The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  “What?”

  “Well, doesn’t it perhaps signify... or at least suggest... that we might do better to... go our separate ways?”

  Frances walked slowly across the room and took a seat by a window. “So that’s it,” she said in a flat tone. “You want to be free to marry her.”

  “Why, as you said, do we have to talk about Gladys? Isn’t the real issue between you and me? That I have ceased to be the man you admire and look up to? Why should there be recriminations? Why should I not lead my life as I like and you, yours? The children are old enough to accept it.”

  As I recreate this conversation, I can see that it sounds as if I was taking advantage of Frances’s criticisms of my political and social attitudes; as if, by blowing these up to a much greater irritant in my life than they actually had been, I was using them as a reason for our separating. Certainly Frances interpreted what I said this way. I wonder if we can ever know all the sources of our motivations. Certainly I had been hurt by Frances’s failure—nay, her willful refusal—to see my goal in life as I saw it.

  “Oh, Felix, you have never ceased to be the man I admire and look up to!” she exclaimed bleakly. “And if it’s really necessary to tolerate your new values, I shall most certainly try to tolerate them. I thought you needed the stimulus of dissent. I thought you even liked it. But if that’s not the case, I can be quiet as a mouse. You’ll see!”

  “What I’d see would be you sitting on your tongue. Hanging on to it with all your might!”

  “No, no, no.” She became very disturbed at this. “You grossly underestimate me. I have considered it my duty, at certain times in the past, to act as a counterinfluence to people who I thought were doing you no good. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t love you and admire you, dearest, even if I think they’ve harmed you. You’re still better than all the rest of us. You are, darling! And from now on I’m determined to accept you as you want to be. To stop being a nag.” Here she came over to seize my hand pleadingly in both of hers. “Give me a chance, love!”

  I turned away, stricken. I think I even jerked my hand away. All my plans were in ruins. “But, Frances, you must face something. You must face what has come between us. This terrible suit of Heyward Satterlee’s. I can’t leave Gladys to face that alone.”

  “How else can she face it?”

  “With the man who is ready to marry her! Isn’t that what I must do?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” she almost shouted. “Since when has a man’s adultery created an obligation to leave his wife?”

  “I got her into this mess.”

  “I doubt that. But even supposing it were true, what of it? Has there ever been a society that held that a breach of contract creates a duty to the person for whose sake it was broken?”

  Yes, Frances could talk that way, even at a moment of such emotional pitch. Anyone who cannot believe it never knew her.

  “I didn’t know that you went in so for codes.”

  “Since when have you?”

  “But, my God, Frances, when I think of the agony I’ve caused that woman and how much she cares for me, and how little else she has in her life, and when I see you, usually so cool and calm and self-sufficient, so concentrated on your duty to the underdog, I can’t help wondering if my place isn’t with Gladys. At least she needs me, damn it all!”

  She flew at me—no other word can describe it—and wound her short arms around my neck. Never had I realized before, except perhaps in the first months of our marriage, how deeply feminine she was. I shall not go into all the things she said. I cannot properly remember them or reconstruct them, but their gist was very clear. Frances wanted me, at any cost. She was perfectly willing to give up her ideas of my true career, to allow me to frequent any society that I chose, perhaps even to permit me Gladys on the side, if I would only remain at home as a husband and father, titular if I insisted, but at least there. It was a surrender, abject, groveling, utterly atypical of a great and noble woman and not further to be recounted here. I was ashamed for her and ashamed for myself.

  Of course, I could not then and there deny her what she asked. I did not, I am quite sure, make any definite commitment, but I think I must have left her with the idea that the status quo ante had been restored—at least for the time being. I have been called weak, and I suppose I was, but I do not understand how any man with the faintest simulacrum of a heart could have told that wretched creature at that time that he was going to leave her. Could I have lashed her naked back with a whip? Could I have cut her face with a razor? It was unthinkable.

  God! Why is it always considered hypocrisy for the deliverer of the stroke to cry out that it hurts him more than it does his victim? I am convinced that the breakup of our marriage hurt me at least as much as it hurt Frances. I even suspect that her refusal of a subsequent offer of marriage from a brilliant and important public servant was motivated in part by a desire, perhaps subconscious, to keep alive my feelings of guilt. But I always knew that the real weakness, the real^cowardice, would have been to preserve a stale union to avoid a short pain, to abandon what I then believed to be a passionately loving woman for what I then considered an essentially possessive one, to turn my back on a life that offered the finest fruition of heart and mind. No, if I were ever going to be a man, I had to do what I now proceeded to do.

  But how did I do it? Ay, there’s the rub. How gloatingly our public seizes upon our poor means to scorn our larger end! I found that I simply could not face Frances and tell her that I was going to leave her. So I did what Professor Cutter angrily told all Seal Cove was my “invariable habit” to retreat, like an escaping squid, behind a cloud of black ink. In short, I took up my pen. I went down to New York where I holed up in a small hotel, giving my address to none but Gladys. From there I wrote to Frances, and to Heyward.

  The latter returned my letter unopened with this note: “You have always believed you could do anything with the written word. You will find that in hell there are no readers.” Heyward could never have thought that one up. I suspect that old Cutter had a hand in it. Frances, I was relieved to find, did not even write a note. She simply placed the matter in the hands of her lawyer who relieved me of every cent I had: savings, houses, book royalties, all, plus a whacking slice of my future income. She did it, the lawyer told me, to secure our children’s future. I believe that she was perfectly sincere in this. At any rate, I was only too happy to pay up. I even thought it generous of her to allow me so to assuage some of my guilt.

  I took a leave of absence from my firm. As my children would no longer speak to me (a state of affairs that lasted for two years), and as the furor among my friends and acquaintances reached a heat almost not to be credited in 1938, I decided to go abroad with Gladys until our divorces were final. We made a motor tour of the cathedrals of France.

  Looking back, I think that this trip was the most serene period of my life. The agony of the great decision was behind us, and we were finding that we were able to live with the consequences. I knew that my children would have to come around in time, that Gladys and I would marry, and that the friends, however unforgiving, would ultimately at least tolerate the situation. In the meanwhile we had this enchanting interlude, this time suspended, with our love framed by the glorious facades of the cathedrals against the pale mist of a French autumn. We saw nobody, spoke to nobody. It was a Gothic Eden.

  You may wonder why the soaring spires and blue glass of Chartres, why the craggy magnificence of Amiens, why the lacelike delicacy of Rheims, did not put me in mind of vows broken, of sacraments violated. But I had taken a strong stand about this. These churches were the moments of a civilization founded in the rule of a supervising God who dealt out awards and punishments. The people who lived under those towers had duties that we do not have today, but they also had rewards for which we should now look in vain. I had to live in my own time, under my own moral law. Each man must find it for himself. Once I had come to my decision, I was not to be thwarte
d by sentiment. It had never been easy to be a man. It was not in 1938. It is not today.

  Roger Cutter (5)

  FELIX has described the summer of his affair with Gladys as the happiest of his lifetime; I wonder if it was not the happiest of mine. He made me his confidant, and I thrilled with pride at the honor. I also think I felt some portion of his love. I had already, under his tutelage, come to face the fact that my joys, if any, were going to be vicarious, but that they need not be spurned for that reason. Felix had taught me that nothing in life was to be spurned.

  My father was to accuse me at a later time of having derived actual pleasure from the Leitners’ unhappy marriage because I could not marry myself, but this was not fair. He was never fair. I do not think that I derived any pleasure from the wreck of Frances’s happiness; I simply reveled in Felix’s. Then, too, I suppose, there was a part of me that could not help but feel that if a man has the exquisite possibility of complete sexual fulfillment, he is an ingrate, if not almost a sinner, in the cold eyes of a natural universe, not to avail himself of it. “Only God’s free gifts abuse not,” I hummed, perhaps heretically, to myself.

  When Felix returned from his midday assignations with Gladys, he would be so bursting with energy that he would want to climb a mountain or go on a walk that was almost a run along the rocky coastline. As he was supposed to be ruminating about a book and gone for the day, he would give me meeting points on the Seal Cove trails where I would join him for these afternoon excursions. Indeed, I came to feel almost as much a part of his secret life as Gladys, and this, of course, was very pleasing to me.

  On one of these walks, when we had paused to sit concealed behind a tree near a little mountain tarn, where an old bull moose was sometimes known to drink, Felix said something to me that I think he may have since forgotten.

  “How is it all going to end, Roger? What is going to happen? Sometimes I think I am going to explode into tiny pieces and be scattered all over the Maine woods. It would be a solution.”

  “Only last Monday you said you had not thought of the morrow.’ That the present was all in all.”

  “That was last Monday. I must be waking up.”

  “Go back to sleep. It’s better.”

  “Ah, there youth speaks. If I only could! Do you know, there are moments when I actually wish that Heyward would discover us? When I want to see Gladys exposed and disgraced and hunted so that I, a Lancelot, could fly to her side and protect her?”

  “You mean you want something to happen that will make it your duty to be her lover?”

  “Instead of my duty not to be? I suppose that’s it.” For several moments after this he was so silent and still that I thought he might be waiting for the moose. I observed that it probably came only at dawn. “I don’t give a damn about the old bull,” he said with a chuckle. “He’s probably off on a rendezvous himself. No, I was thinking what a smart mind-reader you are.”

  “I don’t see why. Isn’t it pretty obvious that you should be dreaming of a heaven where you had to marry Gladys?”

  “It would be too much happiness,” he muttered. “Then I really would explode.”

  This gave me what I needed. I had surprisingly little hesitation about it. It astounds me, as I look back, that I could have taken so much responsibility upon myself. Perhaps I lacked the imagination to foresee all the consequences. I had placed Felix in the position of the sun in my private universe, and what could I do but revolve around him?

  My opportunity came on a Saturday night at the Troys’ when I had a long chat with Lila Nickerson. She had sought me out and led me to a corner because she wanted to pump me about Felix. It was generally believed in Seal Cove that Lila had a “crush” on Felix, but it was considered a trivial, a harmless, even a rather amusing thing, about which her husband did not have to be in the least concerned, about which, indeed, it was even permissible gently to tease him. I had long suspected that it was something considerably stronger, and that Felix, any time he chose, might enjoy the privilege of decorating the temples of Aleck Nickerson with the same horns that now adorned those of Heyward Satterlee.

  “Isn’t it funny that we never see the Satterlees any more?” Lila asked.

  “I believed Heyward has to be in New York a lot.”

  “Undoubtedly. A brain like his must be in great demand on Wall Street. But what about the divine Gladys? Surely she does not languish in torrid Manhattan?”

  “I hope not, for her sake.”

  “You don’t follow her comings and goings?”

  “Why should I? Do you?”

  “I know a little bird that does. I listen to its tweet-tweet.”

  “And what does the little bird tell you?”

  “That she is meeting somewhere with our Felix.”

  “Happiness to their sheets, then!” I exclaimed. “What’s it to me?”

  Lila became pointed. “Gladys isn’t the gal for Felix, Roger. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I don’t even know that he needs a gal, as you so crudely put it. But if he does, why not Gladys?”

  “She has no bean.”

  “Why should a man married to an intellectual like Frances need another? I should think it’s just the opposite he’d be after.”

  “Oh, Frances!” Would anyone have guessed from her tone that Lila was speaking of her best friend? I sometimes feel today, looking back thirty-five years, that the women’s liberation movement was needed to protect them, not from men, but from themselves. They could be very terrible to each other in the days when they still fought for mates. “Frances doesn’t regard herself as a woman anymore. Look how she dresses! She’s too busy reforming the world to care. Well, let her have the world! That should satisfy her. Felix needs a woman who can keep up with his intellectual flights.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Who do you think?”

  I threw my hands up. “Poor Aleck! I’m glad I’m not a husband along this strip of Maine coast.”

  “Roger, be the man of the world I take you for!” Lila was totally one-tracked; nothing was going to deflect her from her chosen course. “Aleck is no responsibility of yours. Don’t be stuffy. If anything did happen between Felix and myself, Aleck would take it like the perfect gentleman he is. You see how I trust you.”

  “Yes, but you take very little risk. If I were to quote you, not a soul in Seal would believe me.”

  “Pooh. People will believe anything, if it’s bad enough. But tell me. Gladys and Felix are meeting. I know they must be meeting. How do they do it? Where do they go?”

  “What good would it do you to know?”

  “They are, then. I knew it!”

  “If they are, it shouldn’t take anyone as smart as you long to find out.”

  “How would you go about it?” she pursued eagerly.

  “Well, they wouldn’t dare go to the well-known hotels, would they? And the smaller ones are too crummy for Gladys.”

  “There’s always the woods, I suppose.”

  “Not for anyone as urbane as Mrs. Satterlee. So it would have to be somebody’s empty villa or cottage. Or even a camp.” Now I pretended to reflect. “Owned by a relative or an understanding friend. Of course, Gladys knows everybody, so that doesn’t help. Let’s see if we can’t narrow it further. It wouldn’t be in Butterfield Bay. Everyone knows every house there.”

  “Or in Seal Cove. Same thing.”

  “Exactly. So what about...” I paused.

  “Kent.”

  “Kent.” I nodded and then shrugged with assumed indifference. “I suppose you could always try Kent.”

  “I could ask in the village,” Lila said musingly. “Gladys would have been bound to buy things.”

  Of course, Lila did not accomplish what she intended to accomplish when she transmitted the fruits of her research to Gladys’s husband. She had totally underestimated both the extent of Gladys’s marital ambition and that of Heyward’s jealousy. She thought that Heyward would simply make a blusterin
g scene, and that Gladys, conventional at heart and terrified of scandal, would beg a speedily granted forgiveness, and that Seal Cove would then be emptied of their importunate presences, leaving the scene free for a new candidate for Felix’s affections. But I had had a pretty shrewd suspicion that things would turn out just as they did.

  To begin with, I knew Heyward Satterlee far better than Lila did. She regarded him as too trivial to be taken seriously. I understood his emotional dependence on Felix, for it was analogous to my own. Felix’s friendship represented to Heyward the distinguishing aspect of a life otherwise banal, the proof that there could be in a poor stockbroker’s soul something that a genius could, not only recognize, but value, like the deep red glow that the observer at last begins to make out in the somber grays and blacks of a Rothko canvas. Heyward could have forgiven Gladys any lover but Felix. For her to take his friend was not simply an act of adultery; it was a kind of murder.

  And, secondly, I had had my talk with Felix. I knew how he would regard such a crisis. The reader may be shocked at the responsibility that I took upon my shoulders in dropping such a deadly hint to Lila. Looking back today, I am surprised myself that I had so little hesitation about it. I can explain it only as the single-mindedness of youth. Felix was to me the greatest man in the world. He would be happier, work better—be greater, in short—with Gladys than with Frances. Therefore, his acolyte should do what he could to accelerate the change. It hardly occurred to me that I might have any personal obligation to Frances or any duty to the institution of marriage.

  What I did not anticipate was the storm that the scandal evoked and its long duration. Adultery following by divorce, after all, was sufficiently common in 1938. Some of the most respected persons of Butterfield Bay and of Seal Cove had been divorced and remarried. Indeed, Mrs. Livingston Polhemus, always described in the local gazette as the grande dame of the former community, had three living husbands. Why then the great pother over Felix and Gladys?