The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  On a visit to the Sistine Chapel in the hot summer of 1938 his chatter became suddenly intolerable. He was hopping briskly about, pointing upwards to illustrate the “tactile values.”

  “But all those terms came later. This was a church, Amory. People came here to worship.”

  He tittered at her insularity. “Really, Rosa, do you think Michelangelo believed all that rubbish? He only painted religious subjects because the pope made him.”

  “Exactly. He didn’t believe in anything. One doesn’t have to believe in anything.”

  Amory blinked at her. “And just what, pray, do you mean by that extraordinary statement?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. And I don’t care.”

  “Maybe the heat’s too much for you, my dear. We’d better go back to the hotel.”

  “I’m going to sit right here. Let me be, please, Amory. For half an hour, anyway. Go look at the Raphael portrait of Leo X. That’s your favorite, isn’t it?”

  The next day, in a modern gallery, she bought her first painting. It was a lyrical abstraction called Hills and Ocean, a study in pallid, fragile blues and pinks and darker greens, done with thin paint. It made Rosa think of a summer trip that she had taken as a child with her father to Mount Desert Island in Maine.

  “Bar Harbor?” Amory inquired with a snort when she showed it to him at the hotel. “It looks more like an old rag the artist used to rub his hands with. May I ask what you paid for it?”

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “My God, woman, are you out of your mind?”

  But he thought she was even more so the next day when she received a polite note from the artist, a young American, asking her to come to a party at his studio. She informed Amory that she planned to accept.

  “But we don’t even know him!”

  “We will when we get there. He’s very pleased at my purchase and would like me to see some of his other things.”

  “How did he get your name?” Amory demanded suspiciously.

  “From the gallery, of course. You don’t have to go. I’m perfectly all right by myself.”

  “In Rome? With a crowd of artists? All Fascists, or maybe even Communists? Of course, I’ll have to be with you.”

  “That’s up to you. But in any event I’m going.”

  The studio was six flights up, on the top of an old house, and Amory protested bitterly at almost every step. They were greeted at the door by the young artist, George, who was small and dark and charming and made Rosa think of Little Billee in Trilby. When he handed her a drink and took her to a window to overlook the busy rooftops of the neighborhood, she had a moment of intense pleasure and almost forgot about Amory. In a short time she was actually telling the nice young man what she fancied she could see in his painting. Was it the gin?

  “But you must think my approach is hopelessly subjective and sentimental,” she exclaimed ruefully.

  But he was nice. “Not at all. It’s always allowable to see something organic in my work. You should never be ashamed, anyway, of what you see in a picture. It is the creation, after all, of two persons.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean it’s not one but several things? Or as many as there are viewers?”

  “Well, what’s the harm in that? Anyway, I think your eye is a good one. It saw something good in me.”

  This was delightful, but his friends were bound to spoil it. One of them, a large, unshaven, hirsute man, spoke to her with a rather abrasive assurance.

  “Don’t believe George, Mrs. Kingsland. He’s always trying to appease people he suspects of being antiabstractionists. He thinks, if he allows them their fantasies as to what his lines and squiggles represent, that they will buy his daubs. But some of us are made of sterner stuff. I’d be happy, ma’am, if you’d buy one of mine, but I’m not going to let you think I approve of your finding it ‘organic.’”

  “Well, I’m sure I shouldn’t,” Rosa said hastily. “And, of course, I’d love to see your things. What do you try to depict in them?”

  “If I could tell you that, ma’am, I wouldn’t have to paint them.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  The laughter of the little group seemed more mocking than friendly. One of the girls, who had long straight hair, bold eyes and a sacklike dress of dull brown, now asked her in a voice that seemed poised on the impertinent:

  “Do many of your class back home still like pictures that tell a story?”

  “My class?”

  “You know. Society people.”

  Rosa decided that she had better not be offended. “Well, even if we liked them, where would we find such pictures?”

  “She’s got you there, Carol,” the big man said to the brown dress in a tone that almost made Rosa think he was taking her side. “Those people have been frightened out of their natural tastes. We’ve browbeaten them into thinking if they dislike something, it must be good.”

  “Anyway, I don’t care for pictures that tell stories,” Rosa affirmed.

  “Even if you make them up yourself?” the tall man asked with a laugh that was almost a sneer.

  Rosa was wondering if she might not find the courage to take him on when she heard her husband’s shrill voice across the room addressing another group:

  “Well, say what you will, I’d take the Sargent gallery in the Tate for all the modern art on this planet!”

  In the silence that followed this she knew that her plight was hopeless. Even if by some miracle of effort she was able to establish a thin line of communication between herself and these young people, Amory would be there to sever it. Never the twain would meet.

  In the taxi returning to their hotel Amory rattled on against young “anarchists” and deplored her getting involved with them. She waited for an appropriate pause and then put in firmly:

  “It’s all right, Amory. You needn’t worry. You will never have to go to a party like that again.”

  “You mean you’ll go without me?”

  “No, I shan’t go either. It’s not seemly. We don’t belong there.”

  “Well, I should hope not! And while you’re making good resolutions, how about promising me not to buy any more of their crazy pictures?”

  “No.”

  “No?” He glanced at her quickly, surprised at the metallic quality of her tone. “You mean you’re going to throw good money after bad? And get more of that junk?”

  “Yes, I think I may, Amory.”

  “And do you expect me to finance this new craze?”

  “You needn’t. I have my own money now.” Grandma had died the year before, having held out till ninety-six and spent most but not all of her principal.

  Amory was used to directing even the minor events of their domestic routine, but he knew that on the rare occasions when, for reasons incomprehensible to him, she took a stand, she was unbudgeable. Indeed, she knew how to make him feel at such times that he did not exist as a force in her life. He could then only retreat into sulkiness.

  “You’d better hope I don’t go mad, too. You’d better pray that our joint exchequers don’t founder in lunatic collecting.”

  “But I should love to see you collect, Amory. You might even find you had an eye for it.”

  In the decade that followed, Amory never altered his attitude of contemptuous disapproval, but he learned to confine his opposition to that. The years of the Second World War were important ones to Rosa because she made friends with a gaunt and taciturn gallery owner near Washington Square who knew some of the painters who were refugees from France and Germany, and was able to introduce her to the school that became known as abstract expressionism. Silas Levine seemed to understand her intuitively; he never talked technically about pictures, but simply showed them to her. If she liked one, he would nod and show her another. He made her feel that if two people were lucky enough to share a discriminating taste, they had no need to discuss it.

  “Come by next week, Mrs. Kingsland. I’ll have some drawings of Adolph Gottlieb’s tha
t may amuse you.”

  But if Rosa had reduced her husband to at least a sullen acceptance of her acquisitions, she had no such success with her son. Meredith seemed to have inherited all of the conservative genes of his greatgrandmother but little of her ability to cope with the world. When she hung a Miro sketch in his bedroom as a surprise, she found it face down on the floor in the hall the next day.

  “At least let me have my own room to myself, Mummy!” he bawled at her. “You’ve got the whole rest of the house for your garbage!”

  Everybody considered Meredith a hopeless problem but Meredith himself. His self-confidence seemed to grow with the hurdles that life put in his way until total failure was crowned with total arrogance. Tall, awkward, with shiny, long black hair, and spindly limbs, his big, staring pop eyes and high, harsh, jeering voice seemed to be calling down the world for its idiotic failure to appreciate Meredith Kingsland. He could never be sent away to camp, boarding school or even an out-of-town college. He was simply too fumbling to take proper care of himself, yet not enough of a freak to win exemption from the physical hostility of his peers. He went for twelve years to a mild, genteel boys’ school on the east side of Central Park of which Amory was a trustee, and thereafter took endless courses in literature and history at City College.

  Insofar as Meredith seemed able to take in the dismal lacks in his life—lack of a job, lack of a girl, lack of any body of friends—he blamed “Mummy” for them. She had cared too much and too little about him. She had fretted unduly over his health and then criticized him for playing no outdoor games. She had puffed his imagined virtues, making an ass of him in their social circle, and had then been hypercritical of any composition he produced. She embarrassed him by her heaviness and dowdiness and then criticized him for spending so much time and money on his own appearance.

  Meredith’s greatest ally was whoever happened at the moment to be his psychiatrist.

  “Doctor Cranch thinks your real family are your pictures, Mummy. He says that’s what’s my basic trouble.”

  “Did he really say that, Meredith? Or did he suggest that one of your troubles might be that you thought it?”

  “Don’t you think I even know what my own doctor says?”

  “I think you sometimes edit him for my benefit.”

  “Why should I want to do that?”

  “To get even with me, dear. A son can’t lose, can he? He takes full credit for his assets and blames Mummy for his liabilities.”

  “Really, Rosa,” Amory intervened, “aren’t you being a bit hard on the boy?”

  “Oh, what does she care?” Meredith cried angrily. “What does she care for but her silly old art?”

  Indeed, Rosa had to admit, after one of these meals, that all she did want was to get back to her silly old art. She liked nothing better than sitting alone in a room with her pictures, looking at them and thinking about the things they conjured up in her mind.

  She understood that many observers of the art of Franz Kline found in his bold blacks and whites a sense of the violence and power of large, dark, coal-besmirched cities, and in the trajectories of hurtling black across passive white planes an image of encroachment and forcible possession. But what she chose to make out in her Kline was not a twisted mass of steel beams but a giant menacing insect, seen through a magnifying glass, whose only function was to destroy and consume its lesser fellows, and in this horned, multilegged monster she had no difficulty in identifying her late grandmother. Yet this interpretation gave her no pain or unease; on the contrary, it seemed to bind her father’s parent into a web of beauty that she could accept and try to love.

  Even more factitious was what she read into her Motherwell, one of his Elegies to the Spanish Republic. She had heard that Motherwell had not visited Spain until after the civil war, and she had taken this as her excuse to deviate from his tide. Besides, were the tides of modern paintings not notoriously misleading? In the old academic days one had known just where one was. Henry IV Barefoot in the Snow before the Gates of Canossa meant just that. But did she have to identify the black polelike figure and the two black spheres on either side as the phallus and testicles of a sacrificial bull nailed to a whitewashed wall? No. It was a beautiful evocation of the trunk of the old elm tree in the garden in Newport with the dumpy figures of her two maiden aunts, always in mourning, and the whole concept was death.

  Little by little her pictures had begun to fill the house. Amory continued to grumble, but he didn’t really care what she hung on the walls, and she put none in the dining room, where the family conversations occurred. Meredith objected more vociferously, but she had given him a whole floor where he could surround himself to his heart’s content with his great-grandmother’s Turkish bazaars and Tuscan peasant girls. There were moments, however, when she had to remind him that it was her house. She dared not go further and suggest that he get his own apartment. Meredith, faced with the smallest threat of what he called “rejection,” was likely to become hysterical.

  The family friends and cousins, almost without exception, looked upon “Rosa’s daubs” as a kind of harmless mania to which it was kinder not to draw too much attention. They could not be unaware of the growing importance of abstract art in the city around them, but they maintained their silent but united front against it, lumping it as one of the not-to-be-escaped evils of a decadent society, along with high taxes, drugs, overstressed civil rights and the bad manners and promiscuity of youth. Yet even in their ranks there was an occasional deserter, and Rosa sometimes found an adventurous individual arriving ahead of the other guests at one of her dinner parties to have a peek at the little gallery off the hall.

  Silas Levine decided at last that she had gone far enough to justify him in seeking to penetrate her reserve.

  “You know, Rosa, in any other social milieu but yours you’d be considered a remarkable woman. Why do you cling so to your constipated little group of antediluvians?”

  “It’s my husband’s world. He hasn’t any other.”

  “But don’t you ever crave the company of people who care for the things you care about?”

  “Then I can come to you.”

  He laughed and gave it up. “All right, Rosa. Maybe you’re right. Maybe your pictures are enough.”

  Sometimes artists wished to see her collection, and she would make arrangements through Levine for them to come to the house at times when neither her husband nor son would be home. This became more difficult after Amory had his stroke and was permanently in the house, but the little hall gallery, discreetly used, still answered her purpose. Only if Meredith happened to be going in or out of the house at the time was the visitor likely to be startled by the shrill voice from the dark hall exclaiming: “Are you in there, Mummy? Who’s being polite enough to look at your zany show?”

  Meredith, in his late twenties, unoccupied except for his daily hour with his analyst, seemed to have nothing to do now but hound his mother. Family meals had become a torture to her.

  “All I really want to find out, Mummy—seriously—is how to tell the difference between a good abstract and a bad one. It can’t be by whether or not it resembles something, because it isn’t anything, is it? And you can’t say that a line or a curve is badly drawn, because the artist can always say that’s the way he meant it. So what standard have you left to go by? What do you look for?”

  “I guess I just look.”

  “Oh, Mummy, what kind of an answer is that? You have to look for something in a picture.”

  “Do you, Meredith? But, anyway, I think I can tell a bad abstract. There were some at the Junior League show.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “By what they did to me. They gave me a dead feeling. I wanted to turn away. I wonder if that isn’t the only way to teach art. Perhaps we make a mistake in dragging classes of children through museums to see masterpieces. It might be more effective to show them the discards in the cellar.”

  “So that’s your only criteri
on: a kind of gut feeling?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Amory, embittered by his stroke, tended to side with his son in these arguments, but not without getting in an occasional thrust at the latter. “Just as I suspected, the whole business is a kind of emotional pudding. But you ought to understand that, Meredith. Doesn’t your shrink explain those things to you? Don’t you suppose those dots and squiggles are sexual symbols to your poor frustrated mother? Why not? Married to an old man in a wheelchair, she must dream of something better, mustn’t she? Now don’t get excited, Rosa, I’m blaming myself, not you. What can a poor, impotent creature like me . . .”

  But Rosa had already left the table. In the silence of her own chamber she contemplated the serene truth of the parallel lines of her Mondrian and turned her mind firmly from humanity as represented in the dining room below. For once she was not subjective.

  ***

  Not long after this conversation Meredith took too many sleeping pills and was revived only with difficulty. It was not clear that he had intended a fatal dose—he might have simply planned a melodrama—but his psychiatrist recommended commitment to the Dunstan Sanatorium, and once there, there seemed little possibility of any early release. Six years elapsed, and Rosa’s collection, one by one, ascended the auction block. She thought of them as the pale, proud victims of a reign of terror, silently mounting the steps of the scaffold. She never wished to learn who had bought any of them.

  When she went to Silas Levine’s gallery to tell him that she would have to sell the Gorky, he threw his hands up in anger and disgust.