The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  I don’t think any of the rest of us would have placed much money on the proposition that Hilary was not going to write that column. It seemed to me that it was half done already. Hilary was as thin and sleek and dark as he had been at college, but he was more hirsute; black bushes rustled under his red silk sport shirt, and his sharp, feral countenance was a closely shaven blue. His language was precise, his accent affected, his gestures on the verge of the effeminate. Yet he considered himself irresistible to women, and according to what I heard about him, fatuity must have been half the battle with the fair sex in East Hampton. He had had three famously beautiful wives.

  “Lester Gordon was a kind of one-man inflation,” Townie Drayton observed. “Almost a one-man revolution. By driving up prices and destroying old values he could make the wealth of a whole community change hands. And in the turnover, of course, Lester would come out on top. Before we knew it, there he was in every club, on every board of trustees, in control of the old institutions, making one welcome in one’s own backyard—”

  “Even marrying a Drayton,” Hilary interrupted, and we all laughed, for Lester Gordon had married a cousin of Townie’s.

  “Well, exactly,” Townie agreed in all seriousness. “I don’t mean to sound overly snobbish, but when I first met Lester at Columbia, I certainly never expected to see that in my family.”

  Townie had only joined us in Columbia after he had been fired from Yale for taking all the radiator caps off the cars parked outside Wolsey Hall on a concert night. He had been one of the handsomest members of our class, but those fine youthful looks had long been buried in the heavy flesh of his middle years. His glassy gray eyes, thick lips and broad aquiline nose would have seemed as coarse as his bulky figure, had it not been for a certain decadent imperial air, the flash of a Caesar, a Nero. Townie, after the Yale escapade, had tried to alter his ways and had tended to pooh-pooh his old Manhattan lineage and land, but as life had developed neither his brains nor his imagination, and had swelled only his girth and the value of his earth, he had come to lean more frankly on these once nominally discredited assets.

  “I think that what we all really resent in Lester,” John Grau suggested, “is that he understood the heart of our world so much better than we did. Don’t you remember his total indifference to the causes that interested us before the war: communism, socialism, pacifism? It wasn’t really even indifference; those things actually had no existence for him. What he saw and all he saw was the innate toughness of the capitalist system.”

  “Oh, come now, John,” Townie protested. “There were plenty of us who believed in capitalism, even back in the blackest days of the Depression.”

  “No, Townie, you don’t see what I mean,” John insisted, in his clear lawyer’s voice. “You believed in it, but you didn’t believe it would endure. I remember distinctly, when you were first kind enough to ask me to visit your family on Long Island, and we went to some of those fabulous debutante parties, your friends would always say the same thing. As soon as they caught sight of the marquee, the lanterns, the two orchestras, they would exclaim: ‘End of an era!’ That was the cry to everything, half laughingly, half seriously: ‘End of an era!’ If I had predicted, in 1938, that in twenty years’ time the two gubernatorial candidates in New York would be a Rockefeller and a Harriman, each richer than ever before, I would have been laughed out of court. By everyone but Lester.”

  John Grau seemed at first blush older than the rest of us because his hair was gray. But except for this, which suited his sobriety, his gravity and the legend of his constant toil, he was in the best physical shape and the best-looking of the group. His wide brow, square firm face and broad shoulders gave a formidable backing to his vigorous language, and yet his intent gray-green eyes preserved an enthusiasm that was almost youthful. It was as if the idealist of college days had been better preserved in John’s cell of hard labor than in the more dissipated existences which the rest of us had led.

  “Lester perfectly understood,” John continued, now with a touch of bitterness, “the modern alliance between capital and labor to load the costs of private wealth and public welfare on the backs of the professional classes. He wasn’t fool enough to become a lawyer like me.”

  “Oh, come, John, you do pretty well,” Hilary pointed out. “If I were to tell you that your income would be under seventy-five grand this year, I bet you’d shriek bloody poverty.”

  “But look at the tax bracket I’m in!” John exclaimed indignantly. “What do you guys know about taxes? Townie here lives off capital gains and tax-exempts, while you, Hilary, swim in a sea of phony deductions.”

  “Boo hoo!” Hilary cried. “Let’s weep for the destitute Wall Street lawyer!”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” I remonstrated, “to hell with your taxes. Let’s get back to Lester Gordon. I want to know much more about him. I want to know why this thing happened. What were his origins? So far as I’m concerned, he was born freshman year at Columbia. Do any of us know who his family were or even where he came from?”

  “I do,” replied Hilary, our always documented columnist. “I got it from his first wife, Huldah. Lester was born Felix Kinsky, the son of a Lithuanian haberdasher in Hamburg. His parents brought him here to escape the Nazis, and both died early. He lived in Queens with a cousin of his mother’s, one David Gordon, originally Ginsberg, a minor building contractor. Lester took his guardian’s name, or at least his new name, and later married his daughter. You can readily see from that much that he grew up without any of the usual commitments: religious, national or even family. His parents were Orthodox Jews, but the Gordons were not, and Lester became a Gordon. He had no ties with Lithuania or Germany, and he took people literally when they described America as the land of opportunity. We four were inclined to be snotty to him at first, when he cultivated us at college. We considered ourselves the big shots of the class, and we didn’t want to be cultivated for our big-shottiness. What fatuous asses we were! As if a man starting from scratch should not aim as high as he could!”

  “Particularly when our usefulness only began at college,” Townie added. “Lester made a very good thing out of every man at this table.”

  “Well, I don’t know about me,” I demurred. “He bought the usual ‘chic’ collection of impressionists at Hone’s, but that was more our making a good thing out of him. You were the one, Townie, who gave him his real start. Tell us about it. Weren’t you and Lester together in the war?”

  “Just at the beginning,” Townie replied, pausing to suck deeply on his cigar. “We were both in the Army Signal Corps and had adjoining desks in Washington. After Pearl Harbor everybody screamed for overseas duty, including Lester. But there are ways and ways of screaming, and it did not surprise me much, when I was shipped off, that he remained, as ‘indispensable’ to General Miles. Years later, in the Normandy invasion, I saw him again, a smart, blustering little lieutenant colonel, attached to some big brass well behind the lines. Oh, hell, I can’t blame him for that.” Townie seemed bored, as I think we all felt, at the prospect of reviving the tired old hatred for the desk soldier. “Anyway, he kept things cheerful in the dull Washington days, and he always wrote me afterwards. When the war was over he called one night on Ella and me, and we sat up late drinking and reminiscing. He had a lot of good stories and knew what had happened to everybody in our class. But he seemed particularly interested in where we lived. Father and Mother had moved out to the old family homestead in Queens and had turned over to us the pretty Georgian house in Eighty-seventh Street that Mott Schmitt had built for them in the late twenties. I must say, Ella and I rather rattled around in it, and when Lester suggested a price that was well over the current market, we were interested.”

  “Where did he get the money?” I asked.

  “Oh, he had made use of army connections. He had friends in banks. Besides, he had married that builder’s daughter. And there was a big mortgage, of course. But after Ella and I moved out, we never could walk through
that street again. It was what afterwards became known as a standard Gordon operation. A cheap front was put on the two lower floors to make it as ugly as the restaurateur who had leased it could wish, and the rest of the building was cut up into small apartments with papery walls. There were plenty of violations, but before they were discovered Lester had sold out and was off to bigger deals.”

  “Is that the way he did it?” I asked. “From house to house?”

  “And from corner to corner, from block to block. He and his father-in-law formed a company called Adas that did a lot of buying in Queens and Brooklyn. They had a reputation for block-busting, probably well deserved. But the most amazing thing to me about Lester was the way he could do the same thing to you twice. He was a bit of a magician: he could show you his hand and then play it. The Eighty-seventh Street house was only a warm-up. What he really wanted was the old Drayton homestead in Queens. You remember it, John. You came out for a weekend once, didn’t you? There were sixteen acres and a beautiful white eighteenth-century farmhouse, a landmark if ever there was one. But taxes were high, and my parents were getting older and found it hard to get the maids to run the place. When Lester turned up in my office, with a face as round and bright as a newly minted fifty-cent piece, and offered me a quarter of a million in cash for the property, I didn’t see how I could turn it down. Indeed, despite what I knew about him, I thought he was doing me a favor, as there were several other sites that he could have purchased for his veterans’ housing development. I wanted to save the family home if I could, and he said it might be used as a clubhouse for the center of the development.”

  “And you believed him?” Hilary demanded.

  “I wanted to believe him,” Townie replied with another shrug. “It was a good deal. You know how those things are. Of course, once the deed was signed, the old house was wrecked before you could say ‘Jack Robinson.’ Obviously, Lester had planned it that way, and obviously I should have seen it. Then he leased the land for twenty-five years to one of his corporations, which borrowed the money from the FHA to construct an oval of twelve highrise apartment houses. The company then leased the apartments to veterans at a rental that covered taxes, interest and amortization, plus a tidy additional sum for the landlord. Thus at the end of twenty-five years, a point of time rapidly approaching, Lester will own—or would have owned—his apartments free and clear, the whole tab being picked up by the FHA. I figure conservatively that an original investment of two hundred and fifty grand will net him a cool twenty-five million.”

  “But if he was ever to get his buildings back,” I asked, “wouldn’t he regret having made them so bare and cheap?”

  “No. Because the likes of Lester would have built all the other buildings in the area, and there is nothing else for people to live in. And the irony is that he christened the project Drayton Gardens.”

  “Well, after all,” Hilary remonstrated, “the Draytons got a quarter of a million for it. You may sneer at that sum, Townie, but it can still feed and clothe a good many little Draytons. Even if they eat at the Colony and dress at Bergdorf’s.”

  “You can’t compare it to twenty-five million!”

  “That’s the price you pay for being too grand to go into the real estate business,” Hilary pointed out scornfully. “But it still took two to wreck the Drayton homestead. And you were one!”

  “All right, goddamnit, Hilary,” Townie rejoined roughly, reddening to the color of real anger, “suppose you tell us the story of when you became Lester’s hired hand?”

  “I shall be glad to,” Hilary said coolly, crossing his knees. “Presumably, you are speaking of the time when Lester acquired Blackwell’s Bi-Weekly, using, no doubt, some of the profits from his coup with the Draytons’ ‘cherry orchard.’ I was then drama editor on that esteemed but impecunious periodical. When the news leaked out that Lester had bought it, the other editors, knowing I was his classmate, scurried to my office to find out what their fates might be under the new management. I could offer them little comfort. What would a realtor of that stripe care for a bleating herd of intellectuals like us? I was surprised, therefore, when our new owner, instead of summoning me to his office, came to mine. You should have seen him! Short as ever but stouter, red-faced, with that eternal smile and boyishly curled hair, a painted tie dotted with gold balls, a ring with a big diamond, mammoth cufflinks with sapphires and a pair of yellow gloves that he kept slapping against his noisily tweeded arm. The King of Philistia astride the throne of Athens!

  “‘I suppose you think your money can buy the muses,’ I told him. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find they’re not for sale.’ ‘There you go,’ he retorted; ‘like all the rest, you’re telling me what my money can’t buy. I know I can’t buy the muses. But can’t I purchase a little seat from which to see them at work? Is that asking too much?’ As he paused for an answer, I had to agree that this might not be asking too much. ‘Very well!’ he exclaimed, leaning back with folded arms. ‘Then here I am watching.’ ‘And what are you watching?’ I demanded. ‘Why, my new editor-in-chief, of course!’

  “Well, Gentlemen, I guess we all have to admit that Lester has charm. It may be a vulgar, repulsive sort of charm, but it’s still charm. If anyone had told me the day before that I was going to give up my career as a drama critic to become the amanuensis of Lester Gordon, I’d have called up Bellevue and told the little men in white coats to come and take me away. Yet that is precisely what happened. Of course, he promised me a carte blanche and a salary double what I was getting. The picture that he drew of the future of Blackwell’s was an editor’s dream. Everything was to be increased: the circulation, the quality, the illustrations, the text, the advertisements, the staff. Even if one knew it was a pipe dream, it was still impossible not to try to believe it.”

  “But did you succeed in believing it?” Townie interrupted, remembering, no doubt, Hilary’s question to him.

  “Not really—never really,” Hilary admitted. “But I thought I might be able to have things my way with the new Blackwell’s for a year, and a year’s a long time in journalism. The first step I took was to house myself and my staff in sumptuous new offices. Lester was perfectly affable about this, as he was about all the people I wished to hire. He did not bat an eye when I added a music editor, an art editor and an architecture editor to our roster. Blackwell’s was to be the review of reviews; it was to point the way forward to the best in all the arts everywhere in America.”

  “But, as I remember it, Hilary, Blackwell’s did in a way become that,” I objected. “For a while, anyway. Wasn’t it after Lester sold it that it went to the dogs?”

  “Perfectly true,” Hilary agreed readily. “But that leaves out of the picture why Lester sold it. You see, Lester knew from the beginning that a magazine genuinely dedicated to the arts could never be supported by the greater public. He also knew that the town was full of fat cats who were dying to own just such a magazine, but who were terrified of losing their shirts. For this reason he calculated that by souping up Blackwell’s to look both intellectual and successful, he could make a quick killing. So Blackwell’s got a large shiny new format, some dazzling photography, a galaxy of brilliant names for one-shot contributions, interviews with such unlikely persons as the Pope, Stalin and Lady Macbeth and a big promotion campaign. By its third issue Brian Longford, a third-generation soft-drinks heir, who was tired of boozing and marrying and wanted to ‘contribute’ to mankind, was trailing Lester all over town, begging and bawling to buy his magazine. Lester at last, out of the kindness of his heart, agreed to swap Blackwell’s for a little bottle cap company that Brian happened to own. It also just happened that this little company had a portfolio of vital contracts with Brian’s family corporation. By the time the latter had awakened to the necessity of getting the bottle cap factory back, Lester’s price was five million!”

  “And Blackwell’s?” I asked. “At least poor Brian Longford had you, Hilary.”

  “Yes, he had me, and a lot of goo
d it did him. I was as much taken in as he was. I had no idea, as Lester had, that four issues of brilliant ideas could not be repeated indefinitely and that the new Blackwell’s was ‘too much, too soon.’ I was astonished when subscriptions began to fall off and suggested to Brian, as disaster followed disaster, that we go back to the old format. But the old Blackwell subscribers had been alienated by our flashy changes and could not be coaxed back to the fold. Brian kept the magazine going as long as his tax lawyer allowed him and then closed shop and threw his staff into the street.”

  “Some of them evidently managed to scramble out of that street,” John Grau observed dryly.

  “And it’s interesting, isn’t it,” Townie suggested, for we were nothing if not critical that day, “that when Lester wanted an editor to give Blackwell’s the meretricious gleam that would attract the greater multitude, he knew just where to find him.”

  “And even more interesting,” I pointed out, to add my own small bit, “that that same editor went directly from the obsequies of Blackwell’s to his own greatest triumph as a columnist in The Knickerbocker Gazette. Would you have got that job, Hilary, without the fame you acquired in the brief but giddy heyday of Lester’s magazine?”

  Hilary was not in the least put out. He lit a new cigarette and waved the match slowly back and forth, as if he did not really care to extinguish it. I suppose my word “triumph” made up for everything. “We should be grateful, I suppose,” he said with a wink, “that anything at all was saved from so disastrous a wreck.”