Manhattan Monologues

by Louis Auchincloss

  All this Gary had done, though somewhat differently in each case. Gilbert, for example, he had taken into the business. Gilbert, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed and blond-haired, was the charming idler of the family; he had the greatest difficulty in avoiding expulsion from different institutions of learning. Gary decided to grapple with this and to rectify his brother’s natural laziness by giving him the flattering job of acting as his personal assistant, which had the additional merit of keeping him under close observation. He was also careful to give Gilbert plenty of time off and a salary many times greater than he was worth. He turned his brother, in short, into the kind of aide every great man needs, one who is blindly devoted to the boss and can never become a rival. And Gilbert’s generous nature made him recognize all that Gary had done for him. He became his brother’s admiring slave.

  Gary’s mother had been easier to handle. Adelaide Kimball, as a devoted reader of Victorian fiction, had always had a sneaking sympathy for the British upper-class prejudice against people in “trade” and a horror of even hearing about the family business. To keep her happy and uninquiring, Gary had only to see that she had the funds to add to her collection of French paintings, drawings, porcelains and furniture. But he made himself something of an expert in her field to be sure that she bought things that would appreciate in value. So successful were they in partnership that Madame de Pompadour, he liked to say, returning to earth, would have found herself quite at home in Adelaide’s drawing room.

  His sister, May, was a high-spirited, handsome and theoretically independent woman who regarded the sexes as equal and herself fully as qualified as any man to ask and answer questions at a stockholders’ meeting. But her impatience with detail made her easily bored, and Gary knew just how to use the intricacies of trade in a way to make her throw up her hands and leave everything to management, i.e., his management. Her husband was the real problem and the most expensive to solve. That big beautiful sailing yacht and its crew had cost Gary a pretty penny, though it would have been worth twice the sum to keep its skipper away in distant seas on expeditions undertaken for the Museum of Natural History!

  And now, alas, Nick was home, with no sign of disappearing on or in the briny deep.

  Gary’s next step was to get hold of Gilbert before the latter was corrupted by Nick. But he found he had been forestalled. At the office the next day he was told that his brother was home with the flu, and when he telephoned, Gilbert’s pretty but empty-headed little blonde of a wife, obviously nervous, informed him that Gilly was sleeping and shouldn’t be disturbed. It was evident that Gilbert would do anything rather than talk to him, though he was not too ill to attend a family conference summoned by Nick at Adelaide’s apartment the very next day at six.

  Gary arrived to find Nick, May, his mother, Gilbert and Gilbert’s wife, Sophie, already grimly assembled in the drawing room. Gilbert’s expression was strained, and he avoided his brother’s sharp glances.

  Nick opened the meeting with a concise but accurate summary of the Times report, followed by a brief account of the answers he had received from an officer of the family company to questions he had put as to conditions in its plants in other countries. He ended with the suggestion that the facts were being blurred to the shareholders but that he strongly suspected things were a lot worse than the Times had implied, and he called for a total reconsideration of overseas hiring.

  In the silence that followed, Gary kept his eyes fixed on Gilbert, and when he spoke it was to ignore his brother-in-law’s oration.

  “Why didn’t you come to me, Gil? Why did you sit by and let Nick prepare all this garbage without a word to me?”

  “Because I advised him not to!” Nick broke in angrily. “Because I knew you had him paralyzed with a false sense of what he owes you at the office. Just the way you’ve shell-shocked the rest of us. It’s not to our credit, I fully admit. But all things have their end, and your game is up, Gary. You may as well face it.”

  “Nick, you’re going too far,” Gilbert protested, obviously in the greatest discomfort at being caught in the crossfire between Nick and his boss brother. “There’s no reason we can’t work these things out in a friendly and sensible fashion. And it wasn’t Nick who first put me on to what we were doing abroad,” he continued, turning at last to Gary. “It was my little Sophie here.”

  “Sophie?” Gary repeated in astonishment.

  Gilbert’s wife spoke up now in a flurry of shyness. “It was at a lecture I attended at the New School for Social Research. The speaker mentioned the name of your company and went on to give some appalling figures. I was so ashamed that I hid my face when I left the classroom, even though nobody knew who I was.”

  “Gary, my dear,” his mother intervened, “I’m sure you will see to it that something is done to alleviate these appalling conditions.”

  “I can assure you, Mother, that I will, and please forgive me for the rude term I used to describe Nick’s proposal.”

  He closed his eyes and his lips tightly for a second while he got hold of himself. After all, what was it but the continuation of a struggle in which he had always had the foresight and will power to win?

  When he came home and described the meeting to Katrina, it was immediately apparent that, unlike her usual reaction, she was not only listening but listening intently.

  “I knew there was going to be a flap this evening,” she remarked when he finished. “Sophie called me this morning after you’d left for the office. She poured it all out. Odd that such a little booby should be the one to upset the apple cart, but that’s often the way, isn’t it? And Gilbert’s more under her thumb than yours. And your mother will always side with the majority. Well, that leaves you with one thing to do, doesn’t it?”

  “And that is?”

  “The merger, or course. The merger with United Metals.”

  “Oh, Katrina!” he groaned.

  “I know, my dear, how painful it will be for you to lose control of a business that has been your life’s work. But face it. You’ve already lost control.”

  He shook his head in misery. Katrina was life; she was market; she was truth. She knew that the merger, astutely handled—and who could handle it better than he?—would make them even richer. Nothing else really mattered to her, and she had never pretended that it did. His life was over.

  ***

  The right solution didn’t take long; right solutions rarely do. Harry Welles, president of United Metals, only once touched significantly on the vital issue in the merger talks, and that was when he was lunching alone with Gary in a private dining room in his office suite to arrange the latter’s “golden parachute.” In truth, it was more like a platinum one.

  “Of course, you know, Gary, that one of the things we’ve most coveted in your company is yourself. I make no secret of it. We expect to call on your expertise in labor management in all of our new third world plants.”

  “And you’re aware of my family’s attitude about that.”

  “Well aware. That’s why we’ve made it clear in all our talks with the Kimballs that our policies abroad will undergo a drastic reassessment.”

  “And after the reassessment?”

  Was it a nervous twitch of Welles’s eyelid or a wink? “I believe the French have an expression: the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing?”

  ***

  Two years after the merger, when Nick Gilder ruefully decided that there had been no basic change in hiring policies abroad, he advised his wife and mother-in-law to sell out what was only a small minority position in the united companies. Gilbert had already done so, to retire to his ranch in Wyoming. The Kimballs almost doubled their investment, and Adelaide has recently bought a magnificent Lancret and Nick a new yacht. But Gary, holding on to his investment, has outdone them all. None of them, however, will speak to him. He is alone at last with Katrina.

  The Scarlet Letters

  IN THE midsummer of 1947 the coastal village of Glenville on the opulent north sh
ore of Long Island was shaken by scandal. At least its principal citizens were so affected: summer and weekend residents, commuters to the big city and proprietors of the larger stores. It was not to be expected that the smaller folk would be much affected by adultery in the family of Arnold Dillard, distinguished counsel though he was to many great corporations and managing partner of the Wall Street law firm of Dillard, Kaye & Devens, known popularly as Dillard Kaye or simply Dillard K. But when the adulterer was none other than Rodman Jessup, not only the son-in-law and junior partner of Dillard but his special favorite and all-but-designated successor, a young man universally admired in the neighborhood for his impeccable morals and high ideals, and when his partner in crime, Mrs. Lila Fisk, was a middle-aged Manhattan society woman of fading charms and loose behavior, the effect on the good burghers of Glenville was comparable to that of the Hebrews when Delilah cut off Samson’s curly locks. A champion had inexplicably fallen; they could only raise their hands and deplore the degeneracy of the times. Small wonder that the planet was menaced again with a third world war!

  No one had seen a flaw in the Jessups’ marriage. Lavinia, or Vinnie, the most adored by Dillard of his four daughters, had introduced her future husband to her father when he was a law student at Columbia, almost as though she were bringing him the son he had never had and was supposed to have passionately wanted. Pretty, bright, charming and amiable, now the mother of two daughters herself, Vinnie and her handsome husband were the undisputed leaders of Glenville’s younger set.

  Would Rod now come to his senses? Would he drop to his knees before his wronged bride and beg her forgiveness? Was not his legal career as well as his marriage at stake? But Rod showed no signs of repentance. He left his home in Glenville and his apartment in town and holed up in his club. He was seen at night spots with the elegantly clad Mrs. Fisk. They posed for their picture together at a charity ball. Indeed, he seemed intent on flaunting the affair. Next, it was heard that he had submitted his resignation to Dillard Kaye and that it had been accepted. Finally, it became known that Vinnie was suing him for divorce in New York on the grounds of adultery and that representing her in her father’s firm was none other than Harry Hammersly, the young bachelor partner who had been known as Rod’s best friend.

  ***

  Arnold Dillard had never faced a personal emotional crisis as bewildering and upsetting as that caused by his son-in-law’s unexampled conduct. He could not seem to find, in the well-stocked armory of his selected resources, the tool to deal with it. He had always secretly lauded himself on a precise understanding of what he liked to think of as his own highly individual and complex double personality. He had formulated a diagnosis of himself as a kind of Jekyll and Hyde—eliminating, of course, the darkest evil of the latter—and he had practiced the inner therapy (harmless, as he had then believed) of dramatizing himself as two brilliant but near opposite types. One, of course, was the prominent public figure, large, bony, broad-shouldered, grizzled, high-browed and expensively tweeded, with hard gray eyes that, however, could twinkle as well as rebuke, a legal scholar and philosopher as well as a deft administrator, a lofty idealist who was yet capable of a diplomatic compromise. The other was a man of concealed depressions, the victim of black moods in which he believed in nobody and nothing and would try to console himself behind the locked door of his study with a bottle of whiskey. But there was also a horrid little spy in his psyche that whispered to him that his melancholia was the finishing touch that the first man needed for a properly dramatic portrait.

  And now, due no doubt to the high pitch of his resentment of the man who had betrayed his favorite daughter—and her father, too, oh, yes, himself as well—a fourth Arnold Dillard was emerging, a grotesque caricature of the horrid little whispering spy, a shrill hyena accusing the first two Dillards of playing God and Satan in their own Paradise Lost. Was he having a true nervous breakdown at long last?

  He recalled with a searing clarity the image of the twenty-three-year-old Rodman Jessup who had first applied for a job at Dillard Kaye in the fall of 1935. Under the high-standing, wavy blond hair was a beautiful boyish face, the face of a fine clean youth, a kind of all-American cartoon. Yet the blue-gray eyes had a mature and rather fixed stare, and one felt that the muscular, well-shaped body under the tight white spotless summer suit would respond instantly to anything those eyes saw as needing correction.

  Arnold had been half-apologetic about the exiguous salary then offered.

  “That’s all right, sir,” was the prompt response. “I’m looking for opportunity rather than remuneration. I’ve had to work my way through Columbia College and Law School, so I know how to live on a shoestring. And if I may say so, sir, it was hearing you speak at law school commencement last year that made me apply here first. I liked the way you put the high role that lawyers can play in our business system.”

  Arnold looked at him carefully for a moment. “My daughter Lavinia is a friend of yours, I believe.”

  “I am honored if she so describes me, sir. But I wasn’t going to mention her.”

  Of course, Rod was promptly hired. He had been editor-in-chief of his law journal and was clearly a “catch.” And what, of course, clinched the matter was that Vinnie had confided in her father (though not in her mother, she flatteringly assured him, and certainly not in Rodman) her fixed determination to marry this young man.

  Arnold had succumbed to the somewhat perverse temptation to submit this self-assured intruder into his family midst to the toughest office test, so he assigned the new recruit to the job of acting as his principal assistant in the most complicated of corporate reorganizations. Rod had been extraordinary. He toiled away, night and day, even sleeping on a couch in the law library, until he mastered every detail of the massive transaction with a clarity of mind and an organizing capability that had astonished and delighted his new boss. When the job was finished, Arnold took him out to a Lucullan dinner at the most expensive French restaurant in town, where, he was pleased to note, his guest partook freely of three famous wines without slurring a syllable.

  As they sat over their cognac afterward, Arnold embarked on a more personal note. “Well, my boy, now you’ve had a glimpse of what a corporate law practice is all about, I daresay it strikes a young idealist like yourself as something a bit dustier than you’d expected. Even a bit grubbier. Isn’t that so? You know the poem about the young Apollo, tiptoe on the verge of strife? How does it go? ‘Magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life’? Well, I suppose the ‘magnificently’ is something.”

  “But the details are nothing, sir, if the whole is good.”

  “You find a corporate reorganization good? You interest

  “Isn’t it part of the social machinery designed to get us out of this Depression? How can that not be good?

  “Well, you might argue that in the matter we’ve just finished. But I’m afraid, my friend, you’ll find that some reorganizations have no purpose loftier than to establish the control of one set of pirates over another.”

  Arnold, facing the cool responding stare of those blue-gray eyes, felt almost ashamed of himself. What was he doing now, old ham that he was, but trying to astonish a young man with the broad reach of his mind into the bottom as well as the top of a law practice?

  “But those things are going to be done anyway, sir” was Rod’s sturdy reply. “And, as I see it, it’s our job to make sure that they are done efficiently and legally. In a democracy, and in a free market, or as free as practicable, we have to let businessmen and capitalists to some extent work things out their own way. But as lawyers we can see that they work it out strictly within the law. It doesn’t so much matter what they do as long as everyone can see it. Then, if laws have to be changed, the voters will know what to change.”

  Arnold nodded, musingly. “Which means that a lawyer doesn’t really need a conscience at all?”

  “Or the highest and most sensitive kind. Like yours, sir.”

  This had all
been very gratifying, and the young man was evidently sincere, if almost too much so. It had not taken more than a few months before it was recognized by all twenty partners and sixty clerks of the firm that young Jessup had been enlisted among the small group of selected associates who worked almost exclusively for the senior partner. Within a year he became Arnold’s son-in-law, and in another five he was made the youngest of his partners. A tour of naval duty in the Pacific war only added to his luster, and he and Vinnie, neighbors of her parents in town and tenants of a cottage on the latters’ estate in Glenville, became as essential to Arnold’s family as they were to his law practice. Even Vinnie’s younger sisters adored their handsome and intriguingly serious brother-in-law and sought his approval of their boyfriends.

  There were times when Arnold liked to think of himself as an aging Hadrian leaning on the sturdy shoulders of a stalwart Antinoüs, on whose total fidelity he could confidently rely to help him bear the burdens of the empire. But there were also moments when he was subject to the uncomfortable suspicion that his protégé was gaining control of his inner being and becoming as much a guide as a support. If there was the hint of a fanatic in Rod, there might also be the hint of a fanatic’s strength.