Watchfires

by Louis Auchincloss

  Dexter stamped on the parquet floor. "Damn his feelings! Annie, this thing has got to stop. I want you to give me your word that you will never see Bleeker alone again!"

  "Not see Juley alone?" Annie's pout would have been an appropriate response to the request that she give up a night at the opera. "I couldn't promise you any such thing. Is a girl to have no fun after she's married?"

  "Do you have any conception of the danger you're in?" Dexter demanded, exasperated by her lightness. "Charley was in an absolute frenzy of jealousy when he came to the house this morning. It was all I could do to get him to listen to reason. If he blows up again, I won't be able to contain him. This thing will be all over town, and you'll be ruined."

  "Ruined?"

  "Your reputation, I mean. And how do you expect to live in a city like New York without a reputation?"

  "I was beginning to wonder how I could live in it with one. Have you any conception what it's like for a young woman with any spirit to live with a man as moody and thirsty as your cousin? Not to speak of the remorseless supervision of all the Handys and Fairchilds? With an aunt behind every tree and a sister behind every bush? And a brother-in-law to play the arch-snoop? What does poor little Annie have to live for?"

  "You have your child."

  "There are women, I suppose, who can live for their children. Rosalie, I dare say, is one. I am not."

  Dexter paused to consider the threat in her tone. "What are you trying to tell me, Annie?"

  She jumped to her feet in a sudden flare of temper. "Just this! That if you push me too far you'll wake up one morning to discover that Juley and I have decamped! That we've run off to..." She paused, and then flung her arms up as a destination came to her. "To Venice!"

  Dexter was beside himself. "You'd do that!" he almost shouted. "You'd go off with that cad? That greasy bounder? You care that much for that scribbling climber? That pompous show-off? That ... poetaster?"

  "It would be you who had driven me to find out how much I cared!"

  He saw that he would have to interrupt her game. She was having much too good a time provoking him.

  "Let's sit down and discuss this," he said in a more reasonable tone, and they both sat, or rather perched, on the edge of the ottoman. "Let me draw you a picture of what your life would be like in Venice."

  "Oh, I haven't settled on Venice."

  "Venice, Florence, Paris, it doesn't matter. To begin with, you wouldn't be received by any respectable people."

  "How dreadful!"

  "You say that now, because you take dull, respectable people for granted. You can afford to despise them. But dull respectable people can assume a very different look when they slam their doors in your face."

  "We'd see the real people. The artists and writers."

  "You mean the would-be artists and writers. The hacks. The failures. The good ones are just as anxious to get into society as anyone else. But pass that for the moment. What would you live on?"

  "Why, just what I mostly live on now, thank you very much. My own trust fund."

  "Your father has the discretion to withhold the income. How much do you think he'd pay to support you in that kind of menage? And what about little Kate? Do you think for a moment that Charley would allow his daughter to be brought up abroad by you and your ... your..."

  "My paramour!" Annie clasped her hands exultantly.

  "I can't even utter the word. And how will Bleeker react when he finds out that his ticket to society, his greatest asset, has turned herself into his greatest liability? How long do you think he'll stick?"

  "Longer than you think. You underestimate my charms."

  "I have never underestimated your charms! But the combined charms of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy couldn't hold a man like Bleeker under those circumstances!"

  "Ah, there you're wrong." Annie shook her head now with something like gravity. "Poor Juley. I think he really loves me. No, it would not be he who would be the first to crack." For several moments she contemplated her hands, folded in her lap. "You paint a dismal picture."

  "I am only trying to spare you the cruelty of such an experience."

  Suddenly, startlingly, she was weeping. Her head was bent forward, and her thin shoulders were shaking. Only the horrid vision of an embrace as Bleeker's way of comforting her kept him from putting his arms around her. And then she was suddenly on her feet again, striding rapidly back and forth across the gallery. Her voice was angry, cutting.

  "My life is so ... abject! So unutterably abject. What in God's name am I to do? It's all very well for you to lecture me about morality, but what do you do to help me? You talk about respectable people slamming doors in my face, but isn't that just what you're doing? Why should it matter to me whether they slam them in New York or in Venice? All I know is that that's what doors seem to be for!"

  Dexter rose and held his arms out to her pleadingly. "Annie, listen to me. You have a mind. A beautiful mind. You've studied art and music. You've traveled in Europe. Just now you compared me to a Gothic tympanum. How many women in New York would even know what a Gothic tympanum is? Doesn't the life of the intellect offer you any satisfaction? You used to be a great reader."

  "So that's what good people do? They read! And what do you suppose they read about? What the bad people are doing!" When he looked blank at this, she continued indignantly, "Well, isn't that what all those books were about that you used to give me? Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and The Scarlet Letter? Passion and adultery and bigamy?"

  "But those novels all point out the disastrous effects of those things!"

  "But the disasters come after. Maybe the passion was worth it."

  Dexter stared at her in dismay. "Surely you don't mean that you have really so misconstrued those writers as to suggest that...?"

  "Let me change the target." Annie had no idea of being trapped in a literary debate. "Do books and art and music mean that much to you? Do Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Italian opera make up to you for the dullness of your life with Rosalie?"

  Dexter turned away quickly. He did not even know quite whom he was protecting by hiding the pain that he knew must be showing in his face: Rosalie, himself or even Annie. All he was sure of was that it was somehow not to be borne that his life with Rosalie should be described in that way.

  "Oh, Dexter, now I've hurt you! I didn't really mean to. But you put me in a position where I have no alternative. I have to make you see these things! You can put up with dullness at home because your real life is in your law office. That is where you live and breathe and have your being. But we poor wives don't have that. Rosalie and Jo are always talking about what miserable lives the slaves have down South, but they can't see that they're slaves themselves." Now she took him by the elbow and turned him around to face her, so that he should see her mimic him as a lawyer. She coughed and frowned as she pretended to be studying a paper. " 'Let's see. What have we on the diary this morning, Miss Somers? Oh, yes, the Annie Fairchild matter. I'd better run up and see the little woman and put some sense in her head. This is not the kind of thing we care to see in court, is it?'"

  He gripped her hands in his. "Do you think I see you as a case, Annie? Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me that I see you as just a case?"

  She broke away from him, shrugging impatiently, and walked to one of the two west windows. After a few minutes of looking down at the avenue, she turned to him with an air of embittered resolution.

  "Very well, Dexter, I see it's no use. You're determined to win. I am not to be allowed to go on with my harmless flirtation. I am embarrassed to call it even that. So be it. Have it your way. But mind you, you will have to make it up to me! You will be responsible for seeing that I don't die of boredom."

  "Oh, we'll see to that!" he exclaimed, exultant.

  "We? I mean you!"

  "All right, me. May I instruct Mr. Bleeker that I shall be representing you?"

  For once he had surprised her. "You mean you're going to see him?"
/>
  "Certainly, I'm going to see him."

  "And what will you say to him?"

  "I think you can trust me with that."

  "But, Dexter, you'll promise to be a gentleman!"

  "Quite as much as he is, I promise."

  "You look so fierce!" Suddenly she burst again into her high mocking laugh. "My knight! My white knight!"

  He decided it was time he left. In another minute she might withdraw her commission.

  5

  DEXTER, in the years immediately following his marriage, used to tell himself that it had worked out a good deal more happily than he could possibly have anticipated from its start. In the first place, Rosalie had proved herself a better sport than most girls of her background. She seemed resolved to keep a guard on her critical tongue. If she would not go so far as to express enthusiasm for his enthusiasms, at least she would not openly deprecate them. Secondly, as Dexter had rightly suspected, the satisfactions of sex made up for a good many differences of opinion. And, finally, the arrival of children took up much of the attention that might otherwise have been directed to a husband's shortcomings. Rosalie was the kind of mother who adored babies to the point of cooling off a bit when time had made them less cunning, and Dexter had been free to work on briefs on nights when she fretted by the cradles of her sick children, Fred and Selby and little Charles, who, alas, had died in his first year.

  But there was still no question that Rosalie continued to be irked that her life should so blandly follow the pattern laid down by her forebears. It was at times disheartening to a hard-working husband not to feel that his wife supported him all the way. There were even moments when Dexter contemplated with envy the image of the frontier wife, standing with shouldered musket at the stockade gate, happy to share the dangers of a husband off fighting the Indians. But, of course, he always recognized that he had no right to expect any such loyalty. If ever a man had walked into a marriage with eyes wide open, it was he.

  A man, however, could not be always judicial. What did Rosalie want? he would sometimes testily ask himself. Did she want him to throw up his law practice and take her west in a covered wagon? Not at all. She was much too concerned about the health of her infants. Did she want him to eschew society and lead her into the paths of letters, art and music? Not at all. She was much too dutiful about her friends and relations and not in the least intellectual. What did she want then? Oh, she wanted, he supposed impatiently, to lead, more or less, the life she was leading, only for him to be less sure that it was the right one.

  Early in their marriage, however, something occurred to convince him that, whatever Rosalie's evaluation of himself, she could still be intensely possessive. No part of Dexter Fairchild was going to be lightly relinquished to anyone else, particularly to her youngest sister Annie, who had been touring Europe with an aunt during the year of Dexter's courtship and who had returned just in time to be a bridesmaid.

  Annie's birth had cost her mother her life, so she had never known but one parent, and that a too indulgent one. In looks, in character, in general demeanor she might have been a foundling, a strange little dark imp introduced by a not wholly kindly humorist as a contrast to her larger, more placid sisters. She was small and tense and bright; she moved in quick jerks that somehow meshed into gracefulness, and she constantly indulged in a high, sharp laugh. Whether because she had never known a mother's love or because her doting father and governesses had spoiled her, she never shared in the family's outward conventionalism. She was a rule to herself, and got her way by coaxing or wheedling or pouting or simply through a wicked display of caustic wit. When Annie was allowed to skip a Sunday service, it was less that she had made a point of freedom of religious thinking than that her father disliked her restlessness in the family pew.

  She was exceedingly pretty, with large, mocking dark eyes and raven hair, and also exceedingly flirtatious, and it was generally assumed that she would marry early and well. But this did not happen. Annie never seemed to fall in love. She turned from man to man; she broke a few hearts, but her own remained intact. She read dozens of novels, attended every play and opera, and acted as a lively hostess for her father, who ruthlessly relegated poor Joanna to temporary shade whenever Annie was available. She did not appear to be bored with any particular part of her life, but she was certainly bored with the whole. Rosalie told Dexter once that Annie's problem was that she believed in nothing.

  When Rosalie and Dexter were first married, Annie took a great interest in helping them to arrange their house, spending almost more time with them than at her father's. Lily's husband, Rutgers Van Rensselaer, was too much older to be a satisfactory brother-in-law for Annie, but what she promptly dubbed Dexter's "high seriousness" seemed to give her just the foil she needed. Annie loved to play the iconoclast with him; she made a great thing of trying to shock him with her agnosticism. On the subject of art, however, they thought too much alike for dissension, and it was their accord rather than their dissension that brought about the first remonstrance from Rosalie.

  They had been contemplating a little Kensett seascape of the rocky coastline near Newport that Dexter had just purchased and hung in the dining room.

  "It's absolutely fantastic how he combines the mist with the clarity!" Annie exclaimed, clapping her hands. "It's just that particular moment, early in the morning, when the last bit of mist is about to blow away, and you know it's going to be the most beautiful day in the whole history of the world! And those sailboats ... you can hardly see them. And suddenly, yes, there they are, tiny specks of white, almost indistinguishable against the sky. It's a trouvaille, Dexter. You'll be a Maecenas!"

  "Rosalie's not so sure."

  "Oh, Rosalie's like Papa. She wants things to be just so. 'What does this man Kensett think he's painting? A clear day or a misty one? Why doesn't he make up his mind?'"

  Annie adopted so comically Rosalie's "Do you call that art?" look that Dexter found himself bursting into disloyal laughter. It was this that Rosalie heard from the hall and that prompted her later to suggest to him that Annie should spend less time in their house.

  "But why, darling?"

  "Do I really have to tell you why, Dexter?"

  That was all that was said on the subject, but it struck instant terror to his heart. Had he, without even being aware of it, wandered that close to the primrose path that had conducted his father straight to hell?

  At first he had tried desperately to close his mind to the suggestion. Rosalie, like most young wives, was absurdly jealous and suspicious. All the Handy sisters resented Annie. But his arguments simply fell to pieces before the continued image in his mind of Rosalie's pointing finger. How could he not look where it pointed? How could he any longer delude himself that his attraction to Annie was that of a normally affectionate man for a kitten, a puppy dog, a bunny rabbit, a darling little girl not quite nubile? No, no, it was a burning lust.

  The only reason he had been able to cover this over with such ridiculous veils and rags, like a nude male statue in an artist's studio hastily draped before the advent of a ladies' class, was that he had never been visited by a burning lust before. And suddenly, shockingly, a thrilling vision of what the life of the flesh might have been had he married Annie burst upon him!

  But this vision did not stay. There was a kind of arid consolation in his rapid recognition that he had not, after all, missed the bliss of such a marriage. For such marriages simply did not exist. The intensity of his attraction to Annie had its basis in her moral unavailability. She was forbidden fruit. His importunate physical need of her and his fear of hurting Rosalie were part and parcel of the same thing. Perhaps Rosalie's warning had come just in time. Putting his hands together in silent prayer, Dexter at last forgave his dead father.

  Annie came to the house now only with Mr. Handy or Joanna. She made no reference to this change in her habits and seemed oddly subdued with Dexter. Had she felt some of the same attraction? He hardly dared hope so. He must have seemed
too old to her. But he had been too scared not to be almost stiffly formal with her now.

  "You've changed," she told him briefly. "I suppose that's what marriage does to people. Will I become as dull as you and Rosalie when I marry?"

  He was afraid to answer her seriously.

  Not long after this his cousin Charley, at one of their lunches downtown, asked him abruptly:

  "Why do you never ask me to your house with the lovely Annie? Are you keeping her to yourself?"

  Dexter, startled, stared at his younger partner as if he had just received a message from a higher sphere. Wasn't it plain enough? How could he have missed it before? Manifestly, it was his duty to foster a match between a sister-in-law so perilously at loose ends and this charming blond, blue-eyed, curly-haired cousin. A second Handy-Fairchild alliance—what could be more appropriate: physically, dynastically, morally? And if the vision of the mating of two such beautiful beings should cause the matchmaker a few hellish pangs, should he not grit his teeth and try to regard them as a solid down payment to redeem the mortgage on his soul?

  That same week he arranged that Charley should dine at Mr. Handy's and be seated at Annie's right. The two young people had known each other for years, but never well, and now Charley, making the most of his opportunity, showed himself at his wittiest. Annie responded in like manner, and their end of the table fairly exploded with merriment.

  Home with Rosalie, Dexter found her considerably less keen about the plan that he unfolded to her.

  "Don't you think Annie needs someone stronger than Charley?"

  "That's so like a woman! Just because Charley was a cutup in his college days, he must be a rake forever. Can't you trust me that he's a reformed character? Charley, when you first knew him, was simply full of youth and high spirits!"

  "He certainly used to be full of spirits," Rosalie observed acerbly. "But I don't mean to deny that he's done well under your tutelage. All the Fairchilds agree you've been the making of him. But if Charley has developed strength enough for one, does that mean you should shoulder him with the weight of two?"