The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (7 page)

Mrs. Bakewell I had made a picture of before I met her. She would be a small grim woman, always in black, mourning the husband whose existence one could never quite believe in; she would be wearing a black ribbon choker and a shiny black hat, and she would never change the weight or the quantity of her clothing, equally inappropriate for St. Petersburg or Anchor Harbor, for any such considerations as seasons or weather. I saw her thus as small, as compact, as uncompromising, because in my imagination she had had to wither to a little black stump, the hard remnants of the heaping blaze of what I visualized as her maternal possessiveness. How else could I possibly explain Gregory expect in terms of such a mother? And when I did meet her each detail of her person seemed to spring up at me to justify my presupposition. She
was
a small, black figure, and she
did
wear a broad, tight choker. She was old, and she was unruffled; her large hook nose and her small eyes had about them the stillness of a hawk on a limb. When she spoke, it was with the cold calm of a convinced fanatic, and beyond the interminable details of her small talk that dealt almost exclusively with Episcopal dogma and Episcopal teas I seemed to catch the flickering light of a sixteenth-century
auto-da-fé
. But a vital element of my preconceived portrait was missing. She showed no weakness for her only child. Indeed, her attitude towards him, for all one could see, demonstrated the most commendable indifference. He had hatched from her egg and could play around the barnyard at his will. I discovered, furthermore, that, unlike her son, she had read my books.

“It's very kind of you to take time off from your work to walk with Gregory,” she said to me. “I don't suppose that he can be a very stimulating companion for an historian. He never reads anything.”

Gregory simply nodded as she said this. She brought it forth without severity, as a mere matter of fact.

“Reading isn't everything,” I said. “It's being aware of life that counts.”

She looked at me penetratingly.

“Do you think so?” she asked. “Of course, I suppose you would. It's in line with your theories. The Bishop and I were interested in what you had to say about the free will of nations in your last book.”

“Did you agree with it?”

“We did not.”

Gregory looked at her in dismay.

“Now, Mother,” he said protestingly, “you're not going to quarrel with my new friend?”

“I'm going to say what I wish, Gregory,” she said firmly, “in my own house.”

No, she certainly did not spoil him. Nor could it really be said that she was possessive. It was Greg who kept reaching for apron strings in which to enmesh himself. He seemed to yearn to be dominated. He tried vainly to have her make his decisions for him, and even after she had told him, as she invariably did, that he was old enough to think things through for himself, he would, not only behind her back but to her very face, insist to those around him that she ruled him with an iron hand. If I asked him to do something, to take a walk, to go to a movie, to dine, he would nod and smile and say “I'd love to,” but he would surely add, and if she was there, perhaps in a lower tone, behind his hand: “But I'll have to get back early, you know. Mother will want to hear all about it before she goes to bed.” And Mrs. Bakewell, overhearing him, with her small, fixed grim smile, did not even deign to contradict.

During that winter, when I was working on my book in Cambridge, I forgot poor Greg almost completely, as I usually did Anchor Harbor people. They were summer figures, and I stored them away in camphor balls with my flannels. I was surprised, therefore, each time that I received a letter from him, on the stationery of a large St. Petersburg hotel, protesting in a few lines of wretched scrawl that he had really met a number of very nice people, and could I possibly come down for a visit and meet them? One of them, I remember, he thought I would like because she wrote children's plays. I wrote him one letter and sent him a Christmas card, and that, I decided, was that.

I was in a better frame of mind when I went up to Anchor Harbor towards the end of the following July to stay with my mother-in-law. I was still keeping largely to myself, but the volume of my wife's poems was finished and in the hands of the publishers, and I no longer went out of my way to spurn people. I asked my mother-in-law one afternoon while we were sitting on the porch if the Bakewells were back in Anchor Harbor.

“Yes, I saw Edith Bakewell yesterday at Mrs. Stone's,” she said. “Such an odd, stiff woman. I didn't know you knew them.”

“Was her son there?”

“Greg? Oh, yes, he's always with her. Don't tell me
he's
a friend of yours?”

“After a fashion.”

“Well, there's no accounting for tastes. I can't see a thing in him, but the old girls seem to like him. I drew him as a partner the other night at the bridge table.”

“Oh, does he play bridge now?”

“If you can call it that,” my mother-in-law said with a sniff. “But he certainly gets around. In my set, anyway. I never go out that I don't run into him.”

“Really? Last fall he knew nobody.”

“And Anchor Harbor was a better place.”

Little by little I became aware that my friend's increased appearances in the summer-colony world were part of some preconceived and possibly elaborate plan of social self-advancement. He was not, I realized with a mild surprise, simply floating in the brisk wake of his mother's determined spurts; he was splashing gaily down a little backwater on a course that must have had the benefit of his own navigation. At the swimming club he had abandoned the lonely couch near the table of fashion magazines, where he used to wait for his mother, for the gay groups of old ladies in flowered hats who gathered daily at high noon around the umbrella tables and waited for the sun to go over the yardarm and the waiters to come hurrying with the first glad cocktail of the day. I was vaguely disgusted at all of this, though I had no reason, as I well knew, to have expected better things, but my disgust became pointed after I had twice telephoned him to ask him for a walk and twice had to listen to his protests of a previous engagement. I wondered if he fancied that his social position was now too lofty to allow of further intimacy between us, and I laughed to myself, but rather nastily, at the idea. I would have crossed him off my books irrevocably had I not met him one day when I was taking my mother-in-law to call on old Mrs. Stone. We had found her alone, sitting on the porch with her back to the view, and were making rather slow going of a conversation about one of my books when her daughter, Theodora, came in with a group of people, including Greg, who had just returned from what seemed to have been a fairly alcoholic picnic. I found myself caught, abandoned by my fleeing mother-in-law, in the throes of a sudden cocktail party.

“My God!” cried Theodora as she spotted me. “If it isn't Arnold of Rugby!”

I had always been rather a favorite of Theodora's, for she had regarded, in the light of the subsequent tragedy, her very casual friendship with my wife, of the kind that are based on childhood animosity and little more, as the deepest relationship that she had ever known. And in all seriousness it may have been. Theodora had had little time, in her four marriages, for friendships with women. At the moment she was in one of her brief husbandless periods, and her energy, unrestrained, swept across the peninsula like a forest fire. She drew me aside, out on the far end of the huge porch, hugging my arm as she did when she had had one drink too many, and hissed in my ear, with the catlike affectation that purported to be a caricature of itself and which, presumably, a minimum of four men had found attractive:

“Isn't he precious?”

“Who?”

“Little Gregory, of course.” And she burst into a laugh. “He tells me that you were kind to him. Great big you!”

“Where on earth did you pick him up?”

“Right here.” She indicated the porch. “Right here at Mummie's. I found him in the teapot. The old bitches were stuffing him into it, as if he were the dormouse, poor precious, so I hustled right over and caught him by the fanny and pulled and pulled till he came out with a pop. And now he's mine. You can't have him.”

I glanced over to where Gregory was talking to two women in slacks. His white flannels looked a tiny bit dirtier, and he was holding a cocktail rather self-consciously in his round white hand.

“I'm not sure I want him,” I said gravely. “You seem to have spoiled him already.”

“Oh, precious,” she said, cuddling up to me. “Do you think Theodora would do that?”

“Is he to be Number Five?”

She looked up at me with her wide serious eyes.

“But could he be, darling? I mean, after all, what sex is he? Or
is
he?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“How much does that matter at our age, Theodora?”

She was, as always, a good sport. She threw back her head and howled with laughter.

“Oh, it matters!” she exclaimed. “I tell you what, darling. Greg will be Number Seven. Or maybe even Number Six. But not the next one. No, dear. Not the next one.”

I found it in me to speculate if I had not perhaps been selected on the spot for that dubious honor. Anyway, I decided to go. Conversation with Theodora, who believed so patently, so brazenly, in nothing and nobody, always made me nervous. As I reentered the house and was crossing the front hall I heard my name called. It was Greg. He ran after me and caught me by the arm at the front door.

“You're leaving!” he protested. “And you haven't even spoken to me!”

“I'm speaking to you now,” I said shortly.

To my dismay he sat down on the stone bench under the porte-cochere and started to cry. He did not cry loudly or embarrassingly; his chest rose and fell with quiet, orderly sobs.

“My God, man!” I exclaimed.

“I knew you were mad at me,” he whimpered, “by the way you spoke on the telephone when I couldn't go on a walk with you. But I didn't know you wouldn't even speak to me when you saw me!”

“I'm sorry,” I said fretfully.

“You don't know what you've meant to me,” he went on dolefully, rubbing his eyes. “You have no idea. You're the first person who ever asked me to do anything in my whole life. When you asked me to go for a walk with you. Last summer.”

“Well, I did this summer too.”

“Yes,” he said, shaking his head, “I know. And I couldn't go. But the reason I couldn't go was that I was busy. And the reason I was busy was what you told me.”

I stared down at him.

“What the hell did I tell you?”

“To do things. See people. Be somebody.” He looked up at me now with dried eyes. There was suddenly and quite unexpectedly almost a note of confidence in his tone.

“And how do you do that?”

“The only way I can. I go out.”

I ran my hand through my hair in a confusion of reluctant amusement and despair.

“I didn't mean it that way, Greg,” I protested. “I wanted you to see the world. Life. Before it was too late.”

He nodded placidly.

“That's what I'm doing,” he said.

“But I wanted you to read big books and think big thoughts,” I said desperately. “How can you twist that into my telling you to become a tea caddy?”

His wide thoughtless eyes were filled with reproach.

“You knew I couldn't read books,” he said gravely. “Or think big thoughts. You were playing with me.”

I stared.

“Then why did you think you had to do anything?”

“Because you made me want to.” He looked away, across the gravel, into the deep green of the forest. “I could feel your contempt. I had never felt that before. No one had ever cared enough to feel contempt. Except you.”

As I looked at him I wondered if there were any traces of his having felt such a sting. I was baffled, almost angry at his very expressionlessness. That he could sit and indict me so appallingly for my interference, could face me with so direct a responsibility, was surely a dreadful thing if he cared, but if he didn't, if he was simply making a fool of me . . .

“I hope you don't think,” I said brutally, “that you can lessen any contempt that you think I may feel for you by becoming a social lion in Anchor Harbor.”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said firmly. “Your contempt is something I shall have to put up with. No matter what I do. I can't read or think or talk the way you do. I can't work. I can't even cut any sort of figure with the girls. There aren't many things open to me. You're like my mother. You know that, really, but you think of me as if I was somebody else.”

I took a cigarette out of my case, lit it and sat down beside him. From around the corner of the big house came a burst of laughter from Theodora's friends.

“Where are you headed, then, Greg?” I asked him as sympathetically as I could.

He turned and faced me.

“To the top of the peninsula,” he said. “I'm going to be a social leader.”

I burst into a rude laugh.

“The
arbiter elegantiarum
of Anchor Harbor?” I cried.

“I don't know what that means,” he said gravely.

Again I laughed. The sheer inanity of it had collapsed my mounting sympathy.

“You're mad,” I said sharply. “You haven't got money or looks or even wit. Your bridge is lousy. You play no sports. Let's face it, man. You'll never make it. Even in this crazy place.”

Greg seemed in no way perturbed by my roughness. His humility was complete. The only thing, I quickly divined, that could arouse the flow of his tears was to turn from him. As long as one spoke to him, one could say anything.

“Everything you say is true,” he conceded blandly. “I'd be the last to deny it. But you watch. I'll get there.”