The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss
Page 26
“What have I thrown away? Have I thrown away this house or your clothes or our private schools or any of my fabulous Xerox stock?” Benny got up and paced the room angrily. “What have I done since I made my lucky strike but look down in my stupid lap as it filled with treasures?”
“Lucky?” Fales broke in. “You call it luck to take the calculated risk that you took? To sell everything you had, to borrow every cent you could and put it all in one stock? That took guts, man!”
“It took despair,” Benny retorted sullenly. “Oh, all right, so it took a bit of nerve, yes. But why should a bit of nerve be rewarded so extravagantly? Why should it make me a fat cat, a sleek citizen, a gentleman of clubs, a friend of Byron Fales, a pillar of the community! A man ought to work his way up the ladder, rung by rung. He ought to have to save, pinch and scrape. Then there’d be some kind of substance to him when he got to the top!”
“But we did all those things, Benny,” Teresa pleaded. “Didn’t we learn everything the hard way? The only thing that ever came fast was the Xerox!”
“But all that pinching and scraping didn’t contribute/” Benny protested, beginning to feel that he was making a fool of himself, but unwilling to yield on what he deeply felt must be a matter of some kind of principle. “I was nobody till I had my lucky day. I might as well have made it in Las Vegas!”
“We stockbrokers don’t care for that kind of comparison,” Fales retorted, with a wink at Teresa. “But let us agree to disagree. With me Xerox was sheer financial acumen; with Benny it was dumb luck. But do please, Mrs. Galenti, bring your lucky husband to the club dance on Saturday night. Dine with us first at eight. I’ll have a nice little party, and I think we’ll persuade Benny that we want you both for your beaux yeux and not your market portfolios.”
“Oh, Mr. Fales, I promise you!” Teresa exclaimed, with clasped hands. She might have been a schoolgirl whose head had just been patted by the principal.
“Benny,” she began imploringly, after Fales had left, “tell me you’re not going to spoil this for me and the kids!”
“I can’t talk about it till I’ve seen Brooks.”
“That rotten rum pot, that . . .”
“Oh, shut up, Tessie!”
Ten minutes later he drove alone to the Clarksons’. In the moonlight he could make out the ragged countenance of the old place: the choked, unweeded garden plots by the gravel drive, the broken windowpanes in the garage, the peeling paint, as he approached it, on the front door. Brooks opened it, drink in hand, and bowed sardonically.
“If it’s not the Caesar of Xerox! The duke of duplication! Come in, Caesar. Come in, Duke. Fanny has gone to bed, and I was just yearning for someone to drink a nightcap with. Of course, I had not aspired so high as yourself, but if you will only ‘condescend,’ as the immortal Mr. Collins would have put it, we may still salvage a bit of the moonlight.”
Benny sat in the chair and drank silently as Brooks went on in this mocking strain. There was no interrupting him, no shifting of his mind to serious topics. Brooks was reaching the final stage of his decline: a maudlin monologism. To Benny it was more terrible than it had been at any of the worst moments of the past four years. What Brooks had been destroying up until that night had been his career, his family, himself. Now he was destroying his romance.
“I came to ask your opinion,” Benny interrupted at last. “I came to ask if you think I’d be doing a cruel thing to Tessie and the kids if I turned down your cousin’s invitation to join the Glenville Club.”
Brooks stared at him for a moment and then rose. He looked almost handsome again as he reached down to throw some kindling wood on the dying fire. “You’d be doing a cruel thing to me,” he said with surprising lucidity. “What else do you think I’ve lived for but to see you in that club? Isn’t it the last delicious twist of a crazy world? Please, Benny, you can’t deny an old friend a laugh like that! Did you know they threw me and Fanny out?”
“What else could they do? You wouldn’t resign and you wouldn’t pay your dues!”
“Ah, but that was just the excuse. There have been plenty of examples of the board’s looking the other way when desirable members defaulted on their dues. But one Saturday night, at the weekend dance, a rather grotesque little incident occurred. Fanny and I had made a wager that I could use the ladies’ room and she the men’s, on the stroke of midnight, without anyone’s noticing, and . . .”
Benny could hear no more. He needed all his concentration to arrest his tears. He was rarely emotional, but when it happened, it could be very bad. He was apt not only to weep but to sob. For a moment he closed his eyes and saw before him the old portrait—or selfportrait—of Brooks Clarkson, of the ancient Clarksons, with his fine triangle of long wavy hair retreating from a noble forehead, a figure that would have dignified the bridge of a clipper ship in fine old days of China trade or the pulpit of Grace Church, robed in shimmering white, or the back of a sweating pony on the polo field at Meadowbrook. But the decline of the dream and the decline of Brooks Clarkson had now fused into the shabby sight that confronted Benny’s reopened eyes. Brooks was not passing from the scene as a beautiful memento of a day that could not coexist with the Xerox machines that duplicated to infinity the jargon of a world of irretrievable vulgarity. He was perishing as something too vulgar himself to be duplicated.
“I shall join the club,” Benny announced, as he rose to leave. “And you shall have your long awaited giggle. I can only hope that the irony of the situation will be all that you have so eagerly anticipated.”
The last Saturday night party at the old clubhouse was an affair of almost frenzied nostalgia, but Byron Fales, after the orchestra drums had rumbled for silence, struck the note of the future by toasting a model of the new clubhouse, an ingenious combination of modern and Georgian styles designed to conciliate all tastes, as it was borne in by four waiters, in a blaze of candles, and placed on a table in the middle of the dance floor. The tumultuous applause that followed allowed the members to fold their regrets, like wet umbrellas, on the advent of sunny skies. It was widely agreed that Byron Fales had been, as always, perfect.
At his table, Teresa Galenti seemed perfectly happy. Benny noticed that she did not have much to say to either of her neighbors, or they to her, but obviously this did not matter. She was a seraph in heaven, and as long as seraphs were destined to sing everlastingly, it could hardly matter if they took an occasional night off. But he could not join her because Byron Fales, the star of the evening, chose to monopolize him. Perhaps Fales was sufficiently arrogant to enjoy the anomaly, at the old clubhouse’s final party, of devoting his time to a new member.
When Benny had drunk double his normal quota of Scotches, he dared at last to bring up the topic that had been on his mind all evening. He asked if it might be possible to restore the Clarksons to membership if he paid up their delinquent dues.
“The offer does you credit,” Fales replied, knitting his brow, “but I’m afraid there’s not a chance. Brooks has made his bed, or rather unmade it, and I’m afraid he’ll have to toss on the bare mattress. After that last trick that he and Fanny pulled, the board wouldn’t want them back, even if they were on the wagon.”
“Is there no way to help them, then? Must we just let them go?”
“They’ve gone, fella. Ask any newcomer what ‘Clarkson’ stands for in Glenville today, and he’ll tell you: booze. Brooks and Fanny are suffering from an incurable disease: decadence.”
“But how can you say that?” Benny cried in astonishment. “You, of all people! Isn’t he your own cousin?”
“My mother was a Clarkson, it’s true. She was Brooks’s aunt. But there’s never been anything wrong with the Clarksons. Brooks’s mother was a Fortescue, and we know about them.” Fales rolled his eyes and tapped his temple with his forefinger. “Still, I can’t believe it’s only a matter of genetics. The individual may degenerate, even though the family’s sound. You find the same kind of rot in poor whites in the South. Y
ou find it among the red Indians. Once it starts, no surgery can stop it. All you can do is make the patient as comfortable as possible.”
“By pushing another drink his way?”
“Allow me to push one yours.”
Benny watched grimly as those thick, facile hands busied themselves with the bottles and glasses massed in the center of the table. “Make me comfortable, by all means. But there’s still something I don’t see. How can Brooks be decadent and creative at the same time?”
“What do you suggest he has created?”
“Me!”
“Oh, come off it, Benny. Just because he loaned you some dough in a tight spot doesn’t mean . . .”
“Now listen to me, Byron. It was Brooks who singled me out of the office boys in his firm and pushed me ahead. It was Brooks who sold me to his partners as office manager. It was Brooks who got me to move to Glenville and loaned me the money to buy Xerox. It was Brooks . . .”
“Well, if he’s so damn creative, why didn’t he buy Xerox himself?”
“Because that isn’t his way.”
“He could have, couldn’t he?”
“I suppose.”
“But he’d rather watch, is that it? He’d rather sit back and gaze into his man-making machine? Do you know that you’ve just proved the very point you were trying to rebut? You’ve described the most decadent creature that ever drew a fetid breath!”
Benny broke off the conversation and went to look for Teresa, who was dancing. Whether Fales was right or Fales was wrong, all that he, Benny, could do now was to put on, as gracefully as possible, the emerald snake’s skin that Brooks had shed for him. It might be instructive, at the least, and perhaps of some future utility, to contemplate the affluent festivity of the evening where Xerox was the bridge between the new riches of the Galentis and the renewed riches of the Faleses, and to consider that the switch of rungs between the Clarksons and the Galentis on the Glenville social ladder had taken just four years. But then Brooks had always known the quickest way to do things.
THE PRISON WINDOW
1970
“YOU ALWAYS FORGET, Aileen, that we’re not an art institute. Perhaps it would be more fun if we were, but we’re not. The Museum of Colonial America, as its name implies, exists for a very specific purpose. We’re a history museum. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t a great many ways of accomplishing that purpose, such as awakening the young to a proper sense of their heritage and revitalizing the old forms of communication . . .”
“I know, I know,” Aileen Post interrupted. It was not the thing to do for a curator to interrupt the director, but when the curator was middle-aged and female and the director male and very young, exceptions had to be admitted. “I know all the jargon. I realize that we have to be ‘relevant’ and ‘swinging’ and ‘up to the minute.’ I understand very clearly that we have to be everything on God’s earth but simply beautiful!”
“History is not always beautiful, Aileen.”
“Oh, Tony! Don’t be sententious. Save it for the trustees. You know what I mean. The illustrations of history should be beautiful! We can read about the horrors. We don’t have to look at them. Why should there be any but lovely things in my gallery? Why should I have to put that in the same room with the Bogardus tankard and the Copley portrait of Lillian van Rensselaer?”
Here she pointed a scornful finger at an ancient rusted piece of iron grillework that might have fitted into a small window space, two feet by two, which lay on a pillow of yellow velvet on the table by Tony Side’s desk.
“Because it’s a sacred relic,” Tony replied, with the half-mocking smile that, as a modern director, he was careful to assume in discussing serious topics. “Because tradition has it that it covered a window on the ground floor of the Ludlow House in Barclay Street. During the Revolution it was the sole outlet to a large, dark storage room in which Yankee prisoners were miserably and sometimes fatally confined.”
If the distressed virgin curator of beautiful things suggested too much the past, her superior was almost too redolent of the present and future. He had long chestnut locks—as long as his trustees would tolerate, perhaps half an inch longer—that fell oddly about a pale, hawklike face and greenish eyes that fixed his interlocutor with the expression of being able to take in any enormity. Tony twisted his long arms in a curious ravel and nodded his head repeatedly as if to say, “Ah, yes, keep on, keep going. I’m way ahead of you, way ahead!” It might have been the point of his act to be both emperor and clown.
“It’s not that I haven’t any feeling for those poor wretches,” Aileen protested, her face clouding as it always did at the thought of pain. “God knows, it isn’t that. But must their agony be commemorated in my gallery? It isn’t as if there weren’t memorials enough everywhere to dead patriots.”
Aileen herself might have been an academic painting of a martyr. One could imagine viewing the long, gray, osseous face and those large, gray, desperately staring eyes raised heavenward, through the smoke of a heretic’s pyre. It seemed a wasteful fate that had cast her, tall and bony, with neatly set hair and black dresses, in the role of priestess of antiques.
“Your concept of history is too limited, too snobbish,” Tony warned her. “It’s odd, for you’re completely unsnobbish yourself. But be objective for once and take a new look at your eighteenth century. Aileen Post’s eighteenth century. Isn’t it all tankards and silverware and splendid portraits and mahogany furniture? Doesn’t it boil down to the interior decoration of the rich? Where are your butchers and grocers? Where are your beggars? Where are your slaves?”
“But you shouldn’t judge beautiful artifacts by their owners!” Aileen exclaimed with passion. “They represent the aspirations of the age! The way the spire of a Gothic cathedral represents the thrust of man’s soul toward heaven! What is history but the story of his reaching? Do you want a museum to show the whips and manacles, the starvation, the failure? Leave that to Madame Tussaud and the printed record. I want the person who comes into my gallery to breathe in the inspiration of the past!”
“Tut, tut, Aileen,” Tony warned her, wagging a finger. “You’re playing with nemesis. In your books the rich and mighty enjoy not only the delights of this world but the respect of posterity. What is left for the wretched but that pie in the sky they no longer believe in? Watch out! Those wretched can be very determined. They want their bit of the here and now.”
“Who? The dead? The dead poor?”
“Why not?” Tony smiled broadly. “Aren’t I helping them right now? By setting up the prison window in the very center of your gallery?” He got up and made her a little bow. “Those are orders, my dear.”
Aileen left the room without another word. She knew that, mock bow or no, his orders were to be obeyed. Tony Side, under his perpetual smile, was a very serious young man who had no idea of staying in the Colonial Museum for more than a few years. It was too obvious that he was headed for greater things. He would keep his name before the eyes of other institutes—and particularly before the eyes of their trustees—by arranging shows that need have only slender ties to the colonial era. Already he had achieved a considerable success with a gaudy display of eighteenth-century balloons and primitive flying machines against a background of blown-up photographs of Cape Canaveral. It had even been written up in Life.
Traversing the Ludlow Gallery of decorative arts on her way back to her office, Aileen noted bitterly that there were only two people in it. Two visitors on a Saturday morning in the middle of the biggest city of the nation! It spoke little for the much touted “cultural revival.” Aileen scorned the huge, mute, unthinking crowds that pushed by the high-priced masterpieces of the Metropolitan and the shaggy youths and pert-eyed, trousered girls who gawked at abstracts in the Whitney and the Modern. She told her friends at the Cosmopolitan Club that beauty was obsolete and fashion despot. She nodded grimly when they laughed at her. They would live to see their idols perish as hers was perishing.
But now all that was over. Modern New York had repudiated the concept of permanence. No grave, no shrine, no cache of riches was any longer safe. No quantity of carved names on marble, no number of “irrevocable” trust instruments drawn up by long dead legal luminaries, no assemblage of conditions, prayers, engraved stipulations or printed supplications could arrest the erosion of endowments or the increase of costs. The “dead hand” of the past became as light as dust when the money it once represented had slipped away. Aileen found herself faced with the probability that she might survive her own selected tomb.
It was unthinkable. The treasures of the Ludlow Gallery were like so many members of her family. At least a third of them had come to the museum as a direct result of her own detective work and solicitations. The great Beekman breakfront she had discovered in a storage house; the tea service of Governor Winthrop had been redeemed at a sheriff’s sale; the Benjamin Wests of the Jarvis family had come as one man’s tribute to the “ardor and faith” of Aileen Post. She could smell out eighteenth-century artifacts through stone walls; she could track them down in the dreariest and most massive accumulations of Victorians. How she pitied people who spoke of her misguided adoration of the inanimate! As if a Copley portrait could be dead! As if a coffee urn from Westover could be without life! Only ugliness was dead, and it was Aileen’s passionate faith that it should never be resurrected.