A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth

by Louis Auchincloss

  For a summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, my parents had rented a house on the top of a large hill owned by a Dr. Thorndike, a rich and deeply respected old Bostonian who had built other houses on the hill for his married daughters. There had been, years before, a beloved daughter who had died young. A small, unfurnished structure where she had "played house" was preserved intact in her memory. No one ever entered it but the cleaning woman.

  I broke into it, smashing every piece of china in the little place. Why this madness seized me I shall never know. Was there some sort of anger that I had not otherwise acknowledged? What on earth was I feeling? Afterward, I tried to forget it myself. I attempted to believe it had never happened, as there were no repercussions. I never went near the little house again; I began to think it had not occurred.

  But it had, indeed. The repercussions for me occurred some forty years later. I was having Sunday lunch with my elderly parents when the discussion fell on a peculiarly nasty act of vandalism by a gang of youths described in the morning paper. Father was violent in his denunciation of the boys involved.

  "Oh, I can understand them," I averred. "Boys can do crazy things. I was a vandal myself once."

  "Really? What did you do?"

  As I told them about the Thorndike playhouse, the room became strangely silent. Father was actually livid.

  "You did that," he almost whispered.

  He then told me that the chief of the Bar Harbor police had called on him and taken him to view the devastation. "I'm sorry, Mr. Auchincloss, but we have to investigate every child on the hill."

  "You think a child of mine could have done that?"

  "And the chief actually apologized!" Father almost shouted at me now. "And he didn't even interview you!"

  "You can't be mad at me now!" I protested.

  "I'm not so sure," he retorted. "That police chief is probably long dead by now. I can never apologize to him."

  7. Bar Harbor

  MY FATHER USED to say of Mount Desert Island, which is just off the Maine coast and contains the once very fashionable summer resort of Bar Harbor, that it was so beautifully unreal that one could hardly read the New York newspapers there, with all their threats of doom. This made it, of course, an ideal vacation spot, and we used to rent for midsummer a commodious stone and wood villa on a peninsula called Schooner Head that had the sea on both sides. Our landlord, who laid fishnets along the rocky coast around the peninsula, hauled in a blue shark one morning and laid it out on the small beach at which our housemaids sometimes dared to take an icy dip. There was no other place for them to do that, but needless to say, after the sight of the shark none of them ever put even a toe in the water again.

  Of course, we as a family had the elegant swimming club where the water was let in at first from the ocean to a large enclosure and warmed before being piped up to the members' pool. We had also a golf club and marinas for those who sailed or enjoyed deep-sea fishing. The sumptuous shingle villas along the seashore blended handsomely with the gray of the rocks and the deep green of the surrounding hills, which we called mountains. It was indeed a paradise for the rich.

  Both my parents were old Bar Harborites—my paternal grandparents still in my boyhood occupied their big house on Clefstone Road—but it was the natural beauty of the place rather than its social activity that attracted them to it. Father, who was something of a jock, adored the golf and tennis, and Mother's particular joy was in climbing the mountains and planning picnics. Of course, they had plenty of old friends on the island, and dined out on occasion, but they always insisted that that was not the "point" of the summer, which was essentially a family occasion. They avoided the spectacular new rich like the plague, and even the old if they were too involved in the social game.

  This meant that we children were not invited to children's parties given by parents on whom ours had not chosen to call, and these, of course, tended to be the most lavish and desirable of all. My older brother and sister didn't care, but I resented it bitterly. I tried to make out just what Mother's standards were and listened carefully when she talked to her friends without knowing, so to speak, that she was on the air. Here is the explanation that one of her intimates gave to her question as to how she could bring herself to dine with a particularly vulgar tycoon:

  "But I love it, my dear. You start with strong, well-mixed cocktails followed by a cordon bleu dinner at which you needn't talk to the ape on either side of you as you are expected to listen to a fine organ expertly played. And after dinner there's a brand-new and exciting movie in a comfortable auditorium. Oh, I can't wait to be asked again!"

  But that was not at all Mother's idea of a good time. She deplored the deep impression made on me, her third child, by the very people she sought to avoid. There were, however, people on the island at whose great houses she had to go because of family connections. One of these belonged to Mrs. Duer Blake, the former Mrs. Clarence Mackey, who gave large parties for the children of her second marriage (including my friend Billy Blake), where the winners of games received little cups of real silver that I craved but never won. I thought Mrs. Blake, tall, thin, and aristocratic-looking, the epitome of style, and it further fascinated me that one of her eyes was of glass. We were always told not to stare at her in the effort to find out which one.

  One day Mother had come to pick me up after a Blake party. As she was taking leave of our hostess, I was startled to hear Mrs. Blake say of the next meeting of this children's group (which was scheduled to be at my grandmother's house): "I'll send the children, of course, but you know I can't go there."

  "Why can't Mrs. Blake go to Grandmother's?" I wanted to know as we drove home.

  "Because your grandmother is very old-fashioned," Mother replied in a rather tart tone. "She won't receive women who've been divorced and remarried."

  I was appalled. Dowdy old Grandmother wouldn't receive glamorous Mrs. Blake! I had evidently a great deal to learn about society, which was a tangle of rules that made no logical sense.

  I was much helped in my quest by my friends Edith and Jimmy Clark, with whom I sometimes stayed for a week after my family had returned to New York. Their parents had each been married four times, and they lived for long stretches with their maternal grandmother, Edith Fabbri, the divorced Vanderbilt wife of Ernesto Fabbri. He was one of three Fabbri brothers whose father had been an Italian partner in Morgan & Co. The other two were bachelors: Egisto, a man of fabulous good taste who designed for his sister-in-law Buonriposo, the Palladian villa in Bar Harbor where I stayed, and Alessandro, famed radio expert and inventor who became Edith's lover and is buried beside her in the Vanderbilt cemetery in Staten Island. Visitors assume the tomb is her husband's. The Fabbris were rich, but Edith was richer and considered the essence of respectability on Mount Desert Island, though everyone knew everything about her. I was learning.

  Her past did not keep Mrs. Fabbri from disapproving of most of her grandchildren's friends, whose parents she considered of too recent origin to be invited to Buonriposo, but this did not keep Jimmy and Edith from going. Bar Harbor, like many social summer resorts, offered the new rich a chance to break into a society that barred them at home. Let us suppose, for example, that you have made a fortune from some unattractive aspect of plumbing in Philadelphia and are not received by the better families. Invest your money in Mount Desert Island, where your yacht, your glittering, foreign cars, your fabulous parties will be the envy of the younger generation, who have not yet developed their parents' snobbishness. The latter will not object to their young going to your parties, for they do not imagine a summer friendship commits anyone to much. But they may find, on returning to Philadelphia, that their children will have formed deeper friendships than they have expected—even love affairs—and it will be hard to ignore their parents.

  I learned in Bar Harbor that sex is as interesting to people I once regarded as too old for it as it is to the young. The mother of my friends, Teresa, was the most beautiful woman on the island, and on h
er rare visits to her mother when she was between marriages, and sometimes not, the telephone at Buonriposo rang constantly for her. There was an extension in my bedroom, and I had the impudence to listen in. Was that really Father's friend Tom Cook, whose amorous tone I heard? It was. Yet he was married to a friend of Mother's and had six children, some of whom were older than I. Even so.

  The young were less social snobs than the old, but they had equally rigid standards where personalities were involved. They could be hard as nails on an unattractive girl, which my late friend Mariska de Hedry, for all her sterling qualities, unhappily was in youth. She was the only child of a former Hungarian diplomat, married to an American heiress who crossed the Atlantic every summer to visit her sister, Miss Coleman, in her big house on the Shore Path. The family was hopelessly conservative and old-fashioned, and Mariska's dismal plainness was not alleviated by her dowdy if expensive clothes. The jeunesse dorée of Bar Harbor wouldn't give the poor girl the time of day, but I appreciated her character and saw her from time to time. One day she asked me to take her to the Saturday night dance at the swimming club, which she ordinarily never went to, adding, as if to explain: "The emperor is staying with us, and Mummie thinks he would like the dance."

  It was a command performance from her father's former boss, the Austro-Hungarian emperor pretender Otto, and of course we three went. Word of whom we had brought spread like fire around the dance floor, and Mariska found herself the belle of the ball. For fifteen minutes. By then the beauties of the summer colony had entirely preempted the imperial pretender, who was only too willing to be preempted, and I was left with Mariska, who soon enough told me that she was ready to go home and leave Otto to his new friends.

  Bar Harbor was not the place for her. It was not the place for saints, one of whom, as a nun, she almost became.

  8. Bad Sports

  I MUST BE CAREFUL in writing about my first two years at Groton School, the famous boy's (in my day) private preparatory academy. During my days the institution existed under the administration of an Episcopalian priest (Endicott Peabody) and was located in Groton, Massachusetts.

  My first two years here were a time for me of great unhappiness. I'm aware that it is all too common for persons dilating on their childhood woes to blame them on schools, teachers, parents, anything and anyone but themselves. I assure you that this is not my tendency. While it is true that I was badly trained academically at Bovee for Groton, I had brought a lot of things on myself that were incompatible with a happy boarding school life.

  I had contributed to my athletic incompetence by avoiding sports at Bovee whenever I could. I had also increased my unpopularity there by confining my social life to the least ambitious jokesters who could offer little in terms of social experience for my upcoming years. Why I had not prepared I cannot say. At Bovee, all the while, I had ominously suspected that at Groton I would be no longer protected by family and friendly teachers, but rather at the mercy of a majority of the sort of cruel boys whom I had been mostly protected from. And so indeed it turned out just this way. I had a sorry time before I learned to cope.

  I had just turned twelve when I was sent to Groton and up to that time I had, except for my premonitions about the place, been a moderately happy child. On the night before leaving my parents, my brother John (already a sixth former at the school) and I attended a performance of Sweet Adeline, because John was a fan of Helen Morgan. I well recall the sickening feeling in my stomach as she sang, "'Twas not so long ago, that Pa was Mommie's beau." I knew that my old life was over.

  The beauty of the Groton School campus, with its circle of fine red-brick buildings and handsome gray Gothic chapel, meant nothing to me, despite the genial welcome of the pleasant masters. I knew that I was, suddenly, on my own and that all the nice things that had hitherto protected me—Bovee, dancing school, even the Greys and my parents—themselves were no longer available.

  The trouble started right away. Carrying my fresh new textbooks to the schoolhouse in the morning I approached a large boy who I had learned was my second cousin, Gordon Auchincloss. Without suspicion, I introduced myself.

  "Why hello, Cousin!" he cried in what I naively supposed was a friendly greeting. Then he gave me a rough shove that drove me backwards upside down over his pal, who was kneeling behind me. My new books lay scattered in the mud. Welcome to the real Groton, not the Groton of a benign faculty or a benevolent board of trustees!

  Much worse was to follow. Early on I departed for Groton Village, as was allowed on Saturday afternoons, for an ice cream soda, with two other boys. Passing over a bridge we foolishly cast a few stones at a train passing underneath. Unfortunately, one broke a window in the engine room, and an angry complaint was made to the headmaster. He then asked a class I attended if we knew anything about the assault. I thought it incumbent on me to make a full confession, as I so often, since my days of thievery had ended, was wont to do, whatever my own level of guilt in the matter. I did so, unfortunately and carelessly involving the two other boys. It was an attempt at honesty and, as so often occurs with such forays, disaster was the result. At Bovee we had never heard of the crime of "snitching." I thought I was being virtuous. Well, that did it.

  A non-Buckley boy in a class heavily stacked with Buckley alums, I became even more of a social leper. I could expect to be struck or kicked as I passed from classroom to classroom or even to be beaten up by a mob. I had no friends and was even subject to a sexual violation that would have created a major scandal today. Yet I must emphasize that every person in the administration of that school would have been horrified had they known what was going on. They were helpless then just as their counterparts are these days. Boys cannot be shielded from one another. Nor did I ever complain, either to a parent or teacher. I believe it was all part of the inevitable process of becoming a man in a dreary world.

  I was perfectly aware that many boys played games in the cubicles at night called "mutual masturbation." I doubt if these included sodomy; the very word might have frightened them off. This practice left little aftereffect that I could see: not one member of the form became an acknowledged homosexual in maturity. But there was one difference separating this sort of relationship between boys in England and America. In America it was never called love, even by the boys themselves. This would have been regarded as hopelessly degrading to their masculinity. In English literature you find terms suggesting homosexuality used quite freely about youths who would later happily forsake their own sex to become the warriors of the light brigade. What we call the bad habits of naughty boys can develop into the military force that sustains an empire.

  Certainly one of the most mysterious and memorable figures to emerge from my youth was Jimmy Regan, longtime senior master at Groton School. He was the executive officer, to use a naval term, to the all-dominating figure of the Reverend Endicott Peabody, founder and veteran headmaster, whose exact opposite in character and personality Regan appeared to be. For he was a wispy little man, impossible to associate with the mildest athleticism, perfectly dressed, of quiet good manners yet curiously forceful, who took for granted that he had succeeded in establishing his absolute rule on the campus and need no longer raise his voice. He deferred only to the headmaster but there his deference was complete.

  Regan was precisely what a great headmaster needed, and Peabody was well aware of this. The spirit, the fire, the leadership of the school was all provided by the principal; it was Regan's job to look into every corner and cranny of the institution and be sure that the machinery was working. And tactfully or even ruthlessly correct it if it wasn't.

  Regan was regarded with something like awe by the faculty and boys; they felt his power but one didn't see it. He was always equable, always reasonable. Little was known about his background. Small wonder that there were those who thought he might once have been a Jesuit priest. He would have been a good one.

  But he was always a kind and benevolent man, and he eased the burden of administration on
the aging shoulders of a greater one to whom he was passionately loyal. They were a great team. And in the summer vacation Jimmy Regan went to a little village in the north of France which had suffered cruel damage in World War I and where he found ample opportunities for charity from what seem to have been his adequate private means.

  In my day, the young, unmarried masters who gave so much to the intellectual life of a boys' boarding school were eyed quite closely by the often suspicious and wary members of the administration. A very discreet closet gay, particularly if elderly, might be tolerated on the faculty so long as no boy was ever given a suggestion of the teacher's preferences, but others less careful faced challenges. A popular and attractive master at Groton was let go for having a sentimental summer correspondence with a handsome boy—no touching even alleged.

  It was commonly said, at least in his French class of my year, that Mr. Regan, parading past our chairs as he spouted, with a perfect Gallic accent, from our text, would sometimes pause before a particularly robust boy and rub the back of his neck casually and sometimes even slip a sly hand down the back of his trousers, his fingers approaching the backside.

  He was playing with fire. How could he dare? Because he never went further. And knew he would never go further. The boy would never complain and knew he would not be listened to if he did. The groping could be explained as unintentional. Still, it was much commented on among the boys. We all love to bring the great down to our level or lower.

  Some years ago at the American Academy of Arts and Letters I encountered a fellow member, George Rickey, the world famous sculptor, then ninety, who, as a charming and very muscular young man, had briefly taught at Groton. I asked him to dine, and he replied: "Gladly, but on condition that we discuss nothing but Groton School in 1933."