The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (62 page)

The prospect tarnished the glitter of my new position in the office. A membership in the firm, which had once seemed to me the peak of worldly ambition, now threatened to be a lonely rank, even (to any who suspected the truth) a shameful one. Yet, as I took new stock of my assets and liabilities, I could see no valid alternative to proceeding in the direction in which I had so long been headed. A junior partnership was one thing, but I had my eyes on becoming the senior of all, and if Mr. Dunbar should die, I would surely need the Leslies to achieve the highest rung.

When I called at their town house later that same day, Marion received me alone in the parlor. She had already heard about my partnership. Her elation seemed to be strangely mixed with a sudden misgiving.

“Are you as happy as you should be, George? There are moments when I feel that I don't really know you. I guess this is one of them.”

“Oh, I'm thrilled, of course. How would I not be?”

“But would you tell me if you weren't?”

I hesitated. “Why do you ask that?”

“Don't most married couples tell each other everything?”

“Some may think they do.”

“But they deceive themselves?”

“If they believe the impossible, yes.”

“Wouldn't you want to know everything your wife was thinking?”

“In the name of God, no!”

There was a long, rather tense pause before she laughed. Loudly, and at last almost cheerfully. I had the sense that some lurking reservation had been thrown, perhaps recklessly, to the winds.

That evening we became engaged.

***

Mrs. Leslie was supposed to be as unforgiving as she was righteous. Had she ever, it was said, even once surprised her husband with a pretty housemaid on his knee, she would have left him forever. The mere apprehension of such a crisis was reputed to have kept him permanently faithful. But she seemed to have condemned me on the subject of my parents without the need of evidence. This came out in our discussions of plans for the wedding.

We met, Marion and I and her unsmiling parent, in the latter's chaste pale second-floor sitting room in the Long Island house, with its pastels of the children in their youth and its small glass bookcases filled with the leather-bound volumes of poetry which its grim occupant so unaccountably loved. Banned from its white walls was any suggestion of the trophies that her game-hunting spouse placed over the halls below. No horn, claw, tusk or antler was allowed to sully the purity of the atmosphere.

“A wedding without a single member of the groom's family is an anomaly, George.” Her use of my Christian name had been her sole acknowledgment of the engagement. “It looks as if we refused to have them, which isn't true, or as if they held something very strongly against you. I'm afraid I must ask you what that is.”

“Mother, hadn't you better talk to George alone?”

“Certainly not, Marion. If there
is
something, surely it's as much your concern as mine.”

“But I don't
care
. I trust George for that. I don't want to know anything about his family quarrels. That's his affair. Besides, he has two aunts who will be happy to attend the wedding.”

“Aunts aren't enough. Well, George? Are you going to tell us?”

Of course, I was ready for her. It would be my first important lie, but I had weighed all the circumstances, and I was convinced that I had moral justification. “It invokes delicate matters, Mrs. Leslie.”

“I expected that.”

“You are aware, I'm sure, of my mother's past relationship with Mr. Dunbar.”

“Perfectly.”

“Mother, I don't want to stay to hear this!”

“Sit down, Marion, and don't be a fool. You can't play the innocent with me. Do you think I don't know what you and your girlfriends gossip about? Go on, George.”

“You can imagine that the situation was not agreeable to me. To have my mother so involved, and my father, whether from weakness or love, willing to look the other way! It made it all the worse that Mr. Dunbar, whom I worshiped, should be responsible for the degradation of my family. At last I resolved to have it out with him. I pleaded with him to break off with my mother. I went so far as to urge him never to see or even speak to her again. At first he was furious. I expected to be fired on the spot. But in the end he was too great a man not to be affected by my candor. After due consideration he decided to end the intrigue. My mother learned of my role and has never forgiven me. She has turned my father and sister against me. And she is quite remorseless. There is nothing I can do to bring her around.”

Mrs. Leslie's face was a study. I wonder if she had ever been more perplexed in her life. Sexual misconduct has been pretty much the same through the ages, and society has usually been resigned to leaving it under the rug where common sense had customarily swept it. But if the dogma of a particular era requires condemnation if the rug happens to be pulled back, then all must join in that condemnation. In a Victorian or puritanical age my reasons would have been publicly accepted as the justification of my alleged interference, even by those who would have privately regarded me as a prig and a busybody. But was that true in 1916? By then my alleged sanctimoniousness might have been considered almost as low as adultery itself. But not quite. It was obvious that Mrs. Leslie found distasteful my account of the Galahad son, but her feelings would have been much stronger had she known my true role. And she was not sufficiently liberated from puritan doctrine to criticize me openly. Oh, I had her! I was no longer
the fils complaisant
. She would have to go through not only with the wedding but with the large reception that I had in mind.

As she still, however, did not speak, I urged her to check my story with Mr. Dunbar himself. This was a bold stroke. I was pretty sure that even she would lack the gall to do this, but I figured that if she did, the great man would at once deduce what I was up to and, chuckling inwardly, confirm my story.

“No, that won't be necessary, George,” she replied with a sigh. “I don't doubt your word. Well, that's it, then. We'll have the wedding without the Manvilles.”

America's entry into the Great War followed shortly upon our marriage, but there was no idea of my joining the colors. I was significantly involved in the loans to Britain, and even as fierce a war-horse as my mother-in-law had reluctantly to agree that the firm was justified in applying for my draft exemption. But Marion's brothers were both engaged as infantry officers in the trenches, and Jack, the elder and the more promising, was killed in action. When Bob returned from the carnage, he had no further taste for banking, and he bought a large cattle ranch in Argentina which he colorfully and unprofitably operated thereafter at the family's willingly defrayed expense.

As I was the only relative of John Leslie's left in the firm, as well as the continuing intimate of the now sadly aging Lees Dunbar, it might have been thought that my succession to the leadership was assured, and for a time this appeared to be the case. But I could nonetheless perceive behind the faultless good manners of my father-in-law and the perfunctory civility of his spouse that the tragic events of wartime had not improved their opinion of me. The slaughtered youth at Cháteau-Thierry and the hard-riding gaucho of the Argentine pampas had set a standard of virility that a mere economic whiz kid could never hope to attain. It may have seemed, even to the eyes of the nonrelated partners, that I had taken some obscure advantage of my gallant brothers-in-law, who in any case would have more graced the aristocratic corridors of Dunbar, Leslie & Co. than the pale creature in dark civilian garb who seemed to be thinking only of profits while his betters were dying.

Marion herself was not immune to this attitude. She had not, however, seemed to have felt it at first. Our marriage had got off to a better start than might have been expected. Her equable disposition enabled us to live together like two college roommates. She was frankly bored by my political and economic theorizing and didn't even pretend to listen if I held forth on these subjects, but she took, as she always had, the greatest interest in the social side of my business life and loved to entertain the members of the firm and their wives in the commodious houses that she built in town and country. Indeed, her father used to twit her for deeming herself the Agrippina of Dunbar Leslie, being the daughter, wife and (he vainly hoped) future mother of “emperors.” I daresay some of the partners' wives thought she put on airs and scoffed at her rousing cheerleader tones, her tossed head and noisy good will, but no doubt they were careful to do so behind her back.

But the loss of Jack and the absence of Bob had, by 1920 anyway, begun to affect our relationship. It might have been because those friendly fellows were no longer around to take my side and back me up. I believe that they had always been rueful about the way they and their father had conspired to give me a loveless wife (they did not know
how
loveless) and that they kept an eye on their sister to be sure she was nice to me. But now their loss served only to remind Marion of how little I seemed a male Leslie. She never said so, but she was cooler with me, at times irritable. I suspected that she had forgotten Malcolm Dudley at last and was beginning to wonder why she had doomed herself to a
mariage blanc
.

And indeed it was not long before she appeared to be taking steps to mitigate the rigor of this doom. In Old Westbury she went fox hunting or golfing every weekend with Hugh Norman, my partner and our neighbor. Hugh, my exact contemporary, was generally considered my nearest rival in the firm. He was certainly not like me in any respect, with his strong build, his slicked-back dark hair, his long stern countenance and eyes which could somehow twinkle and reprove at almost the same time. He gave a remarkable impression of strength, both in character and physique; one suspected that he had been a polo player or something equally stylish and arduous. And to top it off, he had what the military call “command presence”; he could dominate a meeting without raising his hand or his voice. Needless to say, I detested him.

Hugh was married to a wonderful woman of great character, but Aggie Norman had been stricken with a terrible polio five years before and was confined to a wheelchair. Hugh was supposed by the office to have had occasional discreet affairs, and for a time I naively took it for granted that these satisfied the rutting male in him and that he and Marion were united primarily by their love of sport and their joint passion for the firm. For Hugh, quite as much as I, lived essentially for Dunbar Leslie.

I had also thought that Marion was not the type to appeal to his senses. Were not men as cold and grave as he notoriously attracted to gamier morsels? But I had underestimated the subservience of his baser appetites to his ambition. If he could subject an infatuated Marion to his will, he might dominate, through her, her adoring father—and John Leslie's share of the firm's capital was second only to Mr. Dunbar's. And if John Leslie became the trustee under Dunbar's will . . . well, what would
that
mean to the future of George Manville?

When I was fool enough to twit Marion with the rumors of her hunting companion's extracurricular sex life, she warmly defended him.

“And if it were true, what's the harm? He's a man, isn't he? Aggie Norman understands that. She and I have become the greatest friends, you know. She wouldn't want him to be frustrated. It might make him difficult in the home. It might even affect his work at the office.”

“Because all that loose semen knocking around inside him might clog a he-man's business judgment?”

“George! I've never heard you be so vulgar. What's come over you?”

“Jealousy, perhaps.”

“Jealousy? You can't expect me to take
that
seriously?”

Really, was it possible for a woman to be so insensitive? Even granting what our marriage was, or wasn't, couldn't she see that I might still be uncomfortable?

“While we're on the subject of Hugh, don't you think your seeing so much of him may cause people to talk?”

Her firm answer made me suspect that she had been waiting for this. “Let them. And now let me ask
you
something. Hugh and I think we ought to do even more things together. He thinks we ought to take over the firm's entertainments. The receptions, staff parties and so on. Aggie's simply too ill to do more than have a few friends for supper at home, and we all know how you've always hated any kind of office socializing.”

“But haven't I always done my part?”

“Yes, dear, but
so
reluctantly. I've always had to drag you! And Hugh has a great flair for public relations. He needs a hostess, and I've always regarded the social side of business as my particular forte. So people are just going to have to get used to seeing us act as a team. I'm sure they'll come to view it as a business relationship. I assume you have no real objection?”

“None whatever,” I replied bitterly. “You'll both do it to the queen's taste.”

Marion wasted no time in putting her plan into effect. At office gatherings in the following months she and Hugh acted as host and hostess, and as this appeared to have the total sanction of their spouses, Aggie's illness and my solitary preferences being known, the firm seemed to accept it. At a reception at the Waldorf which the partners gave for a delegation of Japanese industrialists, I was told that they made a handsome, almost a royal, couple, receiving together at the head of the grand stairway.

But the woman who told me this, the catty wife of a younger partner, the sort of person who would sacrifice her husband's very future for the pleasure of making a disagreeable remark, added: “One would have thought them Princess Flavia and Rudolph Rassendyl in
The Prisoner of Zenda
. So romantic!”