The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  It so happened that the first time that I was to see this sordid performance was the last time that it ever took place. It was on a Saturday night at the swimming-club dance, the festivity that crowned the seven-day madness known as “tennis week,” the very height, mind you, of Anchor Harbor’s dizzy summer of gaiety. Even my mother-in-law and I had pulled ourselves sufficiently together to ask a few friends for dinner and take them on to the club. We found the place milling with people and a very large band playing very loudly. I noticed several young men who were not in evening dress and others whose evening clothes had obviously been borrowed, strong, ruddy, husky young men. It was the cruise season, and the comfortable, easy atmosphere of overdressed but companionable Anchor Harbor was stiffened by an infiltration of moneyed athleticism and arrogance from the distant smartness of Long Island and Newport. All throbbed, however, to the same music, and all seemed to be enjoying themselves. Theodora, in a sweater and pleated skirt and large pearls, dressed to look as though she were off a sailboat and not, as she was, fresh from her own establishment, spotted me and with characteristic aplomb deserted her partner and came over to our table. She took in my guests with an inclusive, final and undiscriminating smile that might have been a greeting or a shower of alms, took a seat at the table and monopolized me.

  “Think of it,” she drawled. “You at a dance. What’s happened? Well, anyway,” she continued without waiting for my answer, “I approve. See life. Come for lunch tomorrow. Will you? Two o’clock. I’ll have some people who might amuse you.”

  Since her mother’s death Theodora had begun to take on the attributes of queen of the peninsula. She dealt out her approval and disapproval as if it was possible that somebody cared. Struggling behind the wall of her make-up, her mannerisms and her marriages one could sense the real Theodora, strangled at birth, a dowager, with set lips and outcasting frown, a figure in pearls for an opera box. I declined her invitation and asked if Gregory was going to do his dance.

  “Oh, the darling,” she said huskily. “Of course he will. I’ll get hold of him in a minute and shoo these people off the floor.”

  “Don’t do it for me,” I protested. “I don’t want to see it. I hear it’s a disgusting sight.”

  She snorted.

  “Whoever told you that?” she retorted. “It’s the darling’s precious little stunt. Wait till you see it. Oh, I know you don’t like him,” she continued, wagging her finger at me. “He’s told me that enough times, the poor dear. You’ve hurt him dreadfully. You pretend you can’t stand society when the only thing you can’t stand is anything the least bit unconventional.”

  I wondered if this were not possibly true. She continued to stare at me from very close range. It was always impossible to tell if she was drunk or sober.

  “Like his old bitch of a mother,” she continued.

  “That’s a cruel thing to say, Theodora,” I protested sharply. “Do you even know her?”

  “Certainly I know her. She’s sat on poor Greg all his life. Lord knows what dreadful things she did to him when he was a child.”

  “Greg told you this?”

  “He never complains, poor dear. But I’m no fool. I can read between the lines.”

  “If she’s a bitch you know what that makes him,” I said stiffly. “I was going to ask you tonight to give him back to his mother. She’s the one person who knows what you’re doing to him. But now I don’t want to. It’s too late. Keep him. Finish the dirty job.”

  “You must be drunk,” she said and left me.

  It was not long after this that the orchestra suddenly struck up a monotonous little piece with a singsong refrain and as at a concerted signal the couples on the floor gathered in a half-circle around the music, leaving a space in which something evidently was going on. The non-Anchor Harborites on the floor did not know what it was all about, but they joined with the others to make an audience for the diversion. I could see nothing but backs from where I was sitting, and suddenly hearing the laughter and applause and an odd tapping sound, I was overcome with curiosity and, taking my mother-in-law, we hurried across the dance floor and peered between the heads that barred our view.

  What I saw there I shall never be able to get out of my mind. In the center of the half-circle formed by the crowd Gregory was dancing his dance. His eyes were closed and his long hair, disarrayed, was streaked down over his sweating face. His mouth, half open, emitted little snorts as his feet capered about in a preposterous jig that could only be described as an abortive effort at tap dancing. His arms moved back and forth as if he were striding along; his head was thrown back; his body shimmied from side to side. It was not really a dance at all; it was a contortion, a writhing. It looked more as if he were moving in a doped sleep or twitching at the end of a gallows. The lump of pallid softness that was his body seemed to be responding for the first time to his consciousness; it was only thus, after all, that the creature could use it. I turned in horror from the drunken jigger to his audience and noted the laughing faces, heard with disgust the “Go it, Greg!” It was worse now than the hysterical arena; it had all the obscenity of a striptease.

  As I turned back to the sight of Gregory, his eyes opened, and I think he saw me. I thought for a second that once again I could make out the agonized appeal, but again I may have been wrong. It seemed to me that his soul, over which Mrs. Bakewell had expressed such concern, must have been as his body, white and doughy, possessed of no positive good and no positive evil, but a great passive husk on which the viri of the latter, once settled, could tear away. I turned to my mother-in-law, who shared my disgust; we were about to go back to our table when I heard, behind us, snatches of a conversation from a group that appeared to feel even more strongly than we did. Looking back, I saw several young men in flannels and tweed coats, obviously from a cruise.

  “Who the hell is that pansy?”

  “Did you ever see the like of it?”

  “Oh, it’s Anchor Harbor. They’re all that way.”

  “Let’s throw him in the pool.”

  “Yes!”

  I recognized one of them as a graduate of my school. I took him aside. “Watch out for your friends, Sammy,” I warned him. “Don’t let them touch him. Remember. This is his club and not yours. And every old lady on the peninsula will be after you to tear your eyes out.”

  He nodded.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  This may have kept Sammy under control, but his friends were another matter. When Greg had finished his jig and just as general dancing was about to be resumed, four young men stepped up to him and quietly lifted him in the air, perching him on the shoulders of two of their number. They then proceeded to carry him around the room. This was interpreted as a sort of triumphal parade, as though students were unhorsing and dragging a prima donna’s carriage through enthusiastic streets, and everybody applauded vociferously while Greg, looking rather dazed, smiled and fluttered his handkerchief at the crowd. Even I, forewarned, was concluding that it was all in good fun when suddenly the four young men broke into a little trot and scampered with their burden out onto the porch, down the flagstone steps and across the patch of lawn with the umbrella tables to where the long pool shimmered under the searchlights on the clubhouse roof. People surged out on the terrace to watch them; I rushed out myself and got there just in time to see the four young men, two holding the victim’s arms and two his legs, swinging him slowly back and forth at the edge of the pool. There was a moment of awful silence; then I heard Theodora’s shriek, and several ladies rushed across the lawn to stop them. It was too late. There was a roar from the crowd as Greg was suddenly precipitated into the air. He hung there for a split second in the glare of the searchlights, his hair flying out; then came the loud splash as he disappeared. A moment later he reappeared and burbled for help. There were shouts of “He can’t swim” and at least three people must have jumped in after him. He was rescued and restored to a crowd of solicitous ladies in evening dress who gathered a
t the edge of the pool to receive him in their arms, regardless of his wetness. At this point I turned to go. I had no wish to see the four young men lynched. I heard later that they managed to escape with their skins and to their boats. They did not come back.

  5

  Gregory appeared to have developed nothing but a bad cold from the mishap. He spent the next two days in his bed, and the driveway before his mother’s little cottage was jammed with tall and ancient Lincoln and Pierce-Arrow town cars bringing flowers from his devoted friends. When he recovered Theodora gave a large lunch for him at the club. Everybody was very kind. But it became apparent after a little that, however trivial the physical damage may have been, something in the events of that momentous evening had impaired the native cheerfulness of Greg’s sunny disposition. On Saturday nights he could no longer be prevailed upon to do his little dance, and at high noon his presence was frequently missed under the umbrella tables when the waiters in scarlet coats came hurrying with the first martini of the day. Theodora even spread the extraordinary news that he was thinking of going with his mother to Cape Cod the following summer. He had told her that the pace at Anchor Harbor was bad for his heart.

  “That old witch of a mother has got her claws back into him,” she told me firmly. “Mark my words. You’ll see.”

  But I suspected that even Greg could see what I could see, that despite the sympathy and the flowers, despite the public outcry against the rude young men, despite the appeal in every face that things would again and always be as they had been before, despite all this, he had become “poor Greg.” What had happened to him was not the sort of thing that happened to other people. When all was said and done, he may have known, as I knew, that in the last analysis even Theodora was on the side of the four young men. And perhaps he did realize it, for he was never heard to complain. Silently he accepted the verdict, if verdict it was, and disappeared early that September with his mother to St. Petersburg. I never heard of him again until several years later I chanced to read of his death of a heart attack in Cape Cod. I asked some friends of mine who spent the summer there if they had ever heard of him. Only one had. He said that he remembered Greg as a strange pallid individual who was to be seen in the village carrying a basket during his mother’s marketing. She had survived him, and her mourning, if possible, was now a shade darker than before.

  THE COLONEL’S FOUNDATION

  1955

  RUTHERFORD TOWER, although a partner, was not the Tower of Tower, Tilney & Webb. It sometimes seemed to him that the better part of his life went into explaining this fact or at least into anticipating the humiliation of having it explained by others. The Tower had been his late Uncle Reginald, the famous surrogate and leader of the New York bar, and the one substantial hope in Rutherford’s legal career. For Rutherford, despite an almost morbid fear of clerks and courts, and a tendency to hide away from the actual clients behind their wills and estates, had even managed to slip into a junior partnership before Uncle Reginald, in his abrupt, downtown fashion, died at his desk. But it was as far as Rutherford seemed likely to go. There was nothing in the least avuncular about Uncle Reginald’s successor, Clitus Tilney. A large, violent, self-made man, Tilney had a chip on his shoulder about families like the Towers and a disconcerting habit of checking the firm’s books to see if Rutherford’s “Social Register practice,” as he slightingly called it, paid off. The junior Tower, he would remark to the cashier after each such inspection, had evidently been made a partner for only three reasons: because of his name, because of his relatives, and because he was there.

  And, of course, Tilney was right. He was always right. Rutherford’s practice didn’t pay off. The Tower cousins, it was true, were in and out of his office all day, as were the Hallecks, the Rutherfords, the Tremaines, and all the other interconnecting links of his widespread family, but they expected, every last grabbing one of them, no more than a nominal bill. Aunt Mildred, Uncle Reginald’s widow, was the worst of all, an opinionated and litigious lady who professed to care not for the money but for the principle of things and was forever embroiled with landlords, travel agencies, and shops. However hard her nephew worked for her, he could never feel more than a substitute. It was Clitus Tilney alone whose advice she respected. Rutherford sometimes wondered, running his long nervous fingers over his pale brow and through his prematurely gray hair, if there was any quality more respected by the timid remnants of an older New York society, even by the flattest-heeled and most velvet-gowned old maid, than naked aggression. What use did they really have for anyone whom they had known, like Rutherford, from his childhood? He was “one of us,” wasn’t he—too soft for a modern world?

  The final blow came when Aunt Margaretta Halleck, the only Tower who had married what Clitus Tilney called “real money,” and for whom Rutherford had drawn some dozen wills without fee, died leaving her affairs, including the management of her estate, in the hands of an uptown practitioner who had persuaded her that Wall Street lawyers were a pack of wolves. The next morning, when Rutherford happened to meet the senior partner in the subway, Tilney clapped a heavy hand on his shrinking shoulder.

  “Tell me, Rutherford,” he boomed over the roar of the train. “Have you ever thought of turning yourself into a securities lawyer? We could use another hand on this Smilax deal.”

  “Well, it’s not a field I know much about,” Rutherford said miserably.

  “But, man, you’re not forty yet! You can learn. Quite frankly, this Halleck fiasco is the last straw. I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault, but the family business isn’t carrying its share of the load. Think it over.”

  Rutherford sat later in his office, staring out the window at a dark brick wall six feet away, and thought gloomily of working night and day on one of Tilney’s securities “teams,” with bright, intolerant younger men who had been on the Harvard Law Review. The telephone rang, startling him. He picked it up. “What is it?” he snapped.

  It was the receptionist. “There’s a Colonel Hubert here,” she said. “He wants to see Mr. Tower. Do you know him, or shall I see if Mr. Tilney can see him?”

  It was not unusual for prospective clients to ask for “Mr. Tower,” assuming that they were asking for the senior partner. Rutherford, however, was too jostled to answer with his usual self-deprecation. “If I were the receptionist,” he said with an edge to his voice, “and somebody asked for Mr. Tower, I think I’d send him to Mr. Tower. But then, I suppose, I have a simple mind.”

  There was a surprised silence. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tower. I only meant—”

  “I know,” he said firmly. “It’s quite all right. Tell Colonel Hubert I’ll be glad to see him.”

  Sitting back in his chair, Rutherford immediately felt better. That was the way to deal with people. And, looking around, he tried to picture his room as it might appear to a client. It was the smallest of the partners’ offices, true, but it was not entirely hopeless. If his uncle’s best things, including the Sheraton desk, had been taken over by Mr. Tilney, he at least had a couple of relics of that more solid past: the large framed signed photograph of Judge Cardozo in robes, and his uncle’s safe, a mammoth green box on wheels with REGINALD TOWER painted on the door in thick gold letters. The safe, of course, would have been more of an asset if Tilney had not insisted that it be used for keeping real estate papers and if young men from that department were not always bursting into Rutherford’s office to bang it open and shut. Sometimes they even left papers unceremoniously on his desk, marked simply “For Safe.” Still, he felt, it gave his room some of the flavor of an old-fashioned office, just a touch of Ephraim Tutt.

  An office boy appeared at the doorway, saying “This way, sir,” and a handsome, sporty old gentleman of certainly more than eighty years walked briskly into the office.

  “Mr. Tower?”

  Rutherford jumped to his feet to get him a chair, and the old man nodded vigorously as he took his seat. “Thank you, sir. Thank you, indeed,” he said.

  H
e was really magnificent, Rutherford decided as he sat down again and looked him over. He had thick white hair and long white mustaches, a straight, large, firm, aristocratic nose, and eyes that at least tried to be piercing. His dark, sharply pressed suit covered a figure whose only fault was a small, neat protruding stomach, and he wore a carnation in his buttonhole and a red tie with a huge knot.

  “You are in the business of making wills?” the Colonel asked.

  “That is my claim.”

  “Good. Then I want you to make me one.”

  There was a pause while the Colonel stared at him expectantly. Rutherford wondered if he was supposed to make the will up then and there, like a sandwich.

  “Well, I guess I’d better ask a few questions,” he said with a small professional smile. “Do you have a will now, sir?”

  “Tore it up,” the Colonel said. “Tore them all up. I’m changing my counsel, young man. That’s why I’m here.”

  Rutherford decided not to press the point. “We might start with your family, then. Do you have a wife, sir? Or children?”

  “My wife is dead, God bless her. No children. She had a couple of nieces, but they’re provided for.”

  “And you sir?”

  “Oh, I have some grandnephews.” He shrugged. “Nice young chaps. You know the sort—married, live in the suburbs, have two children, television. No point in leaving them any money. Real money, I mean. Scare them to death. Prevent their keeping down to the Joneses. Fifty thousand apiece will be plenty.”

  Rutherford’s mouth began to feel pleasantly dry as he leaned forward to pickup a pencil. He quite agreed with the Colonel about the suburbs. “And what did you have in mind, sir, as to the main disposition of your estate?”