The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (65 page)

I had been able to persuade two other major partners of the peril to the firm's portfolio, and I surmised that, if I could add Marion's voice to theirs and mine, Hugh might be forced to some compromise.

With this in mind, I approached Marion that same evening. She was home for a change, and after dinner, in the library, I outlined my plan. She only half listened until it broke upon her what it entailed.

“You mean you and I would join forces
against
Hugh?”

Life in this period had been perplexing for Marion. She had begun to put on weight, and this, with her increased social activity that now extended well beyond the firm (she was the queen of the charity ball), had probably diminished her interest, or at least her dependence, on romance. I had heard rumors in the office that Hugh had a lady friend from a very different social zone, and I had made it my business (always prepared) to verify this. I did not know whether or not Marion was aware of the affair, but if she had her suspicions, I wondered if a person as honest as she basically was might not have questioned her own continued right to call her lover to account.

“Does your loyalty to Hugh require you to place your fortune at risk?”

“But how can I be sure that it is? How can I know which of you two is right?”

“You can't. You may have to toss a coin. At least that would give you a fifty-fifty chance of not going down the drain with Hugh.”

“Oh, George, don't be horrid! Explain it all to me!”

“I can't turn you into an economist overnight, my dear. You'll have to play your hunch.”

“Can't you do
something
to help me?”

“I can do this. I can at least try to persuade you that honor doesn't call you to be more loyal to Hugh than he is to you.” I handed her a card on which was typed a name, address and telephone number. “This is where you can reach Mrs. Ella Lane. I doubt that she will have an interest in refusing you any information you request. Her liaison with Hugh is well known in the social circles in which she moves.”

Poor Marion held the card away from her as if it emitted a bad odor. “Why are you doing this to me, George?”

“I've told you why.”

Her eyes slowly filled with tears. “I've known there was someone. But I didn't want to know who. Are you sure you're not doing this because you hate me?”

“I don't hate you in the least. I'm very fond of you, and I always have been. I'm doing this for you.
And
for your son.”

She was silent for a minute. “Let me go upstairs now. I'll let you know in the morning what I decide.”

At breakfast Marion's maid came down to deliver me a note from her mistress which simply read: “Go ahead with your plan.” That morning I was able to induce Hugh to agree to reinvest in safer securities one half of the firm's capital. Thus are the major events of history often brought about.

***

When the great crash came that fall, Dunbar Leslie lost only fifty percent of its principal and escaped what might have otherwise been a receivership. My status in the firm was enormously enhanced, and a much humbled Hugh at partnership lunches was now careful to seat me at his right and to consult me on every question of importance. I never said “I told you so.” There was no need.

Marion was much bewildered by these events. The re-emergence of her husband from, so to speak, the back chambers of the firm, whither he had been relegated by the wisdom of the old guard, seemed to defy the rules of the game as she had learned them. True, she had originally picked me as her candidate for the first spot, but had she not been proved wrong by her father and lover? And now here was the old struggle all over again! I was amused by her quandary, likening her in my mind to a sea lioness basking on a rock until the victor of two battling bulls should flop over to claim her.

Except she wasn't basking. She was making cautious overtures to me suggesting that we had drifted too far apart and perhaps should do more things together again. She even asked me if I would join her at the table which the firm had taken at the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom for a dinner honoring the secretary of the treasury. I firmly declined.

“In the first place, there's nothing to honor. Neither the secretary nor any of his party has done a thing to ameliorate the national disaster. In the second, I wouldn't be seen dead at a hotel banquet. We have established our pragmatic sanction, my dear Marion. Let us abide by it.”

This may sound cruel. Marion was having her troubles. I knew that Hugh's Mrs. Lane had abandoned him for a corporate tycoon too great to be openly resented and that he was doing his best to reinstate himself in Marion's good graces. I was probably thrusting her back in his arms. But I didn't care. I had no further interest in the politics of the firm, or who was senior partner, and, having lived my life without the complications of sexual involvement, I had little patience for the heartaches and jealousies of people obsessed with their own genitalia and what to do or not to do with them.

Actually, I was probably helping Marion. She did patch things up with Hugh, and this may have been the best thing she could have done with her emotional life, or what was left of it. He probably continued to divert himself on the sly, but if he did, he took greater pains to conceal it. And in a year's time he had already started to take some of the credit, at least with the younger partners, for the investment policy which had saved the firm. The fact that I never bothered to contradict him lent credence to his claim, and by 1933 he was as strongly in the saddle as if his wisdom and leadership had never been questioned.

I have been accused of enjoying the Depression. There is some truth in that. I did not enjoy, certainly, the human suffering entailed, although I have never much concerned myself with human misery that I was powerless to allay. Pain and agony beyond my reach, at home or abroad or even on other planets, in the past, present or future—how could my sentimental wails mend matters? What I did enjoy was the interest of watching a national catastrophe unfold in very much the fashion I had foreseen, with the added excitement of feeling that the same mind which had seen it coming might offer some small clue in the problem of preventing its repetition.

For the years which followed the crash, bringing no return of our fevered prosperity, but, on the contrary, revealing even darker abysses, had begun to open up to many persons, like myself, the vision of radical changes in the management of our securities markets. The time might have come not merely to say “I told you so” to Hugh Norman but to add: “And here is what I'm
going
to tell you!” My life might not, after all, be a failure. There might still be a way to find consistency and even purpose in the career which had started in my mother's salon, discussing the Medici with its principal ornament, and had seemed to end with my relegation from the status of second partner to that of a mere economic consultant.

I had been working, off and on for two years, on a short text about the need for government regulation of the issuance and marketing of stocks and bonds. It had had its origin in my indignation at Hugh's little pool games. But now, with the new confidence engendered by my role in the firm's survival, I decided to expand it into a full-length book and offer it for publication. What I had once conceived as the policing role of the banking community I now realized had to become one of the many functions of Uncle Sam.

Principles of Market Regulation
was published in 1932. It was read only by a small public, but that public was precisely the audience I had wished to reach: those economists who hoped to assist the new government if Hoover should be defeated and the banking world of downtown New York. The former hailed me; the latter decried me as a false prophet and, worse, a false friend.

Marion was thoroughly bewildered. She had tried to read my book and hadn't been able to make head or tail of it. But she had talked to her mentor.

“Hugh says you're trying to undermine the whole capitalist system!”

“On the contrary, I'm trying to save it.”

“No one in the firm seems to think that.”

“Have any of them any better ideas?”

“I don't know. It's all beyond me. I wish my father were alive to talk to you.”

“Who knows? He might have agreed with me.”

But it was only too clear, in any division between the firm and myself, which side Marion would be on. She was a tribal creature, and if necessary she would carry even the severed head of her spouse to the real chief. She had offered me my chance to be that, first in marrying me, then, when Mr. Dunbar had died, in trying to rouse me from my apathy, and, more lately, in offering me the resumption of a kind of partnership marriage, and I had failed her, and Hugh was king. But I was free of all this. I had my new thing. Detached, superior, in my box of observation, I could watch the inevitable unfolding of the drama below.

Marion's real trial came the following year, after the change of administration in Washington, when I was invited to go down to the capital and help with the drafting of the bill which was to become the Securities Act of 1933. This was the law which, more than any other, would open up the real struggle between right and left. My firm's executive committee came in a body to my office to beg me not to associate the name of Dunbar Leslie with such radical legislation, and when I calmly and politely declined even to debate the matter with them and requested them to leave me in peace, they departed in high dudgeon, but later delegated Hugh to appeal to Marion to intercede with me.

I was thus prepared on the night that she made her dramatic appearance at my study door, more than ever the Roman matron. Dressed for the reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art whither she was bound, accompanied by the again faithful Hugh, to the opening of an exhibit of Hindu art sponsored by the firm, she was arrayed in red velvet with a necklace of large emeralds, and her fine auburn hair was for once neatly combed and set. Her full figure, erect in the doorway, was almost imperial in its static pose, and across her breast she was wearing the blue ribbon of a pompous Indian decoration which I had privately and ribaldly dubbed “the Order of Chastity, second class.”

“I suppose it's true?” she began in a sad, lofty tone.

“Oh, Marion, sit down and have a drink. I'll tell you all about it.”

“I don't care to sit, thank you. It's true, then, that you are going to betray the firm to which you owe everything and the class to which you have aspired.”

“Aspired? My family was quite as good as yours, Marion.”

“I am not speaking of blood. I am speaking of accomplishment and responsibility. Your father was a nobody. And we know too well what your mother was.”

“Very much what you are, wasn't she?”

Marion looked more surprised than indignant. Her imagination was not capable of equating her relationship with Hugh, which she probably saw as a mating of gods on Olympus, with the humbler copulations of my mother and Mr. Dunbar.

“Your parents, I meant, were not leaders of the financial community. Which may explain why you have so little sense of loyalty. But have you stopped to consider in what light the captain of a great ship in a storm must view the man who jumps overboard to join the wreckers flashing a false beacon on the rocks?”

Really, Marion was magnificent. She must have written that out on her dressing table before coming down. But my amusement subsided when I recalled how much she resembled the aging Lees Dunbar before the congressional committee. None of those she called our financial leaders, or even the wives who had no real part in the game, were able to play it without waving banners and chanting martial songs. My momentary pity for Marion vanished when I considered that nothing would ever convince her that her values might be false.

“My dear, you are to Wall Street what Julia Ward Howe was to the Union. And your eyes will never admit that they have seen the glory of the going of the Lord. What I'm doing will no doubt raise the hackles of the old guard. I'm sure I shall be called some very nasty names. But not everyone feels that way. Even in the office some of the younger men think I'm doing a very interesting thing.”

“I'm sure you're very persuasive. No one's ever doubted that. But Hugh questions whether our John, after this, will be accepted at Groton.”

I laughed in sheer surprise. “But President Roosevelt went to Groton!”

“And the school is not proud of it, I'm told.”

“Really, Marion, you and Hugh are being too absurd. Even the stuffiest people aren't going to hold what I do against a child. The boy may have to suffer a few cracks, but if he's worth his salt, he'll crack right back.”

“Not everyone has your independence, George. Not everyone could take so lightly the bitter feelings that you have aroused.”

“Lightly! I
welcome
the resentment of people like that! It actually exhilarates me.”

This was too much. Marion seemed now to reach for a hidden weapon she had so far been reluctant to use. “Do you know what Hugh says your real motive is?”

“Oh, do tell me! I delight in Hugh's theories.”

“He says you've always hated our world. That you've been biding your time for the chance to bring it down in ruins about our ears.”

“And to what, pray, does he attribute this fervid rancor?”

“To your lifelong resentment of what Mr. Dunbar did to your mother! Nothing less than the destruction of his entire life work would make up to you for that humiliation!”

“I
see
. It's not unclever. For Hugh. But what about himself? Might not his reckless investment policies have concealed an inner drive to bankrupt the firm?”

Marion stared. “But what would have been his motive?”

“Ah, the id, my dear, the id. Who can penetrate its murky depths? But no, I shan't press that theory too far. And as to his of me, well, it might be as true as heaven or as false as hell. I don't think I really care. What difference do motives make? If they're unconscious, they're beyond our control. And even if they're conscious, are they our true motives?” I smiled in pleasure at the liberating idea. “Isn't there always a me-me-me behind the fair face of the do-gooder?”