The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (47 page)

But my dismay was equaled only by my consternation on the morning when I faced the indicted judge himself seated before my desk. Gridley Forrest was actually asking me to represent him! He was as grave and impassive as if he were having a drink at the Greenvale Club after one of our golf games. None of the tenseness of which Pussy had spoken was visible now.

“Of course you're pleading guilty,” I managed to articulate.

“Guilty? Certainly not. I deny the whole ridiculous business.”

“But, Gridley! You
know
what I know!”

“Never mind what you know or don't know. It will be your job to see that the U.S. attorney proves his case.
If
he can. There is no end of hurdles that can be set up. Hearsay, privilege, malicious intent to defame a judge, even entrapment.”

“You mean you're really going to fight this?”

“To the end!”

For several moments I sought words in the angry red tumult of my mind. Then I gave up. “Not with me, Judge.”

“You mean you decline to represent me?”

“Absolutely.”

Oh, that gray metallic stare of his! It was the last time I ever saw it. Or him.

“You'll let down a friend in need? Take care, Fabbri. The friend in need may let
you
down.”

I rose. “Good day, Judge.”

***

Unlike my former friend, I did not fight my accusers. When the Bar Association, acting on the evidence introduced in the trial by Forrest's attorney of my participation in the patent case, instituted disbarment proceedings against me, I was permitted to resign as an attorney in the state of New York upon admission of the charges. Although I was not technically disbarred, my disgrace was complete. I have been able to make only a small living since as a real estate broker. But for the sale of my art collection I should at times have suffered actual need.

The hardest part of the whole business was my family. Pussy greeted my misfortune as an early Christian might have greeted the chance to detach a centurion from a Roman legion and lead him with her to the glory of martyrdom. Her nobility in disaster was almost unendurable. The only thing that kept me from leaving her was that she left me. She was so horrified when I told her that I felt no repentance that she moved for a time to her old mother's. But when she came back, it was to accept me, brazen and unrepentant as I was. We managed to remain on civil terms until her death two years ago.

Tom took the drastic step of changing his name. I believe that he did this to show that he was not afraid of incurring the odium of deserting a parent in trouble. It takes guts for a gentleman to look like a cad, but Tom had those guts. He detested my crime and deplored my intransigence; he saw no alternative but to cut himself off from me forever. I simply hope that he has not regretted it. If he has, he has shown no signs of it. He is a successful physician and has a large family that I have never seen. God bless him.

Alma accepted me and my crime. It was happy for me that in marrying she was able to shed my name without a moral problem. Her children are almost cozy with me; they think I was a “victim of my time,” whatever that means. Alma has a comfortable theory that I was confused between an Italian Catholic upbringing and something she calls “the Protestant ethic.” Between them, anyway, I am considered virtually without blame, a dear old wop grandpa who is not to be taken quite seriously.

There is a young man today, however, who is writing a Ph.D. thesis for Columbia on the implications of the Forrest case. He has been to see me several times, and I have come to like him. He has a theory that Gridley Forrest was subconsciously trying to destroy the judicial system of the United States in revenge for not having been appointed a justice of the Supreme Court. He was delighted when I supplied him with the confirming evidence of Gridley's hatred of FDR. I do not know if I believe in his theory, but it certainly gives a dignity to my saga which is preferable to Mathilde's shopping bills.

 

 

 

 

1987

 

 

 

 

T
HE REPUTATION
of Eric Stair, who was little known at the time of his death in the Normandy invasion of 1944, has grown steadily in the last four decades, and the retrospective show this year at the Guggenheim has given him a sure place among the abstract expressionists, although that term was not used in his lifetime. Walking down the circular ramp past those large imperial bursts of color, those zigzagging triangles of angry red piercing areas of cerulean blue which seem to threaten, in retaliation, to encompass and smother the triangles, those green submarine regions occupied by polyp-like figures, those strangely luminous squares of inky black, I wondered that there could ever have been a time when Eric Stair had not struck me as a wonderful painter. And yet I could well remember myself as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at St. Lawrence's in 1934 staring with bewilderment at the daubs of the new history teacher from Toronto, who had turned his dormitory study into a studio. Nothing could have seemed stranger or more out of place on that New England campus than an abstract painter who was rumored not even to believe in God.

My bewilderment, at any rate, had not lasted long; I had soon become an admirer of the man without whose example I might never have become a professional painter at all. Not that I have become an abstract expressionist. Far from it. What, I wonder, would Eric have thought of my portraits? Would he have simply raised those rounded shoulders and grinned his square-faced grin at the sight of all those presidents of clubs and corporations, those eminent doctors and judges who make up the portfolio of the man sometimes known as a “boardroom portraitist”? “Jamie Abercrombie,” I seem to hear him saying, “may have made it into the world of art, but he has certainly carted all his lares and penates along with him!”

What I suppose I shall never fathom, no matter how deeply I dive into the subaqueous caverns of the past, is the exact balance between benefit and detriment that I derived as a painter from my juvenile acquaintance with Eric Stair. If it be true that his example deflected me from the paths of banking or law, it may also be the case that, discerning early how much he could accomplish in the field of the abstract, I became too fearful of competing with him there. Maybe I slammed that door prematurely. Maybe I was too anxious, in confining my art to portraiture, to hide away in a world where Eric would never seek to follow or humiliate me.

And there is another thing. I can face it now I am growing old. Without what happened at that school might I not have painted the nude? When I cast my inner eye over the long gallery of my portraits, it strikes me how covered up the figures are, how draped and buttoned and tucked in, how expensively and colorfully added to, how bolstered and propped! Even my ladies in evening dress seem to reveal to me, in their alabaster arms and necks, in the exposed portions of their breasts and shoulders, how much more they are hiding from intrusive eyes. It has been said of Philippe de Champaigne that, being obliged as a strict Jansenist to eschew the flesh, he limited himself to ecclesiastical or judiciary subjects where all but the face and hands could be enveloped in voluminous robes, white or black or scarlet red. The peak of his great art was in the portrait of Cardinal Richelieu, where the sweeping cassock expresses the power and energy of the ruthless statesman. I have sometimes in preliminary sketches attempted to convey the character of my sitter in the suit or dress alone, as a kind of reverse nude. But that is as near as I ever come to it.

At any rate, all I can do is write down the facts, at least as they appear to me, and see if some kind of answer can be deduced from them.

***

I grew up with a feeling of “not belonging.” Some people claim that this has become so common a social phenomenon that the rare state is that of the child who feels himself a square peg in a square hole, but in my case the psychosis may have been intensified by my being the youngest, smallest and most subdued of a clan of Abercrombies who were generally large and noisy, and by my own uneasy suspicion that even if by some trick of fate I should become a true Abercrombie, I'd still be a fraud. For I cannot recall a time when my family did not seem to be trying to look brighter and funnier and richer and more fashionable than they were. Or was that true of everybody in the years of the Great Depression?

Mother dominated us all, as a famous old actress will dominate the stage. She was plump and rackety and full of high spirits, and she adored company. Her rich auburn hair, which surprisingly was not dyed, rose in a high curly pile over a round powdered face with small features and popping black eyes. Mother was thoroughly unintellectual and unartistic; she read nothing but detective fiction, and she never tired of cards or gossip. What saved her from being banal was the quality of her affections; she loved people, and she loved to laugh with them and at them. She was the presiding spirit of the summer colony in Southampton; a watering place was her natural milieu. She would amble down the sand to the Beach Club, close to our shapeless, weatherbeaten shingle pile on the dunes, and then back; these two sites made up her summer universe, except, of course, for the houses in which she habitually dined. Poor Mother! When the Depression obliged us to give up the brownstone in Manhattan, and she had to spend the winter months gazing out on the tumbling gray Atlantic, it was a hardship indeed. But her spirits never flagged. She always found just enough “natives” for her daily game of bridge.

It sometimes seemed to me, because my siblings so strongly favored Mother, that I should have inherited some of Father's traits, but I could never really believe this to be the case. Father did not seem to have many traits to bequeath; his function must have been completed when the queen bee had been fertilized. Yet he was not subservient to Mother. He acted more like an old and familiar employee, a kind of trusted but peppery superintendent whose management of the household was never challenged. Father was bald and stooping; he would gaze at us with watery eyes that seemed to anticipate nothing but irrational conduct that it would be his tedious task to clean up after. His other children took him entirely for granted; only I made an effort to establish a relationship with him, and here I failed utterly. When I would ask him questions about his boyhood and the problems of growing up, he would look at me as if I had inquired as to the whereabouts of the washroom. Human intimacy must have struck him as a total irrelevance.

I realize now, looking back, that some of my sense of our being on the fringe of society may have been justified. We were as “old” as many other families, but we were a good deal poorer than the average in the world to which we clung. Father, so far as I could make out, had nothing and did nothing, other than to sell an occasional insurance policy, and Mother's trust fund was woefully inadequate to pay the bills with which she was constantly dunned. Of course, our state was a common one in the Depression, but when club dues and school tuitions were left unpaid while Mother continued to entertain and gamble, she and Father came in for some harsh criticism. And I was early assailed by the uncomfortable feeling that, because I was plain and unathletic, I could not claim the partial exemption from social contempt that my exuberant, party-loving older siblings, no doubt unfairly, achieved. I deemed myself hopelessly encased in the parental tackiness.

There seemed, at any rate, just enough cash (plus a partial scholarship) to send me to St. Lawrence's, and I entered that school with a sense of profound relief. Here, I hoped, I would not stand out as the child of my parents; I would be on my own. The whole tightly organized academy, with its ringing bells and hurrying boys, with everything happening at exactly the time it was supposed to happen, struck me from the start as a welcome proof that a world existed outside the papier-mache one of the Abercrombies, a “real” world, properly possessed of order and neatness, of heaven and hell. I found absolution in its regularity and blessing in its very sternness, and I became an overnight convert to the conservative social values that it enshrined. Even today, when I visit the school and behold the tall dark Gothic tower of the school chapel rise over the trees as I approach it from the railway station, I feel that actuality, even if it be a rather grim one, is taking the place of illusion.

St. Lawrence's was considered architecturally a handsome school. Some four hundred boys slept and worked and exercised in long Tudor buildings of purple brick picturesquely situated along a creek that wound its snakelike way through the landscaped grounds. Sometimes, particularly in spring, the place seemed to exude a rich, throat-filling emotion, but in winter, under rapidly dirtying snow and a hard pale sky, it took on a somber gloom, and the narrow mullioned windows put me in mind of Tudor prisons, of Tudor discipline, of pale, tight-lipped Holbein victims and torturers, of the ax and stake. Emotion was never light at St. Lawrence's; life was always earnest. I thought of Christ, as the near-mystic headmaster evoked him, the Christ of the passion, whose nails and thorns were far more than symbols, an elongated tortured gray body hideously twisted on the cross and illuminated by streaks of lightning against a weird, flickering El Greco background.