The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  3

  It was Dan Carmichael who introduced me to that august circle. He was then, in 1947, at age fifty, just past the peak of his great reputation as the last exponent of the Ashcan School, but if he had begun to decline, no one would have anticipated the low esteem in which his name is held today. He was a big, bony, black-haired, hirsute, oleaginous man whose angry canvases of Coney Island bathers, drunken sailors and crowded urban streets on hot summer nights had been considered appropriately powerful and radical in the Depression years. Ordinarily my editor would have reviewed his last show, but he happened to be ill, and I had the chance to write the column which pleased the great man and earned me an invitation to visit him in his studio on the top of his brownstone in Chelsea.

  His ego, I found, was insatiable, but I knew how to satisfy it, and I was soon accorded the privilege of dropping in whenever I chose for a drink and a chat, of which I took full advantage, as I saw a longer and perhaps important article in it for me.

  One afternoon I met him at his front door about to go out. “This is well met, young fellow! I’m off to the Suydams’. It’s one of their Wednesdays. Come along. You’ll like them, and I think they’ll like you.”

  I followed him down the street in docile compliance. “Who are the Suydams?”

  “I thought you knew everything. She’s Arlina Randolph.”

  Well, of course I knew who that was. Like Carmichael’s, her reputation was then near its peak, but it was not, despite some rather slick later novels, to dip thereafter as low as his. The feminist movement may have sustained it a bit, but her best books, I feel sure, will bear the test of time. I had read and loved all she had written to the date of that first visit. I knew she had been born in Richmond of an old Virginia family, one member of which had married a daughter of Jefferson’s, and that she had been a passionate student of the Reconstruction. Her finest novels—historical ones, I suppose, as their action occurs in the decades immediately preceding her birth—deal with the travails of war-impoverished tobacco planters rebuilding their shattered world, but at the same time virtually reenslaving their blacks. More recently she had turned her lights on the current New York scene, and although her satire was keen, her prose luminous and her plots deft, these later fictions were not bathed in the nostalgia which, at least in my view, gave to their predecessors their peculiar moral beauty.

  She was married, Dan informed me as we rode east in a taxi, to a rich older man, Red Suydam, now an arthritic victim confined to a wheelchair, who, although high-toned and high-handed with others, was yet content to regard himself as a privileged high priest in charge of the temple of his wife’s art. He maintained her in a beautiful red brick Federal mansion in Gramercy Park, where they provided a buffet supper for a weekly salon of mixed artistic and social folk.

  When Dan and I arrived, the great lady was not yet down. It was her habit to wait until most of what Proust’s Madame Verdurin would have called her “faithful” had assembled. Dan led me up to where our host was sitting in his chair by the fire.

  “I read your little piece on Dan’s last show,” Suydam informed me with snapping, malignant eyes as Dan retreated out of earshot. “He certainly must like you for that one.”

  I took a moment to assess his tone before answering. He had a long, oblong, cadaverous countenance with steely gray hair, presumably once red, and reddish eyeballs.

  “You think I went too far?”

  “Oh, not so far as I should have gone! I should have compared him with Michelangelo.”

  “Indeed? You don’t think that would have flattered him?”

  “I said compare, not equate, young man. Dan shares a fault if not a virtue with the Tuscan master.”

  “And what may that be?”

  “He can’t paint women. His are all brawny men with tits.”

  I laughed. “But his men are very male, you will admit.”

  “Oh, they are that! Those sailors with muscular thighs bursting their tight pants.” Here the old boy winked at me. “Scrumptious, don’t you think? Can you imagine them in bed with Dan’s scrawny females?”

  “Do you imply they go to bed with each other?”

  “I don’t. Dan does. At least in his pictures. Have you ever met Mrs. Carmichael?”

  “Actually, I haven’t.”

  “He won’t be apt to introduce you. He never brings her here, poor woman. I guess she sits at home and looks at the sailors.”

  Another guest came up to greet him, and I was able to make my escape to look at the pictures on the high white walls. They were all American, the finest examples of Hassam, Robinson, Glackens, Sloan, Innes and, of course, Carmichael. I was too enthralled with these to bother with the other guests until I caught sight of my hostess pausing on a landing of the stairway and glancing down at the crowd.

  I think I knew right away that a change had come into my life. It was not anything as banal as falling in love at first sight; it was rather the appearance in my too familiar sky of a new planet, a fine glowing orb of still undetermined influence but with an effect on the gravity of minor astral bodies that was bound to be felt. Her tall, full, firm figure, clad in blue velvet, her fine firm nose and strong chin, her alabaster skin and large pensive dark eyes gave her the air of a priestess of classic times, a Norma erect before an altar. Her hair was long and blond. I assumed it was dyed. It wasn’t. Descending the stairs, she noted the staring new guest and came directly over to me.

  “Who is this nice new friend?” she asked gravely as she extended her hand.

  When I told her and explained my auspices, she nodded, complimented me on my “hell” story and led me to a corner, where we both sat. A maid brought her a glass of white wine. I later learned that she was not to be interrupted by others in that corner. Her rules were simple but definite.

  We talked about writing, and she treated me charmingly as an equal. I asked her why she had never written about the antebellum South, the old planters in their heyday.

  “Because it was too long ago. Henry James said in one of his wonderful prefaces that the charm of the past as used in fiction depended on its proximity.”

  “And I suppose in your childhood the memory of Reconstruction was still vivid.”

  “And still bitter!” she exclaimed. “My grandparents were very far from reconstructed. Oh, very far! Yet there were some rare souls who saw it as a period of something like redemption. My father was one of those. He used to say that slavery was the cancer of the Old South.”

  Her articulation was astonishingly precise. She might almost have been reading aloud, without an er or an ah. And she seemed to have lost all trace of a Southern accent. Her tones were high and sharp, more the voice of New York than of Richmond.

  “You don’t mean he saw the war as a spiritual one? Like the crusades?”

  “My dear young man, he ran away from home at the age of sixteen in the last year of the war to fight for General Lee. The Yankees had nothing to do with his moral struggles. He loathed them!”

  “Would you have fought for Lee had you been a young man then?”

  “Of course I would!” Her laugh was hearty and infectious. “Do you see me as a fatuous Mrs. Howe scribbling down the inane verses of her battle hymn as she watched a review of the Army of the Potomac? No, Mr. Babcock, I would have been like our sainted general. With a heavy heart I would have shouldered a musket and gone to die for my native state!”

  As she clapped her hands together, I had a vision of Boadicea, of Zenobia, of Joan of Arc. And I wondered how heavy that heart would have been. There might have been too much joy in battle.

  It was time for her to join her other guests. But I had made the grade. When I left that night, she said, “Come back, Mr. Babcock. Come back to us, please.”

  And I did. I became the most faithful of her faithful. Arlina’s salon had probably the best conversation in New York. The people who came for cocktails and supper, and stayed to talk (unless it was a musical evening) until midnight (Arlina always retire
d on the stroke of twelve), were a mixture of writers, journalists, painters and musicians, with a goodly number of the more enlightened members of the banking and legal communities. They talked in groups, unless a particularly burning topic united the chamber in a general discussion, moderated by Red Suydam. Otherwise, he took an almost violent interest in every subject, wheeling his chair furiously from group to group, cackling with sometimes cruel laughter, for he loved to pounce on the ridiculous, even when a half-decent compassion would have spared it.

  My enthusiasm for Arlina’s salon did not blind me to the fact that she paid a certain price for her high sense of decorum. Because she would not tolerate drunkenness, bad language, too heated arguments or too casual dress, some of the major artists and writers of the day, including too many of the younger ones, made no appearance under her roof. She was quite aware of this herself, but she pointed out to me, with some truth, that geniuses were rarely as good talkers as near geniuses and that conversation, after all, was more the point of her gatherings than the furnishing of food and alcohol even to the sublime. I had to agree with this, but I did not go on to tell her that convention and respectability lent a faint tinge of things passes to her salon. Hiram Scudder, the hoary old veteran of an earlier radicalism, whose “big” novel about steel strikers in 1905 had aroused the literary world, seemed, with his hoarse croaking and false teeth, a bit of a museum piece, while Dan Carmichael’s shrill denunciations of the new abstract impressionists betrayed a senescent imagination. Time, so to speak, had dressed the old pioneers in dinner jackets.

  Yet the milieu formed the perfect background for Arlina herself. She was at her best and brightest with a certain formality in the conversational give-and-take, where a witticism was never lost in a babble of conflicting voices and where a pause could signify reflection on what one’s interlocutor had just said and not simply the rehearsal of one’s own next mot. And her laugh, her wonderful laugh, could unite any group in good humor. She had the remarkable gift of making reserve seem almost intimate.

  Sometimes, inevitably, to so frequent a guest as myself, her machinery showed from under its smooth cover. In spring, when she planned excursions out of the city for a select few—for a picnic on the Palisades or a visit to her Westchester “farm”—there was a slight strain in the very perfection of her arrangements and in the precision of her instructions to guests: who was to bring what or wear what or take whom. Some even breathed the word bossy, though it would have been kinder to say that she could never quite take in the fact that many people would rather be wrong in their own way than right in hers. The only person to whom she consistently deferred was Red. Hiram Scudder, who had known her the longest, told me that her husband, and he alone, had inherited the subservience with which she had honored her late parents.

  I was soon her particular favorite. At picnics she assigned me to most tasks, and I fetched and carried for her like a faithful dog. She was certainly not one to suffer fools gladly, but once admitted to her inner circle one could relax and even indulge in an occasional bad pun. And she was a good sport, too. She could take sallies at her own expense from the initiated. Once on a country outing, where we played a word game of associations (I would say “dog,” and you had to say the first word that came into your head, like “cat”) and I had totaled up Arlina’s responses, I announced to the group that her primary concerns appeared to be “clothes and men.”

  “Youth, youth,” she murmured. “You are so cruel.”

  She took a personal interest in my life and work and did not hesitate to scold me.

  “Your trouble, Martin, is that you are lazy. You should make yourself write. You should assign certain hours of the week to composition and stick to your program no matter what.”

  “Do you do that?”

  “No, because I don’t have to. I can afford to wait for the mood, because I now know that the mood will come. But when it does come I give it full sway. Even if Red and I are traveling in Europe on a fixed schedule, and I feel the mood, then I must stay where I am and write. Red is an angel about changing accommodations.”

  “But he’s still a taskmaster. He makes you write.”

  “He doesn’t make me do a thing. He simply insists that I follow my bent. I tell him we should hang a sign on our door: ‘Arlina and Red, Makers of Fine Fiction.’”

  What was their relationship? It was obvious that it couldn’t have been a physical one for several years. And before that? They had no children, which was no proof of anything, but it struck me that there was something virginal in Arlina’s air. Dan Carmichael, who delighted in sexual speculations, claimed to have had it from Red himself that Arlina had been so frigid and inexperienced at the time of their wedding that it had taken him three months to consummate the marriage. But Dan’s imagination was an embroidering one; I did not trust it.

  The first time Arlina and I discussed the relation between the sexes was when we were seated on a bench in Bryant Park, whither we had strolled on a mild early spring afternoon following a matinée of Tristan und Isolde. I had been asked to fill Red’s subscription seat because he hated Wagner. He had missed, however, one of the great performances of all time—Flagstad and Melchior—and Arlina, who had been deeply affected, was moved to speak of the “tragedy” of illicit love.

  “Is there anything in art more shattering than the surprising of the lovers in Act Two? They have almost escaped the harsh dry world of daylight—the meanness of things too clearly delineated—into the enchantment of night—death, if you will—I don’t care—and bang! Melot breaks in. Marke breaks in. All hell breaks in.”

  “Just before their orgasm.”

  Arlina paused—judicially—as if to consider whether I was being crude or merely explicit. “Well, yes, if you choose to construe the music that way.”

  “Isn’t it unmistakable? Those rhythms?”

  “I know what you mean, of course. But to me Wagner is expressing more than just that. The lovers have reached a point where their relationship is the only reality. Marke and Melot and even the warning Brangàne are irrelevancies. The terrible thing about unsanctified love—unsanctified, that is, by law or religion or mores or even by a decent regard for one’s spouse or betrothed—is that these irrelevancies are always bound to intrude. Even if they’re not actually intruding, they may be intruding in the lovers’ minds. The lovers are never free.”

  “But isn’t that just what makes their love so great? The difficulty? Even the danger?”

  “Oh, Martin, what a superficial view! How can you?”

  “Because it’s true! Look what’s happening today. People everywhere are obsessed with removing the impediments to love. Easy divorce threatens the very existence of adultery. Our most respectable debutantes are permitted love affairs, and every kind of sexual perversion is freely tolerated, at least in the best society. And is anyone happier? Of course not! Because the pleasure of love is diluted with its availability. The nun in a convent who nurses a guilty passion for the priest who officiates at mass gets as much kick out of it as the busiest Don Juan on Park Avenue!”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “Never more so. If King Marke, stumbling on the lovers, had said, ‘Go to it, kids. I only quit the hunt for a date with Brangane,’ there’d have been a terrible let-down. I bet they wouldn’t have got going again until they’d quaffed the rest of that love potion.”

  “Don’t be so disgusting.” But the reproach in her voice was mild. The topic intrigued her. “It’s all very well for you to talk that way. There are no impediments for a bachelor.”

  “Are there not, Arlina?” I turned to look into her eyes with an expression of mock ardor.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  And she rose to walk on.

  But the sudden rigor in her tone gave me my first notion that perhaps what she minded was that the ardor was mock.

  And was it? My feelings about the wonderful Arlina were mixed indeed. On the lowest level—and that was where I always starte
d—there was the itching yen of a small randy male for a fine large female figure, the lust of a Nibelung to pollute a Rhine maiden, or, translated into terms of literary competition, the drive of a scribbler to equate himself in the only way he could think of with a novelist of the first rank.

  But that was far from the whole. By my own half-serious philosophy of love, just enunciated, I might have diluted such intensity as I was capable of in a series of easy affairs, but I still know that I was more devoted to Arlina than to any other woman in my life. She had become the warmest of friends, a kind of sisterly mentor to a man rejected by his own mother, and I cannot think of her even today without a return of something like the old heartache.

  At any rate, after our Bryant Park chat, I began seriously to entertain the idea that it might be one of the delightful functions of my idle life to make some contribution to her deeper happiness.

  It was Hiram Scudder who first hinted to me that my project was not entirely unfeasible. I had become a great favorite of the paunchy, bald old boy, who was always asking me to lunch, ostensibly to discuss my writing but really to hold forth about his own, and he would walk slowly down the avenue afterwards, his arm entwined with mine, while he chanted about what he would do if he had again, like me, “a manly vigor and youth.” In parting he would seize my head with both his hands and plant a wet kiss, presumably of benediction, upon my forehead. Perhaps he thought of the emotion I aroused in him as paternal. Unlike Dan, who, though married, was a notorious wooer of young men, Hiram was a bachelor and very possibly a virgin to both sexes. Such things were not uncommon to his generation. Arlina’s court had a decidedly androgynous note, although Red himself was given to tasteless antipederast jokes. But then Red, perhaps out of bitterness at his own incapacities, was anti everything. Except, of course, Arlina.