The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (34 page)

“Benny!”

“Don't worry, Mrs. Galenti,” Fales reassured her. “He's not going to get my goat, no matter how hard he tries. I'll tell you why we want you, Benny. We want you because you and your family are decent people, and that's a breed that's getting kind of rare in Nassau County. We want you because you believe in things. Because you believe in your own marriage, for example. Because you believe in bringing up your children properly. I'll bet none of
your
kids go in for dope. We want you because you're the kind of people who still take pride in the American flag and aren't ashamed to admit it. So there! Call me a Fourth of July windbag. Go ahead!”

“You're a Fourth of July windbag!”

“Oh, Benny,” his wife cried. “Must you throw away every favor that comes our way? Why do you do it? To spite me?”

“What have I thrown away? Have I thrown away this house or your clothes or our private schools or any of my fabulous Xerox stock?” Benny got up and paced the room angrily. “What have I done since I made my lucky strike but look down in my stupid lap as it filled with treasures?”

“Lucky?” Fales broke in. “You call it luck to take the calculated risk that
you
took? To sell everything you had, to borrow every cent you could and put it all in one stock? That took guts, man!”

“It took despair,” Benny retorted sullenly. “Oh, all right, so it took a bit of nerve, yes. But why should a bit of nerve be rewarded so extravagantly? Why should it make me a fat cat, a sleek citizen, a gentleman of clubs, a friend of Byron Fales, a pillar of the community! A man ought to work his way up the ladder, rung by rung. He ought to have to save, pinch and scrape. Then there'd be some kind of substance to him when he got to the top!”

“But we
did
all those things, Benny,” Teresa pleaded. “Didn't we learn everything the hard way? The only thing that ever came fast was the Xerox!”

“But all that pinching and scraping didn't
contribute
/” Benny protested, beginning to feel that he was making a fool of himself, but unwilling to yield on what he deeply felt must be a matter of some kind of principle. “I was nobody till I had my lucky day. I might as well have made it in Las Vegas!”

“We stockbrokers don't care for that kind of comparison,” Fales retorted, with a wink at Teresa. “But let us agree to disagree. With me Xerox was sheer financial acumen; with Benny it was dumb luck. But do please, Mrs. Galenti, bring your lucky husband to the club dance on Saturday night. Dine with us first at eight. I'll have a nice little party, and I think we'll persuade Benny that we want you both for your
beaux yeux
and not your market portfolios.”

“Oh, Mr. Fales, I promise you!” Teresa exclaimed, with clasped hands. She might have been a schoolgirl whose head had just been patted by the principal.

“Benny,” she began imploringly, after Fales had left, “tell me you're not going to spoil this for me and the kids!”

“I can't talk about it till I've seen Brooks.”

“That rotten rum pot, that . . .”

“Oh, shut up, Tessie!”

Ten minutes later he drove alone to the Clarksons'. In the moonlight he could make out the ragged countenance of the old place: the choked, unweeded garden plots by the gravel drive, the broken windowpanes in the garage, the peeling paint, as he approached it, on the front door. Brooks opened it, drink in hand, and bowed sardonically.

“If it's not the Caesar of Xerox! The duke of duplication! Come in, Caesar. Come in, Duke. Fanny has gone to bed, and I was just yearning for someone to drink a nightcap with. Of course, I had not aspired so high as yourself, but if you will only ‘condescend,' as the immortal Mr. Collins would have put it, we may still salvage a bit of the moonlight.”

Benny sat in the chair and drank silently as Brooks went on in this mocking strain. There was no interrupting him, no shifting of his mind to serious topics. Brooks was reaching the final stage of his decline: a maudlin monologism. To Benny it was more terrible than it had been at any of the worst moments of the past four years. What Brooks had been destroying up until that night had been his career, his family, himself. Now he was destroying his romance.

“I came to ask your opinion,” Benny interrupted at last. “I came to ask if you think I'd be doing a cruel thing to Tessie and the kids if I turned down your cousin's invitation to join the Glenville Club.”

Brooks stared at him for a moment and then rose. He looked almost handsome again as he reached down to throw some kindling wood on the dying fire. “You'd be doing a cruel thing to
me
,” he said with surprising lucidity. “What else do you think I've lived for but to see you in that club? Isn't it the last delicious twist of a crazy world? Please, Benny, you can't deny an old friend a laugh like that! Did you know they threw me and Fanny out?”

“What else could they do? You wouldn't resign and you wouldn't pay your dues!”

“Ah, but that was just the excuse. There have been plenty of examples of the board's looking the other way when
desirable
members defaulted on their dues. But one Saturday night, at the weekend dance, a rather grotesque little incident occurred. Fanny and I had made a wager that I could use the ladies' room and she the men's, on the stroke of midnight, without anyone's noticing, and . . .”

Benny could hear no more. He needed all his concentration to arrest his tears. He was rarely emotional, but when it happened, it could be very bad. He was apt not only to weep but to sob. For a moment he closed his eyes and saw before him the old portrait—or selfportrait—of Brooks Clarkson, of the ancient Clarksons, with his fine triangle of long wavy hair retreating from a noble forehead, a figure that would have dignified the bridge of a clipper ship in fine old days of China trade or the pulpit of Grace Church, robed in shimmering white, or the back of a sweating pony on the polo field at Meadowbrook. But the decline of the dream and the decline of Brooks Clarkson had now fused into the shabby sight that confronted Benny's reopened eyes. Brooks was not passing from the scene as a beautiful memento of a day that could not coexist with the Xerox machines that duplicated to infinity the jargon of a world of irretrievable vulgarity. He was perishing as something too vulgar himself to be duplicated.

“I
shall
join the club,” Benny announced, as he rose to leave. “And you shall have your long awaited giggle. I can only hope that the irony of the situation will be all that you have so eagerly anticipated.”

The last Saturday night party at the old clubhouse was an affair of almost frenzied nostalgia, but Byron Fales, after the orchestra drums had rumbled for silence, struck the note of the future by toasting a model of the new clubhouse, an ingenious combination of modern and Georgian styles designed to conciliate all tastes, as it was borne in by four waiters, in a blaze of candles, and placed on a table in the middle of the dance floor. The tumultuous applause that followed allowed the members to fold their regrets, like wet umbrellas, on the advent of sunny skies. It was widely agreed that Byron Fales had been, as always, perfect.

At his table, Teresa Galenti seemed perfectly happy. Benny noticed that she did not have much to say to either of her neighbors, or they to her, but obviously this did not matter. She was a seraph in heaven, and as long as seraphs were destined to sing everlastingly, it could hardly matter if they took an occasional night off. But he could not join her because Byron Fales, the star of the evening, chose to monopolize him. Perhaps Fales was sufficiently arrogant to enjoy the anomaly, at the old clubhouse's final party, of devoting his time to a new member.

When Benny had drunk double his normal quota of Scotches, he dared at last to bring up the topic that had been on his mind all evening. He asked if it might be possible to restore the Clarksons to membership if he paid up their delinquent dues.

“The offer does you credit,” Fales replied, knitting his brow, “but I'm afraid there's not a chance. Brooks has made his bed, or rather unmade it, and I'm afraid he'll have to toss on the bare mattress. After that last trick that he and Fanny pulled, the board wouldn't want them back, even if they were on the wagon.”

“Is there no way to help them, then? Must we just let them go?”

“They've gone, fella. Ask any newcomer what ‘Clarkson' stands for in Glenville today, and he'll tell you: booze. Brooks and Fanny are suffering from an incurable disease: decadence.”

“But how can you say that?” Benny cried in astonishment. “You, of all people! Isn't he your own cousin?”

“My mother was a Clarkson, it's true. She was Brooks's aunt. But there's never been anything wrong with the Clarksons. Brooks's mother was a Fortescue, and we know about
them.”
Fales rolled his eyes and tapped his temple with his forefinger. “Still, I can't believe it's only a matter of genetics. The individual may degenerate, even though the family's sound. You find the same kind of rot in poor whites in the South. You find it among the red Indians. Once it starts, no surgery can stop it. All you can do is make the patient as comfortable as possible.”

“By pushing another drink his way?”

“Allow me to push one yours.”

Benny watched grimly as those thick, facile hands busied themselves with the bottles and glasses massed in the center of the table. “Make me comfortable, by all means. But there's still something I don't see. How can Brooks be decadent and creative at the same time?”

“What do you suggest he has created?”

“Me!”

“Oh, come off it, Benny. Just because he loaned you some dough in a tight spot doesn't mean . . .”

“Now listen to me, Byron. It was Brooks who singled me out of the office boys in his firm and pushed me ahead. It was Brooks who sold me to his partners as office manager. It was Brooks who got me to move to Glenville and loaned me the money to buy Xerox. It was Brooks . . .”

“Well, if he's so damn creative, why didn't he buy Xerox himself?”

“Because that isn't his way.”

“He could have, couldn't he?”

“I suppose.”

“But he'd rather watch, is that it? He'd rather sit back and gaze into his man-making machine? Do you know that you've just proved the very point you were trying to rebut? You've described the most decadent creature that ever drew a fetid breath!”

Benny broke off the conversation and went to look for Teresa, who was dancing. Whether Fales was right or Fales was wrong, all that he, Benny, could do now was to put on, as gracefully as possible, the emerald snake's skin that Brooks had shed for him. It might be instructive, at the least, and perhaps of some future utility, to contemplate the affluent festivity of the evening where Xerox was the bridge between the new riches of the Galentis and the renewed riches of the Faleses, and to consider that the switch of rungs between the Clarksons and the Galentis on the Glenville social ladder had taken just four years. But then Brooks had always known the quickest way to do things.

 

 

 

 

1970

 

 

 

 

“Y
OU ALWAYS FORGET
, Aileen, that we're not an art institute. Perhaps it would be more fun if we were, but we're not. The Museum of Colonial America, as its name implies, exists for a very specific purpose. We're a history museum. That doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't a great many ways of accomplishing that purpose, such as awakening the young to a proper sense of their heritage and revitalizing the old forms of communication . . .”

“I know, I know,” Aileen Post interrupted. It was not the thing to do for a curator to interrupt the director, but when the curator was middle-aged and female and the director male and very young, exceptions had to be admitted. “I know all the jargon. I realize that we have to be ‘relevant' and ‘swinging' and ‘up to the minute.' I understand very clearly that we have to be everything on God's earth but simply beautiful!”

“History is not always beautiful, Aileen.”

“Oh, Tony! Don't be sententious. Save it for the trustees. You know what I mean. The
illustrations
of history should be beautiful! We can read about the horrors. We don't have to look at them. Why should there be any but lovely things in my gallery? Why should I have to put
that
in the same room with the Bogardus tankard and the Copley portrait of Lillian van Rensselaer?”

Here she pointed a scornful finger at an ancient rusted piece of iron grillework that might have fitted into a small window space, two feet by two, which lay on a pillow of yellow velvet on the table by Tony Side's desk.

“Because it's a sacred relic,” Tony replied, with the half-mocking smile that, as a modern director, he was careful to assume in discussing serious topics. “Because tradition has it that it covered a window on the ground floor of the Ludlow House in Barclay Street. During the Revolution it was the sole outlet to a large, dark storage room in which Yankee prisoners were miserably and sometimes fatally confined.”