The Young Apollo and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  One could, however, always laugh at men. Camilla recognized that her mother and aunts liked to chuckle over men's foibles: their tippling, their falling asleep after dinner, their obsession with spectator sports, their bawdry, and their passionate anger at anyone who suggested the mildest control of free enterprise. But the myth had nonetheless to be maintained that the head of the family was fundamentally benign, an "old darling" at heart, gruff but lovable and pleasantly subject to female wheedling. How else was one to handle him? And handled he had often to be.

  There were males, of course, in Camilla's and Marielle's lives: the youths of the neighborhood, if they got through the girls' mothers' social sieves, for the most part wellbehaved, sometimes shy, even inarticulate, sometimes impertinent, sometimes almost coarse, always well dressed, at least at subscription dances, at times handsome, at times winsome, at times simply disgusting. There were flirtations, even kisses, but at least in Camilla's case, there was nothing really serious until her sophomore year at Barnard College, in 1919.

  There had been a minor family issue over her going to college at all. Her mother, something of a reader of good books herself, had not been strongly opposed to it, and the end of the Great War had ushered in an era that was already showing signs of drastically changing the status of women, but the Townsend clan as a whole did not yet see the university as a necessary part of a woman's education. Did Camilla really want to be a bluestocking? But when Camilla, scenting a new independence in the air, found the courage to insist, objections were withdrawn, though on the condition that she should choose a college where she could still live at home. So she chose Barnard.

  She had hoped that Marielle would go with her, but Marielle was now engaged to Pedro Blagden and already embarked on the career of preparing herself to share the life of a rich sportsman. Pedro had made one silly crack about her and Camilla training for an all-girls football team, at which his fiancée had promptly dropped all idea of further education. Camilla had rather pitied her for abandoning so easily the road to a higher culture and had entered enthusiastically into academic life, making several new friends among young women of backgrounds very dissimilar to her own. Indeed, she did well enough to be given a bid to the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma and was not in the least put off when Pedro, now married to Marielle, referred to it laughingly as "Wrapper, Wrapper, Pajama." It was so like him!

  But a major crisis arose at home when it materialized that the night of her initiation coincided with that of an aunt's dinner party which she had agreed to attend. She protested to her mother that she would have to back out, that Aunt Maud would surely understand, but Eva Townsend was unexpectedly rigid.

  "It happens to be an important party: your cousin Willy's twenty-first birthday. But in any event, when one accepts a dinner invitation, one goes. Or sends one's coffin."

  Her father, appealed to, of course backed her mother, as he always did in any social question, and Camilla had tearfully to explain to her sorority sisters that she would have to be initiated in absentia. At the party she found herself seated next to David Hunter, whom she was meeting for the first time. As her mother who, like many New York matrons of her group, had at first been much taken with this handsome young man, commented, "It goes to show that it pays to stick by the old rules."

  David Hunter, at twenty-two, was certainly gifted with looks. Just before he had been sent overseas as a second lieutenant, his adoring mother, desperate at the idea that she might never see him again, had sent him up to Boston to sit for a charcoal sketch by the great John Sargent, so that she would at least have a perfect likeness to console her in the event of disaster. The master had done a wonderful job, and reproductions of his drawing of the curly-headed, wide-eyed, noble-browed, square-chinned youth had been used on enlistment posters as the epitome of the young American fighting spirit. David, on the distaff side, was the great-grandson of a giant railroad tycoon, but the tycoon's children and grandchildren, famous for their flamboyant expenditure, had depleted his great fortune to a small fraction of its one-time glory, and this romantic-looking scion had been happy after the war to find a desk in the brokerage house of Jonathan Stiles & Son, where it was hoped that his looks and still stylish connections might attract investors.

  He and Camilla hit it off at once. She was pretty enough to attract even a man who had his choice of her sex, and the badinage that she had learned from her new college friends struck him as livelier than that of the usual New York debutante. Besides, she was a good listener.

  "Do you know what, Miss Townsend? The war hasn't just made the world safe for democracy, as President Wilson has said. It's made the world safe for young people, like you and me. We're not going to be confined as our parents were to all the petty dos and don'ts of the generation before us. We're going to be free to blaze new trails, to make our own rules for the game of life!"

  Camilla had had enough of her mother's much-vaunted common sense pounded into her to suspect that this was the kind of thing that all the young men were saying, but she had also been indoctrinated in the maternal principle that a wise woman learns to tolerate, and even on occasion to applaud, banality in the opposite sex.

  "A year in the trenches," she observed, "must have had the educative value of ten in an ordinary life. So it almost puts you ahead of the older generation."

  "You see that, do you? It's because you're smart, Miss Townsend. I like smart women. The cute little 'you're so big and strong' type bore the bejesus out of me, if you'll pardon my French."

  He had been only briefly at the front by the time of the armistice, but he certainly made the most of it, and he had the gift of talking about himself without either boring his listener or appearing arrogant. Or was it just the charm of his youth and beauty? Camilla didn't care, and knew that she didn't care. She was already well on her way to being pulverized. He went on to tell her that he intended to make a fortune on Wall Street and that he would spend it in ways to make even his most flamboyant forebears look like cheapskates. He absolutely declined to turn to his other neighbor at the serving of the roast, as etiquette then required, and blandly insisted on monopolizing Camilla in the parlor after dinner, also in flagrant contradiction of the established practice of mingling. Obviously, she didn't mind at all.

  She would have only too many occasions then and in later years to wonder why love is so often described as blind. It was certainly never so in her own case. She had been aware from the beginning of her relationship with David that however attractive she might have been, what had really immediately drawn him to her was the only too apparent effect that he could see he had made on her. But how long would that last?

  For a while anyway, and that while was hers. He called at the house almost daily; he brushed aside her college commitments as so many flies and took her to expensive restaurants, where he held forth exuberantly on his great plans for a future in which he seemed to take silently for granted that she would play an admiring role. Camilla knew that she had tumbled to the bottom of the dark abyss of love and listened with controlled patience to her mother's now freely expressed doubts as to David's financial future. Eva's original enthusiasm for him had been qualified by later acquaintance.

  "There's certainly no doubt as to his capacity to spend money. He has inherited plenty of that talent. But I'm much less sure of his capacity to earn it. David wants to make a fortune in order to be able to squander it. He doesn't seem to realize that most of our great tycoons built their fortunes out of the love of building. Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller—those men weren't interested in spending their piles. The accumulation was everything to them. It was up to their descendants to dispose of the loot. And the descendants were more than ready to take care of that. Mr. Morgan was different, but Mr. Morgan was born a rich man. And anyway, David is no Morgan. He's got the cart before the horse."

  Camilla was perfectly willing to concede this, but she didn't care. She and David were married six months after their first meeting. Her parents had urged a longer wa
it, but she had found the force to resist them, pressing down in her mind the ugly suspicion that she dreaded the effect of a longer wait on David's volatile nature. And David's parents, who still managed to live with a certain splash on the remnants of the ancestor's fortune and who were relieved that their excitable and impetuous son had selected so sensible and reliable a mate, managed to scrape up enough cash to see the young couple at least through their first year.

  Thus had started the decade and a half that was to elapse before the district attorney had issued his indictment against Stiles and Hunter and the last lights in Camilla's life flickered out.

  The first years, at least, had had their pleasant side. In the 1920s, David's firm made plenty of money, and he was able to buy the shiniest and longest of foreign cars and the fastest and noisiest of motorboats, to rent large summer villas in the Hamptons and to go off with chosen Racquet Club pals on distant and dangerous mountain-climbing expeditions or on African big-game shooting safaris. Camilla had always feared that the time would come when his mercurial mentality might begin to tire of her so much plainer and more placid disposition and tastes, and she patiently acquiesced in being left behind with their son when he took off for far parts of the globe, seeking to console herself with the illusion that the limitation of his company to males would guard him from the allurements of her own sex.

  He took for granted that she was totally content with her life. Was she not Mrs. David Hunter? What else could a woman want? "You know, Millie," he told her once, on his return from a fishing trip in the Arctic Circle, "it does a man good when he's freezing in below-zero temperatures to know there's a home fire always burning for him and a great little woman whose face will light up when he comes through the door. How's young David?" And then he looked for a corner of his mind not full of his latest adventure to devote briefly to David Junior, hugging him and spoiling him and buying him anything that he clamorously demanded at any price. And of course the boy adored him.

  But it was, predictably, a very different David who survived—and barely survived—the market crash of 1929. He seemed to regard the long depression that followed it as a personal affront aimed at him by a vindictive fate, and when Camilla, with all the calm and resolution that she could muster, attempted to adjust their lifestyle to the drastic reduction of their income, he resented her disinclination to join in his shrill complaints, as if she were somehow in conjunction with the forces of evil. If she ever protested at his stubborn insistence on continuing to buy the most expensive clothes for himself or at his refusal even to consider resigning from any of his clubs, he would ask her angrily if she expected him to take to the streets and hold out a tin cup. She knew that he was seeing a lot of Paul and Gloria Davison, at whose apartment he seemed to be always dropping in on his way home from work without asking her to join him, and she began to suspect that Gloria, the avid young blond wife of a much older and notoriously gullible millionaire, might be paying some of David's bills. Camilla remembered having read in a life of the first duke of Marlborough that he owed some of his amorous success as a dashing young officer to his habit of borrowing money from the ladies he seduced.

  And then, suddenly, David seemed almost rich again. He announced that he was renting a big house on the dunes in Southampton for the summer of 1936. But they were never to occupy it. David was fated to endure a very different kind of housing.

  He behaved well enough at his trial; he was always at his best in the public eye. Camilla had even once wondered if he shouldn't have been an actor; he might have lacked the subtlety for the graver dramatic roles, but he certainly had the looks of a movie star. He denied boldly all the charges leveled against him. He had simply acted, he maintained, on the orders of his boss, in whom he had had and continued to have implicit faith. He even sneered at the prosecuting attorneys, who, in his lofty view, were simply misguided Marxists incapable of detecting the grand and noble overall projects of the Wall Street mighty behind the petty details of daily trading, which were subject to malign misinterpretation. But it was difficult for the jury—and for the sadly listening Camilla—to believe that any grand overall scheme had dictated the plundering of his wife's little trust fund.

  He even continued to insist on his innocence at home in the brief period before his incarceration. He openly resented his wife's downcast eyes and lachrymose silence, which, for all her head shaking, so clearly expressed her agreement with the jury's finding, and his bursts of temper culminated in his request that she not visit him in jail but leave him to such peace as he could find there.

  This was Camilla's bitterest blow. She went up to the prison, of course, and he did allow her to see him. He craved such news as she could bring of the outside world, and besides, a refusal to see his wife might have been deemed by the authorities a demerit in his carefully sustained record of good behavior. He was indeed a model prisoner, even popular with his fellow inmates, who were not immune to the attractive note of democratic friendliness that he so easily knew how to assume. David had always known how to appeal to both sexes.

  At home, during the Sing Sing years, Camilla reduced her living expenses to a Spartan minimum and earned some extra dollars by giving old friends lessons in bridge, a game at which she had always been adept. At first she received many dinner invitations from sympathetic friends and acquaintances, but as she felt it would be disloyal to David to go to any houses where she had reason to believe he had been roundly excoriated, and as most of her old world was of the unconcealed opinion that David and Jonathan Stiles had been traitors to their class, betraying it to the gloating mob of the new left, she spent most of her evenings alone. David Junior, who had had a nervous breakdown over his father's collapse and been expelled from Andover for drinking, was a bitter trial to her, but he ultimately emigrated to Hong Kong, where he was able to support himself as a bartender in surroundings where his name was not known.

  Camilla had one opportunity to supplement her income substantially, but her sense of honor compelled her to reject it. Her lawyer advised her that the bank that had been cofiduciary with her husband of her trust fund was legally liable for the money it had negligently allowed him to embezzle and would replenish the account if requested. She could not see herself making the request.

  Such, however, was by no means David's attitude when he was at last released, a coarser and moodier man. He professed himself utterly disgusted with the small apartment Camilla had taken in an unfashionable West Side district and was irate that she could not come up with the sum needed for his new wardrobe. And he really exploded when he heard from their lawyer what she had failed to do about her trust fund.

  "Have you completely lost your mind, Millie? Do you realize the difference even that little income will make to us? Plus the fact that the income's been accumulating for three years. I'm going after the bank at once!"

  "But, David, I can't touch that money! And you, of all people, ought to know why!"

  "You can give it to me to touch, then. I'm not so finicky."

  She gave in. He was her husband, after all. If she didn't look after him, if she didn't help to rehabilitate him, who would? She would have to see him through this crisis. And there would be others.

  There were. The bank restored the embezzled fund without waiting for the suit that David threatened. But what she found even harder, for here her role was active rather than merely passive, was his insistence that she mend her bridges with all the people whose invitations she had spurned.

  "My God, woman, don't you see what a hole we're in! We have no choice. I don't give a rat's ass at this point if you go to houses where I'm no longer welcome. We have to make do with what we have. And you at least have some goodwill left with people who swing a lot of clout. Well, use it! Use it to help a poor guy whom they're still mean enough to spit at. For doing what they all do. Or would do if they weren't scared shitless of being caught!"

  So Millie, as he insisted, proceeded painfully to repair her social breaches. Nor did it ease her achi
ng soul to find that she was good at it. Time had passed; prejudices had softened; pity opened the pocketbooks of men who were glad enough to help out without actually admitting David to their homes. They could be generous if they were allowed to be consistent.

  Paul Davison went so far as to give David a modestly paying job as director of a small museum of ancient automobiles in Queens, and the Hunters were almost comfortably solvent when David died of a sudden stroke seven years after his re-lease from prison.

  ***

  When Camilla had sufficiently recovered from the shock of finding her friend Marielle so philosophically resigned to the readjustment—if that was the right word—of moral standards as professed by the younger generation, she agreed to resume their weekly lunches at the latter's club.

  "I've done a lot of hard thinking since we had that illuminating talk," she told her friend after her first sip of the traditional Dubonnet that always preceded their meal. "And I've come to the conclusion that David may have been ahead of his times. That is, if his times were not, under the surface, pretty much what today's times are. It is I who may have been the blind fool."

  "A fool you never were, Millie."

  "But blind?"

  "Perhaps a bit astigmatic. So many of our generation were. I certainly was."

  "But he must have seen me as a fiend! Tormenting him with imputations of a guilt he didn't want to feel. That he wanted only to throw off. So that he might pick up his lost life! No wonder he hated me."

  "Hated you? Oh, Millie."

  "He was having an affair with Gloria Davison. I found it out from letters in his desk after he died. Did you know that?"

  Marielle looked very grave. "We all knew that, Millie. And we rather assumed you did. It's not such a big deal, you know. With middle-aged men panicking over their lost youth. Many wives put up with it."

  "Not you."