The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (26 page)

The great event that had occurred between the summer of 1965 and its predecessor was the failure and flight from justice of our classmate Lester Gordon, the “boy wonder” (if one could still be that at forty-seven) who had made fortunes in one enterprise after another—real estate, magazines, the stock market—only, at what had seemed the apex of a career of miracles, to plummet, a cherub (which he always a bit resembled) from a golden heaven to a most bankrupt hell. Needless to say, such a fall aroused the most complacent feelings in the hearts of those who had envied him, and there were four such hearts around the table at the Dime Club that day.

Hilary Knowles now regretted his friendship with Lester. “How can I write a really candid column about a friend in trouble?” he asked with a moan. “And yet it's the perfect story of our time, tailor-made for my space, a bright, jingling morality tale. Think of it! Everything about Lester was what we were told as children to distrust: he was too glib, too smiling, too quick. He was all glitter and no substance, all hands and fingers and no soul. Do you remember how he was at college: round and ruddy-faced with that thick curly hair and those ghastly shirts and ties, pushing, giggling, unsnubbable? You couldn't get rid of Lester; he stuck like glue. Until he had what he wanted. And then, when he used you as a ladder, he moved so lightly you hardly felt the foot on your face. Aren't we all the better for his fall? The church bells can ring out bravely again, and we can stroll down Main Street in our Sunday best. God
is
in His heaven, and all's right downtown!”

I don't think any of the rest of us would have placed much money on the proposition that Hilary was
not
going to write that column. It seemed to me that it was half done already. Hilary was as thin and sleek and dark as he had been at college, but he was more hirsute; black bushes rustled under his red silk sport shirt, and his sharp, feral countenance was a closely shaven blue. His language was precise, his accent affected, his gestures on the verge of the effeminate. Yet he considered himself irresistible to women, and according to what I heard about him, fatuity must have been half the battle with the fair sex in East Hampton. He had had three famously beautiful wives.

“Lester Gordon was a kind of one-man inflation,” Townie Drayton observed. “Almost a one-man revolution. By driving up prices and destroying old values he could make the wealth of a whole community change hands. And in the turnover, of course, Lester would come out on top. Before we knew it, there he was in every club, on every board of trustees, in control of the old institutions, making one welcome in one's own backyard—”

“Even marrying a Drayton,” Hilary interrupted, and we all laughed, for Lester Gordon had married a cousin of Townie's.

“Well, exactly,” Townie agreed in all seriousness. “I don't mean to sound overly snobbish, but when I first met Lester at Columbia, I certainly never expected to see
that
in my family.”

Townie had only joined us in Columbia after he had been fired from Yale for taking all the radiator caps off the cars parked outside Wolsey Hall on a concert night. He had been one of the handsomest members of our class, but those fine youthful looks had long been buried in the heavy flesh of his middle years. His glassy gray eyes, thick lips and broad aquiline nose would have seemed as coarse as his bulky figure, had it not been for a certain decadent imperial air, the flash of a Caesar, a Nero. Townie, after the Yale escapade, had tried to alter his ways and had tended to pooh-pooh his old Manhattan lineage and land, but as life had developed neither his brains nor his imagination, and had swelled only his girth and the value of his earth, he had come to lean more frankly on these once nominally discredited assets.

“I think that what we all really resent in Lester,” John Grau suggested, “is that he understood the heart of our world so much better than we did. Don't you remember his total indifference to the causes that interested us before the war: communism, socialism, pacifism? It wasn't really even indifference; those things actually had no existence for him. What he saw and all he saw was the innate toughness of the capitalist system.”

“Oh, come now, John,” Townie protested. “There were plenty of us who believed in capitalism, even back in the blackest days of the Depression.”

“No, Townie, you don't see what I mean,” John insisted, in his clear lawyer's voice. “You believed in it, but you didn't believe it would endure. I remember distinctly, when you were first kind enough to ask me to visit your family on Long Island, and we went to some of those fabulous debutante parties, your friends would always say the same thing. As soon as they caught sight of the marquee, the lanterns, the two orchestras, they would exclaim: ‘End of an era!' That was the cry to everything, half laughingly, half seriously: ‘End of an era!' If I had predicted, in 1938, that in twenty years' time the two gubernatorial candidates in New York would be a Rockefeller and a Harriman, each richer than ever before, I would have been laughed out of court. By everyone but Lester.”

John Grau seemed at first blush older than the rest of us because his hair was gray. But except for this, which suited his sobriety, his gravity and the legend of his constant toil, he was in the best physical shape and the best-looking of the group. His wide brow, square firm face and broad shoulders gave a formidable backing to his vigorous language, and yet his intent gray-green eyes preserved an enthusiasm that was almost youthful. It was as if the idealist of college days had been better preserved in John's cell of hard labor than in the more dissipated existences which the rest of us had led.

“Lester perfectly understood,” John continued, now with a touch of bitterness, “the modern alliance between capital and labor to load the costs of private wealth and public welfare on the backs of the professional classes. He wasn't fool enough to become a lawyer like me.”

“Oh, come, John, you do pretty well,” Hilary pointed out. “If I were to tell you that your income would be under seventy-five grand this year, I bet you'd shriek bloody poverty.”

“But look at the tax bracket I'm in!” John exclaimed indignantly. “What do you guys know about taxes? Townie here lives off capital gains and tax-exempts, while you, Hilary, swim in a sea of phony deductions.”

“Boo hoo!” Hilary cried. “Let's weep for the destitute Wall Street lawyer!”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” I remonstrated, “to hell with your taxes. Let's get back to Lester Gordon. I want to know much more about him. I want to know
why
this thing happened. What were his origins? So far as I'm concerned, he was born freshman year at Columbia. Do any of us know who his family were or even where he came from?”

“I do,” replied Hilary, our always documented columnist. “I got it from his first wife, Huldah. Lester was born Felix Kinsky, the son of a Lithuanian haberdasher in Hamburg. His parents brought him here to escape the Nazis, and both died early. He lived in Queens with a cousin of his mother's, one David Gordon, originally Ginsberg, a minor building contractor. Lester took his guardian's name, or at least his new name, and later married his daughter. You can readily see from that much that he grew up without any of the usual commitments: religious, national or even family. His parents were Orthodox Jews, but the Gordons were not, and Lester became a Gordon. He had no ties with Lithuania or Germany, and he took people literally when they described America as the land of opportunity. We four were inclined to be snotty to him at first, when he cultivated us at college. We considered ourselves the big shots of the class, and we didn't want to be cultivated for our big-shottiness. What fatuous asses we were! As if a man starting from scratch should not aim as high as he could!”

“Particularly when our usefulness only
began
at college,” Townie added. “Lester made a very good thing out of every man at this table.”

“Well, I don't know about me,” I demurred. “He bought the usual ‘chic' collection of impressionists at Hone's, but that was more our making a good thing out of
him
. You were the one, Townie, who gave him his real start. Tell us about it. Weren't you and Lester together in the war?”

“Just at the beginning,” Townie replied, pausing to suck deeply on his cigar. “We were both in the Army Signal Corps and had adjoining desks in Washington. After Pearl Harbor everybody screamed for overseas duty, including Lester. But there are ways and ways of screaming, and it did not surprise me much, when I was shipped off, that he remained, as ‘indispensable' to General Miles. Years later, in the Normandy invasion, I saw him again, a smart, blustering little lieutenant colonel, attached to some big brass well behind the lines. Oh, hell, I can't blame him for that.” Townie seemed bored, as I think we all felt, at the prospect of reviving the tired old hatred for the desk soldier. “Anyway, he kept things cheerful in the dull Washington days, and he always wrote me afterwards. When the war was over he called one night on Ella and me, and we sat up late drinking and reminiscing. He had a lot of good stories and knew what had happened to everybody in our class. But he seemed particularly interested in where we lived. Father and Mother had moved out to the old family homestead in Queens and had turned over to us the pretty Georgian house in Eighty-seventh Street that Mott Schmitt had built for them in the late twenties. I must say, Ella and I rather rattled around in it, and when Lester suggested a price that was well over the current market, we were interested.”

“Where did he get the money?” I asked.

“Oh, he had made use of army connections. He had friends in banks. Besides, he had married that builder's daughter. And there was a big mortgage, of course. But after Ella and I moved out, we never could walk through that street again. It was what afterwards became known as a standard Gordon operation. A cheap front was put on the two lower floors to make it as ugly as the restaurateur who had leased it could wish, and the rest of the building was cut up into small apartments with papery walls. There were plenty of violations, but before they were discovered Lester had sold out and was off to bigger deals.”

“Is that the way he did it?” I asked. “From house to house?”

“And from corner to corner, from block to block. He and his father-in-law formed a company called Adas that did a lot of buying in Queens and Brooklyn. They had a reputation for block-busting, probably well deserved. But the most amazing thing to me about Lester was the way he could do the same thing to you twice. He was a bit of a magician: he could show you his hand and then play it. The Eighty-seventh Street house was only a warm-up. What he really wanted was the old Drayton homestead in Queens. You remember it, John. You came out for a weekend once, didn't you? There were sixteen acres and a beautiful white eighteenth-century farmhouse, a landmark if ever there was one. But taxes were high, and my parents were getting older and found it hard to get the maids to run the place. When Lester turned up in my office, with a face as round and bright as a newly minted fifty-cent piece, and offered me a quarter of a million in cash for the property, I didn't see how I could turn it down. Indeed, despite what I knew about him, I thought he was doing me a favor, as there were several other sites that he could have purchased for his veterans' housing development. I wanted to save the family home if I could, and he said it might be used as a clubhouse for the center of the development.”

“And you
believed
him?” Hilary demanded.

“I wanted to believe him,” Townie replied with another shrug. “It was a good deal. You know how those things are. Of course, once the deed was signed, the old house was wrecked before you could say ‘Jack Robinson.' Obviously, Lester had planned it that way, and obviously I should have seen it. Then he leased the land for twenty-five years to one of his corporations, which borrowed the money from the FHA to construct an oval of twelve highrise apartment houses. The company then leased the apartments to veterans at a rental that covered taxes, interest and amortization, plus a tidy additional sum for the landlord. Thus at the end of twenty-five years, a point of time rapidly approaching, Lester will own—or would have owned—his apartments free and clear, the whole tab being picked up by the FHA. I figure conservatively that an original investment of two hundred and fifty grand will net him a cool twenty-five million.”

“But if he was ever to get his buildings back,” I asked, “wouldn't he regret having made them so bare and cheap?”

“No. Because the likes of Lester would have built all the other buildings in the area, and there is nothing else for people to live in. And the irony is that he christened the project Drayton Gardens.”

“Well, after all,” Hilary remonstrated, “the Draytons got a quarter of a million for it. You may sneer at that sum, Townie, but it can still feed and clothe a good many little Draytons. Even if they eat at the Colony and dress at Bergdorf's.”

“You can't compare it to twenty-five million!”

“That's the price you pay for being too grand to go into the real estate business,” Hilary pointed out scornfully. “But it still took two to wreck the Drayton homestead. And you were one!”

“All right, goddamnit, Hilary,” Townie rejoined roughly, reddening to the color of real anger, “suppose
you
tell us the story of when you became Lester's hired hand?”

“I shall be glad to,” Hilary said coolly, crossing his knees. “Presumably, you are speaking of the time when Lester acquired
Blackwell's Bi-Weekly
, using, no doubt, some of the profits from his coup with the Draytons' ‘cherry orchard.' I was then drama editor on that esteemed but impecunious periodical. When the news leaked out that Lester had bought it, the other editors, knowing I was his classmate, scurried to my office to find out what their fates might be under the new management. I could offer them little comfort. What would a realtor of that stripe care for a bleating herd of intellectuals like us? I was surprised, therefore, when our new owner, instead of summoning me to
his
office, came to mine. You should have seen him! Short as ever but stouter, red-faced, with that eternal smile and boyishly curled hair, a painted tie dotted with gold balls, a ring with a big diamond, mammoth cufflinks with sapphires and a pair of yellow gloves that he kept slapping against his noisily tweeded arm. The King of Philistia astride the throne of Athens!