False Gods

by Louis Auchincloss

“No, dear child, even you haven’t.”

  “Then we’re in the same boat.”

  “Is that a compensation?”

  “I don’t know why it should be, but I think it might be. We can get together at special times. I’ll show you my old drawings of houses, and you will recite Phèdre.”

  But now she had returned to her old self. She smiled at him as if he were a fanciful child. Then she turned to signal to the chauffeur that she was coming.

  “No, dear, we can never do that.”

  “And just why not?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be fair to Olive.” She took his arm, and he helped her up. “Your job, you must understand, will be to make very sure that she never hears a word about the silly talk we’ve been having today. Or even has reason to suspect it. Don’t you agree that you owe her at least that?”

  POLYHYMNIA

  Muse of Sacred Song

  THE ARCHBISHOP instructed me to write out this apologia or confession, whatever it may turn out to be—perhaps it will simply end as the plain account of my unhappy situation and its origins—and to begin it on the first day of the then approaching new year, so I am dating this page January 1, 1925.

  “Your first love, my dear Reggie Turner, as I well recall, was literature. Before you decided to become a priest, you were all for being a writer. Well, maybe that is just the way to work your problem out. First by putting down on paper exactly what it is. Surely you must recognize that a release from your vows is a very serious matter.”

  “Even if I’m not fit to be a priest?”

  “How can we be sure of that? How old are you? Twenty-nine? Thirty? You have years to reflect, to repent, even to reform. Whatever may be needed.”

  I stared gloomily at the window behind his desk through which, even closed, we could hear the rumble of Madison Avenue, almost on our level. The Archbishop’s bland round face, surmounting his round tight little body in immaculate black, was, as always, uncannily redeemed from the flesh and the world with which it seemed so linked by the spiritual quality of the small tan eyes he kept steadily fixed on his interlocutor and the set half-smile that mightn’t have been a smile at all. I reflected with mortification that he was giving a lot of important time to a most unimportant person.

  “If Mrs. Douglas had her way, I’d be burned at the stake in Times Square!”

  “That comment is out of order, my son.”

  His tone was soft, but entirely authoritative. His round little hands were folded on a spotless blotter. Even the crude portraits of his predecessors, stout, smug, irretrievably Celtic, could not derogate from the dignity that emanated from his presence. But what have I just written about those wretched portraits? Will I have to show it to him? Yes, of course, I’ll have to show it to him. Perhaps that is why I wrote it. How full of hate I am! How could anyone wish me to go on being a priest?

  “You are too kind, sir. I have presumed on your patience.”

  “Your case is a special one, my dear boy. You were not reared to be one of us. You had to break through walls to gain the church. These things must be taken into account. And we must consider, too, how all of this may affect your dear mother. She has always been deeply sympathetic to your vocation. Go in peace, my son. Go in peace and write your piece. You see I can never resist a bad pun. God bless you, my boy!”

  Archbishop Walsh’s speaking of my mother was characteristic of the whole world in which I grew up. Everyone was always speaking of Mother. Alice and I seemed to exist only as her children, and we were presumably expected to rejoice in the label. If we didn’t, it must have been due to our perversity.

  Mother, to my childish eyes, was the mistress of a Moorish castle in the middle of a desert of limitless sand. Within, one reclined on silk cushions on divans, breathing in the perfumed air, listening to the lute and waited on by devoted slaves. I might have been something of an anomaly there, being neither a woman nor a eunuch, but Mother cuddled me to her side, fingering my blond curls abstractedly as she issued instructions to menials in her cool clear tone. If I shrank at the idea of ever having to go outside, she would simply laugh her high laugh and exclaim that only a fool would exchange our existence for one of lizards and scorpions.

  The fantasy shows how competent an artist Mother was in her own peculiar field, for it was she who had painted my vision. She had converted the dark, bleak mansions that Father had inherited on Fifth Avenue and in Newport into shrines of luxury, but instead of barring her gates to the outer world, she had lured in the threatening warriors and emasculated them at the most Lucullan of dinners.

  Mother indeed was no lute-loving houri. She was a mine of energy, a triumphant hostess, a handsome Junoesque figure with hair that was always golden and serene pale blue eyes that saw only what they wished to see. Her aura of calm and repose was a mask that covered a frenetic activity. No detail of housekeeping was beneath her. Her butler and footman in setting the vast dining room table had to equalize the distances between the covers with a ruler, and a single withered petal in the glorious floral display evoked a gentle but immediate reproof. Even on family summer picnics the chauffeur would set up a folding table in the wilderness and place on it the wicker baskets crammed with delicious things. Mother seemed to regard her very guests as part of the décor of her entertainments. I remember her pausing over a list of invitees to a garden party and exclaiming with genuine regret: “But I can’t ask Margaret Lee! She might wear that huge ghastly blue hat she’s so stuck on!”

  Her guests, however, once qualified, had nothing to complain of, and the society columns lauded her above other hostesses. But on non-party days the big gaudy chambers of our homes in winter and summer had some of the mournful loneliness of empty theatres, and Alice and I, though usually meek and accepting, could not but feel ourselves relegated to the fringes of Mother’s busy existence.

  It was not that she was ever unkind or even unloving. Quite the contrary. She was inclined to be demonstratively affectionate and was always insisting that the closeness of our family ties was a model to all. In the portraits she commissioned of Alice and me, we were shown with arms intertwined, in laces and frills, or hugging Mother dramatically on a sofa (this last by Boldini), as if to proclaim our solidarity and refute the horrid little facts that crept stubbornly in at the corners of our lives: Alice’s depressions and my own occasional hysterics.

  Where was Father in all this? Usually absent at sea on the yacht that brought him his only satisfaction, where he could invite a few old cronies to cruise and drink with him. Father had worked until early middle age in the New York office of his father’s Pittsburgh coke business, and when the latter had made them both rich by selling the works to Andrew Carnegie, he had found himself with nothing to do, too old to take up a profession. A moody, brilliant man who had been captured by my mother’s youthful beauty, and bitterly disillusioned by what he deemed her trivial obsession with society, he had early in our lives absented himself from the family hearth to find solace in the bottle and on the briny deep. On his rare appearances he was gruff and formal with his children; as a parent he was almost a cipher.

  Mother could never understand him. Why could he not be as happy as she in their lovely life with all their lovely friends and the many lovely occasions of entertaining them? What was so wonderful about knocking about on the ocean? She could be almost touching in her pathetic efforts to interest him in her new ideas for parties: musicals, private theatricals, charades, fancy dress. Even when he was abrupt to the point of downright rudeness, she would excuse him to us on the ground that he was tired, or worried about the “market,” or simply being as unreasonable “as men will be.” She never for a moment faced the fact that love had disappeared from both their hearts. Love was good taste, wasn’t it?

  Mother, as I grew older, didn’t shut out the world for me; she lived too much in it. What she did was somehow to establish herself in my mind as a counterbalancing force to the world; there was it and there was Mother; the cosmos was a duality. T
he two elements were not necessarily antagonistic; they could live together in a kind of harmony with a little good will. Mother’s attitude to her co-equal was one of gentle irony, of occasional impatience. When she came up to see me in the large dark Gothic boarding school in New Hampshire to which my father, in a rare exhibition of will, had insisted on sending me, her presence jolted even that fixed routine, from the moment when her huge red-uniformed chauffeur parked her equally fiery Rolls-Royce town car in the headmaster’s reserved space by the chapel and she descended, all smiles, to ask that indignant pedagogue whether she could take my dormitory on a picnic. I would suffer agonies of embarrassment at her flouting of all rules governing visiting parents: the beautiful silk tie she brought for my dormitory master, the golden-wrapped chocolates she distributed to the boys, the high voice with which she warbled out of tune the hymns in chapel and the equally high cries with which she cheered the wrong side at the Saturday afternoon football game. Yet even I could see that her intrusions into the set schedules were welcome to the boys and younger masters and that my meagre stock of popularity gained a few points, very temporarily, by the possession of a parent so colorful and bizarre. But convention always won out in the not very long run at Saint Matthew’s; Mother once gone, her silliness and not her originality remained to brand me.

  I suppose, by the new Freudian rules, I should have turned out a homosexual. Was that not the common fate of the coddled darlings of dominating mothers and abdicating fathers? But such was not to be my fate. The lust that I felt for girls in my late school and Harvard days was one of the elements that propelled me into the arms of the church. For I never developed a reasonable or even a friendly attraction to my contemporaries of the opposite sex. The act of love always appeared to me as a beastly copulation. I have my own amateur theory of what may have gone wrong. It is a truism that boys find it difficult to conceive of their mothers making love, and in my case this could have been even stronger, as Mother, like many society hostesses of her day, may have been what is now called “frigid.” Could I not as a child have imagined my own generation by a dark, remote and severe father as a kind of rape? And, in a way, might it not have been? Could this not explain why I tended mentally to brand women who actually liked that kind of thing as tramps? And to condemn the solitary and shameful acts with which I relieved my libido as crimes against the maternal half of creation, against Mother herself?

  Reserved, timid, of little athletic ability and small appetite for learning, other than what was contained in romantic literature, I was an unprepossessing but largely unnoticed student at Saint Matthew’s. For I had taken refuge in a kind of protective coloration to blend into the grey background of that solemn institution. I came almost to enjoy my anonymity and wondered whether I was not beginning to understand why Father spent so much of his life at sea, gazing at the horizon as he stood silently on the bridge, waiting patiently for his ultimate inclusion in the greater and final silence.

  In my last year at school, however, I made a friend who changed my life. Or rather whose religion changed my life. I had had a few other friends, boys like myself who tended to be moody and lustreless (Mother said of one of them, after failing to get three words out of him at lunch, that he wouldn’t be asked to dinner even to avoid a table of thirteen), but they had had no effect on me. Frank Chappell was a big boy, handsome in a blocky manner, but he was so dull that even his prowess as a football guard hardly made him acceptable to the elite of our class. He didn’t, however, bore me at all, probably because it never occurred to me that anyone could bore me. He was serious, humorless, thoroughly decent and a Catholic, of a devout New York family.

  Saint Matthew’s was a strict Episcopal school, but a few Catholic boys were admitted under condition that they attend all chapel services. On Sundays they were allowed to go to early mass in the neighboring village in the bus that took the school maids. Frank’s parents knew their son too well to fear the effects on him of any effort to proselytize; the social advantages of the school, to their mind, outweighed its heresy. Nor were they wrong. Frank was resolute in his faith as in everything else. And he never made the least effort to convert me. It was I who came to envy him the consolation of his quiet conviction that his psyche contained a comforting presence evocable at any moment.

  The Episcopal Church had never offered me anything like that. Its ceremonies were associated in my mind with the other formal underpinnings of our social life. Mother was a regular churchgoer, and when I watched her kneeling, a bit laboriously, to take communion, greeting her neighbors at the rail with a brief and (for the occasion) democratic nod, glancing up to salute the chalice bearer with the hint of a gracious smile and, after the service, lauding the minister’s sermon as he, unctuous with gratification, took her hand in both of his and shook it slowly, it seemed to me another of her parties. There was never the inner certitude, the inner peace and joy that I sensed in Frank. He seemed impregnable, and I came to wonder whether I couldn’t be that, too.

  The first truly bold act of my life was to ask my dormitory master whether I could go to mass with Frank. He was obviously taken aback; he would have to consult the headmaster. That worldly and formidable old prelate received me in his vast study, hung with photographs of athletic teams, as if I had been guilty of some offense too grave for ordinary discipline, but his tone was uncharacteristically gentle. I must have represented something dangerous, to be caught and stifled as soon as possible. Did he foresee a twentieth-century Oxford Movement sweeping the New England church schools? He would take the matter under advisement; he would write to my parents. Father was fortunately off cruising, and Mother answered with the request that I be sent home to discuss the problem, which was promptly granted.

  Mother was not at all hostile to my project; on the contrary it caught her fancy and interest as no other proposition of mine ever had. Until then she had tended to see me, I’m afraid, as a not too individualized offspring through the mists of a warm but not too discriminating maternal affection. She now told me that she had long had a secret hankering for the more splendid rites of the Roman Church, for the soaring choral music, the smell of incense, the intoning priests, the glory of Gothic cathedrals and red-robed cardinals. “They do it so well!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands. She had never dared to “take the leap”; my father and most of her friends were too anti-Catholic, associating the faith with superstitious Irish maidservants and the rough priests who led them by the nose. “But if I had someone to lead the way!” she ended.

  Then she really surprised me. “I’ve arranged for you to talk with Archbishop Walsh.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was Mother all over, to go straight to the top. The Archbishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of New York was a familiar figure to all. He sat by the mayor at parades; he gave the invocation at political dinners; he was quoted in all the newspapers on the moral aspects of current events and he was as much at home in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria as at the altar of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. He was affable, shrewd, worldly wise (would Your Grace object to that?) and universally admired, even by non-Catholics. The social world cultivated him, and Mother placed him on her right at her grandest dinners.

  When I called on him in his “palace” behind the cathedral, he was, of course, much too astute to encourage me in anything but the fulfillment of my simple wish.

  “Go to mass with your school friend, by all means, my son. And if you find it edifying, as I have no doubt you will, come to mass at the cathedral on your next vacation, and I will give you breakfast afterwards.”

  I returned to school with the necessary permission and never missed a Sunday mass before my graduation in the spring. And of course I attended services at the cathedral in the Christmas vacation and enjoyed an inspiring breakfast with my new mentor. At school I no longer felt lonely or set apart. However much of an oddball I appeared to my classmates, I was at peace with myself. There may even have been a smugness in my new security, a sense of
something like pity for those still benighted. Frank Chappell seemed to find that I was overdoing it; I was encountering for the first but not the last time the irritation that born Catholics feel with zealous converts. I think he was even faintly embarrassed when I announced my intention to be received into the church. Protestants, I fancy he believed, were all very well, but they should stay in their place. He could not have reconciled any such attitude with his faith, but Frank was never one to see that things had to be reconciled. He took the world pretty much as it came.

  He went to Yale and I to Harvard, and for the next four years we met only on football weekends or at New York parties. My interests, at any rate, had developed in very different directions from his. I was taking as many courses as I could in English and French literature and trying my hand at pieces for The Advocate. There had never been a writer in our family, but I was beginning to wonder whether I shouldn’t be the one to break new ground, and I made a special trip to New York to talk with old Mr. William Dean Howells, whom my mother, true to her habit of going straight to the top, had invited to lunch that I might meet him. That dear delightful dean of American letters was enchanting to me. When I told him that I was a fervent convert to the Roman Church, he replied, “Then why not become a fervent Catholic writer?”

  This gave me the inspiration that sustained me for the next two years in Cambridge. I was now determined to be a “Catholic novelist,” not a novelist who happened to be a member of the faith, but one whose whole work was designed to promote it. I at once proceeded to devote my afternoons to the composition of a story about a reputable banker who finds himself suddenly, even quixotically, involved in a hugely profitable and virtually undiscoverable embezzlement. At the opulent debutante party he is now able to give for his beloved only daughter, he is suddenly seized in the stranglehold of an atrocious depression. He knows at once that he is damned, that he has already, fully alive, descended into hell. In a desperate effort to redeem his soul he seeks to restore the stolen funds to their rightful owners, but each repayment results only in his further enrichment. Nothing will ransom him, it seems, but public confession and exposure, and when he at last resorts to this, he and his family are publicly disgraced and beggared. His ultimate torture was to be his apprehension that it was Satan who had induced him to prefer his own salvation to the welfare of his loved ones, but in the end…