The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (20 page)

“And you are?”

“Oh, my dear, you should know that. Don't you send a tribute of men and maidens each year to the labyrinth? No, I'm
serious
, Morris,” she exclaimed when he smiled. “You've created a robot! He's grown and grown until you can no longer control him, and now he's rampaging the countryside. I dared to face him. I tried to give you time to get away. I was even able to stand him off a while. But now my stones are gone, and Goliath is stalking towards me!”

“How fantastical you are. Really, Aurelia, I wouldn't have thought it of you. You've seen for yourself that the entries stop with our friendship. If anyone's won, it's you.”

“But I tell you I'm out of ammunition!” she exclaimed shrilly. “I have to take my heels while I can. For don't think Goliath wouldn't get his revenge for all those missing entries. I should be made his slave, like you. I should be harnessed and put to work. After all, he has missed the woman's touch, hasn't he? The woman's point of view? Isn't that the one thing he needs? Didn't Pepys have a wife? Wasn't there a Mrs. Saint-Simon?”

“There was a duchess,” Madison said dryly.

“Exactly. And your diary wants a Mrs. Madison. But it won't be me. And if you're wise, Morris, it won't be anyone. You and your diary can be happy together. But, I beg of you, don't listen to it when it points its long, inky finger at another human being!”

Madison was beginning to wonder if she was sober. “You must think me demented.”

“Well, I don't suppose you'd burn down New York to make a page for your diary.” She laughed a bit wildly. “After all, you might burn the diary with it. But, no, you have copies in a vault, don't you?” Here she seemed at last to remember herself, and she placed a rueful hand on his. “Forgive me, my dear, for being so overwrought. Let me slip away now and get a good night's sleep. I'll take a pill. And next week we'll talk on the telephone and see if we can't put things back on the nice old friendly basis.”

“Aurelia—”

But she was gone. She was hurrying across the room, between the tables, and he had actually to run to catch up with her, clutching his three volumes.

“Aurelia!” he cried in a tone that made her turn and stare. “Wait!”

“What is it, Morris? What more is there to say?”

“You haven't told me what you
think
of the diary.”

She seemed not to comprehend. “I haven't?”

“I mean what you think of it
as
a diary.”

“Oh.” She treated this almost as an irrelevance. “But it's magnificent, of course. You know that.”

“It's just what I
don't
know! It's just what I've spent the past several months trying to find out!”

“Oh, my dear,” she murmured, shaking her head sadly, “you have nothing to worry about
there
. It's luminous. It's pulsating. It's unbelievable, really. I doubt if there's ever been anything like it. Poor old Saint-Simon, his nose
will
be out of joint. Oh, yes, Morris. Your diary is peerless.”

She turned again to go out the door, and he let her go. For a moment he stood there, dazed, stock-still by the checkroom, until the headwaiter asked him if he wished to dine alone. He shook his head quickly and went out to the street to hail a taxi. It was only seven-thirty; he had still time to dine at the Century Club. When he got there, he hurried to the third floor and glanced, as he always did, through the oval window to see who was sitting at the members' table. There was an empty seat between Raymond Massey and Ed Murrow. Opposite he noted the great square noble face and shaggy head of Learned Hand. He must have just finished one of his famous anecdotes, for Madison heard the sputter of laughter around his end of the table. It would be a good night. As he glided forward to take that empty seat he knew that he was a perfectly happy man again.

 

 

 

 

1952

 

 

 

 

S
HIRLEY SCHOOL
in appearance was gloomy enough to look at, but it was only when we returned there in later years that it seemed so to us. As boys, we took its looks for granted. The buildings were grouped in orderly lines around a square campus; they were of gray stone and had tall, Gothic windows. The ceilings inside were high, making large wall spaces which were covered with faded lithographs of Renaissance paintings. There was a chapel, a gymnasium, a schoolhouse, several dormitories and, scattered about at a little distance from the campus, the cottages of the married masters. No fence separated the school from the surrounding New England countryside, but none was needed. Shirley was a community unto itself; its very atmosphere prohibited escape or intrusion. The runaway boy would know that he was only running from his own future, and a trespasser would immediately feel that he was intruding on futures never intended for him. For Shirley, even through the shabby stone of its lamentable architecture, exuded the atmosphere of a hundred years of accumulated idealism. You were made as a boy to feel that great things would be expected of you after graduation; you would rise in steady ascent on the escalator of success as inevitably as you rose from one form to another in the school. Life was a pyramid, except that there was more room at the top, and anyone who had been through the dark years of hazing and athletic competitions, who had prayed and washed and conformed at Shirley, should and would get there. It was good to be ambitious because, being educated and Godfearing, you would raise the general level as you yourself rose to power, to riches, to a bishopric or to the presidency of a large university. At the end there was death, it was true, but with it even greater rewards, and old age, unlike Macbeth's, would be sweetened by a respectful lull broken only by the rattle of applause at testimonial dinners. I find that I can still look at life and feel that it ought to be this way, that I can still vaguely wonder why one year has not put me farther ahead than its predecessor. There were no such doubts at Shirley, unless they were felt by Billy Prentiss.

Billy was my cousin and the only other boy at school whom I knew when I went there first at the age of thirteen. The contrast between us, however, was not one to make me presume on the relationship. Billy came of a large and prosperous family, and I was an only child whose mother gave bridge lessons at summer hotels to help with my Shirley tuition. Billy, though thin and far from strong, was tall and fair and had an easygoing, outgiving personality; I was short, dark and of a truculent disposition. But these contrasts were as nothing before the overriding distinction between the “old kid” and the “new kid.” Billy and I may have been in the same form, but he had completed a year at the school before my arrival, which gave him great social prerogatives. By Shirley's rigid code there should have been only the most formal relations between us.

Billy, however, did not recognize the code. That is what I mean when I say that he had doubts at Shirley. He greeted me from the first in a friendly manner that was entirely improper, as if we had been at home and not at school. He helped me to unpack and showed me my gymnasium locker and supplied me with white stiff collars for Sunday wear. He talked in an easy, chatty manner about how my mother had taught him bridge and what he had seen during the summer with his family in Europe, as if he believed that such things could be balanced against the things that were happening at Shirley, the real things. He was certainly an odd figure for an old kid; I think of him now as he looked during my first months at school, stalking through the corridors of the Lower Forms Building on his way to or from the library, running the long fingers of his left hand through his blond hair and whistling “Mean to Me.” He lived in a world of his own, and, with all my gratitude, I was sufficiently conservative to wonder if it wasn't Utopian. It embarrassed me, for example, when he was openly nice to me in the presence of other older kids.

“How are you getting on, Peter?” he asked me one morning after chapel as we walked to the schoolhouse. Nobody else called me by my Christian name. “Have you got everything you need? Can I lend you any books or clothes?”

“No, I'm fine, thank you.”

“You're a cousin, you know,” he said, looking at me seriously. “Cousins ought to help each other out. Even second cousins.”

I didn't really believe that anyone could help me. Homesickness was like cutting teeth or having one's tonsils out. I nodded, but said nothing.

“If you have any trouble with the old kids, let me know,” he continued. “I could speak to them. It might help.”

“Oh, no please!” I exclaimed. Nothing could have more impressed me with his otherworldliness than a suggestion so unorthodox. “You mustn't do that! It wouldn't be the thing at all!”

We were interrupted by voices from behind us, loud, sneering voices. It was what I had been afraid of.

“Is that Prentiss I see talking to a new kid? Can he so demean himself?”

“Do you pal around with new kids, Billy?”

“What's come over you, Prentiss?”

The last voice was stern; it was George Neale's.

“Peter Westcott happens to be my cousin,” Billy answered with dignity, turning around to face them. “And there's nothing in the world wrong with him. Is there a law that I may not talk to my own cousin?”

He turned again to me, but I hurried ahead to join a group of new kids. I'm afraid I was shocked that he should speak in this fashion to a boy like George Neale. George, after all, was one of the undisputed leaders of the form. He was a small, fat, clumsy boy who commanded by the sheer deadliness of his tongue and the intensity of his animosities. He also enjoyed an immunity from physical retaliation through the reputation of a bad heart, the aftereffect, it was generally said, of a childhood attack of rheumatic fever. He had chosen for his mission in school the persecution of those who failed to meet exactly the rigid standards of social behavior that our formmates, represented by himself, laid down. I sometimes wonder, in trying to recollect how George first appeared to me, if he derived the fierce satisfaction from his activities that I believed at the time. It seems more probable, as I bring back the straight, rather rigid features of his round face and his tone of dry impatience, that he looked at nonconformists as Spanish Inquisitors looked at heretics who were brought before them, as part of the day's work, something that had to be done, boring and arduous though it might be. Why George should have been chosen as the avenging agent of the gods it was not for him to ask; what mattered only was that they required, for dim but cogent reasons of their own, a division of the world into the oppressed and their oppressors. He and his victims were the instruments of these gods, caught in the ruthless pattern of what was and what was not “Shirley,” a pattern more fundamental and significant in the lives of all of us than the weak and distant humanitarianism of the faculty, who brooded above us, benevolent but powerless to help, like the twentieth-century Protestant God whom we worshiped in the Gothic chapel.

George was in charge of the program of hazing the new kids, and Billy's ill-considered kindness only resulted in bringing me prematurely to his attention. Custom required that each new kid be singled out for a particular ordeal, and I was soon made aware, from the conversation of the old kids who raised their voices as I passed, that mine had been decided on. Apparently I was to have my head partially shaved. I lived from this point on in such apprehension that it was almost a relief to discover one Sunday morning, from the atmosphere of huddles and whispers around me, that George had chosen his moment. I retreated instinctively to the library to stay there until chapel, but the first time I looked up from the book I was pretending to read, it was to find George and the others gathered before me.

“Won't you come outside, Westcott?” George asked me in a mild, dry tone. “We'd like to have a little talk with you.”

“It won't take a minute, Westcott,” another added with a leer.

No violence was allowed in the library; it was sanctuary. I could have waited until the bell for chapel and departed in safety. George knew this, but he knew too, as I knew, and he knew that I knew it, that the fruition of his scheme was like the fall of Hamlet's sparrow: if it was not now, it would be still to come. I got up without a word and walked out of the library, down the corridor and out to the back lawn. There I turned around and faced them.

There was a moment of hesitation, and then someone pushed me. I went sprawling over on the grass, for George, unnoticed, had knelt beside me. They all jumped on me, and I struggled violently, too violently, destroying whatever sympathy might have been latent in them by giving one boy, whose heart was not really in it, a vicious kick in the stomach. In another moment I was overwhelmed and held firmly down while George produced the razor. I closed my eyes and felt giddy with hatred.