”

  “But, as you say, he likes to surprise people. Eliot can’t bear being taken for granted. He’ll always contradict you. Tell him someone’s a bore, and he’ll call him a wit. A wit whom only someone as perceptive as Eliot can see. Tell him someone’s a genius, and he’ll call him an ass!”

  “To prove you an ass. Yes, I see that. But this thing with Tommy seems a bit of a muchness.”

  “Hasn’t Eliot been using Tommy to help him on some legal problem?”

  “True. But since when did Eliot choose his friends from among his hirelings?”

  Well, that was it. I wouldn’t admit it to Letty for the world, but I was troubled. I had never made it a secret to myself that I disliked Eliot Amory. He simply possessed too many assets. His blond good looks, his straight, slim, sturdy build, the amiable charm of his glowing good manners, the small, intimate smile that seemed to initiate you into the inner circle of those who really knew what it was all about, the seeming effordessness of his brilliant solution to every offered problem, all enhanced the portrait of a man with spectacular gifts. Why did I smell an arch ego behind his masterful manipulation of his wife’s enterprises? Wasn’t it rather mean of me to feel that only condescension lay behind his genial acceptance of his wife’s old English teacher? But there you are. I did.

  I now began to track the developing intimacy between Eliot and Tommy. It was true, of course, that Eliot had retained Tommy as counsel to the New Orange Review, which certainly necessitated a number of meetings, but why did they have to take place at the Newbolds’ apartment?

  The Newbolds’ baby, Stephen, of whom Eliot seemed inordinately fond, was naturally his godson and the brightest and most beautiful child anyone had ever seen, but Eliot had never been a noticeably paternal type with his own two children, both daughters, and had seemed quite content with the somewhat perfunctory colloquy that he accorded the girls when the nurse brought them in for a short visit on his evening return from the office. Indeed, Letty had once confessed to me that she feared her failure to produce a son had deeply disappointed him and that she bitterly deplored the ovarian disorder that had caused her doctor to prohibit any try for a third child. Of course, she had quickly added
that Eliot had never expressed a word of his regret. Like his recurrent fits of depression, he kept it to himself. The Eliot the world saw was always a cheerful one.

  The crisis, as it was for me, anyway, came after a dinner at Alfreda’s—just the two of us, Tommy being in Albany arguing a case—when she brought me a cognac and closed the door to the library to which we had withdrawn.

  “You and I know each other so well, Hubert, that I can skip the prologue,” she began. “I know what you have guessed, and I’ve known it for some time.”

  “What have I guessed?” I asked with a sinking heart.

  “That my Stephen is Eliot’s son.”

  I gasped as if I had been thrown into churning waters.

  “If that is so,” I finally was able to retort, “what business is it of mine? Isn’t it a matter between you and Tommy and Eliot alone? If Tommy consented to such an arrangement, mustn’t it be kept the darkest of secrets? For I can’t imagine that Letty knew! Mind you, I’m not criticizing you or Tommy. It may even have been, on his part, an example of his magnanimous love for you. But it must never be spoken of!”

  “But Tommy would never have consented to such a thing.” Alfreda’s small smile seemed directed at my naivete. “He may be brought to accept it after the fact—he might even be glad to have a distinguished father for the boy he has come to love—but he would never have consented in advance.”

  “Would it have made that much difference to him whose sperm was used in that tube? So long as he had to know it wasn’t his?”

  Alfreda rose, in a movement that suggested outrage, and strode across the room and back. “There was no question of a tube! Can you imagine Siegfried bringing a tube to Brunhild on her flaming mount? I wanted my baby to be born of a beautiful act. And he was!”

  “And Tommy never knew? All right, let’s keep it that way.”

  “But I want Tommy to know! That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I want Stephen to grow up knowing that his father and mother produced him in an act of love! I want the whole wretched subterfuge to be blown away. I want truth! And we’re living in a world where these things are increasingly accepted. Eliot wants to recognize and be recognized by his son. And I’m betting that Tommy, in the last analysis, will be big enough to accept the situation which was created by his fault. No, don’t look at me that way, Hubert. I know it was only a biological fault. But there you are. He will continue to be daddy to Stephen. Eliot will be simply father.”