The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  “My God!” cried Theodora as she spotted me. “If it isn’t Arnold of Rugby!”

  I had always been rather a favorite of Theodora’s, for she had regarded, in the light of the subsequent tragedy, her very casual friendship with my wife, of the kind that are based on childhood animosity and little more, as the deepest relationship that she had ever known. And in all seriousness it may have been. Theodora had had little time, in her four marriages, for friendships with women. At the moment she was in one of her brief husbandless periods, and her energy, unrestrained, swept across the peninsula like a forest fire. She drew me aside, out on the far end of the huge porch, hugging my arm as she did when she had had one drink too many, and hissed in my ear, with the catlike affectation that purported to be a caricature of itself and which, presumably, a minimum of four men had found attractive:

  “Isn’t he precious?”

  “Who?”

  “Little Gregory, of course.” And she burst into a laugh. “He tells me that you were kind to him. Great big you!”

  “Where on earth did you pick him up?”

  “Right here.” She indicated the porch. “Right here at Mummie’s. I found him in the teapot. The old bitches were stuffing him into it, as if he were the dormouse, poor precious, so I hustled right over and caught him by the fanny and pulled and pulled till he came out with a pop. And now he’s mine. You can’t have him.”

  I glanced over to where Gregory was talking to two women in slacks. His white flannels looked a tiny bit dirtier, and he was holding a cocktail rather self-consciously in his round white hand.

  “I’m not sure I want him,” I said gravely. “You seem to have spoiled him already.”

  “Oh, precious,” she said, cuddling up to me. “Do you think Theodora would do that?”

  “Is he to be Number Five?”

  She looked up at me with her wide serious eyes.

  “But could he be, darling? I mean, after all, what sex is he? Or is he?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “How much does that matter at our age, Theodora?”

  She was, as always, a good sport. She threw back her head and howled with laughter.

  “Oh, it matters!” she exclaimed. “I tell you what, darling. Greg will be Number Seven. Or maybe even Number Six. But not the next one. No, dear. Not the next one.”

  I found it in me to speculate if I had not perhaps been selected on the spot for that dubious honor. Anyway, I decided to go. Conversation with Theodora, who believed so patently, so brazenly, in nothing and nobody, always made me nervous. As I reentered the house and was crossing the front hall I heard my name called. It was Greg. He ran after me and caught me by the arm at the front door.

  “You’re leaving!” he protested. “And you haven’t even spoken to me!”

  “I’m speaking to you now,” I said shortly.

  To my dismay he sat down on the stone bench under the porte-cochere and started to cry. He did not cry loudly or embarrassingly; his chest rose and fell with quiet, orderly sobs.

  “My God, man!” I exclaimed.

  “I knew you were mad at me,” he whimpered, “by the way you spoke on the telephone when I couldn’t go on a walk with you. But I didn’t know you wouldn’t even speak to me when you saw me!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said fretfully.

  “You don’t know what you’ve meant to me,” he went on dolefully, rubbing his eyes. “You have no idea. You’re the first person who ever asked me to do anything in my whole life. When you asked me to go for a walk with you. Last summer.”

  “Well, I did this summer too.”

  “Yes,” he said, shaking his head, “I know. And I couldn’t go. But the reason I couldn’t go was that I was busy. And the reason I was busy was what you told me.”

  I stared down at him.

  “What the hell did I tell you?”

  “To do things. See people. Be somebody.” He looked up at me now with dried eyes. There was suddenly and quite unexpectedly almost a note of confidence in his tone.

  “And how do you do that?”

  “The only way I can. I go out.”

  I ran my hand through my hair in a confusion of reluctant amusement and despair.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Greg,” I protested. “I wanted you to see the world. Life. Before it was too late.”

  He nodded placidly.

  “That’s what I’m doing,” he said.

  “But I wanted you to read big books and think big thoughts,” I said desperately. “How can you twist that into my telling you to become a tea caddy?”

  His wide thoughtless eyes were filled with reproach.

  “You knew I couldn’t read books,” he said gravely. “Or think big thoughts. You were playing with me.”

  I stared.

  “Then why did you think you had to do anything?”

  “Because you made me want to.” He looked away, across the gravel, into the deep green of the forest. “I could feel your contempt. I had never felt that before. No one had ever cared enough to feel contempt. Except you.”

  As I looked at him I wondered if there were any traces of his having felt such a sting. I was baffled, almost angry at his very expressionlessness. That he could sit and indict me so appallingly for my interference, could face me with so direct a responsibility, was surely a dreadful thing if he cared, but if he didn’t, if he was simply making a fool of me . . .

  “I hope you don’t think,” I said brutally, “that you can lessen any contempt that you think I may feel for you by becoming a social lion in Anchor Harbor.”

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said firmly. “Your contempt is something I shall have to put up with. No matter what I do. I can’t read or think or talk the way you do. I can’t work. I can’t even cut any sort of figure with the girls. There aren’t many things open to me. You’re like my mother. You know that, really, but you think of me as if I was somebody else.”

  I took a cigarette out of my case, lit it and sat down beside him. From around the corner of the big house came a burst of laughter from Theodora’s friends.

  “Where are you headed, then, Greg?” I asked him as sympathetically as I could.

  He turned and faced me.

  “To the top of the peninsula,” he said. “I’m going to be a social leader.”

  I burst into a rude laugh.

  “The arbiter elegantiarum of Anchor Harbor?” I cried.

  “I don’t know what that means,” he said gravely.

  Again I laughed. The sheer inanity of it had collapsed my mounting sympathy.

  “You’re mad,” I said sharply. “You haven’t got money or looks or even wit. Your bridge is lousy. You play no sports. Let’s face it, man. You’ll never make it. Even in this crazy place.”

  Greg seemed in no way perturbed by my roughness. His humility was complete. The only thing, I quickly divined, that could arouse the flow of his tears was to turn from him. As long as one spoke to him, one could say anything.

  “Everything you say is true,” he conceded blandly. “I’d be the last to deny it. But you watch. I’ll get there.”

  “With the old ladies, perhaps,” I said scornfully. “If that’s what you want.”

  “I have to start with the old ladies,” he said. “I don’t know anyone else.”

  “And after the old ladies?”

  But he had thought this out.

  “They all have daughters or granddaughters,” he explained. “Like Theodora. They’ll get used to me.”

  “And you’re ‘cute,’” I said meanly. “You’re a ‘dear.’ Yes, I see it. If it’s what you want.” I got up and started across the gravel to my car. He came after me.

  “I’m not going to hurt anyone, you know,” he said. “I only want to be a respected citizen.”

  In the car I leaned out to speak to him.

  “Suppose I tell them?”

  “About my plans?”

  “What else?”

  “Do. It
won’t make any difference. You’ll see.”

  I started the motor and drove off without so much as nodding to him.

  3

  Gregory was good to his word. Every ounce of energy in his small store was directed to the attainment of his clearly conceived goal. I had resolved in disgust to have no further dealings with him, and I adhered to my resolution, but curiosity and a sense of the tiny drama latent in his plans kept me during the rest of that summer and the following two with an ear always alert at the mention of his name for further details of his social clamber.

  Little by little Anchor Harbor began to take note of the emergence of this new personality. Greg had been right to start with the old ladies, though he had had, it was true, no alternative. The appearance of this bland young man with such innocent eyes and wide hips and such ridiculous blazers would have been followed by brusque repulse in any young or even middle-aged group of the summer colony, intent as they were on bridge, liquor, sport and sex. In the elderly circles, however, Greg had only to polish his bridge to the point of respectability, and he became a welcome addition at their dinner parties. His conversation, though certainly tepid, was soothing and enthusiastic, and he could listen, without interrupting, to the longest and most frequently repeated anecdote. He liked everybody and every dinner; he radiated an unobtrusive but gratifying satisfaction with life. Once he became known as a person who could be counted upon to accept, his evenings were gradually filled. The old in Anchor Harbor had an energy that put their descendants to shame. Dinner parties even in the septuagenarian group were apt to last till two in the morning, and in the bridge circles rubber would succeed rubber until the sun peeked in through the blinds to cast a weird light on the butt-filled ashtrays and the empty, sticky highball glasses. The old were still up when the young came in from their more hectic but less prolonged evenings of enjoyment, and Gregory came gradually, in the relaxed hours of the early morning, to meet the children and grandchildren of his hostesses. Friction, however, often ran high between the generations, even at such times, and he found his opportunity as peacemaker. He came to be noted for his skill in transmitting messages, with conciliatory amendments of his own, from mother to daughter, from aunt to niece. Everyone found him useful. He became in short a “character,” accepted by all ages, and in that valuable capacity immune from criticism. He was “dear old Greg,” “our lovable, ridiculous Greg.” One heard more and more such remarks as, “Where but in Anchor Harbor would you find a type like Greg?” and “You now, I like Greg.” And, I suppose, even had none of the foregoing been true, he would have succeeded as Theodora’s pet, her “discovery,” her lap dog, if you will, a comfortable, consoling eunuch in a world that had produced altogether too many men.

  That Mrs. Bakewell would have little enough enthusiasm for her son’s being taken to the hearts of Theodora and her set I was moderately sure, but the extent of her animosity I was not to learn until I came across her one hot August afternoon at the book counter of the stationery store, which was a meeting place second only in importance to the club. She was standing very stiffly but obviously intent upon the pages of a large volume of Dr. Fosdick. She looked up in some bewilderment when I greeted her.

  “I was just looking,” she said. “I don’t want anything, thank you.”

  I explained that I was not the clerk.

  “I’m sorry,” she said without embarrassment. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Well, it’s been a long time,” I admitted. “I only come here for short visits.”

  “It’s a very trivial life, I’m afraid.”

  “Mine? I’m afraid so.”

  “No,” she said severely and without apology. “The life up here.”

  “Greg seems to like it.”

  She looked at me for a moment. She did not smile.

  “They’re killing him,” she said.

  I stared.

  “They?”

  “That wicked woman. And her associates.” She looked back at her book. “But I forgot. You’re of the new generation. My adjective was anachronistic.”

  “I liked it.”

  She looked back at me.

  “Then save him.”

  “But, Mrs. Bakewell,” I protested. “People don’t save people at Anchor Harbor.”

  “More’s the pity,” she said dryly.

  I tried to minimize it.

  “Greg’s all right,” I murmured. “He’s having a good time.”

  She closed the book.

  “Drinking the way he does?”

  “Does he drink?”

  “Shockingly.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. When people like Mrs. Bakewell used the word it was hard to know if they meant an occasional cocktail or a life of confirmed dipsomania.

  “And that woman?” she persevered. “Do you approve of her?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Bakewell,” I protested earnestly. “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong between him and Theodora.”

  She looked at me, I thought, with contempt.

  “I was thinking of their souls,” she said. “Good day, sir.”

  I discovered shortly after this awkward interchange that there was a justification in her remarks about Greg’s drinking. I went one day to a large garden party given by Mrs. Stone. All Anchor Harbor was there, old and young, and Theodora’s set, somewhat contemptuous of the throng and present, no doubt, only because of Theodora, who had an odd conventionality about attending family parties, were clustered in a group near the punch bowl and exploding periodically in loud laughs. They were not laughing, I should explain, at the rest of us, but at something white-flanneled and adipose in their midst, something with a blank face and strangely bleary eyes. It was Greg, of course, and he was telling them a story, stammering and repeating himself as he did so to the great enjoyment of the little group. It came over me gradually as I watched him that Mrs. Bakewell was right. They were killing him. Their laugher was as cold and their acclaim as temporary as that of any audience in the arena of Rome or Constantinople. They could clap hands and cheer, they could spoil their favorites, but they could turn their thumbs down, too, and could one doubt for a moment that at the first slight hint of deteriorating performance, they would? I felt a chill in my veins as their laughter came to me again across the lawn and as I caught sight of the small, spare, dignified figure of Greg’s mother standing on the porch with the Bishop and surveying the party with eyes that said nothing. If there were Romans to build fires, there was a martyr worthy of their sport. But Gregory. Our eyes suddenly met, and I thought I could see the appeal in them; I thought I could feel his plea for rescue flutter towards me in my isolation through the golden air of the peninsula. Was that why his mother had come? As I turned to her I thought that she, too, was looking at me.

  He had left his group. He was coming over to me.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Come over and meet these people,” he said to me, taking me by the arm. “Come on. They’re charming.” He swayed slightly as he spoke.

  I shook my arm loose.

  “I don’t want to.”

  He looked at me with his mild, steady look.

  “Please,” he urged.

  “I said no,” I snapped. “Why should I want to clutter my summer with trash like that? Go on back to them. Eat garbage. You like it.”

  He balanced for a moment on the balls of his feet. Evidently he regarded my violence as something indigenous to my nature and to be ignored.

  “Theodora’s never been in better form,” he held out to me as bait.

  “Good for Theodora,” I said curtly. “And in case you don’t know it, you’re drunk.”

  He shook his head sadly at me and wandered slowly back to his group.

  4

  Gregory went from glory to glory. He became one of the respected citizens of the summer colony. His spotless white panama was to be seen bobbing on the bench of judges at the children’s swimming meet. He received the prize two years running for the best costume at the fanc
y dress ball. On each occasion he went as a baby. He was a sponsor of the summer theater, the outdoor concerts, and the putting tournament. He was frequently seated on the right of his hostess at the very grandest dinners. He arrived early in the season and stayed into October. What he did during the winter months was something of a mystery, but it was certain that he did not enjoy elsewhere a success corresponding to his triumph at Anchor Harbor. Presumably, like so many Anchor Harbor people whose existence away from the peninsula it was so difficult to conceive, he went into winter hibernation to rest up for his exhausting summers.

  That he continued to drink too much when he went out, which was, of course, all the time, did not, apparently, impair his social position. He was firmly entrenched, as I have said, in his chosen category of “character,” and to these much is allowed. Why he drank I could only surmise. It might have been to steady himself in the face of a success that was as unnerving as it was unfamiliar; it might have been to make him forget the absurdity of his ambitions and the hollowness of their fulfillment, or it might even have been to shelter himself from the bleak wind of his mother’s reproach. Theodora and all her crowd drank a great deal. It was possible that he had simply picked up the habit from them. It would have gone unnoticed, at least in that set, had it not been for a new and distressing habit that he had developed, of doing, after a certain number of drinks, a little dance by himself, a sort of jig, that was known as “Greg’s peg.” At first he did it only for a chosen few, late at night, amid friendly laughter, but word spread, and the little jig became an established feature of social life on Saturday night dances at the club. There would be a roll of drums, and everybody would stop dancing and gather in a big circle while the sympathetic orchestra beat time to the crazy marionette in the center. Needless to say I had avoided being a witness of “Greg’s peg,” but my immunity was not to last.