The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  But, after all, I had never really believed anything else. And Dunbar would not have been a man to push a natural child, any more than he would have pushed a legitimate one, beyond, that is, a decent provision. No, he was like a Roman emperor, more apt to rely on adoption than generation to obtain the ablest successor. He had no faith in things not under his direct control. And as to what Mother had said about Father, I deemed it the merest twaddle. He had simply, in his own economic interest, known where not to look and what not to hear. But it was interesting that a woman so clear about her goals and how to achieve them should feel the need of crassly sentimentalizing two lives dedicated to simple self-aggrandizement.

  It was time anyway to put an end to the discussion.

  “I shall tell Mr. Dunbar that we have had this clarifying chat. And you can be sure that the easier you make the implementation of his decision, the more fruitfully will he supervise your account.”

  Mother’s stare had now the quality of near disbelief, almost of awe, as if she were confronted with a creature of nonhuman quality. At last she emitted a hard, jarring laugh. “So I am to find virtue more profitable than vice? Oh, do get out of here before I vomit!”

  I left, confident that her innate good sense would dictate a moderate course and that her wrath against me had deflected much of her ire against Dunbar. And so it worked out. We met only a few times after that, but she accepted an income from Dunbar, and after his death from me, as the least an unfaithful lover and ungrateful son could offer.

  Now many if not most readers at this point will assume that I have bad character, or perhaps no character at all. I am only too well aware that many men with whom I have done business through the years, and even some of my own partners, have regarded me as a cold fish who cares for nothing but making money. Nor would the fact that I have shown little interest in spending it alter their opinion, as American self-made men are notoriously more concerned with wealth than with what it can buy. Nobody, I am afraid, has ever given me credit for being, in my own way, a consistent idealist. Of course, it is true that I have never advertised the fact.

  Let me summarize the aspects of my youth which might have turned me into the man so many have deemed me to be. I was raised by parents who did not love me and for whom I had no respect. I had a sole sibling who detested me. An early illness kept me from being sent to a boarding school, where at least I might have escaped the unsavory atmosphere of my home. And finally, I found no one around me to admire and emulate until I went to work for Mr. Dunbar.

  What saved me—for I insist that I was saved—was my clarity of vision. I saw the world I lived in. I saw perfectly that it contained, outside my own family, love and honor and innocence and that it was not my fault that my life was barren of these qualities or that my heart did not beat at the pace that others liked to believe theirs did. Nor did I resent or even much envy persons more richly endowed with the gift of love. The id may be called on to rebut me here, but we cannot deal practically with the unconscious. What I was conscious of was that I had to play the hand of cards I had been dealt and that it would be futile and even ridiculous to waste my life lamenting that it did not contain more honors.

  I have always been dedicated to the concepts of order and restraint in the governance of human affairs. Most of the problems of civilization, in my opinion, emanate from messy thinking and sloppy or sentimental feeling. Even Mr. Dunbar allowed his passions to embroil him in a sordid affair from which he was rescued only by the sexual impotence of old age. But he always yoked his ambition to the chariot of virtue. His life goal, he maintained, was to impose a balanced budget on a fevered and reckless world, though only if and where it was feasible. He took no credit for spreading ineffective sentiment over barren soil. Only results counted to him. And to me.

  To have or not to have a loving heart is not a matter of choice but of birth. Yet people tend to applaud “warmth” and to condemn “coldness” in a man’s nature as if such things were matters of merit. But merit, I insist, should attach only to what a man contributes usefully to the welfare of his fellow beings. Vain efforts, good intentions, mean nothing. That has been my credo, as Mr. Dunbar has been my god.

  3

  There was a change now, hard to define but nonetheless perceptible, in my relations with Mr. Dunbar. It might have been expected that we should have become more personal in our conversations, but that was not quite it. It was more that we seemed tacitly to acknowledge that we had no further secrets from each other, or at least that he had none from me. I presumably had no secrets at all. The awe, at any rate, that I constantly felt for him when out of his presence I was now able to shed at the door of his office or study. I was at ease with him alone, though this ease, if a sense of it was conveyed to him at all, must have been through some barely visible relaxing of my reserve, never of course through any idle chatter or impertinent lounging. And he, for his part, would utter his thoughts openly in my presence, almost as if I were a recording instrument for possible memoirs.

  I was now invited regularly to come across the street to take breakfast with him and Mrs. Dunbar. The morning repast was her one regular appearance of the day; she still spent most of her time in her bedchamber. I was somewhat surprised to find her a dear little old lady, soft, gentle and rosily round-faced, who wore a white cap and a black silk dress in perpetual mourning for a long-dead only child. She would fuss over my not eating enough and warn me, if it was a cold day, to wear a muffler to the office.

  But she also worried about my working too hard. She was afraid I was having no fan, no love affairs. And she seemed particularly anxious that I should appreciate the man behind the tycoon in her husband, perhaps suspecting me of being one of those for whom the pedestal obscures the statue.

  One morning, anyway, when her husband had abruptly quit the table to take his coffee cup to his library, protesting gruffly that she was spoiling his breakfast with her constant nagging him for her little charities, she offered me this mitigation of his conduct.

  “You hear, George, how he grumbles. Yet I never have to wait later than noon before a messenger brings me a check for double what I asked for. I know you young men admire him for his brilliance in business. But what I admire him for is the greatness of his heart. He is basically the kindest and gentlest of men.”

  I didn’t quite like this. I fancied a note of denigration. Mr. Dunbar to me was a man above the world because he was free of the weaknesses that beset mankind: love and hate, pity and cruelty, sentimentality and meanness, religiosity and mendacity, holiness and vice.

  “I confess I have not always found him kind and gentle. Nor do I believe that to be his general reputation downtown. No one disputes that he is a great man. But great men are not apt to be gentle.”

  She regarded me smilingly as if pleased to have kindled the mild impatience of my retort. “Oh, you young men today fancy yourselves such a self-contained lot. What are you afraid of? Wasn’t President Lincoln a gentle man?”

  “The man who unleashed the slaughter of the wilderness campaign? Hardly!”

  “That he could bring himself to do that was part of his greater humaneness. It was for an ultimate saving of lives. Yesterday my husband promised me to do something very much against his wishes, and even against one of his old principles, to spare anguish to some persons I love. Never has he shown more tenderly what his deepest feelings have always been for me and mine.”

  I really sat up now. “Mrs. Dunbar, would you mind telling me what that was?”

  But her eyes glistened with sudden tears. “Someday, George. Someday perhaps. Not now.”

  I left the breakfast table as soon as I decently could and took the subway downtown. In my office I found my throat and tongue so dry I had to drink a glass of water. Then I told my secretary I was to be disturbed by no one (Mr. Dunbar always excepted), closed my door and resumed the inspection of certain papers on my desk that I had left unfinished the night before.

  They involved a trust of which Olive
r Lovat was the sole trustee for his considerably richer wife. Lovat, a nephew of Mrs. Dunbar, owed his limited and very minor partnership in Dunbar, Leslie & Co. to the fact that he was the grandson of the uncle for whom Lees Dunbar had come to work after the Civil War. Lovat was a handsome if rather beefy gentleman dandy of the period, tweedy, mustachioed, derby-hatted and cigar-smoking, who had a joke for everyone, high and low, and a loud blowy manner that I cordially detested. He did no work for the firm of any significance and lived largely on the income and commissions of the trust for his wife, to whom he was notoriously unfaithful and of which her father had been unwise enough to leave him sole fiduciary.

  Now it so happened that the much wronged Mrs. Lovat had at last decided to check on her trustee and had hired an accountant who had asked me, as the clerk in charge of fiduciary accounts, for an appointment at the bank the following week. As a matter of routine I had examined the books myself first, and the securities in our vault as well, and I had been surprised to discover that a number of bonds were missing. Of course, this did not have to mean a misappropriation; Lovat might have removed them for a sale. Yet on the same day, receiving as I did the daily list of Mr. Dunbar’s personal market transactions, I noticed that he had acquired the same bonds in the same denominations that were missing in the Lovat trust. And now, after Mrs. Dunbar’s mysterious revelation, only one interpretation fitted the facts.

  Lovat, a known gambler on the stock market, must have hypothecated trust assets to cover his personal loans and was now unable to replace them. Learning of his wife’s proposed investigation, he had thrown himself on his knees before his soft-hearted aunt, and she had prevailed upon her husband to make good the loss.

  Now this was certainly a new light on my great man, nor did I welcome the idea of any change in his iron character. He was not simply the major influence in my life; you might say he was the only one. I had liked to think of him as a cold man, but only in the sense that I too was cold: reason ruled our hearts. He was always just and fair in all his business dealings, and his word was his bond. And now was he compromising his standards? The ideal of virtue he had so loftily preached to me?

  Surely this would be a relaxation of one of his greatest strengths. He had always stipulated for absolute honesty among his own partners and in his own dealings. Anyone who tried to take crooked advantage of him would never do business again with Dunbar, Leslie & Co. As with the dealers who sold him art, to be once caught in a lie was to be banished forever. He believed that American business could police itself, and he had nothing but contempt for reform politicians.

  But now had the bell struck? I am still proud to say that I did not flinch before the challenge. Armed with my list of his recent market purchases, I marched into his office and laid it boldly on his desk.

  He picked it up and read it slowly, as if for the first time. I was almost embarrassed for him, which made me even bolder, daring enough to put this reminder to him:

  “You once asked me, sir, if your decision not to take a military part in the Civil War had been a virtuous one.”

  How still he was! But he might have been crouching. “Yes, sir. And, as I recollect, you told me you believed it had been.”

  “I was deeply impressed at how much you cared that any act of yours should be virtuous.”

  He nodded. “And now you are wondering how much I still care.”

  “Precisely.”

  “You have perceived that I am preparing to make whole my wife’s nephew’s misappropriations.”

  “Just so.”

  “And you are questioning the virtue of what I am considering?”

  “No, sir, I am not questioning it. I am condemning it.”

  Oh, he liked that! He liked to be stood up to by one who knew what he was doing. “Condemning without a trial? Without considering all the facts? I am saving a man’s wife from destitution, our firm from disgrace, himself from indictment. And I can police him in the future. I shall require his resignation from his fiduciary position. He will be no farther menace to society.”

  “But you will have concealed a felony. You will know that in the future the word of Lees Dunbar will be good only when the circumstances are propitious.”

  “My word, sir? What word?”

  “You will be certifying to an accountant that a trust is in order.”

  “And will it not be?”

  “Only when you have doctored it.”

  He grunted and now moved for the first time, shifting heavily in his chair. “Let us consider the consequences. Oliver will be a desperate man. He may even do himself in. He’s just the type that does. Where will be the benefit to society?”

  “Is that our criterion?”

  “We? Are ‘we’ so sure of our own motives? You, for example. Mightn’t my nephew offer a possible obstruction to your own advancement in the firm? ‘The old boy is getting senile,’ my partners may be already saying. ‘How many protégés do we have to put up with? First the incompetent Lovat and now this young fellow with whose family the old boy had such a curious intimacy? Isn’t one enough?’”

  I smiled inwardly. Surely I had achieved the ultimate union with him now. That he should even speak of the “curious intimacy”! “I’m not worried about Lovat, sir. I could lick him in the firm with one hand tied behind my back.”

  Again that slow nod. “I believe you could. Very well. Let us probe even deeper. Mightn’t we—and I do mean both of us—derive an actual satisfaction from the bloody sacrifice we would be making on the altar of our given word?”

  “Should the pleasure of doing the right thing disqualify us from doing it?”

  A ponderous silence. “Why are you doing this to me, George?”

  “Because I believe in you, sir.”

  “And because you believe in nothing else?”

  I must confess, this took me aback. “That could be in it, I suppose.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” His sigh, if deep, was final. “Very well. Obviously, I cannot now proceed with my little plan of rescue. But don’t worry. I shall not hold it against you. I even sympathize with your point of view. Alas! I must tell the wretched Oliver to look elsewhere for his salvation. What a world! But I had no hand in the making of it.” Oliver Lovat’s body was fished out of the East River the next morning. He had joined the army of those despairing souls who elect to solve their insoluble problems by a leap from Brooklyn Bridge. But there was no disgrace for the firm or destitution for the widow, as the real motive for the suicide was never discovered. His debts and disorderly love life provided adequate causes for the journals. And it was I who suggested to Mr. Dunbar that it would now be in order to replace the embezzled securities before the accountant’s inspection. There was no longer an embezzler to be prosecuted. But I suspect that Mrs. Dunbar had somehow divined my role. The invitations to breakfast were rescinded on the excuse that she now took that meal in her room.

  Her husband made up for the breakfasts by asking me regularly to lunch in his office. There was nothing at this point that he did not discuss with me, from his purchase of a still life to the merger of two railroads. And at the bank I was now universally treated as the established favorite. I did not trouble myself with how much envy and how much dislike might be concealed under the polite exteriors. I knew that none of the juniors would play any part in my rise or fall. I had staked my all on Mr. Dunbar, placing my eggs in a single basket, but having total faith in the reliability of that container. He might die—but a banker must be prepared to take some risk.

  And indeed it was not long before he advised me that the time had come for me to extend myself socially in the firm.

  “We’d better start thinking about a partnership for you. Twenty-seven is young in the eyes of the world, but you have the experience of a much older man. You must become better known to the partners. We’ll start with John Leslie. He will ask you for a weekend on Long Island. He won’t, of course, mention that I have suggested the invitation. You will be your discreet se
lf about that.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “And pay some attention to his daughter, Marion. Unless your heart is otherwise engaged?”

  “Free as air, sir.”

  “As I rather supposed. You work too hard, my boy. Marion’s a fine girl. A bit on the athletic side, but handsome. Apparently she’s had some sort of unhappy love affair which she claims she’ll never get over. But women like to make a drama of these things. We know about that. There are two brothers in the London office, fine fellows, charming, but a bit on the playboy side. It’s not a sure thing they’re partnership material. Leslie might content himself with a partner son-in-law. Verbum sapienti.”

  I restrained a gasp. Had I really come that far? Like a papal nephew in the Renaissance marrying into the old Roman nobility? “But would a girl like that so much as look at a dreary bank clerk who doesn’t even play polo?”

  He shrugged scornfully. “You don’t want me to tell you how to do it, do you? Go to. You’re not a bad-looking fellow. A bit on the skinny and pale side, but even that can be attractive. Who knows? She may be tired of the brawny brainless. And her old man tells me that she’s got a thing about the firm. Wishes she’d been a man so she could be a member of it. It’s up to you, my boy!”

  4

  Mr. Leslie was as handsome, as suave and as unsurprising as his fine, purple brick Tudor mansion with its emerald lawns and shady elms and white-fenced fields and stables. He had thick black-gray hair, a strong, well-shaped nose, a square chin and gleaming white teeth. He had to have had brains to have achieved his position in the firm and his assistant secretaryship of the army under Theodore Roosevelt, but I supposed his mind had been largely and shrewdly focused on using a charming personality to its best advantage. Mr. Dunbar, who was plain to the edge of ugliness, had notoriously converted his envy of good-looking males to a desire to be surrounded by them; it was a distinct tribute to my own intelligence that I had become his intimate without a stalwart build.