A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (18 page)

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Mother's greatest blunder, at least so far as I was concerned, was in inducing me to bring out my first published book under a pseudonym as she feared the reaction at Sullivan & Cromwell. Why I weakly succumbed to her passionate plea that I at least use a pen name, I don't know. You would think that at age thirty, after four years of total absence from home on naval duty in Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean waters, I might have developed the independence to bring out my own book under my own name. And what made the whole thing even more ridiculous was that my friends all knew about the book anyway. The only point to a pen name is to conceal the true author, and the secret was already out. I had made a fool of myself.

The book was well reviewed, and none of my bosses gave a damn about it. But Mother, not in the least abashed, continued her fretful opposition to my publications, shifting her ground and claiming now that two characters in my next novel would give offense to my elder colleagues in law as libelous cartoons. It was years before Mother came around to my side, and I forgave her. What made me in the end do so was the sense that I was really the one to blame for giving in to her foolish obsession.

It is only fair to add that Mother would never have been so silly with any but a child. She had a neurotically exaggerated sense of the duty she owed her offspring, and she sought it in the most unlikely places. With the large host of her good friends she allowed her beautifully sound mind free play, and they came to her constantly for advice in the most private and personal matters. As one woman who suffered from her mother's opposition to her perfectly acceptable beau, a problem deftly solved by my parent, told me, "Thank God I wasn't your mother's child! I'd never have gone to her then for advice."

Where was Father in all this? Well, the blindness that Mother showed with her children did not exist with him. They adored each other, and she was genuinely helpful in the severe periodic depressions from which he suffered. If he intervened in a family matter she promptly deferred to him. What she feared was responsibility, and once he assumed it, she was only too glad to be unburdened. It is a great pity that he did not assume it more often.

It must not be assumed that Mother's occasional social ineptitudes had any serious effect on her wide reputation as a brilliant and attractive figure in the world. People thought of her as a much more forceful and self-assured person than she actually was. She had little appreciation of her own gifts, and when she wrote for a privately printed family genealogy an enchanting introduction about the lives of her parents' generation, she insisted that it be produced as a detachable pamphlet so that it could be thrown away and not clutter up the volume. She refused to see any merit in her writing. If she had only waited to be born in that son's generation, she might not have died with that talent unwasted.

The little piece I have mentioned, consisting of some dozen pages about her mother and aunts and uncles, is a beautiful picture of a closely knit upper-middle-class New York family of the 1890s and early 1900s. It is a kind of fable of how to combine worldliness and epicureanism with warmth, tolerance, and humanity, and live happily and attractively. I tried to catch some of its flavor in my novel
Portrait in Brownstone.

In my first book,
The Indifferent Children,
I created a character based on a friend of mine who was a charming fellow but a bit of an ass. He recognized himself and was deeply hurt, and I resolved never to do that again. But when I came to write
Portrait in Brownstone,
based on Mother's family, I could hardly avoid resemblances, so when I took her the finished manuscript, I rather handsomely, I thought, offered not to publish it in her lifetime if she objected.

"Why should I mind?" she asked. "They're all dead. I rather like your bringing them back."

Portrait in Brownstone
turned out to be a bestseller, as has often been the case with novels that are family sagas.
The New-comes, The Forsyte Saga, Buddenbrooks
come instantly to mind. The novel form suits them exactly. It provides the smoothest method of changing the theme with each generation to which there can be no objection. The son of a saint can be a serial killer if the author wishes, or even another saint.

Many literary critics like to play the game of seeking out the actual person who they imagine was the model from whom an author has copied a particular character. Some of them credit the author with no imagination whatsoever; he is always hiding a source. It is a harmless game but rarely contributes much to the understanding or even the appreciation of the work involved. Some authors are obvious copyists; others are not. It doesn't affect their quality. We can find a model for almost every character in Charlotte Bronte's fiction; none in Emily's. Both were great writers. Sometimes a writer may use more than one model for a character; several great ladies have been perceived in Proust's Duchesse de Guermantes. In my own case I always start with a particular person in mind, but as my story develops he or she may change in character, appearance, virtue, age, or even sex, though the latter is very rare.

One thing a writer must learn is not to be surprised by the curious identifications that readers constantly make. The best-known character of all my books, the headmaster in
The Rector of Justin,
my number-one bestseller and winner of a national prize, which still annually sells many copies, has been almost universally seen as modeled on the Reverend Endicott Peabody, a gentleman who shared not a single characteristic with my rector. But they were both headmasters, were they not? And Auchincloss went to Groton, didn't he?

What makes this even odder is that, more than any other character in my fiction, I
had
modeled my rector on an actual person, the late Judge Learned Hand, the greatest man I ever knew, and whose personality was not only publicly known but the very opposite of Peabody's.

W
HO CAN SAY
why some are born inside the circles that some consider of such importance and why others are placed in less advantageous positions. I cannot, but I wanted to give a special prominence to one memorable personality who loomed large in my early years, despite her being neither actual family or of shared background. You see, no one—in society or in any of the grand, monied places I have seen—is more etched in memory than Maggie Kane. She came to us fresh from a poverty-stricken Ireland. I believe my parents were her first and perhaps her last employers—but she never showed the attachment or homesickness for the old country that our other Irish maids did. She was very young when she left and perhaps it was not a happy home that she chose to forsake.

At any rate she never referred to it. Nor did she ever really adopt America or American ways. The world that she accepted with seeming totality was simply the world that we as a family offered her: our household of family and servants in a New York brownstone, a country house on Long Island, and a sea side villa in Maine. In these she spent a whole lifetime until the day she left us—or disappeared rather, for we never found her—perhaps in her sixties. The detective we hired to locate her thought she had returned to Ireland, but I never thought so. Years later we received a package containing photographs of me and my siblings that I knew she had had. It had been mailed in the New York area. It may have come from people with her when she died. We never knew. She felt, poor soul, that she had survived her function in our lives: the children she had lovingly nursed were all grown and had their own independent existences; the parents were old and well looked after; her position in the household was a kind of charity. She knew she was loved and was welcome to remain as a kind of pensioner, but her pride required her to remove herself.

The life of those poor Irish immigrant girls in the 1920s and '30s was not an enviable one. They frequently came alone, leaving families glad enough not to have to support them further, and went into domestic service here for which there was a constant demand but which was badly paid and futureless. They were apt to be relegated to tiny rooms at the top of big houses to which the heat sometimes didn't reach and share a bathroom with four or five other housemaids. They had a day off each week, but what could they do with it? They knew nobody and had no means of meeting people, and if they were lucky enough to have a boyfriend (a "follower" as they were somewhat contemptuously referred to by employers) he was certainly not welcome in the house where they served. When the family in summer moved to a country place it was apt to be near some village where the locals were totally uninterested in the visitors' Irish help.

When we went to Maine my mother was actually heard to say that the maids should be happy in the beauty of Mount Desert Island, but what did they care about that? The sea by our house was really too cold for any but the hardy to bathe in, and anyway the poor maids were scared of sharks. Their sole diversion was on Saturday afternoons when the chauffeur might drive them to the village of Bar Harbor where they could see a movie as racy as Pola Negri in
DuBarry, Woman of Passion.

Maggie's official position with us was as a nurse to my sister and me. My elder brother didn't need a nurse, and my younger one had his own, a huge Swedish woman who looked after Priscilla and me on Maggie's day off. We never had a governess who would have been addressed as "Miss" and taken her meals with our parents. Maggie ate with the other maids in the servants' dining room. But she soon developed the entire trust of both my parents and assumed the undisputed position of a general family adviser. She had a wonderfully deep and realistic common sense that was badly needed at times to moderate Mother's occasional volatile and nervous thinking where her offspring were concerned. When we heard Maggie's impassioned but always respectful cry to a bizarre suggestion of Mother's—"Woman, dear, are you mad?"—we knew that plans were going to be changed.

Yet Maggie never encroached on her favored position in the household to lord it over the other maids or even to obtain some special privilege for herself. She was utterly content with the status quo and never wanted to change it by an iota. She loved us children as if we had been her own, but I don't think she ever caused my mother a moment of maternal jealousy. She comforted her in her sadness at sending us to boarding school. "Your poor mother is so upset at sending you off," she told me. "In this country you have to be rich to afford the unhappiness of parting with your children."

Maggie gave physical proof of her devotion to her wards. One afternoon when Priscilla and I were little and coming back from the park, each holding on to one of Maggie's hands as we crossed a street under a green light, a taxi that had failed to stop completely at the red lurched toward us, and Maggie instantly hurled us both onto the safety of the sidewalk, receiving herself the blow of the impact. Fortunately she soon recovered.

Maggie made friends easily enough with other Irish nurses at the Bar Harbor Swimming Club and sometimes for our amusement and sometimes perhaps for our improvement let us know what was said about us. My parents had an argument as to which came out on top in this assessment of Maggie's acquaintance. "The nurses say that Mrs. Auchincloss seems so cross, and Mr. Auchincloss is so pleasant spoken, but I tell them if they knew them better they'd find it is just the other way round." It was true that Mother, when occupied with her own thoughts, had a preoccupied look that could be interpreted as bad humor, and Father's social manners were always charming, but it was also true that in the home Mother's nature was almost invariably equable and Father could be sharply impatient.

Maggie's conversation was full of odd quotations that she would insert into the general discourse when she deemed relevant, which seemed to have come from some unrecognizable body of folklore, like "'I see,' said the blind man, when he couldn't see at all," but they were vivid and made us laugh. Mother and Father didn't believe in corporal discipline, and we were never spanked, but this didn't stop Maggie in what she regarded as a necessary means of correction. But she was never violent, and we would have died rather than betray her to Mother. We always adored her, and my sister's ultimate decision not to have her as a nurse for her own children, the relationship being too close, I always resented. It would have been the ideal solution for the problem of Maggie's later years.

These were not easy. As we grew up Maggie's function as a nurse disappeared. There was never any idea of letting Maggie go; she had become too much a part of our lives, and in a large household there were always tasks that she could perform: cleaning, mending, darning, tending anyone who was sick, walking the dogs, and so forth. But the time came when the children were all gone and Mother and Father moved to smaller quarters and really there was nothing to fill Maggie's time. Most painful of all as I recall it was Maggie's desire to keep up with all our doings and new interests, which she was unable to share. The truth was that there was really nothing for Maggie and us children to have a serious talk about. Hugging is not enough. But even now, many years later, after I have lived more than ninety years, Maggie remains someone to recall, not a subject for a writer of my ilk, as it happens. Rather, a genuine and lasting comfort.

It was a pity that none of my students in the three years I taught at NYU seemed to have any real conception of the beautiful language that was theirs. I do not think it helped that most of them had never had a lesson in grammar. Yet classes in what is called creative writing are offered in colleges from coast to coast to students who couldn't explain to you the use of the subjunctive. It is not that they can't learn. They are quick enough. It's that grammar is not a glamorous subject.

In reading a student's paper I frequently had to ask: "This sentence—do you mean A or B?"

The student would look at it. "Why A, of course."

"Read it for B."