The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (63 page)

I realized then that I could no longer go on fooling myself. Except what would I really gain by facing the truth?

That same year saw a congressional committee's investigation of monopolies, and Mr. Dunbar himself was called as a witness. I accompanied him to Washington, indignant at the idea that he was being summoned, not because the testimony of an old man of now obviously declining memory would be helpful to proposed legislation, but because his famous name might provide a football to be kicked about for political advantage. And so indeed it turned out.

Mr. Dunbar had difficulty with some of the questions. He showed a vagueness as to the identity of certain corporate mergers that he could have recited in his sleep a few years before. But Rex Florham, counsel for the committee, a former assistant attorney general known for his aggressive enforcement of the Sherman Act, had been quick to sense that the old man might be induced to express a philosophy of economic laissez-faire so extreme as to bring ridicule on the whole banking community, and he pressed his final questions with an air of assumed respectfulness that led his witness deep into the trap.

“To a banker of your vast experience, Mr. Dunbar, the experiments of legislators less versed in economics must often be trying.”

“Well, sir, you might say that politicians, like the poor, we have always with us.”

“Just so. And no doubt in your time you have seen our elected well-wishers come up with some pretty strange ideas.”

“I could a tale unfold!”

“Might it not then have been helpful to the nation, sir, if more of your fellow bankers had seen fit to seek seats in Congress to help in the drafting of regulatory legislation?”

“Only on the premise that such regulatory laws are needed.”

“And they are not, sir?”

“No, sir, they are not. I believe in a free market.”

“Absolutely free?”

“Absolutely free, sir.”

“You believe the Congress should exercise no control whatever over our giant corporations?”

“I believe that control should remain where it still largely is: in the chief executive officers of our greater businesses and in the heads of the major banking institutions. Competition tends to eliminate the inept, and the vital importance of a gentleman's word in any market transaction weeds out the dishonest. Of course, you are going to find rascals in any walk of life, but that includes the Congress as well.”

Florham grew bolder now. “But does that not place power in the hands of our magnates comparable to the power of the Congress?”

“And what of that, sir? Are they not more qualified?”

“Tell me, sir. Are you yourself not one of the financial leaders of the country?”

“That is not for me to say, Mr. Florham.”

“But if you are—and let us suppose, for the purposes of this discussion, that you are the greatest of such—would you not have a power comparable to that of the President himself?”

“Granting your hypothesis, yes, sir, I should.”

I groaned inwardly. I had a vision of what the newspapers would surely make of this. They would shout from coast to coast that Lees Dunbar deemed himself more powerful than Warren G. Harding. And wasn't it true that he
did
believe it, even if he had not said it in so many words? It was not so much that my hero had made himself into a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal; anything could be forgiven the senescent. What split my heart was that I was now beginning to see that this streak of megalomania had always been there. I had been fighting off my suspicions for some time, but now my vision had been horridly cleared. The Dunbar on the stand was not so different from the one I had worshiped in my mother's salon. Had he not always harbored the illusion that he was running his little world, like Napoleon in Tolstoy's
War and Peace
, pulling the straps and cords in the back of his plunging carriage in the belief that he was making it go? What was Wall Street in the obsessed imagination of Lees Dunbar but a parade ground where regiments in close-order drill executed his barked commands of “Squads left!” and “Left by squadrons!”? And what was I but the dazzled child who had believed it all?

Mr. Dunbar did not long survive the congressional hearing or the embarrassing publicity that followed it, though the worst of the latter I was able to spare him. His last days were marked by delirium, and I hardly left his bedside. His ravings about a Brazilian rain forest made little sense to me until at last he gave this seeming cohesion to them:

“That company we had on the Amazon. Do you remember, George? We had to clear a great area for rubber farming. And then that crazy manager chucked the work. After the men tried to kill him, do you remember? And how fast the jungle filled it all in. In
weeks
, George! In just
weeks!”

I supposed this was his way of expressing the futility of trying to make any permanent clearing in the jungle of economic life and that the poor old boy was experiencing some of the same sour disillusionment that I was facing. I attempted to console him, but he did not seem to hear me. Soon after he became entirely incoherent. When at last his heavy breathing ceased, and I contemplated that strangely still body, I was seized with a wild despair. Marion, hearing my cry in the next room, hurried in with the doctor. I shall never forget the shocked look on her countenance as she contemplated mine.

I can appreciate now that what had shocked her was not my grief but its cause. How could a woman, brought up to admire the strong and superior in the male sex, feel anything but distaste for a man who sobbed over the death of an old gentleman who was not even kin to him? And how could such a man take up the scepter that old Dunbar had meant for warlords? Hadn't I just proved myself inept?

With Lees Dunbar's death I seemed to have lost my purpose in life; I began even to wonder if I might not as well have lost life itself. For three weeks I did not go to the office at all. I stayed alone in the house in Old Westbury, leaving Marion and her father to cope with the problems of the estate of which he and I were executors. I wondered at times if my depression would not congeal into a permanent state.

Marion telephoned every other day to see how I was doing. Her attitude was that of a nurse to a child whose illness might have been feigned; she showed a businesslike concern, but little sympathy.

“I suppose you must be aware there are important questions to be decided in the firm. Do you really think it's wise to be away?”

Of course, she meant the question of succession. Marion's conscience required her to warn me. But I had a distinct sense that she was just as glad to have me where I was.

“I can always be reached by telephone.”

“All right, George. If that's the way you want to play it.”

Mr. Dunbar, even approaching senility, had retained the function as well as the title of managing partner. His replacement would now have to be proposed by a nominating committee on which I, as a likely successor, did not sit. The only other serious candidate was Hugh Norman, and everyone knew that Mr. Dunbar had given me his preference.

It was my embarrassed father-in-law who drove out to Long Island to inform me of the firm's choice.

“I needn't tell you, George, how esteemed you are by all your partners,” he assured me, after several throat-clearings. “But there does seem to be a feeling that your talents do not include a taste for the petty details of day-to-day management. Why should they? We have partners who even like that sort of thing. You're too valuable to be wasted on questions of promotion and demotion, or hiring and firing, or whether the reception hall needs redecoration or should we put urinals in the old washrooms.”

“In other words, I should stay in my ivory tower.”

“Now, George, you mustn't take it that way. This is all very well meant. You can say your partners are greedy if you like. They want to squeeze the last drop out of what you're best at. Leave administration to Hugh Norman. Nothing's too petty for Hugh. He's that
rara avis
who can see both the forest and every damn tree in it.”

It was thus I first learned that, without either my advice or consent, Hugh Norman had been chosen to succeed Lees Dunbar as managing partner of the firm. John Leslie was too old, and I . . . well, it was obvious that the membership did not see in me the image they wished to present to the world. It was also obvious that Marion had conspired with her father to promote her lover ahead of her husband. But wasn't the lover more of a husband than I?

The crisis for me was simply that the elaborately wrought inner scaffolding on which I had gingerly positioned my entire emotional life had been swept away overnight by the roaring cataract of Hugh Norman. At dreary dawn I found myself forlornly stranded on the gray banks of his relendess river. Where now was the long envisaged role of the arbiter of Wall Street? Oh, no, not quite of Wall Street—I was never such a fool as to think I could attain that, though in dizzy dreams such a pinnacle might have seemed almost achievable. But I had certainly visualized myself in a position of power comparable to that of Lees Dunbar, though without his hallucinations of national dominance. I had seen myself, much more modestly, as the umpire of corporate conflict within my chosen bailiwick, as a man who could bring some degree of governance into the chaos of my immediate economic vicinity, who could impose the order of the balance sheet on clients of messy thinking and even messier emotions. All I had wanted was to create a little civilization in my own back yard.

But now! Now I was only the expert diagnostician of corporate ailments. My analyses would still be sought by my partners, but how they would use them was no longer my affair. They would, of course, be concerned only with profit. In other words, my firm would be just like all the others. Some would ask: had it not always been? Who cared about George Manville's dreams? Did anyone even know about them? Whom had I ever told but the unlistening Marion?

I had never liked Hugh Norman, even before his affair with Marion. Not because he was cold; I have never minded coldness. It was more that I suspected he was at heart unscrupulous. Oh, he would do everything according to the rules, yes. But if he should ever learn that a form of profitable wrongdoing had become at least tolerated by the “better sort,” I had little doubt that he would engage in it. His morals, so to speak, depended on his private poll of the marketplace. Like a courtier of Henry VIII, as interpreted by Holbein, he would nurse no ideals. His courage consisted simply in his willingness to risk the headsman's ax in his pursuit of power.

He and I had always got on well enough, outwardly anyway, and he probably assumed we would continue to. He undoubtedly despised me as a cuckold, but this was not a matter that much concerned him. He exactly appreciated my value to the firm, and now he had the satisfaction of knowing I was no longer a rival.

How long his contempt and my resentment would have jogged along uneventfully together without the incident of the “pool” for the cornering of a certain stock, I do not know, but that changed everything. Hugh asked me to attend a small gathering of bankers and brokers at his house in Old Westbury one Sunday afternoon. It was not a firm matter, and it was not my custom to go in for such games, but I had no wish to offend him without good cause, so I went, to be polite.

It was three o'clock on a peerless June afternoon. Most of the dozen gentlemen gathered in that dark library, surrounded by English hunting prints and standard sets of unread classics, would have been on the golf course had not a sharper game attracted them. They had lunched with their host; brandy and whiskey glasses were on the tables, and the air was heavy with cigar smoke. Having walked over from my own place in the glorious air, I felt an immediate revulsion.

“Ah, George, good, we can start,” my host greeted me. I declined both drink and weed a bit brusquely and took a seat in the corner. “I think you gentlemen will all agree that this is a very pretty little scheme. I miss my guess if even the great George isn't tempted.”

He proceeded, without interruption, to oudine his plan to corner the stock of a vulnerable food-store chain of whose precarious financing he had had a careful study made. It was a simple and classic scheme. A graduated purchase of the company's common stock would drive the market price to an unrealistic high, at which point the pool would dump its holdings, leaving a gullible public to pick up the pieces in the subsequent crash. It was the same old game played half a century before by Jim Fisk and Jay Gould except on a smaller and less market-threatening scale, a kind of gentlemen's cockfight, disastrous largely to gambling short sellers with whose welfare the loftier bankers and brokers had little concern. It was not my practice to take part in such ventures, but I had never expressed disapproval of them. I had followed the lead of that greatest of stoics, Marcus Aurelius, who deemed it his duty to attend the bloody but popular games at the Colosseum which even he was powerless to ban, but, seated in the imperial box, kept his eyes fixed on some learned scroll.

“How about it, George? Can we count you in?”

“I think I'll pass, thank you.”

I received some surprised looks, even a couple of critical ones, and a general discussion began in which I took no part. But I was confused by my own unrest. Where was the emperor, calmly perusing a tract of Zeno while the gladiators dueled below? I should have been above it all instead of being angry. Was it my function to interfere with bread and circuses? No! But I didn't have to stay and listen. I rose.

“Gentlemen, I leave you to your little frolics.”

Hugh followed me out of the room to the front door. “You won't play with us, George?” he asked in his usual quiet tone. But there was a hint of a rasp in it now.

“No, I find I have put away childish things. Particularly when the other children are playing such dirty pool.”