The Friend of Women and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  “And Letty? What will she be?”

  “Letty will have all the important things. She will continue to have an important husband to share with her the important enterprises they have undertaken together. Besides, everyone knows that all has not been idyllic in the Amory household. You don’t think this was Eliot’s first affair, do you? He married her for her money—face it. And she knows it. She’s too shrewd to upset her whole applecart by a fit of manufactured jealousy.”

  “It would not be manufactured. And you would not be only an unfaithful wife, Alfreda. You would have been an unfaithful friend. Never could I have believed that our old trio would end like this.”

  Alfreda’s sudden change of expression made her whole face a gape. “Why should it end, Hubert?”

  “Because I could never see you again if you go through with this.”

  “Oh, my god! I had no idea you’d take it this way!”

  “Didn’t you?”

  She covered her face with her hands. She was weeping. “Oh, of course I did. You’ve always been our conscience, Hubert. I knew you’d never go along. And that I was wicked, wicked, wicked. All right, what do we do now?”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing to do. Little Stephen will do much better as people think he is than as Eliot’s known bastard.”

  “And Eliot? Who adores the boy?”

  “Can’t a man adore his godson? Particularly when he has no son of his own? Never mind about Eliot. I’ll keep an eye on him. Eliot is not a man, as you put it, to upset applecarts.”

  “And what do I do, Hubert, if in the days to come, I find myself hating you?”

  “When you really love someone, my dear, as I love you three girls, you do not hesitate to incur their hate if it’s for their own good.”

  With which I kissed her and took my discreet departure. My good deed had certainly been done for that day.

  5

  Cora’s marriage to Larkin started smoothly enough, or so it seemed to the casual onlooker. I assumed that Ralph, a heavy and lustful man, found adequately agreeable the couplings of their early period together. I am certainly no expert in such matters, but among my male contemporaries, I have one or two who knew Ralph moderately well and who have freely opined to me, in view of what later happened, that he might have been the kind of rough and rapid lover who derived satisfaction from coition even when his partner was only passively cooperative. But what boded really ill for the future was his too articulate chagrin at the two miscarriages that Cora suffered in the first three years of their union. Instead of the sympathy that such a disappointed mother needs, it was made very clear to her that she was expected to continue the unvarying schedule of dinner parties and sporting weekends that Ralph’s Racket Club friends and their fashionable wives arranged as their refuge from any lives differing from their own. He also had a demanding and domineering old mother who expected a daughter-in-law to be constantly at her beck and call. Ralph must have been looking for an Oriental bride of complete submissiveness and thought he had found her in that lonely corner of her mother’s salon. He should have foreseen that even the most passive have their moments.

  I was present at an early tiff between the Larkins. I had been asked to dinner—just the three of us, in the third year of their union, during the brief period when Ralph had approved of me as a possible restraining influence on his spouse. This period did not last after he discovered that not only could I not play that role, but neither could anyone else. Cora, at the table, had asked me to support her in her expressed wish to spend the approaching summer in a villa that she proposed to rent in the south of France rather than in Southampton. Ralph had countered with his reasons for opposing her project. His tone was measured and gravelly, but not condemnatory. He evidently expected to prevail.

  “Why should I wish to abandon my comfortable cottage with its well-trained staff, my sailboat, and my golf, to traipse about Europe and see palaces and cathedrals I’ve seen a dozen times before? Cora had a honeymoon there of two whole months. That should last any sensible woman for a few years at least.”

  “But we spent all last summer on Long Island,” Cora protested. “And saw all the same people week after week. You’ve seen what it’s like there, Hubert. We give a dinner of twenty one night, and the following night we meet the same twenty people at our next-door neighbors’. And they always talk about the same things! They never get tired of it, never can have too much of it. But, oh, I can!”

  “I am sorry my friends don’t meet your lofty intellectual standards,” Ralph retorted coldly. “And that you will have to postpone your plans to scale Mount Olympus, at least for this summer. The house is being readied for us now, and I plan that we be there by June fifteenth.”

  “Oh, Hubert, do speak to him,” Cora cried. “Tell him what you think of all those ghastly cocktail parties you had to go to when Alfreda had you down for that weekend.”

  “Why couldn’t you do both?” I asked cautiously, turning to my host. “Why not take a jaunt to France in late June and then spend the balance of the summer on Long Island?”

  “Because my plans have already been made, thank you” was his short rejoinder. My suggestion had not been relished.

  “Well, I’ll go anyway!” Cora declared. “You can have the house to yourself and entertain your head off!”

  “I’ll be interested to know how you plan to pay for your trip and rental in Provence.”

  With this he rose and left the dining room. Cora, in a rush of harsh words now explained what his last remark entailed. Ralph maintained a stiff control over their exchequer. He paid all her bills that he approved and gave her a moderate allowance for daily cash expenses, but whenever he disapproved of an item, she had to pay for it out of her own exiguous income, and that was already used up for the year. Summer travel, for that summer anyway, was out of the question.

  “You could borrow, I suppose,” I suggested weakly.

  “He’s quite capable of publishing a statement that he will not be responsible for my debts.”

  “Oh, Cora, surely you exaggerate!”

  “You don’t know him, Hubert!”

  That spat, alas, was the opening gunfire of a war that would last for some three years. I hardly saw Cora more than a half dozen times in all that period, and then only at Letty’s or Alfreda’s, as Ralph now distrusted my influence and as Cora herself remembered too bitterly my premarital warnings and was probably afraid that I would stoop to saying “I told you so.” Though I never would have.

  As I put together the sorry tale of that time in her life, it appeared that the marriage was a constant struggle and Cora the constant loser. Ralph, so far as I could make out, was absolutely unyielding; he rarely even bothered to lose his temper. He simply laid down the law of where they should live and whom they should see, and refused her any funds which might have been used to introduce the least variety to their schedule. No child came to unite their interests; I suspected that separate bedrooms had been their rule. I could conclude only that Ralph was the kind of despot who was capable of deriving a grisly satisfaction in contemplating the plight of his victim. He did not, like Nero, play a lyre at the burning of Rome; he simply watched it.

  It was Letty Bernard Amory who, in her practical, realistic way, proposed a solution to Cora’s problem.

  “I want you to help me persuade Cora to take a job, Hubert,” she told me. “I’ve offered her a position on the New Orange Review, and Eliot has agreed to use her as a file clerk with the chance of rising to be a copy editor. Of course, she has no training, but she can learn. She’s plenty bright enough. And we’ve got to get her out of that apartment where she broods all day and fights with Ralph all night.”

  “Won’t she take the job?”

  “She thinks Ralph will have a fit.”

  “I’ll talk to him. If he’ll see me.”

  Ralph did see me, and he gave a sullen consent to the change in his wife’s life more easily than I had expected. I supposed that even he had come to
realize how badly he had misjudged his bride.

  I didn’t much like Cora’s working for Eliot, whom I deeply distrusted, but knowing how much he resented his wife’s ownership of the periodical and how little he must have liked her imposing an employee on him, I could hope only that he would give Cora a fairly wide berth. At any rate, things seemed to work themselves out, and in the next year the reverberations from the Larkin household appeared to have ceased. Cora was happy in her new job and told me that Eliot had even asked her to help him with the periodical.

  The Bernards’s magazine had originally been devoted to articles on politics and foreign affairs, contributed by supposed experts, but Letty and Eliot had greatly expanded its coverage. It now contained reviews of books, Broadway openings, musical events, and art shows, in addition to pieces on current events both national and international. Eliot had started a woman’s page, with topics ranging from civil rights to fashion, and it was to this that he had had the keenness to promote Cora after a brief time in the files.

  It seemed to Cora like a godsend. All her rather scattered wits appeared to focus in this new assignment. She had needed a cause to pull her disordered life together, and she now found it in women’s rights. Perhaps Ralph had come to symbolize for her everything in the male sex that kept women down, while Eliot had become the shining light of Ralph’s diametric opposite. A shabby peace had been replaced by a heroic war. She read everything about discrimination and the failure of equal treatment for women in every walk of life and came to work with shining eyes.

  “I’m becoming another Carrie Nation,” she exclaimed to me with a cheerful laugh. But all this came to a shuddering halt. One early morning, while I was still at breakfast, a pale and haggard Cora appeared on my doorstep. Ralph, she announced in shrill tones, wanted to divorce her, and on grounds of adultery, too! Would I accompany her to a session with his lawyer in the latter’s Wall Street office? The lawyer wished to present her with Ralph’s terms for a consent divorce. When I protested that she needed her own lawyer and not an old schoolteacher, she insisted that she could get hold of counsel later, that this was simply to hear Ralph’s demands. She wanted a friend to be with her, someone, so to speak, to hold her hand.

  So I went.

  The lawyer, Stanley, I think his name was, received us in a large, threatening paneled office with a million-dollar view of the harbor for any who had the heart to look at it. I had not. He was the sort of grave, staring attorney who took pleasure on behalf of a rich client to “crush the serpent with his heel,” a legal John Knox who carried his stern morals into his practice whenever his high fees allowed it.

  “I take it that Mr. Hazelton is here as your friend but not as your counsel,” he opened, eyeing me with evident disapproval. “However, there is no reason why I should not outline for you both your husband’s proposal. It will also be contained in this memorandum, which you may deliver to your attorney.”

  The horrid man then proceeded to air his horrid client’s conditions for submitting to the jurisdiction of the state of Nevada, where he chose to establish her temporary residence. This was clearly intended, without stating it, to indicate his client’s willingness to consent to a plea of incompatibility in a Reno court. Mr. Stanley now went on to give us an idea of the evidence that his client’s detectives had gathered. There was no mention of a corespondent’s name, nor did Cora ask for one. Her only alternative, the lawyer implied, to a thunderous scandal would be to sign a separation agreement waiving her rights to any settlement and apply to a Reno court for a divorce on grounds of incompatibility.

  She and I left the office without commitment. Despite the early hour, I took her to a bar and ordered two whiskies.

  “Of course you’ll fight it,” I muttered.

  Slowly, she shook her head.

  “Tell me he’s bluffing, Cora!” I begged.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  I dreaded to hear her mention Eliot’s name. I knew that he and Letty had been having difficulties about the running of the magazine. He had made little secret of his growing restiveness at her stubborn retention of the veto power that she had in the publications and foundation that her father had created. I had never trusted Eliot since the business over Alfreda’s baby; indeed, I actually detested him. He had not hesitated to make himself the lover of one of his wife’s most intimate friends. Could he possibly have had it in mind to add the second to his collection? Could a man really be so wicked? And why?

  “You told me, Hubert, that if I married Ralph for the reason I did, I’d be wicked. I sneered at the word. But you were right. I was wicked, I am wicked. And, as you predicted, I’ve been in hell.”

  “But you’ve been working, Cora. You’ve been doing a job, and doing it darn well. What happened?”

  “Everything was all right until Eliot started paying attention to me. He didn’t at first. He was even standoffish. I think he may have disliked Letty’s pushing me on him. But gradually he began to talk to me. And then one day he took me out to lunch. It seemed perfectly natural. Everyone in the office knows that Letty and I are best friends. She usually works at home, but she has an office at the magazine, of course, and never comes in without speaking to me. And after Eliot assigned me the job of helping him with the new column, we lunched together frequently to discuss it. And then… and then…” Her voice trailed off, and she ended with a shrug.

  “Oh, Cora, how could you? With your dearest friend’s husband?”

  “Well, I did, Hubert.” She wiped the sudden tears from her eyes and faced me. “You know how winning Eliot can be. And I’d never had a real lover in all my life! I tried to convince myself that Letty wouldn’t care that much. I certainly resolved that she should never know. And if I helped myself to one little piece of happiness after all my years of frustration, was it really so wicked? Yes, I suppose it was.”

  “How did Ralph find out?”

  “I don’t know!” She gave a little cry of pain. “He must have been trailing me for weeks and hoping against hope that he’d catch me in something like this. And now I must accept his humiliating terms!”

  “I’m afraid it’s going to cost you a pretty penny.”

  “Anything is better than having Letty know! I couldn’t bear to have Letty know that I’d betrayed her.”

  For a moment, I was rendered speechless by such a sacrifice. For even in a successful divorce for adultery, a husband might have to give his wife more than Ralph had offered. “That’s very big of you, my dear. I haven’t a fortune, but what I have will always be at your disposal. And when I die I’ll leave it to you. Alfireda and Letty will hardly need it.”

  Cora took my hand. “That’s darling of you, Hubert. But don’t forget. I still have my job. And Letty is very generous with her staff.”

  “Your job? You mean you’ll go on with Eliot? After what’s happened?”

  “Certainly. We mustn’t do anything to make Letty suspect.”

  “But you won’t…?” I couldn’t finish.

  “Carry on the affair? Oh, that’s over and done with.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “Because I found out that he didn’t give a damn about me. I was only another tart to him. He had these terrible depressions when he would tell me that. And he was always ranting about Letty. He was obsessed with her!”

  “You mean because he really cared for her, after all?”

  “No! Because he really hates her!”

  “Oh, my god! What makes you think that?”

  “I feel it! He hates her because she owns all the things he thinks should be his. Because his successes are all really hers. Because she’s him! And he was screwing me only to screw her. He’s a fiend, Hubert!”

  “Perhaps something simpler than that.”

  “Anyway, I’m terrified that in one of his blinding depressions he may tell Letty to get back at me for ending the affair. And to get back at her for being her. To destroy our friendship and knock her to bits. He’ll tell her abou
t Alfreda’s baby, too.”

  “Oh, you know about that?”

  “He told me. The man’s capable of anything. Can’t you do something about him, Hubert?”

  “I can’t think of what, but I can certainly try.”

  “If you think I should quit the magazine, I will.”

  “Certainly not. That’s the one thing in your life that makes sense. Let’s not throw everything away. But don’t go to work today. Too much has happened. Why don’t you go home now and have a nap and then meet me for lunch at Lutèce, where we’ll talk only about pleasant things.”

  6.

  In the first six years of their marriage, the Amorys seemed to be accomplishing everything that Elias Bernard had expected of their combined efforts. Eliot reduced his practice of law to a minimum, though retaining his partnership at a much smaller share of the firm profits, and devoted the bulk of his seemingly inexhaustible energies to the management of his late father-in-law’s interests. He and Letty as coeditors of the magazine turned it into a major periodical of political and literary significance with a national circulation. Letty’s securities swelled in value under Eliot’s expert supervision, and the great ranch became a model for new techniques in the breeding and raising of cattle. With two fine little daughters, Letty and he appeared to be sitting on top of the world.

  Did I ever think I had been wrong? Of course not. Alas, I had only apprehensively to wait.

  ***

  Letty discovered an early infidelity of her husband’s through a domestic incident overused in the trite chronicles of marital betrayal. Her shock and indignation were tempered with disgust at the banality of her experience. Checking the pockets of a jacket that Eliot had left on his bed for the cleaners, to be sure that no keys or other possessions had been carelessly forgotten, she had come across a scented epistle with an amatory greeting as crude as the letterhead was elegant. She did not hesitate to read it. It might almost have been placed there in order that she should do so. She had suspected such dalliances before, but had had no grounds for a spoken reproof. What should she do with such evidence? After much powerful cogitation, she decided to do nothing.