The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (42 page)

“She was never really in it. What kind of idiot says there can't be a friendship between a man and woman?
We
had such a friendship. Now don't say I'm being unladylike!” Again her laugh pealed out. “You know it was true—on both sides. And you helped me, that's the point. But all those books we discussed together, all those poems and plays—what were they really about?
Jane Eyre
and
The Scarlet Letter
and
Madame Bovary?
They were about passion! Do you remember when we went to see Rachel in
Phèdre
?”

“What are you getting at?” Winthrop asked abruptly.

“Simply that those books taught me that passion is the whole thing in this world. That if you miss it, you miss everything!”

Winthrop was able to turn back to her now, sobered by the enormity of her misconstruction. “But those books and plays all point out the pitfalls of illicit love. Look what happens to Madame Bovary and to Phèdre and to Hester Prynne.
Jane Eyre
ends happily, it is true, but only because she keeps away from Mr. Rochester until his wife dies.”

“And until he goes blind,” Annie added with a giggle. “But it doesn't matter what happens to the heroine
afterwards
. The point is that the great experience is passion. Maybe it's punished—
tant pis
. But it's still worth it. For without it, what are you? Phèdre doesn't give a hoot about going to hell. The only thing that keeps her from Hippolyte is that he won't have her! But Jules, dear Winthrop, is no Hippolyte.”

“Do you love him?”

“How you bite the word!” Annie shrugged. “Perhaps I do. More than I do Charley, anyway.”

“Annie!”

“Oh, go home, Winthrop, if you can't talk. What did you come out here for? Jules is willing to give up everything—his job, his career, his position in New York—to go off with me. How many men would do that?”

“Many. Who had as little to give up as he.”

“You're not fair. Uncle Lewis tells me his prospects are excellent. He's the rising journalist on the
Daily Post
. Everyone's talking about him.”

“If they're not, they will be. When
this
thing breaks.”

“Well, what do you offer me instead? A dull, loveless brownstone life, paying and receiving calls and learning to look the other way when Charley exercises the right of his sex to seek his pleasures elsewhere. Oh, Winthrop! A woman needs a faith greater than mine to make her stick to such a course. What do you offer for my pleasure? Or don't women count at all?”

“There's your child.”

“Nothing else?”

“Well, isn't there literature? Art? As you've just said?”

“So life is made up of bad people who live and good people who read about them?” Annie gave herself over to the longest and most exuberant of her laughs. “And Uncle Lewis who does both!”

For the first time Winthrop joined in her laughter. She came over and fixed her dark eyes with a smiling intensity on his. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “If you will promise me an honest answer, an absolutely honest answer, I will promise to consider taking your advice.”

“Only to consider it?”

“Oh, that's a great concession for a naughty lady who's contemplating an illicit trip to Paris.”

“If she really
is
contemplating it.”

“Well, if she isn't, what do you have to worry about?”

“All right. I promise to give you an honest answer.”

Annie nodded and removed her hands from his shoulders. “I want to know if art, if the life of the imagination, makes up to
you
for the dullness of your life with Rosalie.”

Winthrop stepped back. For a moment he considered leaving the house without a word. Then he remembered his mission.

“Suppose I reply that my life with Rosalie is not dull?”

“Then I shan't believe you. I know there has to be something outside of your marriage that keeps you going. And I doubt that it's the law. I do you the honor of supposing that when you recommend to me the consolation of the life of the imagination, you are recommending a consolation in which you have a strong personal belief.”

Was it his growing belief that she was
not
, after all, in love with Bleecher that brought the sudden exhilaration to his heart? Not that she was in love with Winthrop Ward, or ever had been—that was manifest. He was too middle-aged, too spare and lean, too ascetic, too darkly garbed, for such as she. She liked him, played with him, understood him—in part. Was he really and truly in love with her? Did it matter if he never voiced it? He would have to remember to pray all the way home and to give thanks to the Almighty that Annie had never guessed!

“I am waiting for your answer, Winthrop. Does the life of the imagination make up?”

“Make up?”

“You know for what!”

“Yes,” he said at last. “It does.”

The wonderful girl knew when not to laugh. She became even paler. “Thank you,” she half whispered. “I know what that cost you. Go to Jules. Talk to him. I'm in your hands. Goodbye.”

When Winthrop went to the door to the hall, she had already disappeared up the staircase. Her young aunt, Carrie Andros, was on the landing. She came hurriedly down to speak to Winthrop. Her big soft worried eyes seemed to pop out of her heart-shaped face. She was a child, a child who had already borne four children to the old bull.

“Is it all right, Winthrop?” she asked tensely. “Can things be arranged?”

“I trust so.”

“It'll be all right between her and Charley?”

“Let us pray.”

“Ah, yes. Let us pray, by all means.” But Carrie Andros's anxiety seemed now to give way to a sterner mood. “And let us pray, while we are at it, that Charley will appreciate the sacrifice that she is making.”

Winthrop stared. “The sacrifice, ma'am?”

“The sacrifice of love, Winthrop! The sacrifice of everything her heart has dreamed of.”

Winthrop was too stupefied to reply. Was it possible that adultery could be thus publicly denominated in the front hall of a mansion built for Lewis Andros by the architect of Trinity Church? Was
this
what the world had come to? Had Annie and her aunt been confiding in each other, whispering of plans for escape and love? Of course they had! Had Carrie not used that same vulgar word?

Winthrop disposed of his embarrassment as best he could, aided by a quick bow, and took his immediate leave. But on the way back to town, amid a lightly falling snow, he allowed himself to speculate if there was any essential difference between the ladies of the highest Manhattan society and the commercial dames of Mercer Street! He did not remember the prayers he was to make until he was on the barge over the Harlem River, and he then recited them with chattering teeth. Happily, it was never too late.

Back in town he drove directly to the Patroons' Club, where he wrote a note to Bleecher, requesting him to call that night at Union Square on a matter of the utmost importance. He sent the note to the
Daily Post
by messenger, together with one for Rosalie, instructing her to leave word with the servants that Bleecher should be ushered into the library if he called but not received upstairs. Then he went to the bar, where he was sure of finding Charley.

“Bleecher will come to my house tonight,” he told his now rather shaky cousin. “I plan to give him this one chance. If he will agree never to address your wife again, in conversation or by letter, I shall advise him that the Wards will take no further action against him. It will simply be understood that he will abstain from all further social relations with our family.”

Charley seemed to have some difficulty taking this in. “And if he refuses?”

“Then we destroy him.”

“In a duel? Thanks for the ‘we.' Do you know that Bleecher's a first-class shot? He fires one bullet between the wife's legs and the next between the husband's eyes. Don't you give a damn about me, Winthrop?”

Winthrop contemplated Charley's sagging pale cheeks and moist, rolling eyes. Why, he wondered, was panic so contemptible? It was sickening to consider what the wretched Bleecher was costing them, but the worst casualty of all might be his own love for Charley. Could nothing in their family survive the raid of this big, buzzing, gilded bee, this coprophagous poetaster?

“No, of course there will be no duel. Why should you submit your life to Bleecher? Gentlemen don't duel in New York, and if they did, they wouldn't duel with the likes of him. No, I mean destroy him financially and socially. I'll close every pocketbook and front door in New York to him!”

“How?”

“You'll see, my boy. Just leave it to me. And in the meanwhile I want you to purge your mind of all those filthy thoughts about your wife. I know you've been under a great strain. Otherwise I should not tolerate your language. But you must get this through your head. Annie has
not
been unfaithful to you. I'll go to the stake for that. She has been indiscreet, yes; she has been foolish, yes; she has been naughty, yes. But she has not been wicked. She has not submitted to the lewd embracements of that fiend.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I know Annie. And because I know she loves you.” Winthrop stared Charley coolly in the eye until the latter had to look away. “You and she have had your difficulties, I know. Annie is a very emotional creature and inclined to hysterics. She leaps to conclusions. She probably decided that you didn't love her anymore and that her marriage was over. So she turned in desperation to flirt with the first man available, who happened to be Bleecher. She needs help, Charley, not abuse. You and she are going to be all right, I promise you!”

Charley was again the surly schoolboy, but this time the schoolboy who has misread the calendar and finds that his vacation is almost over. Winthrop decided that he had better stay and dine with him. In the course of their meal and a bottle of wine Charley was finally induced to give his sullen word that he would welcome Annie back from Yonkers if she would promise never to see Bleecher again.

This accomplished, Winthrop returned to Union Square, where he found Molly waiting in the front hall to tell him that a Mr. Bleecher was in the library. He could see through the half-open door the stocky back and curly black hair of his detested visitor. Bleecher was studying his little Kensett, a Newport seascape.

“Ah, there you are, Ward,” he exclaimed, turning to flash his dark, impudently friendly eyes on Winthrop. “I'm admiring your Kensett. Such a subtlety of coloring. It's hard to tell where the sea stops and the horizon begins. I can see why people speak of your taste as advanced. While the rest of us are buying Italian peasant scenes and Turkish marketplaces, you're putting up your money for something as good as this. Congratulations!”

This appeal was to Winthrop's most vulnerable side, for he fancied his own eye as a collector. But that night he was unassailable.

“Never mind the compliments, Bleecher. May we get right down to business?”

Bleecher stared at him for a moment, then smiled and nodded briskly, as if he, for one, could never have been responsible for such a breach of good fellowship. “I'm at your service, Ward. I assume from your tone that you prefer to remain standing?”

“Much.”

“Very well. Excuse me.” Bleecher went over to a table and crushed out his cigar in a bowl. “Let us eliminate the last traces of conviviality.” Winthrop declined to notice the sarcasm. “Your correspondence with Mrs. Charles Ward has been discovered.”

Bleecher's bushy eyebrows rose. “Do you imply that it was concealed?”

“I most certainly do. It was delivered clandestinely, through Miss Jane King.”

“It was delivered through Miss King. Let me ask you something, Ward. Whom do you represent in this matter?”

“The family, of course. The outraged family.”

“I see. But do you represent Annie?”

“Do you refer to Mrs. Charles Ward? I do indeed.
And
her husband.”

“You mean you are speaking to me tonight with Mrs. Ward's authority?”

Winthrop could not resist a little snarl of satisfaction at the note of surprise in his antagonist's tone. “That's a bit of a shock to you, isn't it, Bleecher? Yes, I am speaking to you tonight with her authority. I received it today at Yonkers.”

“Where she is residing, I gather, as the virtual prisoner of her uncle. Mr. Andros had better remember that there is such a thing as habeas corpus in this country.”

“Can it be invoked by the would-be seducers of married women?”

Bleecher advanced a threatening step towards his host and stopped. He took a heavy breath. “It should be invocable by any man who champions the cause of a poor woman shackled to a swine like your cousin.”

Winthrop's heart was beating so hard now that it hurt. He closed his eyes and counted to ten. Then he cleared his throat. “I suppose we had better avoid epithets. Are you prepared to give me some assurance that you will have no further communication with Mrs. Ward?”

“Does
she
ask that?”

“She has placed her case in my hands.”

“Then what assurance can you give me that she will be allowed to live a life free from the constant apprehension of violent abuse and drunken threats?”

Winthrop trembled on the verge of incoherence. “Do you presume to treat with me, sir?”

“And why not? Have I not enjoyed Mrs. Ward's confidence? And that of Miss King? Do I not have letters from each? Do you think, Ward, that you are living in Turkey, where women are kept in harems and put in sacks and thrown in the river if they are disobedient? Let me disillusion you. The days are past when a married woman can be incarcerated by an old bulldog of an uncle while the family lawyer lays down ridiculous terms to her friends!”