False Gods

by Louis Auchincloss

  What I now heard Horace say, as coolly as if he were talking about a party or a trip that my son was planning, was this: “Oscar has a project he wasn’t sure about broaching to you. He has this idea about changing his name back to Ullman. He wanted to know how I thought you’d react.”

  I rose to walk to the window. I needed time for this one. I had first to digest the disagreeable fact that Oscar’s relationship with his godfather was a good deal more intimate than I had suspected. I knew he had spent a weekend recently with the Aspinwalls in Greenwich, and I had even wondered whether he might have been attracted to one of their daughters, though both were as gushing and giggly as Horace’s sisters had been at the same age. Still, those sisters had married surprisingly well. But a change of name to Ullman would hardly have been the way for Oscar to ingratiate himself with Horace’s bustling little country club wife.

  “And what did you tell him?” I demanded.

  “I told him I thought you would mind, but that you were too sensible to mind very much. And that the decision in any case had to be his own and no one else’s.”

  “Is that all you told him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I swung around from the window. “Didn’t you tell him you approved of the idea?”

  “I certainly didn’t tell him I disapproved.”

  “Obviously, you think it’s a good move on his part. Why?”

  “Because I feel that Oscar should be free to assert his identity as a Jew. I needn’t tell you how fine a son you have, Maury. He holds his head too high to be associated with the least taint of misrepresentation.”

  “Unlike his old man, eh?”

  “You’ve always had your own good reasons for doing the things you’ve done. I’m not going to start criticizing you at this point in our lives.”

  “You’re not?” I stared into those usually gentle eyes, astonished to sense the sudden dislike in them. “I suggest you already have. If you had to pick a son of Dorothy’s to make up to you for having none of your own, why couldn’t it have been Edgar? Why couldn’t you leave me out of it?”

  Horace was too shocked at first to answer this. Of course I was being absurd. I was surprised at the violence of my own temper. Edgar would never have had any truck with the likes of poor Horace. He was a languid, indolent homosexual, a frequenter of the highest society, a collector of Greek and Roman sculptures of nude young men. Now Horace tried to reason with a lunatic.

  “There was no idea of ‘picking’ a son of yours, Maurice. Isn’t it permissible for a man to be fond of his godson and to want to help him? There are some things that Oscar has found it hard to discuss with either you or Dorothy. She has such pronounced views, and you aren’t the easiest person in the world to discuss delicate matters with.”

  “Why am I not?”

  “Just because you can stand there the way you’re standing and ask that question the way you’re asking it. But let’s get back to the point, for heaven’s sake. Would you. really mind so terribly if Oscar became Oscar Ullman?”

  “Yes! Because it would hurt him!”

  “You mean in the eyes of the world? Why should it? Everyone knows it’s his real name. That’s the penalty of your fame, Maurice.”

  “No, I don’t mean in the eyes of the world. I don’t give a damn about the eyes of the world. I’ve gotten everything I need from the world.” My heart was beating painfully now. “You talk about his real name. What I chose for him is his real name. If he changes it, he will be repudiating his father. He will have created the ridiculous image of a father and son with different family names. And when he sees what he has done, he will suffer what may be a terrible remorse, for he is a very sensitive soul.”

  “But suppose you change your name, too?”

  “Ah, now we have it! Now you’re smoked out, Horace! Let the Jew call himself what he is! That’s your revenge at last, isn’t it, for my muscling in on your unrequited Browning-esque love for Dorothy and taking her for myself? You could never forgive my trying to shake you out of that masturbating passion of yours and showing you how to win the woman you never really wanted!”

  “Maury, Maury, you’ve gone crazy!” Horace shook his head sadly as he slowly rose to his feet. “Let us put a stop to this terrible conversation. You’re going to be sorry enough for what you’ve already said.”

  “Of course, I don’t mean it was all conscious on your part,” I said lamely.

  “At least we have decided one thing.” He turned back from the door. “There can be no further question of Oscar’s changing his name. Certainly not in your lifetime.”

  So he had the last word, after all. I guess I have always underrated Horace.

  The outbreak of war in Europe effected a curious change in my former best friend. Horace became the most concerned and vocal of interventionists. I wondered whether Armageddon didn’t seem to offer him a possible escape from the long littleness of his life. I suppose this was true of many men. We had both been in Officers Candidate School in 1918 when the war had ended, depriving us of our chance for combat in France, as much to my relief as to Horace’s chagrin. I had been eager only to get on with my career. But now, in 1940, Horace was always plaguing me with his plans to take a leave of absence and go to England in any assisting capacity. As the United Kingdom had no urgent need of American males in their fifties, except to promote war feeling and military aid in their own country, he spent his days in interventionist committee meetings, organizing huge rallies in halls draped with the banners of the occupied nations. Dorothy joined him with the exaltation born of finding a cause worthy of all her shattered ideals. So they were together at last in a union that even Horace’s disgruntled little wife could not openly object to. They could both exclaim, like the dying Henry James, “At last, the distinguished thing!”

  The war had an equally strong but less heady effect on Oscar. He was a lawyer now and still living at home, but not working, for he had planned a year’s trip around the world which Hitler’s invasion of Poland had interrupted. He became almost sombre and much less communicative. He spent his days largely in his own rooms, reading or listening to records of his beloved Bach, and his nights in bars with unmarried friends who worked in the day. As he didn’t drink, his need for discussion with his contemporaries had to be compelling.

  The crisis that was clearly pending broke one morning when he appeared in my office, solemn of mien.

  “I’m going to Canada, Dad. I want to enlist in the RAF or the RCAF, whichever will take me.”

  The razor that had been encased in my heart ever since Oscar had started taking flying lessons now turned over.

  “Can’t you wait until we get in?”

  “But will we?”

  “If your mother and godfather have anything to do with it, we will.” I had seen them as pathetic, even a bit ridiculous; now I saw them as menacing.

  “Ma and Uncle Horace have an awful lot of isolationists to fight. And maybe the isolationists have a point. Maybe it’s not their war. All I know is it’s mine.”

  “You mean it’s a Jew’s war.”

  “I’m not trying to convert anyone. It’s a war for me as a Jew. The little man with the moustache is doing his best to exterminate us.”

  “Does your mother know your plan?”

  “Yes, and she’s being very Roman about it. Uncle Horace tells me I’m doing what he’d do if he were my age. He says he envies me.”

  “I wish to hell he was your age!” I almost shouted. “What the hell are they trying to do? Ship you off to your death before I can stop you?”

  “Now, Dad, calm down. They’re both very much concerned as to how you’ll take it.”

  “And well they might be!” We argued, I heatedly and he coolly, for the rest of the morning and through lunch. The only thing I was able to obtain was a delay until September. It was now June, and France had fallen. My clinching argument was that if we were suddenly dragged into the war, our air force would desperately need pilots. I did not
tell him that I feared Britain would now go under and that my requested delay in his plans might spare his going under with her.

  “And what shall I do in the meantime?” he asked sullenly.

  “Come and work in the firm for the summer. I’ll see you get something interesting to do.”

  But he didn’t want to work for me; he preferred, he said, to be on his own. Was it because he begrudged me his concession? Our most important decisions are based on trivia. He consulted Horace, and Horace suggested he apply to his firm. Had I known of this, I would have raised heaven and earth to stop him. I learned of it, however, only when Oscar again presented himself in my office, this time flashy-eyed and tightlipped. He had been refused a job by the hiring partner of Gurdon and Horace’s firm.

  “I suppose they give summer jobs only to second-year law students,” I suggested in a voice that concealed my desperation.

  “That was what Mr. Otis said. But that was not the real reason.” Of course it wasn’t. Oscar had stood in the first ten of his class in law school and had been an editor of the review.

  “Why should you doubt him?”

  “Because on my way out I dropped in to see a classmate who’s been working there a year. He’s a pal and put it to me straight. Otis had shown him my application and asked him about me. He said he was thinking of recommending to the firm that they make an exception in their no-Jews policy. My friend and I could only assume that Otis had been overruled by the hiring committee.”

  “Have you told this to Horace?”

  “Yes. Just now. He was frightfully upset. He said he’d talked to his cousin Gurdon, and that Gurdon had assured him it would be all right. Uncle Horace thought I would be proud to be the first to make them lift the bar. But I guess Gurdon, like Otis, couldn’t swing it.”

  “Assuming he even tried! Assuming this wasn’t his way of humiliating me, getting back at me for old scores! Goddamm Gurdon Aspinwall! And goddamn your godfather, too!”

  “Dad, I’m sure Uncle Horace, at least, meant well. But do you see what this means? One of the most distinguished firms in the country turns down a qualified candidate—and the son, too, of a man who could help them, or even hurt them—simply to preserve unblotted their perfect record of never taking a Jew! Dad, I’m off to Canada tomorrow!”

  ***

  And that is how I lost my son. In Canada he was found a capable enough aviator to be sent directly to England, where he was commissioned in the RAF and killed in an air battle over London, his second of time in Britain’s finest hour.

  For a while I didn’t care what happened to me. I went through my days at the office, spending more and more time there, performing my tasks automatically, though enough like my old self for my partners to think I was a stoic, if indeed they did not rather suspect I was simply hardhearted. Dorothy was afflicted, but much less than I; I doubt she had ever really loved anyone since Guy Thorp’s betrayal.

  Besides, she found exaltation in the role of a dead hero’s mother; it dramatized and elevated her sale of war bonds. But I will admit that she seemed to sense my agony with an uncharacteristic compassion. She may have felt, not that she had helped to drive Oscar to his death, but that I might believe she had. Oddly enough, she may have preferred a hating Maurice to an indifferent one. But then she was always an exception to her own rules.

  Horace had begged my forgiveness, almost on his knees, for the fiasco with his firm. I could only offer my pardon formally, to be rid of his lugubrious presence.

  “Don’t flatter yourself that you had anything to do with Oscar’s enlistment,” I couldn’t help adding. “It was entirely a matter between him and Hitler.”

  Some weeks later, when I encountered Gurdon in the washroom of a downtown lunch club, a hotter scene occurred. I had meant not to speak to him at all, but he sidled up to my wash stand with a long countenance.

  “Maury, I can’t tell you how sorry I was about your son. We thought he was the finest fellow in the world. Of course, we don’t give summer jobs to fully fledged lawyers, but we were planning to offer him a full-time one as soon as the war was over.”

  And there, in the presence of all those middle-aged and elderly hand-washing and urinating gentlemen, I spat in his mournful face. It was one of the more satisfactory moments of my life.

  It seemed for a long while that all the things I had achieved in life were simply the vanities of which the sages speak. I almost wanted it to be so. What was the point of living in a world where the Oscars were killed and the Gurdons survived? I tried to take a gloomy pleasure in my own futility. But my egotism, like the cheerfulness of Doctor Johnson’s friend, was always breaking in. I could not blind myself to the fact that some Oscars would survive a war fatal to many Gurdons. And the day came when, standing before my great Gauguin of a yellow idol on a green beach by a red sea, I congratulated its astute purchaser. The following week, in Virginia, I visited my stables and recognized my revived affection for my beautiful horses. There was talk now of my receiving an important post on the War Production Board. I was coming back to life in spite of myself. Or was it, really, in spite of myself?

  HEPHAESTUS

  God of Newfangled Things

  TUXEDO PARK, some forty miles northwest of New York City by beautiful Sterling Forest, was still, in the autumn of 1948, a reservation of large estates where some of the richer burghers of Manhattan could escape the urban heat or crush in summer or on weekends, protected, like the ancient Chinese, from the invasion of intruders by a long encircling wall and a guarded gate. In this House of Mammon were many mansions, and of many styles, most of them now weatherbeaten and maintained less lavishly than in the belle époque, but still making a brave enough show to impress the houseguest, and it was generally conceded that old Humphrey Kane’s little gem of a French Renaissance château, designed in the ‘twenties by his nephew Gilbert, before the latter went “modern,” was the prize of them all.

  Humphrey’s wife, Heloise, a generation younger than her husband and half-French to boot, had worked closely with his nephew in planning the house, inspired by Azay-le-Rideau on the Loire, and in laying out the grounds, which included a moat, a formal garden and a maze. There were those who had not scrupled to say that the whole undeniably beautiful place was a monument to their illicit passion. But that was more than two decades ago. Gilbert Kane in 1948 was sixty, with a fashionable wife and four teenage children, and his uncle, a hale ninety, no longer seemed unseasonably old for his now fading spouse. When the Gilbert Kanes arrived to spend an October weekend with their relatives to discuss the proposed demolition of the now obsolete servants’ wing and the reorganization of the corps de logis to make it manageable by a hired couple, only the oldest residents of the Park wondered whether Olive Kane still harbored any jealousy of her aunt-in-law, or whether old Humphrey yet kept a wary eye on his nephew.

  Certainly Gilbert, circling the house alone in the chilly twilight of that Saturday, was not thinking of his uncle’s wife. He was utterly absorbed in the contemplation of his early work, and his heart ached as he took in, with each new vista, a further and deepening reassurance of its continuing lightness and loveliness. American houses of the Beaux Arts school, even the best of them, even those of Hunt and White, had always struck him as tending with time to take on a dank, heavy, institutional quality, which had been a principal reason for his giving them up in favor of contemporary styles. But now it actually began to seem to him that he may have constituted a blessed exception to that rule, that it may have been his unique distinction to transport the spirit of the European country manor to the West in such a way as to enhance and even enrich what Henry James had called the “thin American air.”

  But few, alas, of his earlier creations had not been destroyed or perverted. His proud Roman villa in Bernardsville, New Jersey, was now a scrubby college sprouting two grotesque dormitory wings. His serene Irish manor house in Westbury, Long Island, like a sleek racehorse harnessed to a hay wagon, served as the “social centre” of the
housing development clustered thickly around it. And the romantic, rambling Jacobean mansion that had commanded a rocky peninsula on Mount Desert Island was a heap of ashes after the great Bar Harbor fire of the preceding year.

  Still, his masterpiece remained before his vision, or would until he had fulfilled his uncle’s commission. Its chaste white front under the high gabled windows and turrets of its roof seemed to cast a reproach at him over the glinting moat and the pale park in the darkling air. Never had he conceived a more perfect thing! There was no way he could remove a shutter or add a window without marring the harmony of the whole. Returning now to the house, he knew he would have to tell his uncle to get another to do his dirty work.

  He entered the parlor by a French window and found the other three seated by the fire, as if they had been waiting for him. His uncle, rigid, gaunt and brown, with snowy hair, rarely spoke these days, though his mind, once largely occupied in multiplying a modest inheritance, like a shiny tool kept in a velvet case, was still in perfect order. Heloise, interrupted by his entrance in something she was saying to Olive, let her arms, which she no doubt had been using in an emphatic Gallic gesture, drop to her sides. She was painfully thin and too pale, and her hair was almost absurdly gold. Olive, nearly as trim and straight as when she had married Gilbert, her lineless face bearing only a hint of marble, had no need to be concerned. But her small piercing eyes told the advent of the mood of apprehension with which she so constantly had to grapple.

  “This house is the best thing I’ve ever done!” he exclaimed too loudly. “It’s a shame to slice off even one room.”

  His uncle shrugged. Heloise murmured something about eight servants’ rooms being a lot for a couple. Olive came straight to the point, her point, anyway.

  “What does it tell you about our marriage,” she demanded in the cool, mocking tone that had helped to make her reputation as a wit, “that Gilbert thinks his best work was done in his bachelor days?”