Diary of a Yuppie

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Do you think Wordsworth would have felt that here?” I asked.

  “Of course. Don’t you?”

  “Well, I was wondering to what extent his emotion had been activated by a particular landscape. You think any landscape would have done the trick?”

  “Any beautiful one, yes.”

  “But what about his ‘Poor Susan’? She was standing inhaling the vapors of Cheapside, and it’s an equally beautiful poem.”

  Mr. Hawkins looked perplexed. “But it’s not a poem about the direct impact of nature. Susan is remembering the delights of the countryside that she has lost.”

  “So that’s it. It’s all in the mind, in memory, is it? Wordsworth could have had his elevated thoughts anywhere, so long as he’d seen one landscape. Or did he really need one? Couldn’t he imagine it?”

  Mr. Hawkins frowned; he wanted to enjoy the panorama before him. “I suppose so,” he murmured.

  “It would be a good subject for an essay, wouldn’t it? Do you think it would do for my end-of-term paper?”

  He reached over at this to give me a friendly admonitory pat. “Must you always be thinking of what you’re going to write about something, Bob? Can’t you just give yourself to an experience like this? Can’t you simply enjoy it?”

  “But isn’t that enjoying it?”

  “Not really. Do you know, Bob, it sometimes occurs to me—now don’t be offended—that you are ‘putting on’ literature, as if it were some kind of tool or weapon that would be useful to you in the battle of life.”

  “And it isn’t?”

  “Well, it might be, I suppose. But its real use is subjective. It’s for your private edification.”

  “I don’t see the difference. What edifies privately must be of some ultimate practical use.”

  “Let me put it this way. Suppose yourself marooned on a Pacific island. There is delectable fruit and beautiful native girls—call it a veritable paradise on earth—but there is no chance to satisfy worldly ambition and nobody with whom you can discuss literature. Would you read as eagerly as you do now?”

  “I suppose a lot of the point would be gone if I couldn’t talk about it.”

  “Yet Wordsworth would be just as fine.”

  “Look here, Mr. Hawkins.” I extracted from my pocket a paperback copy of The Prelude. “Wordsworth doesn’t agree with you. In the very beginning of The Prelude he says that enjoying nature without writing about it is acting ‘like a peasant.’” I opened the book and searched until I found this passage, which I read triumphantly to him. For, of course, I had prepared myself for the encounter.

  “I had hopes

  Still higher, that with a frame of outward life

  I might endue, might fix in a visible home

  Some portion of those phantoms of conceit.”

  Mr. Hawkins chuckled as he conceded my point. “Very good. But that is the poet speaking. Wordsworth felt it his duty to put his thoughts in verse for our edification. But that doesn’t mean that you and I have to write. He gives his verse to us out of his bounty. We need simply enjoy it.”

  “But he gets all the glory!” I exclaimed.

  Mr. Hawkins laughed, but did not reply. I loved that hour with him. I felt an openness in his nature that I had never experienced in another human being. I felt that at last I was in the company of a man who would understand me because he understood himself, because he had a sane conception of the value of human character. Had he not said that Catholics accepted the universe?

  “And isn’t everything we think and do a part of our organized life?” I continued. “Is it really possible to isolate any experience? Would there be a sound in a forest when a tree fell if there was no ear to hear? Suppose that I read a beautiful poem. It enters my mind and imagination. It contributes to my education and culture. An educated and cultivated man makes a greater mark in his community. Doesn’t that give the poem a greater role than simply being read on a beach on that Pacific island of yours?”

  “Are you really such a utilitarian, Bob? Do you apply your doctrine to everything in life?”

  “I don’t apply it. It’s there.”

  “In everything? At home, in school? In friendship?” He paused, and there was a hint of something more serious in those kindly eyes, perhaps a hope that I would deny his suspicion, or at least a fear that he might be going too far, that he might be on the verge of discovering too much about me. “You’ve been a very good friend to Lindsay. You never resented his mean remarks. I admired that in you.”

  “Well, I knew he was sick.”

  “Did you? Oh, of course, you’re both from Keswick, aren’t you? I suppose your families knew.”

  “My family didn’t. I found out about it in his doctor’s office.”

  As I related the circumstances of my discovery Mr. Hawkins remained totally still and silent. I should have been warned by this, but I wasn’t. I plunged on blindly. At last he interrupted with an interpretation of my tale that he seemed to be almost begging me to accept.

  “I see it, Bob. You realized that poor Lindsay was in for a bad time and that he was going to need a patient and sympathetic friend.”

  “That was part of it. But I was also going to need a friend at Haverstock. It was what biologists call a case of symbiosis.”

  “Did you ever tell him you knew?”

  “Oh, no. He would have rejected pity. I knew what I was doing.”

  “I see.”

  And then I saw, too. He was appalled. I had been a fool to think I had found a man who could face the truth. Mr. Hawkins, like the rest of them, wanted to live in a world of make-believe.

  “You think I’m horrible!”

  “I don’t think any such thing.” He scrambled to his feet. “I think you’re a sensible young man with a good head on your shoulders. I think you’ll go very far. But I wonder a bit if writing is the career for you. I think I see you in something … more active. Well, shall we be getting back?”

  My vague dreams of being a writer were probably quelled at this point, though they persisted into Columbia. Mr. Hawkins remained on friendly terms with me for my last weeks at school, but we were less intimate now. This was my fault. His Christian heart embraced me even with my disclosed flaw, but I did not care to receive the benefit of his charity. I did not regard what I had disclosed as a flaw. I had learned another lesson in the dangers of self-revelation. Henceforth I would keep my soul to myself.

  That summer, after graduation, when I went over to see Lindsay, who had returned from Arizona, I was told he was too ill to have any visitors. But his father came down to the front hall to talk to me. Mr. Knowles had always been in the city working on the days that I had come to swim at his place, and I knew him only by sight. He did not know me at all, but his air was cordial.

  “So you’re Bobby Service. Lindsay has told me some fine things about you. That you had only one year at Haverstock and helped him to learn more than in the other three. And that you’ve read all of The Ring and the Book and The Faerie Queene. If you become a lawyer like your old man, you’re going to be the most literary one since Francis Bacon. And didn’t he write all of Shakespeare, too?”

  Mr. Knowles was the finest type of Yankee aristocrat, if that’s not an oxymoron, a plain old shoe of a man, with short grizzled gray hair and leathery cheeks, a high-pitched laugh and the kindest, gentlest eyes I have ever seen.

  “Let me tell you something, Bob,” he said as he took me to the door. “You’re going to have the life my boy may not have. Always remember that’s a reason for you to be sure to get an extra kick out of every minute of it!”

  I’m afraid that what I most minded when Lindsay died, only a month later, was that I could not see Mr. Knowles again. There was simply no way that he and I could be friends. It made Keswick and my parents seem duller than ever.

  As a freshman at Columbia that fall I began at last seriously to brace myself for the future. I think I always had known, deep down, that I was not going to be a writer. I had too
worldly a nature to cope with. But I still had my college years in which to equip myself with a philosophy that would carry me through at least the early years of my professional life—assuming, as I largely did, that I should be a lawyer. I had just about totally destroyed the last remnants of the parental standards and made a clean sweep of the lares and penates above their hearth. I was like Marius, whose “only possible dilemma lay between that old ancestral religion, now become so incredible to him, and the honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence.”

  And it was at just this point that not only my intelligence but my heart was confronted with the greatest exception I have ever known to my category of “shams.” I fell in love with Alice.

  18

  IT WAS AMAZING how totally that hurled glass cured me of Sylvia. I was as cold to her now as some keeper of a zoo of big cats who, thinking he has made friends with one of the glowing tawny animals, enters her cage to find himself savagely scratched and gored. Obviously, that is the nature of the beast, and the keeper has no one to blame but his careless self. I recognized that Sylvia’s very fury may have been evidence of her attachment to me, even of her passion, but it was equally a fact that I cannot value affection expressed so violently—nay, I actually abhor it. All I wanted to do was slam shut the door of her cage and walk away from that zoo for all time.

  But I must say this for Sylvia. She knew when something was over. She made no desperate midnight calls to me, nor did I find any message on my desk the following morning. That shattered glass was an effective farewell.

  I felt a strange stupor. I did not even look at my mail. I had no concern for Ethelinda’s will or for the great merger that had been the subject of so many conferences. Was I a monster to have so little feeling for people who had done so much for me? Well, so be it. I didn’t care. I was what I was.

  My secretary entered, in response to my buzz. She was a silent, efficient, dark-complexioned middle-aged woman who never made personal remarks, worked any number of hours that I requested and had, I fatuously assumed, a crush on me.

  “I’m going away, Elaine.” The news came almost as much of a surprise to myself as to her. “I’m going away for a few days, and I shall leave no forwarding address. I shan’t be reachable to anyone.”

  “And the merger?”

  “The merger can take care of itself.”

  “What about your family, Mr. Service? What shall I do if one of the girls is ill?”

  “Their mother can take care of that.”

  “If you will allow me to say, Mr. Service—”

  “No, Elaine, I will not allow you to say anything. Just put it down that I’m temporarily off my rocker. Don’t worry. I’ll get back on it again.”

  I strode quickly down the corridor and out of the office, ignoring the receptionist’s cry, “Lunch, Mr. Service?”

  I went home, packed a bag, got my car from the garage and drove north to Millbrook. I found the little inn where my parents had stayed at the time of my graduation from Haverstock School; it was still in business and I took a room. Later that evening I drove to the school and called on Mr. Hawkins.

  He was alone in his study, correcting examination papers, but he jumped up to greet me with a heart-warming welcome. I had seen him only half a dozen times in the eighteen years since my graduation, and he had changed very little, except that he was stouter and his hair, prematurely for one still under sixty, was now a snowy white. He was still a bachelor, and as intense and benevolent as ever. He let me talk until late that night as if he had nothing else to do, and the following afternoon we went for a ramble in the autumnal woods.

  “I have thought of you often through the years, Bob. I wondered what was ultimately going to happen to you.” Hawkins paused here to fix those glowing, concerned eyes on me. “I was terribly afraid it was going to be something bad.”

  “Like this?”

  “Well, of course, I didn’t know what form it would take. What I feared was that when you got what you wanted—and I was always sure you were going to get that—you would find it turn to dust and ashes in your mouth.”

  “Doesn’t it for everybody?”

  “Oh, my, no. Lots of people are utterly content with the rewards of this world. But you had been vouchsafed a vision of better things. You had loved Wordsworth and Hopkins. You knew long passages of The Prelude by heart. How were you ever going to be satisfied in a shallow pond?”

  “But you never believed that I cared for Wordsworth!” I remonstrated, half indignant that his memory should be so flattering. “You thought I was a fraud, a phony! That I only read to get good marks and show off!”

  “Is that what you thought I thought?” he asked in distress. “Is that what you think other people think?”

  “It’s what I know they think.”

  “My dear Bob, I may not have done you a good turn in encouraging your love of letters. Of course, I always knew there was a worldly side to your cultivation of the fruit of that garden. But that’s not as uncommon as you seem to think. What I may have failed to recognize was that you were mixing two incompatible things: a real love of beauty with a real love of success. And perhaps that hasn’t been possible since the Renaissance. Why don’t you go back to your wife? She, I gather, at least shares your literary tastes. That’s better than Mrs. Sands, surely.”

  “Alice won’t have me.”

  “She wouldn’t have the man you were yesterday. She might have the man you are today.”

  I seized on the idea at once. I knew now that I had been waiting for him to say it, that I had come up to Millbrook to hear him say it. “She’s my soul,” I murmured, and I was afraid that I sounded greedy.

  “Maybe you’re still a little bit hers.”

  I drove down to Keswick in the late afternoon and found Mother alone. Father was off on a fishing trip, but she was willing to give me supper and put me up for the night. We sat up late while I told her my story. She listened with that cool, faintly disapproving but essentially resigned air that she so often adopted with me.

  “So you’ll go back to Alice now? What will she say, do you think?”

  “That’s what I want you to tell me. You see her more than I do. Has she got anyone else?”

  “One of her poets, maybe. I don’t know how much there is in it. I met him once there. A John Cross. He’s middle-aged, rather small and quiet, and walks with a limp. I believe he had infantile as a child.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a very formidable rival.”

  “Don’t be too sure. He may give Alice something she needs. Something you didn’t give her. Are you really sure, Robert, that you want to go back to her?” Mother’s eyes seemed to search me as if I had just reconfirmed that I should always be an enigma to her.

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “Because I think she may be on the way to finding some kind of peace in her life. I’d hate to have her all riled up again.”

  Mother had never learned that the most essential maternal quality is loyalty—loyalty that can be blind, if necessary. The failure of this quality in a mother does even more damage than its presence does good. I felt at that moment that Mother was simply responsible for all the bad things in my life.

  “I think I’ll mix myself a stiff drink and take it to bed,” I muttered in a kind of growl.

  The next day was Saturday, and I found Alice at home when I telephoned. The girls were both at friends’ houses for the weekend; she agreed, when I told her it was important, to see me any time that I wanted to call. I arrived at the apartment that evening at five to find her reading manuscripts by a fire. For the third time in two days I related the events of the preceding week. I told her that the revision of the Low will had upset our merger plans and that my old firm would now continue as it had been. I knew this to be a point in my favor as Alice, kept up to date in such matters by her good friends, the Peter Stubbses, did not like the prospect of Gil Arnheim.

  “You see me right back where you and I started,” I
concluded. “I believe that I’m perfectly capable of doing as well as I did before, although it will be a handicap to have the record of a split-off merger to live down. But that, however, will be as nothing if I could have you with me again.”

  Our eyes met in a long stare. She was startled because she had not expected this ending. I was startled because she looked tired and even a bit older. I had been idealizing her for two stunned days; I had built up a high vision of pale, lofty beauty. But I quickly recovered. I loved Alice. I adored Alice. And I still do. We are all subject to these devastating and disillusioning flashes. It is part of learning to live to become indifferent to them.

  “Oh, Bob, do you really mean that?” There was nothing in her tone that offered me the smallest encouragement.

  “I mean that and much more. In the future you would be my guide in all ethical questions involved in my practice.”

  “But I don’t ask for that. I don’t want it!”

  “I ask for it. Because I need it. I want to put our marriage back together on a basis that will wholly satisfy you. I have never stopped loving you. Sylvia was an interlude, one of those things that happen to lonely men. Why can’t you and I be together and bring up our daughters as they should be brought up? If you’re worried about love, you needn’t be. You can have a separate bedroom for as long as you like. Of course, I’d always hope that would end, but it would be only a hope.”

  “I know I should think of the children,” she said, turning her face from me. “But I have to think of myself, too. You say Sylvia was an interlude. I’m not at all sure I want to call my friend John that.”

  What a thing is jealousy! In a second the wan and tired look had disappeared from her countenance. Alice was as beautiful as when I had first loved her!

  “Are you in love with him?” I cried.

  Had Alice lit a fire in the grate so that she could stare into it? It seemed a necessary prop to her thoughtful reflection.

  “No, I won’t say I’m in love with John. I’ve wanted to be, I think. He’s a wonderful man, and we’ve been very comfortable together. I never believed you’d come back like this. I thought you’d go from glory to glory.”