The Friend of Women and Other Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  L’Ami des Femmes

  The Devil and Rufus Lockwood

  The Call of the Wild

  The Conversion of Fred Coates

  The Omelette and the Egg

  The Country Cousin

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2007 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Auchincloss, Louis.

  The friend of women and other stories / Louis Auchincloss.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-71866-5

  ISBN-10: 0-618-71866-4

  1. Upper class—Fiction. 2. Rich people—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3501.U25F75 2007

  813’.54—dc22 2006011044

  eISBN 978-0-544-10900-1

  v1.0613

  For

  VIRGINIA DAJANI,

  imaginative and resourceful executive director of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

  1

  L’Ami des Femmes

  I.

  I LIKE TO THINK of myself as l’ami des femmes, although in a longish life—I am now sixty—I have never married, nor even (though I hardly glory in it) had a love affair. But as a confirmed bachelor and head of the English department at Miss Dickerman’s Classes, the finest, at least in my opinion, of Manhattan’s private day schools for young ladies, I have made it my lifework to convince my pupils that there is nothing that men can do, outside of the mindless fields of violent sport and physical combat, that women cannot do as well or even better. In this year 1960 (I share the age of the century), the realization of such an ideal is much more widely shared than when I started preaching it, but in the nineteen thirties, the period treated in this memoir, it had still a long road to travel.

  Obviously, at least to any devotee of French drama, the name I give myself is taken from the play of Dumas fils in which the protagonist dedicates himself to the task of saving a married woman, trapped in what she has deemed an incompatible union, from taking a lover. He believes, like La Rochefoucauld, that the wife who has taken but one lover in her life is a rare being, and that the first misstep inevitably entails successors. No doubt contemporary mores have left Dumas fils and myself behind, as dead as the dodo. Dumas is remembered today only because Verdi made a beautiful opera out of one of his plays, and he himself came to realize the inevitable doom of a double standard established by an aristocratic désoeuvré society, where the men were engrossed with seduction and hunting and their neglected wives left with nothing but children and the small satisfaction of their own chastity. And when he at last advocated that men also should be virgins until marriage, he was no longer taken seriously. Both sexes had opted for liberty in what they chose to call love.

  My difference from Dumas’s hero is not that I am any less the friend of women, but that I do not see their problem so much as subjection to the laws of men as subjection to men themselves. Sex is their danger, and freedom to indulge in it only makes it more so. It is not that I think it should hold no role in their lives, but that it should play a much smaller one than it does. Very much smaller.

  There! I’ve said it. I have articulated the greatest heresy of our time. The first thing a modern biographer wants to know about his subject is what was his sex life like. And if there doesn’t seem to have been one, as in my own, what is he re-pressing? Is he homosexual? Well, call me neuter. The beauty I have passionately sought all my life has been in literature, which I have tried to share with those young persons most open to it. It was not in football or baseball fields that I found my sharers.

  Am I really so odd? It wouldn’t have seemed so in the past. Religions all over the world have seen untold numbers of men and women devote themselves to chastity; sects have existed that shunned all forms of sexual union. My message to women has been, See first and foremost what you can do to make something of yourself, free of any other human being. That accomplished, let husbands and children come as they may.

  If I say so myself, I have been a popular teacher at Miss Dickerman’s Classes. I have now served under three headmistresses, the last and longest tenured of whom treats me as a kind of first minister and consults with me on every change in school policy. The trustees regard me as a desirable extra man for their dinner parties, and mothers of my students seek my advice, sometimes embarrassingly, as to their daughters’ personal problems. I enjoy the reputation, certainly exaggerated, of being so rapt by poetry that I sometimes have one eye on a page of Keats or Shelley as I walk to school in the morning, and I have often felt the unsought grip of a friendly pupil’s hand on my elbow as I cross a street. At Christmastime I have had to let it be known that I would accept no gifts from students, to avoid the flow of ties, scarves, and sweaters that would otherwise cover my desk. And I have kept up with my girls even after their graduation; I have attended multitudes of weddings and acted as godfather to many a baby daughter.

  But of course there are girls who have been special. I formed a little club of students who wanted to read books over and above what their courses required, and we met at my tiny brownstone in the East Seventies on Saturday mornings to discuss the volume chosen for the week, a practice entirely independent of the school curriculum and for which I received no emolument other than my own joy in it. And it was from these gatherings that I formed my friendships with three girls that have been the three closest relationships of my life, excepting only that with my late, lovely, long widowed mother, whose only and cherished child I had the great good fortune to be. It is to review for my own stern edification the benefit or the damage I may have done these three women that I am writing this memoir. The audience is myself alone.

  Readers of Henry James’s ghost story “The Turn of the Screw” have much debated whether the governess who narrates the tale actually saw the ghosts that seem fatally to threaten the children or whether they are the figments of her diseased imagination. Is she saving the children from tragedy or causing it herself? Was I the bewitched or the witch?

  My three young ladies, all members of the senior class of 1937 at Miss Dickerman’s, were intimate friends with one another. Indeed, they called themselves the three musketeers, as in the famous novel of my favorite playwright’s father. What brought them to me was the hope they shared to find in fiction or poetry a life beyond the somewhat narrow and conventional existence for women envisioned by the Miss Dickerman’s Classes of that day. They were by no means radical; the Great Depression, which had only lightly scarred their families, had not moved them to communism or even socialism. Their common passion was to express themselves, their real selves. Or what they wanted their real selves to be.

  They were Alfreda Belknap, of a decent but unremarkable old New York clan; Cora King, daughter of a famous Manhattan salon hostess; and Letitia “Letty” Bernard, heiress of the Jewish millionaire Elias Bernard, prominent member of “our crowd.”

  To describe them individually, Alfreda Belknap presented a neat, clean, and orderly if somewhat demure appearance to a world of which she was always keenly conscious. You saw at once that she was striving to make a good impression. She was not quite as pretty as she seemed at first: her turned-up nose was a trifle too small and her chin a bit too cleft, but her total effect had a winsome charm, and her clothes (she
never wore the ugly green school uniform when she came to my house) were, as even the much more casually arrayed Cora King reluctantly admitted, in the best possible taste. If I were writing a modern version of Little Women (which I certainly hope I’m not), I would say she was our Amy. The Belknaps were solid, mildly prosperous brownstone bourgeois—Alfreda’s father a lawyer, her mother active on charitable boards—who led a sensible and mundane existence, very much deemphasizing the more glittering memory of Mrs. Belknap’s parents, who had belonged to the epicurean expatriate world of Paris in the belle epoque until they lost their fortune in the Wall Street panic of 1907.

  I mention this last because it was so important in Alfreda’s spiritual development. She shared in no way her family’s stern repudiation of what they deemed a life of false values that had cost them an inheritance, and seemed determined to reconstitute, insofar as she should be able, the elegant and polished manners of her grandparents’ social circle where, as she saw it, artists and writers had mingled decorously with nobles of the old faubourg. She envied Cora King the latter’s mother’s salon, which Cora hated. Yet Alfreda was no fool. She recognized perfectly that the world about her had turned to cruder pleasures and cruder language, but she saw no reason that older values should not, at least for a privileged minority, be revived. And she had a formidable willpower to accomplish anything she chose.

  What did she hope to get out of me? And out of Cora King and Letty Bernard? Of course she was intrigued by Cora’s beauty and Cora’s mother, even if Cora seemed to value these less. And anybody might cast a covetous eye at Letty’s wealth. But I think her main object was to attain, with two other students to help, the culture that might stand her in good stead if she should ever be able to take a lead in a society that was to be intellectually as well as socially prominent. She may have dreamed of becoming a political hostess like the Princess Lieven, moving in the courts to which the Russian czar sent her husband as envoy. I know she had studied a life of that lady.

  Cora King was quite her opposite. The poor girl had been made to feel a bore in her mother’s brilliant salon, where wit and repartee trumped youth and beauty, and where age had little patience with the stammering or the tongueless. Her popularity with her own contemporaries should have made up for this, but it didn’t. Cora was what Dante Gabriel Rossetti would have called a stunner: she had a splendid figure, firm and tall, and a wonderful flowing mane of golden hair. Yet she had been somehow undermined by lack of appreciation at home. She was careless in her demeanor, in her dress, in her talk; she lounged in chairs and was critical and easily discouraged. But she had a big heart and a generous nature, and, however suspicious she might be of any who sought to befriend her, she yearned for love and to be loved. I believe that her strong attachment to myself sprang from my making her feel that she had as much to give the world as any of her mother’s snooty friends. And she almost did. There was a brain behind all that blond allure, if one could only get at it.

  Letty Bernard was certainly the brightest of my trio; she had a first-class intellect and knew it. She was perfectly clear as to what she wanted from me: the school was not filling her to capacity. That was not the fault of the school, nor did she blame the school—her capacity was endless. She simply pumped everything I had out of me, and I loved it. She was a plain girl with a round, bland face and dark hair brushed straight back and a short plump body, but she moved with grace and dignity. She was quite conscious of being the only Jewish girl in her class (these were the days of secret quotas), but she seemed neither to minimize the fact nor resent it. Like Margaret Fuller, she accepted the universe. She appeared to take no false pride in her father’s wealth; she respected him deeply as a philanthropist and was fully prepared to become one herself when the time should call. She had great kindness, and I think she saw in Cora a chance to help the girl make more of herself. What she saw in Alfreda I could never quite make out, but they seemed good friends. Letty might have been our Meg had she been gentile and gentler. But she was too strong for that. And we had no Beth. All three of my girls enjoyed rude health.

  To give an example of how the trio devoured Victorian fiction, I shall try to reconstruct a weekend discussion at my tiny brownstone on a mews near the East River in their last school year. The topic was “Your favorite heroine of the era.”

  ALFREDA (with modulated enthusiasm): Oh, that’s an easy one for me. Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice. She has the same charm for everyone, high or low. Even for Mr. Collins. And Darcy’s pride goes down like ninepins before it.

  ME: She is indeed enchanting. Yet a realist, too, like her father and not like her idiotic mother.

  CORA (perhaps finding Alfreda a bit prim): Maybe Elizabeth’s a bit too much of a realist. Doesn’t Darcy’s great house and garden play a role in her affection for him? You will remember, Alfie, that when Jane asks her how long she has loved Darcy, she replies that it dated from her first sight of his beautiful gardens at Pemberley.

  ALFREDA: But she was only joking!

  LETTY (judiciously): Still, Cora may have a point, Alfie. My father used to say that if you take everything said in jest literally, you’ll be right as many times as you’re wrong. When a man jokes, “I’d like to kill my mother-in-law!” he may mean just that.

  ALFREDA: And even if Elizabeth was motivated in the least bit by Darcy’s great position in the world, where’s the harm? She knew that he needed a woman with taste and moderation to run his households and that she herself would be just the person. She had seen in his aunt, Lady Catherine, how badly the rich often do it.

  CORA: Is that what you would think, Alfie, if you were courted by a millionaire?

  ME: Girls, girls, let’s not be personal.

  LETTY: What Cora is suggesting could, of course, be true of anyone. There are imps in our souls of whom we are not even aware. Sometimes they emerge when we’re old and senile. I had a great aunt who had lived a life of the severest virtue. No untoward word or phrase was ever heard from her lips. But when she became incompetent she suffered from an illusion that she had been captured by the Barbary pirates and sold to the proprietor of a house of ill fame. Her language was such that her doors had to be closed to all but the immediate family.

  ME: Dear me, shall we get back to Miss Austen? Cora, who is your favorite?

  CORA: Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. She was married to the proper Edgar Linton, but her love was all for Heathcliff.

  ALFREDA (shuddering): But he was a monster!

  CORA: A monster with sex appeal, Alfie. You can see why Isabella Linton went off with him even after he strangled her little dog.

  ALFREDA (to Letty): Cora’s giving us the example of the beauty and the beast. She prefers the jungle because her beauty would give her the advantage over you and me. All the beasts would go for her, of course.

  CORA: Thanks, Alfie, for the Irish compliment!

  ME: Ladies, please! Letty, will you give us your candidate?

  LETTY: Let me say one more thing first about Cathy Earnshaw. I share Cora’s sympathy for her. Her dilemma is a hopeless one. She sees that Edgar Linton is a better man and a better husband than the savage Heathcliff could ever be, and that a marriage to Heathcliff would be a social disaster for her. Yet there she is: Heathcliff has her soul. It’s a pitiable situation, and death seems the only solution.

  ME: So she’s not your favorite.

  LETTY: No, Jane Eyre is. She’s so straight and clear-visioned and firm. So modest, yet so proudly independent, And so brave. I love the way she stands up to Mr. Rochester’s bullying.

  ALFREDA: I agree about her, but isn’t the novel too full of exaggerations? There’s something so violent about the Brontës. Would the daughter of a peer really rebuke a servant with “Cease thy chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding!”

  ME: But I love that! It’s so Charlotte Bronte! No one else would have written it.

  LETTY: And who’s to say it’s exaggerated? The Brontës had governesses—they knew the score.
r />   In writing about my girls I obviously can choose any technique I prefer, but it is impossible for a teacher of English literature not to be very much aware of the points of view. Can I possibly forget that I am the Hubert Hazelton who wrote that little study (forgotten, alas, by everyone else) “The Styles of the Master”? And did James not condemn the first-person narrator? I may not be writing fiction, yet to some extent all writing is fiction. I can certainly use the art of the novel for part of what I shall write about Cora and Letty, for I think I have some “in” as to what they might say in my absence, but Alfreda is more of a mystery, and I can set down only my speculations.

  Anyway, I shall start with Alfreda, for she is the only one of the trio whom I knew before I had her in a class. Her parents summered, as they put it, in Bar Harbor, Maine, where I too used to spend July and August in a rented room at the DeGregoire Hotel. As a bachelor who knew members of the summer colony who had daughters at my school, I received frequent invitations to dinner parties, some of which I found tedious but, as the representative of an academy at least partially dependent on their bounty, I hesitated to decline. I know it was something of a joke among the more liberal visitors to that enchanted island that my “kill off” dinner, given at the end of the season at the Pot and Kettle Club, was the best fun of the summer, as at the last minute I found I could not bear to invite all the bores who had wined and dined me and instead confined myself to the much more amusing folk who hadn’t.

  Mrs. Belknap, Alfreda’s mother, was a very sensible woman, not at all one of the summer bores, though a bit on the dry side, and I went with considerable pleasure to her shingled villa on the Shore Path where I met her then sixteen-year-old daughter. Alfreda was small, dark eyed and dark haired, reserved, and pretty, and dressed with a fashionable neatness that seemed more of her own taste and choosing than that of her rather plain and sober parent. Her conversation was advanced for her age, precise and a bit formal. She was very much the young lady. When I called one afternoon and found her mother out, Alfreda invited me to stay for tea and presided over the table like a practiced hostess. But she was intelligent and, unlike so many of her contemporaries, already had a clear concept of the woman she wanted to be.