The Young Apollo and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  "Will you live in France now?" Ella wanted to know.

  "Not permanently. My place is here. The family fortune was made here and will be spent here."

  "Spent? Whoopee!"

  Evalina frowned. "I mean used. Used for the betterment of all concerned. Gran has taught me that it's a kind of sacred trust."

  "My father would certainly approve of that. But you make it sound so serious, Lina. Won't you kick up your heels a bit?"

  "My father didn't kick up his heels, Ella."

  "Didn't he ever? Just a little? How can you be so sure?"

  "If he did, he made up for it at the end. He died a hero."

  "Oh, Lina, you can't live on that!"

  "Can't I?"

  Before she sailed for France, Evalina received a grave warning from her grandmother about a matter she had not wanted to bring up before it should be absolutely necessary.

  "My dear child, this is a painful subject, so sit down here beside me and just listen. You are going to be away from me, and anyway I haven't that much longer to live, so I must speak now, while I can. It's about your mother. Your mother, child, is an ill woman. Not so much physically, as she constantly supposes, as mentally. She cannot help her dark moods any more than she can moderate her high ones. That is in the nature of the disease. But God or Nature does not wholly neglect people stricken as she is. He endows them sometimes with the instinct to recognize and attach themselves to the particular humans who are adapted to support them. They are like certain natural parasites: vines that know what tree to entwine, small fish that ride on the backs of larger ones. Your mother found your father, who devoted his life to her. Don't let her do that to you!"

  "But Gran," Evalina protested in distress, "if I can help her wouldn't Papa have wanted me to?"

  "Up to a point, yes. I'm not saying you shouldn't love your mother. But you can help someone without becoming their slave. Your father was always worried about that happening to you. Don't doubt me. I know! You'll always have the means to keep yourself independent of anybody. Well, use them!"

  Evalina arrived in France determined to have good relations with her mother. Eliane was still her legal guardian; Evalina would have to await her twenty-first birthday before she came into full possession of her property. She had learned a good bit about the family finances from her grandmother and been told to rely on the advice of Thaddeus Warwick, the reputedly brilliant young man at the Morgan Bank who was in charge of the Lane interests in France. She had also been warned that her mother had been making deep inroads into that part of the family capital that her father had unwisely bequeathed to her outright. But even if all of this portion of the fortune should be dissipated, a far vaster share was safely in the hands of trustees holding it for Evalina's sole benefit. She had been told that she had only to bide her time till the day when she should be utterly free.

  She had little affection for this mother across the sea, and she blamed her for the waste of her father's life. Had he come home to America, he might have had a fine political career. Nor would he have been killed in the war, as by the time the United States entered the conflict he would have been above military age. But she was also aware that her father had deeply loved his difficult spouse and would certainly have expected his daughter to do her duty by her. Which indeed she would, though not without thorough and discreet observation of this Gallic parent.

  She found a mother still beautiful and stylish, if faintly raddled, so to speak, about the edges, living superbly in the glorious old hôtel in the Rue de Grenelle and waited on by smartly uniformed footmen and maids. Eliane was one who had flung to the winds all the cares and worries of four years of carnage and resumed with a kind of ecstasy of relief the old life of pleasure, greeting the nineteen twenties as a golden age. She appeared to regard her commendable war work as the fulfillment of every duty she owed to her deity and a license to make up now for every hardship endured.

  She greeted Evalina with more enthusiasm than the latter had expected, evidently regarding it as a high amusement to have an heiress daughter to launch in what was left of the best society.

  "You are going to simply adore your new life here, ma chère. You will go with me everywhere and meet all my friends. They will adore you. But first we must get you a new wardrobe. I can see that your grandmother has had a hand in your outfitting. Oh, you needn't tell me. I have eyes! You will find yourself, as they say, in the desirable position of being naked with a checkbook. And you'll see what money well spent can accomplish. You don't have to be Helen of Troy, my sweet, for something to be made of you. You've really got quite a decent figure and complexion, and your eyes are fine—your best asset. And we'll get that Lane reserve out of your expression. We'll endow you with some of my family's joie de vivre!"

  Evalina accepted this outpouring, as she did the many others that were to follow, with silent acquiescence. She submitted herself to the visits to dressmakers and milliners, conceding that the maternal taste in such matters was peerless and that Eliane would never buy anything that would clash with what she was keen enough to recognize as her daughter's unalterably subdued personality. A good workman, she accepted her basic material. But Evalina had more trouble with her mother when it came to her firm intent to take courses at the Sorbonne, which meant curtailing the social schedule to make time for reading and preparation. Her adroit argument, however, that her lessons in French literature would help her with some of the writers who attended her mother's salon brought the latter ultimately around.

  "When I talk to your friend Monsieur Paul Bourget, Maman, it should help if I've read Le Disciple."

  "There's something in that, I admit," her mother, who had not herself read the novel in question, conceded. "Society is becoming more and more mixed. Before the war, if you wanted intellectual chatter, you could go to Madame de Caillevet's and talk to Anatole France. Today you might meet him at the Noailles. But don't get the idea that the old values are gone. They lurk. Our faubourg used to be an ace of trumps. It isn't that anymore, but it's still a trump. You have to learn to play every card in your hand. I once asked Laure de Saxe which of the many handles to her name she was apt to use. 'It depends on the group I find myself in,' was her reply. And while I'm on the subject I should warn you that a mésalliance can still be just that. No matter how democratic we've become or how wide the doors are open. Your dot, my dear, is going to attract a lot of young men, some of whom, even the most charming, will be quite impossible matches. You must learn to discriminate."

  Evalina wondered if her mother included Thaddeus Warwick, of the Morgan Bank, among the impossible matches. Certainly he was the most charming of all the men who came to her salon, and he reputedly had a brain on a par with his dark, dashing good looks. And he came to the house, moreover, less for her mother than for her whom he was supposed to educate in the financial responsibilities that would one day be hers. But he did his job with lightness and charm.

  "I see you as a latter-day Isabel Archer," he told her one evening as they sat in a corner of her mother's crowded parlor, under the great green tapestry that depicted Louis XV at a hunt.

  "In The Portrait of a Lady ? Do you predict that I will fall victim to a shady fortune hunter?"

  "Never! You'll be an Isabel Archer who has the sense to go home. You won't be taken in by wicked old Europe."

  "You think yourself very perceptive, don't you, Mr. Warwick?"

  "But anyone can see that in you. And call me Thad, please. And you'll be Lina. Or rather Evalina. It's a prettier name unabbreviated. Unlike mine."

  "What about yourself, Thad? Will you be taken in by wicked old Europe? Or has it already happened?"

  "Not on your life! This is only a tour of duty. Next year I'll be back in 14 Wall Street."

  "And that will be it? Forever and ever?"

  "Ah, don't rob my life of all interest. I've always played with the idea of one day doing something in politics."

  Her heart gave a little jump. Like her father! "Oh, that would
be interesting."

  He was tall and well made, with a high broad brow, a fine prominent nose, a determined chin, thick raven-black hair, and yellow-gray smiling eyes. Or at least they seemed to be smiling, perhaps to mitigate some of his handsome straightness. She guessed that he could be quick, definite, incisive, but then, as if to warn the observer that he was not to be taken too seriously, that maybe nothing should really be taken too seriously, he would say something wonderfully witty. Evalina was put in mind of Talleyrand's point de zèle, surtout point de zele. Did he not need someone to supply the zeal?

  Her mental image of Thaddeus, adjusted to a vision of a silver-toned orator in the halls of Congress, became tinged with the faint pink hue of romance. And she was now more critically observant of his relations with her mother. He was halfway between Eliane's age and her own. Was Eliane the "older woman" in his life that she had read about in Henry James's The Ambassadors} But no, he was strictly her mother's homme d'affaires, and indeed the latter made no secret of finding his restrictions on her spending irksome. For the Lane properties in France—Magny, the Normandy chateau with its extensive farms and stables, the vineyard in Bordeaux, the villa in Cannes, the game park in Fontainebleau—were all under his direct supervision. Eliane took no interest in the business side of life, and Evalina, on the excuse of learning about her heritage, accompanied him on his tours of inspection. In Normandy they roamed together over the ancestral acres, visiting barns and dairies.

  Thaddeus made learning the business side of wealth as easy and pleasant as novel reading—indeed, quite like it. He made her think of how Lord Melbourne made parliamentary debates amusing to the young Victoria, as described in Lytton Strachey's new biography of the queen, which everyone was reading. "But will your expertise in French agricultural problems do you much good when you're back in New York?" she wanted to know.

  "Finance is pretty much the same the world over. The man who likes to get to the bottom of things rarely wastes his time. You'll find that most of what you've observed in France will stand you in good stead one day. Of course you have to apply the rule of mutatis mutandis. But something tells me you'll be able to do just that."

  "How can you tell?"

  "By the fact that you've remembered everything I've taught you. I haven't had to repeat anything."

  "That's because you're such a good teacher."

  "What good is a teacher, even the best, without an apt pupil? And you're the kind whose way a teacher has to get out of."

  "I do try, it's true."

  "Well, we're a pair."

  Her heart swelled with pleasure. But her elation was diminished by her suspicion that she was a pupil to him and only that. Oh, yes, perhaps a bit of a pal as well, but never a girlfriend. No, she could tell. He was older, maybe thirty, and had been in the war. He would need a woman more mature, more sophisticated, one to dazzle the great world. And of course there were plenty of such. One was sure to grab him.

  At length she felt sufficiently secure in their own special kind of intimacy to ask him a more personal question. What, at any, rate did she have to lose? "Why haven't you married? There must have been ladies who wouldn't have turned a deaf ear to such a proposition."

  "Oh, that's a long story. It would bore you."

  "Try me."

  He told her, quite willingly and at some length, of his drawn-out and futile pursuit of a woman who was "simply the most beautiful creature God ever made." Obviously, he enjoyed airing something long in his innermost heart. Had he made a fetish of it? Her name was Pauline, and she had always professed to be his dear friend but nothing more. He had fallen in love with her at the age of sixteen, while a student at Groton School, at a Washington's Birthday dance to which she had been invited by his roommate, and he had adored her hopelessly until her marriage to that same roommate eight years later.

  "I guess she was drawn to ugly men," he ended sadly. "Old Tom was always mortally plain."

  "You mean it was a case of Beauty and the Beast?"

  "Oh, hardly that. He's a good enough fellow. I hear they're happy as clams."

  "Are clams so happy?"

  "Maybe they don't know enough not to be."

  It didn't occur to Eliane that her daughter could be much drawn to Thaddeus Warwick, because she wasn't herself. She preferred men who made a fuss over her, and the young banker had too skeptical an eye to do much of that. Her current beau was a fastidious, literary, and highly cultivated English bachelor and epicure, Peter Everett, who took at face value all her complaints and seeming ailments and enveloped her in a mist of uncritical devotion. For Evalina it soon became clear that her mother had greater matrimonial projects for her: she had in mind no less than a duke.

  Raymond, due d'lvry, was a very gentle, very mild, very kindly, neat little man, possessed of a famous chateau and a glorious ancestry. He was also witty and companiable. He perfectly understood that it was essential for his family and himself that he should marry an heiress, and nobody could doubt that he would be a very proper and well-behaved husband.

  Evalina liked him but was not romantically aroused. Besides, she had no intention of living in France. The time soon came when it behooved her to let the duke know he was wasting his time. This was when her mother informed her that she had invited him for a weekend at Magny.

  "And I'm asking no one else but Peter Everett," Eliane added. "I thought we'd be just a cozy foursome for once." Here she gave Evalina one of her sidelong glances. "I'm sure Raymond will have no objection to that."

  Evalina drew in her breath. The moment, the great moment that had always been to come, had come. She found herself thinking, with an odd inner smile, of her grandmother Lane's favorite hymn: "Once to ev-e-ry man and nation comes the mo-ment to decide." Was courage so difficult, after all? Mightn't it even be fun?

  "What are you thinking about, my dear?"

  "I was just thinking, Maman, of how impossible it will be for me to spend a lovely idle weekend at Magny. I have a pile of reading to do for my philosophy class. I simply have to stay in town with my nose to the grindstone."

  "But, my child, that's impossible! How can I offer an excuse like that to Raymond? Why, it would be practically an insult."

  "He needn't take it that way. But if he does, he does."

  "You mean you don't care?"

  "I don't care at all."

  Eliane became grave. "What is behind all this, Evalina? There is something behind it, isn't there?"

  "There is." Evalina straightened herself to deliver the blow. "If I go up to Magny with just you and Peter, it will look to Raymond as if I were not averse to something more serious."

  Eliane's features hardened as she stared at her daughter. "Are you telling me that you are averse?"

  "Certainly."

  "It's nothing to you to be admired by the greatest catch in Paris?"

  "Nothing at all."

  "You don't wish to be a duchess?"

  "I don't even wish to be the wife of a Frenchman. If I marry at all, I shall marry an American. As you did."

  Eliane gasped. "But I wasn't an heiress! Look, child, let's not be rash. There's no need for resolutions at this time. Come to Magny and treat Raymond as you would any other guest. He will see at once that this is not the moment for anything further. He has perfect tact. Trust him. And trust your mother."

  "I'm afraid I can't do that, Maman. If I continue to see Raymond on this basis, he will be justified in thinking that I am at least considering him as a husband. And a girl who considers it is generally taken as more than half won. If she backs out, she will be said to have led him on. The only way to make it crystal-clear to Raymond that I will never be his bride is to stop seeing him except on public occasions."

  "That is nonsense, Evalina. You will be thought to be the kind of giddy girl who thinks that every man who so much as kisses her hand is about to propose. But I see there's no point arguing with you. You're too set in your ways. Very well. You force me to use my parental authority. For your own good
, I insist that you accompany me to Magny this weekend."

  "You order me?"

  "If you want to put it that way."

  "Then I must disobey you. You'll have to get a gendarme to get me there."

  "Oh, Evalina!" Eliane's eyes filled with tears as she bowed her head and struck her fist on the table beside her. "How can you hurt me so? A mother who only wants what's best for her only child! It's not enough to have lost a beloved husband in the war and to be despised and scorned by his biased old mother! And to be railed at by her money man here for trying to keep up a half-decent appearance in the life her son wanted me to lead! And to be doomed with a weak heart that may go back on me any day! No, no, all that is not enough. I have to have a daughter who flings my love and devotion back in my teeth!"

  Evalina gazed at her without flinching. "Don't you know, Mother, that all that won't work with me? Can't you tell?"

  Eliane regained her control. The stare with which she fixed her daughter for several long moments glittered with something new. Was it hate?

  "Yes, I can tell. You're a monster."

  From this point on, Evalina's relationship with her mother underwent a drastic change. Eliane became cool and distant; she treated her daughter with the proud reserve she might have shown to a German officer in wartime occupying her chateau. But Evalina found this preferable to the exaggerated enthusiasm that had preceded it. She could attend her courses, visit museums, and spend her evenings reading, while her mother resumed, alone now, her frenetically active social life. Her twenty-first birthday was approaching, and then she would be free.

  When Thaddeus tried to assure her that her mother's resentment was bound in time to thaw, she firmly shook her head.

  "I don't think, Thad, that you fully comprehend what's wrong with her. My grandmother told me all about it. Mother knows, with a kind of instinct, just on whom her charm will work and just on whom it won't. She wasn't sure of me at first, because I was young and possibly unformed. But now she knows and hates me. I must face that."