“Tower, Tilney doesn’t mean that much to me,” he grumbled, and she saw that she had said enough. More than enough.
“Of course it doesn’t, darling! Why should it? And in the future it’s only going to mean to me what it means to you. Is that a bargain?”
When she saw him smile at last, if reluctantly, she could only pray that the crisis had been averted and swear an inward vow that she would never play Imogen again.
THE SINGLE READER
1963
NONE OF HIS law partners or clients, or even the friends who considered themselves closest to him, knew the secret of Morris Madison. They saw the tall, thin, smooth, urbane tax expert, at the height of his career in his early fifties, the thick, graying hair parted in the center and rising high above a tall forehead, the long, strong, firm nose and the long oblong face, the melancholy but un-self-betraying eyes. They heard the soft, precise voice, the slow, clear articulation; they marveled at the ease with which he could explain the thorniest tax principle and at the profundity of his general information, from politics to social gossip. Morris, they all agreed, was not only the ideal extra man for the grandest dinner party; he was the perfect companion for the Canadian fishing trip. But they had no idea that he was a dedicated man. They suspected all kinds of lacks in his life, besides the obvious ones of a wife and children, and in the free fashion of a psychiatrically minded era they attributed his reserve and good manners to every kind of frustration and insecurity. But none of them suspected that he had a passion.
He kept a diary. He had started it twenty-five years before, when his wife had left him, a horsy country girl who had never relaxed her attitude that the city was full of “snobs and toadies,” of whom her husband was one of the worst. Madison had resented her for a year; then in his mind he had forgiven her; ultimately he had even admitted that he might have mishandled her. He had taken her too seriously, too literally, too reasonably. She had wanted domination rather than understanding. The only person who cared about understanding was himself. And for himself he started a diary.
How he could have lived without it in the years that followed, he would not have known. As a rising young lawyer and a single man he was at everybody’s mercy. The wives of the older partners expected him to fill in at their dinner parties and listen respectfully to widows and matrons who talked about their servants and children. Clients with personal problems, knowing that he had no family, felt entided to help themselves to his nights as well as his days for greater self-revelation. Married friends in domestic trouble poured out their woes to him, ostensibly to profit from his experience, but actually for the heady delights of indiscreet confession. Single women regarded him as fair game for every imaginable confidence, and even happy husbands in summertime, when their wives were at the seashore, sought out the congenial company of “old Morris” to relate to him, in alcoholic profusion at the bars of their clubs, the business worries that no sensible spouse would dream of listening to. It began to seem to Madison, in the words of Emily Dickinson, that “all the heavens were a bell and being but an ear” and that the only way for him to talk was to talk to himself.
At first the diary was, naturally enough, primarily the vehicle for his resentment. His circle of acquaintance appeared in it in all the banality of their unsolicited communication, with huge heads and eyes and bigger mouths; their talk was lampooned rather than reported. But on a reading at the end of its first year Madison had been struck by the fact that the most illuminating passages were those where he had dryly set down scenes and conversations that had not seemed of particular interest at the time. For example, a lunch with Clitus Tilney in which the latter had discussed his own prospects of partnership in the firm contained in a dozen lines the very portrait of downtown ambition. Madison now became more selective in his entries. His ears were alerted for the right confidence, the right complaint, even the right phrase that would convey the essential quality of the speaker. And as his people began to breathe and chatter like themselves in his pages, he realized the first great joy of re-creation.
He began to raise his sights. He decided that he wanted to paint a picture of life in New York for a subsequent generation. He began to note the razing of buildings and the erection of new ones. He watched ticker tape parades and dined in the newest restaurants. He marked fashions and fads and even attended fires. He read exhaustively in the great diarists of the past, Pepys, Evelyn, Saint-Simon, and paid many visits to the New York Historical Society to pore over the unpublished pages of Mayor Hone. His conservative friends were surprised to find themselves deserted for Elsa Maxwell’s frolicsome balls, as was café society in turn to find itself abandoned for the dullest bar association dinners. Madison would leave a reception at the Archdiocese to go to a late party at Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s and slip away from there to a gathering at Sardi’s. He was widely regarded as a snob, but it was rare for two people to agree on what kind.
Inevitably, he came to think of his people as they would one day appear in his diary. If a judge was rude to him while he was arguing a case, if a government official was quixotic or arbitrary, Madison would reflect with an inner smile that they were marring their portraits for posterity. Yet he took great pains to avoid the prejudices which he suspected even in his idol, Saint-Simon. Most of the people whom he knew, like many of Saint-Simon’s, would survive to posterity only in his own unrebuttable pages. If he succumbed to the temptation of “touching them up,” of making them wittier or nastier or bigger or smaller than they were, nobody in a hundred years would be any the wiser. But his work would have become fiction, and he had no intention of being a mere novelist.
When he was fifty-three, the great set of red morocco on the shelves of his cedar closet totaled more volumes than the years of his age, for there were sometimes three or four to a single year. The diary was now insatiable. It not only demanded its daily addition; it demanded footnotes, appendices, even illustrations. Madison found that he spent as much time editing it as he did writing it, but the former task had the advantage of requiring a constant rereading of his work, a constant reabsorbing of his own glowing, crowded, changing picture of the city, now a Bruegel, now a Hogarth, now a quiet, still Vermeer. Was it not as near as he might ever come to the joys of having an audience? Friends were surprised to find him asking for snapshots of themselves or of their deceased relatives or even of long destroyed houses. They decided that he was becoming sentimental with age. His dinner partners were sometimes piqued to find the “perfect listener” interrupting their confidences with such questions as: “Do you happen to remember what year your father sold the house in Seventieth Street?” or “Is it true that your Aunt Gisèle refused to swim in a pool if there were men in it?”
But only Clitus Tilney seemed to suspect the existence of an avocation. At lunch one day at the Down Town Association, Tilney rubbed his cheeks, his elbows on the table, for several long silent moments, reminding Madison of a great sleek lazy bear, bored in a zoo.
“Morris, do you know something?” he began, folding his hands on the table and contemplating them with an air of mild surprise. “I worry about you. Oh, I know, downtown we never talk personally. We live and work, cheek by jowl, year after year, and never know a thing about each other. And never seem to want to, either. But once in a while I have to break that rule. With people I like, anyway. And I like you, Morris. But if you don’t want to hear me, just tell me to shut my big mouth.”
“No, please, Clitus. I’d love to hear you.”
“That’s what you always say: ‘I’d love to hear you.’” Tilney shook his large head as if Madison’s response were the very symptom that most troubled him. “But anyway. I’ve never had a doubt that, after my own, yours was the best legal head in the office.” He smiled to show that his boast was humorous. “Yet you and I both know that we can go just so far in life as lawyers. We don’t kid ourselves. I’m a securities expert, and you’re a tax wizard. We’ve mastered our respective fields of gimmickry. But that’s n
ot enough for us. Rutherford Tower can be perfectly happy with his wills and trusts, and Waldron Webb with his lawsuits. But you and I . . . well, our souls need more.”
“What does your soul need, Clitus?”
“There you go again, throwing the ball right back at me. Will you hang on to it a moment, for pity’s sake? I want to talk about you.”
Madison stirred uneasily. “But I could answer better if you told me first.”
“Oh, very well,” Tilney answered with an impatient shrug. “Only you know it, anyway. I’ve got the Washington bug. Ever since I had that job with Bob Lovett. And sometimes I even think I’d like to go back to Ulrica and teach.”
“The firm will never let you go.”
“Ah, well,” said Tilney with a sigh, “that’s another matter, isn’t it? But to get back to you. You see? I can be very persistent. I’ve noticed in the past year that you’ve delegated more work.”
“Is that a reproach?”
“Not in the least, my dear fellow. You know how I feel about that sort of thing. If a man can’t delegate most of his work at fifty, he’s either a dunce or a Napoleon. No, I’m wondering what you do with your life. Do you have any hobbies? Are you a Sunday painter? Or do you simply gaze at the sky and think great thoughts?”
The bantering tone of Tilney’s question did not in the least conceal its genuine friendliness and concern. Madison was surprised to feel, for the first time in many years, that sharp pricking little urge to confide in another human. As he gazed back into his partner’s sympathetic gray eyes, he moistened his lips and after a silence that was beginning to be embarrassing, began: “Well, as a matter of fact, I have what you might call a hobby—”
But he stopped. He stopped, frozen, on the edge of this new precipice. Talk about his diary? It was appalling; it was unthinkable. He shook his head quickly several times, as if to awaken himself. “It’s my social life,” he concluded lamely.
“Great Scott, man!” Tilney exploded. “You don’t mean to sit there and tell me that all you care about is to dress up in a monkey suit and exchange banalities with stupid women?”
Madison wondered if he had ever wanted anything so much as he now wanted to have Tilney read the diary. But it was out of the question. Tilney would have been scandalized at the entries about his partners and clients, about the innermost workings of the firm, about Tilney himself. Besides, his personality was too powerful. Even if he liked the diary, in some bullying fashion he would try to put his own stamp on it.
“I take a broader view of social life than you do, Clitus,” Madison said meekly. “To me it’s more than a matter of monkey suits and stupid women. I like to think I’m observing a microcosm of the world. Everything, you know, can be contained in everything else. Isn’t it a question of the power of one’s lens?”
“I suppose it is, of course,” Tilney said gruffly, and, giving up, he turned the conversation to office matters.
***
Madison discovered in the weeks that followed that the seeds which Tilney had so officiously scattered were growing with tropical speed into the jungle of his own uneasiness. His evening delight of dipping into the old volumes of the diary was now curtailed by the most agitating speculations. What would Tilney think of it? What would his other partners think? What would his ex-wife, long since remarried and contentedly living in Pasadena? Would they laugh? Or would they be impressed? Even dazzled? Was it enough to be thought all one’s life a mere clever lawyer and diner-out and only to be posthumously appreciated at one’s true worth? If there were no life hereafter, what would it gain him to have his diary acclaimed? Madison began to feel that he had to have at least one reader. At least one judge in his lifetime. But whom? Nobody seemed to have just the right qualifications. They were all too close to him or too distant, too ignorant or too terrifyingly knowing, too kind or too malicious. He started thumbing the Social Register and ended with the Manhattan Directory.
There was, however, one name that reoccurred on every list that he jotted down, and that was Aurelia Starr. Mrs. Starr was a widow, without children or other visible appendages, a few years younger than himself, with a small but adequate income, a trim and well-clad figure, who managed, for the proverbially unwanted extra woman, to get herself asked out nearly as widely as Madison himself. She was very decorative, with her dark, sleek hair, her long eyebrows rising to her temples, her widely parted blue eyes, her straight Egyptian nose. She might have had some of the elegance of a Nefertiti had she not trembled with an American widow’s insecurity. But Aurelia, for all her nervous charm, was “safe.” She was supposed, like all the unattached of her sex, to be after a husband, but she was so kind, so considerate, so understanding, such a good sport, that no man felt there was any danger of a dinner-table flirtation being taken too seriously. It was probably for just this reason that poor Aurelia had not re-wed. Like Madison himself, she was too good a listener.
When he sat beside her at dinner the next time, in the penthouse of a theatrical designer, he for once had no eyes or ears for the other guests. All he could think of, as he listened to her quiet, tense, pleasant chatter, was the question of showing her the diary. When the party was over, he took her home in a taxi, and she asked him up to her apartment for a drink. It was the kind of invitation that as a prudent single man he ordinarily declined, but now he hesitated.
“Oh, do come up, Morris,” she urged him. “You and I meet and talk so often, and I love it, of course, but what do we ever really say? What do any of us ever really say in social life? Couldn’t we try to talk for once, just you and me?”
“We could try.”
In her tiny white and gold living room, which gloried in an Aubusson rug and Hubert Robert panels, he took a long draft of whiskey and relaxed.
“It’s true that people talk banalities at parties,” he agreed. “They like it that way. They think any real communication would be too much work. And then they complain of loneliness.” He snorted in derision. “Are you never lonely?”
“I think I can honestly say I’m not.”
Aurelia laughed. “You sound very superior. With whom do you communicate? Or don’t you?”
“I communicate with the future.”
When she paused to consider this, he hoped that she would not try too hard to be sympathetic. But she was simplicity itself. “And how do you do that?”
“By keeping a diary. Or a journal. I’m not sure which you’d call it.”
“I can see the advantage to you. But how does the poor future get its word in?”
“That’s exactly what I was going to ask you. How can I arrange to let it?”
She mused. “Does it go back far, your diary?”
“Twenty-five years.”
“My goodness. And it’s complete?”
“As you can’t imagine.”
“Oh.” She seemed to be looking through him, her lips apart, as if she could dimly make out those red volumes in the cedar chest. “And now you want someone to see it. For an opinion? Do you want a historian or a professor of literature?”
“Hardly. I think I just want someone to tell me if it’s . . .” He paused to swallow and moisten his lips. “Well, if it’s real. I mean, if it really exists. I sometimes wonder. But I think I’ve found the person who can tell me. Do you suspect who it is, Aurelia?”
“Of course I do! But I’m doubling back and forth in my tracks. I’m scared stiff! Why should I be the one so honored?”
“Because you never appear in it.” He had not realized that this was so until the second before he said it, and immediately he understood that it might hurt her. “I don’t mean by that that there’s nothing to say about you. I mean that I must have always planned that you should be my reader.”
“But I can’t!” she protested, and the way she touched her middle fingers to the ends of her long eyebrows conveyed some of her tenseness. “It’s not simply that I’m scared of such a responsibility. I think you’re making a mistake. Once it’s shared, it isn’t
really a diary anymore. There wouldn’t still be that special intimacy between you and it. Be careful how you play with that!”
“Oh, but I know,” he exclaimed. “This has been no light decision, believe me. You should be very proud. My diary and I are choosy!”
“I am proud, dear Morris. But I’m not foolhardy.”
Nor was she. He was baffled and at length irritated to find that he could not move her. The most that he could obtain was her promise to discuss it on another occasion, and to do this he took her out for dinner the following week in a new Javanese restaurant. Aurelia had quite recovered her equanimity and was able to talk about the diary in a lively, even a facetious manner. She asked him all kinds of questions and seemed particularly fascinated by the mechanical details of its typing and storage. He told her about the safe deposit vault where one copy was always kept and described his plans for its posthumous publication and the trust to effect them that he had established in his will.
“But we can’t talk all evening about my diary,” he interrupted himself, with perfunctory courtesy, when the dessert was placed on the table.
“You mean you’d rather talk about mine?”
“Do you keep one?” The sudden sharpness of his tone reflected the instant crisis of his jealousy. “But of course you do! It’s too obvious. How could I not have guessed it?”
“It’s just a line-a-day.”
“Just a line-a-day!” he retorted with a snort. “But, obviously, you love it. Obviously, you have visions of it being published.”
“Oh, Morris,” she protested, laughing. “You’re too absurd!”
“Am I?” His tone was almost plaintive. “I see it all too clearly. Your diary will come out the same year as mine and put it completely in the shade. Oh, I can read those reviews as if they were written on that wall! ‘Although Mrs. Starr may not have the thoroughness of Mr. Madison, neither does she have his pedantry. Hers is the woman’s hand, the light touch that illuminates her era. The universities and the scholars will undoubtedly be grateful for Mr. Madison’s painstaking observations, but for that train trip, for that hospital gift, or even for reading aloud at the family hearth, we recommend Aurelia Starr.’”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 14