The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  And then old age surprised him. It was as if Father Time had been walking down Q Street on a quiet, mild spring morning, and met Felix with his dogs. I suddenly noted that there were lines on the clear cheeks and that the youthful face had somehow shriveled. Felix would pause more often now in his walks; he would sometimes stand still for a minute at a time. He was quieter at meals. But he listened just as sharply. There was no shortening of his hours of work, no drop in the quality of the famous column.

  The last drama, if that be not too strong a word, was the arrival of Felicia in Washington at the end of 1965. She was now forty-five years old and the mother of two children, a son and a daughter, both college dropouts. She herself was a kind of dropout, for she had left her husband (at his own rudely voiced request) and had conceived as a bright new life for herself—a compensation, no doubt, for the mess that she had made of her old one—that of making a “wonderful home for Daddy.”

  Felicia had taken her mother’s side so violently at the time of the divorce that it had been years before she and Felix had been reconciled, and the breach had never been entirely healed. I believe that it might have been, had Felix been fonder of her. But, to tell the truth, Felicia has always been a difficult person to love. She is bright and handsome and direct and honest; she has a generous heart, and she wants to love and be loved. But she is too big, in size, in tone, in gesture, in emotion. She is too violently partisan in all her conflicts, and she brings little imagination and no vestige of humor to aid her chosen team. In a word, she is exasperating.

  She had adored Stephen Cast and had driven him almost mad. A sample of an argument she had with him once, when they were spending a weekend with Felix, will show what I mean.

  Felix never much cared for modern art, particularly abstract, but he liked to preserve on open mind, and he was always interested in learning about any subject from a person who really knew about it. That particular weekend had been largely devoted to Stephen Cast’s attempt to persuade him that representational painting no longer had a valid function in our century. Stephen was a big, burly, dark man, with the intense dedication and rough language commonly associated with painters, but he was quick to appreciate similar dedication, even in very different fields, and his respect for his father-in-law was not only apparent but deep. When I came in for cocktails that Saturday evening, he was explaining to Felix a cubist water color which he had just given him and which was propped up on the mantelpiece for their better examination. It appeared to be made up of squares, some blue, some rusty red, some deep green, the colors spilling over the edges of their containing barriers and blending in blurbs. On top of the squares was a small blue-gray triangle.

  “What should I be looking for?” Felix asked.

  “Nothing. Just take it in. Absorb it.”

  “But that’s what I find most difficult. I can’t help having a reaction. I can’t help saying to myself, What does it look like? What does it remind me of?”

  “Well, there’s no great harm in that,” Cast said easily. “What does it remind you of?”

  “Well, you may laugh, but it gives me the feeling of a mountain. It gives me a sense of my old summers in Seal Cove, when I used to go climbing. I see the gray of the rocks and the blue of the sea and the green of the forest. In fact, now that I begin to make it out, I quite like it. Yes! Thank you, Stephen. I shall call it Seal Cove Summer—1938.”

  I do not know if it was Felix’s mentioning the summer of his affair with Gladys that upset Felicia, but she came into the argument now with a rumble.

  “Daddy, that’s not the way one approaches modern art at all! You mustn’t be an old-fashioned representationalist looking for images in every square and squiggle. There’s something rather pathetic about it, really—all that yearning for sunsets and landscapes and nudes and knights-in-armor in abstract canvases. Don’t give in to it! You must learn to feel, without constantly objectivizing.”

  “I’m not sure about that at all,” Felix retorted, slightly net tied by her condescension. “Take that series of landscapes Cézanne did of that mountain—what was it called?”

  “Mont Sainte-Victoire,” Cast supplied.

  “That’s it. Well, I remember a show in Paris where a great number of them were exhibited chronologically. The early ones were naturalistic—at least the way I use the term—and then came a group that I should call impressionistic. And finally there were some almost abstract ones. Very much like your painting here, Steve. In fact, if one hadn’t seen the earlier studies, one might not have been sure they were of a mountain at all!”

  “But, Daddy, Stephen wasn’t thinking of a mountain when he painted it. He wasn’t thinking of any sort of landscape at all.”

  “Oh, shut up, Felicia! How do you know what I was thinking about?”

  “Well, you weren’t, were you?”

  “I don’t think I was thinking of a mountain, no. Or even of trees or rocks. But there is some kind of organic origin to all my painting, and if that water color makes your father think of a mountain in Maine, it’s a perfectly valid reaction.”

  “But, darling, you told me that you wanted people to see your pictures and not just paint what they want over them!”

  “You’re confusing two different things,” Cast said impatiently. “I was talking about the kind of people who bring nothing to a painting but their own preconceptions. Your father has a totally different reaction. He is attempting to match his emotion to that of the artist. He is, in effect, seeking to complete the communication. That’s what every painter wants. What difference does it make if he sees a mountain where I may have sensed only a particular shape? We each had a mountainous feeling.”

  “I don’t see that at all! What is the difference between Daddy seeing a mountain where you never intended one and that silly Mrs. Hicks, whom you made such cruel fun of, saying that the circles in your Study in Black and White reminded her of the cherubs in Murillo’s Ascension of the Virgin?”

  “Oh, Felicia, how can you compare your father with that idiotic Hicks woman? Try not to be more of an idiot than God made you!”

  Felicia now fled from the room, in tears, an exit frequent for her in this last stage of her marriage, and Stephen announced that he would walk off his irritation by taking the dogs around the block. Felix, left alone with me, showed a certain callousness at his daughter’s evident suffering.

  “That was naughty of me,” he admitted, but with a chuckle that belied his repentance. “I knew I’d put them at each other’s throats, but I couldn’t resist it.”

  “Resist what? I didn’t notice that you said anything.”

  “I compared Steve with Cézanne. Indirectly, anyway. That was all I needed to get him on my side. Once Felicia attacked my point of view, she was destroying his compliment. So, presto! He had to jump on her.”

  “Felix, you fiend! You should be helping her.”

  Felix shrugged. “There’s nothing to be done, my friend. That marriage is on the rocks.”

  Indeed it was. Only a few months after that weekend, Stephen told poor Felicia that he was through. In true artist fashion, he neither asked for a divorce, nor offered her the smallest support, nor took the least interest in what happened to the children. He simply holed up in his studio and went on with his painting. It rather shocked me that Felix described this reaction as “manly.”

  “You mean it’s manly to leave one’s family in the lurch?” I inquired.

  “They’re not left in the lurch. The children are old enough to support themselves, and Felicia has some money. No, what I mean is there’s so much crap today about all the love and care and understanding a man owes his family, that I can’t help applauding a male who sees the cultivation of his own artistic gift as his primary duty.”

  “Like a lion that nourishes itself by eating its own young?”

  “Maybe that’s better than pushing a perambulator!”

  I knew that there was no arguing with Felix when he was in this mood. But for all his expressed
independence of mind about family ties, he reversed himself when Felicia turned to him in her distress, and actually offered to take her into his house in Georgetown. Both Julie and I thought this was a very poor idea. Felix, however, evidently relishing the new vision of himself in the role of the good father, brushed our objections aside.

  “Felicia needs me,” he told us, rather loftily. “She has been humiliated by her husband, and to some extent by her children. She feels herself a failure. If it will save her pride to let her imagine that she is helping to sustain her doddering old father, shouldn’t I go along with her fantasy? Who knows? It may turn out to be true!”

  Felicia’s son, an amiable, feckless lad, was living in a commune in California, but her daughter, Varina, was very much on the scene. She had reentered college, at New York University, but only to intensify her radical activities. She was big, like her mother, with long blonde hair parted in the middle, but she was much brighter and harder and more efficient. She had many causes, but currently she was absorbed in the fight against the Vietnamese war. Felicia embarrassed not only her father but I think her daughter, in the way she prostrated herself before the younger generation.

  “I call them the generation of truth,” she told Felix and me. “Never before have young people so resolutely challenged the hypocrisy and greed of the past. It is absolutely inspiring, Daddy! They stand up to every once-accepted value and cry sternly: ‘Prove yourself!’”

  “But do they have to mix it up with drugs and beards and bad language?” Felix protested.

  “Those things are simply badges of the movement. They are no more important than your tie or your collar or your habit of saying ‘Good morning.’”

  “That may be true of serious girls like Varina. But some of her friends seem to find the badges everything.”

  “I’m surprised, Daddy, that a man of your perception and intellectual curiosity should be so superficial.”

  “Well, my dear, that will be one of the blessings of your visit. That you will teach me otherwise. We must all learn to understand the young. Where else is the future?”

  I was astonished at how mildly Felix reacted to what I regarded as Felicia’s officiousness in seeking to take over the housekeeping in Q Street. She managed to be bossy and apologetic at the same time, overwhelming the couple with compliments and then suggesting changes in everything they did. Had they not been so devoted to their employer (and naturally conscious of what he might have provided for them in his will), they would have walked out. Felicia had evidently decided that I was a fixture and had to be accepted, but she tried to make me an ally against Julie.

  “That woman is trying to marry my father. It’s as plain as the nose on your face!”

  I patiently supplied my arguments for not thinking this to be the case.

  “Because she said so?” Felicia demanded scornfully. “And you believed her?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, if she doesn’t want to marry him, what does she want?”

  “Simply to be his friend.”

  “And not... not his...?”

  “Mistress? No. She wants to be what Madame de Pompadour was to Louis XV when their affair was over: a charming and diverting companion. Fortunately, she doesn’t have to procure girls for him, as the Pompadour did.”

  “Roger, please!”

  “You brought the matter up, Felicia. Don’t blame me for indelicacy.”

  After this colloquy I decided that Felicia might turn on me as well, so I decided to forestall her. I had a discussion with Felix about the advisability of setting her up in her own apartment. But he was still reluctant to take any definite step.

  “If Felicia has made a mess of her life, it’s partly my fault. Now that she has no mother to go to, she needs me. I can’t fail her, Roger.”

  “But you don’t have to let her live with you. You don’t have to let her disrupt your household. You can be a perfectly good father short of that. You’ve spent a lifetime seeking the exact right working conditions for yourself. Why let her interfere with them? I think you owe it to the papers that publish you to keep her from messing up your life.”

  “You know as well as I, Roger, that I’ve always been accused of having a monstrous ego. Now here’s a belated opportunity to do something for another human being, who happens to be my own child. I say, let’s not let it slip!”

  Well, as it turned out, I did not have to worry. All that was necessary was to supply Felicia with a noose and she would stick her neck in it. It was her daughter, Varina, who not only produced the rope but neatly tied the knot,

  Varina had been delighted that her grandfather had so strongly opposed the commitment of ground troops to the fighting in Vietnam. She had been down to Washington to visit her mother and to quiz him, rather sternly I thought, about his position, to be sure that he was orthodox according to her “activist” principles. Although she could not induce him to support deserters or even draft evaders, she finally decided that his reluctance to do so was a holdover from “gentlemanly rules of conduct” that he was too old to shed. She invited him to address a students’ antiwar rally to be held in New York in the gymnasium of a settlement house near Washington Square. Felix accepted despite my protest.

  “They’re all smelly and bearded,” I warned him, “and they won’t listen to anyone who deviates one inch from their sacred credo.”

  “Roger, middle age is making you an impossible Tory. It’s like weight. You have to watch it. Of course I’m going. I think it will be a lark. I’ve been much too out of touch with young people these many years.”

  We flew up to New York for the rally, which was held on a Saturday afternoon, accompanied by Felicia, who, I think, was prouder of this invitation to her father than she had been of his Pulitzer Prize. The gymnasium, large and smelling of varnish, was packed, and Felix did not go up to the platform until several ragged students had made inane but much applauded inflammatory addresses. Felicia and I sat in the front row, and I spotted Varina, who, presumably from modesty at not wishing to stand out as the granddaughter of so famous a man, was over to the side, sitting with a particularly shaggy young man who was being constantly consulted by students who came up behind him and leaned down to whisper to him. He and Varina were evidently in charge of the afternoon’s events.

  When Felix at last rose to speak, he was as cool and clear and amiable as if he had been addressing a group of fashionable ladies at the Colony Club. He denounced President Johnson’s escalation of the war; he denounced the domino theory of former Secretary of State Dulles; he excoriated the tendency to divide the world into Communists and anti-Communists, but he did it all as if he were delivering a fascinating lecture on some past conflagration, the Civil War, say, and the position of such neutral nations as France and England. The audience was interested but restive. They were accustomed to more fireworks.

  It had been agreed that Felix would speak for only twenty minutes and that then the floor would be open for general discussion.

  “I usually have a question planted in the audience to get things started,” he concluded with a smile. “But I have a feeling today that everyone in this room has a question. Am I right?”

  The hirsute young man by Varina was now whispering to her in a very animated fashion. He looked stern and suspicious. Finally, she nodded to him, as if to give him permission, and he rose to direct a question at Felix.

  “Mr. Leitner, you have said that the United States made a ‘tactical error’ in committing ground troops to the fighting in Vietnam. Wasn’t it more than an error? Wasn’t it an immoral act?”

  “Well, who was it who said: ‘It’s worse than a crime. It’s a blunder’?”

  There was some scattered laughter at this, but the young man did not join in it.

  “What I want to know is whether you consider it immoral.”

  “In a sense, I do. It must be immoral to ask young men to die for idiotic reasons. It was the duty of our executive branch to make a more comprehensive stu
dy of the facts before it pressed for so drastic a remedy.”

  “You speak of asking young men to die. What about asking them to kill?”

  “Doesn’t it come to the same thing?”

  “No. I understand that you think it’s immoral for our government to kill American soldiers—or to allow them to be killed, under these circumstances. What I’m getting at is whether you think it’s immoral for our government to kill North Vietnamese soldiers.”

  “Of course, I’m against senseless slaughter. For what do you take me?”

  “I’m trying to answer that, Mr. Leitner. Let me put it another way. Do you think that it is immoral for American soldiers, acting under the orders of their government, to shoot and kill North Vietnamese soldiers, acting under the orders of their government?”

  At last I saw his point and saw that Felix had seen it The young man was hard and sure, the odious epitome of a generation that claimed a monopoly on virtue. But Felix, I noted to my dismay, was beginning to enjoy himself.

  “No, I don’t suppose I do.”

  “It is immoral, then, to ask a man to die in Vietnam, but not to kill there?”

  “Yes. That may sound inconsistent, but I think I can show it is not. To ask a man to die in a hopeless cause, with no advantage to his country, is immoral. But if a man finds himself in South Vietnam, facing a cruel invader who wishes to enslave the state, I can hardly say that it is immoral of him to help the defenders, even to help them kill.”

  A slow, hostile murmur began to circulate throughout the auditorium.

  “Then God, according to you, is on the side of the South Vietnamese?” cried the young man triumphantly.

  “I don’t know about God. How should I? But I certainly believe that right is on their side.” The murmur was now becoming a tumult. “I have already stated my opinion,” Felix continued, raising his voice to dominate, for a moment, the interference, “that the United States was justified in supplying South Vietnam with air and naval assistance. Morally and politically justified! What would such military assistance be used for but against the armed forces of the invaders? Would it not result in the killing of at least some of them? And if that is the case, how could I possibly say that it would be immoral to shoot a North Vietnamese soldier?”