The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  “You can’t imagine what fun this is for me, Roger. Oh, I know, you probably suppose that I live for pleasure, and in a way I suppose I do, but that doesn’t mean I get it. Far from it. Pleasure is the most elusive thing in the world. One has to work and work for it. To be up here on—what do you call it? Beehive? how rather disingenuous—but anyway, to be up here, without anyone in the world knowing where I am, for I’ve told nobody—I never tell anyone—makes me feel, well, that just for a minute I own my soul again.”

  Now, a remark like this, made to a young man by a middle-aged married woman in the dark Maine woods, might have seemed a come-on. But Gladys was so obviously sure of herself and of her own attractions that she would not have used the slightest subterfuge had she had designs (however futile) on my own poor self. I was not alarmed. Only when she turned the conversation to her daughter did I feel that we were talking about me.

  “Everyone is so sympathetic about Fiona,” she said with a shrug, “and, of course, the poor darling had much to suffer about and is a perfect angel. But there are assets in her condition. Whatever she manages to accomplish in life, being against such great odds, will be more worthwhile. She won’t have the bitterness that so many of us have, of seeing what a mess she’s made of her natural advantages.”

  “You don’t mean that you have? Of yours?”

  “Why not?”

  “But you’re such a success, Gladys!”

  “Don’t make me laugh. All my life I’ve thrown things to the winds. My landscape is knee deep in litter.”

  “What have you ever thrown away?”

  But Gladys was not going to be tied down. She hurried on ahead of me now, ascending more rapidly, as if to give emphasis to her feeling “It’s a crime, the way we leave everything to the young! Oh, we warn them, yes. We tell them they’re impatient, inexperienced, reckless, naive, green. But when you come right down to it, we let them make all the basic decisions they’re not qualified to make—what life to lead, what career to choose, what person to marry. Yes, we let the poor creatures make their beds, and then we sternly tell them to lie in them!”

  “But surely your marriage is happy, Gladys. And didn’t you choose for yourself?”

  “Did I?” She turned back to mark the pitch of her impending confidence. I saw that she was determined to be indiscreet. But why? I had half an inclination to warn her, but she plunged ahead. “I fell head over heels for the handsomest man in his class at Yale. I was nineteen. Heyward was perfect. He had no vices; he was an athlete; he came of a good family. And he was going off to war. He was probably going to be killed! When he proposed to me after an opera matinee in Bryant Park, I rushed home to tell my parents. They raised their hands simultaneously and cried, ‘We couldn’t be more pleased!’ God! I think a little voice must have tried to warn me at that moment. But I brushed it aside. ‘We couldn’t be more pleased!’ Death knell!”

  “You mean you wish you hadn’t married him?”

  “I mean that my whole life shouldn’t have been decided then and there for the simple reason that I wanted to sleep with Heyward Satterlee. There. Have I shocked you?”

  “I suppose you have. I thought you and Heyward were so happy together.”

  “We are. As happy as most people, anyway. I’m only saying that we make very important choices on very slim grounds. I think what first attracted me to Heyward was the peculiar glow in his eyes. It was moisture, probably. His eyes are quite dry now.”

  “That’s what lawyers call a failure of consideration. The contract falls.”

  “But mine stands up!”

  “Would you go back to arranged marriages?”

  “What good would that have done me?” She raised her arms in a picture of mock despair. “My parents would have chosen Heyward!” She strode on rapidly now. We had almost reached the top of Beehive where there was no view, as it was covered with trees. “Why do I tell you these things? What is it about you, Roger, that makes me gas on so?”

  What indeed?

  When we arrived at my home we found Daddy and Mother on the terrace with Aleck and Lila Nickerson. Aleck Nickerson, rotund, bald, bright eyed, was an editor of The New York Times and was considered, after Felix and my father, the leading brain of Seal Cove. His manners were very gentle, and he voiced his carefully thought out opinions in a most moderate tone. He smoked constantly and watched people carefully with his small, fixed eyes. He seemed always to be waiting for the world to turn itself into news. Lila, his wife, was one of those persons who just miss the top in every quality. Her nose was too large and her chin too pointed for beauty; her manners were too good not to seem insincere; her wit was too sharp for profundity and her laugh too quick not to hurt. She wanted the world and found it wanting. In Butterfield Bay, where Aleck, like Felix, was in constant demand, she missed the intellectual play of Seal Cove, but in the latter community she found the women frumpy and even her revered parents faintly ridiculous. As Felix said of her once, she was an unhappy woman who wanted everyone else to be unhappy.

  As I now read this over, I see that I have made her somewhat less attractive than she was. It must be remembered that I am looking back with considerable hindsight. Lila was generally considered good company. She liked to own people, it was true, but it was not altogether unpleasant to be owned by Lila. She thought she owned Felix; she even thought that as small a catch as myself, being Felix’s disciple, was part of her property. She regarded the intrusion of Gladys Satterlee into Seal Cove as an act of simple trespass. As Gladys now drew the entire attention of Daddy and Aleck, Lila moved over to the bar table where I was mixing drinks.

  “Are you Paris, Roger, abducting la belle Hélène to Troy?”

  “Is that how you see it?”

  “Or are you a spy, with a crafty Greek in a Trojan horse? I think the latter. I think you have her here to deliver us into her power.”

  “Do you think she needs the likes of me? Why, Gladys has but to appear on the border, and our troops would flock to her standard!”

  Lila did her best to suppress the instant irritation in her tone. “Ah, but she needs a subtler victory. She wants to deliver us to the enemy in such a way that we shall not even know what has happened.”

  “Why should she be so merciful?”

  “Because she was a problem. She is married to a dunce. If the borders are to be opened, she must be sure that he will be well received. Heyward Satterlee has never been to any house in Seal Cove. He has been too afraid. Now that she wants us, she must ensure his good reception.”

  “But I thought Heyward did exactly as he was told.”

  “Far from it. He can be very difficult. Dunces always are. Besides, she has Felix to cope with. Felix would not want Heyward to be unhappy.”

  “Are they really such friends?”

  “It seems strange, doesn’t it? But not when you put it together. You must picture them in New Haven in 1910. Each had what the other lacked. Heyward had the glorious looks, the athletic reputation, the social position. Felix had his genius and charm, but it was not an Anglo-Saxon genius or an Anglo-Saxon charm. And he was an intellectual, a Jew. It was a symbiotic relationship. Felix, of course, soon left poor Heyward a million miles behind, but he has always been generous, and he remembers early favors: weekends with the Satterlees in Newport and so forth. Oh, yes, Felix is loyal. And Heyward... well, to have been the friend of Felix Leitner is simply the one great event of his humdrum life.”

  “But the Satterlees and the Leitners have been coming to Maine for years! Why, all of a sudden, should it be so important for Gladys to conquer Seal Cove?”

  “Why, indeed?” Lila glanced over at the object of our discussion sitting between Daddy and Aleck. “Why should she be acting the Lorelei with your gallant father? And pulverizing my dear husband! Poor Aleck, he has no defenses against a woman with an atom of sophistication. His farm background betrays itself! But look who approaches. Don’t try to tell me, Roger Cutter, that a certain pundit didn’t have wind of your lad
y’s proposed visit!”

  And, sure enough, I looked up to behold Felix Leitner approaching our dock in his scull. It was so clear a day that he had been able to row down the stream from his camp and right across the cove. As he got out of his boat and leaned down to raise it up and place it on the dock, I suddenly felt that he was showing off his strength. I looked up at Lila, and I did not like her smile.

  Mother, of course, asked Felix to stay for lunch, and the seven of us were soon gathered about the long log table on our porch. Daddy poured wine and talked about Hitler. He was inclined to think that the Nazis were bluffing and that a firm resistance would make them back down. Felix was less sure. He suspected a paralysis of will in the democracies, the hangover of a guilt complex at having won the last war and lost the peace.

  “What do you think?” he asked, turning suddenly to Gladys.

  “Oh, we poor women. What can we do when you gods thunder?”

  “But you have the most important function of all.”

  “And what is that?”

  “To ask the right questions.”

  Gladys smiled as she gazed over the water. “Very well. Let me try one. You pointed out in your article in the Atlantic last month that the Nazis face a dilemma. They depend absolutely on leadership—they must have a great Führer. Yet their system of education—or obfuscation, as you called it—is designed to produce only followers, and servile ones at that. Suppose we wait until they’re led by an idiot?”

  “Very good. If they’ll give us the time.”

  “Oh, we can always stall, can’t we? And in the meantime we could be arming. What I can’t see is why, if we are so inclined to lose peaces, we think we can afford to win wars?”

  Lila, who could no longer contain her jealousy, interrupted sharply. “It’s one thing to lose a peace. It’s quite another, I’m afraid you’ll find, Mrs. Satterlee, to lose a war.”

  “Germany did. So did Russia. Yet everyone trembles before them now.”

  “Germany would dictate a monstrous peace,” Felix suggested.

  “Isn’t that what you said we did in 1919?”

  “There may be degrees in monstrosity.”

  “Perhaps in Butterfield Bay, the Nazis seem less monstrous,” Lila surmised with a sneer. “They might prefer Hitler to Roosevelt. What is it they say of Mussolini? That he made the trains run on time?”

  But Gladys seemed merely amused. “Do they say that?”

  “Well, don’t they?”

  Gladys shrugged, as she smiled again at Felix. “I’m afraid that’s not the right question.”

  Roger Cutter (4)

  THE LASSITER TROYS gave their larger dinner parties on Saturdays, and nobody in Seal Cove presumed to entertain on that night without first checking to see if it were clear. There was always a strong nucleus of the principal Troy friends at Troy parties, but the addition of weekend house guests, sometimes very important persons, gave the needed variety. Dinner in the big room with all the antlers and fangs was served from a buffet, and the guests seated themselves as they chose, at three long tables. After dinner we always played parlor games, such as charades or twenty questions.

  I enjoyed the long cocktail hour and the animated talk at dinner, usually dominated by my father and Felix, with an occasional roar from our venerable host, but I dreaded the games. Nobody was exempted, except my modest and retiring mother, and participation was noisy and hilarious. There was always the danger that Mrs. Troy, a devilishly resourceful old woman, would come up with some new and more embarrassing one. One of my regular Seal Cove nightmares was that I was made to strip bare and parade down one of the long tables before the gaping guests.

  Mrs. Troy was inclined to be superior about Butterfield Bay and to accuse its visitors to the social precincts of Seal Cove of “slumming,” but she always had one or two carefully selected Butterfield couples at her Saturday nights, The first time that Heyward and Gladys Satterlee appeared at one of these, I found myself chosen by the former to be his guide and interpreter. Heyward seemed enchanted by everything: the cabin, the game heads, the distinguished hosts, the bright, alert assembly. Even Mrs. Troy could not have detected condescension behind his smiling naiveté.

  “Of course, I know we’re only asked because of Gladys,” he confided in me with cheerful humility. “Nobody here would want a duffer like me. Even Felix never asks me to his parties. No, I mean it! Why should he? I come over once a week, and we go fishing. That’s good enough for old Heyward. Truly. That way I have the great man all to myself. And sometimes he dines with us, because he likes a smart party. He picks up bits of news, you know. Why not? That’s his stock in trade, and I’m tickled pink if I can help him. Every time Gladys and I catch something in our net, we ask, Will he do for Felix? But these people tonight—they beat everything! I thought they’d be discussing the Rhineland or the Saar Territory, but do you know what old man Troy’s been talking about? Shakespeare! God, I haven’t read any Shakespeare since I took Billy Phelps’s course at Yale. But I remember Troy in Macbeth. He used a beam of light for the dagger, and it jumped all about the stage to lead him to Duncan. We thought it very clever.”

  When I turned to hear the discussion, I found that it was indeed about Shakespeare. Lassiter Troy was holding forth, in his deep, mellifluous tones, on the final comedies.

  “It is pleasant to contemplate that, after the dark, melancholy years that produced the sublime tragedies of Lear and Hamlet, our bard should have found peace in the semi-retirement of Stratford. The bitter rivalries, the savage strivings of London, were past. In his rose garden at New House, he was able to conceive the enchanted fairyland of The Tempest, the sweet rusticity of The Winters Tale, the glorious dirge in Cymbeline. He was concerned now with flowers, with songs, with magic, with reconciliation. Oh, I know why Lord Tennyson directed that his copy of Cymbeline should be buried with him! I have told Prudence that I want The Tempest placed in my lifeless hands.”

  Daddy now jumped noisily into the fray, like an antichorus. A stranger to Seal Cove ways might have thought the evening had been rehearsed.

  “With all due respect, Lassiter, I am compelled to call that tommyrot.” Some of the new guests, including Heyward, audibly gasped, but Troy waved his arms benignly and nodded his head to urge his old friend to continue. “One must have a very strong preconception in favor of a tranquil fairyland to close one’s eyes to the monsters in these last comedies. Why, they outdo Goneril and Iago! How benign is the queen in Cymbeline who tests her poisons on the servants? Or Posthumous, who orders the murder of his wife on evidence of infidelity that wouldn’t have fooled even Othello? Or Leontes, who exposes his newborn babe to the wilderness because its mother happened to smile at his oldest friend? No, no, Lassiter, you shan’t persuade me that our poet had achieved any lasting peace. On the contrary, I suspect that he came back to Stratford to find a middle-aged, nagging wife who made him pine for London and the Globe!”

  “It occurs to me that you may both be right,” Felix now intervened, in his slow, level voice, which seemed almost to chew the words and which commanded the instant attention of all. “Or perhaps, by the same token, that you may both be wrong. I hazard a different theory. I follow Lytton Strachey. I suggest that Shakespeare had moved beyond plots and beyond characters in this final phase. There is no consistency between the sudden passion and sudden repentance of Leontes. There is none between the wickedness and patriotism of Cymbeline’s queen. Or between the philosophical calm and crabbed petulance of Prospero. The librettos leap over time and space. They spurn logic and sequence. Knotty problems are solved by magic; the long lost are found again, and ancient wrongs are dramatically righted. What is Shakespeare up to? What has happened to the subtle psychologist who created Macbeth and Cleopatra?”

  A pause was followed by Gladys’s sudden, clear “What?”

  “The words ran away with him!” Felix exclaimed, turning at once to her, his voice rising to a pitch of enthusiasm unusual to him. “The words that had always
been his love, his passion, suddenly ceased to be his tools. He gave himself up to them; he became their slave, not their master. So character went by the board, plot went by the board, nothing was left but a peerless poetry caught in a void. Look at Timon. Its plot is absurd and its hero a bore, but his tirades are greater than Lear’s. Shakespeare’s final victory was a Pyrrhic one. The words destroyed his plays. It was a love-death, a warning to all of us here!”

  Mrs. Troy now interrupted to herd us to the buffet. I filled my plate and took the empty seat between Gladys and Lila, who talked, or rather sparred, across me. Gladys made a bit of an ass of herself. She was a very clever woman, but there were certain things she never learned. When literary people talk about literature, they may be sentimental, like Lassiter Troy; or violent, like Daddy; or intent upon novel concepts, like Felix—but they are always involved. They do not talk merely for effect, as Gladys now did, unaware that she was enunciating one of the most banal theories in Shakespearean criticism.

  “I’ve always thought that when Prospero broke his wand, it was Shakespeare saying farewell to the stage,” she remarked in a high, faintly melancholy tone, intended, no doubt, to show the depth of her feeling. “When he says: ‘Our revels now are ended,’ isn’t he thinking of the wonderful years at the Globe, now ending, and all those golden comedies and tragedies? Leaving ‘not a rack behind’? If he had only known!”

  I should have blushed for Gladys had not the yellow stare in Lila’s eyes made me feel sorry for her instead.

  “Did you hear that, Felix?” Lila called down the table. “Mrs. Satterlee has a novel theory about The Tempest. That Prospero is really Shakespeare and his magic, the playwright’s art. So, when he breaks his wand, we know it must be the last play. Isn’t it wonderful that such an interesting idea should come to us from Butterfield Bay? We thought they only cared for parties there!”