The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (54 page)

 

When he returned to college after a brief suspension, he found that he was very differently regarded by his classmates. Whereas he had been formerly treated as a man of reserve, whose formal good manners were justified by his lineage and whose romantic concern with the history of his state tinged his sobriety with idealism, he was now seen as a faintly sinister figure, possessed of a cold will power that repelled intimacy. He was respected, however; courage was always admired in Virginia. Some of his old friends insisted that he had been motivated by a high principle, although they did not agree on what that principle was.

Roger himself felt no guilt at what he had done. Drayton had certainly assumed the risk, and the South was the better for the elimination of such a firebrand. But he had to face the fact that the episode had changed him, unless it had simply brought out something that had all along been concealed. He felt that he was now a man with a mission. The nature of the mission he did not yet see, but he was confident that time would bring it out. He did not for a minute believe that he had killed a man for nothing.

Girls were especially awed by his new reputation; his good looks were now described as Byronic. His reticence and solitary habits added to his fascination, and to Kitty Cabell, the prettiest debutante of her Richmond season, he seemed the Corsair himself. Roger had known Kitty since childhood; they were even, like so many of the first families, related, and he had long been perfectly clear that she had the characteristics, both good and bad, of the renowned Southern belle. She was superficial and affected, and she posed as being a good deal sillier and less worldly than she was, but she was also enchanting. She now turned her full lights upon him and soon aroused his lust to the point where he was reluctantly willing to pay society's price to sleep with her. They were married in 1855, shortly after his father's death from a stroke, and settled in Castledale.

Kitty proved one of those rare persons who become perfectly amiable when their ambition is satisfied. As chatelaine of Castledale and mother of a small son, she happily took the lead in the local society and got on splendidly with her docile mother-in-law, who continued to live in the house. That Roger, engaged in his law practice and the supervision of the beloved plantation, should be little concerned with her she accepted as the conventional attitude of a husband. So long as his manners were correct—and they invariably were—she was content with her bar
gain. But no more children came, and in time he requested his own bedroom. If he ever had an affair, she never learned of it, and that was all she cared about. As for herself, there was never any idea of a lover. She was afraid that Roger might have killed him.

Everything would have been well enough, in Kitty's opinion, had the Yankees only seen fit to leave them alone. She had spent much of her youth in Paris, where her father had represented a syndicate of tobacco planters, and she had viewed with a detachment imbued in her by her older brother Lemuel, a satirical dilettante, the semi-ludicrous efforts of their Francophile parents to be included in the
gratin
of the old faubourg. Lemuel had taken a perverse delight in establishing his dominance over his pretty younger sibling by exposing the silliness of a father who spent an hour every morning practicing his French
r
and of his mother, who thought she would ingratiate herself in legitimist circles by dressing as closely as she could to the Empress Eugénie. He made Kitty understand that Vieille France, however polite, however
amicale
, was never going to clasp to its bosom or allow to marry one of its sons an American girl who wasn't a Catholic and who hadn't a fortune, the plantation at home being morally entailed to the firstborn, a brother older than she and Lemuel. Kitty learned that in a foolish world one had to rely on oneself, and she didn't forget this when the family returned to Richmond. She had no greater loyalty to slaveholding Virginia than she did to the Faubourg St.-Germain. She laughed at the golden calves on both sides of the Atlantic, but she was always careful to laugh to herself.

Roger's attitude to the great issue of the day struck her as just as senseless as everyone else's. He believed that the slaves should be freed, but he was quite willing to kill anyone but himself who proposed to free them. At least that was how it looked to her. He disguised his fierce ego, as she saw it, behind the mask of a Virginia patriot. And after the abortive John Brown raid onto his sacred state's soil, he became as hot a secessionist as the fiery South Carolinian whose brains he had blown out.

In the first years of the fighting, during which she had to manage a crumbling plantation while he was off, all over the state, with Jeb Stuart's cavalry, she sometimes complained to her mother-in-law that the wives and mothers of warriors had the worst of their wars.

“Let us call it our glory,” the docile widow would invariably reply.

Hate sustained Roger during the whole of the conflict, hate and, at least in the first two years, his hope that the Confederacy's choice of Richmond as its capital might restore Virginia to the leadership it had enjoyed in the golden days of Mr. Jefferson. No compromise, he always insisted grimly, was possible with the enemy that was ravaging his native state. Although he met some captive Union officers who he had to concede had shown at least the courage of gentlemen, he could only pity them as the tools of an unholy alliance between fanatical abolitionists and avaricious war profiteers. And when, after two years of constant campaigning, he was offered the relief of a staff job in Richmond, accompanied with a promotion, he turned both down to continue in the cavalry. Nothing else seemed to make any sense to him.

The double defeats of Vicksburg and Gettysburg destroyed his last illusion of ultimate victory for secession. No matter how many battles or skirmishes his company won on mangled Virginia soil, no matter how horribly its rich beloved red clay seemed to ooze Yankee blood, there were always new waves of the boys in blue rising out of the very foam of their collapsed predecessors.

He had no wish to survive the inevitable end. He was wounded three times but always slightly; he seemed to be proving the old adage that death avoids those who seek it in battle. The long days in the saddle riding through familiar countrysides, sinister now in their haunting beauty, the nights in the field where he would let his exhausted body drop to the earth after swinging the lead ends of his blanket around his shoulders, began to produce an odd consolation in their very monotony and dreariness. Once when he sat up till dawn couching in his lap the head of a boy whose lifeblood was slowly dripping away, he felt something like peace at his own acceptance of all that the loathed enemy had destroyed. But he could not bear the sight of Castledale; on one of his leaves he put up at a hotel in Richmond rather than go home. And when word reached him that his mother had died, he could only be thankful for what she had been spared.

After Appomattox he had the privilege of a few words with General Lee, who had stood as godfather to his son seven years before. Like all the army he worshiped Lee, but he was ready to relegate him to the past. “Go home, my friend,” the general said. “Now the real task awaits us. God helping, we shall not shirk it.”

Roger nodded and went home, but he stayed there only a year. He felt like an atheist who has died only to discover that there
is
an afterlife. It might not be a better one, but at least he would be free of the old.

“I'm going up to New York to see whether I can make a living there practicing law,” he informed his younger brother, Ned, a mild and gentle man, a bachelor, who deemed it entirely fitting that he should fall in with all of Roger's schemes. “Look after Castledale and Kitty and the boy. If I don't starve, I'll send for them when I can provide them with a home there. Explain this to Kitty tactfully after I've gone.”

A cousin of his mother's had married a well-to-do New York landlord, Basil Tremont, a generous victor, who had answered Roger's letter of inquiry with the assurance that he would help him at least to a modest start.

Roger's cousin had a small office on Canal Street, where he and one old clerk and an even older female secretary handled the Tremont family affairs, largely the collection of tenement rents, and he accorded his Southern relative a narrow cubicle, used for file storage, as his “chambers.” But it was free, and although there was no question of Roger's getting his hands on the family law business, he did receive an occasional crumb from that ample table in the form of a small eviction or lease renewal. Furthermore, Basil Tremont was good enough to tout these services to the guests at the Sunday night suppers in Union Square to which Roger was occasionally invited, and he thus picked up some modest retainers, enough, anyway, to pay for his bedroom in Houston Street and his simple meals.

He used his plentiful spare time, both day and night, in studying New York cases and statutes in the library of the Manhattan Law Institute. He had no interest in the social scene or in public amusements. He heartily despised the whole dirty brown noisy city with its Yankee twangs and its Yankee familiarities. He had come north for one purpose only, the recoupment of his fortune, and his eye was rarely averted from that goal. But he perfectly realized that this could not be accomplished by law alone, and he was careful to cultivate the few important men he met at the Tremont Sunday gatherings.

The talk there, however, was dominated by the women, whose importance Roger recognized but did not exaggerate. Mrs. Tremont, a vast cheerful bundle of flesh and red velvet, could get anything she wanted from her pale bald spouse, but she wanted things only for herself and her offspring. She and her fellow matrons had not the smallest interest in business or politics; the power they sought and achieved was purely domestic. They had, of course, the power to ruin a man with their tongues, but any such danger was easily averted by a routine exhibition of Southern gallantry. They were rather titillated at meeting a handsome and impoverished rebel officer; they enjoyed the idea of exercising a beneficent open-mindedness in their affable condescension to a safely defeated enemy. If Roger had been free, he might even, with a skillful play of his few trumps, have secured the hand of one of their well-endowed daughters. As it was, he had to direct his principal attention to the men.

The City Club, a large pink-and-white building on Madison Square with a membership of lawyers, judges and politicians, was more useful to him. The ever-generous Basil had treated him to a year's guest membership, and it was an easy enough matter for a former Confederate officer, dropping into the big bar with the oak-paneled walls and potted palms, to fall into friendly converse with those members who had served in the Union Army and evoke the bond between fighting men that never quite includes even the bravest noncombatant. Roger, in postmortems of battles, was always careful to avoid any criticism of Union strategy. His cool good manners, unaffected by the few drinks he permitted himself, made him popular, and after his year's free membership was up, he found it renewed for another without dues. When he went to the treasurer's office to inquire about this, he was politely shown a minute from a meeting of the board of directors stating that Colonel Carstairs could pay dues “when his ship came in.”

Roger decided to accept this. He would not have done so in Richmond, but then Richmond was reality, a quality he was not willing to accord New York.

The president of the club, Charles Van Rensselaer Pratt, turned out to be just the man he had been looking for. He was every inch a gentleman—at least, as Northerners defined that term—tall and grave and dignified, with a short, well-cut beard and dull blue gazing eyes under bushy eyebrows which seemed to be wondering whether you were as much a gentleman as he. His Knickerbocker background would have qualified him more for the presidency of the Union Club than the City, but Roger had heard that his intense patriotism during the war, throughout the whole of which, like Roger, he had fought, had prompted him to resign from an institution some of whose most distinguished members had favored a compromise peace. Pratt at forty looked ten years older, as fitted the senior partner of the Wall Street firm that his late father had founded, and his reputation for honor and high-mindedness was unchallenged. The same, however, could not be said of some of his partners. There were even those who dared to suggest that he was a figurehead of respectability to be displayed in nobly speechifying meetings of bar associations and behind whose broad and stylishly tailored back a good deal of less edifying but profitable business was transacted.

Pratt was intrigued by what he called Roger's decision to “move his career north.” He visited the club regularly on Monday nights, when his wife dined with her invalid mother, and made his two whiskies last for two hours. He soon made it a habit to invite Roger to join him at his reserved table in a corner of the barroom. They would talk of problems facing the South and what Pratt called its “future redemption and regeneration.” Roger, for whom whiskey had become a controlled solace, found that it increased his tact by temporarily softening his bitterness. He was not even tempted to call the club president an ass.

“Oh, I suppose the South will come back in a way,” he conceded as he puffed his pipe, for he smoked now too. “But it will not be in any way that will interest me. I have seen the old days, and there can be no possible revival of
them.”

“But surely in time the great plantations will revive. Will it make such a difference to you that the hands will be paid instead of owned? Mightn't they even be more efficient?”

Roger smiled inwardly at this hint from the counsel to capitalists. “It's not that, sir. I belonged to the civilization that died at Appomattox. I do not care for reconstructions.”

“So you will stay here?”

“If I can survive here.”