The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  No, I won’t call this a book. I always said that I’d never write a book. Too many of my family already have. Wards have written about Wards; Chanlers about Chanlers; Livingstons about Livingstons. And all of them have written about the Astors, to whom, poor as my parents were, we were still kin. Even their titles were inclined to be proprietary, such as: My Aunt, Julia Ward Howe, or My Cousin, Marion Crawford. There was a kind of literary cannibalism in all these memoirs, into which I resolved I should never be tempted. And yet here I go. At least I have the excuse of a private circulation. I am not writing, let me remind my readers, for publication.

  I have said that we were poor, and so we were by the standards of richer kin, but what did that mean in 1912, in our world, even on the fringes of it? It meant a shabby, comfortable brownstone house on East Twenty-third Street, tended by two loyal and devoted maids, and a summer shingle shack on the Hampton dunes. It meant economizing by spending a year in Fontainebleau, another in Dresden. It meant my going to Brooklyn Law School alone by trolley, without a chaperon. It meant my sisters and I wearing hand-me-downs. It meant darning our own socks.

  Dad was the editor of the Knickerbocker Monthly. Its circulation was small but its literary reputation high. He had published stories by Crane and Dreiser. Mother wrote sentimental poetry on elevated topics for the evening papers. We were a cheerful and loving family who never envied our grander cousins. My three sisters and I used to compare ourselves to the March girls in Little Women.

  But I must not make us seem too demure. Harriet, after all, became a surgeon, Lila a social worker in Harlem, and Sophie proclaimed her independence by living openly for twenty years with a married man. We were certainly emancipated by the standards of the era. I think poor Mommie and Dad were sometimes upset by our disregard of the proprieties, but there was never a time that any one of us felt the least failure in their love and support. Parents and daughters were always a unit.

  What made us so liberal, or indeed so radical—as we were then considered? I think it may have been simply that we were intelligent and perhaps a bit more exposed than other girls of similar background to the appalling suffering that existed not far from our own front door. How could reasonable young women not surmise that there had to be something wrong with a society that permitted our Astor cousins to live in Renaissance splendor on Fifth Avenue while stinking slums existed a few blocks from our own brownstone?

  But there was an important difference between our radicalism and the radicalism of many other young people. We never wanted anyone’s blood. This is not a boast. Why should we have? We had never suffered poverty, filth, repression. Why should we have sought the heads of the rich? We were not frustrated social climbers. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt asked Mommie and Dad to her balls. We were under no inner compulsion, in doing our paltry bit to improve the world, to ring tocsins or mount heads on pikes. We had inherited our father’s basic reasonableness.

  This, I feel sure, was one of the qualities that made us attractive to Felix when he first began to call. He always detested shouting, and he used to say in later years that bad manners alone had turned him from socialism. When he came out to see Dad in Westhampton in the summer of 1912, he felt immediately at home.

  The Bull Moose campaign was in full swing, and Dad, a passionate admirer of Colonel Roosevelt, with whom he had some slight acquaintance, was busily editing and promoting party literature. Felix, who had just finished at Harvard Law and had been recommended to Dad by a friend in the law faculty as a volunteer, was engaged in writing the campaign biography of TR, a good copy of which is now a prime collector’s item as its author’s first published book. He spent far more time with the Wards than was warranted by what they had to contribute to the life of the candidate, and it soon became apparent that his interest had descended from the father to the daughters and from them to me.

  Why me? I wasn’t even pretty, though Mother used to say that my smile should catch me a husband. But Felix Leitner? I wasn’t as charming as Sophie or as good as Lila or as bright as Harriet. I was a law student, it was true, as was Felix, but was that a thing to attract a man? You must remember, reader, that Felix was quite marvelous-looking at twenty-two (not that he ever wholly lost it), pale and shining, with a bit of red in the hair, a bit of green in the eyes, and a manner so cool and calm and assured! I could not help thinking of the sonnet of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s:

  What hast thou to do

  With looking through the lattice lights at me,

  A poor tired wandering singer, singing through

  The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?

  From the beginning he treated me the way the romantic Edwardian girl, only half-hidden behind the radical law student, wanted to be treated. He listened to my ideas with a grave attention that enchanted me, and he made only the gentlest fun of those with which he disagreed. He was strong without seeming aggressive, and he managed to imply an interest in my person without any of the gestures expected by girls today.

  Here, for example, is how we discussed a woman’s problem of combining a career with marriage:

  “Of course, if she wanted children, she would have to take a few years off,” I affirmed, “unless she could do her work at home. I suppose a lawyer could see clients that way.”

  “It would place her at a distinct competitive disadvantage. Think of it! Testators in the playroom. Why couldn’t a nurse look after the children?”

  “Would you want your children brought up by a nurse?”

  “Why not? I was.”

  “But I think that’s terrible!” I exclaimed with feeling. “A child needs a mother.”

  “She could be home in the evenings.”

  Of course, eventually this was very much how our two children were brought up, but at the time I was an idealist in everything. I wanted to have all my cakes and swallow them. Felix’s ideas of family life struck me as very backward.

  “Home in the evenings!” I exclaimed in disgust. “How can a mother give a child the attention and warmth it needs in an hour before bedtime?”

  “I think you could, Fran,” he said with a cryptic smile. “I think one shot of your electricity might keep that baby warm all night.”

  “And just what do you mean by that?”

  “Simply that you’re full of life and vitality. Don’t look at me that way. It’s a compliment!”

  I suppose it was. Sensitive souls tend to admire qualities they lack themselves. Felix had plenty of vitality, but it was commonly said of him that he had a cool nature. Some people, like my sister Harriet, even found him cold. But I suspected that he was simply reserved, perhaps inhibited, and that he found in the friendly warmth of our family circle and in my own intense reactions a milieu that corresponded with something hidden behind his own polished, faintly formidable exterior. At least I hoped so, for I was already immensely attracted to him, although something like fear made me struggle with this attraction. Felix might be a man who would own a woman, and I had no intention of being owned.

  Nothing, however, in his conversation betrayed the slightest inclination toward philistinism. He would discuss marriage with me as an institution, quite dispassionately, when we were still only friends.

  “I should expect my wife to have any career she chose except the stage. And that is not in the least because I disapprove of the theater—my own mother was an actress—but simply because I should hate to have her away from home in the evenings. But there’s no danger. I don’t know any actresses.”

  “But your wife might become an actress after she married you!”

  “True.” Was he assessing, behind that calm, amused gaze, the possibility that Frances Ward might fling over her law books and tread the boards? An actress? What could I be but a comic? “One can only deal with likelihoods.”

  “You wouldn’t repudiate her?”

  “I should probably take to the grease paint myself. That should teach her a lesson.”

  Harriet did not like Felix. She thought him n
ot only cold but calculating. She explained with pitiless ingenuity the seeming illogicality of his apparent preference for a plain, penniless girl like myself. As a dedicated socialist he could hardly saddle himself with a mere debutante. On the other hand, his innate snobbishness would cause him to turn up his nose at the girls he encountered in liberal circles. How many of these possessed my qualifications? How many “new women” with old backgrounds could he find?

  I do not think that I realized how completely I had fallen in love with Felix until Harriet imparted this theory. I rejected it with a passion that gave me away.

  “I’m sorry, Fran. I felt I had to say it.”

  “I guess that duty was more like a pleasure,” I retorted with a sniff.

  “Believe me, dear, this has been a very hard thing for me to do.”

  “Oh, stuff, Harriet!”

  For what she told me was wormwood. It made a kind of ghastly sense. I felt like a butterfly—no, not even a butterfly, a poor brown moth—selected by an entomologist whose only passion was in classifications and impaled by the needle of my own sentiment to his crisp, clean chart. But in the whirlwind of my unhappiness I suddenly reached out and made a grab for hard earth. And I found it! Felix, already an intimate in our family circle, could hardly be seeking an illicit relationship with a daughter of Dad’s. If his attentions pointed to anything, they had to point to marriage. And why on earth should he consider it worth his while, from any point of view, social or socialist, to marry me? Why would he not be better-off young and free? This idea afforded me a great relief. Felix might never ask me to marry him, but if he should—despite all that Harriet could say—it would have to be for love.

  And then I learned something else. Dad, who was devoted to Felix, told me that a young Ward cousin, who had been at Yale with him, had related how Felix had turned his back on his old Jewish friends and had cultivated the socially elite of the class in order to get himself elected to an exclusive fraternity.

  “I thought I’d tell you, Fran, because I see that you and Felix are becoming very good friends. You’re old enough and independent enough not to be put off by that sort of talk, but it’s also a good idea to know what’s going around. Personally, I don’t believe a word of it. People are always trying to put Jews in their place. If Johnny Ward wants to be elected to Psi U, it’s because he wants a jolly place to eat and drink with his pals. But if Felix Leitner does, that’s social climbing! I guess you and I are above that kind of spite.”

  Dad was, but I was not at all sure about myself. All the doubts aroused by Harriet flared up again. Felix was looking not only for a “society” girl; he was looking for a Gentile! Did he have a backbone at all behind that stiff back? Was he a man, a real man, like Dad?

  Women have a reputation for subtlety, but it was not a characteristic of the female Wards. The very next time that Felix and I were alone together, I turned the conversation bluntly to Yale fraternities. It did not take him long to pick up the gist of my thoughts.

  “You feel like my Uncle Jacob,” he said. “He’s always criticizing me for not having more Jewish friends. When I asked him once why he cared about my being Jewish or non-Jewish, he replied very candidly: ‘Well, even if a man doesn’t like his own club, he hates to see anyone else get out.’”

  “What a cynical family you must have! I thought Jews were proud of being Jews.”

  “Many are. Some are not. And you’ve inherited more Christian prejudices than you’re aware of, Fran.”

  “How can you say that? I respect everybody’s religion! Or lack of religion.”

  “It’s the last that I question. You accord liberty of religion to everyone but Jews. They have to be Jewish.”

  “That’s not so. I believe in everyone’s right to choose his own faith.” I hesitated, but I was so tense now that I soon blurted it out. “Provided they don’t choose it for social advantage!”

  Felix now became as nearly angry as I had ever seen him. His cheeks became paler, and his eyes were hard and glinting. “I think you had better take a good look at yourself before you do any more preaching, Frances. You come of an old New York aristocracy whose rules and customs you take great pride in violating. You have chosen your own little world and your own little rules. Very well. That is fine by me. I shouldn’t object if you became a converted Jew. But let me assure you, my friend, that I claim the same liberty for myself. I intend to select the association I want and join the clubs I want and live the life I want, regardless of what labels and motives small people may attach to my acts. If you wish to call that turning my back on my heritage for social advantage, you are quite at liberty to do so. But I don’t intend to discuss this matter a second time. It’s too demeaning.”

  After this I was more than just in love. I was pulverized. There is no better word for it. But that didn’t mean I was convinced. Oh, no! I did not dare bring up the subject again, but I kept thinking of other questions that I longed to ask. Had he cultivated friends just to be elected? Did he go to see his Leitner cousins as much as he ought to? Did he prefer the Aunt Renata he was always talking about because she was the richest member of his family? I began to feel like Psyche, who was loved by the invisible Eros in the dark, or like Elsa who could not ask Lohengrin his name. I was in love with a stranger, perhaps not even a very nice one. I was helpless.

  And then I would shake myself angrily. What sort of an ass was I to be dreaming of marriage to a man like Felix? Did that sort of thing happen to girls as drab as myself? No, I had long since made my plans: I was going to be a lawyer and represent the underprivileged. If I married at all, it would be to some good, plain, obscure, unromantic guy like the German professor who married Jo March in Little Woman. And that was going to be good enough for me, too. I hadn’t been complaining!

  I was more and more on my guard now with Felix. I was even occasionally antagonistic to him. When I went back to law school in the fall, Felix, who was still in New York writing for the campaign, used to take me out on weekends. Sometimes we went to the theater or a concert, but just as often we would stroll in Central Park and talk. I never had to be chaperoned, like my “uptown” cousins. But there were times when I almost envied them their lack of freedom. What was I going to do with mine?

  Felix seemed in no hurry to “declare himself,” as Grandmother Ward would have put it. Yet his conversation never seemed a curtain to disguise sexual timidity. I always had the sense that as soon as he wanted to change our relationship, he would change it. I was the only one in the throes of doubt. The nearest he came to wooing me was in an occasional, unexpected compliment.

  “It’s hard to believe that you and my mother can belong to the same sex,” he told me once. “She hasn’t entertained a serious thought since she had to decide between exposed legs and knickerbockers for Rosalind in As You Like It. And you, as a babe in arms, could have probably given her four good reasons why Sir Francis Bacon didn’t write that play!”

  Where the young Felix of this period most differed from his latter-day counterpart was in the quality of his political enthusiasm. He had a vibrant faith in a better world. He believed that progress was accelerating at such a rate that a violent upheaval might not be required to make the forces of greed give way to a benign and universal socialism. The world might find its own way, for the simple reason that that way would become so abundantly clear to all men. This was typical of the euphoria that invaded parts of Academe just before the Great War. I did not share it. I knew that the way would be long and hard, though I longed to believe otherwise.

  He was immensely keen about Colonel Roosevelt, and this keenness was turned into something like worship after a day spent with the great man at Oyster Bay, which included a twelve-mile hike and a picnic of raw clams. When he told me about it, I made no comment.

  “I’m beginning to recognize that gray questioning stare,” he reproached me. “You don’t agree with me about the colonel. Why not?”

  “Well, there was that comment he made about his sons be
ing soldiers and his daughters being mothers...”

  “Don’t take it out of context!” he interrupted. “He was talking about the importance of traditional challenges in developing character.”

  “Yes, but that emphasis on battles and babies, Felix! You can see what he really thinks of women. No wonder Mrs. Roosevelt insisted on her own sitting room at Sagamore. There had to be one place in that house where she would be spared the sight of horns and hoofs and claws!”

  “I admit he may overdo the trophies. And, of course, there is the Rough Rider side of him. But how many presidents have we had—since the early days, anyway—who have read what he’s read and done the things he’s done? And whom have we had since Lincoln with a heart like that? The man’s lovable, Frances. Think of it. A lovable president!”

  “I’m not denying his lovability. You can love him all you want. What I question is his depth.”

  “You find him superficial?”

  “On social issues, yes. I’m not impressed with what he’s done about the trusts. He’s like those keepers at the zoo who are so brave about going in and out of cages and sometimes even cuffing the big cats. But the moment any real snarling starts they’re quick enough to get out of the way.”

  “You won’t find that they take him so lightly on Wall Street!”

  “Oh, but those people are always hollering before they’re hurt. You know that, Felix. The American businessman gets hysterical at the very mention of the word reform. It proves his guilty conscience.”

  “I think you’re going to find things different in nineteen thirteen. The colonel means every word he says!”

  “We’ll see. If he’s elected.”

  ***

  It was wonderful of my parents that neither found it in the least remarkable that I should have attracted such a prize as Felix. This was not, as my cousin Johnny Ward surmised, because they were Wards and he a Jew; snobbishness of that sort was unknown to them. It was simply that they thought no man in the world too good for their daughter. They were perfectly willing to welcome Felix into the family and to admire him—but not to be dazzled by him.