The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Tell us about Lester during the Blackwell era,” I suggested. “Did he take an active interest in it?”

  “Not really. He left the running of it to me. But we were all surprised at how much he was there. I don’t think a day went by that he didn’t come to my office to chat, to listen in at editorial conferences, to look over galleys. At last it began to dawn on me that Lester had had a subsidiary interest in acquiring the magazine. He wanted to educate himself.”

  “In art?” Townie demanded in surprise.

  “In everything. Or rather in everything fashionable. This was the period in Lester’s life when he began to be interested in society, and he took me for his guide and mentor. I considered it a case of symbiosis, or living together for mutual advantage. He would let me run his magazine, and I would try to make him presentable. We started with clothes. I made Lester jettison all his wardrobe and jewelry; I stripped him, so to speak, to his checkbook. Then we took a trip to Europe: to London for suits, to Paris for shirts and ties, to Rome for boots and accessories. But it was a dismal case of plus ça change. Lester remained stubbornly Lester. Dressed by a duke’s tailor, he was still the realtor from Queens. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter in the fluctuating society of modern New York, particularly in the world of fashion magazines and charity balls.”

  “Hairdresser society,” Townie sneered.

  “Society is always society,” Hilary retorted coldly, “and as Oscar Wilde so wisely put it, only those who can’t get in abuse it. The Draytons and Livingstons and Stuyvesants have had their day. Nobody who really counts gives a hoot about family anymore. But I will admit that I could never persuade Lester of this. He was as loyal to the old Knickerbocker families as Townie himself. At least he was then. The very ease with which he was accepted by the international set made him suspicious. When he found himself sitting at the Duchess of Dino’s table at the Heart Ball, his triumph was clouded by the sad reflection that only a déclassée duchess could be the friend of such a meatball as Lester Gordon!”

  We all laughed, and I asked: “But where was Huldah in all of this? Did she, too, make the grade with duchesses?”

  “Ah, no, even that world has its limits. Poor Huldah was left to sulk at home. Lester, with his customary tact, suggested that she take lessons in voice and deportment and learn to be a lady, and she threw a vase at him. Yet he was fond of her in his own way, and when he begged me to intercede and persuade her to grant him a divorce, he wept at the cruelty of a world that made him be so cruel. Napoleon had to cast off Josephine for an Austrian archduchess. Lester Gordon had to have a Drayton!”

  “How did he ever pull that off?” John Grau asked, turning to Townie.

  “Ask Hilary,” Townie replied with a shrug. “He’s telling the story.”

  “Can I speak frankly, then?” Hilary asked Townie.

  “Oh, Lord, yes. Gabrielle’s only my second cousin. I told her she was a goose to marry him, and she sent me smartly about my own business. That was the last time we spoke until he absconded, and then she came around humbly for my advice. Go ahead, Hilary. I’d like to know myself how she ever talked her father into it. Cousin Bronson once told me he’d rather see his daughter in her coffin than married to a Jew!”

  “Gabrielle’s father wasn’t talked into it,” Hilary explained. “He was told. She and her mother, like most women, could be very practical on occasion. Gabrielle, unlike Townie, was a poor Drayton, over thirty and, despite a regal nose and sandy hair, something less than a beauty. She and her mother sneered at Lester when he started calling after meeting them at Townie’s, but all sneers ceased together when he made the offer of his hand—even before it was out of Huldah’s grasp—and a settlement of a million bucks!”

  John whistled. “That’s what I call taking a place by storm!”

  “Gabrielle and her mother promptly reversed course, and the Drayton aunts were given the family line to spread over town. Lester a Jew? Hadn’t people heard of integration? Lester married? Well, was he the first man who had to buy off an adventuress who had trapped him into matrimony in college days? Lester sharp in business practices? Wasn’t that what people always said of the successful? Lester not a gentleman? My dear, who was these days? By the time Lester and Gabrielle were united, there was even talk that one of her uncles might propose him for the Union Club!”

  “And did he?” I asked when Hilary paused to sip his drink.

  “He might have, had Lester not lost interest. The same inner principle that made him devalue a charity-ball world as soon as it accepted him depreciated an old New York that no longer sneered. Lester was oppressed by the stuffiness of Gabrielle’s world—as who would not be?—and soon set his sights on higher goals. He was looking now toward big business, the management world, the politicians, control of the human destiny. He chafed at the mild, softly chatting dinner parties at Gabrielle’s mother’s. He found that his wife had used all her energy to fit him into her world and didn’t have an ounce left over to cultivate the people he cared to cultivate. Gabrielle was always deploring the low standards of the Social Register, yet to be in it was at least a sine qua non. It was only a matter of months before she became an actual liability to Lester.”

  “Oh, come off it, Hilary,” Townie interrupted, irritated at last. “I know things have changed, and the parents of half the people Ella and I see socially today would have been sent to the servants’ entrance by our parents—”

  “Thanks!” Hilary interrupted with a sneer. “I guess that takes care of John and myself.”

  “Don’t get huffy,” Townie retorted. “I’m only trying to point out that an item can drop in value without becoming worthless. I cannot allow that Gabrielle was ever a hindrance to Lester’s social career.”

  “Ah, but you see, Townie, you don’t really know how drastically things have changed!” Hilary exclaimed, rising to the climax of his argument. “The social scene has become so diffuse that it’s not at all unusual, for example, for a woman like Mrs. Knossos, whose face by Elizabeth Arden and jewels by Schlumberger are known to every reader of the evening papers, never to have heard of the Draytons. I insist that Gabrielle’s habit of snubbing people who thought they were simply being kind to Lester’s awkward wife did him more damage than all of Huldah’s boners. Really, from a purely practical point of view, and leaving aside the moral question, I don’t see that Lester had any alternative but to shed Gabrielle. The churning waves of high finance bobbed before him. But that is the tragic denouement, and John’s part of the story.”

  John Grau had been listening carefully as he drank. He was a weekend drinker, for he worked too hard at other times, but when he did drink, he did it thoroughly, like everything else. His capacity seemed unlimited, yet he never showed the effects, except that he very slightly softened. The hard, handsome, regular squarish face relaxed, and the usually pursed, almost censorious lips spread in a half-smile. One was no longer so aware of the gray hair, the humped, about-to-spring quality of that craggy, muscular body. When John smiled and gave one of his intense gray-green stares, he had charm. It may have been the charm of the totality of his temporary commitment.

  “When Lester threw his derby hat down on my desk and said airily that he wanted a ‘Wall Street lawyer,’ I practically told him to go to hell,” John began. “I don’t think I’d seen him more than half a dozen times since college, and I didn’t like anything I’d heard. I informed him that we had only a very small, accommodation real estate department, at which he roared with laughter and said that we weren’t nearly tough enough to handle his housing matters. No, he was coming to us, he explained, only for his securities work! Well, I got so mad at the idea of our being too soft for one thing and not for the other that I told him that if we weren’t good enough to advise him generally, I wasn’t interested. And then, of course, he had me, for he offered me the works: housing, building, finance, and told me to name my own retainer. The upshot of it all was that he took me to lunch, and I had a new client.”

&nb
sp; “So you did do the real estate,” Townie interpolated.

  “There wasn’t much of it left,” John replied. “Lester had pretty well sold out of it by then, except for Drayton Gardens. As Hilary implies, he was ashamed of it. He wanted something with more ‘tone.’ No doubt, he considered that he wouldn’t be in ‘trade’ if he dealt with intangibles, if he sat in a great gleaming office downtown and pushed buttons and talked on the telephone while he bought control of vast enterprises. We always keep coming back, don’t we, to the child in Lester, the dreaming, scheming child? I’ll never forget the first deal I handled for him. He had figured out that S. & T. Manley’s, the old jewelry store on Fifth Avenue, was a ripe fruit to be plucked. Under a gentle family mismanagement the stock had declined in value to a point where it was worth considerably less than the inventory. Swoop! Lester pounced from the sky in the fastest proxy raid I have ever witnessed, closed down an ancient and distinguished firm and sold out the inventory for a spanking profit.”

  “All handled by you, John,” Hilary pointed out.

  “Oh, yes, all handled by me, I admit it,” John rejoined with a rueful, impatient shake of his head. “What is one to do? I practice law in Arnold & Degener at One Chase Manhattan Plaza. Who am I to turn down high-paying clients with legally honest deals? What would my partners say if I did? For Lester pays well—make no mistake. I’ve never seen him haggle over a bill. He even once sent me a check for double the amount charged with a note that read: ‘I want the best securities lawyer in town, and this is what the best securities lawyer should get.’ How many clients do you find who give you that kind of appreciation? Is it my job to look out for old mismanaged stores?”

  “Of course not,” Townie agreed firmly. “You’ve got to live in the present. We all do.”

  “Not I,” I protested. “I’m an auctioneer. I live in the past and off the past.”

  “And as a commentator,” Hilary insisted, “I live off the immediate future.”

  John’s expression became harder. “I’m not apologizing for myself,” he said, “but neither am I praising myself. I knew what I wanted to be when I was in law school, and I’m only sorry that I can’t be it more often. I wanted—and want—to be the kind of lawyer who builds, and Lester’s genius was always for destruction. If he pieced together a little railroad empire, it was to close it down in favor of his noisy buses. If he laid his hands on a picturesque country inn, it was to replace it with a cheap motel. And his favorite game was the simple taking over and looting of companies, passing on the empty, glittering shell to the unwary public that thought it was protected by a benevolent government. Sometimes I tried to excuse Lester as a frustrated would-be pioneer who had been born too late. What would Vanderbilt or Rockefeller have done with their energy in our century with the frontiers gone? Might they have not torn each other to bits, like so many Lester Gordons?”

  “Is that why Lester turned ultimately on himself?” I asked. “Wasn’t there an element of financial suicide in the last debacle?”

  “I think there was,” John agreed, nodding. “Lester was tired of having everything give way before him. He may have experienced an odd kind of relief when he batted his head at last against the hard wall of crime and knew that detection was a minute-to-minute possibility. But first I must tell you about Luella. Let the cold Wall Street lawyer tell you boys about love. True love!”

  “Oh, come, John,” Hilary protested, “you’re not going to try to convince us that Lester was in love with that little tramp.”

  “Ah, but I am!” John exclaimed. “Lester was very much in love with that little tramp. Or thought he was, and what’s the difference?”

  “Lester in love,” Hilary sneered. “It’s a contradiction in terms!”

  “But Lester is always in love,” John insisted. “And he always was. Lester from the beginning was in love with the whole beautiful world that he wanted to possess. You remember how he was at college: so intense, so interested, always listening, bubbling with curiosity, affectionate, gay? Well, he’s still that way, damn him! Lester studied the world because he had to have the world. And he had to have it because he loved it.”

  “Even when he was block-busting for Huldah’s father?”

  “Even then. Lester doesn’t see things the way other people do. He is so totally devoid of any kind of racial prejudice that it strikes him, when it’s stuck in front of his nose, as simply another aspect of the human equation to make money out of. People like mountain scenery, so one buys up mountains. Other people don’t want Negro neighbors, so one brings in Negroes to induce them to sell cheap. It’s market, pure and simple, the supreme law of the market! Lester, you might even argue, was the last of the pure capitalists. He wants to believe that the best of all possible worlds will materialize if the Lesters are only left free to make their profit.”

  “He couldn’t!” I exclaimed incredulously.

  “I said he wants to,” John emphasized. “Of course, he doesn’t believe it. Like the rest of us, he sees clearly enough that the world which Lester conquers is an inferior place to the one which Lester assaults. He sees his shoddy houses, his tinsel motels, his soulless stores. He understands that he has made his fortune by swimming in a sea of junk. But hope keeps bubbling. What else keeps him alive? Somewhere, somehow, he has to believe that the brightness and smartness of a good boy like Lester is going to produce something admirable, something permanent, some bit of merchandise that will not fall to pieces before one has got it from the shop down into one’s car.”

  “And that was Luella?” Hilary exclaimed with a snort.

  “That was Luella. Exactly. Luella was beauty and sex and love and ideals, like the advertisement of a new car. Huldah, after all, was a bit of a dog, and Gabrielle, saving your reverence, Townie, was no rose, but every man at this table will have to admit that Luella was a dish.”

  “But a dish for the multitude,” Hilary added. “Who has not partaken?”

  “Luella was a typically American phenomenon,” John continued, again in his lawyer’s voice. “Blond, curved, with pouting lip and bad temper. She was the personification of the appearance of sex, the symbol, if you like, of fleshly passion. You might say she was a sort of female Lester, a capitalist in love, who gave the least for the most, who wanted a man’s soul in return for a wriggle of her fanny. It’s elementary psychology to speculate that she was probably no good in bed.”

  “You needn’t speculate,” Hilary put in flatly. “I can assure you she was not.”

  The rest of us were careful not to give Hilary the satisfaction of so much as a cocked eyebrow. As Townie used to say, given enough rope Hilary would prove every hour on the hour that he was no gentleman.

  “Very well, then,” John went on coldly, “we need not speculate. We know. The importance of Luella in American commercial society is not what she gives her possessor, but what people may be induced to believe that she gives. She is as much a status symbol as a Gauguin or a RollsRoyce. Everyone seeing Mrs. Lester Gordon can be counted on to envy Mr. Gordon his nights. If this is so, does it very much matter if they sleep in separate bedrooms?”

  “But you said he was in love with Luella,” I protested. “Surely that implies something beyond impressing his neighbors!”

  “No, with Lester I honestly believe it does not. Indeed, I suggest that this is of the essence of Lester. He doesn’t see the difference between the outward and visible sign and the inward and invisible truth. If Luella is sex to the multitude, then Luella is sex to him. When he came to my office to tell me that he wanted to marry Luella, he was so excited that he could not keep still. He kept jumping up and running about the room, playing with the window shade cord, rustling papers, lighting and putting out cigarettes. Luella was a goddess; Luella was Cleopatra; Luella should be a movie star! Huldah, Gabrielle, all the other women in his life, had been mere shadows. With Luella, at last, he was living!”

  “Why was he telling you?” I inquired, for John seemed an odd confidant in such matte
rs.

  “Because I was his lawyer. And he certainly needed one. One doesn’t divorce a Drayton with impunity, does one, Townie? Also, Luella had a rather sticky spouse of her own to shed. I tried to sober Lester down by pointing out that of the eight lawyers who would necessarily be involved—four for each party in New York and four more in Reno—he would have to pay at least six, and if Luella’s husband was angry enough, all eight. But nothing bothered him. He was in euphoria! ‘I don’t care what it costs,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got to have my Luella!’”

  “How did Luella feel about him?” Townie asked. “Or was it simply a question of dough?”

  “Oh, Luella liked him well enough. To marry him for a few years, anyway. I don’t suppose even Lester expected that she would be capable of the smallest sacrifice in this respect. I know he was not surprised when she threw him over at the first hint of trouble. But he was a big spender who loved late hours and nightclubs: Luella’s ideal of a man. And he was willing to take on the trouble and expense of her own divorce—oh, he was worth it. So Arnold & Degener went to work to clear away the legal underbrush that stood between the union of these two passionate lovers.”

  “I hope you’re not referring to my poor little innocent cousin Gabrielle as legal underbrush,” Townie intervened with a chuckle.

  John flung up his hands. “When it comes to settlements, I’d rather fight a blond gold-digger from the Follies than a brownstone miss from old New York,” he emphasized. “When your poor little innocent cousin was through with us, she had clear title to the whole Drayton Gardens project!”

  “And I’m happy to tell you that the first thing she did was to re-christen it Queen’s Gardens,” Townie informed us in all earnestness. “I’m glad to say that the family name is no longer associated with that dump.”

  “Only the family income,” Hilary retorted.

  “What a pity,” I added, “that Gabrielle’s delicacy in nomenclature could not restore the family landmark.”