The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (59 page)

That the major decisions of life should come without a struggle! But then was it really a major decision? I had only to be careful to make my face expressionless, my tone neutral. “I understand you, sir. I shall be your legate. There will be no trouble.”

Those eyes! There seemed now to be a black spot in the center of each. To express a faint shock, perhaps, that I should be quite so ready, quite so quick? Did it mean that I had a nature too base for larger tasks? Was my willingness to be of service a flaw or a virtue? And then his low grunt of assent seemed to assert his recognition that possibly I
was
the rare bird he had been seeking for his later years, the man of his own genius and philosophy who would carry on what he had started. Anyway, he would try me. That was all I needed. It was all I had ever hoped for.

***

“You're not going to reproach me for my life
now
, are you?”

Mother was seated at her dressing table, brushing her hair with sharp strokes, still in her peignoir at ten in the morning. I was standing by the window. And, yes, I was playing with the cord of the shade. For I
was
nervous, despite my apparent containment. She continued now, turning to give me a glare:

“Surely even you wouldn't have the cold gall to do that?”

As I watched her features congeal and her glare harden, I had an odd sense of slipping inside her head and seeing myself through her eyes. Was I an unusually neurotic person, or had the peculiar circumstances of my home environment simply sharpened my perceptions while cooling my temper? For despite the tension of the atmosphere, the reaction of which I was primarily aware was curiosity. Were Mother and I for the first time actually communicating directly, without concern for manners or any of the usual human subterfuges needed to mask the ugliness of the ego? Might we even be able to recognize that our relationship had been reduced to the biological?

But no. Even if it was true in my case, it was not in hers. For she detested me. That was the difference. And now, taking my silence as the sign that I
did
mean to throw her past in her face, she dropped the reins on her temper.

“Who do you think paid for your school and college? For your Brooks Brothers suits and even your economics library? Do you think you'd have lived as you have on your father's skimpy trust?”

“Oh, no. I am perfectly aware of what I owe Mr. Dunbar. And properly grateful. As, no doubt, is Father.”

“You'll throw that in his face, too!”

“I'm not throwing anything in anyone's face. We all know the facts. Why not go on from there? It's also a fact that Mr. Dunbar wishes to discontinue his relations with you. Hadn't we better face it?”

“
We?”
Mother was on her feet now, her fists clenched. I had not known that she was capable of such a fit of temper. “Where do you come into it, I'd like to know? What are you but your mother's lover's pimp?”

“I should say my function was just the reverse.”

“Ah, how you must loathe me to be so glib!”

I paused to consider this. “That might be what Doctor Freud would call the unconscious. But I'm certainly not aware of any such feeling.”

“I hope, anyway, you're not going to tell me you're a loving son. And that what you're doing is for my good!”

“I'm not
doing
anything. I'm simply conveying a message. A message you were bound sooner or later to receive. And I'm certainly not going to claim the status of a loving son. What have you ever done to make me love you?”

Even Mother seemed taken aback by this. “You don't think I've been a good mother? Haven't I brought you up well? What have you ever lacked? Have you no gratitude?”

“Why should I have? To have done any less than you did would have been to expose yourself to criticism as a parent. And appearances you have always been expert in. We
looked
like a happy family. That was the point, wasn't it?”

“No,” she cried. “I cared for you as much as any mother. Until I saw you had as much love in you as a lizard. And think of all I did for you and Eleanor and even your father! He accepted my relationship with Mr. Dunbar because he knew he couldn't afford to give his wife and children all the things they needed. He loved me! And in return I made him thoroughly comfortable and never once humiliated him in public
or
in private. But
you!
Your greedy hand was out for Dunbar himself—you couldn't wait to slough me off. Well, let me tell you one thing, you cool young man. If you think you're going to slide into fame and fortune by posing as Croesus' bastard, allow me to assure you that, dislike it as you may, you
are
your father's child. And the great Dunbar is well aware of it!”

But, after all, I had never really believed anything else. And Dunbar would not have been a man to push a natural child, any more than he would have pushed a legitimate one, beyond, that is, a decent provision. No, he was like a Roman emperor, more apt to rely on adoption than generation to obtain the ablest successor. He had no faith in things not under his direct control. And as to what Mother had said about Father, I deemed it the merest twaddle. He had simply, in his own economic interest, known where not to look and what not to hear. But it was interesting that a woman so clear about her goals and how to achieve them should feel the need of crassly sentimentalizing two lives dedicated to simple self-aggrandizement.

It was time anyway to put an end to the discussion.

“I shall tell Mr. Dunbar that we have had this clarifying chat. And you can be sure that the easier you make the implementation of his decision, the more fruitfully will he supervise your account.”

Mother's stare had now the quality of near disbelief, almost of awe, as if she were confronted with a creature of nonhuman quality. At last she emitted a hard, jarring laugh. “So I am to find virtue more profitable than vice? Oh, do get out of here before I vomit!”

I left, confident that her innate good sense would dictate a moderate course and that her wrath against me had deflected much of her ire against Dunbar. And so it worked out. We met only a few times after that, but she accepted an income from Dunbar, and after his death from me, as the least an unfaithful lover and ungrateful son could offer.

Now many if not most readers at this point will assume that I have bad character, or perhaps no character at all. I am only too well aware that many men with whom I have done business through the years, and even some of my own partners, have regarded me as a cold fish who cares for nothing but making money. Nor would the fact that I have shown little interest in spending it alter their opinion, as American self-made men are notoriously more concerned with wealth than with what it can buy. Nobody, I am afraid, has ever given me credit for being, in my own way, a consistent idealist. Of course, it is true that I have never advertised the fact.

Let me summarize the aspects of my youth which
might
have turned me into the man so many have deemed me to be. I was raised by parents who did not love me and for whom I had no respect. I had a sole sibling who detested me. An early illness kept me from being sent to a boarding school, where at least I might have escaped the unsavory atmosphere of my home. And finally, I found no one around me to admire and emulate until I went to work for Mr. Dunbar.

What saved me—for I insist that I
was
saved—was my clarity of vision. I
saw
the world I lived in. I saw perfectly that it contained, outside my own family, love and honor and innocence and that it was not my fault that my life was barren of these qualities or that my heart did not beat at the pace that others liked to believe theirs did. Nor did I resent or even much envy persons more richly endowed with the gift of love. The id may be called on to rebut me here, but we cannot deal practically with the unconscious. What I was conscious of was that I had to play the hand of cards I had been dealt and that it would be futile and even ridiculous to waste my life lamenting that it did not contain more honors.

I have always been dedicated to the concepts of order and restraint in the governance of human affairs. Most of the problems of civilization, in my opinion, emanate from messy thinking and sloppy or sentimental feeling. Even Mr. Dunbar allowed his passions to embroil him in a sordid affair from which he was rescued only by the sexual impotence of old age. But he always yoked his ambition to the chariot of virtue. His life goal, he maintained, was to impose a balanced budget on a fevered and reckless world, though only if and where it was feasible. He took no credit for spreading ineffective sentiment over barren soil. Only results counted to him. And to me.

To have or not to have a loving heart is not a matter of choice but of birth. Yet people tend to applaud “warmth” and to condemn “coldness” in a man's nature as if such things were matters of merit. But merit, I insist, should attach only to what a man contributes usefully to the welfare of his fellow beings. Vain efforts, good intentions, mean nothing. That has been my credo, as Mr. Dunbar has been my god.

There was a change now, hard to define but nonetheless perceptible, in my relations with Mr. Dunbar. It might have been expected that we should have become more personal in our conversations, but that was not quite it. It was more that we seemed tacitly to acknowledge that we had no further secrets from each other, or at least that he had none from me. I presumably had no secrets at all. The awe, at any rate, that I constantly felt for him when out of his presence I was now able to shed at the door of his office or study. I was at ease with him alone, though this ease, if a sense of it was conveyed to him at all, must have been through some barely visible relaxing of my reserve, never of course through any idle chatter or impertinent lounging. And he, for his part, would utter his thoughts openly in my presence, almost as if I were a recording instrument for possible memoirs.

I was now invited regularly to come across the street to take breakfast with him and Mrs. Dunbar. The morning repast was her one regular appearance of the day; she still spent most of her time in her bedchamber. I was somewhat surprised to find her a dear little old lady, soft, gentle and rosily round-faced, who wore a white cap and a black silk dress in perpetual mourning for a long-dead only child. She would fuss over my not eating enough and warn me, if it was a cold day, to wear a muffler to the office.

But she also worried about my working too hard. She was afraid I was having no fan, no love affairs. And she seemed particularly anxious that I should appreciate the man behind the tycoon in her husband, perhaps suspecting me of being one of those for whom the pedestal obscures the statue.

One morning, anyway, when her husband had abruptly quit the table to take his coffee cup to his library, protesting gruffly that she was spoiling his breakfast with her constant nagging him for her little charities, she offered me this mitigation of his conduct.

“You hear, George, how he grumbles. Yet I never have to wait later than noon before a messenger brings me a check for double what I asked for. I know you young men admire him for his brilliance in business. But what I admire him for is the greatness of his heart. He is basically the kindest and gentlest of men.”

I didn't quite like this. I fancied a note of denigration. Mr. Dunbar to me was a man above the world because he was free of the weaknesses that beset mankind: love and hate, pity and cruelty, sentimentality and meanness, religiosity and mendacity, holiness and vice.

“I confess I have not always found him kind and gentle. Nor do I believe that to be his general reputation downtown. No one disputes that he is a great man. But great men are not apt to be gentle.”

She regarded me smilingly as if pleased to have kindled the mild impatience of my retort. “Oh, you young men today fancy yourselves such a self-contained lot. What are you afraid of? Wasn't President Lincoln a gentle man?”

“The man who unleashed the slaughter of the wilderness campaign? Hardly!”

“That he could bring himself to do
that
was part of his greater humaneness. It was for an ultimate saving of lives. Yesterday my husband promised me to do something very much against his wishes, and even against one of his old principles, to spare anguish to some persons I love. Never has he shown more tenderly what his deepest feelings have always been for me and mine.”

I really sat up now. “Mrs. Dunbar, would you mind telling me what that was?”

But her eyes glistened with sudden tears. “Someday, George. Someday perhaps. Not now.”

I left the breakfast table as soon as I decently could and took the subway downtown. In my office I found my throat and tongue so dry I had to drink a glass of water. Then I told my secretary I was to be disturbed by no one (Mr. Dunbar always excepted), closed my door and resumed the inspection of certain papers on my desk that I had left unfinished the night before.

They involved a trust of which Oliver Lovat was the sole trustee for his considerably richer wife. Lovat, a nephew of Mrs. Dunbar, owed his limited and very minor partnership in Dunbar, Leslie & Co. to the fact that he was the grandson of the uncle for whom Lees Dunbar had come to work after the Civil War. Lovat was a handsome if rather beefy gentleman dandy of the period, tweedy, mustachioed, derby-hatted and cigar-smoking, who had a joke for everyone, high and low, and a loud blowy manner that I cordially detested. He did no work for the firm of any significance and lived largely on the income and commissions of the trust for his wife, to whom he was notoriously unfaithful and of which her father had been unwise enough to leave him sole fiduciary.

Now it so happened that the much wronged Mrs. Lovat had at last decided to check on her trustee and had hired an accountant who had asked me, as the clerk in charge of fiduciary accounts, for an appointment at the bank the following week. As a matter of routine I had examined the books myself first, and the securities in our vault as well, and I had been surprised to discover that a number of bonds were missing. Of course, this did not have to mean a misappropriation; Lovat might have removed them for a sale. Yet on the same day, receiving as I did the daily list of Mr. Dunbar's personal market transactions, I noticed that he had acquired the same bonds in the same denominations that were missing in the Lovat trust. And now, after Mrs. Dunbar's mysterious revelation, only one interpretation fitted the facts.