Manhattan Monologues

by Louis Auchincloss

  At Saint Jude’s I was not exactly unpopular—my enthusiasm for the roughest kind of football and my skill at the game ensured me a certain respect—but I was not popular. My indifference to the values held dear by most of the boys would have subjected me to severe physical punishment had my ready, too ready fists not kept my schoolmates at bay, and my interference in the hazing of younger and weaker boys was considered a heresy to a sacred tradition. I didn’t even have the satisfaction of imagining that I was a kind of Round Table knight coming to the rescue of the beset, for the surging fury I felt in my throat and chest when I beheld a boy attacked by others led me to a violence that on one occasion resulted in my near expulsion from the school. The headmaster himself informed me sternly that my reaction had been disproportionate to the cause and counseled me to consider in the future whether my urge to inflict punishment wasn’t the same as what I sought to punish. Reluctantly, I conceded to myself that he might have a point, and made efforts thereafter to avert my eyes from scenes of threatened injustice. But this only intensified my innate insociability.

  St. Jude’s, like other New England church schools in the 1930s, was for boys and had only male masters. The faculty wives lived off campus and appeared only at occasional lunches in the dining hall and for Sunday chapel, and most of them had little enough appeal to a boy’s wandering eye. And as for the cleaning women and waitresses, they had been picked by a housekeeper with an eye ready to spot and reject the least pretense of pulchritude. Movies were rarely allowed; home leave was granted only for family weddings or funerals; and it was rumored that saltpeter was put in our soup to reduce bestial cravings. The boys had recourse only to masturbation, solitary or what was called “mutual.”

  Though I was not popular, my muscular figure attracted its share of lewd invitations, which at first I scornfully rejected. But, hot with sexual frustration, I at last succumbed, though I was disgusted with myself for so doing and would hardly speak to my partner thereafter. I thought it a poor and degrading thing to do with one’s sexual apparatus, and I would never have done it, for example, with my one friend, Newton Chandler, a small serious Boston boy whose high ideals seemed to me sincere enough not to be sneered at, and who had penetrated my reserve to discuss everything from our respective families to the existence of God, with a disregard for my churlish manners that I appreciate to this day. I knew that Newt disapproved of mutual masturbation, though he never mentioned it.

  It was through Newt that I became a protégé of Mr. Trumbull, a young, naïve and passionately enthusiastic English teacher who took very seriously indeed his self-imposed mission to enrich the lives of schoolboys with romantic poetry. I am sure it was Newt who persuaded Trumbull, who came to the school on his first academic assignment in our last year there, that I might be an interesting convert, and the young master’s friendship made those final months at Saint Jude’s less lonely for me when Newt, because of a lung problem, had to spend the winter in New Mexico.

  My classmates and I were seventeen, and senior year gave us more privileges. I could spend a Sunday afternoon at the Trumbulls’ house if I was invited or take a canoe alone on the river. We had graduated from nighttime sexual games in the dormitory; we met girls at dances on vacations, and some of us engaged in amorous correspondence. I enjoyed reading poetry and discussing it with Mr. Trumbull. His pretty but sullen young wife sometimes sat with us and listened, but after a while, undoubtedly bored, she would take herself off. She would look at me, however, and I was old enough to know what her look meant. I hardly dared to think that she meant anything more, but I thought of her lustfully at night.

  Wordsworth was Mr. Trumbull’s favorite poet, and I recall a heated discussion that he and I had about the sage of Grasmere’s proposition that “one impulse from a vernal wood” could teach us more of man than all the philosophers of yore. I maintained that Wordsworth had lived before the age of magnified camera studies of insect and plant life, which showed the never-ending consumption of one species by another.

  “Why, even the plants do it!” I exclaimed. “There are those which close their petals to catch some poor feeding bug. It’s eat or be eaten. That’s your impulse from that vernal wood. Nature is savage. And man is savage!”

  “Even civilized man?”

  “Who’s civilized? The great so-called civilizations have been the result of bloody conquests. There’s a savage in every soldier.”

  “You admit no exceptions?”

  “Well, maybe the Romans. A little. In Rome they disciplined the savage in themselves to create a force that could bring order to a world of warring nations.”

  “You’d like to have lived in Rome, Robin?”

  “I wouldn’t have minded.”

  “And killed people?”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to kill anyone, Mr. Trumbull?”

  I remember how he shuddered. “Not consciously.” And then it was like him to go off on a tangent like the following: “But those horrible games in the arena; would you have liked going to them?”

  “Oh, that was later, in the Empire. They probably picked up bad habits from the Carthaginians. No, the Republic would have been my affair. When you could put the brute in you to work—useful work. Killing raiding barbarians. Quelling silly religious wars. Policing the world.”

  “Religion? Would you have liked a religion where gods seduced mortals and turned them into trees and things?”

  “No sillier than one whose god created sinful men in order to redeem a chosen few.”

  “You’re not even a monotheist?”

  “No. I’m not sure I believe in any god. But if I have to believe in one, why shouldn’t I believe in many? Why is believing in one considered such an advance over paganism? The headmaster in sacred studies is always prating about how the Jews had a genius for religion because they invented Jehovah. But I prefer Olympus! I want Venus and Mars, and I like to think of them caught bareassed in the act by Vulcan’s net!”

  I was still immature enough to want to shock my one faculty friend, and his wife, of course, was out of the room when I made my last remark. But I had reason later to believe that she was standing just outside the door. As I have said, she was pretty, a lively brunette with a trim figure, and it was certainly not to hear my silly historical theories that she eavesdropped. Why had she married Trumbull? Probably to get away from something worse. I knew nothing of her background except that it was obviously a humbler one than those of the other school wives. She must have had a mean enough social life on campus.

  Mr. Trumbull’s next comment on my religious speculations showed that he was at last alarmed at how far he may have permitted me to travel mentally beyond the school compound. “I hope you don’t say these things, Robin, to anyone but me. People, even schoolmasters, don’t much care what you think. But what you say—I mean what you say seriously—is another matter.”

  But I was approaching a crisis in my life that involved neither thinking nor saying, and was more important than either. And once again it was poor Mr. Trumbull who indirectly—most indirectly—supplied the occasion.

  One Sunday afternoon, as I was making my solitary way to the river, a woman stepped into the path from the woods some distance ahead of me. As she was evidently awaiting me, I accelerated my pace and discovered it was Mrs. Trumbull.

  “May I join you, Robin?”

  I knew at once that something was up, but my throat was so thick and tight that I could only nod.

  “There’s a nice little path down to Merrill’s Pond,” she continued in a flat tone. “No one ever seems to use it. We can have it all to ourselves. Just Venus and Mars. No Vulcan.”

  Again, I nodded and followed her lead. I could hardly breathe, in my excitement and anticipation. Then, suddenly, but as if in accordance with a plan, she struck into the forest and we made our slow way through underbrush to a little clearing, where she took off her coat and spread it on the ground. When she spoke, her tone was clear and definite.

  “Remembe
r. What we need never admit never happened.”

  After which she quickly stripped, and I followed suit, again without a word. I had a moment to reflect that she showed an ease and habit that must have been learned before her match to poor Trumbull. She helped me and guided me, but I didn’t need much teaching, and on our third orgasm I felt I had graduated from a tyro to Don Juan. When I think of all the literature that has been written about the awkwardness of initial sexual encounters, it seems a miracle that the pleasure of my first adventure has been equaled but never surpassed.

  Mrs. Trumbull and I found occasion to repeat our experience twice before my graduation in June, after which she and her husband went west, to a school where he had been offered a better position, and I never saw them again.

  Yet the affair, if it merited the term, changed my life. I was exhilarated, inebriated; in short, I was a new man. All guilt about sexual fantasies and sexual acts vanished away; I might have been Siegfried, who had braved Loge’s fire to mount Briinhilde. I was sure that I had done the right thing, physically, spiritually, even morally. Mrs. Trumbull had needed me, needed me badly. I hadn’t taken anything from her husband that he really wanted, and his wife was probably half-crazed by his obsession with Wordsworth and his smug assurance that an occasional hug and some hasty Saturday night coitus would satisfy her. What he didn’t know would never hurt him and might even save his marriage.

  Except that it didn’t. Some two years later, when I was a junior at Yale, I heard that the Trumbulls had broken up. Mother told me, on a weekend when I was home, after the guests at one of her Sunday lunches had departed and she and I were sitting alone together, over a half-finished crême-dementhe, in her lovely living room.

  “Agnes Seely told me. She has a boy there, and it appears there was some sort of scandal about an affair with another master. I pricked up my ears because Trumbull was the teacher—was he not?—with whom you were so close your last year at Saint Jude’s?”

  “Not really,” I replied. “We never saw eye to eye. Still, it was nice to have someone in that stuffy academy to talk to. But it was his wife who really taught me about life.”

  “I hope you don’t mean what you seem to mean.”

  “Oh, but I do.” Mother had now become my nearest confidant, closer than Newt, with whom I roomed at Yale. I liked to watch the avidity with which her curiosity and fascination overcame her prudish inheritance. She must have felt that the best way to help her beloved firstborn was to understand him, and I think that she was quite right. As I believed that I was quite right in helping her widen her moral horizon and live in what I conceived to be the real world. So I told her about myself and Mrs. Trumbull.

  “Adultery, Robin! At barely eighteen! Did you have no feeling that what you were doing was wrong?”

  “None at all. We didn’t tell Trumbull; we took great care not to tell a soul. Any wrong would have been in the telling. The doing was what nature called on us to do. And we were both the better for it.”

  “Are you telling me, Robin Belknap, that there’s nothing wrong with men and women making love—if that’s what you call it—whenever they choose, regardless of their commitments to others?”

  “I’d qualify your ‘whenever.’ As a matter of taste, I shun promiscuity. And I think the greatest care should be taken to avoid unwanted pregnancies or to cause jealousy in those with more restricted views.”

  “More restricted views! I like that! I suppose you mean some benighted old-fashioned husband or wife.”

  “Exactly. To me it’s all a matter of tact and not of morals. If two people can satisfy their deepest and most natural urges without outraging others, I see no wrong in it.”

  “But how can they? Look at your Trumbulls. Do you think she never threw in her husband’s face what a better time she probably had with you?”

  “I hope it was more than probably. But if she did, she did wrong. That’s not my business.”

  “How can you say that, when you aroused her and excited her and very likely made her discontented with her marriage?”

  “She was already that. But you may be right. Maybe I should take some blame for what happened to her marriage, though I think that was coming anyway. And remember that I was young and it was my first time and that she seduced me. I hope, if I get involved in another such situation, that I’ll handle it better.”

  “But, my dear boy, these things, as you know, are very explosive. It’s impossible to keep them secret.”

  “Difficult, certainly. Not impossible. But that’s not the point. The point I’m making is that if one can keep them secret, they’re no more immoral than an act of masturbation.”

  “Please, dear! I’m not as liberated as you.”

  “No, but you’re getting there. Look, Ma. You know there’s some sense in what I’m saying. You know I’m not an immoral person.”

  “Yes, I do know that. And you never have been. I remember as a boy how you blew your poor sister up when she kept library books out overtime.”

  “She kept dozens! And for months, too. I tried to impress on her that we weren’t that kind of people.”

  “Everything’s wrong but free sex? Is that it?”

  “Well, isn’t most people’s moral code that everything’s right but free sex?”

  “Right?”

  “In the sense of all right. Or not so bad. I leave out felonies. I’m talking about the moral code of the people we know. They put up with much more than I’m willing to: lying, cheating, exploiting, getting ahead of each other any way they can, pushing, shoving, showing a minimum of compassion or generosity. But when it comes to sex, whoa!”

  “What would your father say to all this?”

  “I wouldn’t be having this talk with Dad. He’s been broken by the system.”

  “You mean by me!”

  “By you operating within the system. You’re a victim, too, Ma. Only you know it. That’s your salvation.”

  “Or my damnation. However, watch out, my child. What you believe could land you in serious trouble. And I won’t have that, because I love you.” She glanced at her watch. “And now you’d better go if you’re going to catch the four o’clock to New Haven.”

  ***

  I sometimes fancy that society used Olivia, as the Philistines used Delilah with Samson, to betray me to my enemies. She was a Philadelphia girl, from Chestnut Hill really, of one of the oldest families, the Peytons, and she concealed, beneath her large but superbly shaped torso and her large handsome Grecian features, a conservatism that was all the fiercer for its studied suppression. A radiantly smiling Olivia gave the convincing appearance of being wide open to a new world and a world of new things. I met her at the Yale prom in my senior year, when she was Newt Chandler’s date. Newt, with his usual excessive generosity, made no objection when I hardly left their side during the entire weekend. I was enchanted with Olivia from the beginning.

  Newt and I had one of our frankest talks when the weekend was over and Olivia had returned to Chestnut Hill.

  “No need to apologize for being such a buttinsky,” he assured me coolly. “I am quite inured to your grabbiness. As a matter of fact, I invited Olivia with you in mind. She and I are old summer pals from Northeast Harbor, and there’s never been anything between us but the best rapport. It occurred to me that she might be just what the doctor would order for you.”

  “And what gave you that idea?”

  “I thought she might civilize you. She’s too good and too clever for you to dismiss her in that scornful way you do most of the girls of your background. And too physically attractive not to grab an old lecher like you.”

  “So that’s what there’s in it for me. What’s in it for her? Isn’t there bigger game at home? Aren’t there any Drexels or Biddies available?”

  “I think she needs more of a challenge. I’ll miss my guess if she doesn’t want to lead the truculent Robin Belknap around the ring of her admirers with a ring through his nose.”

  Well, that was pr
etty much what she accomplished, despite the warning given by my friend. I fell in love with Olivia, and she returned my feeling, at least to the extent to which she was capable, which had its limits. We met every weekend in New York, New Haven or Philadelphia, and I found her exuberantly willing to share whatever activity I suggested, from sailing on Long Island Sound to taking roller-coaster rides in Coney Island. She was never tired, never in low spirits. She was willing to neck, even enthusiastically, but she firmly resisted any effort on my part to promote greater intimacy. She did not resent it, however; she regarded it as conduct to be expected of a male but to be checked by a jeune fille à marier, as she put it, only half-mockingly, in French.

  I had the prospect of a good job in a bank that was a client of my father’s firm, and when I proposed that we marry right after my Yale graduation, she agreed, but I found that she could be very definite about her conditions.