The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (57 page)

“Would Osgood and Felicia live here if the place was theirs? How would they keep it up?”

“They'd have me to help them.”

And Roger realized that, of course, Ned had been writing to them. Well, why not? He closed his eyes as he felt the emptiness coming over him again. If it should be another attack, he could surrender to the soothing notion that he now needn't do anything about anything. There was a wonderful ease to Ned's concept of “nothing in particular.” The pavilions of the Lawn stretched down the valley of his mind to the great dome with all the grace and tranquillity of Mr. Jefferson's noble scheme. He could forget the fire and the sword and the long sordid aftermath and soothe his tired spirits with the blessed memory of the red dirt and blue hills beyond a serene Castledale.

 

 

 

 

1993

I
CAN HARDLY
remember a time in my early life, back toward the turn of the century, when I did not worship Lees Dunbar. No doubt many other boys in New York City, or even along the eastern seaboard, felt the same way, for his power as the founder of Dunbar, Leslie & Co., the putter-together of corporate empires, the adviser to presidents, drew daily to his desk the troubled magnates of Wall Street to pour out their problems as he expressionlessly listened, examining rare stamps through a magnifying lens. Detached, Olympian, stern, he was, without a rival, my ideal of a man.

I will admit that he did not look like a great man. He was stout, with a large square face and brow topped by short thick gray hair, one lock of which curved over his forehead like a small breaking wave. His habitual expression was one of barely contained irritation, either at you or the weather, the latter seeming always somehow oppressive, as if prompting him to tear open his collar or throw off his jacket. His voice had an unpleasant rasp, and was never wasted on small talk. He was a man who needed neither friends nor relatives; his wife was a semiinvalided recluse and they had no children. It was assumed that his mind, his stamps and his art collection were all the companions he needed.

He had been a Southerner, a Virginian of gentle birth, who had come north after the Civil War, but who had not fought in it. He had gone to work for a Manhattan banker, his uncle-in-law, whose daughter he had married and whose business he had splendidly multiplied. If he had had sympathies for the Old South, he never betrayed them; it was not his way to manifest the least religious, patriotic or philosophic affiliation. His faith in money as the circulating blood to sustain an otherwise presumably purposeless humanity seemed his only creed.

Socially his life was confined to excursions on his steam yacht, the
Magellan
, and to my mother's salon. Of the latter he was the principal adornment, sitting aside in a comer armchair to which she would bring up those guests, one by one, whom she deemed sufficiently interesting in politics, finance or art to merit a few words with him. If he was in one of his gruffer moods, she would leave him alone to read his book and sip brandy.

On one such occasion I brought myself to his attention by taking a seat opposite him and also immersing myself in a book. The year was 1902; I was fourteen.

“What are you reading, George?” he asked me. “You seem absorbed.” I held up
The Story of the Medici
, and he grunted. “Is it for school?”

“No, it's for me. I like to read about men who get ahead with their brains. I've never been much at games and sports.”

“That rheumatic fever you had? But you're all over that, aren't you? You look pretty hale to me. A bit skinny, perhaps.”

“Oh, I'm all right. But if I'd lived in Italy in those days, I doubt I'd have been much of a warrior.”

“You could have gone into the Church. Become a cardinal. They ruled the roost then. Scarlet robes. Marble palaces. Poison. A good enough show. You might even have been Pope.”

“But didn't they have to fight, too? Didn't Julius II lead his troops into battle?”

“Only because he wanted to.”

“But to be a priest.” I wrinkled my nose. “Would you have cared for that, sir?”

“I?” The bushy eyebrows soared. “Not in the least. I've never said a prayer in my life.”

“Nor have I. Or one I really meant, anyway.”

For a moment he actually looked at me. “You might have been an artist. They were treated as equals by the great Lorenzo himself.”

“But I could never draw! Even one of those square houses with a balloon of smoke coming out of the chimney.”

I had made him smile. “I suppose you're trying to tell me you'd have been a banker. Well, that's a good thing to be. That book of yours should tell you how the Medici started as pawnbrokers, but succeeded in marrying into every royal house in Europe.”

“I know. And it's my one ambition to become a banker. Do you think I could ever get a job with you?”

But this was precipitate. The great man returned to his book. “Work hard at school, my boy. Get to the top of your class. And when the time comes, we'll see.”

I was not again guilty of such rashness in the years that followed. I continued to see Mr. Dunbar on his visits to our house and would ask him about any financial matters mentioned in the newspaper in which he had been involved. At times, finding me attentive and instructed, he would answer at some length. He noticed, too, that I never forgot a name, a date or a figure that he mentioned. At last he invited me to work as an office boy for a summer, and I had the tact never to speak to him while on the job. The following summer I was rehired and promoted to the file room. A third summer I was an assistant cashier. By the time I had graduated from my day school (my fever had exempted me from the rough and tumble of boarding institutions), I knew as. much about private banking as many adult practitioners.

At Columbia I elected courses entirely in economics and history. I became a work hound with few friends, serious youths like myself who were more concerned with figures and statistics than what some people call life. But I think I had an artist's joy in converting the hash of economic competition into the chaste black and white of a balance sheet.

My relations with Mr. Dunbar had now reached the point where I could confide in him. I don't know even today if he and I ever really “liked” each other in the ordinary sense of that vague term. I needed him, and he came in time to need me. We had the closeness of trust, the word that was the keynote of his existence. He would only do business with men whom he trusted, or purchase works of art in whose authenticity he was convinced, or have social relations with people he knew would not lie to him.

Our important conversation occurred when I was nineteen and had been invited for the first time to lunch with him in the dark tapestried downtown office that he had filled with glinting objects of gold and silver—reliquaries, platters, ewers, ciboria—all paying seeming tribute to the illuminated portrait by Zurbaran of an ecstatically praying monk. It was only on canvas that prayers invaded Mr. Dunbar's ambiance. I put to him my vital question as soon as our brief meal was concluded.

“How much longer, sir, should I go on with college? Is a Columbia degree really worth two more years of courses? I've taken all the ones I want.”

“I never took a degree myself. Any man of first-class intellect is going to be his own educator. Good teachers, even great ones, are for the less intelligent. That's their function, though they'd die before admitting it. They like to boast that they ‘inspire.' But the men I'm speaking about are already inspired. Did Shakespeare need a professor? Did Napoleon? Did Lincoln?”

“But I could certainly learn from you, sir.”

“That would not be school. That would be apprenticeship. A totally different affair.”

I turned away so that he might not see that I had closed my eyes. Then glancing at the monk, I
did
offer a silent prayer. “And when can I start that apprenticeship?”

“Tomorrow, if you're ready.”

“I'll be here at eight!”

And I was wise enough to depart without another word.

My parents expressed a rare surprise when I informed them of my decision that night. They even exchanged a rather startled glance.

“Mr. Dunbar thinks so little of college degrees?” my father asked.

“He certainly thinks he can teach me more about banking than they can at Columbia.”

Another glance was exchanged across the dinner table. It was Mother, as usual, who settled the issue.

“Well, if Mr. Dunbar is really going to look out for George . . .” She clasped her long hands together, the tips of her index fingers touching her lips. “Well, I really don't see how the boy could do much better.”

It is time to speak of Dora and Albert Manville.

Mother's “beauty,” like everything else in her life, was the product of careful planning, a major part of which was its concealment. One had to live with her to be aware of the rare hum of hidden wheels or to catch the even rarer flicker of exhaustion in the mild stare of her eyes. She knew perfectly how to make a dramatic contrast between rest and motion. The angle at which she held her head as she contemplated her interlocutor with a gently mocking air of surprise would be suddenly broken by a whoop of laughter somehow even more complimentary for being so evidently contrived. Her vivid gestures—clapping her hands or covering her face—her high silvery tones and throaty chuckles offered the continuous pantomime of a dainty romping with accepted values, a mincing two-step with the down-to-earth. Mother's small delicate nose, her rosebud of a mouth, her oval chin and high pale brow seemed almost doll-like until one recognized them as stage properties out of which a good deal of highly visible drama could be made.

Our sober little brownstone on East Sixtieth Street exploded into an elegant Elsie De Wolfe interior of bright chintzes whose chairs and divans seemed always waiting for callers and whose pillows appeared to be plumped up by invisible hands every time they were creased. My sister Eleanor and I were part of the decor, washed and combed and reclad whenever we came in, flushed and rumpled, from school or exercise. Mother treated us with a rather studied affection even when we were alone with her; her “darlings” and “pets” had a faintly theatrical ring, but, though she never lost her temper, there was a quiet ineluctability about her discipline that we knew could never be got around. Mother's children, like her furniture, had to be ready for the maid coming in with a card on a silver tray and her rising to greet a caller with: “How angelic of you to come! I was just hoping that might be your ring!”

Father to the world must have seemed the immaculate club gentleman of the era, with smooth prematurely white hair, pointed gray goatee, long handsome brown face and large aquiline nose. But his light blue eyes were windows that seemed to catch the light and reveal nothing within. Father toiled not, neither did he spin; his days in winter were spent at the card table of his club and in summer on the golf course. His manners were ceremonious even with his children; his temper was fretted only by alterations in his routine. And it was evident even to my boyish eyes that our callers, after greeting him with the false cheer that precedes a quick dismissal, would turn their eyes at once to Mother. Not that he minded. He demanded nothing of any day but that it should be just like its predecessor.

All right, my reader will say. When is he going to come out with it? Does he think we don't
know?

Of course, all New York knew that Dora Manville was Mr. Dunbar's mistress. The affair had been going on for years, and I'm sure there were those who fancied a resemblance between myself and the great banker, though in most respects we were physical opposites. My parents were regular members of the cruises on the
Magellan
where Mother, in the absence of the always ailing Mrs. Dunbar, acted as unofficial hostess. But the proprieties were at all times strictly observed on each side; no terms of endearment were employed, nor any fond or even affectionate glances exchanged. Father played cards and fished with his host; indeed, the only hint that anything was out of line might have been that Mr. Dunbar, never known for his tolerance of lesser men, treated this guest with a marked respect.

It was not, however, the old French convention that society should ignore what a husband chose to overlook that kept the Manhattan moralists at bay.
They
would never have considered themselves foreclosed by so mean a thing as a
mari complaisant
. No, it was the simple power of Lees Dunbar to make or break a man in Wall Street that induced them to accept his offered bribe of the rigid observance of forms. The more holy could thus pretend they didn't know; the less sanctified had the release of gossip. The affair had the respectability we read about in Saint-Simon of the liaison between the aging Sun King and Madame de Maintenon.

I don't know when I learned of the affair first, but it seems to me I had always known. Had I gone to boarding school, it might well have been flung in my face, but at my academy, where I attended only morning classes, the boys were more tactful or perhaps more ignorant. And then we were always accompanied; in the park and at dancing school there were governesses, and in our military drill at the armory no chatter was allowed. Sex, if not gossip, I learned about in huddles in school corridors and visits upstairs in the homes of other boys. It squeezed itself into our upholstered life, and the usual first question in a boy's mind, “You don't mean Mummie and Daddy do
that?”
framed itself in mine with respect to Mother and Mr. Dunbar.

But he was old, it may be objected, old and stout and ugly. Still, he was dominating, an obvious power. In my fantasies Mother began to play the role of a white slave who had to strip and wave her hips and roll obscenely on a tiger-skin rug before the pale stare of the sultan. As I became more educated in the ways of sex, thanks to the dirtier-minded of my school associates, I pictured her doing all kinds of lewd things to whet the appetites of her jaded lord, her eyes darkening with the dark pleasure of her humiliation. I certainly felt no urge to defend her. She was a whore! A stylish whore who was earning her keep.