The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  Harry sighed when she had gone and debated how best to get out of it, but this, he finally decided, was unworthy. It was insulting to attribute too much design to Doris and absurdly weak of himself to be afraid of being able to resist it, if design there was. He had taken care of himself on the beaches of Korea; he could certainly do so on those of Devon. The way to take life was as it came.

  And, indeed, it seemed to come easily enough. The cabins of Lois Grimshawe and Miss Clinger, like dozens of others along the dunes of Devon, were small weatherbeaten shingle structures, like overgrown bathhouses, each with a back porch facing the sea on which drinks were constantly mixed. There was a great deal of laughing and joking on arrival, and much shouting back and forth between cabins and many hilarious references to last weekend’s hangovers, but one could do, apparently, as one pleased, and Harry, after changing to a pair of red bathing trunks and sitting for a few minutes with the group on the beach, took off alone down the dunes at a pace that was no invitation to any woman to join him. He walked for miles, past larger cabins, past huge summer palaces, past swimming clubs, and every half-hour he would run down into the water and plunge in the hissing surf. It was glorious exercise, and he did not return until eight that night, when he found a noisy picnic of some twenty people going on in front of Lois’s cabin. Lois had already drunk too much to be cross at his disappearance, and when he had changed to a shirt and blue jeans and joined the group, he felt better than he had felt all summer and in a mood to drink deeply.

  Which he did. Much later in the evening, when the others were singing songs, he was sitting above the group on a ridge of dune with Doris Marsh. She looked very well in the moonlight and in the flicker of the fire below. Her hair blew in the wind, and her figure was well accentuated by her long velvet pants. Harry was reminded of his earlier vision of her naked by the sea. Yet Doris seemed absorbed in a melancholy and reflective mood. She, too, was interested in drinking.

  “You know, Harry, on a night like this, under all those stars, it just doesn’t seem possible that Monday will find me back in that sweatshop writing a memorandum on Miss Johanna Shepard’s capital loss carryovers.”

  “Why go back, then?”

  Doris squinted at the moon. “Just a little matter of bread and butter.”

  “Oh, can it, Doris. You could make more money for half the work. What about Uncle Sam? Ever think of the Collector’s Office? As a matter of fact, I’ve been turning the idea over myself.”

  “Oh, no, Harry, don’t you dare!” Very solemn now, she turned to shake her head at him. “You’re not like me, you know. You could make the grade.”

  “What grade?”

  “You could be a partner. No, dear boy, don’t grunt and throw sand. I know exactly what I’m talking about. And I know all about the real estate department not being the best place to start. Sure, it’s a dead end. But you don’t have to stay in it. You could go to Mr. Tilney and ask for a transfer. And with your personality, you’d get it. Believe me, Harry!”

  “Oh, bosh. They don’t want my kind in their paneled offices. Give me that cup and let me get you a drink.”

  “Here’s that cup and by all means get me a drink, but I still know what I’m saying.” As he took her empty cup she turned away and hugged her knees, facing the soft breeze. “And I’m a fool to tell you, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you do make the grade, you certainly won’t come down to spend weekends in Devon with Lois Grimshawe and Doris Marsh.”

  “Dry up, will you, Doris?”

  “I am dry,” she said without turning. “Why don’t you get me my drink?”

  When he returned with the full cups he was determined not to let the conversation get back to Harry Reilley, even if it had to become sentimental about Doris Marsh. “How did you ever get into this racket?” he asked her. “Why aren’t you living in the suburbs with a station wagon and three children? With one eye on your husband and one eye on somebody else’s?”

  “Would you really like to know?” she asked rhetorically. “Would you really like to hear my dreary tale? I went to law school because of a guy. I went into practice because of a guy. I molded my whole life into a particular twisted shape to please one guy, and I didn’t even catch him.” She turned to give Harry a friendly little push on the shoulder. “It’s your fault if I bore you with my love story, old man. You asked for it. You shouldn’t be so goddamn sympathetic with your questions.” Harry listened with mild interest, as he sipped his drink and watched the moonlight on the waves, to her tale of “Phil,” who was now practicing law, still unmarried, in Hawaii. It seemed that Phil was one of those men who could not live with or without Doris. She had waited for his mother to die, then his father, but these events had brought him no closer. And finally had had left the country.

  “It was all I could do not to follow him to Honolulu,” she concluded mournfully. “I suppose I might have, had I thought there was really any chance. The trouble with Phil was that he couldn’t face up to the fact that he was in love with me.”

  “You were well out of it,” Harry said curtly. “Phil sounds to me like a first-class heel.”

  “You say that because you didn’t know him. You’d have liked Phil.”

  “The hell I would.”

  “What about you, Harry? What’s kept you single this long?”

  “I haven’t found anyone who would have me.”

  “Don’t look too hard.” He knew there had to be a meaningful gleam in her eyes, but he could not make it out in the darkness. “Of course, I was a fool to think you’d tell me anything,” she continued with a grunt. “You’re a real Irishman. You speak with blarney and raddle out all my sordid little secrets. And what do I get in return? Nothing. What will anybody get? Nothing.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing to get.”

  Lois Grimshawe came stumbling up the dune to whisper in Doris’s ear. Then she hurried off with a “Thanks, dearie” and went to the cabin. It was very late, and the party was breaking up.

  “What’s on old Lois’s mind?”

  “She told me to ask you not to notice if Henry Barnes wasn’t sleeping in the living room,” she replied with a slow and careful articulation. “You can imagine where he will be sleeping. Evidently, she’s not ‘old Lois’ to him.”

  Lois’s cabin contained two small bedrooms over the living room. The plan had been that she and Doris would occupy these while the men slept on a sofa and daybed below. “I don’t give a damn where Barnes sleeps,” Harry retorted. “Except I’m glad it won’t be with me. He looks like a snorer.”

  “You’re not hopelessly disgusted at our sordid little ménage?”

  “Be your age, Doris!”

  They finished their drinks and rose to walk back over the now deserted beach to the cabin, which was dark. Doris stumbled in the sand, and he put an arm around her waist, and as she leaned heavily against him, he knew that he was not going to resist any further. He had had many drinks, but he was not drunk, and he saw clearly that what he was going to do he might regret, but he doubted that he would regret it very much. And, anyway, what the hell? There was a touch of fall wind in the air which reminded him that he had been chaste since June.

  “Oh, Harry, please come up with me,” she whispered as they reached the outside stairway. She clung to him in sudden desperation. “Please, please! I’ll be so lonely if you don’t, I can’t stand it.”

  “I’m coming, don’t worry,” he said and chuckled. “Go on up, scat!” And he turned her around and gave her a slap on the buttocks to send her stumbling up the stairs.

  It was not so much that night that was the mistake as the following night. Doris and Lois spent all Sunday on the beach, in a hazy mood between the pleasures of remembered satisfaction and the misery of their hangovers, while Mr. Barnes slept and Harry took another of his hikes. When he returned, late again, the others were drinking cocktails, and again he drank too many, and again he slept with Doris. But this time she was soberer and
more demanding, and when he rose at five, for he had to drive to a real estate closing in Jamaica, leaving the girls to come in by train, and contemplated the gently snoring figure with the messy graying hair on the bed, he knew that he was never going to share a room with Doris Marsh again.

  He did not get to the office until noon, but he had not been at his desk ten minutes reading his mail when he looked up to see her in the doorway, gazing at him with limpid eyes.

  “Good morning, Harry,” she said softly and then continued her way down the corridor. That she did not even wait for him to return her greeting was all the proof he needed that she regarded him now as her own. Harry sighed and prepared himself for the job that had to be done.

  Nor did he have much time. In ten minutes Doris was back in his doorway to ask: “How about lunch?”

  “Sorry, Doris, I’ve got to write up a closing memo. I may just have a sandwich sent in.”

  “Why don’t you order two, then? I’ll come in and eat it with you.”

  “I said I was working.”

  “My, my, aren’t we busy all of a sudden? Are you trying to avoid me?”

  Her tone was light and teasing; it was obvious that she did not take his truculence seriously. Harry rose. “Step in, Doris, will you, please?” he asked abruptly and closed the door behind her. “Now let’s get one thing straight,” he continued, looking directly into her startled eyes, “and then everything will be easier. What happened this weekend was great fun, but it was just a weekend and just fun. Is that clear?”

  “You mean you’re not coming next weekend? Lois told me to ask you.”

  He noted how quickly she tried to shift the discussion from the general to the particular. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe in repeating these things.”

  “It’s a question of kiss and run?” She laughed with sudden harshness. “I’m not running, Doris.”

  She gasped. “Do you think, Harry Reilley, that I’m the kind of girl who behaves that way every weekend?”

  “Not every weekend, no.”

  “Oh!”

  “Well, you don’t expect me to believe I was the first, do you?”

  The tears jumped into her eyes as she exclaimed: “What a brute you are! I should have known better than to have had anything to do with you!”

  Harry was uncomfortable when she had gone, but he knew that it was better and kinder to put things in their proper setting at the earliest possible moment. Whatever Doris should say about him in the future, she would not be able to bracket him with Phil.

  It had required a certain flexing of the muscles to stand up to Doris, but no similar exertion was required with Lois Grimshawe when she came to his office that afternoon.

  “May I see you a minute, Mr. Reilley?” she asked from the doorway in her high, sweet, synthetic tone.

  “Why, certainly, Mrs. Grimshawe.”

  She sat in the chair before his desk and darted her head forward so that her chin was over the edge of his blotter. “What’s wrong, Harry? Doris says you won’t come down next weekend. I thought we all had such a good time. Didn’t you enjoy it?”

  “I enjoyed it very much.”

  “Doris Marsh is one of the kindest, sweetest creatures that ever drew breath!”

  “Exactly a reason for giving her fair warning. Before she begins to get proprietary ideas.”

  “You might have thought of that before.”

  “I don’t see why. A good time was had by all. Can’t we leave it at that?”

  “But I’m not thinking of Doris. I’m thinking of you, Harry. Isn’t it time you settled down? And where in the world would you find a better wife than Doris?”

  “Wife!” Harry laughed, but his laugh was not pleasant. “I hardly think your role last weekend, Lois, was one that justifies your playing the outraged father with the shotgun!”

  Lois’s comprehension was slow, as manifested by the gradual deepening of her color behind a disconcerted stare. “I think that’s a very nasty way for you to talk.”

  “I think you’ve brought up a very dangerous topic.”

  “Then you have no morals?”

  “I have those of Devon.”

  At this Lois Grimshawe took her dignified departure, and Harry’s popularity with the staff was over once and for all. What vicious tales she spread about him he was never to know, but Miss Gibbon only grunted now when he went to the file room and Mrs. Lane in the library gave him cursory nods in exchange for his cheerful greetings. And, needless to add, the stenographers sent to him from Lois’s pool were the greenest she could find. Doris never spoke to him now and seemed to want others to observe her coolness. When they passed in the corridor, she averted her face in an unmistakable cut.

  Harry’s effort to convince himself that he did not care was not altogether successful. He had formed so few friendships in the firm that the loss of his easy bantering relationship with the girls on the staff made the office a cold place. Had he loved his work, it might have made the difference, or had he had any reasonable hope of a transfer to a more interesting department. He decided that if he was going to stay, he would have to reexamine his position, and to do this he determined upon an interview with the senior partner.

  As he turned the corner of the corridor on his way to Clitus Tilney’s office, he almost collided with the large, broad-shouldered, tweeded figure coming out.

  “Hello, Harry.” Tilney made a point of addressing each associate by his first name. He was about to walk on when he stopped suddenly. “Oh, Harry.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Mrs. Tilney and I have never had the pleasure of seeing you in our home. I wonder if you’d care to take family supper with us next Saturday. Quite informally. At seven o’clock?”

  “Why, I should like to very much. Thank you, sir.”

  “Good. We’ll expect you, then.”

  Harry had heard of the Tilney suppers and had always assumed that only “disciples” were asked. Now, as he gazed in surprise after that retreating figure he grunted in self-derision at his own fatuousness for remembering what Doris had said about his future in the firm.

  ***

  He would never have believed that home life in New York could be as attractive as he found it that night at the Tilneys’. The house had a dark, cool, leathery, masculine comfortableness. One felt that Mrs. Tilney had done it all, but had done it with her husband in mind. It was an ordinary brownstone in size, but the ceilings were higher than average, and the walls were covered with landscape paintings of the Hudson River school and photographs of bar groups and judges. The chairs were low and deep and hard to get out of, and the big low mosaic tables invulnerable to spilt drinks. Clitus Tilney himself turned out to be an excellent host. He moved cheerfully about the room with a big silver cocktail shaker from which he poured very cold dry martinis into chilled silver mugs. He was evidently not a man who confined his perfectionism to the law. Mrs. Tilney was attractive, in a large, serene way, but she let her husband take the lead, which Harry liked.

  There were a dozen people in the room, mosdy associates and their wives. Harry looked suspiciously about to see with whom Tilney had classed him, half expecting to find Doris Marsh and Lee Ozite. Would it be a pickup party for all the oddities in the office hitherto neglected by the great man? But he had immediately to admit that his suspicion was unfair. All the other men were “disciples,” and as he was putting this together, Bart French, who had married the oldest Tilney girl, came up to him.

  “Good to see you, Harry. You’ll find my father-in-law makes a very dry martini.”

  “Is that a warning or a compliment?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  Harry was not sure that he liked being made to feel at home by French, and he looked stiffly at that long oval brown face with the tired eyes that Doris Marsh had once described as charming. French was what Harry called a “boy scout.” He was always pretending that, like the other clerks, he had to live on his salary.

  “Quite a place your old man’s g
ot here.”

  “Isn’t it?” French responded eagerly. “What I think of as a real lawyer’s house. I hope someday I’ll be able to afford one like it.”

  “Can’t you now?’

  “On what they pay us clerks at 65 Wall? Fat chance!”

  “But I thought you had a large private income.”

  “I don’t know what you call large,” French muttered, and moved away, obviously put out by such bad form.

  Harry was delighted to have ruffled him so easily. Besides, there was someone far better to contemplate, as he finished his drink, than Bart French, and that was the youngest Tilney daughter, who had just entered the room. He learned that her name was Fran from the nice old gray woman passing cheese and that she taught English at Miss Irvin’s School. She was thin and pale, with soft long auburn hair and small brown eyes that had an odd shine, almost a glitter. Her face was the least bit long and features very delicate, her nose turned up and her skin, Harry observed as he moved closer, almost translucent. Despite the slightness of her frame and the quick nervous gesticulations of her arms, she conveyed, in the rapid, soft tone that he could just hear across the room, the sense of a brittle, bright intelligence. Taking his refilled drink to a corner by a globe of the world that he could pretend to be turning, he resumed his contemplation of Miss Tilney. Suddenly she turned, as if aware of his gaze, and walked over to him.

  “You must be Harry Reilley. I’m Fran Tilney. We’re going in to supper now, and you’re next to me. Can you bear it?”

  Harry would not have thought, as he followed her down the narrow stairway to the dining room, that anything could have spoiled that evening, and yet her very first question at the table did so.

  “What do you do in the office? Are you in ‘green goods,’ too?”

  This was a term used downtown, always with a perfunctory snicker, to describe the department which dealt with corporate securities. Every other lawyer at the party was in “green goods.”