The Friend of Women and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  “You know, Fred,” he began in an informal and friendly tone, “that I often feel we put too much stress on extracurricular activities in a boy’s last year at Chelton. The graduating class has to run so many things: the school paper, the dramatics, the debates, the crew, the football team, and so on, so they have no time to… well, to find their souls. And isn’t it a time to do so? They are really already men.”

  “I don’t quite see what you mean, sir,” Fred replied a bit uneasily, for he tended to shy away from the abstract.

  “I wonder if you don’t. I’ve had an eye on you, my lad. A friendly eye, I should add. Take this paper of yours—for which, incidentally, I’m giving you an A. Aren’t you perhaps implying that Trollope is pulling his punches?”

  “How do you mean, sir?”

  “That he doesn’t really believe in the happy ending of his novel. In the collapse of the villain Melmotte’s fraudulent money schemes and the triumph of the good guys. That Trollope has supplied all that for his rosy-eyed Victorian readers though he knows perfectly well that the monkey business of London’s financial world is going to go right on as before.”

  “And you’re suggesting that it wouldn’t? Is that your point, sir?”

  “No, I’m not concerned with Trollope’s London. At the moment I’m concerned with a bright young Chelton sixth former called Frederick Coates. Does he regard his about-to-be alma mater as a dim bulb lit by those who vainly hope it will illuminate a dark world? A world that nothing can illuminate? And is the said Coates one of the rare few who sees the hopelessness?”

  “And if I did see that,” Fred said, after a considerable pause, “how do you suggest it would affect me?”

  “Wouldn’t the temptation be to live entirely for yourself?”

  Fred stared, with a sudden, almost eerie fascination, into the sad but kind eyes of this intently gazing old man. Was the door of a new communication actually opening a crack for him? It was interesting; it was on the edge of being exciting; it was somehow dangerous. Not only for him, but perhaps also for Mr. Baxter. He parted his lips to answer, but then closed them. Didn’t he see something else in those searching eyes? Couldn’t he make out that the dim bulb was what Mr. Baxter himself dreaded to see as the image of the school to which he had given his all? And if that were the case, what would the poor fellow’s life amount to?

  “No, sir,” he replied firmly. “I don’t see Chelton that way at all.”

  “Well, perhaps that’s just as well,” said Mr. Baxter with a sigh.

  ***

  At Yale, Fred and Alistair, though roommates, began to go their different ways. The friendship remained, but Alistair was growing restless under the other’s semi-tutorial role. He was still his amiable, easygoing self, and he still attracted the few classmates he took the trouble to meet, but he went to New York every weekend to satisfy a professed passion for the theater. He drank more, and Fred suspected that his once latent but now emerging homosexuality accounted for his absences as well as for his taste for Broadway. Ultimately, in his sophomore year, after a thunderous row with his father, he dropped out of Yale altogether and took up abode in Greenwich Village, living comfortably on the ample income that his death tax-saving parent bitterly regretted having settled on him. The latter’s affection for Fred, however, survived his rift with his son. He recognized that Fred had done everything for Alistair that could be done, and he continued his financial support, even to some extent putting his son’s friend into the filial space in his heart that the son had abandoned.

  Fred was quick to note that at Yale Chelton was not quite the ticket to campus success that he had hoped, for his classmates from there tended to be cliquey and to associate with their counterparts from St. Mark’s or St. Paul’s, while the graduates of larger preparatory schools, like Andover and Exeter, dominated the social scene. Fred easily affiliated himself with a group of men whom he spotted as campus leaders: they ran the Daily News, the Political Union, the more exclusive fraternities, and became members in their final year of one or another of the six secret societies. The group, closely knit, had distinct common denominators: they all came from more or less privileged Protestant Anglo-Saxon families; they all had been privately educated, and they all were endowed with a highly patriotic and idealistic desire to become responsible and liberal leaders in law or business or even politics. The Roaring Twenties were out of fashion, the cloud of the Great Depression had lifted, and the rise of dictators in Europe gave the boys the needed foe to raise a glorious standard against. Most of them opposed their fathers in their enthusiasm for FDR and his New Deal.

  Fred saw in them the wave of the future. There was nothing in their creed that he could not easily and convincingly adopt. But unlike them there were things he observed that they didn’t. He noted that, although, with apparent sincerity, they roundly condemned any form of discrimination, there were no Catholics, Jews, homosexuals, indigents, or radicals among them. He likened the group to what in early Victorian days Disraeli had called Young England—graceful, youthful aristocrats of mildly liberal views. These observations, however, he did not feel obliged to share with his new friends.

  Yet he did make one friend outside of this group, Nathan Levy. Nathan was the son of a prominent New York newspaper owner and a member of a prominent German-Jewish family. He had a long, dark, handsome oval face and thick, sleek black hair; he was supposedly intensely intellectual and was an editor of the Yale Literary Magazine, but he held himself somewhat aloofly from the undergraduate body, as if he considered himself above boyish amusements. He was also reputed to embrace leftist political views and to be on the outs with his influential parent.

  Fred, as an editor of the News, first got to know Nathan when he induced him to review for the paper a play, which, as many dramas then did, was opening in New Haven before assailing Broadway. It was a parlor comedy satirizing the apoplectic opposition of Wall Street to the New Deal, and Nathan’s review had been brilliantly witty but also scathing. Fred, who had assumed that Nathan would have approved of the play, asked him what had caused his harshness.

  “The play is full of sham liberalism” was Levy’s relaxed, rather drawling reply. “The kind of crap the more intelligent conservatives put out to make the masses feel that Tories are basically liberal. Sometimes they almost mean it. But it’s still crap.”

  “But if they almost mean it, maybe they’re almost sincere.”

  “Who cares? It’s easy to make fun of extreme right-wingers. They’re so absurdly pompous. But people like the author of this silly play fundamentally dote on the very things they purport to satirize. Like Marquand and O’Hara, for example. They pine for all the shiny baubles they jeer at: the swank clubs, the exclusive parties, the smart set, the whole world of money and privilege. Like Thackeray and the lords and ladies he professed to mock. Or Proust and the duchesses whose asses he kissed.”

  Fred was amused. “What writers are there who are genuine liberals?”

  “There are plenty, but unhappily they’re apt to be unreadable.”

  “So the Tories have it all to themselves?”

  “You should know, Coates. Didn’t you go to Chelton?”

  “That I did. But it seems to me that you go rather too far. Look at my friends here on the News. They all believe in a better world. In a less hierarchical society. In a fairer distribution of the wealth.”

  “Oh, yes, I know those preppies,” Levy retorted sneeringly. “I went to Ames Academy myself. Not exactly Chelton, to be sure, but along those lines. I know about their ideals. I know they want to be as pure as King Arthur’s knights. But at heart they’re full of the old school spirit. Over or under but never around! Our team must never lose! Wave the stars and stripes above their heads and they’ll fight for the devil himself. Oh, yes, they’re brave enough. But they can be had. Courage is cheap. Physical courage, anyway.”

  “I wonder if I don’t need to see more of you,” Fred said thoughtfully.

  “Any time, fella. Be my gu
est. You have an army background, don’t you?”

  “You seem to know everything.”

  “Oh, I keep my eyes open. You may be a brand to be plucked from the burning. The army and Chelton! Wouldn’t that be a feather in my cap!”

  This conversation took place in the fall of Fred’s junior year, and in the months that followed he saw Nathan Levy frequently and read some of the socialist and Marxist literature that his new friend provided. He found the relationship stimulating; a philosophy that annihilated the individual in view of the general well-being intrigued him. It seemed to offer a relaxation from tension at the same time that it provided a goal for action. Didn’t it basically make life easier? At least simpler?

  He didn’t have to introduce Nathan to any of his old group, as Nathan had no interest in them, and as they, for all their stout denial, would have shown little enthusiasm for a Jewish radical. Faced with these two supposedly liberal doctrines of his Yale experience, Fred felt he had to choose between the one that regarded FDR as the leader who had saved the nation from revolution and the one that had branded the president as the force that was holding back the uprising that would redeem the world.

  The choice became critical that spring when Fred was told by friends that he was likely to be tapped, as it was put, for membership in the senior society Scroll & Key. This select group of fifteen seniors, who met twice a week in a windowless stone building where they presumably discussed their souls and futures, was not quite so prodigious as Skull & Bones, which claimed the leaders of the class, but it was distinctly more “social” and was rumored to be the Open, Sesame to many a paneled door on New York’s Wall and Boston’s State Street.

  “This is the ultimate test, Frederick Coates,” Nathan warned him solemnly. “As a Keys man you’ll be forever lost to us and wedded to the establishment.”

  Fred did something he had never done before: he turned to another for advice. That other was Mr. Simpson, his guardian angel. But Mr. Simpson was a Keys man from Yale, 1905. And Fred knew that! Didn’t that mean, he asked himself feverishly, that he had already made up his own mind? Well, what if he had? Hadn’t Simpson paid his bills? Didn’t that create at least a moral debt? Or were there no moral debts, except to oneself? Well, there he was!

  He supposed that Mr. Simpson would be thoroughly disgusted with him for even raising the question and that the great banker would berate him for picking a left-wing Jew as an acquaintance, let alone a friend. He might even threaten to discontinue his financial support. But mightn’t that be the ultimate test of Frederick Coates as a man? And didn’t a man have to meet it squarely? There were times when he reminded himself that he was, after all, the son of a brave army officer.

  What he faced, however, when he went down to Mr. Simpson’s great Wall Street office, was a very different kind of test.

  “I’m glad you came to me, my boy. A bright young man like yourself is bound to have doubts sooner or later about the way his world is run. He is something of a dope if he doesn’t. And that is the time when the bad men who are dedicated to overthrowing our republican form of government get to you. It so happens that I know this Nathan Levy’s father. He is a fine man and an excellent newspaper editor. We are not friends, for I do not happen to choose my friends from Jewish circles. But I respect him, and he respects me. We have cooperated on some financial reports. And he confided in me once, when we were discussing the youth at a lunch, that his son was flirting with communism. He was deeply upset.”

  Fred’s discussion with Alistair’s father lasted for an hour. When he took his leave, he asked for news about his former roommate. Mr. Simpson looked very grave.

  “Fred, I am appalled to say that Alistair is in the deepest kind of trouble. He was arrested last week for soliciting a boy in a public urinal. My lawyers are trying to get the wretched business quashed. No, don’t say anything. Don’t even try to see him. I have him out on bail in the country. Go now, please, my boy, and remember what I’ve told you.”

  He gripped Fred’s shoulder, but then turned abruptly away and returned to his office, leaving his young friend to take his dismayed and thoughtful departure.

  Some weeks later, on Tap Day, Fred stood in Branford Courtyard with others of the Yale junior class, as members of the senior societies circled among them looking for their nominees. At last he felt an impact on his shoulder like Mr. Simpson’s final touch, and heard a voice behind him bellow, “Go to your room!”

  And he went.

  ***

  Fred entered Yale Law School, still supported by his Wall Street backer, and with him went many of the earnest and ambitious members of his prep school crowd. Nathan Levy had made up with his own father, at least enough to be given a job on the latter’s paper, and he disappeared from Fred’s life. There had not been much left of their friendship in their final year; Nathan had assumed that Fred’s inclusion in a senior society had cooled his interest in a person so removed from campus enthusiasms. Fred worked industriously as a law student and was elected an editor of the Law Journal, which virtually assured him upon graduation of being employed by any of the great Wall Street firms that he chose.

  He knew that Mr. Simpson was ready to offer him a fine job and a rosy future in his bank, but he was keen on practicing law, and he decided, correctly as it proved, that the latter would accept his choice so long as he agreed to become an associate in the firm that represented the Simpson interests. As this firm, Shepard & Bates, was one of the most prestigious, Fred, his mother, and his angel were all content. Alistair Simpson, who had been somehow extricated from his jam, had been sent abroad indefinitely, and Fred was more than ever in his place.

  Fred had now put together precisely the kind of career for which he meant to devote his mind, energy, and heart. He had never quite forgotten the concept of a life devoted to a cause as opposed to personal success, and he had combined it with the more worldly but still sufficiently noble image of the great public servant espoused by his other Yale group. The career of the senior partner of a notable corporate law firm who, now possessed of ample riches, took his proper place in national affairs as an ambassador or a cabinet officer, seemed to offer just this—an Elihu Root, a William Maxwell Evarts, a John W. Davis. Such a man would not have to soil his hands, in Disraeli’s horrid phrase, by shimmying up “the greasy pole” of elective politics; he would be appointed by a president and approved by an admiring senate.

  There was first, of course, for Fred and for his generation, a war to be won. He chose the navy as the cleaner and more picturesque service, became an ensign, and served creditably on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, where he had the luck to be mildly wounded in an air attack on his vessel and awarded the Purple Heart. He had dissuaded Mr. Simpson from using his influence to obtain a safe shore job for him in the navy department where, as the latter coaxingly put it, his “expertise in the law would be more useful to the war effort.” He had sensed that a combat record would account for more kudos when peace returned. That he might be killed was a matter of indifference to him. Once a career had been decided on, one had to pursue it regardless of risk. If one was to be a great man, one would probably survive. Napoleon, in all his battles, was wounded only once, and Theodore Roosevelt escaped a rain of bullets on San Juan Hill.

  After the peace of 1945, Fred’s career swept forward as if on wings. He rapidly became an expert in securities law and the right-hand man of the senior partner, Phineas Bates, who was the very prototype of the great man he sought to become: a big, bluff, cheerful, dominating figure with tousled gray locks and cool gray eyes. He was a wily and imaginative attorney, a compelling orator, and the father of three bright, chirping, idealistic daughters who worshipped him and among whom the handsome Fred wondered if he could not find the mate he needed. Naturally, he would have to become a partner, but this rank was accorded him at the early age of twenty-nine.

  He spent many weekends as a guest of the Bateses in Westchester County, for his boss liked to work on Saturdays and ev
en on some Sundays away from the city, but he was careful to see that the tasks of his assistant were varied with strenuous tennis matches and dinner parties attended by his lively wife and daughters.

  Anita was the oldest of the latter and perhaps her father’s favorite. She was not outstandingly pretty, and her figure, if compact and well-shaped, was a bit on the sturdy side, but there was an exuberance in her manner and a candor in her laughing blue eyes that charmed all but the sourest misogynist. Anita loved the world and wanted it to love her. But she was far from dumb and even able to be shrewdly critical; she might give you more credit than you deserved for living up to her own high moral standards, but if you fell too obviously below them, she could manifest a sharp and articulate indignation.

  Fred had never questioned the tradition that a good wife was a vital element in any successful American career, and he had every intention of finding one for himself. He might be cool, certainly, but not cold, in his way of going about it. His consort would not have to be rich, as he expected to be an adequate provider, but neither should she come from impoverished or lower-class parents. It was incumbent that her background and upbringing not be a cause of awkwardness in any social circle to which they might aspire. It was also desirable that she be in love with him, or at least enthusiastically cooperative in sexual matters. He was not such a fool as to underestimate the havoc that a discontented spouse might reap in a man’s life. She must be made happy, or at least contented, and he supposed with some reason that he could count on his own nature to be a faithful and considerate husband. Was it so difficult? And were not his standards common to many sensible and intelligent men, however little expressed?

  Anita came to know him as well as any girl had on the weekends when he was her father’s working guest, and from the beginning he enjoyed the advantage of having the latter’s total approval. Indeed, he was almost thrown at her, which is not always the best way of improving a relationship. But his good looks and seemingly modest yet self-assured good manners, his easy competence on the tennis court and in the swimming pool, his flattering interest in her accounts of her job at Vogue began to stir a deeper feeling in her heart. And when she at last perceived that she had won his friendship without capturing anything stronger from him, that he might even be a man whose passion she might never be able to arouse, she of course fell in love with him.