The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  My wife and I had spent our summers there in the past, not, as one of her obituary notices had floridly put it, “away from the summer resort in a forest camp, nestled in that corner of the peninsula frequented by the literary,” but in the large rambling pile of shingle, full of pointless rooms and wicker furniture, that belonged to my mother-in-law and that stood up on the top of a forest-covered hill in the very heart of the summer community. In Anchor Harbor, however, the poets’ corner and the watering place were akin. Each was clouded in the haze of unreality that hung so charmingly over the entire peninsula. It was indeed a world unto itself. Blue, gray and green, the pattern repeated itself up and down, from the sky to the rocky mountaintops, from the sloping pine woods to the long cliffs and gleaming cold of the sea. It was an Eden in which it was hard to visualize a serpent. People were never born there, nor did they die there. The elemental was left to the winter and other climes. The sun that sparkled in the cocktails under the yellow and red umbrella tables by the club pool was the same sun that dropped behind the hills in the evening, lighting up the peninsula with pink amid the pine trees. It was a land of big ugly houses, pleasant to live in, of very old and very active ladies, of hills that were called mountains, of small, quaint shops and of large, shining town cars. When in the morning I picked up the newspaper with its angry black headlines it was not so much with a sense of their tidings being false, as of their being childishly irrelevant.

  By mid-September, however, the big summer houses were closed and the last trunks of their owners were rattling in vans down the main street past the swimming club to the station. The sky was more frequently overcast; there was rain and fog, and from the sea came the sharp cold breezes that told the advent of an early winter. I was staying alone in my mother-in-law’s house, taking long walks on the mountains and going at night to the movies. I suppose that I was lonelier than I cared to admit, for I found myself dropping into the empty swimming club before lunch and drinking a cocktail on the terrace that looked over the unfilled pool and the bay. There were not apt to be more than one or two people there, usually the sort who had to maintain a residence in Maine for tax purposes, and I was not averse to condoling with them for a few minutes each day. It was on a day when I had not found even one of these that a youngish-looking man, perhaps in his early thirties, approached the table where I was sitting. He was an oddly shaped and odd-looking person, wide in the hips and narrow in the shoulders, and his face, very white and round and smooth, had, somewhat inconsistently, the uncertain dignity of a thin aquiline nose and large owl-like eyes. His long hair was parted in the middle and plastered to his head with a heavy tonic, and he was wearing, alas, a bow tie, a red blazer, and white flannels, a combination which was even then out of date except for sixth-form graduations at schools such as mine. All this was certainly unprepossessing, and I shrank a bit as he approached me, but there was in his large gray eyes as they gazed timidly down at me a look of guilelessness, of cautious friendliness, of anticipated rebuff that made me suddenly smile.

  “My name is Gregory Bakewell. People call me Greg,” he said in a mild, pleasant voice less affected than I would have anticipated. “I hope you’ll excuse my intrusion, but could you tell me if they’re going to continue the buffet lunch next week?”

  I looked at him with a feeling of disappointment.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never lunch here.”

  He stared with blinking eyes.

  “But you ought. It’s quite delicious.”

  I shrugged my shoulders, but he remained, obviously concerned at what I was passing up.

  “Perhaps you will join me for lunch today,” he urged. “It’s supreme de volaille argentée.”

  I couldn’t repress a laugh at his fantastic accent, and then to cover it up and to excuse myself for not lunching with him I asked him to have a drink. He sat down, and I introduced myself. I confess that I expected that he might have heard of me, and I looked into his owl eyes for some hint that he was impressed. There was none.

  “You weren’t up here during the season?” he asked. “You’ve just come?”

  “That’s right.”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s a pity you missed it. They say it was very gay.”

  I murmured something derogatory in general about the summer life at Anchor Harbor.

  “You don’t like it?” he asked.

  “I can’t abide it. Can you?”

  “Me?” He appeared surprised that anyone should be interested in his reaction. “I don’t really know. Mother and I go out so little. Except, of course, to the Bishop’s. And dear old Mrs. Stone’s.”

  I pictured him at a tea party, brushed and combed and wearing a bib. And eating an enormous cookie.

  “I used to go out,” I said.

  “And now you don’t?”

  Even if he had never heard of me I was surprised, at Anchor Harbor, that he should not have heard of my wife. Ordinarily, I hope, I would not have said what I did say, but my need for communication was strong. I was suddenly and oddly determined to imprint my ego on the empty face of all that he took for granted.

  “My wife died here,” I said. “Last summer.”

  He looked even blanker than before, but gradually an expression of embarrassment came over his face.

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Of course, if I’d known—”

  I felt ashamed of myself.

  “Of course,” I said hurriedly. “Forgive me for mentioning it.”

  “But no,” he protested. “I should have known. I remember now. They were speaking of her at Mrs. Stone’s the other day. She was very beautiful, wasn’t she?”

  She hadn’t been, but I nodded. I wanted even the sympathy that he could give me and swallowed greedily the small drops that fell from his meager supply.

  “And which reminds me,” he said, after we had talked in this vein for several minutes, “they spoke of you, too. You write things, don’t you? Stories?”

  I swallowed.

  “I hope not,” I said. “I’m an historian.”

  “Oh, that must be lovely.”

  I wondered if there was another man in the world who could have said it as he said it. He conveyed a sense of abysmal ignorance, but of humility, too, and of boundless admiration. These things were fine, were wonderful, he seemed to say, but he, too, had his little niche and a nice one, and he as well as these things existed, and we could be friends together, couldn’t we?

  I decided we were getting nowhere.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “Do?” Again he looked blank. “Why, good heavens, man, I don’t do a thing.”

  I looked severe.

  “Shouldn’t you?”

  “Should I?”

  “You haven’t got a family or anything like that?”

  He smiled happily.

  “Oh, I’ve got ‘something like that,’” he answered. “I’ve got Mother.”

  I nodded. I knew everything now.

  “Do you exercise?”

  “I walk from Mother’s cottage to the club. It’s several hundred yards.”

  I rose to my feet.

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said firmly, “I’ll pick you up here at nine-thirty. We’re going to climb a mountain.”

  He gaped at me in horror and amazement as I got up to leave him, but he was there when I came by the next morning, waiting for me, dressed exactly as he had been the day before except for a pair of spotless white sneakers and a towel, pointlessly but athletically draped around his neck. He was very grateful to me for inviting him and told me with spirit how he had always wanted to climb a mountain at Anchor Harbor. These “mountains” were none higher than a thousand feet and the trails were easy; nonetheless I decided to start him on the smallest.

  He did well enough, however. He perspired profusely and kept taking off garments as we went along, piling them on his arm, and he presented a sorry figure indeed as his long hair fell over his face and as the swe
at poured down his white puffy back, but he kept up and bubbled over with talk. I asked him about his life, and he told me the dismal tale of a childhood spent under the cloud of a sickly constitution. He had been, of course, an only child, and his parents, though loving, had themselves enjoyed excellent health. He had never been to school or college; he had learned whatever it was that he did know from tutors. He had never left home, which for the Bakewells had been St. Louis until the death of Mr. Bakewell and was now St. Petersburg in Florida. Greg was thirty-five and presented to me in all his clumsy innocence a perfect tabula rasa. His mind was a piece of blank paper, of white, dead paper, on which, I supposed, one could write whatever message one chose. He appeared to have no prejudices or snobbishnesses; he was a guileless child who had long since ceased to fret, if indeed he ever had, at the confinements of his nursery. I could only look and gape, and yet at the same time feel the responsibility of writing the first line, for he seemed to enjoy an odd, easy content in his own placid life.

  We had passed beyond the tree line and were walking along the smoother rock of the summit, a sharp cool breeze blowing in our faces. It was a breathtaking view, and I turned to see what Greg’s reaction would be.

  “Look,” he said pointing to an ungainly shingle clock tower that protruded from the woods miles below us, “you can see the roof of Mrs. Stone’s house.”

  I exploded.

  “God!” I said.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” he said mildly. “I was just pointing something out.”

  I could see that decisions had to be made and steps taken.

  “Look, Greg,” I said. “Don’t go to St. Petersburg this winter.”

  He stared.

  “But what would Mother do?”

  I dismissed his mother with a gesture.

  “Stay here. By yourself. Get to know the people who live here all the year round. Read. I’ll send you books.”

  He looked dumbfounded.

  “Then you won’t be here?”

  I laughed.

  “I’ve got a job, man. I’m writing a book. But you’re not. Give one winter to being away from your mother and Mrs. Stone and the Bishop, and learn to think. You won’t know yourself in a year.”

  He appeared to regard this as not entirely a happy prognostication.

  “But Mrs. Stone and the Bishop don’t go to St. Petersburg,” he pointed out.

  “Even so,” I said.

  “I really don’t think I could leave Mother.”

  I said nothing.

  “You honestly think I ought to do something?” he persisted.

  “I do.”

  “That’s what Mother keeps telling me,” he said dubiously.

  “Well, she’s right.”

  He looked at me in dismay.

  “But what’ll I do?”

  “I’ve made one suggestion. Now it’s your turn.”

  He sighed.

  “Well, it’s very hard,” he said, “to know. You pick me up, and then you throw me down.”

  I felt some compunction at this.

  “I’ll write you,” I said. “To St. Petersburg. You can keep me informed of your progress.”

  He beamed.

  “Oh, that would be very kind,” he said.

  During the remaining two weeks of my visit to Anchor Harbor I walked with Greg almost every day, and we became friends. It was agreeable to be with someone whose admiration was unqualified. He listened to me with the utmost respect and attention and forgot everything I said a moment afterwards. But I didn’t mind. It gave me a sense of ease about repeating myself; I talked of history and literature and love; I set myself up as counsel for the forces of life and argued my case at the bar of Greg’s justice, pleading that the door might be opened just a crack. Yet whoever it was who represented the forces of his inertia was supplying very cogent arguments against me. I decided that it must be his mother, and I stopped at the Bakewells’ one day after our walk to meet her.

  Mrs. Bakewell I had made a picture of before I met her. She would be a small grim woman, always in black, mourning the husband whose existence one could never quite believe in; she would be wearing a black ribbon choker and a shiny black hat, and she would never change the weight or the quantity of her clothing, equally inappropriate for St. Petersburg or Anchor Harbor, for any such considerations as seasons or weather. I saw her thus as small, as compact, as uncompromising, because in my imagination she had had to wither to a little black stump, the hard remnants of the heaping blaze of what I visualized as her maternal possessiveness. How else could I possibly explain Gregory expect in terms of such a mother? And when I did meet her each detail of her person seemed to spring up at me to justify my presupposition. She was a small, black figure, and she did wear a broad, tight choker. She was old, and she was unruffled; her large hook nose and her small eyes had about them the stillness of a hawk on a limb. When she spoke, it was with the cold calm of a convinced fanatic, and beyond the interminable details of her small talk that dealt almost exclusively with Episcopal dogma and Episcopal teas I seemed to catch the flickering light of a sixteenth-century auto-da-fé. But a vital element of my preconceived portrait was missing. She showed no weakness for her only child. Indeed, her attitude towards him, for all one could see, demonstrated the most commendable indifference. He had hatched from her egg and could play around the barnyard at his will. I discovered, furthermore, that, unlike her son, she had read my books.

  “It’s very kind of you to take time off from your work to walk with Gregory,” she said to me. “I don’t suppose that he can be a very stimulating companion for an historian. He never reads anything.”

  Gregory simply nodded as she said this. She brought it forth without severity, as a mere matter of fact.

  “Reading isn’t everything,” I said. “It’s being aware of life that counts.”

  She looked at me penetratingly.

  “Do you think so?” she asked. “Of course, I suppose you would. It’s in line with your theories. The Bishop and I were interested in what you had to say about the free will of nations in your last book.”

  “Did you agree with it?”

  “We did not.”

  Gregory looked at her in dismay.

  “Now, Mother,” he said protestingly, “you’re not going to quarrel with my new friend?”

  “I’m going to say what I wish, Gregory,” she said firmly, “in my own house.”

  No, she certainly did not spoil him. Nor could it really be said that she was possessive. It was Greg who kept reaching for apron strings in which to enmesh himself. He seemed to yearn to be dominated. He tried vainly to have her make his decisions for him, and even after she had told him, as she invariably did, that he was old enough to think things through for himself, he would, not only behind her back but to her very face, insist to those around him that she ruled him with an iron hand. If I asked him to do something, to take a walk, to go to a movie, to dine, he would nod and smile and say “I’d love to,” but he would surely add, and if she was there, perhaps in a lower tone, behind his hand: “But I’ll have to get back early, you know. Mother will want to hear all about it before she goes to bed.” And Mrs. Bakewell, overhearing him, with her small, fixed grim smile, did not even deign to contradict.

  2

  During that winter, when I was working on my book in Cambridge, I forgot poor Greg almost completely, as I usually did Anchor Harbor people. They were summer figures, and I stored them away in camphor balls with my flannels. I was surprised, therefore, each time that I received a letter from him, on the stationery of a large St. Petersburg hotel, protesting in a few lines of wretched scrawl that he had really met a number of very nice people, and could I possibly come down for a visit and meet them? One of them, I remember, he thought I would like because she wrote children’s plays. I wrote him one letter and sent him a Christmas card, and that, I decided, was that.

  I was in a better frame of mind when I went up to Anchor Harbor towards the end of the followin
g July to stay with my mother-in-law. I was still keeping largely to myself, but the volume of my wife’s poems was finished and in the hands of the publishers, and I no longer went out of my way to spurn people. I asked my mother-in-law one afternoon while we were sitting on the porch if the Bakewells were back in Anchor Harbor.

  “Yes, I saw Edith Bakewell yesterday at Mrs. Stone’s,” she said. “Such an odd, stiff woman. I didn’t know you knew them.”

  “Was her son there?”

  “Greg? Oh, yes, he’s always with her. Don’t tell me he’s a friend of yours?”

  “After a fashion.”

  “Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. I can’t see a thing in him, but the old girls seem to like him. I drew him as a partner the other night at the bridge table.”

  “Oh, does he play bridge now?”

  “If you can call it that,” my mother-in-law said with a sniff. “But he certainly gets around. In my set, anyway. I never go out that I don’t run into him.”

  “Really? Last fall he knew nobody.”

  “And Anchor Harbor was a better place.”

  Little by little I became aware that my friend’s increased appearances in the summer-colony world were part of some preconceived and possibly elaborate plan of social self-advancement. He was not, I realized with a mild surprise, simply floating in the brisk wake of his mother’s determined spurts; he was splashing gaily down a little backwater on a course that must have had the benefit of his own navigation. At the swimming club he had abandoned the lonely couch near the table of fashion magazines, where he used to wait for his mother, for the gay groups of old ladies in flowered hats who gathered daily at high noon around the umbrella tables and waited for the sun to go over the yardarm and the waiters to come hurrying with the first glad cocktail of the day. I was vaguely disgusted at all of this, though I had no reason, as I well knew, to have expected better things, but my disgust became pointed after I had twice telephoned him to ask him for a walk and twice had to listen to his protests of a previous engagement. I wondered if he fancied that his social position was now too lofty to allow of further intimacy between us, and I laughed to myself, but rather nastily, at the idea. I would have crossed him off my books irrevocably had I not met him one day when I was taking my mother-in-law to call on old Mrs. Stone. We had found her alone, sitting on the porch with her back to the view, and were making rather slow going of a conversation about one of my books when her daughter, Theodora, came in with a group of people, including Greg, who had just returned from what seemed to have been a fairly alcoholic picnic. I found myself caught, abandoned by my fleeing mother-in-law, in the throes of a sudden cocktail party.