The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (40 page)

Winthrop now shut his eyelids so tight that his eyeballs hurt and then opened them suddenly to a sky full of white stars. When his vision was adjusted, he walked on, reminding himself solemnly that every cart-pusher, every smutched-faced little boy, every black-gowned, mustachioed old Italian woman was as good as he in the eyes of God.

Passing City Hall, he frowned at the sight of the tall, slim figure of Daniel Allen in striped pants and a black frock coat ascending the steps. Old Vanderbilt's broker on his way to see the mayor, no doubt! Winthrop burst into an impassioned appeal to the membership committee of the Patroons' Club:

“Of course, Gentlemen, I recognize the principle that society must continually be opening its ranks to admit new members. We are a commercial community, and new money must always have its claim. But I hope we may never lose sight of the rule that new money must be
clean
money. To an old pirate like Vanderbilt, who boasts in public that he has bought our legislature, the doors of Gentlemen must be forever closed!”

This peroration took him to Sixty Wall Street, a handsome white four-story building with freshly painted green shutters, the first two floors of which were occupied by the law chambers of Ward and Ward. Winthrop, who believed in hearty morning greetings, spoke and smiled to each of the firm clerks, to the old bookkeeper and to the office boy, before mounting the stairs to his own office in the rear and closing the door behind him. The room was clean and bare, with cream-painted walls and no accessories beyond the portrait engravings of Lords Mansfield and Cole, a bookcase of law reporters and a Sheraton table-desk on which were stacked neat piles of papers.

Ah, how quickly now his heart resumed its normal beat, how keenly his mind began to function! What a blessing was law. What were books and deeds and documents but receptacles—like pans set out in a drought—to catch the divine drops from the sky?
Here
was what distinguished men from apes. The big Celtic toughs looking to their fists to terrify the timid, the crooked financiers filling the pockets of politicians, the fire-eating Southerners with their contempt for the free world—let them look to the law books—let them beware! Let them writhe like Laocoon and his sons caught in the coils of the beneficent serpent which God had sent down to guard the meek! Winthrop jumped nervously at the sudden knock on his door.

“Mr. Charley wants to see you, sir.”

“Very well,” Winthrop snapped. “Tell him to come in.”

“Beg pardon, sir, he asked if you could come to him. I think he's not feeling quite himself.”

Winthrop at this got up and went down the corridor to the office of his partner and cousin. The moment he saw the latter's face he knew why the day had started badly. He must have had an intuition of trouble. Charley Ward looked haggard and sleepless. He might, that morning, have been forty-three, like his cousin, and not a decade younger. Winthrop had a sudden picture now of how Charley would look in a few more years, when middle age should have eroded the fragile beauty of his blond, pale type, when the still abundant smooth hair should have thinned, the round cheeks swollen to give the face a pear shape, the small blue eyes receded into dark cisterns in the skull. Winthrop loved Charley and loved his looks, and his heart was stirred even by the prospect of their evanescence. For he felt that Charley's need of him as a mentor and his own need of Charley as someone to protect might be actually intensified when Charley's appearance, puffed and etiolated, should correspond more nearly to Charley's mind and character. It was part of Charley's strange charm that weakness and mildness should so lurk behind the bright bravery of his exterior.

“This note came for my wife last night from Jane King. Or purportedly from Jane King.” Charley threw down a piece of pink notepaper on the desk before Winthrop. “The sender did not know that Annie had gone to Yonkers to spend the night with her uncle. I opened it, thinking it might be something that I could take care of for her. I was wrong.”

Winthrop looked at the paper without touching it. “Does your wife know you have opened it?”

“Not yet. But she shall.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“What a lawyer you are, Winthrop! Read it.”

Winthrop read the following message in a large, jagged masculine hand: “Beloved—can what Jane tells me be true? Are you really reconsidering? Can you deny your own soul and mine? Send me word that you are true. Save your Jules from black despair.” He looked up at Charley.

“Bleecher,” Charley replied to the silent question. “Jules Bleecher.”

Winthrop shuddered. He saw the florid face, the French goatee, the big wet doglike eyes, the large, fleshy nose, the heavy, tumbling hair, the great overdressed body, the effeminacy that was worse for being affected—a parvenu's idea of a cultivated manner—a brown bear with a monocle and top hat. Good God, could Annie Ward fall for
that?
A poetaster, a scribbler of sentimental drivel, a society journalist, a social climber who pranced around the ladies in every evening party, an “ooer” and “aaher” at concerts, a gossiper in the back of opera boxes, probably a Jew . . . what else?

“He's been coming to the house for a couple of months now,” Charley explained. “Annie met him through Jane King. I saw no harm in it. Somebody told me he was a philanderer, but I thought he was too obvious a one to worry about. He was the kind who would lean over when some fat old dowager was tucking her lorgnette into her bosom and murmur: ‘Happy lorgnette!' The man seemed a farce to me. He and Jane King were always giggling and snickering in corners.”

“I never met him in your house,” Winthrop observed.

“That was because I knew you didn't like him. Oh, you can be sure, Winthrop, that Annie and I are always very careful whom we ask when you and Rosalie are coming.”

Winthrop sighed. “But do you deduce from this letter that your wife has . . . has, er . . .”

“Fallen?” Charley's laugh was a jeer. “Not necessarily. She's a cool little minx under all that gush. But what I
do
deduce from that florid episde is that she gave Bleecher an assignation and then got cold feet. She may have even agreed to go off with him.”

“And desert Miss Kate?” Winthrop cried in horror. The sole, six-year-old child of the Charley Wards was so designated because of her little-lady airs.

“It's so like you, Winthrop, to put the child before the father. But yes, I think that Annie would be capable of deserting Miss Kate. She has no real heart. Once she decides that life with me is not what she wants, nothing is going to hold her. You can talk of oaths and sacraments and family ties until the cows come home. You won't reach her.”

“What does she want?”

Charley strode up and down the chamber now, clapping his hands together as he brought out his argument in sharp, jerky phrases. “What do you think she wants? What do any of them want? She wants a man who will live up to her dreams of sexual performance. I tell you, Winthrop, we men are the losers in this system of keeping girls in ignorance until they marry. It's damnably hard on the poor groom. He suddenly finds he's got to be all the impossible things that an uneducated, feverishly sentimental mind has concocted out of fantasy and dirty talk with other ignorant girls. Give me a prostitute from Mercer Street any night in the week. At least she knows what a man is! But these innocent debutantes! They smile and simper behind their fans; they blush crimson at the tiniest impropriety, and then, suddenly, after a big society wedding that hasn't tired them one bit—behind closed doors, alone at last—they turn into fiends. ‘All right, big man. This is life, isn't it? Show me life!'”

Winthrop actually shivered, so violent was his disgust. If his interlocutor had been anyone but Charley he would have walked out. But he was responsible for too many things: for the partnership, for Charley's dependence on him, for the very marriage to Annie Andros that he had so fatally sponsored. He could not help glancing back to his own wedding night. Not that Rosalie had been the tigress that Charley depicted. On the contrary, she had been silent, compliant, perhaps the least bit passive. But hadn't there been an implication of something like disappointment in the determined way in which, early the following morning, she had sat down at their hotel drawing room table to write thank-you notes for her wedding presents?

“So what do you propose?” he asked Charley.

“Immediate and final separation.”

“And Miss Kate?”

“She can live with us alternately. Provided, of course, that Annie does not set up house with her paramour.”

“You are determined then to advertise your shame to the world?” Winthrop stood up to give posture to the high stand that he had elected to take. “Do you want people to say that you couldn't hold your bride?” Seeing Charley bite his lip, he followed up in words from Charley's customary vocabulary. “Do you want even the debutantes, in their kittenish sessions between the dances, upstairs in their hostess's bedroom, to whisper with high giggles that you have no balls?”

“Oh, shut up, Winty! Don't be such a bastard. What else can a man do in my situation?”

“Well, he doesn't have to throw up his marriage and ruin three lives—yours and Annie's and Miss Kate's—for what may turn out to be only a flirtation. I'm sorry, Charley. I can't believe that Annie really cares for a man like Bleecher. I'm sure she has simply lost her head for the moment. Perhaps she is actually ill. If we can only get rid of this oily cad, who knows? Maybe you and Annie will find a new life. You may even discover a deeper congeniality.”

Charley's impatient toss of his head showed what he thought of this. Winthrop perfectly understood what his cousin was looking forward to: a return to bachelor freedom, a liberation from Annie's cloyingly female, looped and tasseled interior. Cousin Winthrop must have seemed like a stiff, prissy teacher holding him after class on a summer afternoon when all the other boys had gone fishing. But Winthrop knew that he could still rely on a teacher's authority.

“Your position as a lawyer, as a father, as a member of society obliges you to do everything you can to avoid a scandal,” he continued sententiously. “You can't shirk this one, Charley.”

“What do I do then?” Charley asked sulkily.

“Leave the next step to me. Go home and get some sleep. I'll go to Annie's uncle and ask him to keep her at Yonkers for a week. And not to allow Bleecher in the house.”

“How can he do that? He can't use force, can he?”

“I don't have to tell Lewis Andros how to do anything. My confidence in him is complete. If all New York were as he, there would be no Bleechers invading the sanctity of our homes. Will you be guided by me, Charley?” There was a pause, as Winthrop stared impassively at his cousin. “Don't you think I am entitled to ask that of you?”

Charley turned away, his face puckered as if he were going to weep. “Have it your way, Winthrop. You always do. I'm going out for a drink. For several drinks.”

Fifteen minutes later Winthrop entered the central hall of the Bank of Commerce and walked briskly down the aisle of yellow marble, past standing clerks at counters making entries, to the rear, where the president sat at a vast roll-top desk under a gas light in a green bowl suspended directly over his head. But Lewis Andros's apparent availability to the public was an illusion. There was an unseen wall that protected the desk and its occupant, and if a stranger dared to intrude, or even to address the silent magnate without authority, he would receive for all his answer a slow raising of the great head and a vision of the whites of eyeballs before which he could only beat a stuttering retreat. Very different, however, was Winthrop's reception.

“Ah, my dear boy, we see too little of you these days, far too little. I was asking Carrie only yesterday: when shall we have the Winthrop Wards for dinner? We cannot afford to neglect the parents of three strapping boys, can we? Certainly
I
cannot, with granddaughters their age, as well as daughters.”

As the great man rose and gripped his shoulder, Winthrop reflected that Lewis Andros managed to give a sexual flavor to every topic. It was always perfectly proper, if rather heavily connubial, but there it was. The great tan eyes may have been limpid, the splendid nose arched, the lips thin and intellectual, the gray curly hair venerable, the voice rich and cultivated, but all of these aspects seemed to merge in the likeness of a velvet cloak flung over an old bull. Mr. Andros had children in their thirties and in their teens; twice a widower, he was now, at sixty, the husband of a woman of twenty-five who already looked tired. He was a man, Winthrop conceded with a rueful admiration, who managed to pack the pleasures of the Renaissance into the permissible limits of brownstone New York. Nowhere did one drink finer Madeira or hear wittier talk than at stag dinners in his Fifth Avenue mansion, when his wife and brood were packed off to Yonkers.

“Could I sit down with you for a minute, Mr. Andros? I'm afraid I have a bit of rather nasty news. It concerns your niece Annie and my cousin.”

Andros's banker's countenance betrayed nothing during the dreary recital, but at the conclusion he permitted himself a windy sigh and a rueful shake of the great head.

“My dear Winthrop, you and I are men of the world. We know that Annie and Charley were mismated from the start. She is too much of a mouthful for those pearly teeth of his. Would it not be for the best if we arranged a dignified separation? Followed, in due course, by a divorce or even an annulment?”

“An annulment? With a six-year-old child?”

“Such things have been heard of, where there was a basic lack of consent at the outset. But of course I need not point out such things to a lawyer.”

“I arranged all the settlements at the time!” Winthrop exclaimed in some heat. “I should regard myself as gravely deficient if the marriage legalities were not entirely in order.”