“They’d be better off. At least their creed would be pure. This way, slavery is in everything they think and do.”
Winthrop was impressed, in spite of himself. Rosalie undeniably had a strong mind. It was a pity that she made so little use of it. Or was it? He coughed loudly now, as was his habit before making a family pronouncement.
“In times as emotional as these I find that I must constantly reiterate my central position. Otherwise I am regarded as a Simon Legree in my own house. So, boys, pay attention. When we created our Union, we had to compromise with our Southern friends. Their price was the acceptance of slavery—at least in their states. We agreed to pay that price. We wrote it into our Constitution. How can we renege on our word now?”
“It’s not reneging on our word to refuse to return their slaves!” James exclaimed hotly. “The slaves should be free the moment they set foot on free soil!”
“The Supreme Court has ruled against you, James.”
“The Supreme Court is packed by slaveholders!”
“If we are going to maintain the Union,” Winthrop argued, trying to hold on to his temper, “we must learn to recognize the other man’s point of view. Do you claim, James, that the South is not entitled to be represented on the Court?”
“What do they know of justice? You’ve said yourself, Father, that they’re blinded by arrogance. I’ve heard you!”
Winthrop found himself considering the surprising little fact that—for that moment at least—he actually disliked James. “God help us to preserve our nation if the young all feel as you do,” he said piously.
Rosalie sniffed. “There you go again, Winthrop, with your sacred Union. Why must we stay together? Why should we be shackled to people who beat women and children and separate families? Why not let them go? Why not let them stand up alone before the civilized world as the only nation where white men have slaves? They won’t last long.”
“My dear, I must ask you to be silent!” Winthrop rose solemnly to his feet. “I cannot admit the advocation of dissolution of the Union. Even from my wife. That is one heresy I will not tolerate in this house. My great-grandfather fought and died for the Union. When I hear the call, I am ready to do the same. I only pray that civil war, if it must come, may come soon enough to spare you boys. And now, having finished my breakfast, I shall proceed to my office. A good day to all of you.”
There was a muffled, embarrassed murmur around the table of something that Winthrop decided to take for a general apology, but in which Rosalie obviously did not join. On the whole, however, he did not think badly of his exit. In the black, paneled hallway where Molly, the waitress, helped him into his fur coat, he listened to his heart and decided that his overexcitement was already ebbing. He chose a cane from the rack. Had he been absurdly dramatic in referring to a call to arms? Would anyone ever ask him to serve in the army? A lawyer, a family man, forty-three years old, with a heart murmur?
“Take the scarf, Mr. Ward. It’s cold out.”
“Very seasonable, Molly. It’s always mild between Christmas and New Year’s. May the eighteen-sixties prove as mild!”
As the door closed behind him, and he gazed down from his brownstone stoop at Union Square, fresh and glittering in the diamond morning air, he adjusted the onyx pin in his cravat. Taking a deep cold breath, he went briskly down the steps and headed south for his daily hike to Wall Street. He counted on those thirty minutes, not only for his exercise—the only kind he took—but for the opportunity to review and settle the disturbing thoughts and emotions of the early morning so that he might arrive at his desk serene and ready for the day’s work.
As he headed down Broadway, however, towards the happy Gothic conception of Grace Church, he was uncomfortably aware of continued tension in his chest. Damn the South for all the trouble they caused with their slaves! Triple damn them! He paused, as he habitually did, to admire the façade of the church and to speculate on what America might have been without the slave trade. What but a paradise, what but a simple Garden of Eden! He stamped his foot. Why had the first blithering idiot to bring a black man in irons to the New World not been hanged for his pains? He recalled now the condescending words of his neighbor in Newport, Colonel Pryor of Charleston:
“My dear Ward, what in the last analysis are we talking about? An issue that could only be settled by a war in which the Northern states couldn’t possibly afford to engage. For where’s your military tradition? Who would be your officers? Let us face the fact, my friend, that only a few families in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, such as your own, were reared in the aristocratic tradition. The rest are good burghers who are quite sensibly concerned with filling their pockets. All very well, my dear fellow, but you don’t put burghers in a battlefield against Southern Gentlemen. At least I should never advise it! Leave us our peculiar institution, and we’ll leave you all of yours. It’s a better way to live, I promise you.”
Burghers! Winthrop snorted as he marched on downtown. It was all very well for Pryor to make a polite exception for the Wards, but Winthrop knew that it was only politeness. Pryor, of course, was sneering inwardly and lumping him with the other shysters and shopkeepers: Yankee trash, nigger lovers. Well, those slaveholders would see! They would see—that is, if they ever tried to break up the Union—how little a society of sportsmen dependent on surly blacks could prevail against millions of free men! They would be lucky if they did not live to behold their plantations burned and their sacred womenfolk raped by lusty niggers . . .
Winthrop paused, and rapped with his cane on the pavement. Really, he must control himself. What would all that adrenalin do to his heart? And, quite aside from his health, what about his eternal soul? Were those Christian visions? Even if the South should secede and God should then order the freeing of the slaves, would that be any reason for His holy army to indulge in scenes of rapine and murder? Never! They should go into battle like crusaders in white tunics with red crosses, singing hymns.
“Well, if it ain’t Mr. Astor himself, in all his fur and feathers! Good day to ye, Mr. Astor. Have ye foreclosed any mortgages? Should I pray for a bit of snow to turn the widows and the bairns out into?” Winthrop paused in utter astonishment before the tattered, bearded inebriate who was sitting on the curbstone squinting up at him. In the shock of the onslaught he forgot his rule of ignoring such creatures.
“I shall instruct the next policeman I meet of your insolence and whereabouts! You had better get packing!”
Accelerating his pace as the brown square tower of Trinity Church came into view, he was now a senator, addressing a gravely attentive Senate:
“It is my painful duty to bring to the attention of this august chamber the dire consequences of our rash policy of unlimited immigration. It is rank folly, merely in order to boast that we are the refuge and haven of the poor and oppressed of old Europe, to fill our land with the refuse of a cynical continent delighted to slough off its human responsibilities. How long can America be strong, how long can America be pure, how long can America be free, if we continue to dilute the blood of our Anglo-Saxon and Dutch and German settlers with that of an Irish peasantry, stupefied by ignorance and superstition, the slaves of whiskey and Rome, whose only demonstrated skill is for worming into and corrupting our municipal governments?”
He slowed his pace to slap his clenched fist against his open hand and to stare defiantly at an old woman who hurried by, afraid that he might accost her. She probably deemed him a street preacher or similar harmless lunatic. Perhaps she was right! Smiling now at his own absurdity, refreshed by his eloquence, he proceeded in silence to Chambers Street, where he paused to consider the better view of Trinity Tower. A fit of dismay seized him. Was its sooty face reproaching him? He closed his eyes and prayed in a whisper:
“Dear God, only God, beloved father of us all, forgive thy servant, Winthrop Ward, for traducing thy other children. Help him to realize that the Irish, however misguided, are as dear to thee as he is, dearer perhaps, for they
are not so puffed up. Help him to comprehend that it is no such great thing to descend from John Winthrop or to be a Ward, that his bit of money is a rag and his social position an illusion. Teach him humility, dear Lord, dear Christ, that he may come to thee and lose himself in thee.”
Winthrop now shut his eyelids so tight that his eyeballs hurt and then opened them suddenly to a sky full of white stars. When his vision was adjusted, he walked on, reminding himself solemnly that every cart-pusher, every smutched-faced little boy, every black-gowned, mustachioed old Italian woman was as good as he in the eyes of God.
Passing City Hall, he frowned at the sight of the tall, slim figure of Daniel Allen in striped pants and a black frock coat ascending the steps. Old Vanderbilt’s broker on his way to see the mayor, no doubt! Winthrop burst into an impassioned appeal to the membership committee of the Patroons’ Club:
“Of course, Gentlemen, I recognize the principle that society must continually be opening its ranks to admit new members. We are a commercial community, and new money must always have its claim. But I hope we may never lose sight of the rule that new money must be clean money. To an old pirate like Vanderbilt, who boasts in public that he has bought our legislature, the doors of Gentlemen must be forever closed!”
This peroration took him to Sixty Wall Street, a handsome white four-story building with freshly painted green shutters, the first two floors of which were occupied by the law chambers of Ward and Ward. Winthrop, who believed in hearty morning greetings, spoke and smiled to each of the firm clerks, to the old bookkeeper and to the office boy, before mounting the stairs to his own office in the rear and closing the door behind him. The room was clean and bare, with cream-painted walls and no accessories beyond the portrait engravings of Lords Mansfield and Cole, a bookcase of law reporters and a Sheraton table-desk on which were stacked neat piles of papers.
Ah, how quickly now his heart resumed its normal beat, how keenly his mind began to function! What a blessing was law. What were books and deeds and documents but receptacles—like pans set out in a drought—to catch the divine drops from the sky? Here was what distinguished men from apes. The big Celtic toughs looking to their fists to terrify the timid, the crooked financiers filling the pockets of politicians, the fire-eating Southerners with their contempt for the free world—let them look to the law books—let them beware! Let them writhe like Laocoon and his sons caught in the coils of the beneficent serpent which God had sent down to guard the meek! Winthrop jumped nervously at the sudden knock on his door.
“Mr. Charley wants to see you, sir.”
“Very well,” Winthrop snapped. “Tell him to come in.”
“Beg pardon, sir, he asked if you could come to him. I think he’s not feeling quite himself.”
Winthrop at this got up and went down the corridor to the office of his partner and cousin. The moment he saw the latter’s face he knew why the day had started badly. He must have had an intuition of trouble. Charley Ward looked haggard and sleepless. He might, that morning, have been forty-three, like his cousin, and not a decade younger. Winthrop had a sudden picture now of how Charley would look in a few more years, when middle age should have eroded the fragile beauty of his blond, pale type, when the still abundant smooth hair should have thinned, the round cheeks swollen to give the face a pear shape, the small blue eyes receded into dark cisterns in the skull. Winthrop loved Charley and loved his looks, and his heart was stirred even by the prospect of their evanescence. For he felt that Charley’s need of him as a mentor and his own need of Charley as someone to protect might be actually intensified when Charley’s appearance, puffed and etiolated, should correspond more nearly to Charley’s mind and character. It was part of Charley’s strange charm that weakness and mildness should so lurk behind the bright bravery of his exterior.
“This note came for my wife last night from Jane King. Or purportedly from Jane King.” Charley threw down a piece of pink notepaper on the desk before Winthrop. “The sender did not know that Annie had gone to Yonkers to spend the night with her uncle. I opened it, thinking it might be something that I could take care of for her. I was wrong.”
Winthrop looked at the paper without touching it. “Does your wife know you have opened it?”
“Not yet. But she shall.”
“Does anyone else know?”
“What a lawyer you are, Winthrop! Read it.”
Winthrop read the following message in a large, jagged masculine hand: “Beloved—can what Jane tells me be true? Are you really reconsidering? Can you deny your own soul and mine? Send me word that you are true. Save your Jules from black despair.” He looked up at Charley.
“Bleecher,” Charley replied to the silent question. “Jules Bleecher.”
Winthrop shuddered. He saw the florid face, the French goatee, the big wet doglike eyes, the large, fleshy nose, the heavy, tumbling hair, the great overdressed body, the effeminacy that was worse for being affected—a parvenu’s idea of a cultivated manner—a brown bear with a monocle and top hat. Good God, could Annie Ward fall for that? A poetaster, a scribbler of sentimental drivel, a society journalist, a social climber who pranced around the ladies in every evening party, an “ooer” and “aaher” at concerts, a gossiper in the back of opera boxes, probably a Jew . . . what else?
“He’s been coming to the house for a couple of months now,” Charley explained. “Annie met him through Jane King. I saw no harm in it. Somebody told me he was a philanderer, but I thought he was too obvious a one to worry about. He was the kind who would lean over when some fat old dowager was tucking her lorgnette into her bosom and murmur: ‘Happy lorgnette!’ The man seemed a farce to me. He and Jane King were always giggling and snickering in corners.”
“I never met him in your house,” Winthrop observed.
“That was because I knew you didn’t like him. Oh, you can be sure, Winthrop, that Annie and I are always very careful whom we ask when you and Rosalie are coming.”
Winthrop sighed. “But do you deduce from this letter that your wife has . . . has, er . . .”
“Fallen?” Charley’s laugh was a jeer. “Not necessarily. She’s a cool little minx under all that gush. But what I do deduce from that florid episde is that she gave Bleecher an assignation and then got cold feet. She may have even agreed to go off with him.”
“And desert Miss Kate?” Winthrop cried in horror. The sole, six-year-old child of the Charley Wards was so designated because of her little-lady airs.
“It’s so like you, Winthrop, to put the child before the father. But yes, I think that Annie would be capable of deserting Miss Kate. She has no real heart. Once she decides that life with me is not what she wants, nothing is going to hold her. You can talk of oaths and sacraments and family ties until the cows come home. You won’t reach her.”
“What does she want?”
Charley strode up and down the chamber now, clapping his hands together as he brought out his argument in sharp, jerky phrases. “What do you think she wants? What do any of them want? She wants a man who will live up to her dreams of sexual performance. I tell you, Winthrop, we men are the losers in this system of keeping girls in ignorance until they marry. It’s damnably hard on the poor groom. He suddenly finds he’s got to be all the impossible things that an uneducated, feverishly sentimental mind has concocted out of fantasy and dirty talk with other ignorant girls. Give me a prostitute from Mercer Street any night in the week. At least she knows what a man is! But these innocent debutantes! They smile and simper behind their fans; they blush crimson at the tiniest impropriety, and then, suddenly, after a big society wedding that hasn’t tired them one bit—behind closed doors, alone at last—they turn into fiends. ‘All right, big man. This is life, isn’t it? Show me life!’”
Winthrop actually shivered, so violent was his disgust. If his interlocutor had been anyone but Charley he would have walked out. But he was responsible for too many things: for the partnership, for Charley’s dependence on him, for the very marr
iage to Annie Andros that he had so fatally sponsored. He could not help glancing back to his own wedding night. Not that Rosalie had been the tigress that Charley depicted. On the contrary, she had been silent, compliant, perhaps the least bit passive. But hadn’t there been an implication of something like disappointment in the determined way in which, early the following morning, she had sat down at their hotel drawing room table to write thank-you notes for her wedding presents?
“So what do you propose?” he asked Charley.
“Immediate and final separation.”
“And Miss Kate?”
“She can live with us alternately. Provided, of course, that Annie does not set up house with her paramour.”
“You are determined then to advertise your shame to the world?” Winthrop stood up to give posture to the high stand that he had elected to take. “Do you want people to say that you couldn’t hold your bride?” Seeing Charley bite his lip, he followed up in words from Charley’s customary vocabulary. “Do you want even the debutantes, in their kittenish sessions between the dances, upstairs in their hostess’s bedroom, to whisper with high giggles that you have no balls?”
“Oh, shut up, Winty! Don’t be such a bastard. What else can a man do in my situation?”
“Well, he doesn’t have to throw up his marriage and ruin three lives—yours and Annie’s and Miss Kate’s—for what may turn out to be only a flirtation. I’m sorry, Charley. I can’t believe that Annie really cares for a man like Bleecher. I’m sure she has simply lost her head for the moment. Perhaps she is actually ill. If we can only get rid of this oily cad, who knows? Maybe you and Annie will find a new life. You may even discover a deeper congeniality.”
Charley’s impatient toss of his head showed what he thought of this. Winthrop perfectly understood what his cousin was looking forward to: a return to bachelor freedom, a liberation from Annie’s cloyingly female, looped and tasseled interior. Cousin Winthrop must have seemed like a stiff, prissy teacher holding him after class on a summer afternoon when all the other boys had gone fishing. But Winthrop knew that he could still rely on a teacher’s authority.
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 30