Her Infinite Variety Read online

  Her Infinite Variety

  Louis Auchincloss

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  …

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  A MARINER BOOK

  Houghton Mifflin Company

  Boston New York

  FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2002

  Copyright © 2000 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Auchincloss, Louis.

  Her infinite variety / Louis Auchincloss.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-618-02191-4

  ISBN 0-618-22488-2 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3501.U25 H47 2000

  813’.54—dc21 99-047302

  Book design by Anne Chalmers

  Typefaces: Monotype Walbaum and Linotype-Hell Didot

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For

  ANDREW POPE

  Fine Friend and Able Agent

  Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

  Her infinite variety.

  —Antony and Cleopatra

  1

  VIOLET LONGCOPE had, from the earliest signs of her daughter’s incipient beauty, drilled into Clarabel’s lovely head the warning that a single unwary submission of the heart to the wrong male charm could throw a girl perhaps irretrievably off the smooth tracks of the best laid life plan. The warning was all the more necessary for a girl raised not only in a university town but in the very heart of a university. Pierpont in 1937 was the newest of the colleges in Yale’s new college plan, and Violet’s husband, Irving Longcope, was its popular master. Their residence, forming a corner of the creamy square Gothic edifice, ornamented with ugly pediments and narrow mullioned windows, was a social center for the undergraduates who came freely in and out to attend her teas or her husband’s famed “readings aloud” in the vast cellar rumpus room. It had not taken any of these young men long to cultivate the acquaintance of the tall lissome blond daughter of the master, with her infectiously sympathetic laugh, her large, amused yet tantalizingly detached gray-blue eyes, her high spirits and her bold graceful stride.

  She had certainly not had her looks from her mother. Not that Violet lacked attractions. She was generally considered the brightest and wittiest of the college masters’ wives (not that this, as she too often reminded herself, was such a compliment), but such qualities in a woman were not those that appealed most to young men. Violet had been pretty enough as a girl, but at fifty her long thin face had sharpened; her chin was more pointed, her nose more aquiline, and her pale, rather staring eyes and way of twisting her head around to look at you while her small body remained absolutely still might suggest a bird, though a bird of sharp acuity and critical acumen. Some of the faculty wives professed to be afraid of her tongue, and she didn’t mind this a bit. She would have adored to preside over a salon, and would have paid with her eyesight for Madame du Deffand’s famous one. And what did she have instead? A circle of Yale students for tea and an occasional faculty supper where the men argued tediously about tenure.

  And she didn’t even get the right undergraduates at tea! The “prep school” crowd, the sons of her girlhood friends, the scions of old New York and New England first families—these not only shunned such sissy affairs as teas; they didn’t even apply to Pierpont, but to Pierson or Davenport or Berkeley. Poor Pierpont, in the inexplicably arbitrary way of fashion, or perhaps because of one year’s assignment to it of some particularly unattractive and riotous youths, had acquired the odious name of a “meatball” college. Irving was sufficiently known as an English professor to attract some of the “white shoe” crowd to his readings in the cellar—and Irving, for all his booming enthusiasm for the down-to-earth Chaucer and the yearning democracy of Walt Whitman, had a distinct preference for handsome, well-heeled men who belonged to the better fraternities and senior societies—while she had to hand out her cups and cakes to hungry bursary students, to timid rustics who regarded her teas as elegant social rituals and to epicene youths who sought a female oasis in a rather too boisterously male society.

  Of her two children, only Clara had seemed moldable—at least up to the present crisis. Clara, almost from the beginning, had been the star of the little family; in Clara, and in Clara alone, had been Violet’s hope of a new and brighter life. Brian, hunky and moody and truculently independent, already a junior at Yale, was absorbed in physics and had no interest in the drama of personalities that so occupied his mother. He would go his own way, God bless him, and never need her. But Clara could have the world—or could have had it—if she could only learn to want it enough! She had warmth and charm and brains and humor, and the way she wrinkled her small, upturned nose as she smiled or laughed and widened her eyes in delight was captivating to the coldest male. She was so enchanting that it sometimes seemed to Violet that she might be playing a part, like an actress in repertory who could be Imogen one night, Cleopatra the next, and, yes, even Lady Macbeth on a third.

  Violet, over her husband’s opposition—and she never hesitated to overrule him, sharply and effectively, in the very few matters about which she cared—had sent Clara for three years to Saint Timothy’s, an exclusive girls’ boarding school, to get her away from New Haven and to introduce her to the kind of women Violet thought would be helpful to her later in life, and the result had been very satisfactory. Clara had not only led the school academically; she had excelled in sports, and the leadership that she had easily established among her classmates showed that she would never be one of those foolhardy women who neglect to make firm allies in their own sex. From Saint Timothy’s she had gone to Vassar, and at Vassar she had developed the unfortunate habit of coming home every weekend. Why? It was surely not for the pleasure of seeing her parents, or even her brother, of whom she was very fond. No, it could be for only one reason, and that would surely be the wrong one.

  And, of course, it was Bobbie Lester. He was just the kind of young man Violet had most dreaded because he was the hardest to fault. He was Irving’s principal assistant, a senior working his way through Yale as a faculty helper, not exactly one of the social crowd but “connected,” as the saying is, his family being respectably impoverished, with an heroic father killed in France in 1918 and a brave little mother who gave bridge lessons to her stylish but charitable friends. Bobbie was handsome and athletic and cheerful and idealistic; his golden ambition was to return to the prep school he had so extravagantly loved, and where he had been football captain and senior prefect, and teach history and coach crew and train boys for the great adventure of life.

  When a beaming Clara and Bobbie came into the garden, hand in hand, that Sunday afternoon, where Violet was sitting, with the great hulk of Irving radiating his blessings behind them, to tell her that they were now’really engaged, and wanted to be married in June because Bobbie had been promised the desired job at his beloved prep school upon his
graduation, Violet found that she simply could not speak. She got up, hurried into the house and locked herself in her bedroom. Nor would she open it when Clara pounded on the door and Irving thundered through the keyhole. She stayed there until she knew it was time for Clara to return to Vassar and watched her from the window as Bobbie drove her to her train. Then she emerged to face her husband.

  “There’s no point discussing something about which you all have made up your minds.”

  And she maintained her position until the following weekend when Clara returned. She arrived early on Saturday morning and went to her mother’s chamber, where Violet was still in bed, drinking coffee and working on a crossword puzzle. She sat firmly down in the chair beside her.

  “Mother, you must talk to me!”

  Violet filled in a word before looking up. “You’re at liberty to wreck your own life, my dear. But don’t ask me to be your auxiliary. I’ll have nothing to do with it!”

  “But if I beg you to discuss it with me!”

  Violet put down the paper. “In that case, of course, I will. I’ve been waiting for the moment when I thought you might be ready to listen. Really to listen, I mean. There’s no point discussing an engagement with a person determined that nothing will convince her that her love is not the be-all and end-all of her life.”

  “And you think that my wanting to talk to you may mean that I’m having my doubts about that?”

  “I don’t really think anything, darling, except that you and I might just possibly be on the verge of a mutual communication.”

  Clara jumped up from her chair at this and strode to the window. How her every move was graceful! Violet knew that her daughter, no matter how keenly her emotions were aroused, never lost sight of how she appeared to observing eyes.

  “It’s only because your deafening silence has driven me mad!” Clara exclaimed, turning now to glare at the complacent maternal figure in the bed. “As I’m sure you meant it to!”

  Violet glanced down at her discarded puzzle. “We don’t have to talk at all, my dear.”

  “Oh, you know we do! Please, Mummie, let’s get on with it. Tell me why you hate Bobbie.”

  “I don’t hate him at all. I rather like him. As a matter of fact, if I were ten or fifteen years younger and your father not in the picture, I could fancy him as a kind of cavaliere servente. For a time, anyway.”

  “For a time! That’s it, then. You don’t think that as a lover—for that’s what your flossy term means, I suppose—that he’d last?”

  “Yes, dear. That is it. In the proverbial nutshell. I don’t think he’d last. And I don’t think he will last. For you, I mean.”

  “You mean you don’t think he’d be faithful?”

  “You know I don’t mean that. He’ll be faithful, all right. To the very end. To the bitter end. And it will be bitter, too, because he’ll be too nice, too dear, too much of a sweet teddy bear, for you ever to shed. That’s where he’ll have you, my girl. And for life.”

  “Why should I ever want to shed him?”

  “To save yourself from suffocation. Look, Clara. You’ve fallen in love with a pair of shining black eyes, a muscular torso with broad shoulders and sculpted thighs, an infectious enthusiasm and some highfalutin ideas—the whole glittering costume of youth—and all of it directed at you with a passionate sincerity!”

  “It is sincere, then? You admit that?”

  “Oh, totally. That’s the trap that’s set for us poor females. Not that we don’t have our own, but that’s not what I’m talking about now. The male animal only wants one thing, and he’s off after he’s got it. But the male human wants us for life. You’ll find yourself snared in that school. He’ll do well enough there, for the boys will like him, and the masters won’t fear his competition.”

  “Why won’t they?”

  “Because they’ll see he hasn’t got the imagination or drive or even the backbiting ability ever to be a headmaster, unless he runs into a Mr. Chips situation, which isn’t likely. And as he grows older, he will become a kind of school legend, much loved but a bit laughed at by the older and more sophisticated boys who will joke among themselves at his little clichés.”

  “Mother, stop! You’re too awful!”

  “You mean too true. Has Bobbie ever said anything that would impress you from the lips of a homely man? You know he hasn’t, though you hate to face it. But face it you will when the hair begins to recede from his temples, and his fanny begins to widen, and he starts to repeat himself, or rather when you start to notice it. That’s a little process called life, and there’s nothing on earth you can do about it.”

  “But even if what you say is true or, let us say, has a molecule of truth in it, which I’m not for a minute conceding, there’d be things I could do with myself at the school. I wouldn’t have to be submerged in Bobbie’s teaching life!”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose you could help in local charities. Or even tutor some of the backward boys. Or take up watercolors. And, of course, it would be an ideal life for a writer, if you had any gift in that line. But I don’t see that as your cup of tea. And the atmosphere of a school community can be a terrible anaesthetic.”

  “I’d have children, I hope. And the support of a loving husband.”

  “The last you’d certainly have. And I’m sure Bobbie would be a vigorous lover. But you’d pay a high price for those wild nights, my girl. And at the risk of your calling me an old bawd, I’d like to point out that Bobbie is far from being the only male who could give them to you.”

  “Really, Mother, I wouldn’t have thought it of you!”

  “You think women my age don’t have their fantasies about sex? Dream on, my dear!”

  Violet had sown her seed; she knew when to stop. When Bobbie came to lunch that day, she was very cordial, particularly as he played into her hand with his theory of how to redirect the disciplinary emphasis of the school to which he was headed.

  “I believe there has been too much of the negative in the moral code of the preparatory schools,” he opined gravely. “Too many can’ts and don’ts. One headmaster is even reputed to have said that if his vocabulary were limited to a single word and that word was ‘no,’ he could still get by. I think boys are better than that. After all, they are young men. I think if you challenge them with something positive, put before them a ‘do’ or a ‘let’s go’ instead of a bleak prohibition, you have a good chance of lighting the real fire inside them. It’s the difference between offense and defense, between the guy with the puck before his stick and the goalie. Give the boys something really to go for…”

  She didn’t have to look at Clara. She knew that she was wincing.

  Violet was very well aware that she was engaged in a struggle that she might lose, but that didn’t matter to her. She wanted to be sure that she had done all she could to keep her daughter from making her mistake, or rather from making a much graver one. For Bobbie Lester was never going to have a career that approached the success of Irving Longcope’s. Indeed, most of Violet’s friends and relatives considered that she had done very well for herself. Irving was a college master and a popular teacher; he cut a sufficient figure on the Yale campus. That was all very well, and Violet was not a woman to undervalue her few blessings as she took them out, one by one, from the tight little chest of her memories and reappraisals, counted them and put them carefully back. It was all very well, truly, but Irving Longcope had not become half the man she had expected him to be.

  Her family, the Edeys, had been the kind of old New Yorkers who had been somehow able to subsist, with moderate but unquestioned respectability, for generations on the fringe of Knickerbocker society, supported by the exiguous rentals of some tightly retained strips of lower Manhattan real estate. Her father had attained an obscure fame by writing a popular book of opera plots with photographs of the great divas of the golden age—Calvé, Eames, Ternina—and some moderately witty vers de société. He had been a fussy old dandy, a perennially white-tied figure
seated in the back of the boxes of the parterre, in one of which he actually managed to die. His wife was the constantly ailing malade imaginaire of the era, mild, sweet and uncomplaining, who didn’t mind that her spouse was so often asked to dine out en garçon. Violet had been sent to Miss Chapin’s School; she had grown up with all the “right” people; in fact she had grown up with none others. But she had always known that her family lived on the edge, that the morning mail contained bills that her father would crumple with a grunt of outrage and that, as a debutante, she had come out only on the coattails, as it were, of a rich second cousin, the honor of whose ball she was allowed to share. And in the New York of the century’s first decade everyone knew everything about everyone else.

  Irving Longcope had seemed the perfect and hardly hoped for answer to the problem of a young woman of no fortune and no very striking looks in a milieu of rather garish prosperity. In 1911 he was a handsome, stalwart figure of a man, some dozen years older than herself, with a military stature and the reputation of a hero—he had fought in Cuba and written a best seller about the charge up San Juan Hill—and he was looking for a wife, it was rumored, because he was running for Congress and the party wanted a married man. Violet’s father had for once proved useful; he had met him in an opera box and taken the delighted Rough Rider backstage to introduce him to Jean de Reszke, who had sung Siegfried that night, after which it had been in order to invite him to dinner, and Violet had done the rest.

  She had seen at once that for all Irving’s rather intimidating bluster he was essentially shy, particularly with women, and dreaded falling into the clutches of a bossy one. He wanted a quiet and admiring spouse, and it took her only a few weeks of what he was later to describe too often as “a whirling courtship” in which he “swept her off her feet” to convince him that she would be the Mrs. Longcope of his fondest dreams.

  But it was not long after their union that Violet began to realize that she had misconceived her man. He handled his campaign for Congress with every ineptitude, disregarding the advice of the bosses and speaking out on issues as if party lines didn’t exist. He lost and lost badly, and it was evident that his political career was over before it had begun, and Violet’s dream of the gubernatorial mansion in Albany or a high position in Washington as the wife of an Empire State senator vanished forever. Irving had some money but not enough for a family; he studied for a master’s degree in English and got a job teaching at Yale. It seemed the best he could do.