False Gods

by Louis Auchincloss

  “It tells me that he was dreaming about the lovely girl he would one day marry,” Heloise suggested, in a tone too bright.

  Gilbert sighed. Why could Olive never endure the idea that he might have had even a moment of true satisfaction before the advent of her love? It was his cue to inundate her with affectionate reassurance, but the vision of the façade and moat was still too strong in his mind, and he breached, even brutally, his old habit.

  “It’s perfectly true! I did do better work then. Much better than anything I’ve done since.” But the instant agony in her eyes smote him. “I don’t suppose it was just being a bachelor,” he added lamely. “It may have been youth.”

  Heloise took it all in, perhaps a touch maliciously, glancing from husband to wife. Then she turned to her own.

  “Come, Humphrey, dear, it’s time for your nap. He always takes one before dinner,” she explained as she led the old man to the hall.

  Alone with her husband, Olive wasted no time. “It’s better out in the open.” Her tone was sharp and clipped. “Let’s face it. You were happier back then. Much happier. What did you need an expensive wife for, or four expensive children? What did you care for being the maker of Clinton Village or Knickerbocker City? All you wanted was to build fancy villas for your rich friends and hear them praised by your silly old aunt! Busybody that I was! I should have left you alone.”

  “Olive, Olive…”

  “And I wish to God I had!” Her voice rose to a wail as she shut her eyes and clenched her fists.

  “Olive, darling, you know that’s all perfect nonsense. Those villas were doomed anyway. Are you forgetting the Depression? I’d have had to go into public building whether or not we’d married. Uncle Humphrey was the only Kane who wasn’t bust.”

  “No, no, bachelors can always get by. You’d have had all those free meals and weekends. Maybe there wouldn’t have been as many private houses being built, but there’d have been some, enough for you anyway. And you’d have been happy, perfectly happy!” She patted her nose and eyes with her handkerchief. It was the sign that remorse was following anger. “I should never have interfered with your life.”

  “Olive, you’re being ridiculous. You know how I love you and the children. I couldn’t do without you.”

  “Maybe not now. But I’m talking about then. Oh, I know you love us in your own way.” She put away her handkerchief; now she would try to be fair. “I shouldn’t have been mean about your houses. They are works of art. Great art, I’m sure. And you’re probably right. They may well be what you should have been doing all these years. Very well then, let’s go back to them.” Oh, she would make up to him now if it killed her! “You don’t have to spend all your time on housing developments and shopping centres. There must be a hundred ways we could cut down on our style of living without even feeling it.”

  Maybe it was only a game, but it was one that he was very much tempted to play. “But nobody wants the kind of houses I used to build. ‘Derivative’ has become a dirty word.”

  “Among our friends, perhaps. They have to be modern. But the new rich aren’t all that way. Read your house and garden magazines. In Dallas and Houston, they tell me, there are areas where you might be floating down the Loire.”

  Gilbert was struck by the truth of what she was saying. In his office, only the week before, he had been trying to persuade a client planning a new house in Greenwich that he would do better to follow Frank Lloyd Wright than Palladio. But suppose he should show the client on Monday his old portfolio of the villas he had drawn during his stay in Vicenza in 1924?

  “You know, darling, you have an idea there. You really have.”

  And he was sure that his violent spouse would now expend as much energy in making him pick up the past as she had in her youth, when she induced him to drop it.

  2

  In 1927, at age thirty-nine, Gilbert was still a bachelor. He had always tolerated the notion, clamped firmly but unobtrusively to the back of his mind, that he would marry at forty. He favored what he liked to think of as the European point of view, that a man should keep the best years of his life for himself. His concept of the young American suburban marriage, with a youthful father throwing balls to little boys on the lawn or taking a noisy rabble of kids with a barking Airedale for a Sunday drive, had little appeal for him. Of course he wanted, in due time, to have a lovely younger woman to be the congenial partner and charming hostess of his middle and later years and a couple of well-brought-up children to be the delight and support of his senescence, but there was no rush about these things, and he was not such a fool as not to realize that any family that fate should accord him might be very different from his projected ideal. He was, after all, a very social creature, and he had observed, at close enough quarters, several of his friends’ marriages falling apart.

  Though “pushing forty,” he still felt youthful; he had kept his tall muscular figure and all of his wavy auburn hair. He played squash in the winter and tennis in the summer; he drank moderately and never smoked; and his success as the designer of private houses and his popularity as a man about town provided a civilized blend of work and pleasure which it seemed folly even to think of interrupting. Might not a man in such good shape put off the fateful decision until forty-five? Or even fifty?

  His friends and relations, however, and particularly the widowed mother whose only child he was, had a very different theory as to the cause of his prolonged unmarried state. They placed the blame, articulately voiced to all ears but those of Humphrey Kane, squarely at the door of the latter’s younger wife, at whose smart new house on Sutton Place, overlooking the East River, her nephew-in-law and near contemporary called every evening on leaving work.

  She was always alone when he came. There would be a bright fire and tea things on a little table, to be followed, after the consumption of a single cup, by the butler with the cocktail tray. Heloise was not so much beautiful as exquisite. Her blond hair and wide opaque eyes and pale luminous skin might have evoked a sense of serenity had they not been balanced by her darting gestures and the vivid mobility of her facial expressions, which announced the accomplished maîtresse de maison, and by the low musical voice that constituted so perfect an instrument for her fine intelligence.

  “Do you know, my dear,” she asked him on an evening which seemed for her to be a kind of summing up, “that this is my favorite part of the day?”

  “Mightn’t that be because it’s mine?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to say that. I wasn’t fishing. And I suppose it’s a mistake to chatter about the things one really loves. They sound smaller when you try to put them into words. But the two of us here by the fire, with the slight lift of the cocktail and with our beloved understanding that it’s just this and doesn’t have to be anything else at all … ah, it’s time suspended, it’s magic! But how I go on. Tell me to shut up. Tell me about your day. How is the house in Syosset coming? Did you solve the problem of the tower?”

  “No. Except that I may eliminate it. It was a quiet day. Nothing at all, really. Oh, except that Mother called. She wants me for dinner on Monday. I said I was going to the opera with you and Uncle Humphrey, but she insisted she absolutely had to have me and promised she’d square it with you.”

  It was their tacit understanding that she would always release him. “That’s quite all right. We’ll be four without you, so there’ll be three in the front row. You know Cousin Polly’s rule when she gives you her box. No gaps in the diamond horseshoe! But why is your mama so desperate?”

  “It’s always the same thing. She’s got some sweet little body she wants me to meet.”

  “She never gives up, does she?”

  “Do you imply she should recognize that the case is hopeless?”

  “Not at all. I haven’t the slightest doubt that you will marry when and whom you wish.”

  “At any rate she will be a young lady who is glad to recognize your place in my life. One who will know how much she has to gai
n by your friendship.”

  “Oh, my dear Gilbert, you don’t know our sex if you really believe that. She will want my head on a silver platter. That’s fine. She shall have it. But not yet. No, not quite yet. Never fear. I shall know the time when it comes.”

  The more delicate-minded among the acquaintance of Heloise and Gilbert preferred to describe their relationship as an amitié amoureuse; the more earthy called it an affair. Gilbert took a pleasure which his mother found perverse in the confusion of his observers. He felt it important for himself as an artist to be in constant touch with a fascinating and sympathetic woman, to be able to tell her what he was building and dreaming of building, to discuss with her the current books both were reading, to laugh, not always with malice, at the foibles and pretensions of their nearest and dearest, and to rejoice with her in a world where he was able to do the only work he cared about and have her appreciate it with a pleasure so obviously genuine that he was not obliged to feel selfish. But it was also important for him to feel that he had not neglected the imperious call of romance to the eyes of a world disposed to consider it an essential part of the “real” life of every man and woman.

  This was where Heloise was perfect; she never made him feel that he offered her too little or too much. He knew that, like himself, a true artist at heart, she made little distinction between appearance and what the crowd called reality. She was the product of two very different societies, and she had learned at an early age that one can seem anything to others that one wishes to seem. Her father, an American puritan and a lecher, had married, in the Paris of the ‘eighties to which he had emigrated in pursuit of pleasure, a pearl of the demimonde with a passion for respectability. Each had been cruelly disillusioned. She had wanted to move to New York, where her past might not be known, and he, a stubborn expatriate, had been disgusted to find that marriage had not made her acceptable to the American colony in Paris. They had already separated when he died of a venereal disease, and his family had reclaimed little Heloise against a maternal opposition motivated only by cupidity and brought her up in New York. It was not, however, her shrewd and worldly old paternal grandmother, but Heloise herself, an alert and sharp-eyed young lady, sophisticated beyond her years, who had decided that marriage to Humphrey Kane, twice her age, was probably the best that the child of a bankrupt father and a disreputable mother could expect. She was wrong. New York memories of the past, particularly a trans-Atlantic past, were soon faded; she could have made a younger and equally advantageous match. But true to her Gallic blood, she carried out her side of the bargain, and no one ever dared offer a hint about her and Gilbert to the latter’s infatuated old uncle.

  Heloise now thought of another point to make in their discussion of Gilbert’s mother’s matchmaking.

  “Your father was older than Humphrey, you know. He was older than you are now when he married your mother. Why must she be so impatient?”

  “She thinks I should be making babies. She has rather a thing about that.”

  “But she made only one herself!”

  “Maybe that’s just it. Maybe she wants me to make up for her deficiency.”

  “Oh, Gilbert, be serious. You must admit it’s a curious obsession for a woman of the world. And that’s what she is, you know. She cuts a considerable figure in society.”

  “All hundred and eighty pounds of her.”

  “I certainly wasn’t referring to that. And anyway, she carries her weight with a kind of majesty. Those shiny black curls and that stately stride. And that wonderful rich deep voice … at times I actually envy her.”

  “At times.”

  “I’m serious, Gilbert! And she enjoys all the good things of life. I’m sure, for example, that she takes the greatest pride in your work.”

  “Well, I think she does appreciate it, yes. She has taste, despite her rather florid style of living. But I feel she suspects a devil lurking behind anything too beautiful. A devil that may be preventing the artist from performing his proper domestic role.”

  “Like making babies?”

  “Yes! Art to her is like a tame leopard walking gracefully at your side, but muzzled and on a strong leash. If it ever gets loose, it may chew up babies and spouses and cozy cottages and all the warm cuddly things any ‘real’ life should be full of.”

  “What a concept!” Heloise raised her hands in dismay. “But wasn’t there a time when she herself was concerned with artistic things? Didn’t she have stage aspirations as a girl? I seem to recall the story of a recitation before the great Réjane herself.”

  “It’s perfectly true. When my grandparents were living in Paris, because Grandpa was working on his monumental life of Napoleon, Mother, who, believe it or not, was then a slip of a girl, learned to recite French classic drama with great skill and effect. And one evening when Réjane was at the house, my grandmother had the nerve to bring her daughter downstairs to recite a tirade from Phèdre. Réjane was so struck that she offered to take her under her wing and train her! And poor Mother was dying to do it. But my grandfather, who was a bit of a despot, like his biographical subject, was certainly not going to expose his virgin daughter to the louche stage world of Paris. No sirree! The sobbing girl was trundled straight home and married off to poor old Dad.”

  “But, Gilbert, they loved each other!”

  “Did they? Or rather did she? She was certainly good to him, particularly in his long painful last illness. But I’ve always nursed the fanciful notion that she kept a hot little flame burning inside her, walled up behind that solid flesh. And that when you hear that rich deep voice of hers announcing some spicy bit of society gossip, she may be inwardly declaiming: ‘Ah, cruel, tu m’as trop entendu … Connais done Phèdre et toute sa fureur!’”

  “Which should make her then understand the needs of an artist.”

  “Or how important it is to circumvent them!”

  He saw at once that he had been perfectly right about his mother’s dinner party. There were eight guests besides himself, seven of whom had been invited in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that he had been asked to meet the eighth. She was Olive Payson, a trim, handsome, dark-haired woman, of presumably undoubted competence in everything she did, who might have been twenty-nine for a couple of years now.

  His mother explained her briefly. “She’s going to do over this room and the dining room. I’m told she’s the cleverest decorator in town. Doesn’t insist I have to get rid of everything. ‘This house is you, Mrs. Kane.’ I like that. No fancy pants.”

  Gilbert certainly agreed that the house was his mother. It had been the old Kane family mansion, tall, high-ceilinged, full of huge cabinets and jardinières, with potted palms in corners, more like a French commercial art gallery than a residence, but his mother, with her ample figure and high-piled glistening black hair, her big flat pearls and rich brocaded gown, fitted it like another jardinière.

  “She’s charming-looking,” he conceded.

  “And with a mind like—”

  “I know. A steel trap,” he finished for her. “Like the one you want to catch me in. Don’t overdo it, Ma.”

  “She’s too good for you. That’s for sure.”

  “She’d better be. Or I won’t look at her.”

  Like all the girls his mother picked out for him, she was the opposite of Heloise. Why were women supposed to be subtle?

  The dinner party was one lady short, so Gilbert had on his other side a deaf old bachelor cousin. That too had been an obvious maternal design. He could talk throughout the meal with Olive.

  She told him that she had recently redecorated rooms in two of his houses.

  “It’s a delight to work in such beautiful buildings, even if they set a tough standard for a decorator to live up to. Which is your favorite, of all your houses? Or don’t you have one?”

  “I’m like a mother with a large brood. It’s always the newest baby.”

  “Do you confine your practice to private houses?”

  “Pretty
much so. I did a country club last year, but that was along the same lines, I guess.”

  “No schools? No office buildings? No factories?”

  “You sound as if you might find me trivial.”

  “No, no. It’s not that I have anything against villas. Only don’t they represent a rather limited section of our society?”

  “Aren’t the best things usually limited?”

  She nodded, but didn’t return his smile. “But even if your houses are the best of their kind—and I have no doubt they are—mustn’t they still represent a culture that’s past?”

  “You mean dead and gone? Well, if Brunelleschi and Palladio and Adam and Mansart are dead and gone, then I am too. And glad to be!”

  “I don’t mean to take anything away from those old masters. But shouldn’t a man of your genius sometimes speak for his own era?”

  Decidedly, he was going to like this young woman. “Leaving my ‘genius’ aside, are you telling me I ought to go ‘modern’?”

  “Well, not exclusively, of course. But in the age of the skyscraper, I think it would be a sorry thing if Gilbert Kane was not at least represented.”

  This was the note on which Olive began and which she continued to strike on the evenings when he took her out to dinner, at one expensive restaurant after another.

  Never in his life before had an emotional relationship developed in so sure and speedy a fashion. Olive made him feel they had been destined to be close to each other like two characters in the first act of a romantic comedy, the happy ending of which is taken for granted. She took hold of him as easily and firmly as if she had been prepared for the role. Yet that was not possible; she had met his mother only the month before. She was never in the least hurried; when she bade him good night, reaching in her purse for her latchkey, the swift little peck of a kiss she gave him on the cheek seemed more the expression of a pleasant proprietorship than any anticipation of deeper delights. They talked about everything from architecture to the repeal of Prohibition, and about all the people it turned out they knew in common, except two. He never spoke of Heloise, and she never mentioned his mother.