The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (32 page)

My teacher scoffed at my Wagnerian pretensions and tried to turn me to operetta. My voice, such as it was, turned out to be nearer contralto than soprano. But there was still Fricka, Erda, Ortrud to be sung. I persisted in my lessons. For ten years I studied German opera, the same decade that witnessed the great popular triumph of Wagner in New York that Uncle Ed had predicted. The irony of my situation and the endless queries of my family drove me at last abroad, where, at the age of thirty, I sang Ortrud for a road company in Rouen, my debut and my finale.

For a cable came, not of congratulation but of recall. Granny was ill. She had had a stroke, which I was made to feel was not unrelated to the absurdity of my operatic career. Father had at the same time come down with a kidney disease that was to kill him, and as Mother had to spend all her time with him, she insisted that my place was with Granny. I debated my reply for a desperate week, and in the end I decided that Mother was right. I sailed home from Le Havre and spent seven dreary years with Granny until her death at the age of ninety-one. By then I was thirty-seven, and there was no further question of an appearance in opera. The family had won—or thought they had.

But I must insist on one point. Everybody has always taken for granted that I was talked into looking after first Granny and later Mother. They say: “Poor old Amy. She wanted to have her little fling, you know, but old Mrs. Stillman put a stop to all that. They preferred to have her a useful ‘companion' to an indifferent opera singer.” Everybody assumes that I was simply another of those weak-minded spinsters of the late Victorian era who bowed their heads submissively as they were cheated of their birthrights by selfish mothers and grandmothers. But it wasn't so. It cannot have been so! What I did, I did under nobody's persuasion but my own. I took a long clear look at my opera career and weighed it against what I could do for Granny. Had I had the voice for Isolde I hope I would have had the divine egotism and the courage to let Granny die alone. As it was, I could not sacrifice the small consolation that I was able to bring her for the chance to sing second-string roles in third-rate opera companies.

But we had our moments, Uncle Ed and I. Who knows, as Robert Browning might have put it, when all is finally added up, if we will not have had as much as the others? It is more graceful, anyway, to think so. It is like keeping that twentieth button properly buttoned on one's coat. And so I am going to be glad for what I have had. I am going to be glad for my little night in Rouen, and I wonder if Uncle Ed, even in those sorry last years, was not occasionally glad that he had had the thrill of producing
Tristan
, if only to a golden horseshoe of chattering friends and relations.

Sincerely yours,

A
MY
S
TILLMAN

 

 

 

 

1970

B
ROOKS CLARKSON
knew at once when his wife had gone too far. For years he had waited for the moment, knowing that he would recognize his doom when it fell. And, what was more, he was convinced that the other guests at that little Saturday night party in Glenville, all contemporaries, all weekday commuters like himself, had recognized it at the same time. That might have seemed curious to some. Was it so unusual for one of his crowd, on Long Island's not notedly puritan north shore, to get roaring drunk on Saturday night? If Fanny Clarkson, so gay, so fée, such a bewitching little wisp of a blond doll, kicked off her slippers, stripped to the waist and sang an obscene song, wasn't it the natural release of any poor female after a week of suburban coping? Doomed? Brooks Clarkson doomed? Doomed at thirty-nine, when one was as handsome as he, a partner, like his father before him, in the Broad Street firm of Emmons, Taylor & Clarkson, with a beautiful house in Glenville, a beautiful wife and three beautiful daughters? Yes! Certainly!

Fanny, like Eve, had first tasted of the apple, but he, like Adam, had readily followed. For years now they had been going to bed half sozzled. It was such a simple way to cloud over the beady eyes of the world: the eyes of his law partners, who suspected that his smooth talk and high connections covered a deficiency in aptitude, the eyes of his fellow trustees of the Glenville Library, the Glenville Museum, the Glenville Art Society, who suspected that he used his civic positions as a cover for his spiritual emptiness, the eyes of Fanny herself, who suspected that he was only half a man. Oh, blessed sin, blessed whiskey! But, of course, he and she were bound to drink more and more, and people were bound to get sicker and sicker of them. And that, in the long run, would provide a kind of dim solution.

Brooks had a theory of what was wrong with him. He had never divulged it to a living soul, not even to Fanny, and he never would, but he hugged it to his heart. It was a conceited, odious little theory, but it did not have to be either conceited or odious if no one knew. It was simply that he was different from other people. He was different from his clients, his partners, his Glenville friends, his cousins, even his brothers and sisters. He was different because he was an aristocrat, the last of his breed.

It was not, obviously, considering those who were
not
aristocrats, a mere question of birth or money or position. These things were only the outward and dispensable signs. It was a question of soul, and questions of soul could never be hidden. Somehow he stank of it, somehow it exuded from him, and, inevitably, like some bleeding creature in the ocean, he was bound to attract the notice of carnivorous neighbors. For his fellow Americans might worship wealth and admire arrogance; they might be dazzled by power and taken in by strutting, but they would never pardon an aristocrat. They could never forgive a man who conceived it his duty and privilege to serve his social inferiors. They would never forgive
noblesse oblige
.

And now the farce was almost over. Now the last invitations in Glenville would cease. Now his partners would meet secretly without him to discuss steps to be taken. Now he had been summoned, so to speak, before the Committee of Public Safety, and everyone knew how
that
had to end. There would be a brief incarceration; there would be the travesty of a trial; there would be the ride in the rumbling cart through narrow, jeering streets and finally the relief of turning into the big sun-bathed square and seeing ahead, soaring over the upturned faces of the vulgar and curious, the tall narrow instrument that guaranteed his swift release.

Fanny could not suspect all this, but she suspected something. She gazed at him darkly over the rim of her cocktail glass the next day, a Sunday, when they were alone before lunch. Brooks stood with his back to her at the bar table, slowly mixing his own, feeling the intensity of her gaze.

“Why do you give me this drink, darling?” she asked in her high, bright tone. “Shouldn't I be punished?”

“Punished? For what?”

“For disgracing you. For behaving in a way that would have convinced your late sainted grandmother that I was the Whore of Babylon. Don't minimize it, Brooks. Be angry. Don't you see, I want to be punished?”

“You were a bit gay. Why not? Is that a crime? Remember what Sylvia Fales did last week.”

“Ah, but she's not a Clarkson.”

“She's married to my cousin, isn't she?”

“Somehow it's different. Anyone can do anything but a Clarkson. As a matter of fact, any Clarkson can do anything but a
Brooks
Clarkson. Tell me the secret, honey. Why do you bear the sins of the world alone? I pine to know.”

“There's no secret, Fanny.” He turned and brought the shaker over to fill the empty glass that she held out to him. “You're imagining things. All I want is to have you enjoy yourself. All I want is to have you be happy.”

“Even if I'm a happy lush?” She took a deep sip from her refilled glass. “Even if I made an ass of myself again next Saturday night?” Her luminous, faintly feverish eyes followed him about the room. “Sometimes I think you'd be glad if I went to pieces. To get it over with, once and for all.”

“Fanny!” he cried. “How can you say anything so horrible? Don't you know I want the world for you?”

“Oh, your world!” She laughed desperately. “What do I want with your world, Brooks? What could I possibly do with it? Does it even exist?”

Brooks never had anything to say to this kind of comment, and when he had finished his drink, he quickly poured himself another. Not until the third, however, did he begin to sense the tingle in the ears, the prickle in the chest, the glow about the heart, that accompanied the gradual cessation of pain. With gin they would get through until the guillotine.

Brooks had no real friends, but, as appropriate for an aristocrat, he had a protégé. Patronage was a function of his class, and he took it seriously. He made himself responsible for Benny Galenti, whose position in life he saw as the inverse of his own. If this were so, the ultimate outcome had to be as happy for Benny as it should be sad for himself.

Benny had started in Emmons, Taylor & Clarkson as an office boy. He was the son of Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side, and his original ambition had been to be a lawyer. He had a slight, tight physical build, thick shiny black hair and blue, staring eyes, slightly misted, as if the sunny Sicilian sky of his family's origin had been diluted with the smog of a new world. Like many second-generation Italians, he had lost the color and excitability of the first. He was careful, methodical, almost Nordic. He had gone to night college and completed one year at law school when the disaster of his fiancee's pregnancy had necessitated their marriage and the permanent abandonment of law.

Brooks had been attracted to him from the day when Benny, intuitively sensing the junior partner's need to befriend an inferior, had walked into his office and asked for a loan. His wife, it seemed, was having a second child, who would be an “Irish twin” of the first. Brooks at once advanced the money, which was promptly repaid, and later made many other loans, which enjoyed the same happy fate. Benny, eased of his burdens, shot ahead in the firm. He seemed pushed by a demoniac energy that might have been designed to prove that he was as good as any lawyer. When he finally achieved the post of office manager, petted by the partners and feared by the clerks, Brooks was especially gratified. If he was the soft old past, Benny was the ruthless future.

But there was one thing on which he had not counted: Benny's gratitude. Brooks was considerably disconcerted to find that his protégé was determined not to let him go to the devil with impunity. Benny would come to his office, close the door and subject his benefactor to endless sermons.

“You've got to kick the booze, Brooks, and you've got to watch your office hours. Do you think your partners don't know just how many Fridays you've taken off this past year? And just how many days you've wandered in at noon? Do you think they don't know about that bottle of bourbon in your desk? Quit kidding yourself! They know all those things and many more. They're planning right now to cut your percentage by a full half! Mr. Emmons is claiming our biggest estate, Carey, as his client. He says you've let him do all the work too long.”

“But Gus Carey was my own great-uncle,” Brooks exclaimed, raising his hands in mock dismay. “What are we old families coming to?”

“A fat lot they care about that! Old family connections, old school ties, those things are great, so long as they're kept current. But you're slipping behind, Brooks. Catch up!”

“I wonder if these trends are reversible,” Brooks speculated with a yawn, jabbing his blotter with a paper cutter. “The social scene, like the human body, seems to have to change its cells. We Clarksons used to have a fleet of clipper ships in the China trade. White sails speeding across the broad Pacific! Where were the Galentis then, I wonder. One family declines, another rises. It's rather beautiful, really.”

“Who's rising?”

“You are, Benny. You've only just started.”

“Brooks, you're getting to be a bore on that subject. Maybe I could have had a future once. If I hadn't married so young. Or been a member of a church that didn't ban birth control. But as it is, my friend, Benny Galenti has gone quite as far as Benny Galenti's ever going. Why, I can't even afford to move to a decent neighborhood! You talk to Teresa and see what a big success
she
thinks I am!”

“Can't you get a mortgage?” Brooks always seized any chance to get the subject away from his own drinking. “Or would you rather finance it privately? I'm perfectly willing to stake you to a move to the suburbs. Why haven't you asked me?”

Benny seemed suddenly embarrassed. Was it, Brooks wondered, because he had planned the conversation this way? If he had, it would be only natural. What was the good of a Brooks Clarkson except to help a Benny Galenti?

“No, no, Brooks. You've done too much for me anyway, and, besides, you're going to need all your money if you keep on this way. How do you expect to live when. . . ?”

“Why don't you move to Glenville?” Brooks interrupted in a sudden inspiration. “You could have the old superintendent's cottage on our place. It's a shingle horror, but it's got plenty of room. We could fix it over for you. I was going to have to do that, anyway.”

Benny's stare might even have meant that he had considered this, too. “What about my kids? Where would they go to school? We can't afford your private academies.”

“Do you think everyone in Glenville is rich?” Oh, he had shut him up now! The terrible sermon was over. “We have one of the best high schools on Long Island. It would solve your vacation problem. You wouldn't have to take your family to the beach.”