Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. ALIDA

  2. ALIDA

  3. ALIDA

  4. CHIP

  5. CHIP

  6. CHIP

  7. CHIP

  8. ALIDA

  9. ALIDA

  10. ALIDA

  11. CHIP

  12. CHIP

  13. CHIP

  14. ALIDA

  15. CHIP

  16. CHIP

  17. CHIP

  18. ALIDA

  19. ALIDA

  20. CHIP

  21. CHIP

  22. ALIDA

  Copyright © 1985 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and

  recording, or by any information storage or retrieval

  system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976

  Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed in writing to

  Houghton Mifflin Company, 2 Park Street, Boston,

  Massachusetts 02108.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Auchincloss, Louis.

  Honorable men.

  I. Title.

  PS3501.U25N4 1985 813’.54 85-5257

  ISBN 0-395-38812-0

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  P 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR

  JOSEPH V. NOBLE

  A great director of the

  Museum of the City

  of New York and

  a great friend

  My Mother, you wot well

  My hazards still have been your solace: and

  Believe’t not lightly (though I go alone,

  Like to a lonely dragon, that his fen

  Makes fear’d and talk’d of more than seen) your son

  Will or exceed the common, or be caught

  With cautelous baits and practice.

  CORIOLANUS

  1. ALIDA

  I TAKE to pad and pencil, I suppose, because I don’t really know what else to do. All my life I have been made periodically restless by the never quite quashable notion that I could write, and I have somewhere a box of old notebooks whose first pages are covered with the scribblings of unfinished stories and discontinued journals. I seem to have been doomed to the purgatory of opening lines, of bright initial flashes lost in the dusty spaces of a failed imagination. And this purgatory leads to a hell of negation, for the habit of stopping short is bound to spread, and what do I have to show for my half-century of life but the memory of good times (“same old good times,” as we used jadedly to put it), the legend of a too much publicized debutante year and a reputation for pulling people apart in words when I could not do so in fact? Should not something more be said of the girl who married the last man to be tapped for Bulldog in the Yale class of ’38?

  Well, today at least, I have done something. Almost three decades after Chip’s nomination to that esteemed secret society I have resolved to leave him. When he comes home to Georgetown after his long day in the State Department he will find my letter, if I have not telephoned him first. It will not surprise him. It may even relieve him. He will no longer have to defend his idiotic war to a wife who “simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” He will now be able to cut himself off entirely from the critics of his foundering Armageddon and from the last person who has the patience and persistence to remind him of all the associates in government who, one by one, have resigned from this demented administration. He can now give himself up to the cloudy trophies of mass suicide. I even see him, like the faithful Seyton in Macbeth, standing, stalwart and handsome, beside his desperate, lonely chief. They say that LBJ, sleepless, rises at night to pore over battle maps of Vietnam. Perhaps Special Assistant to the Secretary of State Charles Benedict is there to help him try to muddle out some specter of hope from the latest wires from the Far East.

  But now that I have read over the preceding paragraph, I see that it is already time to pull myself up. And before I have fairly started! Because if I am to fill this notebook and not close it unfinished, like the others, it must be under the constant reminder that I have nothing to be smug about and that my greatest danger will always be in rejoicing—if that be not too strong a word—at the mortification of a man whose integrity and public spirit have always aroused my basest jealousy and resentment. It may be gratifying to watch one’s moral superiors fall on their faces, but it is also a good idea to look around and see whether there is anyone left to lean upon.

  And what, after all, in the name of all that’s holy, have I to boast about? I can hardly point to my marriage. My son, Dana, at twenty-two, is a college dropout, unemployed, trying to beat a heroin hook and living in Stockholm because he refused to be drafted. My daughter, Eleanor, a lawyer working for an antiwar organization, has her life better organized, but I cannot bring myself in my heart (whatever lip service I may make to the modern deities of toleration) to accept her longstanding relationship with the young woman doctor with whom she shares an apartment in SoHo. Of course, Eleanor retorts, when I mutter about the “fulfillment” to a woman of a husband and children: “You mean a husband like yours, Mummie? And children like yours?” What can I say?

  And yet, as I stare at the paper in my typewriter, reminding myself of the injunction that I should be fair about this man who took over my life, something seems to rip inside me. What life, after all, has he left me to write about but the worn-out garment that I turned myself into for his adornment and that he has tossed aside? For however bravely I may talk about leaving him, don’t I know that he was never really mine to leave? I have a sudden vision of myself as a gaudy little bug flitting haplessly into the corolla of a carnivorous plant and buzzing about while the petals slowly but inexorably close over its idle existence. So is that what I am proposing to do: write about the plant that ate me? I must have been a failure from the very beginning.

  ***

  I suppose the Strutherses were all failures. Unless the term is not applicable to people who never tried to be anything more. Because of my greatgrandfather Ashton Struthers, there was just money enough for his descendants to be idle, though at the rate it had been foolishly spent or ineptly lost, by the time I came along a distinct indigence was mixed with our now tarnished gleam. The house in East Eighty-first Street was inconveniently narrow, though it boasted a pompous beaux-arts façade and a marble stairway that dwarfed its tiny rooms, and its fake Louis XVI chairs and consoles were badly in need of repair. The shingle summer cottage on West Street in Bar Harbor, Maine, had not been painted within anyone’s memory. And the portrait of me with my younger sister, Deborah, in red velvet matching dresses against a gleaming background of chinoiseries had been taken back by the artist when his bill was not paid.

  The first Ashton had been one of Commodore Vanderbilt’s “kept” judges, rewarded for decisions favorable to New York Central. This was always perfectly well known, but the Strutherses lived it down, or perhaps got around it by ignoring it, or even by not knowing it, for they knew very little. Because they never budged from Manhattan, except to a spa, and because they knew by instinct when and where to be seen, they acquired over the decades the reputation of being “old New York” and “exclusive.” Indeed, the avid reader of social columns would have been apt to rank them higher than many families whose far greater fame and wealth had the effect of highlighting their equally crooked origins. In short, our reputation was made of spit and sealing wax.

  Let me turn
to my parents. Daddy always looked at you as if you had interrupted him in the performance of some slightly tedious but nonetheless necessary task. He was serious of aspect but wholly undistinguished; my friend Gus Leighton used to say he looked “like a dentist,” by which I suppose he referred to Daddy’s gray, square, bluish chin and the pale, expressionless eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Even in a dinner jacket he had the air somehow of being about to loosen his tie and roll up his sleeves, preparatory to going down to the cellar to fix the furnace. You would never have supposed that his life was dedicated to the organization of testimonial banquets, charity raffles, athletic tournaments, subscription dances and the like. Yet such were his only passion.

  He had worked as a customer’s man in a brokerage house after his graduation from Harvard, but when he discovered that he earned only what he paid his valet, he dismissed the latter and retired. The rest of his life, on a steadily diminishing income (he was one of those cursed with the fatal illusion that the rise and fall of the stock market was caused by determinable rules), he devoted to serving as secretary on boards of clubs in New York and Mount Desert Island. He made himself almost indispensable to these organizations, and never suspected that he was not as important as any of the tycoons who made up their membership or that they did not consider him entirely their equal. He would have been deeply hurt had he heard their contemptuous references to “busy bee” Ashton Struthers.

  Mother came of different stock. I don’t think Daddy, who, the reader will have gathered, was hardly a perceptive man, ever appreciated how great a gap existed between her family and his. Or did he, like a Victorian baronet marrying a Jewish heiress, feel that his rank obliterated hers? Grandpa Gayley, an immigrant from Galway, was shanty Irish, but he made a fortune in dry goods, built a monstrosity of a house on the south shore of Long Island and married his eight sons and daughters into the Social Register. They had all had rather sexy Irish looks, which, like the Gayley money, they lost early. Mummie, at fifty, which is somehow the age at which I always think of her, was gray and soft, her round countenance and diminutive features only faintly suggesting the pretty colleen she must have been. She smoked endlessly and gossiped endlessly, dropping into the huge portmanteau of her knowledge of trivia the endless scraps of social information that she accumulated like a nest-building bird and never forgot: births; deaths; marriages; divorces; fortunes made, lost, stolen or given away; love affairs; perversions; blackmail; suicides; even murders. Why did she accumulate it all? And why did Daddy care about his clubs? My parents, like the birds and the bees, seemed united in dry, unending, unjoyous and unquestioning instinctive activity.

  Of their two children only I constituted a problem. Deborah, two years younger, has been all her life a totally conventional, placid person. Fortunately, in marrying Tom Ayers she equipped herself with the money the Strutherses so dismally lacked. I think she had just intelligence enough to perceive that this was the one thing she needed to live the life her parents pretended to live, and with it she has been quite content.

  I, on the other hand, conceived at an early age the idea that I had been deposited, like a baby cuckoo bird, in a nest to which I did not really belong. It seemed impossible that a soul bursting with so many romantic and idealistic notions could have been the seed of Gayleys or Strutherses. At Miss Herron’s Classes I singled out the few girls who seemed endowed with something of the same spark, and we smoked secretly in our bedrooms, wrote passionate love poetry and sneaked away from dancing or calisthenics classes in the afternoon to see Clark Gable with Norma Shearer, or Clark Gable with Joan Crawford, or Clark Gable with Garbo. I would stare into my mirror and pull my hair back and strike absurd poses, wildly predicting the metamorphosis of that drowned rat before me into the pale, dark-eyed, languid, mysterious, ideal debutante of that era: bored, jaded, with long, dank black hair falling to her shoulders. Actually, I was developing into something not too different.

  Nor was it all just sex and fantasy, though a lot of it must have been. I refused to believe that I was doomed to be as empty a woman as my mother or to be chained to a life hobby as vapid as my father’s. I felt throbbing deep within me the impulse to become something much more daring and exciting and certainly more beautiful. When I should flap my wings at last and leave my dowdy nest, it would be as a swan, a black swan, not only a paragon of beauty, but a poet or writer or even an actress. I dedicated my afternoons to voice lessons and my weekends to scribbling. I found a retired Russian actress who coached me in Ibsen, and I had visions of the Lady from the Sea and General Gabler’s pistols. My parents were complaisant so long as it did not cost too much. It never occurred to them to stress that what I really needed was discipline and hard work.

  Only when I had a chance to play bit parts in summer stock did Daddy put his foot down. He said I was too young and that I would lose my reputation. When I appealed in desperation to Mummie, she passively agreed with him. I now hated them both. I saw them with the merciless eyes of seventeen. There was no sympathy in my heart, only a cold malignant rage.

  Frustrated, I turned that summer to boys. There were plenty of them in Bar Harbor. I necked in the bushes at the Swimming Club dances, smoked cigarettes in a long jade holder and jumped at midnight from the high diving board in an evening dress that blew out like a parachute. But my precocity disillusioned me before my debutante year. I fell in and out of love with prep school boys and college freshmen; I found them too raw and puppyish. I decided that I was reserved for something much more passionate or perhaps not for passion at all. Why should I not be an Emily Dickinson and hide away from the vulgar world behind closed doors in a white gown and write deathless verse? But I could never seem to “taste a liquor never brewed” or “feel a funeral in my brain,” no matter how late I stayed up after parties to make up rhymes.

  I see now that it might have been better had I rebelled and become a communist, as did so many young people in the nineteen thirties—even in society. But politics was left out of my make-up; perhaps my ego was too strong. The agony of the Spanish Civil War did not move me; the rise of Hitler left me cold. I decided that I might be saved by a novel, and I wrote a dozen chapters about a Newport debutante who falls in love with a bootlegger.

  It was not perhaps quite as bad as that sounds, but it was pretty bad. I showed it to Gus Leighton, a friend of my parents, but also of mine who had established himself as a kind of father confessor. He disliked the book and told me so, but he told me something else that changed my life. Let me introduce him.

  He was a bachelor, in his middle thirties, who, had he ever had any great ambitions, seemed now to have successfully squashed them. Rumor had it that he had taken a master’s degree in English Lit at Columbia in order to teach at a boys’ school, but then had abandoned the idea when neither Saint Luke’s nor Groton, the only two he deemed worthy of him, had seen fit to hire him. There was even a legend that he had been violently in love with a beautiful heiress and had turned his back on romance forever when she had refused him. For about fifteen years now he had lived at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan and summered at the Malvern Hotel in Bar Harbor, dining out nightly and supplementing a modest income by a small but highly select public relations business. No one knew just who his clients were or exactly what he did for them, but his particular field was almost certainly social advancement: how and when the newcomers should entertain, what were the most useful charities for them to support, what clubs and summer colonies they should try for. To do him justice, I believe he took a dignified view of his shabby trade, persuading himself that he was coaching the new rich how to be ladies and gentlemen in the best sense of those hackneyed terms.

  He was a large man, inclined to be stout, with thick, long, rather greasy black hair, a white doughy skin, a round puffy face and large, dark, commanding, often angry eyes. He dressed in black suits in winter and loud blazers and white flannels in summer. He knew a great deal about a great many subjects, but I never saw him presume to know more than he
did. He was a force, at least in the small society in which he had chosen to live.

  As I have said, Gus was not impressed by my novel. He was particularly disgusted by my bootlegger’s “gun moll,” who had gold fingernails.

  “It is not, heaven forbid,” he counseled me, “that I have any truck with the inane rule that a writer should write only of what he knows. What under that restriction would happen to Paradise Lost and most of Shakespeare? But where there are no facts, there must be imagination, and your gun moll, my dear, is not imagined—she is fantasized. You may be one of those unfortunates endowed with the artistic spirit yet not furnished with an outlet. I know something about that. The answer must be found in making your life a work of art. In making use of the materials you have to hand.”

  “And what do those amount to?”

  “A good deal more than you think. You have a sharp eye for the second-rate in your parents’ world. But you do not see it as others do. Cholly Knickerbocker speaks of your mother as a grande dame of Gotham.”

  “But that’s all tommyrot.”

  “Is it?” Gus frowned, as if he were dealing with weighty matters. “Who is to decide? That a considerable body of even ignorant persons believe something to be a fact may be important. To you, anyway. Even supposing your world is rotten and doomed, even assuming it is about to be swept away by a red tide, it is still here and now and part of truth. Maybe a bigger part than you think. Doesn’t Marie-Antoinette take up as many pages in the history books as Robespierre? Is Augustus Caesar more remembered than Cleopatra?”

  “Must I get my head chopped off? Or take an asp to my bosom?”

  “It doesn’t matter how you die. It’s how you live. Let me give you two examples. First, Theodore Roosevelt. He conceived of himself, dramatically, as a leader of men, and his image of himself gained world acceptance. Now move to our own day. Take Mrs. Neily.”