The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (8 page)

“With the old ladies, perhaps,” I said scornfully. “If that's what you want.”

“I have to start with the old ladies,” he said. “I don't know anyone else.”

“And after the old ladies?”

But he had thought this out.

“They all have daughters or granddaughters,” he explained. “Like Theodora. They'll get used to me.”

“And you're ‘cute,'” I said meanly. “You're a ‘dear.' Yes, I see it. If it's what you want.” I got up and started across the gravel to my car. He came after me.

“I'm not going to hurt anyone, you know,” he said. “I only want to be a respected citizen.”

In the car I leaned out to speak to him.

“Suppose I tell them?”

“About my plans?”

“What else?”

“Do. It won't make any difference. You'll see.”

I started the motor and drove off without so much as nodding to him.

Gregory was good to his word. Every ounce of energy in his small store was directed to the attainment of his clearly conceived goal. I had resolved in disgust to have no further dealings with him, and I adhered to my resolution, but curiosity and a sense of the tiny drama latent in his plans kept me during the rest of that summer and the following two with an ear always alert at the mention of his name for further details of his social clamber.

Little by little Anchor Harbor began to take note of the emergence of this new personality. Greg had been right to start with the old ladies, though he had had, it was true, no alternative. The appearance of this bland young man with such innocent eyes and wide hips and such ridiculous blazers would have been followed by brusque repulse in any young or even middle-aged group of the summer colony, intent as they were on bridge, liquor, sport and sex. In the elderly circles, however, Greg had only to polish his bridge to the point of respectability, and he became a welcome addition at their dinner parties. His conversation, though certainly tepid, was soothing and enthusiastic, and he could listen, without interrupting, to the longest and most frequently repeated anecdote. He liked everybody and every dinner; he radiated an unobtrusive but gratifying satisfaction with life. Once he became known as a person who could be counted upon to accept, his evenings were gradually filled. The old in Anchor Harbor had an energy that put their descendants to shame. Dinner parties even in the septuagenarian group were apt to last till two in the morning, and in the bridge circles rubber would succeed rubber until the sun peeked in through the blinds to cast a weird light on the butt-filled ashtrays and the empty, sticky highball glasses. The old were still up when the young came in from their more hectic but less prolonged evenings of enjoyment, and Gregory came gradually, in the relaxed hours of the early morning, to meet the children and grandchildren of his hostesses. Friction, however, often ran high between the generations, even at such times, and he found his opportunity as peacemaker. He came to be noted for his skill in transmitting messages, with conciliatory amendments of his own, from mother to daughter, from aunt to niece. Everyone found him useful. He became in short a “character,” accepted by all ages, and in that valuable capacity immune from criticism. He was “dear old Greg,” “our lovable, ridiculous Greg.” One heard more and more such remarks as, “Where but in Anchor Harbor would you find a type like Greg?” and “You now, I
like
Greg.” And, I suppose, even had none of the foregoing been true, he would have succeeded as Theodora's pet, her “discovery,” her lap dog, if you will, a comfortable, consoling eunuch in a world that had produced altogether too many men.

That Mrs. Bakewell would have little enough enthusiasm for her son's being taken to the hearts of Theodora and her set I was moderately sure, but the extent of her animosity I was not to learn until I came across her one hot August afternoon at the book counter of the stationery store, which was a meeting place second only in importance to the club. She was standing very stiffly but obviously intent upon the pages of a large volume of Dr. Fosdick. She looked up in some bewilderment when I greeted her.

“I was just looking,” she said. “I don't want anything, thank you.”

I explained that I was not the clerk.

“I'm sorry,” she said without embarrassment. “I didn't recognize you.”

“Well, it's been a long time,” I admitted. “I only come here for short visits.”

“It's a very trivial life, I'm afraid.”

“Mine? I'm afraid so.”

“No,” she said severely and without apology. “The life up here.”

“Greg seems to like it.”

She looked at me for a moment. She did not smile.

“They're killing him,” she said.

I stared.

“They?”

“That wicked woman. And her associates.” She looked back at her book. “But I forgot. You're of the new generation. My adjective was anachronistic.”

“I liked it.”

She looked back at me.

“Then save him.”

“But, Mrs. Bakewell,” I protested. “People don't
save
people at Anchor Harbor.”

“More's the pity,” she said dryly.

I tried to minimize it.

“Greg's all right,” I murmured. “He's having a good time.”

She closed the book.

“Drinking the way he does?”

“Does he drink?”

“Shockingly.”

I shrugged my shoulders. When people like Mrs. Bakewell used the word it was hard to know if they meant an occasional cocktail or a life of confirmed dipsomania.

“And that woman?” she persevered. “Do you approve of her?”

“Oh, Mrs. Bakewell,” I protested earnestly. “I'm sure there's nothing wrong between him and Theodora.”

She looked at me, I thought, with contempt.

“I was thinking of their souls,” she said. “Good day, sir.”

I discovered shortly after this awkward interchange that there was a justification in her remarks about Greg's drinking. I went one day to a large garden party given by Mrs. Stone. All Anchor Harbor was there, old and young, and Theodora's set, somewhat contemptuous of the throng and present, no doubt, only because of Theodora, who had an odd conventionality about attending family parties, were clustered in a group near the punch bowl and exploding periodically in loud laughs. They were not laughing, I should explain, at the rest of us, but at something white-flanneled and adipose in their midst, something with a blank face and strangely bleary eyes. It was Greg, of course, and he was telling them a story, stammering and repeating himself as he did so to the great enjoyment of the little group. It came over me gradually as I watched him that Mrs. Bakewell was right. They
were
killing him. Their laugher was as cold and their acclaim as temporary as that of any audience in the arena of Rome or Constantinople. They could clap hands and cheer, they could spoil their favorites, but they could turn their thumbs down, too, and could one doubt for a moment that at the first slight hint of deteriorating performance, they would? I felt a chill in my veins as their laughter came to me again across the lawn and as I caught sight of the small, spare, dignified figure of Greg's mother standing on the porch with the Bishop and surveying the party with eyes that said nothing. If there were Romans to build fires,
there
was a martyr worthy of their sport. But Gregory. Our eyes suddenly met, and I thought I could see the appeal in them; I thought I could feel his plea for rescue flutter towards me in my isolation through the golden air of the peninsula. Was that why his mother had come? As I turned to her I thought that she, too, was looking at me.

He had left his group. He was coming over to me.

“Well?” I said.

“Come over and meet these people,” he said to me, taking me by the arm. “Come on. They're charming.” He swayed slightly as he spoke.

I shook my arm loose.

“I don't want to.”

He looked at me with his mild, steady look.

“Please,” he urged.

“I said no,” I snapped. “Why should I want to clutter my summer with trash like that? Go on back to them. Eat garbage. You like it.”

He balanced for a moment on the balls of his feet. Evidently he regarded my violence as something indigenous to my nature and to be ignored.

“Theodora's never been in better form,” he held out to me as bait.

“Good for Theodora,” I said curtly. “And in case you don't know it, you're drunk.”

He shook his head sadly at me and wandered slowly back to his group.

Gregory went from glory to glory. He became one of the respected citizens of the summer colony. His spotless white panama was to be seen bobbing on the bench of judges at the children's swimming meet. He received the prize two years running for the best costume at the fancy dress ball. On each occasion he went as a baby. He was a sponsor of the summer theater, the outdoor concerts, and the putting tournament. He was frequently seated on the right of his hostess at the very grandest dinners. He arrived early in the season and stayed into October. What he did during the winter months was something of a mystery, but it was certain that he did not enjoy elsewhere a success corresponding to his triumph at Anchor Harbor. Presumably, like so many Anchor Harbor people whose existence away from the peninsula it was so difficult to conceive, he went into winter hibernation to rest up for his exhausting summers.

That he continued to drink too much when he went out, which was, of course, all the time, did not, apparently, impair his social position. He was firmly entrenched, as I have said, in his chosen category of “character,” and to these much is allowed. Why he drank I could only surmise. It might have been to steady himself in the face of a success that was as unnerving as it was unfamiliar; it might have been to make him forget the absurdity of his ambitions and the hollowness of their fulfillment, or it might even have been to shelter himself from the bleak wind of his mother's reproach. Theodora and all her crowd drank a great deal. It was possible that he had simply picked up the habit from them. It would have gone unnoticed, at least in that set, had it not been for a new and distressing habit that he had developed, of doing, after a certain number of drinks, a little dance by himself, a sort of jig, that was known as “Greg's peg.” At first he did it only for a chosen few, late at night, amid friendly laughter, but word spread, and the little jig became an established feature of social life on Saturday night dances at the club. There would be a roll of drums, and everybody would stop dancing and gather in a big circle while the sympathetic orchestra beat time to the crazy marionette in the center. Needless to say I had avoided being a witness of “Greg's peg,” but my immunity was not to last.

It so happened that the first time that I was to see this sordid performance was the last time that it ever took place. It was on a Saturday night at the swimming-club dance, the festivity that crowned the seven-day madness known as “tennis week,” the very height, mind you, of Anchor Harbor's dizzy summer of gaiety. Even my mother-in-law and I had pulled ourselves sufficiently together to ask a few friends for dinner and take them on to the club. We found the place milling with people and a very large band playing very loudly. I noticed several young men who were not in evening dress and others whose evening clothes had obviously been borrowed, strong, ruddy, husky young men. It was the cruise season, and the comfortable, easy atmosphere of overdressed but companionable Anchor Harbor was stiffened by an infiltration of moneyed athleticism and arrogance from the distant smartness of Long Island and Newport. All throbbed, however, to the same music, and all seemed to be enjoying themselves. Theodora, in a sweater and pleated skirt and large pearls, dressed to look as though she were off a sailboat and not, as she was, fresh from her own establishment, spotted me and with characteristic aplomb deserted her partner and came over to our table. She took in my guests with an inclusive, final and undiscriminating smile that might have been a greeting or a shower of alms, took a seat at the table and monopolized me.

“Think of it,” she drawled. “You at a dance. What's happened? Well, anyway,” she continued without waiting for my answer, “I approve. See life. Come for lunch tomorrow. Will you? Two o'clock. I'll have some people who might amuse you.”

Since her mother's death Theodora had begun to take on the attributes of queen of the peninsula. She dealt out her approval and disapproval as if it was possible that somebody cared. Struggling behind the wall of her make-up, her mannerisms and her marriages one could sense the real Theodora, strangled at birth, a dowager, with set lips and outcasting frown, a figure in pearls for an opera box. I declined her invitation and asked if Gregory was going to do his dance.

“Oh, the darling,” she said huskily. “Of course he will. I'll get hold of him in a minute and shoo these people off the floor.”

“Don't do it for me,” I protested. “I don't want to see it. I hear it's a disgusting sight.”

She snorted.

“Whoever told you that?” she retorted. “It's the darling's precious little stunt. Wait till you see it. Oh, I know you don't like him,” she continued, wagging her finger at me. “He's told me that enough times, the poor dear. You've hurt him dreadfully. You pretend you can't stand society when the only thing you can't stand is anything the least bit unconventional.”

I wondered if this were not possibly true. She continued to stare at me from very close range. It was always impossible to tell if she was drunk or sober.

“Like his old bitch of a mother,” she continued.

“That's a cruel thing to say, Theodora,” I protested sharply. “Do you even know her?”

“Certainly I know her. She's sat on poor Greg all his life. Lord knows what dreadful things she did to him when he was a child.”