The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (6 page)

A few weeks later her club mobile unit crossed to France, where it operated just below the front. A friend of Halsted's sent her a note that he had placed in an envelope marked “Maud Spreddon, Red Cross” just before he had taken off on his last flight. It was simply a line: “Maud, dearest, never forget. You're all right, and you're going to be all right. With me or without me.” She had folded the note and placed it in a locket which she wore around her neck and which she never afterwards reopened. She did not tell her parents or even Sammy that she had seen Halsted again before his death, or what had passed between them. Such a tale would have made her a worthy object of the pity that she had so despised herself for seeking. It was her sorrow, and Halsted would have admired her for facing it alone.

 

 

 

 

1950

I
T WAS
in the autumn of 1936 that I first met Gregory Bakewell, and the only reason that I met him then was that he and his mother were, besides myself and a handful of others, the only members of the summer colony at Anchor Harbor who had stayed past the middle of September. To the Bakewells it was a period of hard necessity; they had to sit out the bleak, lonely Maine September and October before they could return, with any sort of comfort, to the Florida home where they wintered. To me, on the other hand, these two months were the only endurable part of Anchor Harbor's season, and I had lingered all that summer in Massachusetts, at the small boarding school of which I was headmaster, until I knew that I would find the peninsula as deserted as I required. I had no worries that year about the opening of school, for I was on a sabbatical leave, long postponed, and free to do as I chose. Not, indeed, that I was in a mood to do much. I had lost my wife the year before, and for many months it had seemed to me that life was over, in early middle age. I had retreated rigidly and faithfully to an isolated routine. I had taught my courses and kept to myself, as much as a headmaster can, editing and re-editing what was to be the final, memorial volume of her poetry. But during that summer I had begun to look up from the blue notepaper on which she had written the small stanzas of her garden verse to find myself gazing out the window towards the campus with a blank steadiness that could only have been symptomatic, I feared, of the heresy of boredom. And thus it was with something of a sense of guilt and a little, perhaps, in that mood of nostalgic self-pity that makes one try to recapture the melancholy of remembered sorrow, that I traveled up to Anchor Harbor in the fall.

My wife and I had spent our summers there in the past, not, as one of her obituary notices had floridly put it, “away from the summer resort in a forest camp, nestled in that corner of the peninsula frequented by the literary,” but in the large rambling pile of shingle, full of pointless rooms and wicker furniture, that belonged to my mother-in-law and that stood up on the top of a forest-covered hill in the very heart of the summer community. In Anchor Harbor, however, the poets' corner and the watering place were akin. Each was clouded in the haze of unreality that hung so charmingly over the entire peninsula. It was indeed a world unto itself. Blue, gray and green, the pattern repeated itself up and down, from the sky to the rocky mountaintops, from the sloping pine woods to the long cliffs and gleaming cold of the sea. It was an Eden in which it was hard to visualize a serpent. People were never born there, nor did they die there. The elemental was left to the winter and other climes. The sun that sparkled in the cocktails under the yellow and red umbrella tables by the club pool was the same sun that dropped behind the hills in the evening, lighting up the peninsula with pink amid the pine trees. It was a land of big ugly houses, pleasant to live in, of very old and very active ladies, of hills that were called mountains, of small, quaint shops and of large, shining town cars. When in the morning I picked up the newspaper with its angry black headlines it was not so much with a sense of their tidings being false, as of their being childishly irrelevant.

By mid-September, however, the big summer houses were closed and the last trunks of their owners were rattling in vans down the main street past the swimming club to the station. The sky was more frequently overcast; there was rain and fog, and from the sea came the sharp cold breezes that told the advent of an early winter. I was staying alone in my mother-in-law's house, taking long walks on the mountains and going at night to the movies. I suppose that I was lonelier than I cared to admit, for I found myself dropping into the empty swimming club before lunch and drinking a cocktail on the terrace that looked over the unfilled pool and the bay. There were not apt to be more than one or two people there, usually the sort who had to maintain a residence in Maine for tax purposes, and I was not averse to condoling with them for a few minutes each day. It was on a day when I had not found even one of these that a youngish-looking man, perhaps in his early thirties, approached the table where I was sitting. He was an oddly shaped and odd-looking person, wide in the hips and narrow in the shoulders, and his face, very white and round and smooth, had, somewhat inconsistently, the uncertain dignity of a thin aquiline nose and large owl-like eyes. His long hair was parted in the middle and plastered to his head with a heavy tonic, and he was wearing, alas, a bow tie, a red blazer, and white flannels, a combination which was even then out of date except for sixth-form graduations at schools such as mine. All this was certainly unprepossessing, and I shrank a bit as he approached me, but there was in his large gray eyes as they gazed timidly down at me a look of guilelessness, of cautious friendliness, of anticipated rebuff that made me suddenly smile.

“My name is Gregory Bakewell. People call me Greg,” he said in a mild, pleasant voice less affected than I would have anticipated. “I hope you'll excuse my intrusion, but could you tell me if they're going to continue the buffet lunch next week?”

I looked at him with a feeling of disappointment.

“I don't know,” I said. “I never lunch here.”

He stared with blinking eyes.

“But you ought. It's quite delicious.”

I shrugged my shoulders, but he remained, obviously concerned at what I was passing up.

“Perhaps you will join me for lunch today,” he urged. “It's
supreme de volaille argentée.”

I couldn't repress a laugh at his fantastic accent, and then to cover it up and to excuse myself for not lunching with him I asked him to have a drink. He sat down, and I introduced myself. I confess that I expected that he might have heard of me, and I looked into his owl eyes for some hint that he was impressed. There was none.

“You weren't up here during the season?” he asked. “You've just come?”

“That's right.”

He shook his head.

“It's a pity you missed it. They say it was very gay.”

I murmured something derogatory in general about the summer life at Anchor Harbor.

“You don't like it?” he asked.

“I can't abide it. Can you?”

“Me?” He appeared surprised that anyone should be interested in his reaction. “I don't really know. Mother and I go out so little. Except, of course, to the Bishop's. And dear old Mrs. Stone's.”

I pictured him at a tea party, brushed and combed and wearing a bib. And eating an enormous cookie.

“I used to go out,” I said.

“And now you don't?”

Even if he had never heard of me I was surprised, at Anchor Harbor, that he should not have heard of my wife. Ordinarily, I hope, I would not have said what I did say, but my need for communication was strong. I was suddenly and oddly determined to imprint my ego on the empty face of all that he took for granted.

“My wife died here,” I said. “Last summer.”

He looked even blanker than before, but gradually an expression of embarrassment came over his face.

“Oh, dear,” he said. “I'm so sorry. Of course, if I'd known—”

I felt ashamed of myself.

“Of course,” I said hurriedly. “Forgive me for mentioning it.”

“But no,” he protested. “I should have known. I remember now. They were speaking of her at Mrs. Stone's the other day. She was very beautiful, wasn't she?”

She hadn't been, but I nodded. I wanted even the sympathy that he could give me and swallowed greedily the small drops that fell from his meager supply.

“And which reminds me,” he said, after we had talked in this vein for several minutes, “they spoke of you, too. You write things, don't you? Stories?”

I swallowed.

“I hope not,” I said. “I'm an historian.”

“Oh, that must be lovely.”

I wondered if there was another man in the world who could have said it as he said it. He conveyed a sense of abysmal ignorance, but of humility, too, and of boundless admiration. These things were fine, were wonderful, he seemed to say, but he, too, had his little niche and a nice one, and he as well as these things existed, and we could be friends together, couldn't we?

I decided we were getting nowhere.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“Do?” Again he looked blank. “Why, good heavens, man, I don't do a thing.”

I looked severe.

“Shouldn't you?”

“Should I?”

“You haven't got a family or anything like that?”

He smiled happily.

“Oh, I've got ‘something like that,'” he answered. “I've got Mother.”

I nodded. I knew everything now.

“Do you exercise?”

“I walk from Mother's cottage to the club. It's several hundred yards.”

I rose to my feet.

“Tomorrow morning,” I said firmly, “I'll pick you up here at nine-thirty. We're going to climb a mountain.”

He gaped at me in horror and amazement as I got up to leave him, but he was there when I came by the next morning, waiting for me, dressed exactly as he had been the day before except for a pair of spotless white sneakers and a towel, pointlessly but athletically draped around his neck. He was very grateful to me for inviting him and told me with spirit how he had always wanted to climb a mountain at Anchor Harbor. These “mountains” were none higher than a thousand feet and the trails were easy; nonetheless I decided to start him on the smallest.

He did well enough, however. He perspired profusely and kept taking off garments as we went along, piling them on his arm, and he presented a sorry figure indeed as his long hair fell over his face and as the sweat poured down his white puffy back, but he kept up and bubbled over with talk. I asked him about his life, and he told me the dismal tale of a childhood spent under the cloud of a sickly constitution. He had been, of course, an only child, and his parents, though loving, had themselves enjoyed excellent health. He had never been to school or college; he had learned whatever it was that he did know from tutors. He had never left home, which for the Bakewells had been St. Louis until the death of Mr. Bakewell and was now St. Petersburg in Florida. Greg was thirty-five and presented to me in all his clumsy innocence a perfect
tabula rasa
. His mind was a piece of blank paper, of white, dead paper, on which, I supposed, one could write whatever message one chose. He appeared to have no prejudices or snobbishnesses; he was a guileless child who had long since ceased to fret, if indeed he ever had, at the confinements of his nursery. I could only look and gape, and yet at the same time feel the responsibility of writing the first line, for he seemed to enjoy an odd, easy content in his own placid life.

We had passed beyond the tree line and were walking along the smoother rock of the summit, a sharp cool breeze blowing in our faces. It was a breathtaking view, and I turned to see what Greg's reaction would be.

“Look,” he said pointing to an ungainly shingle clock tower that protruded from the woods miles below us, “you can see the roof of Mrs. Stone's house.”

I exploded.

“God!” I said.

“Don't be angry with me,” he said mildly. “I was just pointing something out.”

I could see that decisions had to be made and steps taken.

“Look, Greg,” I said. “Don't go to St. Petersburg this winter.”

He stared.

“But what would Mother do?”

I dismissed his mother with a gesture.

“Stay here. By yourself. Get to know the people who live here all the year round. Read. I'll send you books.”

He looked dumbfounded.

“Then you won't be here?”

I laughed.

“I've got a job, man. I'm writing a book. But you're not. Give one winter to being away from your mother and Mrs. Stone and the Bishop, and learn to think. You won't know yourself in a year.”

He appeared to regard this as not entirely a happy prognostication.

“But Mrs. Stone and the Bishop don't go to St. Petersburg,” he pointed out.

“Even so,” I said.

“I really don't think I could leave Mother.”

I said nothing.

“You honestly think I ought to do something?” he persisted.

“I do.”

“That's what Mother keeps telling me,” he said dubiously.

“Well, she's right.”

He looked at me in dismay.

“But what'll I do?”

“I've made one suggestion. Now it's your turn.”

He sighed.

“Well, it's very hard,” he said, “to know. You pick me up, and then you throw me down.”

I felt some compunction at this.

“I'll write you,” I said. “To St. Petersburg. You can keep me informed of your progress.”

He beamed.

“Oh, that would be very kind,” he said.

During the remaining two weeks of my visit to Anchor Harbor I walked with Greg almost every day, and we became friends. It was agreeable to be with someone whose admiration was unqualified. He listened to me with the utmost respect and attention and forgot everything I said a moment afterwards. But I didn't mind. It gave me a sense of ease about repeating myself; I talked of history and literature and love; I set myself up as counsel for the forces of life and argued my case at the bar of Greg's justice, pleading that the door might be opened just a crack. Yet whoever it was who represented the forces of his inertia was supplying very cogent arguments against me. I decided that it must be his mother, and I stopped at the Bakewells' one day after our walk to meet her.