Eleanor, two years my senior, was a large, emotional and rather violent girl, obsessed with the snooty little clique of fashionable females who dominated her class at Miss Chapin’s School, and she made little effort to conceal what a poor thing she found in me. When she finally discovered Mother’s liaison (she was devoid of imagination and had to learn it from a friend), she was appalled.
“I intend to get married as soon as I possibly can,” she announced to me in a storm of tears. “Of course, I shan’t marry without falling in love, but I’m going to make a point of doing that with the first eligible man that comes along.”
“I’d say you got there some time back,” I sneered. Eleanor got from me what she usually gave. “Though the eligibility will come as a relief. Last year we thought you were going off with the piano tuner. The one who said you had a touch like Liszt. I hear he’s been committed.”
She didn’t deign to retort. “Seriously, George, I can’t stand what’s going on. I don’t want to live in this house a day longer than I have to.”
“If you feel that strongly, why don’t you go now?”
“And do what? Beg in the streets? Or worse?”
“Surely one of the aunts will take you in.”
“Never. I’d have broken the sacred rule of looking the other way. The holy family commandment of sweeping it under the Aubusson. Every door would be slammed in my face.”
“But nobody cares that much.”
“Nobody cares at all! That’s the trouble.”
“Why can’t you just let things be? It’s not hurting you, is it?”
“That our mother’s a kept woman! Does that mean nothing to you? Don’t you know who pays for this house? For all the parties she gives? For your and my school bills?”
“Well, so long as they’re paid.” I shrugged, thoroughly enjoying now my newfound sophistication and her fury at it.
“Well, if that isn’t the limit! Splashing about in the dirty puddle of your mother’s dishonor! Honestly, George, I never thought even you’d be such a creep.”
“Can the big talk. What are you doing but sitting on your backside in that same puddle until some fool of a guy is crazy enough to pick you out of it?”
For a moment I thought she was going to be sick to her stomach. Her face turned dark. “You crummy little bastard!” she almost shrieked. Then she paused as if hearing her own word. “Oh, my God, I’ll bet it’s just what you are.”
“Doesn’t that put you in the same boat?”
“No! He didn’t even meet Mother until I was one.”
“Well, you can have Father all to yourself, then. You’re more than welcome to my share of him.”
I guess we were both startled at where we had suddenly come out. Eleanor stared at me in mute amazement for a moment and then hurried from the room. We didn’t speak of the subject again. Indeed, she and I made a point of not finding ourselves alone together. We seemed to have tacitly agreed on a kind of armed truce.
But I didn’t really believe that I was Mr. Dunbar’s son; Mother never seemed to me like a person to whom embarrassing accidents happen. And I shouldn’t have minded if I had been. I had matured early in a household where it was evident that a child would have to take care of his own happiness and welfare. If a side had to be taken, it seemed ridiculous not to pick the stronger. Father was all form and outward show; Mr. Dunbar was life and power. If Father chose to accept his degrading position, why the devil should I object? What debt did I owe him, or even Mother for that matter? And as for my honor, how was that concerned? Was I sleeping with Mr. Dunbar? Could I have stopped my mother from sleeping with him had I tried? And as for the money, Father did have an income sufficient to feed, clothe and school me, which the law anyway required of him. I, then, was not legally living off Mr. Dunbar. What did Mother’s diamonds (discreetly small, by the way) have to do with me? Did I wear them?
2
It was probably significant that when I went to work for Mr. Dunbar, he suggested that I move from home to a small but pleasant bachelor’s apartment in one of the brownstones that he owned across the street from his own mansion to protect his sunshine against a possible high-rise. This might have been to make me more available for the nocturnal business conferences frequently held in his library, but I had a notion that he wanted me in a drawer distinctly separate from the one in which he kept my mother. There was to be no overlapping there, and indeed I agreed, for I had already resolved that my relation to my new boss was going to be as important to him as hers had ever been. Her appeal was to his lustful old body, but mine was to his mind, and time as well as his own innate sense of values was bound to be on my side.
From the beginning of my permanent employment with the firm I worked only for the senior partner. In the course of three successive summer jobs I had pretty well mastered the routine of the back rooms, and I was now ready to act as his “snoop,” as he liked to call me, in poring through the books of companies in which he had or sought to have an interest. After only two years of this apprenticeship, when I was still a mere twenty-one, he began to send me as his emissary to interview corporate executives. He knew now that he could trust me to be properly modest and to seem as little as possible the “arrogant kid genius” that these gentlemen, however polite to the great Dunbar’s emissary, undoubtedly dubbed me once the door had closed behind me.
He was not a patient man, and I saw to it that he never had to tell me anything twice. He preferred silence while he was developing plans, and I never interrupted at such times. He liked my speed and my ruthlessness in cutting out irrelevant detail. He appreciated the fact that I could change the subject from work the very moment I saw he was tired, and although I was not educated in art, I was in history and could talk easily on the historical associations of the pictures in his collection. He would sometimes even seek my advice as to a proposed purchase. After all, his collection formed a substantial portion of his wealth. Yet beyond finance and art and the occasional tales of his great business coups, we had few topics of conversation. But then had he with anyone else? Even here I could be a convenience; when it was time to put the little “genie” back in the bottle, the little genie went home.
My early and even rather dramatic preferment did not arouse as much envy in the office as might have been supposed. I think it was because my case was too special. I had not come up through the ranks; I had suddenly appeared, as Ariel on Prospero’s island. It was true that I had worked those summers, but then my status had been so low that only the humblest members of the staff had been aware of me. And then it was in my favor that I had not beaten anyone out for my particular position. Mr. Dunbar had never had a young “favorite” before. Perhaps the firm considered me a first faint harbinger of the boss’s senility.
Did we like each other, my old man and I? I still keep asking myself that. Was he a surrogate father? I don’t think so, really. It was more that I was Lees Dunbar, or a small portion of him, anyway. When I followed him down a corridor to a corporate gathering or sat behind his chair at the long conference table, I felt a tingling pride simply to be coupled with him. Perhaps I was not unlike a mystic identifying himself with his deity. In a curious fashion my ego, at what some might have deemed its grossest period, may have virtually ceased to exist.
I saw my parents very little. Mother seemed perfectly willing to accept my excuses of constant toil at the office, and Father, who surely had guessed by now that I knew all, must have been glad to be free of the embarrassment of my presence. And Eleanor, who had still not found “Mr. Right” to deliver her from a household of shame, had to loathe me for having been the confidant of the plan she had been unable to implement.
But the time was coming when my break with home would be absolute. One night in Mr. Dunbar’s library, when we had concluded our discussion of a railroad receivership and I had risen to take my leave, he waved a hand towards the drink tray.
“I want to know what you think of that Van Dyck.”
On the easel
before the empty grate of the gray stone fireplace reclined the huge portrait that he was presumably thinking of buying. It was his custom, detested by art dealers, so to display for weeks the current candidate for his collection, nor did he hesitate to invite other dealers in to offer their opinions as to merit, authenticity and even asking price. The canvas before me depicted a young Cavalier with a wolfhound. The youth, lace-collared, long-legged, high-heeled, one hand casually on a hip, the other muzzling the affectionate canine, had high cheekbones, long blond hair and blue eyes serenely reflecting the security of his rank and station. One felt that he would have been absolutely charming to inferiors. But they would have certainly been inferiors.
“He was killed by the Roundheads in the civil war.” Dunbar slowly lit his cigar. “You can see that, can’t you? He has that look of doom. But I doubt he much cared. He wouldn’t have regretted a world where a brute like Cromwell could cut off King Charles’s handsome head.”
“I do feel it,” I replied with some surprise, examining the picture more closely. “You might even call it ‘Portrait of a Lost Cause.’”
He nodded. “And lost causes have their charm. Or don’t you agree?”
I studied the canvas for another silent period. What did he want me to say? Could he have supposed that I might derive some instruction from a contrast between the young peer and myself? I too was long and skinny and of a pale complexion, but my eyes were closer together and my brown hair rose in a billow over my high brow. Mother used to say, in her mocking way, that if I hadn’t dulled my eyes by squinting at figures, I might have had the air of a poet, a kind of emaciated Yeats, and saved myself the trouble of becoming a banker by courting a newly rich heiress not yet converted to society’s love of the athlete. And as I thought of all this, I felt a tug at my heart. Was the Cavalier laughing at me? Or was he sneeringly suggesting that I was a kind of renegade Cavalier who had perversely turned myself into a quill-behind-the-ear Roundhead? But I didn’t want to cut off anyone’s head, least of all a king’s. Was he too much of an aristocrat to see that I hadn’t had an alternative to be anything but what I was? I turned back with something like defiance to my boss.
“Lost causes have not been exactly your forte, sir.”
He sniffed. “Such a preference would hardly have recommended me as a guide to investors. Not that I haven’t made a good thing out of seemingly lost causes. That’s when you pick them up cheap. But the truly lost cause, the hopeless battle doomed from the start, has always had a certain attraction for me. The fact that there’s nothing in it for its defenders. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing. So unlike our trade, my friend. Yours and mine. Yes, I think I shall acquire the Cavalier.”
“Were you ever tempted to join a lost cause, sir?”
Ah, that was it; that was what he had wanted me to ask! He sat up. “I was tempted. And my whole life has turned on my successful resistance to that temptation. It was the lost cause of the Confederate states.”
The pause that followed was so long that I supposed he needed a cue. “You moved north after the war, did you not, sir? From Virginia?”
“No, sir, I moved west. From Paris, after Appomattox. My father had been with the French mission during the war, and I had been his secretary. I was too young to fight in the beginning, but in 1863 I turned eighteen, and there was talk of my going home to join the boys in gray. Father, however, insisted that he needed me to stay on and help him. This was certainly a respectable excuse; it might even have been considered my duty. Henry Adams, on the other side, did the same thing for his father in London. I don’t think I was ever seriously criticized for not joining the colors. But the important thing to me was that my decision to remain in safe Paris was in no way motivated by a desire to help my father or even the Southern cause. It was purely and simply that I saw that cause as irretrievably lost. I did not choose to lose a finger, much less my life, in fighting for it.”
I hesitated, unsure what he wanted. “Surely that was only sensible.”
“Ah, but was it good? Was it virtuous?”
I gaped. “Virtuous?”
“Yes. You must learn, George, something that I suspect you do not know about your old boss. That what is virtuous and what is not are very important questions to him.”
“Well, why was it not virtuous? Your fighting would not have changed anything. Except that you might have been killed or even killed someone else. For no purpose. Wasn’t that good?”
He stared at me so keenly that I felt it was I and not he that was being morally tested. “Then I find you’re a stoic, like myself. You accept the world and its follies. That is, you seek to redress only those follies you can redress. Virtue does not weep over the irremediable woes of man. Virtue does not idly wring her hands.”
I had my cue now. Virtue was not what the layman would at once ascribe to a great banker. Very well, we would teach him! Had the Cavalier not been an ass to die for such a fool as King Charles? “Futile virtue is like futile pain. It does nobody any good.”
Mr. Dunbar seemed to frown from his great forehead down to his thick eyelashes. And how those pale eyes stared! But it was not a stare that seemed to focus on me; it simply included me in the landscape, solar fashion.
“You would not then involve yourself in a lost cause? Even if it were the lost cause of one of your parents?”
Ah, so that was it! “You are not suggesting, I presume, sir, that I should do anything to hurt my mother.”
“On the contrary, you would be helping her. Financially, morally, even socially. I am old, George. I wish to dedicate my remaining years to peace and quiet. I even hope to become a better husband to my neglected spouse. But she has exacted that I first make a complete break with a certain part of my past.”
That the major decisions of life should come without a struggle! But then was it really a major decision? I had only to be careful to make my face expressionless, my tone neutral. “I understand you, sir. I shall be your legate. There will be no trouble.”
Those eyes! There seemed now to be a black spot in the center of each. To express a faint shock, perhaps, that I should be quite so ready, quite so quick? Did it mean that I had a nature too base for larger tasks? Was my willingness to be of service a flaw or a virtue? And then his low grunt of assent seemed to assert his recognition that possibly I was the rare bird he had been seeking for his later years, the man of his own genius and philosophy who would carry on what he had started. Anyway, he would try me. That was all I needed. It was all I had ever hoped for.
***
“You’re not going to reproach me for my life now, are you?”
Mother was seated at her dressing table, brushing her hair with sharp strokes, still in her peignoir at ten in the morning. I was standing by the window. And, yes, I was playing with the cord of the shade. For I was nervous, despite my apparent containment. She continued now, turning to give me a glare:
“Surely even you wouldn’t have the cold gall to do that?”
As I watched her features congeal and her glare harden, I had an odd sense of slipping inside her head and seeing myself through her eyes. Was I an unusually neurotic person, or had the peculiar circumstances of my home environment simply sharpened my perceptions while cooling my temper? For despite the tension of the atmosphere, the reaction of which I was primarily aware was curiosity. Were Mother and I for the first time actually communicating directly, without concern for manners or any of the usual human subterfuges needed to mask the ugliness of the ego? Might we even be able to recognize that our relationship had been reduced to the biological?
But no. Even if it was true in my case, it was not in hers. For she detested me. That was the difference. And now, taking my silence as the sign that I did mean to throw her past in her face, she dropped the reins on her temper.
“Who do you think paid for your school and college? For your Brooks Brothers suits and even your economics library? Do you think you’d have lived as you have on your father’s skimpy trust?”
“Oh, no. I am perfectly aware of what I owe Mr. Dunbar. And properly grateful. As, no doubt, is Father.”
“You’ll throw that in his face, too!”
“I’m not throwing anything in anyone’s face. We all know the facts. Why not go on from there? It’s also a fact that Mr. Dunbar wishes to discontinue his relations with you. Hadn’t we better face it?”
“We?” Mother was on her feet now, her fists clenched. I had not known that she was capable of such a fit of temper. “Where do you come into it, I’d like to know? What are you but your mother’s lover’s pimp?”
“I should say my function was just the reverse.”
“Ah, how you must loathe me to be so glib!”
I paused to consider this. “That might be what Doctor Freud would call the unconscious. But I’m certainly not aware of any such feeling.”
“I hope, anyway, you’re not going to tell me you’re a loving son. And that what you’re doing is for my good!”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m simply conveying a message. A message you were bound sooner or later to receive. And I’m certainly not going to claim the status of a loving son. What have you ever done to make me love you?”
Even Mother seemed taken aback by this. “You don’t think I’ve been a good mother? Haven’t I brought you up well? What have you ever lacked? Have you no gratitude?”
“Why should I have? To have done any less than you did would have been to expose yourself to criticism as a parent. And appearances you have always been expert in. We looked like a happy family. That was the point, wasn’t it?”
“No,” she cried. “I cared for you as much as any mother. Until I saw you had as much love in you as a lizard. And think of all I did for you and Eleanor and even your father! He accepted my relationship with Mr. Dunbar because he knew he couldn’t afford to give his wife and children all the things they needed. He loved me! And in return I made him thoroughly comfortable and never once humiliated him in public or in private. But you! Your greedy hand was out for Dunbar himself—you couldn’t wait to slough me off. Well, let me tell you one thing, you cool young man. If you think you’re going to slide into fame and fortune by posing as Croesus’ bastard, allow me to assure you that, dislike it as you may, you are your father’s child. And the great Dunbar is well aware of it!”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 44