The Young Apollo and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  "Actually, it's a wig," Publius snapped. "And he doesn't wear it all the time."

  "Only on special occasions? Perhaps on Christian holidays?"

  "It's not an aspect of our imperial master's personality that I care to stress," Publius retorted. "Constantine has enough virtues to be forgiven a minor weakness."

  "But so visible a one! Must we paint his statues accordingly? I wonder really, cousin, if you should not drop a hint in the imperial ear that he's going a bit far. As a quaestor, are you not one of the seven greatest powers in the land?"

  "Lentulus, you're too astute an observer not to know that the tide is nothing. It's the proximity to Caesar's ear alone that counts."

  "But I thought you were indeed close to that august organ.

  "Constantine listens to me at times. But he listens to others more often. He is not a man to be led by anyone."

  "Not even by the high priests of his new faith?"

  "There you go again, Lentulus. Can't you stay off that subject for one afternoon?"

  "No! Not, anyway, until I've explained something to you. Something that I feel very strongly a quaestor should know. And that is this: Where this sect differs from others and where it is dangerous is that its priests aim not merely to control the conduct and the creed of its faithful; they aim to rule the state. And if the faithful are converted, and if the faithful become a working majority in the empire, to which end Constantine may have unknowingly contributed, they may raise their ferocious priesthood to the seats of power it claims."

  "Lentulus, you go too far. Much too far. I don't know much about the sect, but everyone knows it was founded by a lowly Jewish thaumaturgist who promised an afterlife of bliss to the lowly and never offered the least threat to the empire. He even allowed himself to be crucified by the Jews, who took him from our procurator, who found nothing wrong with him but who, like all wise governors, knew when to throw an occasional tidbit to the mob."

  "I know all that, of course. It's even in their creed. But here's the rub, my friend. The man Jesus was harmless enough, I concede. He believed that the end of the world was imminent and that it behooved him to preach preparedness for some kind of final judgment that would decide whether you would be transmitted to a state of bliss or cast into outer darkness. Obviously, with such a fate around the corner, there was no point worrying about your business or your family ties or your government. Just get ready, that was all you had to do, and the ticket to a happy afterlife was faith. That was what his god wanted: laudation and plenty of it. None of this was of any concern to Rome. Why should it have been? It seemed a harmless delusion. But when time passed and it became evident that the end of the world was not coming, it was necessary for the now established priests of the sect to fabricate a revised religion to hold on to the converts they had already acquired. And this they have done in one of their councils at Nicaea. And where does the revised religion put the priests? One guess! Right! At the very top of the ecclesiastical and political ladder!"

  "All of which is highly speculative."

  "All of which is verifiably true."

  "In any event, it will take a long time. I think we can count on living out our lives under the old regime."

  "Don't be too sure of that!" Lentulus rose with his guest, who was preparing to depart. "In the meantime, I can enjoy a Rome more peaceful and benign without the glitter of your eastern court. And highways uninterrupted by the blare of some general's alleged triumph."

  "A Rome shorn of its old glory!"

  "A Rome that may have found its soul."

  "Let us hope so, anyway." Publius strode to the doorway and turned back. "I'll see you before I go. We'll have a banquet or something. And Lentulus, one word of caution. Say what you like to me and men you trust about the Christians, but don't air your views in public. After all, our emperor has adopted their creed. And you know that Constantine can be vindictive."

  "I know that he killed his wife and son."

  Publius raised a finger to his lips. "Hush about Fausta. That's not acknowledged. Crispus, of course, is."

  Lentulus chuckled. "Ah, I'm right then. You are afraid of him. And of the Christians. Shall we be baptised, you and I?"

  Publius shrugged as he departed. "You make a joke out of everything, cousin."

  "Perhaps it keeps me alive. Or will it do just the opposite?"

  Pa's Darling

  PA'S DEATH, in the cold winter of 1960, at the age of eighty-seven, was a crucial event in the lives of his two daughters, but particularly for myself, the supposedly most loved, the adored Kate, the oldest. As I sit in my multichambered apartment, the last of my many wasted efforts to impress him, looking out on the strangely white and oddly dreary expanse of Central Park, with the newspaper clippings of his laudatory obituaries in my lap, it seems a timely if unsettling opportunity to review my own life, no longer, I can only hope, in the shadow of his, unless it will be even more so. For people, I know, always think of me not as the widow of the brilliant young attorney Sumner Shepard, gallantly dead in the 1940 fall of France, nor even as the present wife of Dicky Phelps, senior partner of his distinguished Wall Street law firm, but as the daughter of Lionel Hemenway, the great judge of the New York Court of Appeals, renowned sage and philosopher, author of provocative books on law and literature, and the witty deity of the Patroons Club. God rest his soul if it be capable of resting.

  I have decided to write up this assessment of my past to make a probably vain attempt to get it off my chest. Whether I shall ever show it, or to whom, I do not know as yet. I am sure, however, it will not be to my husband, fond of him as I am. Perhaps to my daughter. Or to a grandson, if I ever have one. But that needn't concern me now.

  As I have already suggested, I was always supposed to be Pa's favorite daughter. He made a good deal of me, particularly before company; he liked to show me off—he was proud of my good looks, of what he called my "pale-faced, raven-haired beauty." But he was like a financial magnate showing off a master painting he has just acquired, inwardly confident that the owner of the picture is superior to both the work and its artist. There was always a distinct vein of sarcasm in his ebullient mirth. Did he really value me very much? Did he even value women very much? Oh, he had to make a fuss over them, of course; he had to be the gallant gentleman who elevated the fair sex to the skies and left them there, but when it came to a question of real work, the real thing ... no, give him a man.

  But I have now just learned that all of this may have been the cover-up of doubts as to his own masculinity. This exploded before me last night, at a family gathering in this apartment. It erupted from what Uncle Jack Sherman, brother of my other, also now deceased parent, told me when he and I, after dinner, were sitting apart from the others in a corner of my living room, discussing who among Pa's surviving friends and disciples might be the best qualified to write his biography.

  After considering and discarding several names, Uncle Jack paused and glanced cautiously about the room, as if to be sure that none of the others were within earshot. This, I knew, was his usual prelude to some particularly odoriferous piece of gossip. He was a tall, thin, rather emaciated old man, a lifetime bachelor, who wanted to bring down any man who had done more in life than he, which was almost everyone. He liked to pretend that he and I were the only truly sophisticated members of the family.

  "The first job of your father's biographer," he told me emphatically, "will be to explain why he lived for so many years on such intimate terms with his wife's lover."

  "Oh, Uncle Jack! That old canard! Surely you don't believe it. Of your own sister?"

  "My dear, I had it from Sam Pemberton himself. One night when he was in his cups."

  "The filthy braggart! And you credited him?"

  "I did not. At first. But when I warned your mother about what he was saying, she explained the whole matter to me in her own cool, measured way. Your father, it appeared, had become impotent while only in his forties. He had agreed to her finding an outlet for her
very natural desires in this unconventional but by no means unique fashion. She assured me grimly that she would see to it that Sam Pemberton should hold his tongue in the future. And indeed he did, to the very day he died. He even became a teetotaler! And your mother pledged me to silence in your father's lifetime."

  Some cousins at this point crossed the room to bid me good night. The party was over, and Uncle Jack departed, leaving me to my troubled thoughts.

  Perhaps the strangest thing about Uncle Jack's revelation was that it gave me a nasty kind of exhilaration. Of course, I knew perfectly well that a certain number of family friends and relations believed that there had always been something more between Mother and Sam Pemberton than an amitié amoureuse. But my sister and I had both firmly repudiated the idea. That Mother, so tall and straight, so grave, so unbending, so somehow chastely beautiful, with her prematurely snow-white hair, her lineless face, high cheekbones, and noble brow, could ever have shared her couch with a man as unimpressive as Sam was unthinkable. Sam, however grinning and good-natured, however accommodating, was still a balding, rotund little bachelor who taught French at a fashionable private girls' day school. We thought Mother liked him because he read Gallic plays and poems aloud with her and that Father put up with him because he listened, seemingly impressed, to Pa's monologues. It was true that he was a household fixture, but such a harmless one!

  And why should all this now titillate me when all three participants are dead? I suppose it is possible that I felt in Pa's humble acceptance of the eternal triangle some settling of an old score between him and me. He, who had been so superior, despite any effort he may have exerted to condescend, whose towering masculinity had seemed to relegate his daughters to a kind of mock respect and reverence, had in reality allowed a silly little man to be his pal, his constant houseguest, and the lover of his wife!

  How the past now unreeled itself through my mind, like a film played backwards! I saw Mother passing serenely through the years, calmly going about her domestic tasks, efficiently organizing the social gatherings that Pa required for an audience, attending to the myriad problems of complaining daughters, always in control of everything, yet always placidly aware of the respite that awaited her in the arms of her lively if diminutive bedmate. Mother was never unreasonable in her requirements; she rarely raised her voice, because she rarely had to: there was something ineluctable in her tone and demeanor. Her daughters knew—and Pa knew—that she revered the rule of reason, and that if ever reason was ousted by emotion in her house, she would simply walk out and never return.

  I can remember a party that Dicky and I gave for a visiting English economist who expounded after dinner on the subject of a novel theory of taxation. Pa took extreme objection to some of his points and even heckled him, to the poor man's obvious embarrassment. Mother at last spoke up in her fine, clear tone that everyone heard: "Lionel, if you make another objection, we're going home." That was the way she would do it, without a trace of anger or even criticism in her voice. And when Pa did make another crack, she simply rose, went over to him, and told him, "We're leaving now," and he followed her out of the room like a dog with its tail between its legs.

  It was probably in the same fashion that she had put to him her proposed solution for their more intimate marital problem. I am sure that she never reproached him for his bullying manners at parties or for his sexual inadequacy; she simply took the steps she deemed appropriate for the situation at hand. She was always a realist, but one doesn't always relish so much realism in a wife or in a mother. Pa, of course, must have blamed himself for his impotence, if that was what it was. I don't think many men could have helped that, no matter how fiercely they told themselves it was not their fault. And I don't blame them. I even think I might have admired Pa more had he smothered Mother with a pillow, like Othello. What I suppose I resented was that, however small he may have come to think himself, he still thought he was bigger than I.

  It was like him to overdo his role of mari complaisant. There was always something of the ham actor in him. Was it his way of recapturing the lead from his wife? Surely otherwise he wouldn't have made such a pal of Sam Pemberton. He wouldn't have invited him for long visits to our summer camp in Maine, or made him a member of his elite men's discussion group, the "round table," at the Patroons Club. Was it even his way of taking Sam from Mother? What she thought of her lover and her husband being such friends I cannot imagine. Perhaps it amused her. She would have been capable of that.

  Sumner Shepard, my first husband, and the only real love of my life—which reminds me, I must hide this manuscript from Dicky, who is utterly amoral about reading things not addressed to him—was one of Pa's golden boys. He had been first in his class at Harvard Law and editor in chief of the review and on graduation could have gone to any of the great Wall Street firms (which, of course, he eventually did), but he chose instead to go first to Albany and clerk for a year for Pa. This was not, in 1927, considered the bright choice it is today, but Sumner was in love (there's no word more fitting) with the luminous prose of Pa's judicial opinions and yearned to sit at the great man's feet. And it was no surprise to anyone that Pa rejoiced in an esteem so flattering and reveled in a brilliant and handsome young assistant who saw, as he did, the law as great literature.

  Pa stayed in Albany only while his court was sitting; the rest of the time, except for our Maine summers, he was in Manhattan in our East Side brownstone. In order to have Sumner available for discussions, particularly in the evening, he arranged for him to occupy a spare bedroom on the top floor whenever they worked late, as a result of which he was frequently present at our family board. I was attracted to him at once, for he was not only bright but beautiful. But at first my sister, Edith, and I were cast in the role of rather dumb listeners while he and Pa argued about law, and Mother and Sam Pemberton, another constant guest, discussed French literature. Of course, my ears were open only to Sumner. To me the law was mere nitpicking, something men adored and women had little use for. But I noted that Pa and Sumner seemed to be looking for beauty, even when they worked on the draft of one of Pa's opinions; you might have thought they were carving a statue out of marble. I couldn't for the life of me see why it was such a big deal to dress up a dry legal opinion in purple prose. Who but other lawyers were going to read it, anyway?

  I should make it clear that I was no philistine. If I cared too much for dancing parties and smart clothes, if I spent too many weekends visiting rich friends in chic resorts like the Hamptons, if I had a bit of a yen for gambling and casinos, I was still up on the latest novels and plays and served three afternoons a week as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was not from a lack of appreciation of the finer things in life that I found Pa and Sumner's ecstasy over some silly little phrase excessive.

  Of course I had the ancient weapon of sex, and I decided it was time to wield it. I began to ease myself into their discussions. One night, when they were making rather heavy weather over how best and concisely they could phrase the excuse of a defendant who had severely damaged a plaintiff while pulling him out of a burning house through the jagged glass of a shattered window, not having noted that the same room had an open door to the outside, I had a bright idea.

  "Peril blunts caution!" I suggested in one of my rare flashes. I had always been clever at parlor games.

  "Peril blunts caution," Sumner repeated slowly and thoughtfully. He turned to Pa. "It's perfect! Just three words. Let's start the opinion with them."

  "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!" Pa murmured approvingly, and he pulled out his notebook and jotted down my suggestion.

  I didn't have to say another word, and I had the sense not to. I had gained Sumner's full attention, and that was all I needed. He looked at me; he really saw me, for perhaps the first time, and Pa thereafter got only his second glances. I won't say that I caught Sumner with three words, but they gave me a start. To keep up his image of the bright and thoughtful woman he had idealized for him
self I had only to let him develop his own conception. I wouldn't have to do a thing until we were married. Then, of course, I could relax. Hasn't that been the story of millions of women?

  ***

  We were married right after the completion of Sumner's year's clerkship with Pa and enjoyed a glorious honeymoon in Hawaii before he started work in the great law firm of Harris & Eyer, of which he and his friend and ultimate successor to my hand, Dicky Phelps, were to become partners. Pa had wanted to keep him as his clerk for another year, and Sumner had wanted this too, but I had pointed out that we might as well get started on a career that would bring him eventually the income we were both going to need. It was the first time that I had to take a firm position in my share of the direction of our joint lives, and it was not by any means to be the last. Sumner always had a tendency to espouse the ideal as opposed to the practical, but he was at the same time generous and malleable, particularly with a woman he loved. And he certainly started by loving me. By loving me almost to distraction.

  Yes, I'm getting to it. Getting to the point. Sumner in time discovered that he had attributed qualities to me that I did not have. He had assumed that I was much more my father's daughter than I really was, and I had certainly, at least until our marriage, done my best to sustain that illusion. I daresay he agreed that it was all very well, to some extent anyway, for a woman of the earth to be earthy, but he had expected this to be counterbalanced by something more ethereal, and there was very little of the sky in my nature, except the suspicion that those who claimed it bordered on the hypocritical. Yet I have to admit that he never breathed a word about this; he was always the perfect gentleman, and, yes, the perfect husband. I could nonetheless feel his concealed disillusionment at finding that I did not share my father's tastes and appreciations and that our life together was not going to be a joint search for all that was glorious and inspiring in the universe. However, he put the best possible face on it.