The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (44 page)

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because I want them and because I'm in a position to barter for them. If you will deliver them to me, I will ask the
Daily Post
to reemploy you as a foreign correspondent. You will be able to live in London or Paris. I have no doubt that you will find life in one of those cities, particularly the second, preferable to our quiet existence on this side of the Atlantic.”

Bleecher looked at him now with something like fascination. “And will the
Daily Post
do as you tell them?”

“I think so. If my proposition be endorsed—as I trust it will be—by certain gentlemen of prominence in this town.”

“Like Messrs. Hardy and Andros. I see. And now the bounder is supposed to crumble. Or, like Shylock before Portia, be sent to renounce his faith. Only you have the wrong script, Ward. In
my
script, the villain turns upon you with a splendid defiance. You may take your proposition and cram it up the aperture—if indeed there be one in a snowman—in the nether part of your frozen body.”

Ward averted his eyes from his foul-mouthed visitor. “I suppose I should expect such talk from you.”

“You will be relieved to hear that I am removing myself from your ‘quiet existence.' I have a standing invitation to come to Richmond and write a column for the
Enquirer
. It will be pleasant to be among gentlemen again. Perhaps I can help to warn them in the South what they are up against. They think, because they know how to fight bravely, that they are bound to prevail in a struggle with men of straw and men of ice, such as I have met up here. But they may well be wrong. If your millions of labor-slaves are ever harnessed into an army and sent into bloody battle by such remorseless bigots as you and Andros and Hardy, who can tell the outcome?”

“Then you keep the letters?”

“What I may do with the letters must remain the one little cloud of uncertainty on your cerulean sky of fatuity. Keep your eye ever peeled on it, Ward! Keep your umbrella in constant readiness!”

“Even if you want revenge of me,” Winthrop protested earnestly, “must you take it out on Annie, too? Must she live in the daily fear of seeing her letters printed somewhere?”

Bleecher's gasp was incredulous. Then he burst suddenly into a harsh, raucous laugh. “Annie! That teasing, tantalizing little bitch? Do you honestly think she'd give one holy goddamn if I told the world she copulated with sailors every Saturday night on a public pier?”

“Get out of my house!”

“You don't know her, Ward.”

“Get out of my house!”

“I can't go fast enough.”

Winthrop drank two whiskies before he went upstairs. Rosalie was at her dressing table, already in her nightgown. As she removed her earrings, she studied his face in her mirror.

“You didn't get the letters.”

“No,” he replied with a sigh, sitting down on the bedside.

“I didn't think you would. But it doesn't matter. He'll never do anything with them.”

“Now what makes you say that?”

“Because he's a gentleman.”

“Oh, Rosalie! Are you trying to annoy me?”

“No, dear. But I think you should face a fact every now and then. Even a disagreeable one.”

“He's going to Richmond. He loves the Southern aristocracy. Slaveholders! How does
that
go down with your abolitionist principles?”

“Very badly.” Rosalie's smile was obscure. “I never said I liked him, Winthrop. Or that I approved of him. I merely said he was a gentleman. To me that is a technical term. But one can deduce certain things from it. And one is that he'll never use those letters.”

“And what about me? Am I a gentleman?”

“No, I don't really think you are.”

“Rosalie!”

“I don't really think any man in New York society is. It's not what we go in for here.”

“I'm tired. I'm going to bed.”

“Good, dear. Do.”

But later, in the dark, she put another question to him. “Tell me something, Winthrop. Do you really think you have done a good turn for Annie and Charles in salvaging their marriage?”

“I did what I had to do.”

“What
you
had to do? Why you? Nobody else felt that way. Certainly none of our friends or family. You were the designer of the whole plot. Has it ever occurred to you that you've been playing God, Winthrop?”

“Maybe that's what I meant by doing what I had to do. Maybe there are times when one has to play God—when everyone else seems to forget He exists.”

But Rosalie seemed unimpressed by his religious turn. “Do you suppose that's how history's written?” she mused. “Like a play being put together for the dress rehearsal? With one little man rushing about, shouting directions and trying to get people into the right costumes? Not necessarily a powerful man—simply a man with an
idée fixe
. A man with a sense of how things should at least
look
. Even a fussy man, a . . .”

“Rosalie, I want to go to sleep.”

When a silence of several minutes followed by gentle snoring indicated that he had no farther interruption to fear, Winthrop moved his lips in silent prayer:

“Dear God, if I have ever thought of Annie carnally, please forgive me. Remember that I have never given her or anyone else the right to say so. My conduct has been correct, even if my heart has been sinful. And let me face the facts of my motive in doing what I have done to Bleecher. Did I destroy him because I was jealous? Perhaps. But would I not have done so even if I had not been wickedly attracted to Annie?
Yes!
Yes, I would have! So is it a sin to enjoy performing a task essentially done for thee, O God? Is it wrong if jealousy gives a fillip to doing one's duty? Make me humble, dear God. Crush me, overwhelm me. I am nothing, nothing, nothing . . .”

Winthrop felt calmer now and hoped that he would doze off before his excitement returned. Two drinks! He should never have had two drinks. Oh, why had he remembered them? He was wide awake again, watching the curtains gently blowing in the moonlight. The
Enquirer
? The Richmond
Enquirer?
Bleecher would be writing for
that?
Was that not the rag which had urged secession that very morning, suggesting that the Southern states place themselves under the protection of Louis Napoleon? What traitors! How could one govern a nation with such firebrands trying to pull it apart?

“Dear God, of course I know that we must allow our Southern states to live in peace. But if in thy great wisdom thou seeest fit to permit them to strike the first blow, if thou turnest thine eyes away and allowest them to secede,
then
will it be wrong if we leap to arms with joy and jubilation in our hearts and if we bring the devastation of thine anger to their fair land, burning their plantations with a cleansing fire and chastising their rebel people with the sword? Or even with worse? Wilt thou blame us if their women are raped by the very slaves whom we have freed, if . . .”

He started as he heard Rosalie's voice. “What's wrong, Winthrop? Are you having a nightmare? You're rocking the bed!”

 

 

 

 

1980

 

 

 

 

I
HAVE BEEN FRETTING
for some days now over an article in the
Manhattan Law Review:
“Hubris and the American Lawyer,” which contains, in addition to essays on Alger Hiss, Dean Landis and John Dean, a piece on myself entitled “Mario Fabbri, Merchant of Justice.” Ordinarily, in the now considerable literature dealing with the bribery trial of Gridley Forrest, it is the judge who occupies center stage, and indeed it is hard to imagine a greater exemplar of the arrogance so fatal to the Greek tragic hero than my late, unhappy friend. But this particular author has chosen to see
me
as the principal villain, the mastermind behind the tragedy. And he has taken the trouble to carry his research down to this year of our Lord 1975, for he ends on this note: “Fabbri, hale and hearty at eighty-four, sole survivor of a scandal that four decades ago shook our bar from coast to coast, cheerfully persists in his ancient error. ‘Believing what I then believed to be the facts,' he told a reporter recently, ‘I'd do the same thing again!'”

It is perfectly true. I would. But it behooves me, I suppose, in an era of general review of moral values, to make some effort to set down my reasons for the benefit of any posterity that cares to hear them. We live in an age of records, where history is transcribed on a minute-to-minute basis. So long as I am still in possession of my faculties, I may as well add my tape to a heap already so high that future scholars will be tempted to make a bonfire of it. Why not? Doesn't each generation want to rewrite history according to its particular lights?

Young people today, including my grandchildren, are very busy reevaluating the morals of the past. They tend to see American history as a study in hypocrisy. To them crime is largely a technical matter. If you are caught, you go to jail, and that is that. You are no longer made an outcast as I was. Unless, of course, you have been guilty of discriminating against an ethnic or religious minority, and then you
are
wicked. Sometimes I think that is the only moral value we have left.

But that is all right. I can live with that. I grew up as a youngster in Manhattan when to be poor, Italian and Catholic was hardly a ticket to fame and riches, and although I always regarded social prejudices as simply hurdles that I had to get over, I can agree that in a decent society they should be eliminated. And as to the concept of other crimes being technically rather than morally reprehensible, I can only point out that that was precisely my own gospel and the reason I did what I did. In an era that valued appearances I strove to save the appearance of the bar, the appearance of the judiciary, indeed the appearance of our whole legal system. I still believe it would have been better for everybody had Gridley Forrest never been found out.

My late wife, I should admit, never agreed with me. She believed that I had been profoundly evil and left me for a time because I would not repent. She would have loved me as a sinner, but only as a repentant sinner. And in the end it was her duty that made her return, not my persuasiveness. She decided that a wife never has the right to give a husband up.

Let me fill in, as briefly as I can, the minimum of background that the person listening to this tape should know. My parents emigrated from Genoa in the late eighteen-eighties and started an Italian restaurant in Twelfth Street. I was one of eight children, but because I was bright my father lavished his particular attention on me. His small means required him to pick and choose among his offspring. It was through him that I got a job as an office boy with Mr. Findlay of the great Wall Street law firm that bore his name. Mr. Findlay was a bachelor who lived on Washington Square and frequently dined at my father's place. After my employment he kept a sharp eye on me, and finding me quick, responsive and able, he decided to put me through college and law school and then to hire me as a clerk. Once I had a hand on the bottom rung of that ladder I never loosened my hold. I stayed in the firm until I became a member and, after Mr. Findlay's death in 1930, I succeeded him as managing partner. That is the story, in its very briefest form, of my rise.

Let me say just a word about Thomas Findlay. He was the most impersonal man I have ever known, a close-mouthed, hard-hitting, utterly industrious Yankee. He lived, so far as I could make out, for the love of the law alone. He never spent much money on himself, and he bequeathed the substantial fortune that he made to a hospital in which he had shown only a perfunctory interest in his lifetime. Our relationship was one of symbiosis. As he grew older, he leaned increasingly on me, but he always recognized that I needed him quite as much as he did me. He never praised or dispraised my work. He knew that I knew just how good it was. And somehow, without ever expressing his affection for me, he managed to make me feel it. I was the nearest thing that he had to a son, perhaps the nearest thing to a friend.

The gulf between us, as I look back, seems limitless. He was small and dry and lived to work. I was large and, in my young days, rather floridly handsome, and I craved pleasure as much as work. I loved music and art and food and wine and women. He did not so much object to these tastes as to seem to find them irrelevant to what life, to him anyway, was all about. The nearest thing we ever had to an intimate conversation was when I told him that I had fallen in love with Pussy Fish, the daughter of one of his partners.

“I suppose it's a social step up for you,” he observed, with his usual candor. “But not very far up. And you're quite capable of making it on your own.”

“But, Mr. Findlay,” I protested, “you don't understand. I love the girl!”