Skinny Island

by Louis Auchincloss

  She told Suzannah about the incident with pride; the latter was vociferous in her enthusiasm.

  “Oh, Mummy, you and I are really together at last! I’m so happy. You’re free of those horrible harpies.”

  But Elaine did not like this classification of her friends. “Adelaide I give up to you freely, my dear, but the others? I don’t think you can call Florence King a harpy. Or Mel-anie Codman.”

  “Oh, maybe not exactly harpies. I guess I went too far there. But they belong to that international set that feels so much closer to London and Paris than they do to Chicago or Des Moines. And they wouldn’t hesitate to shed American blood to save Eton or Oxford or the Comédie Française or the Grand Prix. They’re not real Americans, Mummy. And now that I’ve got you away from them, after all these years, I’m damned if I’m going to let them snatch you back!”

  Elaine was struck by the sudden idea that Suzie might be identifying all the things that her mother had preferred to herself in the past—parties in Paris, racing, gambling, beautiful people—with the Allied cause in Europe. It was as if Hitler were fighting high society and gaining an odd respectability by doing so!

  “I think you’ll find that many of the husbands of my friends had honorable war records.”

  “But don’t you see, Mummy, back then it was the same thing! They were fighting for Anglo-French imperialism!”

  Elaine was still too much alone in her new life to dispense with Suzie’s support, but she began now to wonder how long she would need quite so many bristling turrets and machicolated battlements. Her daughter and son-in-law appeared to bring to the task of keeping America out of the war an animus against their opponents far bitterer than seemed required. Peyton Priest, like his wife, had little use for the survival of the kind of world that Elaine still wistfully missed and had perhaps too willfully loved. Indeed, he went further than she did.

  “Suzie tells me you’re really one of us now,” Peyton told her that night before dinner, patting the hand into which he then placed one of his sugary rum cocktails. He looked at her with that guarded twinkle, that suspended husk of a smile, that was supposed to conceal, or at least cover, his distrust of all nonlegal minds and of female minds in particular. “I am very happy about that. You can now be our Trojan horse in the Colony Club.”

  “Don’t you and Suzie go a little bit far there? Some of my fellow members are very intelligent women.”

  “Intelligent, my dear Elaine, of course! Have I ever denied it? My only point is that there are certain vital factors in modern life of which they are simply unaware. Because they exclude Jews from their society, they are ignorant of the force and organization of Jewish opinion. They are unaware, therefore, of the extent to which they are being manipulated.”

  “You think Jews are sinister?”

  “I think that Jews, understandably, are more interested in destroying Hitler than we need be. It’s a question, again, of what is and is not in our best national interest. I do not happen to believe that Jews put America first. Perhaps I should not myself, were I a Jew. But I’m not a Jew.”

  And glad of it, Elaine reflected, taking in that somber grin. She had been too inured to anti-Semitism in her long life to be shocked by it. She even tended to regard it, in some types of American professional men, as something naturally associated with their heaviness and seriousness. But in her international circles any form of ethnic prejudice had been considered “hick”; one couldn’t be bigoted and “top drawer.” Of course, in France she had met anti-Semites, but she was well aware that her son-in-law would have made little distinction between a Jew and a Frenchman. It was all rather confusing.

  Peyton, at any rate, was only a source of mild amusement, or at worst of mild irritation. What really changed the quiet tenor of Elaine’s existence and brought her up before the shooting pains of choice was a conversation that she had at the Colony Club with Erica Breeze.

  Mrs. Alonzo Breeze, at least in Elaine’s eyes, was the greatest social figure in Manhattan. Only ten years younger than Elaine, she was still the thinnest, daintiest, most elegant creature imaginable, and she wasn’t afraid to wear large jewels or to tell you what she had paid for them. She had convinced herself that she was tired of the social whirl and sought only the divine peace of a quiet talk with a real friend—like whichever one she happened to be speaking to at the moment—and, what was more, she had the charm to convince that person it was true. She and Elaine were second cousins, but they had not met since Elaine’s return to New York. Erica Breeze had the kind of visual intellect that can focus only on a person who is present. As with Louis XIV, out of sight was to be totally out of mind.

  “Elaine, darling, I never see you! Are you often at the club? No, I get in here very little. My life has not been much among women.” Here she emitted a surprisingly hearty laugh. Erica was very successful with hearty laughs. “But what’s all this I hear about your being an isolationist? Are you really America First, Elaine?”

  “Are you—?”

  “America last? I know you said that to Adelaide. And of course she is, was and always has been. But you, my dear! You who have always so beautifully reminded us of our debt to France! How can you tie yourself up to such a bunch of dowdies?”

  “Well, I can’t help wondering why our young men should die to pull England’s—”

  “Chestnuts out of the fire? Because they’ll die in even greater numbers if they don’t. And to think of you, Elaine, one of the loveliest, most glamorous things we’ve got, rescued from all the horrors of war, only to be taken over by those frumps! Why should they fear the Nazis? They’re as ugly as Huns.” Again that laugh! “Paris is what they’re afraid of, not Berlin—anything that will show them up for what they are. No, no, don’t even talk to me about it—I’ve neglected you horribly—imagine letting you fall into such claws. I’m going to remedy things immediately. Come to dinner. Tonight! I’ve got the most marvelous Free French general and a secretary from the British embassy. And all sorts of old pals of yours who keep asking, ‘What on earth has happened to Elaine Wagstaff?’ Don’t worry, we won’t quiz you about your horrible new friends. We won’t let you say a word. Just listen!”

  Elaine went that night to Erica’s and had a glorious time. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be among people who cared so intensely for appearances, for things. Dining at Erica’s apartment, a veritable museum of impressionist painting, with her easily talking, easily laughing friends, was like swimming in a translucent Caribbean cove amid brilliantly colored fish over a sand as smooth as a rich carpet. It made Suzannah’s world seem like the hustle and bustle of a Coney Island beach covered with bulbous women and white-limbed men in lumpy black bathing suits.

  The talk turned to the war and England’s ordeal. Nobody made so much as a glancing reference to Elaine’s supposed convictions, and she listened at first gratefully, and at last avidly to all they had to say. By the end of the evening she was thoroughly ashamed of her work on Suzannah’s committee.

  She slept little that night, bracing herself for the disagreeable talk that she was bound to have with her daughter. It turned out even worse than she had anticipated. No sooner had she mentioned the fact, when Suzie came in to bid her good morning over her breakfast tray, that she had enjoyed herself at Mrs. Breeze’s, than her daughter burst out:

  “I suppose there was a lot of talk about how soon they could get our boys over there!”

  “There was some talk of greater aid to England, yes.”

  “Like an immediate declaration of war?”

  “No, Suzie, not that. I found Erica and her guests considerably more moderate than I find your friends.”

  “And so they won you over? In one evening? Just like that! Oh, Mummy!”

  “No, dear, it was not just like that. I simply thought that they put the case against a Nazi victory very cogently.”

  “I knew it! I should never have let you go! I should have locked the front door and held you here by force.” Suzie stamp
ed her foot now in an alarming show of temper. “You’re like a drug addict. All Mrs. Breeze has to do is give you a whiff of that old atmosphere, and there you are, back in the same old crowd, caught by the same old clichés, ready like Saint Peter to deny me, not three times, but thirty times three, three hundred times three!”

  “Suzie! Must I remind you that you’re speaking to your mother?”

  “As if I could ever forget it! What have I tried to do all my life but have a mother? And, of course, you’ve always cared more for that crowd and all their drinking and gambling and love-making, than you’ve ever cared for poor dull little me! Oh, I know it, I’ve always known it, but I still had to try to save you from yourself and bring you back to decency and honor and patriotism. Well, I guess I must face the fact it’s a hopeless task!”

  “If it’s a hopeless task,” Elaine said with dignity, “I think you had much better give it up.”

  “Oh, Mummy, no!” Suzie clasped her hands beseechingly. “Don’t listen to me. I’ll still help you. Please! Give me one more chance.”

  But Elaine, contemplating the fat flushed cheeks, the wild eyes and the messy hair of her only offspring, felt nothing now but distaste. She had tried, God knows, and nothing worked. And what did it matter, really, if it did or didn’t? Churchill and Erica were preferable to Hitler and Suzie. For once in life, anyway, good taste and morals could go hand in hand.

  “I think under the circumstances, Suzannah,” she replied in a tone of lofty sadness, “that it might be best if I moved to the St. Regis. I’ve trespassed long enough on your hospitality.”

  Suzie burst into tears. “Go where you want! I’m not stopping you. I was an idiot to think I could ever weigh against any part of your old life. Your old life? Hell, your whole life.”

  Elaine was very comfortable at the St. Regis in a delicious little suite looking over and up Fifth Avenue, and it was indeed delightful to be taken up again by Erica Breeze. She knew that Erica’s sudden spurts of perfectly genuine enthusiasm for old friends whom she had somehow lost sight of, had to be taken advantage of in their brief heat. It was not that Erica would drop her when the spurt was over, but Elaine would then no longer be able to count on the daily invitations that poured forth while her stock was high. But by then Elaine would have had her chance to sink her own roots in Erica’s Eden. It was all the chance she needed.

  Elaine was featured at Erica’s dinners at a martyr of the Nazi conquest, as one who had been flung, stripped and battle weary, on our shores and was now ready and qualified to plead the cause of the threatened old world to the still immune new one. She rapidly put together every horror story that she had heard in Paris, embellishing them a bit—who, after all, could, or would want to correct her?—and found that she could be quite effective on her feet, gazing wistfully over the heads of her audience as she told her brief tales. She had always had a hankering to act, and now she discovered that her low, grave, musical voice, with its slight tremulousness, could be used to good effect. She was able to convey the impression that she was imparting only a few drops of the sea of human misery in which she had come so near to drowning. And it was all in a good cause, was it not? Could one proselytize successfully without a bit of histrionics?

  She had continued to see Suzannah for lunch once a week, and they had managed to keep the conversation on neutral topic. But after Elaine had joined the membership drive for Intervention Now, the pro-war organization of which Erica was a co-chairman, Suzannah had suggested dryly that it might be as well if they confined their communications to the telephone. And when Elaine started speaking in public even these calls were discontinued.

  On the Monday following the Sunday of Pearl Harbor the offices of Intervention Now throbbed with a muted elation. Elaine foregathered with a few of Erica’s co-workers in her poster-filled office overlooking lower Fifth Avenue. After a secretary had closed the door, they sipped a toast to victory from a pint of warm champagne that Erica had brought in her handbag. It might have been indiscreet to be seen as overjoyed in a time of national sorrow.

  “No matter what this dastardly attack may have cost us,” Erica assured them solemnly, “it will be seen one day as a blessing in disguise. Hirohito will have saved democracy despite his damned yellow soul!”

  Elaine, on the way back to her desk, was informed she had a visitor waiting in the reception hall, and she found Suzannah staring sullenly at a poster of an anguished Polish peasant father holding up his murdered child. When she turned to her mother, Elaine was at once appalled by the flush on her cheeks and the hate in her eyes.

  “Dear Suzie,” she began falteringly, “we’re all together now, aren’t we?” And she held out doubtful arms as if to receive the prodigal.

  The prodigal did not rush to them.

  “I hope you’re satisfied now!” Suzannah almost shouted. “Bert was on the Arizona.”

  “Bert? On the Arizona?” For a moment Elaine could not think who Bert was. “Oh, Bert!” she cried as it came to her. “But that can’t be! Bert’s in Stanford. Bert’s not even in the service!”

  “He wasn’t until three months ago. But then he quit college and enlisted. As seaman second class. And do you know why? Because of you! Because of you and your murderous committee!”

  “You’d better come to my room,” Elaine murmured, as the alarmed receptionist arose. “It’s all right, Miss Pink. This is my daughter.”

  “I’m not going a step further into this snake pit,” Suzannah ranted on. “You needn’t worry, Miss Pink. I don’t have a gun or a bomb. I’m going to say what I came to say. It won’t take me long.” She turned back to Elaine. “My son read about you in the paper. He wrote me that if you could do what you were doing at your age, at least he could join up. And do you know what else he wrote me? That he was doing it to make up for what I was doing! That you and he had to wipe out my shame. My shame!”

  “But, Suzannah, what have you heard about him? He’s not hurt? He’s not—?”

  “Dead? Very probably. We haven’t heard anything yet. How could we? But whatever it is, I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “Oh, my poor child, how can you go on so? You’re hysterical, of course. Let me take you home. Let me—”

  “Keep your hands off me! This is what you’ve been after all my life, isn’t it? To sacrifice everything, and everybody—Daddy, me and now Bert—to your bloody France! You might as well have cut the poor boy’s throat.”

  And she was gone. Elaine hurried over to peer through the glass pane of the door into the corridor while Suzannah waited, interminably, ridiculously, for the elevator. At last the doors opened, and she almost jumped into the car.

  Elaine went back to her little office and sat at her desk and tried to think and not to think. The boy might not be dead at all. Suzannah was half crazed. Then she shook her head, as if to clear her mind of something that might destroy it if she couldn’t. For what sort of grotesque fate was it that made her so fatal to this wretched girl she had never loved? No, no, she wouldn’t think of it! Even if Bert were dead, wouldn’t many young men have to die? Why should Bert Priest be exempt?

  She would go in to see Erica in a minute. Erica would be charming and sympathetic, and there was a war to win, and they were on the side of the angels. Very well, they would act like angels! She should be able to sell a million war bonds as the grandmother of its first victim.

  Portrait of the Artist by Another

  THE REPUTATION of Eric Stair, who was little known at the time of his death in the Normandy invasion of 1944, has grown steadily in the last four decades, and the retrospective show this year at the Guggenheim has given him a sure place among the abstract expressionists, although that term was not used in his lifetime. Walking down the circular ramp past those large imperial bursts of color; those zigzagging triangles of angry red piercing areas of cerulean blue which seem to threaten, in retaliation, to encompass and smother the triangles; those green submarine regions occupied by polyp-like figures; those strangely luminous
squares of inky black, I wondered that there could ever have been a time when Eric Stair had not struck me as a wonderful painter. And yet I could well remember myself as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at St. Lawrence’s in 1934 staring with bewilderment at the daubs of the new history teacher from Toronto who had turned his dormitory study into a studio. Nothing could have seemed stranger or more out of place on that New England campus than an abstract painter who was rumored not even to believe in God.

  My bewilderment, at any rate, had not lasted long; I had soon become an admirer of the man without whose example I might never have become a professional painter at all. Not that I have become an abstract expressionist. Far from it. What, I wonder, would Eric have thought of my portraits? Would he have simply raised those rounded shoulders and grinned his square-faced grin at the sight of all those presidents of clubs and corporations, those eminent doctors and judges who make up the portfolio of the man sometimes known as a “board room portraitist”? “Jamie Abercrombie,” I seem to hear him saying, “may have made it into the world of art, but he has certainly carted all his lares and penates along with him!”

  What I suppose I shall never fathom, no matter how deeply I dive into the subaqueous caverns of the past, is the exact balance between benefit and detriment that I derived as a painter from my juvenile acquaintance with Eric Stair. If it be true that his example deflected me from the paths of banking or law, it may also be the case that, discerning early how much he could accomplish in the field of the abstract, I became too fearful of competing with him there. Maybe I slammed that door prematurely. Maybe I was too anxious, in confining my art to portraiture, to hide away in a world where Eric would never seek to follow or humiliate me.

  And there is another thing. I can face it now I am growing old. Without what happened at that school might I not have painted the nude? When I cast my inner eye over the long gallery of my portraits, it strikes me how covered up the figures are, how draped and buttoned and tucked in, how expensively and colorfully added to, how bolstered and propped! Even my ladies in evening dress seem to reveal to me, in their alabaster arms and necks, in the exposed portions of their breasts and shoulders, how much more they are hiding from intrusive eyes. It has been said of Philippe de Champaigne that, being obliged as a strict Jansenist to eschew the flesh, he limited himself to ecclesiastical or judiciary subjects where all but the face and hands could be enveloped in voluminous robes, white or black or scarlet red. The peak of his great art was in the portrait of Cardinal Richelieu, where the sweeping cassock expresses the power and energy of the ruthless statesman. I have sometimes in preliminary sketches attempted to convey the character of my sitter in the suit or dress alone, as a kind of reverse nude. But that is as near as I ever come to it.