Diary of a Yuppie

by Louis Auchincloss

  On one of these occasions he drank so much that I believe he was actually on the verge of betraying himself, not only to me but to himself. An evening headline about a march to promote gay rights gave him the start that he needed on a favorite subject.

  “Your friends have no prejudices in that field, do they, Bob?”

  “It depends what you call a prejudice. Some of us regard inversion as an aberration. However, we certainly don’t think one should persecute aberrations. But most gays think that even calling them ill shows prejudice.”

  “And you think that’s what they are?”

  “Sick? Yes. And most sick people are curable. Particularly if you catch them early enough.”

  “So at the first hint in your infant son of such depravity—say, that you observe him admiring a butterfly or showing no interest in peeking under his baby sister’s skirt—you’d whisk him off to the nearest manly shrink?”

  “To answer the question behind the persiflage—yes, essentially, I would.”

  “You don’t think that in placing psychological blinkers on his young eyes and heading him towards the ‘quivering thigh’ and parts adjacent of a female of the species, you might have blunted sensitivities perhaps indispensable to the development of an artist?”

  “I suppose I’d have to take that chance. But do you assume that Proust would have become a doctor like his father and brother had he not been a fag?”

  “Oh, I assume nothing. I leave assumptions to youth. I should not even assume that there is such a thing as a fag, as you call it.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “Nothing. A man committing a homosexual act, in my opinion, is not a homosexual. He is simply a man committing a homosexual act. I wonder how many men have never been guilty of one—or of wanting to be guilty of one.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “You, my dear fellow? With your love of Pater and Symonds? You disappoint me. I shouldn’t have thought you so crude!”

  What did his long serious stare mean? Was Alice’s father actually going to make a pass? Something like panic crept over me. Suppose she were to find out that her old man was her rival? Would I not forever be hopelessly identified with the nausea that such a discovery would bring about? I had to put an end to it in some way that would warn him before he fatally exposed himself.

  “Do you really think, Mr. Norton, that I could ever look your daughter in the face again if I had such filthy thoughts? Come now. Admit you’re just being a cautious parent and testing me.”

  Norton seemed confused by this, but he abandoned the odious subject and soon left me to go up alone to his room, where he presumably dropped into an inebriated slumber. At any rate he never brought up the topic with me again, and it was noticeable that for some months thereafter he cut down on his drinking. I think he had had a bad scare.

  Certainly he never forgave me, and his revenge took a peculiarly ugly form. In one of his short stories, which appeared in Good Housekeeping, he drew a savage caricature of me in the person of one Uriel Heemuth (designed, of course, to suggest Dickens’s villain), a student at Harvard who cultivates all the socially important men of his class, but always with an avowedly unworldly motive, as Mr. Rich Kid because he plays the piano, or Mr. High Society because he writes poetry for the Advocate. Uriel Heemuth is ultimately seen through and rejected, and in a fit of repentance and self-disgust he goes to call on an old, sick, retired professor of philosophy in Cambridge, a friend of his father’s whom he has been urged to look up but whom until now he has not deemed important enough to be worth it. Of course, there he finds, gathered respectfully around the old sage, all the cream of the class. The shunned philosopher has become his social open sesame! Moral: a determined enough climber will always make it, one way or another.

  And how did I know that Uriel Heemuth was Robert Service? Very simply. Not only did the physical description of the character match me perfectly, but he was represented as an enthusiast of such “purple prose” writers as Symonds and Pater, though only with a view to drape his own social and material ambitions in the garb of a cultivated littérateur. It was a real hatchet job.

  And there was no way that I could even hint to Alice the nature of my suspicions as to the origin of her father’s animosity. If I should have done so and convinced her, she might have been dangerously depressed. And if I had failed to convince her, I should have dished myself forever in her good graces. All I could do was take the whole business as a kind of joke on her father’s part. But this did not keep her from being very upset, particularly when her father took the lofty position that there was no reference intended to me and refused to discuss the matter.

  It was her mother, Isabel, who finally put an end to our difficulty and in a most unexpected manner. She was a bright, jumpy, twittering little bird of a woman who ordinarily played a secondary role in the lives of her more brilliant husband and daughter, but who could be surprisingly assertive if the occasion required. This was such an occasion. Her husband was away on a fishing trip, and Alice and I were spending a Saturday night in Keswick in our respective homes. I had gone over to the Nortons’ for supper.

  “I don’t want to hear another word about that wretched short story,” Isabel snapped, the moment Alice, inevitably, referred to it. “It’s the meanest thing I ever heard of. Now you listen to me, Alice. And you, too, Bob. Jock Norton all his life has been a poseur. He wants to blame someone else for the fact that he’s not Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I happen to be a very handy person to blame. It’s my tastes, my extravagance, my middle-class values that have chained him down, turned him into a hack writer of potboilers, a money-making machine. All right. I’ll go along. I’m perfectly willing to be the fall guy. Let him have his fantasies if they make him happy. But when he spreads them over into your lives, when he identifies himself with you, Alice, and picks on Bob here to be your excuse—in advance—in case you one day fail to be Virginia Woolf or Katherine Anne Porter or whoever else he happens to have in mind, then I cry: ‘Cut it out! That won’t do, Buster!’ Bob is as fine a young man as I know, and I’m not going to stand for your father mussing up your life because of some neurotic illusions of his own. Let him keep them to himself!”

  Alice, pale and grave, must have stared at her mother for five seconds of shocked surprise. Then, to my astonishment and joy, she got up, came over to my chair and leaned down to kiss me on the lips.

  “Oh, Bob, darling, I’m so sorry!”

  And then she burst into tears.

  Later that night, after her mother had retired, we decided to marry immediately after graduation. We had talked before of waiting until I had finished law school, but now she insisted that she wanted to belong to me entirely and would go to work to help support us until I was qualified to practice. It was certainly the happiest day of my life.

  And certainly the three years at Columbia Law School were the happiest of our married life. Alice and I seemed to have no conflicts then. She worked in a publishing house and loved it, and I made the discovery that I was just as fascinated by the law as I ever had been by letters. Was there, after all, so very much difference? In our discussions of law and life and literature Alice and I seemed at last in pleasant accord. If there were times when it occurred to me that she was flying a bit too high above our terrestrial abode—that it might not be feasible, when the day came that would call upon me to earn my living, to put all her ideals into daily practice—she was still as necessary to me as the shining, glorious sun is to the weeds that push sturdily up from the soil below. Robert Browning, inspired by Plato, spoke of the broken arcs on earth, the perfect round in heaven. The fact that my arcs were broken did not mean that I could not worship Alice’s distant perfection.

  And have I really lost all that? It seems so.

  11

  I HAD, of course, to adjust myself to my now confirmed loneliness. I should have to equip myself, not only with new friends, but with something of a new philosophy to guide me in the p
ath into which I had been thrust. Like Marius of Pater’s beautiful novel, in the golden Rome of the Antonines, I should have to keep sampling theories of life, with eyes wide open to find some pattern in seeming chaos. And I was also going to need a girl friend. Misery would not make me a monk.

  For a considerable time now my evenings had been divided between work at the office and reading in my room at the Stafford. I had become so absorbed in the firm that I did not seem to need any interest other than my faithful classics and an occasional movie. But I came to realize that some kind of a social life was indispensable to the managing partner of a firm that was long on talent and short on personal connections, and of course there were the demands of sex. As I had always detested the idea of purchased love and thought it unwise to get involved with women in the office, whether lawyers or staff, it behooved me to look about.

  Actually, it was through the office that I met Sylvia Sands, and through her that I reorganized both my social and sex lives. So you might say that I killed two birds with one stone. Not that Sylvia was a stone—far from it.

  Al Cornelius, president of Atlantic Rylands, had taken a great liking to me and often wanted me with him, even on occasions where legal advice was not strictly necessary. He was a grim, silent, self-made man, astonishingly lean and youthful at fifty, with close-cropped thick gray hair, who was constantly analyzing people and their problems and coming up with terse, gruff, cynical and usually accurate appraisals. He had taken on the chairmanship of the board of the Colonial Museum, one of the cultural institutions enshrined behind white columns in the complex of buildings unhappily far north at 155 th Street on the Hudson. The job had challenged Al because it seemed so hopeless. The collection was priceless; the endowment tiny; the public absent. I met him there one afternoon in the board room to discuss a fund-raising program with a public relations expert. Two other trustees, members of the drive committee, were also present.

  Mrs. Sands, the expert, was about my age, or even a touch older, a handsome blonde who spoke in a clear level tone with a very precise articulation.

  “I suppose you’re all aware that you’re going to get most of your money from a few big donors in the early months of the campaign. Charity begins literally at home, and we’ll start with the trustees. May I suggest an amount for you to pledge, Mr. Cornelius?”

  “You may suggest anything you like, my dear lady.”

  “Could you see your way to pledging a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “No way. I have too many commitments.”

  “I didn’t say you had to pay it, of course. I said you should pledge it.”

  “Is that quite straight?”

  “Perfectly straight. You pledge your ‘best efforts’ to raise it. That does not create a legal liability.”

  Cornelius turned to me. “Is that so, Bob?”

  “Yes. That gives me no trouble, Al.”

  “But, Mrs. Sands,” my client pursued, “mightn’t people think I was legally committed?”

  “Are we to be concerned about that?”

  “Well, well. You are a cool customer.”

  “Put it this way, Mr. Cornelius. There are four members of your board who are too rich to be seen doing less than the chairman. They will give what he pledges. I have seen this happen again and again. A pledge from you will guarantee us a four hundred thousand dollar start.”

  “Very well, I’ll pledge it. Just as you say. And who knows? I might even pay it.”

  I looked now with admiration at the cool Mrs. Sands. Her blonde hair was perfectly set. Everything about her was prepared, manicured, scrupulously shining and neat. Yet she could hardly have been a woman with hours to spend at her dressing table. She had to be as efficient in her toilet as in her business. Her regular features, her calm gray eyes, her air of stillness, enhanced my original sense of her almost movie-star loveliness, yet on closer inspection I could see that she was the least bit dry, a too typical American blonde. And then, as she continued to outline her fund-raising plans, the seriousness, even the gravity, of her nature, corrected once more my misimpression. She seemed to be trying to look like what she felt the well-dressed career woman as pictured in Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar had to look like. Yet she was probably too smart to believe that she had wholly succeeded or perhaps even to care. As I watched her look up from her notes at each man as he questioned her, I took in her air of total attention, which, nonetheless—and without suggesting the least failure of good manners—did not even attempt to conceal that it was a business mask.

  “That is right, Mr. Seldon. We have to have a membership drive as well. Of course, we will not expect much revenue from that. We can’t charge more than fifteen or twenty dollars a year, and a good sixty per cent will not renew. But the foundations believe in membership drives. Even if we take a loss on it, I’m afraid it’s indispensable.”

  “Is that true of the mail drive, too?”

  “Well, it’s what we call the widow’s mite. It’s not the mite that counts, but how it affects your major contributors. Big donors hate to feel they’re doing the whole thing. The widow’s mite makes them feel that the burden’s being shared.”

  “Even if it’s not?”

  “Well, they’re apt to take the wish for the deed. There are certain rituals in these campaigns.”

  “But a mail drive like this one is a terrible waste of paper. What do we expect by way of response? Two per cent? Will all our national forests be consumed by these voluminous appeals?”

  “If you have conservationists on your board who object to that, we might try to work out something by telephone. Or even a radio appeal. TV is best, of course, but I don’t think we can afford it, unless a station will donate the time.”

  I was beginning to be fascinated. Did nothing daunt her? Had she no principles? Would she work simultaneously on pro-and anti-abortion programs? For the NAACP and South African investors? Would she undertake a campaign to rehabilitate the Mafia? The only hint I had that she was human was my sense that she knew I was watching her. Once I thought she sent me the trace of a smile, as if she recognized that I was “on” to her.

  I was to see a lot more of Mrs. Sands that day, because after our conference my client drove directly home to Greenwich and suggested that I give our fund raiser a lift downtown in a cab. She had promised the director of the museum that she would first visit a loan show of old ecclesiastic treasures: chalices, reliquaries, ciboriums and the like, and I accompanied her to the large, dark, unpeopled central gallery.

  She walked slowly but without stopping past the glass cases of glittering objects. We paused at last before a missal bound in silver gilt and studded with large semiprecious stones.

  I broke our silence. “Doesn’t it make you feel that God must have been an old Jewish banker living on Fifth Avenue behind a Beaux Arts front?”

  Again her faint smile seemed to confirm our sympathy. “Well, J. P. Morgan went in for this kind of thing, too. But he lived in a brownstone on Madison.”

  “When he ran his fingertips over those stones, do you suppose he thought of God?”

  “As you imply, his god.”

  “A god who likes the bones and teeth and nails of his saints immured in gold and studded with opals!”

  “Is your god so different, Mr. Service?”

  “Do you ask that because I’m a lawyer?”

  “Let’s just say I ask it.”

  “I don’t suppose I really have a god. Have you?”

  “I’m perfectly prepared to have any god who can convince me he is one.”

  “But he hasn’t so far?”

  She didn’t answer me, but continued her tour of the cases.

  On the way downtown in the taxi we became more personal. She told me that she was a widow and lived with her ten-year-old son in an apartment on East Ninety-fourth Street. I informed her in turn of the state of my marriage. When we arrived at her house, she paused for a moment before getting out, apparently considering something. Then, with her hand on the
door she said abruptly:

  “I’m dining tonight with a friend of mine, Ethelinda Low. Perhaps you’ve heard of her? She’s a kind of Mrs. New York. She always lets me bring a man. Would you care to come?”

  “I’d like to very much.”

  “Good. Pick me up at eight. Black tie.”

  She told me about our hostess later, in the cab on our way to the party. Mrs. Low, like Odette in Swann, of obscure, indeed, unfathomable social origin, had started her career more or less as a kept woman and then had married, first, a restaurateur, second, a Brooklyn contractor, and finally, twice widowed, old Sidney Low of railroad fame. She was a woman of colossal energy who had brought to the management of the great fortune that her third husband had bequeathed outright to her a mind, in someone’s phrase, “unclouded by the usual American fetishes about the spending of money acquired by sweat, will or altar.” According to Sylvia, she had earned the total respect and even admiration of New York society.

  We found our hostess standing by the doorway of her living room, formally receiving her guests. Gray-haired and brown-skinned, but very tall and straight and endowed with the most serene blue eyes I had ever seen, Mrs. Low in no way suggested her beginnings. She had converted such youthful spirits as might have been needed in earlier days to an almost awesome respectability. Yet at the same time she impressed me as a person who had no desire to appear as anything than what she evidently now was: a wise, rich, sensible, down-to-earth woman. I was later to learn that all of her stepchildren and step-grandchildren had fallen utterly under her spell and visited her submissively to be berated for their follies or approved for their good conduct, like the descendants of Louis XIV with his formidable morganatic spouse, Madame de Maintenon.

  My hostess waited until Sylvia, who had greeted her with a quick kiss, had moved out of hearing, and then addressed me with a grave candor.