The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  ***

  Mr. Widdell did not delay in doing what he had to do. He reached into a manila folder, pulled out my drawing and laid it on the desk so that it faced me. “We won’t play games with each other, Jamie. Mr. Morse discovered this in your cubicle and thought he had better bring it to my attention. It shows, I believe, a considerable talent. But the subject is not one that I feel is suitable for your artwork. Perhaps later, when you are an adult. I believe there are such things as ‘life classes’ where you can draw unclad models. But this picture seems to me to have emanated from a fevered imagination. If you have such thoughts, I think you should take more physical exercise. I should like your permission to destroy the drawing, and your promise that you will not reproduce it.”

  “But it didn’t come from my imagination, sir.”

  “How could it not have? You can’t mean that there was a model in the school? And I cannot believe that your parents would have permitted you to attend a life class in vacation.”

  “No, no, sir, it was something I saw, here at school.” I leaned my head over the desk, staring down at its surface, as if struggling with a terrible embarrassment. “I hate to say it, sir, but I don’t want you to think that I have a fevered imagination.”

  In the awful silence that followed I at last looked up. Mr. Widdell’s face was stricken with incredulity and dismay.

  “You mean, you saw a woman unclothed? Here at St. Lawrence’s?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His voice now rose to a bark. “Are you telling me, Abercrombie, that you’ve been a peeping Tom?”

  “No, sir! Please, sir!” I burst into tears. The sudden terror at what I was doing must have had the effect of grief. “I didn’t peep. She was right there by the window. For a long time, just like that. She stood there, looking out at the night, and I had plenty of time to study her. I didn’t think it was wrong, sir. I thought it was like an art class, as you say, sir.”

  “She? Who?”

  “Mrs. Stair, sir.”

  “You say you saw Mrs. Stair in that condition? At night?” In the silence, as I waited, I could see that he was mentally correlating the windows of the Stairs’ apartment with the windows of my dormitory. “At what time of night?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It was after lights.”

  “You shouldn’t have been looking out the window. You should have been asleep.”

  “I know, sir. But I couldn’t sleep. It was a warm night, and I got up to sit in my chair by the window.”

  The headmaster, obviously much agitated, snatched up my drawing and tore it in two. “That will be all, Jamie. We will not speak of this again. You did wrong, but it is understandable. Let us have no more night peerings.”

  I hesitated as he simply sat there, glaring at me. “Will that be all, sir?”

  “That will be all.”

  “You won’t tell Mr. Stair, sir? I mean, he might not understand.”

  “I shall not mention your name. Now go.”

  Nobody, including myself, knew just why the Stairs left the school the following week. The headmaster’s version—that Mrs. Stair was faced with a serious illness in her family—was believed by no one. It was obviously most unusual for a master and his wife, both apparently in perfect health, to quit before the end of the academic year, with all the trouble to the school of replacing him in his courses, and the enigma was deepened by the fact that the Stairs said goodbye to nobody. They simply disappeared.

  Years later I learned that Mr. Widdell had informed Eric that he and his wife were to be moved immediately to a hotel in the village until a new apartment off-campus could be found for them. When Eric had, quite naturally, insisted on a reason, the headmaster had simply replied that Mrs. Stair had been seen by boys in a state of undress at her window. When Eric had demanded indignantly if the headmaster was suggesting that his wife had intentionally exposed herself, and had received no answer, he did the only thing a gentleman could do: he resigned his post after threatening to punch his superior in the nose.

  What I did, I suppose, was to suppress, in the psychiatric sense, the whole matter. I simply decided, in the panic that threatened to overwhelm me, that I had to dismiss the subject as far as possible from my mind. I affirmed to myself that there was no necessary connection with what I had wanted to accomplish, that is, the opening up of Eric Stair’s eyes to the kind of woman he had married and his sudden detachment from the world in which I lived. I was confident that the headmaster had not disclosed the fact of my artifact; he had, in fact, destroyed it before my eyes. And he never thereafter alluded to the topic. I banished the Stairs from my conversation even at home, responding curtly to Mother’s inquiries, and in time I almost came to believe that the episode had not occurred, though I would sometimes wake up in the night with the memory of a nightmare and then, while I was waiting for that soft reassuring feeling that it was all a dream, the horrid notion would steal into my consciousness that it was all too true, and I would jump out of bed and walk briskly to and fro, desperately trying to convince myself that I had blown up the whole matter monstrously out of proportion.

  In time I learned to live with myself, and as the years at school and then college passed, it became almost a quaint recollection, like some childish prank that one could tell people about with a smile, even when it was a fairly nasty one. Only I didn’t.

  Eric had begun to make a name for himself. He had a studio in SoHo, and some of his paintings had been shown at the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. I started gradually to allow myself to think about him again, and I would inquire about him, when I was with art enthusiasts who had no reason to suspect that I had known him. I was very excited when I learned that he and Janice had split up and that she had married an active member of the Communist party. Perhaps my now ancient crime had been for the best!

  After my graduation from Harvard in the spring of 1939 I came to New York to study at the Art Students League. I determined to call on Eric at his studio, and when I did so, I was cordially received. He occupied a large loft filled with his huge abstracts and seemed contented and cheerful. He acted as if we had parted the day before and did not show the smallest surprise that since our last meeting I had become a man.

  After several drinks and much talk of his painting and of mine—he charmingly treated me as an equal—he made a startling suggestion.

  “How would you like to take over this studio while I’m gone?”

  I looked around me. “But where are you going?”

  “I’m going home to sign up. I’ll be leaving in a day or so.”

  I was astonished. Of course he was a Canadian, and of course the war in Europe had started, but somehow I had thought he had joined his destiny with ours.

  “You look surprised. I suppose you’re recalling that I had it in for the empire.” His chuckle seemed quite devoid of partisan feeling. “Well, this war should finish it, anyway, whoever wins. And no matter how I feel about the stately homes and the British Raj, I have to back them against the bad boy in Berlin.”

  “But your art, Eric!”

  “Who gives a blow about art, dear fellow, when the world’s on fire? You’ll find you’ll be coming in yourself. And the beautiful portraits of Jamie Abercrombie will have to wait!”

  At that point, a terrible thought struck me. If he and Janice had still been married, they might have had a child or children! He might have had to stay and support them. I leaped to my feet, clapping a hand over my mouth.

  “What is it, Jamie? Have you seen a ghost?”

  “Yes! Oh, my God!” In that moment I was absolutely convinced that he would be killed. And whose fault would that be? “Eric, I’ve got to tell you something. I’ve got to make a confession.”

  My sorry tale erupted from the mental storage closet where it had been so long and securely kept like a short story read aloud by a proud author, without an “er” or an “ah,” in finished sentences. But the author was far from proud. What would Eric do? Would he strangle me? He was
strong enough. That craggy face was absolutely expressionless, but I thought there was a glimmer at last of something like amusement in his small blue eyes. When I finished there was a moment’s silence. Then he whistled.

  “My God, it’s like something out of Kraft-Ebing! Those schools should be suppressed.”

  I stared in disbelief. “Then you don’t resent me? You don’t think I’m a fiend?”

  Eric looked at me with faint surprise. “No, I don’t resent you, Jamie. I’ve made my own life, such as it is, and I’ve left St. Lawrence’s a good way behind me, just as I’ve left Janice. So none of it matters to me anymore, except that it’s amusing. But for you, yes, I guess I can see it’s another kettle of fish. Because you have to face the fact that you behaved like a real shit. And there may be some of that shittiness still in you.”

  How he said that! As pleasantly and with as much detachment as if we’d been discussing a character in fiction. Of course, that made it all the worse. To my own astonishment and shame the tears that I had not shed five years before and that may have been waiting for just this summoning flowed forth, and I found that I was sobbing.

  “Jamie, Jamie, my poor fellow,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder, “let it come out—it will do you good. I’ll write you from time to time. Just to show you that I’m all right. And that just because you were a shit once doesn’t mean that you always have to be one.”

  I pulled myself together at last, and we went out to dinner and talked of St. Lawrence’s until the small hours. He was very funny and mercilessly observant. It seemed there was nothing on that little campus that had escaped his painter’s eye. I drank far too much, and he very kindly took me home in a cab. But the next day when I called to thank him he was gone.

  He did write me, every few months, during the war, and I received his letters at the Pacific base where I was stationed. Without the mercy of this correspondence I think I might have been emotionally crippled when the news of his death reached me in the summer of 1944. As it is, I have never since been able to draw or paint a nude figure of either sex.

  THE RECKONING

  1987

  ROSA KINGSLAND was the same age as the century; she had just passed her sixtieth birthday when she received the final verdict from the Dunstan Sanatorium about her son.

  “We are sorry to inform you that not only is there no immediate prospect of Meredith’s being able to resume a normal life, but, in the opinion of at least one of our medical staff, it may be years before it will be advisable to release him from the institution. And we are afraid that we cannot advise your further visits while his resentment against his family and home is still so intense.”

  Rosa stared at the letter, wondering stonily if she were inhuman to see only a bill in its terms. But thirty thousand a year, that was what it added up to, not to mention the other fifteen just to keep her husband in his wheelchair on the floor above. At last slowly, ineluctably, the tears began to bubble up in her resisting eyes. Did tears matter? Did they make her any more absurd than she always had been: a stout Chinese Buddha with a round face and short gray curled hair? But a weeping Buddha—how ridiculous.

  Calm again now—as calm and stolid as she usually managed to be—she rose and went to the wall to take down The Betrothal, one of Gorky’s earlier versions. What should she put in its place? Why, what but what had been there, forty-odd years before, in her grandmother’s day, and which was still presumably in the attic with the others of the old lady’s collection, its face to the wall, the very dearest of dear little Tuscan peasant girls, a pitcher balanced on one shoulder, painted in Florence by Luther Terry in 1876. God.

  She turned her reading lamp full on the Gorky and sadly studied it. She knew about the “biomorphic” images drawn from sexual organs, but she had mentally suppressed them. It didn’t make any difference what she thought so long as she kept it to herself.

  What she saw in her Arshile Gorky . . . ah, that was what made the difference. It was simply the most beautiful picture in the world—except for the Resurrection of Piero della Francesca that she and Amory had seen at Borgo San Sepolcro and which Aldous Huxley had called the greatest painting ever painted, so that was that. But the Gorky, a symphonic poem of light gray, dark gray and black, with flashes of yellow and red and soothing traces of pale green, evoked for her a fashionable ladies’ store on Madison Avenue with round glass-topped tables, lamps on tall steel poles, elegant high-heeled slippers and the suggestion of beautiful women, soft-skinned Circes, worldly-wise, corrupt, stonyhearted. Yet broken up as they were into bits and pieces their menace was muted and their loveliness intensified. It was always so in a world that concealed beauty behind every horror if you could only pull it out. Her imagined ladies made Rosa think of the answer of the Abbé Mug-nier to a leering anticleric who had surprised him admiring a painting of nudes bathing: “C’est un état d’âme, monsieur!”

  She heard the sound of her husband’s wheelchair in the corridor and looked up to see the wizened little man squinting at her from the doorway. His eye took in the painting on the floor.

  “Poor Rosa,” he cackled. “Must that go, too?”

  “What else?”

  “You could put Merry in a state institution, you know. I would, if I were you.”

  She noted his “you.” Meredith was hers now. This was his way of recognizing that his money had been spent and that they lived on what was left of hers. Oh, yes, it was all hers, for whatever good it might do her, the shabby narrow red brick house with the high Dutch gable on Tenth Street that she had inherited from her grandmother, with the late Victorian horrors for which the old lady had unwisely exchanged her Federal treasures; the dwindling pile of securities at the United States Trust Company; Amory, his wheelchair and senile complaints; and Meredith, dreadful Meredith, at Dunstan. And her pictures. Soon enough, no doubt, to be only a picture. She shuddered at the thought of the Max Ernst downstairs in the tiny gallery that had once been the maids’ dining room.

  “He’ll eat us out of house and home, that’s what he’ll do,” Amory continued petulandy.

  “Not so long as I have anything left to sell.”

  “And how long will that be?”

  “A year, maybe.”

  “I must admit that your crazy things have brought more than any rational man could have guessed. Do you suppose you’re selling them too soon?”

  “Oh, much too soon! But I didn’t buy them to make money.”

  “And what will you do when the year is out? Though I don’t suppose it’ll be my problem. I shan’t be around much longer.” If his pause was to give her the opportunity to contradict his prognostication, it was in vain. “I suppose you can sell this house for a bundle. You won’t need more than a couple of rooms then.”

  “I shall need the house when Meredith comes home.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “When the last picture has been sold.”

  “Because he’ll know there’s no more money for his shrinks?”

  “No. Because he’ll have been cured.”

  The most shattering discoveries can come very quietly, perhaps because they are not really discoveries. One has suspected them all along. Rosa helped her husband’s nurse to push his chair into the tiny elevator, where it just fitted. The nurse closed the door and then descended the narrow stairway to the front hall to meet him and take him for his morning circumnavigation of the block. Rosa, alone in the house, sat on the sofa before the empty grate and allowed the pallid ghosts of her early years to possess her.

  She remembered the day when she had told her grandmother about Amory. The old lady had been sitting by the fire in the black silk that she always wore, inattentively nodding that handsome head with the fine Greek profile and high-piled, beautifully set white hair. Her head was like a fine piece of sculpture on a black ball; it moved around on top of a motionless body like an owl’s. In her childhood Rosa had used to wonder if she could turn it around entirely and look backwards.

&
nbsp; “I’m engaged to Amory Kingsland, Grandma.”

  “What are you telling me, child? Amory Kingsland? Are you sure you understood him correctly?”

  “Quite sure. He was very plain. And anyway, what else could he have meant?”

  “What will you live on? I hope he’s not counting on me.”

  “Oh, no, Grandma. He says he can support me. We shan’t need a great amount.”

  Perhaps some memory of her dead son, alcoholic and bankrupt, and of her dead daughter-in-law, victim of an overdose, flickered in the mind of the grandparent. Perhaps even something like remorse. “Well, you’ll have what I have when I’m gone, child. It’ll be something.”

  “Oh, Grandma, don’t even think of that!”

  “I’m sure Amory thinks of it.” The old lady snorted. “He must be your senior by twenty years.”

  “Only fifteen.”

  “Think of it. Amory Kingsland. Well, I suppose it’s better than being the last leaf on the tree.”

  Rosa thought that it was a good deal better. She knew that tree. It was true that Amory was a fussy, dyspeptic, excitable little man, sputtering with ideas and theories that nobody listened to, and that he had a mincing manner, round soft cheeks and short hair, brushed close to his scalp and parted in the middle, that looked like a wig. And he was always the first on his feet at a banquet to offer a fulsome toast or tribute. But he was harmless and kind, and she fancied that he would not be difficult to live with. He had no job, but he belonged to enough clubs and patriotic societies to ensure his being out of the house a good part of the day.

  What was the word for it—symbiosis? If she needed to get away from Granny, he needed a wife to make him look like other men. He was no more attractive to women than she to men. To find a mate, other than each other, they would have had to fish in lower social pools. And she had been right. It had worked.

  The only times in the early years that she had found herself impatient with Amory was in their trips to Europe. He fancied himself a connoisseur of the arts and loved to quote John Addington Symonds on the Italian Renaissance. At home Rosa had trained herself not to hear him except for certain phrases that gave her a cue for rejoinders such as: “Really, dear?” or “Amory, you are extraordinary,” but when they were actually in the presence of a masterpiece she found him tediously distracting. Pictures had always stirred a chord within her that was unlike any other vibration, and she hated to be talked to while viewing one.