“Would that be asking for the moon?” But she held up a quick hand to keep me from answering and hurried on in an almost breathless voice. “Please, George, listen to me carefully before you decide against it. I know it’s a tricky business, but I’m sure we can work it out if we all agree. Hugh, like you, has never had much interest in children. He’d only be doing this for me. He’s perfectly willing to have you be the putative father. He promises he’d never interfere or embarrass you with claims about the child. And I’d see that you’re never troubled with it. Oh, if you will see me through this, George, I’ll be your staunch ally! We haven’t been very friendly since I fell in love with Hugh, but you will find there’s a lot I can do to make your life pleasant and agreeable. You’ll see!”
I got up and walked to the window. I found myself unexpectedly touched. There was always something rather noble about Marion; she showed it even with her present proposition. And, really, why should I not oblige her in this? I had been, like my father, a man complaisant. Before that I had been, at least in Marion’s mother’s eyes, a fils complaisant. It seemed only logical that I should now become a pere complaisant.
“So you’ve found love at last, Marion.” I turned back to face her. “And Hugh is really lovable?”
“I love him anyway.”
“And he you?”
She paused. She was always honest! “Ah, don’t ask too many questions. He loves me as Hugh can love.”
Could she have realized that this was the one way to save my pride? No, she was not so subtle.
“Have your baby, Marion. I’ll go along.”
***
These things are always known, or at least suspected. We four put on a very good act, but I fear nonetheless that at least a faint odor, something un peu malsain, emanated from our performance. Certainly Marion’s mother sniffed us out. And it was I, of course, who bore the brunt of her unspoken contempt. If Aggie Norman could be considered generous in her self-effacement, and Hugh romantic even in an adulterous part, and Marion at least forgivable for a gripping passion, what word could mitigate the scorn that might be justly heaped on my role?
Perhaps most confusing to the prying observer was the genuine devotion I felt for John Leslie Manville, born ten months after my fateful conversation with his mother. He was an enchanting little boy full of smiles, and when he stretched out his arms to me I hoped indeed that he might one day occupy Mr. Dunbar’s chair. I’m afraid that Marion found my fondness for the child somewhat embarrassing, even showing a lack of taste, but Hugh, cold fish that he was, did not seem in the least to care.
I spent much of my free time now aboard my sixty-foot motor yacht, the Arctic Tern, which gave me all the haven I needed from worldly distractions. Whenever I could, I would head out to the ocean, sitting contentedly on the bridge by my skipper, a pair of binoculars hanging from my neck, as satisfied with foul weather as with fair. I eschewed the new habit of fitting out these beautiful vessels with period furniture and master paintings. I insisted that mine be shipshape in every respect: nothing placed on the gleaming bulkheads but charts, and all chairs and divans upholstered in spotless white leather. Whiteness indeed was everywhere on board except in the shining mahogany of table legs, rail tops and instrument covers; it enhanced my sense of the nothing from which we come and to which we shall surely return. It was white that made my boat almost disappear against the alabaster of the horizon. Only at sea was I truly alone with my aloneness.
And what of my stoic hero? What would Marcus Aurelius have said? That I had borne too much? Been too much a stoic? But had he not looked the other way from Empress Faustina’s notorious love affairs? Nor had he objected to the naming of Commodus as his heir, although he might with a clear conscience have denied paternity of that cruel and dissolute youth. John Leslie Manville, at least, appeared to be a promising child. No, I concluded that the great emperor would have sanctioned my stand.
9
What finally aroused me from what I might term the spiritual hibernation of these years was the lunatic market boom of 1929. If my social relations with my fellow men had almost ceased, the activity of my mind had not. Indeed, it had taken advantage of my solitude to be more active than ever. The excuse that Marion had used to explain my absence from the Norman soirees—namely, that I was working on some economic thesis—had become true. I did now spend my evenings, as well as a good part of my days, in the office studying market trends, past and present, and seeking to determine what principles, if any, guided them. My goal was to place a finger on the very pulse of free trade. Were the rules which Mr. Dunbar and I had sought to apply to a tiny fraction of the general market extendable in any way to the whole? He had had a dream of accomplishing this by himself, but it had been the dream, at least in his senescence, of a megalomaniac.
It was perfectly evident to me, by the spring of that fateful year, that stocks had reached prices which could not be maintained. I was later to be deemed a great prophet, but in fact there had been many men of equal perspicacity. I adjusted my own portfolio to my dour prognostications, investing it in government obligations and the soundest blue chips, but I was much concerned with the firm’s capital in which I, both as a partner and as co-trustee with Marion of her trusts, had a substantial interest. Hugh, who was primarily in charge of the Dunbar Leslie funds, was an all-out bull.
When I went to his office to discuss this, he pooh-poohed my doubts.
“Do what you want with your own, George, but don’t fuss about the firm’s. What we have, and what we’re going to have, should make us more a power in the land than we’ve ever been.”
“But you see, I don’t believe that. Are you prepared to buy me out?”
He frowned. “Well, if you insist. Though it’s a bit awkward, with everything invested right up to the hilt. I suppose we could raise the cash.”
“And for Marion, too.”
“Marion! Does Marion want out?”
“I haven’t asked her. But I think she will when she hears my reasons.”
“Marion doesn’t know anything about the market, for Pete’s sake!”
“She can learn. I owe it to her to safeguard her fortune. And that of our son.”
“Your son?” Hugh peered at me with squinty eyes.
“Our son,” I repeated firmly. “John Leslie Manville.”
“Oh.” He might have been reflecting that my reclusive life had affected my reason. “I see. Of course. Well, talk to Marion if you think you must. But I should warn you that I intend to talk to her, too. With sums like this involved, it becomes a serious firm matter. And Marion has always put the firm first.”
“A New York heiress never puts anything ahead of what has made her that” was my parting shot.
I had been able to persuade two other major partners of the peril to the firm’s portfolio, and I surmised that, if I could add Marion’s voice to theirs and mine, Hugh might be forced to some compromise.
With this in mind, I approached Marion that same evening. She was home for a change, and after dinner, in the library, I outlined my plan. She only half listened until it broke upon her what it entailed.
“You mean you and I would join forces against Hugh?”
Life in this period had been perplexing for Marion. She had begun to put on weight, and this, with her increased social activity that now extended well beyond the firm (she was the queen of the charity ball), had probably diminished her interest, or at least her dependence, on romance. I had heard rumors in the office that Hugh had a lady friend from a very different social zone, and I had made it my business (always prepared) to verify this. I did not know whether or not Marion was aware of the affair, but if she had her suspicions, I wondered if a person as honest as she basically was might not have questioned her own continued right to call her lover to account.
“Does your loyalty to Hugh require you to place your fortune at risk?”
“But how can I be sure that it is? How can I know which of you two is right?”
&n
bsp; “You can’t. You may have to toss a coin. At least that would give you a fifty-fifty chance of not going down the drain with Hugh.”
“Oh, George, don’t be horrid! Explain it all to me!”
“I can’t turn you into an economist overnight, my dear. You’ll have to play your hunch.”
“Can’t you do something to help me?”
“I can do this. I can at least try to persuade you that honor doesn’t call you to be more loyal to Hugh than he is to you.” I handed her a card on which was typed a name, address and telephone number. “This is where you can reach Mrs. Ella Lane. I doubt that she will have an interest in refusing you any information you request. Her liaison with Hugh is well known in the social circles in which she moves.”
Poor Marion held the card away from her as if it emitted a bad odor. “Why are you doing this to me, George?”
“I’ve told you why.”
Her eyes slowly filled with tears. “I’ve known there was someone. But I didn’t want to know who. Are you sure you’re not doing this because you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you in the least. I’m very fond of you, and I always have been. I’m doing this for you. And for your son.”
She was silent for a minute. “Let me go upstairs now. I’ll let you know in the morning what I decide.”
At breakfast Marion’s maid came down to deliver me a note from her mistress which simply read: “Go ahead with your plan.” That morning I was able to induce Hugh to agree to reinvest in safer securities one half of the firm’s capital. Thus are the major events of history often brought about.
***
When the great crash came that fall, Dunbar Leslie lost only fifty percent of its principal and escaped what might have otherwise been a receivership. My status in the firm was enormously enhanced, and a much humbled Hugh at partnership lunches was now careful to seat me at his right and to consult me on every question of importance. I never said “I told you so.” There was no need.
Marion was much bewildered by these events. The re-emergence of her husband from, so to speak, the back chambers of the firm, whither he had been relegated by the wisdom of the old guard, seemed to defy the rules of the game as she had learned them. True, she had originally picked me as her candidate for the first spot, but had she not been proved wrong by her father and lover? And now here was the old struggle all over again! I was amused by her quandary, likening her in my mind to a sea lioness basking on a rock until the victor of two battling bulls should flop over to claim her.
Except she wasn’t basking. She was making cautious overtures to me suggesting that we had drifted too far apart and perhaps should do more things together again. She even asked me if I would join her at the table which the firm had taken at the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom for a dinner honoring the secretary of the treasury. I firmly declined.
“In the first place, there’s nothing to honor. Neither the secretary nor any of his party has done a thing to ameliorate the national disaster. In the second, I wouldn’t be seen dead at a hotel banquet. We have established our pragmatic sanction, my dear Marion. Let us abide by it.”
This may sound cruel. Marion was having her troubles. I knew that Hugh’s Mrs. Lane had abandoned him for a corporate tycoon too great to be openly resented and that he was doing his best to reinstate himself in Marion’s good graces. I was probably thrusting her back in his arms. But I didn’t care. I had no further interest in the politics of the firm, or who was senior partner, and, having lived my life without the complications of sexual involvement, I had little patience for the heartaches and jealousies of people obsessed with their own genitalia and what to do or not to do with them.
Actually, I was probably helping Marion. She did patch things up with Hugh, and this may have been the best thing she could have done with her emotional life, or what was left of it. He probably continued to divert himself on the sly, but if he did, he took greater pains to conceal it. And in a year’s time he had already started to take some of the credit, at least with the younger partners, for the investment policy which had saved the firm. The fact that I never bothered to contradict him lent credence to his claim, and by 1933 he was as strongly in the saddle as if his wisdom and leadership had never been questioned.
I have been accused of enjoying the Depression. There is some truth in that. I did not enjoy, certainly, the human suffering entailed, although I have never much concerned myself with human misery that I was powerless to allay. Pain and agony beyond my reach, at home or abroad or even on other planets, in the past, present or future—how could my sentimental wails mend matters? What I did enjoy was the interest of watching a national catastrophe unfold in very much the fashion I had foreseen, with the added excitement of feeling that the same mind which had seen it coming might offer some small clue in the problem of preventing its repetition.
For the years which followed the crash, bringing no return of our fevered prosperity, but, on the contrary, revealing even darker abysses, had begun to open up to many persons, like myself, the vision of radical changes in the management of our securities markets. The time might have come not merely to say “I told you so” to Hugh Norman but to add: “And here is what I’m going to tell you!” My life might not, after all, be a failure. There might still be a way to find consistency and even purpose in the career which had started in my mother’s salon, discussing the Medici with its principal ornament, and had seemed to end with my relegation from the status of second partner to that of a mere economic consultant.
I had been working, off and on for two years, on a short text about the need for government regulation of the issuance and marketing of stocks and bonds. It had had its origin in my indignation at Hugh’s little pool games. But now, with the new confidence engendered by my role in the firm’s survival, I decided to expand it into a full-length book and offer it for publication. What I had once conceived as the policing role of the banking community I now realized had to become one of the many functions of Uncle Sam.
Principles of Market Regulation was published in 1932. It was read only by a small public, but that public was precisely the audience I had wished to reach: those economists who hoped to assist the new government if Hoover should be defeated and the banking world of downtown New York. The former hailed me; the latter decried me as a false prophet and, worse, a false friend.
Marion was thoroughly bewildered. She had tried to read my book and hadn’t been able to make head or tail of it. But she had talked to her mentor.
“Hugh says you’re trying to undermine the whole capitalist system!”
“On the contrary, I’m trying to save it.”
“No one in the firm seems to think that.”
“Have any of them any better ideas?”
“I don’t know. It’s all beyond me. I wish my father were alive to talk to you.”
“Who knows? He might have agreed with me.”
But it was only too clear, in any division between the firm and myself, which side Marion would be on. She was a tribal creature, and if necessary she would carry even the severed head of her spouse to the real chief. She had offered me my chance to be that, first in marrying me, then, when Mr. Dunbar had died, in trying to rouse me from my apathy, and, more lately, in offering me the resumption of a kind of partnership marriage, and I had failed her, and Hugh was king. But I was free of all this. I had my new thing. Detached, superior, in my box of observation, I could watch the inevitable unfolding of the drama below.
Marion’s real trial came the following year, after the change of administration in Washington, when I was invited to go down to the capital and help with the drafting of the bill which was to become the Securities Act of 1933. This was the law which, more than any other, would open up the real struggle between right and left. My firm’s executive committee came in a body to my office to beg me not to associate the name of Dunbar Leslie with such radical legislation, and when I calmly and politely declined even to debate the matter with them and requested them
to leave me in peace, they departed in high dudgeon, but later delegated Hugh to appeal to Marion to intercede with me.
I was thus prepared on the night that she made her dramatic appearance at my study door, more than ever the Roman matron. Dressed for the reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art whither she was bound, accompanied by the again faithful Hugh, to the opening of an exhibit of Hindu art sponsored by the firm, she was arrayed in red velvet with a necklace of large emeralds, and her fine auburn hair was for once neatly combed and set. Her full figure, erect in the doorway, was almost imperial in its static pose, and across her breast she was wearing the blue ribbon of a pompous Indian decoration which I had privately and ribaldly dubbed “the Order of Chastity, second class.”
“I suppose it’s true?” she began in a sad, lofty tone.
“Oh, Marion, sit down and have a drink. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“I don’t care to sit, thank you. It’s true, then, that you are going to betray the firm to which you owe everything and the class to which you have aspired.”
“Aspired? My family was quite as good as yours, Marion.”
“I am not speaking of blood. I am speaking of accomplishment and responsibility. Your father was a nobody. And we know too well what your mother was.”
“Very much what you are, wasn’t she?”
Marion looked more surprised than indignant. Her imagination was not capable of equating her relationship with Hugh, which she probably saw as a mating of gods on Olympus, with the humbler copulations of my mother and Mr. Dunbar.
“Your parents, I meant, were not leaders of the financial community. Which may explain why you have so little sense of loyalty. But have you stopped to consider in what light the captain of a great ship in a storm must view the man who jumps overboard to join the wreckers flashing a false beacon on the rocks?”
Really, Marion was magnificent. She must have written that out on her dressing table before coming down. But my amusement subsided when I recalled how much she resembled the aging Lees Dunbar before the congressional committee. None of those she called our financial leaders, or even the wives who had no real part in the game, were able to play it without waving banners and chanting martial songs. My momentary pity for Marion vanished when I considered that nothing would ever convince her that her values might be false.
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 49